Magill's Literary Annual, 2009

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2009 MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2009 Essay-Reviews of 200 Outstanding Books Published in the U...

Author: John D. Wilson | Steven G. Kellman

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MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2009

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2009 Essay-Reviews of 200 Outstanding Books Published in the United States During 2008

With an Annotated List of Titles

Volume One A-Lib Edited by

JOHN D. WILSON STEVEN G. KELLMAN

SALEM PRESS Pasadena, California Hackensack, New Jersey

Cover photo: © Warren Rosenberg/Dreamstime.com

Copyright ©2009, by Salem Press All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews or in the copying of images deemed to be freely licensed or in the public domain. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997). Library of Congress Catalog Card No. ISBN (set): 978-1-58765-547-0 ISBN (vol. 1): 978-1-58765-548-7 ISBN (vol. 2): 978-1-58765-549-4

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CONTENTS

Publisher’s Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Complete Annotated List of Titles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Contributing Reviewers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxvii Author Photo Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xl Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life— Kathleen Norris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008—Sean Wilentz. . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Ajax—Sophocles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Alfred Kazin: A Biography—Richard M. Cook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed—Martin Evans and John Phillips . . . . . . 19 All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems—Linda Gregg . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well—Tod Wodicka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 All the World’s a Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare— John Reed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof . . .—Roy Blount, Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 America America—Ethan Canin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House—Jon Meacham . . . . . . 43 Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and His World—Jed Perl . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 The Appeal—John Grisham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Armageddon in Retrospect, and Other New and Unpublished Writings on War and Peace—Kurt Vonnegut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Atmospheric Disturbances—Rivka Galchen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Austerity: Britain, 1945-51—David Kynaston. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer—David Goldblatt . . . . . . . . 69 The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition— Thomas P. Slaughter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Behind My Eyes—Li-Young Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century— Steve Coll . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 The Bishop’s Daughter: A Memoir—Honor Moore. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Keep the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics—Leonard Susskind. . . . . . . . . . 93 The Boat—Nam Le. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Books: A Memoir—Larry McMurtry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 v


The Brass Verdict—Michael Connelly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Breath—Tim Winton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 But Didn’t We Have Fun? An Informal History of Baseball’s Pioneer Era, 1843-1870—Peter Morris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession—Anne Rice . . . . . . Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen—Philip Dray . . . . . . . . . . . . Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan— Donald Keene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Collected Prose of Robert Frost—Robert Frost . . . . . . . . . . . The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday—Alexander McCall Smith . . . . . The Commoner—John Burnham Schwartz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction—Amy Laura Hall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City—Mark Kingwell . . . . The Craftsman—Richard Sennett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Credit and Blame—Charles Tilly. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball— Nicholas Dawidoff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories—Steven Millhauser . . . . . . . The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals—Jane Mayer . . . . . . . . . . . . . David Mamet: A Life in the Theatre—Ira Nadel . . . . . . . . . . . . Day—A. L. Kennedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction—Charles Lane . . . . . . . . Death with Interruptions—José Saramago . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Delusion: A Novel of Suspense—Peter Abrahams . . . . . . . . . . . De Niro’s Game—Rawi Hage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Design in the Age of Darwin: From William Morris to Frank Lloyd Wright—Stephen F. Eisenman . . . . . . . . . . . . The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler— Leslie Fiedler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Diary of a Bad Year—J. M. Coetzee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dictation: A Quartet—Cynthia Ozick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Did Lincoln Own Slaves? And Other Frequently Asked Questions About Abraham Lincoln—Gerald J. Prokopowicz . . . . . . . . The Draining Lake—Arnaldur Indriðason . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . 120 . . . . 124 . . . .

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129 133 137 142

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147 152 156 161

. . . . 166 . . . . 170 . . . . 174 . . . . 179 . . . . 183 . . . .

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188 193 198 202

. . . . 206 . . . . 211 . . . . 215 . . . . 220 . . . . 225 . . . . 230

Eternal Enemies—Adam Zagajewski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234 Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard— Richard Brody . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 vi

CONTENTS

Experiments in Ethics—Kwame Anthony Appiah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 The Eye of the Leopard—Henning Mankell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Fault Lines—Nancy Huston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fidelity—Grace Paley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3—E. Annie Proulx . . . . . . . Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems—Mark Doty . . . . . . . . . . . . . Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater—William F. Buckley, Jr.. . . The Forever War—Dexter Filkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America—Steven Waldman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II—Stanley G. Payne . A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties— Suze Rotolo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Friends of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeuscz Kokciuszko, and Agrippa Hull—A Tale of Three Patriots, Two Revolutions, and a Tragic Betrayal of Freedom in the New Nation— Gary B. Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges . . . . . . . . . . . The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession—Adam Leith Gollner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life—Paul Mariani. . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Ghost in Love—Jonathan Carroll. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Given Day—Dennis Lehane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . God and Race in American Politics: A Short History—Mark A. Noll . . . Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres—Ruth Brandon. Gustav Mahler: A New Life Cut Short (1907-1911)— Henry-Louis de La Grange. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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251 255 260 264 269 273

. . 278 . . 283 . . 288

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301 306 310 315 320

. . . 325

The Hakawati—Rabih Alameddine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Happy Trails to You—Julie Hecht . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Havana Gold—Leonardo Padura . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family— Annette Gordon-Reed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . His Illegal Self—Peter Carey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances, and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century—John Burrow . Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life— Timothy W. Ryback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Home—Marilynne Robinson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Homecoming—Bernhard Schlink . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God, and Diversity on Steroids— Julie Salamon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

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. . 330 . . 335 . . 340 . . 344 . . 349 . . 354 . . 358 . . 363 . . 368

. . 373


The House on Fortune Street—Margot Livesey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 378 How Fiction Works—James Wood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 382 Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching—Paula J. Giddings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted—A Memoir— Jennifer Finney Boylan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto—Michael Pollan . . . . . . . . Indignation—Philip Roth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier—Timothy J. Shannon. It’s Go in Horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006—Leslie Scalapino . . . The Jew of Culture: Freud, Moses, and Modernity—Philip Rieff . . . . John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought—Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of the American Revolution—Jerome Charyn Just After Sunset: Stories—Stephen King . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . 387 . . . . .

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392 396 401 406 411

. . . . 415 . . . . 419 . . . . 424 . . . . 428

Knockemstiff—Donald Ray Pollock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 433 The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed—Michael Meyer . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman’s Fight to Save the World’s Most Beautiful Bird—Bruce Barcott . . . . . . . Lavinia—Ursula K. Le Guin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Lazarus Project—Aleksandar Hemon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality—Martha C. Nussbaum . . . . . . . . . .

viii

. . . . . . 437 . . . . . . 442 . . . . . . 447 . . . . . . 452 . . . . . . 456

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Magill’s Literary Annual, 2009, is the fifty-fifth publication in a series that began in 1954. Critical essays for the first twenty-two years were collected and published in the twelve-volume Survey of Contemporary Literature in 1977; since then, yearly sets have been published. Each year, Magill’s Literary Annual seeks to evaluate critically 200 major examples of serious literature, both fiction and nonfiction, published during the previous calendar year. The philosophy behind our selection process is to cover works that are likely to be of interest to general readers, that reflect publishing trends, that add to the careers of authors being taught and researched in literature programs, and that will stand the test of time. By filtering the thousands of books published every year down to 200 notable titles, the editors have provided the busy librarian with an excellent reader’s advisory tool and patrons with fodder for book discussion groups and a guide for choosing worthwhile reading material. The essay-reviews in the Annual provide a more academic, “reference” review of a work than is typically found in newspapers and other periodical sources. The reviews in the two-volume Magill’s Literary Annual, 2009, are arranged alphabetically by title. At the beginning of both volumes is a complete alphabetical list, by category, of all covered books that provides readers with the title, author, and a brief description of each work. Every essay is approximately four pages in length. Each one begins with a block of reference information in a standard order: • Full book title, including any subtitle • Author: Name, with birth and death years • First published: Original foreign-language title, with year and country, when pertinent • Original language and translator name, when pertinent • Introduction, Foreword, etc., with writer’s name, when pertinent • Publisher: Company name and city, number of pages, retail price • Type of work: (chosen from standard categories) Anthropology Archaeology Autobiography Biography Current affairs Diary Drama Economics Education Environment

Essays Ethics Film Fine arts History History of science Language Law Letters Literary biography ix

Literary criticism Literary history Literary theory Media Medicine Memoir Miscellaneous Music Natural history Nature


Novel Novella Philosophy Poetry

Psychology Religion Science Short fiction

Sociology Technology Travel Women’s issues

Time: Period represented, when pertinent Locale: Location represented, when pertinent Capsule description of the work Principal characters [for novels, short fiction] or Principal personages [for biographies, history]: List of people, with brief descriptions The text of each essay-review analyzes and presents the focus, intent, and relative success of the author, as well as the makeup and point of view of the work under discussion. To assist the reader further, essays are supplemented by a list of additional “Review Sources” for further study in a bibliographic format. Every essay includes a sidebar offering a brief biography of the author or authors. Thumbnail photographs of book covers and authors are included as available. Four indexes can be found at the end of volume 2: • Biographical Works by Subject: Arranged by subject, rather than by author or title. Readers can locate easily reviews of biographical works—memoirs, diaries, and letters in addition to biographies and autobiographies—by looking up the name of the person covered. • Category Index: Groups all titles into subject areas such as current affairs and social issues, ethics and law, history, literary biography, philosophy and religion, psychology, and women’s issues. • Title Index: Lists all works reviewed in alphabetical order, with any relevant cross references. • Author Index: Lists books covered in the annual by each author’s name. A searchable cumulative index, listing all books reviewed in Magill’s Literary Annual between 1977 and 2009, as well as in Magill’s History Annual (1983) and Magill’s Literary Annual, History and Biography (1984 and 1985), can be found at our Web site, www.salempress.com, on the page for Magill’s Literary Annual, 2009. Our special thanks go to the editors for their expert and insightful selections: John D. Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture for Christianity Today, and Steven G. Kellman is a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. We also owe our gratitude to the outstanding writers who lend their time and knowledge to this project every year. The names of all contributing reviewers are listed in the front of volume 1, as well as at the end of their individual reviews. • • • •

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COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

VOLUME 1 Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life—Kathleen Norris . . . 1 Norris examines the concept of acedia from its ancient understanding in monastic spirituality through its more recent role in philosophy, psychology, literature, and American culture and also in her spiritual, marital, and writing life The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008—Sean Wilentz. . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 A fast-paced, well-documented analysis of the rise of Ronald Reagan, his presidential administration, and his impact on American politics Ajax—Sophocles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 A fast-paced contemporary rendering of Sophocles’ tragedy Alfred Kazin: A Biography—Richard M. Cook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 This first comprehensive literary biography of one of the most notable literary critics of his age chronicles Kazin’s emergence while still in his twenties as a critic of considerable note, and it relates this emergence to the intellectualism that abounded in New York during the 1930’s Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed—Martin Evans and John Phillips . . . . . . 19 A thoughtful and well-researched study that explains clearly why Algerian governments, since independence from France in 1962, have failed to meet the expectations and needs of the vast majority of Algerian Muslims All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems—Linda Gregg . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 This collection of Gregg’s older and new poems incorporates elements of classicism, nature, and contemporary life All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well—Tod Wodicka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Burt Hecker, a widower who has lived his entire life out of step with his family and his surroundings, attempts to find peace as he journeys across Europe in search of his lost son

xi


All the World’s a Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare—John Reed. . . 31 A conflation of parts of several of Shakespeare’s tragedies formed into a new tragedy with additional dialogue Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof . . .—Roy Blount, Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Underlying this eclectic, hilarious consideration of language is the author’s conviction—with examination and examples—that the meanings of words and their constructions are not arbitrary America America—Ethan Canin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 A young man from a working-class family becomes involved with a wealthy landowner and the senator he is supporting for president in 1972 American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House—Jon Meacham . . . . . . 43 Meacham explores the character of one of America’s early heroes during the years that Jackson served as president of the United States, examining his role in redefining the office of president Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and His World—Jed Perl . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Perl explores history, artistic creation, symbols, and the human condition by examining Antoine Watteau’s paintings. The book, in the form of an alphabet primer or dictionary, elucidates the influence of Watteau and his work The Appeal—John Grisham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 After a Mississippi jury returns a verdict against Krane Chemical for dumping toxic waste into the town of Bowmore’s water supply, the company appeals to the Mississippi Supreme Court, whose newest member has been hand-picked by Krane Chemical Armageddon in Retrospect, and Other New and Unpublished Writings on War and Peace—Kurt Vonnegut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 A collection of short works, primarily fiction, relating to issues surrounding the endings of wars, with special focus on the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in 1945 Atmospheric Disturbances—Rivka Galchen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Galchen’s debut novel chronicles what happens when a psychiatrist becomes convinced that his wife has been replaced by a double Austerity: Britain, 1945-51—David Kynaston. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 The first volume of Tales of a New Jerusalem, a history of Britain from VE Day to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, focuses on the way in which the victorious 1945 Labour government shaped Britain over three decades xii


The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer—David Goldblatt . . . . . . . . 69 Goldblatt’s comprehensive book intertwines the history of soccer with the general political and social history of the countries around the world where soccer has been an important popular sport The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition— Thomas P. Slaughter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 This biography of Quaker saint and social reformer Woolman traces his spiritual development, analyzes the roots of his activism, documents the changes he helped bring about, and recognizes his continuing relevance to issues such as racism, economic justice, cruelty to animals, and simple living Behind My Eyes—Li-Young Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 A profound and haunting collection that touches on isolation, love, loss, and spiritual growth The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century—Steve Coll . . . 83 Coll illuminates the life of Osama Bin Laden by setting it against the rise to unimaginable wealth of his family, builders to the Saudi royal family at a time of unprecedented development The Bishop’s Daughter: A Memoir—Honor Moore. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Moore explores her complex relationship with her father, the revered Episcopal bishop of New York, Paul Moore, Jr., and the impact that his hidden homosexual life had on his priesthood and his family The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Keep the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics—Leonard Susskind. . . . . . . . . . 93 A partly historical, partly autobiographical account of a recent controversy in theoretical physics by one of the physicists involved The Boat—Nam Le. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Le’s first book offers seven short stories that cover the globe and feature an amazingly varied cast of central characters; his plots include assassinations in Colombia, a failed family reunion in New York City, religious festivals in Iran, and escape from Communist Vietnam Books: A Memoir—Larry McMurtry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 A semiautobiographical account of the author’s life as a bookman, providing glimpses into the arcane and complex trade of bookseller and highlighting interesting books, characters, and personages he has known

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The Brass Verdict—Michael Connelly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Connelly’s two sleuths, defense attorney Michael Haller and police detective Harry Bosch, share the spotlight in this novel about the murder of a Hollywood mogul’s wife, her lover, and the film producer’s lawyer Breath—Tim Winton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 A coming-of-age story about a young man who learns about life and death from a guru surfer and his American wife But Didn’t We Have Fun? An Informal History of Baseball’s Pioneer Era, 1843-1870—Peter Morris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 A comprehensive social history of baseball’s formative age when modern rules were codified and fraternal clubs such as New York’s Knickerbockers and Cincinnati’s Red Stockings began to employ professionals Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession—Anne Rice . . . . . . . . . . 120 Rice traces her journey from Catholic believer to atheist to committed Christian in this account of spiritual and literary transformation Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen—Philip Dray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 A study of the Reconstruction of the American South with emphasis on the contributions of black congressmen and other black officials Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan— Donald Keene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 An autobiography concentrating primarily on Keene’s early interest in the Orient, his specialization in Japanese, his role as a translator in World War II, his education at Columbia, Harvard, and Cambridge, his association with Japanese writers and playwrights, as well as his discussion of some of the many books he published The Collected Prose of Robert Frost—Robert Frost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 An intriguing assortment of prose pieces from one of America’s most honored twentieth century poets The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday—Alexander McCall Smith . . . . . . . . . 137 Scottish philosopher Isabel Dalhousie seeks to save the reputation of an Edinburgh physician as she worries about her own relationship with her lover Jamie The Commoner—John Burnham Schwartz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 A commoner who finds that by marrying a prince she has lost her freedom and her identity later helps another woman to escape from the same fate xiv


Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction—Amy Laura Hall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 An exploration of Protestant—especially Methodist—popular church literature in the twentieth century, showing significant capitulations to such anti-Christian trends as eugenics, the corporate control of motherhood, and the campaign to present nuclear power as benign and inevitable Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City—Mark Kingwell . . . . . . . . 152 The questions that Kingwell asks in this cultural essay on the transnational global city—New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, Toronto—are “How do cities shape people?” and “How do people shape cities?” The Craftsman—Richard Sennett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 Sennett envisions a material culture in which human beings—through better understanding the process of making things—can skillfully craft their own places in the world Credit and Blame—Charles Tilly. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 This study of giving and receiving credit and blame places an emphasis on the relationship between those who assign and receive credit and those who assign and receive blame, essentially defining such relationships as ultimately seeking justice in human relationships The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball— Nicholas Dawidoff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 Dawidoff’s autobiographical coverage of his attempt, through an identification with the Red Sox and with literary characters, to cope with his absentee father Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories—Steven Millhauser . . . . . . . . . . . 170 Millhauser’s eclectic collection of short fiction, ranging from accounts of towers built to heaven to stories about uncontrollable laughter The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals—Jane Mayer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 An account of the events and personages of the United States’ interrogation policies of the “war on terror” in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 David Mamet: A Life in the Theatre—Ira Nadel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 The first full-length biography of a prominent contemporary American dramatist, who is also the writer of screenplays, novels, essays, and children’s books

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Day—A. L. Kennedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 A former Royal Air Force sergeant looks back on his life in order to see a way, if any, ahead The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction—Charles Lane . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 A compelling and scholarly account of the brutal killings of more than sixty African Americans, the criminal convictions of three white supremacists, and the overturning of their convictions by the U.S. Supreme Court Death with Interruptions—José Saramago . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 Saramago offers a fictional exploration of what life would be like in a country where people suddenly stopped dying; from this simple premise, the story touches a great many aspects of modern society, suggesting that a world without death would not be as perfect as might be supposed Delusion: A Novel of Suspense—Peter Abrahams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198 A woman and her family struggle with the repercussions of a testimony that put an innocent man behind bars for murder when that man is set free De Niro’s Game—Rawi Hage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202 Best friends since childhood, two young men come of age in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war; only one escapes as brutality, criminality, and betrayal bring their relationship to a tragic end Design in the Age of Darwin: From William Morris to Frank Lloyd Wright—Stephen F. Eisenman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 A book of essays and photographs of objects that explores the interaction of design and the concepts of evolution in nineteenth century England and the United States The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler— Leslie Fiedler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 This sampling of Fiedler’s criticism shows how he anticipated recent trends in literary analysis and studies of popular culture Diary of a Bad Year—J. M. Coetzee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 This novel fuses three narratives into one, describing the writing process and examining relationships among neighbors, coworkers, lovers, and generations. Coetzee takes advantage of the physical paper by placing each story on the same page and separating it by a single line

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Dictation: A Quartet—Cynthia Ozick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 Four long stories link several themes characteristic of the author’s work in both her fiction and her literary criticism Did Lincoln Own Slaves? And Other Frequently Asked Questions About Abraham Lincoln—Gerald J. Prokopowicz . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Informal but nonetheless authoritative study of President Lincoln written in the form of question-and-answer discussions by a noted scholar The Draining Lake—Arnaldur Indriðason . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 This Nordic crime fiction deftly solves the mystery at its center and also reveals the inner turmoil of its characters Eternal Enemies—Adam Zagajewski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234 The enemies named in Zagajewski’s title are love and time, enemies which the poet reconciles in this meditative collection of poems that moves the reader through many places and people he has loved Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard— Richard Brody . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 A biography of the French film director that places particular emphasis on how life and art are commingled in the methods he has used to produce one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary cinema Experiments in Ethics—Kwame Anthony Appiah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 The author looks at traditional theories of ethics and their contemporary relevance through the lens of empirical research in the social sciences The Eye of the Leopard—Henning Mankell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Shifting between Africa and Sweden, this novel explores the interplay between destiny and choice Fault Lines—Nancy Huston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 Psychological trauma is engendered and replicated within a single family over four generations as a consequence of a Nazi project that uprooted children from homelands occupied by the Germans during World War II Fidelity—Grace Paley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255 In plainspoken but often witty poetic style, Paley comments on growing old, loss of family and friends, her own illness and death, feminism, war and peace, and hope for the future

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Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3—E. Annie Proulx . . . . . . . . . 260 Proulx’s third collection of Wyoming-based fiction adds to her impressive repertoire, with more stories from an author who knows the hardscrabble West Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems—Mark Doty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264 This collection combines twenty-three new poems and a selection of Doty’s best poems from seven previous volumes Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater—William F. Buckley, Jr.. . . . . 269 Buckley’s posthumously published book describes the “grand time” that he and Goldwater had leading the counterrevolution against the orthodoxies of the Left and against those Republicans the two conservative stalwarts perceived as accommodating those orthodoxies The Forever War—Dexter Filkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 Prizewinning New York Times correspondent Filkins presents a compelling and brilliantly written account of his experiences reporting on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America—Steven Waldman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278 An examination of the Founding Fathers’ relationship to their faiths and the growth of religious tolerance in the United States Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II—Stanley G. Payne . . . 283 Payne, an authority on European fascism and the history of modern Spain, debunks conventional wisdom about Spanish neutrality during World War II, documenting Francisco Franco’s admiration for Adolf Hitler, Spain’s alliance with the Third Reich, and its ambivalence toward Jews facing Nazi annihilation A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties— Suze Rotolo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288 A touching memoir of Greenwich Village during the 1960’s through the eyes of Bob Dylan’s girlfriend at the time Friends of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeuscz Kokciuszko, and Agrippa Hull—A Tale of Three Patriots, Two Revolutions, and a Tragic Betrayal of Freedom in the New Nation— Gary B. Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292 The authors examine Kokciuszko’s relationships with Jefferson and Hull, focusing on their ideas and actions regarding slavery in the early American republic, with Hull’s life providing a fascinating example of the black experience in those years xviii


The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession—Adam Leith Gollner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 Gollner travels around the world in search of exotic fruits largely unknown in North America, and explores the scientific, historical and sociological origins of fruits and of humans’ obsession with them Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life—Paul Mariani. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 Mariani’s critical biography examines the literary and religious commitments that led Hopkins to his extraordinary poetics and to his insistence on the efficacy of God’s love The Ghost in Love—Jonathan Carroll. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 When Benjamin Gould refuses to die at his appointed time, he takes control of his own destiny with all of its idiosyncrasies The Given Day—Dennis Lehane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310 Lehane’s eighth novel and first foray into historical fiction is an epic-length saga of political and social unrest in 1919 Boston, a city plagued by influenza, reeling from the implications of World War I, terrorized by anarchist bombings, and bracing for an impending police strike God and Race in American Politics: A Short History—Mark A. Noll . . . . . . 315 A relatively short survey of the interconnections among race, religion, and politics in the history of the United States Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres—Ruth Brandon. . . . 320 Brandon gives an account, based on the lives of six women, of the demographic, economic, and social forces that led to the rise and fall of the governess, who thrived in England from the beginning of the nineteenth century into the twentieth century Gustav Mahler: A New Life Cut Short (1907-1911)— Henry-Louis de La Grange. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 In this culminating volume of his monumental biography of Mahler, La Grange gives a painstakingly detailed, revisionist account of the musical genius’s work as the conductor at the Metropolitan Opera and for the New York Philharmonic and as the composer of such momentous creations as Das Lied von der Erde and Symphony No. 9 The Hakawati—Rabih Alameddine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330 Upon his return home to Lebanon, the narrator is inspired to recount stories from his family history and to retell ancient Arabic tales that are an integral part of his heritage xix


Happy Trails to You—Julie Hecht . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 The female narrator, a professional photographer putting together a collection of her work, tries to cope with the modern world and the unwelcome changes coming to Nantucket Island Havana Gold—Leonardo Padura . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340 In Padura’s second novel in his Havana Quartet featuring Lieutenant Conde, the policeman must find the rapist and murderer of a teacher in the high school that Conde had attended years earlier The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family— Annette Gordon-Reed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344 A landmark work of history and biography, reconstructing not only the history of an African American family born into slavery but also the emotional life of the slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson, who presided over so much of the family’s destiny His Illegal Self—Peter Carey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349 The story of a young boy taken from his privileged New York City life to a life among 1960’s rebels and hippies on the run from American and Australian authorities A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances, and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century—John Burrow . . . 354 A history of the writing of history, from the first Greek historians to the major trends in history writing of the late twentieth century Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life— Timothy W. Ryback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358 Of the sixteen thousand books owned by Adolf Hitler, some twelve hundred reside in the Library of Congress, and another eighty at Brown University; Ryback analyzes the books that defined and directed the development of Hitler’s major attitudes and beliefs Home—Marilynne Robinson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363 This companion to Robinson’s novel Gilead recounts the Boughton family’s struggle for reconciliation and healing amid disappointed hope and irretrievable loss Homecoming—Bernhard Schlink . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368 A German man born in 1945 and raised after World War II struggles to make a life for himself while pursuing clues that his supposedly dead Nazi father lives on, clues that eventually lead to the highest circle of American academia

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Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God, and Diversity on Steroids—Julie Salamon . . . . . . . . . 373 Salamon’s account of a year in the life of Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, told through the lives of administrators, doctors, staff, and patients, captures the day-to-day drama of large metropolitan hospitals, struggling to survive in a broken health care system The House on Fortune Street—Margot Livesey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 378 Two young women and two men are variously defeated in the pursuit of ideal love How Fiction Works—James Wood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 382 Rather than suggesting how aspiring fiction writers should write, Wood, by engaging in close, analytical readings of representative passages from their writing, analyzes how a broad spectrum of writers from ancient times to the current century write Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching—Paula J. Giddings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387 A comprehensive biography of this journalist, lecturer, feminist, reformer, and public intellectual, a forceful advocate of civil rights, social justice, woman suffrage, and the antilynching cause, that provides an overview of Jim Crow racial violence and African American citizenship and activism in the post-Reconstruction and Progressive eras I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted—A Memoir— Jennifer Finney Boylan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 392 Boylan’s touching but humorous account of growing up as a young male haunted by the secret knowledge of his true female identity In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto—Michael Pollan . . . . . . . . . . 396 Pollan offers a different way to think about food, and he exposes the belief system he calls “nutritionism,” an ideology that benefits the food industry and the nutrition industry at the cost of human physical and spiritual health Indignation—Philip Roth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401 Setting his story against the background of the Korean War, Roth tells of a young man whose single-mindedness, ambition, and naïveté render him vulnerable to a series of increasingly disastrous mishaps Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier—Timothy J. Shannon. . . 406 Shannon describes how this Indian Confederacy used diplomacy with the French and British to further its own interests

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It’s Go in Horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006—Leslie Scalapino . . . . . 411 A startling and distinctive selection of poetry from one of America’s most innovative contemporary poets The Jew of Culture: Freud, Moses, and Modernity—Philip Rieff . . . . . . . . 415 The final volume of Rieff’s Sacred Order/Social Order trilogy, this book presents a selection of Rieff’s writings from the early 1950’s through the 1990’s loosely organized around the theme of “the Jew of Culture” as an ideal type in Rieff’s vision of the nature of social order John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought—Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419 An exacting account of Milton’s life that reshapes conceptions of the man, as a thinker, a political and religious activist, and a poet Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of the American Revolution—Jerome Charyn . . . . 424 This novel depicts both imaginary and real characters of the Revolutionary War era, providing unique insights and three-dimensional characterizations of major historical figures Just After Sunset: Stories—Stephen King . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 428 A collection of thirteen stories by King, twelve of which originally appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Postscripts, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other magazines and anthologies between 1977 and 2008 and one that first appears in this book Knockemstiff—Donald Ray Pollock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 433 Eighteen loosely connected stories about the desperate underclass denizens of a backwater Appalachian town in southern Ohio The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed—Michael Meyer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 437 The experiences of a Peace Corps teacher who stayed on in Beijing and witnessed the preparations for the Olympics in 2008 The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman’s Fight to Save the World’s Most Beautiful Bird—Bruce Barcott . . . . . . . . . . . . . 442 An exploration of the environmental, economic, and political forces involved in an attempt to save a river, its valley, plants, and wildlife from a dam and the lake it would impound

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Lavinia—Ursula K. Le Guin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447 A back story from Vergil’s Aeneid is transformed into the fictional autobiography of the Italian princess who became the bride of the Trojan Aeneas after a bitter war for her hand on Italian soil The Lazarus Project—Aleksandar Hemon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 452 Hemon’s second novel uses alternating chapters to tell the story of a Jewish refugee killed by the chief of police in Chicago in 1908 and a contemporary Bosnian immigrant who retraces the young Jew’s steps through Eastern Europe Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality—Martha C. Nussbaum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 456 In a wide-ranging study of the sources and results of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom, a noted philosopher finds a guiding principle in the dual concepts of fairness and of respect for the demands of each individual citizen’s conscience

VOLUME 2 The Library at Night—Alberto Manguel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 461 In this collection of bookish essays, Manguel explores the fascinating life of libraries from antiquity to the present Life Class—Pat Barker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465 Novelist Barker returns to a World War I setting in this story of a small group of art students in London who have their assumptions about art and life called into question by the arrival of the Great War The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature—Jonathan Rosen . . . . . 469 In his exploration of bird watching and its interaction with and impact on everything else in life, Rosen explores many aspects of his life, putting them into a perspective obtained from watching birds Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America— Allen C. Guelzo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 474 In a series of seven debates over a period of four months, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, candidates for an Illinois seat in Congress, defined the issues which in less than three years would result in civil war, with Lincoln taking the first steps which would lead to his becoming a national figure

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The Line upon a Wind: The Great War at Sea, 1793-1815—Noel Mostert . . . 479 A naval history of Britain’s wars with France and the United States during the Napoleonic period, with an emphasis on tactical developments The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street—Charles Nicholl . . . . . 483 In his sixth book about the writers of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, journalist Nicholl explores the nuances of a legal deposition that William Shakespeare made at the end of his career, a record of the only words he is known to have spoken offstage The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia— and How It Died—Philip Jenkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 488 A history of the often-overlooked Eastern Christians, a third branch of Christianity as influential and pervasive during the first millennium of the faith as Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism became in later Christian history Lulu in Marrakech—Diane Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 494 In this novel, Johnson examines the cultural clashes among French, American, English, and Islamic residents and visitors in contemporary Morocco from the perspective of Lulu Sawyer, spy Lush Life—Richard Price . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 498 The two worlds of contemporary urban life in Manhattan’s Lower East side collide when a jumpy Latino teenager murders a young white would-be hipster during a mugging gone wrong McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld— Misha Glenny. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 503 Glenny describes the operations of organized crime elements throughout all parts of the world and examines the causes and consequences of their activities and their impact on governments and law-abiding citizens The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn—Solomon Volkov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 508 Volkov describes the often contentious relationship between government leaders and practitioners of the literary, visual, and performing arts during the turbulent century in which the Soviet Union rose and fell Man in the Dark—Paul Auster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 513 A seventy-two-year-old widower, living with his daughter and granddaughter, suffers from insomnia and invents stories as he lies awake in the dark

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The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom— Simon Winchester . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 518 A biography of Joseph Needham, the world’s leading figure in the historiography of Chinese science The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus—Joshua Kendall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 523 A biography of the physician who created the English-speaking world’s most successful thesaurus by attempting to classify and quantify everything in the known world Maps and Legends—Michael Chabon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 528 A collection of essays examining different facets of genre fiction, sometimes presented as literary criticism and sometimes as autobiography A Mercy—Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 532 Morrison’s ninth novel explores the lives of a range of women and men—some free, some enslaved—in the American colonies of the late seventeenth century The Miracle at Speedy Motors—Alexander McCall Smith . . . . . . . . . . . 537 In this ninth novel in the series that began with McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Mma Ramotswe has several problems to contend with, including a woman who is looking for her family The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry—Adam Kirsch . . . . . 541 This collection of twenty-six previously published critical essays offers perceptive, hard-hitting commentary on poetry written in English during the postmodern period and on many of the leading poets A Most Wanted Man—John le Carré . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 545 Le Carré’s twenty-first novel of international intrigue and espionage, focusing on the human cost of the “war on terror” and the practice of “extraordinary rendition” My Revolutions—Hari Kunzru. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 550 A historically based novel whose major characters were centrally involved in the anti-Vietnam War protests in London in the late 1960’s; the main action of the novel is set in the last decade of the twentieth century, with orchestrated flashbacks and updates

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My Sister, My Love—Joyce Carol Oates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 554 Oates weaves the story of an unsolved child murder into a portrait of modern American consumer culture and the families caught up in it Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769-1799—Philip Dwyer. . . . . . . . . . . . 558 Dwyer presents a compelling picture of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, portraying him as an opportunist reacting to events and cleverly shaping his heroic image through the mass media Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature—David Quammen . . . 563 A new edition of Quammen’s 1985 collection of essays on nature, scientists, the history of science, and human interaction with the environment Nazi Literature in the Americas—Roberto Bolaño. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 567 This fictional literary encyclopedia of invented North and South American fascist authors includes the lives, works, creative significance, and historical context of these imaginary figures Netherland—Joseph O’Neill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 572 A Dutch banker struggles to move forward with his family in post-9/11 New York New Collected Poems—Eavan Boland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 576 An inclusive edition of Boland’s poetry, containing all the poems in nine previous volumes, reversing exclusions from the Selected Poems, adding two books that were not included in an earlier Collected Poems, and containing a brief excerpt from an unpublished verse play 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War—Benny Morris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 581 Considered by some as a “revisionist” historian, Morris addresses both the military conflict that followed the declaration of the State of Israel and the underlying politics driving both the Jewish and Arab antagonists Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America— Rick Perlstein. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 586 An insightful examination of forces that polarized America, commencing with the mid-1960’s urban riots and the escalation of the war in Vietnam, making possible the amazing political comeback of cunning, tormented Richard M. Nixon and culminating in his 1972 landslide reelection victory Nothing to Be Frightened Of—Julian Barnes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 591 By embarking on a thoughtful journey through his family background and intellectual history, Barnes gradually zeroes in on the causes of his lifelong fear of what will happen when he dies xxvi


Old World, New World: Great Britain and America from the Beginning— Kathleen Burk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 596 A large and comprehensive narrative account of the cultural, economic, and diplomatic relations between Americans and the British, from John Cabot’s explorations of North America of 1497 until the Iraq War of the early twenty-first century Olive Kitteridge: A Novel in Stories—Elizabeth Strout . . . . . . . . . . . . . 601 The title character, a prickly, outspoken woman, plays a major role in this collection, which deals with the lives and the relationships of the people who live in a small Maine town One More Year: Stories—Sana Krasikov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 605 Krasikov’s first collection of short stories depicts experiences and travails of immigrants from Georgia and Russia, torn between their native country and the new one The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama— Pico Iyer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609 Iyer traces the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s life from their first meeting in 1974, describing the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism’s activities in Dharamsala, India, and in his worldwide travels Original Sin: A Cultural History—Alan Jacobs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 613 The author samples beliefs about the origins and nature of sin in cultures from the ancients to contemporary sages The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America—Tom Buk-Swienty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 617 A life of Riis, whose articles, books, and photographs taught the American public about abysmal immigrant living conditions, helping spur urban reform in the Progressive Era Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories—Tobias Wolff . . . . . . . . . . 622 A selection of stories from Wolff’s previous collections, along with ten previously uncollected new stories A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir—Donald Worster . . . . . . . . 626 A definitive new biography of one of the United States’ foremost naturalists, conservationists, and environmentalists People of the Book—Geraldine Brooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 631 A valuable Jewish manuscript, dating from medieval Spain, has been preserved at the National Museum in Sarajevo, Bosnia; this fictional story imagines how the book might have survived through five hundred years of historical turmoil xxvii


A Person of Interest—Susan Choi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 636 Choi’s story of a professor, whose life changes dramatically when a colleague is killed in the adjoining office and he becomes a “person of interest” to the federal agents trying to identify who mailed the deadly bomb Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood—Mark Harris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 640 Five films released in 1967 reflect major changes in Hollywood The Plague of Doves—Louise Erdrich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 645 The long-ago slaughter of a white family casts a shadow over the inhabitants of a small North Dakota town and the nearby Ojibwa reservation The Post-American World—Fareed Zakaria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 649 Newsweek editor-columnist Zakaria presents a breathtaking picture of the emergence of the non-West to create a rich composite of the two hemispheres; his welltitled book envisages not the United States’ decline but the gradual suspension of hegemony for accommodation to what he calls the global “stakeholders in the new order” Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography—Stanley Plumly . . . . . . . . . . 653 Plumly’s meditation on the final eighteen months of John Keats’s life and posthumous reputation brings the dying poet and his work to life The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America—Maury Klein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 657 A panoramic history of the development and application of steam power and electric power, with biographic information on leading figures and attention to social, economic, financial, and technological dimensions The Private Patient—P. D. James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 662 The eighteenth crime novel by the “Queen of Detective Fiction” features James’s recurring detective team and includes the distinguished octogenerian author’s insights into old age’s redefinition of self, reflecting a continuing refinement of her elegant, restrained prose style that accords perfectly with the subject matter The Pyramid—Henning Mankell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 667 Although the first Kurt Wallander mystery appeared in 1991, these five stories cover the years between 1969 and 1989 and present Wallander as a young policeman by illustrating some of the cases that made him into a master detective

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Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian—Scott Douglas . . . . . . . 671 Douglas writes about his personal transition from aimless college student to professional librarian during a time when libraries and librarianship are also experiencing a critical transition The Reavers—George MacDonald Fraser. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 675 In a comic novel marked by wordplay, anachronisms, and outlandish events, the Scots and the English unite to defeat a vicious Spanish plot Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West—Benazir Bhutto . . . . . . . 679 Bhutto’s vision for reconciling differences within the Muslim world and between the Muslim world and the West was finished just days before her assassination in December, 2007 Red Bird—Mary Oliver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 684 In this collection of sixty-one new poems, well-known poet and nature writer Oliver observes the Cape Cod landscape from the perspective of her seventy years, encompassing love and loss, happiness, and grief Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45—Max Hastings . . . . . . . . . . . 688 Japan was losing the war, and Japanese intransigence, arrogance, and brutality were bringing retribution Rising, Falling, Hovering—C. D. Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 693 Wright blends motifs of her private life and details from a trip to Mexico to create a vehicle through which to express her anguish and rage over the U.S. war in Iraq The Road Home—Rose Tremain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 697 An immigrant tries to adjust to his new surroundings despite his yearning for the home and the family he left behind Save the Last Dance—Gerald Stern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 701 Stern’s lyrical poems delve into the diffuse worlds of dreams and memory, dwelling especially on feelings of vacancy and loss Say You’re One of Them—Uwem Akpan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 705 Akpan’s stunning collection reflects the unspeakable events that have taken place in some modern African nations, as perceived through the eyes of children

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Sea of Poppies—Amitav Ghosh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 709 The lives of Deeti, Zachary Reid, Paulette Lambert, and Raja Neel Rattan Halder become intertwined as their various paths lead them to the ship Ibis bound for Mauritius with a cargo of indentured laborers The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal—Gore Vidal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 713 A choice collection of works from one of the United States’ most prolific and provocative writers Selected Poems—Frank O’Hara . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 717 O’Hara wrote electric poetry expressing the spirit of the mid-twentieth century New York art world, and this new selection of his work showcases his unique gift Shakespeare’s Wife—Germaine Greer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 721 Greer recounts what is known about the life of Ann Hathaway, who became Ann Shakespeare, and speculates on other possibilities that her life might have included The Silver Swan—Benjamin Black. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 725 The husband of a drowned woman implores an old schoolmate to ignore protocol and suspend an autopsy on the body, which leads the doctor into a private criminal investigation that produces unexpected results Sitting Bull—Bill Yenne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 729 A narrative account of the life and times of Sitting Bull, probably the best-known Native American leader of all time Sleeping It Off in Rapid City: Poems, New and Selected— August Kleinzahler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 734 A probing and blunt collection from a poet whose restless spirit has taken him to various spots around the world The Solitary Vice: Against Reading—Mikita Brottman . . . . . . . . . . . . . 738 Brottman takes aim at the glorification of reading, suggesting that books (at least some books) are not as good as some people make them out to be The Soul Thief—Charles Baxter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 742 Divided into four parts, the novel follows the course of a single character from graduate school until middle age in an effort to examine the notion that identity theft may be as much an internal as an external threat

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The Spies of Warsaw—Alan Furst . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 747 Furst weaves a complicated and rich web of spies, passion, and intrigue in the period immediately preceding World War II A Step from Death—Larry Woiwode. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 751 Woiwode’s memoir juxtaposes a series of traumatic accidents against the composition of his most important novel, Beyond the Bedroom Wall The Story of a Marriage—Andrew Sean Greer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 755 An unusual triangle is at the center of this novel about love and war, told from the point of view of a black woman transplanted from a Midwestern farming community to the city The Story of Edgar Sawtelle—David Wroblewski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 759 The mute Sawtelle grows up in rural Wisconsin, helping his parents raise and train highly intelligent dogs A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade—Christopher Benfey . . . . . . . . . . . . . 764 Benfey describes the intersecting lives of some of the most famous American writers and artists of the Gilded Age, and he examines their artistic responses to the changing post-Civil War world Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller—Steve Weinberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 769 This dual biography traces the trajectories of two great American lives and their collision over the proper role of business in the nation’s economy, politics, and morality The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America—David Hajdu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 774 Hajdu describes the suppression of comic books in the immediate aftermath of World War II Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century— Philip Bobbitt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 779 Bobbitt argues that the nature of terrorism is largely misunderstood because it is adapting to globalization and to the market orientation of the terrorists’ primary target, secular democracies

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That Little Something—Charles Simic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 783 An accomplished poet of the vaguely ominous moves closer to the dark heart of history and human behavior Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius—Detlev Claussen . . . . . . . . . . . . 788 A student of Adorno at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in the 1960’s, Claussen has written a sweeping survey of Adorno’s career and valuable accounts of many of Adorno’s associates There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories—Ch’oe Yun . . . . . . . . . . . . . 793 Three lyrical stories by one of South Korea’s most respected writers This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War— Drew Gilpin Faust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 797 An examination of how the unprecedented carnage caused by the Civil War changed the American perceptions of death and dying Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)— Tom Vanderbilt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 801 Vanderbilt draws upon wide-ranging research to describe the complexity of traffic, the technology and infrastructure making it possible, and the often ill-advised behavior of drivers The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind, and Ecology—Robert Bringhurst . . . 805 Thirteen lectures delivered by Canadian poet, translator, and linguist Bringhurst at universities and academic institutions cover the relationship of Native American oral literature to other world literatures, emphasizing their unappreciated similarities, their narrative methods, their prosody and literary form, and their connections to the natural world 2666—Roberto Bolaño . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 810 Bolaño’s five-part saga centers on the vicious murders of young women in a northern Mexican city and the life of a mysterious German writer, Benno von Archimboldi Unaccustomed Earth—Jhumpa Lahiri . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 815 An exquisite collection of eight stories focusing on the Indian diaspora in generation 1.5, those who were either born in the United States or immigrated as young children The Waitress Was New—Dominique Fabre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 819 In Fabre’s novel, Pierre, the barman at Le Cercle, recounts the events of his final three days at the café, during which his entire lifestyle slips away from him xxxii


Wallace Stegner and the American West—Philip L. Fradkin . . . . . . . . . . 823 Fradkin’s detailed study of Stegner includes valuable discussions of the American West, conservation, Western writers, and the relationship between region and literature Wellsprings—Mario Vargas Llosa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 827 In seven essays, Peruvian novelist and essayist Vargas Llosa critically examines the literary, cultural, and political “wellsprings” of his work What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir— Haruki Murakami . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 831 A famous Japanese novelist describes how his lives as a distance runner and a writer overlap When You Are Engulfed in Flames—David Sedaris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 835 A collection of autobiographical essays that reveal absurdity in the mundane Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe—James J. Sheehan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 839 Sheehan examines the radical shift of Western Europe after World War II from a collection of competitive, warring states to an interconnective, peaceful society White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson—Brenda Wineapple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 843 Wineapple traces the friendship between Emily Dickinson, the reclusive poet of Amherst, Massachusetts, and her more worldly friend, the older, former pastor, soldier, essayist, and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson The White Tiger—Aravind Adiga . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 847 Adiga’s compelling story of the coming of age of a young man caught in the tension between wealth and poverty in a newly globalized India examines deeply questions about human nature and its struggles with good and evil, justice and injustice, equality and inequality The Widows of Eastwick—John Updike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 851 In his final novel, Updike continues the story of the women first introduced to readers in The Witches of Eastwick, tracing their lives as they return to Eastwick and attempt to atone in some ways for their past transgressions Willie Nelson: An Epic Life—Joe Nick Patoski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 856 A country-western music journalist with thirty-five years of experience writing about Willie Nelson tells the singer’s epic story xxxiii


The Winter War: Russia’s Invasion of Finland, 1939-40— Robert Edwards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 861 Edwards explores in daunting detail the events, political and social, that led up to Russia’s invasion of Finland in 1939 and the ensuing war that lasted from late November, 1939, until March 12, 1940 Without Saying: New Poems—Richard Howard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 866 In his fourteenth collection of poetry, Howard provides more of his famous dramatic monologues, supplemented by a number of other poems filled with wit and wordplay Woman’s World—Graham Rawle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 870 A cutup novel of a 1960’s British woman with a terrible secret The Word of the Lord Is upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr.—Jonathan Rieder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 874 An exploration of the various modes of speaking that King employed in communicating in particular situations, with a special emphasis upon distinctions between public and private, black and white audiences The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul— Patrick French . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 878 This authorized biography of Naipaul—an East Indian, West Indian Trinidadian turned British citizen of the world—examines his life and canon set against the history of colonialism as he moved from island scholarship lad to Oxford graduate to controversial author and Nobel Prize winner World War I: The African Front—An Imperial War on the African Continent—Edward Paice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 883 Paice describes a grueling campaign of World War I on a nearly forgotten front, East Africa Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform—Martin J. S. Rudwick. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 888 Through an analysis of the work of such scientists as Charles Lyell, Rudwick shows how geologists, through their discoveries and search for causes, constructed an accurate, consistent, and enlightening history of the earth with a periodization and directional sweep characteristic of the reconstructive histories of ancient Greece and Rome

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The Writer as Migrant—Ha Jin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 893 A collection of three essays, originally delivered as lectures, by Ha Jin, who is an eminent immigrant translingual writer, on writers like himself who have moved between countries and languages Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body—Neil Shubin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 897 Retracing studies in paleontology, genetics, and cellular and molecular biology, Shubin draws upon his own experiences and the history of seminal experiments to demonstrate how mammalian anatomy can be traced back to the anatomy of fishes living between three and four billion years ago

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CONTRIBUTING REVIEWERS

Michael Adams City University of New York Graduate Center

Franz G. Blaha University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Richard Adler University of Michigan-Dearborn

Pegge Bochynski Salem State College

Thomas P. Adler Purdue University M. D. Allen University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley Emily Alward Henderson, Nevada, District Libraries Andrew J. Angyal Elon University Charles F. Bahmueller Center for Civic Education Barbara Bair Duke University Dean Baldwin Penn State Erie, The Behrend College Carl L. Bankston III Tulane University Milton Berman University of Rochester Cynthia A. Bily Adrian, Michigan Margaret Boe Birns New York University

Richard Hauer Costa Texas A&M University Mary Virginia Davis University of California, Davis

Steve D. Boilard California Legislative Analysts’ Office

Frank Day Clemson University

Edmund J. Campion University of Tennessee

Rebecca Hendrick Flannagan Francis Marion University

Francine A. Dempsey College of Saint Rose Harold Branam Savannah State University M. Casey Diana (retired) Arizona State University Peter Brier Robert P. Ellis California State Worcester State College University, Los (retired) Angeles Northborough Historical Society Jeffrey L. Buller Florida Atlantic Thomas L. Erskine University Salisbury University Thomas J. Campbell Thomas R. Feller Pacific Lutheran Nashville, Tennessee University

Henry L. Carrigan, Jr. Northwestern University Dolores L. Christie Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) John Carroll University Marc C. Conner Washington and Lee University

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Roy C. Flannagan South Carolina Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics Robert J. Forman St. John’s University, New York Kathryn E. Fort Michigan State University College of Law


Donald R. Franceschetti The University of Memphis Jean C. Fulton Landmark College Ann D. Garbett Averett University Janet E. Gardner University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth Leslie E. Gerber Appalachian State University Sheldon Goldfarb University of British Columbia Karen Gould Austin, Texas Lewis L. Gould University of Texas, Austin Hans G. Graetzer South Dakota State University Jay L. Halio University of Delaware Diane Andrews Henningfeld Adrian College Carl W. Hoagstrom Ohio Northern University (retired) William L. Howard Chicago State University Jeffry Jensen Glendale Community College

Kyle Keefer Converse College Fiona Kelleghan University of Miami Steven G. Kellman University of Texas, San Antonio Howard A. Kerner Polk Community College

David W. Madden California State University, Sacramento Lois A. Marchino University of Texas at El Paso Charles E. May California State University, Long Beach

Grove Koger Boise, Idaho, Public Library

Laurence W. Mazzeno Alvernia College

Margaret A. Koger Boise, Idaho

Vasa D. Mihailovich University of North Carolina

James B. Lane Indiana University Northwest

Timothy C. Miller Millersville University

Eugene Larson Los Angeles Pierce College Leon Lewis Appalachian State University

Robert Morace Daemen College Daniel P. Murphy Hanover College Robert Niemi St. Michael’s College

Thomas Tandy Lewis St. Cloud State University

John Nizalowski Mesa State College

R. C. Lutz Madison Advisors

Holly L. Norton University of Northwestern Ohio

Janet McCann Texas A&M University Joanne McCarthy Tacoma, Washington Andrew Macdonald Loyola University, New Orleans Gina Macdonald Nicholls State University S. Thomas Mack University of South Carolina-Aiken

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Robert J. Paradowski Rochester Institute of Technology David Peck Laguna Beach, California Marjorie J. Podolsky Penn State Erie, The Behrend College Cliff Prewencki Delmar, New York

CONTRIBUTING REVIEWERS

Maureen J. PufferRothenberg Valdosta State University

Marc Rothenberg National Science Foundation

Edna B. Quinn Salisbury University

Elizabeth Sanders Nicholls State University

Thomas Rankin Concord, California

R. Baird Shuman University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

R. Kent Rasmussen Thousand Oaks, California Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman Charleston Southern University Mark Rich Cashton, Wisconsin Carl Rollyson City University of New York, Baruch College Joseph Rosenblum University of North Carolina, Greensboro John K. Roth Claremont McKenna College

Thomas J. Sienkewicz Monmouth College Charles L. P. Silet Iowa State University Carl Singleton Fort Hays State University Roger Smith Portland, Oregon Maureen Kincaid Speller University of Kent at Canterbury Theresa L. Stowell Adrian College Gerald H. Strauss Bloomsburg University

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Paul Stuewe Green Mountain College Paul B. Trescott Southern Illinois University William L. Urban Monmouth College Sara Vidar Los Angeles, California Ronald G. Walker Western Illinois University Shawncey Webb Taylor University Twyla R. Wells University of Northwestern Ohio Bob Whipple Creighton University Thomas Willard University of Arizona John Wilson Editor, Books & Culture Scott D. Yarbrough Charleston Southern University

Author Photo Credits

Kwame Anthony Appiah: Greg Martin; Paul Auster: © Jerry Bauer; Julian Barnes: © Isolde Ohlbaum; Eavan Boland: Library of Congress; Jennifer Finney Boylan: James Bowdin/Courtesy, Random House; Geraldine Brooks: Randi Baird/ Library of Congress; William F. Buckley, Jr.: Courtesy, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh; Michael Chabon: © Patricia Williams/Courtesy, Random House; Michael Connelly: Courtesy, Allen & Unwin; Scott Douglas: Diana Le Counte/Courtesy, Perseus Books; Louise Erdrich: Michael Dorris/Courtesy, HarperCollins; Dominique Fabre: Courtesy, Archipelago Books; Robert Frost: Library of Congress; John Grisham: Courtesy, Doubleday & Co.; Amy Laura Hall: Courtesy, Wm B Eerdmans Publishing; P. D. James: Courtesy, Allen and Unwin; Ha Jin: Kalman Zabarsky; Stephen King: Tabitha King; Ursula K. Le Guin: © Marion Wood Kolisch/Courtesy, Harcourt Books; Dennis Lehane: David Shankbone; Alexander McCall Smith: Tara Murphy/Library of Congress; Alexander McCall Smith: Chris Watt/Courtesy, UCLA; Toni Morrison: Lynda Koolish/Courtesy, University Press of Mississippi; Joyce Carol Oates: © Norman Seeff; Frank O’Hara: Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Archives & Special Collections/George C. Gordon Library/Courtesy, George Montgomery; Cynthia Ozick: Nancy Crampton/Courtesy, Houghton Mifflin Company; Grace Paley: Courtesy, New York State Writers Institute, State University of New York; Richard Price: Ralph Gibson/Houghton Mifflin; Anne Rice: Courtesy, Random House; Philip Roth: © Nancy Crampton; John Updike: © Davis Freeman; Mario Vargas Llosa: © Jerry Bauer; Gore Vidal: © Jane Bown; Kurt Vonnegut: © Jill Krementz; Steven Waldman: Christine Austin/Courtesy, Random House; Simon Winchester: © Marion Ettlinger/Courtesy, Picador USA; Larry Woiwode: © Nancy Crampton; Tobias Wolff: © Jerry Bauer

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1

ACEDIA AND ME A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life Author: Kathleen Norris (1947) Publisher: Pantheon (New York). 334 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Memoir Time: 1947-2007 Locale: South Dakota and Hawaii Norris examines the concept of acedia from its ancient understanding in monastic spirituality through its more recent role in philosophy, psychology, literature, and American culture and also in her spiritual, marital, and writing life Kathleen Norris, a poet and nonfiction writer, has written earlier about her life and her spirituality in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (1993), Cloister Walk (1996), and Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (1998). In these and in The Virgin of Bennington (2001), an account of her college and early professional years, Norris alludes to the bouts of despondency and the resistance to commitment that marked her life. She maintained that she had found professional help for her depression, but she had no name for or understanding of the latter affliction. In Cloister Walk, written after two residencies at a Benedictine monastery, she devotes a few pages to acedia, and she credits a lecture that became The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and “Women’s Work” (1999) with inspiring her to do a full-length study based on her belief in the usefulness of the literature of monasticism for herself and her world. In Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life, Norris focuses on this belief. She found that those in monastic life, going back to the fourth century, understood acedia best, identifying it as the “noonday devil,” a spiritual temptation to weariness unto giving up that may be felt by a monk after his first fervor, at a time when he is facing the reality of his day-by-day life committed to prayer. It was at noon that a monk felt most acutely the temptation to lose his belief that he could live a life completely devoted to prayer. In the first chapter, “Somewhere,” the writer acknowledges that in discovering the term “acedia” she felt “a weight lift from [her] soul.” For Norris, throughout her life, making any commitment was difficult, since the thought of having to follow through on commitments was wearying. Discovering acedia was life-changing for Norris, giving her an understanding of the feeling she had suffered from childhood and still suffers. After this discovery, she spent years in research to broaden and deepen this understanding, and the result is Acedia and Me, which describes the connections between acedia and her nearly thirty-year marriage, her ongoing spiritual journey, and her successful writing life. Norris first briefly recounts the understanding of acedia in early monastic literature. She points to the inclusion of the term “acedia” with spelling variations in editions

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Magill’s Literary Annual 2009

of the Oxford English Dictionary from the fourteenth century though the 1989 edition. This persistence of the word, says Norris, is “like the lexicon’s version of a mole, working on us while hidden from view.” The persistence even while obscure means, Norris adds, that acedia has always been and remains a human affliction. The opposite of acedia, she suggests, is caring, and to illustrate the importance of caring she gives her text an underlying foundation of her battles with acedia, moving easily in the text from an essayist’s discussion of acedia to a storyteller’s presentation of its role in the different phases of her life. In her earlier texts, Norris connected her spirituality to her Presbyterian roots in rural South Dakota and her sojourns at the Benedictine St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. She grounded these narratives in the landscape of the midwestern plains and in the rhythms and images of scriptural and liturgical hymns and prayers of her religious roots. Though Norris’s spiritual language is also part of Acedia and Me, this style is often overwhelmed by her research. The text is replete with definitions and quotes, valuable to the reader but lacking useful bibliographical citation. “I can hear scholars howling with some justification,” she writes, “that I am mixing it all up, failing to make the necessary and proper distinctions.” Perhaps to make up for her freewheeling style, in the final chapter she gives the reader “Acedia: A Commonplace Book,” forty-five pages of quotations, arranged chronologically, that give or imply a definition of acedia. These alone make rich reading. Norris asserts her right to her chosen writing style in the “Author’s Note”: What she is attempting is a lengthy “meditation on the subject of acedia.” Meditation as method seems to give the writer license to discuss acedia in the way that works for her. The text meanders, looking at the main topic from every angle: depression, faith, hope, illness, love, prayer, marriage, theology, monastic life, suffering, caregiving, writer’s block, and more. Norris quotes rich material from every age, genre, and spiritual tradition. Numerous insights of great value appear within her presentation of these source materials, as if Norris the poet is trying to share in another way the epiphanies that are the heart of the rigidly concise forms of poetry. If sometimes her insights seem to be buried in the breadth and depth of her prose, much enlightenment does come to the reader. Some of the richest sections in Norris’s study of acedia relate the story of its role in her marriage to the poet David Joseph Dwyer (1946-2003), to whom she dedicates this book. Throughout this marriage, as she dealt with the mysterious malady she now calls acedia, her husband suffered from psychological problems, alcoholism, serious illnesses, and in the end terminal cancer. Perhaps in Acedia and Me the writer found a safe way to express honestly the ongoing pain and enduring love in her marriage and to face the seventh decade of her life as a widow. The narrative sections make a sometimes overly informative text a richer reading experience, and traveling with Norris on her spiritual journey is always worthwhile.

Kathleen Norris is an award-winning poet, and three of her nonfiction titles have been national best sellers and New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She has received grants from the Bush and Guggenheim Foundations, and she is an editor-at-large of The Christian Century.

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Norris’s stated intention of rescuing the lost term “acedia” and restoring it in contemporary language, psychology, and spirituality effectively holds the text together. Although it is difficult to define because it is a complicated syndrome, properly understood, acedia is, she asserts, what the third millennium needs to heal “much of the restless boredom, frantic escape, commitment phobia, and enervating despair” she has found in herself and seen in her contemporaries. One difficulty is that dictionary definitions of acedia by the end of the twentieth century, when they did appear, were so broad as to confuse or hide what the word meant. She finds many terms and phrases: “heedlessness, torpor . . . [a] non-caring state”; “the deadly sin of sloth,” “spiritual torpor and apathy”; “a mental syndrome, the chief features of which are listlessness, carelessness, apathy, and melancholia.” None captures as well as monastic literature about acedia the mental, emotional, and spiritual impact that she has suffered during her lifetime. Some distinctions that Norris makes are useful to understanding acedia. Though some confuse clinical depression and acedia, Norris asserts that the former implies a certain level of anguish, while in the latter it seems a matter of indifference. “Despair” is not an adequate synonym, either: “For despair, participation in the divine nature through grace is perceived as appealing, but impossible; for acedia, the prospect is possible, but unappealing.” Better to understand acedia as the monks did: that it is a “bad thought,” meant to be replaced by another thought, a good thought. At one time Christianity defined acedia as one of the “eight bad thoughts” that were part of one’s being but could and should be rejected in favor of good thoughts, lest they lead to sinful acts. Norris agrees that acedia comes as a bad thought, and she is surprised that at some point in church history the eighth bad thought, acedia, disappeared into the term “sloth,” and the remaining seven bad thoughts became the “seven deadly sins.” Acedia is not in her mind a sin, such as sloth, but bad thinking that might lead to sinful acts, such as walking out on one’s commitments. According to Norris, the cure is humility, knowing that one is weak but also knowing that with God’s grace one can be strong. Her poet self helps Norris explain that looking at one’s own smallness with humility gives one “fresh eyes” to see that impasses or blocks are “not merely the cause of the symptom of . . . misery but also as places where the light of promise shines though.” Though “Abbas” and “Ammas,” wisdom figures in ancient Christian monastic life, are her primary sources for understanding acedia, Norris finds other helpful teachers across the ages. One is the sixteenth century spiritual leader John of the Cross (1542-1591). When this Carmelite mystic and monk describes spiritual aridity, he means acedia, Norris says, that which is felt by anyone who reaches a mental impasse, “whether in writing, art, prayer, marriage, or parenting.” The defeating thought is that the impasse or block one faces cannot be overcome because no tactic one can think of will work, so why bother? All is futile, hopeless. Norris, who has faced both writer’s block and spiritual emptiness many times, notes how appropriate it is that John of the Cross is the patron saint of poets. Similar is the statement by philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) that it is presumptuous to think “that there is no way out for God because I cannot see any.” For a twentieth century view, Norris calls on play-

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wright Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006), who, in writing on sloth was really referring to acedia. Wasserstein wrote that, like “traditional” sloths, “New Age [sloths look] at the possibility of real thought” and reject it. Norris’s spiritual journey with acedia, with its integral connection with monastic texts and Benedictine men and women religious, has led her to many epiphanies about her writing life. For example, when St. Benedict (480-547) writes about sloth, he says, “Every time you begin a good work, you must pray to [God] to bring it to perfection.” Benedict, she finds, sees all who follow the Benedictine rule as beginners, and she contrasts this attitude with our culture’s view that beginners are those at the bottom of the heap. Better are those who leap forward, quickly, impatient with any delays. Like the pilgrim on a spiritual journey, beginning again and again, Norris as a writer begins over and over, facing again the feared blank page. “Beginning requires that I remain willing to act, and to summon my hopes in the face of torpor . . . rejecting that self-censurious spirit that will arise to scorn my efforts as futile.” Another important definition of acedia helpful to her writing life came from an essay by Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) called “Accidie.” Huxley traces the term from medieval times through nineteenth century Romantic literature where it assumed a “deadly form, a mixture of boredom, sorrow, and despair, [that became] an inspiration to the greatest poets and novelists, and it has remained so to this day.”As a young writer in New York during the 1960’s, like many younger poets, Norris was tempted to believe that writing poetry required such ennui. Huxley’s essay, Norris says, taught her that one could be a poet and have faith. These words define accurately the Norris known through her totally human and deeply spiritual writings. Francine A. Dempsey

Review Sources America 199, no. 10 (October 6, 2008): 31. The Atlantic Monthly 302, no. 4 (November, 2008): 140-141. Booklist 104, no. 21 (July 1, 2008): 27. Christianity Today 52, no. 8 (August, 2008): 59. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 14 (July 10, 2008): 80. Library Journal 133, no. 19 (November 15, 2008): 44. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 23 (June 9, 2008): 44.

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THE AGE OF REAGAN A History, 1974-2008 Author: Sean Wilentz (1951) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 564 pp. $27.95 Type of work: History Time: 1974-2008 Locale: Washington, D.C. A fast-paced, well-documented analysis of the rise of Ronald Reagan, his presidential administration, and his impact on American politics Principal personages: Richard Nixon (1913-1994), U.S. president, 1969-1975 Gerald Ford (1913-2006), U.S. president, 1975-1977 Jimmy Carter (1924), U.S. president, 1977-1981 Ronald Reagan (1911-2004), U.S. president, 1981-1989 George H. W. Bush (1924), U.S. president, 1989-1993 Bill Clinton (1946), U.S. president, 1993-2001 George W. Bush (1946), U.S. president, 2001-2009

Sean Wilentz, who teaches American history at Princeton University, has a welldeserved reputation as both an outstanding scholar and a strong partisan for the Democratic Party in contemporary American politics. His was a leading voice, for example, against the effort to impeach President Bill Clinton in 1998. Because of Wilentz’s involvement in contemporary politics, this new study, The Age of Reagan, on the impact of Ronald Reagan on recent national politics will surprise Wilentz’s critics and disconcert some Democrats. In this lengthy but lively treatment of the last four decades of public affairs, Wilentz takes Reagan seriously and examines his effect on the political scene with a shrewd sense of the president’s genuine importance. From that interpretive point of view, Wilentz then proceeds to analyze Reagan’s impact on subsequent presidents and American politics in general. Wilentz’s scholarly field has been the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, about which he has published important books about Jacksonian democracy and for which he has received prizes for his substantial accomplishments. Wilentz brings his strong capacity to do extensive research in primary sources and to write compelling prose to his study of Reagan and his times. His in-depth explorations in the archival collections of the Gerald R. Ford Library and the Jimmy Carter Library are among the genuine strengths of this study. Wilentz offers a timely reminder that extensive research in primary sources is still one of the hallmarks of excellence in an historian. Readers will find an abundance of fresh information about the major players in the time period covered by Wilentz’s book. He has useful things to say about the

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deeper meaning of the Iran-Contra episode of Reagan’s second term. Few writers have provided more intelligent treatments of Clinton’s trials at the hands of the president’s political enemies during the 1990’s. Through out, Wilentz has an eye for the appropriate quotation to illustrate his arguments and to illuminate the character of the public figures that he discusses. Wilentz has mastered the facts of innumerable now-forgotten controversies, and he sets the record straight on such questions as The New York Times and its questionable role in promoting the bogus Whitewater flap of the Clinton era. The narrative begins with the resignation of Richard Nixon in August, 1974, and the launch of the administration of Gerald R. Ford, and Wilentz provides an insightful analysis of Ford’s brief tenure in the White House. He emphasizes the importance of such figures as Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney to the decision making of the president in the run-up to the 1976 presidential election. The displeasure with Congress that Rumsfeld and Cheney experienced at that time influenced their disdain for Congress during the administration of George W. Bush. Ford emerges as an underrated president who suffered from the legacy of Nixon and his inability to overcome the negative public reaction to his pardon of the former president in September, 1974. The Carter administration comes in for a tart appraisal from Wilentz. The president’s political ineptitude in office and the contradiction between his lofty campaign rhetoric and his maladroit governing style are developed in rich detail. Carter overmanaged the details of his presidency and failed to connect with the public as economic conditions worsened. This chapter recaptures the difficulties of the Carter years and the consequent decay of the Democratic Party as a governing coalition. The key to the book, however, is the enigmatic personality and enduring political appeal of Reagan. Wilentz describes how Reagan’s star rose in California politics during the mid-1960’s and why the governor became the darling of Republican conservatives in the 1970’s. Reagan had a winning style that avoided the stridency of Barry Goldwater and the moral squalor of Nixon. With his team of savvy media advisers, Reagan used the techniques of Hollywood stardom to package conservatism in a way that addressed the fears of Americans in the turbulence of the post-Watergate era. Wilentz is especially good on Reagan’s ability to adapt to changing political circumstances, even when his tactical shifts conflicted with his philosophical creed. In California and in Washington, the tax-cutting Reagan proved able to raise revenues when it was politically necessary. Reagan’s inscrutable character has defied the efforts of biographers such as Edmund Morris to explain what made this disengaged executive so successful and popular for most of his eight years in office. Reagan was not a leader who revealed his inner thoughts on paper or to his closest associates. The memoirs of those who worked in the Reagan White House are filled with episodes in which aides try to decipher what the chief executive was thinking or how he exerted himself to achieve his ends. Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was president from 1933 to 1945, had

Sean Wilentz is a member of the history faculty at Princeton University. His book The Rise of American Democracy (2004) won the Bancroft Prize in 2005.

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there been so opaque a leader who hid from view the way he arrived at conclusions and decided issues. While there have been volumes published of Reagan’s speeches, his letters, and his personal diaries of the White House years, the core of the man remains a mystery that has eluded biographical examination. Wilentz stresses Reagan’s genuine commitment to arms control and his antipathy to the prospect of nuclear war as key elements in driving his willingness to negotiate with the Soviet Union and its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Wilentz shows how Reagan rebounded from the reverses associated with the Iran-Contra scandal to end his administration on a high note and with his popularity restored. At the same time, the author resists giving Reagan too much credit for the decline and breakup of the Soviet Union. Wilentz is an expert and evenhanded guide through the complexities of the Reagan years in power. He recalls the difficult first two years, when the economic program associated with tax cuts and increased defense spending resulted in a brief, sharp recession. He then shows how the economic stimulus of the Reagan tax cuts restored prosperity in the middle of the 1980’s and propelled the president to his sweeping triumph in the 1984 election. Time after time, the president escaped the Democratic efforts to paint him into a corner in political terms. Wilentz’s balanced account will be a keystone for genuine revisionism about Reagan’s record as president. In his effort to be fair to Reagan, Wilentz sometimes overstresses the positive argument for the president. The accumulated deficits impaired the economy and started a process of economic unraveling that has yet to end. Reagan was a divisive force on the race issue, as Wilentz shows, with his presidential suspicions about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his willingness to pander to the worst tendencies of Southern Republicans. Wilentz gives Reagan credit for his turnaround after the Iran-Contra scandal in 1986 and 1987. With a new leadership team in the White House led by former Senator Howard Baker, Reagan pursued serious arms agreements with the Soviet Union that accelerated the collapse of that political system. As a result, Reagan renewed his popularity with the American people. The accounts of the Bush and Clinton administrations carry forward Wilentz’s contention about the key role Reagan played in modern American politics. In the case of George H. W. Bush, the effort of the president to soften the Reagan policies and make them more acceptable resulted in an administration that outraged the right wing of the Republicans without producing corresponding electoral gains among moderate Democrats. The economic downturn of the early 1990’s doomed Bush’s chances for reelection in 1992. Clinton’s election in 1992 ushered in a turbulent decade in national politics. The Republicans never accepted Clinton as a legitimate chief executive, and the president faced a series of campaigns to oust him from office. Wilentz traces the evolution of these right-wing efforts to find grounds for impeachment in Clinton’s pre-presidential career and in his conduct as president. There are few better brief treatments of the Clinton “scandals” and the resulting impeachment trial of the incumbent in 1999. Wilentz acknowledges Clinton’s moral lapse in his affair with Monica Lewinsky and

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the political trial that grew out of that mistake, but he underscores how much politics rather than genuine conviction lay behind the Republican drive for impeachment. There is an abbreviated examination of the presidency of George W. Bush, a chief executive for whom Wilentz has little regard. The conclusion of the narrative comes down to the 2008 primary election season and seems somewhat tacked on for contemporary relevance. However, the rather hasty conclusion of Wilentz’s story should not detract from the merits of his larger argument. This study is one of the first to endeavor to place Reagan in historical context and to weigh his record with dispassionate evaluation. Few will doubt Wilentz’s conclusion about Reagan’s historical importance, whatever one might think about the president’s performance in office. Only in passing does Wilentz examine an important element in the reshaping of American politics under Reagan. The former film star, with his sure sense of how to handle the television and print media, came into power during a key shift in how Americans received news about public affairs. With the emergence of cable television during the early years of Reagan’s presidency, entertainment values, especially the relentless drive for ratings, dominated the news business. Reagan and his advisers understood that attractive visual images and a well-constructed daily narrative trumped hard news every time. In the process, American politics was “dumbed down” to the lowest common denominator of what would grab the attention of the viewing public. That development was another key legacy of Reagan and the show-business ethos he embodied. Journalists who read this book with close attention will get a needed lesson in how their professional practices declined during the years of Reagan’s ascendancy in American politics. Writing contemporary history is no easy assignment. The absence of primary sources that reveal the motivations of the participants is one handicap. Modern journalism, often unreliable, makes establishing basic facts a formidable challenge. Misinformation clouds the Internet, and urban legends about politicians proliferate on blogs and in the resulting commentary. That is what makes Wilentz’s achievement here so impressive. He has navigated through the intricacies of the Reagan era and the decades that followed with a sure hand. Interested readers will find in his annotations guides to all the important issues of the period and information about where to locate more relevant data. This is a resource that historians and their students will be mining for years. While Wilentz has written a book that scholars can use, he has also well served the reading public. His account of the Reagan era will stimulate debate and provoke useful dialogue. He has achieved his purpose of opening up the Reagan presidency and its consequences for serious discussion. In that sense, a historian of liberal Democratic beliefs has done for Reagan what conservative apologists for the president have failed to accomplish. Wilentz has placed Reagan in historical context and made his career in American politics a centerpiece of how the late twentieth century in the United States will be understood in the future. Lewis L. Gould

The Age of Reagan / wilentz

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Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 15 (April 1, 2008): 19. Commonweal 135, no. 21 (December 5, 2008): 22-24. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 3 (February 1, 2008): 141. Library Journal 133, no. 4 (March 1, 2008): 97. The New York Times Book Review, May 18, 2008, p. 50.

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AJAX Author: Sophocles (496-406 b.c.e.) Translated from the Greek by John Tipton Foreword by Stanley Lombardo Publisher: Flood Editions (Chicago). 112 pp. Paperback, $13.95 Type of work: Drama, poetry Time: The final year of the Trojan War (c. 1184 b.c.e.) Locale: The Greek encampment outside the walls of Troy A fast-paced contemporary rendering of Sophocles’ tragedy Principal characters: Odysseus, the Greek warrior who has received the armor of Achilles Ajax, the Greek warrior denied Achilles’ armor, then inflicted with madness by Athena Athena, daughter of Zeus and Metis (“Wisdom”), born of Zeus’s head Tecmessa, Ajax’s bride by capture Teucer, Ajax’s brother, entrusted with his burial Menelaus, Greek warrior who awarded Achilles’ armor to Odysseus Agamemnon, Menelaus’s brother who refuses Ajax burial

Modern medicine would classify Ajax’s problem as battle fatigue or as post-traumatic stress. In Sophocles’ play, Athena is to blame, or be praised, since by sending a fit of madness to Ajax she saves her champion Odysseus. The immediate result is the mass slaughter of the Greek army’s herd animals. The ultimate outcome is the suicide of the disgraced Ajax. Ajax has reason for his anger. Agamemnon and Menelaus have denied him the armor of the dead Achilles and awarded it instead to Odysseus, the great strategist of the Trojan horse. Odysseus is the hero most beloved by Athena, the goddess who masterminds the Olympian strategies that keep Zeus in power. Usually, Athena is protrayed as a benign and comforting deity who reassures everyone that order in the cosmos is possible. Sophocles’ Athena, however, has a sadistic streak. She encourages Ajax in the delusion that he is killing the Greeks who slighted and ridiculed him, even to the point of admiring the ram he plans to kill last and believes to be Odysseus. His suicide at the play’s climax places him literally and figuratively among the animals that he has slaughtered. John Tipton’s textual realization of Sophocles’ play is not so much a translation as it is a modern rendering. In verse, it employs what Tipton calls the “counted line.” By this he means that each line of dialogue represents his choice of six words that render the parallel Greek line. The immediate effect is to shorten and simplify diction and sometimes to create poetic shorthand that preserves the narrative while rewriting Sophocles’ poetry.

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An example of this technique is worthwhile. When Ajax’s wife Tecmessa realizes that her husband has awakened from his fit and realizes what he has done, she says: At least while he was sick he was happy in his havoc; I was the one in pain. But after he could breathe again the ugly truth poured over him. I’m no better now than before and his problems have just doubled.

Ian Johnston’s translation, which is closer to the Greek text, reads: That man in there, when he was still so ill, enjoyed himself while savage fantasies held him in their grip, but we were sane, and, since he was one of us, we suffered. But now there is a pause in his disease, he can recuperate and understand the full extremity of bitter grief, yet everything for us remains the same— our anguish is no milder than before. This is surely not a single sorrow, but a double grief?

Tipton’s rendering reduces twelve lines of Greek to seven. More significant, he changes the emphasis of Tecmessa’s speech. He makes her a character independent of the collective identity of the Greek forces and a pained wife rather than a captive woman among sympathizing onlookers. What Tipton’s text loses in fidelity to Sophocles it gains in immediacy and humanity. A reader might object to this, but it is hard to argue that Tipton departs from Sophocles’ larger intention to describe human transcendence. Tipton’s immediate influence is the poet Louis Zukofsky, who employs the counted line in his anthology 80 Flowers (1978). Tecmessa is a bride by capture who be comes a willing spouse. Teucer is an initially John Tipton is an experimental poet diffident brother who argues for Ajax’s right working in Chicago. Flood Editions to burial and ultimately performs that ritual also published his earlier book, scrupulously. Even Odysseus, the warrior who Surfaces (2004). He prides himself on receives the armor by judgment of Agamem- being considered a nonacademic poet, non and Menelaus, argues for Ajax’s honor- works for Morningstar, Inc., and has able burial. While even Menelaus recognizes had previous work published in the the necessary justice of this, Agamemnon does Chicago Review and on the Internet in not. In fact, Agamemnon becomes a para- Cordite Poetry Review, Fascicle, and digm of the leader who refuses to acknowl- MiPOesis. With Louis Zukofsky, he has edge a disastrous mistake. The mistake ex- pioneered use of the counted line as a tends beyond awarded armor to prosecution creative technique. of the Trojan War itself. Agamemnon had be-

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gun this enterprise by sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia, what one could reasonably characterize as a mad act performed by a man the world judges as sane. He remains unconverted to the last. Sophocles’ Ajax is, thus, a deceptively subtle play that contrasts small-minded brutality and generous forgiveness. Ajax sacked Tecmessa’s city and tore her from her father, yet she comes to love him as her husband. Odysseus is the ally who becomes, after receiving the armor, Ajax’s most hated enemy. Odysseus forgives Ajax and argues for his burial; this is a request Agamemnon grants with mean reluctance. Tipton takes even greater liberties with the Chorus than he does in translating the dialogue. The choral odes become abstractions of the Greek rather than translations. This is by design. Tipton eliminates all first-person references. He further abstracts syntactical elements to make the Chorus’s words those of a psychologically distressed human being. After Ajax leaves the stage, intent on his suicide, the Chorus, which consists of sailors rather than soldiers, compares the dull pain of wielding oars to the formless ache it feels for Ajax’s disgrace. Alliteration merges with repetition in the words hurt heaps hurt here left right left where it will will it learn the place? dropped it dropped can’t find it be found half a boat’s oars in sync with what?

These changes create a dynamically contemporary play. They underscore its symmetry in the sense that the initial frenzy that results in Ajax’s slaughter of the herds parallels the ten-year slaughter of the Trojan War. The dead Ajax among the herds becomes another senseless corpse among the other corpses, leveling the value of warriors and the animals that sustain them. In essence, Tipton has written another play. It extends the myth to an apocalypse, a bare landscape that is timeless, and such, after all, was the goal of Sophocles. In Tipton’s realization, the ancient world merges with the modern. Tipton has no problem having Ajax describe his sword, a “gift” he received through Hector “who was my most hated enemy—planted in the angry Trojan ground,” as though it were a gun “cocked and ready . . . ” The zeugma describes both the sword that Ajax will plant upright in order to fall upon it and Hector himself, for whom his city has become his burial place. Tipton’s Chorus wonders about “where it will end/ the count of years wandering/ the toll the statistics of missiles.” It concludes that it is “better [to be] hurled into space/ or into the crowd in hell/ than to be a bomb maker/ and share your results/ the Los Alamos boys knew what they’d done.” None of this is Sophocles. It has an anger that one never finds in that playwright. Tipton still does manage a powerful realization of the mythic idea implicit in the Ajax myth. That myth, in the final analysis, is about endless war, brutalizing by its nature,

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and the power of the human heart to generously forgive. In doing this, Tipton continues in the tradition of the ancient playwrights who created neither their characters nor the plots of their plays. The originality of Sophocles, just as the originality of Aeschylus, Euripides, or Tipton, lay in his ability to emphasize an aspect of personality or an element of the theme that is appropriate to a historical period. Ajax was a great hero, but he was never the greatest hero. The decision of Agamemnon and Menelaus to award the armor of Achilles to Odysseus makes logical sense. Odysseus had masterminded the scheme through which the Greeks stole the statue of Athena from the Palladium, the temple that stood on the Trojan citadel. This achievement, which fate had decreed necessary if Troy were ever to fall, would have been enough to ensure Odysseus’s fame. The deep-seated fear of Ajax, then, is his realization that while he is a hero, he is not one of the first rank. Ajax’s achievement, such as it first seems to him to be, is that he has slain and imprisoned his enemies, his fellow warriors who brought him to Troy, allowed him to fight there for ten years, and then would not recognize his service. Athena encourages this delusion. Ajax’s achievement, such as it is in reality, is that he has proved that though everyone considers that killing the herds proves Ajax’s insanity, Agamemnon’s pursuit of a ten-year war and the death of thousands of soldiers is proof of courage and perseverance. Tipton’s rendering allows the audience to realize that those Ajax perceives as his enemies, his fellow warriors, may be so in actuality. Agamemnon had led him into war and maintained the war for ten full years. After madness that Ajax cannot control causes him to kill the herds, Agamemnon becomes Ajax’s declared enemy. Nearly a third of the play follows Ajax’s suicide. This is a definite indication that Sophocles intends something more for his audience to consider. It can only be the debate over Agamemnon’s refusal of burial. Both in Sophocles’ text and in Tipton’s vision of the play, this passage shows maturity in the character of Teucer, generosity on the part of Odysseus, and sullen stubbornness in the character of Agamemnon. Only Odysseus’s appeal to Agamemnon as a friend causes the latter to relent, though he remains ungracious to the end and refuses participation in the rites. The world at large would judge Agamemnon a great leader. Sophocles’ audience, and certainly Tipton’s, might easily question that hero’s sanity. Robert J. Forman

Review Sources Bryn Mawr Classical Review 44 (August, 2008). The Nation 287, no. 3 (July 21, 2008): 41-44. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 20 (May 19, 2008): 37.

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ALFRED KAZIN A Biography Author: Richard M. Cook (1941) Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). Illustrated. 452 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Literary biography, literary history Time: 1915-1998 Locale: New York City; Roxbury, Connecticut; Wellfleet, Massachusetts; California; Italy This first comprehensive literary biography of one of the most notable literary critics of his age chronicles Kazin’s emergence while still in his twenties as a critic of considerable note, and it relates this emergence to the intellectualism that abounded in New York during the 1930’s Principal personages: Alfred Kazin (1915-1998), a prominent literary critic Gita Fagelman Kazin (d. 1990), Alfred’s mother Gedahlia “Charles” Kazin (d. 1970), Alfred’s father Ann Birstein (1927), Kazin’s third wife Judith Dunford (1933), Kazin’s fourth wife Michael Kazin (1948), Kazin’s son Cathrael “Kate” Kazin (1955), Kazin’s daughter Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), a notable intellectual and Kazin’s friend Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970), a historian and Kazin’s friend Carl Van Doren (1884-1950), Kazin’s friend who encouraged him to write On Native Grounds

Richard M. Cook might well have subtitled his biography of Alfred Kazin “An Anatomy of Loneliness.” Throughout his eighty-three years, Kazin was never able to relate easily to people nor did he find in any of four marriages the kind of closeness that marriage usually involves. His first marriage to Natasha Dohn in 1938 was annulled in 1944. His marriage in 1947 to Carol Bookman ended in divorce after three years and one child. His tumultuous sixteen-year marriage to Ann Birstein was terminated in 1978. Finally, in 1983, he wed Judith Dunford, eighteen years his junior, to whom he remained married for the rest of his life. The son of Eastern European immigrants to New York, Kazin was brought up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, living there with his parents from birth until he had completed a bachelor’s degree at New York’s City College in 1935 and a master’s degree at Columbia University in 1938. He shared the values found in many immigrant families of the period. His parents, like those of many Jewish American children who grew up during the Great Depression, sacrificed substantially with the

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expectation that their children would become the first college graduates in the family and Richard M. Cook, a professor of would devote themselves to worthwhile en- American literature at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, knew Alfred deavors. Kazin’s mother, Gita Fagelman Kazin, was Kazin. Cook talked in depth with Kazin a seamstress who worked at home making about his contributions to American fashionable clothes for a circle of devoted literature as a field of study. customers. Gita had a dominant personality and doted on her son and his sister, Pearl, seven years Kazin’s junior. Kazin’s father, Gedahlia Kazin, who Americanized his name to Charles, was born in Minsk. After living in New York in the early 1890’s, he had returned to Europe with his mother, who, remarried and unable to care for him, placed him in an orphanage at age nine. The boy grew up feeling unwanted and was extremely shy. Kazin viewed his father as someone who felt abandoned and incredibly lonely. Charles returned to the United States in his twenties, holding various jobs around the country until he married Gita and settled into life as a painter. Kazin’s notion of marriage was based on his mother’s dominance and on his father’s virtual withdrawal from family interaction. The couple was not demonstrative with each other, but they did lavish love on their two children. Although withdrawn and virtually unable to communicate verbally with his children, Charles, did take them across the Brooklyn Bridge to the magic city of New York, exposing them to museums, theater, and music on a regular basis. Kazin always felt drawn to the cultural excitement of New York City, yet he felt anchored in Brownsville. On the first anniversary of his death, his son, Michael, and his widow, Judith, took a box containing his ashes to the center of the Brooklyn Bridge and dropped it into the water, believing it to be a symbolic gesture Kazin would have appreciated. Like his father, Kazin was shy and had difficulty reaching out to other people. Throughout his years in elementary and secondary school, he was afflicted by a stutter, made worse when he was under pressure. He did not like school, although he loved learning and read voraciously, as did his sister. Both children gained fluency in Yiddish because their parents’ ability in English was quite limited. Yiddish was the language in which they usually communicated at home. It was expected that first-generation Jewish American children in the Brownsville ghetto would strive to do well in school, fearing the shame that their parents would suffer should they not excel in their studies. Cook reports that Kazin, at age ten, bought a bottle of iodine he could ingest to kill himself if he failed to meet his mother’s expectations. It was also a given that the children, particularly the male offspring, of these Eastern European immigrants would enjoy the free education offered to all local citizens at City College, in which Kazin enrolled at age sixteen. When he completed his bachelor’s degree in 1935 at age twenty, he had little idea of what he wanted to do with his life, so he embarked on a career as a freelance writer, often writing for the “Books” section of the New York Herald Tribune, whose editor was Irita Van Doren, the wife

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of literary critic and Columbia University professor Carl Van Doren. Irita gambled on hiring an unknown to write critical articles, but she was well rewarded by the scope and vitality of Kazin’s literary writing. Still uncertain about where he was headed, Kazin thought he might become a secondary-school teacher, so he enrolled in a master’s degree program at Columbia University. He knew that the life of a freelance writer did not offer the financial stability that he needed, especially after his marriage to Dohn shortly after he completed the master’s degree. It was at this point that Carl Van Doren suggested to Kazin that he might write a serious study of American literature. Kazin had been looking for a job, but jobs were scarce during the Great Depression. Carl told Kazin that if he would write such a book, Carl would encourage the publishing house of Reynal and Hitchcock, for which he was an adviser, to publish it, liberating Kazin from having to worry about finding a job. Still only twenty-three years old, Kazin decided to do what Carl suggested. The result, four years later, was the publication of Kazin’s On Native Grounds (1942), one of the most influential books of literary history and criticism produced in the twentieth century. At age twenty-seven, Kazin unexpectedly became a celebrity, for which he paid a high price when his neglect of Dohn during the feverish writing of his book resulted in the annulment of their marriage. Cook has a keen appreciation of the strong influence that Kazin’s family had on him. His relationship with his father, a loner who made small attempts to expose his children to the finer things in life, was never warm. Injured emotionally in his youth, Charles never recovered from being consigned to an orphanage when it was inconvenient for his mother to care for him. Similarly, Kazin was alienated from his children, Michael and Cathreal, during their formative years, although, as a divorced father, he saw them regularly if not always enthusiastically. He helped them to attend good schools, but he did not feel close to them, although in his later years, he grew closer to his son, especially after Michael married Beth Horowitz, a physician who won Kazin’s heart. Reflecting on his father’s death in 1970, Kazin “often worried about the traits they shared, particularly the penchant for self-preoccupation and self-pity.” Kazin wrote, “One looks for one’s father—one looks—one looks and one realizes I am my father.” As penetrating as it was, this insight was not comforting to Kazin, who in actuality was more like his mother than his father. The Kazin that Cook presents is a mass of contradictions, as perhaps any complex person is. For example, Kazin longed for stable relationships with women, but once he achieved stability, he strayed and had affairs outside his marriages. Always good looking, he usually gave in to the temptations that his handsome looks threw into his pathway. He opposed the establishment of Israel, but he rejoiced when it finally proved viable. Kazin used his celebrity to obtain visiting professorships at prestigious universities, among them Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Brown. Once appointed, however, he did little to endear himself to his academic colleagues, generally treating

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them with condescension and contempt. Cook does not attempt to analyze the reasons for this, but it seems obvious that Kazin was unsure of himself, which caused him to act defensively. The condescension Kazin showed in many academic situations carried over into his relationship with Michael, whose political radicalism went far beyond his father’s. As Cook notes, “He strongly disputed Michael’s easy assumption that socialism offered the best answer to every national problem.” Kazin told Michael, “You ought to think about . . . concrete situations in themselves. What continued dumbness on your part not to recognize that each country, each situation, has its historical past, its specific traditions.” Some of his reaction to Michael’s political postures was obviously tongue-in-cheek, such as calling Michael “comrade.” Underlying much of it, however, was a deep-seated condescension. Kazin’s tour de force, On Native Grounds, did a great deal to rescue American literary studies from the oblivion that it faced in much of the academic community during the first four decades of the twentieth century, when it was viewed as something of a stepchild by serious literary scholars. Vernon Parrington had paved the way for broadening the scope of literary criticism in 1927 with the publication of his monumental Main Currents in American Thought, a book that greatly influenced Kazin, as had F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941), published one year before On Native Grounds was released. No book could have been more right for its time than Kazin’s. The late 1940’s and the 1950’s saw the establishment of cross-disciplinary programs in American civilization and in American studies at many of the most prestigious universities in the United States, including Harvard, Brown, Princeton, and Yale. Kazin’s book was, in part, the motivating force behind such developments. Cook, who interviewed scores of people and who used Kazin’s journals extensively in creating this biography, notes that of the dozen books Kazin published, On Native Grounds, for which he is best known, was his only work of pure criticism. Some of his later books are collections of critical essays, but it was his first book that focused exclusively on the broad presentation of the American literary canon. Kazin wrote with singular vigor and verve about American literature, and Cook quotes Kazin as saying that he “fell in love with it [American literature] because in a sense this literature was mine—I felt at home with it. . . . I responded [to the writers and their texts] with intellectual kinship and pleasure. I knew the modulations of their language.” Kazin captured many of these modulations in his own writing, notably in A Walker in the City (1951) and in Starting out in the Thirties (1965), both works that drew heavily on his Brownsville background and on his family experiences. Brownsville and the alluring metropolis across the Brooklyn Bridge came to symbolize the yin and the yang of Kazin’s personality. R. Baird Shuman

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Review Sources Booklist 104, nos. 9/10 (January 1, 2008): 34. Commentary 125, no. 4 (April, 2008): 61-64. Journal of American History 95, no. 2 (September, 2008): 579. Library Journal 133, no. 5 (March 15, 2008): 72. London Review of Books 30, no. 12 (June 19, 2008): 11-14. New England Quarterly 81, no. 3 (September, 2008): 525-527. The New Republic 238, no. 5 (March 26, 2008): 43-47. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 10 (June 12, 2008): 54-56. The New Yorker 83, no. 44 (January 21, 2008): 81. The Times Literary Supplement, May 2, 2008, pp. 10-11. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 10 (January 12, 2008): W9.

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ALGERIA Anger of the Dispossessed Authors: Martin Evans (1964) and John Phillips Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). 352 pp. $35.00 Type of work: History Time: 1830 to the present Locale: Algeria A thoughtful and well-researched study that explains clearly why Algerian governments, since independence from France in 1962, have failed to meet the expectations and needs of the vast majority of Algerian Muslims Principal personages: Charles de Gaulle, president of France, 1958-1969 Ahmed Ben Bella, president of Algeria, 1963-1965 Houari Boumediène, president of Algeria, 1965-1978 Chadli Bendjedid, president of Algeria, 1979-1992 Mohammad Boudiaf, president of Algeria, 1992; assassinated on June 29, 1992 Abdelaziz Bouteflika, president of Algeria, 1999 to the present Abassi Madani, leader of the Islamic Salvation Front Ali Belhadj, number two in the Islamic Salvation Front

With the subtitle Anger of the Dispossessed, Martin Evans and John Phillips evoke well in their book Algeria the tragic fact that, since the French invasion and occupation of Algeria in 1830, most Algerians have been effectively excluded from any meaningful involvement in determining the economic, political, social, and religious policies of their country. This marginalization quite naturally caused deep feelings of bitterness, especially because Algerian Muslims, who remained faithful to Islam, recognized all too clearly their powerlessness to create a society in which the basic tenets of Islam determined governmental policies and the rule of law in Algeria. Evans and Phillips do an excellent job describing the humiliating nature of the French domination of Algeria, which lasted 132 years, from 1830 until 1962. This was far longer than French colonial rule in any other African country. Further insults to Algerian Muslims were manifested when France annexed Algeria, sent French immigrants to settle in the country, and showed contempt for the well-known Muslim prohibition against alcohol by planting vineyards and making wine in Algeria. France made a mockery of its supposed commitment to liberty, equality, and fraternity, three values affirmed in the motto of the French Republic, by offering French citizenship to those Algerians who renounced Islam. Apostasy is an unforgivable sin for Muslims.

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Algerian Muslims understood all too well that they would be exploited for as long as they remained under French domination. Although many Algerian soldiers fought bravely with Free French Forces under the command of General Charles de Gaulle and helped to liberate France from Nazi occupation, nothing really changed in Algeria after France and Algeria were freed from Nazi rule. In November, 1954, Algerian Muslims saw no alternative to overt resistance to continuing French domination in Algeria. Under the general leadership of the National Liberation Front, Algerian Muslims began a civil war that French soldiers and police officers could not suppress. In 1958 the French Fourth Republic came to an end, and French voters turned to De Gaulle to extract France from the seemingly endless violence in Algeria. Although De Gaulle had favored preserving the French empire during and immediately after World War II, he was a realist: He realized that the modern world was rejecting colonialism. Starting in 1960, he began granting independence to French colonies throughout Africa, while at the same time offering financial and technical assistance to new democracies. In Algeria, rebel French army officers undertook military action against Algerian Muslims in a vain effort to prevent De Gaulle from granting their country independence, but De Gaulle handled effectively this disobedience to the rule of law. He went on French television and denounced military officers who had committed treason by disobeying lawful orders from their commander in chief. His speech followed several attempts by French traitors in the Secret Army Organization led by General Jacques Massu to assassinate De Gaulle. De Gaulle skillfully persuaded people in both Algeria and France that France could remain faithful to its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity only by granting these same values to all people, no matter where they might live. Hepresented French and Algerian people a simple choice: order or chaos. Order meant a peaceful transition in Algeria from colonial domination to independence; chaos meant endless violence fomented by the Secret Army Organization under the traitorous Massu against Algerian Muslims or violence by the National Liberation Front against French citizens in Algeria that had been occurring since 1954. On March 18, 1962, Algerian and French negotiators signed the Evian Treaty, granting Algeria independence, and submitted it to Algerian and French voters. In both countries, support for the independence of Algeria was more than 90 percent. This permitted a peaceful transition to independence, and both countries were understandably hopeful. Things, however, quickly deteriorated in Algeria. The leaders of the National Liberation Front promptly transformed Algeria into a one-party dictatorship in which socialism and not Islam inspired all significant political, social, and economic decisions. The new Algerian government made numerous decisions that hurt Algeria economically. Its new president, Ahmed Ben Bella, undertook an absurd and costly

Martin Evans is a history professor at the University of Portsmouth in England. He has published extensively on colonial and postcolonial Algerian history. John Phillips was a reporter in Algeria from 1991 to 1997 for the London newspaper The Times. He has published extensively on recent wars in the former Yugoslavia.

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war in a vain attempt to seize land in eastern Morocco. Ben Bella also forced French residents in Algeria to leave the country in order to completely eliminate French influence in Algeria. The immediate result was that Algeria lost the expertise of thousands of well-educated technicians and professionals. Algeria has vast amounts of petroleum, but without technical experts, the petroleum remained in the ground. In addition, Ben Bella and other leaders in the National Liberation Front ignored Muslim leaders who wanted Islam to have a significant influence in the newly independent Algeria. Ben Bella created a sharp separation between religion and politics, alienating influential imams. Algerian Muslims soon concluded their government was no more responsive to their needs than were the French colonial administrators. Although Algerian generals overthrew Ben Bella in a 1965 coup and replaced him with Houari Boumediène, nothing really changed. Like Ben Bella before him. Boumediène spoke repeatedly about the supposedly positive values of Russian and Cuban communism. He invited thousands of Cuban and Russian advisers into Algeria, where they drank alcohol publicly in clear violation of the Muslim prohibition against the presence or consumption of alcohol in a Muslim country. In the minds of practicing Muslims, who constitute a vast majority of Algerian citizens, atheistic communists had simply replaced French administrators. The new Algerian government appeared as unsympathetic to Islam as was the French government. Although Algeria did earn a great deal of money by selling petroleum to other countries, almost all of this money was used to pay down debts to the Soviet Union and to enrich the generals who ruled Algeria with iron fists. Very little was spent on education, health care, and infrastructure. Average Algerians continued to live in abject poverty while generals lived in luxurious villas in fancy neighborhoods to which ordinary Algerians came as domestic servants. Although significant increases in the price of petroleum in the 1970’s enriched the Algerian government that had nationalized the oil fields, this wealth was not distributed fairly. Basic needs such as housing, health, clean water, and education were not met, and unemployment remained distressingly high in a country that was receiving massive amounts of money from the sale of petroleum. Algerian Muslims, observing that things were going badly in their country, demanded change. However, no significant change was forthcoming from the National Liberation Front. After President Boumediène’s death from natural causes on December 27, 1978, the generals appointed Chadli Bendjedid as the new president of Algeria. His government continued its Soviet-style planned economy that prevented economic innovation and flexibility, making the Algerian economy even worse. The National Liberation Front was unwilling to change a corrupt system that had enriched a privileged few at the expense of a suffering majority. Several influential Muslim clerics under the leadership of Abassi Madani and Ali Belhadj argued that a return to the purity of Islamic traditional practices would eliminate the overt corruption that had denied Algerians basic human dignity. Together, Madani and Belhadj created a political movement called the Islamic Salvation Front. Preachers in mosques in Algeria called upon faithful Muslims to participate in peaceful protest

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marches against political corruption among Algerian military and political leaders. By the fall of 1988, the Islamic Salvation Front had a huge following, and Algerian generals viewed supporters of the Islamic Salvation Front as a threat to their wealth. They feared that if the Islamic Salvation Front were ever to attain political power, it would audit bank accounts of leading Algerian military and political leaders, who might then end up in prison. In October, 1988, Algerian generals overreacted by firing on peaceful demonstrators in the streets of Algiers, turning the Algerian people en masse against Algerian military leaders. In an effort to restore calm, President Bendjedid tried to appease alienated Algerians by permitting multiparty participation in free elections. He mistakenly thought that he could somehow control the righteous anger of “dispossessed” Algerians, but he underestimated the depth of their mistrust of the National Liberation Front that had ruled Algeria since independence in 1962. He scheduled the two rounds of parliamentary elections for December 26, 1991, and January 16, 1992. In the first round, 231 members of the Algerian parliament would be elected, and the remaining 199 seats would be determined in the second. Much to the surprise of President Bendjedid, the Islamic Salvation Front won 188 of the 231 seats in the first round, and it was expected to do as well in the next round. The Algerian generals were unwilling to accept the loss of their absolute power. On January 11, 1992, Bendjedid was forced to resign, and just three days later Algerian generals canceled the second round of elections, imprisoned the leaders of the Islamic Salvation Front, and installed an aged businessman named Mohammed Boudiaf as the puppet president of Algeria. This “putsch” enraged the Algerian public and contributed to active resistance and violence against the usurpers who had transformed Algeria into an overt military dictatorship. Several resistance groups that came to be known by the French acronyms GSPC (Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat) and the GIA (Armed Islamic Group) carried out violent attacks throughout Algeria, and the Algerian soldiers retaliated with similar violence to all attacks against the Algerian governments. Political assassinations were common, and President Boudiaf was assassinated on June 29, 1992. Evans and Phillips, who lived in Algeria for many years, confirm that most Algerians believe that Algerian generals had Boudiaf killed because they believed that the president was about to arrest high-ranking military officers for corruption. Murders of simple workers and apolitical religious leaders were frequent occurrences in Algeria throughout the 1990’s. Abdelaziz Bouteflika won a fairly honest presidential election in 1999 and was then reelected in 2004 to a second five-year term. Although Algerians generally admire President Bouteflika for his personal integrity, it will take a succession of ethical leaders for Algerians to begin to trust their political and military leaders. Edmund J. Campion

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Review Sources Foreign Affairs 87, no. 1 (January/February, 2008): 192. History Today 58, no. 12 (December, 2008): 70. International Affairs 84, no. 2 (March 2008): 394. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 44 (November 5, 2007): 59. The Spectator 306 (January 5, 2008): 26-27. The Times Literary Supplement, October 10, 2008, p. 24.

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ALL OF IT SINGING New and Selected Poems Author: Linda Gregg (1942) Publisher: Graywolf Press (St. Paul, Minn.). 213 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Poetry This collection of Gregg’s older and new poems incorporates elements of classicism, nature, and contemporary life The older poems in All of It Singing are drawn from Linda Gregg’s collections Too Bright to See (1987), Alma (1989), The Sacraments of Desire (1992), Chosen by the Lion (1995), Things and Flesh (1999), and In the Middle Distance (2006). This collection spans a landscape of love, loss, and redemption. Beginning with poems from Too Bright to See, Gregg starts small in “We Manage Most When We Manage Small,” with an image of hair, which “falls before you./ Fragile and momentary, we continue.” In fact, the two lovers in the poem are so vulnerable and ethereal that they are only “Managing as thin light on water” and “love a little, as the mice huddle.” From this small moment, Gregg’s poetry expands. Through personification, Gregg gives elements of nature a mythical quality, as in her depiction of the sun and the moon in “Different Not Less”: “The sun, bull-black/ and ready to return, holds back so the moon,/ delicate and sweet, may finish her progress.” In this description, the strength of the sun and the translucence of the moon interplay to create a kind of eclipse, coming close but not quite touching, like the lovers in the poem who “look into the night, or death, our loss,/ what is not given.” The speaker describes how she and her lover “see another world alive/ and our wholeness finishing.” This observation of wholeness and detachment from it is also portrayed in “Classicism,” a three-line poem describing how “The nights are very clear in Greece./ When the moon is round we see it completely/ and have no feeling.” In “Whole and Without Blessing,” this wholeness becomes a self-contained autonomy where the speaker renounces her attachment to people and announces her detachment from earthly things: “I proclaim myself whole and without blessing,/ or need to be blessed. A fish of my own/ spirit. I belong to no one. I do not move.” Even the sun that warms her is “indifferent.” In “Safe and Beautiful” from Alma, the moon is personified again, but this time “lying around in pretty satin,” her “hair fixed all careful like a widow,” playing “safe, safe, beautiful and safe,” as if to preserve herself from pain. The matter-of-fact tone with which the speaker of Gregg’s poems describes her isolation continues in “Summer in a Small Town,” where the speaker explains, “When the men leave me,/ they leave me in a beautiful place.” With this acceptance comes irony, the speaker walking “back across the mown lawn/ loving the smell and the houses/ so

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completely it leaves my heart empty.” Per haps it is the familiar smells and sights of summer that comfort this woman after feelings of abandonment and of being “alone no loneliness in the dream in the quiet” that is repeated like a chant in “Alma to Her Sister.” In “New York Address,” there is a marked contrast to this, with the speaker “walking three miles to get home” and wanting to die. Rather Among Linda Gregg’s awards are a than an empty heart, she doesn’t “seem to Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan have a heart at all.” In “Eurydice” Gregg de- Literary Foundation Fellowship, a scribes the loss after Eurydice and Orpheus National Endowment for the Arts grant, have been reunited, only to be separated again a Whiting Writer’s Award, and multiple forever because Orpheus looked back at her, Pushcart Prizes. She won the Sara not trusting that she was there. It is more pain- Teasdale Award in 2003 and the PEN/ ful for Eurydice to have had a brief glimpse of Voelcker Award for Poetry in 2006. Orpheus after resigning herself to being with- Gregg teaches at Princeton University. out him: “I did not cry as much in the dark ness/ as I will when we part in the dimness.” Orpheus and Eurydice reappear in “The Ninth Dawn” from Chosen by the Lion. The gods are “willing to have/ the lovers destroyed . . . pulsing around their perishing.” This alliteration mimics the heartbeat that is threatened to be silenced because Eurydice “went too far into the woods and after/ lived with the darkness around her forever.” One can hear her voice in “The Terrifying Power of Darkness Is Inseparable from the Redemptive Power of the Sacred”: “If you do this to me, if you/ do this to me, if you take your love away, if you take,/ if you go away, you will make my heart blind in me.” In poems from this collection, Gregg also confronts middle age, coming “prepared to answer questions, because it said there would be questions.” It’s as if the speaker sees herself in “The Shopping-Bag Lady” who has a way of getting money, “Never asking. Sideways and disconcerting” or the women who are “asleep on the floor/ on pieces of cardboard.” The detachment continues with “Dry Grass & Old Color of the Fence & Smooth Hills,” where “All life is beautiful/ at a distance” from the women in a California town with their “mess and canning and babies crying.” Gregg also confronts mortality in her poems depicting the brutality that can exist in nature and relating it to humanity, as in “The Men Like Salmon,” in which she describes how “The flesh falls off like language,/ bruised and sick.” “Sick with the bones. Rotten with sorrow,” it leaves “everything good or loved behind.” This brutality continues with “The Copperhead,” where “Almost blind he takes the soft dying/ into the muscle-hole of his haunting./ The huge jaws eyeing, the raised head sliding/ Back and forth, judging the exact place of his killing.” This copperhead “knows the fastness/ of his mouthing” but “does not see the quickness collapsing” and “does not see at all what he has done.” In poems such as these, Gregg shows how nature is not only beautiful but unforgiving and will not hesitate to do whatever it takes to survive. This violence in nature

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continues in the title poem from Chosen by the Lion, where the speaker is “the one chosen by the lion at sundown/ and dragged back from the shining water./ Yanked back to the bushes and torn open, blood/ blazing at the throat and breast of me./ Taken as meat. Devoured as spirit by spirit.” The Sacraments of Desire begins with a more celebratory tone in “Glisten,” where the speaker knows that no one is there to see her glistening when she returns “naked to the stone porch.” The “almond tree with its husks/ cracking open in the heat” contrasts the moisture that is lying on her skin. She notices how the earth is “moving slowly” as she stands there drying in the light. This appreciation of the body continues in “The Small Thing Love Is,” with the speaker describing how her body is “filled by a summer of lust” and how she “can’t tell the difference between desire,/ longing, and all the sweet speeches/ love hoards.” She marvels at “the wet couple undone/ by a power only the earth could love,” the earth perhaps represented by an unnamed woman in “All the Spring Lends Itself to Her.” The speaker entreats, “We will lie in the humming fields/ and call to Her, coaxing Her back. We will lie/ pressed close to the earth, calling Her name,/ wondering if it is Her voice we are whispering.” Resignation and even relief for being alone reappear in this section with “Grinding the Lens.” “In the middle of my life,” the speaker says, she is “Alone and happy.” In “Singing Enough to Feel the Rain,” she is “alone writing as quickly as [she] can,/ dulled by being awake at four in the morning,/ Between the past and future, without a life.” In another reference to midlife, she is “writing on the line [she walks] between death/ and youth, between having and loss.” Perhaps she is writing poetry to capture “the voice of what has no voice,” to which she refers in “There Is No Language in This Country.” Perhaps it is also her duty to “live in the suffering and desire of what/ rises and falls. The terrible blind grinding/ of gears against our bodies and lives,” as described in “It Is the Rising I Love.” Yet even choosing to be in a relationship is a resignation in “I Thought on His Desire for Three Days,” with the speaker explaining, “I chose this man, consciously, deliberately,/ I thought on his desire for three days/ and then said yes” despite his being married. In fact, she says, “I am here/ to tell you I did not mind.” Even when the man’s wife calls and says she’s a whore, the speaker says, “I was quiet, but inside I said, ‘perhaps.’” She cannot bring herself to see the relationship as tawdry, viewing herself and her lover as “innocent in purity and magnificent disorder” (“The Clapping”) and even describing how they “could have been mistaken for a married couple” in “Asking for Directions.” Perhaps she is referring to her lover’s marriage when she says, “Let the tower in your city burn” (“The Resurrection”). Yet after this operatic exhortation, the speaker calmly observes her lover’s forehead, cheek, and lips in “Winter Light.” In contrast to the brutality of nature portrayed in other poems by Gregg, nature and God become complicit when the lovers make love in a “collision that makes His face shine./ Makes the sap rise. God squeezes and relents/ like winter ending, and the sap rising.” Nevertheless, the speaker of “A Bracelet of Bright Hair About the Bone” (a line from John Donne’s “Relic”) wants something more permanent, a material memento of the relationship, “Dirt and corpses even.” This sequence of poems ends with an exultation in “Let Birds,” where the speaker pledges to “never

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give up longing” and let her hair stay long. In the repetition of lines that begin with “Let,” such as “Let birds, let birds./ Let leaf be passion./ Let jaw, let teeth, let tongue be/ between us,” she opens herself to all possibilities and accepts whatever may come, including whatever repercussions she may have in this tumultuous relationship. The poems of Things and Flesh, however, take a more modest approach, as in “Precision,” where the speaker observes, “There is a modesty in nature, where The leaf moves/ just the amount the breeze indicates/ and nothing more.” In an ironic comparison she sees this in “the power of lust, too,” where “there can be a quiet and clarity, a fusion/ of exact moments.” She describes this stillness as profound in how “There is a silence of it/ inside the thundering. And when the body swoons,/ it is because the heart knows its truth.” In yet another paradox, though, “There is a hunger for order,/ but a thirst against” (“A Thirst Against”). “The Limits of Desire” gives human form to Love, who comes along and says, “I know,/ I know. Abandoned after all/ those promises./ But I can’t help. I traffic/ in desire, passion, and lust.” People who lose their moorings are one of Gregg’s recurrent themes, as in the woman in “Downsized” who thinks to herself, “I am less/ and less part of the world, even though/ I live closer to it than ever,” and the woman in “Hephaestus Alone,” whose “heart is like a boat that sets forth alone,/ on the ocean and goes out far from him.” Yet this feeling of aloneness is also cherished in Gregg’s poems, as in “Staying After,” where the speaker describes living “alone in a kind of luxury,” echoing Alfred Lord Tennyson’s line about it being better to have loved and lost than never loved at all when she states, “I fell in love./ I believed people.” There are no regrets in these lines, just as there are no regrets in lines that range from startlingly brutal to achingly gentle, from complete detachment to complete immersion. In describing how people connect with and are separated from each other and nature, Gregg shows how people are all essentially alone, how “Each person has a secret world” (“Getting Down”) but still feels the need to be in the world and with others. Holly L. Norton

Review Sources Library Journal 133, no. 13 (August 15, 2008): 89. Los Angeles Times, September 14, 2008, p. F9. Poetry 193, no. 2 (November, 2008): 162-168. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 33 (August 18, 2008): 44-45.

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ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL MANNER OF THINGS SHALL BE WELL Author: Tod Wodicka (1976) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 272 pp. $21.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The present day Locale: New York state, Germany, and the Czech Republic Burt Hecker, a widower who has lived his entire life out of step with his family and his surroundings, attempts to find peace as he journeys across Europe in search of his lost son Principal characters: Burt Hecker, founder of the Confraternity of Lost Times Regained, reenactor, husband of Kitty, father of Tristan and June Kitty Hecker, wife of Burt and owner of the Mansion Inn Anna Bibko, Kitty’s mother, a partisan for the rights of the Lemko people Tristan Hecker, son of Burt and Kitty, talented musician and instrument builder, who leaves home after his mother’s death to live among the Lemkos and learn their music June Hecker, daughter of Burt and Kitty, who rejects her father and refuses to speak to him Lonna Katsav, Burt Hecker’s friend and lawyer

As Tod Wodicka’s All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well opens, Burt Hecker is taking part in celebrations for the ninehundredth anniversary of the birth of Hildegard of Bingen, nun, prophet, and composer. Members of the group with which he is traveling are reenacting the hermetic life of an anchorite, sequestered for a few days in an isolated tent. Although Hecker is on the outside, shutting the other members away from the world, he is, for all intents and purposes, an anchorite in the twentieth century. His beloved wife, Kitty, has died of cancer, compounding the disarray of his life. Tolerant and loving, Kitty had been his anchor in a modern world where Hecker has never really belonged. Founder of the Confraternity of Lost Times Regained, Hecker has attempted to live in medieval times, wearing the clothes, eating the food, making and using the artifacts of that era, all while obsessively striving not to be out of period (OOP). He has gathered around him a small group of equally dedicated reenactors, who meet periodically to live as fully as possible a medieval life. The irony is that Hecker has spent most of his adult life OOP, with Kitty acting as his bulwark against the modern world. Kitty ran a successful period hotel, the Man-

All Shall Be Well . . . / wodicka

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sion Inn, while Hecker lurked in the back ground, having abandoned his training as a Tod Wodicka was born in Glen Falls, high school history teacher. Instead, he de- New York, and raised in nearby voted himself to recovering the lost skills and Queensbury. He studied at the arts of the medieval period, assisted in this by University of Manchester in England Tristan, his son and initially eager follower. and moved to Berlin, Germany. All His daughter, June, on the other hand, had long Shall Be Well . . . is his first novel. since rejected everything her father stood for, striving to be as modern as possible, becoming an obsessive fan of the television series Star Trek and all forms of science fiction. As an adult, she marries a dull but modern man and moves across the United States, as far from her father as possible. She refuses to speak to him, and she encourages her children to fear their crazy grandfather. As he grew older, Tristan came under the influence of his grandmother, Anna Bibko, mother of Kitty. Daughter of Polish immigrants who originally embraced all things American, she has gradually turned back to her roots, among the neglected Lemko people from the Carpathian Mountains. From her and from his travels to her ancestral land, Tristan has learned the music and the customs of the Lemko. Just as his father lives in the Middle Ages, Tristan vigorously embraces all things Lemko, until finally he flees the family home and disappears in Europe. Completely unhinged by Kitty’s death, Hecker finally finds himself in court, agreeing to take a plainchant workshop to deal with his anger-management issues. It is then he hatches a grand plan, breathtaking in its scope and seemingly out of character for him. The Mansion Inn has been sold, and Hecker is traveling to Germany with the plainchant workshop members to celebrate the nine-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Hildegard of Bingen. However, no one knows that his ticket is one way and that he is going to try to find his missing son. Hecker’s journey from the New World to the Old World is, in fact, a journey from the past into the present, as he recalls his life—from his first meeting with Kitty, his strained relationship with her mother Anna, and his attempts to be a good father to his children. All this is set alongside his experiences at the anniversary celebrations and the performances of his workshop group, which are, he realizes, unpolished but utterly sincere. Hecker’s memories bring back to life his daughter’s increasing disenchantment with her father’s behavior and his son’s increasing preoccupation with his grandmother’s heritage. Hecker strongly suspects that his mother-in-law’s intense relationship with Tristan is a means of getting back at him for not being the financially successful all-American husband she imagined for her daughter, even though Hecker and Kitty were clearly a love match. The most poignant memory involves the time when Burt was shut out of the house while his wife was dying because of his erratic behavior and forced his way in to spend the precious final hours with her. Traveling deeper into Europe, revisiting his own life and his own struggle with being in and out of period, Hecker finally arrives in Prague, where, according to a tipoff from Lonna, his son Tristan is now working as a musician. Hecker assumes that

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Tristan is still performing traditional folk music, and it comes as a shock to discover that his son, now calling himself Tim, is more aggressively in period with the present day than Hecker could ever have imagined. He finds himself in a club, watching his barely recognizable son perform music Hecker can barely comprehend. Their first meeting is tense and unsuccessful. However, finally, with the help of Tim’s girlfriend, Lenka, and Lonna, who has followed Hecker to Europe, the family gathers again, joined, unexpectedly, by June, who is in the process of divorcing her husband, and unbelievably Anna, who speaks only in her native tongue and glares malevolently at Hecker. This is no happy reunion. June demands that Hecker buy back the Mansion Inn because she has set her heart on living in it, and Tim, having finally escaped his father’s orbit, does not know how to respond to his reappearance. The attempted reconciliation disintegrates, and Hecker finds himself sitting in the stairwell of his son’s apartment block, in the dark, listening to the music of Hildegard of Bingen pouring out of the flat. Despite everything that has gone wrong, Hecker becomes convinced that there is still hope for him and for his family. It is impossible to tell if he is just deluding himself, yet, uncertain of his future, Hecker conjures a vision of the anchorite Hildegard that bolsters his hope. At this point, it is not difficult to understand why, despite all of Hecker’s infuriating ways, Kitty loved him. Maureen Kincaid Speller

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 8 (December 15, 2007): 23. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 14. Library Journal 133, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 91. New Criterion 26, no. 8 (April, 2008): 71-73. New Statesman 136 (July 30, 2007): 57-58. The New Yorker 83, no. 45 (January 28, 2008): 83. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 46 (November 19, 2007): 36. The Times Literary Supplement, September 21, 2007, p. 20.

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ALL THE WORLD’S A GRAVE: A TRAGEDY A New Play by William Shakespeare Author: John Reed (1969) Publisher: Penguin (New York). 197 pp. $12.00 Type of work: Drama Time: The early seventeenth century Locale: Bohemia and Aquitaine A conflation of parts of several of Shakespeare’s tragedies formed into a new tragedy with additional dialogue Principal characters: Hamlet, prince of Bohemia Juliet, princess of Aquitaine King Lear, Juliet’s father Iago, Hamlet’s lieutenant Romeo, a general under Hamlet The queen of Bohemia, Hamlet’s mother Macbeth, the queen’s lover and later king Old Hamlet (and his ghost), Hamlet’s father Three weird sisters, witches Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet’s friends Polonius, the speaker for the Senate

Textual conflation has long been a problem for editors of Shakespeare’s plays, those with two or more substantive texts that do not completely agree. A famous example involves the two texts of King Lear, the quarto text of 1608 and the Folio text of 1623. Each version of the play omits lines found in the other and includes lines unique to itself. Until recently, editors—not wishing to lose any of Shakespeare’s language—engaged in combining the two texts into a single text of the play that Shakespeare never saw performed. A long play, King Lear in the conflated text is even longer. An even more extreme example is Hamlet, which has three different texts: the first quarto of 1603, a second quarto of 1604, and the Folio version. Not only do these texts have lines unique to each (the first quarto even has a unique scene in act 4), but often their readings have variant words or phrases, making the job of the modern editor still more difficult and problematic. What John Reed has done is to take conflation to a further extreme. His play, All the World’s a Grave, subtitled A New Play by William Shakespeare, combines large chunks of dialogue from several of Shakespeare’s tragedies into what is indeed a “new play.” Despite the fact that Shakespeare is the author of about 80 percent of the text, one might well question whether it deserves to be called a new play “by Shakespeare,” for Reed has transformed his sources, rearranged much of the plot and structure, and added a good deal of his own dialogue. He has borrowed extensively from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet (pb. 1597), Henry V (pb. 1600),

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and Othello (pb. 1622), along with scraps of verse from several other plays when it suited his purposes. What results is something new and strange, amusing (and occasionally a little baffling) to those who know Shakespeare’s original works and entertaining—to say the least—to those who are less acquainted with the originals but enjoy seeing them in a new light. As if to demonstrate Hamlet’s martial prowess, but mostly to fuse his character with Othello’s, Reed starts the play with the prince on the field of battle in Aquitaine against the forces of King Lear. Iago has the opening lines, borrowed from the first Chorus of Henry V (“O for a muse of fire”), appropriately modified to introduce the new situation; hence, after referring to “the swelling scene,” he says: “Then should the warlike Hamlet, all for love,/ Assume the cost of blood.” Readers soon understand that Hamlet is battling against the forces of Aquitaine to gain his love, Juliet, whom he presumably has met earlier and with whom he has fallen in love. Before the battle begins, he speaks Romeo’s lines, fearing “some consequence yet hanging in the stars.” Iago urges him on to claim his bride, and Hamlet responds with more lines from Henry V (act 3, scene 1, lines 3-17) on the proper countenance and behavior of the warrior. In the next scene, Hamlet lightly paraphrases Henry’s “St. Crispin Crispian” lines (act 4, scene 3, lines 18-67), converting it to a St. Valentine’s Day speech. The battle ensues, and a herald later confirms that the day is Hamlet’s: King Lear has lost. In scene 3, Hamlet/Othello/Henry V assumes a Romeo-like role, knocking on the door of a parish church, as Juliet comes to meet him. Reed here adapts lines from Romeo and Juliet (act 2, scenes 2, 3, and 6), taking a few lines out of context from Hamlet (act 1, scene1), before the pastor (not a friar) agrees to marry the young couple. The dialogue in the following scene is quite unlike the aubade in Romeo and Juliet (act 3, scene 5), though the situation is roughly similar. It ends with more lines taken out of context as Juliet, not Romeo, asks if her lover will leave her “so unsatisfied,” and Romeo replies, “What satisfaction canst thou have, dear love?” This role reversal is an “in” joke, and it is clear by now that Reed’s play is a spoof of Shakespearean tragedy. The last scene of act 1 is set outside the Boar’s Head tavern, where Hamlet and Juliet are celebrating their wedding night. Not content with adapting lines from Shakespeare’s plays, Reed has Iago begin by reciting Sonnet 129 (“Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame”) directly to the audience. Soldiers are loading corpses onto a wagon, while inside the tavern General Romeo and his surviving soldiers carouse. They drink to the health of the prince and princess, oblivious of anything tragic that will follow. Act 2 opens in Bohemia with the weird sisters chanting their diabolical charm around a bubbling cauldron from act 4, scene 1 of Macbeth (pb. 1623), when Macbeth enters as if summoned by them. They hail him as “king hereafter.” Since no Banquo character accompanies Macbeth, he speaks some of Banquo’s lines. The witches vanJohn Reed graduated from Columbia University’s program in creative writing with an M.F.A. A novelist, he is currently working on his fifth book. Among his novels are A Still Small Voice (2000) and Snowball’s Chance (2002), a critique of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945).

All the World’s a Grave / reed

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ish, leaving him amazed. The next scene opens with the queen of Bohemia, and although Reed does not name her, she is a composite of Hamlet’s mother Gertrude and Lady Macbeth. She complains about being married to “a poor, infirm,/And despised old man” (Old Hamlet) and spurs her lover, Macbeth, to murder him. Most of the action and the lines here and in the rest of act 2 are taken directly from the plot to murder Duncan in Macbeth. In act 3 Hamlet returns home to Bohemia to find that his mother and her paramour, now the king, have murdered his father. However, the first scene opens with Iago’s soliloquy about how he hates Hamlet, who has appointed Romeo general instead of him. The Othello plot is thus introduced, although it is not until act 4 that Iago’s machinations are fully developed. Act 3 is chiefly concerned with King Macbeth’s attempt to deal with King Lear, who tries to regain his daughter, much as Brabantio does in Othello, and with young Hamlet’s meeting with the ghost of his father. The news of the Ghost is brought to him not by Horatio and Marcellus (as in Hamlet act 1, scene 2), but by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Meanwhile, Iago secretly allies himself with King Lear to take revenge on the prince, who has put on an antic disposition. The act ends again with Iago’s soliloquy, largely taken from Othello (act 1, scene 3, lines 392404), in which he foments his plot against Hamlet, Romeo, and Juliet. It is curiously preceded by his speaking Ophelia’s lines in Hamlet (act 2, scene 1, lines 84-97), describing the prince’s strange visitation to her in her chamber. Act 4 is the longest in the play; in fact, each act up to this one gets longer. It includes the banquet scene from Macbeth, where the ghost of Old Hamlet substitutes for the ghost of Banquo; Hamlet’s greeting of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet (act 2, scene 2, lines 222-379), despite the fact that they have been together earlier in act 3; a version of the Players Scene (Hamlet, act 2, scene 2, lines 421-605), in which lines 145-170 from act 3, scene 2, of Richard II (pb. 1600) substitute for Aeneas’s Tale to Dido; Romeo’s attempt to comfort Juliet, who complains about Hamlet’s mad disposition, glimpsed by Iago and Hamlet; the play within the play—The Pantomimi of Murder, not The Murder of Gonzago, but essentially the same—immediately followed by Iago’s deception of Hamlet regarding his wife’s infidelity with Romeo, as in Othello (act 3, scene 3, lines 90-329), including the dropped handkerchief (but no Emilia); Hamlet’s confrontation with his mother, taken almost verbatim from Hamlet (act 3, scene 4), except that the Ghost materializes here naked and does not speak; Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy after Gertrude exits followed by an adaptation of the Nunnery Scene and then Iago’s further goading of Hamlet (as in Othello, act 3, scene 3, lines 335-480); King Macbeth’s prayer scene and Hamlet’s abortive attempt to kill him (as in Hamlet, act 3, scene 3); Hamlet’s abuse of Juliet about her missing handkerchief (as in Othello, act 3, scene 4, lines 35-45 and 51-97 and act 4, scene 1, lines 240-249), with Juliet’s pathetic pleas taken from Helena’s dialogue with Demetrius from lines 195-212 of act 2, scene 1 in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (pb. 1600). The final scenes of act 4 include the weird sisters (but no Hecate) around their cauldron once again, invoking for Macbeth the apparition of the bloody infant wearing a crown who warns Macbeth that the prince will doom him to death, but he need not fear any man born of woman. Reed’s lines occupy most of scene 7, in which the

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queen, unlike Gertrude in Hamlet, curses her “revolting” son and King Macbeth sympathizes not with her but with Hamlet! They welcome Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who agree to discover the cause of Hamlet’s affliction. Act 5 opens with the sleepwalking scene adapted almost wholly from Macbeth (act 5, scene1), except that the queen enters naked. Without a scene break, the location shifts to Hamlet digging a grave and singing lines from the dirge in Cymbeline (pb. 1623), “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun.” He throws up various skulls, commenting on them somewhat as the First Gravedigger does in Hamlet (act 5, scene 1), but interspersing his monologue with lines from the dirge, when Iago enters and further antagonizes Hamlet about his wife’s infidelity with Romeo, as in Othello (act 4, scene 1, lines 3-47). Hamlet here does not fall into a trance, though his strange cry, “Baaaa! Baaaa!” may signify something of the sort. Elsewhere in act 5 Reed intersperses more of Shakespeare’s lines, including some dialogue from lines 270-278 in act 5, scene 3, of All’s Well That Ends Well (pb. 1623), but changes several salient aspects of the plot. For example, Hamlet does not, like Othello, smother Juliet; he orders Romeo to do so, and, faithful soldier that he is, Romeo does. However, that awakens in Hamlet the awareness of Romeo’s innocence and Juliet’s infidelity. Nevertheless, Hamlet kills Romeo, who falls into the grave that Hamlet has dug. Meanwhile, King Lear advances on Bohemia with his army, when King Macbeth gets the news of his queen’s death, delivered by the Doctor in Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s death (Hamlet, act 4, scene 7, lines 166-183). While trying to guard Macbeth against Lear, Rosencrantz is killed by Iago, who also kills Guildenstern, who sings more lines from the dirge in Cymbeline as he dies. Finally, Macbeth confronts Lear, a man not born of woman but untimely ripped from his mother’s womb. He drops his weapon, and Lear kills him. The play ends with this scene, Lear speaking lines mostly from the last scene of Shakespeare’s King Lear but also some from Romeo’s apostrophe to Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (act 5, scene 3, lines 101-115) as he mourns the death of his daughter, Juliet. In an afterword he calls “Gist,” Reed justifies his approach and explains how he has modernized Shakespeare’s language. He sums up his justification with: “[I]t is precisely because Shakespeare’s plays were monsters assembled from other monsters that a fresh monstrosity can be assembled from Shakespeare. And because of Shakespeare’s use of stock players and storylines, a new Shakespearian narrative is equally possible.” Not everyone will agree that Shakespeare’s plays are “monsters,” though whether Reed’s play is one may be a subject of debate. Jay L. Halio

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 22 (August 1, 2008): 25. New York Post, July 8, 2008, p. 11.

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ALPHABET JUICE The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof . . . Author: Roy Blount, Jr. (1941) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 364 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Language Underlying this eclectic, hilarious consideration of language is the author’s conviction—with examination and examples—that the meanings of words and their constructions are not arbitrary The full subtitle of Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory—peculiar, expansive, begging to roll off the tongue—is a fitting appetizer for what follows. The author has explained it as a tribute to his ancestor Sir Thomas Blount, who in 1656 published a dictionary with an unusual subtitle. However, it could also be the author poking a bit of fun at academia, where titles— and subtitles—tend to twist and turn with studied abandon. It is difficult to be sure with Roy Blount, Jr. He seems to be a down-home Georgia country boy, except that he graduated from Vanderbilt University magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and he earned a master’s degree in English from Harvard University. He is best known as a humorist, compared by many to Garrison Keillor and Will Rogers. However, he has also made his living as a sportswriter, lecturer, novelist, poet, essayist, performer, dramatist, anthologist, and storyteller Like its author, Alphabet Juice is also hard to classify. Its focus is language, and readers can certainly learn much about usage, grammar, punctuation, and more. In addition, the author’s idiosyncrasies share center stage. For example, in elucidating the subjunctive tense, Blount uses the title of O. J. Simpson’s book If I Did It (2007), explaining that it would be grammatical only if Simpson did not know whether or not he had committed the homicide for which he was acquitted in criminal court but found in civil court to be responsible. Blount says that if Simpson had not done it, he would have titled his book—subjectively—“If I Had Done It.” However, if Simpson did do it, he would “certainly not be above going with If I Did It, which is catchier, in a loathsome sort of way.” Blount suggests that “with the rising tides of uncertainty and unthought-out assertiveness in Western civilization today . . . , the subjective often blends with the indicative to create a syntactical can of worms.” Alphabet Juice comprises its own can of worms, in the best sense, as linguistics cavorts with ingenuity and erudition meets horse sense to create an unconventional reality. Similar to a dictionary, the entries in this book are formatted A to Z, giving readers

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something familiar to hold on to as Blount twirls his language loves—and occasional pet peeves—like Möbius strips. A few reviewers have noted that Blount’s personal associations may lose his readers in places, yet most critics seem to consider this part of the charm. All the entries will probably not resonate with all readers, and some may even begin to feel slightly exasperated in places. However, Blount seems to be having too much fun to care, and his glee—and originality—are contagious. As with traditional dictionaries, readers can learn from Alphabet Juice how to pronounce “divisive” correctly and appreciate that “tango” does not derive from the Latin tangere (to touch), but rather from American Spanish, perhaps of Niger-Congo origin. Blount offers word definitions, and many of the terms he includes—such as “chic” and “mnemonic”—would also be found elsewhere. Nevertheless, how many examinations of “mnemonic” would begin with a confession that, although the author would prefer to appreciate rather than criticize words, one such as “mnemonic” should be easier to keep in mind? Similarly, not many dictionaries—after tracing the derivation of “chic”—would add that none of it had anything to do with the etymology of the chewing gum Chiclets. Blount concludes this entry with the news that Chiclets “comes from chicle” (quoting the American Heritage Dictionary definition: “the coagulated milky juice of the sapodilla, used as the principal ingredient of chewing gum”), which he says in turn comes from the “even chewier Nahuatl word chictli,” and then he announces that chiclets meaning teeth (“in particular knockedout ones”) derive from physical likeness alone. Digressions aside, there are other features that make this book distinctive. For example, Blount offers introductory remarks to each letter before delving into its entries. Some prologues are scholarly; others are barely there. However, each gives readers an opportunity to catch their breath and take a particular angle before entering into a relationship with the next unit of the alphabet. Some, such as A, are fun to read aloud as Blount lists “denotative upbeat long-a words” that include “May, lei, play, gravy, pay (assuming you’re receiving), gay, way (as opposed to no way, and as in ‘Where there’s a way, there’s a will’), and ray (of hope, of light, of sun, of Charles).” The remarks about H also demand enunciation, such as where Blount lists “a heap of effortful words,” forty-one, to be exact, beginning with “hack, haggle, hammer, handle, hard, harness, harry, harsh . . . . ” Other introductions offer tidbits as diverse as the reason why capital Q extends below the line; a joke about an aging Leonid Brezhnev, former leader of the Soviet Union, beginning his opening speech at the Moscow Olympics by reading the Olympic symbol as O! O! O!; and the result of a university research study that “S would seem to be monkeys’ favorite letter.” Another peculiarity of this book concerns the entries themselves. In addition to words that might be predicted, Blount offers items such as “of a,” noting erroneous Roy Blount, Jr., is the author of twentyone books, and his work has appeared in many publications. Among other affiliations, he is a contributing editor to The Atlantic Monthly, a long-term member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel, and a regular panelist on National Public Radio’s quiz show “Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me.”

Alphabet Juice / blount

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usage on the sports page of The New York Times. The entry that follows “chicken” is “children’s classic, in verse, all I have so far” (just four short lines). A pithy entry is “has-been”: “A bee that is over the hill.” Unhampered by dictionary expectations, Blount suits himself, tendering items such as “Bossom/Bottum” (about an editor for The Weekly Standard whose name was routinely misspelled and what he decided to do about it); “death, coolest euphemism for” (attributed to Louis Jordan, considered one of the most successful African American musicians of the twentieth century); and “syntax collie” (Blount’s invention, inspired by a New Yorker cartoon). It would be a mistake for readers to come to Alphabet Juice looking for a specific word. Still, trying to find something in particular would be as good an entry point as any into this array. Nothing is really left out, considering the assortment of what is included. Similarly, nothing is really included, given the spaces within and around the extraordinary leaps that Blount makes. Alphabet Juice has been well received by critics. In seeking to capture and expound upon Blount’s stream-of-consciousness vision, they tend to cite their own favorite entries, often quoting at length. The book has been variously termed a language elixir, the ultimate browser’s dictionary, and word play on steroids. Blount presents himself as a word lover meandering at will, illuminating particulars that strike his fancy, occasionally getting in little digs at things that may have bothered him for a while. In fact, Blount explained in an interview that he has been making little notes about items included in this book for fifty years. Due to its dictionary structure, he did not have to maintain any narrative and thus felt free, he says, to hop around considerably as he wrote, calling it a very self-indulgent undertaking. Readers are also likely to navigate this book by their own paths. Those who read dictionaries for sport may devour Alphabet Juice in one or two sittings. For most people, however, it is probably best appreciated a few bites at a time. Ian Frazier, American writer and humorist, says this book is as much fun to read backward as forward. Blount advises that he would read it the way he wrote it, “thumbing back and forth, without ever being sure you’ve read it all.” In addition to encouraging connections among ideas within entries, Blount also creates a simulated, low-tech Google experience across items. Words in the text that appear in boldface are themselves entries, he explains, something his readers “might want to check out.” Alphabet Juice offers readers options in terms of approach and subject matter as well as irreverent wit, yet this is a book of consequence. The introduction gives a glimpse of the knowledge base upon which it rests. Blount is well acquainted with dictionaries and other reference volumes, he has a working knowledge of Latin, French, and Greek, and he holds his own views about language. Considering himself a “shade-tree etymologist” (like a shade-tree mechanic), he sets up shop at the side of the road and knows what he is doing. Regarding the relationship between how a word sounds and what it means, which linguistic scholars say is arbitrary, Blount’s position is clear: “arbitrary, schmarbitrary.” Acknowledging that “linguisticians” would probably allow him onomatopoeia (like “snap,” “crackle,” and “pop”), Blount asserts it goes much beyond that. Each language, he says, has its own “deep aesthetic network of sonic correspondences.” What runs through the veins of language is alphabet juice:

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“the quirky but venerable squiggles which through centuries of knockabout breeding and intimate contact with the human body have absorbed the uncanny power to carry the ring of truth.” Blount coins the term “sonicky” to describe “a word whose sound doesn’t imitate a sound, like boom or poof, but does somehow sensuously evoke the essence of the word: queasy or rickety or zest or sluggish or vim.” In this book, many sonicky examples are woven through Blount’s opinions, assorted bits of quirky information, and a wealth of language nuggets. However, as some critics have emphasized even as they acknowledge Blount’s argument, this book is not designed to make a case, least of all to a scholarly audience. Blount says simply that he hopes it will be useful to anyone who wants to write better, including himself. Whenever “disinterested” is used instead of “uninterested,” he explains, an angel dies, and each time “very unique” appears, “thousands of literate people lose yet another little smidgen of hope.” Blount considers himself the kind of person who “realistic latitudinarians” think of as a crank; still, his tongue seems firmly planted in cheek. He offers insight in Alphabet Juice but does not prescribe. He cites established language sources but also such references as urbandictionary.com (where he has contributed a top definition). In the entry “voyeur,” Blount’s elegantly spare comments on the thinning effects of television may reverberate in readers’ minds for some time, even gaining momentum, but will probably not cause defensiveness. This is a book of intelligence and energy, likely to be appreciated by those who love language, those who value humor, and those just looking for something singular to read. Jean C. Fulton

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 22 (August 1, 2008): 2. The Buffalo News, October 5, 2008, p. F9. The Columbus Dispatch, November 2, 2008, p. O4E. Fortune 158, no. 7 (October 13, 2008): 82. The New York Times, November 16, 2008, p. L9. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 33 (August 18, 2008): 53. The Seattle Times, October 30, 2008, p. 14. Sports Illustrated 109, no. 24 (December 15, 2008): 24. The Washington Post Book World, October 12, 2008, p. BW10.

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AMERICA AMERICA Author: Ethan Canin (1960) Publisher: Random House (New York). 458 pp. $27.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1971-2006 Locale: Saline, a small town in upstate New York near Lake Erie A young man from a working-class family becomes involved with a wealthy landowner and the senator he is supporting for president in 1972 Principal characters: Henry Bonwiller, a New York state senator who runs for president Liam Metarey, a wealthy patriarch and Bonwiller’s financial supporter and campaign manager Corey Sifter, teenage protégé of Liam; he later publishes a newspaper JoEllen Charney, a young female campaign worker who has an affair with Bonwiller Trieste Millbury, a high school intern on Sifter’s newspaper June Metarey, Liam’s wife Clara Metarey, Liam’s daughter, Corey’s wife Christian Metarey, Liam’s daughter Grange Sifter, Corey’s father Anna Bainbridge Sifter, Corey’s mother

The novel America America begins in 2006. Corey Sifter, a middle-aged newspaper publisher, describes attending the funeral of Henry Bonwiller, eighty-nine, a New York state senator and a resident of the small town of Saline, New York. Sifter recalls thirty-four years earlier when Bonwiller was running for the Democratic nomination for the presidency as “the best friend the working men of this country have ever had”—a man who would beat Richard Nixon and bring the troops home from Vietnam. At that time, Sifter was the protégé of Liam Metarey, a wealthy businessman supporting Bonwiller’s bid for the nomination, and he was Bonwiller’s junior aide and driver during the campaign. After the funeral, Sifter, seeing a man kneel and weep at the graveside, recalls his involvement with Metarey and Bonwiller and the death of a young campaign worker that the two men had covered up and in which Sifter, perhaps innocently, played some part. Sifter is the son of a plumber who sometimes works on Aberdeen West, the estate of Liam Metarey. As he works with his father on a plumbing job on the grounds, his conscientious effort not to injure the roots of an ancient oak that have clogged the underground pipes sparks the admiration of Metarey who offers him a position doing odd jobs on the estate. Metarey is the descendant of Scottish migrant Eoghan Metarey, a hard-nosed, and

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sometimes unscrupulous, pioneer who rose from impoverished circumstances to become a mining and lumber magnate. At one point, he was blamed by union officials for the deaths of five men trapped in a collapsed mine shaft. The Metareys are almost wholly responsible for building the town of Saline and still own much of it. Liam is a milder man than his ruthless father and, perhaps feeling responsible for his father’s aggrandizing acts in the past, serves as a benevolent patriarch of the town. His decision to try to get Bonwiller, a populist friend of the workingman who has vowed to bring the troops home from Vietnam, elected president is also perhaps part of his effort to compensate for his father’s callousness. In the novel’s outset, Sifter is a middle-aged man recalling the days when, as a sophomore in high school, he began working for Metarey and trying to justify his involvement with Metarey and Bonwiller’s cover-up of a scandal. This is a traditional bildungsroman, a coming-of-age novel, and it is also a political novel, with a message, sometimes laid on too heavy-handedly by Canin, in which the boy’s lost idealism is a reflection of a nation’s lost idealism. As the title suggests, and Canin’s sympathetic treatment of Metarey and Sifter indicate, this book intends to be an American Dream epic, a Great American Novel, in the classic sense. Perhaps for this reason, the characters, although larger than life, are two-dimensional, and the plot moves with a predictable inevitability. Metarey is a rich man who tries to wear his wealth lightly. Although he lives in a twenty-four-room brick and stone Edwardian mansion on a huge estate covered with ancient oaks, he dresses modestly, spends little, saves much, and tries to remain in the background. His wife gets her clothes in a local shop, and his children attend public school. Although he owns his own airplane, which his wife often recklessly and sometimes drunkenly flies, he putters around in his workshop and saves parts and pieces of old machinery that he files away carefully. Perhaps because Metarey sees in Sifter a reflection of his own youthful idealism, he takes the boy under his wing, securing him a scholarship at a fancy boarding school and supporting him through college. Metarey seems to be a wise, honest man, more an inhabitant of a novel from the nineteenth century than of the twentieth. These characteristics make his fall from grace at the end of the novel all the more tragic, yet all the more predictable. As a young man, Sifter was idealistic, hardworking, respectful, polite, and scrupulously honest, and he narrates the story from his position as the aging owner of a small-town newspaper, recalling his past involvement in American politics with a mixture of guilt and justification. He still insists that Metarey was a generous, civicminded, and “altruistic patron” of the community. His tendency to make excuses for the politicians in his past are tempered by his somewhat cynical high school intern, Trieste Millbury, who challenges his gullibility. As a young man, Sifter is often in awe of the powerful political figures with whom he rubs elbows, marveling that while his father is a poor plumber, he is the driver for a man who could become president.

Ethan Canin is the author of six books of fiction, including his highly praised debut collection of stories, Emperor of the Air (1988). He is on the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.

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Bonwiller, the liberal senator who aspires to be president, is less clearly delineated. Although he is saluted for doing more for the causes of civil rights and labor than anyone in congressional history, Bonwiller never becomes anything more than a shadowy and distant figure in the novel. In spite of his devotion to abstract liberal values, he is a drinker and a womanizer. Conscientious in public, he is careless in his personal life. What continues to torment Sifter is how Bonwiller combined public idealism with personal ruthlessness. The novel places fictional characters in the midst of real-life politicians, such as Richard Nixon, Edmund Muskie, and the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972, George McGovern. A huge party at the Metarey mansion is attended by George Meany, Carl Stokes, Averell Harriman, Senator Edward Kennedy, Senator Mike Mansfield, and Senator Hubert Humphrey. Sifter also describes seeing Arthur Schlesinger, Betty Friedan, David Halberstam, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Shirley Chisholm. Later, Sifter recalls that even as a young man, he sensed that there was a new sort of stature in the room. When Bonwiller has an auto accident while out drinking with his intern JoEllen Charney, he staggers away, leaving her in the snow. Metarey covers it up and Sifter lies to the authorities, saying he has never seen Bonwiller take a drink. Even worse, he helps Metarey crash the car to conceal the damage done in the drunken accident. Bonwiller’s liberal leanings and his womanizing make it impossible to ignore that Canin bases him on Ted Kennedy and his involvement in the death of a young aide at Chappaquiddick in 1969, a scandal disastrous to Kennedy’s ambitions to be president. In the last part of the novel, Sifter, now middle-aged, helps to care for his aging father, who is in a convalescent home after suffering a stroke. The older man spends much of his time reading and talking with his son about his involvement with Metarey and Bonwiller. He insists that Metarey was a better father to Sifter than he had been and that, regardless of what happened, Bonwiller was the best friend the workingman has ever had. His father tells Sifter that there is always something half criminal about progress. After Metarey’s death in a plane crash, Bonwiller reads W. H. Auden’s famous poem “Museé des Beaux Arts” at his funeral, about Pieter Breughel’s painting of Icarus, in which a ploughman in the foreground does not seem to notice the death of the young man in the background.The novel ends, predictably, with the loss of the old world, as bulldozers tear down the great Metarey mansion and destroy the majestic oaks that surround it to make room for a shopping center and housing development. All that is left is an iconic image of an oak at the entrance to the shopping center. When he published his first book in 1988, the collection of short stories entitled The Emperor of the Air, Ethan Canin at the age of twenty-seven amazed his readers with his sensitive ability to penetrate the mysteries of motivation in the minds of both teenagers and elderly men. Although the stories could be interpreted as being about the tension between hope and hopelessness and between great expectations and disappointment, these abstract categories were so skillfully embodied in the complexities of Canin’s characters that they could not be directly stated but rather could only be intuited and emotionally felt. America America, because of its ambitions to be a Great

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American Novel, embodying youthful idealism and adult disillusionment, is much less subtle. Although this may be because Canin is a better short-story writer than a novelist, it may also be due somewhat to basic differences between the two narrative forms. The great Italian novelist Alberto Moravia once argued that the difference between the short story and the novel is the difference between their ground plan or structure. The novel, he says, has a bone structure of ideology, whereas the short story is boneless. Thus, while the short story is more like a lyric, the novel is similar to the essay or the philosophical treatise. A comparison between the title story of The Emperor of the Air and America America, both told from the point of view of an aging man, supports Moravia’s distinction. What makes characters act in Canin’s short story is mysteriously embedded in their secret lives, whereas the motivations of the characters in his novel seem obvious and abstract, more a result of the conventions of the political novel than the complexities of the characters. In America America, Canin faced the challenge of writing a political novel, which deals with the conventional clash between idealism and reality, yet endowing it with originality and psychological complexity. No matter how hard the writer may try, the pull of the abstract theme of such a novel is often so strong that characters become mere ciphers, puppets dominated by the power of the political theme. Thus, America America, in spite of its ambitions to be an epic political novel, seems to be more a skeleton of concepts, abstractions, and ideas. The result is a certain flatness and predictability. Such a story may have been more compelling if handled by a historian rather than a fiction writer, who runs the risk of falling into the trap of clichés posed by the Great American Novel. Charles E. May

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 17 (May 1, 2008): 4-5. The Boston Globe, July 13, 2008, p. C6. Elle 23, no. 11 (July, 2008): 88. Entertainment Weekly, June 20, 2008, p. 69. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 9 (May 1, 2008): 449. Library Journal 133, no. 12 (July 1, 2008): 60. The New York Times Book Review, July 6, 2008, pp. 81-83. O, The Oprah Magazine 9, no. 7 (July, 2008): 139-140. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 16 (April 21, 2008): 31. The Times Literary Supplement, August 1, 2008, p. 20. USA Today, July 8, 2008, p. 5D. The Washington Post Book World, June 29, 2008, p. BW07.

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AMERICAN LION Andrew Jackson in the White House Author: Jon Meacham (1969) Publisher: Random House (New York). 483 pp. $30.00 Type of work: Biography Time: 1824-1837 Locale: Washington, D.C., and Tennessee Meacham explores the character of one of America’s early heroes during the years that Jackson served as president of the United States, examining his role in redefining the office of president Principal personages: Andrew Jackson, seventh president of the United States Andrew Jackson Donelson, nephew of Jackson and secretary to the president Emily Donelson, niece of Jackson and his hostess at the White House John C. Calhoun, vice president and Jackson’s rival Henry Clay, senator from Kentucky and a Jackson rival Nicholas Biddle, president of the Second Bank of the United States John Henry Eaton, Jackson’s first secretary of war Margaret Eaton, wife of Jackson’s secretary of war and controversial Washington, D.C., socialite Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s secretary of state and vice president

There is no dearth of books about Andrew Jackson, America’s seventh president. He is a towering figure in American history. Born in colonial North Carolina, orphaned as a teenager, captured by the British during the Revolutionary War, he grew up to be an ardent patriot and public servant. Lacking formal education, he worked tirelessly both to improve his own prospects (he became a lawyer and eventually a judge) while accepting every opportunity presented him to serve his fellow citizens in his new home, Tennessee, where he became its first representative in the U.S. Congress in 1796 and later a U.S. senator. He served in his state’s militia, then in the U.S. Army, and in 1815 he secured his place in history as leader of the American forces that defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans. Lionized as the greatest military leader since George Washington, he used his fame as a drawing card to gain popular support in national politics. Although he lost his bid for the presidency in 1824, to the surprise and dismay of many who had long been involved at the top levels of the government, he was elected to the country’s highest office in 1828. Despite his advanced age and sometimes questionable health, he managed to serve two terms, during which he transformed the presidency from its traditional role as the chief executive for Congress into the undisputed representative of the people at

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large, equal to (and sometimes surpassing) Congress in determining the fate of the nation. That Jon Meacham would undertake a new study of such a powerful figure whose career has been well documented speaks to his own temerity and skills. Rather than produce another standard biography, however, in American Lion Meacham focuses on Jackson’s presidency, providing readers only a brief summary of Old Hickory’s career from his birth in rural North Carolina through the tumultuous years in which he rose to prominence as a lawmaker and military leader. Meacham’s central thesis is that Jackson was first and foremost a family man. Orphaned as a child, he came to value the concept of “family” in both his personal and political lives. His long-time marriage to Rachel Donelson gave him the stability and comfort to face the rigors of life in the field with his troops and in the halls of state and federal legislatures. Her death just months before he left Tennessee for Washington, D.C., to assume the presidency drove him to fill that void by creating a new family for himself, taking under his wing his nephew and niece, Andrew and Emily Donelson, who went to the capital with him as his personal secretary and as his hostess, respectively. Jackson’s relationship with these two and with his small group of confidants (the majority outside his official cabinet) provided him the kind of family circle, Meacham says, on which he depended in his efforts to transform the presidency. At the same time, Meacham argues, Jackson saw the entire country as his family—with himself serving as a benevolent father figure whose principal responsibility lay in serving their best interests, not the wishes and whims of the Congress. Relying on published research and newly discovered documents, Meacham outlines the major battles Jackson waged in his efforts to reshape the role of the president. While all of these have been written about before, Meacham’s focus on Jackson’s motives makes his account particularly engaging. Unlike his six predecessors, Jackson had little use for what he perceived as the untitled aristocracy that had ruled America since the revolution. He entered office as a sworn enemy of patronage, moving swiftly to dismiss hundreds of government workers who had been appointed by previous presidents to positions they had assumed to hold for life. Although he was a devout (but not churchgoing) Protestant, he held strong beliefs about the separation of church and state, and he fought efforts by a coalition of clergymen to push the country toward adopting legislation that would make it the exclusive privilege of white Protestant Christians to hold public office. Jackson was active in promoting treaties that would remove the Native American population from all lands east of the Mississippi River. Having been a major force in securing Florida as a U.S. territory while he was still serving as a general in the U.S.

Jon Meacham is editor of Newsweek magazine. He is the author of the bestselling historical studies Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (2003) and American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (2006) and editor of Voices in Our Blood: America’s Best on the Civil Rights Movement (2001), a collection of nonfiction about struggles against Jim Crow laws.

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Army, he was a committed expansionist who was delighted to lend his tacit support to Americans mounting a rebellion in Texas. He almost took the country to war against France when that nation refused to honor a debt for damages inflicted on U.S. shipping during the Napoleonic wars, claiming that the snub was an affront to national honor and that to allow the French to behave with such disdain for America would weaken the United States’ position on the international stage. Meacham concentrates much of his narrative on Jackson’s struggles against those who sought to challenge his ideology and thwart his policies. From the start of his presidency, Jackson had to contend with powerful opponents, including Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, a perennial rival for the presidency who thought Jackson was seeking to turn the office into a virtual dictatorship. Chief among those who sought to check Jackson at every turn was his first vice president, John C. Calhoun. A man with his own presidential ambitions, Calhoun was a states’ rights supporter who worked actively with politicians in his home state of South Carolina to promote the concept of nullification, the right of an individual state to declare federal laws invalid within its borders. The immediate cause for Calhoun and his fellow South Carolinians’ concern were the high tariffs imposed in 1829 to protect American manufacturing. Many Southern states thought the tariffs unfairly favored those in the North and, for several years, tried in Congress to have them repealed. When that failed, South Carolina’s leaders at home and in Washington began championing the idea of nullification—and hinting that the state might be forced to secede from the Union if its demands were not met. Jackson, a strong Unionist, thought this was one step on the road to secession, and events proved him right. For all of his first term and part of his second, he battled against the nullifiers in the press and in the legislature, eventually getting Congress to grant him extraordinary powers to take military action against any state that might attempt to nullify a law or secede from the Union. Not until well into his second term did he finally quell this crisis. Jackson’s struggle against the Second Bank of the United States is often cited as the most notable incident in his years as president. Meacham presents this story as a traditional conflict of personal wills, pitting Jackson against the bank’s president, Nicholas Biddle. The charter for the bank, a private corporation in which all federal funds were deposited, was to expire during Jackson’s term, and the president was adamant that it not be renewed. Jackson’s argument against the bank was that, by consolidating all federal funds in a single institution, Congress was giving the bank’s president inordinate power to influence national politics. With millions of dollars at his disposal, Biddle could—and did—make money available to those who supported efforts for rechartering, usually in the form of loans to their pet projects. Jackson’s behind-the-scenes efforts to remove the federal government’s deposits and invest them in various state banks, and his public relations campaign in which he appealed directly to the American people to gain support for dissolution of Biddle’s bank, ushered in a new era of political maneuvering that changed the way politics in Washington was conducted. Curiously, one crisis that plagued Jackson during his early years in office, and which led to the breakup of his first cabinet, was something instigated by his stubborn

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refusal to separate himself from loyal friends. As his first secretary of war, he appointed John Eaton, a fellow Tennessean who had recently married Margaret Timberlake, a notorious socialite whose scandalous behavior caused her to be ostracized by almost all of Washington society (including Jackson’s niece Emily). Jackson insisted that his cabinet members support the Eatons and accept them socially. Few would do so, and Jackson ended up diverting much time from matters of government to resolving disputes over the treatment the Eatons received from both elected and appointed officials. The only person to benefit from the Eaton affair, Meacham suggests, was Secretary of State Martin Van Buren, who befriended Mrs. Eaton and thereby ingratiated himself with the president. Van Buren soon became Jackson’s closest adviser in the cabinet. Eventually he became Jackson’s vice president and succeeded him in the White House in 1836. In nearly every encounter between Jackson and his political foes, Meacham takes pains to paint Jackson in a favorable light. At the same time, however, Meacham is not shy about discussing the darker side of Jackson’s character. He had a quick temper that, coupled with his conviction that he always knew what was best for both his political future and that of the nation, made him a formidable presence, difficult for friends and enemies alike to deal with. He was, Meacham admits, a man of his time who believed that slavery was acceptable. He owned slaves, his family owned them, and he was committed to the preservation of the South’s “peculiar institution,” even though the idea seemed to run counter to his professed belief in the equality of all people. He held only slightly less patronizing views toward Native Americans, believing that it was in their best interests to be separated from white Americans—preferably in lands away from those which white Americans wished to have for themselves. Jackson was far from perfect, Meacham admits, but his courage in forging ahead with his agenda and his unwavering commitment to the idea that the president owes his allegiance to the people of America and not to Congress transformed the nature of politics in the country forever. Such accomplishments must be acknowledged and admired despite Jackson’s shortcomings. Meacham weaves together these stories of Jackson’s public life with accounts of his relations with various relatives, especially the Donelsons, further highlighting the seamless nature of Jackson’s vision of himself as head of a family that extended in concentric circles from his blood relations outward to include the entire nation. Whether he is relating the account of Jackson’s struggles to eradicate the Second Bank of the United States or the lingering illness and untimely death of Emily, Meacham has the ability to convey the emotional impact of the events he describes. He writes with a flair for the dramatic, but his scholarship is sound and his ability to extract from events long past the character and motives of his subject make American Lion a book of significant value to anyone interested in Jackson or the evolution of the American presidency. Laurence W. Mazzeno

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 6 (November 15, 2008): 14. Entertainment Weekly, December 5, 2008, p. 75. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 19 (October 1, 2008): 1054-1055. National Review 60, no. 22 (December 1, 2008): 53-54. The New York Times, November 11, 2008, p. C1. The New York Times Book Review, November 6, 2008, p. 16. Newsweek 152, no. 19 (November 10, 2008): 36-39. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 37 (September 15, 2008): 57.

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ANTOINE’S ALPHABET Watteau and His World Author: Jed Perl (1951) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). Illustrated. 207 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Fine arts Perl explores history, artistic creation, symbols, and the human condition by examining Antoine Watteau’s paintings. The book, in the form of an alphabet primer or dictionary, elucidates the influence of Watteau and his work By choosing the form of an alphabet book or dictionary for Antoine’s Alphabet, Jed Perl has produced a text that can be read as a single entity or consulted as a reference book with attention given only to specific topics. From the prologue to the last page of the book, Perl extols Antoine Watteau’s greatness as an artist and adeptly explains why Watteau is his favorite painter. He also uses Watteau’s paintings as a springboard into an exploration of the influence of art and creativity in the shaping of human history and also as a reflection of the sensory and sentimental realities experienced in living. The book is subtitled Watteau and His World. Through the alphabetical entries, Perl takes the reader into Watteau’s world, which has no boundaries, neither geographical nor temporal. Watteau’s is the world of the human spirit and of the human life experience, filled with uncertainties, hesitations, and ambiguities and yet totally and vitally alive. Preceded by an illustration of Watteau’s painting of Mezzetin, the prologue begins with a literary portrait of the character portrayed in the painting. Perl describes his attitude of abandonment, his fanciful attire, his energetic pose, and his elusive thoughts. Perl’s discussion is reminiscent of the descriptions of paintings written by the eighteenth century philosopher Denis Diderot in Les Salons (1759-1781). Both writers create stories suggested to them by the paintings. With this introduction, Perl unabashedly announces that Watteau, a French artist of the early eighteenth century, is his favorite painter. The rest of the prologue previews what is to be found in the text. Thirty-six entries are devoted to Watteau and his paintings or are closely linked to Watteau; five treat art in general; and twenty-one discuss topics more or less related to Watteau. In the various entries about Watteau, Perl discusses specific paintings by the artist; themes and characters painted by Watteau; Watteau’s methods of working; and his friendships with and his influences on later artists, writers, musicians, dancers, and filmmakers. The two Watteau paintings that receive the most elaborate treatment are Gersaint’s Shopsign and The Pilgrimage to Cythera. Perl sees Watteau’s paintings as having an immense power of attraction, of symbolism, and of ambiguity. For him, the

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men and women depicted are never static or easily categorized. They are individuals sub- Jed Perl has been the art critic for The ject to ever-changing emotions and indeci- New Republic since 1994. He has also sion. With his detailed verbal descriptions, written Paris Without End: On French Perl draws the reader into the world of the Art Since World War I (1988), painting just as Watteau draws the observer Eyewitness: Report from an Art World in Crisis (2000), and New Art City: into the painting with his visual imagery. In his entry Gersaint’s Shopsign, Perl de- Manhattan at Mid-Century (2005). scribes the luxury items sold by the store and the elegant aristocratic shoppers, and he discusses the way in which Watteau shifts the symbolism of desire back and forth from desire for beautiful objects to sexual desire. Perl succeeds in enticing the reader to enter the shop and participate in the action of the painting. Then he incorporates William Cole’s description of Madame Dulac’s shop in Paris in 1760 and a scene from Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (1904) into his discussion in order to illustrate further the many suggestions that Watteau makes in this painting. In his entry on The Pilgrimage to Cythera, Perl discusses how Watteau uses ambiguity. Upon viewing the painting, the spectator is overcome with uncertainty as to exactly what is happening. Are the men and women leaving for Cythera or are they returning? Are they falling in love or have they been in love? Illuminating this point, in the entry on “Soldiers,” Perl emphasizes Watteau’s predilection for painting scenes in which the characters are about to do something of importance or have just finished doing something. Watteau peopled his paintings with men and women who are often in ambiguous relationships but who always draw the attention of the spectator. What are these men and women like? Did Watteau create a Watteauesque man and a Watteauesque woman? Perl believes the artist did and defines each of these characters. Preceding the entry for an illustration of a print taken from one of Watteau’s drawings of a man, Perl describes men who are at ease, completely relaxed, and doing exactly what they want to do, reflecting what Perl calls an understated masculinity. The men that Watteau created and portrayed in his paintings have a certain air of mystery about them, and they are at home in Watteau’s world. Perl examines the concept of women in terms of Watteau’s depiction of them in the entry “Women.” He begins his discussion by stating that Katharine Hepburn in the film Bringing Up Baby (1938) is an example of the Watteau woman, beautiful and sexy with a capacity for being funny. She is also independent yet feminine. She is not overly concerned about her looks, and she is not fettered by social convention. She is above all else the incarnation of indecisiveness; for her, everything as a possibility. Perhaps she is ready to embark for Cythera, perhaps she is not. She is ambiguous and mysterious like her male counterpart. Although few biographical facts are known about Watteau, Perl does include in the various entries information about Watteau’s life as an artist and about his personal life. He mentions that Watteau was friends with Edme-François Gersaint, the shopkeeper for whom he painted Gersaint’s Shopsign, and with Jean de Julienne, who was

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in charge of the weaving and dying processes at the Gobelins tapestry works. Perl tells the reader that Watteau was accepted as a member of the Royal Academy in 1712 and was given the privilege of choosing the subject of the presentation piece he was required to paint. Watteau neglected to paint the piece and was finally told that he had six months to produce the painting and submit it if he wished to be a member of the Royal Academy. Perl’s book explores the world created in Watteau’s paintings in the entry “Party.” Perl visualizes a party to which Watteau has invited all the artists, writers, musicians, dancers, and other creative individuals that he has influenced. The painter Giorgione and the writer Colette are there as well as the poets Paul Verlaine, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Wallace Stevens, the painters Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, and the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. In this way, Perl elucidates the tremendous influence that Watteau has had. Perl devotes a considerable number of entries to the importance and influence of the characters Harlequin and Pierrot. These two characters place the painter in a long artistic tradition, related to commedia dell’arte, to actors, to illusion, to shifting emotions, and to mystery, all elements important in Watteau’s paintings. These two characters also bring about a rediscovery of Watteau’s world long after he had created it in his paintings. The entry “Impresario” takes as its subject Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes. After discussing Diaghilev’s skills as an entrepreneur and his relationship with his dancers, especially with Léonid Massine and Nijinsky, Perl describes Nijinsky dancing Harlequin and Massine dancing Pulcinella (Pierrot) and sees in their performances and in their relationship with Diaghilev a reincarnation of Watteau’s world, with its masks, its mysterious characters, its exuberance, and its ephemeral quality. In “Cezanne,” Perl tells the story of Cezanne painting Harlequin and Pierrot. Inspired by a Harlequin costume hanging in his studio, Cezanne decides to ask his son Paul to pose in it. Then, Paul’s friend Louis is asked to wear the Pierrot costume and pose with Paul. Once the painting is finished, Cezanne sits looking at it and realizes that all of the uncertainties that he had experienced while painting it have somehow combined into one uncertainty. Once again, Watteau’s world has reappeared. The reader begins to feel that any appearance of Harlequin and Pierrot will, almost magically, re-create Watteau’s world. In the entry “Verlaine,” Perl writes about how Watteau’s world was re-created in a different medium when Verlaine published Fêtes galantes (1869), a book of poems in which he treated the themes that Watteau had portrayed in his paintings. In the five entries treating art in general, Perl shares some of his personal viewpoints in regard to art. In “Art-for-Art’s Sake,” Perl discusses the modernists’ desire to free beauty from any requirement to possess meaning, permitting beauty to be equated to an emotional state or to an act resulting from feeling. The entry “New” presents Perl’s concept that new is not synonymous to evolutionary or progressive but rather to individual, to that which is uniquely the artist’s, which imbues the work with the emotions of the artist. His concept of “New” also insists that the artist’s feelings must be freed to exist in the work independently of the artist. In “Qualities,” Perl re-

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veals his personal need for a work to contain a wide range of different and, at times, unexpected qualities, which, he asserts, gives the work a wholeness. These entries reveal why Watteau is Perl’s favorite painter. Perl’s book includes forty-three illustrations, most of which are reproductions of prints of Watteau’s paintings. These illustrations are an integral part of his discussion of the quality and of the attributes of Watteau’s works, especially for the reader who may not be familiar with Watteau’s paintings. Upon reading an entry such as “Actor” or “Backs” or “Kleist,” the reader is drawn to look closely at the illustrations accompanying the entry. In this way, the reader reaffirms what Perl has presented in his entry. Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and His World is an affirmation of Watteau as a talented and important painter. Perl convincingly argues that Watteau’s impact ranges across the full spectrum of artistic creation, influencing artists, poets, musicians, and dancers from the eighteenth century to the present. Shawncey Webb

Review Sources Art & Antiques 31, no. 10 (October, 2008): 138. Booklist 105, no. 1 (September 1, 2008): 23. The New Yorker 84, no. 33 (October 20, 2008): 93. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 26 (June 30, 2008): 169.

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THE APPEAL Author: John Grisham (1955) Publisher: Random House (New York). 355 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 2007 Locale: Mississippi After a Mississippi jury returns a verdict against Krane Chemical for dumping toxic waste into the town of Bowmore’s water supply, the company appeals to the Mississippi Supreme Court, whose newest member has been hand-picked by Krane Chemical Principal characters: Mary Grace Payton, popular small-town trial lawyer, good wife, and mom Wes Payton, her partner in law, good husband, and dad Carl Trudeau, Wall Street tycoon and CEO of Krane Chemical Ron Fisk, clean-cut attorney picked by Krane Chemical to run for the Mississippi Supreme Court Shelia McCarthy, incumbent Mississippi Supreme Court judge Barry Rinehart, behind-the-scenes political consultant Tony Zachary, Rinehart’s man who runs rigged elections Jeannette Baker, plaintiff in the Krane Chemical trial Denny Ott, supportive pastor Brianna Trudeau, billionaire Carl Trudeau’s trophy wife

Now that husband-and-wife attorney team Wes and Mary Grace Payton have won a forty-one-million-dollar verdict in the seventy-one-day Baker v. Krane Chemical trial, they can take their children out for pizza. As recounted in John Grisham’s The Appeal, it has been four long years since the couple had taken the case that was to cast them into bare-bones poverty. They are deeply in debt, living in a run-down campus apartment, practicing law in a shabby office whose rent has not been paid in months, employing a courageous staff that has gone without wages, and dreading the appearance of the banker to whom they owe four hundred thousand dollars. Before the trial, their life had been replete with a luxury home and sports cars. Luckily, they have a friend in minister Denny Ott, who also provides spiritual sustenance to the victims of Krane Chemical’s toxic dumping in the water supply of Bowmore, Mississippi. After hearing the “guilty” verdict, the primary victim, Jeannette Baker, who lost her husband and young son to cancer, finally stops crying. Although her grief provided her with courage throughout the lengthy and excruciating trial, she nevertheless has no faith that she will ever see a penny of her enormous verdict and continues to live in her trailer so she can visit the graves of her loved ones. The other victims, many in advanced stages of cancer, are eager to finalize the case in order to experience a

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modicum of personal satisfaction in the just verdict and to have some much needed financial relief. Simultaneously, Wall Street billionaire Carl Trudeau, the chief executive officer of Krane Chemical, is apoplectic about Krane’s plummeting stock and his loss of the case. He never pauses to think about the cancer rate in Bowmore, which has skyrocketed to fifteen times the national average and which has been caused by his company’s illegal dumping of chemical waste into the town’s water supply. John Grisham graduated from the He simply carries out his luxurious lifestyle University of Mississippi law school with his bubble-headed, anorexic trophy wife, and set up a legal practice in Brianna. On the evening of the punishing ver- Southaven. He was elected to the dict, he attends a highbrow party at which he Mississippi House of Representatives in buys a hideous piece of dubious art for twenty 1983. After his enormous success with million dollars. After all, he will never give The Firm (1991), he moved to Oxford, the others on the Forbes world’s wealthiest Mississippi, to concentrate on his list the satisfaction of seeing him cringe over writing. Grisham is a highly prolific his enormous financial losses. Trudeau fully writer; The Appeal is his twentieth realizes if the verdict is not overturned, all the novel. other victims will come forward for a bite of what he considers his exclusive pie. On a balcony overlooking New York City, Trudeau vows to win back his money and gain much, much more—after the appeal. Another player in these legal and financial high jinks is Barry Rinehart, a nefarious, behind-the-scenes fixer who, in a secret meeting with Trudeau, promises him a bought-and-paid-for judge to be elected to the Supreme Court of Mississippi. Rinehart’s man, Tony Zachary, has located a squeaky-clean, churchgoing, baseball-coach local attorney who can easily be elected with a campaign chest of three million dollars funded by various special-interest groups in Washington, D.C., who are intent on crippling trial lawyers by bringing about legislation that places limits on monetary awards in lawsuits. Trudeau jumps at Rinehart’s bait. After all, this is Trudeau’s opportunity to recoup his loss and make billions more by purposely causing Krane Chemical’s stock to fall. He will buy as much stock as possible at deflated prices and sit back and watch his bottom line grow bigger and bigger after his own newly elected judge overturns the Baker v. Krane Chemical verdict. Meanwhile, attorney Ron Fisk has been approached by Zachary, Rinehart’s henchman, promising Fisk a seat on the Mississippi Supreme Court. Zachary assures Fisk, a conservative, that he has been selected to run against the incumbent judge Shelia McCarthy because he is a family-values type of guy, with no skeletons in his closet. After all, McCarthy, Zachary confides, is much too liberal. It does not matter in the slightest that Fisk has no judicial experience. Leave the business aspects of the

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election to him, Zachary tells Fisk. Just get out there, look good, and say the things the voters want to hear. Fisk, who cannot believe his good luck, is whisked off to Washington in a private jet to meet the bigwigs who will finance his campaign. In addition, Zachary has rounded up a red-herring candidate, a highly unelectable shady alcoholic lawyer named Coley Clete, to run against Fisk and McCarthy. Clete’s candidacy serves to generate negative headlines that will make Fisk look much better by comparison. While the appeal to the forty-one-million-dollar verdict is proceeding, shyster lawyers invade Bowmore for a piece of the pie that is sure to come about if the verdict is not overturned. Wes and Mary Grace, who study the sixteen-thousand-page trial transcript and continue to battle the opposing lawyers’ myriad objections, manage to attract more clients. Their financial situation improves, although they are not making much progress in paying down their bank loans. They hold their breath, waiting for an outcome on the appeal in their favor or a rich settlement from Krane Chemical, which could turn them overnight into millionaires and bring great financial relief to their suffering friends and neighbors. In this regard, the Krane lawyers set up a meeting, bogusly holding out bait for a large settlement—all of which serves to lower the price of Krane stock when the settlement falls through. A nasty election ensues for the seat of the Mississippi Supreme Court judge who will be instrumental in determining the fate of the appeal. McCarthy is sideswiped by the millions of dollars poured into her opponent Fisk’s campaign. In campaign advertisements, she is painted as a liberal, a supporter of gun control, and an advocate for same-sex marriage—issues traditionally not viewed favorably in that region of the United States. Despite her best efforts and an infusion of funds from the state’s Trial Lawyers’ Association, McCarthy loses and Fisk takes her seat. He has managed to look good and speak well on the stump, but he has remained clueless about the underhanded operation of his campaign. All the while, behind the scenes, the strings of the puppet people are being pulled by Rinehart, whose company specializes in rigging elections, and Wall Street tycoon Trudeau, who sits back gleefully watching the price of Krane stock tumble and waiting to buy large quantities of Krane stock at bargain-basement prices. He is safe in the knowledge that Krane stock will turn around and skyrocket, and he will gain billions after the judge he just bought overturns the verdict. Meanwhile, in a vindictive move, Trudeau arranges to buy the bank where Wes and Mary Grace have their long-overdue loans, forcing the couple into bankruptcy. None of those ignorant people, Trudeau swears emphatically, will ever get one thin dime of his money. Although the stage is set for Trudeau to make a financial comeback, a glitch upsets his plans. Fisk’s son is injured in a baseball accident and rushed to the local hospital. After an examination, he is given a clean bill of health and returns home, shaken but apparently okay. As time goes on, however, it appears that in fact he did suffer a serious injury when the ball hit his head, and he slips into a coma. An investigation determines that the hospital was negligent because the overworked physician read the wrong X-rays. Sadly, the son suffers permanent brain damage, and the newly elected Fisk is left with a serious dilemma. While he is certainly free to engage a trial lawyer,

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sue the hospital, and win a large monetary verdict, he realizes that he will become a laughingstock if he chooses this path—after all, he won the election based on the premise that trial lawyers were hurting corporations, and thus causing employees to lose jobs, because of enormous verdicts. Ultimately, while Fisk, as expected, votes to overturn the huge Krane Chemical verdict, he does so with a heavy heart and a statement decrying the process of his decision. This does not help the victims in Bowmore, but Trudeau is catapulted to financial heaven. Unlike the traditional legal thriller, which usually ends with a trial, Grisham’s The Appeal begins with a trial and goes on to focus, for three hundred pages, on the event that is usually overlooked—the subsequent appeal. Indeed, after the plot machinations of a meaty legal thriller, readers often blow a sigh of relief at the completion of the trial, when traditionally the corporate lawyers get their comeuppance for harming the disenfranchised victims. However, in The Appeal, readers must wait to see if any of the victims and their struggling lawyers ever get a dime of the juicy forty-onemillion-dollar verdict, although the outcome is not surprising. After reading about the corporate and legal shenanigans behind fixed elections, they know there is no happy ending. Although Grisham has been criticized for his weak characterization—his characters appearing like paper-doll cutouts—there is little doubt that he is a fine storyteller. In The Appeal, he surpasses his reputation as a story-meister. Indeed, this powerful and shocking tale opens readers’ eyes to the wheelings and dealings behind what appear to be benign local elections. In short, Grisham’s book shows how elections can be bought and paid for and how any candidate, regardless of experience, can be elected if he or she has enough money to attract voters through negative thirty-second sound bites that sling mud and assassinate reputations. No doubt Grisham, who admits to being an election addict and who spent two terms in the State of Mississippi House of Representatives, is deeply aware of how big money controls political races. M. Casey Diana

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 16 (April 15, 2008): 61. Entertainment Weekly, no. 976 (February 1, 2008): 78. Forbes 181, no. 6 (March 24, 2008): 38. The New York Times, January 28, 2008, p. 48.

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ARMAGEDDON IN RETROSPECT And Other New and Unpublished Writings on War and Peace Author: Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) Introduction by Mark Vonnegut Illustrations by Kurt Vonnegut and Edie Vonnegut Publisher: G. P. Putnam’s Sons (New York). Illustrated. 234 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Short fiction, memoir Time: 1067; 1918; May, 1945; 1951; February, 2000; the future Locale: Dresden, Germany; Floyd City, Indiana; Chateau-Thierry, France; Stow-on-the-Wold, England; Peterswald, Czechoslovakia; Beda, Czechoslovakia; Verdigris, Oklahoma A collection of short works, primarily fiction, relating to issues surrounding the endings of wars, with special focus on the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in 1945 Principal characters: Great Day, private in a future Army of the World Captain Poritsky, officer in charge of a time-traveling operation Private Donnini, gourmet-minded prisoner of war in Germany Private Kniptash, gluttony-minded prisoner of war in Germany Corporal Kleinhans, German prison-camp guard Old man, undocumented civilian in a war-ruined city Boy, undocumented orphan cared for by the old man Louis Gigliano, collaborationist prisoner of war in German camp Elmer, eleventh century English woodcutter Ivy, the woodcutter’s wife, who yearns for courtly life Ethelbert, their son Robert the Horrible, friend of William the Conqueror Baby girl, first child born January 1, 2000, in New York City Paul, prisoner of war in Sudetenland taking victor’s spoils Sam Kleinhans, German American prisoner of war liberated by Russians George Fisher, German American prisoner of war and collaborationist Pop, English-speaking cabinet maker in Beda, Czechoslovakia Marta, his daughter Major Lawson Evans, war-hardened American overseeing occupation of Beda Captain Paul Donnini, the major’s assistant in the occupation of Beda Dr. Selig Schildknecht, theorizer of a unified theory of mental illness Jessie L. Pine, oil millionaire obsessed with Schildknecht’s theory Dr. Gorman Tarbell, scientist who assists Pine Dr. Lucifer J. Mephisto, Pine’s business manager

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Kurt Vonnegut was unusual among Amer ican novelists for his frequent return, in his fiction, to an incident early in his life that profoundly affected him. Armageddon in Retrospect, the first planned posthumous collection of his unpublished works, is a remarkably fitting capstone on a career that stretched for more than fifty years—for not only does that recurring incident reappear here, but it provides the unifying thread for the entire volume. Kurt Vonnegut earned a reputation as The formative event took place near the a darkly sardonic humorist with his end of World War II, in Dresden, Germany. early novels, including The Sirens of Vonnegut, a private in the U.S. Army’s 106th Titan (1959) and Cat’s Cradle (1963). Infantry Division, was captured by the Ger- His 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five mans in mid-December, 1944, and impris- became a best seller and was turned oned in Dresden, a city famed for its beauty into a film, making him a literary where many noncombatant Germans sought celebrity. He wrote fourteen novels and safety. Two months after Vonnegut’s cap- four plays. ture, he witnessed Dresden’s destruction by an Allied firebombing. As a surviving prisoner, he gained firsthand knowledge of the carnage, being assigned to a work crew disinterring victims, many of them women and children. Vonnegut revisited this incident in several important works, most famously in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Although the historical incident remained the same, from work to work, successive works were varied in their approaches to the theme of individual responsibility. For Vonnegut, an individual may act as if innocent and may feel innocent of wrongdoing. Nevertheless, in the face of universal culpability for the horrors of war, the sensitive individual must confront the issue of personal responsibility in some way. Armageddon in Retrospect takes the reader back to Vonnegut’s Dresden experiences with a strikingly effective summary, written by him only months after the events, as a letter to his family. The letter’s dry, sardonic style anticipates his later fiction, as in this brief note on the firebombing: “On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. Their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden—possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.” Earlier in this letter, Vonnegut had written about the captured Americans who died from shock in the delousing showers, after days of starvation, thirst, and exposure; then he added, “But I didn’t.” In echo, the phrase “But not me” appears several times, prefiguring the author’s later use of repeated phrases in his novels. This typewritten document, “Letter from PFC Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., to his family, May 29, 1945,” is presented in facsimile form. The subsequent short memoir,

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“Wailing Shall Be in All Streets,” provides more details and relates incidents from the liberation of Dresden that have their own echoes in the short stories to follow: The occupying Russians, when they discovered that we were Americans, embraced us and congratulated us on the complete desolation our planes had wrought . . . but I felt then as I feel now, that I would have given my life to save Dresden for the World’s generations to come. That is how everyone should feel about every city on Earth.

To describe the book’s structure in musical terms, Armageddon in Retrospect is a theme-and-variations composition. Vonnegut’s letter of May 29, 1945, and the short memoir state the thematic elements, while the subsequent stories provide artistic variations. Consistent with his own varied literary background, Vonnegut treats his theme through the approaches of science fiction, semiautobiographical fiction, historical fiction, fable, and even semireligious fantasy. No notes accompany these stories to indicate if they are of older or of recent vintage, or whether perhaps all were written in the last years before Vonnegut’s death. The quality of writing, however, is consistently high throughout. Among the most memorable short stories, for the bleak notes they strike, are “Great Day” and “Happy Birthday, 1951.” The former is a science-fiction story involving time travel, and the latter is fablelike in presenting unnamed characters living in the wreckage of an unspecified city. In “Great Day,” an Indiana soldier with a full store of hick expressions, who acquires the nickname Great Day, lives in a future where there is an Army of the World, with “everbody like brothers everwhere, peace everlasting, nobody hungry, nobody ascared.” His commanding officer, Captain Poritsky, hungers for real war to such a degree that he leads a party backward in time to Europe in 1918, to witness a World War I battle in which American soldiers were counterattacking German forces. Great Day and Poritsky become stranded in 1918, and Great Day emerges a celebrated hero. When he maintains he is no such thing, others tell him, “We’ll all swear we seen you killing Germans with your bare hands.” The sardonic bitterness of “Great Day,” in which inhabitants of a peaceful world are drawn back into disastrous war, whether by inner need or by external circumstances, is surpassed by the quiet pessimism of “Happy Birthday, 1951.” In this fable, an old man without proper documents lives in a ruined city. Soldiers patrolling the area have just forced him to fill out papers for himself and the boy he has been caring for. Having to choose a birthdate for the boy, the pair decide to celebrate it the next day. The old man hopes to observe it in a way that reflects his distaste for all matters military. The boy slips away on his “birthday,” however, making the old man go in search. Nearing the wreck of a tank, he hears the word “Bang!” cried out by a small voice from within. With the story’s last sentences, Vonnegut underlines the futility of the old man’s hopes: “The boy raised his head from the turret triumphantly. ‘Gotcha!’ he said.” In some cases, successive stories in Armageddon in Retrospect employ similar elements and situations. The short stories “Spoils” and “Just You and Me, Sammy” depict events on May 8, 1945, when Peterswald, Czechoslovakia, is being liberated by

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the Russian army. Both involve American prisoners nervous about their new status; both revolve around the spoils being claimed by the victors. The aims, techniques, and thematic developments of the two stories, however, are distinct. Despite the reiterations of fact and the repetition of situations and character types, each story has its internal integrity; and the strength of Vonnegut’s narrating voice keeps the experience surprisingly fresh for the reader, as remains true throughout the volume. The impact of these closely related stories, in fact, may be deepened by their being presented together. The Peterswald stories deal with the remorse felt even by the lowliest of victors— the captured prisoners, upon their release. In “Spoils,” when a freed American named Paul tentatively engages in spoils-taking, he is so forcefully struck by remorse he can partake no further. That he returns to the United States with a single piece of rusty metal, not the valuables other soldiers take home with them, becomes a defining element of his character. In “Just You and Me, Sammy,” two released American prisoners, Sam Kleinhans and George Fisher, become engaged in a conflict over Kleinhans’s dogtags. Fisher, who collaborated with the German guards during imprisonment, plans to return to the United States disguised as the similar-looking Kleinhans. The response of “Sammy” to the situation generates his remorse, although the sharpness of his feelings is mitigated by a later revelation about Fisher’s real motive. The title story, “Armageddon in Retrospect,” is an unusual fantasy utilizing religious elements. Vonnegut’s wartime-born perspective is satirically embodied in the character of the late Dr. Selig Schildknecht, of Dresden, Germany, who “believed that the mentally ill were possessed by the Devil.” The theory inspires oil tycoon Jessie L. Pine of Verdigris, Oklahoma, to set up an institute for eradicating all mental ills, including the inclination toward violence. With the help of a business manager, who is the narrator, and a scientist, Gorman Tarbell, Pine undertakes to ward off the Devil’s influence over several Oklahoma counties and then to capture the Devil himself in a force-field container, an act that might prove to be Biblical Armageddon. Describing Tarbell as “the living martyr of Armageddon,” the narrator reveals his character in such a way as to underline the futility of attempting to remove humankind’s inner evils. Along with recurring locations, times, and events, recurring characters may be found in Armageddon in Retrospect. While the characters appearing in different stories under the names Paul, Private Donnini, and Major Paul Donnini may or may not be exactly the same individual, they play similarly sympathetic roles. The unnamed first-person narrator who seems to be Vonnegut also appears, as in the story “Brighten Up.” The constant and powerful focus brought to those moments surrounding the ending of war, however, provides the main unitary element, making this work cohere in a way unusual for story collections. With his clear, humane voice steadily refreshing the memory of the Dresden firebombing and of other devastating and inhumane acts of war, Vonnegut in this posthumous collection ably demonstrates the artistic skill that won him high standing in American letters.

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The collection includes graphic works, many incorporating pithy statements by Vonnegut, and an introduction by Vonnegut’s son, Mark. Included also is Vonnegut’s last speech, “At Clowes Hall, Indianapolis, April 27, 2007.” The speech was to kick off a “year of Kurt Vonnegut” in the city of his birth. Although Vonnegut died before that date, the speech was delivered by his son. Even in print, it offers a fine example of yet another form in which this unconventional American humorist excelled. Mark Rich

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 14 (March 15, 2008): 8. The Boston Globe, April 13, 2008, p. C6. The Hartford Courant, March 30, 2008, p. G4. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 3 (February 1, 2008): 141. Library Journal 133, no. 7 (April 15, 2008): 85. Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2008, p. R2. The New York Times Book Review, May 4, 2008, p. 16. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 8 (February 25, 2008): 66. The Village Voice 53, no. 13 (March 26, 2008): 44.

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ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCES Author: Rivka Galchen (1976) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 240 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The early 2000’s Locale: New York, Buenos Aires, Patagonia, and Argentina Galchen’s debut novel chronicles what happens when a psychiatrist becomes convinced that his wife has been replaced by a double Principal characters: Dr. Leo Liebenstein, a delusional fiftyone-year-old psychiatrist Rema, Leo’s young wife from Argentina Dr. Tsvi Gal-Chen, a fellow of the Royal Academy of Meteorology Harvey, one of Leo’s patients who thinks he can control the weather Magda, Rema’s mother who lives in Buenos Aires

Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances concerns Dr. Leo Liebenstein and his quest to find his wife, Rema, who, he believes, has been replaced by a double. There is no particular reason for the reader to accept that Rema has been substituted by what he calls a “simulacrum,” and once the reader learns to doubt Leo’s perspective, much of the novel’s tension comes from trying to tease out what is real and what is delusion. Written in the unreliable first-person narrative tradition of Fyodor Dostoevski’s Zapiski iz podpolya (1864; Letters from the Underworld, 1913; better known as Notes from the Underground), Atmospheric Disturbances alerts the reader to Leo’s bizarre theory in the novel’s first sentence: “Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.” As a “fifty-one-year-old male psychiatrist” with no previous history of mental illness, Leo is used to analyzing his patients’ crazy behavior, but he has a humorously hard time distinguishing his own. In an interview, Galchen has admitted, “I’m not that interested in the medical side of the narrator’s condition—did he get hit on the head with a board? Is it dementia? I’m more concerned with the emotions behind it.” Through the lens of Leo’s highly intellectual but distorted point of view, Galchen creates a novel of the mind enlivened by the scientific and psychological mysteries as well as anything happening externally in the novel’s plot. Once the reader starts to see through Leo’s presumed discovery, the novel raises the question “Why would he think that his wife has been replaced?” Perhaps the answer has something to do with her being so much younger than he is. In addition, her “double” brings home a puppy, and he’s certain that Rema would never do that, since she does not like dogs. His alienation from her might have something to do with how

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their relationship has changed over time. Leo also betrays insecurities about Rema that may have led to his theory of her supposed disappearance. He constantly fears male competition for her affection. When he first leaves the home to go check about a patient, Harvey, Leo notes how many of Rema’s colleagues are devoted to her. When he tells a colleague that there may be something “off” about Rema, the man abruptly replies: “You used to just be jealous. Now you’ve converted your jealousy into a psychological gain, some narcissistic pleasure in believing that everyone else wants what you have, wants to sleep with your wife. You should grow up. It’s not healthy.” Every now and again, reality almost intrudes upon Leo’s delusions in this fashion, but he’s good at finding evidence to refute it. In another scene, he considers that even though the “simulacrum” looks very much like Rema as she leans against the counter in the kitchen, he worries that he may be falling into “post hoc reasoning” of the “psychotic,” when “all evidence [is] interpreted under the shadow of an axiomatic belief.” Therefore, she must not be Rema. In other scenes, he even considers “analyzing” his situation as if it were a “patient’s,” but ultimately his psychiatrist’s detachment helps keep him from ever correctly diagnosing himself. He continues to find external clues to help support his crazy deductions. Through this process, Galchen meditates on how the most familiar person (such as one’s spouse) can become alien through a small shift in perspective, and in the tradition of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, the characters’ identities become opaque and fragment during the remainder of the novel. As the novel’s title implies, Galchen uses the weather both metaphorically and scientifically. Leo has a patient with “schizotypal personality disorder,” the aforementioned Harvey, who believes that, as a member of the Royal Meteorological Society, he can control the weather. After receiving directives from clues buried in the New York Post, Harvey sometimes leaves New York to encounter some storm or weather front in different places in the United States. To stop Harvey from making these dangerous trips, Rema persuades Leo to pretend to be an official of the Royal Meteorological Society at a level superior to Harvey so that Leo can order his patient to stay in New York City. Leo has serious problems with her proposal, but he goes along with the duplicity, in part to get along with her. When they are obliged to mention another member of the society as a colleague, they arbitrarily find a member’s name—Tsvi Gal-Chen—to firm up the deception. Their ruse works very well, but it also leads Leo to assume other identities with greater ease later in the novel. Ironically and poignantly, Tsvi Gal-Chen is also the name of Galchen’s father, a professor of meteorology who died in 1994. As Leo gradually becomes obsessed with Gal-Chen, the author plays in a postmodern fashion with her relationship with her father and, by implication, with her grief over his loss. Galchen includes in the novel a photograph of her family that Leo analyzes at length after Rema attaches it to the re-

Raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Rivka Galchen has received an M.D. from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. In 2006, she won the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award. Atmospheric Disturbances is her first novel.

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frigerator. The author therefore allows a small, realistic image to assume a mystery in her narrative. Galchen also begins the novel with Tsvi Gal-Chen’s epigraph that “we cannot tell what the weather will be tomorrow (or the next hour) because we do not know accurately enough what the weather is right now.” The quote perfectly summarizes Leo’s problems with self-knowledge. He can continue to look around for Rema indefinitely, but he will not find her as long as he remains blind to his conflicted impulses. Ultimately, Tsvi Gal-Chen hovers over all of the goings-on of the novel like a scientific deity, the man who unites the characters with their creator. Galchen also frequently alludes to Franz Kafka’s techniques in using analysis as means to give ironic transparency and exactitude to a dream narrative. Leo’s early visit to a hospital to check up on Harvey leads to a Kafka-esque moment when a male nurse guffaws at him for no apparent reason. The scene echoes the one in Kafka’s Der Prozess (1925; The Trial, 1937) when the guards first laugh at Joseph K. In both cases, the protagonists are too caught up in their own interpretations to be able to clearly see why they are appropriate subjects for ridicule. In addition, Atmospheric Disturbances shares with The Trial an opening sentence that launches the novel into an extended inquiry that the novelist deliberately does not ever fully answer. Just as Joseph K. must try to decipher the reason for his arrest, so does Leo have to determine what happened to his wife. In neither case is the author interested in solving the riddle. Last, as in Kafka’s Das Schloss (1926; The Castle, 1930), Galchen likes to have the protagonist engage in mysterious communications with officials, such as Tsvi GalChen, that fuel contradictory interpretations as to what’s going on. Leo corresponds with Gal-Chen by e-mail several times over the course of the novel. Later, he learns that Gal-Chen may be deceased. When he asks him about getting the “impression that he was not alive,” Gal-Chen responds, “Oh. Yes. That is true, in most senses.” Part inverted love story, part psychological intrigue, the novel follows a mock detective story line as Leo searches for the original Rema when he’s not stopping by coffee shops for refreshment or attending to his Blackberry for recent e-mail. After investigating Rema’s absence at the New York Public Library, Leo arbitrarily decides to leave for Buenos Aires, Argentina, to search for her. Once there, he meets up with Rema’s estranged mother, Magda, whom he has never before seen. The forged-identity lies that Leo started with Harvey continue when Magda thinks that he is actually Rema’s lover and not her husband, and Leo goes along with it. Leo also blithely tells her that he is a meteorologist, and once again he retires to a nearby coffee shop to pursue his investigations over coffee and cookies. The novel’s imagery tends to repeat in more elaborate ways that reflect Leo’s free associations. Rema’s puppy leads him to notice multiple dogs in Argentina. The waitress in the Argentine coffee shop looks like Rema, so Leo leaves a lovingly large tip. Since his suitcase was lost en route, Magda lets Leo borrow some clothes that look suspiciously like Tsvi Gal-Chen’s clothes in the photograph. Increasingly, much of what Leo sees reflects and refracts his delusions. Concerned, Rema flies to Argentina to try to talk some sense into Leo. Many of Leo’s conversations with people end up at cross purposes because he’s so preoccupied with his theories, he’s often not listening, and increasingly he finds Rema crying

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because he’s acting strange. After her arrival, he leaves her again for Patagonia—to take on a job for his new assumed identity as a meteorologist for the Royal Academy. Since Rema has characterized Patagonia as the “wild, uncultivated unconsciousness of Argentina,” the reader gets a sense that Leo retreats further and further into his own mind the more he eludes his family and his practice. Pretty soon, Harvey joins him to cross-fertilize his crazy theories with the psychiatrist’s, thereby relating Rema’s disappearance with a weather war: “Harvey worked out that the Rema swapping most likely had been an early move to harvest chaos from our world to bring to a nearby one, that the dog was likely an essential determining agent, that the Patagonian cropdestroying winds—they weren’t after sheep, just fruit—would be deployed soon . . . and that nevertheless it was essential to understand this not as a minor skirmish but as a pivotal battle that might be the tipping point in the full determination of our . . . world.” Humorously, Leo has only one small quibble with this outlandish theory. Galchen also alludes to Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and its conspiracy theories when Leo and Harvey worry about the 49 Quantum Fathers, an underground organization seeking to undermine the Royal Meteorological Society. Conspiracy theories often give a spurious sense of order to random occurrences, and, besides, both Harvey and Leo enjoy attaching cosmic significance to their personal concerns. By the last portion of the novel, Galchen has created such a hall of mirrors that the plot basically stops. Leo admonishes himself to not “get metaphysically and metaphorically extravagant,” but that ends up happening as the narrative becomes burdened with crisscrossing analytical speculations. Still, by constantly having Leo almost realize how crazy he is, and by maintaining such an intellectual investigation into the roots of his denials, Galchen dramatizes how the mind eludes selfunderstanding. In addition, there is always some truth to Leo’s theories. Rema has changed over time, and she is not the same person that he first fell in love with. His alienation from her reflects the fragmentation of his own identity. He claims that “I’ve always thought of my own mind as an unruly parliament, with a feeble leader, with crazy extremist factions, and so I don’t look down on others for being the same.” By allowing Leo to betray himself obliquely through his lies, his investigation, and his insecurities, Galchen explores the geography and the atmosphere of her main character’s psyche. Roy C. Flannagan

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 6 (November 15, 2008): 65. The Economist 387 (June 28, 2008): 92-93. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 8 (April 15, 2008): 383. Library Journal 133, no. 8 (May 1, 2008): 55. The New York Times Book Review, July 13, 2008, p. 4.

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The New Yorker 84, no. 18 (June 23, 2008): 79-80. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 6 (February 11, 2008): 47. Time 171, no. 22 (June 2, 2008): 62. The Village Voice 53, no. 24 (June 11, 2008): 47. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 122 (May 24, 2008): W1-W6.

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AUSTERITY Britain, 1945-51 Author: David Kynaston (1951) Publisher: Walker (New York). 704 pp. $45.00 Type of work: History Time: 1945-1951 Locale: Britain The first volume of Tales of a New Jerusalem, a history of Britain from VE Day to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, focuses on the way in which the victorious 1945 Labour government shaped Britain over three decades On May 8, 1945, a Mass Observation investigator overheard two women complaining about the way in which the end of the war in Europe had been announced the previous day. The peace declaration had been signed at 2:40 a.m., but it had not been announced in Britain until sixteen hours later. At that point, legend has it, the country went wild, and the citizens of London poured into the streets to celebrate—or at least some of them did. As the opening chapters of the first volume of David Kynaston’s magisterial new history of postwar Britain, Austerity, show, most people stayed quietly at home or expressed disappointment at the nature of the boisterous celebrations in their local area. As Mass Observation’s research revealed, “riotous abandon was the exception rather than the rule.” In fact, many were apprehensive about what the future would bring. Already people were starting to remember the aftermath of World War I, when, not twelve months after it ended, men were out of work and desperate to scrape out some sort of living. As it turned out, they were right to be concerned, though unemployment would be less of an immediate worry than the lack of housing and the continued rationing of practically everything. For anyone who had imagined that the end of the war would mean an immediate return to prewar normality, there was a rude awakening. In postwar Britain, there were so many problems to be tackled, it was difficult to know where to begin. Nearly a million houses had been destroyed or severely damaged by bombing, while public services were suffering under the strain. Britain had a national debt of 3.5 billion pounds, a record sum. However, many of Britain’s problems were far older. Life expectancy had risen and many diseases, formerly killers, were coming under control, but access to medical services was at best patchy. Many people lived in appalling conditions, with no running water, indoor sanitation, or adequate heating, and indeed many shared houses with parents and grandparents. After the economic slump of the 1930’s, poverty was endemic. Britain needed a plan, and during the war people had begun to work on one. The Beveridge Report of 1942 had effectively formulated a plan for a welfare state, attacking “the five giant evils” of “want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness.” As war came to an end, the Labour

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Party produced a manifesto for the election that must surely follow called “Let Us Face David Kynaston has been a professional historian since 1973. He the Future.” When the election did come and, as seemed has published fifteen books, including inevitable, the Labour Party did win, a new the widely acclaimed four-volume The and, for many, worrying era of British life be- City of London (1995-2002). He has gan. For the conservatives and the Conserva- been a visiting professor at Kingston tive Party, the Labour Party was simply the ac- University in London. ceptable face of communism, and they feared a Labour victory, assuming that the old ways would immediately be overturned. As it happened, change proceeded slowly, more slowly than many ardent Labour supporters might have wished, and the old guard found less to complain about than they might have expected. Those with enough money and black market contacts could still maintain a decent lifestyle, although the “servant problem” was a constant topic of conversation. For the middle and working classes, basic survival was a more urgent problem. Rationing, a bone of contention throughout the war itself, remained in place and, in fact, became more severe as the government poured all of its resources into earning money through exports. For the first time, bread was rationed, which did not sit well with a nation that, although well nourished, was tired and desperate for novelty and excitement. Although the government understood this, it frequently seemed at a loss to know how to respond. As Mass Observation’s many inquiries showed, people, particularly the women who were still fighting on the “home front,” were less interested in national strategies and more interested in knowing how the government would rehouse them and help them get a decent meal on the table. Of equal concern was the fact that although Labour was the professed party of the people, its grand schemes too often failed to take into account what “the people” really wanted. Perhaps the biggest debate concerned the regeneration of towns and cities. As Kynaston shows, what people wanted and what town planners thought they should have were two entirely different things. Most people wanted a little house with a bit of garden, putting things back as they had been before the war. However, planners thought in terms of grand schemes, many involving the total razing of districts and the introduction of blocks of flats, and they imposed these ideas, insisting that ordinary people did not know what they really wanted. It took fifty years to prove that people knew exactly what they wanted, and many towns and cities are still coping with the legacy of those lofty, out-of-touch plans. Likewise, the government’s education plans were less well received than anticipated. Raising the age of leaving school to fifteen did not prove popular with some parents, who wanted their children out earning as soon as possible. For brighter working-class children, a place at grammar school was as much a curse as a blessing, and many suffered greatly at the hands of better-off schoolmates. Nationalization of the railways and the coal mines was not as successful as the government had hoped. The great success was the creation of the National Health Service in 1948 (although many doctors protested against its formation), in spite of the fact that portions

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of the institution revealed staggering ignorance on the part of officials of the health needs of ordinary people. To take but one example, the demand for spectacles was twice that anticipated in the first year, simply because so many people had been making do with cheap glasses from stores such as Woolworth’s. Nevertheless, as Kynaston’s history shows, little by little, things did begin to improve. He draws heavily on Mass Observation surveys and private letters and journals to illustrate how, gradually, as items came off ration and the country’s debts began to decrease, people’s lives improved. Holidays became possible once again, and families began to dream of owning a home and a car. What is also striking in the accounts he uses is how insular people were. Myths abound about Blitz spirit, about a greater sense of community, yet it is quite clear that many people did not engage with the world around them. They did not belong to clubs or political parties, they played little part in their local communities, and women in particular remained firmly at home, apparently by choice. They worried about the influx of immigrants, especially from the West Indies. They worried about changes in industrial practice, about women working outside the home. For every innovator, four other people were ready to step forward and argue for a return to the good old prewar days. For those pressing for social change, it was still an uphill battle. Kynaston draws on a wide range of accounts and personal testimonies to paint a vivid portrait of postwar Britain that is by turns thrilling and disturbing, showing how people struggled to come to terms with a new political and social landscape. The confidence of the Elizabethan era is yet to come, and many people are puzzled by the world in which they find themselves. They know they cannot go back, and yet, on the threshold of a new Britain, they hold back nervously, waiting. The first volume of Kynaston’s new history perfectly catches this uncertainty. Maureen Kincaid Speller

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 301, no. 5 (June, 2008): 89-93. Booklist 104, no. 18 (May 15, 2008): 17. History Today 57, no. 7 (July, 2007): 64. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 4 (February 15, 2008): 183-184. Library Journal 133, no. 12 (July 1, 2008): 94. London Review of Books 30, no. 8 (April 24, 2008): 30-31. New Criterion 27, no. 1 (September, 2008): 68-71. New Statesman 136 (May 28, 2007): 55-56. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 7 (February 18, 2008): 145. The Spectator 303 (May 5, 2007): 53-54. The Times Literary Supplement, June 15, 2007, pp. 7-8. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 117 (May 19, 2008): A13.

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THE BALL IS ROUND A Global History of Soccer Author: David Goldblatt (1965) First published: The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football, 2006, in Great Britain Publisher: Riverhead Books (New York). 974 pp. $24.00 Type of work: History Time: The early 1800’s to 2006 Locale: Primarily Europe and Latin America Goldblatt’s comprehensive book intertwines the history of soccer with the general political and social history of the countries around the world where soccer has been an important popular sport Principal personages: Pelé, born Edson Arantes do Nascimento, charismatic Brazilian soccer player Diego Maradona, Argentine soccer player Joao Havelange, president of the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), 1974-1998 Matthias Sindelar, Austrian soccer player Sepp Blatter, FIFA president beginning in 1998 Johan Cruyff, Dutch soccer player Silvio Berlusconi, Italian media magnate, politician, and owner of soccer club AC Milan Josef “Sepp” Herberger, German national soccer coach, 1936-1964

David Goldblatt’s The Ball Is Round is much more than a history of soccer. Rather, it is an epic depiction of how soccer developed within the political and social history of different countries and societies around the world for the last 150 years. Goldblatt’s broad historical scope is deliberately opposed to a narrow focus on sports alone, such as that exemplified by the 361 notebooks of legendary German national team coach Josef “Sepp” Herberger that never mention anything but soccer, even though they cover the momentous years of World War II. Ironically, it is Herberger’s famous quip about the basic fact of soccer that Goldblatt chose as title for his sweeping historical work. Since The Ball Is Round was published first in the United Kingdom in 2006, Goldblatt added a foreword to his American edition of 2008. Here, the author alerts his readers that, except for the subtitle and this foreword, he did not substitute the term soccer for a game known outside the United States as football. For the next nine hundred pages, American readers must remind themselves that football in Goldblatt’s book does not mean the American version of the game. The American edition is virtually identical to the first English one, ending just prior to the 2006 World Cup in Germany without an update.

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Throughout The Ball Is Round, Goldblatt’s central thesis is that there is a strong correlation between a nation’s social and political conditions and its sports, particularly its soccer games. For this reason, Goldblatt places the birth of soccer in the modern period in Great Britain, when social and economic forces favored team sports and discipline. While briefly describing other forms of people playing with balls, such as China’s cuju or kickball popular from about 200 b.c.e. to its extinction in 1644, Goldblatt dismisses as “utterly vacuous” the claim that football is as old as human history. This claim was made by Sepp Blatter, president of the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) since 1998, whom at the end of the book Goldblatt charges with gross mismanagement. Instead, Goldblatt convincingly shows that modern football developed in the early to middle 1800’s when the game became popular in English public schools. Eventually, schools wrote down their rules, and when graduates from different schools wanted to play against each other, they had to agree on shared rules. In November, 1863, the Football Association (FA) was founded in London and published rules that would lay the foundation for the development of association football, called soccer in the United States and known as football everywhere else. Goldblatt maps out the ensuing development of the referee system, the play for the first FA Cup won by the Wanderers 1-0 in 1871, and the formation of an English league in 1888. Tantalizing the reader, Goldblatt mentions the first international soccer match, England versus Scotland in 1872, but does not give its score. Maybe this demonstrates that The Ball Is Round is more interested in soccer’s connection to society rather than mere scores and statistics. Throughout, Goldblatt inserts whimsical descriptions of some historical matches but gives no tables or lists. Always, Goldblatt strongly ties his narrative to the development of the societies in which soccer is played. As to the nature of this relationship, Goldblatt writes that in the late 1800’s, “industrialization underpinned the emergence of British workingclass football in a number of direct and material ways.” He thus chooses the term “industrial football” to characterize the game in England and Scotland before World War I. “Early-twentieth-century industrialization would spawn the same connections in much of Europe and Latin America,” to where the focus of the book shifts. Here, Goldblatt shows the apparent irony that soccer failed to catch on in the countries of the British Empire and its former colony, the United States. Instead, the game made great progress wherever contact with England was more casual. In Europe, soccer became the sport of the liberal Anglophile elite before encompassing the working classes. In Latin America, contact with British sailors and expatriates popularized the game. In 1867, the FA rules were published in Buenos Aires, and a Spanish transla-

A British sociologist, David Goldblatt is coeditor of Global Transformations (1999; revised edition, 2009) and author of books on the social sciences such as Knowledge and the Social Sciences (2004). He wrote the British Football Yearbook for three soccer seasons, 2002-2003, 2003-2004, and 2004-2005. In 2008 he became a lecturer at Open University in the United Kingdom.

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tion appeared there in 1903 as the sport spread to the working class and the recent European immigrants. Contemplating the early success of soccer in Europe and Latin America, Goldblatt adds to the sociological explanations a deeply felt emotional one, stating that “people played because they just loved to play” soccer. Here and elsewhere in his magisterial book, Goldblatt does acknowledge that there are always national exceptions to major economic, social, and political trends. While industrialized France hosted the foundation of FIFA in 1904, for instance, soccer enjoyed only regional interest there. In Germany, gymnastics competed with soccer for mass participation in sport. The Ottoman Empire faced Islamic opposition to the game. Discussing the global development of soccer after World War I, Goldblatt looks again at larger social shifts as well as at changes to the game itself. He discusses internal changes in the national organization of the game in England, continental Europe, and Latin America, as well as development of new tactics and strategies. However, narrative space is also devoted to a tangential discussion of the Viennese coffee house, for example. Relatively rare are such passionate portrayals as that of the Austrian anti-Nazi striker Matthias Sindelar, called “the wafer.” An innovative force on the playing field, Sindelar was “found . . . dead in his flat” in 1939 after Hitler’s takeover of Austria. His death remains one of soccer’s great mysteries. As Goldblatt’s narrative passes through the decades of the twentieth century, The Ball Is Round addresses the major issues in the development of soccer. The rise of professionalism, the improved coaching, the international competitions, the impact of mass media (such as sports magazines and radio, later television) which increased the base of supporters, as fans are known in England, and the darker issues such as racism, violence, and scandals are portrayed and related to society at large. Fascist, National-Socialist, and Communist attempts to co-opt the sport are detailed, and Goldblatt shows soccer’s relationship to international politics. The Ball Is Round does justice to the importance of soccer in Latin America. The period of 1935 to 1954 is seen as “The Road to El Dorado,” when soccer was played with passion in countries that slowly emerged from the Great Depression. As political and economic conditions deteriorated in South America, Goldblatt sees a time of “Demons and Angels,” from 1955 to 1974. The book juxtaposes the situation in Brazil, where soccer was played both for serious competition and for pleasure, in an atmosphere of relative freedom. This style was exemplified by Pelé, a young Brazilian striker who made his national debut in the 1958 squad that won the World Cup. He repeated that feat with his team in 1962 and 1970. Goldblatt reminds readers that Pelé, like his teammates, “were products of their time” and the result of a “social production line,” although some readers may take exception to this Socialist interpretation. In Argentina, Goldblatt argues, social repression created a brutal soccer game focused on destroying the opponent’s game and lurking for swift counterattacks. When The Ball Is Round discusses Argentine soccer in the 1970’s, the reader will learn as much about Argentine generals running the country as about Diego Maradona, Argentina’s star player of the period. As soccer develops further, Goldblatt looks at the work of João Havelange, who

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transformed FIFA during his long presidency from 1974 to 1998. Havelange is depicted as a master politician and network specialist who modernizes FIFA and turns the World Cup tournament into the most-watched global sporting event. The postwar rise of European soccer is highlighted as benefiting from television as well as the 1954 formation of the Union des associations européens de football (UEFA) that brought annual competitions of the best European clubs. In the context of the Cold War, Goldblatt credits UEFA as being one of the few institutions in which Communist Eastern and Free Western Europe worked well together. As an organizing principle, each chapter focuses on a particular region and time period, and Goldblatt generally goes from country to country looking at soccer and society together. Thus the emergence of Dutch star player Johan Cruyff, whose team bitterly lost the 1974 World Cup final to Germany, is related to social changes in Dutch society that altered the way soccer was played in the Netherlands. At times, going from country to country inevitably leads to some duplication of soccer’s international events, yet this books shows them from a unique perspective each time. When Africa decolonizes after World War II, The Ball Is Round looks at soccer in the emerging countries. Predictably, the underdeveloped economies and instable political situation of many African nations of the 1960’s and 1970’s are reflected in the difficulties soccer teams face there. Goldblatt tells of the indomitable spirit of African players and spectators who manage to hold matches against considerable odds. In the 1990’s, many African talents migrate to European clubs. The Ball Is Round honestly chronicles the crisis of European, and particularly English, soccer in the 1980’s. Hooliganism becomes a serious problem, and attendance falls. Goldblatt fixes as low point the tragedy of Heysel Stadium in Belgium on May 29, 1985, when thirty-nine people die after a dilapidated wall is crushed by fans. Now, Goldblatt states, “football was rescued from its predicament by the forces of the market,” and “unalloyed commercialism” turns soccer into “one of the central collective cultural experiences of the new millennium.” The market overcame hooliganism as it threatened its precious product, which became “sanitized entertainment” instead. Goldblatt identifies as one exponent of commercial soccer Silvio Berlusconi, an Italian media mogul and later politician who bought and restructured AC Milan in 1986, though not without allegations of match fixing and corruption. Yet as Goldblatt’s subsequent chapters show, soccer rises again in Europe, flourishes in Latin America, begins to blossom in Africa, and takes Asia by storm in the 1990’s. As the world readied for the 2006 World Cup, Goldblatt shows, soccer was a global event with very few, but notable, exceptions, such as India and the United States. About half of The Ball Is Round contains descriptions of larger political events with a varying degree of their link to soccer history. As a result, at times Goldblatt’s book reads like a work on soccer’s place in world history. Yet his book has been quite popular in the United States, despite Goldblatt’s insistence on the term football for the game. His work follows the tradition of Simon Kuper’s Football Against the Enemy (1994), graciously acknowledged by Goldblatt, that strongly linked soccer to politics. About one-third the size of Goldblatt’s work, Kuper’s American edition, Soccer

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Against the Enemy (2006), not only translated football consistently as soccer in the text but also updated the book. At times, a stronger focus on soccer and some judicious cuts could have tightened The Ball Is Round. It does not mention some recent innovations in soccer rules, such as the change to award three instead of two points to the match winner or experiments with golden and silver goals in international games. After compiling three yearbooks on soccer for a British publisher covering the seasons of 2002-2003 to 2004-2005, British sociologist Goldblatt obviously desired to write a book that would place the special history of soccer in the larger context of the historical development of the societies where the game has been played. The result, The Ball Is Round, makes for compelling reading. R. C. Lutz

Review Sources History Today 57, no. 4 (April, 2007): 62. Library Journal 133, no. 12 (July 1, 2008): 38. Sports Illustrated 107, no. 26 (December 31, 2007): 19. Times Literary Supplement, January 19, 2007, p. 32.

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THE BEAUTIFUL SOUL OF JOHN WOOLMAN, APOSTLE OF ABOLITION Author: Thomas P. Slaughter (1954) Publisher: Hill and Wang (New York). 449 pp. $30.00 Type of work: Biography, religion, ethics Time: 1720-1772 Locale: Colonial America and England This biography of Quaker saint and social reformer Woolman traces his spiritual development, analyzes the roots of his activism, documents the changes he helped bring about, and recognizes his continuing relevance to issues such as racism, economic justice, cruelty to animals, and simple living Principal personages: John Woolman, tailor, traveling minister, and author Sarah Ellis Woolman, his wife Mary Woolman, their daughter Samuel Woolman, John’s father Elizabeth Burr Woolman, John’s mother John Smith, a friend from a wealthy Quaker family Benjamin Franklin, a Philadelphia publisher Benjamin Lay, a radical Quaker reformer Slave woman, for whom young John writes a bill of sale John Papunhank, an Indian spiritual leader and prophet Abner Woolman, John’s brother and fellow writer James Pemberton, a friend from a wealthy Quaker family John Pemberton, a friend from a wealthy Quaker family John Comfort, Woolman’s son-in-law Stephen Comfort, his father, Woolman’s executor Samuel Emlen, a friend and fellow Quaker minister Sarah Morris, a traveling minister in England Deborah Morris, her accompanying niece William Tuke, Woolman’s final host in England

Early New Jersey Quaker John Woolman (1720-1772) was an eccentric who dressed all in white, sometimes walked rather than rode his horse, refused to drink from silver cups, and declined inoculations against smallpox, from which he eventually died. He was also a saintly man who resisted war taxes, opposed cruelty to animals (and humans), and led the fight to abolish slavery. These two sides of Woolman have a common explanation: A deeply religious person, Woolman cultivated the life of the spirit and the moral actions that flowed from it. For the same reasons, he undertook a traveling ministry that led him to leave his wife and daughter at home for long periods and journey through the colonies and to England preaching his messages.

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Woolman also wrote pamphlets and left his Journal (1774), which has never been out of Thomas P. Slaughter is a professor of history at the University of Rochester. print. For these clear explanations of the strange His other books include Bloody Dawn: and saintly Woolman, readers are indebted to The Christiana Riot and Racial historian Thomas P. Slaughter’s biography Violence in the Antebellum North The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apos- (1994), Exploring Lewis and Clark: tle of Abolition. Slaughter’s well-performed Reflections on Men and Wilderness (2004), and The Natures of John and task was doubly difficult not just because of William Bartram (2005). Woolman’s complex personality but because that personality had to be reconstructed, sometimes with sparse information, for a modern audience alien to the frame of mind and to the many beliefs that moved Woolman. Slaughter’s biography is like an archaeological excavation of psychology, history, and religion. One might think that Woolman’s Journal would have supplied most of the answers that Slaughter needed. but Journal is a spiritual autobiography, a genre much favored by the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) but reaching back to antiquity. Such autobiographies focus on the inner life of the spirit, the state of the soul, and typically record outer events only as they influence the inner life. For example, Woolman does not specify the activities of his youthful friends that repulsed him, says little about his courtship of and marriage to Sarah Ellis, says nothing about their infant son who died, and seems oblivious to the beauty of the natural landscapes he traveled through. However, he does record his dream visions and his spiritual crises as a child and young adult: the time he talked back to his mother, the time he killed a mother robin and her nest of young, and the time he made out a bill of sale for a female slave. Woolman began writing his Journal in his thirty-sixth year, so this raises questions about how well he remembered his childhood and young adulthood, what he left out, and how he interpreted what he remembered. The sparse information forces Slaughter to speculate at times, but he stays close to what can be documented from the journal and from other sources, such as meeting records. Woolman also wrote several drafts of the journal, and a Quaker committee edited the first published version (deleting all of the dream visions). Slaughter traces the changes and deletions closely to glean additional information. (The authoritative modern edition, taking the various drafts into account, is The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman, published in 1971 and edited by Phillips P. Moulton.) Most importantly, Woolman’s Journal reveals his overall frame of mind, the mind-set of a sensitive soul immersed in religious belief. Even in his own religious age, Woolman was something of a throwback: He admired the Old Testament prophets, the early Christian martyrs, and the Quaker martyrs of the seventeenth century, thousands of whom had been thrown into prison in England and persecuted with Calvinistic zeal in New England. The Religious Society of Friends recognized Woolman’s unusual spiritual gifts, appointing him a minister at the age of twenty-two, endorsing his travels, and publishing his writings—even though the moral beliefs

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emerging from his spirituality put him in opposition to many of the common practices of the time, including among the Quakers. Slaughter supplies the historical contexts that make Woolman’s spirituality and his preaching of reforms understandable. The saintly Woolman was always a work in progress, so that the story of his life reads somewhat like the archetypal journey of Christian in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Even at a young age, Woolman showed a precocious tendency to cultivate his inner life, preferring around the age of seven to leave his playmates and go off by himself to read Revelations. As a teenager, he disapproved of his friends’ worldly ways, but some of them belonged to rich New Jersey and Philadelphia Quaker families that had libraries he desired to use. These same families offered him access to the prosperous business world when he became an adult, but after working in a Mount Holly shop for several years and turning down other business opportunities, Woolman withdrew to the more solitary occupation of a lowly tailor and later of a farmer. The crucial incident that turned him away from the business world was making out a bill of sale for a black female slave. During Woolman’s time, slavery was widespread in the colonies, including the Northern ones, and even Quakers owned slaves. When Woolman visited Quaker homes that had slave servants, he felt uneasy, and making out a bill of sale for a slave provoked a major spiritual crisis that Woolman never forgot. He felt complicit in a business world built on slavery and exploited laborers, on cruelty to animals, on unjust dealings with the displaced Indians, on the sale of shoddy and unneeded goods, and on the encouragement of a vain, luxurious, materialistic way of life. Woolman looked around him at William Penn’s green promised land of Pennsylvania and of New Jersey and saw his fellow Quakers living in Bunyan’s Vanity Fair. Like his reasons for seeking reforms, Woolman’s methods of achieving them flowed from his saintly temperament: He always worked nonviolently from within the Religious Society of Friends. Some earlier abolitionists had resorted to harsher methods, such as the dwarfish radical Quaker Benjamin Lay (1681-1759), who “spattered pokeberry juice on [meeting] worshipers” and “kidnapped a slaveowner’s son.” Run out of meeting, Lay moved to a cave near Philadelphia from which he made his attacks. Some later abolitionists resorted to guerrilla warfare, such as the militant martyr John Brown (1800-1859). In accordance with Woolman’s subtle nonviolent methods, he was first of all scrupulous to relieve his own mind but also to set an example by disassociating himself from any connection with slavery, however indirect. He stopped making and wearing clothes that were dyed, eventually wearing all white, because the manufacture of dyes involved slave labor. He stopped riding horses on his traveling ministry because they were often fed and groomed by slaves. He refused to use anything made out of silver because South American Indian slaves mined it, even refusing to drink from silver cups when he was a guest in someone’s house. Woolman’s behavior as a guest illustrates how he subtly worked inside Quaker homes, including those of his rich friends, to make slavery a moral issue. He discussed the issue personally with meeting members, friends, customers, acquaintances, and strangers. If a slave served him in a Quaker home, he would pay the slave

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for services rendered, maybe embarrassing the slave’s owner. After making out that first bill of sale, he refused to process other sale transactions involving slaves and agonized over serving as coexecutor of an estate that included slaves. In some instances, Woolman’s influence resulted in the freeing of slaves. Most prominently, Woolman preached (strictly speaking, Quaker silent meetings do not have preachers, but anyone can speak out of the silence) and wrote pamphlets against slavery. He spoke against slavery in local meetings but also took numerous journeys in his lifetime of traveling ministry. Especially in his forays south to Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, he met unfriendly opposition, people who wanted to argue in favor of slavery, even in Quaker meetings (but, significantly, no one seems to have offered any violence against him). Refusing to argue, Woolman stated his case simply and plainly, but not without some subtlety again: He cited the slaves’ natural right to freedom and appealed to the Golden Rule, but he also pointed out the debasement of slaves and the corrupting moral effects of slavery on masters, their progeny, and society as a whole. The wider implications of a society based on exploitation, cruelty, injustice, and luxury were always there in Woolman’s thinking, and in his later preaching and his writing he explored those implications. As a reformer, he started with children, practicing and advocating an exemplary nonpunitive raising and education of children, both male and female, in an age that excluded girls and heavily applied the rod. He worked for the just treatment of Indians, once making a wilderness journey deep into hostile Indian territory to speak with them. He developed an inclusive respect for life, reaching out to all races and religions and condemning cruelty to animals. With clear implications for capitalism, he preached a simple lifestyle, fair treatment for workers, and the fair sharing of the world’s resources (later the Fabian Society hailed him as a precursor of socialism). For a humble tailor and farmer, Woolman left a large imprint on American history and on the world. He might even be called the conscience of America. He and other abolitionists influenced the gradual passage of laws against slavery, especially in the Northern states. As Slaughter records, “it became mandatory in 1776 for all Quakers living under the authority of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to release their slaves,” and “[t]he Pennsylvania Abolition Act of 1780 was the first adopted by a legislative body anywhere in the world.” In addition, Woolman influenced education, especially in Quaker schools that remain the best in the land. Woolman’s imprint can also be seen on such movements as the humane treatment of animals, vegetarianism, nonviolence, and drinking of fair-trade coffee (although he probably would not imbibe). Finally, his Journal remains a source of spiritual inspiration for readers everywhere. Woolman’s personality was sometimes hard to take and seemed to become more extreme as he grew older. Always a sympathetic writer and interpreter, Slaughter refers to the older Woolman’s “hyperdedication.” For example, Woolman had a concern about approving a traveling minute (letter of travel) to England for Elizabeth Smith because her furniture indicated some impurity. On his trip to England, he insisted on sleeping in steerage, where the sailors’ foul language shocked him. He rushed from the dock to London Meeting, where the English Quakers found him dirty

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and uncouth. His appearance created a sensation as he made his progress through England, walking from one end to another and saving souls despite his failing health. He died of smallpox in York and is buried there. Harold Branam

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 1 (September 1, 2008): 13. Christian Century 125, no. 18 (September 9, 2008): 42-44. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 13 (July 1, 2008): 693. The New Yorker 84, no. 32 (October 13, 2008): 145. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 22 (June 2, 2008): 36.

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BEHIND MY EYES Author: Li-Young Lee (1957) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 106 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Poetry A profound and haunting collection that touches on isolation, love, loss, and spiritual growth Li-Young Lee was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, to parents of Chinese heritage. Before leaving China in 1949 after the Communists took control, his father had served as Mao Zedong’s personal physician. Life in Indonesia was extremely difficult for the Lee family. Because of Sukarno’s oppressive regime, the family suffered at the hands of the authorities and were forced to escape from the country. After living for short periods of time in Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, the family finally settled in the United States in 1964. In each of his volumes of poetry, Lee has tapped into the experiences of exile, loss, and strength of family in order to add weight to his poetry. Lee published his first book of poetry, Rose, in 1986. Since then, he has published two highly regarded poetry volumes and a memoir. Behind My Eyes is his fourth collection of poetry and a worthy addition to his oeuvre. Since each collection is a labor of love, there have been significant gaps of time between each book of poetry. The first was published in 1986, the second, The City in Which I Love You, was published four years later in 1990, and the third, Book of My Nights, was not published until 2001. Since each of Lee’s volumes were highly praised, his fourth collection was eagerly awaited. Over the years, he has gained a rather large readership. It is rare for a book of poetry to sell in the many thousands, but Lee’s third volume sold more than ten thousand copies. In addition to his reputation as a fine poet, he published a powerful memoir, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, in 1995. The memoir touches on what life was like for the Lee family in Indonesia, the years they spent in one place after another, and the struggles they had in adjusting to life in a small town in Pennsylvania. The family endured every hardship with love and perseverance. The Before Columbus Foundation honored this extraordinary book with an American Book Award. Just as Lee’s poetry, his memoir is rooted in the past. In addition to his own personal past, he has inherited his family’s past. The past has so many metaphysical and magical layers. For anyone, the past can be a burden that stifles a person’s ability to move forward. For Lee, it was necessary for him to expose what lives in memory, what festers in the past. He knew that he had to use the tools of the poet in order to become the master of his collective past. Over the years, he has learned that it is a neverending process. As soon as one layer is exposed, it is discovered that there is so much more that needs to be faced. Lee’s father casts a huge shadow on everything around him. Larger-than-life, he

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was a physician in China, a political prisoner in Indonesia, an evangelical minister in Hong Kong, and—eventually—a minister in a Pennsylvania Presbyterian church. The struggle to survive as an outcast, refugee Chinese immigrant was always paramount. There was no way to escape oneself. The poet son has learned this, realizing that it is best to confront his identity. In most of what Lee has written, he revisits the bonds that hold a family together, the love that helps members of a Li-Young Lee is the highly acclaimed family to survive against terrible trials, and author of four books of poetry and one the way that memory connects people to the nonfiction book. He also has been the past and to one another. Through close obserrecipient of several literary awards, vation of his father, Lee struck a universal including the Whiting Writer’s Award, chord in his first volume of poetry. The strugthe Lannan Literary Award, and an gles of his father become the struggles of evAmerican Book Award. ery father who attempts to hold his family to gether against the powers of tyranny. For his second collection, Lee turned the spotlight onto himself, onto his own identity as a Chinese American. Lee is concerned with how the individual fits into the whole, into the world around him, and into the world of his ancestors. While the past runs through all of Lee’s volumes, he turned inward more deeply in his 2001 collection. This introspection led the poet to a heightened sense of self. Like a restless spirit, Lee looks into the face of mortality. In Behind My Eyes, his fourth collection, the poet expands on the themes that have been grandly illuminated in his previous volumes. Exile, sacrifice, mortality, loyalty, and the power of the past pervade the new collection with a stunning audacity. The reader is carried along by words that radiate compassion, concern, and an almost colloquial purity. With a total of thirty-nine poems, Behind My Eyes is divided into three sections. The richness of the collection can be found in the poet’s way of writing about the refugee experience, the experience of not belonging. At a young age, Lee discovered that it was necessary to appear as if you fit in with those in a new country. The immigrant always is under suspicion, viewed by those around him as someone who will upset the balance of power and how the social fabric is held together. An immigrant family must negotiate for a place in society. In the first section of Behind My Eyes, Lee writes words of advice for all refugees in the poem “Self-help for Fellow Refugees.” He enumerates the rules of the road, offering words of wisdom and of caution. He opens the poem, “If your name suggests a country where bells/ might have been used for entertainment,” then it is necessary for the refugee “to dress in plain clothes/ when you arrive in the United States,/ and try not to talk too loud.” For someone attempting to settle in the United States, it is a difficult gauntlet to run, especially if you come from a different and strange culture. Lee is able to win over the reader to his extraordinary family history by employing concise and straightforward images. There is a disarm-

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ing simplicity found in the language of his poetry. He has stated that he was influenced in his poetry by classical Chinese poetry and by the King James Version of the Bible. Classical Chinese poetry is noted for using descriptions of the natural world as expressions of human emotions. As a poet, Lee has learned how to be a close observer of the environment around him and how to set the appropriate mood for the reader. He takes great care in revealing the “sacred” in everyday experiences. For this reason, he has been favorably compared to the great nineteenth century American poet Walt Whitman. Lee has said that his poetry and the world which he inhabits are one and the same. The qualities that he has utilized throughout his life in order to make sense of the world are the very same qualities that he utilizes to construct his poetry. Lee envisions that everyone will, at one time or another, come face to face with some kind of “spiritual” revelation. This revelation is a building block in the poetic process. The poet believes that all art can lead one to wisdom. He writes in order to communicate with something or someone greater than himself. For Lee, this creative process is never-ending. He is consumed by both poetry and by life. The poem “Seven Happy Endings” revolves around giving a proper name to the unification between himself and his wife. The poem opens, “Love, after talking all night,/ where are we? Where did we begin?” For him, there must be a name that he can give to “we,” “us,” and “this.” Some of the ideas he proposes are: “Shadows on the garden wall./ A man rowing alone out to sea./ Seven happy endings.” His wife, though, seems to be perfectly happy with where they are, with “two rooms, and a door to divide them.” She also is content with the “Borrowed music from an upstairs room./ And bells from down the street/ to urge our salty hearts.” Lee has promised seven endings, but he is unsure of what they will be. He understands that he knows “nothing about endings.” Beginnings are what he understands. His relationship with his wife “always feels like beginning.” This is more than merely the two of them; it is the “beginning of reality itself.” Toward the end of Behind My Eyes, Lee includes a poem that is a tender portrait of his relationship with his wife. In “Virtues of a Boring Husband,” the poet admits that, “Whenever I talk, my wife falls asleep./ So, now, when she can’t sleep, I talk./ It’s like magic.” His talking calms her down, makes her feel safe. For the poet, his wife plays the role of muse and sounding board. At one point in the poem, Lee speaks of what the sages have said about “moving up a ladder of love.” If he is remembering correctly what the sages “have said,” then love of another starts first with love for that person as “object,” followed by as “presence,” and then as “essence,” and finally as “disclosure of the divine.” As he continues to ponder these ideas out loud, it is his wife who surrenders to sleep. He realizes that it is time to stop talking, and so he kisses “her forehead . . . before leaving the bed and closing/ the door behind” him. For this volume, Lee has stated that he wanted to delve deeper into issues that always have prodded him. He desired to have in-depth arguments with God. For him, it took seven years to grow sufficiently as a poet and as a person in order to write Behind My Eyes. While he felt that confusion surrounded Book of My Nights, in the new collection he has found more clarity of purpose. Whether he is speaking about the immigrant experience or about close personal relationships, Lee still sees himself as the outsider, as someone who remains tied to the past. As a poet, it is his nature to want to use language in order

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to explain and to comprehend more coherently. He also realizes that even language can become a barrier to growth and to revelation. With Behind My Eyes, Lee has confronted the incongruities of life, and he has discovered that opposites can coexist. The attentive reader can immerse himself in these dualities presented by the poet and feel both challenged and comforted. Jeffry Jensen

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 8 (December 15, 2007): 18. Harvard Review, June, 2008, p. 219. International Examiner 35 (April 16, 2008): 11. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 46 (November 19, 2007): 38. World Literature Today 82, no. 3 (May/June, 2008): 8.

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THE BIN LADENS An Arabian Family in the American Century Author: Steve Coll (1958) Publisher: Penguin Press (New York). Illustrated. 671 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Biography, current affairs, history Time: c. 1900 to the early twenty-first century Locale: The United States, Sudan, England, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia Coll illuminates the life of Osama Bin Laden by setting it against the rise to unimaginable wealth of his family, builders to the Saudi royal family at a time of unprecedented development Principal personages: Mohammad Bin Laden (c. 1908-1967), founder of the Bin Laden family and its business empire Salem Bin Laden (1944 or 1945-1988), his eldest son and successor Bakr Bin Laden (1945 or 1946), brother and successor of Salem Osama Bin Laden (1957 or 1958), son of Mohammad, half brother of Salem and Bakr, jihadist, and organizer of 9/11 attacks on the United States Abdulaziz, Saud, Faisal, Khalid, Fahd, and Abdullah, successive kings of Saudi Arabia

One of the most extraordinary stories of the last century is the establishment of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its transformation in the course of a single generation from poverty and obscurity to unsurpassed wealth and influence. In The Bin Ladens, Steve Coll recounts the story and its familiar actors: Abdulaziz Bin Saud, who set out from Kuwait one day in 1902 with a few ragtag followers to reconquer the little town of Riyadh, formerly part of his family’s possessions, and who within a quarter of a century went on to take the Hejaz in the west and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina; the Englishman Harry St. John Bridger Philby, Arabia’s greatest explorer, personal friend of King Abdulaziz, and an advocate of American development of the oil fields; the self-indulgent King Saud, who inherited from his father a society reeling in an effort to accommodate the technological and consumerist fruits of that development with the demands of Wahhabism, a particularly austere form of Islam; the devout King Faisal, another son of Abdulaziz, who first used oil as a political weapon against

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the West; and his three, to date, successors, Khalid, Fahd, and Abdullah. However, in addition to the House of Saud, another family, from even more modest beginnings, found its fortunes unrecognizably changed over the first half of the twentieth century. Around 1900, Awadh Bin Laden decided to leave his village in present-day Yemen to avoid threats generated by the death of a borrowed ox. He died young, but his sons Mohammad and Abdullah soon found themselves doing well in Jeddah, on what would become the Saudi Red Sea coast. Eventually Mohammad would forge a close relationship with the Saudi royal family and establish a role as the king’s chief builder, and this at a time when oil revenues were pouring into dynasty-consolidating, prestige-enhancing construction projects in Mecca and Medina, not to mention into the creation of the kingdom’s first real roads and into the building of numerous royal palaces. If all this meant keeping a constant wary eye on the whims of spoiled princes and waiting months or longer to be paid, it also meant stupendous and increasing wealth: The most notorious of Mohammad Bin Laden’s grandchildren, one of twenty-five brothers and twenty-nine sisters, would inherit about eighteen million dollars in 1988 as his share of the family pile when Salem, Mohammad’s eldest son and successor, was killed in a plane crash, as his father had been. Notwithstanding his business savvy, Mohammad Bin Laden was practically illiterate and ignorant of the non-Arab world. It was Salem who began bringing the Bin Ladens into contact with the West, especially the United States. Salem was an engaging and charismatic figure who “believed in his Learjet and his MU-2 and his jeans and guitar and harmonica,” as a friend put it. Secular and Westernized, he represented the company’s interests well in Europe and in the United States during the boom years of the 1970’s; and it was he who encouraged his brothers and even his sisters to pursue graduate education in the United States. More than a quarter of the fiftyfour did so. One who did not was Osama. He was the single offspring of Mohammad and a Syrian girl who was about fifteen when he was born and who was divorced by her husband within three years. Shy and obedient as a boy, he would be radicalized by a teacher at his elite high school in Jeddah. Despite his later claims of a long-standing hatred of Americans as enemies of Islam, at this stage of Osama’s life there was little exceptional about him beyond his piety. He was “perfectly integrated” into the family, according to a sister-in-law, playing soccer, working for the family companies, and buying expensive cars with his allowance, even, in typical teenage style, totaling one of them. The greatest strength of Coll’s book is that it portrays Osama not as a diabolical figure of unique evil or as a paragon of Islamist virtue but as the comprehensible product of his time and place. Just as his later role in Al Qaeda would be molded by knowl-

Steve Coll worked for twenty years at The Washington Post, where he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for explanatory journalism. He is the author of six books, including Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004), which won him a second Pulitzer Prize.

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edge and techniques acquired in his family’s companies, so did his earliest contributions to the Islamist cause flow naturally from the life he led. He began as a young man who tried to live a strict Muslim life within Saudi society. When a Saudi official wanted to circumvent Pakistani involvement in the channeling of funds and arms to the Afghans fighting the Soviet occupation of their country, it was suggested that prominent mujaheddin be invited on the pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina so they could be wooed privately. As Coll rhetorically asks, “who better to help manage such invitations, and to participate in the ensuing charitable and religious festivities, than Osama Bin Laden, a scion of the family that played such an influential role in the holy cities?” Coll further observes, “His volunteerism remained inseparable from his family’s identity and its business strategy.” Osama would later base himself in Peshawar, a city close to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. There he worked on media operations and education, as if he were producing glossy Bin Laden brochures that promoted the accomplishments of his family’s businesses. His elder brother Salem flew in, too, and filmed orphans created by the war, thus appealing to the orthodox Muslim obligation to succor such unfortunates. Soon Osama wanted a more active role, and he asked Salem for portable antiaircraft missiles. Stung by the social and intellectual condescension of some of his Muslim Brotherhood associates (the widow of one described him as “not a very educated man [and] easy to persuade”), Osama began to talk of diversity and equality and to spread his money around to rival groups. This egalitarianism was spawned in part by the management styles of Mohammad and Salem. As a Bin Laden, Osama had also learned about administration and the handling of money. In addition, he was interested in what Coll calls “the technologies of global integration”: The Bin Ladens had always possessed the latest gadgets. Many Islamists could preach the ideology of fundamentalist jihad. Only Osama could fuse seventh century rhetoric with twentieth century innovations. He showed himself to be human and hypocritical in other ways, too. When Kuwait temporarily disappeared from the world’s map in 1990 (when Saddam Hussein attempted to annex it to Iraq), many Saudis panicked, fearing the same fate for their country. Osama deposited $450,000 in a Swiss bank account as a safety measure and thus began earning $2,500 a month in interest. Later, he would condemn “usury” and the way in which it allegedly enabled “the Jews” to control the economy of the United States, and he would see the presence of coalition “infidel” forces in Saudi Arabia as an outrage upon Islam. At the time, however, he seemed to have no problem with the “outstanding support,” in the words of no less an Unbeliever than U.S. Army General Norman Schwarzkopf (who was in charge of the coalition forces in the Gulf War), that Bin Laden Telecommunications afforded U.S. troops or with the handsome profits such support brought. In time, Osama began to have problems with the Saudi establishment, which disapproved of some of his jihadist activities. Osama left for Sudan, whence he would be ejected due to U.S. pressure. He moved on to Afghanistan, a considerably rougher environment, and his hatred for the United States deepened. “Zionists” and “Crusaders” wanted to take the oil that had been deposited in the birthplace of Islam by God in or-

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der to further the triumph of the true faith. The drunken and whoring Saudi princes who had rejected Osama collaborated with them. Stripped of much of his wealth by the events of the previous five years, Osama went back to marketing and fundraising for Al Qaeda, which he had helped to found. He saw the power of global satellite television networks, gave interviews to CNN and ABC, and recognized before most what Al-Jazeera, an Arabic-language channel based in Qatar, could do. By now the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was listening in on calls from his satellite telephone and getting a sense of Al Qaeda’s global presence. Nevertheless, a lack of specificity in intelligence gleanings did not prevent the bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa. As all the world knows, the same applies to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, organized from remote Afghanistan by a technologically savvy Bin Laden family member whose father and half-brother had both died in plane crashes. While Osama was using his satellite telephone to direct attacks on the United States, some of his relatives were hoping to make yet more money by investing in that same technology in Washington. The fraught relationship—noted for its compound of admiration, envy, resentment, and hatred—that many in the Third World have with the United States is well reflected in Coll’s book, as is the mixture of greed and contempt with which the West has historically responded to Saudi wealth and ostentation. The inextricable melding of cultures, including the global mobility of which Osama had taken such cruel advantage, is even more on display. The last section of The Bin Ladens deals with efforts at damage control made by leading members of a family which now had an unfortunate name; it narrates, too, the story of the flight organized to get Bin Laden family members domiciled in the United States out of the country. Some of the younger passengers looked and sounded more American than Arab; one had just acquired a fake identification card to get into bars and clubs, a piece of laminated plastic he did not foresee using much in Saudi Arabia. Another daughter—who apparently elected to stay, spoke no Arabic, and did not possess a Saudi passport—gave an interview to Barbara Walters. She wanted to become a popular singer and appealed to Americans not to “judge” her “because my values are just like yours.” Coll’s thoroughly researched and cleverly written book fascinates. He can turn the occasional phrase: His last, memorable simile describing Osama is to be found on the book’s final page. Osama, still “exploiting the channels and the ethos of global integration,” is likened to “a Barbary pirate with a marketing degree.” M. D. Allen

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 15 (April 1, 2008): 4. The Daily Telegraph, April 27, 2008, p. 42. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 6 (March 15, 2008): 281.

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Library Journal 133, no. 8 (May 1, 2008): 84. Los Angeles Times, April 1, 2008, p. E1. The New York Review of Books 51, no. 9 (May 27, 2004): 19-22. The New York Times Book Review, May 25, 2008, p. 11. The Observer, May 11, 2008, p. 22. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 13 (March 31, 2008): 54. The Times Literary Supplement, August 8, 2008, p. 25. The Washington Post, March 30, 2008, p. T3.

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THE BISHOP’S DAUGHTER A Memoir Author: Honor Moore (1945) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 365 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Memoir Time: 1919-2003 Locale: New York City Moore explores her complex relationship with her father, the revered Episcopal bishop of New York, Paul Moore, Jr., and the impact that his hidden homosexual life had on his priesthood and his family Principal personages: Bishop Paul Moore, Jr., a bishop of the Episcopal Church Jenny Moore, his wife Honor Moore, his daughter

Honor Moore first delved into her family history when she published the wellreceived The White Blackbird in 1996, the story of her mercurial maternal grandmother, painter Margarett Sargent. In The Bishop’s Daughter, she ranges closer to home as she probes the private and public life of her famous father, Bishop Paul Moore, Jr. In recounting her often difficult relationship with him, she comes to terms with a distant, sometimes cruel parent, who was a beloved and respected church leader but who also harbored a secret so painful that it indelibly scarred his relationships with those who loved him most. In her “Prologue,” Moore opens with an image that haunts the book’s pages from beginning to end. It is Easter morning in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. The choir has finished singing, when three knocks sound in the silence. Then the massive doors swing open, an ethereal shaft of sunlight floods the dark, the roar of the city breaks the gigantic quiet, and there at the far end of the aisle, in a blaze of morning light, stands the tall figure of a man. My flesh-and-blood father, the bishop.

The contrast between the phrases “my flesh-and-blood father” and “the bishop” captures the tension between the human and the holy that characterized Paul Moore throughout his life. Cloaked in his rich vestments and surrounded by glowing light, the bishop seems godlike and inapproachable. Yet as Honor Moore draws on her own reminiscences, as well as on letters, diaries, and interviews with family and friends, she divests her father of his episcopal accoutrements, demythologizing him in order to discover the man’s true self and the reasons for their often contentious relationship. As she does so, it becomes clear that his bishop’s crook and miter are not the only things that set Paul Moore apart.

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In “Father,” the first section of her book, Moore offers an overview of the future bishop’s family pedigree and education. Grandson of William Moore, one of the founders of the Bankers Trust Co. and contemporary of such notables as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, Paul Moore was born to a life of wealth and privilege. His family had residences in New York City, New Jersey, Florida, and Prides Crossing, Massachusetts, where he met his first wife and the mother of his nine children, the beautiful socialite Jenny McKean. From an early age, he was sensitive about his family’s favored status. He once dove to the floor of a chauffeured limousine as it drove through a blighted neighborhood because he was ashamed to be seen riding in luxury while others were living hand to mouth. His pang of conscience would blossom into full-blown social activism early in his ministry. While attending the exclusive St. Paul’s School, an Episcopal-run boarding school in New Hampshire, Paul underwent a conversion. After his graduation from Yale, he entered the Marine Corps in 1941 and survived a gunshot wound that just missed his heart. His narrow escape from death further cemented his religious sensibilities, and he came to believe that his life was spared for a higher purpose. After he was ordained to the priesthood in 1949, Reverend Moore became the rector of a parish in Jersey City, New Jersey. His experience in the inner city gave birth to the social activism that would be the hallmark of his ministry. When he was named Dean of Christ Church Cathedral located in conservative Indianapolis, Indiana, he continued to speak out in favor of liberal causes. In 1964, after he was appointed Suffragan Bishop of Washington, D.C., he marched for civil rights with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma, Alabama; protested the Vietnam War; and berated presidents and other government officials for their lack of concern for the poor. In the last sermon he preached before his death in 2003, he strongly criticized President George W. Bush for initiating the war in Iraq. Moore’s brief biography of her father lays the foundation for part two of her book, titled “Daughter.” With her declaration, “And so I have come into the story,” the genre changes from biography to memoir. She writes movingly and with obvious pain about her struggle to understand why her father was often distant, aloof, and sometimes indifferent to his wife and family. Honor recalls a time when Paul, then a student at General Theological Seminary in New York, brought her to a service of evensong: Once after supper, my father swept me up into his black seminarian’s cape . . . we climbed the stairs to the seminary and stepped along the grassy path to the chapel. I could already hear it, something like the rushing of the wind, the coming of a storm. We were late, and as we slipped into the pew in the candlelit church full of men, I understood that the rushing sound was singing. . . . I was scared and so I leaned against my father . . . but he didn’t look down at me or put his big hand on my head. . . . Now he belonged to something else, this big and strange sound, so deep and loud it made me shake. . . . After that night, I looked at my father with a new curiosity. . . . He was in touch with something that couldn’t be seen but was also real. . . . Across the street in the dark, inside the red tower, in the honey light of the candles, was a landscape like a dream, a place to which my father belonged and from which my mother and I were excluded.

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The passage is both poignant and ironic. Moore’s description echoes the dramatic scene at St. John the Divine where the bishop appeared at the door in his regal vestments. The ecclesiastical trappings in which her father felt at home heightens the aura of “otherness” that often surrounds those who enter the priesthood. Her assessment that he seemed “in touch” with something unseen enhances the mythology that frequently envelops the clergy. Moreover, the fact that the seminary was a male fraternity further separated Honor from her father and his vocation. Up until 1975, when the ordination of women was sanctioned by the Episcopal Church, women were prohibited from becoming priests or deacons. Honor’s first contact with Paul’s ecclesiastical life should have solidified the father-daughter bond, but it only increased the distance between them. Finally, the juxtaposition of this excerpt with the revelation in the next paragraph that Paul had his first full-fledged affair with a married male instructor at the seminary only intensifies his “otherness.” The fact that he had a wife and child did little to lessen the influence of his hidden conflict and only served to separate him psychologically and emotionally from his family. While Paul was periodically surrendering to his “addiction,” as he later termed his homosexuality, Honor was exploring her own sexuality. She is open about her love affairs with men, her abortion, her fifteen-year period of loving women, and her return to dating men. She dealt with her sexual confusion by participating in years of therapy, not knowing that her father was bisexual. Jenny had told Honor that she and Paul were having problems in their marriage, and Paul confirmed it. Honor, however, assumed that her parents’ marriage was a conventional Christian union between two heterosexual people. In “Revelations,” part three of the book, Honor relates a conversation with one of her mother’s friends who told her that Jenny had guessed that Paul had had gay lovers. Brenda, his second wife whom he married after Jenny’s death, discovered it was true. Paul’s desire for men was very much at odds with church policy on homosexuality at the time he was serving as a priest and later as a bishop. Honor notes, however, that her father believed that “sexuality and religious feeling came from the same place in the psyche”—a heretical idea in the era Paul answered his call to the priesthood. While he was an exemplary priest, he did not fully accept himself as a gay man. As both father and daughter struggled with their sexuality, Honor tried to help her father accept his gender orientation. In an effort to close the ever-widening emotional gap between them, Honor invited her father to join her in therapy sessions. At first he refused, but then he assented. Their common therapy treatments did not produce the intimacy that both the bishop and his daughter had hoped. Paul remained a remote figure to the end of his life. On one of Honor’s visits during Paul’s final illness, she reached out to him, but

Honor Moore is the author of poetry collections Red Shoes (2005), Darling (2001), and Memoir (1988). She is also the author of the biography The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter (1996), which was named a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in New York City.

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violently he drew back. “I love you,” he said, an expression of terror and distaste on his face, “but not . . . so . . . close.” He tried to recover himself. “I mean I love you, but . . . . ” I had been helping him finish his sentences, and so I helped him complete this one “ . . . not that much.” “Yes,” he said, holding himself apart, “not that much.”

Closure came for Honor after her father’s death when, out of the blue, she received a telephone call from a complete stranger. In a chapter titled “Andrew Verver,” Honor recounts the conversation she had with the man who claimed to have been Paul’s “sexual life” for the previous thirty years. The bishop’s daughter drew solace from the fact that her father had enjoyed emotional fulfillment, not just sexual pleasure, with Verver. The chapter caused a firestorm of controversy when it was excerpted in The New Yorker, and admirers of the bishop—as well as members of his own family— accused his daughter of sullying his memory. Yet Honor’s sensitivity and generosity of spirit are evident when she recounts the story of the pilgrimage she and Verver made to her father’s grave. Some readers may view Bishop Moore as a hypocrite because of his double life. Honor suggests, however, that because homosexuality was an anathema during the era in which he came of age, Paul had no choice but to keep his sexual orientation a secret. Doing so was necessary in order to fulfill his primary passion, which was to serve God. From the 1950’s to the 1970’s, the church was far from ready to wrestle with the question of whether to ordain gay clergy—until Bishop Moore pushed the issue to the forefront when he ordained a lesbian to the priesthood in 1977. His action could be viewed as an expiation for his own reluctance to acknowledge his homosexuality and as a willingness to create a path for gay clergy that had never been available to him. One wonders how he would react now that the Episcopal Church nears schism over the consecration of Gene Robinson, who was made bishop of New Hampshire shortly after Paul’s death in 2003. Throughout The Bishop’s Daughter, Honor treats Paul with forgiveness, respect, and ultimately love. Her compassionate portrait of her father is in stark contrast to the memoir of Frank Schaeffer, another scion of a prominent Christian, who wrote Crazy for God (2007), a sharp-edged, tell-all story about his well-known parents, evangelicals Francis and Edith Schaeffer. Moore’s beautifully written memoir is a wonderful tribute to the quest for redemption and love she and her father shared, and it serves as a poignant reminder that grace often reveals itself amid the struggles and pain that afflict the lives of flawed human beings. Pegge Bochynski

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Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 16 (April 15, 2008): 8. Elle 23, no. 10 (June, 2008): 118. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 4 (February 15, 2008): 185. Lambda Book Report 16, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Summer, 2008): 12. Library Journal 133, no. 8 (May 1, 2008): 66. Ms. 18, no. 2 (Spring, 2008): 75. The Nation 286, no. 25 (June 30, 2008): 46. The New York Times Book Review, May 11, 2008, p. 57. Newsweek 151, no. 19 (May 12, 2008): 55. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 9 (March 3, 2008): 38.

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THE BLACK HOLE WAR My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Keep the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics Author: Leonard Susskind (1940) Publisher: Little, Brown (New York). 470 pp. $27.99 Type of work: Science Time: 1981-2008 A partly historical, partly autobiographical account of a recent controversy in theoretical physics by one of the physicists involved Principal personages Niels Bohr, Danish theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate, one of the central figures in the development of quantum mechanics Albert Einstein, German-born American physicist best known for his work on relativity theory but also one of the key contributors to early quantum theory Richard Feynman, American physicist and author, Nobel laureate for his contributions to quantum theory Stephen Hawking, current occupant of Isaac Newton’s chair at Cambridge University and one of the principal contributors to the quantum theory of black holes John Polkinghorne, British physicist turned Anglican priest, one of the principal proponents of the anthropic principle Leonard Susskind, the author, professor of physics at Stanford University, one of the principal contributors to the theory of black holes Gerard ‘t Hooft, Dutch theoretical physicist, Nobel laureate for his contributions to the quantum theory of elementary particles and one of Susskind’s allies in the black hole war

Modern physics abounds in concepts that capture the imagination. Perhaps no concept has had greater impact on the popular imagination than that of the black hole, a concentration of mass so great that even light cannot escape its gravitational attraction. Black holes can be understood in terms of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The quantum theory of black holes is generally attributed to Stephen Hawking, a British physicist who realized that a black hole could actually evaporate, becoming smaller and emitting elementary particles created from the vacuum as it does so. The Black Hole War of the title is a dispute among physicists over the content of black holes, that is, whether the identity of the particles that made up a black hole becomes forever lost to science. Susskind’s book provides a description of the dispute, character sketches of the

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disputants, an introduction to the more esoteric concepts, and anecdotes from scientific conferences and academic culture generally, interspersed in a way that keeps the reader entertained. There is Susskind himself, who despite his august academic accomplishments— he holds an endowed chair at Stanford—finds a great deal of humor in physics and its development. There is Hawking, who as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics holds the chair once occupied by Isaac Newton and has been battling Lou Gehrig’s disease since graduate school. Hawking now lectures from a wheelchair using a voice synthesizer; in earlier times he used human translators. Despite his physical limitations, Hawking is regarded as a great showman who can hold an audience’s rapt attention. There is Gerard ‘t Hooft, who early in his career was able to solve some of the key problems of the so-called standard model of elementary particle physics and who is regarded by Susskind as one of the cleverest people in physics. Going back in time there is Albert Einstein, whose equations of general relativity provide the theoretical framework for the big bang cosmology and who rejected the quantum theory as incomplete, and Neils Bohr, mentor to a generation of quantum physicists, who defended it successfully against many of Einstein’s counter examples. Susskind provides qualitative explanations for many modern physics concepts, some of which are part of the average physicist’s intellectual toolkit and some of which are familiar only to researchers in the esoteric realm of black holes and strange particles. As he describes it, the human brain, which has evolved to understand the physics of everyday life—for example, how to hit a target with a rock—has to undergo a certain amount of rewiring to deal with events outside routine experience. The need for rewiring became apparent when it was realized that light traveled at great but finite speed. Further rewiring is needed to deal with very large and very small numbers, distances, and time intervals and spaces of different dimensions. Physical theories are nowadays most naturally formulated mathematically, and to communicate them to the layman writers such as Susskind make extensive use of mental pictures and analogies. The analogies will be more helpful to some readers than others. Many readers will be familiar with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that the position and momentum (mass times velocity) of a particle cannot be simultaneously known with perfect precision. An important consequence of this is the realization that at an atomic level all matter is in constant motion. Heisenberg and Bohr considered position and momentum to be complementary observables. One could measure the position of a particle in one type of experiment at the cost of giving up information about its momentum, or measure its momentum in another, giving up information about its position. Bohr elevated the notion of complementarity to a general principle, noting that properties often come in complementary pairs, for which

Leonard Susskind has been the Felix Bloch Professor of Theoretical Physics at Stanford University since 2000. He received his Ph.D. degree from Cornell University in 1965, and he has taught at Yeshiva University and the University of Tel Aviv. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has written several books on modern cosmology.

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being precise about one implies being imprecise about the other. There is a form of uncertainty principle that treats time and energy as complementary variables. This implies that while energy is conserved over any significant time interval, the principle of energy conservation can be violated for short times, and on the shortest time scales there can be major fluctuations in physical variables. The picture that emerges is not an easy one for human brains to grasp. The notion of a black hole actually predates relativity. All that is necessary is to have enough matter fall within a small enough volume so that the escape velocity from its surface, located at the Schwarzschild radius, equals the speed of light. In relativity theory, distances and time intervals can vary with the position of the observer. An observer being pulled into a black hole would perceive nothing unusual about the passage of time. A second observer would see the first frozen in time at the Schwarzschild radius. The history of physics over the past two centuries has been marked by the unification of theories for different phenomena into ever more general theories. This began in the early nineteenth century as a theory of electromagnetism revealed that electricity and magnetism were aspects of the same physical force and that light was an electromagnetic wave, which led to the theory of relativity. The development of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory in the twentieth century provided a coherent description of electromagnetic and nuclear phenomena culminating in the so-called standard model. The unfinished business of fundamental physics is reconciling quantum mechanics with the theory of gravitation. According to Susskind, the black hole war began in 1981 at a small scientific meeting sponsored by Werner Erhard, the founder of the est Training movement. At this meeting Hawking asserted that information about the particles falling into a black hole would be irretrievably lost. This was inconsistent with the conservation laws known to be true outside of black holes and, since black holes could evaporate, would mean an additional source of entropy and a need to discard trustworthy principles of physics. Susskind and ‘t Hooft immediately realized the problem, which would take about twenty years to resolve and lead to a number of new concepts in physics. Among these are black hole complementarity, the holographic universe, and extensions of string theory. Black hole complementarity refers to the different realities that govern a particle falling into a black hole and an observer watching one fall into the hole. The first process is a smooth falling with nothing exceptional about it. The second is of infinite duration—the particle seems frozen at the Schwarzschild radius. Even stranger is the holographic principle, which claims that the full structure of the universe is contained in a two-dimensional surface, in much the same way that a hologram allows the construction of a three-dimensional image. The hologram’s information is contained in a two-dimensional array. By similar reasoning, the information needed to describe the particles that had fallen into a black hole is contained just outside the Schwarzschild radius, that is, for an observer outside the black hole, and available for release in the Hawking radiation released while the hole evaporates. Since information, at a fundamental level, is related to entropy, this is really a state-

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ment about the entropy of a black hole, important for extending the second law of thermodynamics, the law-of-entropy increase, to a universe with black holes in it. To make the holographic principle plausible, Susskind enters into a presentation of string theory. This theory remains controversial within physics: Providing a unified approach to gravitation and the other forces is appealing in its universality but offers very little that can be tested by experiment. In string theory, all particles are treated as one-dimensional strings vibrating in a multidimensional space. The common three dimensions of ordinary space are inadequate. Required are nine spatial dimensions, six of which are of finite extent. To grasp this type of space, a major amount of brain rewiring is necessary. Susskind goes further, to introduce the modern theory of D-branes, which will require even more “rewiring” of the reader’s brain. Throughout his exposition, Susskind provides interesting sidelights on the personalities in physics and on academic culture. He describes his encounters with Richard Feynman, iconoclast, master showman, and genius, first as a young physics professor in 1972. The reader finds Hawking in his wheelchair, racing down a hill in San Francisco at breakneck speed, to the astonishment of his able-bodied friends. The reader learns that at one of the colleges of Cambridge University, only full professors are permitted to walk on the grass; all lower ranks must keep to the walkways. Susskind is a frequent writer and speaker on science and religion and was intrigued by the juxtaposition of religious symbolism and scientific cosmology found on the Cambridge University campus. He confesses to a mild case of “cathedralitis,” in which the stained glass and the vaulted archways of the Cambridge colleges inspire a sort of religious feeling even in the nonbeliever. The modern Cambridge faculty includes outright atheists as well as many committed to traditional religion. Susskind wonders why religious feeling has persisted, when it conveys no evolutionary advantage Particularly interesting is John Polkinghorne, a Ph.D. physicist based at Cambridge who entered the Anglican priesthood later in life. Polkinghorne is one of the major proponents of the anthropic principle, the claim that, had the fundamental constants of nature, the mass of the electron, or the constant in Newton’s law of gravitational force been even slightly different, the world as we know it, with life based on the chemistry of carbon compounds, could not possibly exist. Whether this principle, along with string theory and D-branes, will endure as physics progresses remains to be seen. Donald R. Franceschetti

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Review Sources Discover 29, no. 7 (July, 2008): 73. Library Journal 133, no. 11 (June 15, 2008): 89. Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 13, 2008, p. R2. Nature 454 (July 31, 2008): 579-580. New Scientist 199 (July 5, 2008): 46. The New York Times Book Review, August 24, 2008, p. 16. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 20 (May 19, 2008): 48. Science News 174, no. 9 (October 25, 2008): 29. Sky & Telescope 117, no. 2 (December, 2009): 43.

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THE BOAT Author: Nam Le (1978) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 272 pp. $22.95 Type of work: Short fiction Time: 1945 to 2005 Locale: Worldwide Le’s first book offers seven short stories that cover the globe and feature an amazingly varied cast of central characters; his plots include assassinations in Colombia, a failed family reunion in New York City, religious festivals in Iran, and escape from Communist Vietnam Principal characters: Nam Le, a character named after the author, struggling with writer’s block Juan Pablo “Ron” Merendez, a teenage assassin in Colombia Henry Luff, a middle-aged New York painter who tries to meet his long-estranged daughter Jamie, an Australian teenager who faces a vicious bully Mayako, a Japanese schoolgirl who survives the bombing of Hiroshima Sarah Middleton, an American lawyer visiting her college friend in Tehran Mai, a sixteen-year-old Vietnamese refugee cast on the open sea

The most outstanding feature of the Vietnamese Australian writer Nam Le’s first book, The Boat, is the remarkable variety of the seven short stories in the collection. Only the first and the last story deal with Vietnam. The others cover a wide range of locales, taking the reader to Colombia, New York City, Australia, Japan, and Iran. They span six decades from the end of World War II to the early twenty-first century. Each story tells a fresh tale, and Le masterfully presents central characters who have to meet an existential challenge. “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” introduces Le’s readers to his convictions and self-understanding as a writer. Cleverly mixing the autobiographical and the fictitious, the central character is named Nam Le like the author himself. The character Le is given many of the author’s characteristics, but the author adds strong fictional deviations. By doing so, Le challenges the reader not to fall into the trap of reading his fiction as a mere exploration of his personal experience. Like his author from 2004 to 2005, Le is a Vietnamese Australian ex-lawyer who has become a fellow at the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop that has nurtured many contemporary literary talents. As Le is facing a final deadline to write a story, he is visited by his estranged father from Australia. Now Le tries any trick to overcome his writer’s block, and he uses an old typewriter instead of a computer to stop himself

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from endlessly revising. While thinking, he remembers a conversation with a fellow as- Nam Le worked as a lawyer in piring writer. It is through this imaginary con- Australia before receiving a fellowship versation that author Le offers a strong view from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2004. His short stories won for Le of his beliefs as a writer. A friend offers Le a surefire shortcut to writer’s fellowships and the Michenersolve his problem: “just write a story about Copernicus Society of America Award Vietnam.” That fits with Le’s observation of in 2007, and “Cartagena” earned him the Pushcart Prize XXXII that same the contemporary American literary market. year. In 2008, Le was fiction editor of As an instructor tells him, “ethnic literature’s the Harvard Review. hot” and “visiting literary agents” admonish young writers to write only from their own “background and life experience.” Against this, Le’s friend quotes the words of William Faulkner, which give the story its title. This list that starts with “Love and Honor” suggests that literature should be about what truly matters in human experience. As a parting shot, his friend tells Le that he admires him for his struggle against an easy way out: “You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. But instead, you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans—and New York painters with hemorrhoids.” The Boat features stories on all those topics, with the exception of the lesbian vampires, indicating Le’s fondness to mix fact with fiction. As Le yields to the temptation to write an “ETHNIC STORY” to make his deadline, he chooses as its subject his father’s survival of the infamous 1968 My Lai massacre of American troops in Vietnam. In reality, author Le’s father grew up in a different location, in Rach Gia, south of My Lai, and has no connections to that atrocity. In the story, Le is poetically punished for abandoning his quest for true literary art as his father burns the typewritten pages of that story in the gasoline drum of a homeless man they had befriended earlier. The reader will not find this story among author Le’s fiction. True to Le’s belief in the necessity to expand the horizon of his fiction, “Cartagena,” which won the 2007 Pushcart Prize, takes the reader into the world of teenage Colombian assassins. Violent social and dire economic circumstances, as well as a vicious civil war and the international cocaine trade, have turned the children’s lives into premature hell. Juan Pablo Merendez, called “Ron” for his childhood feat of drinking Ron de Medellin tequila without vomiting, slithers into a criminal life. It began once he and his friend Hernando were kidnapped by a corrupt policeman and a pedophile Colombian businessman. After Hernando killed both their captors with the policeman’s gun, Ron decided to throw in his lot with the assassination squads of underground figure El Padre, himself a victim of Colombia’s cruel war against radical Communist insurgents. Now Ron kills for money that allows him to buy a safe house in the barrio for his mother, who lost her husband to right-wing militias—Le is careful to show that murder is committed on both sides of the Colombian political divide.

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Eventually ordered to kill Hernando, who works to get street kids out of gangs, Ron refuses and is called to meet El Padre. Characteristically for Le’s central characters, Ron is pushed to the limit of endurance by his author. Le stops Ron’s story just short of its likely conclusion, but he does not leave much doubt about the eventual dark outcome. In “Meeting Elise,” fifty-something New York painter Henry Luff desperately tries to meet with his estranged daughter, Elise. She is a famous cellist about to be married to her British manager. Henry has not seen his daughter since her Russian mother took her away as a toddler after Henry started an affair with his young model, Olivia. Told from a convincing first-person point of view, Henry is a character whose body seems to give out when his hemorrhoids are diagnosed as likely indicators of colon cancer. His mental collapse in the face of Elise’s ultimate rejection is reminiscent of Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow’s character of Wilhelm Adler in his 1956 novel Seize the Day. “Meeting Elise” shows impressively how Le can create pathetic characters that evoke a reader’s pity for their demoralizing situation. “Halflead Bay” presents a moving coming-of-age story in which Jamie, a goodnatured high school kid in a backwater, run-down Australian seashore town, has to face Dory Townsend, a vicious bully, rapist, and murderer. Jamie’s winning football goal has pushed his school into the final and suddenly has given him a certain clout at school and the dubious attention of the popular girl Allison Fischer, Dory’s girlfriend. As Jamie struggles with family problems—his mother is dying of multiple sclerosis—he is haunted by the idea of incurring Dory’s wrath for accepting Allison’s obvious invitation. He remembers how Dory viciously beat up a previous rival and, with his sycophant buddy Lester, raped and killed a Chinese girl, “the young woman’s body . . . found in the swale—within shouting distance of where Dory lived with his uncle.” The police let the teenagers go for lack of direct evidence and underlying institutional racism. After Jamie sleeps with Allison, he is challenged to a fight by Dory. Moved by the appeal of Jamie’s father, who brings into his office his wheelchair-bound mother, and concerned about Jamie’s availability for the football final, the principal effectively cancels the fight. Yet Jamie feels cheated and challenges Dory at his shack. Allison is there and betrays Jamie by goading on Dory to beat up Jamie before his father comes up and leads him away. The story strikes a fine balance between Jamie’s need to prove himself and his realization that his father genuinely cares about him. From its narrative structure, “Hiroshima” is a story about the irony of fate. Not being granted one’s dearest wish may actually save one’s life because of a cruel twist of circumstances. The story’s narrator, Mayako, is a third grader evacuated from Hiroshima at the end of World War II in the Pacific. She wishes nothing more than to be reunited with her parents and big sister, who continue to live in the city. On August 6, 1945, Mayako feels faint heat on her cheeks from the flash of the distant atom bomb, which signals the deaths of her family and her survival. What makes Le’s “Hiroshima” particularly powerful is his authentic rendition of the mind-set of Mayako. She has totally internalized imperial Japanese propaganda of the period. By telling the story completely from her point of view, showing her belief

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in honor and sacrifice without the slightest trace of doubt, Le creates a masterful tale that moves his readers to great compassion for his young protagonist. “Tehran Calling” features thirty-something lawyer Sarah Middleton, who, after breaking up with her lawyer colleague Paul, decides to visit her Iranian college friend Parvin during the Shiite’s Ashura festival in Tehran. The story closely follows Sarah as she enters the alien city for the first time. Once Sarah meets Parvin at the home of her privileged parents, she encounters the cultural fissure between official religious doctrine and private transgressions. Parvin leads a party of reformists, and Sarah learns about the tragedies in her friend’s life, such as the death of her brother in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980’s. Determined to challenge the authorities with a play about a thirteen-year-old girl killed by religious radicals, Parvin disappears and her fiancé Mahmoud goes with Sarah to find her. When Sarah sleeps with Mahmoud after their close call with the militias, while Parvin is still unaccounted for, there is a sense of multiple betrayals that underlines quite a few of Le’s stories. Only the final story of Le’s book returns to the topic of Vietnam. “The Boat” tells of the harrowing experience of sixteen-year-old Mai. Her family has placed Mai on a boat full of refugees trying to escape the hardships of Communist Vietnam in the late 1970’s. A storm wreaks havoc with the boat, and the refugees find themselves without engine power and rapidly dwindling resources. Mai befriends Quyen, mother of the six-year-old boy Truong. The boy shares the same name of one of the author’s brothers, yet another instance in which Le mixes the autobiographical and the fictional. Truong attracts Mai’s attention because he sings a forlorn Vietnamese folk song, reminding her of her mother. As the ship’s captain, the saintly Anh Phuoc, tries to steer the boat toward a friendly coast with the help of an emergency sail, people start dying. Like a Bodhisattva who could enter Nirvana but chooses to stay in this world to guide others to Buddhist fulfillment, Phuoc has made the passage to freedom already, but he chooses to return to Vietnam to rescue others. Indicative of the narrative doubling in “The Boat,” first Mai falls seriously ill but recovers. Then it is Truong’s turn, and the boy dies on the day that land is finally in sight. By contrast, the author’s real brother survived such an ordeal. Le’s The Boat met with enthusiastic critical reception in the United States. Michiko Kakutani, the influential critic of The New York Times, praised his work for its portrayal of characters facing extreme life circumstances. A day after this favorable review, the paper published a rave interview of Le. With a sense for irony, he met the journalist at the same New York restaurant where Henry waits in vain to encounter his daughter Elise in “Meeting Elise.” Critics overwhelmingly agree that Le has succeeded in offering an extraordinary first collection of short stories. R. C. Lutz

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Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 17 (May 1, 2008): 69. Entertainment Weekly, May 16, 2008, p. 70. Esquire 149, no. 6 (June, 2008): 44. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 7 (April 1, 2008): 325. Library Journal 133, no. 8 (May 1, 2008): 62. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 18 (November 20, 2008): 38-40. The New York Times Book Review, June 8, 2008, p. 8. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 3 (March 31, 2008): 37. The Times Literary Supplement, October 10, 2008, p. 21. The Washington Post, July 16, 2008, p. C8.

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BOOKS A Memoir Author: Larry McMurtry (1936) Publisher: Simon & Schuster (New York). 259 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Memoir A semiautobiographical account of the author’s life as a bookman, providing glimpses into the arcane and complex trade of bookseller and highlighting interesting books, characters, and personages he has known Principal personage: Larry McMurtry, author and bookseller

A bookman is a person who lives for, by, and with books. Not simply a bookseller, a bookman (or bookperson) is someone for whom books are a governing metaphor, providing not only financial but also social and intellectual support. It would seem that with the advent of online bookselling, the physical bookstore, particularly the secondhand and antiquarian bookstore, may be a thing of the past, but in this memoir Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove (1985) and Terms of Endearment (1975), among many others, in a ramble through his life as a bookman, lovingly and somewhat dryly illuminates his love of books and how his life has been shaped by them and the people who buy and sell them. McMurtry has had a dual career: novelist/essayist and bookman. For many years he has operated Booked Up, first in Washington, D.C., and more recently in his hometown Archer City, Texas (the prototype for the fictional Thalia in McMurtry’s 1966 novel The Last Picture Show). This Booked Up is a massive bibliographic enterprise, sprawling over four separate locations (including a former automobile showroom) in the small north-central Texas town. Books: A Memoir is as much a memoir of books as it is of McMurtry, and it begins with a description of a box of nineteen books, adolescent literature given to McMurtry as a child by an older relative. McMurtry writes that the books “changed my life.” These books are the genesis of both McMurtry’s intellectual life and the memoir itself, launching the book on its seriatim evocation of important books and bookpeople that have influenced McMurtry’s life. McMurtry’s first book, from the box of nineteen, is Sergeant Silk, The Prairie Scout (1929). Few people (except book lovers) can remember the first book that they ever read. It is significant that McMurtry can, and he chronicles how this early collection set him on his diverse reading and acquisition journey. McMurtry’s journey is not without its stumbles. He tells of books that he sold for a relatively small amount of money that soon after realized a much higher price. “Les

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Jeux de la poupée, the famous tortured-doll book by the Belgian surrealist Hans Bellmer,” was sold by McMurtry for $45, then sold by another for $120, and later was on sale for $5,000. Another time, a bookstore McMurtry managed acquires valuable historical letters that are likely stolen. The writer regales the reader with stories of the bookpeople he has known through the years: Dorman David (the acquirer of the shady letters), “who seemed to simply attract good things” (but was a poor businessperson Larry McMurtry won the Pulitzer Prize and eventually left the country to avoid bankfor his novel Lonesome Dove (1985) ruptcy); David’s mother (and McMurtry’s and was the screenwriter, with Diana early employer), Grace, a charming woman Ossana, of the 2005 film version of E. who had nineteen telephones in her home; Annie Proulx’s story “Brokeback Gershon Legman, mysterious scholar of erotMountain.” Several of his books have been made into films, including ica who hid his library of books, in a French Horseman, Pass By (1961, as Hud), Templar monastery, from McMurtry. While The Last Picture Show (1966), and the personalities are not always eccentric or Terms of Endearment (1975). offbeat, McMurtry shows them respect. McMurtry has written more than Perhaps some of the best stories involve the twenty novels, several screenplays, and bookshops, dozens of which McMurtry mencollections of essays. He operates a tions in passing: Lowdermilk’s in Washingmultilocation bookstore, Booked Up, in ton, D.C., the auction of whose books started Archer City, Texas. the original institution of McMurtry’s D.C. store; an unnamed bookshop whose proprietor slept in the store; another bookstore run by “a nice retired CIA man.” The stores are clearly characters in their own right, places that live and evolve with the acquisition and sale of libraries, stocks of other bookstores waning with the passage of time, the death of the booksellers, and the advent of online bookselling. McMurtry portrays the bookstores as organic, evolving entities. In many ways these moments in the memoir—in which McMurtry notes the passing of a long-lived or memorable bookstore or bookseller—become an elegy for a way of work and life now lost. These anecdotes are augmented by ones about the people who own and work in the stores and the varied customers who enter, with their diverse requests and reasons for seeking a particular book. The stories—small, intimate portraits of transactions with like-minded bookpeople—are perhaps not significant in themselves but in aggregate are quite telling. It is in the compilation that the memoir gains its force, the accretion of one story after another and one book after another. By the middle of the book the reader begins to share McMurtry’s quiet excitement over a good find, a good deal on a book, an interesting collector or bookseller. It is a quiet enthusiasm, but nonetheless a seductive one. Even so, this memoir does not follow a traditional linear structure, though the book

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does (generally) begin with McMurtry’s childhood and end with a list of the bookstores McMurtry dealt with that are now shadows of their former selves or gone altogether. This is an easy, but not typical, book to read. The chapters are quite short (109 chapters in a book less than 260 pages long), making the memoir much more a series of vignettes than a continuous narrative. This might be a problem for a reader expecting extended commentary on a particular book or character. (As McMurtry writes, “Here I am thirty-four chapters into a book that I hope will interest the general or common reader—and yet why should these readers be interested in the fact that in 1958 or so I paid Ted Brown $7.50 for a nice copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy?”) Books: A Memoir is essentially a ramble, a saunter, a serendipitous walk through McMurtry’s long experience with books. For example, the sixth chapter—less than two pages long—starts with a discussion of how McMurtry’s childhood isolation on a ranch shaped his reading, then mentions the Republic Pictures serials (with footnotes on books about them), and ends with a reflection on the persistence of the Yellow Peril fears of the early twentieth century. In addition, in chapter 5 the reader finds out why it is necessary to discover that McMurtry took Katherine Drew’s history class at Rice University (because, as he notes, McMurtry was helped in learning history by having read the World Book encyclopedia as a child). As a result, the book is quite informal, with a slightly desultory and laconic style, as if the chapters were preliminary notes for a more ambitious project or perhaps for a long essay rather than for a book-length study. Some chapters could be transcripts for a speech. To judge the book on this element alone, however, would not be completely fair. Indeed, this reads like a meandering walk through a large and diverse bookstore, where one finds by surprise books on one topic shelved with books on completely different topics (The Web site for McMurtry’s bookstore asserts that the books are arranged “whimsically”). This memoir, then, provides an effective metaphor for McMurtry’s life, engaging for readers who understand books not only as repositories of stories and information but also as mileposts of an individual’s intellectual progress and of a culture’s social and moral development. While this is no Education of Henry Adams (1918) in scope, it can certainly be said to be an “education of Larry McMurtry” and the beginning of an education for a booklover as well. Bob Whipple

Review Sources Booklist 104, nos. 19/20 (June 1, 2008): 28. The Christian Science Monitor, July 8, 2008, p. 13. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 10 (May 15, 2008): 58. Library Journal 133, no. 13 (August 15, 2008): 84. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 13 (August 14, 2008): 54-56. The New York Times Book Review, September 14, 2008, p. 31. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 21 (May 26, 2008): 54.

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THE BRASS VERDICT Author: Michael Connelly (1957) Publisher: Little, Brown (New York). 422 pp. $26.99 Type of work: Novel Time: The present Locale: The Los Angeles area Connelly’s two sleuths, defense attorney Michael Haller and police detective Harry Bosch, share the spotlight in this novel about the murder of a Hollywood mogul’s wife, her lover, and the film producer’s lawyer Principal characters: Michael Haller, a defense attorney, formerly a Los Angeles public defender Harry (Hieronymous) Bosch, a Los Angeles Police Department detective Walter Elliot, Hollywood film producer, on trial for murdering his wife and her lover Nina Albrecht, Elliot’s secretary and lover Mary Townes Holder, the chief judge and administrator of the Los Angeles Superior Court system Dennis (Cisco) Wojcichowski, a freelance investigator and Haller’s trusted legman

A distinguishing trait of Michael Connelly’s novels—starting with The Black Echo (1992) and continuing to The Overlook (2007)—is the deliberate manner with which he incrementally develops the character of his primary detective, so that Hieronymous Bosch is by the thirteenth book a more fully realized persona than is the norm for the mystery genre. Details of his checkered career with the Los Angeles Police Department, of his failed marriages and subsequent liaisons, of his difficult relationship with his daughter, of his efforts to resolve questions about his past, and of his passion for jazz loom large, albeit tangentially related to plot. In The Lincoln Lawyer (2005), Connelly introduced a new sleuth, defense attorney Michael Haller, who uses a Lincoln Town Car as his office and shares with Bosch an uneven career path, rocky relationships with women, and troubled parenting. Readers presumably will learn more about him in subsequent books. In The Brass Verdict, Haller’s second appearance, Connelly pits Bosch against Haller, a detective supporting the prosecution versus an attorney for the defense. Presenting them as adversaries adds texture to the narrative and makes ironic the eventual revelation that they are half-brothers, sons of the late J. Michael Haller, a famous criminal defense lawyer. Whereas the Bosch novels are police procedurals, the Haller books are primarily legal thrillers or procedurals, though written in the same gritty, realistic style. Almost a

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third of The Brass Verdict takes place in court, and the novel recalls Erle Stanley Gardner’s formulaic Perry Mason books, which also portray a defense attorney in battles of wit and will who occasionally twists the law in behalf of clients. Haller, who has been disciplined by the bar for questionable behavior, believes “a trial is a contest of lies” and offers this mantra at the beginning of the novel: “Cops lie. Lawyers lie. Witnesses lie. The victims lie.” Later he adds: “Clients lie. Even jurors Michael Connelly, a native of Florida, lie.” In sum, a courtroom lawyer cannot be has worked as a newspaper crime concerned only with innocence, guilt, or jus- reporter. The Black Echo (1992) tice but often must resort to connivance and received an Edgar Award for the best manipulation, which reinforces Haller’s cyni- first novel of the year, and he also has cal belief that he lives in a corrupt milieu. In received the Grand Prix Award the Bosch novels, wayward cops and other (France) and Anthony, Macavity, and rogue law enforcers are exposed; in The Brass Shamus prizes. In 2003-2004 he was Verdict, corruption in a court system is Con- president of the Mystery Writers of nelly’s focus, and he follows his standard nar- America. rative pattern of an apparently simple case unfolding into complexity as Haller pursues new leads. A present crime has its origin in an earlier one, past events provide clues to present motives and events, and exposure and unraveling threaten reputations, positions, and lives. The Brass Verdict (the title refers to a killing that comes down to simple street justice) starts with a reflective prologue about Haller as public defender beating attorney Jerry Vincent in a trial that ends the latter’s prosecutorial career. Fifteen years later, Vincent is a successful defense attorney whose current clients include Hollywood film producer Walter Elliot, who is charged with murdering his wife and her lover. While preparing his case, Vincent is killed, and Haller inherits his former rival’s practice, a timely windfall because Haller had not worked for two years while recovering from a gunshot wound (suffered at the end of The Lincoln Lawyer) and addiction to painkillers that required rehabilitation. While familiarizing himself with the complexities of the high-profile and lucrative Elliot case and dealing with other Vincent clients, Haller is distracted by death threats that murder-homicide detective Bosch investigates. The Elliot case is Connelly’s main plot, and though Vincent’s murder at first seems unrelated, its connection is apparent when the Federal Bureau of Investigation becomes involved. Beyond these plots is one involving another former Vincent client, Eli Wyms, a man who is apprehended during a shooting spree. A recurring Connelly device is to enrich his novels with seemingly irrelevant characters and incidents whose significance slowly emerges. The Wyms case is an example. Wondering why Vincent would take it pro bono and expend so much effort on it, Haller realizes that hapless Wyms’s troubles

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somehow may provide the “magic bullet,” key evidence Haller will spring upon the court at a crucial moment to clinch his victory. Elliot, who twelve years earlier had “traded in his wife for a newer model,” suspected she was having an affair with their German interior decorator and was concerned about her threat to divorce him. He says he discovered the pair’s bodies in his home and called 911, but because gunshot residue is on his hands and clothes, and he had motive and opportunity, the police arrest him. His position is tenuous (though no weapon has been found), but he is unconcerned about the possibility of a conviction and dismissive of Haller’s requests for cooperation. Frustrated, Haller says: “There’s something I don’t know about this case and you are holding back on it with me . . . . You are too confident . . . . It’s like ya know you are going to walk.” Much later Elliot tells Haller a story of his Florida past, including indebtedness to the mob, whom he says killed his wife so she would not get half his fortune. Haller’s skepticism increases, and when he threatens to quit the case, he describes Elliot’s reaction: “I saw his face grow tight with checked anger. In that moment, I knew he could be a killer, or at least someone who could order it done.” Albeit frustrated by an uncooperative client, Haller is a skilled courtroom advocate, deftly tailoring his querying of witnesses to lead the prosecution astray, such as when he wants to shift the opposing attorney’s attention from something. While preparing for his days in court, Haller also continues to review Vincent’s financial records and concludes that he transferred a large portion of Elliot’s advance to someone as a bribe and was killed because of it. Pressed, Elliot tells Haller that the trial is fixed, but with the understanding there would be no delays or continuances. When Vincent decided to delay the trial, he was murdered before filing a motion. Reviewing the possibilities, Haller realizes “that there was only one aspect that would change if the trial were delayed and rescheduled . . . the jury pool changes week to week.” Elliot tells Haller that Vincent was offered a chance to salt the jury, to empanel someone who would support the defense during deliberations and stand fast for acquittal, but the trial would have to remain on track to assure that the plan would work. Haller assumes that Vincent decided to ask for a continuance because he came across exculpatory evidence and thus did not need a fix. He already had the magic bullet. Haller, rusty from two years’ absence, has to juggle two demanding problems: getting his client acquitted and resolving the bribery matter. Central to both, apparently, is juror number seven, and Haller asks his private investigator Cisco to shadow this person and learn everything about him. In the event, the legman gets what his boss needs: A legitimate potential juror’s name and perhaps his summons were hijacked, and a ringer took his place. Connelly thus introduces another plot to his multiple narrative, further increasing the pressure on Haller, who is being stalked by a potential assassin, thinks the trial has been fixed by parties unknown, and has an uncooperative client who may be complicit in three murders. Nevertheless, he says, “I felt like a guy flipping a three-hundred-pound sled in midair. It might not be a sport but it was dangerous as hell and it did what I hadn’t been able to do in more than a year’s time. It shook off the rust and put the charge back in my blood.” So inspired, he is ready for the defense phase of the trial. Before the session begins, however, the judge calls

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Haller and the prosecutor into his chambers and shows them an anonymous letter: “Judge Stanton, you should know that juror number seven is not who you think he is and not who he says he is. Check Lockheed and check his prints. He’s got an arrest record.” Juror number seven, indeed a ringer, goes missing, but the judge decides to resume the trial with an alternate. When Haller informs him, “Elliot stiffened and looked like somebody had just pressed a letter opener two inches into his back . . . . I looked at the pleading look on my client’s face and realized he’d never had any faith in his own defense. He had been counting solely on the sleeping juror.” Haller’s first defense witness, a freelance videographer who responds to crime scene reports on police scanners, shows his video of Elliot’s arrest, focusing on the patrol car and Elliot in handcuffs. The second witness is the driver of the car that took crazed gunman Wyms to jail and confirms that his vehicle later transported Elliot. Haller is now ready to call his star witness, a forensics expert whose testimony is that the gunshot residue on Elliot’s hands and clothing was inconsistent with that which results from firing a weapon but rather was transferred by contact. In other words, Elliot was contaminated by residue in the vehicle that transported him. On the cusp of this success, Haller learns from Cisco that his contacts in Florida report that Elliot’s tale of being in thrall to the mob is a lie. Confronted, Elliot admits he cribbed his story from a rejected film script in order to light a fire under Haller, to “bring your best game” and be “goddamn relentless.” He then describes how he, with Nina Albrecht’s help, committed the double murder, taking care to wear gloves and to dispose of the gun, but never thinking of residue transference. When Haller asks him if he killed Vincent, he replies, “No, I didn’t. But it was a lucky break because I ended up with a better lawyer.” In a Connelly novel, prior to a plethora of rapidly moving events signaling the approaching conclusion, the detective usually is lured into a life-threatening trap. Indeed, Haller is ambushed at night by the phony juror (David McSweeney), but Bosch and FBI agents arrive at the crucial moment. To cap the evening, Bosch tells Haller that his client Elliot and Albrecht, his secretary and lover, were dead, probably killed by juror number seven, and that the judge would discharge the jury and end the trial. After that formality, Haller goes to Judge Holder’s chambers, tells her, “I know that you are for sale and that you tried to have me killed,” and presents his reconstruction of the events, including her sending McSweeney to kill Elliot and then him. She protests, but since McSweeney has sung, the judge and her lackeys are indicted for conspiracy to commit murder and corruption in plots spanning many years. Finally, Haller admits to Bosch that he sent the anonymous letter and thus “started this whole thing tumbling,” because he wanted McSweeney off the jury so he could “then win the case fair and square,” but did not expect the judge to consult with colleagues, including Holder, about the letter. Connelly spins yet another twist to the convoluted plot when Bosch tells Haller that McSweeney had killed only Vincent; the family of Mitzi Elliot’s murdered lover exacted their revenge by shooting Elliot and Albrecht and immediately returning to Germany. This unexpected Connelly fillip, which shocks Haller, is gratuitous and unnecessary, but regular readers have come to expect such last-minute surprises.

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Connelly’s novels, heavily promoted by his publisher and supported by his extensive tours, are best sellers worldwide because they are compellingly readable, even if he is not a skilled prose stylist. The first-person narrative voice of his sleuth always is flat and unchanging, and everyone else sounds the same, unlike the characters of Elmore Leonard, a master of realistic dialogue in whose novels everyone has a distinctive voice. However, Connelly’s complex plots invariably are page turners, sometimes with contrived denouements, but always with unexpected conclusions. Important, too, are Bosch and Haller, whose professional acumen trumps their flaws and who basically are likable men with whom the reader empathizes and looks forward to meeting again in a later novel. Gerald H. Strauss

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 22 (August 1, 2008): 5. Entertainment Weekly, October 17, 2008, p. 18. Library Journal 133, no. 14 (September 1, 2008): 114. The New York Times, October 13, 2008, p. 1. The New York Times Book Review, October 19, 2008, p. 30. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 33 (August 18, 2008): 38. The Wall Street Journal 252, no. 98 (October 24, 2008): A17.

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BREATH Author: Tim Winton (1960) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 218 pp. $23.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The late 1960’s and early 1970’s Locale: Sawyer, a small mill town near Angelus, on the western coast of Australia A coming-of-age story about a young man who learns about life and death from a guru surfer and his American wife Principal characters: Bruce Pike (“Pikelet”), adolescent boy who later becomes a paramedic Ivan Loon (“Loonie”), his reckless companion during adolescence Billy Sanderson (“Sando”), a mid-thirties ex-surfing champion Eva Sanderson, Sando’s wife, a twenty-five-year-old American skiing champion Queenie Cookson, a girl with whom Pikelet had a relationship in high school

Although many American readers may not be familiar with the fiction of Tim Winton, he is one of Australia’s most popular writers. His novel Cloudstreet (1991) topped the list of favorite books compiled by several thousand Australian radio listeners in 2002 and also by several hundred members of the Australian Society of Authors. His novel Dirt Music (2001) was third and fourth on the two lists, respectively. After publishing a well-received collection of short stories, The Turning (2004), Winton returns to the novel format. Breath is a traditional bildungsroman about the coming of age of a young man in a small town on the western coast of Australia in the early 1970’s. It begins with a brief account of the middle-aged protagonist Bruce Pike making an emergency call as a paramedic in an Australian city. Later, after Pike awakens from a dream of being underwater and seeing himself swimming down to rescue himself, he plays his didjeridu (an Australian wind instrument) and begins the story of his youth in Sawyer, a small mill town a few miles from the sea on the western coast of Australia. Pike is a solitary child with parents older than those of his friends; the only thing he excels at is swimming. He is eleven when he meets Ivan Loon, nicknamed Loonie, a twelve-year-old, who tricks people into thinking he is drowning in the river by holding his breath for a long time under water. On a dare, Pike, nicknamed Pikelet (little fish), proves he can hold his breath for a long time, also. Thus begins the central metaphor that gives the book its title and unifies it thematically. Loonie is an urchin, usually on his own, and given to taking chances, something

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that the more timid Pikelet yearns to emulate. The two boys fulfill their desire for risk one day when they bicycle to the ocean and watch a group of surfers. Although Pike says he could not have expressed it when he was a boy, he realizes now that what so fascinated him about surfing was seeing men do some thing beautiful, something pointless and elegant, that he had not seen before in the ordinary men, such as his father, in his hometown. The two boys become obsessed with surfing, chopping firewood to earn enough money to buy used surfboards and learning the sport by watching a group of surfers. They are just on the cusp of adolescence when they meet Billy Sanderson, nicknamed Sando, a surf bum who lets them leave their boards at his house on the beach. Winton’s most explicit statement of the novel’s unifying theme occurs when he shifts narrative perspective back to the adult Pike blowing on his didji, saying he has been thinking about the enigma of respiration as long as he can remember. He notes how funny it is that you never really think much about breathing, until it is all you ever think about. He remembers the birth of his two daughters and the moment after they are suctioned and draw their first breaths. He thinks about the rude shock of respiration, which in a moment or two becomes automatic, that is, until your first asthma attack or the first time you encounter a stranger trying to draw breath; then you can no longer take breathing for granted. When the novel shifts back to the primary time frame of Pike’s adolescence, he and Loonie practice holding their breath until they are so good at it that Pike thinks this is what sets them apart from everyone else. Pike’s relationship with Loonie is a combination of admiration and fear. Whereas Loonie hurls himself at the world like a madman, Pikelet cautiously holds back; Loonie fascinates Pikelet, but also exhausts him, making him glad sometimes to get back to the routine of school after their weekend trips to the beach, admitting that he likes the privacy of books. At the beginning of summer vacation, the two boys discover a box of magazines under Sando’s house filled with pictures and stories about his legendary surfing competitions. During the summer, Sando teaches them about surfing and shows them the riskiest places to surf, encouraging them to even more hero-worship, while Eva, Sando’s young American wife, seems only to tolerate them and scorn their idolatry of her husband. Related to the theme of breath in the book is the theme of taking risks, facing danger, something that Loonie embraces manically, but from which Pikelet holds back. In an interview, Winton has said that he intended Breath to be about how young people struggle to escape the ordinary, how they try to find a place for themselves by doing what others fear to do. However, Pike often wonders if their risk taking is nothing more than a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath. Breath is also about, Winton has said, how the sea can combine both dramatic wonder and soothing calm. Sando’s house is filled with books by Jack London, Joseph Conrad, and Herman Melville. Tim Winton is one of Australia’s bestknown writers. His novels The Riders (1994) and Dirt Music (2001) were short-listed for the Booker Prize. His novels Shallows (1984) and Cloudstreet (1991) won the Miles Franklin Award.

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The relationship between Pikelet and Loonie shifts as Sando first favors one and then the other. When Loonie is injured and cannot surf for a time, Sando goes surfing alone with Pikelet, making Loonie jealous. When Pikelet, recklessly encouraged by Sando, refuses to take a treacherous wave, he begins to wonder if he is indeed only ordinary. When Pikelet gets pneumonia, Sando takes Loonie to Indonesia to search for more dangerous waves. While they are gone, Pikelet, although he has a relationship with Queenie Cookson, a girl at his school, becomes sexually involved with Sando’s wife Eva, who seduces the boy in order to compete with her husband for his attention. Eva was once a famous skiing champion, until she made a bad landing; she now has a limp. While Sando goes out to face danger, she stays home alone, smoking pot and unable to take her own risks with death. She tells Pikelet that she misses being afraid. Winton’s risk-taking theme takes on a dangerous erotic element when Eva gets Pikelet to participate in her sexual thrill seeking with the use of a cellophane bag over her head so that she comes close to suffocation at the height of sexual pleasure. Winton’s twin themes of breath and death merge emphatically here. Pikelet, however, always the cautious one, only pretends to choke Eva, putting his fingers under the plastic bag to break the seal and blowing breath into her face while shouting at her. When Sando returns, Eva is pregnant and he assumes the baby is his. Loonie does not return; he is no doubt off to follow his own demons, chasing even more danger. Pikelet’s transformation into an adult—with the death of his father, with his marriage to a university teacher, with the birth of his two daughters, with his decision to come full circle from someone who teased death by holding his breath to a paramedic who often breathes life into others—takes place rather hurriedly in the last dozen pages of the novel. Pike later finds out that Billy Sanderson has become an investment guru and a motivational speaker. He reads a newspaper story about the death of Eva, who has been found hanging on a bathroom door of a hotel in Oregon with a belt around her neck. Later, after his divorce, he finds out that Loonie has been killed in a barroom shooting in Rosarito, Mexico.The novel ends with Pike in his late forties, visiting the town of Sawyer, taking his board down to the ocean, and enjoying for a few moments a sense of grace, of dancing on the waves. However, his final understanding is that there was something careless about Eva that he mistook for courage in the same way that he misread Sando’s vanity for wisdom. He now thinks that thriving on risk is a perverse effort to deal with what everyone is terrified of: that whatever life they are living is the only life they will have and that it will soon be over. Readers usually expect a coming-of-age story such as this one to come early in a writer’s life. Winton’s decision to write it midway through his career is probably due more to the thematic design he conceived for the novel than it is to personal experience, although he did indeed grow up in a small town on Australia’s western coast. This is not a rough-edged realistic account of the trials and adventures faced by a young boy as he tries to find a place for himself. Rather, this is a highly formalized, tightly structured literary novel that has the symbolic structure of a novella. It is not like Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861); it is more like Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (1924). Pikelet and Loonie are Jekyll and Hyde doubles, the mild side versus the wild side. Sando is a two-dimensional ex-hippie who reads Carlos Castenada,

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a self-styled wannabe epic hero, a mentor who tries to mold the lives of his young acolytes in his own image. Eva is the wounded woman who seduces the young protégé out of jealousy of his devotion to the bigger-than-life hero. What holds the novel together, other than the traditional plot structure of the initiation of a young man, is the thematic device suggested by the title—that breathing, the most essential human activity, is also the most unconscious and taken-for-granted ordinary activity. Consequently, to be able to manipulate breathing—by holding one’s breath, by putting a plastic bag over one’s head to come as close to death as possible—is a way to make the ordinary extraordinary. Winton makes surfing the medium by which the young men defy death in this novel because it carries with it a certain mystic aura. While dangerous in its defiance of nature, it is also delicate and beautiful, a human way to triumph over the chaotic and uncontrollable sea, to do something purely for its aesthetic form and its dangerous challenge. Winton presents these elements in a tight thematic pattern in which breath and breathing—from sleep apnea to erotic self-asphyxia—are described in a lyrical style that often exceeds his narrator’s linguistic ability, even if Pike does love books. Although Winton’s control of his material is unobtrusive enough that one could read this novel as a simple coming-of-age story, to do so would be to overlook all the work he has put into making it a lyrical bit of narrative poetry. Charles E. May

Review Sources The Economist 387 (April 26, 2008): 108. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 7 (April 1, 2008): 329. Library Journal 133, no. 7 (April 15, 2008): 78-79. Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2008, p. R2. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 13 (August 14, 2008): 28-29. The New York Times Book Review, June 8, 2008, p. 17. The New Yorker 84, no. 20 (July 7, 2008): 95. Outside 33, no. 7 (July, 2008): 34. Publishers Weekly 244, no. 14 (April 7, 2008): 40. The Spectator 307 (May 3, 2008): 36-37.

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BUT DIDN’T WE HAVE FUN? An Informal History of Baseball’s Pioneer Era, 1843-1870 Author: Peter Morris (1962) Publisher: Ivan R. Dee (Chicago). 286 pp. $27.50 Type of work: History Time: 1843-1870 Locale: The United States A comprehensive social history of baseball’s formative age when modern rules were codified and fraternal clubs such as New York’s Knickerbockers and Cincinnati’s Red Stockings began to employ professionals Principal personages: Daniel Adams, a founder of the Knickerbockers Jim Creighton, pitching sensation who died at age twenty-one Frank Pidgeon, a founder of Brooklyn’s Eckford Club Harry Wright, captain of the Cincinnati Red Stockings

The thesis of But Didn’t We Have Fun? is that the American national pastime originated in a variety of bat-and-ball games played by children and by amateur groups of adults for amusement and camaraderie. Peter Morris punctures a number of myths, among them that Abner Doubleday invented it all in Cooperstown, New York. Refuted also are assertions that baseball was a direct descendent of British rounders and that the Civil War boosted its popularity and augmented its dissemination (more important than soldiers as ambassadors were collegians in an era of unprecedented social mobility). Club teams withered away during the four years of carnage, and few veterans participated in the postwar boom because of wounds sustained, atrophied skills, or time-consuming adult responsibilities. Morris compares baseball’s forerunners to the many varieties of hide-and-seek or tag—whose informal guideposts changed depending on local customs, the nature of the playing field, and the number of participants. Whatever name they went by—barn ball, sock ball, patch ball, round ball—most employed a soft sphere thrown at runners to get them out, a practice commonly called soaking. In Connecticut, wicket was similar to the British cricket with bowlers, fielders, and batsmen. Round-town players in Virginia swung one-handed with a paddle. A writer described town ball in Cincinnati, Ohio: There were no basemen to whom the ball was thrown, but the sphere was hurled directly at the base-runner. As the excitement of the game intensified the ball began to be made harder and heavier to aid the throwing. This led to an unusual number of accidents, resulting from the players being hit by a too solid ball. It was this dangerous outgrowth of town-ball playing which first suggested to some Yankee mind (whom nobody knows) to put basemen on the bases and let the ball be thrown to them instead of at the runner.

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Fielders did not wear gloves, leading to telltale finger deformities. When four-foot stakes were used, runners ran around them in order to avoid injuries. This practice of not touching the bases continued even after flat stones and bags filled with sand or sawdust replaced the stakes. Sometimes two runs were credited if a batsman circled the bases and then made it safely to first again. Before pitchers became dominant, high scoring games of a hundred runs or more were not unusual. In 1845 members of New York’s Knickerbocker Club drew up twenty rules, many dealing with matters of etiquette and sportsmanship. The umpire’s role was twofold—to settle arguments pertaining to the rules and to record for posterity what happened. Often a local dignitary ensconced in an easy chair under an umbrella, he rarely injected himself in disputes on the field. Better positioned were the players themselves, who were expected to be fair and honorable. The infield was diamond-shaped, set at forty-two paces from first to third and home to second (in the 1850’s bases were designated to be placed ninety feet apart). Among the innovative rules were the abolition of soaking (or throwing at runners) and making two-strike foul balls do-overs rather than in play or strike three. A batter was out if a fielder caught the ball in the air or on first bounce. Though not set in stone, the number of players was customarily nine. In the infield were three basemen plus a shortstop, whose main function initially was to retrieve throws from outfielders. Widespread acceptance of these rules outside New York proceeded slowly. Following their 1856 publication in Porter’s Spirit of the Times, they gradually won wider acceptance. In 1858 Daniel Adams formed the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP), which adopted the Knickerbocker rules. The elimination of soaking allowed for a harder ball that traveled farther and made the game more exciting. As William A. Cochran wrote, the faculty at Wisconsin’s Beloit College was in heavy sympathy with the boys, and cheered them with their presence as well as by their voices. The grave, sedate, dignified President was an habitué of the ball ground, and it is reported that he would become so enthused at times that he would rise in his carriage and wave his silk hat, in a very dignified manner, to cheer the boys.

Sister sororities and other female spectators brought out the best in handsome New York shortstop Bernard Hanigan. He was so popular with “the belles of the village,” one wag remembered, that the Union Club of Morrisania attracted “a more numerous bevy of pretty girls at their matches” than any of their rivals. The lively, rubbery balls necessitated larger fields. Evicted from various Manhattan sites, the Knickerbockers discovered the aptly named Elysian Fields across the Hudson in Hoboken, New Jersey. In 1969 Boston aldermen banned baseball on the Commons, but a pro-ballplayer slate of candidates won eight of twelve contests in the ensuing election. Baseball returned to the Commons. Social clubs were commonly organized by occupation: milkmen, bartenders, firemen, attorneys, shipbuilders, government workers, and even clergymen. The sober photographs that have survived from that era only hint at the fun and esprit de corps that belonging to a team engendered. Baseball was often just one of the club’s recreational

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activities (cricket and harness racing were also popular). Rosters generally were open to all Peter Morris is the author of Baseball willing members. Exhibitions pitted bachelors Fever: Early Baseball in Michigan against married men, newcomers against old (2003), A Game of Inches: The Stories timers, corpulent “whales” against “shrimps,” Behind the Innovations That Shaped and so on. The Knickerbockers donned dis- Baseball (published in two volumes in tinctive team uniforms of white flannel shirts, 2006, The Game on the Field and The blue pantaloons, and straw hats, and the cus- Game Behind the Scenes), and Level Playing Field: How the tom spread (one photograph unearthed by Groundskeeping Murphy Brothers Morris even shows a team name, Union Club, Shaped Baseball (2007). He is a former displayed on bats). A ceremonial coin toss de- national and international Scrabble termined who batted first. In contrast to red champion. cricket spheres, balls were white (a symbol of purity), at least at the outset of a contest. A ball might last an entire game, or until somebody knocked its stuffing out. At first there was no standard size or regulation for the material used. Some had a bullet in the middle, others a sturgeon’s eye. A Boston player recalled: It was not difficult to procure an old rubber shoe for the foundation of a ball. Many a dear old grandma or auntie of today will remember having stockings and mittens being begged of them, which were knit at home by hand, to be unraveled for ball stock. When leather was not to be had, a cheap and easy way to cover a ball was with twine in a lock stitch, called quilting.

Etiquette dictated that onlookers cheer good plays for both sides and only hiss at demonstrations of poor sportsmanship. Processions to the field featured the singing of club songs. Rivals, victors and vanquished, gave three cheers for opponents at game’s end. At the customary post-game banquet, the defeated team’s captain presented the ball (or a clean replica) with names, score, and date duly recorded. Barnstorming tours by the Excelsiors of Brooklyn (1859-1860) and the Washington’s National Club (1866-1867) spread these ceremonies. A player on a Kalamazoo, Michigan, team recalled: When we went to an outside town to play we paid our own expenses. There was no admission fee charged. I remember the first game we played with Jackson. We played for the supper and we also paid for the supper. But it was a good one, I tell you. They had to play hard to win and they deserved a good meal.

Inevitably, with civic pride at stake during the proliferating intercity competition, regional challenges, and tournaments (some taking place at county or state fairs), the competitive drive threatened cherished customs. Bunting, once not considered a sporting method of reaching base, became more common. So did intentionally trapping the ball to turn, in modern parlance, a double play. Lamentably, the honor system crumbled. Increasingly, umpires were called upon to render judgment calls. Some

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batsmen waited interminably for a good pitch, necessitating rules for called strikes and eventually balls. The NABBP discontinued the one-bounce rule, deeming it to be a vestige of child’s play. Aggressive social organizations lured “stars” with job offers or emoluments under the table even when, as in the case of Patsy Dockney, they had a reputation for carousing and public drunkenness. In 1858 promoters of a contest featuring all-stars from New York and Brooklyn charged admission. The following year, Jim Creighton, whose underhand motion made him the nation’s first formidable pitcher, jumped to the Excelsiors. By 1868 the proliferating practice of “revolving” (switching teams) undermined club allegiance. Philadelphia’s Keystone Club lost several mainstays after veteran Fergy Malone joined the cross-town Athletics, a team that defeated a Pottsville nine 107-2 (Jimmy Foran made all three outs in the initial inning, the first two in the second, then quit in humiliation). It became impractical for those with legitimate jobs to play multiple games a week or go on tour. In St. Louis, the Union and Empire clubs strove to remain nonprofessional, but they were no match for visiting squads until they upgraded their roster with semi-pros. In Cincinnati, six thousand fans watched the Buckeyes square off against the Red Stockings, and rumors abounded that gamblers had enticed a few players into throwing the game. In 1869, bowing to the inevitable, the NABBP permitted payment to team members. That year Harry Wright’s Red Stockings toured extensively and enjoyed an undefeated season. By the following spring, the team had disbanded, a casualty of budget tightening, alleged boorishness (one player entered a tavern in uniform), and unexpected setbacks from rivals who outbid them for talented “revolvers.” Reacting against the trend toward professionalism, organizations staged “muffin” games where the score took a back seat to food, spirits, silliness, and general merriment. Morris labeled them a parody of the excesses besetting the game and a reminder to Americans that baseball was meant to be fun. Though the amateur tradition came to encompass industrial leagues, school curricula, and church teams, the “muffin” tradition survived in “donkey ball,” where players sat atop four-legged animals, and, more important, in pickup games all around the world. Morris uses a plethora of primary source quotes. The best capture charmingly the flavor of a bygone era. Smoky Joe Wood, for instance, recalls playing for his hometown of Ness City, Kansas. The ballgame between two rival towns was a big event then, with parades before the game and everything. The smaller the town, the more important their ballclub was. A team that beat a bigger town would practically be handed the keys to the city. For players who lost a game by making an error in the ninth inning, the best thing to do was hit the road, because the town would never let them forget it.

James B. Lane

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Review Sources Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 4 (February 15, 2008): 186. Library Journal 133, no. 2 (February 1, 2008): 77. The New York Times Book Review, April 6, 2008, p. 6. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 43 (October 29, 2007): 38. The Washington Post Book World, April 6, 2006, p. BW16.

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CALLED OUT OF DARKNESS A Spiritual Confession Author: Anne Rice (1941) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 245 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Memoir, religion Time: 1941-2008 Locale: New Orleans, Dallas, and San Francisco Rice traces her journey from Catholic believer to atheist to committed Christian in this account of spiritual and literary transformation In October, 2004, Anne Rice shocked her legions of loyal readers by announcing that she would never again pen the American gothic novels that had catapulted her to the top of best-seller lists. Proclaiming that she had renewed her commitment to Jesus Christ and returned to the Catholic faith of her childhood, she insisted that she would write “only for the Lord.” At the time of her announcement, she had published twenty books that had dealt with the supernatural, beginning with Interview with the Vampire, which appeared in 1976. The main character, Lestat de Lioncourt, a French nobleman who became a vampire in the eighteenth century, rivaled Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula in fame, and to the delight of Rice’s adoring fans, he appeared in subsequent books of the Vampire Chronicles series. In addition to writing about vampires, witches, mummies, and other beings of the occult, Rice wrote adult and erotic fiction under the pseudonyms Anne Rampling and A. N. Roquelaure. She is one of the most popular authors in modern history, and more than one hundred million copies of her novels have been sold. Several of her books have been adapted for film, television, and the stage and have also inspired musical compositions by various artists. In spite of warnings that she was committing career suicide, Rice kept her promise to confine her writing to Christian-themed books. In 2005, she published Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, the first in a trilogy of novels based on the life of Jesus. Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, the second in the series, appeared in 2008. Well received by critics, the books were lauded for vivid, well-researched, and reverent portrayals of Jesus. While hardcore fans of Rice’s vampire stories were dismayed by the new direction that her writing had taken, spiritually inclined readers were intrigued. Both groups, however, asked the same question. How could a renowned writer of best-selling gothic novels renounce the genre that made her career and become a committed Christian who writes only for God? Rice attempts to answer this question in Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession. Reflecting on her life and work, Rice chronicles her Catholic upbringing, a thirty-eight-year detour through atheism, and a return to her Catholic faith at age fifty-seven in 1998.

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Rice lays the foundation of her account by offering a lengthy retrospective of the ways in which her Catholic faith suffused her childhood. Born into a devout Irish Catholic family in New Orleans, Louisiana, she grew up in an all-white neighborhood. Her neighbors and extended family were all Catholics. Her father went to seminary briefly but left and eventually became a postal worker. She had two aunts who were nuns. Her mother, who became an alcoholic after Rice’s grandmother’s death, made sure her two daughters and son were grounded in Catholicism. Steeped in the trappings and practices of her faith, Rice was a faithful churchgoer until the age of seventeen. She describes in detail the churches where she worshiped and the feast days that were so much a part of church life. However, it is the pageantry of the mass that most captivated her: Daily mass was extremely interesting because the priest wore vestments of watered taffeta with thick embroidery, and even the altar boy wore a lovely white lace-trimmed surplice over his black robe. The priest said the Mass in Latin, facing away from us, and moved back and forth across the altar as he consulted an enormous book. The altar boy rang small golden bells at the moment of the Consecration when the priest spoke in Latin the words of our Lord from the last Supper, “This is my body . . . This is my blood.” . . . Our feelings were those of immense gratitude and wonder. We believed in this miracle as we believed that streetcars passed our house, or that rain fell in great soft glimmering sheets in the afternoons.

Her evocative descriptions open a window on the brand of Catholicism practiced in the 1940’s and 1950’s that may seem foreign to young contemporary Catholics of the early twenty-first century, who have been raised in the wake of the sweeping changes of Vatican II. The Latin mass, rich vestments, and ornate churches reflected an almost magical world where the authority of priests and nuns was trusted and unquestioned. In fact, Rice notes that not even a whisper of scandal touched the religious of her day, and any allegations of priests engaging in pedophilia or other misbehavior were unheard of. Rice’s memories of this early period of her life exude the rosy glow of nostalgia and reflect a Anne Rice is the best-selling author of world that is sheltered from everything by the twenty-eight books, including Interview comforting yet dominant influence of Mother with the Vampire (1976), The Queen of the Damned (1988), Memnoch the Church. Devil (1995), Blackwood Farm (2002), Rice notes that one reason the church had Blood Canticle (2003), Christ the Lord: such a strong hold on her young imagination Out of Egypt (2005), and Christ the was because “[i]ntermingled with my religious Lord: The Road to Cana (2008). A experiences at this time were preliterate aes- native of New Orleans, Louisiana, she thetic experiences which left a lasting mark.” resides in Rancho Mirage, California. Her mother and father encouraged their chil-

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dren to appreciate and participate in the arts. Their mother often took Anne and her sister, Alice, who also became a noted writer, to museums and the theater. Rice accompanied her father, also a writer, to the library. Oddly for a future author, words did not hold as much appeal for the young Rice as did artwork and images. Reading was difficult for her, and she claims that “[w]hen I went to school and began to read, I lost an immense world of image, color, and intricate connections.” Her aversion to reading continued until she attended Texas Women’s University in Denton, Texas. There she was no longer constrained by the banned-books policy of the Roman Catholic Church. Instead, works by Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Immanuel Kant beckoned her from the library shelves. Her intellectual and psychological awakening, however, did not stop at the library door. She notes, “It was the modern world—wanting to know the great incidents and heroes and heroines of the world . . . that caused me to leave the church.” Other reasons contributed to her eroding faith—her mother’s death from alcoholism, her father’s remarriage to a woman who was a Baptist, her family’s removal from the insulated life of the Catholic community in New Orleans to the unfamiliar secular environment of Texas, her awakening sexuality, and the fact that she was “growing up.” She acknowledges that, little by little, her faith began to “crack apart,” yet there was a defining moment when she abandoned belief. During a conversation with a priest, he insisted that because of her strong Catholic upbringing she could never turn her back on the church. His comment struck a raw nerve and, as she tells it, she “was no longer a Catholic when I left the room.” She did not return to the church for thirty-eight years. Although Rice makes plain why she left the church, it is less clear why she reembraced faith after such a long absence. The fact that she and her husband returned to New Orleans to live in 1988 may have had a psychological and spiritual influence. Members of her family and the Catholic community in which she had spent her childhood were still there, but the church of the 1980’s and 1990’s was not the same institution she had left nearly four decades before. She observes that the Catholic attitude toward marriage was more relaxed and that separations and divorces were more accepted, Catholic couples were no longer having so many children, and views on sex were no longer as rigid. The ceremonies of the church changed as well, and Rice remarks that she “mourned” the passing of the Latin mass. Although Rice approved of many of these changes, they also caught her off guard. Her comments about returning to New Orleans and finding the Catholic Church transformed may surprise readers. She maintains that she knew nothing of the changes precipitated by Vatican II—an odd claim since even atheists would have been aware of the extensive media reports of the council held between 1962 and 1965. She was also largely unaware of the social upheaval of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Again her attitude is surprising because at the time she was living with her husband on Haight Street in San Francisco in the middle of a hippie enclave. By her own admission, she writes that she “drifted through the contemporary world, blind as usual to what was happening politically and religiously.” One wonders how she could have been so detached from current events in such a turbulent time. As disconnected as she was from the occurrences that were shaping society, she

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was growing more deeply connected to God. Lacking conscious awareness of the process of her reconversion, she drifted unknowingly toward faith. While an atheist, she began to collect religious artifacts and, when visiting other countries, was drawn toward churches and cathedrals. When she and Stan traveled to Jerusalem, the land where Christ had walked captivated her, and later she began obsessively to read books about Jesus. A trip to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was the fulfillment of a long-held dream where she saw the “great statue of Jesus Christ with his arms outstretched.” Echoing Flannery O’Connor, she describes herself as “Christ haunted” during these years of searching. Finally, on December 7, 1998, she surrendered to God. Perhaps the most exuberant and passionate chapter of Rice’s “confession” is the one that she opens with the question “What happens with faith returns?” Her profound love for God is apparent when she proclaims joyously that: I didn’t care about the framing of the doctrine. I cared about Him. And He was calling me back through His Presence on the altar. He might have used the falling rain to call me back; He might have used the music of Vivaldi. He might have used the statue of Christ and Francis that was on my desk. But, no, He used the doctrine of the Real Presence.

Her years of doubts and searching were over, and Rice began to disentangle herself from her literary legacy of vampires and witches in order to dedicate her talents completely to God. It seems that the priest who told her that she would never really leave the church behind was right after all. Thirty-eight years of unbelief could not erase the imprint the strong faith of her childhood had left on her heart and soul. In the introduction to her spiritual memoir, Rice notes that “I want to tell as simply as I can—and nothing with me as a writer is ever really simple—the story of how I made my decision of the heart.” Although she lacks the scholarly precision of a Kathleen Norris or the grittiness of an Anne Lamott, Rice does tell her story with beautiful simplicity and engaging honesty. With the exception of her curious tendency to gloss over life-changing events, such as the death of her daughter, Michele, at age six, and the death of her beloved husband, she offers a transparent account of her spiritual journey. Interested readers should be satisfied with Rice’s answer to the question “Why did you reconvert to Christianity?”—and find much inspiration as well. Pegge Bochynski

Review Sources America 199, no. 18 (December 1, 2008): 34-35. Booklist 104, no. 22 (August 1, 2008): 2. Elle 24, no. 2 (October, 2008): 316. Kirkus Reviews, 76, no. 15 (August 1, 2008): 78. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 37 (September 15, 2008): 62. Vanity Fair, no. 578 (October, 2008): 164.

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CAPITOL MEN The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen Author: Philip Dray (1959) Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (Boston). 463 pp. $30.00 Type of work: History Time: 1865-1877 Locale: Washington, D.C.; the post-Civil War Southern states; Kansas A study of the Reconstruction of the American South with emphasis on the contributions of black congressmen and other black officials Principal personages: Blanche K. Bruce, Mississippi senator Richard (Daddy) Cain, South Carolina clergyman and congressman Frederick Douglass, former slave and champion of black congressmen Robert Brown Elliott, lawyer and South Carolina congressman Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, Louisiana senator and acting governor Joseph H. Rainey, South Carolina congressman Hiram Rhodes Revels, Mississippi senator Robert Smalls, South Carolina congressman George H. White, North Carolina congressman, the last black member from Reconstruction Ulysses S. Grant, president of the United States through much of Reconstruction

Philip Dray begins Capitol Men, his study of Reconstruction, with an adventure in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. It occurred one year after a more famous incident that happened nearby: the surrender of Fort Sumter to Southern secessionist forces. The mulatto pilot of a Confederate transfer ship, the Planter, stole the vessel and delivered his own family and a small group of runaways and slave crewmen to the Onward, a Union ship blockading the harbor. This daring accomplishment was a demonstration—one of many in Dray’s book—of the courage, initiative, and resourcefulness often displayed by slaves that generations of slavemasters had not been able to acknowledge. The leader of this group was Robert Smalls, the son of a slave woman who lived at Beaufort on one of the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast and a white man who was either her white master or a Charleston merchant. Union naval forces had attacked the Sea Islands the preceding November, but the Confederates had not tried to defend them, and plantation owners quickly vacated, leaving behind their homes and their slaves. During the spring of 1862, when Smalls

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performed his naval theft, Northern abolition ists, sensing a gold opportunity to demon- Philip Dray won the Robert F. Kennedy strate that slaves could be their own masters, Book Award and the Southern Book descended on the islands, and a new era began Critics Circle Award for At the Hands for these people. The Port Royal experiment, of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of as it was called, was not an easy adjustment, Black America (2003). The book was but it raised the question of possibilities for also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. further confiscation of land formerly owned by whites. These possibilities turned out to be minimal. Even observers sympathetic to African Americans wondered whether former slaves, free after the war, had the capacity to function as the citizens they became by virtue of Article 14 of the Constitution in 1868. To the surprise of many, and to the horror of many white Southerners, the new citizens showed that, given the chance, they could. Consequently, the promises of Article 14 and Article 15, passed two years later, were successfully undermined, and black Americans generally, and in the South particularly, had to face another century of cursorily limited citizenship. In this book, Dray shows the accomplishments of black men who, in the process of serving the Union, unleashed a retaliation by the South and the resignation of the North to that retaliation. He explains why, despite the efforts of black Americans and those of their supporters, Reconstruction failed. Plantation owners, committed to their ingrained notion of the basic inferiority of blacks, had no desire to see their former slaves become their congressmen. In states with large black populations, whites began to learn, if not to admit, that blacks were far abler than their former masters supposed. The whites also feared retaliation in states with proportionately large black populations such as South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi, although credible evidence of such a desire or goal is lacking. The movement was sabotaged in the South, federal support declined, and blacks saw their hopes dashed. From 1901, when Robert H. White, who had long outlasted the other black congressmen, finished his term, until 1973, when Andrew Young and Barbara Jordan took office, no African American held a seat in Congress. Dray’s contribution to the study of Reconstruction focuses on the achievements of black legislators, but for the most part he has organized his material topically. To assess several of these men, the reader must dip into the various chapters. Two early chapters, however, are named for two of the most colorful of the “capitol men,” “Daddy” Cain of South Carolina and P. B. S. Pinchback of Louisiana. Cain, a freeborn man originally from Virginia, pursued the goal of devising a mechanism by which blacks might obtain land in South Carolina; the measure of his qualified success, however, is found only in the book’s final chapter. Pinchback, another Virginian and the child of a slave woman and her white master, pops up in Dray’s book several times as Louisiana state senator, lieutenant governor (and, for a few weeks, acting governor), appointed U.S. senator, and elected member of the House of Representatives. During the Civil War, the light-colored Pinchback, who could pass for white, was a steward on a Mississippi River steamboat. He saw no

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future opportunity there, abandoned ship for military service in the Union Army in New Orleans, met equally discouraging results there, ran for the Louisiana state senate, apparently lost to a white opponent, charged election fraud, and was awarded the seat by the state commission on elections. Then he managed to participate in a gunfight with another mulatto on Canal Street in New Orleans and was arrested, although he and his opponent were soon freed. Despite the turbulence of his personal life, Pinchback demonstrated a talent for promoting civil rights. He argued successfully for a bill that fined any steamboat master or hotel manager who refused accommodations because of a person’s race. The bill passed—but it was not enforced. While Mississippi strove to regain admission to the Union, its considerable black population was able to secure one senatorial seat for a black man. That man was Hiram Rhodes Revels, from a free black family in North Carolina. Educated for the ministry in the North, he served as a missionary in Kansas and as a chaplain to a black Civil War regiment in Maryland. As a consequence of his enlistment in the Freedmen’s Bureau, he found himself in Mississippi, the state legislature’s choice to hold the same seat in the United States Senate which Jefferson Davis had abandoned in 1861 to become president of the Confederacy. In his maiden speech Revels opposed the readmission of Georgia, where, two years earlier, whites had impelled the removal of thirty-two elected black state legislators from office. This speech helped to generate an outcry that resulted in the reinstitution of a federal military governor in Georgia and the subsequent reinstatement of the blacks. A few months later Georgia was back in the Union. Revels favored a conciliatory approach toward former secessionist officials. He spoke in favor of amnesty for these men as a gesture toward the racial harmony for which he held high hopes. Believing Mississippi to be “well reconstructed,” he thereby gained favor with whites in the North who shared—or hoped to share—his optimism, but he displeased many blacks who tended to support disenfranchisement of these officials. Like Cain, Robert Brown Elliott showed no trace of white ancestry. Even Henry Ward Beecher, a famous preacher with an abolitionist background and brother of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) author Harriet Beecher Stowe, saw danger in a strong influence of “unmixed Africans.” When Elliott came to Congress from South Carolina in 1871, he presented a puzzle. His origins were unclear, but he could speak French and Spanish and quote the classics. Here was a decidedly black man with a keen mind and oratorical ability which could not be attributed to miscegenation. He leaped capably into the struggle for the Ku Klux Klan Act, opposed by some Northern representatives who considered that the states should maintain themselves against the racial outrages of the Klan. Elliot could argue tactfully in the legislature, but he knew how to fight for his rights. He resisted—and sometimes won—when refused service by railroad, hotel, and restaurant managers at a time when even the long-famous Frederick Douglass often had to endure their slights. Elliott and another black South Carolina congressman, Joseph Rainey, were called on to defend residents of Hamburg, a small black village where an ugly racial incident began on the hundredth anniversary of the nation’s independence, July 4, 1876, when

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white officials confronted a black militia group attempting to parade during the celebration. The death of a white rifle club member from the nearby city of Augusta set off a barrage of killing of blacks and mutilation of their bodies. Rainey made a powerful speech in Congress to the effect that blacks were becoming “vassals and slaves again.” He was very nearly correct. The inauguration of President Rutherford B. Hayes after his much-disputed victory over Samuel Tilden in the centennial year election of 1876 is often regarded as a marker of the end of Reconstruction. Along with the Republican Hayes, the nation received a tide of new Democrats in the House of Representatives. In withdrawing federal troops from the South, Hayes was acknowledging the changing mood of the nation. Even some of the black legislators were conceding that the Southern white reaction against Reconstruction was reaching a point too dangerous to blacks to justify continuing an expensive and discouragingly futile effort. Black leaders often expressed sharply contrasting opinions on what was good for members of their race. Some thought that as white Southern resistance to Reconstruction swelled and as the reluctance of the federal government to support it increased, hope for future prosperity might lay in the west. Kansas became the favorite destination in the period from 1878 to 1880. The weather was more moderate, the land was well watered and yet clear of swamps, and a network of roads and railroads was growing. Rainey and Douglass saw merit in what became known as the Exoduster Movement, but Senator Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi thought otherwise. Bruce, a mulatto native of Virginia who had been educated alongside his white half-brother and later had lived in Missouri, Kansas, and Ohio before settling in Mississippi, considered that blacks were by nature “unmigratory.” Not only were they better suited to the South, a mass movement out of the South would threaten the livelihood of those who remained. Bruce also led a congressional inquiry into the harassment of a black cadet at West Point. The case traveled to the West Point supervisor, the commander of the Army, and finally to President Hayes, but the cadet, Johnson Whittaker, was judged a liar and a coward and thrown out of the institution. The best efforts of black legislators often ended in such discouraging ways. One challenge on which Rainey and Bruce worked together was an attempt to save the constituents of a failed enterprise, the Freedman’s Saving and Trust Company, formed to encourage savings among former slaves who were now wage earners. The bank prospered for a few years but made some risky loans and was devastated by the financial panic that struck in 1873. Continuing efforts by the two legislators and by Douglass, who had enthusiastically backed the idea of the bank from the beginning, got nowhere. Dray’s book ends, as it began, with Smalls. A story still told in Beaufort, South Carolina, relates that after the war Smalls took in the wife of his former master, poor and disoriented. She apparently did not know that the Civil War and slavery had ended and that her former slave had served in Congress and had met with President Abraham Lincoln. Reportedly, she stayed with him until her death. Robert P. Ellis

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Review Sources Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 15 (August 1, 2008): 116. Library Journal 133, no. 12 (July 1, 2008): 92-93. The Nation 287, no. 14 (November 3, 2008): 30-33. The New York Times Book Review, September 28, 2008, p. 20. The New Yorker 84, no. 32 (October 13, 2008): 145. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 24 (June 16, 2008): 40. The Washington Post Book World, September 21, 2008, p. BW04.

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CHRONICLES OF MY LIFE An American in the Heart of Japan Author: Donald Keene (1922) Publisher: Columbia University Press (New York). 208 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Autobiography Time: 1930-2006 Locale: Japan, New York City, Cambridge, Massachusetts An autobiography concentrating primarily on Keene’s early interest in the Orient, his specialization in Japanese, his role as a translator in World War II, his education at Columbia, Harvard, and Cambridge, his association with Japanese writers and playwrights, as well as his discussion of some of the many books he published Principal personages: Donald Keene, the author, an expert in Japanese life and literature Abe Kfbf, close friend of Keene, a major novelist and playwright Arthur Waley, translator of Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (c. 1004) and the person who inspired Keene’s work Serge Elisséeff, Harvard professor who became Keene’s model of how not to teach Tsunoda RyNsaka, Keene’s first teacher in Japanese classes at Columbia and reader for his master’s and Ph.D. Nagai Michio, Keene’s closest friend in Japan Mishima Yukio, Keene’s friend, who was a celebrated Japanese writer and reactionary activist who committed suicide Lee, Columbia classmate who interested Keene in Chinese characters, which were the basis for his study of Japanese Jack Kerr, Columbia classmate with whom Keene studied Japanese during a summer in North Carolina

Donald Keene’s autobiography, which contains some material already covered in his earlier memoir, On Familiar Terms (1994), is essentially the story of how a young American boy became infatuated with the Orient and eventually became a noted scholar who wrote books, translated the work of outstanding Japanese writers, and anthologized the major works of Japanese literature. This is not a coming-of-age story in the usual sense; it is about the making of a scholar. Keene reveals little about his childhood, which he sees as unremarkable. The family had financial problems; his parents quarreled much of the time (they were divorced when Keene was fifteen); and he was an “outsider,” an unathletic, unpopular boy whose hobby was collecting stamps and whose only friends were other stamp-collecting “nerds.” The highlight of his youth was a trip he took when he was nine to Europe with his father. In Paris he attended an

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international exhibition, where he visited the Indo-Chinese pavilion and had his first experience with foreign food: being served a fish with its head still attached. He also fell in love with the French language and eventually became fluent in it. Throughout his public school education, he was the best student in his class and skipped two grades without difficulty. Being smaller and younger than his classmates, he compensated for his lack of athletic ability by excelling in literary studies: He edited the high school magazine, for which he wrote several stories, and he wrote the school plays. Thanks to the assistance of Miss Tannenbaum, his English teacher, he won a Pulitzer Scholarship to Columbia University, which he entered when he was just sixteen, two years younger than his classmates. His Columbia experience shaped the rest of his life. Acting on Miss Tannenbaum’s advice, he studied Greek and Latin and took a course in the humanities. His teacher was Mark Van Doren, whose teaching strategy he eventually adopted as a model. Fortuitously, in Van Doren’s class, he was seated alphabetically next to a Chinese American named Lee, who whetted his interest in Oriental languages by teaching him Chinese characters. He and Lee ate lunch together every day, and Keene also took a lesson once a week with him. By this time, World War II had begun, and Keene, a pacifist, describes himself as torn between his hatred of war and of the Nazis. At a bookstore, he saw Arthur Waley’s translation of the Japanese work The Tale of Genji, which he purchased for forty-nine cents. He said of the book that it became “a refuge from all I hated in the world around me.” Despite his dislike of the militaristic Japanese, he responded favorably to an invitation from Jack Kerr, and he, Kerr, and Paul Baum spent a summer studying Japanese with Inomata Tadashi. Keene’s knowledge of Chinese characters helped him learn Japanese. On Kerr’s recommendation, he took a class in Japanese thought from Tsunoda Rynsaka, who later helped him with his graduate degrees. He was at first the only one in the class, but two other students, one of whom was Baum, enrolled later. Keene’s studies at Columbia were interrupted by the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Rynsaka was briefly interned as a suspected spy, but he was soon released. Lee went into hiding for a while because he feared violent retaliation because of his ancestry. Keene applied and was accepted to the Navy Japanese Language School at the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied for eleven months before graduating (as valedictorian) and beginning his duties in the Pacific, first at Pearl Harbor, where he translated captured Japanese documents, and then in the Aleutian Islands, where the Americans were retaking islands held by the Japanese. He then went to Hawaii, where he continued his study of Japanese, and he spent the rest of the war on Okinawa.

The Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, Donald Keene has written more than thirty books, among them Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World (2005), an anthology of Japanese literature, and the definitive multivolume history of Japanese literature. He has also served as guest editor of Asahi and has lectured at many institutions, including Harvard and Cambridge universities.

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After the war Keene was sent not to Japan, but to China, where he interviewed and read the diaries of Japanese prisoners held in China. Upset by the rampant corruption in China, especially with the conduct of the war crimes investigation, he asked to be transferred. Although he was supposed to return to Hawaii, he went to Japan, where he attempted to find the families of the Japanese prisoners he had met in China. He finally returned to Hawaii, then moved to the United States, where he resumed his studies at Columbia under Rynsaka. Keene wrote his master’s thesis on Honda Toshiaki and his dissertation on Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s Kokusenya kassen (pr. 1715; The Battles of Coxinga, 1951), both of which he had studied with Rynsaka. In six months Keene became fluent in Chinese, and in 1947 he decided to switch to Harvard University to continue his study of Japanese, to which he felt more “temperamentally suited.” Unfortunately, Serge Elisséeff, the professor Kene left Columbia to study under, proved to be a disappointment, not only in what Japanese he knew but also in the way he lectured, reading from notes. His teaching style became the model of what not to do. Keene wanted to “pass on my enthusiasm, my love for Japanese literature, not to relay facts that could easily be found in books.” So when he received a Henry Fellowship to Cambridge University, he gladly accepted and finished his degree there, after taking some time off to visit Italy, where his only draft of his dissertation was stolen, and he had to rewrite it. While at Cambridge, Keene taught a course in Japanese conversation and met Bertrand Russell, E. M. Forster, and Arthur Waley, whom he tried to emulate. In his spare time Keene visited London, where he indulged his passion for opera. He especially loved Norma (1831), with Maria Callas in the title role, and he acknowledged that of all drama opera was his favorite. He then returned to Columbia, where every year he was able to spend his summer vacations visiting Japan, immersing himself in Japanese culture. He translated Japanese poetry (one of his translations is included as well as his comments on the problems of translation); published essays on bunraku and nf, two types of drama; studied singing in Japanese; acted in kyfgen (comic drama); began his history of Japanese literature; and wrote for the journal Asahi (for which he eventually became a guest editor). During the 1960’s he also developed friendships with many Japanese writers, including Michio Ngai, Kfbf Abe, and Yukio Mishima. For the next twenty years Keene continued publishing books, winning prizes (the Kikuchi Prize) and honors (a Doctor of Letters degree from Cambridge in 1991), and becoming embroiled in the awarding of international literary prizes, notably the Formentor and the Nobel Prize. After his retirement at age seventy in 1992, he received the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and continued writing books, among them the highly acclaimed biography of Emperor Meiji, greatest of the Japanese monarchs. In addition to his discussion of his travels, his writings, and his friendships, Keene includes interesting anecdotes, among them his meetings with Yoko Ono and Greta Garbo. Among the most fascinating episodes are the political machinations involved in the selection of the recipients of prestigious literary awards and his travels in Indonesia and Cambodia. Interspersed throughout the book are Keene’s opinions about French opera (a real passion), Japanese architecture (he explains how the design of a

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room reflects Japanese cultural traditions), the growing acceptance of Japanese writing into world literature, and the role of bicycles at Cambridge. Lightening the text, which can hardly be described as self-deprecating, are the humorous, whimsical drawings of Akira Yamaguchi and one photograph, among all the staged photos of literary giants, of a young Keene performing the role of Tarf Kaja in the traditional comic drama Chidori (plovers or gulls) in 1956. In its focus on his academic life as a Japanese scholar and his emotional, physical, and cultural movement from the United States to Japan (“The center of my world has moved to Japan”), Keene’s autobiography omits his personal life, except for a brief mention of his father, who was included perhaps because he took Keene with him on a lengthy trip, which whetted his interest in travel and other cultures. He mentions several male friends, but there does not seem to be much “depth” in their relationships, which consist mainly of academic discussions and a great deal of drinking. When one relationship seems to be moving in an intimate direction, Keene seems skittish, and the relationship remains at the cordial level. He does mention Russell asking him if he had had a love affair and adding that he would not be shocked if he had not, but Keene does not include his answer. In fact, “relationships” may not be the right term to describe his dealings with people. Reflections, not emotions, are the “stuff” of this memoir. (Ironically, the hero of Keene’s treasured The Tale of Genji is a man who does have emotions and seems the opposite of Keene.) The book is interesting to academicians, but there is too little of the “human” element to engage the general reader. Thomas L. Erskine

Review Sources Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 3 (February 1, 2008): 133. The Times Literary Supplement, May 9, 2008, p. 26.

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THE COLLECTED PROSE OF ROBERT FROST Author: Robert Frost (1874-1963) Edited by Mark Richardson Publisher: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass.). 378 pp. $39.95 Type of work: Essays, short fiction An intriguing assortment of prose pieces from one of America’s most honored twentieth century poets Robert Frost is foremost a renowned American poet, and The Collected Prose of Robert Frost should whet the interest of those who wish to read what he said about writing poetry. This volume also will be of interest to those who desire to be exposed to everything the poet wrote. The editor, Mark Richardson, must be commended for his diligence in completing this project. Over time, major poets such as Frost are often taken for granted, dismissed after their work has been squeezed dry of all fresh meaning. It can take new collections of the poet’s work or new critical material to jar the public’s perception of what the poet truly accomplished. Many readers recognize Frost as an award-winning poet who wrote about rural themes while employing common speech patterns. His vast popularity can be linked to his use of traditional poetic forms and his approachable subject matter. While his poetry may seem simple, it is never simplistic. For a more complete understanding of his approach to poetry, it is advisable to read the relevant essays, letters, notes, and lectures Richardson has compiled. Through hard work and persistence, Richardson has established himself as an expert on everything related to Frost. He coedited with Richard Poirier the 1995 collection Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays and wrote the 1997 critical study The Ordeal of Robert Frost: The Poet and His Poetics. Many of the prose pieces included in the 1995 collection also are included in The Collected Prose of Robert Frost. While there is some overlap with previous volumes of Frost’s prose, this is the first critical edition of his collected prose. It is organized in chronological order, beginning with Frost’s high school prose of 1891 and 1892 and ending with statements that he made in 1963. Richardson begins the collection with an informative “Introduction.” He is quick to point out that Frost was always reluctant to publish his prose, both editors and publishers finding the poet “peculiarly uncooperative” whenever approached on the subject. Richardson also notes that, even after Frost’s death, very little of his prose was collected, and that was in Selected Prose of Robert Frost (1966), Robert Frost: Poetry and Prose (1972), and Robert Frost on Writing (1973). While Richardson applauds the publishing of these volumes, he is critical of them for not including a large selection of Frost’s prose and for the texts being “marred by occasional inaccuracies.”

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Richardson had a chance to correct some of these problems in the 1995 collection he coedited with Poirier. For this volume, he took it upon himself to add supplemental material, producing a more complete picture of how Frost wrote. In addition to reprinting “all of the prose Frost is known to have prepared for print,” Richardson has provided “extensive and detailed notes on Frost’s habits of composition, on important textual issues, and on related matters.” The editor has made this collection invaluable by adding these detailed notes Robert Frost is considered a giant of and by making it possible for “the reader to twentieth century American poetry. He consult in one place all information presented published several award-winning in connection with a given item,” as well as volumes, including New Hampshire providing “a kind of loosely consequential (1923), Collected Poems (1930), A narrative of Frost’s total career as a writer of Further Range (1936), and A Witness Tree (1942). Frost is the only American prose.” With this much attention to detail, the poet to have won the Pulitzer Prize in collection can, therefore, be of use to both the poetry four times. Although he made general reader and the scholar. It is obvious his reputation as a poet, Frost also that the editor wholeheartedly believes that a wrote essays, notes, letters, prefaces, poet of Frost’s stature deserves to have his and lectures. other writings published and analyzed. While the value of the high school editorials and the stories Frost wrote for poultry magazines may be questioned, there are a number of remarkable essays that clearly enunciate Frost’s opinions on the art of poetry. It is obvious after reading some of the essays and looking at Richardson’s corresponding notes that Frost could express himself well about how he wrote his poems. It is not always the case that a first-rank poet can explain his art and his way of crafting a poem. This allows for a greater understanding of the poet under discussion and can be helpful to a poet in the construction of his or her own work. In addition to this collection, there have been several other vital books recently published that concern Frost. In 2001, The Robert Frost Encyclopedia (edited by Nancy Lewis Tuten and John Zubizarreta) was published. Deirdre Fagan’s Critical Companion to Robert Frost: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work was published in 2007, as was Peter J. Stanlis’s Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher. The Notebooks of Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen, was published in 2006. Faggen is also the author of The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost (2008) and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost (2001). With all this attention being focused on Frost, it is hoped that a more balanced appreciation of his literary accomplishments will be forthcoming. It is not unusual for a major author to go in and out of favor over time, and it seems that with so many books now revisiting Frost that he will gain from the fresh exposure. Although Frost has remained a widely read poet,

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he has been a misunderstood one. With the publication of The Collected Prose of Robert Frost and the other books previously mentioned, this misunderstanding should be greatly reduced. Through the reading of his extraordinary essays and his notebooks, the reader should come away with a far richer assessment of Frost’s creative process. He was an endlessly curious and complex person, and, as with most thoughtful writers, he could hold contradictory opinions about various topics. Frost has been praised for his ability to paint vibrant portraits of rural New England life in his poems, but the poems do not end there. Although born in San Francisco, California, he grew up in New England. It was the New England milieu that he became so adept at capturing in his poetry. While attending high school in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Frost wrote some of his earliest editorials. In the December, 1891, editorial “Physical Culture,” he speaks of the need to have a “good mind” as well as a “sound body.” In his already finely developed sense of observation, he speaks about standing on a street corner and watching men and women hustle past. Frost surmises that someone would see that “scarcely one in ten is erect and well built.” The commentator concludes that it is a good idea to make use of the gymnasium, especially the new Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) gymnasium that was to be built in Lawrence. While the early editorials and short stories are youthful curiosities, Frost truly shines as a critical thinker in his essays and lectures. He did not write much in the way of criticism, but the few times he did are worth digesting. Since he did not have a high opinion of literary criticism, it is remarkable that any critical essays exist at all. Frost was suspicious of anyone who claimed to be an authority on a poem. For the poet, it is the reader who should be the ultimate critic of a particular poem. As he stated in his brilliant essay “Education by Poetry: A Meditative Monologue” (1931), “Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say ‘Why don’t you say what you mean?’ We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections—whether from difference or some other instinct.” While the sciences or history may instruct, poetry exists to provide something closer to enjoyment or possibly even wisdom. Always apprehensive of academic criticism, Frost found that not much originality came from the education process. He hoped that students would be taught to think and not merely to repeat what they had been told. For him, school and poetry do not mix. In his 1925 “Introduction to The Arts Anthology: Dartmouth Verse 1925,” Frost concludes, “We are here getting a long way with poetry, considering all there is against it in school and college. The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then he must strike or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past.” These are harsh words, and it is no wonder that Frost never finished his studies at Dartmouth or Harvard University. He learned to be protective of his own poetry and of poetry in general. Poetry should not become the victim of how a student is taught to read a poem in school. The true appreciation of a poem comes through the spontaneous act of immersion into the poem by the reader. In his 1951 “Poetry and School,” Frost emphatically states that “poems are not

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meant to be read in a course any more than they are to be made a study of.” For all of his misgivings about what goes on in schools and colleges, Frost was forced to serve as a lecturer in order to earn a living. He could not support his family merely on his earnings as a poet. While he certainly was grateful to academia for lending support to poetry, he also felt that academia could suffocate the poet. Throughout his essays, lectures, and prefaces, Frost wrestles with how the poet and the educational system can best coexist. Toward the end of his life, he had become the face of American poetry, a public figure whose words and actions held national weight. Richardson has done a national service by gathering these fascinating, mischievous, mundane, ornery, and important prose works by one of America’s greatest modern poets. Jeffry Jensen

Review Sources Library Journal 133, no. 2 (February 1, 2008): 69-70. London Review of Books 30, no. 21 (November 6, 2008): 29-30. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 19 (December 4, 2008): 48-50. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 42 (October 22, 2007): 46. The Times, May 15, 2008, p. 7.

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THE COMFORTS OF A MUDDY SATURDAY Author: Alexander McCall Smith (1948) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 240 pp. $23.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Edinburgh, Scotland Scottish philosopher Isabel Dalhousie seeks to save the reputation of an Edinburgh physician as she worries about her own relationship with her lover Jamie Principal characters: Isabel Dalhousie, a wealthy Edinburgh divorcé in her early forties and editor of The Review of Applied Ethics who analyzes the ethics of the most mundane aspects of life Jamie Fraser, a professional musician in his late twenties and father of Isabel’s child Charlie, the sixteen-month-old son of Isabel and Jamie John Liamar, Isabel’s former husband, who has left scars on her psyche Grace, Isabel’s long-time housekeeper who has assumed the role of Charlie’s nurse Cat, owner of a delicatessen in Edinburgh and Isabel’s unmarried niece whose long history of unsuccessful relationships includes one with Jamie Christopher Dove, Isabel’s professional nemesis, who recently attempted to wrest the editorship of The Review of Applied Ethics from Isabel Nick Smart, an American composer, who competes with Isabel for Jamie’s time and affection Marcus Moncrieff, an Edinburgh physician embroiled in a pharmaceutical research scandal Stella Moncrieff, Marcus’s wife, who is determined to clear her husband’s name at all cost Norrie Brown, Marcus Moncrieff’s nephew and medical colleague Eddie, an odd and enigmatic employee in Cat’s delicatessen Brother Fox, a wild inhabitant of Isabel’s garden, who attracts the attention and affection of Isabel and her family

The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday is the fifth book in McCall’s Isabel Dalhousie Novel series, a collection of light mysteries centered around the daily life of a wealthy Scottish philosopher. Isabel enjoys a successful professional life as the owner and editor of The Review of Applied Ethics. She is engaged in all aspects of the intellectual and cultural life of her native Edinburgh. An avid collector of art, especially by Scottish artists, she frequents art galleries and attends concerts, especially those in which

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her lover Jamie performs as bassoonist. Her inherited wealth has provided her with considerable financial security as well as the means to sponsor a variety of philanthropic activities. McCall draws his readers into the mind of his main character via a constant stream of introspective reflections and self-analysis. As a philosopher, Isabel sees issues of motivation, guilt, innocence, and chance in all the aspects of her personal world. Her philosophical training encourages her to examine the motives The creator of the popular No. 1 and ethical implications of even the most evLadies’ Detective Agency series, eryday matters. A dinner invitation at the beAlexander McCall Smith is a retired ginning of the novel, for example, leads Isabel, professor of medical law at the wrongly it turns out, to suspect that her hosts University of Edinburgh. Born in what only invited her so they could meet Jamie, is now Zimbabwe, he has lived in Edinburgh, Scotland, for most of his who is considerably younger than she is. The life, and he has authored a wide variety submission of an article to Isabel’s journal by of legal books, children’s literature, Christopher Dove, a scholar who had once and adult fiction. tried to replace her as editor, generates an elab orate analysis of ethical motivation. Isabel thinks through Dove’s possible reasons for submitting the article and agonizes about her moral obligations to accept the article for publication. Isabel also worries about the personal choices of her niece Cat, who has had a long succession of men in her life and seems unable to form a long-term commitment. Isabel is concerned that her relationship with Jamie, one of Cat’s former boyfriends, as well as the birth of Charlie may result in a permanent rift between herself and her niece. Much to Isabel’s relief, by the end of the novel, Cat is becoming reconciled to Isabel’s happy life and demonstrates some affection toward her young cousin. The birth of Isabel’s son Charlie and his growing demands upon her time and emotions have challenged the philosopher to examine her maternal responsibilities in the context of her wider professional and social interests. While she loves her son, Isabel the philosopher reflects almost daily on the choices she makes in balancing Charlie’s needs and her other obligations and in working quality time with Charlie into her other activities. Most importantly, she mulls over every nuance of her relationship with Jamie and worries that their age difference will inevitably lead to a break-up. She is especially concerned that the responsibilities of their relationship and especially of fatherhood will lead Jamie to resent his loss of freedom. Jamie, on the other hand, seems quite content with his situation. He loves Isabel and enjoys his role as a new father. Isabel’s feelings of insecurity lead her to take an instant dislike to Nick Smart, a pretentious American composer whom she meets at one of Jamie’s concerts. She is

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suspicious of Nick’s motivations and jealous of every minute Jamie spends with him. Eventually she learns, much to her relief, that Jamie’s interest in Nick is little more than professional, but not before she has been awkwardly ungracious to Nick. She has unfairly suspected the composer of persuading Jamie to seek an exciting career opportunity in New York, while in fact Nick kindly has been helping Jamie work on a musical composition for Isabel. Isabel’s wide circle of friends and acquaintances appear again and again in the Isabel Dalhousie Novel series. This installment is no exception. In The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday, Grace, Isabel’s strong-minded housekeeper, now cares for Charlie with an attitude more maternal than servile. Her role is relatively minor compared to those in previous novels. Here the housekeeper serves as little more than a background source of concern and tension for Isabel, who strives to ensure that Grace does not monopolize the young Charlie and allows primary care to fall to his parents. Repeatedly Isabel and even Jamie must politely remind Grace of their parental rights in order to spend time with their own son. More prominent in the plot of The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday is Eddie, the emotionally disturbed employee in Cat’s delicatessen, with whom Isabel interacts closely as she tends the shop while her niece vacations in Sri Lanka. Mild conflicts emerge as Eddie struggles to understand Isabel’s generosity toward customers and even beggars. Isabel is fond of Eddie but curious about his past and his personal life. She invites Eddie home to dinner, where the sight of Isabel’s art collection further challenges the lower-class Eddie. After dinner Jamie asks Eddie to demonstrate his recently acquired skill in hypnotism on him, but Eddie accidently hypnotizes Isabel instead. In the process he uncovers in her a lingering and embarrassing affection for her ex-husband John Liamar. The conscious Isabel argues that she no longer loves Liamar, but this episode, combined with Jamie’s understanding reaction to it, reminds the rational philosopher about the powers of the irrational and helps her to feel more secure in Jamie’s love. Isabel’s wealthy lifestyle becomes more than an awkward topic of conversation with Eddie. When he asks Isabel for 500 pounds, she assumes he needs the money because of a drug or girlfriend problem and readily gives it to him. When she learns that he really wanted the money to pay for surgery for his father, Isabel is disappointed in Eddie’s “lie” and expects both an apology and a return of the money as the morally correct course. Isabel’s generous and well-intentioned efforts to help Eddie are, in the end, unsuccessful, and her unfair reading of Eddie’s motivation and her response to their misunderstanding create an awkwardness that is not resolved in The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday. Isabel’s tendency to involve herself in the problems of acquaintances such as Eddie and even strangers is, in fact, a major focus of the Isabel Dalhousie Novel series. Jamie discourages such “intermeddling” or interference in other people’s lives, but Isabel’s compulsion to engage in such activity drives the “mystery” plots of McCall Smith’s novels. The first book in this series, The Sunday Philosophy Club (2004), for example, centers around Isabel’s “investigation” into the suspicious death of a young man. The Careful Use of Compliments (2007) deals with an apparent paint-

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ing forgery. In The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday, Smith, a retired professor of medical law, weaves into the plot his own professional interest in medicine, and especially bioethics, as his protagonist finds herself examining the questionable circumstances surrounding the testing of a medical drug that has left two people dead and destroyed the career of Marcus Moncrieff, a reputable Edinburgh research physician. Isabel becomes involved in this pharmaceutical scandal at the request of Moncrieff’s wife, Stella. Initially Isabel accepts the “facts” of the case as described by both husband and wife and comes to suspect Moncreiff’s nephew, Norrie Brown, and, subsequently, the pharmaceutical company itself of framing Moncreiff. Once again, Isabel misreads people’s motivations, as she assumes that Marcus’s nephew is harboring a grudge against his uncle and interprets the warnings of David McLean, a lawyer for the pharmaceutical company, as veiled threats. In the end, Isabel learns that her basic assumptions about personal motivation in this case are groundless, even as she offers Marcus a way forward for his professional life. As Isabel is thus challenged by failure and disappointment in The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday, she demonstrates resilience and a philosophical positivism that enable her to move beyond her frustrations, especially in her dealings with Eddie and the Moncrieffs. Not only does her relationship with Cat become somewhat more positive after her niece’s return from Sri Lanka but also Isabel is reassured of Jamie’s loyalty and affection as she watches him interact lovingly with their son and as she sorts out her misunderstandings regarding Nick. These episodes in Isabel’s life conclude, as the title suggests, in the comforts of a muddy Saturday at home, where Isabel and Jamie spend some quiet time with their son in the garden. Isabel feels a sense of personal security and satisfaction watching Charlie play in the grass, while his father works in the garden (and muddies his feet). This peaceful domestic scene is observed not only by Isabel but by a wild fox who lives in her garden and whom she and Jamie endearingly call “Brother Fox.” Like Grace and Cat, Brother Fox is a regular character in the Isabel Dalhousie series. He considers Isabel’s garden his territory. At the end of The Right Attitude to Rain (2006), for example, Brother Fox enjoyed some culinary delicacies Cat had left as a peace offering for her aunt. In The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday, Brother Fox digs up flower bulbs that Jamie must replant in the last scene of the novel. Grace complains about the damage the fox does, worries that the fox might somehow harm Charlie, and wants to call an exterminator. Isabel does not share her housekeeper’s concerns. She and Jamie enjoy rather than resent these intrusions by Brother Fox into their lives and feel a special bond with the creature. Jamie, in fact, surprises Isabel with an expensive painting of a fox that becomes a special demonstration of his love for her. He also buys for Charlie a stuffed toy fox with which the real Brother Fox makes yet another mark on their lives at the end of The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday. Thomas J. Sienkewicz

The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday / mc call smith

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 22 (August 1, 2008): 5. Christianity Today 52, no. 11 (November, 2008): 74. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 15 (August 1, 2008): 3. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 30 (July 28, 2008): 50.

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THE COMMONER Author: John Burnham Schwartz (1965) Publisher: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday (New York). 351 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1934-2003 Locale: Tokyo and Karuizawa, Japan A commoner who finds that by marrying a prince she has lost her freedom and her identity later helps another woman to escape from the same fate Principal characters: Haruko Endo, a commoner, a princess after her marriage and later empress of Japan Shige, her husband, the crown prince of Japan and the emperor after his father’s death Yasuhito (“Yasu”) or Prince Tsuyo, their son, later the crown prince and Keiko’s husband Kumiko, his younger sister and a princess until her marriage to a commoner The Emperor, Shige’s father and a scholarly, unworldly man The Empress, Shige’s mother and Haruko’s bitter enemy Mrs. Oshima, Haruko’s chief lady-in-waiting and the empress’s spokesperson Tsuneyasu Endo, Haruko’s father and the owner of a sake brewery Mrs. Endo, his wife and Haruko’s mother Miko Kuroda, Haruko’s best friend since school days and a longtime resident of the United States Keiko Mori, the daughter of a diplomat and Yasu’s wife Reiko, the daughter of Keiko and Yasu

As the title suggests, John Burnham Schwartz’s The Commoner is set in a society where there are sharp distinctions between ordinary people and those of noble or royal ancestry. Though the novel is part an indictment of social stratification based on birth, its primary theme is the conflict between ancient customs and new ideas. The Commoner is narrated in the first person by Haruko Endo, the title character. Haruko is the only child of Tsuneyasu Endo, a prosperous Japanese businessman, and his wife, a conventional homemaker. Haruko begins her story with a description of an idyllic childhood. From the time of her birth in 1934, Haruko is petted and protected, not only because she is her parents’ only child but also because only a young woman with an unspotted reputation can expect to make a suitable marriage. The walled garden where she spends so much of her time symbolizes her existence: She is kept in a beautiful, safe place, where she can do whatever she likes. Haruko has no desire to es-

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cape, nor is she interested in what is going on beyond the wall. An economic depression John Burnham Schwartz is the author passes almost without her noticing it. When of three previous novels, Bicycle Days the war comes, Haruko is aware of food short- (1989), Reservation Road (1998), and ages, and when her family is evacuated from Claire Marvel (2002). His books have Tokyo, she knows that they are fleeing from been translated into more than fifteen the bombings. However, her father’s business languages. Schwartz has also written survives, and two years after the end of the for The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Boston war, the Endos move back to Tokyo and settle Globe, Vogue, and Newsday. down in their new house, which is much like the one that had been destroyed. Though she cannot ignore the devastation all around her, Haruko is soon preoccupied with her schoolwork at the Sacred Heart Convent School. She later muses that it was there, under the strict rule of the nuns, that she acquired the habit of silence and the capacity for self-control that later became so important to her. Her best friend, Miko Kuroda, is less submissive. Unfortunately, after they graduate, Miko’s father, a diplomat, takes his family with him to his post in Washington, D.C., and Miko enrolls in an American college. Later she marries an American. Thus Haruko loses her only confidante. Meanwhile, the Endos have begun to spend their summers in Karuizawa, a picturesque country village. There Haruko catches her first glimpse of Shige, the crown prince of Japan. Though after the war Shige’s father, the emperor, has declared himself to be a human being instead of a god, his people still hold him in awe and even repeat farfetched stories about his miraculous powers. They extend the same attitude toward his heir. By the time she is a senior at Sacred Heart University, Haruko is attracting suitors, but she insists that she is not interested in marriage. She would rather be a teacher, she tells her father, like many of her ancestors; he blasts that dream by pointing out that all of those she mentioned were men. It is clear that her only option is to become a wife and mother. However, though her parents bring one promising young man after another to meet their daughter, Haruko does not like any of them. Her parents are puzzled by her attitude, but they are not tyrants; they do not intend to force their only child into marriage with a man she does not like. Meanwhile, Haruko is perfectly happy, especially when she is perfecting her considerable skill at tennis. Ironically, it is a game of tennis that brings Haruko into contact with a young man who does appeal to her. Because he is the crown prince of Japan, she assumes that they will never be more than acquaintances. However, he seems to like the fact that, to the horror of onlookers, she does not let him win the game. Shige is obviously attracted to Haruko. As the months pass, he manages to see her frequently; meanwhile, he rejects one after another of the young women suggested to him by the committee entrusted with choosing his consort. Finally, the prince’s tutor, Dr. Takeshi Watanabe, comes to Endo on Shige’s behalf, requesting Haruko’s hand in marriage. He is amazed when her father refuses the offer and begs that she be eliminated from consideration. Endo’s reasoning is that because Haruko is a commoner, she would never be

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accepted at court, and that as a result her life would be miserable. He proves to be right. Although Endo promptly sends his daughter to Europe, hoping to end the matter, Shige is determined to make Haruko his wife. After her return, since the presence of the press has made casual encounters impossible, Shige pursues his courtship by phone. Impressed by his intelligence, his sensitivity, and above all his assurance that he accepts change and even welcomes it, at least in moderation, Haruko finally accepts his proposal. The next seven chapters of this first section of the novel describe the preparations for the wedding, the ceremony itself, and the couple’s ride through the city afterward. Though The Commoner is divided into four parts, the first part of the novel is by far the longest, constituting half of the book. It may seem odd that in a novel whose subject is the marriage of a commoner to a prince, so much time is spent on what would seem to be the least glamorous part of the heroine’s life. However, in order to show how she is stifled by her marriage, the author must first establish who Haruko is. Later, her malevolent mother-in-law will suggest that Haruko is a disrespectful, illmannered young woman without respect for tradition; however, in these early pages it is made clear that Haruko is not a rebel like her friend Miko Kuroda. Haruko accepts the authority of her parents and her teachers, and like them she is in awe of the Emperor. If she is independent-minded enough to trounce the crown prince in a tennis match, she intends no disrespect toward him; the fact that early in their relationship she sees him as a human being, not a prince, is one reason Shige is so strongly attracted to her. However, even before the wedding there are hints that the two young people will not be permitted to live in peace. Endo’s impression of the court is only too accurate. It is ruled by people who not only adhere to centuries-old traditions but also use them as the basis of their own power. If Haruko persuades Shige to suggest a change, the prince is reminded that this is how it has “always” been done, and even if it is pointed out that the supposed tradition is a fairly new development, the imperial staffers are deaf to argument. With Shige’s help, Haruko might have been able to deal with such matters, but she has two personal enemies at court who resent the fact that she is a commoner and are determined to break her spirit. One of them is the empress; the other is Mrs. Oshima, who was appointed by the empress to be Haruko’s chief ladyin-waiting. Mrs. Oshima is the empress’s spy and her mouthpiece; she hears every word Haruko speaks and observes every move she makes, reports to the empress, then repeats the empress’s criticisms to Haruko. Since it would be disrespectful to disagree with the empress, even at second hand, Haruko is helpless. She cannot turn to Shige, for she soon learns how much he is intimidated by his mother. When on their wedding night the newlyweds are given instructions on how to produce a boy, Haruko begins to suspect that, though Shige loves her, the rest of the court and, indeed, the Japanese people value her only as the future mother of an heir to the throne. After she does produce a son, Yasuhito, or “Yasu,” as he is nicknamed, she assumes that, having fulfilled her function, she will be left in peace. However, when Haruko is still breastfeeding him, the empress has him weaned and taken away from

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his mother, insisting that Haruko must return to her scheduled appearances. Haruko has learned to be silent, and now she finds that she cannot speak at all. When she is sent home for a rest, her father tells her she must honor her commitment, and her voice comes back. In time she gives birth to a daughter, Kumiko. In the last two sections of the novel, the author proceeds to the next generation. Though among commoners,women now have new opportunities, the women at court are as trapped by adherence to old customs as those of Haruko’s generation. The only answer, it seems, is for a princess to marry a commoner, give up her title, and learn to cook. Earlier in the novel, it was mentioned that Shige’s sister had done just that and was living happily as an ordinary, upper-class woman. In the 1980’s, Kumiko makes the same choice, and as a result she has a much more satisfying life than her mother. With the death of his father in 1989, Shige becomes emperor, and Yasu takes his father’s place as crown prince. He knows that his primary duty is to marry and produce a male heir so that the dynasty can continue. When Haruko asks “Why?,” she is accused of irreverence. In any case, like his father, Yasu falls in love with a commoner, Keiko Mori. However, Keiko has her mind set on a diplomatic career. She gives in only after Haruko, now the Empress, pleads with her and promises her protection. Though, unlike her own mother-in-law, Haruko is kind to Keiko, Haruko finds that she cannot smooth Keiko’s way at court, where women are still supposed to remain silent, or defend her inability to produce a son. When Haruko sees her daughterin-law falling into despair, she contacts her old friend Miko, and through her efforts Keiko and her little daughter Reiko escape into anonymity and freedom. The Commoner is a book built on contrasts: the difference between commoners and royalty, between women and men, between self-expression and self-control, between change and custom. What makes the book so thought-provoking is that Schwartz takes pains to understand a point of view with which he clearly disagrees; though he may agree with Haruko’s question, he admits that if a dynasty is indeed to continue, there must be an heir. Critics praise The Commoner for its compelling narrative structure and for its subtle characterization. It is also described as an important novel because it shows a society in change that is also, in many respects, not changing at all. Though the emperor of Japan may have been forced to admit that he is not a god, Schwartz suggests that there are still many commoners who do not believe him. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman

Review Sources Book World 38 (February 10, 2008): 11. Booklist 104, no. 8 (December 15, 2007): 23. The Christian Science Monitor, January 22, 2008, p. 13. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 21 (November 1, 2007): 1125-1126. Library Journal 132, no. 19 (November 15, 2007): 51-52. The New York Times Book Review 157 (February 24, 2008): 27.

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The New Yorker 84, no. 2 (February 25, 2008): 74. People 69, no. 3 (January 28, 2008): 58. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 42 (October 22, 2007): 33. USA Today, January 31, 2008, p. 5D. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 21 (January 26, 2008): W8.

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CONCEIVING PARENTHOOD American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction Author: Amy Laura Hall (1968) Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans (Grand Rapids, Mich.). 452 pp. $32.00 Type of work: History, religion An exploration of Protestant—especially Methodist— popular church literature in the twentieth century, showing significant capitulations to such anti-Christian trends as eugenics, the corporate control of motherhood, and the campaign to present nuclear power as benign and inevitable In 1905, German scholar Max Weber published The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, a foundational text in the development of the discipline of sociology. Weber argued that Western capitalist economies gain their unique character and remarkable dynamism not—as Karl Marx had held—from changes in class structure but from the “worldly asceticism” of its religious makers. Weber believed that Martin Luther and John Calvin had destroyed the deep emotional securities found in Catholicism; in their place arose uncertainty about “election” (predestination). However, anxiety about salvation could, Weber argued, be allayed by work. Additionally, Protestants were to avoid ostentation and the accumulation of goods. When this ethic of self-denial combined with the “work ethic,” the result was the regime of saving, investing, and calculating that are the prerequisites of capitalism. As her title— Conceiving Parenthood—indicates, Amy Laura Hall seeks to interpret American Protestantism along Weberian lines, but with a special focus on norms of family life that have evolved since Methodism’s fervent early days on the American frontier. A pro-life feminist, she teaches theological ethics at the Divinity School at Duke University. Significant to her account is the fact that Hall is the mother of two daughters, one of whom is adopted. Her general thesis is that American Protestants have too readily fulfilled Weber’s characterizations, forsaking their best theological impulses in doing so. They have indeed been controlling and “mercantilist” when they should have been extravagantly generous and celebratory. They have been narrowly calculating in too many phases of life, identifying success with wealth and status rather than with solidarity and service. Worst of all, they have allowed themselves to be manipulated by capitalist culture into thinking that their children must be perfect or, at least, earn perfection in a Darwinian struggle for prominence. Against this broad trend, Hall places the example of Methodism when it was “filled with new wine,” heedless of institutional and familial correctness. Born in England in the first half of the eighteenth century, Methodism “embraced the holy work of open-air stump preaching, coal-mine conversions, women preachers . . . and wor-

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ship that mixed shopkeepers, factory workers, and Oxford-trained dons in ways that seemed ill conceived to many in power.” Hall particularly admires the example of Jonathan Kozol, whose emphasis on the permanent worth and blessedness of all children pushes his readers to extend their imagination beyond the family, embracing as their own the children of the poor and rejected. That this Jewish revolutionary pedagogue should be a hero of Hall’s book is an irony that her theology—focused on God’s surprising grace—can easily enAmy Laura Hall teaches theological ethics at Duke University. As a member compass. Hall advances her case by treating four of the Bioethics Task Force of the topics that at first appear to be unrelated. InUnited Methodist Church, Hall has deed, one of the book’s achievements is the addressed the World Council of demonstration of their thoroughgoing conChurches in Geneva and academic audiences in Zurich, Cambridge, nection. They are the campaign to make AmerEdinburgh, and Oxford about her work ican homes “hygienic”; the corporate takeon reproductive ethics. Her book over of childrearing and homemaking through Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love the marketing of “expert information” and rewas published in 2002. lated products such as infant formula; the conscription of church elites into the American eugenics movement, whose “poisonous messages echo still”; and the complacent reception by Protestants of the propaganda effort to make Hiroshima seem necessary and nuclear power an unambiguously good thing. In recent decades, failure to resist the darker temptations of genetic manipulation builds on the same tendency. Hall argues these far-reaching theses by adopting the strategies of both the popular culture studies movement and postmodernist discourse analysis. She examines such mass-market periodicals as Parents, Ladies’ Home Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, and McCall’s because their readership was “markedly Anglo-Saxon, mainline Protestant.” She pays especially close attention to Together, a Methodist magazine designed to compete with these secular publications. In addition to commenting on particular articles and editorials in these magazines, Hall does “close readings” of photographs, illustrations, and, especially, advertisements. Indeed, of the 135 figures that enliven the book, the majority are advertisements. This research strategy makes for lively viewing and reading, but it also limits the book in significant ways because the relation among advertising, public opinion, and core attitudes is exceedingly complex. The fact that many expensive advertising campaigns do not actually succeed is only one facet of this complexity. In chapter 1, “Holy Hygiene: Parents’, Protestantism, and the Germ-Free Home,” Hall vividly illustrates the commercial and cultural impact of the late-nineteenth century discovery of pathogens and effective antisepsis. Drawing on the work of social

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historian Rima Apple, she traces the rise of “scientific motherhood,” a movement to reform old-fashioned homemaking practices through the use of electrical appliances, sterilization, and disinfection, the new teachings of home economics and pediatrics, and—ominously—eugenics. Hall’s overarching claim is that while the new research labs, institutes, university courses, medical expertise, and mass-marketed products seemed “value-free” attempts to improve public health, they actually promoted a lethal hidden agenda. Hence, advertisements for Lysol, Maltine, Gold Dust Twins soap, and evaporated milk were not just about the benefits of cleanliness; they also positioned women and mothers in oppressive social frameworks. By purchasing these products, they would not only be cleansing their homes and children more effectively, they would also be advancing the cause of “the race.” For “scientific motherhood” came of age during the first flourishing of theories of “racial hygiene” in the United States, and it incorporated many of its themes: the necessity of keeping “favored” races separate from “failed” races; the superiority of “Nordic” peoples; the inherent primitiveness and filth of black Africans; and the threat posed by immigrants from central and southern Europe. (Readers who associate such ideas only with the National Socialists will be surprised to learn about the American Eugenics Society, some of whose founders published books that inspired German race theory.) Hall also detects in her sources strongly sexist and classist messages. Thus, Lysol’s claims about the advantages of douching stressed both contraception and the need for women to remain sexually appealing to their husbands. At the same time, the woman who used Lysol and similar products would be allying herself with an educated elite. If this meant confinement in a sterile home and an obsession with germs, at least women could feel that they were “progressive.” As Hall puts it, “For my reading of ‘the germ-free home,’ the aspiration to craft families of providential promise teetered on the knife edge of maternal self-loathing, whereby a woman’s own body became a site of potentially hidden menace.” Viewed theologically, the submerged rhetoric of the hygiene craze invited Christians to separate themselves out from the germ-ridden “other.” Hall insists that followers of Jesus—especially Methodists whose entire history has been one of evangelizing the ordinary and the outcast— violate their central calling by such drawing apart. In other words, providing safe and clean environments only for one’s own children is simply heretical. Chapter 2, titled “The Corporate Breast: ‘Scientific Motherhood’ During the Century of Progress,” moves Hall’s critique closer to the present. The title derives from the official name of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair: “A Century of Progress: 18331933.” Relying especially on Christina Cogdell’s book Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930’s (2004), Hall explores advertisements placed in medical journals and popular family magazines by such companies as Nestlé, Gerber, Johnson & Johnson, Scott, and Enfamil. She finds two intersecting trends: the persistence of themes rooted in the “science” of evolutionary progress and an appropriation of the language of “natural” by the makers of distinctly less-than-natural child-care products. The ultimate aim of these commercial campaigns was, believes Hall, the transformation of the meaning of “natural” and “ordinary.” “Normal” everyday life, to

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meet these implicit standards, had to become enhanced by a vast panoply of toys, nutritional supplements, sexually rejuvenated moms, and evenings filled with televised entertainment. What especially interests Hall about the Chicago World’s Fair is the way “primitive,” backward, and unprogressive people were displayed. Thus, juxtaposed to the World of Tomorrow were the Midget Village, the Old Plantation, and Ripley’s Odditorium. Freaks of nature were not merely present as lures to the curious, she argues. They were living lessons in the importance of genetic purity, AngloSaxon excellence, and the dangers posed by Negroes. Conceiving Parenthood’s third chapter, “To Form a More Perfect Union: Mainline Protestants and the American Eugenics Movement,” traces the impact of race-purification ideas on prominent clergy and laity in the early decades of the last century. Hall’s argument is made possible by such recent works as Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998); Wendy Kline’s Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (2001); and Edwin Black’s War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003). What Hall brilliantly adds is information about Protestants’ enthusiasm for the American Eugenics Association, birth control, sociological studies of “cacogenic” rural families, and intelligence testing. She details the disturbing fact that, under the sway of eugenic ideas, the church began to question its own work of caring for the poor. Christian charity, it was argued, was “dysgenic,” as it perpetuated unfit lives. Indeed, some theologians began to argue that salvation’s first phase was realized in the protection of a healthy biological heritage, coded language for racial “cleansing.” In doing so, they effectively biologized the meaning of “grace,” making it synonymous with mental and physical fitness. Hall believes these anti-Christian patterns of thought persist into the present. Protestant Christians, she states, are “eager to forge a promising future for their families . . . by way of technologies, neighborhoods, and schools of distinction, leaving behind those who do not measure up and cannot keep up in a competitive, streamlined market culture.” In her final substantive chapter, “For Domestic Security: The Atomic Age and the Genomic Revolution,” she presses these claims with even more force. Still working historically, she first reviews the early postwar political and commercial effort to present atomic energy as promising an abundant, safe future for Americans. Just as the small, upwardly mobile “nuclear family” was becoming normative, the atom became “domesticated” in the form of power plants. Americans were inundated by advertisements that connected such power to a limitless future of consumption. This campaign served to block out the memories of the horrors of what happened in Japan and anesthetize citizens to the sufferings posed by above-ground nuclear testing. As a dominant cultural symbol, the “peaceful atom” gave way, claims Hall, to the double helix. Thus, the remainder of the book explores the implications of the Human Genome Project, genetic screening, and the role of large pharmaceutical companies in persuading the public to purchase its products. Hall fears that Christian ethics and lay opinion will focus narrowly on particular biotechnological issues at the expense of

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basic public health concerns. Worse, though, is the temptation to trace individual defects to genetic inheritance. Such a perspective, she argues, rests on the assumption that defects and deficits are fixable—if not now, then in some more controllable genetic future. This notion runs counter to essential Christian orientations, which subsume the family under the wider notions of “God’s people.” Membership in the body of Christ is open to all and proceeds by means of adoption. Because adoption is incompatible with ideas of racial and genetic purity, it becomes Hall’s central closing metaphor. Christians do not in fact recognize “unfitness”; adopting children—and new members—is their “natural” way. Thus, the present task is to present stories of resistance to the cultural dominance of Darwinism. In practical terms, asserts Hall, “resistance involves eschewing the various means by which I am to distinguish my own daughters from children who seem vaguely ‘backward,’ from those who are considered ‘at risk,’ from neighborhoods that seem forsaken by God, and from schools deemed by quantified percentages to be subpar.” Hall’s contribution is a substantial one, especially to Christian parents trying to withstand the ethos of individualistic competition and success-through-achievement. That much of her evidence comes from advertising—well displayed throughout the volume—makes the book very engaging. Hall’s dedication to Methodism, whose shortcomings she persistently documents, is refreshing at a time when “mainline” denominations are declining. Nevertheless, Conceiving Parenthood could have been a better book. Hall’s editors failed to eliminate both academic jargon and authorial process-talk. Clarity of argumentation is compromised by ungainly chapters into which too much material is packed. One is never quite sure about the audience Hall wants to address. While apparently a theological critique of a submerged but powerful current in American history, the book keeps moving toward feminist-postmodernist cultural commentary. For example, “The Corporate Breast” is nearly ninety pages long, yet it contains almost no references to the church or to theology. This drift in focus—coupled with Hall’s reluctance to indicate at regular intervals how her main argument is developing—diminishes the book’s power. The problem is best exemplified by the fact that while the Weber thesis is invoked in the title and referenced in the introduction, she actually does nothing with this crucial intellectual connection. One might therefore predict that particular sections of the book will be carefully studied, with relatively few readers actually making it through to the end. Leslie E. Gerber

Review Sources Christianity Today 52, no. 7 (July, 2008): 55. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 51 (December 24, 2007): 48.

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CONCRETE REVERIES Consciousness and the City Author: Mark Kingwell (1963) Publisher: Viking (New York). 292 pp. $24.99 Type of work: History Time: The twenty-first century Locale: New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, Toronto, and other cities around the globe The questions that Kingwell asks in this cultural essay on the transnational global city—New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, Toronto—are “How do cities shape people?” and “How do people shape cities?” Concrete Reveries begins with a meditation on concrete, the gray, malleable stuff that turns hard when set and is one of the principal building blocks of modern cities. Mark Kingwell describes the texture as having a tough muscularity and thinks of the iron rebar inside as its skeleton. The rain marks chiaroscuro patterns on its micro-pitted surface. For him, a concrete wall seems to weep in the rain as the water runs down the surface, appearing like mascara on a crying face. Although he finds concrete beautiful, especially in the rain, Kingwell points out that it is a material that people love to hate in preference to natural building products such as wood or finished stone. He admits concrete has been abused as a building material, constructing, for example, Soviet-style apartment blocks, faceless structures such as parking lots, and the soulless academic boxes that have become synonymous with the modern university. In the defense of concrete, however, Kingwell observes that although any material becomes the sum of its treatments, it does not need to be so. Concrete is not just basic to the structures of the urban moment: It is also central to the perceptions of the city, especially in creating the idea of the contemporary, alienated metropolitan imagination, the concrete jungle that permeates the modern artistic sensibility. “Concrete is also expressive and rewarding, a human material for all its toughness. It is capable of making a complex statement, exciting a nuanced reaction,” Kingwell writes, and he notes that at one time concrete was lauded as a revolutionary building material, as avant-garde as glass. In spite of its solidity and seeming intractability, concrete is nevertheless a plastic material, as architect Frank Lloyd Wright observed, one seeking form by an elemental alchemy of the stuff of the earth—sand, rocks, and so on. It is an argument designed to counter the natural materials critics. This back-and-forth debate—between concrete’s perceived negative aspects and its qualities made positive under Kingwell’s creative gaze—forms a tension that typifies the intellectual structure of the book. It is one of the purposes of his study to encourage his readers to learn to observe textures, and by extension the city, as surfaces writ large in new and different ways, expanding his readers’ experience of the urban space.

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Kingwell posits that the transnational global city is the most significant machine ever pro- Mark Kingwell is a professor of duced by humans. Every major urban center philosophy at the University of Toronto is a testament to a human desire to master na- and Senior Fellow of Massey College. ture in the drive for order, cleanliness, and He is a contributor to Harper’s beauty that is the center of the civilizing pro- Magazine, and he frequently appears ject, according to Sigmund Freud. As King- on radio and television. He teaches and well notes: We are cities and cities are us. writes about cultural issues, design, and architecture. “And yet, we fail,” he writes, “again and again, to understand them correctly. Almost all of our models of metaphors for thinking about cities are inadequate . . . .” Cities are not biological, but they exhibit organic features: They experience growth, disease, and decline. They are more than architecture, violence, or commerce, although all three are part of the city’s character. Kingwell quotes the urbanist Kevin Lynch, who identifies five ways of attempting a unifying model for the city: “an organism, an economic engine, a communications network, a system of linked decisions, and an arena of conflict.” All are helpful ways to envision the city, but none is adequate to sum up the breadth of the ways to experience it. Cities are not just systems, markets, or arenas but, as Kingwell describes them, collisions of natural conditions, material forces, and human desire. They are tangles of vectors and imponderables. First and foremost, though, cities are places, areas of significance, physical staging grounds. “Places are environments, sites of action, horizons of concern.” With these evocative observations, Kingwell begins a philosophical and physical investigation into what he describes as the built environment, especially the late-model form of cities. Concrete Reveries directs its readers to work from the outside in when thinking about the city, moving from the physical object to the philosophical contemplation of it, moving from architecture to consciousness. Kingwell intends his readers to achieve a renewed appreciation for the complexity of their conscious lives and their being in place and, more practically, a sense of urgency for their engagement in the creation of new democratic cities. Every city is, in a sense, a city of the imagination, an unrealized project. The book is not a blueprint, Kingwell writes, but rather a series of incomplete sketches for thinking and arguing about what places, namely cities, mean to humans. Kingwell begins his exploration of urban space in New York City, the place he calls the capital of the twentieth century, in the way that Walter Benjamin, the German cultural critic, labeled Paris the capital of the nineteenth century. Just as Benjamin excavated in his extraordinary Arcades Project (1989) the urban environment of Paris as the birthplace of modernity, so, too, does Kingwell plumb the depths, sift the sediment, and troll the streets of the cities he explores. Like the flâneur, that walker in the city made famous by the nineteenth century French poet Charles Baudelaire who has no particular object or even destination for his walk around the city, Kingwell lets his thoughts and imagination be guided by the structure of the streets, the buildings flanking them, and the crowds mingling on the sidewalks. The flâneur is the observer who meditates over each event, moment of contact, and

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striking visual, allowing these to direct his mind, if not his feet. The seemingly random meanderings of the walker belie the coherence of the thoughts engendered by the observations on that walk. Like those urban explorers before him, Kingwell comments on his surroundings to draw broader lessons from them, and in his case he quickens the pace. He cites the jaywalker as the new urban pedestrian, one who moves at a faster speed, with perhaps more purpose, creating a dynamic to refashion not only the idea of the city but also his observations on the new environment of the twentieth, now twenty-first, century metropolis. As a philosopher, Kingwell cites his intellectual sources—from the ancients, such as Plato, to the moderns, such as Jacques Derrida—in reshaping his view of the topology of ideas surrounding the urban experience. His text is evocatively and generously illustrated by a wide variety of visual images, and his narrative is punctuated by references to other such popular commentators on the urban scene as Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs. Saul Bellow, Henry Miller, Sylvia Plath, Tom Wolfe, Woody Allen, and Walt Whitman are quoted or referenced along with a list of other urban artists who add to the cultural and intellectual mosaic of the book. There is so much going on here that it is impossible to adequately summarize the book’s content. The fun of reading Concrete Reveries is found in the various ways Kingwell combines ideas, generates new ones, and re-forms the reader’s concepts of the city, of how it works, and of how it influences perceptions. One of this multiexperiential narrative’s strengths is following the multiple paths Kingwell’s mind takes and enjoying the means by which he arrives at his conclusions. It is instructive to watch Kingwell play with his references, bounce ideas off the architecture that has become so banal a part of the urbanized-world landscape, and challenge his readers to engender some thoughts of their own. Concrete Reveries is a philosophical meditation, dense at times, occasioned by the experience of the city. Urban space offers a multiform site for the exercise of human desire and the exploration of the self. Kingwell describes the streets as a fluid site for interaction. With their thirst for stimulation, humans can best realize it in the everchanging kaleidoscope of otherness and spectacle that makes up the thoroughfares of the city. The interaction between the individual and the street-level urban environment can foster “new forms of selfhood, new subject positions and nodes of identity, by way of our being outside ourselves: the dance of movement on the streets, the kinesthesis of walking, the artwork of self-presentation.” The rationalization of the city—with its linearity, its laws, and its rules—gives way to appropriating the city scene as a democratic play, undermining the potential restrictions of the concrete reality of the urban environment. Thus, in its restrained chaos and its organized fluidity, the city can, if approached in the right way, aid the individual citizen in his or her personal development. Kingwell concludes: “The self, conscious of itself as embodied consciousness, crossing and recrossing the thresholds of the city, creating new ones, is a kind of alien body within the civic order. This imaginary self leaves traces of its swift meander behind, in the form of interactions and encounters. It constantly charts its possibilities. In search of wonder, it opens its gaze to the existence of the others, moving here and

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there, and shifts the brusque call of authority into a warmer message of shared vulnerability and desire, a shared second-person space.” Kingwell has written a challenging, thoroughly original, and rewarding book that plots the impact the transnational modern global city has made on the consciousness of the contemporary human psyche. His opening reverie on concrete points to the direction, from the solid to the intellectual, that his peregrination through the urban landscape will take and demonstrates the impact that a freewheeling meditation on the physical can have on consciousness. He accompanies his text with a comprehensive bibliographic essay that contains sources for further reading and a listing of the origins of the references throughout the book. It is also fully indexed. As demanding as Concrete Reveries can be and as tricky as Kingwell’s prose sometimes is, making the effort to stay with him on his journey ultimately does pay off. Readers will come away with a better understanding of the urban landscape and with an increased appreciation of how an informed and critical eye can expand knowledge of the city and of its inhabitants. Charles L. P. Silet

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 22 (August 1, 2008): 12-14. Library Journal 133, no. 13 (August 15, 2008): 88. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 21 (May 26, 2008): 48. The Wall Street Journal 252, no. 39 (August 15, 2008): W3. The Wilson Quarterly 32, no. 4 (Autumn, 2008): 99.

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THE CRAFTSMAN Author: Richard Sennett (1943) Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). 326 pp. $27.50 Type of work: Sociology, psychology, technology, ethics Time: Medieval times through early twenty-first century Sennett envisions a material culture in which human beings—through better understanding the process of making things—can skillfully craft their own places in the world People tend to have strong opinions about material culture, and what is viewed as advancement by one may be another’s anathema. The continuum ranges from those who experience acquisition (and thus ever-increasing production) as their birthright and those who may not possess as much or gain it as easily but who are nonetheless aspiring and acquiring to those who do not participate appreciably or successfully in the material culture as well as the iconoclasts who are consciously choosing to forgo it. Despite differing practices and perspectives, the culture of materialism seems likely here to stay. As it becomes irrefutable that materialism is endangering the ecology of the planet, long-term ramifications and ethics are increasingly being emphasized. People are asking what is good and what is enough and what is good enough. People are also asking about work. What is work for, and what does it mean to do work well? Richard Sennett addresses such issues in The Craftsman. He investigates—among other things—the history of craftsmanship; how work is (or could better be) organized; distinctions between job and career; the correlation between disciplined work and a settled mind; and the interconnectedness of work and play. Sennett values the sense of craftsmanship that was exemplified in earlier times and documents its diminishment. He argues, however, that its essence is still present in the technological world, evidenced by such examples as open-source computer software, particularly Linux, which Sennett refers to as a public craft. Refuting polarizing viewpoints, Sennett asserts that material culture matters. To that end, this first volume of Sennett’s planned trilogy lays the foundation by investigating craftsmanship as “an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.” He explains that the second volume will explore the creation of rituals to deal with aggression, while the third will focus on making sustainable environments. Sennett says that all three books consider the dangers of material culture and look at technique as a cultural issue, yet each book is intended to be independent. Sennett traces the fear of material civilization back to the Greek myth of Pandora. The story is that Zeus ordered Hephaestus (god of craftsmanship, bringer of civilization) to create Pandora (goddess of invention), who was sent to earth as a punishment for Prometheus’s wrongdoing. Pandora, possessed of talents, was also given a box (or

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jar, terminologies differ; Sennett sometimes refers to Pandora’s casket), which she was Richard Sennett is professor of told not to open. Pandora disobeyed, and thus sociology at New York University and she released all the ills of humanity. Sennett the London School of Economics. The cites the modern secular interpretation of this recipient of numerous honors, he was myth, in which the evils in Pandora’s casket awarded the Hegel Prize in 2006. His are no longer seen as put there by angry gods most recent books include The Culture but are somehow intrinsically the fault of hu- of the New Capitalism (2006) and Respect in a World of Inequality mankind. (2003). Sennett is also a classically Sennett believes that “experts in fear of trained musician. their own expertise” create new technologies almost in a detached way and then turn them over to the general public without a framework of how their work should be used. He references instances in wartime (obviously, the atomic bomb) as well as in peacetime (the ecological crisis, for example, for which Sennett believes “technology may be an unreliable ally in regaining control”). Sennett disagrees, however, with people who idealize the simpler ways of the past as well as those who eschew technological trends for the future. He unfolds his disagreement with influential political theorist Hannah Arendt and well-known German philosopher Martin Heidegger, among others, explaining that “fear of Pandora creates a rational climate of dread,” and dread can cause paralysis. Sennett sees technology as a risk, for sure, but certainly not as the enemy. A student of Arendt almost half a century before, Sennett says that he was inspired by her ideas, but, even then, he felt they were not sufficient to deal with materialism and the technology inside Pandora’s casket. He argues that the division between Animal laborens (humanity as beasts of burden who ask “how,” where work is seen as a never-ending necessity) and Homo faber (people asking “why,” producing a life in common) is false because it “slights the practical man or woman at work.” In order to deal with the issues of Pandora’s casket, Sennett calls for what he terms a more vigorous cultural materialism, including a fuller general understanding of how people produce things. Rather than present the public—after the fact—with what has already been produced, Sennett says that engagement with materialism must start earlier. The Craftsman is his attempt to jump-start the conversation, and this intellectually and emotionally stimulating expedition is likely to do just that—although it may not completely satisfy readers looking for reductive reassurance. Sennett’s approach to materialism is to ask “what the process of making concrete things reveals to us about ourselves,” and in doing so, he advocates for the blending of doing and thinking. Western civilization, where a rather wide chasm exists between working with the hand and working with the head, typically has trouble with such balance. Sennett delves into craftsmanship historically as a means to examine both current practices and what craftsmanship has the potential to mean. Along the way, he clears up misconceptions even as he expands the concept of craft from skilled manual labor to include the doctor, the artist, the parent, even the role of citizen of the world. All of these improve, he says, when they are practiced as skilled craft. Sennett explains that good

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craftsmanship involves “a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking,” evolving into “sustaining habits,” in turn establishing “a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding.” The Craftsman is organized into three sections of several chapters each, focusing in turn on the craftsman, the craft, and craftsmanship. Sennett moves easily through the centuries, suggesting that “developments in high technology reflect an ancient model for craftsmanship, but the reality on the ground is that people who aspire to be good craftsmen are depressed, ignored, or misunderstood by social institutions.” Sennett considers in detail the master-apprentice relationship—including, among other things, an investigation of medieval workshops (using guilds of goldsmiths as a detailed example), the workshop of Antonio Stradivari (generally considered the most significant luthier of all time), and institutions such as modern hospitals and laboratories. Discussion of The Encyclopedia, or Dictionary of Arts and Crafts (published in thirty-five volumes between 1751 and 1772) is particularly thought-provoking. Edited mainly by Denis Diderot, it described in words and pictures how to do practical things in fields ranging from agriculture to military science to masonry. Sennett says that this book put work with the hands on par with mental work, such that “the craftsman stood out as the emblem of Enlightenment.” Shortly afterward, the Industrial Age created a turning point in human society. In Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), considered the first modern work of economics, it was asserted that machines would destroy the Enlightenment. Sennett chooses instead to advance the counter position held by Diderot and others, explaining that its true implications may only be becoming clear centuries later. Sennett formulates Diderot’s position as follows: The enlightened way to use a machine is to judge its powers, fashion its uses, in light of our own limits rather than the machine’s potential. We should not compete against the machine. A machine, like any model, ought to propose rather than command, and humankind should certainly walk away from command to imitate perfection. Against the claim of perfection we can assert our own individuality, which gives distinctive character to the work we do.

Sennett advances the view that doing things perfectly is not the same as doing them well, and technological progress is not improvement unless it also enlightens people about themselves. In the section on craft, Sennett explains that all skills—even abstract ones—begin in the body, and that in order to gain technical understanding, the imagination must be involved. In one perceptive and hilarious chapter, he uses three recipes for cooking chicken to illustrate the power of tacit knowledge as well as the distinction between expressive and denotative instruction. Sennett’s extended discussion of resistance and ambiguity is also especially insightful, explaining how working with material challenges can foster understanding of the resistances and unclear boundaries that exist between people. “In labor as in love,” Sennett says, “progress occurs in fits and starts.” The third section considers motivation and talent for quality-driven work. Arguing

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that motivation is more important than talent, Sennett agrees with the Enlightenment view that nearly everyone can become a good craftsman (he says he uses this term throughout as inclusive of men and woman). Asserting that craftsmanship is often thwarted rather than encouraged in many modern organizations, he distinguishes between social and antisocial expertise, highlighting the ill effects of the latter. He also explains how the gradual accrual of knowledge and skills creates “a sustaining narrative” in a person’s life, which a well-crafted organization would want to support and encourage. In his conclusion, Sennett traces the growth of American pragmatism, of which he is a proponent, and clearly reiterates the book’s central argument: “the craft of making physical things provides insights into the techniques of experience that can shape our dealings with others.” It is interesting to consider that in a world full of problems, between and among individuals and nations, the key to understanding and mutual progress may have been in people’s hands all along. The Craftsman has been generally well received by critics, who cite Sennett’s brilliant mind and command of wide-ranging material. A few have questioned the book’s historical sense, and many have expressed surprise that a work on craftsmanship would itself contain so many typographical errors. For the most part, however, such things do not diminish the book’s significance. Many reviewers have commented on Sennett’s writing style. Rather than expound in a straightforward fashion, he embarks on an erudite, multifaceted quest full of references and examples, with subject matter, continents, and centuries juxtaposed to create “ah-ha” moments for the reader. Sennett sometimes introduces an idea, then leaves it—only to pick up the thread later and expect readers to be right with him on the cusp of his thought. While some readers may be frustrated by what seem to be digressions, others will likely be engrossed and invigorated. Ultimately, The Craftsman is an intellectual journey rather than a means to an end. On one level, readers are asked to follow the artifacts of Sennett’s investigation, with all the idiosyncratic twists of a personal essay. Readers are also expected to have basic background knowledge; Sennett says he includes context for his references only where he feels it will be needed. Sennett is a polymath, so whether he will be on target with any individual reader is an open question. On a deeper level, however, readers are being encouraged to chart their own course, to create a wholeness of knowledge for themselves from the parts provided. Rather than simply offer information, this book is likely to stimulate expansion on the level of consciousness, essential for readers in order to make the imaginative leap for which Sennett argues—to understand the value of experience itself as a craft. Jean C. Fulton

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Review Sources American Scholar 77, no. 2 (Spring, 2008): 128-131. The Guardian (London), February 9, 2008, p. 6. New Statesman 137 (February 11, 2008): 58-59. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 16 (October 23, 2008): 28-30. The New York Sun, April 23, 2008, p. 14. The New York Times Book Review, April 6, 2008, p. 20. The Observer (London), February 17, 2008, p. 25. The Sunday Times (London), February 10, 2008, p. 44. The Wall Street Journal 271, no. 72 (March 27, 2008): D7.

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CREDIT AND BLAME Author: Charles Tilly (1929-2008) Publisher: Princeton University Press (Princeton, N.J.). 183 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Sociology, philosophy This study of giving and receiving credit and blame places an emphasis on the relationship between those who assign and receive credit and those who assign and receive blame, essentially defining such relationships as ultimately seeking justice in human relationships Principal personages: George Washington, first president of the United States Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of the United States Warren G. Harding, twenty-ninth president of the United States Richard Milhous Nixon, thirty-seventh president of the United States Bill Clinton, forty-second president of the United States Jeff and Michael Derderian, brothers who owned The Station, a nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island Daniel Biechele, manager of the rock band Great White Fyodor Dostoevski, Russian realistic novelist

Shortly after Charles Tilly’s death on April 29, 2008, Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University, where Tilly had held the Joseph I. Buttenwieser Professorship in the Social Sciences, noted that Tilly “could write, interpret, and explain virtually anything to curious minds.” Bollinger went on to say that during Tilly’s fifty-year academic career, he had published more than six hundred articles and fiftyone books and monographs. Credit and Blame, released around the time of Tilly’s death, amply demonstrates the breadth and depth of his thinking and writing. His two books that immediately preceded Credit and Blame—Why?, published in 2006, and Democracy, published in 2007—bear a relationship to Tilly’s final publication. Why? seeks to understand explanations that are used to get to the roots of human actions and reactions. As Tilly pondered such questions, he began to focus on people’s acceptance of credit and assignment of blame as they affect human relationships. In Why?, Tilly categorizes explanations into four classifications that he calls dereliction, deviance, distinction, and good fortune. He points out that if one misses an appointment, an explanation might be that one is having a “senior moment.” This explanation is generally sufficient if one is explaining such a dereliction to family members or close friends. It is not appropriate, though, if one is attempting to explain a missed appointment for an important job interview. Considerations relating to blame, inher-

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ent in this earlier study, led Tilly to a deeper probing of how people deal with blame in various contexts. In Democracy, Tilly focuses on how people often misinterpret what democracy is. As in Credit and Blame, he probes deeply into misunderstandings of many principles and conventions that people have grown so accustomed to that they fail to arrive at a critical understanding of those principles and conventions. Tilly’s explanation of the two major terms he considers in his work, credit and blame, is useful. He cites the Oxford English Dictio nary, the most comprehensive etymological dictionary of the English language, for the origins of these terms. Credit is derived from the Latin word credere, which means to trust or to believe. Historically, its participial form, creditum, refers to something entrusted to another person, including a loan. Tilly is accurate in contending that where there is credit there also exists a human relationship between those receiving and those giving credit. Blame is derived from the Latin blasphemare, which means to revile or blaspheme. Implicit in this term is, as in the other term upon which Tilly is focusing, a human relationship between one who blames and one who receives blame. He emphasizes that both of the terms he is exploring generally involve human relationships, a point he reiterates throughout his book. In discussing the trials relating to a Rhode Island nightclub fire in which more than one hundred people died, Tilly relates how, during the sentencing of the Derderian brothers, who owned the nightclub, and a band manager, Daniel Biechele, who ignited the fireworks that spawned the deadly conflagration, victims and those related to victims swarmed into the courtroom to place blame and demand justice for their losses. Throughout Credit and Blame, Tilly demonstrates how those who ascribe blame are ultimately seeking what, in their eyes, constitutes justice. In most cases, an eyefor-an-eye retribution is sought by an injured public that is predictably disappointed at what might be considered light sentences. Tilly points out, however, that “judges try to keep decisions on the unemotional tracks of existing codes. They steer discussion away from popular justice toward what a ‘reasonable person’ would do in the circumstances.” In Democracy, Tilly provides similar cogent examples of how the masses misinterpret situations in which they have vested interests. In essence, Tilly assesses how emotion often thwarts reason in instances where credit is given or blame is ascribed. He cautions that blame is not necessarily credit turned upside down, although, in some situations, such may be the case. He concludes that blame may be a distortion of credit rather than the opposite of it.

During a teaching career spanning fifty years, Charles Tilly published studies in a daunting array of topics, most sociologically oriented. Following a distinguished academic career at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Tilly became a professor of social sciences at Columbia University. He is also known for his books on French culture, including Strikes in France, 1830-1968 (1974), with Edward Shorter, and The Contentious French (1986).

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In discussing the differences between credit and blame, he contends that “credit calls up a justification that associates giver and receiver in the same moral milieu, while blame separates two moral settings from each other.” This is perhaps the most cogent distinction Tilly makes between the two entities of his topic. In some instances, credit may quickly become blame. Tilly cites the death in office of President Warren G. Harding in 1923. At the time, many Americans viewed Harding’s death as an irreparable loss. More mourners lined the route of his funeral train than at any time since the train carrying Abraham Lincoln’s body made its way from Washington to Illinois. Soon, however, the credit the public ascribed to Harding diminished as tales of his cronyism and his adultery in the White House circulated. Credit turned to blame, and Harding’s reputation was damaged beyond repair. Lincoln, on the other hand, did not enjoy universal credit immediately following his assassination. It took a strenuous effort to convince a wary public of Lincoln’s greatness and to acknowledge his contributions to the public good. In cases in which moral dilemmas are posed, credit may be ascribed to a person for a given act and blame may be ascribed to another person for the same act. Such is particularly true of many political figures. Lincoln is credited with putting an end to slavery and with advancing significantly the cause of human rights in the United States, acts for which his subsequent public image was burnished through the years. Certainly in Lincoln’s day, he was credited for both these advances. At that time, however, much of the South and some pockets of discontent in the North regarded the Civil War as an intolerable act of Northern aggression and placed the blame for the destructive war on Lincoln. Tilly provides a list on page 133 of Credit and Blame of “Scholars’ Ranking of U.S. Presidents, 2000.” Only three of the presidents—George Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt—were ranked as great. Tilly notes that all three served during wartime and that, in all three cases, the United States won the war during which they served. He goes on further to note that three of the presidents the scholars ranked as failures—Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Andrew Johnson—served in peacetime but that considerations of war were fundamental in the ranking of all three. Pierce and Buchanan were deemed failures for not striving more vigorously to prevent the Civil War, and Andrew Johnson was considered a failure for mismanaging Reconstruction following the Civil War. The scholars involved in this survey were fundamentally concerned with matters of credit and blame as they assessed the contributions of every president from Washington to Bill Clinton. It is interesting that these scholars ranked Clinton as average, placing him in the same list as such lackluster presidents as Chester Arthur, Calvin Coolidge, and John Quincy Adams. Although he could be credited with effective foreign and economic policies, he obviously evoked rancor and blame because of his unfortunate dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, a peccadillo that was generally thought to besmirch the dignity of his office.

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An even more flagrant case of this sort was the two-term presidency of Richard M. Nixon that produced an admirable foreign policy. Nixon deserved considerable credit for bringing about an accord between his nation and China, a monumental diplomatic undertaking. Nevertheless, the presidential scholars placed Nixon on their list of below-average presidents. Nixon was tainted by the unpopular Vietnam War that raged during his terms of office. His presidency was, in the eyes of many, connected with political corruption that led eventually to the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew for tax evasion in 1973. Many people were convinced that Agnew’s crimes were more numerous than those of which he was found guilty. The crowning blow for Nixon, however, was the Watergate scandal for which he was eventually forced to accept the blame, resulting in his resignation from the presidency under the threat of an impeachment trial, which he was almost certain to have lost. Tilly delves into the past to consider questions of credit and blame in some venerable texts, including Fyodor Dostoevski’s Prestupleniye i nakazaniye (1866; Crime and Punishment, 1886), whose very title reminds one of Tilly’s. Tilly explores the mind and motives of the novel’s murderous protagonist, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, in the light of the credit-blame dichotomy at the heart of his study. Raskolnikov, finally captured, tried, and exiled to Siberia for his crime, is followed there by the prostitute Sonya, who loves Raskolnikov and ultimately redeems him, making him realize that in the end people must take responsibility for their actions, good or bad. Having reached this understanding, he now acknowledges that his redemption lies in working to earn credit and in accepting the blame for his misdeeds. Tilly contends that crediting and blaming are essentially social acts and that, in human relationships, responsibility consistently trumps luck or happenstance. In his discussion of war monuments, Tilly finds concordant examples of credit and blame. Such monuments commemorate events for which the winning side (usually the side erecting the monuments) claims credit. There is in most such situations, however, a losing side, so the very act of erecting a monument casts a shadow of blame. Tilly cites as his examples the Hermann Monument in Germany, begun in 1838 by Ernst von Bandel, a German sculptor. The monument commemorates Armin (mistranslated as Hermann in later years), who, early in the first century of the common era, defeated three Roman legions led by Publius Quinctilius Varus in the Teutoburg Forest. Armin came to represent German resistance to the French forces that had conquered much of Germany during the Napoleonic Wars. The rub was that von Bandel’s sculpture was not completed until 1875, some thirty-seven years after it was begun. By that time, as Tilly recounts, “Prussia had trounced France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, Napoleon III’s Second Empire had collapsed, Prussia had taken Alsace and much of Lorraine from France as spoils of war, and Germany had united under Prussian leadership.” In other words, in the thirty-eight years that had elapsed, the purpose of the sculpture lost its relevance. Tilly’s book is not for the weak of heart. It perhaps undertakes to provide too

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much detail about its quite narrow subject. As Tilly jumps from example to example, some readers will predictably become confused by the broad span the text is covering. R. Baird Shuman

Review Sources The New York Times Book Review 255, no. 14 (August 17, 2008): 10. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 14 (April 7, 2008): 56.

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THE CROWD SOUNDS HAPPY A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball Author: Nicholas Dawidoff (1962) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 288 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Autobiography Time: 1965-2004 Locale: Washington, D.C., New Haven, Boston, and New York Dawidoff’s autobiographical coverage of his attempt, through an identification with the Red Sox and with literary characters, to cope with his absentee father Principal personages: Nicholas Dawidoff, the author Sally Dawidoff, his sister Heidi Dawidoff, his long-suffering mother Donald Dawidoff, his father, who suffers with mental problems Alexander Gerschenkron, his grandfather, a Harvard professor and Red Sox fan Annette Hamburger, his high school and college friend

Nicholas Dawidoff’s The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball is autobiographical, and it focuses on Dawidoff’s attempts to come to terms with his absentee father, who is slowly descending into madness. In December, 2000, Dawidoff wrote an article for The New Yorker about his relationship with his father, and this book amplifies on that material, placing it in a broader context. The book begins as it ends, with his father. His mother, Heidi, is leaving Donald and Washington, D.C., with her children, three-year-old Nicholas and Sally, the baby. They move to New Haven, Connecticut, where Heidi finds work as a teacher, supporting her family by herself since Donald is not paying alimony or child support. Although his parents are divorced, Nicholas and his sister make monthly visits to their father in New York, where he moved after losing his job. In the course of the book, it is revealed that Donald, who graduated from Harvard and Yale Law School and who was an excellent lacrosse player, had mental problems in school and while he was employed first in New York and then in Washington. Donald’s story is about a promising young man whose fortunes declined because of his mental illness. As a child, Nicholas was aware of a problem, but his mother shielded him from a full knowledge of his father’s condition. In order to stay solvent and sane, Heidi exercises rigid control of her children and her life. Her scrimping and saving and her insistence on doing the right thing (such as returning extra change from a cashier) result in her children being “good,” but it also ostracizes them from other children. Because Heidi will not allow a television set in the house, Nicky and Sally are cultural outsiders among the neighborhood children.

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Timid and athletically inept, Nicky is always the last one picked in the neighborhood and Nicholas Dawidoff’s previous books include The Fly Swatter (2002), which school kickball games. The only competition he excels at is read- was a finalist for the Pulitizer Prize; In ing, and he defeats Binder, his academic rival, the Country of Country (1998), which by reading more books, but the victory is is about country music; and Baseball: tainted. Wanting to look good before Miss A Literary Anthology (2002), which he Swainback, his teacher, Nicky lies to her about edited. He has received Guggenheim, Civitella Ramieri, and Berlin Prize reading Sir James Barrie’s play Peter Pan (pr. fellowships, and he is now the Anschutz 1904). For the guilt-ridden Nicky, his “trans- Distinguished fellow at Princeton gression” cannot be redeemed by his actually University. reading Peter Pan. He must suffer, just as he has paid for asking a friend about where his sister is and finding out that she had been killed earlier. Nicky’s imagination, the product of a morbidly sensitive nature, dwells on the dead girl and leaves him feeling vulnerable. His only escape from the real world is in books, and his favorites are the Hardy boys novels, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918), and baseball stories. Reading about the Hardys’ independence, Cather’s Midwest, and athletic success enables him to cope with his kickball failures, his dependence on his mother, and the bleak urban landscape that is New Haven. His visits to see his father are frightening and confusing. On one trip, his father abandons Nicky, and only by racing can he catch up with his father and avoid being lost. Nicky’s trips to Croton, New York, where his Aunt Susi and Uncle Tony live, do bring him some welcome relief because his mother seems calmer around her sister. Tony and Susi are a “real” couple, and Susi loves the New York Mets and Tom Seaver. In the same way, Nicky’s New Hampshire summers with his mother’s father, a Harvard professor, are relaxing and enjoyable because the two listen to the Red Sox games on the radio. As they listen, his grandfather makes the game seem like a fairy tale with the Boston Red Sox as “knights-errant” and the New York Yankees as “horrible Gilgameshian obstacles to glory.” Dawidoff mentions two athletic outings with his father: the Mets game they attend goes to extra innings, and Nicky discovers that his father does not even like baseball; the other, a football game between Columbia and Harvard, makes his father aware that he cannot go back to his athletic past. Finally, Nicky realizes that the children’s visits are attempts “to make my father seem like a normal dad.” A year after the Mets outing, Heidi takes Nicky, whose obsession with baseball now includes baseball cards, to Cooperstown, New York, to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame. What should have been a wonderful experience soon becomes a nightmare when he sees that most of the visitors are fathers and sons who share their love for the game. He blames his loss to another boy in a game of baseball trivia to his lack of a real father, with whom he could have talked baseball. Despite the unpleasant visits, he continues to make the trek to his father in New York. Nicky comes to fear the city, which he portrays with hellish imagery, and he feels vulnerable. He does not want to go to New York, but he knows if he does not go, “I would be without any father at all.”

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Filling in for his father are a series of surrogate dads, such as Mr. Sullivan, the family’s upstairs neighbor. As Nicky and Mr. Sullivan watch Hank Aaron break Babe Ruth’s career home run record, the sensitive Nicky sympathizes with Al Downing, who gave up the home run. Mr. Sullivan empathizes with Nicky, who senses that “somebody who was not your father could briefly feel like one, might even want that as much as you did, and that it might be okay to reveal yourself a little.” When he later sees Mr. Sullivan drunk, Nicky is disillusioned and realizes that he wants more from his neighbor, from his baseball coach, and from his Uncle Tony, but that when he “touches their limits, the disappointment was outsized. I wasn’t theirs.” Nicky’s life is beset by fear, guilt, and humiliation. The disappearance and death of Jennifer Noon, a classmate, at the hands of a “strange man” terrifies him and makes him think of his “strange” father. When he finds a two-year supply of Penthouse magazines at the curb, he brings them home, but he immediately gives them to his mother because he knows that he is doing something he should not. Another incident demonstrating his sexual naiveté occurs when he sees a couple crawling out from under a front porch: “Then it occurred to me that where they had just come from was a place I knew nothing about.” One of Nicky’s main concerns is his delay in reaching puberty. His teammates even call him “Pubie,” a takeoff on the Hubert “Hubie” Green of professional golfing, but the nickname is only one of the many his classmates heap on him. Because he is unwilling to fight or even to defend himself, he becomes the victim of both verbal and physical abuse. Because of his grandfather’s influence, Nicky switches his allegiance from the Mets to the Red Sox, and he begins listening to their games on the new Realistic Chronomatic 9 clock radio. Just listening to the game becomes high drama as announcer Ned Martin describes the action and the ballplayers. To aid his heroes, Nicky indulges in a lot of superstitious behavior, such as being kind to his mother and Sally and making promises to God if He will produce a Red Sox victory. The 1978 season receives a great deal of attention in the book. The Red Sox start strong, fade as summer ends, stage a comeback, and are tied with the hated Yankees at the end of the season, necessitating a playoff game, which they lose when Red Sox star Carl Yastrzemski strikes out. When the Sox fail, Nicky says that he “was back on my own without them.” In a way, the “inadequacy of the Red Sox exactly matched my own.” Nicky’s favorite Red Sox player is Ted Williams, whose story, told in his book My Turn at Bat (1969), “felt like mine.” Nicky and Williams have a lot in common: divorced parents, troubled boyhood, refuge in baseball, attempting to share friends’ dads, awkward with girls, feeling that nobody likes them, envying a friend’s closeness to his father, highly motivated but insecure. As he reads and rereads Williams’s autobiography, Nicky feels that Williams is “there for me” and even fantasizes that he and Williams could take in a couple Westerns and have some milk shakes together, activities that Williams says he enjoys when he is feeling low. Breaking Away (1979), a film about a young man who dreams of success as a bicyclist, also provides ties to Nicky’s situation since the main character, Dave Stoller, also is estranged from his father. The film concerns a reconciliation between father and son, but it also involves class, the fraternity boys, and the “townies.” Nicky’s

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“class” is ambiguous: Although he attends a prestigious private school, thanks to a scholarship, he is not really an upper-class youngster. He feels that “I didn’t quite belong anywhere.” When he turns eighteen, however, things change: He is bigger, more popular, and even assertive. When he stops the physical abuse by attacking a larger classmate, the other students notice that Nicky “fought back.” He becomes friends with Annette Hamburger and even enjoys, despite the wound inflicted by the girl’s braces, his first real kiss. When his mother asserts, “The good stories are about struggle,” he understands that the expression relates to his own life. After high school, Nicky attends Harvard, just as his father did, and he becomes increasingly concerned that he may become like his father—after Harvard, he goes to New York, and the situation worsens. He says, “Father’s Day was for me like Valentine’s Day for the brokenhearted.” At Thanksgiving dinner in 1991, Nicky decides not to see his father any more. Eight years later his father dies, and when Nicky delivers the eulogy, he understands that his father had expressed his love for his son by avoiding him. The Red Sox do finally win the World Series, but his account of the playoffs and series in 2004 lacks the intensity and detail he gives to the team when they fail. Near the end of the book, Nicky says, “Now that they were winners, I saw that happiness cannot exist without sadness,” a statement that mirrors his boyhood observation that the sweetness of the pomegranate is hidden within its bitter husk. Though the book ends on a positive note, the overall tone of the book is bittersweet, reflecting the ambiguities of life. Even the title is uncertain: In The Crowd Sounds Happy, “sounds” suggests “seems.” Thomas L. Erskine

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 17 (May 1, 2008): 64. Library Journal 133, no. 2 (February 1, 2008): 77. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 13 (March 31, 2008): 49-50. The San Diego Union-Tribune, March 30, 2008, p. E4. The Washington Post, May 6, 2008, p. CO7.

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DANGEROUS LAUGHTER Thirteen Stories Author: Steven Millhauser (1943) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 244 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Short fiction Millhauser’s eclectic collection of short fiction, ranging from accounts of towers built to heaven to stories about uncontrollable laughter Principal characters: Elaine Coleman, a young woman who goes missing in “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman” David, the protagonist and narrator of “The Room in the Attic” Wolf, a rebellious young intellectual in “The Room in the Attic” Isabel, Wolf’s mysterious sister in “The Room in the Attic” The Master, a maker of exquisite miniatures in “In the Reign of Harad IV”

Steven Millhauser is an inexhaustibly creative writer whose stories reflect a broad range of interests and a remarkable ability to shift perspective and thus examine the commonplace from a completely uncommon vantage. In Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories, his influences vary from American writers such as Edgar Allan Poe (as shown in “The Room in the Attic”) and John Barth (in “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman”) to early postmodernists such as Argentine short story writer Jorge Luis Borges (shown by “In the Reign of Harad IV”) and Italian fabulist Italo Calvino (as demonstrated in “The Tower”). The writer’s focus moves from the intensely personal to the philosophically inquisitive and to abstracted ruminations on principles. In the way that some books are considered to be “novels of ideas,” Millhauser (like Borges and Calvino) can be considered a short story writer of ideas. His eclectic and diverse stories demonstrate that Millhauser seems to see things differently than most and to notice things the rest of the world typically overlooks. Dangerous Laughter is introduced by the story “Cat ‘n’ Mouse,” which serves as an appropriate preamble to Millhauser’s postmodern sensibility. The story chronicles the eternal and continuous struggle between a cartoon mouse and his animated feline adversary, reminiscent of the Hanna-Barbera animation studio’s long-running and popular Tom and Jerry cartoons. Millhauser’s approach in rendering these characters into literary fiction could have easily been ironic. Instead, even as cat and mouse plot cruel mischief against each other (as in the Tom and Jerry cartoons, the cat is typically the aggressor, finding again and again to his chagrin that the mouse is a step ahead of him, so that the cat’s own designs return to haunt him—the trick cigar explodes in the

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cat’s mouth; the birthday cake with dynamite for a candle blows up the cat; the sudden bliz- Steven Millhauser entered the Ph.D. zard brought on flash-freezes the cat instead program in English at Brown but never of the mouse)—they each eventually realize completed the degree. He introduced that he is defined by the other. In effect, the his creative and postmodern style of struggle of each creature against his nemesis fiction with Edwin Mullhouse: The Life is the only reason either animated character and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954 (1972). His literary has for existence. reputation was solidified when his Dangerous Laughter is organized accordnovel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an ing to shared thematic motifs. Part one is ti- American Dreamer (1996) won the tled “Vanishing Acts,” and it groups together Pulitzer Prize. Dangerous Laughter is personal stories of loss, dissolution, and dis- his seventh collection of short fiction. appearance. The second section is titled “Im possible Architectures,” and it groups together stories that deal in distant ways with impersonal and improbable artifices—a tower breaking into heaven; a dome that covers first a house, then a city, a nation, a continent, and eventually a world; a mirror town built adjacent to a real town, the first municipality’s twin in every particular save the double’s nonexistent citizenry; and models of houses, furniture, and implements built at an almost invisible microscopic level. The last section is called “Heretical Histories,” and it offers stories that range from considerations of alternate ways to view the purpose and usefulness of history to a first-person account by a member of Thomas Edison’s laboratory, a tale about the magical, artistic excellence of a photographer and painter whose works seem to come to life, and a brief dissertation of fantastical and imaginary fashion trends. Despite the four groupings (including the introductory story, listed as “Opening Cartoon”) used to organize the contents of Dangerous Laughter, the stories can, in a broader sense, be separated into two categories: works driven almost entirely by ideas and works driven by character (even if still extraordinarily rich with ideas). Like the books of Calvino about fictional, fantastical cities and what their cultures might be like, such as Le città invisibili (1972; Invisible Cities, 1974), many of Millhauser’s stories tend to ask “what if?” questions in pursuit of a philosophical answer. Particularly the stories listed in the “Impossible Architectures” sequence fall into the former category, although stories from “Vanishing Acts” and “Heretical Histories” do as well. Stories such as “The Tower,” “The Dome,” “Here at the Historical Society,” and “A Change in Fashion” contain no plot, more or less no dialogue, and no actual characters to speak of; the reader does not become engaged in a protagonist’s particular dilemma or ambitions. “The Tower,” for example, is loosely based on the biblical Tower of Babel; in this version of the tale, the builders of the tower—after generations and generations, the act of construction so long in its fulfillment that the tower has its own culture, residents, and systems—actually do succeed in reaching heaven, at which point they have no idea what to do. In “The Dome,” the idea of sealing off the external world around a house and a neighborhood eventually spreads to encapsulate continents and one day the world; the story is an extended rumination on our human

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need to filter the world and experience it secondhand rather than face to face. Primarily, these stories best function as allegories. Man is meant to always be striving (in this case, building a tower to heaven); should humans ever achieve a presumably unattainable goal, they would be lost. “The Dome” seems to be in some ways about the constant human struggle between security, on the one hand, and life, on the other. Although these stories are interesting as “tales” in the classical sense of the word (which argues that the point of a story is to prove a point, as in cautionary tales, fables, and parables), they are less successful as modern short stories, in which typically the focus is more on character and less on scenario. The best of the “idea” stories in Dangerous Laughter fall more into the Borges than the Calvino camp in that they, while still driven by ideas, also anchor those ideas with plot and character. “In the Reign of Harad IV” is not successful because it deals with the creation of microscopic models as an idea, but rather because it is also focused on the ambition and need of the Master miniature maker in his quest to perfect his craft. “A Precursor of the Cinema” tells of a painter who creates visual effects that seem almost lifelike in terms of effects of motion and movement; like “In the Reign of Harad IV,” “A Precursor of the Cinema” depicts an artist who (literally in this case) disappears into his art. Similarly, the best stories in the collection taken as a whole are equally as creative as “The Dome” and “A Change in Fashion,” but the intricate, sometimes surreal plots and skewed perspectives are united with character and theme in a way that accomplishes more than the cerebral machinations of the former stories. “The Wizard of West Orange” is set in Edison’s workshop in 1889 and composed in diary fashion by one of Edison’s less important employees. Even as Edison and his crew strive to perfect motion pictures, the narrator of “The Wizard of West Orange” becomes obsessed with the work performed on the “haptograph,” a device that perfectly mimics touch. To the narrator, the haptograph seems a bridge to a new eon in human development. “Mimicry,” he records in his diary. “Splendor of the haptograph. Not just the replication of familiar tactile sensations, but capacity to explore new combinations— pressures, touches, never experienced before. Adventures of feeling. Who can say what new sensations will be awakened, what unknown desires? Unexplored realms of the tangible. The frontiers of touch.” The titular story, “Dangerous Laughter,” tells of a youthful fad that moves through a group of teens. The teenagers gather in parties and laugh spontaneously, for no particular reason, until reason and caution are lost behind the laughter. One girl, Clara Schuler, emerges from her shy cocoon under the aegis of the laughter fad and refuses to let go of the craze when the other teens move on to weeping parties. Slowly, Clara loses her sense of self and eventually falls into a fit of laughter from which she cannot recover. Similarly, the title character of “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman” seemingly suffers not from an abduction or random act of violence but rather from a retreat from the world, leaving behind her community (as voiced by the unnamed narrator in the story) who struggles to reconstruct her identity. Perhaps the most effective story in the collection is “The Room in the Attic.” David is a high school athlete who has always been the kind of teenager he is expected to be; he has a girlfriend, a few knock-around friends, and a more or less normal life. His

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senior year is changed when a new, ferociously intelligent boy called Wolf transfers into David’s class. As Wolf and David become friends, Wolf brings him home to meet his sister Isabel. To visit Isabel, however, David must enter a pitch-black room and never turn on a light or open a curtain. The story is reminiscent in some ways of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” with its strange twins Roderick and Madeline, and also calls to mind another pair of legends. In some versions of “The Beauty and the Beast,” the woman hostage does not see her captor face to face until they have come to care for each other. Additionally, in one variant of the legend of the love between the Roman god of love Cupid and Psyche, Cupid visits Psyche but only in the dark; he cannot consort with her once she knows his identity. David is soon obsessed with Isabel and spends every afternoon with her. He is at first convinced that he must see her, but at some deeper level he realizes that he is as much infatuated with the idea of her and what she represents in terms of mystery as he is infatuated with her physical form. David says, Sometimes, I had the sense that Isabel was revealing herself to me slowly, like a gradually materializing phantom, according to a plan that eluded me. If I waited patiently, it would all become clear, as if things were moving toward some larger revelation.

As his relationship with Isabel progresses toward its inevitable conclusion, David is forced to realize what countless young people before him have: When one eats from the tree of knowledge, then one must leave the lands of innocence and safety behind, along with one’s youthful naïveté. Millhauser is an intensely creative short-story writer, with a vast imagination and an ability to direct it in many different channels. His craft is at its peak when his nimbly creative intellect keeps pace with his ability to empathize and create realistic characters that reflect human virtues and foibles. Scott Yarbrough

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 7 (December 1, 2007): 4. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 10. Library Journal 133, no. 3 (February 15, 2008): 99. O, The Oprah Magazine 9, no. 3 (March, 2008): 178. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 50 (December 17, 2007): 33. Review of Contemporary Fiction 28, no. 2 (Summer, 2008): 161-162.

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THE DARK SIDE The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals Author: Jane Mayer (1955) Publisher: Doubleday (New York). 392 pp. $32.00 Type of work: History, current affairs Time: 2001 to the present Locale: The United States and the Middle East An account of the events and personages of the United States’ interrogation policies of the “war on terror” in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 Principal personages: George W. Bush, president of the United States Richard Cheney, vice president of the United States David Addington, legal counsel to the vice president John Ashcroft, United States Attorney General Jack Goldsmith, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel Alberto Gonzales, United States Attorney General Colin Powell, Secretary of State, 2001-2005 Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State, 2005-2009 Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense George Tenet, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Yoo, lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel

Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side is a masterful account of the U.S. government’s “war on terror” interrogation program that followed al-Qaeda’s attacks of September 11, 2001. It relates the capture and seizing of suspects from the Middle East and elsewhere, their incarceration at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and other sites, and the methods employed by American officials to gain information in order to prevent another 9/11. It is a story of fools and knaves and a few heroes and constitutes one of the darkest chapters in history of the abuse of rights that are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and decades of tradition. This is history with a point of view: Mayer is not an admirer of the Bush administration’s use of extreme interrogation techniques. On the Sunday after the attack on New York City’s Twin Towers and on the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on the television program Meet the Press, stated that “[w]e’ll have to work sort of the dark side . . . . And, uh, so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal.” Over the years that followed, extreme measures—including water boarding, sleep deprivation, sexual intimidation, and other physical and psychological methods—were employed

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to break down detainees in order to obtain supposedly crucial information regarding past Jane Mayer, granddaughter of the eminent Civil War historian Alan and future terrorist activities. Like other state governors who ascended Nevins, graduated from Yale University to the presidency, George W. Bush had little and did graduate work at Oxford experience and perhaps little knowledge of University. As a journalist, she has foreign affairs. Conversely, Cheney had an written for The Wall Street Journal, agenda, the result of long political experi- The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. The Dark Side was a ence. He had been chief of staff in the Gerald finalist for the 2008 National Book Ford administration, had served in the Con- Award for nonfiction. gress, and had been Secretary of Defense in the administration of George H. W. Bush. Cheney became convinced that the executive branch had lost its legitimate governmental authority as the result of the Watergate affair in the early 1970’s. He sought to regain for the presidency what he considered its rightful power. If Cheney was somewhat the éminence grise of the administration’s response to the events of 9/11, the point man was David Addington, Cheney’s legal counsel. Addington had served in the Ronald Reagan administration and was responsible for many of the “signing statements” that Reagan and George W. Bush used to modify and dilute the intent of congressional laws. However, Cheney and Addington were not alone in advocating suspect actions. After 9/11, elements in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) argued the necessity to execute suspected terrorists out of hand as well as to conduct espionage within the United States, which by law it was forbidden to do. Whether the origin was the CIA, Cheney and Addison, or other sources, as one individual put it, the gloves were off when it came to ferreting out dangers to the United States. As Mayer points out, both Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus and Franklin Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese Americans went further than did the Bush administration in threatening civil liberties. The difference was that Bush and his advisers claimed that the president had the legal right to do whatever he believed necessary. A crucial figure on giving legal justification for such wide-ranging presidential powers was John Yoo, a deputy chief in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department. In a series of legal memos, Yoo claimed that the requirements of national security trumped all other constitutional or legal restrictions placed upon a president, a legal interpretation that most constitutional scholars deplored. Never had a vice president’s office been more powerful in American history, and in most matters Cheney or Addington had the last word with Bush before any major presidential decisions. Other relevant departments, such as the State Department, and persons, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, were simply bypassed or ignored. Cheney, Addington, and Yoo, and most of the other like-minded advocates of unlimited presidential power in times of national crisis, had no direct experience with counterterrorism, with military service, with the Muslim world. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, neither the CIA nor the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had

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more than a handful of Arabic speakers. Mayer notes that the administration’s worldview was similar to that of the popular television show 24, in which the protagonist Jack Bauer frequently resorts to torture to obtain information to make the world safe for American democracy. However, the real world is not 24, and torture, however defined, does not necessarily lead to actionable information. The Dark Side is about what was done with those captured on a foreign battlefield or seized in some other circumstance. Mayer does not make the claim, but, war being war, some of the captured were probably killed, perhaps intentionally. To people such as Addington, the prisoners had greater value being kept alive because of the information that they supposedly had regarding future terrorist actions. There was perhaps some justification for this in the weeks and months immediately following the events of September 11, 2001, but as the years dragged on, the secrets that terrorist suspects might have held became irrelevant and out of date. In addition, most of those seized were relatively low-level figures, the foot soldiers, whose knowledge of the plans of Osama bin Laden and others was extremely limited or was nonexistent in the first place. Nevertheless, hundreds were captured, and the issues became where to house them and how to elicit from them the supposed crucial information. Guantanamo had the advantage of being controlled by the United States under a 1903 agreement with the Cuban government, but it was not American territory, and thus the inmates, or “illegal enemy combatants,” would be isolated from constitutional guarantees and could be tried by military commissions, another decision by the Cheney cohorts that Bush signed on to with no other input. In the interim, to get information from the inmates, various extreme techniques were employed. Bush and others in the administration denied that torture was used, but the term “torture” was very narrowly defined. In August, 2002, Yoo wrote an in-house memo describing torture as only that which led to “organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Anything short of those was deemed acceptable. Guantanamo prison camp, established in January, 2002, was not the only facility that housed captives. “Rendition” was often elsewhere, and the CIA in particular had numerous black sites or facilities in “friendly” nations around the world, including some in Eastern Europe and in the Middle East. Most renditions remained hidden from the public, but a CIA nightmare occurred in Italy when thirteen or more CIA officials were discovered staying in first-class hotels and running up credit card charges of $145,000 in one rendition escapade. At the black sites, extreme measures were used before they were possibly transferred to Guantanamo. As has been pointed out, even by lawyers within the administration, the employment of many of those techniques, whether or not they met the legal standard of what might be torture, would largely prevent later legal trials of such suspects because of the methods used to gain information. Even in the cases of such high-level figures as al-Qaeda logistics chief Abu Zubayda and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the information gleaned through water boarding and other problematic techniques was often suspect. Mohammed was definitely connected to the planning for 9/11, but what he told the inquisitors was often

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intentionally misleading, irrelevant, and of little use. Sometimes what resulted from extreme measures was patently untrue, as in the case of one suspect whose confinement in Egypt’s notorious facilities gained a “confession” that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were cooperating in terrorist activities and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, information that played a role in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 in spite of doubts within the CIA that the confession was reliable. With Zubayda, Mayer argues that the FBI got more information using more humane methods than did the CIA using harsher techniques. Others, more knowledgeable about interrogation techniques than policy makers in the White House, were doubtful that extreme techniques would succeed, and they claimed that prisoners, if treated humanely, often were willing to talk, perhaps even to brag, about their aims and accomplishments. There were heroes such as Jack Goldsmith, a conservative lawyer and head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) beginning in the summer of 2003. After taking over the OLC, he argued that there was no justification in the law for Yoo’s claims that in wartime the president’s power was absolute in the treatment of wartime captives. Goldsmith was also troubled by the government’s decision to bypass the court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act regarding domestic spying, and he opposed the renewal of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. Ultimately, pressures led to his resignation, but not before he had withdrawn the blanket endorsement given to the CIA to use extreme measures. However, little changed after his departure: The new OLC head authorized whatever the administration deemed necessary. In the Congress, few took up the issue of torture, possibly fearing to appear to be soft on terrorism. One who did was Senator John McCain, who himself had been a victim of torture while a prisoner during the Vietnam War. In 2005, McCain introduced an amendment to a Defense Department bill prohibiting the military from using methods not authorized in the Army Field Manual. Cheney lobbied Congress against it and Bush threatened to veto it, but it passed anyway. However, Bush, with Addington’s input, added a “signing statement,” stating that the law would be enforced only in a manner consistent with his role as commander in chief, and a secret memo from the post-Goldsmith OLC claimed that in any event none of the CIA’s methods constituted torture. It is impossible to gauge the extent of the use of extreme measures. The CIA claims it was minimal, but the victims have claimed otherwise. Until 2005, the CIA kept extensive tapes of the interrogations, but they were destroyed, probably to prevent provable examples of torture. The destruction of such evidence could be considered to be a criminal act, but at the time of the writing of The Dark Side no one had been indicted for that action or for any other violations of U.S. laws or international treaties. Although the administration denied using torture, it justified extreme measures by the results obtained, claiming that the United States did not suffer another 9/11 attack. Whether this was because crucial information had been gained through extreme measures is impossible to prove because the Bush administration has refused to give specific information about any attacks that were foiled. Because administration figures have refused, for obvious reasons, to discuss inter-

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rogation practices toward “illegal enemy combatants,” it can be argued that Mayer largely presents only one side. Nevertheless, as it stands, The Dark Side is a damning indictment of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies. Eugene Larson

Review Sources The Economist 388, no. 8591 (August 2, 2008): 86-87. Library Journal 133, no. 18 (November 1, 2008): 116. The New York Times, July 22, 2008, p. 19. The New York Times Book Review, August 10, 2008, p. 4. Policy Review, no. 151 (October/November, 2008): 80-85. Time 172, no. 4 (July 28, 2008): 18. The Times Literary Supplement, October 31, 2008, p. 10.

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DAVID MAMET A Life in the Theatre Author: Ira Nadel (1955) Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (New York). 278 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Literary biography Time: 1947 to the present Locale: Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles The first full-length biography of a prominent contemporary American dramatist, who is also the writer of screenplays, novels, essays, and children’s books Principal personages: David Mamet, author of nearly three dozen plays and more than two dozen screenplays Bernard (Bernie) and Lenore (Lee) Mamet, the playwright’s parents Lindsay Crouse, actress and Mamet’s first wife Rebecca Pidgeon, actress and Mamet’s second wife Sanford Meisner, influential acting teacher and Mamet’s mentor Gregory Mosher, longtime director and producer of numerous Mamet plays William H. Macy, one of the group of actors often associated with Mamet’s plays

The subtitle A Life in the Theatre that Ira Nadel has selected for his biography of David Mamet, replicating the title of his subject’s 1977 play, signals that readers should not expect an expansive, full-blown narrative covering events from the dramatist’s birth to the present. Rather, Nadel focuses almost exclusively on Mamet’s prolific output as a writer, largely for stage and screen. One reason for this strategy may be, as Nadel notes, that Mamet tends to be circumspect, “maintaining a wall around himself,” preferring to be defined by what he does instead of who he is. Another may be—surprisingly so for an academic scholar—that Nadel chose not to research the available archival material containing Mamet’s 175 journals from over a thirty-fiveyear period, relying instead on secondary sources. Nor is there evidence that he saw need to speak with Mamet directly, though he does quote from interviews by others with the dramatist. Eschewing any interest in psychologizing his subject or delving into his personal relationships, Nadel lays claim only to what is, for a contemporary biographer, the modest aim of “telling . . . ‘WHAT HAPPENS NEXT,’” though admittedly this is Mamet’s chief intent as well. The result is a workmanlike rendition of mostly already-known facts, accompanied by extensive plot summaries. What emerges is a portrait of a bifurcated individual: a Midwesterner born-and-bred in Chicago, yet at home in and lauded on the world’s stages; someone who is street-

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savvy and suspicious of appearing overly intellectual, yet touted as the theatrical heir of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter; a critic of capitalism and consumerism, yet a ready participant in the Hollywood system. The first several chapters, about a quarter of the book, chronicle Mamet’s birth in 1947 on Chicago’s South Side to Bernard and Lenore Mamet, a labor lawyer and a teacher, respectively, who were descendants of Polish Russian Jews; his early years going to films, taking piano lessons, and listening to stories told by his maternal grandfather; his stints on radio and television; his nonstellar record at a progressive school; and his voracious reading of works by Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser at the Chicago Public Library. After his parents’ fractious marriage ended in divorce, Bernard remarried three days later, fathering two more sons; Lenore, too, married again, to another Bernie, who turned out to be physically abusive to Mamet’s sister. The young Mamet was first introduced to theatergoing at Hull House and later at Second City. One of the side stories Nadel sketches is the rather remarkable position of Chicago as an incubator for writers and actors, second only to New York (and of Mamet’s part in that development), with its myriad of storefront and regional playhouses, including the Organic, the Ivanhoe, the Royal Court, the Goodman, and Steppenwolf. Mamet’s attendance at Goddard College—focused on experiential learning that allowed him to write a play for his senior thesis—began his love affair with the geography and hardworking craftsmen of Vermont. Eventually, he would buy a home, build a writing cabin in the woods in Cabot, and use it as the setting for a novel, The Village (1994), and a screenplay, State and Main (2000), as well as a collection of essays, The Cabin (1992), and a travelogue, South of the Northeast Kingdom (2002). While a student, Mamet learned about the theater of Bertolt Brecht, worked backstage Off-Broadway, and began to study acting—which he would teach when he returned to Goddard as a faculty member in the early 1970’s after a period of depression and psychoanalysis, about which Nadel provides no illuminating details. It was at Goddard, too, that Mamet started to assemble a coterie of actors (beginning with William H. Macy, but later including such Mamet regulars as Mike Nussbaum, Joe Montegna, Felicity Huffman, and Ricky Jay) who would work with him at the St. Nicholas Theater in Chicago and at the Atlantic in New York. Mamet’s return to his hometown and the launching of his playwriting career with Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974) began his long association with Gregory Mosher, artistic director of the Goodman Theater, with whom he collaborated on an adaptation of what he considered the greatest American novel, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1978). After this point, the biographical material becomes sketchier, mostly a spine to support the plot summaries and to draw some connections between the outer life—playing poker in a junk shop, sailing on an ore boat, working in a North Side real estate office—and the art: the award-winning American Buffalo (1975),

Ira Nadel is professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he is a Distinguished University Scholar and Fellow of Canada’s Royal Society. Previously, he has written critical biographies of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Leonard Cohen, and Tom Stoppard.

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Lakeboat (1982), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross (1984). Mention is made of his marriages to two actresses, first Lindsay Crouse and then Rebecca Pidgeon, who converts to Judaism for Mamet, and the births of his children; his moves from the Chelsea section of Manhattan to Boston, to Vermont, and finally to Los Angeles; his study of the Hebrew language and two visits to Israel; and his popularity in Great Britain and the increasing number of honors he receives, including a festival devoted to him at the Goodman. Through it all, Nadel is often annoyingly repetitive, as when, for instance, he twice quotes within a few pages Mamet’s credo about constructing a scene, the basic element of stagecraft: “‘Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don’t get it? Why now?” The later chapters of Nadel’s study proceed as much by topic as by chronology, with several recurrent motifs: the differences between working in theater and in film; the Hobbesian nature of business in America; the ubiquity of the confidence game in human interactions; the connection between language and power; machoism and the masculine ethos; and a renewed interest in Judaism. Sometimes these focal points coalesce around a body of work produced during a certain chronological period in Mamet’s career and so receive coherent development; but mostly the reader needs to pull them together from disparate mentions. For long stretches, Mamet is simultaneously producing fiction and nonfiction prose, dramas, and a string of films that he either writes and/or directs—such as The Verdict (1982), through The House of Games (1987), to The Winslow Boy (1999). In writing for the theater, Mamet subscribes to an Aristotelian emphasis on characters in conflict and a Beckettian minimalism that leaves out things once deemed essential by the audience. Actors in his plays must build their characters from doing rather than thinking—a technique he learned from his teacher, Sanford Meisner, at the Neighborhood Playhouse during his formative years. The film medium, unlike theater, allows three opportunities to get things right—in the writing, in the shooting, and in the editing processes, but the greatest of these is the last. Mamet takes his cue from Russian director Sergei Eisenstein—to whom he pays visual homage in the steps sequence in The Untouchables (1987)—by affirming that cinema art resides in the juxtaposition of cuts to create meaning. Despite Mamet’s extensive work in films (and recently television), he will excoriate producers as hustlers in such plays as Speed-the-Plow (1988) and even critique his own pact with Tinseltown as a sacrifice of artistry in such satiric works as his adaptation of Faustus (2004). Filmmaking comes in for the same moral indignation at Mamet’s hands as other forms of business in America: unfettered capitalism with its ruthless competition and its unchecked individualism becomes predatory in nature (something Mamet’s favorite sociologist, Thorstein Veblen, warned against), warping values and destroying lives. A business ethic that sanctions, even demands, the commodification of all values, so that everything is measured in terms of material gain and loss, destroys the bonds of connection between human beings in American Buffalo, leaving the hardwon restoration of community just the slimmest of possibilities. There may be a modicum of camaraderie in the guise of honor among thieves in Glengarry Glen Ross as the real estate salesmen band together against the unseen owner-managers, but the base amorality of bilking their clients is still the order of the day. There is a long tradi-

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tion in American literature of the confidence man, and Nadel stresses Mamet’s place in that tradition, noting the recurrence of the con in works such as his film Heist (2001), not only as a means of individual survival but also as a way of deceiving the other. It is related to the bluff in poker, one of those pastimes such as hunting that lend an aura of machismo and misogyny to the mostly male inhabitants of Mamet’s world. The spare language of that world, sometimes called “Mametspeak,” is full of bravado and profanity that reflects an absence of affective response, a deliberate attempt to camouflage rather than reveal emotional emptiness. One pattern that Nadel hints at but that he well might have emphasized more thoroughly is the presence of homosocial bonding and the atmosphere of homoeroticism that pervades several of Mamet’s works, such as The Cryptogram (1985) and The Edge (1997). It appears not only in a 2006 episode of the television series The Unit, with a soldier’s love letter addressed not to a wife but to a gay comrade, but also, as Nadel discusses in the most sustained literary analysis in this volume, in Mamet’s play Edmond (1982), a hellish fable about urban emptiness and violence, where the title character ultimately finds surcease from an existential angst in a homosexual relationship with his black cellmate. What has increasingly filled Mamet’s own life is a renewed commitment to the practice of Judaism, reflected in several works in various genres: the play The Disappearance of the Jews (1983), the film Homicide (1991), the novel The Old Religion (1997), and the essay collection The Wicked Son (2006). Although there was little evidence of the Jewish religion in the nonobservant home where Mamet grew up, he was secretly bar mitzvahed. To Mamet’s mind, ill-advised attempts at assimilation feed a sense of paranoia and lead to feelings of self-loathing; so he focuses not only on antiSemitism but also on a sense of victimization that is self-imposed, counteracting these with an aggressive defense of Israel and an admonition to those Jews who know little about their faith. While Nadel displays a ready familiarity with the Mamet canon, his book is unlikely to satisfy either those readers who are seeking a definitive biography or those desiring a work of solid literary criticism. Although certainly a step up from the standard showbiz biography, this effort neither probes Mamet the man deeply enough nor offers much in the way of a compelling interpretation of the work produced by Mamet the writer, or of his place among his peers. So while Nadel’s claim that Mamet resides “at the pinnacle of contemporary American drama” may be justified, here it remains unconvincingly demonstrated. Thomas P. Adler

Review Sources American Theatre 25, no. 9 (November, 2008): 80-81. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 22 (November 15, 2007): 1192. Library Journal 132, no. 20 (December 15, 2007): 120. Los Angeles Times, February 21, 2008, p. E11. The New York Times Book Review, February 24, 2008, p. 11.

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DAY Author: A. L. Kennedy (1965) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 274 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1939-1949 Locale: England and Germany A former Royal Air Force sergeant looks back on his life in order to see a way, if any, ahead Principal characters: Alfred F. Day, Royal Air Force turret gunner, prisoner of war, and film extra Joyce Antrobus, his lover Struan Macallum Pluckrose, Royal Air Force navigator Vasyl, a film extra interned at camp for displaced persons Ivor Sands, owner of a London bookstore The Good German, former German soldier, now a film extra and resident of England

A. L. Kennedy is finally receiving the kind of recognition she has long deserved— deserved, in fact, ever since the publication of her first book, Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains (1990). This is not to suggest that Kennedy has been toiling away in obscurity for the past two decades. Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains was well received, and Kennedy has been selected for two of Granta magazine’s three Best of Young British Novelists issues (1993 and 2003). Nonetheless, although her first two novels—Looking for the Possible Dance (1993) and So I Am Glad (1995)—have been much discussed, they have been overshadowed by fellow Scot Janice Galloway’s debut, The Trick Is to Keep Breathing (1989). The trick for writers who cultivated their own patch of Scotland, in those times before Irvine Welsh’s popular novel Trainspotting (1993), was to get noticed at all outside the United Kingdom, especially in the United States. The American edition of So I Am Glad did not appear until 2000, one year after Original Bliss, a novella published in the United Kingdom in 1997 as part of a collection of Kennedy’s short fiction. Therein lies another hurdle that Kennedy had to get over. She is, like Lorrie Moore in the United States, a master short-story teller who alternates between collections and novel. Her work in the one form (where her brilliance shines most intensely) has worked against her achieving greater fame in what Pascale Casanova calls “the world republic of letters,” where, because literary size does unfortunately still matter, the novel rules. Admittedly, Kennedy’s two most recent novels (also her longest)—Everything You Need (2002) and Paradise (2004)—have received mixed reviews. With the publication of Day, however, mere respect has turned into nearly universal acclaim. The novel has already won the Costa Prize (formerly the Whitbread) in Britain, the Saltire Award in Scot-

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land, and major prizes in Austria and Germany, and Kennedy has been selected for a Literary Award (worth $150,000) from the Lannan Foundation in the United States. Will all the attention cause the prolific and demanding but decidedly low-key author to give up her budding career as a stand-up comedian? Probably not. Day succeeds so well in large part be cause Kennedy brings the psychological, atmospheric, and stylistic intensity of her short fiction to bear on a long narrative that develops in chronologically knotted bursts rather than progressing linearly. The novel begins in 1949 on a film set in Germany, where Alfred F. Day plays a prisoner of war (POW). It is a part he knows well, having spent time in a real POW camp after his Lancaster bomber was shot down in July, 1944, during a raid on Hamburg. From this moment, the twenty-five-year-old Day (and the two-hundred-and-eighty-page Day) travels back over the previous decade: to his time in the POW camp, to his Royal Air Force (RAF) training and nearly thirty missions as a turret gunner, to his wartime love affair with an officer’s wife he meets while on leave in London, and, more fleetingly, to his long-suffering mother and abusive father in a small town in Staffordshire in England’s West Midlands. Recounting Day in this fashion makes the novel seem much more orderly and readerly than it actually is, for what Kennedy has written is really a stream-of-consciousness, day-inthe-life novel, such as James Joyce’s monumental Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s more circumscribed Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Woolf and Joyce wrote just as film—the medium Orson Welles described as “a ribbon of dream”—began to influence fiction writers. Kennedy, who already has one film to her credit—Stella Does Tricks (1994), adapted from one of her short stories—combines a number of cinematic techniques, such as cross-cutting and lap dissolves, with the free association and free indirect discourse of the dreamlike novel’s second-person narration. She does so both to rewrite history from Day’s highly personal perspective and to rescue the written word from the shock and awe of visual media’s spectacularizing of history. (Day may be set during and just after World War II, but it was written and presumably is meant to be read in the context of the disastrous U.S. attack on Iraq and its prolonged aftermath.) The depth of Kennedy’s research—conducted at the Imperial War Museum in London and at the Lincolnshire Aviation Centre—is evident throughout the novel, but the historical facts are never pedantically presented merely to edify the reader, and they never detract from Kennedy’s famously opaque style. The novel’s authenticity strangely but effectively combines with an intertextuality that provides a literary frame of reference and bits of comic relief and that tells the reader far less about the autodidact Day than it does about the postmodern Kennedy. Randall Jarrell’s sardonic poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” comes quickly to mind, as does Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and The

Alison Louise Kennedy was born in Dundee, Scotland, and studied English and drama at Warwick University. She has written four collections of short fiction, five novels, two works of nonfiction. and a screenplay, and she frequently contributes to a number of British newspapers.

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Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), about which Kennedy wrote a short study for the British Film Institute’s film classics series in 1997; Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means (1963), another novel about Britons dealing with war’s aftermath; David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945); and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Day also alludes to more recent writers who have sought to revitalize the war novel: Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (1990-1995) and Sarah Waters’s Night Watch (2006), which, like Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991), tells its story backward. Day also includes jokey references to the films The Longest Day (1962)—at five feet, four inches, Alfred Day is “usefully short”—Alfie (1966), and, via Joyce’s husband’s surname, Antrobus, to the first of the “Carry On” films, Carry on Sergeant (1958), cowritten by John Antrobus. However, Kennedy’s novel includes another form of intertextuality. As one reviewer noted, or rather complained, Day is a compendium of clichés from war novels and war films: “bands of brothers, courage under fire, doomed love triangles, postwar guilt.” However, instead of succumbing to the clichés, in the fashion of Pearl Harbor (2001), or simply parodying them, postmodern style, Day makes them humanly and aesthetically real. For all of its narrative brilliance, Day is a novel made in the image of its protagonist and his time; it is a study in repression in an era of rationing. In the local dialect, which he tries mightily to escape, “day” means “don’t,” and “don’t” is pretty much what Day does and has been taught to do by his domineering father and his schoolteachers. In this novel of small, confining spaces (home, town, gun turret, POW camp) and of loss, Day is at war not only with the enemy but also with himself. Far more than an enemy that, as part of a bomber crew, he never actually sees until he is captured, he hates his father and especially himself, sometimes for the choices he has made but most often for those he has not. When his mother dies, Day chooses to fly with his mates rather than return early for the funeral, but a preoccupied Day fails to stave off a fighter attack in which his closest crewmate, the upper-class, part-Scottish Pluckrose, is killed. Guilt-ridden, Day comes to believe that his mother did not die in a freak accident but was murdered by his father. The “soft” Day attacks his father in the dark and from behind, but even in this act of filial revenge, Day becomes a passive spectator when his father falls in the canal and slowly drowns while calling out for help. In his love affair with Joyce, the sexually inexperienced Day is the passive partner. Day is far too passive and self-effacing to tell his story directly, in the first person. He narrates from within the Perspex bubble of his metaphorical gun turret, and it is the sheer ordinariness of his observations that have led some reviewers to wish that Kennedy had developed the novel’s secondary characters more: the crew; fellow loner Ivor Sands, who owns the bookshop where Day works, whose mother also died during the war; the Good German Day meets on the film set who returned to his native Hamburg after the war to find his city destroyed and his family dead, except for an aunt gone mad; and especially Vasyl, one of the many displaced persons (DPs) working as film extras: “someone you heard about: rumours of bad history and a knife.” Vasyl claims to be a Ukrainian who had been forced to fight on the German side, but he later admits that he is Latvian and that when the Germans arrived in his town, their

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mere presence unleashed a bestial savagery that Vasyl and others directed at their Jewish neighbors. Vasyl and his story trouble Day so much that he tries to expose Vasyl as a criminal in order to prevent his immigrating to England. No less disturbed by Vasyl’s lengthy account of his murder of a classmate, readers also understand—as at some level Day undoubtedly does—that Vasyl’s brutal act is not altogether different from the part Day played in the firebombing of “Hamburg on the Magic Night.” Day’s death wish is evident long before he sees Hamburg burning; it is evident in his choosing to play the most vulnerable part (to use film language), that of turret gunner. In choosing to return to Germany as an extra in a film set in a POW camp, Day in effect chooses to return to his past in order to relive it, with his narration taking the form of his life flashing (albeit slowly, over several days) before his eyes. He is a man drowning in his own failings, and his narrative seems at times a long suicide note. As the film wraps up, two extras, fellow Brits, offer Day a new life (a new day): fake papers that will give him a new identity and the chance to make a new life for himself amid the chaos of postwar Europe. Day refuses, returns to London and to Joyce, whom he has not seen in six years. “Where have you been?” she asks. The answer is the novel that bears Day’s name. At the beginning of her book On Bullfighting (2001), Kennedy explains that just as she contemplated ending her life, she heard someone singing “her least favourite folk song in all the world,” a “piece of pseudo-Celtic pap” entitled “Mhairi’s Wedding,” and she ended up writing On Bullfighting instead. Day is like that: an Emily Dickinson-like letter to the world that never—or rarely—wrote to Day, or rather a suicide note as well as a delaying action as Day looks back over his past and considers whether to have a future. Day opens with a funny bit about Day growing a moustache. “An untrained observer might think he was idling, at a loose end in the countryside, but this was not the case. In fact, he was concentrating, thinking his way through every bristle, making sure they would align and be all right.” Only at novel’s end, when he returns to Joyce, do we realize how he had been planning this all along, growing the moustache to cover the scar that resulted from his capture, because Day wanted very much to be the man she wanted. His odyssey over, Day comes home, no longer Homer, to a Penelope encumbered with a husband psychologically damaged from the war. If things do not end quite happily ever after, they certainly end better than they might: somewhere between Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) and Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death. Because the Luger he takes from Vasyl at the beginning of the novel does not go off, Chekhov style, Day gets to love another day, but that, as they say, is another story. Robert Morace

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Review Sources The Economist 386 (January 26, 2008): 81-82. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 20 (October 15, 2007): 1070. Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2008, p. R7. New Statesman 136 (April 23, 2007): 67. New York 41, no. 2 (January 14, 2008): 64-65. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 7 (May 1, 2008): 44-47. The New York Sun, January 9, 2008, p. 11. The New York Times Book Review, January 20, 2008, p. 14. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 42 (October 22, 2007): 34. The San Diego Union-Tribune, January 13, 2008, p. E4. The Seattle Times, January 20, 2008, p. J7. The Spectator 305 (November 17, 2007): 48. The Times Literary Supplement, April 20, 2007, p. 19.

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THE DAY FREEDOM DIED The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction Author: Charles Lane (1961) Publisher: Henry Holt (New York). 326 pp. $27.00 Type of work: History Time: 1873-1876 Locale: Grant Parish and other places in Louisiana A compelling and scholarly account of the brutal killings of more than sixty African Americans, the criminal convictions of three white supremacists, and the overturning of their convictions by the U.S. Supreme Court Principal personages: James R. Beckwith, U.S. Attorney in New Orleans who prosecuted the case Christopher Columbus Nash, exConfederate officer who led the attack on the courthouse William J. Cruikshank, large landowner who was convicted of murder William B. Woods, federal circuit judge who was later named to the Supreme Court Joseph Bradley, pro-Southern Justice of the Supreme Court William Smith Calhoun, white Republican who was the largest landowner in Colfax

Journalist Charles Lane’s book The Day Freedom Died focuses on the Colfax Massacre of 1873 and its consequences, providing an insightful window into Louisiana society during the turbulent age of Reconstruction. In telling the story, Lane begins with a perceptive analysis of the political and social conditions in the South following the Civil War. He presents a gripping description of the gruesome attack on the Colfax courthouse, resulting in the deaths of between sixty-two and eighty-one African Americans (or Freedmen)—the single most deadly race-based episode during the period. He then examines the two federal trials in which three of the participants were found guilty of civil rights violations. Finally, he describes and analyzes the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Cruikshank v. United States (1876), which overturned the convictions and made it much more difficult for the federal government to protect the rights of the Southern Freedmen. The Colfax Massacre occurred when Louisiana’s Reconstruction regime was still upheld by federal troops and supported by a coalition of Freedmen, carpetbaggers (Northerners in the South), and scalawags (local white Republicans). Lane emphasizes that the majority of white Southerners believed that continuing military occupation was unjust, and they were bitterly indignant at Republican policies aimed at imposing a degree of racial equality. Angry whites called for the establishment of so-

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called redeemer governments, which included two main goals: first, restoration of the local Charles Lane, a former editor for Democratic Party to power, and, second, es- Newsweek and The New Republic, has tablishment of public policies based on white worked as a journalist in several supremacy. In the wake of the Civil War, the countries, and he has published articles Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups in Foreign Affairs and other conducted a reign of terror and intimidation prestigious reviews. Before taking a in numerous areas of the South. Lane points six-month leave to write about the Colfax massacre, he covered the out, for instance, that Louisiana was the scene Supreme Court for The Washington of more than a thousand political murders be- Post. tween April and November of 1868. Although the two Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871 weakened the Ku Klux Klan to some extent, white racists continued to use violence to promote the cause of “redemption.” White supremacists were extremely active in Louisiana’s Red River valley, including the small parish of Grant, which the Republican state government had organized in honor of President Ulysses S. Grant in 1869. The parish had a population of about 2,400 African Americans and 2,200 whites. Its capital was Colfax (named after Grant’s vice president, Schuyler Colfax), a hamlet located in the middle of a large estate owned by William Calhoun, a liberal defender of Freedmen’s rights and the Republican Party. Since the Civil War’s end, a considerable amount of violence, usually related to race, had occurred in the parish. When elections were held, almost all Freedmen voted for Republicans, while most whites supported the Democratic Party. In 1872 the Democrats joined with dissident Republicans to form an electoral coalition of so-called Fusionists. In the bitterly contested election of that year, registered voters in the parish consisted of 776 African Americans and 630 whites. After the votes were counted, the Fusionists claimed victory, which, according to Lane, was “almost certainly” based on the fabrication of returns and the intimidation of black voters. On January 18, 1873, Republican Governor William Kellogg accused the Fusionists of fraud and named the entire Republican slate as victors. The Fusionists in Grant Parish, however, refused to accept the governor’s edict, and they continued to occupy the Colfax courthouse. In reaction, two white Republican leaders, Robert Register and Daniel Shaw, surreptitiously entered the courthouse during the night of March 25. The next day, the new Republican officials took control of the building. To maintain control, about three hundred men, women, and children, mostly Freedmen, stayed in and around the courthouse. Among whites in the parish, rumors spread that revolutionary blacks were preparing to exterminate all the white people. The Fusionists were determined to retake the building, using whatever force might be necessary. Christopher Columbus Nash, a veteran Confederate officer who had been the Fusionist candidate for sheriff, was the group’s leader. Calling for help from white supremacists in neighboring parishes, Nash soon had a force of about 165 militiamen, of whom about half were former Confederate soldiers. All of the men were armed with good-quality firearms. They also possessed a small but usable cannon

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from the war. In contrast, only about half of the Freedmen had firearms, mostly old shotguns and hunting weapons of poor quality. Expecting that an invasion was imminent, the Freedmen dug a shallow, makeshift trench around the courthouse. They also used old steam pipes in a futile attempt to improvise crude cannons. On April 13, Easter Sunday, Nash announced to the militia that it was time to march on Colfax. He advised that “anyone who was afraid to die for the cause” should step out of line, and about twenty-five men did so, leaving a force of some 140 men. Arriving at the courthouse about noon, Nash promised the occupiers they would not be harmed if they stacked their weapons and withdrew in peace. The women, the children, and the few white occupiers agreed to leave. About 150 African American men refused to capitulate. The shooting soon began. After a few hours, the militia used the cannon. Then they forced a Freedman to set the building on fire, causing about sixty occupiers to flee in panic, and Nash’s men pursued them on horseback, killing as many as possible. Eventually, the remaining Freedmen displayed a white flag, and they were allowed to surrender. Although there is some dispute about what happened next, survivors testified that a large number of the unarmed prisoners were slaughtered while pleading for their lives. Prominent planter William J. Cruikshank was later identified as having shot at least two prisoners. Three of the white attackers had been killed, although the nature of the bullets suggested that they had died from friendly fire. For the next few days, the streets of Colfax were littered with dead bodies. Most of the Louisiana newspapers reported that rebellious Freedmen had provoked the confrontation. The Northern press, in contrast, tended to blame the white attackers for the bloodshed. In Lane’s view, the real hero is the U.S. Attorney in New Orleans, James Roswell Beckwith. As soon as Beckwith learned of the atrocities in Colfax, he was determined to investigate the event and prosecute as many of the guilty as possible. His power to bring charges in federal court was based on Section 6 of the Enforcement Act of 1870, which applied to private individuals and criminalized conspiracies to deny citizens’ constitutional rights. Two deputy U.S. marshals traveled to Colfax to investigate the murders and to collect evidence. On May 8, Beckwith convened a grand jury, mostly composed of men of color, and he succeeded in getting indictments against ninety-seven defendants. To undertake the dangerous job of arresting these persons, U.S. marshal Theodore DeKlyne sailed from New Orleans to Colfax with two dozen mounted state police and a few U.S. infantrymen. However, most of the indicted men, including Nash, learned about DeKlyne’s mission and went into hiding. After twenty-two days in Grant Parish, DeKlyne and his men were able to find and capture seven of the men, including Cruikshank. On February 25, 1874, the first of two federal trials began, with nine defendants charged with first-degree murder. Beckwith sought the death penalty. He called fifty witnesses, including more than three dozen Freedmen and a few white liberals from Grant Parish, most notably the large landholder William Smith Calhoun. Led by conservative attorney Robert Marr, the defense called seventy-nine witnesses. On March 16, following vigorous speeches and questioning of witnesses, the jury acquitted one

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defendant and was unable to agree about the culpability of the others. Federal Judge William Woods had no choice but to declare a mistrial. The second trial, which had eight defendants, lasted from May 20 to June 10. This time, Beckwith called eightynine witnesses, and Marr called ninety-nine witnesses. Although none of the defendants was declared guilty of murder, Cruikshank and two others were found guilty of violating the constitutional rights of citizens. The three men were sentenced to ten years in prison and fines of five thousand dollars. A majority of Southern whites were infuriated with the outcome. The New Orleans Bulletin declared that it proved “that Southern white men have no rights that Republican officials are bound to respect.” On June 27, however, Justice Joseph Bradley of the U.S. Supreme Court, who was riding circuit in the Deep South, overturned the convictions and ordered the three men released on bail. Bradley based his ruling on two points. First, Bradley wrote that the indictments had not specifically charged that the defendants had been racially motivated to violate citizens’ civil rights. Second, building on the recent precedent of a group of lawsuits known as the Slaughterhouse Cases, Bradley wrote that the Fourteenth Amendment was applicable only to state governments, and that Congress had no power to legislate punishment for criminal actions by private individuals—a power reserved to the states in the Tenth Amendment. The ruling meant that the defendants could only be prosecuted in state courts, where it was unlikely that whites would be punished for crimes against blacks. Lane writes that Bradley’s decision “had a swift, bloody impact on Grant Parish.” On July 25, white supremacists gathered in Colfax to honor the defendants by holding a large barbecue. One group of extremists rode through the black quarters randomly firing pistols, and then six miles from town, they murdered two Freedmen, Frank Foster and Jim Cox. None of those who witnessed the crimes dared to testify against the killers. Although the new sheriff had knowledge about the persons responsible, he was incapable of arresting them. In other parts of Louisiana and the South, a new organization, called the White League, was spreading a wave of violence. On March 27, 1876, the U.S. Supreme Court finally issued its decision, Cruikshank v. United States, in which all the justices basically endorsed Bradley’s earlier conclusions. Under the Cruikshank precedent, federal prosecutors would only be able to bring cases under the Enforcement Act when whites attacked blacks specifically because of their race and with the intent to violate a small number of constitutional rights relating to federal as opposed to state citizenship. Under the decision, federal prosecutors would rarely be able to prosecute crimes against the Freedmen, no matter how egregious. Lane persuasively argues that the failure to punish the perpetrators of the Colfax slaughter and the narrow interpretation of federal authority in Cruikshank were important “milestones” on the tragic road toward the establishment of “Jim Crow,” the rigid system of white supremacy and segregation that would continue until the civil rights revolution of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Lane’s book focuses on an important topic that has received relatively little attention in standard historical accounts of the period. Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (1988), for instance, devotes less than a page to the event. In addition to Lane’s book, another interesting volume, Leanna Keith’s The Colfax

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Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and Death of Reconstruction (2008), has been published. The two books take similar perspectives on issues of civil rights, and both have their strengths. Keith has written a compelling and fastmoving narration that concentrates on the massacre, the participants, and local lore. Some general readers interested primarily in the dramatic aspects of the incident itself might prefer to read her book. Lane’s book, however, is also readable, and it provides much more detail and analysis about the criminal trials and the Supreme Court’s decision. Lane has unquestionably made a valuable contribution to the study of race relations during the Reconstruction era. Thomas Tandy Lewis

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 11 (February 1, 2008): 18. Hill 15, no. 43 (April 18, 2008): 20. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 24 (December 15, 2007): 1280. Library Journal 133, no. 5 (March 15, 2008): 79-80. The New York Times Book Review, May 18, 2008, p. 24. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 1 (January 17, 2008): 49.

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DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS Author: José Saramago (1922) First published: As intermitências da morte: Romance, 2005, in Portugal Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa Publisher: Harcourt Books. 238 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The future Locale: Unspecified country the size of Portugal Saramago offers a fictional exploration of what life would be like in a country where people suddenly stopped dying; from this simple premise, the story touches a great many aspects of modern society, suggesting that a world without death would not be as perfect as might be supposed Principal characters: The queen mother, very elderly and near death at the end of the old year The director general, the head of the national television authority The grammarian, a stuffy expert on proper usage The cellist, a middle-aged member of a symphony orchestra Government officials, peasants, and other nameless citizens Death (also called death), a young woman carrying a scythe

When awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, the Portuguese novelist José Saramago was praised as the creator of “parables sustained by imagination, compassion, and irony,” which afford fresh insights into the complexities of human life. His latest novel is true to the form that he has made his own. Like many of his best fictions, it asks the question “What would happen if?” Saramago’s 1987 novel Jangada de pedra (The Stone Raft, 1995) asks “What would happen if the Iberian peninsula broke away from the European continent and floated in the Atlantic? What would change politically or economically?” His 1989 novel Historía do cerco de Lisboa (The History of the Siege of Lisbon, 1996) asks “What would happen if a proofreader inserted the word ‘not’ into a work of history?” In what may be his best-known parable, the 1995 novel Ensaio sobre a cegueira (Blindness, 1997), Saramago imagines what would happen if almost everyone in a city suddenly went blind. The story was made into a feature film in 2008. Death with Interruptions (published in England as Death at Intervals) asks the question “What would happen if people suddenly stopped dying, no matter how injured, ill, or elderly they might be?” Like Blindness, it has an essayistic quality, providing a “panoramic view” of the country rather than details about specific lives. The narrator, who occasionally identifies himself as such, neither names the characters nor describes them, but simply accounts the events of a half-year as the unnamed

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country descends into chaos. Many lie on their deathbeds in a state of suspended animation, the country’s queen mother among them. Hospitals become impossibly overcrowded. Gravediggers must go abroad to find work. Members of the mafia find new work and indeed perform a public service as they spirit the comatose out of the country. The military plans a coup. Churchgoers pray for the return of death. Seven months into the crisis, another crisis occurs when the state television authority receives a letter from death, saying that normal activities will resume at midnight that night. Everyone who would have died in the first half of the year will die now— more than sixty thousand in a country of ten million. In the future, anyone who had not been on the point of death will be given a week’s written notice before the fatal hour. The return of death is a boon for funeral directors and other idle workers and eases the crisis in old-age homes. As life returns to normal, attention shifts to death. People study the strange letter, written on violet-colored paper. Grammarians and graphologists replace the philosophers in public speculations. All the signs—the irregular letters, “the chaotic syntax, the complete lack of very necessary parentheses, the obsessive elimination of paragraphs, the random use of commas,” and much more—suggest the author is a young woman. It seems incredible, but as new sightings are reported at the foot of a bed or the scene of an accident, there is confirmation. Death is more than a feminine noun, in Portuguese and the other Romance languages; death is also very human. The rest of the novel tells death’s story, as she dashes off letters to the dying and tries to have a life of sorts, attending concerts and shopping for clothes. She has the snits and crushes one would expect of an inexperienced young woman. She is not at all the terrifying abstraction that the pundits have imagined. She is not even the supreme power; she is more like an intern or a representative. All too human, she even has something in common with the story’s narrator. Everything the grammarian denounced in the public letter—the syntax, the comma faults, especially “the intentional and almost diabolical abolition of the capital letter”—can also be found in the novel. Not only titles of office but names of classical deities and famous people such as the cellist’s beloved Johann Sebastian Bach are left uncapitalized. Question marks and quotation marks are also omitted. In the absence of standard editing conventions, a reader must either slow down and engage with the text or skip over large chunks of the story (at least there are paragraph and chapter breaks). Coming halfway through the story, the grammarian’s remarks apply inescapably to the narrator as well and to the author who created him. The remarks give the novel a quality that critics call self-reflexive, a reference to the story’s own fictional quality and to the creation of this fiction. Earlier in the story the narrator apologizes to readers for the “overhasty judgment” that placed the emphasis on prominent public figures rather than ordinary people. The

A former journalist, José Saramago has published more than two dozen books of fiction, poetry, and essays over the last sixty years. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. Thirteen of his earlier novels have been translated into English.

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focus then shifts to the people of the countryside and the experience of living in a country where no one dies. However, only when death is identified and particularized do other characters emerge with any sort of individuality. Even so, only death has a name, and she prefers the lowercase “death.” There is a fable here, the moral of which seems to be that death makes us who and what we are, that only humans have the awareness they will die. Saramago, an outspoken atheist, hints in this direction when he chooses as the epigram for this book a quote from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, which suggests that anyone who thinks deeply about death is likely to think new thoughts, with new words and images. Death with Interruptions is, then, Saramago’s own meditation on death, along with a social commentary. As an atheist, he can easily imagine how church officials would squirm at the loss of a major selling point. How could they talk about resurrection and last judgment? Then again, as a communist, he can just as easily imagine how insurance executives would cringe and struggle to find new ways to market policies and persuade policy holders to keep up their payments. Throughout the novel, Saramago plays with storytelling conventions and, in doing so, draws the reader into his project. The narration switches from third-person accounts to first-person comments about the narrator’s intentions and from ostensibly reliable descriptions to clearly unreliable predictions. Then, once death has entered the story, the point of view shifts twice to the second person, and the reader is asked to think and see as death would. The effect is to break down the life-and-death opposition, so that death is just another dead person, though one experiencing some things “for the first time in her life.” When death becomes a character in a story and speaks to other characters, there are many opportunities for dramatic irony. The words she speaks have one meaning for her and the reader, but quite another for a character like the first cellist in a symphony orchestra. Emerging as a principal character in the story—the person who never receives his summoning letter because the postal service repeatedly returns it to sender—the cellist has the impression that he never quite gets death’s drift when she appears in person. He is likened to a reader who cannot quite understand a line of poetry. Paradoxically, when death ceases to be the enemy of mankind and God and becomes a character in a story, a new kind of myth-making begins. Atropos, eldest of the three Fates in Greek mythology and the one that cuts the thread of life with her famous shears, becomes the Acherontia atropos (or death’s head moth), so called because its thorax has a marking that looks like a human skull. A photograph of this rare species appears on the dust jacket. The moth has a mythological name, the Acheron being one of the four rivers of the classical underworld, but the moth is part of the natural order. Death, too, is part of nature. This does not make it benign; death is, after all, the world’s most dangerous “serial killer.” In the complete absence of personal names for characters—perhaps the only innovation that Saramago’s readers will not have encountered in earlier novels—names from myth and legend loom large. The references to literary characters outside the novel both elevate the role of ordinary humans and deflate the mystique of death

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and dying. References to Achilles, whose wrath is the stated subject of Homer’s Iliad (750 b.c.e.), lead to comparison of the modern city to ancient Troy. A passing reference to the sea goddess Amphitrite, in a description of a musical performance, gives a sense of the sublime and transcendental to the artistry of a composer such as Bach. Meanwhile, however, a reference to Count Dracula and the horrors of Transylvania appears in a statement that death is less scary than the popular imagination makes it out to be. Margaret Jull Costa, who has translated some two dozen novels from Spanish and Portuguese, won the Weidenfeld Translation Prize for her translation of Saramago’s Todos os nomes (1997; All the Names, 1999). Costa has faithfully preserved the idiosyncrasies of Saramago’s prose, which she has compared to that of the innovative Irish novelist James Joyce. She even follows such innovations as “maphia” for “mafia,” this one to indicate a new kind of state-sponsored racketeering. Nevertheless, when the Portuguese idioms would be lost in translation, she has appropriate English ones to substitute, perhaps more appropriate for British readers than for Americans but still right for the characters and situations. The first reviews of Costa’s translation have praised her graceful rendering of Saramago’s broad social satire and his clever interplay of absurd and profound ideas. Some have found the novel “frustratingly tricky to plow through” (The Washington Post) and “unfocused” when compared to Saramago’s earlier work (The New York Times), while others have praised the language as “deadly serious in its mythic élan” (Guardian Review) and as entirely appropriate to the author’s “thought experiment” (New Statesman). One review has compared the strange wandering sentences to a chorus of mixed, sometimes discordant voices talking about recent events (The New Yorker). The consensus seems to be that the novel demands a close reading and will reward anyone who makes the effort. Searching for a precedent, some reviewers have compared Saramago’s novel to the 1934 film Death Takes a Holiday. There is similarity, to be sure, notably the possibility that a mortal can fall in love with death and death can reciprocate. However, there is a striking difference. The film leaves no question why Frederic March’s character wants a vacation in the land of the living and why he wants to pose as a mere mortal, albeit of the dashingly handsome sort. The novel never explains why death stops working at the end of the old year or why she later picks up where she left off. Like the Prodigal Son and other good parables, Death with Interruptions raises more questions than it answers. Thomas Willard

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Review Sources Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 16 (August 15, 2008): 17. Library Journal 133, no. 14 (September 1, 2008): 122. The New York Times, November 12, 2008, p. 6. The New York Times Book Review, October 26, 2008, p. 19. The New Yorker 84, no. 34 (October 27, 2008): 88-91. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 29 (July 21, 2008): 136. The Washington Post, October 5, 2008, p. N6.

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DELUSION A Novel of Suspense Author: Peter Abrahams (1947) Publisher: William Morrow (New York). 297 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Locale: Belle Ville, Louisiana, and Little Parrot Cay, Caribbean A woman and her family struggle with the repercussions of a testimony that put an innocent man behind bars for murder when that man is set free Principal characters: Nell Jarreau, a forty-something woman whose testimony against Alvin DuPree put him in jail for murder Alvin DuPree, also known as Pirate, the man wrongly convicted of murder who served twenty years of prison sentence Clay Jarreau, police officer who put DuPree behind bars, now Nell’s husband Norah Jarreau, daughter of Nell Jarreau and adopted daughter of Clay Jarreau Johnny Blanton, the young man whose murder was the cause for DuPree’s imprisonment Duke Bastien, Clay Jarreau’s best friend who runs a construction business Kirk Bastien, the brother of Duke Bastien, the mayor of Belle Ville, a partner in Bastien’s construction business Lee Ann Bonner, a reporter who wants to write DuPree’s story Joe Don Yeller, Norah Jarreau’s boyfriend

As its title clearly indicates, Peter Abrahams’s twentieth novel explores the idea of a life lived as a delusion. It was well received by critics and acclaimed as being a model of the suspense genre that goes beyond formula work. In this novel, almost every character holds a belief that undermines and shatters identity, status, and relationships. Focused equally on Nell Jarreau and Alvin DuPree (Pirate), the book uses a limited omniscient point of view that gives readers glimpses into such personality motivators as innocence, naiveté, and barely suppressed anger. The confused maze of DuPree’s mind, in particular, provides a fascinating look at what these qualities mean when one is distanced from trauma by a delusion about what really happened. The use of irony builds suspense in the novel as the characters reveal aspects of their personalities that uphold their delusional versions of life. DuPree has spent twenty years in prison. During that time he has been both the victim and the perpetrator of violence, but at the beginning of the novel, just before he is released as the result

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of the emergence of new evidence, he has fi nally found peace. He has associated himself Peter Abrahams has written numerous with the biblical character of Job, internaliz- suspense novels for adults, and he has ing the message of hope found in that book of recently entered the young adult the Bible. He is sure his favorite verses— market. His honors include an Edgar “And the Lord turned the captivity of Job, Award nomination for best novel for when he prayed for his friends: also the Lord Lights Out (1994) and the Agatha gave Job twice as much as he had before”— Award for Best Children’s/Young Adult novel for Down the Rabbit Hole are prophetic when his innocence is proven. (2005). Despite his assurances to himself that it is the biblical message that provides peace, his sense of tranquillity is more often physically manifested in the act of stroking the silky tassel of the ribbon that marks his place in the Bible. That delusion of peace deserts DuPree, however, when he is sent back into society. Once out of jail, he struggles to understand the varied people and situations he confronts: a reporter, Lee Ann Bonner, who wants to write a prize-winning book about his imprisonment; his thoughts of vengeance against the woman who sent him to prison; the idea that a guilty person has remained free while he was jailed; and his criminal tendencies. He centers his peace on two things: the book of Job and a homemade weapon that he hides in the empty space that is left behind after he lost an eye in prison. During the first days of his freedom, he finds that society is still brutally classist, and he turns to the familiarity of violence when he cannot interact in more acceptable ways. Nell provides a complete contrast to DuPree. He was an uneducated criminal delinquent when Johnny Blanton was murdered, and Nell was Johnny’s educated middle-class girlfriend. DuPree had already dabbled in the dark side of criminal behavior, and Nell had never been confronted with evil. The fact that Nell has been sheltered from most aspects of life, even from the repercussions of the violence that she witnessed as her boyfriend was murdered, foreshadows her inability to see past the façade of her life. As a result, when DuPree is freed from jail and her testimony is questioned, Nell’s whole life is destabilized. Among other issues, she is forced to confront her daughter’s anxious concerns about whether Blanton’s murder was covered up by Clay Jarreau, the man to whom Nell has been married for almost twenty years and who has filled the role of Norah’s father. Norah even invokes William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601) through a reference to the king’s ghostly warning that his death was contrived by his brother Claudius and his widow Gertrude. As Nell’s life unravels, readers are confronted with the question of what reality is and whether their versions of their lives are valid or deceptive. The use of literary reference is not a new technique for Abrahams. DuPree’s reliance on Job and Norah’s invocation of Hamlet can be seen as echoes of his style in earlier works. For example, Abrahams’s 1994 novel Lights Out revolves around the main character’s obsession with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s long poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). More recently, his Echo Falls series for young adults brings in references to Sherlock Holmes as a central character building tool.

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The characterization also confronts the issue of innate evil as DuPree fights against his instincts to lash out at those he perceives as dangerous to him. He considers hurting Lee Ann, Nell, and Norah as they talk to him about the crime, but since all three women have positive motives in seeking him out, he is able to maintain his peace. When he is found next to Lee Ann’s dead body, he is once again perceived as evil. As the novel draws to a close and the true culprit is discovered, DuPree does attack an innocent bystander, losing his peace and his salvation. Abrahams invokes a sense of realism as he confronts a variety of societal problems while his characters careen out of control. A hurricane, Bernardine, has swept through Belle Ville, leaving carnage and disrupting lives. As the physical damage to the city has been mainly confined to the Lower Side, racial tension becomes a dark undertone to the story’s outcome. Repairs in this area of the city are neglected until the mayor is forced to look past the delusion that everything is being cleaned up in an appropriate way. Racial problems become more of a focus when the evidence that should have exonerated DuPree twenty years earlier has been found in the locker of a dead African American police officer who served as Clay Jarreau’s partner when Blanton was murdered. Doubt rises about whether this officer’s death, as he was saving a child after the hurricane, was accidental, causing an inquiry into whether he was murdered for the evidence he held. This man’s years of exemplary public service are challenged merely because of his race. Beyond racial tension, political intrigue becomes a possible motivation in the murder. Kirk Bastien has been elected to the office of mayor, despite some troubling issues. He is a partner in a construction company that stands to profit mightily from the hurricane damage and that stood to profit twenty years earlier by the death of a brilliant geology graduate student who had questioned the safety factor of a major project. The reference to the damage caused by Katrina is obvious as the characters struggle to beat back the repercussions of nature’s fury. Nell is forced to face the reality that neither her husband nor her life is perfect every time the wind blows across town, and she complains about the stench left over from Bernardine. Another theme that the novel attacks is the validity of eyewitness testimony. As Nell remembers Blanton’s murder, she struggles with her identification of DuPree as the murderer. Striving to understand how she might have accused the wrong man, she seeks out the help of a hypnotist and of a professor who is an expert on the issue of eyewitness testimony. Learning that police officers can mislead witnesses with subtle gestures, she questions Clay’s pursuit of DuPree as the killer and starts to suspect her husband is the murderer. As the plot unravels, the strong belief in the legal system is undermined as delusional. Mystery-suspense novels are often plot driven, and this work is no different. The complications of the characters’ lives move the mystery forward, and subtle foreshadowing leads to a questioning of who is guilty and who is innocent. DuPree’s innocence is only superficial. Through the use of inner monologue, DuPree’s motives are revealed. Readers learn that he is plagued by the desire to harm those who attempt to accept him, and the ultimate irony occurs when Nell finds him next to the dead body of Lee Ann, so that he is accused of yet another murder he did not commit. His situa-

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tion is a classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. His violent nature takes over his actions as the novel draws to a close, and he figures out who the real killer is but too late to save his soul. Nell’s innocence in the murders seems to be clear, yet her unwillingness to face the delusion of her marriage and her life becomes the basis for a plot twist that reveals the truly guilty. Clay has lived for twenty years with the knowledge of who the real killer is, yet he covers up the truth, and an innocent man serves jail time while the murderer goes free. As the novel progresses, Abrahams provides so many possible killers and motives that readers may be surprised to discover the identity of the murderer and the motive. Some readers, however, may figure out the murderer before the plot’s revelation. In this book, Abrahams creates a multilayered work that challenges our perception of life. Though the characters are a bit one-dimensional, the plot spirals them into an abyss of doubt that questions what motivates action and whether innocence is real or perceived. If it is real, who is at fault when something goes wrong? If it is perceived, how many lives are affected and how are delusions revealed? Abrahams’s skillful use of irony manipulates readers’ expectations of what the foreshadowing means. The delusion is more than just an issue of the characters’ understanding of their lives and of their belief systems. It forces readers to question what delusions they may have about their lives and their belief systems. Theresa L. Stowell

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 11 (February 1, 2008): 5. Globe & Mail, April 26, 2008, p. D12. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 4 (February 15, 2008): 159. Library Journal 133, no. 7 (April 15, 2008): 70. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 7 (February 18, 2008): 136.

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DE NIRO’S GAME Author: Rawi Hage (1964) First published: 2006, in Canada Publisher: HarperPerennial (New York). 320 pp. $14.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1982 Locale: Beirut and Paris Best friends since childhood, two young men come of age in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war; only one escapes as brutality, criminality, and betrayal bring their relationship to a tragic end Principal characters: Bassam, a young man coming of age in Beirut during the civil war George, nicknamed De Niro, Bassam’s best friend Nabila, George’s aunt Rana, Bassam’s girlfriend Laurent and Nicole Aoudeh, a wealthy couple befriended by George Rambo, Bassam’s torturer Rhea Mani, George’s half-sister, living in Paris Roland and Moshe, Mossad agents based in Paris

The title of this novel, De Niro’s Game, refers not only to the character of George, who is nicknamed De Niro after the American actor, but also to the suicidal Russian roulette that Robert De Niro’s character is forced to play in Michael Cimino’s 1978 film about the Vietnam War, The Deer Hunter. The title does not, however, simply refer to the game of Russian Roulette that will finish the story of George and Bassam. It also describes the situation of young men in a world in which survival seems to be increasingly an inexplicable matter of chance and in which the value of life is treated with a careless disregard. Additionally, it is a world in which violence is perceived as virtually the only effective solution to any problem, and although on one level the reckless young men are convinced of their invincibility, their irresponsible conduct—in a world without hope or options—takes on a suicidal ideation. The narrative explores the friendship of two Lebanese young men within this context. Bassam and George come of age in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. The militias that have taken over the city are little more than powerful criminal gangs; the city, besieged by bombs and bullets, has become not only a war zone but also an amoral, lawless space that easily accommodates theft and violence. As a result, the young men growing up in this place and time find they are becoming socialized into criminality. Bassam is drawn into this world through the offices of his friend George, who in-

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vites him to steal a bit of cash from the ca sino run by the powerful Christian militia that Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Rawi Hage governs their section of town. George pulls lived through nine years of the Bassam in deeper by tricking him into a job Lebanese civil war and immigrated to smuggling liquor and drugs. While Bassam is Canada in 1992. He is a writer, a in a state of panic and determined to escape visual artist, and a curator, and he Beirut and the underworld in which he has be- resides in Montreal. De Niro’s Game come enmeshed, his friend George feels nei- won the 2008 McAuslan First Book Prize, the 2006 Paragraphe Hugh ther helpless nor powerless. He rises in the MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and the ruthless world of the militia but, at the same 2008 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. time, loses his moral compass, callously be traying a friend and eventually taking part in the Phalangist massacre of Palestinian women and children at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla. George’s corruption is also indicated by his strange sexual involvement with a wealthy young couple, Laurent and Nicole Aoudeh; he ends by addicting Nicole to drugs and is responsible for the murder of her husband. Unlike George, Bassam is not drawn to the world of power and criminality. Having lost both his father and more recently his mother when a bomb hits their apartment, he is looking to get out. However, although Bassam’s path gradually diverges significantly from George’s, there is also considerable intermingling, almost twinning, of the two. Bassam has a brief love affair with George’s attractive aunt, Nabila; in turn, George steals Bassam’s girlfriend, Rana. More and more, Bassam appears to be not George’s friend but his rival and then his dupe. For instance, Bassam is stuck taking the blame for George’s crimes, such as the murder of Laurent, and is as a result cruelly tortured by a thuggish soldier named Rambo. Bassam’s position becomes even more untenable after he vengefully murders his torturer and after he passes information from his communist uncle to a contact in Beirut. This favor leads to the death of Al-Rayess, the highest commander of the Christian Lebanese forces. The web of violence and intrigue into which Bassam has been drawn is troubling, but even more disturbing is Bassam’s struggle with the disintegration of his personality. This breakdown is indicated by the narrative style, which on the one hand is edgy and hard-boiled and on the other hand is poetic and strangely healing, as if the madness into which he is descending contains also the seeds of his recovery. While beset with a flow of dreams and fantasies that take him both out of himself and deeper into himself, Bassam’s harsh side finds validation in the famous Albert Camus novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, 1943). When Bassam escapes to Paris after the death of George, the concierge at his hotel gives him the Camus novel, which offers Bassam an existential context in which to understand why he has adopted an empty, alienated perspective that not only makes it difficult for him to assign value but affords him little or no sense of personal agency. It is in this mood that Bassam acquaints himself with the wife and daughter of George, whose address Nabila had given him. A sexual encounter with George’s halfsister leads him to stalk a man he considers his rival, although what Bassam thought

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was a personal matter is a political one. Bassam learns that Rhea’s friend Roland, as well as her friend Moshe, are in reality Mossad agents, who backed Al-Rayess against the Muslims. Furthermore, Bassam discovers that the Mossad recruited George as one of their agents. Since Roland and Moshe are certain Bassam can lead them to the missing George, once again Bassam is ensnared in political intrigue related to the volatile political situation in Lebanon. Although Rhea seems only concerned about George as a half-brother, and about Bassam as his friend and her lover, Bassam realizes that even in Paris, and even in his personal life, the political situation in Lebanon—connected as it is to global politics—is inescapable. Roland and Moshe are correct that it is Bassam who knows the whereabouts of George. He confesses to Rhea that George had been sent to bring him back to headquarters to be tortured and killed for the murder of Laurent. Bassam goes on to tell Rhea that George, in a moment of consideration for his childhood friend, gave him a chance to end it all immediately by handing him his revolver and suggesting that he play “De Niro’s game” of Russian roulette. When Bassam’s spin of the cylinder comes up empty, George unexpectedly takes a turn himself, as if giving Bassam yet another chance. Unlike Bassam, George is unlucky; he puts a bullet through his brain. It is at this point that Bassam escapes, only to wander the streets of Paris still armed with a revolver and still psychologically trapped in the pattern of brutality and criminality created by the warlords. Realizing that it is likely he will be persecuted as an Arab in France, unable to imagine that he will ever find a place for himself in French society, and hounded by Roland and Moshe, Bassam returns to his early fantasy of finding sanctuary in Rome. The first chapter in this novel is, in fact, titled “Rome,” speaking to Bassam’s desperate dream of escaping the war-torn city of Beirut. At novel’s end he returns to the possibility that this is the way out of his terrible situation, even going so far as to buy a ticket to the Eternal City. Whether Bassam will ever actually get to Rome is left open; in some ways, he is simply back to square one. By the end of this novel, however, Bassam has descended from petty thuggery into more serious complicity with evil; there is no doubt that there is blood on his hands—that he is a good example of Sartre’s famous phrase concerning the “mains sales” or “dirty hands” that come to anyone drawn, however unwillingly, into the modern world of power politics. While Bassam has approached the zone of madness and evil, he has never fallen into his friend George’s abyss of torture, terror, crime, and treachery. In the end, however, Bassam is utterly alone. The tragic end of his relationship with George, his escape from Beirut, and his anticipated second escape from Paris have left him in a condition of rootless alienation. It is clear that the context of a brutal civil war and an unraveling society have shaped the character of Bassam as he struggles to come into his manhood; like other young men of his generation, he has become ruthless, nihilistic, and utterly alone. Although George’s Aunt Nabila described these young men as not unlike the abandoned dogs that now ran wild through the city of Beirut, Bassam is a more complex figure. He does not want to degenerate into the treacherous, amoral George, and his inner life demonstrates that he is working to understand the situation into which he has been thrown and, in so doing, transcend it. Of special interest in this

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regard is the way in which Bassam is constantly imagining other historical eras, as layers beneath the present one; he imagines he is a soldier in Napoleon’s army, or that he is being persecuted by the Gestapo. He imagines Beirut when it was an ancient Roman city, and the historical affiliation of Lebanon and Rome, in fact, adds resonance to Bassam’s fixation on finding sanctuary in Rome, which had in the time of the Roman Empire exercised sovereignty over the territory that later became Lebanon. While Bassam’s confused, dreamlike inner life may seem at times unwholesome and miasmatic, his fantasies and ruminations possess a kind of wisdom that allows him to see himself through the difficulties of coming of age during an age of crisis. His obsession with Rome, for instance, which at first appears irrational, actually expresses an aspiration to have a place in a more universal society, one not sundered by sectarian interests, as has happened in Bassam’s home country of Lebanon. While Bassam may strain toward an ancient Roman universality, this narrative is a mélange of cultural ingredients: There are Arabic poetic elements to Bassam’s inner life, and the narrative also indicates a political perspective associated with the Arabic peoples of the Middle East. Furthermore, though Hage is not a Frenchman, he deploys French philosophy quite effectively, and he uses one of the great French novels of the twentieth century as an explanatory model for his own predicament. Although English is not his first language, Hage has chosen to write this and subsequent fiction in English, one of the two languages that inform the culture of Montreal, where he now lives. The global reach of this novel and the way it addresses a political situation of international interest and implication are impressive. Nevertheless, its greatest achievement is in the psychological acuity with which Hage renders the intense and complicated inner life of a troubled boy caught between good and evil, madness and sanity, life and death. A mosaic of cultural influences and filled with incident to the point that the narrative could be described as a thriller, the novel is enriched by the vitality of Hage’s language and his astute reading of character. Margaret Boe Birns

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 18 (May 15, 2007): 19. Books in Canada, December, 2006, pp. 5-7. International Fiction Review, January, 2007, p. 196. Journal of Third World Studies 25, no. 1 (Spring, 2008): 293-297. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 12 (June 15, 2007): 573. Library Journal 132, no. 12 (July 1, 2007): 77. Los Angeles Times, February 24, 2008, p. R5. Maclean’s 119, no. 22 (May 29, 2006): 40-41. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 16 (April 16, 2007): 26. The Village Voice 52, no. 33 (August 15, 2007): 54. The Washington Post, June 24, 2008, p. C8.

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DESIGN IN THE AGE OF DARWIN From William Morris to Frank Lloyd Wright Author: Stephen F. Eisenman (1956) Publisher: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.). 141 pp. $36.95 Type of work: Essays, fine arts, history of science Time: 1859-1910 Locale: England and the United States A book of essays and photographs of objects that explores the interaction of design and the concepts of evolution in nineteenth century England and the United States Principal personages: Charles Darwin, British naturalist and author of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) William Morris, British designer and author Christopher Dresser, British botanist and industrial designer C. R. Ashbee, British craftsman and socialist C. F. A. Voysey, British architect and designer Louis Sullivan, American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, American architect and designer

Design and evolution were topics of great significance during the nineteenth century, and Design in the Age of Darwin examines the interactions between evolutionary theories and design after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. Although debates about natural history had many nuances, the main division between “intelligent design” and Darwin’s view of evolution shared an emphasis on the importance of the way plants and animals were designed and adapted to function within their environments. A key difference was in the agency of design. “Intelligent design,” especially as articulated by the Reverend William Paley in Natural Theology (1802), argued that such “intelligent design” in nature is ultimately the work of the Creator, God. Darwin, in contrast, saw design as evidence for the struggle for survival, and he proposed that evolution occurred by incorporating the most functional and adaptive designs to meet the challenges of survival. Design in the Age of Darwin originated in an exhibition held at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. Stephen F. Eisenman, professor of art history at Northwestern University, conceived and curated the exhibit whose purpose was to explore how British and American architects and designers responded to the challenges presented by Darwin’s theory of evolution. The book accompanies this exhibition. Through five essays, the book explains and probes many facets of this time when “the theory and practice of design were closely tied to the theory of evolu-

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tion.” Sixty-nine color plates of some of the objects and designs in the exhibition along Stephen F. Eisenman is a professor of with additional illustrations allow the reader art history at Northwestern University. He is the author of several books and to view the visual evidence. One starting point in approaching this topic catalogues on nineteenth century art, is the third essay in this volume, “Designing including Nineteenth Century Art: A Evolution: Darwin’s Illustrations,” by Jacob Critical History (2007). W. Lewis. Darwin wrote a number of books on natural history, and many were studies that demonstrated the kind of detailed evidence on which Darwin drew from close examination of natural phenomena to present his theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species. In addition, toward the end of his life, Darwin grappled with the implications of evolution for the human species in The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Thus, Darwin faced some major design issues himself. First, he needed to find ways to bridge the gap between the close visual observation of the naturalist and the abstract theories that this detailed visual evidence engendered. Second, his theory of evolution and natural selection was “a glacially slow process” over time. Darwin had to devise ways to capture, in effect, a time-lapse process within the confines of the concrete physical and visual presence of a book. To an extent, the designers and architects whose works are presented in this book confronted the same fundamental design challenges. Lewis’s essay discusses Darwin’s eclectic approach to providing illustrations for his books. On the Origin of the Species had only one illustration, a schematic diagram that Darwin devised to represent a tree of life showing the stages of evolution of various species from extinct ancestors. In other books, Darwin often selected wood engravings from previously published sources, some of which were too abstract and archetypal to capture the sense of change and adaptation so essential to his evolutionary theory. For The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin used some photographic images. However, at this early stage in the development of photography, these staged and altered images fail to illustrate the spontaneity of emotional expressions. While Lewis concludes that Darwin “adapted well” to these visual problems, the evidence in this essay points to a struggle with the limitations of visual presentation of Darwin’s theory of evolution. In contrast to Darwin, who was using design to illustrate a single theory of evolution, designers and architects drew on multiple sources and concepts to create their works. Eisenman’s introductory essay, “Design in the Age of Darwin: From William Morris to Frank Lloyd Wright,” provides an overview of how these issues varied with the individual designers who are represented in the exhibit. After discussions of the principal division in the evolutionary debate between “intelligent design” and Darwin’s evolution by natural selection as well as the basic design issues concerning form and function, method of manufacture, and historical evolution of design, Eisenman turns to the centerpiece of the essay by contrasting the approaches of William Morris and Christopher Dresser. When Morris was designing ornamental patterns based on plant forms, he echoed

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the Darwinian view of the particular and the mutable in organisms within their environmental context. At the same time, Morris rejected the linearity of evolutionary development when he evoked the return to earlier stages of civilization, especially the Middle Ages, which, for Morris, celebrated the communal socialism in which hand craftsmanship was valued. Dresser, on the other hand, was a formalist. He saw within each plant an ideal archetype, and his plant illustrations and designs emphasized this abstracted archetypal form. His book Unity in Variety, published in 1859 just months after the appearance of On the Origin of the Species, aligned his design philosophy with “intelligent design” since he attributed this underlying unity of natural forms to “one intelligence,” that is, God. However, because his designs were based on “models, prototypes, templates, and infinite repeatability” and so well suited to mechanical reproduction, in the realm of industrial manufacture, Dresser verged into Darwinian ideas about fitness of designs for their purpose. The case of these two designers, Morris and Dresser, demonstrates how they selected, adapted, and blended Darwin’s ideas about evolution with other aesthetic, social, and political currents of thought. This process continued in England with the British designers C. R. Ashbee and C. F. A. Voysey. In the United States, the architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright were heirs to the impact of evolutionism on design. Eisenman’s essay concludes with a coda on how Darwinian ideas were reshaped by these designers and architects as they moved toward a modernist style at the beginning of the twentieth century. In addition, three of the essays discuss specific aspects of the work of these designers. Zirwat Chowdhury, in his essay “C. F. A. Voysey: An Aesthetic of Independence and Interdependence,” writes about how Voysey integrated the functionalist design approaches of Morris as well as those of John Ruskin with the formalist designs of Dresser. Voysey was an architect who also designed decorative art. His wallpaper designs seem more aligned with the typological versions of natural forms that Dresser advocated. However, the designs incorporate some of the sense of interdependence of forms, the kind of “contingencies” that Morris and Ruskin espoused. In production, Voysey also distanced himself from the communal situation favored by Morris and emphasized adaptation to modern manufacturing methods and fitness for purpose that were closer to Dresser’s ideals. Angelina Lucento’s essay, “Evolution and Homogenic Love in C. R. Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft,” takes the reader into another realm of Darwin’s impact, social Darwinism, especially as articulated by Herbert Spencer. Although Ashbee rejected the “survival-of-the-fittest” aspect of social Darwinism, he was drawn to the idea of humanity striving toward perfection. Ashbee, under the influence of the scholar Edward Carpenter (who, in turn, drew on the work of the French writer Jean-Baptiste Lamarck), was attracted to the idea that homogenic love was the force driving humanity to perfection. Ashbee eventually formed a Guild of Handicraft in which Ashbee followed some of the ideals of Morris in the communal production of useful handcrafts, especially tableware, that reflected Ashbee’s design philosophy that forms should be “true to both the patterns of nature and the materials from which they had

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been created.” In Ashbee’s efforts, the mixture of strains from differing aspects of evolutionary thought grafted to a social system based on a homogenic theory of sexuality demonstrates the complexity of influences on design in the wake of Darwin. These intellectual, scientific, social, and aesthetic currents also animated American culture. Two architects, Sullivan and Wright, who worked around the turn of the twentieth century in the Chicago area are highlighted in this exhibit and book. The essay by David van Zanten, “Louis Sullivan, Herbert Spencer, and the Medium of Architecture,” is devoted to these architects. He focuses on Sullivan’s drawings to demonstrate the architect’s “organicist, evolutionary” approach not only to architectural ornament but also to ground plans that developed from the inside out. Both Sullivan and Wright designed their buildings to be part of and responsive to their environmental surroundings. Both architects, however, blended these organic, evolutionary elements with stylized abstraction as well as machine production reminiscent of Dresser’s designs. The book and exhibit call attention to the way architecture and design developed during the age of Darwin. However, the book is problematic in several ways. First, except for the essay on illustrating Darwin’s books, Darwin and his writings, especially the influential On the Origin of the Species, remain elusive. There is little evidence that these designers and architects read Darwin directly. While it is apparent that ideas about evolution articulated by Darwin and others were key elements in the directions that architecture and design took, a discussion of how Darwin’s writing on evolution circulated and gained a wider audience could have bridged the gap between Darwin’s work, on the one hand, and the drawings and decorative arts that are so handsomely illustrated and discussed in the book. A second problem is a lack of integration and focus of the material presented. There are so many currents and crosscurrents and so many intersections and divergences in the ways that designers responded and reacted to ideas about evolution and embodied these concepts in their designs. Darwin’s theory of evolution took many forms when applied to social and political arenas. The growth of industry and technological progress allied itself with many aspects of evolutionary thinking. Because designers and architects were closely connected to both social organization and methods of production, the ancillary lines that emerged from the challenges of Darwin’s views of evolution are also key to understanding the way design was practiced. The five essays in the book are too discrete and specialized to guide the reader through the tangled web of the interplay and the intersection of so many ideas and theories. Despite Eisenman’s good introductory essay, which endeavors to bring these multiple strands together, too many loose ends remain dangling. In effect, there is not enough unity in the variety. Examining the interaction between design and the myriad forms of evolutionary thinking that Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species stimulated is an important intellectual project, and this book provides a good starting point for continuing exploration of these issues and ideas. Karen Gould

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Review Sources The Daily Northwestern, July 10, 2008, http://media.www.dailynorthwestern.com. North by Northwestern, May 18, 2008, http://www.northbynorthwestern.com. Time Out Chicago 169 (May 22-28, 2008).

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THE DEVIL GETS HIS DUE The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler Author: Leslie Fiedler (1917-2003) Edited and with an introduction by Samuele F. S. Pardini Publisher: Counterpoint (Berkeley, Calif.). 315 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Literary criticism This sampling of Fiedler’s criticism shows how he anticipated recent trends in literary analysis and studies of popular culture A provocative and influential literary critic, Leslie Fiedler established his reputation as a maverick when he published his essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” in Partisan Review in 1948. This essay proposed that the relationship between Huck and Jim not only has homoerotic overtones but also serves as a literary archetype found in other American classics, such as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer (1841). The critical establishment was not pleased with this hint of sex and miscegenation in American classic novels about male bonding, but the scandal made Fiedler famous. By the time he developed his ideas further in his 1960 book Love and Death in the American Novel, Fiedler had established himself as one of the best literary analysts of his generation. After his heyday in the 1960’s and 1970’s, his star dimmed, in part because of scholarly interest in the French theorists of the 1980’s, but Fiedler kept publishing books and articles in journals and magazines such as Esquire. His showman’s side expressed itself when he appeared on talk shows such as Today and The Merv Griffin Show, and he even portrayed a Gypsy caravan driver in a full-length feature film that was never released. Since Fiedler’s death in 2003, his work has not received much valedictory attention, so Samuele F. S. Pardini sought to redress that by assembling Fiedler’s uncollected essays into The Devil Gets His Due. In his introduction to the volume, Pardini finds that “literary criticism is in crisis,” mostly because of a general lack of appreciation for or knowledge of major American critics and the heritage they represent. He hopes that this sampling of essays will find a younger audience who may not know how much Fiedler influenced contemporary criticism, especially in relation to popular culture. Pardini assembled the essays thematically, moving from an early section that explained Fiedler’s critical agenda to other sections devoted to Mark Twain’s writings, American literary criticism, pop modernism, writers of the 1950’s and 1960’s, and cultural studies. As Pardini points out, the book “covers almost sixty years of critical work,” but his effort to get readers to look at Fiedler’s writings thematically can make the essays hard to place in historical context. For instance, Fiedler be-

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gins his essay entitled “The Ordeal of Criticism” in mid-conversation with other writers, and one has to hunt through the acknowledgments page to find that it came from Commentary in 1949. Similarly, when Fielder blasts the “totalitarian” nature of political correctness in his discussion of “The Canon and the Classroom: A Caveat,” his insights make sense in terms of his essay’s publication in 1992, but not at all in terms of the essays of the 1950’s that immediately preceded it in the collection. Aside from these abrupt historical shifts, one can still tell that Fiedler did much to redefine criticism in terms of style and of content. In his early essay “Toward an Amateur Criticism,” Fiedler advocated “the language of conversation—the voice of the dilettante at home” in opposition to jargon-laden criticism, finding that “the ideal form for critical discourse is the irresponsible, non-commercial book review.” One can see how his critical strategies anticipated controversy when Fiedler declares that “the critic’s unforgivable sin is to be dull.” Fiedler also struggled against the predominant focus on high modernist literature in the 1940’s and 1950’s, especially the works of William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Henry James, and Herman Melville. Instead, he liked to celebrate what he called “good bad” writers, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and James Fenimore Cooper. While critics working within the modernist tradition might champion style, allusion, and the internal architecture of classic works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Fiedler prefers the “mythopoeic power of the author” and his or her ability to stir up the “collective unconscious, the evocation of closely shared nightmares of race and sex.” Sometimes Fiedler takes this tendency to democratize aesthetic taste to an extreme. For instance, at one point he claims that television “represents the fulfillment of all to which the popular arts have aspired from the start,” but otherwise his openness to other writers and other forms of storytelling greatly widened the possibilities for critical discourse. At times, Fiedler attempted to turn the standard critical reception of a famous author on its head. For instance, in his essay “Ezra Pound: The Poet as Parodist,” Fiedler explores Pound’s uneasy relationship with the American poetic tradition, especially when he tried to reject the influence of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or Walt Whitman. Pound rebelled against Whitman’s celebration of democracy, but he found himself obliged to adapt Whitman’s voice for his own ends in his collection entitled Lustra (1916). Ultimately, Pound tried out various voices with mixed success, so Fiedler designates Pound’s magnum opus the Cantos (1917; complete edition, 1948) as a “mock epic” in which is heard “Nobody talking in garbled and half-understood tongues . . . about Nothing at all,” not the highest praise for the culmination of Pound’s life work. Fiedler has nice things to say about William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren, but in both cases he highlights the populist side of their writings. Instead of discussing one of the more canonical novels, Fiedler spends much of “Pop

Leslie Fiedler was a prolific critic who often wrote about American literature and popular culture in terms of psychology and mythology. His most influential work was Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). In 1998 Fiedler received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle.

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Goes the Faulkner” meditating on how Faulkner’s scandalous and pornographic Sanctuary (1931) may be “the essence, the very center of his achievement,” having more in common with Dashiell Hammett than with James Joyce. From the beginning, Fiedler tended to focus on an author’s violations of the ethical conventions of his day. In doing so, according to Fiedler, the author may then uncover the deeper psychological forces at work underneath society’s polite veneer. In Freudian terms, Fiedler clearly prefers the id to the superego. He finds that the artist is against “everything in ourselves that responds to . . . law and order appeal.” Where other critics might like to draw clear lines between high and low Art, or accepted and unacceptable material, Fiedler clearly likes to mix things up, upset other people’s categories, especially when it comes to race and sex. This tendency explains the title of his essay “Giving the Devil His Due.” The author has the right to acknowledge “our deepest ambivalence toward violence, toward sex, toward our parents, toward our mates, toward our children, toward our secret selves, toward the daylight deities we are proud to boast we honor alone.” So it should come as no surprise that Fiedler celebrates Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), in spite of admitting to the misogyny of the novel. He takes pleasure in dissecting the convoluted history of censorship and praise in relation to Twain’s 1884 masterpiece in “Huckleberry Finn: The Book We Love to Hate,” and he even wrote a short essay on a little-known piece of pornography written by Twain in 1601 (published anonymously in 1880). Fiedler made it his critical technique to look for archetypes in revolt against received morality. Given his interest in ambivalent works of literature, Fiedler also wondered about both public and academic acceptance of various writers. Aside from his aggravation with critics inflating the importance of the high modernists, he also questioned in “Looking Back After Fifty Years” why John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) could be considered a classic in spite of its acknowledged “didacticism, sentimentality, stereotyping, and melodrama.” Fiedler finds much to decry in the novel, but he says it succeeds with readers because of the “archetypal resonance” that it shares with Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1939) and with such characters as Hamlet, Falstaff, Odysseus, Tarzan, and Sherlock Holmes. Given his critical lens that tries to acknowledge the reasons for popular appeal, Fiedler has no trouble writing about Kurt Vonnegut, who managed to attain pop classic status with mixing of genres, especially science fiction. When it comes to James Branch Cabell, Fiedler notes how his critical reputation has completely disappeared, but his novels, such as Jurgen (1919), may still find a new audience as fantasy novels for adolescents. Given Fiedler’s tendency to write in broad strokes without much in the way of specific evidence, one wonders how well some of these authors would hold up under a closer stylistic analysis, but then again Fiedler is interested more in the myths that they convey than in the details. Especially toward the latter third of the collection of essays, Pardini shows how Fiedler mixed in creative nonfiction and cultural studies with his literary analysis. One gets the sense that Fiedler would have liked to figure out a way for his criticism to cross over into artistry, so his notes on a canto of Dante’s Inferno, from La divina

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commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802), are written in end-stopped lines with rhyme directly opposite Dante’s verse on the page. In “Giving the Devil His Due,” Fiedler claimed that “literature is what I know about, literature is what I am interested in, literature is what I am committed to,” yet given the way his criticism tended to dissolve the hierarchy of literature, films, and television, it makes sense that Fiedler would increasingly write about films. He had already found that Cooper’s largest influence was inspiring the Western, so when he turned to Vietnam, he focused on films such as Apocalypse Now (1979), The Deer Hunter (1978), and the Rambo series as well as the works of Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad to explore myths and countermyths in reaction to the war. One might wonder about including Rambo in this study, but Fiedler makes a good point about how the film series conveys the basic American countermyth, in which “the value of fighting for God and Country is not questioned and combat heroism is glorified.” Pardini includes in this collection both this essay, “Mythicizing the Unspeakable,” and “Who Really Died in Vietnam? The Cost in Human Lives” perhaps as a way for the reader to consider correlations between the class differences of those who fight and those who stay home to protest. Even though Fiedler’s rebellious stance may seem quaint by today’s standards, since his ability to shock has diminished with time, one can still find his influence in a broad range of critics and popular-culture scholars. Every time someone discusses the myth of the hero in the film Star Wars (1977), that person owes something to Fiedler. Marcus Greil, a major rock-and-roll critic, acknowledges Fiedler’s influence in Mystery Train (1975), his study of the mythical aspects of rock and roll. Fiedler was the first critic to use the word “postmodern” in relation to literature, and he ushered in an era when the predominant academic interest was in race, gender, class, and queer theory, although he ironically complains in “The Canon and the Classroom: A Caveat” about the way political correctness has caused English professors to exclude dead white authors, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville, and Hemingway, from their class reading lists. Perhaps the major heir to Fiedler’s fiefdom is Camille Paglia, the writer of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990). Like Fiedler, Paglia prefers to challenge the critical orthodoxy, and she revels in popular culture, cheerfully free-associating Lord Byron and Elvis Presley or Emily Dickinson and sadomasochistic bondage. So it makes sense that Paglia wrote on the book jacket of an edition of Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) that “Fiedler created an American intellectual style that was truncated by the invasion of faddish French theory in the ’70’s and ’80’s. Let’s turn back to Fiedler and begin again.” This collection of Fiedler’s essays can help awaken readers to a wide-ranging critical heritage about which little is known. Roy C. Flannagan

Review Source Los Angeles Times, May 4, 2008, p. 8.

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DIARY OF A BAD YEAR Author: J. M. Coetzee (1940) Publisher: Viking Press (New York). 229 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 2007 Locale: An undisclosed city in Australia This novel fuses three narratives into one, describing the writing process and examining relationships among neighbors, coworkers, lovers, and generations. Coetzee takes advantage of the physical paper by placing each story on the same page and separating it by a single line Principal characters: Señor J C, the aging protagonist who hires Anya to transcribe his writings Anya, Señor C’s seductive young neighbor and secretary Alan, Anya’s jealous and money-obsessed boyfriend Mrs. Saunders, Anya and Señor C’s nosy neighbor

With Diary of a Bad Year, J. M. Coetzee cleverly examines the ways in which people relate to one another, their immediate community, and the international community, by weaving together three separate tales to form an experimental and intellectual novel. Each of the three stories appears on the same page separated by a line, working together harmoniously throughout the novel. The reader is free to read each story all the way through in its entirety, read them one after another within each chapter, or read all three at once. While each narrative can stand on its own, reading the three together provides each additional background, depth, and substance. The novel’s protagonist, J C, or Señor C, is a somewhat autobiographical representation of Coetzee. Both men were born and raised in South Africa, both taught in the United States, both reside in Australia, both are established authors and educators, and both have coincidentally written a book called Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). The similarities end there, however. Coetzee is well groomed, healthy, and a noted vegetarian, while Señor C suffers from Parkinson’s disease, has poor teeth, wears smelly and fraying sweaters, and eats meat regularly. Older than Coetzee, Señor C reflects upon his position in his later solitary life, lamenting In public life the role I play nowadays is that of distinguished figure (distinguished for what no one can quite recall), the kind of notable figure who is taken out of storage and dusted off to say a few words at a cultural event (the opening of a new hall in the art gallery; the prize-giving at an eisteddfod) and then put back in the cupboard.

Alone and of retirement age, Señor C has given up writing novels. He does, however, eagerly accept an invitation to partake in a writing effort in which six writers from around the world will share their opinions on democracy, pedophilia, origins of

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the state, Guantanamo Bay, and many other topics. “The book itself is the brainchild of a publisher in Germany. Its title will be Strong Opinions. The plan is for six contributors from various countries to say their say on any subjects they choose, the more contentious the better, six eminent writers pronounce on what is wrong with today’s world. ” Señor C jumps at the opportunity to collect and to compose his thoughts on politics and society and share them with others. Obsessed with world politics and international relations, he sees this writing opportunity as the perfect platform to express his views and the perfect time to do so since he finds it Interesting that at the moment in history when neo-liberalism proclaims that, politics having at last been subsumed under economics, the old categories of Left and Right have become obsolete, people all over the world who had been content to think of themselves as “moderate”—that is, as opposed to the excesses of both Left and Right—should be deciding that in an age of Right triumphalism the idea of the Left is too precious to abandon.

Señor C’s essays for “Strong Opinions” form the first of the three narratives that create the novel. These writings consist of heady viewpoints expressing Señor C’s, and one can only assume Coetzee’s, opinions on the state of the world. Señor C discusses the origin of the state and how those ideals have evolved into the modern state, concluding that The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.

The essays offer a harsh critique of the George W. Bush administration, questioning its motives and operations while accepting its power by acknowledging that We may thus legitimately speak of an administration which, while legal in the sense of being legally elected, is illegal or anti-legal in the sense of operating beyond the bounds of the law, evading the law, and resisting the rule of law.

Señor C places under equal scrutiny Great Britain, Australia, and other democracies that have supported the United States, claiming, “Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian.” He is relentless in his accusations against Bush, as he examines and explores the origin, effects, and purpose of the War on Terror, accusing the administration of ignoring international and domestic laws and adopting a new Machiavellian position that holds “infringing the moral law is justified when it is necessary.” He expounds upon the administration’s misrepresentation and fabrication of facts by suggesting, “By nature politics is uncongenial to the truth, they say, or at least to the practice of telling the truth under all circumstances.” Señor C’s quiet and secluded lifestyle is turned upside down while doing laundry in his apartment’s basement. A young Filipina neighbor, Anya, enters wearing a skimpy red shift, and Señor C describes her “black black hair, shapely bones. A cer-

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tain golden glow to her skin, lambent might be the word.” Aware of her beauty and youth, Anya goes out of her way to move seductively and to act flirtatiously while participating in mindless small talk with Señor C. He is instantly taken by her and realizes As I watched her an ache, a metaphysical ache, crept over me that I did nothing to stem. And in an intuitive way she knew about it, knew that in the old man in the plastic chair in the corner there was something personal going on, something to do with age and regret and the tears of things.

Upon finding out that she is currently unemployed, Señor C hires her to transcribe his scribbled notes at three times the going rate. Anya reawakens within Señor C youthful feelings, allowing Coetzee the opportunity to explore society’s relationship with age, class, and gender. Upon Anya’s entrance, the reader is introduced to the second voice of the three-part harmony, that of J C’s relationship to Anya. As Anya’s relationship with Señor C intensifies, the final part of the harmony emerges. Anya’s voice allows the reader a glimpse into her thoughts and feelings as well as an external look at Señor C. In her initial introduction, Anya comes across as somewhat self-absorbed, constantly reveling in the power she has over men and the ways in which she uses her feminine charms against them. She toys with Señor C, admitting, As I pass him, carrying the laundry basket, I make sure to waggle my behind, my delicious behind, sheathed in tight denim. If I were a man I would not be able to keep my eyes off me.

However, as she begins typing Señor C’s essays, she engages in discussions of the work with the author, and though she is not as articulate, she defends her beliefs and encourages Señor C to write on lighter, more entertaining topics. Although the dialogue comes across almost as a monologue because of the division in narratives, Anya’s discussions and debates over Señor C’s writings offer a fresh and lighthearted perspective to otherwise dense topics. Anya’s narrative also introduces the reader to Alan, Anya’s boyfriend. As she becomes more enthralled with the writings and the person behind them, Alan J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town, becomes increasingly jealous and suspicious South Africa, and became an of the old man’s motives, accusing him of Australian citizen in 2006. He won the possessing a senile lust for her. Having grown Booker Prize for Life and Times of fond of Señor C, Anya defends him by trying Michael K (1983) and for Disgrace to convince Alan that the writer “wants to (1999), and he received the Nobel Prize cuddle me on his knee. He wants to be my in Literature in 2003. grandfather, not my paramour.”

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A forty-year-old financial analyst who is concerned entirely with accumulating money and wealth, Alan too begins reading Señor C’s essays, pointing out their faults to Anya at every opportunity. At times Alan’s voice dominates Anya’s section of the novel, as he opines, criticizes, and argues against the old man’s views. His jealousy turns into an obsession, and he secretly plants spyware on the writer’s computer through a disc Anya unknowingly installed to upload her work. Through the spyware, Alan is able to track everything Señor C does, and the boyfriend finds the writer’s bank account, which contains three million dollars. He devises a plan to move the money into an offshore bank account, live off the interest, and return the original sum without Señor C ever being the wiser. Alan feels an entitlement and an obligation to make the money work for him, as though the old man were a Spanish galleon going down on the high seas with a hold full of gold from the Indies, that would be lost forever if he, Alan, didn’t dive in and save it.

Anya discovers Alan’s plans, and she struggles to put a stop to them and possibly their relationship. She proves her depth when she prevents Alan’s plan from coming to fruition and chastises him for his ill behavior toward her elderly friend. Divided into two parts, the second section of Diary of a Bad Year, entitled “Second Diary,” reveals a softer side of the characters than the first section, “Strong Opinions.” In “Second Diary,” Anya has left Alan and has returned home to live with her mother. She keeps in contact with Señor C through letters, and she also checks up on him through a secret correspondence with their neighbor, Mrs. Saunders. Señor C takes Anya’s advice and begins writing about lighter topics, such as cricket, personal dreams, views on love, and birds congregating in the park across from his apartment. This turnabout within the characters changes the reader’s relationship and opinions of them and provides them with an additional layer of complexity. Coetzee challenges the reader in Diary of a Bad Year by taking advantage of the physical page and allowing the reader to choose how he or she will consume the individual parts to develop the complete story. The essays are cerebral yet accessible, consisting of subject matter that is both thought provoking and timely. The two personal narratives are displays of human interaction that cross social and generational boundaries, offering an emotional respite from the academics of the first section. Coetzee delivers a unique reading experience, as the reader is transformed from a passive voyeur into an active participant that determines what course the novel will take. Sara Vidar

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Review Sources America 199, no. 5 (September 1, 2008): 24-26. The Atlantic Monthly 301, no. 2 (March, 2008): 104. Booklist 104, no. 3 (October 1, 2007): 5. Esquire 149, no. 1 (January, 2008): 19. Harper’s Magazine 316 (January, 2008): 83-84. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 20 (October 15, 2007): 1065-1066. London Review of Books 29, no. 19 (October 4, 2007): 5-7. The Nation 286, no. 7 (February 25, 2008): 29-34. New York 41, no. 3 (January 21, 2008): 94. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 1 (January 17, 2008): 23-25. The New Yorker 83, no. 41 (December, 24, 2007): 140-143. O, The Oprah Magazine 9, no. 1 (January, 2008): 143. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 37 (September 17, 2007): 31. The Spectator 304 (September 8, 2007): 43. The Times Literary Supplement, August 24, 2007, pp. 3-7.

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DICTATION A Quartet Author: Cynthia Ozick (1928) Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (Boston). 179 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Short fiction Time: The early 1900’s; the late twentieth century; the 1930’s; and the 1940’s Locale: London, New York City, and Fascist Italy Four long stories link several themes characteristic of the author’s work in both her fiction and her literary criticism Principal characters: Joseph Conrad, a Polish-born novelist Henry James, an American novelist living in England Lilian Hollowes, Conrad’s secretary Theodora Bosanquit, James’s secretary Matt Sorley, an aging Jewish actor Frances, his wife, who composes crossword puzzles Ted Silkowicz, a young theater director Eli Miller, an elderly actor from the bygone Yiddish theater Frank Castle, a devout Catholic attending a theological conference Viviana Teresa Acceno, a peasant chambermaid Percy Nightingale, a conference participant Phyllis, the narrator, a college student Simon Greenfeld, a relative of Phyllis Essie, Simon’s wife

In Dictation: A Quartet, Cynthia Ozick presents four long stories, three of them previously published: “Dictation,” “Actors,” “At Fumicaro,” and “What Happened to the Baby?” An admirer of Henry James’s work in her early years, Ozick later freed herself from his influence. The title story, “Dictation,” is an exuberantly witty exercise in imagination in which James, his spoken words mimicking his elaborately constructed prose, discusses literary matters with the young Joseph Conrad, the apprentice novelist. James and Conrad were acquainted—that much is history. The rest of the story is the author’s invention. Conrad, visiting the master in his country home, learns that James, his hands crippled by years of gripping his pen, has hired an amanuensis to type his dictated words on a newfangled invention, the Remington. Conrad worries: Might the intervention of the typist and her machine break the sacred relationship between the brain and the pen? Nine years later, after Conrad has achieved success, he meets James again in London. However, Conrad’s hands have been crippled by gout; he, too, has hired

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a secretary with a Remington. Conrad and James debate weighty literary questions, such as whether a writer’s fiction reveals the dark secrets of his inner self, as Conrad believes, or masks his true identity, as James believes. The comedy turns on the ironic irrelevance of this debate when the two amanuenses, portrayed under their real names, take matters into their own hands and conspire to interfere with the texts of their employers. Theodora Bosanquit, James’s secretary, is a schemer who sets out to seduce Lilian Hollowes, Conrad’s shy, awkward secretary who Cynthia Ozick is an acclaimed novelist, is secretly in love with her employer. Conrad short-story writer, and essayist. Among has hoped to prevent a meeting between the her awards are the National Book two women, fearing that his secrets would be Critics Award, four O. Henry first revealed. Nevertheless, Theodora outmaneu- prizes for the short story, a National vers him and introduces herself to Lilian, tak- Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and ing her to tea and ferreting out personal de- a Guggenheim fellowship. She has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the tails of her life. Having failed to seduce her, Theodora Man Booker International Prize. plays upon Lilian’s secret worship of her employer and her jealousy of Conrad’s wife. Lilian agrees, albeit reluctantly, to Theodora’s plot. The scheme is intriguing: Is it possible for each typist to copy a passage from her employer’s text and have the other insert it into her writer’s manuscript without being detected? Certainly, says Theodora; the artistic ego, believing in its own genius, will assume that the substituted passage is of his own brilliant invention. The two supposedly altered stories are James’s “The Jolly Corner” and Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer.” Ozick revels in linguistic play and, with an unerring gift for dialogue, mimics James’s pretentious diction and Conrad’s passionate outpourings. She even hints at a liaison between Theodora and a young Virginia Woolf, identified only as Ginny. Should anyone detect anachronisms, Ozick assures readers, in an impish footnote, that this is, after all, just fiction. Perhaps this is a diabolical instance of feminist revenge against the great men who treat their secretaries as inferiors. Certainly the story poses an intriguing literary puzzle: If the amanuenses, mere employees in the service of genius, succeed in their scheme, who can claim ownership of a literary text? In “Actors,” Matt Sorley, the stage name of Mose Sadacca, is nearly sixty, an unemployed actor who prides himself on the wit and subtlety of his work. He pretends to attend auditions, rejecting the “geezer” roles that he is offered, and he disdains his occasional stereotyped roles in television series. Frances, his long-suffering wife, resents having to support them both by creating crossword puzzles. Her arcane vocabulary is the source of much of the humor in the story.

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To the rescue comes Ted Silkowicz, a trendy young director who offers Sorley a role he cannot refuse: the lead in an updated version of William Shakespeare’s King Lear (1608), a revival of the bygone Yiddish melodrama. There is one condition; Sorley must agree to meet with the deceased playwright’s father, Eli Miller, a retired actor living in a Jewish home for the elderly. This visit, with Frances along for support, is a masterpiece of comic misunderstanding. Is Miller hovering over the edge of sanity or uttering artistic truth about the greatness of Yiddish theater? After first dismissing the play as “The Lear of Ellis Island,” Sorley begins to inhabit the role. Abandoning all subtlety, he howls and gestures in an excess of melodramatic emotion. The success of the play will depend upon the audience’s willingness to accept as tragedy the unfamiliar style from the past. On opening night, Sorley, believing that an unannounced guest in the audience is a director whom he hates, delivers an over-the-top performance in the first act. The second act is interrupted by the guest, Miller, who has escaped from the institution and thunders down the center aisle in outrage against the travesty of a performance: “Liars, thieves, corruption! In the mother tongue, with sincerity, not from a charlatan like this!” The audience loves it and roars with laughter, sending Sorley into the wings in defeat and humiliation. Well schooled in theatrical tradition, Ozick poses the question: Does artistic truth lie with the trendy young director, the old Yiddish actor, or Sorley, who struggles vainly to maintain his own integrity against the incongruities of competing theatrical visions? In “At Fumicaro,” Frank Castle has anticipated with pleasure his invitation to a conference for Roman Catholic intellectuals who will debate the role of the Church in the world. Three dozen men will meet daily for Mass and for discussion of current church issues at the Villa Garibaldi on Lake Como. Frank, unmarried at the age of thirty-five, has practiced celibacy for six months, preparing for a transport of religious enlightenment. His spiritual aspirations are abruptly interrupted by his lust for Viviana, a pregnant teenage chambermaid he first encounters as she is vomiting into the toilet in the bathroom she is supposed to be cleaning. Instantly—and incongruously—smitten with love, Frank promises to marry her and take her home to New York. Frank alternates visions of lust with moments of common sense (these perhaps more believable than his unbridled passion) during which he fears that Viviana is exploiting him and intends to steal his money. Viviana, however, has the peasant instinct for survival, and she is wise in the ways of men. She understands the fate that awaits her as the mother of an out-of-wedlock child in Italy’s conservative society. Viviana’s promiscuous mother Caterina refuses to believe the truth: Her daughter has been impregnated in an unwilling encounter with one of her own lovers. She is baffled by Frank’s willingness to marry Viviana, but she happily supports the marriage that will rescue her daughter from her predicament. Percy Nightingale, a cynical latecomer to the conference, offers another point of view, denouncing Frank as a fool for planning to elope with a chambermaid. The conference quickly degenerates into chaos, with the pretentious intellectuals falling asleep over the debris of their food. Viviana is deeply religious, with a primitive faith that impels her to worship an an-

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cient stone figure that Frank knows is a pagan artifact. Her superstitions become even more evident when she falls down in prayer before museum figures of the Virgin and Christ Child. Frank foresees the embarrassment that she will cause him in the pretentiously sophisticated world of his New York peers. Still, consumed by lust and his Catholic sense of guilt, he marries her, envisioning himself as the rescuer of his young bride. She will be both his penance and his salvation. Although “At Fumicaro” has received mixed reviews, it is an example of the author’s fascination with the comic possibilities of opposing forces, here the superstitious peasant and the self-torturing intellectual who find each other in an incongruous match. “What Happened to the Baby?” is a dark satire on the consequences of lying and deception, narrated by Phyllis, a college student at New York University. Phyllis, whose parents have moved to Arizona, resents her mother’s request to take care of “Uncle” Simon, her mother’s cousin. Phyllis recalls unpleasant childhood experiences at Uncle Simon’s meetings. Simon has invented GNU, an artificial language designed to replace Esperanto. Phyllis’s mother, despite her husband’s protests, believes in Simon’s genius and donates money to his cause. She blames Simon’s wife Essie for the mysterious death of their baby years ago. At Simon’s meetings, Essie, with theatrical ardor, entertains the audience by performing chants and poems in GNU. However, these gatherings, initially successful, always end in chaos, with shrieking and ridicule bordering on violence. Improbability and deception follow relentlessly as the narrative turns to Phyllis’s college years. Simon and Essie have divorced; he lives in a filthy apartment with a refrigerator full of rotting food. He has a new set of followers, led by Phyllis’s roommate Annette, who is collecting money for the cause but pocketing it. Phyllis spends the money sent by her mother for Simon on herself and lies to her mother, telling her that Simon’s language has gained acceptance. In the meantime, Phyllis’s mother has become a wealthy entrepreneur by selling fake Native American artifacts in her gift shop in Arizona. Edging toward death, Simon evokes Phyllis’s pity. She supports him with the money her mother now sends for Phyllis. Hoping that Simon and Essie will reconcile in their old age, Phyllis visits Essie in their old apartment where she, too, lives in squalor. Here the comedy takes a darker turn as Phyllis learns the story of the baby’s death. Pregnant by another man, Essie had tricked Simon into marrying her. One day, as a cruel joke, she told him that he was not the baby’s father. The events of the narrative mount in improbability. The young couple had rented a summer cottage in the Catskills where Simon, a habitual philanderer, fell in love with their neighbor Bella, a devotee of Esperanto. Baby Retta died one night when Essie, who was caring for Bella’s baby son, put both children into the same crib. When the boy became ill during the night, Essie sent Simon for the doctor. Instead, he spent the night with Bella. When the doctor arrived in the morning, the boy had recovered, but Baby Retta, apparently smothered, was dead. Consumed with guilt, Simon rebelled against Esperanto with the mad scheme to create his own language. Essie blamed Simon for the baby’s death and wreaked her

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revenge by pretending to encourage his followers, then inviting the Esperantists to disrupt his meetings and humiliate him. The trips abroad to research language were a lie; Simon and Essie spent their summers in the Catskills, where Simon mourned at Retta’s grave. The final words of the story echo the tirade of Miller in “Actors,” suggesting a motif that links the four stories in this collection. Essie’s words slide seamlessly into the thoughts of Phyllis to become the perception of the author herself: “Lie, illusion, deception. . . was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?” The collected stories, dating over a period of twenty-five years, represent constant themes in Ozick’s work: the witty playfulness of language, the juxtaposition of opposites, and unexpected plot reversals. Her stories are a darkly satiric view of the all-toohuman weakness for self-deception and lying and the consequences that follow, her characters getting what they deserve. Critics have described Ozick’s fiction variously as fantasy, farce, allegory, or tragicomedy. Her work is highly regarded for its intellectual complexity and mastery of the nuances of language. Marjorie Podolsky

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 11 (February 1, 2008): 5. The Christian Science Monitor, May 6, 2008, p. 16. Commentary 126, no. 2 (September, 2008): 68-72. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 3 (February 1, 2008): 111-112. Library Journal 133, no. 5 (March 15, 2008): 66-67. Los Angeles Times, April 27, 2008, p. R4. The New York Times Book Review, April 20, 2008, p. 11. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 2 (January 14, 2008): 37. The Washington Post, April 13, 2008, p. T10.

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DID LINCOLN OWN SLAVES? And Other Frequently Asked Questions About Abraham Lincoln Author: Gerald J. Prokopowicz (1958) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). Illustrated. 352 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Biography Time: 1809-1865 Locale: The United States Informal but nonetheless authoritative study of President Lincoln written in the form of question-and-answer discussions by a noted scholar Principal personage: Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), sixteenth president of the United States

On April 14, 1876, on the eleventh anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Frederick Douglass eulogized the sixteenth president at the dedication of the Freedmen’s Memorial in Washington, D.C. Claiming there was little need to speak at length about Lincoln’s life because that “ground has been fully occupied and completely covered,” Douglass went on to say, The whole field of fact and fancy has been gleaned and garnered. Any man can say things that are true of Abraham Lincoln, but no man can say anything that is new of Abraham Lincoln. His personal traits and public acts are better known to the American people than are those of any other man of his age. He was a mystery to no man who saw him and heard him.

Douglass was certainly correct in saying that Lincoln was better known to most Americans than any other person of his time. Was he, however, correct in arguing that nothing new remained to be said of the man? That is almost certainly not the case if Gerald R. Prokopowicz’s Did Lincoln Own Slaves? And Other Frequently Asked Questions About Abraham Lincoln is an accurate reflection of the state of Lincoln studies. The most frequently asked question about Abraham Lincoln may not be whether he owned slaves but whether the world really needs yet another book about him. Exact figures are impossible to find, but it is clear that more has been written about the sixteenth president of the United States than about any other American—or almost anyone else, for that matter. Despite Douglass’s skepticism about the possibility of saying anything new on the subject, more than fifteen thousand books have been published about Lincoln since his assassination in 1865. That number averages to more than one hundred entirely new Lincoln books a year, and that rate was certainly increasing during the bicentennial year of Lincoln’s 1809 birth. An Amazon.com search of books about Lincoln published during 2008—the year before the bicenten-

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nial—yielded 427 new titles, a figure more than double the combined totals for new books that year about Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. At a conservative estimate, fifteen thousand Lincoln books must contain at least three million pages, with more than one billion words. Such staggering numbers again beg the question: With so much already published about Lincoln, what can possibly remain to be learned about the man that is not already known? What questions about him can there be that have not already been answered? In his brief introduction to Did Lincoln Own Slaves?, Prokopowicz addresses these issues immediately. He begins by citing a remark attributed to the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy: “Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions no one has asked them.” After pointing out that professional historians have a duty to ask innovative questions that others may have not yet posed, he steps back to consider, “But who are we to say that whatever questions the public may already be asking about history are not the ‘right’ ones?” Similar questions might be asked of all scholarly fields in the arts and social sciences. After all, whom should scholarship serve? Prokopowicz answers that question implicitly by explaining that the purpose of his book is to answer questions about Lincoln that are asked by members of the public, not by scholars. In this, he succeeds brilliantly. Always fascinating and often witty, his book is such a pleasure to read that one wonders why its question-and-answer format is not used more frequently by scholars. Moreover, subject matter has a great deal to do with the book’s strengths. It should be safe to say few questions are frequently asked about Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, or James Buchanan, Lincoln’s immediate predecessors in the presidency. Lincoln stands out because he succeeded in the face of the most difficult challenges faced by any president in U.S. history. In addition, as Prokopowicz’s book demonstrates repeatedly, Lincoln was also an endlessly fascinating human who continues to be full of surprises. There are reasons that thousands of books have been written about him. Although Prokopowicz is himself a distinguished scholar, he is also peculiarly well placed to know what questions members of the public actually ask about Abraham Lincoln. For nine years, he was resident historian at the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he talked with visitors on an almost daily basis. The words “frequently asked” in his book’s title are clearly more than mere hyperbole. At the same time, those words might be read as a warning flag. Readers approaching a book titled Did Lincoln Own Slaves? And Other Frequently Asked Questions About Abraham Lincoln might expect it to be a collection of trivia. The book however, is any-

Gerald J. Prokopowicz earned a doctorate in history at Harvard, studying under Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald. He served as historical director of the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and is chair of East Carolina University’s history department. Among his publications are The Reform Era and Eastern U.S. Development, 1815-1850 (1998) and All for the Regiment: The Army of the Ohio, 1861–1862 (2000). He is a member of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission Board of Advisors.

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thing but that. In roughly 250 pages of its main text, it poses more than 325 questions that are arranged in roughly the same chronological sequence as events in Lincoln’s life. These questions are grouped within twelve chapters, each of which concludes with a brief discussion of further readings. Prokopowicz supplements these references with nearly thirty pages of detailed endnotes. The book also contains a substantial bibliography and an excellent index. Prokopowicz’s discussions of each question range in length from a few words (“What was Lincoln’s middle name?” “He didn’t have one.”) to many pages. One of his longest discussions answers a question about “how Lincoln failed at everything he tried . . . until one day he was elected president.” Prokopowicz uses more than seven pages to analyze each of Lincoln’s alleged failures, while arguing that his “successes far outweighed his setbacks.” He concludes by suggesting that the notion that Lincoln had experienced mostly failures has grown out of the public’s need for reassurance that their own failings need not bar them from ultimate success. Prokopowicz is at his best in his chapter on the Civil War (1861-1865), which is another of his areas of expertise. His chapter on Lincoln as the “Emancipator” is also very strong. Although Prokopowicz is clearly a devoted admirer of Lincoln, he does not blink in dealing with questions about Lincoln’s motives for abolishing slavery and his not-alwaysadmirable attitude toward African Americans. When read from cover to cover, the questions and answers in this book add up to an exceptionally readable narrative biography that feels like a warm fireside chat with an expert who answers every question thoughtfully and respectfully, never making his interrogators feel ignorant or foolish. If Prokopowicz’s classroom teaching techniques reflect his approach in this book, then he must be a popular professor. Prokopowicz stresses that his book is “not meant to substitute for a full-length scholarly biography” and suggests that anyone who has read at least a half-dozen books on Lincoln is unlikely to find anything new in his book. Here he may be overly modest. It is probably true that readers already well familiar with Lincoln’s life will find little historical information with which they are not already familiar in Prokopowicz’s book. However, they may find other things of at least equal value: new ways of looking at Lincoln and a better understanding of how the modern American public views the man. Despite the ocean of books already published about Lincoln and the interest in him taken by the public, it is clear a substantial gap exists between what many people believe to be true about Lincoln and what is really known about him. Prokopowicz’s book helps close that gap, and it should encourage other biographers and historians to make their own work accessible to wider audiences. A book such as Did Lincoln Own Slaves? has a singular advantage over standard biographies in being freer to address issues that most biographers would regard as unnecessary distractions. An interesting example appears in the book’s third question, which immediately follows “When and where was Lincoln born?” and “Is the cabin still there?” After explaining that no authentic version of Lincoln’s birthplace cabin still exists, Prokopowicz answers the third question: “Haven’t I seen the cabin somewhere else?” The surprising answer is “You probably have.” As Prokopowicz explains, not only are all “birthplace cabins” replicas, most are copies of the cabin at the

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National Park Service’s Lincoln memorial near his actual Kentucky birthplace, and that cabin itself is a partly fanciful replica. It is not surprising that people get confused about Lincoln. Of the many questions Prokopowicz heard over the years, some were stimulating, provocative, or perceptive. Some were funny or weird. Some were based on legends, myths, or half-remembered history lessons. Many were asked out of a desire to learn, while others revealed the speaker’s prejudice or ignorance.

The descriptive terms that Prokopowicz uses accurately reflect the mix of questions in his book. Some questions are, indeed, funny, weird, or ignorant. One wonders whether someone really asked Prokopowicz this: “About the original Lincoln birthplace cabin—is it true that Lincoln helped his father build it with his own hands?” It is certainly one of the weirdest questions that Prokopowicz raises, but he simply dismisses it out of hand and moves on to questions about Lincoln’s ancestry. In a much later section, he offers a thoughtful reply to another seemingly foolish question about whether Lincoln could dunk a basketball. While pointing out that the game of basketball was not invented until 1891, Prokopowicz suggests that the six-foot-four Lincoln might have been able to dunk a ball and devotes a half-page to discussing Lincoln’s known athletic skills, which were impressive. Another example of a thoughtful reply to an ignorant question is Prokopowicz’s response to: “Are there any recordings of Lincoln’s voice?” Instead of merely dismissing the question after explaining that no practical technology for recording existed during Lincoln’s time, he discusses what is known about the sound of Lincoln’s voice. Moreover, he makes the subject even more interesting by comparing what is known about how Lincoln sounded to how actors Henry Fonda and Raymond Massey spoke when they played Lincoln in films that are still frequently shown on television. In addition to oddball queries, speculative questions appear. The chapter on Lincoln as a politician ends with two such questions: “If he were alive today, what party would Lincoln belong to?” and “If Lincoln were running for office today, could he get elected?” Answers to such questions can naturally be only informed guesswork, but Prokopowicz treats both questions seriously by examining the nature of Lincoln’s political views in the context of his time and allowing readers to try to place Lincoln within a modern-day context. Did Lincoln Own Slaves? does such a fine job of connecting past and present, it seems a shame that Prokopowicz did not finish the book a year or two later, so he could have brought Barack Obama into the discussion. Some people see Obama’s rise to the U.S. presidency as beginning the third “chapter” in the evolution of American freedom at which Lincoln’s presidency formed the center. In this view, the first chapter began with the Declaration of Independence that set the United States on the path to a democratic and egalitarian society. The second chapter began with the culmination of the Civil War, which settled the question of preserving the national union and abolishing the institution of slavery, which Lincoln regarded as a stain on the nation’s democratic principles. The third chapter thus begins in 2009, with the election of an

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African American to the highest office in the land—an event that many see as a belated fulfillment of the promise of freedom offered by emancipation. Many comparisons have been made between Lincoln and Obama. Both were Illinois state legislators who rose to the presidency with comparatively little experience in Washington politics but with growing national reputations as exceptional orators. Both entered their presidencies during times of extraordinary national crises, and both began their presidencies by appointing to their cabinets some of their most powerful political rivals. While such comparisons may well be the subjects of countless future questions about future presidents, however, what is most obviously—and unavoidably—missing from Did Lincoln Own Slaves? is a discussion of what Lincoln himself might have thought about the possibility of a black president. R. Kent Rasmussen

Review Sources America’s Civil War 21, no. 1 (March, 2008): 63-64. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 46 (November 19, 2007): 52. Time 171, no. 6 (February 11, 2008): 84.

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THE DRAINING LAKE Author: Arnaldur Indriðason (1961) First published: Kleifarvatn, 2004 in Iceland Translated from the Icelandic by Bernard Scudder Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press (New York). 312 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 2004 Locale: Lake Kleifarvatn and Reykjavik, Iceland; Leipzig, Germany This Nordic crime fiction deftly solves the mystery at its center and also reveals the inner turmoil of its characters Principal characters: Sunna, a hydrologist who discovers the skeleton in Lake Kleifarvatn Erlendur Sveinsson, a detective obsessed with missing persons Elinborg, the partner of Erlendur who writes cookbooks Sigurdur Óli, the partner of Elinborg, he and his wife have no children Marion Briem, the former boss of Erlendur who is dying of lung cancer and is partially paralyzed Ilona, Tómas’s love, a Hungarian student opposed to the Communist regime Tómas, socialist Icelandic student, lover of Ilona Lothar Weiser, East German Communist, recruiter of students, double agent Emil, Tomás’s friend and betrayer, also known as Leopold

The Draining Lake is many different books in one: a murder mystery, a crime novel, an espionage novel, a missing-persons novel, a psychological novel about loneliness, a mythic novel, and a character study of its central figure, Erlendur Sveinsson. Arnaldur Indriðason skillfully interweaves these elements into a complex and fascinating novel. Events and characters on one story path lead the reader into another and then back to the central story, which is the murder mystery. Arnaldur (the first name is used according to Icelandic custom) succeeds in juxtaposing the intrigue of the various story threads in such a way that they remain separate and could stand alone as a self-sustaining story. The structure of the novel is given texture by the use of repeated images and situations in the various stories. Tomás, the Leipzig student, observes a couple who walk hand in hand every evening; at the end of the novel, Sunna and her new companion walk off hand in hand. Tomás lives in the memories of Ilona; Leopold’s girlfriend lives in the memories of her life with him; and Erlendur’s thoughts constantly return to his brother, who has died tragically. The setting of the novel is Iceland, but it plays a greater role than merely providing

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a location. The country and its traditions, its myths, its mysteries, and its physical attrib- After working as a journalist and film utes of climate, terrain, and weather set the reviewer, Arnaldur Indriðason tone of the work. The climate is harsh, with its published his first crime fiction novel, cold, its damp, and its long dark season. Simi- Synir dufstens (sons of dust), in 1997. larly, life is harsh, with its obstacles, its disap- This was the first book in his popular pointments, its dangers, and its failures. Ice- Detective Erlendur series. He received land is reflected in Erlendur’s life and in his the Glass Key Award for Nordic crime fiction in 2002 and in 2003 and the cold temperament. He is estranged from his CWA Gold Dagger Award for best children and rarely socializes. He lives alone crime novel in 2005. in an apartment with only the bare essentials, except for one luxury: a large collection of books that provides him an escape from the dreariness of reality. Traditionally, Iceland’s people had a close connection to the land, but many who lived in the country have moved to the cities to earn a living, and their lives are colored by a sense of displacement. The majority of Arnaldur’s characters suffer from a sense of not belonging and are ill at ease in their lives. Life in Iceland is precarious because of its natural phenomena; Erlendur is haunted by the loss of his younger brother in an avalanche. Iceland’s cold, snow, and darkness provide an atmosphere of immobility and sameness. Arnaldur exploits this concept to create irony and tension in his novel. Nothing ever happens in Iceland, an opinion constantly repeated by the foreign envoys encountered by Erlendur and his colleagues, and yet people disappear, lakes mysteriously drain, and the dead bodies of murder victims appear. The novel begins with Sunna, a hydrologist, discovering a skeleton in the mud of Lake Kleifarvatn, which has been mysteriously draining since a recent earthquake. The Reykjavik police are called in to conduct an investigation, and the team of detectives working on the case includes Erlendur, who is obsessed with missing-persons cases; Elinborg, a female detective who has written a cookbook; and Sigurdur Óli, a no-nonsense detective. The skull shows evidence of a severe blow to the head and is attached to a radio transmitter bearing Russian words. There are, however, no clues to the identity of the murder victim. Once it is determined that the skeleton is the remains of a body put into the lake sometime around 1970, the detectives begin reopening unsolved cases of persons reported missing about that time. One of these cases is a man who left a black Ford Falcon at the train station and the woman he was to marry outside the dairy shop where she worked. Erlendur is particularly drawn to this case, and he discovers that the abandoned woman is still waiting for her missing lover. In pursuing the renewed investigation, Erlendur finds that there was no record of the man’s identity at the time of his disappearance. From his interviews with the woman, Erlendur does, however, find out that the man, known as Leopold, sold farm machinery made in East Germany and that on the day of his disappearance he had an appointment to meet a prospective client, Haraldur, at his farm. Further investigation results in Erlendur locating the black Ford Falcon, with its missing hubcap. As a result of Erlendur’s tenacity, Haraldur eventually tells him that

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Leopold was at the farm and that Haraldur’s mentally challenged brother stole the hubcap, which Haraldur buried along with a wallet that had fallen out of Leopold’s pocket. Erlendur digs up the items; the hubcap belongs to the Falcon and the wallet reveals the name of the man whose skeleton had been found in the lake. All of this leads Erlendur to the Icelandic students and finally to Tomás. Before the police arrive, Tomás writes a letter containing the details of how and why he killed Emil and then shoots himself. Arnaldur’s introduction of his second story line is veiled in mystery. The discovery of the skeleton receives considerable attention from the media, including lengthy coverage on television. In chapter 3, an unidentified man watching the coverage begins to reminisce about his days as a young socialist studying in Leipzig, East Germany. He also ponders what will happen in regard to the person found in the lake, but he reassures himself that it happened a long time ago and that there was no one to care about the murdered man whose skeleton had been found. This is the beginning of the story of the Soviet activities in Iceland during the Cold War and of the Icelandic students recruited and sent to study at the university in Leipzig. It is a story of naïve faith in a political system, of disappointment, of disillusionment, and of loss. In telling the story of the Leipzig students, Arnaldur gives his narrative an almost poetic quality, with his descriptions of objects, places, and sensory stimulants. As the mysterious man who was watching the news remembers, he once again smells the aromas of Leipzig, he sees again the desolation brought about by World War II, and in contrast he relives the wholesome bountiful Christmas feast that the Icelandic students shared as a result of gifts from home. Eventually, Arnaldur gives a name to this man who watches and remembers: Tomás, who is one of several Icelandic students studying in Leipzig, all ardent socialists who believe the socialist system is the path to improving people’s lives. His friend from school in Iceland, Emil, is a student there, as are Hannes, Rut, Karl, and Hrafnhildur. Life at the university is different from their lives at home in Iceland. There are food shortages, and they live in a dilapidated villa where rats run rampant. With the exception of Rut, who does not return to Leipzig after Christmas vacation, they manage to deal with the physical hardships and look forward to the day when socialism will have eradicated such difficulties. However, there are other differences besides a harsher lifestyle; there is the system of surveillance and personal spying that most of them find unjust and wrong. Hannes is the first to be deeply disillusioned by socialism as practiced in Communist East Germany. Emil accepts the Communist Party line and becomes more hardline as he refuses to consider the system might be less than the panacea he believes it to be. Tomás fails to understand the Soviet system and how it is modifying not only the tenets of socialism but also the relationships between comrades and friends. During this time Tomás meets and falls in love with Ilona, a Hungarian student. Tomás’s naïveté proves disastrous for both Hannes and Ilona. Trusting in friendship, Tomás tells Lothar Weiser, an East German who has befriended the students from Iceland and who is his own mentor, about Hannes’s disillusionment with the political system. Shortly thereafter, Hannes is expelled from the university and sent back to Iceland. His plans for a career as an engineer are destroyed.

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Ilona, who has witnessed the use of Soviet military force in Hungary, is a dissident among the students; she participates in secret meetings and is working against the party. Although Tomás realizes that he should not have trusted Lothar, he still believes in the friendship and loyalty between the Icelanders and shares this information with his friend Emil. Soon, Ilona is arrested and disappears. Tomás refuses to believe that she will not be released and come back to him. He seeks out Lothar, and he asks Emil for help. Eventually, he understands that she will never come back to him, but out of habit he keeps searching for her. Finally, he is asked to leave East Germany. He returns to Iceland; he never marries but lives in solitude remembering and searching for answers as to why Ilona was arrested. Arnaldur permeates his novel with the theme of loneliness as he delves into the personal lives of his characters. At the beginning of the novel, Sunna the hydrologist is out walking alone when she discovers the skeleton. Since her divorce, she has found no one with whom to share her life. Erlendur’s former boss, Marion Briem, who never married and never had children, lives alone. Suffering from lung cancer and partially paralyzed, she is confined to her chair and spends her days watching John Wayne Westerns. Leopold’s girlfriend lives a lonely life, waiting for a man who will never return. Tomás lives in solitude with his letters and his memories. The man who keeps calling Sigurdur Óli lives an empty life, continually blaming himself for his wife’s death. The lives of Sigurdur Óli and Bergthorá are colored by the sense of loneliness experienced by the childless couple who desperately desire a child. The portrayal of Erlendur’s personal life adds significantly to the novel and its themes of disappearance and loneliness. The detective is obsessed with cases involving missing persons, since his life is filled with the voids left by missing persons. Erlendur is repeatedly drawn back to the place where his younger brother was lost in an avalanche. Erlendur’s family is among the missing, for he has been divorced for a long time and also estranged from his children, Eva Lind and Sindri. Even Valgedur, with whom he has become romantically involved, seems to be missing far more than she is present in his life. The Draining Lake, the sixth book in Arnaldur’s Erlendur series, is an important addition to the genre of Nordic crime fiction. This genre has gained popularity and stature with each of his books. Shawncey Webb

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 22 (August 1, 2008): 42. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 15 (August 1, 2008): 23. Library Journal 133, no. 14 (September 1, 2008): 103. New Statesman 136 (July 30, 2007): 60. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 29 (July 21, 2008): 140-141. The Wall Street Journal 252, no. 105 (November 1, 2008): W13.

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ETERNAL ENEMIES Author: Adam Zagajewski (1945) Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 116 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Poetry The enemies named in Zagajewski’s title are love and time, enemies which the poet reconciles in this meditative collection of poems that moves the reader through many places and people he has loved The title of Adam Zagajewski’s latest volume of poetry, Eternal Enemies, comes from his poem “Epithalamium,” a poem to celebrate a wedding, in which he notes that despite the difficulties of sharing one’s life with another, it is only in marriage that love joins with time to let partners see each other “in their enigmatic, complex essence,/ unfolding slowly and certainly, like a new settlement. . . .” Many reviewers have noted Zagajewski’s concern with time in earlier volumes. Because the poet’s life has been a witness to political upheavals, and since political upheaval often results in exile, as it did for Zagajewski, it is not surprising that in these poems time is inextricably bound with place. “The sovereign of clocks and shadows,” the poet says, referring to how time has intervened between a loved place and the young man, now considerably older, who once loved it Indeed, the collection’s first poem, “Star,” recounts a return to a lost home, and its second poem, “En Route,” in its fourteen short stanzas is a sort of travelogue from Belgium to Mont Blanc to Sicily. Other poems name streets in the poet’s home cities of Lvov and Krakow; Rome and Syracuse are settings for some poems; the United States (where Zagajewski spends part of each year teaching) is the setting for others. Some of these are intended to evoke a sense of the place described. In “En Route,” for example, the great Greek temple at Segesta, Sicily, is called “a wild animal/ open to the sky,” suggesting its isolated location as well as its lack of a roof. In “Stagliano,” Zagajewski compares the memorial statues of professors, lawyers, children, and even dogs in the famous Genovese cemetery to the fossilized remains of Pompeii, another place where tourists may meet the past. Ironically, Zagajewski notes in “Syracuse” that tourists run the risk of being “imprisoned in our travels.” The poet’s Polish homeland frequently informs these poems. (That Zagajewski writes in Polish is a measure of how deeply he claims his national heritage.) In “Evening, Stary Sacz,” he describes nightfall in the modern town that has emerged from ancient roots. The time of day is marked with the usual tea kettles and television sets, but it also harbors the memory of angels that once inhabited its skies, though now they have been replaced by a policeman on a motorcycle. Even the knife that slices bread for the evening meal seems to recall episodes in the town’s more violent past.

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Zagajewski is skilled at using details such as the tea kettle and bread knife to evoke both Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov, place and emotion, a fact the reader experi- Poland, and educated at Jagiellonian ences frequently in these poems. Often the University in Krakow. He left Poland mood is melancholic, characteristic of the East for Paris in 1982. His books include European voice. In “Rainbow,” for example, Mysticism for Beginners (1997) and he looks at Long Street and Karmelicka Street Without End: New and Selected Poems in Krakow, the ancient university city where (2002). He lives in Krakow, Paris, and Chicago. the poet himself was educated. The streets are filled with “drunks with blue faces,” with used bookshops, and with “rain, rats, and garbage.” It is a city where childhood “evaporated/ like a puddle gleaming with a rainbow of gasoline.” Even the university appears to its long-departed alumnus as a clumsy seducer of naïve youth. In “Camogli,” a brief sketch of an Italian fishing village in November, the details of houses, cats, fishing nets, and pensioners seem innocuous, but behind them the sea’s relentless waves suggest a past in which lofty goals have been lost like youth and dreams. In “Bogliasco: The Church Square,” the sea seems to wash the minor events of the day into “oblivion.” The cities and towns of Zagajewski’s native Poland are logical places for him to confront his personal past as well as the past of his nation. Similarly, the cities of Sicily, with their rich legacy of Greece lying alongside their modern stones, invite the poet to examine the relationship between past and present. Zagajewski, however, is often more concerned with art and artists than with the simple artifacts of history. For some poems, artists are the subject matter; for others they appear as allusions. Many will be familiar to English readers of poetry. “Brodsky,” for example, offers a brief biography of Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet, who, exiled in the United States, became the U.S. poet laureate in 1991. It must surely please Zagajewski to know that Brodsky taught himself Polish in order to translate his favorite poet, the Pole Czesuaw Miuosz. Zagajewski offers a sketch of Brodsky’s life but is most interested in his “Favorite topic: time/ versus thought . . . .” Zagajewski reminds the reader that “irony and pain” characterize Brodsky’s voice and concludes by noting a modest tenderness that offsets Brodsky’s perfections. Still other poems deal with the late eighteenth century English poet William Blake and with Karl Marx, the nineteenth century political philosopher of communism, and his life in London. Other of Zagajewski’s subjects, such as Polish futurist writer Aleksander Wat or avant-garde writer-director Tadeusz Kantor, will be more familiar to readers with some knowledge of Polish literary history. The ease with which the Internet identifies the unfamiliar (and sometimes reminds the researcher of American parochialism) means that such names offer no real stumbling block to the poems. In any case, Zagajewski makes the significance of the artists clear enough. In “The Power Cinema,” a poem dedicated to Polish actor Wojciech Pszoniak, Zagajewski recalls the seductive charm of films in his youth. In “Tadeusz Kantor,” he pictures Kantor in Krakow, where the writer-director was connected with the Academy of Fine Arts, and recalls how as a young man he dismissed the senior artist as irrelevant and flawed.

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Later, when he saw Kantor’s much-praised play Umarua klasa (pr. 1975; The Dead Class, 1979), he recognized the man’s genius. As an adult, “I saw how time/ works on us . . . .” and understood Kantor’s achievement in the play’s themes concerning life’s mysteries: “what wars are, seen or unseen, just or not,/ what it means to be a Jew, a German, or/ a Pole, or maybe just human . . . . ” It should be no surprise that Zagajewski addresses the poetry of Miuosz, one of the best known of contemporary Polish poets. Here his topic is the achievement of Miuosz’s work and the significance of poetry itself. Zagajewski praises the great sweep of Miuosz’s poetic stances: “poems written by a rich man, knowing all,/ and by a beggar, homeless,/ an emigrant, alone. . . .” Miuosz’s work can momentarily show that life is “rounder,/ fuller, prouder, unashamed . . . .” That poetry is an art that can lift the reader out of the limits of self is one of this volume’s central themes, joining many of its disparate locations and human subjects. In “Our World,” dedicated to the contemporary German novelist W. C. Sebald, for instance, Zagajewski considers the voice of a writer he never knew and the power of the dead man’s art to evoke his particular vision of the world. In “Poetry Searches for Radiance,” the poem’s title encapsulates his premise: “ . . . poetry is the kingly road/ that leads us farthest.” Significantly, the middle stanza of the poem describes a moment when a waiter in a Chinese restaurant mysteriously begins to weep. Poetry’s search for kingly radiance is not limited to life’s grandest moments but defines brief glimpses into worlds difficult to understand. This is the power that gives the reader access to Erinna of Telos, who died at the age of nineteen somewhere around 350 b.c.e, leaving only a few hexameters as well as to the ancient people who painted on cave walls and to painters from every era and to the old man—evidently Zagajewski’s father—who sits in an apartment in the charmless city of Gliwice, recalling the past in both its beauties (kisses, gooseberries) and its horrors (the bombs of World War II, the political terrors of 1968). That past is not lost, because it is fixed in art. The last poem in the volume is the longest, “Antennas in the Rain.” It is composed of seven pages of one- and two-line stanzas, not necessarily closely related. Many of them draw their images from poems earlier in the volume. One references an earlier poem about the liturgy of the Orthodox church. Plato reappears, and dolphins and a number of painters claim images. Vermeer appears, for example, represented by his picture of a woman who knits in front of a dark doorway. Many of the stanzas carry the vividness and allusiveness of haiku: “May evening: antennas in the rain.” That seems to be the intention of these lines, to catch threads of image and ideas much as an antenna might. One line mocks the academic fondness for categories; the professor counts six types of longing (while the poet hints that there may be many more). One line describes the sign that identifies an air-conditioned bus and also notes its destination—a day trip to Auschwitz. One offers a fragment of an American country-western song, a few present brief pictures of Krakow and Lvov. Some lines are bits of conversation; some seem mockingly addressed to the poet: “Oh, so you’re the specialist in high style?” In the Washington, D.C., Holocaust museum, the poet recognizes “my childhood, my wagons, my rust.” A salesgirl tells the speaker that she comes from Vietnamese boat people. A few lines later he notes that boat people are “the only na-

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tion free of nationalism.” His father is quoted again, saying that he spends all of his days remembering. One line is a note to himself: “Pay the phone and gas, return the books, write Claire.” The effect of this montage is to summarize much of what Zagajewski has said throughout this volume. The artist must speak “from within the moments” that the antennas capture. The artist puts the reader in touch with the ordinary objects that create the texture of life. If poetry is “joy hiding despair,” under that despair it offers “more joy,” which evidently rises from the world the writer forces readers to see anew. From this the reader may understand the poem’s last four contradictory injunctions. “Speak from within” has long been a theme of art. “It is not about poetry” implies that, despite Zagajewski’s many poems in which the topic has appeared to be poetry, the real subject is how to be alive. “Don’t speak, listen” calls the artist to give attention to the world he lives in. The last—“Don’t listen”—suggests that at some point the heart can do the work. Ann D. Garbett

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 14 (March 15, 2008): 17. The Nation 286, no. 25 (June 30, 2008): 38-42. Publishers Weekly 258, no. 3 (January 21, 2008): 154. World Literature Today 82, no. 2 (March/April, 2008): 8.

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EVERYTHING IS CINEMA The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard Author: Richard Brody (1958) Publisher: Metropolitan Books (New York). 701 pp. $40.00 Type of work: Biography Time: 1930 to the present A biography of the French film director that places particular emphasis on how life and art are commingled in the methods he has used to produce one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary cinema The career of Jean-Luc Godard has been a fascinating, tempestuous, and often controversial journey that featured engagements with charged social and political issues as well as an idiosyncratic approach to the process of filmmaking. His first feature film, À bout de souffle (1960), better known by its English title, Breathless, appeared at a seminal point in the history of the nouvelle vague, or New Wave, a movement that revolutionized the French cinema and continues to be influential throughout the world. His flirtation with Maoism and the radical left, dramatized in La Chinoise (1967), alienated him from the film industry’s traditional sources of funding as well as from many fans of his previous films. His return to less overtly politicized filmmaking in 1979 inaugurated a series of unusual projects, in particular the six-hour documentary Histoire du cinéma (1989-1998), that have sharply divided both critical opinion and the reactions of theater audiences. There is no question that Godard, whether praised or scorned, has created a body of work that must be taken into account in any history of world cinema. In Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, Richard Brody provides an account of his subject’s life and films, focusing particularly on the complex relationship between the two. It is Brody’s hypothesis that Godard typically, and perhaps to some extent obsessively, used his life experiences as the source of the thematic content of his films, with the latter being best understood as a kind of self-analysis in progress that reveals what their director feels and thinks. This overt linkage between life events and what has been produced as art is an obvious temptation to a biographer, not least because one would be surprised if there were no relationship whatsoever between the experiences of the creator and what has subsequently been created. The dangers of such a potentially reductive approach, however, in which it is assumed that experience is automatically transformed into artistic content, must also be acknowledged, not least because this leaves little room for an individual’s imagination and technical craft to operate. As a result, although Everything Is Cinema is in many respects a valuable contribution to the history of contemporary filmmaking, it does at times make facile and problematic as-

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sumptions about the one-to-one correspon Richard Brody is a film critic, an editor dence between Godard’s life and his films. Brody begins his narrative of Godard’s ca- at The New Yorker, and an reer with a brief consideration of his family independent filmmaker. Everything Is background and childhood. Born into a pros- Cinema is his first book. perous upper-middle-class milieu in 1930, the young Godard was just old enough to experience France’s crushing defeat by Germany at the beginning of World War II, after which a collaborationist regime at Vichy was established that attracted the support of several members of his family. This early fascination with political power and its expression through violence—as a child Godard rooted for the success of the German army and marked its advances with pins on a map—prefigures his adult attraction to left-wing militancy, interestingly reversing the conventional arc from youthful rebellion to adult conformity. It is also indicative of the intimate and often surprising details of his background, long familiar to French readers of his as yet untranslated autobiographical writings, that Brody has now made available to English-language enthusiasts of Godard and his work. After the war, Godard enrolled in a school of engineering in Paris, but in a pattern that would be repeated several times before he finally committed to the cinema as a career, he soon found himself spending more time watching films than studying for his courses. Several subsequent encounters with formal education suffered the same fate, and by the mid-1950’s he had become one of a group of young filmmakers-to-be, including François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer, all of whom would go on to have distinguished careers as directors. This nouvelle vague or New Wave of filmmakers, as it was soon christened by the Parisian media, was steeped in the aesthetic of postwar American films, and utilized improvised scripts and a kinetic visual style—both necessitated by the need to keep production costs low—in films that seemed fresh and innovative compared to the quest for formal perfection characteristic of classic French cinema. Here as elsewhere, Brody provides evocative descriptions of this milieu and of the conception and realization of Godard’s feature films. For this alone Everything Is Cinema constitutes an essential addition to the study of its subject. It is in the author’s interpretation of the personal significance of Breathless, however, that his hypothesis concerning the relationship between Godard’s life and cinematic productions begins to seem somewhat forced. Brody asserts, for example, that the difficulty the film’s protagonist, a petty crook on the run from the police, has in obtaining help from his friends mirrors Godard’s problems in financing the film. However, this is unsupported by any corroboration from Godard or from those who knew him at the time, and it also ignores the salient fact that the criminal’s abandonment by his associates and even a lover—the femme fatale who features in Breathless, as elsewhere—is a standard plot device in crime films. The same can be said of Brody’s claim that both Godard and the film’s protagonist are preoccupied with the problems young men have in achieving adulthood, which is similarly ungrounded in any supporting evidence, and is likewise a staple element of coming-of-age narratives in any film genre.

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Breathless remains, in any event, a critical and commercial success that has lost none of its freshness over the years, and yet, unlike the all-too-common contemporary practice of producing a string of derivative sequels, Godard did not follow it up with the equivalent of Breathless II. His next two films were completely different and suffered completely different fates: Le Petit Soldat (1963), an attack on France’s repression of the Algerian revolt, was banned by the French authorities until the end of hostilities, and when it was finally released, it seemed badly dated. Une Femme est une femme (1961), filmed later but released earlier, is a strange amalgam of musical comedy and deliberately intrusive effects that undercut the viewer’s expectations about narrative cohesion, and it severely disappointed most of those who saw it. Although both films, as well as much of Godard’s subsequent work, have been ignored by those who expect the cinema to provide smoothly pleasing entertainment, it is clear from the book’s extensive and detailed accounts of their genesis and production that Godard was in search of something largely antithetical to the conventionally well-made film. With regard to actors, for example, Godard has consistently asked that they forget their formal training and react in spontaneous, unplanned ways to the situations in which he puts them; this has led to accusations that he does not know what he is doing, which is in one sense true—he frequently has no specific outcome in mind—but is in another sense misleading, since it is precisely the unanticipated and potentially breakthrough performance that he seeks and often obtains. His scripts, similarly, usually materialize only on the day when they are to be enacted, and even then they may be changed or sometimes abandoned, thus adding cameramen and other technicians to the list of those who have found working with Godard a form of hell on earth. Everything Is Cinema provides day-by-day, and sometimes shot-byshot, descriptions of how this works out on the sets of Godard’s films, and thus it will be of particular interest to those who like to go behind the scenes of what is typically experienced only in finished form. In the late 1960’s, Godard was strongly affected by the political protests of the students and workers who wished to revolutionize French society, with his film La Chinoise taking a strongly pro-revolutionary stance and once again provoking state repression and societal disapproval. Where Le Petit Soldat had attacked government policy from a reformist point of view, La Chinoise came down firmly on the side of the Maoist left, and it did so in such a strident, uncompromising manner that Godard found himself cut off from most of his friends and business associates. For the next decade his film projects seemed largely determined by whatever others were willing to offer him. Although he did manage to obtain various commissions from French, British, and Italian television, the material he submitted was so selfindulgent and unconventional that it was found unsuitable for broadcast. His films fared little better: Le Vent d’est (1969) offered directions as to how militants could buy weapons and make bombs, ensuring that it would not be released in France, and Vladimir et Rosa (1970), a sympathetic depiction of American radicals, suffered the same fate. In Tout va bien (1972), however, the casting of Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, both bewildered by Godard’s nontraditional directing style but willing to stick it out because of their ideological sympathies with his politics, resulted in a film

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that presented a French factory worker’s strike in 1968 with a relatively evenhanded and narratively engrossing treatment of the issues involved. Brody follows the twists and turns of Godard’s fortunes during this period closely and revealingly, although the biographer’s tendency to identify what happens in the films with what happens in his subject’s life continues, and is unpersuasive because of the reductiveness of his approach and the lack of supporting evidence for his assertions. At the end of the decade, Godard experienced a dramatic shift in critical and commercial acceptance with Sauve qui peut (1980), in which a focus on the dynamics of sexual relationships replaced previous concerns with revolutionary politics. Brody, as usual, asserts that the film reflects Godard’s own difficulties with those close to him, and, as usual, this is not convincingly argued. Whatever Godard’s personal problems, however, Sauve qui peut was received as a return to cinematic excellence, and it also coincided with the election of a Socialist government committed to state support of French culture. As a result, his applications for financing new films were quickly approved, and he benefited from several commissions from the state-controlled French television network. Godard responded with a wide range of productions, some of them (most notably the Histoire du cinema documentary) completions of projects on which he had previously been working, and others that continued his involvement with controversial political and social issues: Hail Mary (1984), a depiction of the sexuality of Jesus Christ’s mother, earned it instant condemnation from Pope John Paul II; Germany Nine Zero (1991) attacked American foreign policy and argued that France should look to Russia as a model; Notre Musique (2004), with its pro-Palestinian stance, was denounced by Jewish groups. These films, while in no danger of breaking box-office records, have attracted a substantial portion of the audience for cutting-edge cinema, and so they have restored Godard to the directorial eminence that he forfeited during the years between 1967 and 1979. This unusual and complicated story is lucidly recounted in Everything Is Cinema, which fully justifies its subtitle’s claim to describe The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. Although Brody’s notions about the correspondence between his subject’s life and the plot developments of his films need to be taken with several grains of salt, this is otherwise an important addition to understanding the career of one of the world’s foremost film directors. Paul Stuewe

Review Sources Art in America 96, no. 9 (October, 2008): 42. Film Comment 44, no. 3 (May/June, 2008): 79. Harper’s Magazine 317 (October, 2008): 88-94. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 5 (March 1, 2008): 226-227. Library Journal 133, no. 5 (March 15, 2008): 73.

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New Statesman 137 (July 7, 2008): 55-56. The New York Times Book Review, July 13, 2008, p. 12. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 6 (February 11, 2008): 57. Sight & Sound 18, no. 8 (August, 2008): 92.


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EXPERIMENTS IN ETHICS Author: Kwame Anthony Appiah (1954) Publisher: Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass.). 274 pp. $22.95 Type of work: Ethics, philosophy The author looks at traditional theories of ethics and their contemporary relevance through the lens of empirical research in the social sciences In 1973 the noted psychiatrist Karl Menninger asked in his book the question Whatever Became of Sin? In a new century, the questions posed to moral philosophy by work in the social sciences have not gone away. Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosopher, takes another look at competing conclusions drawn about human behavior in philosophy and in modern experimental science. He brings together data from other sciences to form a vision of what makes the good human life. An interesting pursuit for a philosopher, the book is put forth as an experiment of sorts. Appiah asks pertinent questions. Are the traditional ahistorical categories and methodologies of ethics moot in an age of science? Have the conclusions of experimental science overridden the conclusions of philosophy? Empirical studies either have called into question existing terms and categories of ethics or they have reinforced them. The author assumes a teleology to human existence, taking up Aristotle’s belief that ethics has to do with the ultimate aim or end of human life. The book begins with a chapter that considers the history of ethical theory, noting the wide interests beyond philosophy that some past philosophical giants pursued. It is not totally new to examine ethics from the existential perspectives of history or of real life. Nevertheless, in many periods of history, considerations of moral philosophy were lifted out of the more mundane and messy world of real life. An ahistorical perspective tends to postulate unchanging universal conclusions about right and wrong; historical reality is deemed unrelated to moral conclusions. Questions of the connection between the “is” of reality and the “ought” of morality are often framed as a chasm between the irrelevant findings of empirical science and the “unnatural” world of philosophy. Over centuries bridges between the two have either been built with enthusiasm or blown up with vigor and intent. The author asks further questions: Do individuals set the standards for their own ultimacy, for their own sense of happiness? Is happiness merely a warm and fuzzy feeling deep within individuals that has no referent elsewhere? Siding more with moralists who believe in some universal components to moral judgments, Appiah debunks the theory that individual relativism is a sufficient criterion for human contentment. A person is not happy just because he or she has a subjective experience of same.

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Chapter 2 considers “The Case Against Character.” Recent times have seen a turn to so-called virtue ethics, which holds that a virtuous person will perform virtuous acts. This conclusion makes the central task of ethics the development of character in the individual person. Moral focus is not so much what the person does as who the person is. The assumption is that, if one is a person of virtue, “good” actions will follow. Further, a virtuous person will have a good life, as virtues are in themselves worth having. On the contrary, conBorn in London and raised in Ghana, temporary studies by social psychologists find Kwame Anthony Appiah is the that people do not seem to possess any sort of Laurence S. Rockefeller University unified “virtue” package. Real-life decisions Professor of Philosophy at Princeton may pose choices among or between values. University, where he directs the Center All values cannot be actualized in every confor Human Values. He has written The Ethics of Identity (2004) and crete situation. Perhaps the only way to save a Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of spy from discovery and execution (value: proStrangers (2006) as well as three tecting human life) is to lie to the evil authoridetective novels. ties (disvalue: dishonesty in speech). Likewise, researchers suggest that behavior is driven by nonmoral contextual elements rather than by the character of the agent. Not virtue but circumstances are the determinants of moral action. Helping a passerby with change, for example, is more apt to occur if the helper is brought into a good mood by the smell of croissants from the bakery in front of which he stands. The author does not want to jettison completely the notion of virtue, although he takes a much more nuanced view than either the virtue ethicists or the antivirtue ethicists. While virtue ethics concentrates on an inward model of self-development, Appiah would place more emphasis on social contexts that favor good action. If a situation does not force choices among competing values, a person can more easily choose one good without compromising another. Creating contexts that do not pose the moral agent the hard choice between or among values is desirable. Culture plays a part in doing this. In the end, the conclusion is that human flourishing, eudaimonia, comes from doing what is right rather than being virtuous. Flourishing is not simply a matter of getting what one wants. Virtue and happiness are connected, and human flourishing is more apt to occur in situations that do not compromise the person’s values. In the next chapter, the author makes “The Case Against Intuition.” He tackles what he dubs the “intuition problem.” Affirming that moral behavior is a matter of intuition has its difficulties. On examination one finds people—even philosophers— differ as to what conclusions they intuit about morality. There is a suspicion, says Appiah, “that our common sense may be littered with perishable and parochial preju-

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dice,” cultural and personal biases that color what behaviors are considered moral. In an age of slavery, for example, it would be difficult to view keeping human beings in bondage as morally wrong. Living in the home of the Artful Dodger of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1839) might make it difficult to view stealing as an immoral act. Sometimes the way questions are framed changes how individuals think about them. Sometimes how individuals feel in a given circumstance can alter their behavior. Appiah concludes that feelings, emotions, biological realities—all of which contribute to “intuition”—must be supplemented by normative demands. While a situation may color how people come to moral choice, the author asserts that moral behavior is more than the sum of the situational parts. Perhaps a more adequate answer to what comprises a good ethical system is found in examining the chapter “The Varieties of Moral Experience.” The premise, well illustrated, is that for human beings culture and nature cannot be separated. Each person is born into a certain language and into a set of cultural mores that externalize “nature” in a concrete fashion. Stabilization of genetically inscribed behavioral dispositions (nature) occurs culturally. The force of any contemporary values environment—being a Muslim is good; being a Democrat is bad; women are superior to men—will shape what is seen at a particular historical time byte as “good.” Without a particular language of behavior (which culture provides), human beings do not conceive of moral possibilities. On the other hand, one can demonstrate that certain values seem to transcend culture. All people seem to have a sense of compassion, fairness, purity, and other values that are not culturally specific. What is culturally specific, though, is how these values, which appear to be hard-wired in human nature, are expressed in the here and now. Language is particular to culture. Language holds norms and values. Stories demonstrate values as perceived in a particular culture. Bottom line: Persons bent on shaping their lives ethically are bound within the cultural, institutional, and linguistic reality of their time. The final chapter summarizes the major arguments of the author. He examines the claims of individual relativism, which sees happiness as a matter of satisfying one’s personally felt desires. Standards for happiness are not the product of individual whim but rather are supported by objective criteria. This idea floats through the whole book and is not unique here. Values are objective, even when one is faced in the concrete with choices among values that can be realized in the here and now. When a person must break a promise to have dinner with a friend in the face of another competing value judged more urgent, it is not that the person does not recognize the value of keeping his word to a friend. Regret at not realizing a value is not the same as moral blame. Still, which values rise to the surface in making a choice may be dictated to some extent by one’s place in history or in the particular culture. The author tackles the difficult debate about the place of nature in the moral equation. Among philosophers, much debunking of the connection between what “is” and what “ought” to be has occurred. Appiah takes a middle-road approach, as he rejects both a sanitary autonomous ethics, which sees moral conclusions completely divorced from human existential reality, and a total reliance on science to come to moral conclusions. He quotes British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who notes that “ physicists

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may one day have found the answer to all physical questions, but not all questions are physical questions.” Human beings hold values, and they hold many in common. Nevertheless, morality is not simply a matter of people voting as to which values will be held collectively. Morality is not a democratic process. A show of hands does not dictate the hegemony of certain values nor how they are to be applied in moral decision making. As the author says, “Normative theories, if they are sensible, do not offer algorithms for action.” Even wonderful cases, often designed to teach method in ethics (the author speaks of “quandary ethics”), are abstract realities. They cannot with certitude predict the best moral judgment in a real moral dilemma. As Appiah notes, with characteristic humor, such “scenarios, relentlessly abstract, [are] rendered with all the sfumato of an Etch-a-Sketch drawing.” While the author does use many excellent and classic moral cases in his treatment, even the reader discovers that discomfort accompanies the choices that are presented. Perhaps it is the reader’s intuition that affirms the author’s premise: There is no real answer for a moral dilemma that is itself not real. The author does examine the intersecting elements between traditional philosophical ethics and modern social research, but he does not consider the stages of moral development considered by psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg or the feminist studies of Carol Gilligan. Such considerations may have thrown additional light on differences of similar cohorts with different individual reactions to scenarios. This addition would have added another chapter to the book, however. This book is a rigorous read. Those who venture in should be cautioned that the author assumes an understanding of standard philosophical moral method. A novice in philosophical ethics will have a hard plow through the text. The author assumes at least a passing knowledge of various approaches to ethics as he makes his case for an integrated moral landscape. This is a provocative book, questioning assumptions about the efficacy of various moral theories and doing so with reasonable arguments. Nevertheless, its ideas are fresh and comprehensive. This makes the book well worth the plod. It should have a place in the secondary bibliography of a fundamental morals course as well as in graduate studies. Dolores L. Christie

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 7 (December 1, 2007): 6. Library Journal 132, no. 18 (November 1, 2007): 70. Nature 453 (May 29, 2008): 593-594. The New York Times Book Review, February 3, 2008, p. 22.

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THE EYE OF THE LEOPARD Author: Henning Mankell (1948) First published: Leopardens Öga, 1990, in Sweden Translated from the Swedish by Steven T. Murray Publisher: The New Press (New York). 315 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1956 to 1988 Locale: Sweden and Zambia Shifting between Africa and Sweden, this novel explores the interplay between destiny and choice Principal characters: Hans Olofson, a Swedish man who owns a farm in Zambia Judith Fillington, the woman from whom he takes over the farm Luka, his servant Sture, his boyhood friend Janine, “the Noseless One,” a young woman disfigured by a botched surgery Peter Motombwane, a journalist Lars Håkansson, a corrupt Swedish aid official Joyce Lufuma, a woman on the farm, and her four daughters

Henning Mankell is best known for the series of novels featuring police detective Kurt Wallander, with cumulative sales of more than twenty-five million copies worldwide. Thanks to the success of this series, other books by Mankell have been widely translated, some of them written after Wallander had become a familiar name, others written earlier. Many of these books are set in Africa or move between Europe and Africa as Mankell himself has done, dividing his time between his native Sweden and Maputo, Mozambique, where since 1985 he has directed a theater company. In Kennedys Hjärna (Kennedy’s Brain, 2007), for example, first published in 2005, a Swedish archaeologist, Louise Cantor, returns home from a dig to find her son Henrik—a young man, her only child—dead in his bed, apparently the victim of a drug overdose. Convinced that something more lies behind his death, she begins to investigate. The trail leads to an AIDS “mission” in Mozambique, one of a number of such villages in several African countries, presided over by a mysterious American philanthropist, Christian Holloway, who proves to be an egomaniacal villain of James Bondian proportions. The “missions” have hidden laboratories where new AIDS drugs are tried out, both on people who are already ill and on healthy people who have been lured there by promises of being lifted out of poverty. As this summary may suggest, Mankell doesn’t shy away from melodrama. Indeed,

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a straight plot summary of Kennedy’s Brain would sound utterly over the top. But there is more to Mankell than melodrama. His fiction is not only moralistic—as a good deal of melodrama is—but also didactic. Lessons are imparted in dialogue and in the protagonists’ reflections. Kennedy’s Brain is animated by a fierce anger against the citizens of the “developed” world, who are charged with responsiHenning Mankell is a theater director bility for Africa’s woes, whether by active and a playwright as well as a novelist, collusion or culpable ignorance and naïveté. dividing his time between Africa and Cantor (and hence the reader) gets a tutorial in Sweden, his homeland. His books the realities of African life—as Mankell sees featuring police inspector Kurt them—from a young African woman. At the Wallander have been adapted for same time, Mankell’s fiction has an imaginatelevision and film in Sweden and have tive richness that the typical thriller lacks. He been translated into many languages. is a master of compelling images and striking scenes that linger in the memory, and he excels at conveying the darting movement of thought. All these qualities are apparent in The Eye of the Leopard, which was published in Sweden in 1990, a year before the first Wallander book, but which is only now appearing in English. The Eye of the Leopard shifts between a farm in the back country of Zambia, where the Swedish protagonist, Hans Olofson, has been living for eighteen years, and Sweden, where he was born and raised. The narrative shifts repeatedly in time as well, from the present (near the end of the 1980’s) to scenes from Olofson’s boyhood and young manhood in Sweden and then again to episodes from his African sojourn, beginning with his arrival in September, 1969. The stage is set for this fluid movement in time by a prologue of sorts, in which Olofson tosses and turns in the grip of malarial fever. The novel can thus be read as a feverish act of recollection and reckoning, half voluntary, half involuntary. This fluidity is underscored in the prologue by shifts in point of view, from third person to first person and back again. His memory first takes him back to 1956, when he was twelve years old. He has awakened in the night—just as he awakens so many years later, on his farm in Africa—disturbed by the sound of his father, obsessively scrubbing the floor in the kitchen. The boy’s mother left her husband and son long before. The father works hard, drinks too much, mutters to himself, falls into rages now and then. The boy’s mind wanders: The darkness of night is a split personality, both friend and foe. From the blackness he can haul up nightmares and inconceivable horrors. The spasms of the roof beams in the hard frost are transformed into fingers that reach out for him. But the darkness can also be a friend, a time in which to weave thoughts about what will come, what people call the future.

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The man wrestling with fever in Africa, insects crawling in the sweat on his face— these things the twelve-year-old boy curled up in bed in the cold Swedish night remembers. In turn, the boy remembers an earlier moment, playing with some kids in the ruins of a factory where bricks were made. Separated from the others, he experienced for the first time the sharp taste of self-awareness: For as long as he had not established his own identity, he was just somebody among all the others, he had possessed a timeless immortality, the privilege of childhood, the most profound manifestation of childishness. At the very moment that the unfamiliar question of why he was who he was crept into his head, he became a definite person and thus mortal.

One burden of the novel is to explore the mystery of identity—why we are who we are and not someone else—and the interplay of destiny (character is destiny) and choice. Olofson’s memories of growing up in Sweden, alternating with African scenes, center on his friendship with Sture, a boy from a higher social class, and their relationship with a young woman in her twenties, Janine, who was terribly disfigured in a botched operation when she was seventeen years old. The Noseless One is an outsider, living alone, her only community provided by a church that Mankell mocks for its rigid piety. At first, Olofson and Sture cruelly make fun of Janine, as many do, but then they are ashamed of themselves, reproached by her kindness and longsuffering nature. They become friends, entering her private world, where she listens to old jazz records and plays along on her trombone. Sometimes she puts a bulbous red clown’s nose over the place where her nose should be, and she teaches the boys to dance. The idyll does not last. But Janine’s inchoate dream to go to Africa—not to convert anyone, Mankell makes clear, but simply to do good and help others in a place where her particular disfigurement wouldn’t stand out so much, where many are terribly disfigured by injury and disease—plants a seed in Olofson’s mind. Janine doesn’t fulfill her desire to go to Africa. She drowns, a suicide. Olofson betrays her—and in doing so betrays himself. In 1962, the year of the Cuban missile crisis, with the superpowers seemingly on the brink of war, Janine stages a quixotic crusade, standing on a corner in the little town with a handmade sign that reads: “No to the atom bomb. Only one earth.” She is an embarrassment to the townspeople and the subject of ridicule. To avoid contamination, Olofson joins in the ridicule. Later he visits her covertly, but the damage has been done. After a restless few years he finds himself on a plane to Lusaka, in Zimbabwe. He visits the back-country mission that inspired Janine, then ends up working for a woman who runs a farm by herself, her husband having gone mad. When she can no longer stand the stress of the job, she arranges with Olofson to take over the farm. He keeps saying he won’t stay, but he does. Most readers will wonder why he stays, given the unrelenting grimness of Mankell’s account. The white farmers are generally portrayed as irredeemably racist, some of them monsters of cruelty. A suave Swedish aid worker, Lars Håkansson, turns out to be a poster boy for corruption; one of his sidelines is taking pornographic

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photos of young African women and selling them to collectors in Germany. All of Africa’s problems are attributed to the evils of colonialism. Against this Mankell poses images of an idealized, essentialized Africa. His images are not prettified—on the contrary—but they are idealized nonetheless. Olofson’s friend, the journalist Peter Motombwane, turns out to be part of a rebel movement, the “leopard movement,” that is killing white farmers to restore the land to the people and destabilize the corrupt government. Olofson is forced to kill his friend in self-defense. He concludes that Motombwane’s methods were wrong—“he chose the wrong weapon at the wrong time”—but he sees him as a kindred spirit: “Peter Motombwane, he thinks. Peter, Janine, and me.” These are the people who understand the world “in order to change it,” in contrast to the corrupt bureaucrats “who understand the world in order to exploit it.” Given that code, Olofson feels no remorse after he serves as Håkansson’s jury, judge, and executioner. It is clear that Mankell loves Africa. His depiction of the widow Joyce Lufuma and her four daughters as the hope for “the future of Africa” is moving and heartfelt. But that love depends in part on notions of an unchanging African essence that don’t seem to correspond to the actual lives of Africans in all of their particularity. For example, as a devoutly secular European intellectual, Mankell is repelled by the notion of religious conversion—a theme that comes up explicitly in the novel on several occasions. But in Africa—where, in fact, both Christianity and Islam have long histories—there will soon be more Christians than on any other continent. Mankell would seem to be in a position of instructing Africans about how to be authentically African. There are a number of different ways in which to understand the world in order to change it, some of them compatible with one another, some not. As a footnote, it should be added that a character named Lars Håkansson turns up in Kennedy’s Brain as well. He, too, is a corrupt Swedish official—in this case, an adviser to the Ministry of Health in Mozambique—and a thoroughly nasty piece of work, like his namesake in The Eye of the Leopard. Perhaps this is a private joke or a curse of Mankell. If so, it would be in character, for along with his moral intensity comes a trickster’s spirit. John Wilson

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 14 (March 15, 2008): 26. Entertainment Weekly, April 18, 2008, p. 67. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 8 (April 15, 2008): 386. Library Journal 133, no. 9 (May 15, 2008): 91. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 10 (March 10, 2008): 57. The Spectator 307 (May 31, 2008): 43-44.

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FAULT LINES Author: Nancy Huston (1953) First published: Lignes de faille, 2006, in France Translated from the French by Nancy Huston Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat (New York). 320 pp. $14.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 2004, l984, 1964, and 1944 Locale: California, Montreal, New York, Israel, and Germany Psychological trauma is engendered and replicated within a single family over four generations as a consequence of a Nazi project that uprooted children from homelands occupied by the Germans during World War II Principal characters: Erra, also known as Kristina, an uprooted Ukrainian girl adopted by a German family Greta, Kristina’s sister Janek, an angry Polish boy adopted by the same family Sadie, a resentful, illegitimate Canadian daughter of Erra Aron, Sadie’s failed playwright husband Randall, Sadie’s confused and neglected American son Sol, Randall’s emotionally disturbed son Tess, Sol’s indulgent and overprotective mother

Fault Lines, divided into four parts, has four narrators, each of whom is six years old at the time of the telling. Spanning four generations, the story begins in 2004 but rewinds through successive narrators, each of whom is the parent of the child in the previous section. While each segment is set in an historical era marked by war and political upheaval, there is just one gradually disclosed family secret rooted in Nazi Germany. This explains not only the family history but also the many political-historical situations that shaped the characters of the wounded and wounding family members whose fault lines reach into the twenty-first century. The first six-year-old is Solomon, nicknamed Sol, who is worshipped by his mother as a little god-king. His resulting narcissism requires the reader eventually to view the creepy Sol as a victim of an emotional illness that may be the consequence of the way his mother has chosen to raise him. His mother’s Christian evangelism and the self-esteem movement have had an influential role in creating the arrogant but weak and anorexic Sol. His psychological development is also depicted within the context of the foreign policy of the U.S. government with regard to the war in Iraq, which both of his parents unquestioningly support. In fact, Sol’s father Randall works for the military effort by exploring ways to create an army of warrior-robots.

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While his doting mother has deluded herself into believing that her child rearing is an enlightened one that has produced in Sol a paragon of virtue and innocence, the boy’s inner life is warped and sadistic. As a consequence of the excessive sanitizing of his life, Sol is driven to seek out the evil hidden and undisclosed by his mother, and his ability to access this evil through an unsupervised Internet connection allows him to live a double life. His discovery of the torture of Muslim prisoners by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, for instance, creates in Sol a fascination with brutality and with sexualized brutality, and he gravitates to Web sites that show pornography or violence or, ideally, both. Although Sol seems to be an evil little creature, at the same time the reader understands that his upbringing may be a very subtle form of abuse. His eating disorder, his manipulative and exploitive relationship to his mother, and the falsity of the self she has insisted on constructing for him all suggest that the fault line Sol represents in the family may end not in the success of which he feels he has been assured but in a cataclysmic earthquake. This bad seed, however, is not only connected to the cultural and political dynamics of the United States. Huston uses the phrase “fault line” to suggest that Sol must be understood in relationship not to the present but to the fissures that go back to Sol’s grandmother and great-grandmother, with their roots in Europe. Sol’s unsightly brown birthmark, for instance, is a genetic heritage from his grandmother Erra; even when Sol’s mother attempts to have it surgically removed, it remains as an ugly scar that indicates the continuing presence of the past. Sol’s ties to the past are further emphasized when his grandmother Sadie insists that the entire family revisit the German village in which Sol’s great grandmother was raised. Sol’s visit to Germany is the first of the unsettling geographic dislocations that the reader comes to understand as a recurring family pattern. This theme of uprooting is further explored in the next chapter, which takes place in l984 and which features Randall, Sol’s father, as a six-year-old. Randall’s controlling and perfectionist mother, Sadie, obsessed with her family roots in Germany, ruthlessly relocates her son and his acquiescent father to Haifa, Israel, in order to research the Nazi Lebensborn (Fountain of Life) project that bred blond, blue-eyed boys and girls or took blond, blue-eyed children from various conquered territories and recycled them into German families. Huston relocates Sadie’s family at the time of the civil war in Lebanon, and even more specifically the massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatilla. The zealous Sadie, who has converted to Judaism, defends Israel’s role in these massacres against her dissenting Jewish husband; the resolution of this conflict, however, as far as Randall is concerned, is saved for his little Palestinian friend Nouzha. Randall is sure Nouzha has put a vengeful curse on his family as a result of the massacre, resulting in the tragic crippling of his mother in what appeared to have been an unrelated accident.

Nancy Huston was born in Canada, was brought up in Germany and the United States, and as a young adult emigrated to France. She has won awards for many of her novels, including Fault Lines, which won the Prix Femina in 2006. She lives in Paris with her husband, the philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, and her two children.

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The third narrative voice is that of six-year-old Sadie in 1964; the political context is the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Since her mother is preoccupied with pursuing a singing career, Sadie’s Montreal grandparents are raising her. While Sadie’s charming and playful mother attempts to rescue Sadie from her harsh grandparents, the appearance of Janek, a long-lost figure from the old country, changes everything. Always feeling the outsider, Sadie begins to view herself as even more an interloper when her mother marries Janek, changes her name to Erra, relocates to the United States, and seeks world renown as a musical artist. The depressive Janek, whom Sadie does not like, is an eventual suicide, further causing her to question her mother’s choices in life. As with Randall and Sol, Sadie has inherited her mother’s birthmark. Though her mother Erra’s same birthmark is the source of artistic power, this imperfection also indicates the disruptive relationship between mother and child that marked Erra’s childhood. Erra’s story, told when she is a six-year-old living in Germany, is set in l944. At this time, she knows herself as a German child named Kristina. An older boy named Janek, whom the family adopts to replace the son they lost in the war, tells Kristina something she had suspected earlier as a result of the hurtful words from her sister Greta during an argument over a doll. Janek tells her that she, too, was kidnapped and adopted by a German family, as he was. Janek, who appeared a minor aspect of the earlier narrative, becomes a crucial component of the final chapter. It is the angry Janek who makes irreparable the estrangement from her family, begun with Erra’s rivalry with her sister, and encourages her to break from them completely. The break with this mother is a consequence of Kristina’s realization that her adoptive mother had participated in the Lebensborn project that led her to take Kristina as her own child. However, even without this devastating realization, it is clear from the beginning that Kristina’s mother, not altogether consciously, privileged her biological daughter over her adoptive one; this is especially suggested by Greta’s receiving a beautiful doll one Christmas that is clearly superior to the gift given Kristina. After the war, Kristina is told that she is Ukrainian, but that her family is dead; she is adopted by another Ukrainian family that has relocated to Canada. She also dedicates herself to a musical based on singing wordless songs. Her need to do this moves beyond simple ambition, since it becomes a way to indicate the trauma of having been deprived of her mother tongue and of having been subjected to the abandonment, not only by her German caregiver, but also by her dim and traumatic memories of neglect in the orphan asylum in which she was placed when she was taken from her birthmother. Singing with no language becomes for Erra a way to express what it means to have no mother. Erra’s petite stature also suggests that her loss at the age of six of the woman she thought was her mother has kept her a permanent child whose singing, however joyful, is destined on one level to voice this loss. Erra returns to Germany, and the last impression the reader has is of her as the six-year-old she once was, still quarrelling with her sister Greta over the possession of the desirable Christmas doll. Her new name, Erra, also points to the circumstances of her wounding childhood, since her adoptive name is not connected to her Ukrainian roots but is taken from an ancient Near Eastern god of war and pestilence.

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An intriguing aspect of this novel is the way in which Kristina-Erra’s victimization in Nazi Germany, which has never been consciously available to Sol or his parents, nevertheless haunts the latest generation based in California. The German society’s decision to start the clock at zero after the war has in reality not left the past behind. Randall has traveled far away temporally and spatially from the suffering caused his grandmother by the eugenic policies of the Nazis, but his family is scarred nevertheless, although in an unexpected way. The twenty-first century sees Randall involved in the creation of a robotic army that his mother Sadie describes bitterly as the achievement of the perfect Nazi military machine; his son Sol at times appears to be a little Hitler-in-the-making. Additionally, the tragedy of Erra’s childhood has inaugurated a pattern of selfish or self-absorbed mothering in tandem with a pattern of weak and despairing fathers. Huston’s point is that the dysfunctions of the family can be understood as a consequence of the destruction of Erra’s original identity, nationality, religion, and language. The fault lines created by this psychological catastrophe are made more dire by the suppression of the truth in the cause of making a complete break with the past. That Huston sets her saga during times of war and terror adds a political dimension to all that has gone badly for this family since World War II. It is not only the family but also the world that seems somehow to have gone wrong. This carefully planned and beautifully executed novel is a tour de force, as Huston uses the voices of six-year-olds to narrate a personal story, which opens up to larger historical contexts. Interestingly, her depiction of each child’s perceptions includes as much sophistication as naïveté, so that each child seems to know a great deal and yet have a great deal more to learn. Huston effectively deploys dramatic irony in a way that affords the reader an understanding of the family’s complex and tragic destiny that is never quite given to the novel’s confused children. Huston has created a type of mystery-thriller in this novel about suffering passed through many generations. The reader is engaged with the narrative as a witness to the events portrayed, as a fascinated detective seeking clues embedded in history, and a psychoanalyst investigating the mysteries of the soul. Margaret Boe Birns

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 22 (August 1, 2008): 36. The Guardian, March 15, 2008, p. 17. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 16 (August 15, 2008): 45. Library Journal 133, no. 12 (July 1, 2008): 61. The New York Times Book Review, November 2, 2008, p. 7. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 22 (June 2, 2008): 25. The Times Literary Supplement, March 7, 2008, p. 21.

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FIDELITY Author: Grace Paley (1922-2007) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 83 pp. $20.00 Type of work: Poetry In plainspoken but often witty poetic style, Paley comments on growing old, loss of family and friends, her own illness and death, feminism, war and peace, and hope for the future Grace Paley, who died of breast cancer in 2007, is perhaps best known for her short stories, which were originally published in leading magazines and eventually in book form in 1959, 1974, and 1985. In 1994 her book The Collected Stories was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. However, Paley began her career by writing poetry, from her teenage years into her mid-thirties, switched over in the 1980’s to publishing mostly poetry, and rounded out her career with the posthumous poetry collection Fidelity. Although her early poetry was apparently derivative, reflecting in part her study with W. H. Auden, her efforts in poetry might have helped her develop the distinctive voice and dialogue for which her stories are famous. She was noted for reading her stories aloud as she composed them and later when she taught classes. Poetry seems the more natural genre for Paley. Her stories tend toward open form; they have been criticized as being plotless, emphasizing, instead, character and voice. Poetry allows Paley more freedom of form: She writes in loose free verse, leaving some poems untitled and dispensing with conventional punctuation by indicating pauses with lineation and spacing. Poetry also allows the distinctive voice to be hers unambiguously. For a woman who has something to say, why bother with fictional pretense or dramatic personas? In poetry, she could speak more personally and directly, with more bardic authority, although the autobiographical element was never far away, even in her stories. The title Fidelity seems to be a poetic continuation of her main character in the stories, Faith (a thinly veiled substitution for Grace). Much has also been made of Paley’s New Yorker, Jewish background. Her parents, Isaac and Manya Goodside (originally Gutseit), were Jewish socialists from the Ukraine who, persecuted by the czar, immigrated to New York City, where their daughter Grace was born, raised, attended college without taking a degree, and at age nineteen married film cameraman Jess Paley. However, other influences are also important in Paley’s career. After having two children, Paley and her husband divorced, which might explain the feminist influence on her work. Nevertheless, feminist influence did not keep her from getting married again in 1972 to Robert Nichols, a landscape architect and writer. In 1988 they moved to Thetford, Vermont. This more varied background comes out in Fidelity.

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Another notable influence in Fidelity is the philosophy of the Quakers (Religious Society of Friends), especially the Quakers’ peace testimony. Paley was working with the American Friends Service Committee for peace when she met her second husband. During the Vietnam War, she was an antiwar activist and joined a peace journey to Hanoi. After the war, Paley continued working for peace and nuclear nonproliferation, getting arrested several times. In interviews Paley worried about the dangerous world she was leaving to her children and grandchildren (to whom Fidelity Grace Paley was an antiwar activist, a is dedicated). Several poems in Fidelity exdistinguished short-story writer, and a press Paley’s antiwar sentiments, especially poet. Her Collected Stories (1994) was “Fathers,” “Thank God there is no god,” and a finalist for the National Book Award “To the Vermont Arts Council on Its Fortieth and the Pulitzer Prize. Fidelity was published posthumously. Birthday.” Other Quaker attitudes and beliefs reflected in the poems are the liberal interpretation of belief in God (“Thank God there is no god”), belief in the just sharing of the world’s resources (“An Occasional Speech at the Interfaith Thanksgiving Gathering”), natural acceptance of dying, feminism, and a liberal attitude toward sexual orientation. “Sisters,” for instance, opens with the flat statement “My friends are dying/ well we’re old it’s natural . . . .” Nevertheless, the friends live on in memory: “I have not taken their names out of/ conversation gossip political argument/ my telephone book or card index . . . .” (A couple of the friends mentioned are “Claiborne,” probably Sybil Claiborne, an antiwar activist and writer, and “Deming,” probably Barbara Deming, a prominent Quaker activist and writer.) She remembers “their seriousness as artists workers/ their excitement as political actors . . . vigiling fasting praying in or out/ of jail . . . .” In the poem’s strong conclusion, which might sum up the book’s theme, she remembers their fidelity to the idea that it is possible with only a little extra anguish to live in this world at an absolute minimum loving brainy sexual energetic redeemed

Most of the poems in the collection apply this upbeat ideal to common experiences such as growing old, often mentioned. The book begins with a barrage of references to old age. “Proverbs” offers the injunction that “a person should be in love most of/ the time this is the last proverb/ and may be learned by all the organs/ capable of bodily response.” “Anti-love Poem” gives the opposite advice: “turn away that’s all you can/ do old as you are to save yourself from love.” “On Occasion” memorializes senior moments: “I forget the names of my friends/ and the names of the flowers in/

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my garden.” A later untitled poem describes a whole congregation of debilitated oldtimers in a nursing home scene as seen through the perspective of a little girl. Paley applies her upbeat ideal to growing old by using humor, laughing about her own senior moments and balancing the nursing-home scene with the fresh perspective of the little girl, who finds the Dantesque scene “interesting.” A couple of short untitled poems also mention the freedom to be oneself, uninhibited by rules and conventions, that comes with old age. However ambiguous and lonely, this freedom is in some ways the climax of one’s life. “Windows” is about how, for those who keep their minds and senses active, fresh perceptions are possible even in old age: Paley looks out her window and is excited by the suddenly new way she sees Smarts Mountain across the river. She also reacts in Wordsworthian fashion to a drive through Vermont: “my heart leaps up when I behold/ almost any valley or village in/ the embrace of US eighty-nine/ from White River to Lake Champlain.” Other poems deal with the experiences of illness and pain that often accompany growing old. One untitled poem recites the litany of ills suffered by Paley and her women friends—lungs ruined by a smoking husband, Parkinson’s disease, double pneumonia, the need for walkers, inability to type. Nevertheless, Paley addresses illness and pain with typical humor: “my own/ illness was headlined in the Times for/ some reason I was proud . . . .” She writes about tumors on her spine and head being “extraordinarily competitive,” even though she religiously ate “organic and colorful fruits and/ vegetables” and drank a daily glass of red wine “as suggested by The New York Times.” Paley also notes that “I have experienced the amputation/ of my left breast,” but “still after extreme surgeries/ many of us in the pharmaceutical/ west are able to live well . . . .” She and her surviving “sisters” also find comfort and consolation in each other, which is perhaps how one can understand the “love poem” to her friend Mabel, a “useful person one of the/ five or six in this world,” who has “done more good than any of us do-/ gooders even when impeded by/ George’s brains girls gardens . . . .” Death is a release from illness and pain, as Paley remembers from her parents and grandmother who “were in great pain at leaving/ and were furiously saying goodbye.” The main complaint Paley has about death is that it takes away family members, friends, and spouses. Otherwise, she is “a little ashamed/ to have written this [untitled] poem full/ of complaints against mortality which/ biological fact I have been constructed for . . . .” The same human biology that results in death also makes new life possible—children and grandchildren. This natural paradox is symbolized by dying and decaying trees out of which new growth comes in two poems (“Education” and “This Hill”) at the end of the collection. Paley sees hope for the future in the newer generations. “Fathers” celebrates the observation that “Fathers are/ more fathering/ these days they have/ accomplished this by/ being more mothering,” which Paley attributes to “women’s lib” and which is “exciting for an old woman.” “Birth of a Child” celebrates the hope that “was always there” in contrast to the cringing world’s need for “creating hope”: “why/ be so grandiose/ just do something/ now and then.” “Detour” celebrates the ability of children and grandchildren to get around the “detritus” and even “heaviest/ sorrows” of the

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older generation: “luckily their/ children have imperiously/ called offering their lives a/ detour thank god they’ve all/ gotten away.” A few of the poems comment on the process of creating poetry itself. Writing a poem relieves pressure: “ . . . something/ which has pressed upon my breath beyond bearing/ will appear in words take shape and singing/ let me go on with my life.” “Their Honest Purpose Mocked,” which begins with diaries and notebooks and ends with children whose legs are blown off by land mines, seems to acknowledge that a completed poem exists within and is perhaps modified by the full context of the world it can never capture. Some such realization seems to inform “I Went Out Walking”: “My poems had gotten so heavy/ I went out walking . . . ,” whereupon Paley meets “another poet . . . his backpack/ already fat with poems and/ a pen in his teeth.” In “Night Morning” productivity for Paley does not come so easily: “To translate a poem/ from thinking/ into English/ takes all night/ night nights and days . . . also the newest English/ argues with its old/ singing ancestry . . . .” Similarly, in “The Irish Poet,” a creative writing class breathes “a long communal sigh” at “the early abysmal drafts/ of great poets” while “the Irish poet/ smacks his head and sighs his own sigh . . . .” It is not surprising that, inspired by such models as Wordsworth and the Quakers, Paley has a plainspoken poetic style. The simplicity of her style, however, is somewhat deceptive: It does not prevent her from expressing some complex concepts, such as the tenuous nature of meaning, or from coining some colorful phrases, such as “the tele-/ phonic electronic digital nowadays,” “the pharmaceutical/ west,” and “curious bombs like bouquets called/ cluster . . . .” A number of poems are built around conceits. Paley’s plain-spoken style is also enriched by her sense of humor, with its reversals, paradoxes, understatements, and self-deprecation: She includes herself among “dogooders” who have “big mouths” (thereby anticipating and disarming her critics). In addition to plain style and humor, an outspoken social and political consciousness distinguishes Paley’s poetry. Besides examples of this consciousness already noted, other poems attack the rich, such as “The Hard-Hearted Rich,” “An Occasional Speech at the Interfaith Thanksgiving Gathering,” and “It Doesn’t Matter If.” The collection’s title poem, “Fidelity,” expresses and explains this consciousness: Paley cannot allow herself to get immersed too much in “the dense improbable/ life” of characters in a book because “how could I desert that other whole life/ those others in their city basements . . . .” Paley’s poetry is clearly an extension of her activism. Other poets, especially young graduates of creative writing programs, who too often write obscurely and have little to say (which might be why they write obscurely), could learn much from Paley’s work. There is nothing wrong with writing poetry clearly, using humor, and expressing a social and political consciousness. If more poets wrote like Paley, perhaps contemporary American poetry would not be such an obscure, minor enterprise. Harold Branam

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Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 13 (March 1, 2008): 43-44. Library Journal 133, no 3 (February 15, 2008): 108. The New York Times Book Review, April 6, 2008, p. 5. Publishers Weekly 255, no 3 (January 21, 2008): 156.

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FINE JUST THE WAY IT IS Wyoming Stories 3 Author: E. Annie Proulx (1935) Publisher: Scribner (New York). 221 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Short fiction Time: Approximately 500 b.c.e. to the early twenty-first century Locale: Wyoming and Hell Proulx’s third collection of Wyoming-based fiction adds to her impressive repertoire, with more stories from an author who knows the hardscrabble West E. Annie Proulx is a national treasure, writing with intelligence, razor-sharp wit, and impeccable research to background her stories. Fine Just the Way It Is is her third collection to focus on Wyoming, where she has made her home for several years, but not all nine of these stories are set in the Equality State, and equality has little to do with them. The two that take place in Hell are fun, and “I’ve Always Loved This Place” is even better if one is familiar with Dante’s epic, La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802), especially the first canto, the Inferno. In this version, the Devil, hoofs, horns, and all, suspects that a looming religious war on Earth may cause Hell to become too crowded and decides to upgrade. He plans to add more landscaping, as well as a tenth circle for tobacco lobbyists and corporate executives. Grumpy old Charon, who ferries him over Acheron, the river of woe, argues that his crossing is “fine just the way it is.” The Devil is inspired by the wreckage of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and on the marshy bank of the Styx he muses, “I’ve always loved this place,” but he cannot resist adding crocodiles. He also manages to find ideal accommodations for the Tour de France cyclists, for they have earned their place in his domain. Likewise, “Swamp Mischief” is a satire, the author’s revenge on a whole group of people, as the Devil predicts which new guests, such as shoe designer Manolo Blahnik, will arrive in Hell (dentists and highway engineers are already there), where e-mail is mostly spam and computers are programmed to crash five times a minute. Reading that a disgruntled earthly ornithologist is offering to sell his soul for a pterodactyl, the Devil proceeds to construct a few from the resident English sparrows and fit them with sharks’ teeth, in order to seal the bargain. Obviously, Proulx had a good time writing these. Irony is almost a constant in Proulx’s work. Occasionally it is muted, as in “Family Man,” a contemporary story that takes place at the Mellowhorn Retirement Home, where old-timer Ray Forkenbrock tapes his memories for his granddaughter Beth. Now eighty-four, he grew up in the silence of the big plains and remembers with re-

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gret an elderly horse catcher who died in the rain. Ray was mounted on horseback and still E. Annie Proulx has published eight feels guilty that he did not offer the man his books, including The Shipping News horse. After a host of seemingly unrelated an- (1993), which won the National Book ecdotes and an encounter with a woman from Award for Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize, his past who disappears as suddenly as she ar- and the Irish Times International rived, Ray finally reveals a family secret that Fiction Prize, and Close Range: he has carefully guarded all these years. How- Wyoming Stories (1999), containing the O. Henry Prize-winning story ever, Beth does not understand, and his grief “Brokeback Mountain.” and shame are meaningless to her. A harsher irony appears in “The Great Divide,” which chronicles a young family’s tough times during the Great Depression and war years. In 1920, Hi Alcorn and his pregnant wife Helen journey to their new Colorado homestead site, part of a growing development called Great Divide. The glow of marriage has not yet faded, and they have great plans to improve the land, but fate does not allow it. By the following year, crop prices are down, leading Hi to try bootlegging whiskey to bring in some money, but instead he is jailed. Each time the couple get their lives in order, something else goes wrong. Ten years later they are living in Wyoming with four children, and Hi is out of work again. Helen’s sister and her husband Fenk Fipps arrive with a job offer: Hi can help Fenk trap wild horses for animal feed. Unfortunately, Fenk is cruel to the animals, and Hi quits to work in the coal mines. A few years later, Fenk again offers Hi a similar job catching horses. Accidentally kicked by his own horse, Hi finds himself with a broken leg that will usher in far more serious consequences. One of the more unusual stories is “Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl,” inspired by a 2,500-year-old firepit and the traces of a Native American civilization discovered in 2004 when Proulx was building her house. She imagines how life might have been during this period: an early fall, the leaves beginning to turn, the shaman chanting as a hunting party seeks bison for winter food. The tribe’s treasure is a powerful gray stone bowl that will hold the blood of the slaughtered animals. At every summer’s end, the hunters camp near a cliff, yet for several years no bison have come. However, this year one man has dreamed of the herd’s arrival, and the shaman plays his flute to lure bison into a trap as the others hide. The hunters will corral the animals and head them over the cliff, using no horses, bows, or arrows—their weapons only knives, spears, and cunning. No animals are allowed to escape; otherwise they might pass the knowledge of the treacherous cliff to other herds. “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” one of the best of this collection, is Proulx’s tribute to those forgotten pioneers who left no record behind. Archie Laverty’s parents, Irish immigrants, die suddenly when the boy is seven, and he is taken in by the Widow Peck. After she goes to “the land of no breakfast forever” in a grass fire, leaving him one hundred dollars, Archie works as a ranch hand for her stingy son, Bunk Peck. In 1885, young Archie marries even younger Rose Mealor, homesteads with the widow’s gift, and builds a cabin, singing all the while. The couple’s love is idyllic, but the work is hard until Bunk lays off his cowboys for the winter and curly-haired

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Archie must find a job elsewhere. He rides off toward Cheyenne, and the pregnant Rose, who up until now “seemed unaware that she lived in a time when love killed women,” is suddenly made aware that they are “two separate people, and that because he was a man he could leave any time he wanted, and because she was a woman she could not.” Proulx’s awareness of the inequity of women in the early West is evident here, and love is clearly not the answer. Archie finds another job, but the new rancher will not hire married men, so he pretends to be single. He cannot contact Rose or even acknowledge her existence, but he did leave a note in a neighbor’s cabin asking him to look in on her. The neighbor, however, has already gone to New Mexico. In July, Rose, who cannot be more than fifteen, gives agonizing birth alone to a stillborn child. There is no happy ending here, and the traces of the two lovers quickly vanish from the earth. A contemporary version of one woman’s life on the range is shown in “Tits-Up in a Ditch,” in which a hapless rancher describes how he found his milk cow flat on her back, dead in a muddy ditch. Here Proulx addresses the general disregard for women and the devaluation of their roles on the ranch and in life. Sons are idolized; daughters are ignored. This fact is discovered by Dakotah Lister, abandoned by her unmarried mother and raised by indifferent grandparents, Bonita and Verl. Arthritic Verl aches and complains, while Bonita in effect runs the ranch. Verl’s opposite is wealthy Wyatt Match, with a university education and radical Eastern ideas. Match, who wants to get into politics, has to become an archconservative in order to be elected to the state legislature. Married to a resourceful fifthgeneration ranchwoman, he later divorces her to marry a new young wife from California, while his former wife and her brother continue to manage his ranch. Match criticizes Verl (“a trash rancher”); Verl, whose idea of “the pioneer spirit of freedom” is not wearing a seat belt, informs his wife that they do not need any outsider telling them what to do, especially one from California, because “Wyomin is fine just the way it is.” The child Dakotah seeks affection from her grandparents but does not get it; instead, she is expected to do chores, which she hates. She is a misfit in school as well. In high school she is attracted to feckless Sash Hicks, dropping out before graduation to marry him and become a waitress at Big Bob’s. At about the time she and Sash decide to divorce (he is going into the Army), she is fired because of her pregnancy. When her son is born and named after his great-grandfather, both Bonita and Verl melt. Bonita urges Dakotah to join the Army as well, in order to get training and an education while they care for her son. She is ultimately assigned to the Military Police, but in “Eye-rack” her Humvee is hit by a roadside bomb and she loses her right arm. After she is sent to Walter Reed Hospital to recuperate, Bonita shakily informs her that Baby Verl fell out of Big Verl’s truck and was killed. Sash Hicks is also in Walter Reed, brain-damaged and gravely wounded. His parents have been unable to find out details about their son’s condition because they cannot afford to go see him, but when they learn of the seriousness of his wounds, they do not want to. Dakotah discovers that she is still Sash’s legal wife, and as she is trapped by society’s expectations, her world slides away.

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Proulx crafts her stories meticulously: A giant sagebrush grows in the Red Desert and strange things happen; after an argument with her lover, a woman embarks on a ten-day wilderness hike alone, a hike they had planned to take together. It may be tempting to read the stories straight through, but it is better to savor them slowly, one at a time, to enjoy the subtleties characteristic of her work. Notable are her remarkable vocabulary and her wonderful ear for accents, skills she has demonstrated in all of her books. She is very good at burying apparently innocuous information that results in a gut-punching twist at the end. A few critics have speculated that Proulx may be disenchanted with Wyoming, and a British reviewer condemns her choice of silly names, missing the exaggerated frontier humor that is the whole point. (Even minor characters take on a life of their own; her improbably named Fenk Fipps and Wacky Lipe somehow seem exactly right.) Cutting through the sentimentality, Proulx continues to cast a cold eye on the legendary West. Joanne McCarthy

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 17 (May 1, 2008): 5-6. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 10 (May 15, 2008): 15. Library Journal 133, no. 11 (June 15, 2000): 64. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 16 (October 23, 2008): 41-45. The New York Times Book Review, September 7, 2008, p. 7. Outside 33, no. 10 (October, 2008): 38. People 70, no. 11 (September 15, 2008): 67. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 21 (May 26, 1008): 35. The Times Literary Supplement, September 12, 2008, pp. 19-20. Virginia Quarterly Review 84, no. 4 (Fall, 2008): 266-267.

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FIRE TO FIRE New and Selected Poems Author: Mark Doty (1953) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 326 pp. $22.95 Type of work: Poetry This collection combines twenty-three new poems and a selection of Doty’s best poems from seven previous volumes Mark Doty’s poems in Fire to Fire, winner of the National Book Award, are about the large issues of life: human mortality, the transitory beauty of nature, the transformative influence of human aspiration, and the power to realize that aspiration. A self-described poet of the sublime, he has cultivated a style combining plain-spokenness with the elevated diction that often characterizes the sublime. That Doty has a “democratic” sense of the sublime—validating the struggle of all creatures toward something larger than themselves—accounts in part for the great popularity of his work. He shows ordinary people confronting what he has called “the raw fact of our inadequacy in the face of the world,” but reaching out to become allied with forces vastly superior to human nature. This inclusive notion of sublimity is consistent through the eight volumes of poetry represented in this collection. The poem from which this book takes its name—“Fire to Fire,” first appearing in School of the Arts (2005)—includes these lines: “If I were a sunflower I would be/ the branching kind,/ my many faces held out/ in all directions . . . ” The new poems are contained in the first section of the book, titled “Theories and Apparitions,” which was published in Britain as a stand-alone volume. The first poem of that section, “Pipistrelle”—named for the most common of Britain’s fourteen bat species—illustrates Doty’s proclivity for appreciating diverse perspectives without exalting one above another. This habit even diminishes any sense of rivalry with other poets, as he describes himself and a friend writing in two different veins (the friend’s “lyrics” and Doty’s “tale”) about their sighting of the small creature, which could be counted as one of the “apparitions” in the title of this section. The opening lines belong to the friend: “His music, Charles writes,/ makes us avoidable,” meaning that the bat’s sonar keeps it from bumping into objects. Doty, in contrast, calls the bat an “emissary of evening,” An emissary would not avoid but would seek out those for whom a message is intended. Doty decides that this encounter “is my personal visitation,” and the thought humbles him: “. . . I with no music/ to my name save what I can coax/ into a line, no sense of pitch,/ heard the night’s own one-sided conversation.” This is Doty’s poem, so he continues “filling in the tale.” Reflecting upon bats, he realizes that “Only some people can hear their frequencies,” and he is one of them. Just so, not everyone can hear all the nuances of a poem. Then comes a passage that reveals

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Doty’s distinguishing intellectual modesty: “Is it because I am an American I think the bat Mark Doty is the author of several came/ especially to address me, who have the books of poems, including School of particular gift/ of hearing him? If he sang to the Arts (2005), Source (2002), and My us, but only I/ heard him, does that mean he Alexandria (1993). His memoir about love and loss, Dog Years, was a New sang to me?” In “Pipistrelle,” as in much of his work, York Times best seller in 2007. Among Doty uses an everyday experience to enter by Doty’s honors are the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles small steps into deep questioning and meditaTimes Book Prize, a Whiting Writers tion. Soon, however, he becomes concerned Award, and two Lambda Literary that he may be reading too much into the ex- Awards. In 1993 he became the first perience, inspiring though it may be. Does his American poet to receive the T. S. Eliot poem, he wonders, tend to “worry my little Prize in Great Britain. aerial friend/ with a freight not precisely his?/ Does the poem reside in experience/ or in self-consciousness/ about experience?” In the midst of such fervent questioning, the natural setting in which he and Charles saw the bat exerts a calming effect, and in the end he is left with what appears to be a simple contrast between self-conscious art and the natural phenomenon that inspired it: “Listen to my poem, says Charles./ A word in your ear, says the night.” Doty’s preference between the two seems pretty clear; yet he leaves the contrasting viewpoint intact, undiminished in force. Elsewhere he has written, “It’s a very large and capacious house, American poetry. I have no desire for everyone to work in the same way.” In keeping with this philosophy, Doty has chosen a simple, straightforward form—generally, unrhymed stanzas from two to four lines long, each with three to four beats. One can barely detect any craft in his work, so skillfully does he make the difficult look simple. His work represents a return to formalism, not form for its own sake, but as an avenue to depth of thought and feeling. Despite his seeming artlessness, he is not the heir to the spontaneous Beats; indeed, Doty says that while he respects spontaneity, his own poetic practice is “quite the opposite.” Thus, he does not fully subscribe to Jack Kerouac’s theory of “spontaneous bop prosody” or Allen Ginsburg’s “first thought best thought,” but he believes in “sitting” with the poem as long as one can endure any attendant pain. Developing writers, he says, often stop too soon, believing they have finished a piece, but actually they are just avoiding emotional discomfort. He is wary of finishing a poem too quickly so that it presents only “what is familiar, the stories we already know, what we expect to hear from ourselves.” Doty observes, “The longer we can stay submerged in not knowing what we’re doing, the more we’re going to discover in the process of writing.” He adds that his poem “In the Airport Marshes” required two years for completion. That poem concludes with the line, “How do you reckon your little music?” The poem is partly about creating poetry, about finding the words to convey to the listener the meaning an experience has for the speaker. Doty’s preference for the deliberate and well-considered goes beyond stylistic

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consideration. This is clear from the distinction he makes between “theories” and “apparitions” in the section of new poems. Like the little bat, many other “apparitions” in this section tend to be animals that can evoke an aesthetic response by purely mechanical, unconscious means. The pipistrelle cannot know that to a human being—at least to a poet—its cries sound “somewhere between merriment and weeping.” In a poem explicitly titled “Apparition,” a peacock (“oracular pear,” Doty calls it) spreads “the archaic poem of his tail” into “ . . . an arc of nervous gleams,/ a hundred shining animals/ symmetrically peering/ from the dim/ primeval woods . . . ” Two other poems also titled “Apparition” are about human subjects, but these poems, too, deal with mechanical actions and rote responses. In “Apparition (Favorite Poem),” a boy reciting from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous poem is seen repeating a crucial instruction that must be delivered, word for word, as he has learned it: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.

The “theories” in this section’s title are poems that begin with simple anecdotes or comments and develop into meditations on large issues. Doty’s titles include “theories” of narrative, of the soul, and, he says, “five theories of beauty, which I keep returning to because I never seem to get it right.” The poet takes a deceptively casual approach, often humorous, and leads the reader into the subject. His “Theory of the Sublime” recounts a “happening” art project in which Doty simply clapped his hands for thirty-seven minutes while an artist records him on videotape. With no other direction than this, the poet finds himself “reaching for some sort of rhythm to perform” and slowly discovers a natural pattern of the body in which “ . . . the pulse becomes firmer more persistent,/ Life of a tree unfurling, green burl spreading out/ Its swath of selfhood, an actuality . . . ” After his initial sense of inadequacy, he ponders, while clapping, the creation of the sublime in nature and art, such as Barcelona’s massive Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Familia church, begun by Antoni Gaudí in 1882 and still under construction in the twenty-first century. At the end of the clapping session, the artist stops recording and indicates with approval that “something has happened here.” Indeed, the poet has achieved a distance from the ordinary that has allowed him to perceive both the greatness of sublime art and his own smallness. Elsewhere Doty has noted that physically large works of art, which inspire a sense of awe, have been made by human beings—sometimes several generations of them—moving over large areas of canvas or stone to create their work. He feels it even more paradoxical that this realization could have been brought about by “something as ephemeral as 37 minutes of clapping.” Much of the sublime art that so inspires him is Christian art. Implicitly or explicitly, many of Doty’s poems ponder Christian themes. Doty once told an interviewer that while growing up he had Protestant Christian ideas drummed into him, especially that of life’s transitory nature and what he calls “a built-in obsession with mortality.”

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While he believes that much of his influence was negative, his poetic explorations seek to bring out what is fresh and alive in Christian faith. The poem “Citizens,” about the commonplace outrage of nearly being hit by a truck in Manhattan, addresses the Christian theme of forgiveness, as well as the Zen concept of letting anger go. The truck driver grins as Doty shouts indignantly, “what are you doing, act like a citizen.” Later, Doty wonders what kind of “citizen” he must be to have stayed angry so long. He recalls the story of a Zen monk who carried an elderly woman across the river, only to be asked by a fellow monk, “How could you touch her when you vowed not to” traffic with women. “And the first monk says, I put her down/ on the other side of the river./ Why are you still carrying her?” In time, Doty realizes he is angry because the truck driver “Made me erasable,/ A slip of a self, subject to. How’d I get emptied . . . question.” The poet concludes I don’t care. If he’s one of those people miserable for lack Of what is found in poetry, fine. *** When did I ever set anything down?

Poets set all their thoughts down on paper. The best example of a Christian theme made fresh and alive is “Messiah (Christmas Portions),” originally published in Sweet Machine (1989) and included in Fire to Fire as one of Doty’s finest poems. “Messiah” describes a choir of ordinary people coming together under “the Methodist roof” to sing George Frideric Handel’s famous oratorio. They are “blacks and whites,” a cloudbank of familiar angels: that neighbor who fights operatically with her girlfriend, for one, and the friendly bearded clerk from the post office, —tenor trapped in the body of a baritone? Altos from the A&P, soprano from the T-shirt shop . . . *** Silence in the hall, anticipatory, as if we’re all about to open a gift we’re not sure we’ll like; how could they compete with sunset’s burnished oratorio? Thoughts which vanish, when the violins begin.

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Magill’s Literary Annual 2009 Who’d have thought They’d be so good? . . . This music demonstrates what it claims; glory shall be revealed.

Near the end of the poem is the central message of the experience: Aren’t we enlarged by the scale of what we’re able to desire? Everything, the choir insists, might flame; inside these trappings burns another, brighter life, quickened, now, by song . . . . Still time. Still time to change.

It is significant that it is common people whose actions lead the way to these perceptions. The poet acknowledges the doubt that such people as the woman who “fights operatically” can deliver something this great, but the success of their concerted effort reveals a truly Christian message in the best sense. The “Christmas Portions” of the poem’s title refers to the parts of Handel’s Messiah (1742) that are generally sung at Christmas: Part I (The Birth) and the “Hallelujah” chorus. In addition, Doty may also mean by “Portions” that through their own desire for and pursuit of the sublime, these ordinary singers have secured their true portion in life. People sing Messiah from a desire to be uplifted. Doty writes poems for much the same reason. A poem is the outcome of a sometimes arduous process of thought and feeling, a process of digging ever deeper for the truth. Writing poems can be a discipline that can shape the lives of poet and reader for the better. Thomas Rankin

Review Sources The Advocate, April 8, 2008, p. 59. Booklist 104, no. 14 (March 15, 2008): 16. Lambda Book Report 16, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Summer, 2008): 18-19. Library Journal 133, no. 6 (April 1, 2008): 86. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 8 (February 25, 2008): 53.

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FLYING HIGH Remembering Barry Goldwater Author: William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008) Publisher: Basic Books (New York). 208 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Memoir, history Time: 1964 Locale: San Francisco, the site of the 1964 GOP convention; Connecticut, at Buckley’s residence and at National Review headquarters; and “All over the place and accordingly Flying High,” including a journey from Christchurch, New Zealand, to the Antarctic Buckley’s posthumously published book describes the “grand time” that he and Goldwater had leading the counterrevolution against the orthodoxies of the Left and against those Republicans the two conservative stalwarts perceived as accommodating those orthodoxies Principal personages: William F. Buckley, Jr., the author Barry Goldwater, the 1964 presidential candidate and Arizona senator who is Buckley’s subject General Dwight Eisenhower, two-term U.S. president, 1952-1960 Lyndon B. Johnson, politician who defeated Goldwater for the presidency John F. Kennedy, assassinated U.S. president, 1960-1963 Richard M. Nixon, U.S. president, who resigned in 1974 Ronald Reagan, two-term Republican president, 1981-1989, who ended the Cold War Brent Bozell, the author’s brother-in-law, ghostwriter of Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, and National Review editor Marvin Liebman, father figure of the young right-wing Republicans, close personal and professional friend of the Buckleys William A. Rusher, publisher of the National Review George Will, writer, fellow conservative, and long-time friend of the author

Political pundit and prize-winning playwright George Packer declared in a May, 2008, essay in The New Yorker titled “The Fall of Conservatism” that the philosophical roots of the party that nominated Republican John McCain are “older and deeper” than Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War. “They extended back to William F. Buckley, Jr.’s mission statement, in the inaugural issue of the National Review, in 1955, that the new magazine ‘stands athwart history, yelling Stop’; and to Barry Goldwater’s seminal book, The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), in which he wrote, ‘I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient,

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for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones.’” Among the perhaps unintentional services of Buckley’s spare volume, Flying High, is to remind readers that Goldwater did not write a word of The Conscience of a Conservative and probably did not read the manuscript prior to publication. This reader was put in mind of Yogi William F. Buckley, Jr., was the author Berra’s response to former pitcher-turnedof more than fifty works of fiction and Houston columnist Larry Dierker’s inquiry to nonfiction. He was the founder (in Berra about how his first book was doing: “I 1955) and former editor-in-chief of National Review and the former host of don’t know. I haven’t read it yet.” Buckley’s the television show Firing Line. He was brother-in-law, National Review editor Brent Bozell, ghostwrote the book. awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991. Buckley refers to his being snubbed by Goldwater’s advisers as a speaker at the 1964 convention as an instance of sequestration, a word with which in its political context this reviewer was unfamiliar. The year after Goldwater lost to Lyndon B. Johnson, Buckley enacted a riposte sequestration when he mounted a futile third-party bid for the mayoralty of New York City but declined to announce Goldwater’s endorsement. That the prevailing winds of party politics could not alter the affection each felt for the other is reflected in an aside revealed by Buckley five pages from the end of Flying High. Shortly after thanking Goldwater for the endorsement and explaining why he was not using it, Buckley received a phone call. The senator, en route to New York, invited him “and anyone else you’d like” to join him for lunch. The collective response of Buckley’s associates is “What is he up to?” The reply is “He was being a nice guy.” Goldwater is remembered today mainly as Reagan’s unsuccessful forerunner, but Buckley shows that there was much more to the man. In Flying High, he reveals the pilot, the “child of the Grand Canyon,” the nonconformist who, to assess the John Birch Society, showed up incognito at a Palm Beach John Birch bash wearing denim jeans, a cowboy hat, and boots. Perhaps Buckley quotes Goldwater’s exaggeration—“Every other person in Phoenix is a member”—as a reminder to Buckley that the “problem” would not be unfamiliar to an Arizona senator. Asked how Buckley had acquitted himself performing a harpsichord concerto in Phoenix, Goldwater quipped: “Wonderfully. Absolutely first rate. Of course this is the first time I ever went to a concert.” Flying High is pitched as a memoir, but the “pitch” is far from perfect. Buckley enlists the memoirist’s favorite ally: invented dialogue. When Walter Jenkins, an L.B.J. aide, is revealed to be a homosexual, Goldwater forbids his staff to exploit the disclosure. “Don’t you understand, Barry, this election is about morality in government,”

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someone is supposed to have said. To which Goldwater is supposed to have shot back, “Jenkins has a wife and six children. Leave him alone.” A deft paraphrase would have been less suspect. The book, though “factually reliable,” is not, Buckley acknowledges, “strictly factual, in that conversations are reported as having taken place word for word.” Flying High demonstrates the facility of a man who adopted eccentric scenarios to capture the essence of a conservative mien. Buckley tempered the elitism of God and Man at Yale (1951), his first book, and even, during Goldwater’s ascent to the nomination, masterminded the Republican Party’s compromises on civil rights legislation. While never letting down his guard as a conservative who detested vulgarity, Buckley knew what many Ivy League mandarins forget: that is, that the vulgus is often right and the nobiles often wrong. Who else, in the midst of his rashness to run for mayor of New York, could sum up his whole effort when, replying to a questioner who asked what he would do if he won, tellingly countered: “Demand a recount”? In Miles Gone By (2004), Buckley’s previous book—one that purports to be his autobiography but that consists of recycled material from his oeuvre—Buckley already covered his role in Goldwater’s campaign. Readers may have appreciated a fuller account, however, of the origin of these famous words from his acceptance speech: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Buckley claims General Dwight Eisenhower agreed to the inclusion of the word “extremism” when Goldwater reminded the wartime commander his leadership of the Allied forces across the English Channel in 1944 could only be described as an extreme position against Adolf Hitler. However, earlier Buckley acknowledged putting words in Ike’s mouth that were never uttered. In his review of his long-time antagonist’s last book, former Nation editorpublisher Victor S. Navasky concludes that, “through no fault of his own [Buckley] was absent at the creation [of the Goldwater candidacy].” While acknowledging that Goldwater might well have been unaware of all the sequestrations, Navasky also remembers that in Goldwater’s autobiography, which the Arizona senator is assumed to have written and to have read, Goldwater reported that the leader of his brain trust “had passed the word down that the candidate should distance himself personally and professionally from the National Review people.” In a three-page coda, Buckley, an exacting stylist whose choice of mot was usually juste, not once but twice in his book’s final words applies to his hero the adjective “unique,” whose essential meaning is “the only one.” Could such a one pay higher tribute? Richard Hauer Costa

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Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 15 (April 1, 2008): 4. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 6 (March 15, 2008): 279-280. Library Journal 133, no. 8 (May 1, 2008): 86. National Review 60, no. 11 (June 16, 2008): 48-49. The New York Times Book Review, May 25, 2008, p. 8. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 11 (March 17, 2008): 59-60. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 103 (May 2, 2008): A13.

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THE FOREVER WAR Author: Dexter Filkins (1961) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 368 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Current events, history, memoir Time: 1998-2006 Locale: Afghanistan, New York City, and Iraq Prizewinning New York Times correspondent Filkins presents a compelling and brilliantly written account of his experiences reporting on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq Dexter Filkins in The Forever War provides his readers with a vivid, emotionally searing, and intensely personal description of his experiences covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In doing so, he continues a distinguished reportorial tradition pioneered by American war correspondents in the interwar years of the 1920’s and 1930’s. One of the first and most influential of these was Vincent Sheean’s Personal History (1935). In this book, Sheean gave a highly subjective account of his experiences covering conflicts that ranged from Morocco to China to Palestine. Sheean was a product of the literary modernism that was ushered in by the moral disaster of the Great War. He was a member of the lost generation, unmoored from Victorian moral absolutes and from confidence in progress. He identified his own confusion at the mad, bloody rush of events in the 1920’s with the situation of the Western democracies, paralyzed by recent and bitter memories of trench warfare and morally helpless in the face of emergent totalitarianisms. Sheean’s record of personalized history culminated in an epiphany at the Acropolis in Athens, when he embraced a vaguely collectivist vision of life born of conversations with a Communist revolutionary. Sheean’s response to his experiences was unexceptional for an engaged intellectual with leftist leanings during the “Red Decade.” More significant was the pattern his best-selling memoir set for the literarily ambitious newsmen who came after him. Reports from Europe and Asia in the 1930’s, during World War II, the Korea War, and the Vietnam War, were every bit as personal as history. The reporter was not a detached observer; he was an active participant, sharing in the danger, excitement, camaraderie, and horror. He was constantly attuned to the effects of his experiences on his psyche and his evolving perceptions about authority. There were variations on this theme. Michael Herr, writing about the Vietnam War in Dispatches (1977), was deeply influenced by the New Journalism of the 1960’s, and he developed a powerful, highly literary style of writing that captured detail with almost hallucinogenic clarity. Herr’s prose shaped a generation of reportorial memoirs. Thematically, however, he and his heirs followed the path laid down by Sheean. Filkins echoes Sheean and Herr on every page of The Forever War. Even though he is describing a Near Eastern and Islamic world alien to the experience of most

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Americans, the reader nonetheless is in familiar territory. When Filkins writes about Muslim warlords and American generals attempting to impose order on chaotic madness in Afghanistan and Iraq, the reader is comfortably ensconced in the modernist theater of the absurd bequeathed by twentieth century literature and philosophy. It in no way denigrates Filkins’s reporting to say that the reader has been here before. Through Filkins’s eyes the reader sees what the reader expects to see. Not until a reader encounters a journalistic memoir with a radically different perspective on war, on authority, and on the meaning of human life will there be evidence of a new, emergent literature of the twentyfirst century. Filkins’s The Forever War is not a conventional narrative about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is an impressionistic account, conveying a mood rather than a reasoned assessment of the Bush administration’s war on terror. Ultimately, it is a meditation on war and the “other.” As such it draws on that mainspring of modernist reportage, a correspondent’s journey into a Joseph Conrad heart of darkness. What Sheean found in the Rif War and the first bloodlettings between Muslims and Jews in the Holy Land, and what Herr encountered amid the firefights in Vietnam, Filkins discovers in the streets of Kabul and Baghdad. He sees combat in the company of the U.S. Marines in places such as Falluja in Iraq. This is conventional warfare, grim, relentless, and bloody urban battle. It is nerve-wracking and awful, but something akin to what other men saw in Normandy and Hue. More telling is the unconventional warfare, the undifferentiated bloodshed launched by the Taliban in Afghanistan and especially by al-Qaeda in Iraq. Filkins observes that terror is the root of the overly familiar word terrorism. He lived for years with the slaughter of men, women, and children, who died horribly only so that their deaths would horrify others. Filkins also lived with the knowledge that he was a target, that at the whim of seemingly omnipresent killers he could be taken, tortured, and ritually butchered for the edification of zealots surfing the Internet. Like his predecessors, Filkins is acutely conscious of the psychological toll he suffers from his daily exposure to human carnage. At the end, he grew numb to the death around him. He lost the self-defense instincts that had helped him survive in the past. Filkins brilliantly traces his mental and moral trajectory with a series of vignettes describing his attempts to keep up with his running in Baghdad. Here his personal story intentionally merges with the history of the Iraq conflict and the descent of Baghdad into chaos. Filkins liked to run along the Tigris River near the offices of The New York Times. At first this is easily done, and he is accompanied on his runs by friendly children. Over time, security measures increasingly constrict his route, the growing claustrophobia of his running mirroring the deterioration of the country and his inner trauma. The great strength of Filkins’s book lies in his eye for detail and an ability to capDexter Filkins is a journalist who has reported for the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. He won the 2004 George Polk Award for War Reporting. After leaving Iraq, he was a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University.

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ture general truths through a telling anecdote. Filkins reported from Afghanistan before 9/11 and the advent of the Americans. He covered the desultory war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, which was the only organized indigenous force opposing their rule. He describes with some irony the evanescence of political alliances in this seemingly endless civil war, meeting the same men serving on one side and then on the other. He also frequently encountered the dark, sharp side of Taliban repression. Filkins was present when Taliban justice was publically dispensed in a soccer field. He watched as a pickpocket lost his hand and a young man accused of murder was shot to death. He also noticed the growing presence of Arabs in the country, as Osama bin Laden with his men and money became increasingly important to the Taliban regime. One day he stood in line in the Kabul airport next to a group of Arab women, speaking with Saudi accents. The women were covered by burkas, but they wore expensive and stylish designer shoes. The women were complaining about their husbands, whose fantasies about holy war kept them confined to what they called a “cursed place.” Filkins was in New York on 9/11, and he rushed to the site of the World Trade Center, arriving not long after the Twin Towers collapsed. He found himself amid scenes of horror and destruction that reminded him of the Third World. Filkins wandered into One Liberty Plaza, across the street from a mound of debris being sifted through by firefighters with dogs. He entered an abandoned Brooks Brothers store and spent the night there, wrapped in an oversized sweater. His work abroad had followed him home. The title of Filkins’s book, The Forever War, evokes comparisons with Joe Haldeman’s classic science fiction novel of the same name, published in 1974. Haldeman’s novel was a dark meditation on the Vietnam War, positing a future war in space, which, like the conflict in Southeast Asia, seemed to bring pointless destruction without end. It would be easy to assume, given this title, that Filkins is trying to make a political statement, condemning the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The Iraq War, in particular, became widely unpopular at home, as many world leaders denounced what was called American unilateralism, and the evening news nightly regaled viewers with the bloody results of car-bombings and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). As the years dragged by, the once-triumphant American military seemed mired in a Near Eastern quagmire from which there was nothing to be gained or to be won. Filkins, in fact, ends his account in 2006, just before the surge strategy of General David Petraeus dramatically changed conditions on the ground in Iraq. Despite this, Filkins’s book is not a political tract. While there is little within its pages to warm the heart of a Pentagon official, it is not a sustained attack on the American war effort. Filkins does find plenty to criticize, from arrogance and cultural insensitivity on the part of American officials,to the traditional American overreliance on technology. However, he is not blind to the ruthless brutality of al-Qaeda and the Iraqi insurgents. He ruefully acknowledges that one reason he and other reporters remained alive was because the terror masters wanted him to continue sending bad news home. Filkins also makes a point of exploring the grim remains of the regime the

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Americans overthrew. Saddam Hussein ruled by terrorizing the Iraqi people. Filkins visited one of Saddam’s torture chambers, a chilling amalgam of the medieval and the modern, stone cells with chains, and sinister operating rooms with refrigerated aluminum morgue trays for the bodies. People attempting to recover the remains of loved ones murdered by Saddam’s security forces often had to pay for the bullets used to murder them. Filkins believes that much of the brutality that haunted Iraq after the American liberation was rooted in the social and psychic dislocation produced by decades of depraved tyranny. Instead of politics, Filkins charts the vagaries of the human soul under stress, his own and others. While aware of the larger forces at work in the history that he covered, he is chiefly concerned with the individual, with the personal. The genre in which he writes demands introspection; Filkins’s real gift, one that makes The Forever War a truly outstanding work, is his capacity to empathize with the Afghans, Iraqis, and Americans he encounters. Again and again, readers are presented with unforgettable evocations of people caught up on all levels of an intractable war. Filkins met many leaders, among them Ahmad Shah Massoud, the charismatic leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, murdered by al-Qaeda just days before 9/11; Colonel Nathan Sassaman, an aggressive American commander in Iraq; and Ahmad Chalabi, the enigmatic Shiite politician who played a key role in encouraging the American government to overthrow Saddam. The portraits he paints of these different men are subtle and nuanced, when it would be easy to fall into caricature. However, Filkins’s heart belongs to the other ranks, the ordinary men and women living with the consequences of their leaders’ decisions. He writes movingly of the Afghan and Iraqi interpreters who saved his life on more than one occasion, risking their own in an uneasy attempt to find an accommodation between East and West in a war zone. At the moral center of the book is an incident that occurred when Filkins and photographer Ashley Gilbertson were embedded with the Marines during the second battle of Falluja in November, 2004. After heavy fighting that saw nearly a quarter of the company that they were with become casualties, Filkins and Gilbertson had seen few dead insurgents. Gilbertson needed a photograph of a dead insurgent for his newspaper. He and Filkins asked their companions if they could backtrack and photograph a corpse that had been found at the top of a minaret. The Marines agreed and protectively took the lead up the tower. As they neared the top of the stairway, the Marine in front was shot and killed. The Americans suddenly found themselves in an ambush. They fought their way out, but Lance Corporal William L. Miller had died for a picture. Feeling guilty for being the occasion of their son’s death, Filkins visited Miller’s parents twice. Instead of attacking him, they thanked him for letting them know how their son died. The book ends with Filkins waving to them on the ramp to an interstate. It is a final note of grace in a compelling personal history. Daniel P. Murphy

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Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 22 (August 1, 2008): 28. Commentary 126 (October, 2008): 42-45. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 14 (July 15, 2008): 61. The Nation 287, no. 14 (November 3, 2008): 25-30. The National Interest, no. 97 (September/October, 2008): 87-96. National Review 60, no. 21 (November 17, 2008): 55-56. The New York Times, September 12, 2008, p. 34. The New York Times Book Review, September 14, 2008, p. 1. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 26 (June 30, 2008): 15. Washington Monthly 40, no. 9 (August-October, 2008): 40-42.

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FOUNDING FAITH Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America Author: Steven Waldman (1962) Publisher: Random House (New York). 304 pp. $26.00 Type of work: History, religion Time: 1776-1823 Locale: Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Virginia An examination of the Founding Fathers’ relationship to their faiths and the growth of religious tolerance in the United States Principal personages: George Washington, commander of the Continental Army during the American Revolution and first president of the United States Benjamin Franklin, publisher, inventor, ambassador to France, and delegate to the Constitutional Convention John Adams, second president of the United States Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States James Madison, the moving force behind the Constitutional Convention and fourth president of the United States

One of the most informative accounts of early American life comes from Peter Kalm, a Swedish naturalist passing through the northern colonies in the late 1740’s. Upon reaching Albany, in the colony of New York, he was struck by the friction between the townspeople and the British, whose garrison was substantive proof of their imperial rule. The inhabitants, whose dress and speech among the troops reflected British tastes, remained fiercely loyal to their Dutch roots. Although the colony had belonged to the British crown for more than fifty years, the citizens of Albany were only nominal subjects of the king: They hated the British—whom they regarded as an occupying force—and preferred to speak among themselves the language of their Dutch ancestors. That would seem to reinforce the notion of rebellion in its embryonic state, a people who would revolt against their perceived oppressors in less than thirty years; however, Kalm also noted that they had equal contempt for their colonial neighbors, that “Albanians” had no difficulty in bartering for silver that bore the names of their murdered New England neighbors. This small observation about America’s colonial past underscores some salient features of the American character—a keen distrust of a distant central authority and a fierce determination to retain one’s belief system. To phrase it in more basic terms, one of the difficulties that faced the post-Revolution leadership was the tension between the national government and the centrifugal effect of thirteen culturally distinct colonies.

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Never was this more evident than in the is sue of religion, the subject of Steven Waldman’s Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America. The book largely focuses upon the treatment of the issue at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 through the early nineteenth century. The structure of Waldman’s book is solid and workmanlike. He prefaces his discussion of religion in the early republic with brief profiles of the men who set the pattern for religious tolerance in the new nation, the Founding Fathers. Like a good playwright, Formerly a correspondent for Waldman provides a brief synopsis of each of Newsweek and an editor of U.S. News the main characters, which functions as a kind & World Report, Steven Waldman of dramatis personae for his restaging of one currently edits the largest Web site of history’s key moments. While some may devoted to spirituality and faith, question the necessity of reprising such well- Beliefnet.com. His writings include a known careers, this approach is central to book about the legislative process that Waldman’s goal of correcting what he per- resulted in AmeriCorps, The Bill ceives to be current misconceptions regarding (1995), and numerous articles in the religious views of the Founders. While National Review, Slate, The Atlantic evangelists often paint the Founders as ex- Monthly, The New York Times, The tremely religious in order to advance their Washington Post, and Washington Monthly. own agenda of employing government to pro mote faith, advocates of separation of church and state tend to claim that these leaders were Deists—people who felt that God created the universe but did not intervene in human affairs. This is probably the least satisfying segment of a book that makes a profoundly original contribution to the subject of religious tolerance. It is due, in part, to the fact that a précis of any aspect of a person’s life cannot fully capture the nuances and subtle shifts of that most intimate of subjects, one’s belief system. These men led public lives, and as such even their most private correspondence would certainly have been written with a good deal of restraint. Thus, while it is instructive to learn that George Washington believed that God protected him from injury during battle, this is a common conceit among soldiers in all wars. Perhaps more telling was the fact that this Anglican “never kneeled” in church and “did not generally take communion.” These significant omissions suggest a pro forma acceptance of a public necessity rather than an affirmation of faith. The book’s discussion of the Founders’ personal beliefs is even more problematic when it deals with Benjamin Franklin. Waldman is on solid ground when describing Franklin’s seismic shift away from the harsh Calvinism of his native Boston, a Protestant sect that affirmed that those who will be saved on the Day of Judgment have already been chosen by God. Good works count for nothing. As anyone who is

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familiar with the inventor’s life knows, much of Franklin’s later career was devoted to those very acts so haughtily dismissed by his Puritan forebears. Waldman is also accurate in his conclusion that Franklin’s “true faith was religious pluralism,” but what eludes the author is the essentially utilitarian nature of Franklin’s character. The subject of religion receives scant attention in Franklin’s autobiography. While Waldman acknowledges the fact that Franklin tinkered with formal religion in order to shape it more to his liking, he seems to miss the ironic nature of the autobiography toward religion. When Franklin grows irritated by what he perceives to be the inefficiency of formal religion, his attempts to fashion one of his own come across as parody. Of the Founding Fathers profiled in Waldman’s book, it is Thomas Jefferson who appears to have made the most determined attempts to retain the essence of the teachings of Jesus—whom he did not consider divine—in the form of selected passages as moral precepts. The common thread that emerges from Waldman’s well-researched synopses is a belief that formal religion is necessary insofar as it contributes to the public good. With the formal conclusion of hostilities between Britain and its former American colonies in 1783, the Founders were compelled to grapple with the problem of religion in the new nation. As delegates assembled in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention of 1787, they confronted the dilemma of how to foster religion—which they held necessary for promoting virtue—and what role the government would play in that. While most Americans today tend to accept the notion of a distinct separation between the state and the beliefs of the governed, Waldman’s text demonstrates just how revolutionary this concept was in the late eighteenth century. Even in the Age of Reason, religion was tightly regulated by the state, with monarchs such as Britain’s George III as the titular leader of the church. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that the thirteen colonies’ distinct regional differences were reflected in their differing religious preferences. In Southern states such as Virginia, the Anglican faith was dominant; a Northern neighbor, Massachusetts, trumpeted Congregationalism. If for no other reason, Waldman’s book is to be praised for the skill with which he dispels the myth that Americans always supported religious freedom. Quakers, Baptists, Catholics, and Jews were openly harassed with the endorsement of the legal system. As Founding Faith makes clear, the new nation was not without an alternative model. As the leader of the Continental Army during the American Revolution, Washington had to create an effective fighting force despite the regional differences of its members. By quelling anti-Catholic sentiments within the army’s ranks, he sought to win more adherents to the cause. Tolerance of this particular sect was practiced not only to retain those already in the army and to win recruits from Canada but also to gain material support from France. Acceptance of other sects within the ranks such as Unitarians, Lutherans, and Calvinists was also part of a concerted plan to lure Hessian mercenaries from the British army. While that most inspiring affirmation of freedom—the Declaration of Independence—speaks eloquently of the need for liberty, it makes no mention of religious freedom. This is not surprising, given the fact that this was more of a mission statement than a legal document. It was in drafting the Constitution, the actual blueprint

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for governing the nation, that the Founders were compelled to address the role of religion in the new nation. Waldman’s crisp text carefully follows the evolving treatment of the issue throughout the convention. Although a ban on laws regarding religion failed to pass, a prohibition of religious tests for public office did. He convincingly argues that this was a radical move for its time, inasmuch as eleven states did require such tests. Whatever path the new government would eventually take, Waldman emphasizes the framers’ concerted efforts to avoid promoting particular faiths. Waldman’s impressive research allows him to stand on firm ground as he contrasts what he contends are oversimplifications by today’s conservative and liberal elements with their counterparts at the convention. The Constitution has always been something of an ideological battleground, with various factions arguing their points of view from both the written text as well as what they claim was implied by the Founders. However, unlike their modern counterparts, evangelists in 1787 wanted a separation of church and state in order to prevent persecution. To anyone who has not read the Constitution in its entirety, it may come as something as a shock to learn that the document makes no mention of God. While the Declaration of Independence contends that the people are “endowed” with rights “by their creator,” the Constitution focuses on the notion of power coming from the people. If the Founders were as religious as the book asserts, why did they create this deistic void? Modern conservatives focus on what they contend is implied by the Constitution, homing in on traditional religious values. Liberals, on the other hand, hold that this deistic absence proves that the Founders saw no role for religion in the new nation. Waldman walks a middle ground between these extremes on the ideological spectrum: While the Founders held that religion was important, they believed that the best way to promote religion was for the federal government to maintain a hands-off approach. As the book repeatedly states, the language of the Constitution is deliberately vague because it was the product of a series of compromises. Even the Bill of Rights, which was instituted in order to win passage of the Constitution, only prohibits Congress from passing legislation that would establish an official religion or limit the freedom of religion. Incredibly, the Founders were concerned only with the role of religion and its relationship with the national government. They reasoned that if the federal government kept aloof, religion would flourish on its own, and history has validated that stance. The individual states were free to act on their own in this regard, with the result that “official” state-supported religions did not end until 1833, and strict separation of religion and government at all levels did not occur until the passage of the 14th Amendment after the Civil War. Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America proves that the separation of church and state is a concept that evolved over time, an eloquent testament to the wisdom of the nation’s Founders. Cliff Prewencki

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Review Sources The American Spectator 41, no. 10 (December, 2008-January, 2009): 91-94. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 2 (January 15, 2008): 85. Library Journal 133, no. 3 (February 15, 2008): 110. The Nation 286, no. 22 (June 9, 2008): 42-48. The New York Times Book Review, April 13, 2008, p. 22. Newsweek 151, no. 11 (March 17, 2008): 63. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 4 (January 28, 2008): 59.

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FRANCO AND HITLER Spain, Germany, and World War II Author: Stanley G. Payne (1934) Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). 328 pp. $30.00 Type of work: History Payne, an authority on European fascism and the history of modern Spain, debunks conventional wisdom about Spanish neutrality during World War II, documenting Francisco Franco’s admiration for Adolf Hitler, Spain’s alliance with the Third Reich, and its ambivalence toward Jews facing Nazi annihilation Principal personages: General Francisco Franco (1892-1975), the dictator of Spain Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), chancellor of Nazi Germany

Stanley G. Payne’s study of Spain during World War II belongs to the myth-busting genre of historical writing. The first myth it dispels, ironically, involves the book’s title, Franco and Hitler, which is misleading insofar as it implies a close personal relationship between General Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator, and Adolf Hitler, the chancellor of Nazi Germany. Payne’s subtitle, Spain, Germany, and World War II, more accurately identifies his book’s contents. Franco and Hitler met only once. Their encounter took place on October 23, 1940, at Hendaye, a town on the Spanish border in southwestern Nazi-occupied France. Payne calls that meeting “perhaps the most mythified event” of Franco’s lengthy political career. This myth held that Franco kept Hitler waiting, outtalked him, and frustrated the führer by keeping Spain out of World War II and preserving Spanish neutrality. In fact, Franco’s tardy arrival resulted not from political calculation but from the decrepit Spanish railroad’s inability to get him there on time. Franco did talk at length, but what he said scarcely indicated neutrality. Franco thanked Hitler for all that Nazi Germany had done to support Spain, and he also affirmed Spain’s intention to be Germany’s military partner. In the autumn of 1940, Hitler wanted such cooperation from Spain, hoping that it would facilitate the conquest of Gibraltar and help to block the British while Nazi Germany prepared to invade the Soviet Union. Franco, however, was cautious, for he wanted to ensure terms of engagement with Nazi Germany that would best serve Spain’s interests, including its territorial ambitions in North Africa and the economic and military aid that Spain sorely needed. Hitler left Hendaye thinking he had what he wanted at the time, a Spanish pledge to join Nazi Germany’s war effort. As World War II progressed and eventually turned against the Third Reich, Hitler would reconsider the desirability of direct Spanish

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military efforts because Franco’s ill-equipped forces required more German support than their combat was worth. Meanwhile, Franco left Hendaye uneasy about Hitler’s inattention to the Spanish concerns that remained foremost on Franco’s mind. The result was a German-Spanish wartime relationship that remained in flux, maintained not by Franco and Hitler directly, apart from periodic correspondence between them, but primarily by the in teraction and intrigue among their diplomatic surrogates. Though in flux, Spain’s support for and dependence upon Nazi Germany did not amount to Spanish neutrality, at least not until Nazi Germany’s complete defeat was undeniable. Payne makes his case with a detailed analysis that begins with the dismantling of other myths, some of them surrounding the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), which enabled Franco to approach the heights of his long-lasting power. In particular, Payne resists the oversimplification that this struggle pitted democracy against fascism. With the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in April, 1931, a democratic breakthrough did take place in Spain, but Payne argues that the regime failed to meet rising economic expectations. Soon increasingly nondemocratic factions on the left and right vied for control. A right-wing military revolt in the summer of 1936 led, in Payne’s words, to “an intense civil war of the most violent and atrocious kind.” Supported by Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) and the Soviet Union, as well as by American and European volunteers in the left-wing International Brigades, the Republican forces battled the insurgent Nacionales (Nationalists) who, with help from Hitler and Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), the Italian fascist leader, announced victory on April 1, 1939. Nationalist control of Spain included bloodthirsty repression, which, according to Payne, resulted in 28,000 to 30,000 executions. Notable for his valor and leadership during earlier colonial combat in Morocco, Franco had loyally served the Second Republic until 1936 when its leftist leaders deposed him as chief of the general staff. Still the Spanish military’s most prominent officer, Franco was the obvious choice when the nationalist junta sought the military leadership required for successful advances against Republican strongholds. Franco had early contact with the rebel leadership but was not at first in the junta’s vanguard. By the civil war’s end, however, he would enjoy more power than any previous Spanish ruler, directing Spain’s destiny for forty years. Spain went through varied phases during those decades, but Payne criticizes the allegation that changing circumstances showed Franco’s lack of persistent convictions. Spanish nationalism and imperialism, authoritarian rule, Catholic hegemony, social conservatism, anticommunism, and economic strategies that favored Spanish corporate interests—these dominant ingredients emerged early and remained late in Franco’s worldview. Even before the civil war ended, Franco had become the caudillo, the closest Span-

Stanley G. Payne is Hilldale-Jaume Vicens Vives Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he began teaching in 1968. He is the author of more than fifteen books that focus on modern Spanish history and fascism, as well as many articles and book chapters on those topics.

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ish equivalent to führer or duce, as Hitler and Mussolini, respectively, were called. The caudillo’s version of fascism, accompanied by the chant of “Franco, Franco, Franco,” tilted him toward the Axis powers, Germany and Italy, although it never embraced Hitler’s anti-Semitic racism and was more resolutely Catholic than Mussolini’s regime. By the time that World War II began, with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Spanish law “permanently entrusted” governing power to Franco. “In formal juridical terms,” Payne asserts, the Spanish state, while allowing “a limited semi-pluralism,” had become “the most thoroughgoing personal dictatorship in Europe.” Franco’s state political party was the Falange Española Tradicionalista (FET), the broad rightist coalition he forged, that included but was not controlled by the most extreme Spanish fascists. Franco benefited from their support as well as from FET’s loyalty, but he remained wary of partisan initiatives when they conflicted with what the caudillo determined was best for Spain. Nevertheless, Payne contends, Franco and the FET shared the basic conviction that Spain should be closely linked to Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, in the early autumn of 1939, Mussolini strongly supported Hitler but was not yet ready to enter the European war that the führer had started. Therefore, Mussolini created a concept, nonbelligerence, to identify Italy’s status. This idea differed from neutrality in at least two ways. First, nonbelligerence had no standing in international law. Second, as Payne points out, “nonbelligerence was not in any way a form of neutrality, but rather a repudiation of neutrality in favor of a special status of pre-belligerency.” Seizing Mussolini’s idea, Spain officially embraced nonbelligerence, not neutrality, on June 12, 1940, clearly signaling its intention to side actively with the Axis powers and Nazi Germany in particular. Only the tides of war—coupled with economic and military weakness, Franco’s insistence that Spain’s commitment of troops would have to be well repaid, and pressure from Great Britain and the United States—kept most Spanish troops on the sidelines during World War II. Spain’s primary contributions to Hitler’s war effort consisted of supplying natural resources—especially much-needed tungsten—in support of the German navy and providing a safe haven for Nazi intelligence gathering. In at least one significant way, however, the Spanish military fought fiercely on Hitler’s side. On June 22, 1941, Hitler broke his nonaggression agreement with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. The Spanish government, which tended to identify “its own battle in the Civil War with the military initiatives of Germany,” Payne says, responded enthusiastically. Hitler’s advance seemed sure to destroy the Soviet Union and communist ideology itself, thus completing a process whose first blows had been struck in the period 1936-1939 by the Nationalist victory against Soviet-backed communism. Franco himself hailed the German invasion, although he was less enamored when pro-German pressure mounted to send Spanish troops to support Hitler on the new eastern front. The caudillo, however, did not stop the formation of a volunteer unit, which, taking its name from the color of the Falangists’ uniform shirt, came to be known as the Blue Division. According to Payne, Franco and other leaders in his regime “interpreted the inter-

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vention of the Blue Division as Spain’s contribution to a broader conflict, the European resistance to Soviet communism, a common European enterprise of which the Spanish Civil War marked an earlier high point.” In any case, the Blue Division, its members totaling about forty-five thousand, fought for Hitler in the war’s most lethal campaigns. The division’s casualties included as many as 4,900 dead and 8,700 wounded. Hitler’s evaluation of the Spaniards’ performance was so favorable, Payne reports, that “he had a special medal created to award its members, something that he did for no other foreign unit.” Although the division was formally disbanded in October, 1943, as the war turned increasingly against Nazi Germany, more than two thousand of its members still stood with their German comrades. “The Blue Division,” Payne summarizes, “marked the height of Spanish collaboration in the German war effort.” As some members of the Blue Division returned to Spain, they brought disturbing reports about German mass murder of Jews. Spanish diplomats, especially those in the Berlin embassy, became increasingly aware that Nazi Germany had pronounced a death sentence on Europe’s Jews. Contrary to favorable reports that have circulated about the Franco regime’s benevolent policies toward European Jewry during World War II, Payne contends that “a fair conclusion would be that Spanish policy discriminated against Jews less than did that of most European countries, but there was no plan to especially favor or assist them, except with regard to Sephardim [formerly Spanish Jews] who could claim citizenship rights.” As noted, Franco’s Spain was not racially anti-Semitic, but anti-Semitism was by no means absent. Spain’s wartime policy was to be stingy with entrance visas for Jewish refugees but more generous with transit papers, which would enable Jews to pass through the country. Some claims hold that as many as seventy thousand Jewish refugees found safety in Spain, at least temporarily. Payne’s research finds that figure exaggerated; a number between twenty thousand and thirty-five thousand is more likely. The diplomat Angel Sanz Briz, assisted by an Italian named Giorgio Perlasca, stands out as the greatest Spanish rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust. In 1980 Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, honored him as one of the “Righteous among the Nations.” Stationed in Budapest during the autumn and winter of 19441945, Sanz Briz, writes Payne, “managed to protect about 2,300 Jews in Hungary, while issuing transit visas to between five hundred and twelve hundred others who were able to escape abroad.” Payne adds that Sanz Briz “might have accomplished even more had he received greater assistance from Madrid.” Payne minces no words in summing up his demythologizing of the Franco regime’s Jewish policies during World War II: “There was no concern for Jews in general, save in the final phase in Budapest. . . . Spanish policy was so dilatory and sometimes contradictory as to border on indifference.” By May, 1944, Spain no longer tilted toward Nazi Germany. Instead, Franco’s Spain sought to gain favor with the Allies. During the decades of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West that ensued after 1945, Franco’s anticommunist regime enjoyed a considerable amount of that favor, but in Payne’s judgment, “the 1940’s were to a large extent a lost decade for Spain.” Payne’s book appro-

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priately drives final nails into that coffin by demonstrating that the “neutrality” of Spain during World War II must go down in history as a myth that has been justly debunked. John K. Roth

Review Sources Journal of Military History 72, no. 4 (October, 2008): 1320-1322. World War II 23, no. 2 (June/July, 2008): 75-76.

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A FREEWHEELIN’ TIME A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties Author: Suze Rotolo (1943) Publisher: Broadway Books (New York). 371 pp. $22.95 Type of work: Memoir Time: Primarily 1961-1966 Locale: Primarily Greenwich Village, New York City; also Italy, Cuba, and England A touching memoir of Greenwich Village during the 1960’s through the eyes of Bob Dylan’s girlfriend at the time Principal personages: Suze Rotolo, a young activist and artist who became involved with Bob Dylan during the early 1960’s Carla Rotolo, her older sister Gioachino Pietro “Pete” Rotolo, her father, who was a labor organizer Mary Pezzati Rotolo, her mother Woody Guthrie, a legendary American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, a talented singer-songwriter who would change the face of popular music Dave Van Ronk, a well-respected folk singer and close friend of Rotolo and Dylan

In a relaxed, conversational writing style, Suze Rotolo, in A Freewheelin’ Time, reminisces about her place in the history of the turbulent 1960’s and her part in the Bob Dylan saga. The vibrant Rotolo was Dylan’s girlfriend after his move to New York City. Born in the borough of Queens, New York City, in 1943, she was the daughter of radical parents, and she became famous for being pictured with Dylan on the cover of his groundbreaking 1963 album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Some of Dylan’s early landmark songs are found on this album, including “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and “Masters of War.” Rotolo was surprised to find that the photograph of them as a couple was ultimately used for the cover. Their relationship began as two people who inspired each other. Unfortunately, Dylan became a larger-than-life figure, impossible to deal with. Rotolo had “trouble talking or reminiscing about the 1960’s” because of Dylan, stating that he was “an elephant in the room of my life.” When they first met, she was seventeen and Dylan was twenty. He had come to New York to work on his music and to meet the legendary American singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie. While this memoir is most certainly the story of Rotolo and Dylan, it is also a love story about place and time. Greenwich Village of the early 1960’s was where creative people from all over found their way

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and where artists, poets, and musicians would meet and share ideas. It was in this mix that Over the years, Suze Rotolo has been active in many social causes, including Rotolo and Dylan lived. Over the years, the legend of Dylan has the Civil Rights movement during the grown, supported by increasing numbers of 1960’s. She is an artist and teacher books, articles, and films. Scholars, journal- who makes her home in New York City ists, and those who were there have tried to with her family. A Freewheelin’ Time give the public an accurate picture of Dylan— is her first book. who he was, who he is, and who he wanted to be. Rotolo remained silent for many decades about the early 1960’s and her relationship with Dylan because, as a private person, she did not want to get into a literary shouting match with others about where reality ends and fantasy begins. In A Freewheelin’ Time, she tells her side of the story, on her terms. This is not a tell-all, with bombshell moments that will leave the reader gasping. For the most part, it is a respectful sojourn down memory lane, with no bitterness or vindictiveness. Rotolo states early in the memoir: “Secrets remain. Their traces go deep, and with all due respect I keep them with my own. The only claim I make for writing this memoir of that time is that it may not be factual, but it is true.” For some readers this disclaimer may not be enough. Certainly some who thirst for Dylan souvenirs will not be satisfied with her “truth.” In that regard, Rotolo may find herself in a no-win situation. She must have decided that this memoir was not for the fanatical fans or even the archaeologists of all things Dylanesque. The story told, as she emphatically states, “is mine.” In their years together, Dylan and Rotolo believed that they could be a force for change. While both were “sensitive” souls, Dylan also was “tough and focused” and possessed a “healthy ego.” As Rotolo recounts, these qualities helped to make him a successful artist. Upon arrival at Greenwich Village, Dylan entered the folk music scene, and Rotolo first saw him perform at Gerde’s Folk City. At this Village venue, Dylan played harmonica with several musicians, worked in a duo with fellow folksinger Mark Spoelstra, and performed solo. During this period, the young Dylan was in the process of establishing his identity as an artist, as a “rambling troubadour, in the Guthrie mode.” While numerous books and articles have been written about the Village and about Dylan, this memoir is unique for its female voice. A few women close to Dylan have written about their relationship with him. Joan Baez, who has written two autobiographies, did not dwell on her relationship with Dylan in either one. It is possible to recommend several books that delve into the evolution of Dylan, including Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (1986), Tim Riley’s Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary (1992), Clinton Heylin’s Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades (1991) and Bob Dylan: A Life in Stolen Moments—Day by Day, 1941-1995 (1996), Howard Sournes’s Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan (2001), Robert Santelli’s The Bob Dylan Scrapbook, 1956-1966 (2005), and Dylan’s own memoir, Chronicles (2004). With so much already available about Dylan for public consumption, a reader may approach with some trepidation anything

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new published about the early 1960’s and about the singer. Since Rotolo has remained silent about those heady days, her memoir does provide a fresh perspective from a person who can fill in some of the colors on a portrait of a man who became an iconic figure in music. While the reader may open this memoir in order to learn more about Dylan, it is the story of a young girl from Queens who struggles to find her identity that holds most of the fascination in the book. In a real sense, the main character of the story is New York City’s Greenwich Village, a magnet that drew those who had dreams of changing the world and changing themselves and where they could be exposed to “the crossfertilization of different styles.” While Rotolo was referring to Gerde’s in that statement, to a large degree it applies to the whole Village scene. It was not only music that was expanding but also art, social causes, political issues, and cultural concerns. It was literally a “freewheelin’ time” when change seemed to be in the water. In addition to the music figures, Rotolo introduces the reader to an assortment of fascinating characters, including club owners, friends, and relatives. She was considered a “red-diaper” baby since her parents were members of the American Communist Party. Her father, Gioachino Pietro “Pete” Rotolo, came to the United States from Sicily in 1914 at the age of two. Although a talented artist, he was unable to support his family as a painter, so he became a factory worker and eventually a union organizer. In this family milieu, Rotolo learned to be socially aware. Both of her parents had been “radicalized” by the anti-immigrant attitude that they first witnessed during the 1920’s. Growing up in Queens during the 1950’s, Rotolo felt like an outcast, and she took refuge in literature. Tragically, her father died in 1958. His sudden death was extremely upsetting, and she describes the shock as “a trauma” that created “a freeze frame.” The death of her father became her “yardstick” by which all tragedies would be measured. She graduated from high school in 1960. Most of the children who would be considered “red-diaper” babies were “raised on Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Pete Seeger.” Raised in an environment that considered social activism an essential ingredient of a person’s consciousness, Rotolo grew up “working class, bohemian, and schooled by my Marxist parents in equality for all.” She writes with tenderness about how devastated her mother was by the death of her husband. By the age of forty-seven, she had been widowed twice and “survived breast cancer.” The reader senses the heartbreak and perseverance of the Italian immigrant family. Making the most of what America had to offer was not always easy, and it was necessary for Rotolo to work several odd jobs. At the same time, she was involved with the Civil Rights movement. It was in this environment that she first met Dylan in July, 1961. She describes him as looking “oddly old-time” and “charming in a scraggly way.” There was something about him that reminded her of “Harpo Marx, impish and approachable.” However, she observed “something about him that broadcast an intensity that was not to be taken lightly.” For the next four years, these two would become well acquainted, with Rotolo finding him “funny, engaging, intense, and he was persistent.” For the author, “[t]hese words completely describe who he was throughout the time we were together; only the order of the words would shift depending on mood or circumstance.”

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According to Rotolo, she and Dylan had much in common, “including a mutual need for a comfortable place away from the chaos of life.” Each provided a “safe haven” for the other. Nevertheless, the author also learned about how “evasive and secretive” Dylan could be, even with her. They began living together in the Village after Rotolo turned eighteen. Although he was a master storyteller, he was also a great weaver of myths, and over time his vagueness and his unwillingness to tell the truth about himself grated on Rotolo and created a divide between them. She was hurt that he had not even told her that his birth name was Robert Allen Zimmerman. When she accidentally viewed his draft card, that truth was revealed. While it was a struggle, she remained loyal to Dylan and his attempt to re-create himself. His persistence soon paid off, and he became a leading folksinger on the frothy music scene that included such performers as Dave Van Ronk, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Odetta, Judy Collins, José Feliciano, and many more. There was much bubbling on many creative fronts in the Village, and Rotolo uses a light hand to introduce the reader to her world. She does not overanalyze it, saying that there “were so many talented people who practiced their art form and sharpened their skills” during this amazing point of time. Some of these “talented people” made a name for themselves, while others “burned out and lost their way.” Dylan finally transformed himself into the mythical figure that he so yearned to be. Along the way, some had to step out of the shadows of this myth, and in A Freewheelin’ Time, Rotolo shows how she charted a different course. Jeffry Jensen

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 16 (April 15, 2008): 16. Interview 38, no. 3 (April, 2008): 92. Library Journal 133, no. 6 (April 1, 2008): 85-86. Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2008, p. E10. The New York Times Book Review, September 7, 2008, p. 16. The Observer, September 21, 2008, p. 26. People 69, no. 19 (May 19, 2008): 60. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 6 (February 11, 2008): 57.

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FRIENDS OF LIBERTY Thomas Jefferson, Tadeuscz Kokciuszko, and Agrippa Hull— A Tale of Three Patriots, Two Revolutions, and a Tragic Betrayal of Freedom in the New Nation Authors: Gary B. Nash (1933) and Graham Russell Gao Hodges (1946) Publisher: Basic Books (New York). 328 pp. $26.00 Type of work: History, biography Time: The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Locale: The American colonies and the United States The authors examine Kokciuszko’s relationships with Jefferson and Hull, focusing on their ideas and actions regarding slavery in the early American republic, with Hull’s life providing a fascinating example of the black experience in those years Principal personages: Thomas Jefferson (1743-1846), president of the United States, 1801-1809 Tadeuscz Kokciuszko (1746-1817), Revolutionary War officer, Polish patriot Agrippa Hull (1759-1848), African American Revolutionary War soldier who served as Kokciuszko’s orderly

In their book Friends of Liberty, Gary Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges use the life experience of three men to illuminate the thorny issues of slavery and race relations in the early years of the American Republic. Thomas Jefferson is familiar to all. Tadeuscz (Thaddeus) Kokciuszko is likely to be recognized only by those of Polish descent, although his bravery and devotion to freedom in the American Revolution and the 1794 Polish insurrection deserve to be celebrated. Few have heard of Agrippa Hull, whose life history has only recently been discovered and has proved important enough to be included, along with presidents and millionaires, in the magisterial twenty-four-volume American National Biography (1999). Hull is not really part of a triumvirate; he was Kokciuszko’s orderly during the war, and there is no evidence he ever spoke to Jefferson. However, his biography will prove fascinating to readers for what it reveals about African American life in rural Massachusetts during Revolutionary and early America. Hull, who claimed he was the son of an African prince, was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, March 7, 1759, to free African American parents who were members of the Congregational Church, having been admitted when theologian Jonathan Edwards was minister. Although Massachusetts did not specifically approve recruiting African Americans until April, 1778, Hull volunteered on May 1, 1777, when word spread that the British army, led by General John Burgoyne, was moving south from

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Quebec. He was assigned as orderly to Colonel John Patterson, leader of the Berkshire County Gary B. Nash is professor emeritus of regiment, and later commanding general at history at the University of California, Saratoga. Hull was present at Burgoyne’s sur- Los Angeles, and the author of two render at Saratoga, a scene he proudly de- dozen books dealing with early scribed to the youth of Stockbridge for the American history and the history of African Americans. He was president of rest of his life. Kokciuszko, a younger son of not very the Organization of American Historians in 1994-1995. Graham prosperous minor Polish nobility who lived off Russell Gao Hodges is George Dorland the labor of their serfs, turned to the military Langdon, Jr., Professor of History at for a career. After graduating from the Royal Colgate University and author of Root Military Academy, he was sent to France in and Branch: African Americans in New 1768 to study military engineering. Strongly York and East Jersey, 1613-1863 influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Kok- (1999). ciuszko openly criticized serfdom and slav ery, and he became a deist. A failed love affair led to his departure from Poland in 1775. The following year Kokciuszko decided to join the American Revolution, and in October he received a colonel’s commission as an engineering officer charged with building fortifications. Nash and Hodges would like to date Kokciuszko’s friendship with Jefferson to 1776, but the best they can assert is that the two might have met while Kokciuszko was in Philadelphia, although there is no record of any encounter until much later. The authors note that Jefferson, despite being a substantial slave owner, strongly supported antislavery positions in his Declaration of Independence and in his draft constitution for Virginia, which banned further importation of slaves, which he expected would cause the institution to wither. When serving on a committee to revise the laws of Virginia, Jefferson tried and failed to include a provision freeing at age twenty-one all slaves born after passage of the law. As the book progresses, the authors contrast Jefferson’s early statements with his failure to free his own slaves. During the Saratoga campaign, Hull met Kokciuszko, the military engineer responsible for building the defenses at Bemis Hill that stopped Burgoyne. When Patterson and Kokciuszko were charged with fortifying and defending West Point, Hull went with them. After serving as Patterson’s orderly for two years, he switched to Kokciuszko in May, 1779, for the next fifty months. A favorite Hull anecdote concerned the time at West Point when Kokciuszko returned unexpectedly to find Hull dressed in the colonel’s uniform, leading a lively party of enlisted men; to Hull’s relief, Kokciuszko was amused and joined the festivities. When Kokciuszko went south to serve with American forces there, Hull accompanied him. His experiences as a surgeon’s assistant after the 1781 Battle of Eutaw Springs provided Hull with grisly anecdotes of holding down wounded soldiers while doctors operated without benefit of anesthesia. Hull was mustered out of service at West Point on July 23, 1783, his treasured honorable discharge signed by George Washington. Hull worked odd jobs and served as

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occasional butler for Theodore Sedgwick. Lawyer Sedgwick successfully defended an African American woman against attempts by her former owner to claim her services, asserting that she had been freed by the newly enacted Massachusetts constitution, which effectively ended slavery in the state. Hull and his new wife moved with Sedgwick to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where Hull bought a half-acre of land in 1784. He continued to acquire land, and by 1792 he owned about eleven acres, sufficient to meet the property requirement for voting in Massachusetts. Exactly how Hull managed to save the funds for the purchases at a time when many white veterans were unable to afford buying land is unclear. Memoirs of Stockbridge residents and visitors such as Francis Parkman describe Hull as a respected citizen of the town. His wartime anecdotes made him a favorite of young boys; no wedding was complete without the presence of the African American patriarch. Hull slowly increased his property holdings. He was always first among black families on Stockbridge’s assessment rolls, ranking above one-third of white property owners. When Hull died on May 21, 1848, he left his wife and children a home lot and house, twenty-eight acres of land, and personal property worth $167.50. In 1783 Congress promised Kokciuszko a five-hundred-acre tract in the Northwest Territory and agreed to reimburse his back pay of $12,280, with interest, when it had money. Kokciuszko returned to Poland in September, 1784, for the next four years acting as a small Polish landlord, living off the labor of his serfs. When reform movements stimulated by the American and French revolutions shook Poland, Kokciuszko was called to service in 1789 and commissioned a major general. His delaying actions when the Russian army invaded Poland in 1792 made Kokciuszko a national hero, even though he could not prevent the Russians from occupying the country. After failing to interest French revolutionaries in helping Poland, Kokciuszko returned to his country in March, 1794, calling for an insurrection against the occupiers and assuming the role of army commander-in-chief. In April Kokciuszko’s forces defeated a numerically and technically superior Russian army near Kraków, but the combined Russian and Prussian forces were too much for Kokciuszko, whose army lost to them in June. He was badly wounded, captured, and confined to a St. Peterburg prison. Polish historians note that Kokciuszko’s May 7, 1794, proclamation partially abolishing serfdom and granting civil liberties to peasants was the first time in Polish history that peasants were officially regarded as part of the nation, a status previously reserved for nobility. After Czar Paul succeeded Catherine the Great in 1796, he freed Kokciuszko, granting him an estate with fifteen hundred peasants attached to the land. Despite his detestation of serfdom, Kokciuszko could not refuse the gift without insulting the czar. He placed his sisters in charge of land and serfs and departed for the United States, arriving in Philadelphia to a hero’s welcome on August 17, 1797. Kokciuszko slowly recovered from his wounds, which had festered during his imprisonment. Congress issued him a land warrant for five hundred acres in Ohio and awarded him back pay for service during the Revolutionary War that, with interest, amounted to $18,912. Kokciuszko and Vice President Thomas Jefferson were united by their favorable

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view of the French Revolution. When Kokciuszko wanted to return secretly to Europe to try to convince the French to help free Poland, Jefferson arranged for him to get an American passport under a false name. Jefferson helped Kokciuszko draft a will regarding the money he planned to leave in the United States and agreed to act as executor of the will, which directed him to use funds remaining at Kokciuszko’s death to free as many slaves, either his own or those of other owners, as the money would cover, to educate them and to establish the freemen on their own land. The main thrust of Nash and Hodges’s book (which is the substance of the subtitle’s claim of a “tragic betrayal”) is their condemnation of Jefferson for failing to carry out Kokciuszko’s intentions. Readers need to turn to volume two of Miecislaus Haiman’s biography of Kokciuszko to discover how scrupulously Jefferson and his private banker, who invested the money in bank shares and Treasury bonds, carried out their fiduciary duties. The approximately twelve thousand dollars Kokciuszko left in their care regularly produced about a thousand dollars a year in interest, which a Baltimore merchant agreed to transmit without charge. This money was Kokciuszko’s main support during the rest of his life, successfully reaching him in Europe despite the disruptions of the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. At his death, the carefully invested fund had increased to $17,099. Jefferson declined to act as executor under the will, claiming he was too old to undertake the complexities of the task. Nash and Hodges are contemptuous of his excuses, and they seem particularly incensed that seventy-four-year-old Jefferson devoted his remaining energies to pursuing his cherished idea of founding a university for Virginia rather than enforce Kokciuszko’s will. This well-written, informative book is disfigured by the authors’ frequent attempts to denigrate Jefferson’s motives. They note that when the Haitian rebellion against France occurred, Jefferson’s duty as secretary of state was to maintain favorable relations with France, but then the authors criticize him for not praising the rebellious slaves. When Congress failed to act on a petition to revoke the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, they gratuitously suggest Jefferson may not have regretted Congress’s inaction, even though they present no evidence to support their assertion, since Jefferson never mentioned the petition, either publicly or privately. When Jefferson did not comment on South Carolina’s 1803 attempt to reopen the slave trade, the authors accuse him of tacit support of slavery. Nash and Hodges reject the excuse that freeing slaves was too difficult for Jefferson to undertake, citing one of Jefferson’s Randolph cousins who did free his slaves in his will. Their account of what happened supports Jefferson more than the authors’. The widow did her best to carry out her husband’s wishes, but debts and mortgages forced sale of most slaves. She managed to free only five bondsmen. After discovering that freeing slaves, educating them, and settling them on land in Virginia violated the laws of the state, the executor appointed to replace Jefferson tried to use the funds to support a school for free blacks in Maryland, but this, too, was blocked. The final complication was a claim by the children of Kokciuszko’s two sisters that they were entitled to all of his assets by the provisions of Kokciuszko’s April 2, 1817, will, leaving his Polish property to them, with instructions to finally free his serfs. The

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issue was fought through the federal courts for three decades before being decided in 1852 by the Supreme Court of the United States. Although the court recognized that Kokciuszko intended to have his American estate used to benefit African Americans, it ruled that the provisions of his European will legally voided the one Jefferson held; therefore Kokciuszko’s nieces were entitled to his American estate, by then worth nearly fifty thousand dollars. This was indeed a tragic outcome for Kokciuszko’s good intentions, but it was certainly not one Jefferson intended, and it could only be called a betrayal by imputing the worst motives to Jefferson. Milton Berman

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 13 (March 1, 2008): 45. The Boston Globe, April 8, 2008, p. E4. Entertainment Weekly, March 28, 2008, p. 69. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 2 (January 15, 2008): 80. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 11 (June 26, 2008): 46-48. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 2 (January 14, 2008): 47.

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THE FRUIT HUNTERS A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession Author: Adam Leith Gollner (1976) Publisher: Scribner (New York). 280 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Natural history, travel Gollner travels around the world in search of exotic fruits largely unknown in North America, and explores the scientific, historical and sociological origins of fruits and of humans’ obsession with them At the center of Adam Leith Gollner’s The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession lies a strange truth: although there are tens of thousands of edible and delicious fruits growing around the world, the relatively wealthy and sophisticated grocery shopper in North America typically returns again and again to the same twenty or thirty. Worldwide, according to the United Nations, the most widely consumed fruits are bananas and plantains, apples, citrus fruits, grapes, and mangoes—foods that, save perhaps for the mangoes, would not alarm the most incurious and conservative eater. What of more exotic fare? People in the developed world eat mountains of strawberries, but what about the “crackleberry, whimberry, bababerry, bearberry, salmonberry, raccoon berry, rockberry, honeyberry, nannyberry, white snowberry and berryberry”? As a self-avowed fruit obsessive, Gollner attempts in this book to describe his pursuit of the world’s tastiest and most legendary fruits, and of the men— they are mostly men—who grow, smuggle, trade, graft, sell, and market them. Like Walt Whitman’s poetry, The Fruit Hunters is full of lists, bits of trivia, short anecdotes, and an earthy fascination with sex. There is no central narrative arc. Instead, the book reads like an accumulation of facts and ideas acquired here and there, at this time and that, with subtle repeated threads that might signal authorial control or something more fascinating: the slightly untamable mind of the true fruit obsessive. To bring some order to this material salad, Gollner has organized the volume into four sections—“Nature,” “Adventure,” “Commerce,” and “Obsession”—though each section borrows freely from the others. The result is a cheerful, energetic account. “Nature” introduces, among countless other things, two fruits that will stand in this book as emblems for what Gollner’s readers are missing: the mangosteen and the durian. Gollner finds his first mangosteen, “known as the queen of fruits in Southeast Asia,” in the Chinatown section of Montreal, and it quickly becomes one of his favorites. As he will do throughout the book, he struggles to describe its taste: “I could say that it tastes like minty raspberry-apricot sorbet, but the only way to truly know a mangosteen is to try one.” Although mangosteens are commonly available in Chinese markets in Canada, Gollner learns only after he has brought an assortment of Chinatown fruits as a gift for a friend in New York that they are illegal in the United States.

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As Gollner and the reader will learn, several fruits are illegal to import; many of the laws have to do with transporting pests but many others have only political and commercial origins, and smuggling fruit is big business. The durian is introduced in “Nature,” but its full story is not told until the second section, “Adventure.” Although its flesh is sweet and delicious, the fruit emits a strong odor that “has been compared to rotting fish, stale vomit, unwashed socks, old jockstraps, lowtide seaweed,” and other equally appealing things. The smell is so strong that when Gollner and a friend hosted a durian-tasting party in a New York apartment building, other tenants evacuated and called the gas company. No wonder durians are banned in many public spaces throughout Asia. In the most extended narrative in the book, Gollner travels to Borneo to sample the twenty-seven species of durian that grow there, and he finds a fruit-lover’s paradise, with an assortment of obsessed fruit hunters, including the botanist Voon Boon Hoe. The author discovers that trekking through the jungle to find fruit is less effective than visiting a village market at the edge of the jungle; at one visit to a market in Kuching, he eats “dukus, rambutans, soursops, mangosteens, and durians.” Gollner next travels to Bangkok on his way to the islands in southern Thailand where he meets a group of raw foodists—people who consume only raw fruit and raw meats—living idyllically in bungalows on the beach on the island of Koh Phangan. Next he visits a community of fruitarians, who eat only fruit, and digresses to offer a survey of the history, religious symbolism, nutrition, and botany of fruit. Gollner’s next quest is for the legendary “lady fruit,” whose shell looks remarkably like the female anatomy and which is said to be the “fruit from which women originate.” Researching in Montreal, Gollner learns that the fruit is actually named the coco-de-mer, that it is endangered, and that it grows only in the Seychelles. His journey to the valley where the coco-de-mer palms grow, his furtive attempts to taste the protected fruit, and his guilty smuggling of one of the fruits past the customs agents back in Canada make for one the liveliest and most entertaining parts of the book. The section on “Commerce” focuses on the people who discover, grow, manipulate, modify, ship, and market the fruits that are available commercially. Gollner tells the story of the Ichang gooseberry from New Zealand, which did not sell well in North America until it was renamed the kiwi. He introduces Gary Snyder, inventor of the grapple, an apple that tastes like a grape, and Myra Gordon, executive director of the wholesale fruit market at Hunts Point, New York. He explains why most fruit at the grocery store tastes like cardboard: because it is picked unripe, shipped long distances, waxed, gassed, and manhandled. The last section, “Obsession,” describes people who have rejected overprocessed cardboard grocery-store fruit in favor of fresh, locally grown diverse varieties—the fruit hunters. After discussing pesticides and legal wrangling, Gollner ends his book

Adam Leith Gollner has written about food for The New York Times, Orion, Gourmet, and Bon Appetit. An accomplished musician, he is a member of a Canada-based synth punk trio. He lives in Montreal and Los Angeles. Gollner won the McAuslan First Book Prize from the Quebec Writers’ Federation for The Fruit Hunters.

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on an exuberant note with stories about groups such as the Seed Savers and Renewing America’s Food Traditions and people such as Stephen Wood, whose Poverty Lane Orchard in New Hampshire produces heritage apples, and Hugh Daubeny, who has bred new fruit varieties including the Tulameen raspberry. Gollner’s message in this section is clear: It is not necessarily ancient fruit that he values, but delicious fruit, and not one fruit but the wide, awe-inspiring variety. The Fruit Hunters resembles Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession (1998) and Eric Hansen’s Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy (2000). All three feature strong narrative voices, plucky narrators traveling to out-of-the-way locations in pursuit of exotic plants, and a cast of quirky, obsessed characters, interwoven with passages of history and natural history. Where Orlean presents John Laroche and his pursuit of the elusive ghost orchid, and Hansen describes orchid smuggler Henry Azadehdel, Gollner tells the tale of his dogged attempts to interview David Karp, also known as the Fruit Detective. Karp appears and reappears through the book, often unable to honor the author’s request for an interview but able to suggest another interesting fruit fancier with another unusual fruit. Whether due to their own personalities or to Gollner’s struggles to capture them, the oddball characters in The Fruit Hunters are never quite as vibrantly humorous as those Orlean and Hansen describe. When, after more than two hundred pages of wishing, Gollner finally obtains his interview in chapter 14, Karp seems more interested in his ego than in talking about fruit, and Gollner spends much of the chapter describing a dinner party during which no interview occurs. In the end, the book devotes less than four full pages to the day Gollner spends with Karp at home and in the field, and the eccentric Fruit Detective never leaps off the page in full-blown wackiness the way Laroche and Azadehdel do. At times, scenes that might have been intriguingly weird turn into near-misses because Gollner chooses not to develop them further. In chapter 15, the author and his friend Liane visit the Children of Light, a dwindling group of “immortals” who live in the California desert eating only fruit and waiting for the apocalypse. Again, the book gives only a few pages to these fascinating people, and the few quotations from Elder Philip and Elect Star make one long for more. Gollner reports that “the Children of Light write their own kindergarten-like hymns,” but although he and Liane join in the singing he does not quote any lyrics. When, on the way home from the compound, the couple notice “an enormous fire . . . raging near the compound,” they do not turn back to investigate or to help because they are “too freaked out.” Instead, Gollner keeps driving, although he calls on his cell phone to make sure everyone is safe. The Fruit Hunters, intentionally or not, becomes part of a dialogue with several other food books published around the same time: Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006) and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008), Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (2007), and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007) come immediately to mind. Gollner seems gleefully unconcerned about the social and environmental costs of transporting fruit thousands of miles or of traveling thousands of miles to taste exotic fruits, making the im-

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plicit argument that the chance to taste these fruits is worth any price. While The Fruit Hunters might have made a reasoned argument that fruit tourism is harmless or even a force for good, it instead sidesteps the issue almost entirely. Gollner makes a nod to eating seasonally and locally, noting “the importance of cultivating a relationship with someone working in a quality fruit store, ideally someone who sources local fruits.” Nevertheless, many of the fruits he eats—only at their peak—are imported from Spain, China, South America, or other distant lands. One wonders whether McKibben would throw up his hands in surrender at his first taste of mangosteen, or whether he would insist that for the common good some individual pleasures must be forsaken. Gollner does take up the issues of genetic modification, crop diversity, pesticide and fertilizer use, and migrant workers in a chapter titled “Mass Production: The Geopolitics of Sweetness.” Here, he demonstrates his strength as a reporter to succinctly present complex stories, as he describes a late-night act of ecoterrorism at a strawberry farm, the history of the modern banana, and the Bhopal chemical disaster in clear, sure prose. The Fruit Hunters is Gollner’s first book, and it is sadly marked by infelicities of style that one might have expected experienced editors to smooth over. The author alternates between a clipped newspaper style and sentences such as: “Penultimate ripeness, when the finicky ethers reach organoleptic gold, when acids and sugars reach the ague of their imbroglio, is fleeting.” Misuse of the word “penultimate” aside, Gollner is faced with a difficult challenge in trying to capture exotic tastes in exotic words, and often his descriptions, such as this one, are merely bewildering. The text contains enough dangling modifiers (“Known as the queen of fruits in Southeast Asia, its hard, purplish and ocher shell . . . ”; “Arriving at the interrogation booth, the customs agent glances at my form . . . ”) and misspellings (“Witchita”; “Beaurocracy”) to weaken the authority Gollner establishes with his thorough and wide-ranging research. Still, it is an exciting first book. Gollner has shown an inquisitiveness and a willingness to get out of the library and into the rainforest in search of information, and his young and enthusiastic voice will serve him—and his readers—very well, whatever his next project should be. Cynthia A. Bily

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 15 (April 1, 2008): 15. Entertainment Weekly, May 30, 2008, p. 91. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 6 (March 15, 2008): 284-285. The Gazette (Montreal), May 31, 2008, p. I3. The New York Times Book Review, June 1, 2008, p. L10. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 7 (February 18, 2008): 143.

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GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS A Life Author: Paul Mariani (1940) Publisher: Viking (New York). 496 pp. $32.95 Type of work: Literary biography Time: 1844-1889 Locale: England and Dublin, Ireland Mariani’s critical biography examines the literary and religious commitments that led Hopkins to his extraordinary poetics and to his insistence on the efficacy of God’s love Principal personages: Gerard Manley Hopkins, poet-priest whose nineteenth century works of innovative and devout poetry have greatly influenced modern poets Robert Bridges, lifelong friend and confidant of Hopkins who saw to the posthumous publication of his poetry John Henry Newman, leader of a movement to reinstate Roman Catholic beliefs in Anglican worship who later converted to Catholicism and attained the rank of Cardinal Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuit) order and author of Religious Exercises (1522-1524)

In a review of Robert Bernard Martin’s Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life (1991), Paul Mariani—a practicing Catholic and a poet himself—called for a biography that would uncover Hopkins’s true inspiration for writing “some of the most powerful poetry of the last two centuries”: his love of God. Such a biography would “take into account Hopkins’s mature life . . . the entire twenty years Hopkins spent as a Jesuit” and reveal a man “shaped by his intense indwelling,” that is, his inner quest to remain faithful to Christ. In Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life, Mariani has now written that biography. His text begins with Hopkins’s youthful conversion to Catholicism, assesses the consequences of his decision to leave the Anglican fold, and goes on to cover his years as a Jesuit priest. Within this framework, Mariani describes the origins of Hopkins’s groundbreaking poetry, with its unique rhythms and unparalleled intensity. His work offers Hopkins scholars and readers, who have long relied on Mariani’s Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1970), a full version of the poetpriest’s adult life. The Hopkins biography is constructed in four sections. The first, “We Are So Grafted on His Wood: 1844-1868,” quotes the last line of “Barnfloor and Winepress,” a poem celebrating the great Eucharistic sacrifice made by Christ. As Mariani interprets

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the line, it describes the strength of Hopkins’s early commitment to Christianity: “He has seen something, he confesses, has seen into the magnificent mystery of God’s love for him and for millions of others like and unlike himself.” In the same manner, Mariani’s chapter titles stress Hopkins’s religious convictions. The first two chapters, “In the Breaking of the Bread: Horsham & Home, 1866, and the Early Years” and “The Dense and Driven Passion: Oxford & Hampstead, 1866,” substantiate the vital importance of Hopkins’s conversion. After several years of intense soul-searching, the youth became a Catholic while still a student at Oxford University. His philosophical studies and the influences of professors, tutors, and colleagues led him to believe that the Anglicans had failed to follow the true teachings of Christ. Anglican theorists considered the Eucharistic ceremony to be symbolic rather than a manifestation of God’s actual presence, a position that Hopkins strongly rejected. Without an acknowledgement of God-incarnate in the bread and wine, any observance of Christianity inevitably lacked logical depth and spiritual enlightenment. After his conversion, Hopkins graduated from Oxford with highest honors, receiving two “firsts” in his field, Classical Greats; however, as a Roman Catholic, he was given no preferential recognition or even acceptance by his countrymen. Animosity between Anglicans and Catholics, originating during the fifteenth century reign of King Henry VIII, continued to relegate English Catholics to the fringes of mainstream society. In these circumstances, Hopkins’s family believed that their oldest son had made a grave mistake and found further cause for grief in his decision to become a Jesuit. Hopkins’s Catholicism disqualified him from partaking of Anglican sacraments with his family, and in a heartbreaking letter his mother asked if he were truly lost to her. After the influential John Henry Newman received Hopkins into the Catholic faith in 1866, the young convert expressed feelings of peace and joy, emotions that encouraged him to study theology and enter the priesthood. In consenting to God’s call to priesthood, Hopkins gave up personal control of his future in hopes of experiencing a vigorous and joyful spiritual life. He believed that his acceptance of the Jesuit vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience would create an opportunity to strengthen his indifference to worldly concerns, a principal goal of the order. Church leaders would now determine where he would live and what he would do, freeing him to focus on his inner struggle to emulate the life of Christ. With this priority in mind, he burned his finished poems and set aside all plans to write more, although his journals reflect an ongoing philosophical quest to formulate satisfactory views on the nature of reality and the role of language in human perception. These core interests grew as the years passed and emerged when he returned to writing poetry. Part II of Mariani’s biography, “Walls, Altar and Hour and Night: 1868-1877,” follows Hopkins as he studies theology and performs the duties of a priest in training. As a novice, and periodically thereafter, he participated in the spiritual exercises pre-

Paul Mariani is an award-winning poet and biographer who has written the lives of poets William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Hart Crane. He is a professor of English at Boston College.

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scribed by Society of Jesus founder Ignatius Loyola, who envisioned a corps of religious militants performing apostolic, missionary work. Loyola compared spiritual exercises—ones including frequent silent retreats filled with meditation and prayer— to physical exercises, activities designed to incorporate the entire being. Hopkins contemplated such topics as God’s creation, sin, the life of Christ, correct attitudes toward worldly possessions, humility, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and Godly love. He viewed redemption and salvation as the only worthy goals in life. As Mariani explains, Hopkins’s devotion required “kenosis,” an act of self-emptying, and the omission of personal concerns in order to emulate Christ on the cross. On the other hand, Hopkins refused to compromise his cherished belief that words held inspirational meaning that could be understood through reason and contemplation. After two years as a novice and his first set of vows in the priesthood, Hopkins was sent to the college of Stonyhurst as a scholastic to continue his academic training. There, in 1872, he discovered the work of John Duns Scotus, a medieval Franciscan who asserted that God’s constant renewal of the world could be seen in each human, tree, flower, and so on. This philosophy supported Hopkins’s Platonic views on the individuation of things, often poignantly expressed as delight in God’s presence in the beauty of art and nature. The poet referred to this presence as “instress,” existence as opposed to nonexistence, a quality of “Being” that could inspire if only humans would look beyond the mundane aspects of life. The poem “God’s Grandeur,” written in 1877, depicts the “dearest freshness deep down things” and describes the “Holy Ghost over the bent/ World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.” The forms assumed by instress provided “inscape,” a contour somewhat similar to a landscape that Hopkins used to shape his poems. After nearly a decade had passed, Hopkins took up writing poetry again in the winter of 1875 when the rector of St. Beuno’s seminary suggested that he compose a tribute to five nuns who had recently died in a shipwreck. Prior to their deaths, they had been ejected from Germany under the provisions of the anti-Catholic Falck laws. Unfortunately, the editor of the foremost Jesuit publication rejected “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” and Hopkins’s poetic talent remained practically irrelevant to his career as a priest. An 1877 failure to win approval for a fourth and final year of theology study meant that he would never attain “Professed” standing and would instead be relegated to the lower rank of “Spiritual Coadjutator,” one unqualified for advancement. In spite of Hopkins’s intellectual brilliance and great popularity with other students, his propensity for argument and his “somewhat obstinate love of Scotist doctrine” had been evaluated as out of step with current Jesuit theology. Hopkins’s predisposition to go his own way in spite of well-meaning advice caused Jesuit superiors to doubt his usefulness to the order. His poor health and lack of aptitude for administration may also have persuaded them to end his seminary training. Even so, Hopkins composed several outstanding sonnets, including “The Windhover” and “Pied Beauty,” during this period. In parts III and IV, “In Harness: 1877-1884” and “Dublin: 1884-1889,” Mariani chronicles Hopkins’s inner struggle and describes his frequent bouts of physical exhaustion as he cycles through the church calendar with its numerous Biblical ceremo-

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nies, maintains his devotional exercises, and works at ministering, preaching, and teaching. Although Hopkins’s sense of duty compelled diligence, he could not seem to fit in and was often moved with little warning. Eventually he received a seemingly prestigious teaching appointment as Fellow of University College in Dublin. However, the school proved to be small and dilapidated. In addition, the Irish campaign for home rule increased the intolerance, religious and otherwise, directed at Hopkins as an Englishman and former Anglican. The great poverty and suffering of Dubliners added to Hopkins’s emotional burden and increased his longing to serve elsewhere. Hopkins soon faltered under the heavy workload he had been assigned, and he suffered a further decline in physical and mental health. His despair led him to write sonnets of deep desolation, although readers familiar with Ignatian spirituality cite an overall pattern of trial and redemption in the poems. Mariani, who attended a thirtyday Jesuit retreat before writing the biography in order to heighten his awareness of Hopkins’s situation, depicts the poet-priest’s psychological state in his last years with compassion and insight. Almost all of Hopkins’s poetry remained unpublished at the time of his death in 1889 because editors invariably viewed them as odd and unappealing. His preference for “sprung rhythm” (scanning by accents rather than syllables) and other curious techniques troubled them. Hopkins believed that rhythm was generally misunderstood in his day, and he worked tirelessly to reconstitute the language in his poems, drawing on Welsh, Shakespearean, and even Anglo-Saxon influences. He recommended reading the poems aloud to show the speech patterns and nursery rhythms that he believed replicated the instress of God’s ongoing re-creation of the world. Even his life-long friend Robert Bridges (who would later become poet laureate) repeatedly expressed frustration with Hopkins’s strange style. Nevertheless, Bridges collected Hopkins’s poems and saw to their publication in 1918, almost thirty years after their author’s death. Since then several of Hopkins’s poems have been cited as being among the best in the English language, and his collected works have greatly influenced later poets such as John Berryman and Hart Crane. Throughout his biography, Mariani details his critical analysis of Hopkins’s poetry and affirms his respect for Hopkins’s accomplishments as a priest using a day-to-day, month-to-month construct. He deftly weaves together quotations from Hopkins’s journals, sermons, poetry, and correspondence, supplementing and extending passages with paraphrases that frequently echo Hopkins’s own style. Early drafts of poems and journal entries present Hopkins’s sources of inspiration, and Mariani connects those life experiences to later poems by placing quotations from finished works nearby. These interpolations tend to break up the chronology of the narrative, and while some readers may find these movements back and forth in time distracting, the result is a work of dynamic intensity. Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life concludes with comprehensive documentation and a selected bibliography. Margaret A. Koger

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Review Sources America 199, no. 16 (November 17, 2008): 22-24. Booklist 105, no. 4 (October 15, 2008): 12. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 16 (August 15, 2008): 64. Library Journal 133, no. 16 (October 1, 2008): 70. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 37 (September 15, 2008): 56. The Washington Post Book World, November 2, 2008, p. BW10.

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THE GHOST IN LOVE Author: Jonathan Carroll (1949) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 308 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The present day Locale: A quiet city, somewhere on the East Coast When Benjamin Gould refuses to die at his appointed time, he takes control of his own destiny with all of its idiosyncrasies Principal characters: Benjamin Gould, a young man who chooses his own destiny German Landis, his former girlfriend who gets pulled into Ben’s insanity Pilot, Ben’s late girlfriend reincarnated and brought back into his life Ling, the part of Ben that is a ghost and is in love with German Stanley, the Angel of Death Stewart Parrish, the worst part of Ben personified and sent to stop his self-discovery Danielle Voyles, a young woman who has also missed her appointed time to die

A talking dog, a lesbian ghost, the angel of death, and a host of personified character traits are just a handful of the quirky characters in Jonathan Carroll’s surreal fantasy novel The Ghost in Love. This is Carroll’s sixteenth fantasy novel in a career that began with the publication of The Land of Laughs (2001). As in many of his other works, there is a connection to a fantasy world and to an exploration of the consequences of human actions. The story starts with the ghost preparing a gourmet meal for the woman she loves. Looking on and conversing with the ghost while she cooks is the dog. In a flashback, readers find out that Ling, the first of Ben Gould’s personified emotions readers meet, appears when Ben, on the way home from the animal shelter where he has chosen a pet for his new girlfriend, slips on the ice and hits his head. At the moment when Ben should have died, Pilot, his new dog, sees a ghost appear across the street. Ling is that ghost. She has been told by the Angel of Death that there has been a computer glitch in heaven, and she has been assigned to watch over Ben since he did not die at his appointed time and heaven is not sure what will happen to him as a result. This begins the questioning of fate and of who is ultimately in control of human destiny: individual humans or a higher power. At the point when Ben chooses to survive, he embarks on a journey of self-discovery that will lead him to understand who he, German, and even Pilot really are.

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Ling is the part of Ben that is a ghost. Ac cording to the novel, it is the ghost’s job to Jonathan Carroll has written fourteen take care of unfinished business. The nature novels, including The Wooden Sea, a of Ben’s unfinished business becomes con- 2001 New York Times Notable Book. fused as the novel progresses. At the begin- A former English teacher, Carroll now ning of the novel, when German arrives to writes full time at his home in Vienna, pick up Pilot for her weekend of custody, it Austria. The impact of Carroll’s would seem that Ben’s purpose is to under- writing has been compared to that of C. S. Lewis. stand why he has lost the love of his life. Though Ling is part of his unconscious, she does not really comprehend how he was stupid enough to have destroyed the relationship. German also deals with the issue, and throughout the novel all three mourn the loss of the relationship. In trying to understand what has happened to set his life spinning out of control, Ben goes on a journey of self-discovery. This quest begins with his near death experience, and it continues as Ben realizes he is sharing the experiences of Danielle Voyles, a young woman who has also survived an accident that should have left her dead. An inability to understand why he is able to see what Danielle sees, to taste what she eats, and to read her thoughts scares Ben into bizarre behaviors that eventually drive German away. In trying to win German back, Ben decides to share with her what is happening to him. He takes her to Danielle’s apartment, where it is revealed that though Ben can see Danielle, she cannot see him. He is invisible to Danielle. Thinking that Ben and Danielle are putting on an act, German angrily flees the scene. As the story progresses, German and Danielle connect in a strange way, and Danielle becomes one of Ben’s guides on his journey. No quest is complete without a nemesis, and Ben’s foil is Stewart Parrish. Stewart first appears in a pizza parlor where Ben and German are having dinner. At the table next to the couple sit the angel of death and Ling the ghost in human form. Parrish wanders into the restaurant in the guise of a homeless bum. In a series of confusing events, Stewart eventually stabs the angel of death, almost killing him. Stewart does not appear again for several chapters. When he does reappear, it is at a point in Ben’s past where Ben and Ling have gone in search of security. During this trip back in time, Ben realizes his childhood love, Gina Kyte, was a shrill, bossy little girl rather than the sweet child he remembered. Remembering the reality of that young friendship shows Ben that he has built his life around an illusion. This discovery spurs an aggressive mission to stop Ben from learning more about himself, and Stewart appears in Ben’s past to stop his evolution. As the novel moves back to the present, Ben learns more about himself and begins to evaluate his personality. By the end of the novel, Ben has discovered that though he is ultimately in control of his destiny and of his life, some aspects of his own personality do not want him to be the boss of his future. In one of the final chapters, Ben, German, and Pilot struggle with his worst character traits come to life. He is unable to win this fight on his own, so German takes control of her own destiny and calls up the parts of her own personality that love Ben in

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order to protect him. The mishmash of resulting characters causes a public ruckus that is both confusing and humorous. The novel concludes with the beginning of the journey of the rest of Ben’s life, which strangely enough commences with a food fight in a grocery store. In the journey motif, Carroll offers the novel’s strongest thematic issue: what happens to a person after death. The novel challenges traditional views of heaven, fate, and reincarnation. Heaven, in Carroll’s world, is not functioning correctly, so therefore God is not infallible. For example, when Ling is informed that she needs to watch over Ben because of the computer virus in heaven, she does. However, since she really has very little power over him, and he does not even recognize that he has a ghost to guard him, this relationship is useless at best until he starts to realize that he is different from most people. Later on in the novel, Ling is told that her computer virus was a lie, a definite contradiction to the infallibility of God; instead, Ben, like a number of other people around the world, has just taken control of his own fate by refusing to die. In doing so, Ben undermines the idea that a person’s life is predestined and that there is a specific time to live and to die. Further confusing the issues of fate and destiny, Ben is able to travel through time in such a way that he could have changed his future. Throughout the novel, Ben has the ability to personify both his best and his worst personality traits in walking, talking, functioning beings, which also complicates identity in relation to the idea of a predestined personal narrative. Finally, Carroll confronts reincarnation with Pilot, Ben’s dog. Once Pilot is able to communicate with Ben, he reveals that he is the reincarnation of Ben’s former girlfriend, a girl who died when she fell off the motor scooter that Ben was driving when he lived in Italy. Contrary to expectation, as Pilot is threatened to be reincarnated again as a human, Ben is horrified. Humanity is, to him, a step down from canine life. Carroll’s ability to treat these complicated and serious issues with humor and irony stimulates more questions than concerns, encouraging readers to consider their own beliefs about life. Irony is a constant source of humor and of challenge in the novel. The death experiences that Ben and Danielle reject are one example. Ben should have died while taking home his first major gift to German. This should have been the start of the best relationship he would ever have. Instead, his relationship begins its decline, and his refusal to die leads to the temporary death of his romance. Danielle also refuses to die, but when she discovers that she can choose to live in the place where she was happiest, she essentially decides to live in the past, literally. She withdraws from life to remain in a moment in her past, and she only returns to life to help Ben save himself. When that has been accomplished, she disappears into that simple moment in her past. The humorous personification of Ben’s and German’s emotions and their subsequent battle in very public venues is another instance of irony in the novel. Just at the point when Ben thinks there may be some hope for his romance, an army of his worst personality traits attacks. He finds out that every negative thing he had ever thought had come to life and was willing to fight to stay alive. Anger, frustration, violence, and hatred were just a few of the emotions who appeared in human form to thwart Ben’s dawning comprehension that he controls his own destiny. The irony continues

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as German is able to bring to life all the aspects of Ben that she loves to help thwart the attack. Ironically, the conclusion is that Ben, Danielle, and German can choose their own fates, but in charting their own destinies, they affect everyone around them. Parts of Ben want to harm German, while German can call up the elements of his personality that she loves to save both of them. For Danielle, her choice to retreat to that past moment of happiness affects the other people in her apartment building, allowing them to live eternally in their moments of ultimate joy. Ultimately, Carroll is posing a question: What would happen if humans had to take responsibility for their own emotions, behaviors, and destinies? If Ben can accept that he is accountable for his life rather than some outside force, then other people who have refused to die will also have to be accountable for their own actions. This might start an uproar in members of the human race who too often want to blame someone else for their foibles and faults. Although it is often eclipsed in the shadow of Carroll’s fantasy of a changed world, the love story should not be ignored. Ben is in love with German, and she loves him. Ling’s mad obsession with German is a reflection of the depth of Ben’s feelings. The choice of a female ghost to represent the strongest part of Ben’s love for German is one that challenges the gender of that emotion. The reconciliation between the lovers offers a sense of hope. Danielle’s love story is more involved. Danielle learns selflove when she picnics with twenty-nine versions of herself and finds that moment in her life when a simple dinner with a boy was her happiest moment. Choosing to remain in that moment of innocent love is Danielle’s way of defying eternity. She will not have to make decisions or even to live. She can choose as her fate to remain in one moment of her past. Theresa L. Stowell

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 21 (July 1, 2008): 6. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 16 (August 15, 2008): 43. Library Journal 133, no. 14 (September 1, 2008): 114. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 31 (August 4, 2008): 41-43.

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THE GIVEN DAY Author: Dennis Lehane (1951) Publisher: William Morrow (New York). 704 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1919 Locale: Boston Lehane’s eighth novel and first foray into historical fiction is an epic-length saga of political and social unrest in 1919 Boston, a city plagued by influenza, reeling from the implications of World War I, terrorized by anarchist bombings, and bracing for an impending police strike Principal characters: Aiden “Danny” Coughlin, a Boston police officer Captain Thomas Coughlin, Danny’s father and a high-ranking police officer Connor Coughlin, Danny’s brother and assistant district attorney Joe Coughlin, Danny’s youngest brother Ellen Coughlin, Danny’s mother Lieutenant Eddie McKenna, Danny’s godfather and a powerful Boston police officer Steve Coyle, a Boston police officer and Danny’s partner Mark Denton, a police officer and union organizer Nora O’Shea, a servant in the Coughlin household Luther Laurence, an African American athlete who becomes a servant in the Coughlin household Lila Waters Laurence, Luther’s wife Isaiah Giddreaux, a leader in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Yvette Giddreaux, Isaiah’s wife and a leader in the NAACP Deacon Skinner Brocious, a criminal from Tulsa Smoke, a Tulsa criminal who is hunting Luther Frederico Abruzze, an Italian immigrant and Danny’s neighbor Tessa Abruzze, Frederico’s daughter Babe Ruth, a famous baseball player John Hoover, a lawyer for the Department of Justice, later known as J. Edgar Hoover

Dennis Lehane began his successful writing career by producing a series of awardwinning detective novels (most notably 1998’s Gone, Baby, Gone) featuring Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. He expanded his craft with the publication of Mystic River (2001) and Shutter Island (2003), two tightly wound and deftly plotted suspense thrillers. Now, with the publication of The Given Day, Lehane has demonstrated that his talent as a writer extends well beyond that of genre fiction. In an epic-

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length, exhaustively researched novel, Lehane offers readers a close view of Boston in the chaotic, disturbing year of 1919. The Given Day opens with a prologue, set in Ohio in September, 1918. The World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs is going on, and the teams are traveling by train from Boston to Chicago when mechanical problems cause an unexpected delay. On the train is the famous (and famously drunk) Babe Ruth. The players, waiting for the train to be repaired, come upon a group of Af- Dennis Lehane is the author of eight rican American baseball players, and a game novels, including Gone, Baby, Gone ensues. Everyone is in good humor until the (1998), Mystic River (2001), and African American team begins to win and Shutter Island (2003). Lehane has also several dubious calls go the way of the white written for the critically acclaimed team. Ultimately, the black team walks off the HBO drama The Wire. A native of field before a confrontation erupts; Babe goes Boston, he and his wife have homes in back to the train feeling ashamed and angry. Boston and on the Gulf Coast of The prologue serves three purposes: First, Florida. it demonstrates that this will be a book about justice and injustice, power and servitude, and moral integrity and moral bankruptcy. Second, it introduces early one of the secondary themes of the book, the relationship between the races. Third, the prologue introduces one of the two protagonists of the novel, Luther Laurence, a munitions worker in Ohio and an outstanding athlete. However, the waning of the war in Europe means that the demand for ammunition is slowing, and white men returning from the war will be taking the jobs. When Luther is dismissed, he and his pregnant fiancé Lila move to Oklahoma, where they marry and Luther begins both legal and illegal work. As a result of his illicit activities, he ends up taking part in the murder of Deacon Skinner Brocious, a notorious Tulsa gangster. Consequently, he must hurriedly leave Tulsa and his beloved Lila. He soon finds himself in Boston, where he takes a job as a servant in the home of Captain Thomas Coughlin, a powerful police officer. Coughlin has three sons: Danny, a Boston policeman; Connor, a lawyer and the Suffolk County assistant district attorney; and Joe, the youngest of the family, still living at home with his mother and father. Danny, the major character in the novel, is headstrong, rebellious, and confident; he both loves and dislikes his father, respects him and disdains him. Much to his family’s dismay, he has chosen to live in an Italian neighborhood in a small apartment rather than continue to live in his father’s home. At the same time, however, Danny is not without ambition. His wants to make his father proud, and he wants to advance in the police force. The question around which the novel pivots, however, is an old one: to what degree do the ends justify the means? For Danny, this means coming to terms with his ambition, with his understanding of right and wrong, and with his sense of justice and injustice.

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Also in residence in the Coughlin household is Nora O’Shea, a young immigrant woman that Thomas found on the side of the road one cold winter evening and brought home to be nursed to health. Although she is a servant in the Coughlin home, she is very much a part of the family and the source of romantic competition between Danny and Connor, a competition that ultimately leads to anger and threatens the stability of the Coughlin family. A frequent visitor to the Coughlin home is Lieutenant Eddie McKenna, Danny’s godfather and another powerful Boston police officer. After Danny narrowly survives an anarchist bombing of a police station, he is persuaded by his father and McKenna to report back to them on police union meetings and eventually to infiltrate dissident groups in the city as an undercover agent. As a result of this work, Danny slowly changes his ideas and values. When his partner Steve becomes ill, Danny sees how little value is placed on an ordinary policeman’s life. Disabled by disease and unable to resume work, Steve has no means of support and slides into alcoholism. In addition, Danny sees firsthand that the common beat cop is being asked to work longer hours for less pay and in terrible conditions. Increasingly, Danny finds himself in sympathy with the union and ultimately becomes a leader in the movement. His involvement with the union (as well as his love for Nora) finally causes him to break with his family. At the same time that Danny is working as an undercover policeman, Luther becomes acquainted with Isaiah and Yvette Giddreaux, the founders of the Boston chapter of the NAACP. Luther works for them, restoring the building that houses the organization. What he most wants, however, is to be reunited with Lila and to see their baby. His troubles continue to haunt him as the Deacon’s henchmen track him to Boston and threaten his life. Even worse than the gangsters from Tulsa, however, is McKenna. McKenna traces Luther’s past and uses it to force him to betray the Giddreauxs. Lehane’s portrait of McKenna is terrifying; rarely does one find a villain in a novel who is both vicious and nuanced. McKenna is a racist, a sadist, and a Machiavellian manipulator. It is a mark of Danny’s growing maturity when he and Luther, working together, take down McKenna. A more complicated portrait, however, is that of Thomas Coughlin, perhaps the strongest rendition of any character in the novel. Coughlin is representative of a successful member of an immigrant community, one who has clawed his way into the middle class. He has done so by acting according to his own code of conduct, one that includes graft and corruption as a police officer. Unlike McKenna, however, Thomas is not a cruel or cowardly man. He does not single out those weaker than himself and torture them for his own pleasure. Rather, he is a man who places the welfare of his family before all else. Although he holds his beliefs strongly, he is unable to permanently reject any member of his family for going against his wishes. He emerges from the events of the 1919 police strike a changed man, one who knows that the only thing worth living for is love. Lehane makes use of the notable events of the time period to provide not only the setting but also the plot for his novel. Early in the novel, Lehane recalls the terrible in-

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fluenza pandemic of 1918-1919. Boston was one of the hardest hit cities, and Lehane’s description of poor people suffering and dying is potent. In addition, by 1919, World War I was ending, and American soldiers were coming home. The United States was on the brink of profound political, moral, and philosophical change, a transition that Lehane successfully exploits. Further, Boston in 1919, along with other major cities in the United States, experienced a rash of terrorist bombings by anarchists bent on disrupting the social fabric of the country. The fear of anarchists and “Bolsheviks” drove some citizens to xenophobic hatred of non-English-speaking immigrants. It would be easy to dismiss this as wrong-headed stereotyping; Lehane, however, in his creation of Frederico and Tessa Abruzze, demonstrates how complicated the situation was. He places the two directly in Danny’s path. On the one hand, Frederico and Tessa appear to be well-meaning and good-hearted immigrants struggling with the prejudice against immigrants. Danny finds himself in sympathy with the pair and begins an affair with Tessa, who he thinks is Frederico’s daughter. Only later does he discover that the two are anarchists who want to kill him. Lehane thus sets up a situation that is counter to expectation in the attempt to show all sides of the time period. Perhaps the least successful segments of The Given Day are the Ruth interludes. Although the opening prologue is effective, the recurring cameo appearances by the Babe serve to interrupt, not to propel, the story lines. Rather than focusing the action, these segments tend to distract the reader. In addition, it is possible that Lehane has taken on more than one novel can effectively handle—placing either Danny or Luther at the scene of every major historical event in 1919 requires the manipulation of the plot nearly to the breaking point. That said, ultimately the strength of the characters and the masterful handling of the setting thrust The Given Day to a shattering climax during the Boston police strike of 1919. Lehane’s exposition of the reasons for the strike, his depiction of the betrayal suffered by the men organizing the union, and his narration of the utter lawlessness of the days when the police would not walk the streets anchor the novel. At once a gripping narrative and a realistic historical glimpse into the past, The Given Day is a book to savor. Diane Andrews Henningfeld

Review Sources American Libraries 39, no. 8 (September, 2008): 69. Booklist 104, no. 22 (August 1, 2008): 5. The Boston Globe, September 21, 2008, p. K4. The Boston Herald, September 24, 2008, p. 16. The Christian Science Monitor, September 30, 2008, p. 25. Entertainment Weekly, September 26, 2008, p. 96. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 13 (July 1, 2008): 662.

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Library Journal 133, no. 13 (August 15, 2008): 69. Los Angeles Times, September 22, 2008, p. E1. The New York Times, September 18, 2008, p. E1. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 27 (July 7, 2008): 37. USA Today, September 23, 2008, p. 4D. The Washington Post Book World, September 21, 2008, p. BW15.

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GOD AND RACE IN AMERICAN POLITICS A Short History Author: Mark A. Noll (1946) Publisher: Princeton University Press (Princeton, N.J.). 209 pp. $22.95 Type of work: History, religion Time: The 1770’s to 2007 Locale: The United States A relatively short survey of the interconnections among race, religion, and politics in the history of the United States God and Race in American Politics is a revised and expanded version of the Stafford Little Lectures, which Mark Noll delivered at Princeton University in 2006. He begins his book by announcing a broad two-pronged thesis: “Together, race and religion make up, not only the nation’s deepest and most enduring moral problem, but also its broadest and most enduring political influence.” In actuality, Noll proposes an additional thesis, which is clearly stated: “The history of American race, religion, and politics from Nat Turner to George W. Bush is a narrative in which contradictions, antimonies, and paradoxes abound.” Despite this broad reference to “race,” however, Noll’s book is almost entirely devoted to the historical relationships between African Americans and European Americans, and it contains almost no material about Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. A serious scholar, Noll has been teaching, writing, and thinking about the topics of the book for many years, and he is obviously very familiar with the large literature—both original and secondary sources—devoted to the field. Both scholars and curious readers will find that his seventeen pages of endnotes provide an excellent guide to the best books and articles that deal with aspects of the interconnections among religion, race, and politics in U.S. history. The year 2008 was an auspicious time for the appearance of Noll’s book. In addition to Barack Obama’s election as the nation’s first African American president, questions of race and religion were often center stage during both the primaries and the general election. All of the major candidates firmly identified with some faithbased tradition. Obama’s twenty-year membership in an Afrocentric church led by Jeremiah Wright, Jr., an outspoken minister committed to black liberation theology, shocked and confused many voters, especially some white conservatives. Obama’s selection of Senator Joseph Biden as his running mate was widely interpreted as an attempt to attract the support of moderate Catholics. On the Republican side, Senator John McCain received a great deal of criticism for his initial acceptance of John Hagee, a fundamentalist minister who made statements highly offensive to Catholics and Jewish voters. Finally, McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin, who had ties to

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fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches, was highly praised by religious conservatives and ridiculed by secular progressives. Certainly there have been many other times in American history when combinations of religious and racial concerns have had great political significance. By the time of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, American churches were taking fundamentally different positions over the issue of slavery, usually depending on their geographical location. The growing slavery controversy always overlapped in political matters, such as federalism and Manifest Destiny. From Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 until the end of Southern Reconstruction in 1877, the churches in the North and the South disagreed about whether the federal government should support the rights and interests of the former slaves. Following the 1880’s, however, when a conservative Supreme Court supported the right of states to practice Jim Crow segregation, most religious leaders and politicians in the North tended to ignore the existence of white racism, whereas those in the South either endorsed or implicitly accepted the status quo in race relations. From the presidential election of 1948, when the Democratic Party endorsed a civil rights platform, until the achievements of the Great Society in the 1960’s, arguments both for and against civil rights legislation were often based on religious morality, and this has also been true concerning more recent issues, such as court-ordered busing and affirmative action programs. Noll might have given greater weight to the sociological distinction between churches and sects. Whereas the former have often emphasized engagement in secular politics, the latter have been much more likely to focus almost exclusively on individual salvation and nonsecular concerns. Because of his own bias as well as the book’s theme, Noll tends to focus on politically active churches. It is true that those groups that claim to avoid political engagement tend to indirectly reinforce the cultural and legal status quo, just as Martin Luther King, Jr., declared in his “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” (1963). Historically, it has been relatively rare for religious groups to support viewpoints that are highly unpopular in the areas where they live. Reflecting his support for liberal activism, Noll emphasizes the social Gospel tradition to an extent that is disproportionate to its historical influence. He might have included more material about the politically engaged churches that have often promoted conservative, reactionary, and sometimes intolerant policies, a tradition that goes back to the Puritans’ support for the massacres of Indians and the execution of Quakers. Emphasizing the central importance of the Bible before and during the Civil War, especially among Protestants, Noll correctly observes that both opponents and defenders of slavery “deployed the Scriptures to defend their own convictions and skewer the convictions of their opponents.” As a liberal Christian, no doubt, he would have liked to endorse abolitionist Theodore Weld’s The Bible Against Slavery (1837),

A professor of history at Notre Dame University, Mark A. Noll is an evangelical Christian scholar committed to a liberal version of the social Gospel. His previous works include The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1995), America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2002), and The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (2006).

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but as an honest scholar, he is forced to admit that both Old and New Testaments “either took the existence of slavery for granted or made no obvious moves to eliminate it.” He endorses the position of Congregationalist minister Leonard Bacon, who wrote: “the evidence that there were both slaves and masters of slaves in the churches funded and directed by the apostles cannot be got rid of without resorting to methods of interpretation that will get rid of everything.” The best the abolitionists could do was to point to passages that indirectly condemned slavery by implication, particularly Jesus’s so-called Golden Rule: Do unto other people what you would want them to do unto you. Although debates about slavery and racism have often overlapped, Noll correctly observes that they are different issues. While admitting that the Bible never directly condemns the practice of slavery, he asserts that “the Bible is much clearer in its teachings against racism than it is about its permission of slavery.” This assertion, however, is highly questionable. The Bible never makes a distinction between race and ethnicity, and one of the principal themes of the Old Testament (or Jewish Scripture) is that the Israelites are Yahweh’s Chosen People—a separate race based on their parentage and common ancestry. In chapter 25 of Leviticus, Yahweh is quoted as authorizing the Israelites to make slaves of non-Israelites (not members of their own race), and in chapter 7 of Deuteronomy, the Israelites’ deity is quoted as commanding the total destructions of the Canaanites. In the New Testament, St. Paul and other writers occasionally assert that all humans are created by the same deity, but one looks in vain for any condemnations of racial prejudice and discrimination outside the realm of the Christian church. These early Christians were sectarians who expressed little interest in governmental policies of any kind. Noll correctly emphasizes that following the Civil War, the various regions of the country became more firmly committed in their electoral allegiances. Of special interest is his quantitative comparison among various regions, highlighting the differences between New England politics and the eleven states of former Confederacy. In New England from 1880 to 1916, for instance, Republicans won 83 percent of state contests for president, whereas in the Confederate states, Democrats prevailed in 100 percent of the presidential elections. From 1920 to 1984, even with the popularity of New Deal programs, Republicans won 60 percent of the New England contests, but their victories decreased to only 38 percent of the elections between 1980 and 2004. In the Confederate states, in contrast, Democrats won 93 percent of the presidential elections from 1920 to 1948; they won only 56 percent of the elections from 1952 to 1976; and this further declined to only 12 percent from 1980 to 2004. Although Noll acknowledges that many factors account for these regional differences, he cogently argues that “race and religion were nevertheless of first importance.” Noll also provides an excellent analysis of the Civil Rights movement. While recognizing that cultural changes and nonreligious factors were significant, he persuasively argues that African American churches “provided the indispensable foundation” for the accomplishments of the movement. Observing that the African American experience resulted in a theological voice that “differed markedly from other varieties of American religion,” he emphasizes the importance of black pro-

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phetic theology, as epitomized in the sermons of preachers such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Utilizing the historical research of John Chappell, Noll argues that most white churches—mainline Protestant, evangelical, and Roman Catholic—either accepted or actively promoted the movement. Although many opponents of the movement were motivated by “deep religious beliefs,” these beliefs were rejected by the majority of denominations, even conservative ministers such as W. A. Criswell of Dallas. In contrast to Chappell, however, Noll acknowledges the survival and continuing influence of anti-civil rights sentiments. Emphasizing the “moral complexity” of the nation’s history, Noll persuasively declares that religion in American history has been the source of both good and evil; that “reliance on the Bible has produced spectacular liberation alongside spectacular oppression.” He is not entirely correct, however, when he writes that the “racist practices” of the Jim Crow system “have never influenced spiritual or social developments anywhere else in the world.” The existence and example of Jim Crow, for instance, provided some encouragement to the Dutch Reformed ministers and others who supported the establishment of apartheid in South Africa following World War II. One major problem with Noll’s book is his idiosyncratic treatment of Calvinism, which he vaguely describes as the “direct and activistic application of religious principles to public problems.” While it is true that the Puritans and other Calvinists have often been involved in political and secular matters, their emphasis has been on otherworldly beliefs and practices. Calvinism has usually been defined in terms of the five points (or TULIP): total depravity, unconditional predestination, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the preservation of the elect. Contrary to Noll’s assertion that the Calvinist paradigm has been the dominant approach to American Christianity, most churches, especially since the Great Awakening of the early eighteenth century, have accepted an eclectic version of Arminianism, which assumes the human capacity to make indeterminate choices. This has been true of almost all African American churches, as well as the majority of white denominations, including Methodists, Disciples/Churches of Christ, Pentecostals, Mennonites, Catholics, Cumberland Presbyterians, Quakers, and many others. Another problem with the book is Noll’s tendency to make excessive generalizations about the characteristics of different periods in American religious history. After the Civil War, for instance, he writes that the Bible no longer functioned as the preeminent moral authority in the country, but that the exalted place of Scripture “was replaced by heightened commitments to a national civil religion and to the authority of scientific expertise.” Certainly Noll can point to leading intellectuals who replaced beliefs in the Bible with Darwinism and scientific advancements, but it is doubtful that such a transformation took place among the majority of the population. After making extreme observations, Noll usually admits that there are qualifications. He writes, for instance, that from the 1880’s until 1945, “religion exerted only a sporadic influence on national politics,” and then in the next paragraph he acknowledges that “religion did surface episodically in the intervening years as a political force.” This is followed by a listing of religiously inspired movements—such as the temperance cru-

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sade, the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, and the growth of the Catholic Church as a national power—which appear to refute the initial generalization. The last chapter of the book, “Theological Conclusion,” is highly personal and unusual. His most controversial assertion is that the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is relevant to the secular and political realm: “God offers in the work of his Son, Jesus Christ, and in the power of his Holy Spirit, the transforming prospect of redemption . . . . [T]he manifestation of God in Jesus Christ . . . offers the hint . . . for how the commingling of contradictions, antinomies, and paradoxes can occur in other spheres of life.” It is unlikely that many readers will find this mystical perspective to be meaningful. Those who are secular humanists will simple chuckle and view the whole idea of the Incarnation as nonsensical, whereas the vast majority of pious Christians who believe in the truth of the doctrine will consider it to be applicable only to their individual salvation—not a message about how to reform a secular society. Thomas Tandy Lewis

Review Sources The Chronicle of Higher Education 55, no. 6 (October 3, 2008): B18-19. The Humanist 68, no. 6 (November/December, 2008): 44-45.

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GOVERNESS The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres Author: Ruth Brandon (1943) Publisher: Walker (New York). Illustrated. 303 pp. $25.99 (simultaneously published in Great Britain as Other People’s Daughters: The Life and Times of the Governess) Type of work: History, sociology Time: From the 1780’s to 1979 Locale: Principally England but also Italy, Vienna, Russia, Canada, and Siam, Thailand Brandon gives an account, based on the lives of six women, of the demographic, economic, and social forces that led to the rise and fall of the governess, who thrived in England from the beginning of the nineteenth century into the twentieth century Principal personages: Agnes Porter, longtime governess to the family of the earl of Ilchester Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) Claire Clairmont, mistress of the English poet Lord Byron and mother of their daughter Allegra Nelly Weeton, a Lancashire woman and governess Anna Leonowens, author and governess to the wives and children of the king of Siam Anna Jameson, author

For most educated Americans, the word “governess” will recall certain English novels read at school or in college: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) or her sister Anne’s Agnes Grey (1847) or perhaps William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847-1848). The word may recall also mild puzzlement at the thousand indefinable distinctions of the English class system as represented in these and other novels. In Governess, Ruth Brandon quotes a passage from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868-1869) in which Meg is patronized by a visiting Englishwoman when Meg says that she is a governess. The Englishwoman talks of “most respectable and worthy young women [who] are employed by the nobility, because, being the daughters of gentlemen, they are both well-bred and accomplished.” If all governesses had been so employed, then their lot would have been happier, as Brandon makes clear. Aristocrats had large houses, in which a handsome room or two could be allocated to the young lady who taught their children, thus providing all involved with privacy and dignity. Socially secure, members of the nobility did not need to maintain a prickly emotional distance from the governess or to regularly in-

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sult her to make a point. They did not fear that their own daughters might have to ply the Ruth Brandon began her career as a dreaded trade if Papa’s business went under, producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. She lives in London and as a good many Papas’ businesses did. The trade was dreaded. It was known to in- has written ten nonfiction books. Her volve long hours, little pay, the awkwardness book Caravaggio’s Angel, a mystery of living in someone else’s house, and banish- that combines art and French history, ment to a social limbo. Governesses were nei- was also published in 2008. ther mistress nor maid but members of some indeterminate class, paid at the rate of servants but possessed of the tastes and desires of those who employed them, whose intellectual and moral superiors they sometimes were. Young ladies who became governesses were advised to forget about marriage for the duration; and those who indulged in love affairs with their employers (or their employers’ sons) rarely moved up in that longed-for social and financial haven. To top the thing off not so nicely, most governesses would find it difficult to get work after the age of forty or so. The bourgeoisie preferred to hire cheerful young women whose spirit had not yet been broken by toil and by exclusion. Governess is a series of half a dozen biographical sketches, preceded by a general account of the origins and nature of the institution and followed by an occasionally name-clotted chapter narrating the advances in women’s education that made it obsolete. The first of the six women, Agnes Porter, who spent her working life as governess to the family of the earl of Ilchester, was perhaps the most fortunate. However, even she, affectionately devoted to her charges, found her position untenable when the widowed earl remarried. Governess and new countess did not get along. Eventually, Agnes was able to serve a second generation of the Ilchester family, a post she held until her retirement, when one of the earl’s daughters married and started having children of her own. Despite its tensions, her relationship with the family was longstanding and based on mutual affection and respect. The next two chapters are the longest, forming together about two-fifths of the book. They deal principally with famous women not usually thought of as governesses. The charismatic and intelligent Mary Wollstonecraft, later to be the author of the feminist tract A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, went as governess to Ireland, to the family of Lord and Lady Kingsborough. She stayed there less than a year due, apparently, to a slightly fraught relationship with the lady and never worked in that capacity again. Her sisters were not so fortunate. Eliza and Everina lacked both the talent and the pizzazz of Wollstonecraft. For them, there could be no employment but as a governess or as a teacher in a school. The tenor of their lives is best caught by a quotation from a report to the effect that by mid-century governesses and female general servants made up “by far the largest classes of insane women in asylums.” If Wollstonecraft took one of the few avenues open to women by becoming an author, then Claire Clairmont took another: She became a groupie, throwing herself at Lord Byron, moving back in with the Percy Bysshe Shelleys (she was stepsister to Mary Godwin, Shelley’s wife), because Byron would not allow her to follow him

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abroad. After that, she taught English to the daughters of an Italian family in Florence until that arrangement became unworkable. Isolated and cruelly denied access to Allegra, her daughter by Byron, Clairmont began living in obscurity the fifty-seven years of life that remained to her. She worked as a governess for twenty of them and recorded poignantly her sufferings: “What a life! Has Hell any thing worse to offer?” Clairmont’s letters survive because of the glittering people she knew. Nelly Weeton’s survive by chance: A local historian found copies in a junk shop in the distinctly unglittering Lancashire town of Wigan. They record the sort of thwarted provincial life that must have been lived by millions of women, especially that majority denied anything more than a rudimentary education. Weeton “burned” to learn languages, math, and geography, but she was restricted to sewing, teaching, and housework. Her time as a governess, voluntarily undertaken to avoid crushing loneliness, was happy enough until her first employer took to drink. The chronic bad temper of the lady of the house ended her next position. To become a mother, and to avoid more loneliness and the persecution of her family, Weeton married a brutal man who thus became the owner of her hard-won investments and savings. The marriage was wretchedly unhappy until she signed a deed of separation that imposed punitive conditions, including limited access to her daughter. Brandon has somewhat oddly made what she calls a “small and random selection of women,” and certainly the life of Anna Leonowens is in stark contrast to that of poor Weeton. Between 1862 and 1867, Leonowens lived in Bangkok, serving as governess to the wives and children of the king of Siam. (The King and I, the 1951 Broadway musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, which inspired the 1956 smash-hit film with Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner, was based on information from her two volumes of memoirs.) That much is true, but further research has shown that some of the claims Leonowens made about her life are meretricious. Her father was a sergeant, not a captain, and her mother was probably half Indian. She fooled no one in British expatriate society, and she was not received. Leonowens wielded some genuine power at the king’s court, however, acting as his amanuensis and giving advice about foreign relations in the capacity of the superior English lady she was not. She made the king’s heir pro-British at a time when Britain and France were jockeying for power in Southeast Asia. Despite a genuine contribution to Britain’s imperial role, she found success in her subsequent spinoff career as a lecturer primarily in the United States, which was ignorant of subtle British class gradations. Anna Jameson, too, grew up in a classless limbo. Her father was an artist and thus permitted, within limits, certain unconventionalities while still being allowed into the drawing rooms of the socially established. There was no money, however, when Jameson reached the age of sixteen, and she spent many of the next fifteen years as governess, in which role she traveled with one family through France, Switzerland, and Italy. At the age of thirty-one, she contracted a passionless, on her side, marriage with Robert Jameson, a lawyer. When his career took him to Dominica, then Canada, Jameson declined to live with him. Her husband, effectively deprived of a wife, yet paid her three hundred pounds a year, enabling her to live as a writer: Here, at least, is one woman whose ambitions were helped by an unequal marriage. She produced es-

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says with titles such as “Woman’s ‘Mission’ and Woman’s Position” and responded to the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution’s first report with “On the Relative Social Position of Mothers and Governesses.” It will be perceived that Brandon has posed a problem, and her book, intelligent and entertaining as it is, does not entirely solve it. She claims that the letters and journals governesses certainly wrote have not tended to survive: Individual governesses may be mentioned in the memoirs of the prominent or successful but, of no note socially and poor, their own writings have mostly vanished. (One reviewer, Kathryn Hughes, writing in The Guardian of London, regrets that Brandon has not sought new sources in archives available now on searchable databases. Such sources, she says, must surely exist.) Furthermore the writings that have survived do not always make agreeable reading. Those epistles of Eliza and Everina Wollstonecraft and those extracts from the journals of Weeton fail to lift the heart. It is, therefore, the slightly paradoxical case that readers of a book that justifiably insists on the stultifying hopeless frustration of the average governess’s life spend a good part of their time reading about an ambitious, confident, and talented woman who acquired a reputation as an author (Wollstonecraft); a woman who knew, and slept with, Byron (and probably Shelley) and who, wretched as she sometimes was, even in the less dramatic times of her life, traveled in Italy, Austria, and Russia (Clairmont); a woman who lived in Siam and tutored the family of its king (Leonowens); and a woman who was effectively financially independent (Jameson). That these women suffered is not denied, but many a pallid provincial governess would have savored their experiences and their lives, notwithstanding the miseries, failures, and agonies. Late Victorian English novelist George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893)—“odd” in the sense of “superfluous”—tells of the Maddens, impoverished but genteel sisters who form part of the demographic discussed in Brandon’s book, middle-class women who are unable to find suitable husbands and who lack fathers or brothers in whose houses they can live. The occupations available to them without loss of caste can be counted on the fingers of one hand. They look for means of living without breaking into their capital and lament, among other things, that “the (governess’s) place at Plymouth” involves “[f]ive children and not a penny of salary. It was a shameless proposal.” The Odd Women is a grainy, realistic, quotidian portrait of the plight of tens of thousands of women. Brandon’s book has been generally very well received. Some reviewers, including The Scotsman‘s Lesley McDowell, regret that the experience of the typical governess is absent. On the other hand, Martin Rubin writes in The Washington Times that Governess is “fairly sizzling with fascination,” Frances Wilson in The Daily Telegraph celebrates a “beautifully told, effortlessly thoughtful study,” and Sally Vickers in The Independent finds “[t]he accounts of these women’s lives . . . riveting, and the conclusions of this excellent book thoughtful and beautifully expressed.” M. D. Allen

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Review Sources The Daily Telegraph, April 20, 2008, p. 43. The Guardian, March 22, 2008, p. 8. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 7 (April 1, 2008): 338. Library Journal 133, no. 7 (April 15, 2008): 95. London Review of Books 30, no. 14 (July 17, 2008): 32-33. The New York Times, May 25, 2008, p. 6. The New York Times Book Review, May 25, 2008, p. 6. The New Yorker 84, no. 15 (May 26, 2008): 77. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 9 (March 3, 2008): 39-40. The Spectator 306 (March 15, 2008): 48-50. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 104 (May 3, 2008): W8.

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GUSTAV MAHLER A New Life Cut Short (1907-1911) Author: Henry-Louis de La Grange (1924) First published: Gustav Mahler: Le génie foudroyé, 1907-1911, 1984, in France Updated, enriched, and translated from the French by Henry-Louis de La Grange Publisher: Oxford University Press (New York). Illustrated. 1,758 pp. $140.00 Type of work: Biography, music Time: 1907-1911 Locale: The Northeastern United States, especially New York City, and Europe, especially Austria In this culminating volume of his monumental biography of Mahler, La Grange gives a painstakingly detailed, revisionist account of the musical genius’s work as the conductor at the Metropolitan Opera and for the New York Philharmonic and as the composer of such momentous creations as Das Lied von der Erde and Symphony No. 9 Principal personages: Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), Austrian-Jewish composer and conductor whose tenure at the Vienna State Opera (1897-1907) was particularly significant Alma Maria (Schindler) Mahler (1879-1964), Mahler’s wife from 1902 to 1911; later married architect Walter Gropius, then writer Franz Werfel

During his life Gustav Mahler engendered ardent adulation as well as ruthless criticism, and this was especially true of what has been the most unsatisfactorily understood period of his career, the “American years,” when his conducting centered on the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic orchestras. By making use of a massive amount of new material, including previously unknown letters and other documents, as well as such untapped secondary sources as the reviews of all of Mahler’s concerts, Henry-Louis de La Grange in Gustav Mahler has deepened knowledge on this important phase of what the author calls in the subtitle A New Life Cut Short, during which Mahler had his greatest triumphs as a conductor and composed some of his most significant works. La Grange also corrects numerous errors, distortions, misinterpretations, and myths that have accumulated about these final years, for example, that the problems Mahler encountered in the United States precipitated his final illness and death. La Grange discovered his life’s mission in 1945, when he was enraptured by a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 conducted by Bruno Walter at Carnegie Hall. For more than fifty years, he has devoted a substantial amount of his time and energy to

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collecting as much data as possible to illuminate Mahler’s life and accomplishments. The author’s research, which has become more extensive and erudite over the years, has complicated his published books, especially in English. For example, Doubleday brought out an English version of Mahler in the United States in 1973, but in 1979 La Grange published a much expanded and updated French version of the first volume that now covered the years 1860 to 1897 (whereas the American edition had covered 1860 to early 1902, when Mahler became engaged to Alma Schindler). In 1984 La Grange decided that, instead of giving his English readers an abridged second volume of his ever-enlarging Mahler biography, he owed them a complete version. This new English edition, which would be structured in four volumes, began to be published in 1995 by Oxford University Press with the second volume, Gustav Mahler: Vienna, the Years of Challenge, 1897-1904. This was followed in 1999 by the third volume, Gustav Mahler: Vienna, Triumph and Disillusion, 1904-1907. Even though these volumes dealt with shorter periods of time, their lengths became greater, a trend that has continued with the fourth volume. In the second volume, La Grange covered seven years of Mahler’s life in about 125 pages per year; in the third, he needed 250 pages per year; and in the fourth, he used about five hundred pages per year. The English versions were much longer than the French ones because La Grange added new material. This fourth volume does not represent the completion of his Mahler biography, because he has revised, expanded, and updated the French version of the first volume. He has promised that the new English edition of Volume 1will be published within a few years, thus bringing to a conclusion one of the most magnificent biographies of a composer ever written. As a biographer, La Grange believes in taking a scientific approach, insisting that valid interpretations must be based on well-established facts. Behind his Mahler project is his comprehensively detailed chronology, for which he has gathered relevant information for almost every day of Mahler’s life. Furthermore, realizing that these facts have to be understood in context, in this fourth volume, he provides readers with insightful descriptions of the New York social and musical milieu in the early twentieth century. His capsule histories of the Metropolitan Opera (the Met) and the New York Philharmonic deepen awareness of the complex relationship between Mahler and the city’s moneyed aristocracy and its musical community. As in his earlier positions in Europe, Mahler forged his artistic success in the New World amid fierce rivalries among theaters, orchestras, and music critics. One of the reasons the Met hired Mahler was to help it surpass the successes of Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera House. La Grange is particularly interested in such music critics as Richard Aldrich of The New York Times and Henry Krehbiel of the New York Tribune, and he devotes substantial space to extended excerpts from reviews of these and other critics about The son of a French baron and American heiress, Henry-Louis de La Grange was educated in the United States (at Yale) and in Paris (with Nadia Boulanger). Independently wealthy, he pursued a career as a musicologist. His work on Mahler has been honored with several awards in England, Austria, and France.

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Mahler’s work as a conductor and a composer, bringing out their perceptiveness as well as their prejudices, including doses of anti-Europeanism and anti-Semitism. As a conductor, Mahler was caricatured as tyrannical rather than democratic, and as a composer he witnessed his works being criticized as derivative, long-winded, tasteless, and trite. The first biography of Mahler appeared in his lifetime, and many others have been published in the ensuing hundred years. La Grange, familiar with these accounts, emphasizes throughout his fourth volume how his interpretations markedly differ from those of the past. In the traditional view, Mahler’s tragic American years continued the misfortunes of his earlier life. As a child and adolescent, Mahler experienced the deaths of seven of his brothers, and as a young adult he had to confront the deaths of his parents and one of his sisters as well as the suicide of his brother Otto. Furthermore, his later years as director of the Vienna Court Opera were unhappy, and in 1907 he had to cope with the death of his four-year-old daughter and the diagnosis of his heart disease. Nevertheless, La Grange stresses that the evidence overwhelmingly shows that Mahler was not a death-haunted, despairing man during his American years. With grace and courage, he overcame his European catastrophes, and, since his heart problems turned out to have been exaggerated, he was actually in good health and high spirits during most of his career as an American conductor. La Grange is especially severe on those analysts, mainly European, who claim that the money-grubbing and materialistic culture in the United States contributed to the demise of the profoundly idealistic and mystical Mahler. The letters of Gustav and Alma Mahler, as well as many other documents, create a contrary picture. Mahler was energized by the opportunity to develop the Met and New York Philharmonic orchestras into worldclass ensembles. Despite being busier than he had been in Europe, he rarely missed a performance, and many of his concerts were popular successes, much to the chagrin of hostile critics. This new volume profits from recently discovered letters between Alma Mahler and her lover Walter Gropius, then a young architect. La Grange, who knew and interviewed Alma, is well aware that she deleted, doctored, even falsified information about her life with Gustav in her memoirs, but, based on much new data, he is able to create a fascinating account of what he calls “the tragic summer of 1910,” when Mahler learned of the love affair between Gropius and his wife. Alma insensitively blamed her adultery on her husband, who neglected her in favor of his work. Emotionally devastated, Mahler later consulted with the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, but with no knowledge of the Gropius affair and a poor grasp of Alma’s narcissism, Freud, after a single four-hour session, diagnosed Mahler as suffering from a “mother fixation,” predicting that he would fail as a musician if his neuroses were ever cured. La Grange refutes Freud’s analysis by showing that, while under great duress, Mahler still completed sketches for Symphony No. 10 and also managed to persuade Alma to remain with him. A further testimony to the strength of Mahler’s spirit was his dedication to the complex preparations for the premiere of his Symphony No. 8, sometimes called the Symphony of a Thousand, because of the large number of performers it requires. In

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fact, at the Munich premiere on September 12, 1910, Mahler conducted an orchestra of 170, a chorus of 850 with eight soloists and an organ, which totaled well more than a thousand, before an audience of 3,200, which included, besides members of the Bavarian court, such celebrities as writer Thomas Mann, composer Richard Strauss, and conductor Leopold Stokowski (who would later conduct the American premiere). The performance of this symphony, which was structured around a hymn to the Holy Spirit and the last scene of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (1808), was the colossal triumph of Mahler’s career, though many Munich and Viennese critics remained unimpressed. During Mahler’s 1910-1911 concert season in New York, he became ill, but La Grange, unlike many analysts, does not attribute this to Mahler’s personal tragedies in Europe and the United States, but to a bacterial infection, endocarditis, which was then incurable. La Grange blames Alma and like-minded writers for creating the ridiculous “legend” that Mahler died of a broken heart. Mahler himself recognized that his “dear little beasts” were killing him. Records show that Mahler had planned to return to New York for the next season, but, as the disease spread from his heart to his lungs, he returned to Austria, where he died and was buried. The obituaries, which La Grange analyzes, reflected the divided opinions that had characterized Mahler’s musical life in Europe and America. La Grange approaches Mahler’s music in two ways, biographically, throughout the 1,277 pages of the book’s principal section, and musically, through meticulous analyses of Das Lied von der Erde, Symphony No. 9, and the unfinished Symphony No. 10, in three (of the thirty-three) appendices that make up one-fourth of the book’s length. His interpretations of these late works, all of which premiered after Mahler’s death, stress the composer’s love of life rather than his despair over death. Das Lied von der Erde passionately celebrates the beauties of nature and humanity while blending two of the composer’s great loves, the symphony and song. La Grange attacks such interpreters as conductor Leonard Bernstein who see Symphony No. 9 as the composer’s farewell to life. For example, Bernstein’s interpretation of the syncopated motif in the symphony’s opening as a representation of Mahler’s heart arrhythmia makes no sense, since Mahler’s heart was in good shape when he composed the symphony and cardiologists have told La Grange that such a rhythm would be impossible for a human heart. Finally, La Grange sees Symphony No. 10 as a masterpiece that never reached fulfillment, with its themes that illustrate Mahler’s undying faith in music, humanity, and such transcendental values as love. In a written work of such immensity, inevitable flaws do occur, including avoidable repetitions of facts and ideas. There are some factual as well as typographical errors, including a paragraph that ends mid-sentence on page 832 only to be repeated on page 833. Some readers may be bothered by the numerous digressions that interrupt the narrative flow, but others may find these interesting. For example, La Grange devotes much space to a discussion of Mahler’s religious views. Although raised in a secularized Jewish family, Mahler was later baptized, married, and buried as a Roman Catholic, though La Grange thinks that Mahler’s spirituality is best described as an undogmatic blend of Christianity, Buddhism, and other philosophical and theological

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beliefs. These and other digressions, as well as the main text and all the supplements, reveal La Grange’s deep devotion to discovering the genuine truth of a musician he deeply admires. Since enthusiasm is often contagious, his dedicated labors may now inspire not only Mahlerians but also others, new to the worlds of music Mahler created, to explore their wonders, which, through many concerts and recordings, keep his spirit alive. Robert J. Paradowski

Review Sources The Evening Standard, March 5, 2008, Section A, p. 42. Harper’s Magazine 317 (July, 2008): 88-94. The New York Sun, April 17, 2008, Arts and Letters, p. 16. Prospect, no. 146 (May, 2008): 80. The Times Literary Supplement, August 1, 2008, pp. 3-5.

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THE HAKAWATI Author: Rabih Alameddine (1959) Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (Boston). 361 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The late twentieth century to 2003 Locale: Beirut and Urfa, Lebanon; Los Angeles; Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt; Samarkand, in Central Asia; the Underworld Upon his return home to Lebanon, the narrator is inspired to recount stories from his family history and to retell ancient Arabic tales that are an integral part of his heritage Principal characters: Osama al-Kharrat, the narrator, a computer programmer Lina al-Kharrat, his sister, a businesswoman Farid al-Kharrat, their father, a car dealer Layla Khoury al-Kharrat, Farid’s beautiful, strong-willed wife Jihad al-Kharrat, Farid’s younger brother, a storyteller Ismail al-Kharrat, formerly Ismail Guirgossian, Farid’s father, a hakawati Fatima Farouk, Osama’s best friend and a high-spirited, independent woman Salwa, Lina’s daughter Fatima, a slave girl and the heroine of one of the Arabic tales Afreet-Jehannam, a jinn and Fatima’s lover Baybars (Mahmoud), the youngest son of the king of Samarkand and the hero of another Arabic tale Othman, a former brigand and Baybars’s devoted second-in-command Layla, his wife and fellow-warrior

The opening paragraph of Rabih Alameddine’s The Hakawati ends with the words “Let me tell you a story.” Thus the narrator and, implicitly, the author state the book’s purpose. To the Lebanese, a “hakawati” is a highly skilled storyteller, such as Ismail al-Kharrat, the narrator’s paternal grandfather, to whom the title specifically refers. However, though they might not have Ismail’s spellbinding powers, many of the other characters in the novel also like telling stories. Moreover, Osama al-Kharrat, who as the narrator has collected and retold all of the stories in the book, might well be considered a twenty-first century hakawati. His purpose, and thus the purpose of the author, is not only to tell stories but also, in the words used in the introductory paragraph, to take readers “on a journey beyond imagining.” The hakawati tradition also explains the novel’s seemingly random structure. Storytellers are not bound by the demands of reason or even by a disciplined imagina-

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tion. They wander where their fancy takes them. Thus, though the primary setting of The Rabih Alameddine’s earlier novels Hakawati is Beirut, Lebanon, the book begins were Koolaids: The Art of War (1998) in an unspecified place, where a nameless and I, The Divine: A Novel in First emir is deeply troubled because his wife has Chapters (2001). His collection The not been able to give him a son. Fatima, their Perv: Stories appeared in 1999. In slave, offers to travel to Alexandria, consult a 2002, he received a Guggenheim healer who lives there, and return with a rem- Foundation fellowship. edy. The emir and his wife are delighted, and Fatima leaves with their good wishes. With this subplot underway, Osama introduces himself. He has just returned to Beirut after twenty-six years in the United States, where, after completing his schooling, he made his home in Los Angeles, working as a computer programmer. With Fatima Farouk, his best friend since childhood, Osama heads for the hospital to see his father Farid. Though presumably Osama has come home to spend the feast of Eid al-Adha with his family, in fact he has been informed that though his father has been ill before, this time he is not expected to survive. Before the two arrive at the hospital, however, the narrator returns to the story of the legendary Fatima. He describes how she persuades a band of brigands to kill each other, leaving her with two traveling companions: the stable boy Jawad and the one remaining brigand, Khayal, who transfers his loyalties to her in part to save his life and in part because he is in love with the boy. Leaving the three asleep in the desert, the narrator moves to Farid’s hospital room, where Osama and his sister Lina al-Kharrat are sitting with their father. As the novel proceeds, Osama’s memories of his earlier years and of the stories his grandfather Ismail told him are interrupted periodically for accounts of the adventures of Fatima. Her triumphant return to the emir’s court prompts the introduction of a second major subplot. When his wife asks the emir for a story of heroic deeds, he begins his account of the legendary hero Baybars. At that point in the story, the author moves back and forth among the three major narrative lines. In the hands of a less gifted writer, this approach would lead only to confusion, but Alameddine seems to sense instinctively just how long he can leave a narrative in progress before his readers forget the details of the plot. Osama’s story is by far the most complex of the three. Inevitably, his return to Beirut prompts him to recall his early years, when his father was building up an automotive empire. He also remembers his father’s younger brother Jihad, who was a mainstay in the business until his untimely death. Though Uncle Jihad insisted that car dealers such as him were the new hakawati, in fact, unlike Farid, Jihad appreciated his father’s skill and was himself a spellbinding storyteller. When Osama’s grandfather, Ismail, decided that it was time for his ten-year-old grandson to see a professional hakawati in action, it was Jihad who accompanied Ismail, Osama, and Lina to the seedy café where what turned out to be an inferior performance took place. Some of Osama’s most treasured memories involve his mother, Layla, originally Layla Khoury. As a child, he particularly liked hearing the story of his parents’ court-

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ship. Long before he was introduced to her, Farid had decided that he had to make her his wife. When she became engaged to another man, Farid was crushed. However, Jihad encouraged him by pointing out that in stories, an angel always appeared to aid the hero. Farid’s angel turned out to be Jihad. At their first meeting, Layla and Jihad discovered that they had the same attitude toward life and literature; in other words, they were soulmates. It did not take long for Layla to see her fiancé through Jihad’s eyes, and as soon as she did, the engagement was over. Though as a gay man, Jihad could not become Layla’s husband or even her lover, she knew that he would always be her best friend. Convinced that the ideal husband for Layla was Farid, who was already desperately in love with her, Jihad promptly took charge of his brother’s courtship. While Layla was checking up on Farid’s character and his prospects, Jihad informed his brother about her likes and dislikes, emphasizing her particular passion, poetry. It was the hakawati Ismail, however, who ensured Layla’s capitulation; he identified the one poet whose lines, recited by Farid, made it impossible for Layla to refuse her suitor. One of the ways that Alameddine links his narratives is by repeating the names and the characteristics of major characters. For example, Layla is one of the most admired people in the al-Kharrat family, not only for her sensitivity but also for her strength of character. By insisting that before she married him, Farid must become financially successful and provide her with a fine house, Layla motivated Farid to work hard and make a success of his business. It is true that, as Osama discovered when his father came to Los Angeles to visit him, Farid did not succeed as well in fulfilling Layla’s third condition, marital fidelity. In her independent spirit, Osama’s mother resembles another Layla, the one who appears in the story of the great warrior Baybars. When his right-hand man, Othman, decides that he cannot be happy without a wife, Baybars suggests that his friend turn the matter over to his mother. She chooses a beautiful young woman whom she encounters at the shrine of the Lady Zainab, where she is praying. Not until they are married does Othman discover that though she is a sister of the high judge of Giza, Layla is not a virgin but a runaway and a branded “dove,” or prostitute. When he expresses his disappointment, Layla makes it clear that it does not matter that she is not the answer to his prayers, for he was selected by the Lady Zainab to be the answer to hers. Layla prayed for a friend, an adventurer, a companion, and a man who could make her laugh. If he does not make an effort to please her, she points out, she will make Othman the most miserable of men; if he does, he will have a wonderful marriage. Othman capitulates, and Layla reveals herself to be a fearless fighter and a brilliant strategist, who is invaluable both to her husband and to Baybars. Another example of linked names and personalities is that of the two Fatimas. Fatima the slave girl stoically endures having her hand chopped off by the terrible jinn Afreet-Jehannam and proceeds to seduce him. When the jinn is captured by the magician King Kade, Fatima finds King Kade, turns him into a woman, lets her attendant imps eat him, and then brings her lover back to life by performing sexual acts on him. Though Fatima is often cruel, she does prove herself to be a faithful lover and a devoted mother.

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Osama’s friend Fatima Farouk is another of Alameddine’s strong-minded women. Though she has become wealthy by marrying one rich man after another, Fatima has insisted on maintaining her independence; for instance, when she is at her home in Rome, she will not allow her current spouse to visit her. Nevertheless, though no one would accuse Fatima of marital fidelity, like the other Fatima she is devoted to those she loves. At the end of The Hakawati, there are just four people at Farid’s deathbed: Osama, Lina, Salwa, and Osama’s faithful friend Fatima. Unlike Fatima Farouk, Osama’s sister Lina has become successful not by using men but by avoiding them. As a young, rebellious girl, Lina fell in love with a radical militiaman. When her family learned that she was pregnant, they insisted on a wedding. Osama came home to attend it, and everyone tried to pretend that it was a love match. However, though the bridegroom appeared for the ceremony, he left immediately afterward, and he took no further interest in his wife or in his daughter Salwa. That disillusionment was enough; Lina had nothing more to do with men. She began working at the car dealership, and when the death of Jihad left her father too dispirited to manage the business, Lina took over. She was rewarded with success in business and with success as a mother, and even while she is grieving over the loss of her father, she can look forward to the imminent birth of a grandchild. Though love and marriage are important in The Hakawati, Alameddine also looks at relationships between parents and children. The story of Baybars begins with him being adopted as a boy by Sitt Latifah and ends with Baybars’s reunion with his biological father, the king of Samarkand. Like the biblical Joseph, Mahmoud, who later became known as Baybars, was sold into slavery by his envious brothers, and, like Joseph, he later had a brilliant career. Osama’s grandfather Ismail was the son of an English doctor, Simon Twining, and his Armenian servant Lucine Guirgossian. Like the biblical Ishmael, the boy was despised by his father’s wife, who finally drove him away. When he took the surname al-Kharrat, which is literally translated as “the fibster,” Ismail not only rejected his mother’s name and thus his past history but also claimed his new identity as a hakawati. At the end of the novel, Osama is easing his father’s passing by telling him stories. It is a suitable conclusion for a book that demonstrates, both in its substance and in its style, how art enriches and transforms life. “Listen,” the word with which The Hakawati begins and ends, is an admonition that should be taken seriously, for Alameddine’s novel is a work that will richly reward everyone who reads it. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman

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Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 14 (March 15, 2008): 27. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 3 (February 1, 2008): 103-104. Lambda Book Report 16, no. 3 (Fall, 2008): 25. Library Journal 133, no. 4 (March 1, 2008): 73. The New York Times Book Review, May 18, 2008, p. 8. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 8 (February 25, 2008): 48. The San Francisco Chronicle, April 20, 2008, p. M1. The Times Literary Supplement, July 11, 2008, p. 21. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 98 (April 26, 2008): W1-W7.

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HAPPY TRAILS TO YOU Author: Julie Hecht Publisher: Simon & Schuster (New York). 209 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Short fiction Time: The late 1990’s to 2004 Locale: Nantucket The female narrator, a professional photographer putting together a collection of her work, tries to cope with the modern world and the unwelcome changes coming to Nantucket Island Julie Hecht’s collection of seven short stories under the ironic title Happy Trails to You takes us into the consciousness of a representative contemporary type: the deeply dissatisfied, slightly neurotic, politically liberal (and politically correct) professional woman who finds contemporary American life to be bewildering, frightening, and alienating. The volume’s title, which is also the title of the last story in the collection, evokes a very different United States, the optimistic 1950’s, when Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, one of the country’s happily married chirpy television couples, could rescue those in distress without so much as smudging their Western costumes. Each episode ended with the sappy song, “Happy trails to you, until we meet again. . . . Keep smiling until then.” These are hardly stories in a traditional sense. There is never a plot, and seldom is there even a narrative line. Rather, the stories tend to record the narrator’s quirky, sometimes sad, sometimes humorous responses to the people and the world around her. One would not call the method stream of consciousness, at least not in the sense of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf. The reader is privy to the narrator’s interior monologue, and she is a kind of contemporary female Hamlet, continually soliloquizing on the fact that “the time is out of joint.” The title of the first story, “Over There,” evokes another song, this one from World War I. The world the narrator enters when she visits her elderly, hard-of-hearing neighbor at Christmastime is nearly as foreign as the one British troops encountered in the trenches in 1914. As a nondrinking vegan and non-Christian, she is surrounded by heavy-drinking, ham-eating revelers who find her as exotic as she finds them offensive. Her attempt at a gift is some slices of over-baked cranberry bread. Oddly, considering the circumstances, she finds herself wishing she had a family. A second visit finds the old woman alone with her decrepit dog and overweight cat, but the narrator is equally out of place, constantly wanting to point out the need for recycling or the dangers of global warming. As she is about to leave, the sight of the old woman eating dinner evokes memories of her father, living out his last years alone. The reader may find it difficult at this stage to know how to take the narrator.

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Should the reader sympathize with her loneliness and rigorous habits, values, and attitudes, or is she a pathetic figure, substituting political correctness, recycling, and vegetarianism for family, friends, and a significant inner life? In the following six stories, the reader will likely develop a complicated relationship with this pained, struggling woman. “Being and Nothingness” finds the narrator spending far too much time watching news programs and fretting over President Bill Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky affair. Her concerns are partly political, partly personal, and partly for the state of the country. Her reference points are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau, who represent for her closeness to nature, integrity, and, one suspects, a simpler world, where one could ignore the newspapers of the day and focus on building an inner life, This is something the narrator struggles to do, but she cannot because of the media, her absent psychiatrist, and the general gloom in the country. “Thoreau would have the mind feed upon the works of nature, and not trouble itself about the news,” she says. At the instigation of her yoga teacher, she visits the Nantucket Atheneum Library, where Emerson and Thoreau once spoke. It provides some relief: “Every thought which passes through the mind helps to wear and tear it,” she quotes, and then she adds, “I had picked up some of the vibes.” What is reflected here, among other things, is a cluttered mind, driven anxious by information overload, a distaste for conservative Republicans, and perhaps (as noted above) the absence of support from husband, friends, or professionals. Tiny acts of kindness, like a gift of a small tin box, are rare events in an otherwise indifferent world. “A Little Present on This Dark November Day” takes place during the summer before and the few days after the George W. Bush-John Kerry election of 2004. As before, there is only the most slender of narrative lines, with a series of characters and incidents connected only by chronology and place. One focus is the handsome actorwaiter, whom she helps to find a natural cure for his sore throat. Another is the dinerrestaurant where he works and where Kerry had previously eaten a meal, a subject of extended conversation between the narrator and the restaurant’s chefs. At the other end of the political spectrum are her encounters in another restaurant with conservative Republicans. The day after the reelection of “the Alfred E. Neuman president,” the narrator can barely get out of bed, so deep is her disappointment, but she musters enough energy to help the Polish gardener plant bulbs for next spring. A week later, the bookstore manager gives her some miniature prints of medicinal plants in a little brown bag marked “A little present on the dark November day.” She will frame and hang it with other keepsakes. This is a wistful, tragicomic tale, capturing accurately the hope and the disappoint-

In the late 1970’s, two of Julie Hecht’s stories were published in Harper’s Magazine, and the second won the O. Henry Prize. Later her fiction appeared in The New Yorker. In 1997, her short stories were collected in a wellreceived book, Do the Windows Open? She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998. Her other books include Was This Man a Genius? Talks with Andy Kaufman (2001) and the novel The Unprofessionals (2003).

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ment experienced by some during the 2004 campaign and election. The narrator has mellowed since the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. She seems less neurotic and obsessive, though her vegetarian and homeopathic principles remain alive and well. The bulb planting and the little present from the bookstore owner offer a glimmer of hope and friendship after a bitter election. There are lighter moments, too, in “Thank You for the Mittens,” in which the narrator drives to a friend’s house to leave a gift as thanks for the wool mittens the friend knitted for the narrator. As luck would have it, the narrator is allergic to wool. Mention of allergies takes the narrator back to her childhood, the discovery of her allergies to wool and sulfa drugs, the ridicule she endured because of the hats her mother knitted for her. Hoping to leave her gift on the porch and then go for a walk, the narrator is instead invited in for a visit. While she is there, the family’s dog eats an entire chocolate cake, a delightfully absurd episode that causes a great deal of hand-wringing, some online research, and a call to the vet. The dog will be all right. Other trivial domestic matters arise, and one not so trivial: her observations of the family’s alcoholic teenage son. Layered above domestic trivia are larger personal and political concerns, neatly combined in a single sentence: “I felt I had to send [presents] to anyone who had helped me in any way in our new cruel and tough society.” It is a sentence that might stand as a theme of the book: the need for small acts of kindness in a society the narrator perceives as hostile and cruel, both to people and to the environment. In a final irony, however, the narrator leaves without saying thanks for the mittens. “Get Money” begins with an easy errand: obtaining cash for the Jamaican house maid who needs it to fly home. It develops along the way into a meditation on immigrant workers, the filth and germs clinging to money, the narrator’s outrage when the Jamaican warms soup containing meat in her microwave, the high real estate prices and overdevelopment of Nantucket, and cultural differences between the Jamaican maid and herself. The title has a double meaning. It refers in part to the comic way in which the narrator attempts to withdraw money from the ATM machine, with one foot holding open the door so there is air in the cubicle, an arm stretched out to reach the keys, using the card to punch the keys, since they are laden with germs. The other meaning relates to inflated real estate prices and the fact that neither the maid nor the narrator will ever have enough to purchase a home on Nantucket. And now the past decades of peace and quiet in Nantucket were gone. Building, hammering, nail guns shooting, chain saws, jackhammers, power mowers, motorcycles, trucks, and boombox cars were among the sounds replacing birds singing.

The generation gap and menstrual cramps are the primary subjects of “Cramps Bark.” The narrator encounters two young women in their early thirties and is continually distressed by what they do not know about the recent past. For a member of the generation that coined “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” this constant reminder of her age and of the resulting cultural gap between her and Jayne (the pretty woman she nicknames Brigitte Bardot) and Olive (who works in the bookstore and the dinerrestaurant) is depressing and debilitating. With Jayne, the difference expresses itself in clothing styles and pop culture references; with Olive, the issue is menstrual

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cramps and their remedies. The narrator is constantly having to repeat information that Olive seems incapable of retaining, such as the efficacy of raspberry leaf tea with cramp bark. Then I decided to give up. I was worn out explaining botanical remedies and the history of everything. I saw the future—myself old and resigned, worn down by the world changes, the way I’d seen people even older than those in my parents’ generation grow weary and sigh, shake their heads, and refuse to explain anymore.

In the background, as nearly always, is the lack of healthy food and cooking at the diner-restaurant. Melancholy, humor, and realism merge in this examination of the generations. In “Happy Trails to You” we meet the narrator in childhood and her family. It also contains the funniest line in the book: Reflecting on her childhood understanding of the Pledge of Allegiance, she says: “I understood the word ‘Witchitstans,’ a republic of witches in control of America. Just the way it is now.” Not surprisingly, the narrator reveals a sad and lonely childhood and adolescence, then abruptly shifts to “the dreaded phone call” from her agent, requesting that she do an interview. After initial resistance, she agrees to talk to the eager young journalist on the phone, and she even finds it an agreeable experience. The interviewer is a Texan even less healthconscious than any of the other characters in the book, and he is a gay man in a fundamentalist family. Worse, he found himself involved in a scheme to make money by buying old houses and moving them to new locations. His story unfolds as a comedy of errors from a bad home repair film. As their conversations continue, new topics arise: politics, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s musicals, her parents’ love of songs from these musicals, and their spontaneous singing of them. I wondered how I’d gone from that beautiful morning in childhood to this kind of middle-of-night morning, listening to those jokes about those song titles this way. How did it happen? If I thought about it for the rest of my life, and researched it as history. . . I might understand the whole story. The best would be to live it all over, from the beginning. This time I could do it right.

So ends this collection of funny/sad, hopeful/pessimistic, resigned/angry, selfrighteous/self-deprecating stories. They are not for those looking for solutions to complex problems, happy endings, or optimistic outlooks. These are stories for adults who have lived long enough to be disillusioned, who are trying to cling to principles and ideals, and who find age not creeping up but flying by on “time’s winged chariot.” Hecht sees contemporary life for what it is, or at least how it appears to one with a conscience and memory. It is not a pretty picture, but in her hands it is insightful, thought-provoking, and challenging. One cannot help but wonder whether the election of Barack Obama will cheer up her everywoman narrator. It would be nice to think so. Dean Baldwin

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Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 15 (April 1, 2008): 25. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 6 (March 15, 2008): 262. Library Journal 133, no. 9 (May 15, 2008): 97. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 10 (March 10, 2008): 58. The Virginia Quarterly Review 84, no. 4 (Fall, 2008): 267.

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HAVANA GOLD Author: Leonardo Padura (1955) First published: Vientos de Cuaresma, 2001, in Spain Translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press (London). 286 pp. $14.95 Type of work: Novel Time: Spring, 1989 Locale: Havana, Cuba In Padura’s second novel in his Havana Quartet featuring Lieutenant Conde, the policeman must find the rapist and murderer of a teacher in the high school that Conde had attended years earlier Principal characters: Mario Conde, also known as “the Count,” a Havana police lieutenant in charge of investigating the murder of Lisette Delgado Lisette Delgado, a twenty-four-year-old high school chemistry teacher who was beaten, raped, and then strangled to death with a towel Skinny Carlos, Conde’s longtime friend, wheelchair-bound due to a war injury Karina, a beautiful but elusive redhead, age twenty-eight, whom Conde meets and immediately loves, despite knowing almost nothing about her except that she plays the saxophone Major Antonio Rangel, Conde’s superior who constantly watches Conde and presses him to get the case solved

Havana Gold, first published in Spanish as Vientos de Cuaresma (the winds of Lent), opens on a windy Ash Wednesday in the spring of 1989. Lieutenant Mario Conde is not an ordinary police officer, and neither is his beat. He lives and works in a poor area of the crowded city of Havana in an era when Cuba is undergoing drastic changes due to the withdrawal of Russian support. What makes Conde different from others in his police unit is his introspection and his sensitivity to events and people. He is a reader, and he has learned not to lend his novels because they are seldom returned. He is also a would-be fiction writer, though this is more a dream than a reality. He is a heavy drinker when he can get something alcoholic, but he does not drink alone. Coffee is even more difficult to get, but about that and about much of his situation, he has learned to accept the conditions over which he has no control. What he cannot accept is that a murderer in his own district could avoid being brought to justice. The case he must deal with becomes more personal to Conde because the victim was a young teacher at Pre-University High School, Conde’s alma mater, and his investigation stirs nostalgia and a keen awareness of the differences there since he had been a student. The teacher, Lisette Delgado, was apparently well liked by and

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friendly with her students. Yet she was found dead in her apartment, a victim of both rape Leonardo Padura is possibly Cuba’s and murder, not necessarily by the same per- most successful writer on the son; evidence suggests that at least two men international scene, best known for his raped her. Marijuana is found in the apart- contribution to the detective fiction ment, and drugs become a major issue: where genre in the Havana Quartet, four they come from, who benefits, the effect of novels set in 1989 featuring Police usage on the individual, the social repercus- Lieutenant Mario Conde. Padura is a two-time winner of Spain’s Dashiell sions, the connections with the police. Hammett Prize for Best Literary Crime The police are not portrayed in a favorable Novel. He is also a journalist, essayist, light. Rather than finding support and fellow- and scriptwriter. ship with the other police as is often true in police procedural novels, the police around Conde are generally more hindrance than help. Major Antonio Rangel, Conde’s immediate superior, is typical of the others in the department. He is jealous because he knows Conde is better at solving cases than he could ever be. He keeps a tight rein on Conde and pressures him to solve the murder quickly, but without exposing any police corruption. Conde must essentially solve the case alone and might even solve it faster without the nuisance of the others. Conde investigates and learns more about the murder victim, and it appears that Delgado was not the model teacher she was presumed to be. She fraternized with her students outside the classroom, and the marijuana trail begun in her apartment leads to the revelation that she participated in drugs and in sex with a variety of men, including perhaps ex-students and students, a Mexican boyfriend, and the headmaster at her school. Evidence indicates that she had sex with two men shortly before she was strangled, at least one of whom raped her. The suspects keep increasing rather than being easily eliminated. Conde’s visit to Pre-Uni school is full of emotion and nostalgia. The school building, like so many of the buildings in the barrio and the rest of Havana, shows years of neglect. What Conde sees in the behavior of the students, including their seeming lack of respect for teachers and learning, brings him wistful memories of his seemingly more innocent schooldays and the fun and companionship he shared with his close friends during those years. This nostalgia for the past that no longer exists either for him or for the city is a theme that runs throughout the novel. It is stronger than ordinary for an adult looking back to his youth, because the present is so noticeably more impoverished and circumscribed than the past he can remember. It is hard for Conde to accept the finality of the economic woes and political restrictions that he has witnessed. He has learned to adjust, but he cannot pretend that he does not know that things could be better; he has known them to be better. The depressing changes in Cuba that Conde has witnessed add to his tendency to philosophize about life and his personal situation, just as the lack of collegial coworkers in the police department contributes to his tendency to be a loner. He has no immediate family. His only friend is Carlos, called Skinny, who was thin as a boy but now

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weighs nearly three hundred pounds. As a result of being shot in warfare in Angola, he is confined to a wheelchair. Skinny has his mother Josefina to care for him and cook for him, but no other friends than Conde. Skinny likes baseball and listens to it on radio or watches it on television when possible. Although Conde benefits by seeing an old friend and eating Josefina’s cooking, he and Skinny cannot do anything together except talk and drink, and it sometimes seems more an obligation than a pleasure for Conde to visit. When Conde has to work long hours, he feels guilty for not seeing Skinny; and he feels even more guilty when he neglects his old friend because he has suddenly become enamored of a woman he has met by chance. Conde’s feelings of romance and his lust are triggered almost immediately when he comes across a woman alongside the road standing by a car with a flat tire. Conde, who cannot afford a car and rides a bus, stops to help her, although it takes him a long time to figure out how to change a tire. She introduces herself as Karina. He notices everything he can about her body; he is hooked. She is enigmatic, and he spends hours waiting for her to call or to answer the phone, and he desperately wishes to be with her more. She is a jazz fan and plays a saxophone, giving Conde fantasies, such as a naked Karina playing the sax for him. Sometimes his visions are more than met: There is one especially vivid and graphic scene of their being together. This longing for sex, love, and connections sometimes draws Conde away from his work, as well as from his visits to Skinny. Although Conde is a tough guy, he is also vulnerable and lonely. His only long-term faithful companions are a sometimes ignored friend in a wheelchair and, perhaps appropriately enough, a fighting fish in a fishbowl in Conde’s apartment. Leonardo Padura writes serious fiction, and the criminal plot is only one aspect of the novel. In addition, Padura has contributed to the detective fiction genre the presentation of a homeland familiar to him but not until much later to readers in other countries. The atmosphere of the city of Havana in 1989 pervades the novel. The writing and publication history of the Conde novels have added interest and contributed to the impact Padura’s works have made internationally. Padura has said in interviews that Havana Gold holds a very special place in his heart because it was written about the worst times in Cuba following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among other things, there was a severe shortage of paper and virtually no publishing available. He was able to enter this novel for the Cuba Union of Writers prize, and because it won it was published. It was the first of his novels to be released in his country. Havana Gold is the second book in the series, but the novels have not been published in English in the original order, so that the translations do not follow the chronological order of events in Conde’s police career. It made it impossible for readers to follow the sequence as intended, and even now that all four books have been translated, confusion remains. Havana Gold is often called the fourth book because that was the order of publication in English. In the original Spanish, however, Havana Gold was first published in 1994, but it did not appear in English until 2008, the last of the four in the quartet.

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The original order in Spanish is Pasado perfecto (1991; Havana Blue, 2006), Vientos de Cuaresma (1994; Havana Gold, 2008), Máscaras (1997; Havana Red, 2005), and Paisaje de otoño (1998; Havana Black, 2006). The release of the English translations over the years 2005 to 2008 started with Havana Red and concluded with Havana Gold. To further complicate things, although the series is referred to as a quartet, there is a fifth Conde novel, Adiós, Hemingway (2001; English translation, 2005), in which Conde has changed the focus of his career. This fifth book was the first translated into English. The unusual publication history of the five books, both inside and outside Cuba, with the translations in several languages appearing well over a decade after original publication, calls attention to the courage and tenacity implicit in Padura’s decision to write about his native country in an era that presented numerous challenges and difficulties. By writing this series he was joining writers in other times and places who chose to tell the truth as they see it despite the prevailing oppression and censorship of authorities. Padura’s protagonist, Lieutenant Conde, has likewise learned to work within difficult and often depressing confines; he does not openly confront the official system, nor does he whine about it, but his protest against the system that forms the backdrop of his life is always implicit. The publication record also signals that there have been changes in Cuba in the fourteen years since Havana Gold was first published. The fact that Padura and other artists have been able to distribute their work outside of Cuba has improved conditions for them and the way Cuba is perceived in other countries. Reading Havana Gold in English carries with it the poignant recognition that Lieutenant Conde’s story of feeling isolated and cut off from the world, which reflected the situation of Havana in 1989, has reached beyond those confines, even if Conde, with his author, remains in his homeland. Lois A. Marchino

Review Sources Booklist 104, nos. 19/20 (June 1, 2008): 50. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 19 (May 12, 2008): 39-40. The Times Literary Supplement, June 20, 2008, p. 21.

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THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO An American Family Author: Annette Gordon-Reed Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). Illustrated. 798 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Biography Time: 1735-1835 Locale: Albermarle County, Virginia; Paris; and Washington, D.C. A landmark work of history and biography, reconstructing not only the history of an African American family born into slavery but also the emotional life of the slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson, who presided over so much of the family’s destiny Principal personages: Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and a slaveholder Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s slave and concubine Elizabeth Hemings, Sally’s mother James Hemings, Sally’s brother James Madison Hemings, Sally’s son Martha Wayles Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s wife Martha Jefferson Randolph, Thomas Jefferson’s daughter

It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the groundbreaking The Hemingses of Monticello, winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction. As Annette Gordon-Reed points out in her meticulously researched narrative, many others have inquired into the emotional and private life of Thomas Jefferson, especially the historian Fawn Brodie in Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974). Brodie’s controversial work was praised and attacked because it was highly speculative. On the one hand, certain critics admired her effort to reconstruct Jefferson’s affairs with Sally Hemings and Maria Cosway, even when evidence was absent. However, to make her point, Brodie had to resort to a kind of psychohistory that many professional historians disparaged. Gordon-Reed made great advances on Brodie’s approach in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), but she did not argue then that there was conclusive evidence linking the two in a sexual liaison. Instead, she pointed out how previous historians (some of them racist) had discounted the stories about Hemings’s importance in Jefferson’s life and denied that he could have possibly mated with a slave. Jefferson was sanctified, and Hemings was disparaged. Gordon-Reed’s first book on Jefferson and Hemings received respectful reviews because of her impeccable scholarship and handling of Jefferson historiography.

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The subsequent availability of DNA evidence that made it virtually certain that Jefferson Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of had fathered children by Hemings shifted the law at New York Law School and a ground, so much so that historians such as Jo- professor of history at Rutgers seph Ellis could no longer doubt Jefferson’s University. She is the author of Thomas relationship with Hemings and his role as the Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997). She is a father of her children. In The Hemingses of Monticello, Gordon- graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School. She lives with her Reed goes much further than her previous family in New York City. book in fully imagining the world in which Jefferson interacted with his slaves. This was an environment in which the Jefferson and Wayles families were intertwined with the marriage of Jefferson to Martha Wayles and with his inheritance of his wife’s property and slaves, including several of the Hemingses. Sally Hemings, the daughter of slave master John Wayles and thus the half sister of Jefferson’s wife Martha, grew up in the privileged atmosphere of house slaves treated with special care by Jefferson himself. The author avoids the kind of speculative language that weakens the narratives of Brodie and others. Largely absent from Gordon-Reed’s account are such suppositional words and phrases as “must have been,” “probably,” and “perhaps.” Rather than forcing speculation about Jefferson’s motivations, she carefully charts his stays at Monticello, Paris, and Washington, D.C., noting when Hemings became part of his household, when the births of her children occurred, the instances of special treatment that the Hemings family received from Jefferson, and the commentary Jefferson’s actions provoked among his neighbors, family, political allies, and enemies. Consequently, a dense historical context is constructed that reveals how integral slavery was to Jefferson’s physical and mental well-being. Absolutely crucial to Gordon-Reed’s argument is Jefferson’s eight-year residence in Paris. Here he cohabited with his slaves, Sally Hemings and her brother James, even arranging for James to be trained as a superlative French chef. While tracing Jefferson’s behavior, Gordon-Reed also relies on the testimony of Sally’s son, James Madison Hemings, who provides the most direct evidence of his mother’s relationship with Jefferson. Earlier historians and biographers had accused Madison (the name he preferred) of fabricating and exaggerating his connection to the Jefferson family. Similarly, the oral tradition linking the Jeffersons and the Hemingess received little respect from Jefferson scholars. Gordon-Reed demonstrates, however, that Jefferson often remained in daily contact with the Hemings family, taking considerable pride in the accomplishments of Sally’s sons. That Jefferson did not explicitly acknowledge the existence of his African American family should not be surprising, Gordon-Reed explains. Any avowed sexual link to Sally would be used—as indeed it was—by his political enemies to attack Jefferson’s integrity. John Quincy Adams wrote satirical verse about Jefferson’s affair with Hemings, and Jefferson knew it, Gordon-Reed points out. Indeed, contemporary newspapers were full of gossip about the “dusky Sally” that Jefferson kept as a “con-

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cubine,” the term normally used for black women who were the mistresses of slave masters, a not uncommon fact of life in the antebellum South. Most telling in Gordon-Reed’s account is her use of inference, a linking together of discrete data that become, in her narrative, a startling revelation of how many of those close to Jefferson collaborated in concealing the fact of his miscegenation (the term then in use to describe the coupling of blacks and whites). In her Amazon.com interview, Gordon-Reed commented on the crucial role inference plays in her book: It’s a combination of what people said about their lives, inferences from the actions they took, and a consideration of the context in which they were living. Some people have problems with the use of “inferences.” I don’t, so long as they are reasonable. In fact, I would trust the reasonable inferences from a person’s repeated behavior through the years over what they say any day, because people can say anything. I do believe that actions often speak louder than words. Contrary to popular belief, there are lots of actions on the part of Jefferson and Hemings that “speak” about the basic nature of their relationship.

A case in point is Abigail Adams, who became a close friend of Jefferson during her husband’s John’s stay in Paris as an American diplomat. Jefferson’s nine-year-old daughter Polly was supposed to arrive in London (where the Adamses were then residing) accompanied by an older chaperone. Instead, her guardians in Virginia sent her in the company of Sally Hemings, then only in her early teens (somewhere between fourteen and sixteen). Abigail Adams’s letters to Jefferson are full of complaints about Sally. The young slave was not a fit companion for Polly, wrote Adams with considerable vehemence, although with no specific examples of Sally’s inadequacy. Sally was indeed young for the role assigned her, but Gordon-Reed points out that she would hardly have been chosen to accompany Polly on a long ocean voyage if Sally had been deemed inadequate to care for Thomas Jefferson’s child. Jefferson’s behavior at this point also requires considerable pondering. GordonReed points out that he had often been criticized for excessive concern for his family when the affairs of public life demanded his full attention. He was so devoted to his wife that he promised her on his deathbed not to remarry—a promise that he kept. By all accounts, he was a doting father. Nevertheless, he did not hasten to London to take charge of his daughter, and she, in turn, was distressed that she would have to travel on to Paris and meet him there. Gordon-Reed notes an array of factors involved in interpreting the attitudes of Adams and Jefferson. Given eighteenth century manners and decorum, Adams could not say what was perhaps on her mind: that including the young slave girl in the middleaged Jefferson’s Paris household might be an act of impropriety, for it was well known that male slaveholders often treated their female “property” as concubines. By the same token, Jefferson—contrary to his usual behavior as a devoted father, one who had importuned his friends in Virginia for more than two years to make the proper arrangements to send his daughter to him—seemed to act out of character by not rushing to Polly in London. Historians who have not wanted to countenance any sort of untoward behavior on

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Jefferson’s part have been reluctant to speculate on his motives, Gordon-Reed notes. So she turns to Connor Cruise O’Brien, who she admits is hostile to Jefferson, to suggest, as O’Brien does, that Jefferson did not want to appear in London in the guise of a slaveholder. To do so would not only have embarrassed the Adamses, it would also have done damage to his own image. It was one thing to know Jefferson owned slaves; it would be quite another to actually see him take charge of Sally Hemings. Gordon-Reed demonstrates why previous accounts of this episode in the Jefferson-Hemings saga demands more thought. Like a lawyer working with circumstantial evidence, Gordon-Reed has fashioned a narrative explanation founded on deep reading in eighteenth century sources and an exhaustive interpretation of secondary sources and of Jefferson’s interaction with his white and black families. Her method of working is much like a historiographical novel—William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) comes to mind—in which different versions of the past are subjected to multiple points of view in an overriding and authoritative narrative structure. Much of the value of Gordon-Reed’s book, then, is not only her fresh and comprehensive reading of Jefferson the man, the politician, and the slaveholder but also of the slaves that he could not bear to part with or parted with on his terms—usually after they repaid his support by a stipulated term of service. Thus Sally’s brother, James, won his freedom, but only after years of exercising his skills as a chef trained in Paris at Jefferson’s expense. The ultimate mystery of The Hemingses of Monticello, however, is Sally herself, who never left a record of exactly what Jefferson meant to her. The closest readers can come to her is through her son, Madison, whose account now becomes more significant given the full historical context that Gordon-Reed is able to assemble The tone of Gordon-Reed’s book is compassionate and empathetic. She is not, in other words, judgmental. She is profoundly aware of historical context and the mixed motivations of individuals. She does not make Sally a heroine or Jefferson a villain. In an amazon.com interview she aptly sums up her nuanced and tolerant view of Jefferson, his world, and ours: Jefferson was contradictory, but we are, too. Who does not have intellectual beliefs that he or she is not emotionally or constitutionally capable of living by? I find it more than a little disingenuous to act as if this were something that set Jefferson apart from all mankind. It’s always easier to spot others’ hypocrisies while missing our own. He dealt with the conflict between recognizing the evils of slavery, to some degree, by fashioning himself as a “benevolent” slave holder and taking refuge in the notion that “progress” would one day bring about the end of slavery. It wouldn’t happen in his time, but it would happen. That is not a satisfactory response to many today, but there it is.

Gordon-Reed’s words are embodied in a book that is a model for the way history should be reconstructed. Carl Rollyson

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Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 22 (August 1, 2008): 31. Essence 39, no. 5 (September, 2008): 96. Library Journal 133, no. 13 (August 15, 2008): 96. The New Republic 239, no. 7 (October 22, 2008): 35-39. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 15 (October 9, 2008): 15-17. The New York Times Book Review, October 5, 2008, p. 17. The New Yorker 84, no. 29 (September 22, 2008): 86-91. Newsweek 152, no. 15 (October 13, 2008): 51. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 28 (July 14, 2008): 57. The Wall Street Journal 252, no. 68 (September 19, 2008): W2.

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HIS ILLEGAL SELF Author: Peter Carey (1943) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 288 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1972 Locale: New York City; Queensland, Australia The story of a young boy taken from his privileged New York City life to a life among 1960’s rebels and hippies on the run from American and Australian authorities Principal characters: Che Selkirk, a precocious, protected seven-year-old son of unmarried 1960’s radicals, who lives with his grandmother in New York, until being taken by Anna Xenos to Australia Susan Selkirk, his fugitive mother David Rubbo, his fugitive father Phoebe Selkirk, his wealthy maternal grandmother Anna Xenos, also known as Dial, a young Radcliffe graduate about to take a faculty position at Vassar when she is asked to bring Che to his mother Cameron, Che’s sixteen-year-old neighbor and babysitter Trevor Dobbs, an Australian hippie Jean Rabiteau, also known as Rabbitoh, an Australian hippie Phil Warriner, an Australian lawyer

In Peter Carey’s novel His Illegal Self, seven-year-old Che Selkirk has been living with his grandmother since he was two, because his politically radical mother was charged with a bank robbery and has been fleeing the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) ever since. To shield him from knowledge of his outlaw parents, Grandmother Selkirk keeps the boy in her isolated home on Kenoza Lake in upstate New York, only occasionally staying at her Upper East Side apartment. There, one day, a tall blond woman named Dial steps off the elevator, and Che mistakenly believes her to be his mother. He willingly accompanies her and his grandmother on a brief shopping trip to Bloomingdale’s, after which Che is to meet secretly with his mother and then be returned to his grandmother. Things, however, go terribly wrong. The arranged meeting in New York is changed to Philadelphia, then canceled when Che’s mother is killed planting a bomb. In a panic, Dial essentially kidnaps the boy, taking him to Seattle, where he fleetingly sees his father, then finally to Australia, where the rest of the novel takes place and where Che and Dial endure physical, emotional, and relational trials that change their lives profoundly. Carey’s thirteenth novel, like those before it, ventures into experimental territory, though with characters less strange, idiosyncratic, and fantastic than appear in many

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of his previous ones. The method, however, bears the Carey trademark—rapid cutting between scenes, flashbacks, an occasional flash forward, and above all the highly original style and voice. Somewhat more conventional, too, is the form of the novel, which at times verges on the picaresque, at other times on the “foundling” genre as exemplified, for instance, by Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742). There are echoes, too, of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837-1938). Carey’s free-indirect point of view vacillates between the two main characters, Che and Dial, and out of the often-conflicting viewpoints of this pair comes much of the novel’s emotion and appeal. Seven-year-old Che presents problems for Carey, because the boy cannot seem too wise for his years, especially because he has led an extraordinarily sheltered life, deprived even of television for fear he might see news reports and photographs of his “most wanted” parents. His tenuous connections to the outside world are provided by Cameron, the sixteen-year-old neighbor expelled from Groton who supplies Che with bits of information about his infamous parents, including a Life magazine photograph of his absent father, which Che carries along with other scraps as talismans of a family that might have been. It is Cameron who predicts, “They will come for you, man. They’ll break you out of here.” Then, too, there is Che’s starchy and willful grandmother, who secludes him at Kenoza Lake and in her posh apartment, ensuring that the emotionally starved boy will bond immediately with Dial, who seems the fulfillment of Cameron’s prophecy. So nicknamed because “she said dialectic had been invented by Zeno,” Dial comes from a solidly working-class background. Her father, a real revolutionary for Greece in 1945, employed her nights and weekends in his South Boston sausage factory while she attended Harvard. With her five feet, ten inches in height, good looks, and hippie clothes, she was “an SDS goddess” (although one who lacked commitment to the movement), and she was headed for an academic life. Her meeting with Che proves fateful, however, as his enthusiastic embrace and instant bonding fill an unrealized need. Peter Carey was born in Australia and lives in New York City, where he directs the writing program at Hunter College. He has twice received the Booker Prize for fiction.

He looked at her adoringly, little glances, smiles. She thought how glorious it was to be loved, she, Dial, who was not loved by anyone. She felt herself just absorb this little boy, his small damp hand dissolving in her own.

It is a short while after this tender moment, however, that life suddenly becomes surreal for Dial and Che. Exploiting Che’s sketchy understanding of places and events, Carey sends the pair to Philadelphia, then Oakland, then Seattle, then (paid off by the movement) to Australia. Carey’s technique is designed to answer a reader’s obvious question, “Why doesn’t she simply return Che to his grandmother and go on with her planned academic life?” Panic might be one answer, fear of arrest another, since she has obviously if unwittingly “kidnapped” the boy. For Dial, who has time in

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airplanes and motels to consider her situation, her move to Australia seems more than a little improbable. Improbable or not, Australia is the setting for the rest of the novel and the struggle Dial and Che face to survive while dodging the authorities and overcoming their naïveté. Considering that this is 1972 and considering the collective paranoia that was abroad at the time, it is not unlikely that Dial and Che would find themselves in a hippie community in Queensland, drawing strength from one another and from an odd mix of inept escapees from capitalism. Chief among these is Trevor Dobbs, who with his friend Rabbitoh picks up Dial and Che as they head north from Brisbane into the teeth of a hurricane. During the next few days, the tension between Che and Dial intensifies. She is preoccupied with finding a safe haven, away from the authorities who would surely jail her for kidnapping. Che, however, is focused on finding his father, returning home, and staying in motels, where he and Dial can live safely and comfortably, as they did briefly in Oakland. The movement, however, has trapped Dial, first by involving her in the planned meeting with Che’s mother, then by spiriting her and Che out of the country with a wad of American money that Dial cannot convert in Australia without arousing suspicion. In a move that infuriates Che and seems crazy even to Dial, she purchases a pair of run-down cabins on the edge of the Australian rain forest near a hippie commune. Her position now perfectly echoes her surname: “Her name was Anna Xenos. Xenos means displaced person, stranger . . . .” However improbable some readers might find aspects of Carey’s plot, the physical and emotional geography of the novel is rendered with vivid intensity. Part of the emotional tug of war occurs between Che and Dial, as he begins to realize that she is not, as he first assumed, his mother. For her part, Dial is torn between the pain of telling and the lie of pretending, increasingly pressured by Che’s curiosity and suspicion, and sometimes hurt by his persistent longing for the father who has never had time for or interest in him. Their best moments occur when she reads to him from Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903) and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); their worst moments occur when they quarrel. Not surprisingly, Trevor becomes the father substitute, putting the boy to work hauling sledges of seaweed to mulch his garden and rewarding him with stories of his life as an orphan being physically and sexually abused by priests. Tension among them rises as both Che and Trevor pump Dial for answers. Is Che an orphan? Where is his father? Moments like these lead to questions of identity. Dial knows she does not belong in Australia with this ragtag bunch of hippies; she is a scholar, an academic. Che is even more confused, longing to know his parents, loving and not loving Dial, hating where he lives, yet maturing every day as the hardships of life in the bush take him far beyond his cozy, sheltered life in the United States. When the crisis comes and he confronts Dial about his parents and why she brought him here, he runs from the truth. As the third part of the novel’s emotional triangle, Trevor is both a comforting and a threatening presence. Having entrusted her money to him (Trevor hides it with his “stash”), Dial is bound to him without being able fully to trust him. His own paranoia

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and furtiveness, engendered first by his life in the orphanage and then by the official suspicion that surrounded all who sought an “alternate lifestyle,” intensifies the reader’s uneasiness for Dial and Che. In the end, they have no choice but to trust Trevor’s experience and instincts, but he exists as a menace waiting to pounce until the novel’s swift, unexpected conclusion. The personal conflicts and identity struggles occur against the surreal background of radical politics in the Nixon era and the lush Australian coastal rain forest. These are territories Carey knows well, having himself spent time in the late 1970’s in just such a community north of Brisbane. The main point of contention between Dial and her neighbors is the cat she and Che picked up, which offends by killing birds. As a symptom of the petty quarreling endemic to communes, this device works well. Natural, harmless in itself, it offends Dial’s neighbors by doing what it cannot help but do. In a touching scene, Dial tenderly breaks the cat’s neck and tearfully buries it. However, the hippies, for all of their pettiness and paranoia, rally to her side when Che disappears and is feared lost or drowned. Their fear is not unfounded. As the novel nears its close, it comes to resemble a thriller, as those hunting for Che and his abductor come closer and closer to their settlement, and the police raid, wantonly smashing doors and furniture. Lawyer Phil Warriner’s trip to the United States to arrange Che’s return ends in frustration. Readers will differ over whether Carey’s ending is satisfying. What is less in dispute is the novel’s energy, both narrative and stylistic. Its swift, jagged narrative builds in a series of emotional and situational climaxes; the characters deepen and grow. Carey’s earlier novels focused on social and political problems, but with the exception of calling into question the radical politics of the 1960’s and 1970’s, and the geographical and political ignorance of Americans such as Dial, this is a novel about people and their elemental struggles with their emotions, relationships, and identities. Constantly shifting in a free-indirect point of view, Carey explores his main characters’ emotional lives and psychological needs, juxtaposing adult and child viewpoints and needs without favoring either. Che often sees more clearly than Dial, yet she is the adult who understands more broadly. Tensions between them are less often resolved than simply suspended like particles in a supersaturated solution. Carey’s style is swift and direct, with the intensity of William Faulkner’s, without the long sentences and polysyllabic vocabulary. His descriptions, whether of dingy hotels or the Australian rain forest, ring with colorful authenticity. He has a gift for precise and sometimes quirky metaphors and similes: “Grandma’s wrist was pale and smooth as a founder’s belly”; “The conversation continued like water dribbling from a hose.” However one approaches this novel, it will bear, perhaps even demand, rereading. Those already familiar with Carey’s fiction will no doubt be fascinated by this latest experiment; those unfamiliar with his work may find this novel an inviting entrance to his verbal world. As a vivid re-creation of a moment in U.S. political and social history, it will appeal both to those who lived through those times and to those who want to experience them. There are no heroes here, though there are villains—the selfrighteous and self-centered revolutionaries and their enemies, the violent and vindic-

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tive police. Dial and Che are the unwitting victims of both groups, who turn a simple act of kindness into a life-shattering experience. Dean Baldwin

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 6 (November 15, 2007): 5. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 21 (November 1, 2007): 1116. Library Journal 133, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 80. London Review of Books 30, no. 5 (March 6, 2008): 16. New York 41, no. 6 (February 18, 2008): 61-62. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 4 (March 20, 2008): 12-14. The New York Times, February 5, 2008, p. 1. The New York Times Book Review, February 10, 2008, p. 14. People 69, no. 7 (February 25, 2008): 54. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 40 (October 8, 2007): 34. Review of Contemporary Fiction 28, no. 1 (Spring, 2008): 183-184. The Spectator 306 (February 16, 2008): 55-56. Time 171, no. 7 (February 18, 2008): 60. The Times Literary Supplement, February 15, 2008, pp. 23-24. World Literature Today 82, no. 5 (September/October, 2008): 65-68.

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A HISTORY OF HISTORIES Epics, Chronicles, Romances, and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century Author: John Burrow (1935) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 517 pp. $35.00 Type of work: History A history of the writing of history, from the first Greek historians to the major trends in history writing of the late twentieth century The word “history” means both the remembered past and the process of telling the past. The second sense indicates that what is known of the world before the present always comes from someone’s telling, and the different ways in which people have told about the world have been shaped by their understandings, goals, and preoccupations. The recorded past is presented in particular human voices, so that reading history is the double act of hearing the tellers and hearing what they are telling us. John Burrow, in A History of Histories, describes the variety of the voices. Burrow begins with what he considers the first recognizable voices of historians, those of Herodotus and Thucydides. Before Herodotus (born between 450 and 430 b.c.e.), there had been recordings of events, notably by the Egyptians, but no reflections on events or interpretations of them. Herodotus, inspired by the rise of the Persian empire and its invasion of Greece, wrote the work known as Historiai Herodotou (c. 424 b.c.e.; The History, 1709) in order to memorialize the great human achievements of the struggle between the Greeks and the Persians. This would be the motivation of most of the ancient histories in Burrow’s recounting and even a number of the more modern ones. It was certainly a motivation for the writings of the successor of Herodotus, Thucydides, who investigated the events of the Peloponnesian War, when the Greeks proceeded to fight among themselves in the years following their defeat of the invading Persians. Both Herodotus and Thucydides, wishing to create memorials, wrote epic narratives, creating one of the forms of history that would pass through the centuries. Following a generally chronological approach, Burrow moves from the two Greek founders to histories of the Greeks in Asia, as mercenaries of the Persians and then as invaders. In reaching the historians of Alexander’s campaigns, there appears a curious chronological quirk of historical writing. While Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon (author of the epic of the adventures of Greek mercenaries in Persia) were writing about events that had occurred in their own lifetimes and in which they were involved, Alexander’s historians wrote centuries after the Macedonian conquests. Should a chronological telling place the historian according to the historian’s lifetime or the time of the historical narrative? Grouping all of the “ancients” together, Burrow

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uses the latter strategy for the Alexander his torians Arrian and Curtius Rufus, but waits John Burrow received his B.A. in 1957 until the Enlightenment to deal with Edward and his Ph.D. in 1961 from Cambridge University, and he became a Professor Gibbon’s Roman history. Following the Greeks with the Romans, of European Thought at Oxford. Burrow considers the major historians of Rome. Burrow is a Fellow of the British Consistent with the expansion of this new em- Academy and an Emeritus Fellow of pire and its inclusiveness, several of the histo- Balliol College, Oxford. In 2008, he was the Bennett Boskey Distinguished rians were not acutally Roman. Polybius, for Vistiing Professor in History at example, was Greek. Josephus, who wrote on Williams College in Massachussetts. the Jewish revolt, was a Jewish Pharisee. The Roman historians also looked at peoples who were new to historical consideration, as when Tacitus provided observations on the Germans. The Roman historians, especially Tacitus and Livy, would also provide models for future historians, down to the modern period. Because of the chronological approach, Burrow’s A History of Histories is also, necessarily, a history of the world (or at least the Western world), requiring divisions into epochs and periods. Burrow’s epochs are fairly traditional. He moves from the ancient world to that of Christendom, which presented a new, forward-moving scheme of history derived from theology. The Bible gave a new theme to historians, the idea of the people of God. It also gave them a new subject, the church. With the general decline in literacy, though, early Christian historical writers, such as Gregory of Tours, tended to lose their analytical capacities and fall into chronicling. The English historian Bede, as Burrow presents him, played a unique role, telling the story both of the English church and of the English people, preparing the way for the revival of secular history. Secular history returned through the writing of annals and chronicles of the deeds of the knights. Burrow derives the sophisticated historical works of the Italian humanists Giovanni Villani, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Francesco Guicciardini from civic chronicles written during the late Middle Ages. He also discusses the interest of these humanist writers in the ancient Romans, suggesting that history continually looks back at models for rendering the past as well as at the past itself. In taking up modern history, in which the past becomes something to be studied rather than remembered, Burrow renders a service to all readers and writers of history by defending the early modern antiquarians. Regarded in their own day as mere collectors and frequently looked down upon even today, the antiquarians, especially of England, not only assembled and preserved valuable historical sources but also kept alive local history as attention turned to national and political subjects. Burrow gives a pivotal position and an entire chapter to Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon (16091674), whose The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1702) provided the foundation for all future histories of the English Civil War. Readers may question whether Clarendon should really receive roughly the same amount of space as Herodotus, but one could argue this issue, given the role of the civil war in shaping

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England and the importance of England for later world history. Following Clarendon, the study of the past reached an intellectual and artistic high point with the works of David Hume, William Robertson, and Gibbon. The discussion of Gibbon is particularly interesting, as Burrow details both the influence of ancient writers, such as Tacitus, and of contemporaries on this major shaper of modern thought. As the Persian and Peloponnesian wars had been the critical events calling for the attention of the ancient Greeks, the revolutions in England and France became points of concentration for modern historians, especially the English and the French. Thomas Babington (Lord) Macaulay read his own Whig politics into the English Civil War, presenting it as leading the way to growing parliamentary democracy. Views of the French Revolution were more contentious, since its meaning was still a political issue in the nineteenth century and may well continue to be a political issue. In a unique declamatory style, Thomas Carlyle presented the French Revolution as the violent drama of growing realities casting off the dead forms of the past. Jules Michelet and Hippolyte Taine, two of the most important French historians of the nineteenth century, offered different versions of the revolution as a popular uprising. For Michelet, the revolutionary masses were “the people,” often acting in unfortunate ways, but acting in concert and in the name of the emerging new nation. For Taine, those same masses were “the mob,” anarchic and uncontrolled. The contrast between the two French scholars demonstrates that in modern times history is often separated from ideology only with difficulty, if at all. One of the ideological themes that appeared in the nineteenth century was that of history as the story of freedom. Burrow give two examples of this trend. In the Constitutional History (1874-1878) of William Stubbs, the traditional political actors of the past, the rulers, began to recede into the background and history became the story of the emergence of constitutional institutions. The Swiss Jacob Burckhardt, in his interpretation of the Italian Renaissance, identified the rise of autonomous individuals as a characteristic of the rise of modernity. In a sudden move to the United States, Burrow brings together two historians from different origins and eras. Bernal Díaz, who lived in the sixteenth century, was one of the companions of Hernán Cortés in the conquest of Mexico. Díaz wrote an account of the adventure that is still interesting today. William Hickling Prescott was one of the first major historians in the United States, and he is best known for his 1843 classic The Conquest of Mexico. The justification for presenting these two historians in the same chapter is clearly that Díaz was Prescott’s major source. However, earlier in the book, more than one hundred pages separated Edward Gibbon from his sources in the ancient world. A consistent chronological progression is difficult to maintain when the subjects are always looking across the centuries. From Prescott, Burrow moves to major historians in the United States concerned with their own country, Francis Parkman’s history of the American West and Henry Adams’s account of the growth of the United States as a nation. Germany, not seen since the entry on Tacitus, reenters Burrow’s account in the nineteenth century. The German historians of this time were leaders in the professionalization of history, and they helped to determine the character of history as an aca-

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demic discipline rather than as the concern of philosophic gentlemen or politicians out of office. Leopold von Ranke was especially important for creating a professional consensus about what history should be, as much through his personal connections with other historians as through his thinking and writing. Burrow presents twentieth century history as movements in diverse directions. The “Whig history” of Macaulay and Stubbs—the presentation of history as a steady movement toward democratic institutions—came under criticism. Professionalization raised the question of whether history was an art or a science. The Annales school in France drew attention to the underlying structures of history and to cultural interpretations as a subject of history. Marxism arose as a grand narrative for some. Anthropological approaches became more common. The idea of world history became more common, even if most academic historians still tend to be highly specialized in time and place. A History of Histories is an intriguing and erudite work, but one that does have its limits and eccentricities. Some readers may feel that it should properly be called “A History of Western Histories.” While he does not pretend to extend his consideration beyond European and North American historians, readers might consider how Burrow’s personal view of historical writing has been informed and directed by his European outlook. Nowhere in these pages will one find a mention of the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian (c. 145-86 b.c.e.), who wrote a massive work on two thousand years of Chinese history and laid the groundwork for all succeeding Chinese history writing. There is also no mention of the medieval North African Muslim philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), who left behind a history of the world that has influenced modern Western as well as non-Western historians. Burrow leaves the impression that history moved geographically as well as temporally, beginning in Greece, spreading for a few centuries throughout the Roman Empire, then taking up residence mainly in England and France, taking a brief tour of northern Italy during the Renaissance, and popping up in the United States and Germany during the nineteenth century. Carl L. Bankston III

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 16 (April 15, 2008): 22. The Evening Standard, December 3, 2007, p. 39. The New Republic 238, no. 10 (June 11, 2008): 37-41. The New Yorker 84 (March 24, 2008): 79. Policy Review, no. 150 (August/September, 2008): 106-111. The Times Literary Supplement, February 15, 2008, p. 14. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 92 (April 19, 2008): W9. The Washington Times, March 9, 2008, p. B06.

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HITLER’S PRIVATE LIBRARY The Books That Shaped His Life Author: Timothy W. Ryback (1954) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 278 pp. $25.95 Type of work: History Time: 1915-1945 Locale: Germany Of the sixteen thousand books owned by Adolf Hitler, some twelve hundred reside in the Library of Congress, and another eighty at Brown University; Ryback analyzes the books that defined and directed the development of Hitler’s major attitudes and beliefs Since World War II, countless biographies and analyses of German chancellor Adolf Hitler have appeared in print. From Nazi sociology to his personal sociopathy, all elements of Hitler’s life, including every word spoken or written by and about him, have been painstakingly scrutinized, elucidating the mind of the man whose psychopathology led to the death of more than fifty million people. One aspect of Hitler’s life, however, has been little examined: his obsession with books. “I can never remember Adolf without books. Books were his world,” recalled an associate. Hitler explained, “I take what I need from books.” Following GermanJewish art critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin’s belief that books reveal and preserve their owner, Timothy W. Ryback examined some of the twelve hundred Library of Congress volumes, plus some of the eighty housed at Brown University, to draw insightful and incisive conclusions about their owner, Hitler. Building on two prior studies, The Hitler Library: A Bibliography (2001) by Philipp Gassert and Daniel Mattern and Führer olvas (2000; Hitler’s Library, 2003) by Ambrus Miskolczy, Ryback’s Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life compellingly studies the provocative notion that Hitler (little known as a bibliophile) acquired and reinforced his most pernicious theories from books. From weapons manuals and historical biographies to classic great fiction; from adventure novels and religion to the occult; from seething anti-Semitic tracts and political history to art and architecture—literally from militarism to mendacity—Hitler’s eclectic literary tastes lay bare his mind and his morality, and even more revealing are the marginalia he penned in his books. Analyzing effectively in chronological order and blending seamlessly the personal and the historical, Ryback expertly traces, through the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s, the evolution of Hitler’s psyche from genesis to genocide. Critic Max Osborn’s Berlin (1909) was bought in 1915 by twenty-six-year-old World War I message runner Hitler, who, despite his rejection by the Royal Academy of Arts in Vienna, considered himself an artist. Osborn’s book was important because it celebrated two of Hitler’s lifelong obsessions: Prussian elements in Berlin’s archi-

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tecture and German ruler Frederick the Great’s eighteenth century military successes, both of Cofounder and codirector of the which inspired Hitler’s promise to make Ber- Institute of Historical Justice and Reconciliation, Timothy W. Ryback is lin the world’s capital. After reading poet Anton Drexler’s book- the author of The Last Survivor: let Mein politisches Erwachen (1923; my po- Legacies of Dachau (1999) and litical awakening), Hitler concluded, “I saw numerous articles on the Holocaust. my own development come to life before my eyes.” Although he did not consider himself an anti-Semite in his youth, Hitler became fixated on Drexler’s thesis that Jews owned 80 percent of German money, thereby controlling the economy. In 1919, Drexler introduced Hitler to politician Dietrich Eckart, who ultimately became Hitler’s mentor. A newspaper reported that Eckart’s anti-Semitism was so virulent that for his lunch he could well eat “a half dozen Jews along with his sauerkraut.” Eckart and Hitler soon became intellectual partners in hate, relishing Eckart’s writing such chilling absurdities as that the death of “six million men” and “tens of thousands of children” during the Crusades was the fault of the satanic Jews. Eckart also produced a highly regarded adaptation of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt (pr. 1867), a book he gave to Hitler in 1921. In the plot, Peer Gynt’s overweening ambition for global conquest causes mass destruction, and after it, he achieves ultimate absolution. Hitler obviously identified with the play’s protagonist. Clearly, the most significant way to be preserved by one’s books is to write one. In the Hitler collection at the Library of Congress are a dozen or so copies of Hitler’s famous manifesto Mein Kampf as well as the books that are its intellectual antecedents, such as American industrialist Henry Ford’s The International Jew (1921), an antiSemitic treatise that excoriates Jewish plans to rule the world. Hitler described Ford as “my inspiration.” Originally titled A Four and a Half Year Battle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice, Hitler’s magnum opus was composed during his brief time in Landsberg prison. With its poor spelling, grammar, and punctuation, it was published in 1925 with the shorter title Mein Kampf (My Struggle, 1933). One scathing review called it “Hitler’s end”; another said the book casts “doubts about the mental stability of the writer”; and a third humorously renamed it “Sein Krampf (It Is Cramp).” Still, Hitler followed this first autobiographical volume with a political tract in which he horrifyingly states that “the Hebrew corrupters of the people [should have been] held under poison gas,” as German soldiers were in World War I. To filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, director of the notorious 1935 Nazi epic Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), Hitler explained that he had never had a formal education, so, “Every night I read one or two books, even when I go to bed very late.” Indeed in the 1930’s, concurrent with his rise to political power, Hitler’s collection and consumption of books became even more voracious. Although he loved books, giving a book to Hitler as a gift could be risky, as was learned by Henriette von Schirach (the wife of Hitler’s youth leader) when she gave Hitler a history of his Austrian birthplace (inscribed “To our beloved Führer in celebration”) and was thereby welcomed into Hitler’s inner circle. Although he had known her since she was nine and called her

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“my sunshine,” she was later banished when she mentioned her fear that Dutch Jewish women were being dragged off to concentration camps. “You are sentimental,” Hitler screamed at her. “You have to learn to hate. What have Jewish women in Holland got to do with you?” Hitler’s attitudes were strongly shaped by the writings of nineteenth century German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who described an imminent “Volkskrieg, a people’s war,” and proclaimed that Germans and their language were superior to all others in Europe. Furthermore, Fichte’s solution to the “Jewish question” was to decapitate all Jews simultaneously and place on their shoulders new heads, devoid of all Jewish ideas. Similarly, Professor Hans F. K. Günther’s Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (1923; racial typology of the German people) celebrates Aryan racial purity and superiority. Hitler’s growing contempt for Jews is revealed in his marginalia on a 1934 reprint of scholar Paul de Lagarde’s Deutsche Schriften (1878-1881; German essays), a collection of nineteenth century anti-Semitic writings arguing that Jews must be kept separate because of their inferiority and toxicity. Hitler underscored a passage that announced that Germany is solely for those who “feel German [and] who think German,” implicitly not Jews, and boldly highlighted the assertion, “Each and every irksome Jew is a serious affront to the authenticity and veracity of our German identity.” Ryback includes two intriguing chapters on Hitler’s strange and strained relationship with the Catholic Church. Racial separatist Alfred Rosenberg wrote Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (1932; The Myth of the Twentieth Century, 1982), contradicting Catholic teachings by advocating polygamy as well as the bizarre notion that St. Peter was really “a Jewish agent . . . enslaving the peoples of Europe.” The Vatican threatened to excommunicate those who read Rosenberg’s eight hundred-page book; ironically, Hitler, officially a Roman Catholic, owned two copies. By contrast, Bishop Alois Hudal’s tract Die Grundlagen des Nationalsozialismus (1937; foundations of National Socialism) attempted to soften the rough edges of Nazism and to align it with Catholicism, since both concepts “shared a common belief in blind obedience to authority,” the infallibility of their leader, and long-standing contempt for the Jews. Munich Archbishop Michael Faulhader, a moderate Church official, refused to provide names of Jews baptized into Catholicism, since the Nazis insisted that, despite baptism, a Jew remained a Jew. Ironically, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that he had long desired to become an abbot and told his sister that “the good Lord holds a protective hand over me.” Just before Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, Hitler assured his generals that in war, “the victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not . . . it is not right that matters, but victory.” By 1940, about half of Hitler’s library contained books about historical militarism and military vehicles. He was also, however, comforted by popular novelist Karl May’s adventure stories of the American West, since May’s hero used incredible craftiness and skill to destroy his enemies. Dr. Hugo Roch’s insight into a great strategist and thinker, Alfred von Schlieffen, in Schlieffen (1926), provided advice on military matters that Hitler followed, such as conquering Belgium and Holland first, then going east to conquer Russia, thereby avoiding a war

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on two fronts. A German edition of Amerika in den strijd der kontinenten (1943; America in the battle of the continents) by Sven Hedin, a Swedish explorer whom Hitler admired, was another powerful influence. Hedin completed three American book tours preaching in lectures that Hitler had tried to stop the war many times, that U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt had caused World War II, and that America would lose the war. While the Allies attacked German positions in Africa, Hitler clung to Hedin’s thesis that Germany would be victorious, calling Roosevelt, “a puppet of the Jews.” By 1945, with Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich collapsing around him, he took great comfort from a 2,100-page tome, the 1858 biography of Frederick the Great written by English essayist Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle hated the Irish, blacks, and Jews, and the parallels between Hitler and Frederick are striking. Carlyle wrote that Frederick said, “I devour my books,” to prevent insanity. When news of Roosevelt’s sudden death reached Hitler, he gleefully hoped that, like Frederick, his own last-minute salvation was imminent. When this failed, Hitler dictated his last will and testament in which he continued to assert, as had Hedin, that he did not want or cause the war in 1939, and that the war was caused solely by the “propaganda of International Jewry.” In analyzing the range of authors and topics in Hitler’s library—from William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes to military history, anti-Semitic rants, religion, and adventure stories—Ryback cogently demonstrates that Hitler’s obsession with reading and books reveals his intellectual and moral development. While many people read inductively, opening their minds to great writers’ ideas, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that he read mostly deductively, desiring to have his prejudices confirmed, since for him reading was equivalent to “collecting ‘stones’ to fill a ‘mosaic’ of preconceived notions.” He boldly asserted that blind obedience must take precedence over free thought, expression, and will. Even if a leader is wrong, he said, “following a bad decision will achieve the final goal better than personal freedom.” The final goal—genocide and mass destruction—was clearly advocated in Mein Kampf and the books Hitler consumed. Reading was such a “deadly serious business,” reported one colleague, that the sign on Hitler’s study said “ABSOLUTE SILENCE.” Certainly Hitler has left behind deadly, absolute silence. “Books have their fates,” wrote critic Walter Benjamin, as do the readers and owners of books. Ironically, Hitler’s first book—Max Osborn’s Berlin—escaped the Nazi book burnings of 1933, solely because this book, by a Jewish author, was in Hitler’s possession. Indeed, many of the books not in Hitler’s private library suffered a public fate that presaged a more tragic one, which had been chillingly forecast by GermanJewish poet Heinrich Heine more than a century before: “Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings.” Howard A. Kerner

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 2 (September 15, 2008): 16. Christianity Today 52, no. 11 (November, 2008): 74. The Economist 389 (October 4, 2008): 90. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 16 (August 15, 2008): 87. Library Journal 133, no. 17 (October 15, 2008): 70. The New Republic 239, no. 11 (December 24, 2008): 32-35. The New York Sun, September 24, 2008, p. 11. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 33 (August 18, 2008): 56. The Seattle Times, October 16, 2008, p. 16. The Washington Post Book World, October 26, 2008, p. BW10.

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HOME Author: Marilynne Robinson (1943) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 325 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1956 Locale: Gilead, a fictional small town in Iowa This companion to Robinson’s novel Gilead recounts the Boughton family’s struggle for reconciliation and healing amid disappointed hope and irretrievable loss Principal characters: Glory Boughton, the youngest of eight Boughton children, a thirty-eight-yearold high school English teacher, who comes home to care for her dying father Jack Boughton, forty-three, one of Glory’s four brothers, the family’s prodigal son, who returns to Gilead after a twenty-year absence Robert Boughton, the widower father of Glory and Jack, a retired Presbyterian minister John Ames, Robert’s closest friend, a fellow Protestant clergyman in Gilead

“This life on earth is strange business,” thinks Glory Boughton as she prepares supper for her frail father, Reverend Robert Boughton, and her brother, Jack. Their father rejoices that they have come back to Gilead, the 1950’s Iowa town created by Marilynne Robinson in her novel Home. Boughton needs his daughter’s care, but the circumstances of Glory’s homecoming are fraught with regret deeper than the realization that her father is dying. A long, ill-fated love affair and an abandoned teaching career make her wonder what has become of her life. “Home to stay!” is how Reverend Boughton greets Glory, but “her heart sank” as she heard those words, which open the novel, for failure and loss haunt her return to Gilead. Times were better before she left home for good, but in 1956, the year in which Home is set, coming home makes her say, “I hate this town . . . because it reminds me of when I was happy.” “There’s no place like home,” goes an old song, but Glory’s question—“What does it mean to come home?”—leaves little room for nostalgia. That question applies to Jack, the family’s prodigal son, more than to Glory, for without explanation he returns after a twenty-year absence, unbroken even by his mother’s funeral. If his story ends more darkly than Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son in the New Testament’s Gospel according to Luke (15:11-32), which this novel recalls, the Boughton relationships, uncovered layer by layer, possess unusual contemporary power to make readers think about their own families and the homes they try to sustain. Dan, Luke, Jack, and Teddy are the Boughton boys. Faith, Hope, and Grace are

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Glory’s sisters. “The girls in this family,” Glory remarks, “got named for theological abstractions and the boys got named for human beings.” In the Boughton household, however, faith, hope, grace, and glory are not abstractions. In addition to being the names of daughters and sisters, those words shape the family’s identity and its members’ different responses to it. Although the children have grown up and left, and one parent has been buried and the other is dying, the Boughton home remains a place where Scripture is respected, prayers are said, conversation about life’s significance continues, the importance of forgiveness is affirmed, hope seems unending, and gratitude for good everyday things—the stuff that often constitutes grace—finds expression. However, despite Glory’s presence, not much is glorious about the Boughton family, although some of them are successful enough. Teddy is a doctor. Following in his father’s footsteps, Luke is a minister. Like Gloria, Dan is a teacher. Reverend Boughton has been revered as a pastor, and, for the most part, the nowscattered Boughton family enjoys esteem in Gilead. Nevertheless, the Boughtons— especially Glory, Jack, and their father—are hurting and grieving because love is often painful, life does not respect Scripture, prayers go unanswered, coherent meaning is elusive, forgiveness is no match for harm done and guilt felt or unacknowledged, hope harbors hopelessness, discouragement undermines faith, and grace, whether divine or human, may be insufficient. In the Boughtons’ home, these disheartening experiences are linked to the fact that Jack’s full name is John Ames Boughton. He was indeed named for a human being, Robert Boughton’s best friend, Reverend John Ames. The reflection that Robinson invites, intensified by her story’s melancholy, does not depend entirely on Gilead (2004), the equally touching novel that preceded Home. These novels, however, are definitely companions; their narratives intersect and amplify each other as the lives of the Boughton and the Ames families unfold together. Readers who track both stories will appreciate all the more the brilliance of Robinson’s prose, how perceptively she handles the secret contradictions and unspoken feelings of family life, how lucidly she interprets fundamental elements of Christian teaching, and how sensitively she probes the regret and heartache that engulf people when ties that bind are broken. The yearnings found in both novels are specific to the Ames and Boughton homes, which are steeped in Christianity, but versions of those longings are widely shared by families everywhere. Narrated in the third person, Glory’s perspective informs Home, while Reverend Ames’s voice governs the first-person account in Gilead. At seventysix, Ames is older than Robert Boughton, who has been his lifelong friend, but Ames’s heart is failing, and he, too, is dying. Ames treasures books, including those on philosophy, and he loves writing and baseball, too. He has seen plenty of suffering and grief in Gilead. His life has included sorrow, which touched him deeply and for-

Marilynne Robinson, who teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has written three acclaimed novels. Housekeeping (1980) received a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel, Gilead won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and Home was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award.

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ever when childbirth took his wife, Louisa, and then Rebecca, his newborn daughter, as well. Ames was out of town when the child was born six weeks early. She did not live long; Ames got home in time to hold her for only a few minutes before she died. Before Ames arrived, Boughton baptized the baby as Angeline, because nobody could tell him the name chosen for the infant. Eight years later, when the third Boughton son is born, he is named after Ames—probably, Ames thinks, as a way of making up for his own childlessness—and it is Ames who baptizes the boy who will come to be the cause of so much sadness. In Gilead, Ames recalls these tender and heartbreaking experiences because he is writing a memoir for his seven-year-old son, Robby, who is named after Robert Boughton. Late in life, Ames unexpectedly found love again. Boughton performed the marriage between Ames and Lila, who is more than thirty years younger than her husband, and a boy was born to them. Ames longs to be remembered by his son, but he knows that he will die before his son really knows him. So the old man leaves behind a testament that one day may help to fill his absence. Ames writes intimately, lovingly, and in great detail to his child, although he cannot know if his son will ever read the words his father has written, let alone understand them as Ames intends. He expects that Robby will leave Gilead one day. Ames, says Glory, has been like a second father to the Boughton family, and so it is no surprise that she shares news about the long-lost Jack’s homecoming. Jack’s return, however, is very surprising, for this man, now forty-three, has scarcely been heard from since he left home two decades earlier, the departure—an abandonment, really—provoked by his fathering a child out of wedlock. The young mother, Annie Wheeler, came from an impoverished family and a desolate rural home. It made no sense that Jack took up with her. The Boughtons, especially Glory, tried to help the abandoned child but to little avail. At the age of three, Jack’s daughter died from an untreated infection. Though it is scant consolation, her grave is in the Boughton family plot in Gilead’s cemetery. Ames correctly reflects that, despite this, Jack remains the most beloved among the Boughtons, a position that has everything to do with Jack’s being the family’s lost sheep, whose redemption is much desired by them all, and especially by his father. Jack can be charming and considerate. Although he lacks religious faith, even when he seems to long for it, Jack knows the Bible, and his piano-playing repertoire contains well-loved hymns and gospel songs. He remains the wayward outsider, a self-described “lifelong exile from the ordinary world,” his woebegone life scarred by the crime of robbery—prison included—and alcohol abuse. Jack’s history, before and after his rejection of fatherhood’s responsibilities, caused great disappointment to Ames and to Glory and the other Boughtons and gave little hope of change. Nothing, however, causes his father and the others more anguish than Jack’s absence from home, which is amplified by a silence so prolonged that for years at a time the Boughtons did not know what Jack’s circumstances were or even if he were alive. When at last Jack announces his homecoming and makes the promise good, glimmers of hope surround his return. His presence buoys his father’s spirits. Jack makes repairs to the Boughton house; he tends the flowers his mother planted

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long ago. Jack and Glory gradually share painful secrets of their lives, and they become good friends as well as caring siblings. Jack reestablishes his relationship with Ames, even attending his church a few times. Affection grows between Robby and Jack, who plays baseball with the boy, which Ames is too old to do. Not without Ames’s concern, Lila—experience tells her that a person, indeed everything, can change—shows Jack hospitality. Jack even considers that he might be able to make a life in Gilead, a hope that includes the revelation that Jack has an African American wife named Della and a son. However, Jack is unemployed, and the daily news details racial violence in places such as Montgomery, Alabama. The chances are slim that he and his wife can make a home anywhere in a still-segregated America. “I was clutching at a straw, coming to Gilead,” Jack tells Glory, but it does not work. Jack’s shame and self-loathing are redoubled by his drinking and by an Ames sermon that Jack takes—probably mistakenly—personally as condemning his irresponsibility. He tries to asphyxiate himself with exhaust fumes in the Boughton barn, but he is too drunk to start the motor on the car he has restored. Glory finds him before it is too late but not in time to forestall Jack’s decision: “I have to go now.” Jack will not be home when his father dies. He kisses his father’s brow before both of them depart, but the reconciliation between them stays incomplete. On his way to catch the bus out of town, Jack and Ames unexpectedly meet once more. Ames gives Jack some money and then asks if Jack would allow him to place his hand on Jack’s brow and bless him. Jack agrees, thanks the old man, and then he is gone. Both Gilead and Home recall hymns and gospel songs. One that Jack plays for his father has a beckoning refrain: “Come home, come home, You who are weary, come home; Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling, Calling, O sinner, come home!” Home makes its readers wonder how that call works, if it does. As Robinson’s storytelling draws people into such meditation, her readers may recall that the source of Gilead’s name is biblical. Anticipating millennia ago that his people would be swept into Babylonian exile, the Jewish prophet Jeremiah asked his lamenting question, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” (Jeremiah 8:22) A song from the African American religious tradition remembers Jeremiah and affirms that “there is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole . . . [and] to heal the sin-sick soul.” Robinson also leaves her readers to ask if that song rings true, for at the end of Home, Glory decides that she may, after all, be home to stay. A few days after Jack’s departure for destinations unknown, she meets his wife, Della, and their son, Robert. Their visit to Gilead can last only a few minutes, but clearly Della and the boy know and care about the Boughton home in ways that could only be explained by Jack’s love for it and them. Della leaves Glory a phone number in case Jack calls home. In response to Glory’s question about baseball, the young Robert Boughton says, “Yes, ma’am. I play some ball,” and Della tells Glory that the boy “thinks he’s going to be a preacher.” Is there a balm in Gilead? Can one truly come home and be at home to stay? As she provides Glory’s last thought—“The Lord is wonderful”—Robinson aptly keeps her readers wondering and perhaps yearning, too. John K. Roth

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Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 19/20 (June 1, 2008): 6. Library Journal 133, no. 13 (August 15, 2008): 71-72. New Statesman 137 (October 27, 2008): 54. New York, September 1, 2008, p. 96. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 18 (November 20, 2008): 45-46. The New York Times Book Review, September 21, 2008, p. 16. The New Yorker 84, no. 27 (September 8, 2008): 76-78. Newsweek 152, no. 12 (September 22, 2008): 73. O, The Oprah Magazine 9, no. 9 (September, 2008): 218. People 70, no. 12 (September 22, 2008): 63. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 26 (June 30, 2008): 159. Time 172, no. 12 (September 22, 2008): 92. The Times Literary Supplement, September 19, 2008, pp. 19-20. Vogue 198, no. 9 (September, 2008): 662. The Wall Street Journal 252, no. 69 (September 20, 2008): W8.

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HOMECOMING Author: Bernhard Schlink (1944) First published: Die Heimkehr, 2006, in Germany Translated from the German by Michael Henry Heim Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 260 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The 1940’s to the early 2000’s Locale: West Germany, Switzerland, California, East Germany, New York City, upstate rural New York, unified Germany A German man born in 1945 and raised after World War II struggles to make a life for himself while pursuing clues that his supposedly dead Nazi father lives on, clues that eventually lead to the highest circle of American academia Principal characters: Peter Debauer, also known as Peter Graf and Dr. Fürst, a young German law-book editor Ella Graf (“Debauer”), his single mother, a private secretary Grandfather and Grandmother, his father’s Swiss parents Karl, main character in a homecoming novel Barbara Bindinger, Peter’s girlfriend, a teacher Augie Markovich, her American husband whom she divorces Veronika, Peter’s former girlfriend for eight years Max, her son, in need of a father Johann Debauer, also known as Volker Vonlanden, Walter Scholler, and John de Baur, Peter’s father, an opportunist, international con man, and deconstructionist Gerda Wolf, key West German informant for Peter Rosa Habe, key East German informant for Peter Gotthold Rank, key Swiss informant for Peter

A former judge in the Constitutional Court of North Rhine-Westphalia, a professor of public law and legal philosophy at Berlin’s Humboldt University, an author of several detective mysteries, and an author of the best-selling novel Der Vorleser (1995; The Reader, 1997), Bernhard Schlink definitely has the necessary background to write Homecoming, a fictional investigation into modern history, identity, and legal theory. Besides that, Homecoming gets personal, drawing on autobiographical details and reflecting the fallout from Nazism from which Germans of Schlink’s generation suffered, whereby the sins of the fathers were visited on the sons. Homecoming is centered around a son’s search for such a father, unfortunately one who carries on his Nazi ways even in the United States and in highest academia, as shockingly demonstrated in the novel’s climax.

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Before its spectacular climax, however, the novel tends to drag a bit, depending, as it Bernhard Schlink, born in Bielefeld, does, on the somewhat dull personality of its Germany, is a former judge and an main character, Peter Debauer, a law student expert on law. He is author of a series who never finishes his dissertation, drops out, of detective mysteries and the and, after training to be a masseur, becomes international best-selling novel The an editor of law books and periodicals in a Reader (1995). publishing house. Peter’s personal life has a similar drift and malaise: His mother tries to control him right into middle age, and his various affairs with women are either onenight stands or live-in disasters. For eight years he lives with the unstable Veronika, supporting her and her illegitimate son Max even as she continues to be unfaithful. Later he falls in love with and moves in with Barbara Bindinger, who turns out to be married to an American journalist absent for long periods on reporting assignments. Peter, however, has one saving obsession: He is driven to find out about his father, Johann Debauer, a Swiss citizen who supposedly died in Eastern Germany working for the Red Cross during World War II and whom Peter sorely missed growing up. The mystery of Johann Debauer’s fate and Peter’s obsessive search to find out about him provide the other main interest in the first four of the novel’s five sections. Readers cannot help but get caught up in this historical detective story, and luckily Peter is better as a detective of history than as manager of his own life. That is because his own life depends in some measure on unraveling the clues of history. Besides filling a void, the facts about his father might make him proud, since his father apparently died saving lives. In contrast to Peter, older Germans, including his mother, are depicted as being vague and not wanting to talk much about World War II, especially the Holocaust. Although set mostly in unnamed West German towns, the novel begins with Peter recollecting his childhood summer stays in Switzerland with his grandparents. Their middle-class home in a little Swiss village beside a lake is idyllic compared to the shabby environment of postwar Germany where Peter spends the rest of the year with his then-impoverished mother. The peaceful Swiss scene lulls the reader as it does Peter, who has fond memories of the place and of photographs showing his father, also an only child, as a normal talented boy and young man: “ . . . he had collected stamps, sung in the church choir, played handball, drawn, painted, and been a voracious reader.” Although nearsighted, the father had been “a good pupil and law student, and never done military service.” Later, readers might look back and ask how such a peaceful, idyllic place could have produced such a monster as John de Baur. Even in the Swiss setting there are clues, and not just the “impatient,” arrogant look on young Johann’s face. The grandfather is a Germanophile full of stories from “Swiss or German history, especially military history.” It is the grandfather, who has done his share of homesick wandering, who introduces the theme of homecoming in the novel through his theory that all Germans abroad suffer from angst for the fatherland. Homer’s Odyssey (725 b.c.e.) becomes the prototype for a distinct genre of German homecoming stories.

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Like Penelope, Peter’s grandparents become busy at night—in their case editing a pulp-fiction series blandly titled Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment. These four hundred or so sentimental books are full of German angst, heroic deeds, and homecomings. In short, the novels restore the banal German beliefs that supposedly got a reality check in World War II. His grandparents will not let young Peter read the novels, but, because paper is expensive in Germany, they do allow him to take extra galleys home and use the backs of pages for homework. Only years later does the obedient Peter break down and read one of the galleys, followed by others. The first story is about a German soldier named Karl who escapes from a Siberian prison, makes his way across Russia and Eastern Europe, and after several years reaches home, only to open the door on his startled wife, two small children, and another man. The last few pages, however, are missing, used for homework, so the story’s ending becomes another mystery for Peter to resolve, a mystery that turns out to be intertwined with his and his father’s life. Over the years, the mystery becomes harder to solve because his grandparents changed titles and authors’ names, libraries and archives do not keep pulp fiction, and even the publishing house goes out of existence. Two decades later, when Peter moves to another city, he recognizes “a massive, gloomy, inhospitable building of red sandstone” as the home to which Karl returned. A visit to the building at 38 Kleinmeyerstrasse not only enables Peter to meet the love of his life, Barbara Bindinger, but puts him on the trail of the homecoming novel’s author. Some brilliant detective work by Peter (and plotting by Schlink) gradually leads to Volker Vonlanden, a Nazi propagandist during World War II; then to Walter Scholler (supposedly a Viennese Jew who survived Auschwitz), art editor for a Communist newspaper in East Germany; and finally to the homecoming novel’s author—all of whom turn out to be different versions of Peter’s father, now reincarnated as John de Baur, popular professor at Columbia University, family man, and leading American expert on the deconstruction of law. All these revelations leave a reader’s head spinning even before the novel’s spectacular climax: a face-off between Peter and his father first at Columbia University and then at a wintry retreat in rural upstate New York. The revelations themselves raise questions. How could Peter’s mother lie to him for so long? (It even turns out she was never married to his father, so he is illegitimate, legally Peter Graf.) How much did Peter’s upstanding Swiss grandparents know? (Probably very little, but what they did know went to the grave with them.) Could Peter be the half-brother of Barbara’s older sister? (It is bizarre to contemplate, but Peter’s father apparently had an affair with Barbara’s mother before the mother married.) Of most concern to Peter is how his father, who babysat him for ten weeks, could have so callously forgotten about him and his mother. John de Baur recalls the case of Paul de Man (1919-1983), a Yale literary scholar and leading exponent of deconstruction in literature. During 1941 and 1942 in Nazioccupied Belgium, his home country, the young de Man wrote almost two hundred articles for a collaborationist newspaper, including an anti-Semitic article titled “The Jews and Contemporary Literature.” After de Man’s death, the articles were rediscov-

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ered, causing quite a controversy in the literary world. When he immigrated to the United States in 1948, de Man abandoned his wife and three sons, then married an American girl without first getting a divorce. Despite these similarities, the known sins of de Man pale in comparison to those of the fictional de Baur. If de Baur is modeled after de Man, Schlink exaggerated considerably for effect, maybe to avoid any lingering ambiguity such as that which surrounds de Man. De Baur’s Swiss origin seems a rough parallel to de Man’s Belgian origin, but again the Swiss origin eliminates any ambiguity about his Nazi sympathies: De Baur is not a reluctant, one-time recruit in an occupied country but a gungho volunteer from a neutral country. De Baur wants to be involved with the Nazi leadership, cozying up to a favorite of the führer, assuming the ridiculous pseudonym Volker Vonlanden (“Folk of the Land”), and writing Nazi propaganda. Even after the fall of the Nazi regime, de Baur does not so much abandon his Nazi beliefs as cover them up, changing his outer colors like a chameleon to adapt to the powers that be. Caught in the Communist East, de Baur cozies up to the local military administrator, a Soviet Jew; takes on the identity of Walter Scholler, a Viennese Jew and Auschwitz survivor (“And he had a number tattooed on his arm”); and becomes art editor of a Communist propaganda newspaper. Soon he escapes to West Germany, then is not heard from for a while (which might be his homecoming novel period), and finally, according to him, gets a scholarship in 1950 to go to the United States. There, with his Nazi principles, his chameleon personality, his experience in writing propaganda for opposing sides, and his European accent, he is well prepared to assume leadership in the deconstruction movement. De Baur’s résumé proudly lists Leo Strauss (a favorite philosopher of American neoconservatives) and Paul de Man as his teachers. Homecoming is one of those rare novels that is both entertaining on a popular level and intellectually engaging. While Schlink’s leanings as a scholar of law are apparent, he is able to explain deconstructionist theory and present both sides of the debate about it. He also makes it clear that Nazism was not just a German phenomenon, it might not be dead, and it might even have made inroads in the United States. The novel’s frequent references to Homer’s Odyssey become a little tedious and heavyhanded, but they do point to Homecoming as a kind of Germanic allegory, a reverse Odyssey. Readers will obviously notice that de Baur, the slick Nazi Odysseus, does not return home. Instead, after helping mess it up, he flees it, in a mockery of the sentimental homecoming novels that he writes. He abandons his son and the son’s mother and starts another family in a new land. Peter, the Germanic Telemachus, has to hunt down his father, comes to hate him, and finally has to confront him. If anything, it is Peter who experiences the homecoming: He is able to deal with his demons, find some peace, and return home to his beloved Barbara and the fatherless Max. Homecoming is an allegory for Schlink’s lost generation. Harold Branam

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Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 8 (December 15, 2007): 25. Bookseller, February 1, 2008, p. 50. The Economist 386 (January 12, 2008): 74. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 22 (November 15, 2007): 1175. Library Journal 132, no. 20 (December 15, 2007): 102. London Review of Books 30, no. 15 (July 31, 2008): 21-24. The New York Times Book Review, January 13, 2008, p. 14. The New Yorker 84, no. 7 (March 31, 2008): 129. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 41 (October 15, 2007): 37. The Spectator 306 (January 12, 2008): 29-30. The Times Literary Supplement, February 8, 2008, p. 19.

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HOSPITAL Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God, and Diversity on Steroids Author: Julie Salamon (1953) Publisher: Penguin Press (New York). 363 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Current affairs, ethics, medicine Salamon’s account of a year in the life of Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, told through the lives of administrators, doctors, staff, and patients, captures the dayto-day drama of large metropolitan hospitals, struggling to survive in a broken health care system Principal personages: Dr. Alan Astrow, associate director, medical oncology Jo Ann Baldwin, assistant vice president, community outreach Pamela Brier, president and chief executive officer Dr. Joseph Cunningham, chair, department of surgery Dr. David Gregorius, emergency room resident Ms. Hernandez, patient Dr. Douglas Jablon, vice president, patient relations/special assistant to the president Dr. Israel Jacobowitz, cardiac surgeon Dr. Samuel Kopel, oncologist and medical director, cancer center Martin Payson, chairman of the board Mr. Zen, patient

Julie Salamon had little interest in hospitals until a series of coincidences—a “karmic connection” (bashert in Yiddish)—led her to write Hospital. First, Jo Ann Baldwin, an administrator at Maimonides Medical Center (MMC) in Brooklyn, asked to meet her after reading Rambam’s Ladder (2003), Salamon’s book about philanthropy and charity, based on the teachings of the medieval Jewish philosopher and physician Maimonides (known as Rambam to Hebrew scholars). They agreed to meet, and Salamon was impressed by Baldwin’s vivid description of the 750-bed MMC, trying to meet the needs of a constantly changing, multicultural neighborhood. A few months later, Salamon was invited by Dr. Alan Astrow, a hematologic oncologist at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, to attend a series of lectures on the spiritual needs of patients. Astrow also had read Rambam’s Ladder. Impressed by Astrow’s sensitivity to patients, Salamon was drawn to him immediately. Soon afterward, she received an e-mail from a friend, suffering from ovarian cancer, who mentioned Astrow, a “smart and caring doctor,” and informed her that he would be moving to the new cancer center at MMC. A year after meeting Baldwin, Salamon contacted her and asked to spend a year at Maimonides, using the opening of the can-

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cer center as the focus for a book. Pamela Brier, the president of the hospital, and Martin Payson, the chairman of the board, eventually agreed and encouraged staff to cooperate with her. They gave Salamon virtually unlimited access to personnel and patients, with the stipulation that she was to protect the privacy of patients. Maimonides (originally Israel-Zion Hospital) had been founded a century earlier to meet the needs of Hasidic Orthodox Jewish immigrants in Borough Park, Brooklyn. Orthodox Jews still represent 20 to 25 percent of the hospital’s patients and, because of their historic ties to the hospital, they demand and wield a powerful say in its politics and practices. However, the neighborhood has come to include many other ethnic groups, including Chinese, Pakistanis, Russians, Eastern Europeans, and Hispanics. At the center of social change in the United States after 9/11, the neighborhood reflects conflicts between Jews and Muslims, Muslims and Hindus, and modernists and fundamentalists. Cultural differences patients present—languages, customs, health beliefs, and different care expectations—as well as their immigration and health insurance problems make extraordinary demands on administrators, staff, and caregivers. There are also conflicting demands from big business, consumers, and environmentalists. Hospital, the result of Salamon’s year of virtual immersion in MMC, reads like a novel. Payson told her the hospital is like a film set, and Salamon has written a reallife medical drama, as vivid as any film or television series. Interactions between administrators and community; administrators and staff; and physician and staff and patients are depicted against the backdrop of their personal lives, exposing not only their strengths but also their problems, flaws, and errors. Salamon also explores the fears and heartaches of patients and families, dealing with serious illness. Her keen observations and skillful interviews—the direct quotes are excellent—reveal the acute and ongoing day-to-day personal and professional problems that dog dedicated hardworking people on the job. By focusing on selected colorful individuals—physicians, administrators, nurses, cleaners, social workers, technicians, and patients—Salamon, a consummate reporter, reveals the inner workings of the hospital, with its crosscultural forces, its internal feuds, its situations of greed and comedy, its poignant lifeand-death struggles, and its system’s politics, ethics, bureaucracy, and “screw-ups.” A helpful “cast of characters” sorts out the people through whom the story is told. Drama in the emergency room focuses on lead character David Gregorius, a firstyear resident from the Midwest and newcomer to New York City. His outgoing e-mails, “Suck Reports,” provide comic relief as they reveal his “culture-shock” in battling with cockroaches, navigating the subway, and observing Brooklyn crime. They also document his demanding schedule, exhaustion, and dedication. His initial reaction

Julie Salamon, a former reporter and critic for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, is a widely published essayist and best-selling author of six previous books, including the prize-winning Rambam’s Ladder (2003), which deals with modern charity and philanthropy; Facing the Wind (2001), a crime account; and The Devil’s Candy (1991), a Hollywood classic. She was named a Kaiser Media Fellow in 2006.

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to the emergency room (ER) is likened to landing in a Third World country. The ER boasts a sophisticated computer system for tracking patients, but it is an incredibly chaotic world, worse than most ERs in the United States. It is overcrowded with immigrants—including Hispanics, Russians, Eastern Europeans, Chinese, and Pakistanis—and it is extremely noisy, with the constant beeping of monitors and sounds of different languages, including Yiddish, Chinese, Urdu, and Arabic. The hospital has translators for sixty-seven languages. While she spends time in the ER, Salamon learns about Hatzolah, the Orthodox Jewish emergency medical service that mans volunteer ambulance squads. Hatzolah has real clout with MMC, because it decides which hospitals get their business, and hospital admissions bring in money. In the past, when Hatzolah was dissatisfied with the hospital, admissions fell. Demanding in its advocacy for its clients, Hatzolah can increase the stress on caregivers in the ER. The new comprehensive cancer center was built to persuade Brooklynites that they did not have to travel to Manhattan to find good care. However, losses from the center are a serious drain on the hospital budget—its new linear accelerator and the subterranean room that houses it cost five million dollars. The medical director of the cancer center is Samuel Kopel, an oncologist, whose wife is dying of ovarian cancer. The intimate details of their personal battle with cancer provide a narrative thread in the book. The stories of Mr. Zen and Ms. Hernandez, two hospitalized patients, also give a human face to cancer. In discussing their care, Salamon explores questions about cultural and language problems, finances, and policies that drive access to health care. The hero at the center is Astrow, the new chief of hematologic oncology, who brought Salamon to Maimonides. His compassion and preoccupation with the ethical and spiritual aspects of care are inspiring. Nevertheless, it has been a hard first year for him; he is disheartened by the politics and feuds he encounters in his new position. Some wonder if he is tough enough for the job. Bitter feuds provide the content for a chapter entitled “Insults and Injuries.” One involves the rivalry between the chair of surgery, Joe Cunningham, and his former medical partner, Israel Jacobowitz, which is not discussed at any length, perhaps because Cunningham is wary of Salamon and refuses to be interviewed. Salamon has many interviews with various staff members on Kopel’s ongoing feud with his former close friend and medical partner, Michael Bashevkin, but it never makes sense to her. It is generally agreed that they are both decent, caring men. However, their quarrel contributes to the hospital’s financial crisis. The hospital depends on referrals from Bashevkin’s huge practice to fill beds, and he is not sending his patients to Maimonides. Salamon’s impressive research of the health care system places MMC within the “big picture” of managed care in the United States, where greedy pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies, which put profit ahead of caring, dominate. The huge number of payers—Medicare, Medicaid, and insurance companies—require meticulous documentation and adherence to complex coding requirements and guidelines for hospital reimbursement. Since 1983, Medicare’s Diagnosis-Related-Groups (DRGs), a formula based on about 500 categories of patients, has dictated the stan-

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dard reimbursement for patients and made moving patients through the system a bureaucratic nightmare. Salamon learns the challenges of hospital administration, as she interviews and shadows Pamela Brier, the chief executive officer (CEO) since 2003. The hospital is ranked high by the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations: It has a first-class cardiology department, and in 2003 it delivered more babies than any other hospital in New York State. Brier wants to showcase these accomplishments. Despite MMC’s impressive track record, Brooklynites cling to the idea that the best care is found in Manhattan. A major expansion, now underway at MMC, includes building a larger ER and increasing the number of inpatient beds. In transition from a neighborhood institution to a major medical center competing for patients, the hospital is always in a state of flux. Interviews with Brier and other administrators are amazingly candid. A successful leader of a New York City hospital, Brier came to MMC to assist the former CEO turn the hospital into a prosperous institution. Shortly after taking over as CEO, she sustained serious injuries in an auto accident that left her husband a semi-invalid. Brier was back on the job in record time. She sees the hospital as a microcosm of the world, dealing with universal issues, and although she is considered a “micro-manager” and somewhat quirky in interpersonal relationships, she is well equipped to deal with egos, community tensions, budget problems, and local politics. In addition to guiding the overall direction of MMC, she holds town-hall meetings, works to foster good relationships with the neighborhood and the Muslim community, and attends charity functions. She comes across as dedicated and driven, concerned with every aspect of care, from competence to cleaning to staff cooperation to patient treatment. Every patient who comes into the hospital must be treated with respect and made to feel safe. This mission is reinforced by the vice president for patient relations and special assistant to the president, Douglas Jablon. Known as “the fixer,” Jablon is very much in tune with the Orthodox community, and he heads a department of patient representatives who are notary publics, interpreters, and patient advocates. His training philosophy is simple: “First you gotta take care of patients. Number two, all this advertising is very important, but I believe the patient is the best advertising, especially over here . . . if you treat them very well, they’ll talk good about us.” This is a first-rate book. Although Salamon includes petty details and at times seems to belittle people who have been candid in her interviews, Hospital succeeds in describing the hard work, politics, and relationships involved in running a hospital. It also portrays caring people, trying to do their best to help others. However, the book has nothing good to say about the current health care system. Payson, the Maimonides chairman, holds out the hope that eventually a single-payer system will solve the problems of the present “insane” system. This country cannot afford to wait for reform much longer. Edna B. Quinn

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Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 18 (May 15, 2008): 9. The Economist 387 (May 10, 2008): 94. JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association 300, no. 22 (December 10, 2008): 2679. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 6 (March 15, 2008): 293. Mother Jones 33, no. 3 (May/June, 2008): 81. The New York Times Book Review, July 6, 2008, p. 2. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 13 (March 31, 2008): 48-49. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 116 (May 17, 2008): W8.

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THE HOUSE ON FORTUNE STREET Author: Margot Livesey (1953) Publisher: Harper (New York). 311 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: London Two young women and two men are variously defeated in the pursuit of ideal love Principal characters: Abigail Taylor, an actress and founder of a struggling theatrical repertory; owner of the house on Fortune Street in London Sean Wyman, a Keats scholar who left his wife to live with Abigail Dara MacLeod, a therapist, Abigail’s friend since college and downstairs tenant Cameron MacLeod, Dara’s father

The House on Fortune Street is the story of two single young women who were close friends in college but have drifted apart. Their histories and circumstances are revealed in stages, at first through Sean, Abigail’s live-in boyfriend, and Cameron, Dara’s father. Their two points of view dovetail with later accounts from Dara and Abigail, exploring the distances that have grown between them in part due to secrets they have kept from each other. The novel begins with Sean, a scholar writing his dissertation on medical references in the poetry of John Keats (1895-1821). Sean’s experiences to some degree parallel those of Keats, and the novel’s four sections loosely echo the structure of Keats’s poem Endymion (1817), while Cameron’s, Dara’s and Abigail’s tales are each informed by a book or literary character. Sean’s section ends with Dara’s suicide; the following three sections shift from Cameron’s memories of Dara’s childhood, through Dara’s work and the beginning of her doomed love affair with a married man, to Abigail’s childhood, her career, and her relationships with her father, Dara, and Sean. Abigail’s final, summing-up meeting with Cameron allows each of them to reveal secrets, confess failings, and bring Dara’s story to a close. As the novel opens Sean is living with Abigail, a beautiful theater actress who pursued him until he agreed to leave his wife; she owns the house on Fortune Street where the two share the upstairs flat. Abigail has asked him to pay rent, so he agrees to collaborate with his old friend Valentine on a book promoting assisted suicide. Abigail is launching a repertory theater company and constantly travels; when he receives an anonymous letter accusing Abigail of seeing another man he suspects she is involved with Valentine; as soon as their book is complete Valentine confirms the affair (later admitting to Abigail that he sent the anonymous letter) and Sean leaves the Fortune Street house.

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In his last weeks at Fortune Street, Sean occasionally runs into Dara, Abigail’s college Margot Livesey grew up in Scotland friend who rents the downstairs flat. Dara has and holds a B.A. in English from the been waiting years for her lover Edward to University of York. She is the author of leave his girlfriend and move in with her. Just five previous novels, including The before Christmas Sean talks with Dara, but he Missing World (2002), Eva Moves the responds more to her natural gift for listening Furniture (2001), and Banishing than to signs that Dara needs a sympathetic Verona (2004). ear and tells her about the book on assisted suicide. Shortly after the holidays, Sean enters Dara’s apartment, believing she spent Christmas with her family and intending to make her home more welcoming for her return. He finds Dara’s body and a suicide note torn in small pieces and left in an envelope addressed to her parents. Sean hides the note to spare Dara’s parents the pain of reading it. Recalling their last conversation, he realizes he overlooked her obvious distress and may even have validated her suicidal feelings with his talk of people who, he felt, had justifiably ended their own lives. In the second section, Dara’s father, Cameron, tells about his marriage to Fiona, and his realization that he was attracted to young girls. Cameron never acted upon his secret interests, but when Dara was ten years old he became obsessed with her best friend, a little girl named Ingrid. Cameron discovers that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the author of Alice in Wonderland (1865) under the name Lewis Carroll, photographed young girls—sometimes naked. An amateur photographer, Cameron feels an affinity for Dodgson that seems to somewhat justify his own feelings. When Fiona encourages Cameron to pursue photography as a hobby, he welcomes the opportunity to take photographs of Dara and Ingrid or of Ingrid alone. He tells himself that merely taking pictures of the girls is harmless; he can enjoy his passion without any negative effect on the children. Cameron describes a camping trip Dara will later recall as her last happy childhood memory, involving the MacLeods and Ingrid’s family, including Ingrid’s mother Iris and her teenage sister Carol. During the trip, Cameron unthinkingly snaps a picture of Ingrid, half-naked, changing into a bathing suit. The trip ends in an angry nighttime confrontation on the beach involving Carol, Iris, and Cameron when Carol is found naked with a young man who was camping nearby. Later in recounting the incident to Fiona, Cameron does not tell her that Carol had accused him of an inappropriate interest in her little sister. Iris does not confront Cameron, but she does tell Fiona about Carol’s remark, and Fiona immediately understands that Cameron failed to mention Carol’s accusation because it was true. Fiona develops Cameron’s film, and she finds the photograph of Ingrid that proves his guilt. Fiona divorces Cameron, agreeing to keep his attraction to girls a secret if he pays a large amount of alimony and agrees not to see his children again. Years later, she allows him visitation, but he can never explain why he left, and Dara is devastated by her father’s sudden and unexplained desertion. Cameron invites the adult Dara to an exhibition of Dodgson’s photographs that in-

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cludes portraits of little girls, hoping for an opportunity to tell her the truth, but the photographs disturb her; she insists the children were damaged by Dodgson’s predilections, even if he never touched them. Later the same day Dara asks Cameron why he left the family when she was young, and Cameron tells her it was because his older brother Lionel’s untimely death left him with unbearable fears for his own children’s safety. Dara is relieved to think it was Cameron’s love for the family that drove him away. Ironically, she remarks that psychological damage is passed along through generations unless families face the truth, and before the day is out she confides to Cameron that she and Edward are planning to move in together and have a baby. Dara’s point of view in the novel’s third section is informed by Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847). Dara is a counselor at a small center that works with abused and emotionally disturbed women. She first meets Edward when he trips and falls at her feet as she sits sketching by a canal (Edward has the same name as Jane Eyre’s illfated love Mr. Rochester, and his fall mirrors their first meeting where Rochester falls from a horse). Conflict at her job and her own account of the visit to the Dodgson exhibit reveal her inability to read people, confirmed by her growing relationship with Edward. Dara agrees to rent and renovate the vacant downstairs apartment in Abigail’s house so she will have a place of her own where Edward, who refuses to share a bathroom with her housemates, can spend the entire night. The apartment is in poor condition, and Dara resents Abigail’s assumption that it is good enough for Dara, even though Abigail would only live in it if she was broke. Nonetheless, Dara redecorates and waits eagerly for Edward’s first visit—during which he confesses that he has a young daughter with another woman, with whom he still lives platonically for the child’s sake. Dara, who from childhood could not understand or even recognize dishonesty in others, is only briefly angry and soon agrees to continue seeing Edward; they will move in together at some future time when his child is better able to cope. Dara expects Abigail to sympathize, thinking her situation is parallel to Abigail’s persuading Sean to leave his wife. Abigail disappoints her again by pointing out that Sean had no children and never deceived her. Dara’s section ends with her account of the Dodgson exhibit, her confusion about the lies people tell and live, and her innocent acceptance of her father’s lie. Abigail is central to Sean’s and Dara’s stories, but her point of view is only revealed in the novel’s final section, with its echoes of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-1861). Abigail’s parents were nomads, moving from job to job and town to town at a moment’s notice; the adult Abigail longs for stability and has worked hard to become self-sufficient. She and Dara form a close friendship in college—Abigail is talented and beautiful but emotionally distant and financially poor; Dara is plain and studious, emotionally vulnerable but financially secure. A mysterious benefactor offers Abigail a stipend to support her studies; she assumes the money comes from Dara’s mother, Fiona, but learns after Dara’s death that Cameron had provided for her through college (which Dara had envied, unbeknown to either Abigail or Cameron). Abigail’s relationships are primarily sexual; in contrast, Dara is completely de-

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voted to the young political activist she meets in college, and she breaks down and is briefly hospitalized when he ends the relationship. Dara is shocked at Abigail’s promiscuity and surprised when Abigail suddenly focuses on Sean, convinced his marriage is empty and he belongs with her. Abigail uses an inheritance to buy the Fortune Street house, dumping the boyfriend who helps her renovate the upstairs apartment when a friend mentions offhandedly that he might someday be legally entitled to half the house. Once Abigail has won Sean, she quickly becomes disillusioned with him and is easily drawn into the affair that ends their relationship. The novel ends with a chance meeting between Abigail and Cameron. Each admits to the other the ways in which they failed Dara: Cameron speaks about the borderline pedophilia that destroyed his family, while Abigail admits she had avoided Dara and shut down their friendship, weary of hearing about Edward and fearful of revealing that her own ideal love story was a sham. Cameron is carrying Dara’s suicide note, which Sean had decided to give him after all, and allows Abigail to read it. The note reveals that Dara had accidentally seen Edward with his daughter and supposedly platonic—but obviously pregnant—girlfriend. Although central to the novel, Dara—wan, prone to migraines, and defenseless when treated badly by family, friends, or lovers—is a less interesting character than Abigail. Edward’s betrayal is unsurprising; the complete despair that seizes Dara as a result and her failure to seek help seem out of sync with her experiences as a therapist and her emotional reconciliation with Cameron. The writer builds anticipation for Abigail’s entrance, raising questions about this talented and charismatic actress who hounded Sean to leave a happy marriage, casually cheated on him, and then treated her friend so shabbily. In spite of the intended theme—how young single women are affected by their secrets and histories—Cameron’s is perhaps the most compelling of the four stories. Margot Livesey is effective in her risky portrait of a man who successfully avoids acting on his pedophilia, but the depth of Cameron’s conflict and the yawning generation gap between him and the other protagonists make him seem out of place in this novel. Maureen Puffer-Rothenberg

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 302, no. 2 (September, 2008): 118-119. Booklist 104, no. 13 (March 1, 2008): 47. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 5 (March 1, 2008): 6. Library Journal 133, no. 3 (February 15, 2008): 93. People 69, no. 18 (May 12, 2008): 64. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 1 (January 7, 2008): 32.

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HOW FICTION WORKS Author: James Wood (1965) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 288 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Literary criticism Time: 350 b.c.e. to 2005 Rather than suggesting how aspiring fiction writers should write, Wood, by engaging in close, analytical readings of representative passages from their writing, analyzes how a broad spectrum of writers from ancient times to the current century write Principal personages: Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), Spanish novelist William Shakespeare (1564-1616), England’s foremost playwright Molière (1622-1673), French dramatist, born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Jane Austen (1775-1817), British novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), British novelist Gustav Flaubert (1821-1880), French novelist Henry James (1843-1916), American novelist Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), Russian novelist and playwright James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), British novelist E. M. Forster (1889-1970), British literary critic Saul Bellow (1915-2005), Canadian American novelist, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1976 Muriel Spark (1918-2005), Scottish novelist David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), American novelist and essayist

The term “genius” is bandied about so cavalierly that it is usually misapplied. It often confuses mere competence with genius rather than referring to the unique intelligence that is the mark of a William Shakespeare, a Jane Austen, or an Albert Einstein. Given this caveat, it is not out of line to call James Wood, based on his penetrating understanding of the dynamics of fiction writing, a genius in the field of literary criticism. In this discerning book, whose title might erroneously suggest that it is a how-to book for people who hope to become novelists, Wood draws on his encompassing literary background and, in what becomes a thumbnail history of much of the Western world’s greatest literature, analyzes the mystery of how notable writers of fiction have achieved their artistic outcomes. Wood’s credentials for writing a book of this sort are impeccable; other distinguished critics have identified him as the most outstanding literary critic of his day. In 1992, just short of his twenty-seventh birthday, Wood, still living in his native

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Great Britain, became the chief literary critic of The Guardian of London, a publication for British-born James Wood is among the which he still writes regularly. He served for most celebrated contemporary literary twelve years as a major literary critic and critics in the English-speaking world. senior editor of The New Republic in New He has published one novel, The Book York, and during this time he taught classes in Against God (2003). A staff writer for literature and literary criticism at Boston Uni- The New Yorker and professor of the versity (coteaching with Nobel laureate Saul practice of literary criticism at Harvard University, Wood has Bellow), Kenyon College, and Harvard Unipublished two collections of essays, versity, where he has been professor of the The Broken Estate (2000) and The practice of literary criticism since 2003. A Irresponsible Self (2004). regular contributor of book reviews to The New Yorker, he left The New Republic in 2007 to become a staff writer for that prestigious magazine. Wood is controversial in that he spurns a narrow academic approach to literary criticism in favor of applying an aesthetic perspective to the fictional works he is reviewing. He assesses fiction by scrutinizing it closely and analytically, claiming “that there really is no such thing as irrelevant detail in fiction, even in realism, which tends to use . . . detail as a kind of padding, to make verisimilitude seem nice and comfy.” Were he to analyze the preceding sentence, Wood undoubtedly would fix his attention upon its last five words, pointing out that they progress—or, according to one’s likes and dislikes—regress from the formality of “verisimilitude” to the downright familiar jargon of “nice and comfy.” His contrast in those words is clearly aimed at drawing his readers into his camp immediately after the formality of verisimilitude may well have alienated them. Although Wood never refers directly to Plato’s theory of ideas (forms or shapes that are the essence of objects), he is concerned in many pages of this book with a quality that he chooses to call “thisness” and, in one instance, identifies as “quiddity.” Thisness and quiddity refer to the essence of things. In writing about David Foster Wallace’s story “The Suffering Channel,” Wood notes that Wallace is writing about the decomposition of language, and that, by writing twenty or thirty pages in a style that may seem tedious and trying to read, he “prosecutes an intense argument about the decomposition of language in America, and he is not afraid to decompose—and discompose—his own style in the interests of making us live through this linguistic America with him.” In doing so, Wallace creates a Platonic ideal, his prose capturing the thisness of his argument through a process that Wood terms the “full immersion method.” Wood contends that few books have appeared that consider how fiction works after the publication in 1927 of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (which Wood considers imprecise) and of three books by Milan Kundera on the art of fiction. He considers Kundera a novelist and essayist, not a literary critic in any practical sense. Whereas Forster often eschews flat characters, preferring fiction populated by what he considers round characters, Wood defends flat characters. He likens them to

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caricatures and points out their artistic function of illuminating specific human traits or characteristics, often by exaggerating them and presenting them unilaterally. He considers roundness impossible in fictional characters because, he contends, they are not real people. He complains that the quest for roundness in fictional characters dominates (he says, “tyrannizes”) readers, novelists, and critics, much to their critical disadvantage. Wood discusses in fresh critical terms many of the warhorses of early twentieth century literary criticism, leveling his gaze upon most of the usual topics that have concerned critics: plot, metaphor, voice, and character development. He dismisses Forster’s concepts of flat and round characters, preferring that fictional characters be studied in terms of what he terms “transparencies” and “opacities.” To illustrate this, he broaches a broad array of literary characters ranging from the soldier in Anton Chekhov’s short story “The Kiss” to Becky Sharp in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), from Prince Hal and Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I (1597) to Isabel Archer in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Wood consistently draws on an enormous range of works of fiction by such novelists as those mentioned above as well as Gustav Flaubert (to whom Wood devotes considerable space and whom he considers sacrosanct), Honoré de Balzac, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Saul Bellow, Fyodor Dostoevski, Sinclair Lewis, Don DeLillo, William Gass, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Iris Murdoch, Virginia Woolf, Beatrix Potter, Muriel Spark, Theodore Dreiser, and a host of others. Wood details how a novelist such as Spark, in her novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), exercises what he calls a ruthless control over her fictional characters with her use of the flash-forward technique rather than the flashback. Spark surges forward from the main action of the plot to tell her readers what eventually happens to the characters about whom she is writing: Miss Brodie will die of cancer, Mary Macgregor will die at age twenty-three in a fire, and students mentioned in the text will enter into lackluster marriages or, in one case, will enter a convent. Wood acknowledges that these flash-forwards, a technique also employed effectively by National Book Award winner Annie Proulx, may seem cruel to some readers because they make “summary judgments,” but he contends that Spark uses them effectively to question whether Miss Brody ever actually had a prime herself. The primes of some of the schoolgirls with whom Spark populates her novel are behind them rather than skulking furtively in their respective futures. The chief virtue of Spark’s flash-forwards is that they give Spark authorial control beyond any she could achieve were she simply to write within a purely temporally sequential context. Among Wood’s many perceptive discussions of how fiction writers handle the details of their composition is his discussion of temporality. Every writer of fiction is ultimately forced to come to grips with how to deal with time in unfolding their stories. Wood contends that, within any work of fiction, its creator must deal with elements of time and with the simultaneity of events that occur within the story. A fictional character, for example, may be drowning, but, as his or her rowboat drifts away out of reach, children may be flying kites on a nearby beach, unaware of the drama being enacted within sight of them, or a cat may be climbing a nearby tree

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to attack a nest of toothsome fledglings. At any single moment in a story, a crucial event, central to the story, may be occurring while routine activities happen nearby. This is a temporal reality that authors writing realistic fiction must recognize and acknowledge for their fiction to achieve credibility. Wood devotes thirty-one pages to a detailed discussion of language and follows it with eight pages concerning dialogue. In the former, he considers how skillful writers achieve rhythm and linguistic momentum by handling everyday speech in all its simplicity with the sort of deftness found in the writing of such complex stylists as Herman Melville, James, Woolf, and Lawrence. Differentiating writing as an art quite distinct from music or painting, Wood notes that prose is always simple, no matter how difficult and extraordinary it may seem, because it is a medium used in commonplace communication. He accounts how Flaubert, who ranks at the top of Wood’s list of exemplary stylists, labored over matters of style, agonizing over every word. He goes on to demonstrate how such intense labor characterizes the writing of such modern authors as Bellow and John Updike and how it is the offspring of such earlier literary stylists as Molière and Cervantes, who have been models for many of the noteworthy literary stylists following them. Wood points out that Bellow, whom he identifies as one of the most effective stylists among modern novelists, eclipsing such notables as DeLillo, Updike, or Philip Roth, “read poetry: Shakespeare at first (he could recite lines and lines from the plays, remembered from his schooldays in Chicago), then Milton, Keats, Wordsworth, Hardy, Larkin, and his friend John Berryman. And behind all this, with its English stretching all the way back into deeper antiquity, the King James Bible.” The successful novelist, according to Wood, must be attuned to the rhythms and musicality of language. He also points to the difficulty of translating many of the rhythms of one language into another language, citing a Flaubert sentence from Madame Bovary (1857) as an example of this difficulty. The sentence in question is “L’idée d’avoir engendré délectait,” which Wood translates as “The idea of having engendered delighted him,” an accurate literal rendering of the French words. He notes that Geoffrey Wall, in his Penguin translation of Madame Bovary, renders the sentence thus: “The thought of having impregnated her was delectable to him.” Again a worthy translation. Wood then goes on perceptively to point out what is lost in both translations. “Say the French out loud as Flaubert would have done, and you encounter four ‘ay’ sounds in three of the words: ‘L’idée, engendré, délectait.’” He goes on to point out that an English translation that sought “to mimic the untranslatable music of the French . . . would sound like bad hip-hop: ‘The notion of procreation was a delectation.’” Wood’s uniquely fresh approach to interpreting literature makes How Fiction Works an intellectually challenging book that will bear reading and rereading by those seriously interested in literary criticism. The scope and depth of Wood’s assessments consistently impress. R. Baird Shuman

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Review Sources American Scholar 77, no. 4 (Autumn, 2008): 137-139. The Economist 386 (February 9, 2008): 90. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 8 (April 15, 2008): 416. Library Journal 133, no. 9 (May 15, 2008): 103-104. The Nation 287, no. 19 (December 8, 2008): 46-52. The New Republic 239, no. 1 (July 30, 2008): 35-37. New Statesman 137 (February 11, 2008): 56. New York, August 11, 2008, pp. 64-65. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 18 (November 20, 2008): 85-88. Newsweek 152, no. 5 (August 4, 2008): 60. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 16 (April 21, 2008): 43. Time 172, no. 4 (July 28, 2008): 60. The Times Literary Supplement, February 8, 2008, p. 13. The Writer 121, no. 10 (October, 2008): 43.

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IDA, A SWORD AMONG LIONS Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching Author: Paula J. Giddings (1947) Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins (New York). Illustrated. 800 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Biography, history, women’s issues Time: 1862-1931 Locale: The U.S. South, particularly Memphis, Tennessee; the U.S. North, particularly Chicago; Great Britain A comprehensive biography of this journalist, lecturer, feminist, reformer, and public intellectual, a forceful advocate of civil rights, social justice, woman suffrage, and the antilynching cause, that provides an overview of Jim Crow racial violence and African American citizenship and activism in the post-Reconstruction and Progressive eras Principal personages: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, outspoken agitator for social change Thomas Moss, proprietor of a Memphis grocery store who was brutally murdered by a white lynch mob, spurring a black exodus from Memphis to the Oklahoma Territory T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age and founder of the Afro-American League, a key supporter of Wells’s exposés of Southern lynching Frederick Douglass, former abolitionist and proponent of African American equality and women’s rights, who championed Wells’s career as a public lecturer in the antilynching cause Ferdinand Barnett, progressive attorney and founder and editor of the Chicago Conservator, who became Wells’s husband in 1895 Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell, Wells’s colleagues in the black woman’s club movement Susan B. Anthony and Jane Addams, white women reformers with whom Wells associated Walter White and W. E. B. Du Bois, leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

Ida B. Wells was a complex woman, and Ida, A Sword Among Lions by Paula J. Giddings is a complex book that captures the full scope of her challenging and impressive life. It spanned from the Civil War into the “nadir” years of post-Reconstruction racial segregation, through the Progressive Era and World War I, and on to the beginning of the Great Depression. Wells was raised in the South. In the 1890’s, when her newspaper office was destroyed and she received threats upon her life because of her determined political outspokenness on racial violence issues, she went into exile in the North. She spent the

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majority of her adulthood working and traveling for social-justice causes. In the last three decades of her life, she was based in Chicago, where she raised her family and became deeply involved in local social welfare and community politics as well as in more sweeping national reforms. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, the eldest daughter of former slaves who were ardent believers in education and work as means of uplift for African Americans. Her parents were early supporters of the Freedman’s Aid Society’s Shaw University (later Rust College), which Wells attended. Wells’s happy family life was destroyed in 1878, when a yellow fever epidemic claimed the lives of both her parents. Orphaned at age sixteen, Wells set out on her own, with varying success, to supply financial support for her younger siblings and herself. Wellread and a lover of literature, she turned to the highly respectable profession of teaching, and she soon took up residence in Memphis, Tennessee. There she honed her oratorical and debating skills as a member of the Memphis Lyceum. As Giddings demonstrates, this was preparation for a lifetime of public speaking to come. Giddings re-creates the social milieu of Memphis of the 1880’s and the class, gender, and racial contradictions that faced a forthright young black woman such as Wells in a city where Jim Crow restrictions were taking hold. Wells would test those strictures with a lawsuit in 1883-1884, when she was discriminated against on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway and she resisted moving to a segregated car. Teaching school, meanwhile, proved to be just the first of her professions. Gifted as a writer, she began to earn a name in freelance journalism. She wrote regular columns under the pen name “Iola,” and in 1889, in association with the minister Taylor Nightingale and editor J. L. Fleming, became one-third owner and editor-in-chief of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. In doing so, Wells joined the ranks of other influential black male and female journalists working nationwide, and she began to travel extensively to promote the newspaper. The violent murder of Wells’s friend—grocer and postman Thomas Moss—by a white mob in 1892 was a turning point in her career, as well as in the lives of many of the African American residents of Memphis. In a pivotal editorial written after Moss’s murder, Wells observed “that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival.” She then urged the black citizens of Memphis to observe Moss’s dying words and leave the city, because no justice could be found for them there. Thousands responded, and they made their way to the Oklahoma Territory. In a more pronounced way, the death of Moss launched Wells on an incredible arc as the nation’s leading voice of protest against lynching. Her campaign to dispel

A former journalist, Paula J. Giddings is the author of the acclaimed When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1996) and In Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement (1988) and editor of Burning All Illusions (2002), an anthology of articles on race published in The Nation. She is the Elizabeth A. Woodson 1922 Professor in AfroAmerican Studies at Smith College.

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myths and educate the public as to the true causes and intents of lynching took form through her editorials and later pamphlets. In the 1890’s it would lead her from Memphis to New York and on to tours of Great Britain as an antilynching lecturer. Forced from the South, she worked for the New York Age, and in 1892 she produced her classic feature story based on her lynching investigations, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” She was well received in Great Britain in 1892 and 1894, where, speaking before British audiences, she urged that international political pressure be exerted on the United States for an end to atrocities. Back in the United States, she joined with Frederick Douglass in decrying racism at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and she produced the famed protest pamphlet The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the Columbian Exposition. Gleaning personal insights from Wells’s diary and her unfinished autobiography, as well as making copious use of detail from a wealth of African American newspapers from around the country, Giddings tells the story of these pivotal developments in Wells’s activism with thoroughness and grace. Most important, Giddings does an excellent job in explaining Wells’s reeducation of the populace—and of other prominent reformers—on the issue of lynching. Through careful fieldwork investigations and compilation of sociological statistics, Wells disproved the popular belief that lynching was chivalrous retaliatory justice against licentious black men for the crime of rape. Wells demonstrated that more commonly consensual interracial relationships were involved; that white women’s reputations were upheld at the cost of the lives of wrongly accused black men; and that white men who perpetuated lynching crimes were deeply hypocritical, as evidenced by the large number of mulatto citizens in the South. It was indeed black women who historically were victimized at the hands of white men, and Wells defended their honor. Wells pointed out that often, as in the torture and murder of Moss, lynching had nothing to do with sexuality at all. Moss in effect died because he was too successful as a black entrepreneur. After his funeral, ownership of his store ended up in the hands of a white commercial rival. In her lectures and writings on lynching, Wells particularly targeted prominent liberal and progressive whites who she felt perpetuated atrocity through their complacency and silence. For Wells, lynching was a moral outrage that compromised the status of the nation and mocked its stated ideals. Despite the book’s subtitle, Giddings’s study ably demonstrates that the antilynching campaign was far from Wells’s only field of reform. Wells also promoted woman suffrage, and she was an important figure in the black woman’s club movement and the National Association of Colored Women. She was active as well in the early years of both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). The first half of Giddings’s narrative focuses on the portion of Wells’s life leading up to 1895, when, at age thirty-two, she wed publisher Ferdinand Barnett of Chicago. While the young Wells battled against negative views of single women and of women in public, the wedded Wells faced new challenges in balancing continued activism with marriage and family life. Giddings captures the contradictory viewpoints on the issue in

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the elite urban black community: Was racial progress better served by women through devotion to domestic obligations or through public achievement? With a supportive husband, Wells-Barnett hyphenated her name, and she managed to meet both expectations: raising a family of four children and remaining an active force for social change. In the last half of her book Giddings charts Wells’s efforts to create interracial alliances, her political activism against residential and school segregation, and her role in founding social welfare agencies and political organizations, including the Frederick Douglass Women’s Center, the Negro Fellowship League, and the Ida B. Wells Club and Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago. Wells also took on the cause of labor, championing the organizing of black railway workers through A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids. In the course of her perpetual activism, Wells was hindered by the sexism of men of her own race and by the racism (or overwillingness to compromise on issues of race) of white women reformers. Among the latter were the suffragists who attempted to bar Wells from marching with whites in the 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., for fear of alienating white supremacists in the South. Among black women, color consciousness and class biases could be divisive, as were petty or honest differences. Meanwhile, Wells had success working in alliance with others as divergent as Jane Addams and Marcus Garvey. As Giddings demonstrates, Wells’s worst opponent could be her prickly personality, which even she realized was a force to conquer. Wells’s belief in protest and direct action was also dismissed as problematic by those who favored more accommodating approaches and by other activists who feared loss of financial support from white philanthropists. In her last years, Wells found herself marginalized in the causes to which she had dedicated her life. The NAACP grew in strength as it led action on the lynching issue, and the influence of women’s groups declined. Wells helped win success in the 1915 campaign of Oscar DePriest, the first black alderman of Chicago, but her own independent efforts at winning office in the Illinois State Senate in 1930 failed. The East St. Louis riot and the racial violence that ravaged American cities at the end of World War I dismayed many who had long struggled for progress in racial rights. Wells was placed under surveillance and threatened with arrest on charges of treason for her organizing on the issue. Readers of Ida, A Sword Among Lions—the title of which comes from Psalm 57:4—will be struck by how many of the dilemmas that faced Wells as a woman and as an African American citizen transcend time. Giddings’s narrative of the unfolding events of Wells’s personal and public life is encyclopedic. The biographical account is set in the context of the grassroots political history of the nation and the inner workings of organizations for social change. Despite its length, Ida, A Sword Among Lions encourages readers to follow up with more exploration into the life and impact of Wells-Barnett. Readers interested in greater scholarly analysis of Wells, especially the religious basis of her political outlook and the gendered aspects of her activism and the antilynching campaign, should turn to Patricia A. Schechter’s brilliant biography, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930 (2001). Those who

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would like to enjoy Wells through her own words can delve into Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (1970), edited by Wells’s daughter, Alfreda M. Duster, or some of Wells’s many published essays. Barbara Bair

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 11 (February 1, 2008): 20. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 2 (January 15, 2008): 74-75. Library Journal 133, no. 3 (February 15, 2008): 112. Ms. 18, no. 1 (Winter, 2008): 74-75. The New York Times Book Review, May 18, 2008, p. 25. O, The Oprah Magazine 9, no. 3 (March, 2008): 176. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 56 (March 8, 2008): W8.

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I’M LOOKING THROUGH YOU Growing Up Haunted—A Memoir Author: Jennifer Finney Boylan (1958) Publisher: Broadway Books (New York). 288 pp. $23.95 Type of work: Memoir Time: The 1970’s to 2006 Locale: Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Maine Boylan’s touching but humorous account of growing up as a young male haunted by the secret knowledge of his true female identity Principal personages: Jimmy/Jenny Boylan, transgendered writer, musician, college professor Lydia Boylan, Jenny’s once close, now estranged older sister H. S. and Eleanor Boylan, Jenny’s parents Grace Finney, Jim Boylan’s wife and Jenny Boylan’s partner

Jennifer Finney Boylan has already written about her experience as a transsexual in the best-selling memoir She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders (2002), a book that recounts the story of a forty-year-old man, married with two sons, who finally embraces his true identity and begins the process that leads to gender-reassignment surgery and a new life as a woman. So while this new memoir, I’m Looking Through You, does not cover that ground (giving the basic information with real dispatch at several points), it nevertheless cannot help focusing on the issue of Boylan’s gender identity, though it does so by placing this in the much more universal context of a coming-of-age tale. The declaration emblazoned on Jimmy Boylan’s high school T-shirt, “I act different because I am different,” could be the motto for all teenagers rebelling against parents and conventions as they struggle to come to terms with who they are and what that means for their future lives. Adolescence is turbulent, brutal, and comical, not just for boys who feel trapped in the wrong body, but for everyone, to some degree or another. Boylan’s confusions and fears, however, are more specific; and it is this specificity that gives the book its uniquely haunted quality. Aware of his particular difference, young Boylan knows that “in order to survive, I’d have to become something of a ghost myself, and keep the nature of my true self hidden.” It means haunting his own body, being “a wraithlike presence otherwise invisible to the naked eye—like helium, or J. D. Salinger, or the G-spot.” In those few early sentences readers are introduced both to the memoir’s principal metaphors (ghosts and hauntings) as well as to Boylan’s principal tone: a voice that can turn on a dime from the serious to the comic. She is dead earnest about her haunted past; but as a fiftyyear-old woman looking back on that time, she is also able to see and re-create the genuine comedy in it all.

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A word about this act of looking back on the past: In a prefatory “Author’s Note,” Boylan makes it quite clear that her story, like all memoirs, is an impression, not a photographic record, and so it will “contain elements of invention, in keeping with the facts of my life.” She will dramatize events, supply dialogue, and expand time frames in telling her story. Perhaps this is no more than a reminder that memories are personal and emotional constructs: They invite embellishment, Jennifer Finney Boylan is a professor insist on dilation or contraction, are powerful of English at Colby College, the author in their instability and suggestiveness, diffi- of several novels and short-story cult to verify, and rarely shared exactly by collections, as well as the best-selling others (when a friend at a thirtieth high school memoir She’s Not There (2002). An reunion, for instance, says that something increasingly public transgendered Boylan wrote about never happened, she re- personality, she has appeared on The sponds: “just because it never happened does- Oprah Winfrey Show and Larry King n’t mean I can’t remember it”). So long as she Live, and she has played herself on the does not “shamelessly bamboozle the reader,” ABC soap opera All My Children. Boylan believes that she is on safe ground in terms of presenting the truth. However, some readers may feel that proviso gives her a little too much leeway for creative elaboration. Before many pages have gone by, the reader confronts a family living in a crumbling haunted house: an affable father who asks his son to play piano pieces backward; a kimono-clad grandmother who dances atop barroom tables dispensing wisdom about the value of eating dirt; a visionary uncle who rides the rails scrawling utopian manifestos; an aunt with foot-long fingernails; a cousin who eats only plums; a dog, Matt the Mutt, that urinates on cue in fireplaces; and a friend who channels the Cowardly Lion. Then there is the narrator herself, who is electrocuted within the first few minutes of arriving at the family’s “Coffin” House, who sees ghosts and hovering blue mists everywhere, who travels on trains that run over young girls, who sleeps in batridden bell towers, and who wakes to play Rolling Stones songs on the college carillon. It all seems a little over the top, everything boosted into capital letters and day-glo colors—a sort of “can-you-believe-this?” hyperbole designed to rivet readers and boost sales. Should the reader question any of this? Should the reader believe that a toilet left running overnight could actually flood three floors of a house, knocking down walls, taking out ceilings, and floating grand pianos? Should the reader simply understand that little Jimmy’s mistake creates a mess for his family: an external image that makes concrete his internal condition? Is it just the nature of contemporary memoir to trade in this species of exuberant exaggeration? These questions do not exactly resolve themselves, but they do not finally undermine the tale, either. Even accounting for an imagination that may be cranking up the dial on drama and whipping up dialogue that

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has the tart, quippy feel of a novel (if hardly the feel of everyday human exchange), the reader quickly accepts the fact that Boylan’s life really did unfold among some quirky personalities and in some amazing circumstances—a haunted house, spectres, floods, electrocutions—all on Philadelphia’s Main Line. Most readers will indeed be riveted. Questions of heightened dramatization aside, it is clear that Boylan tells the story she needs to tell. The motives are sound, transparent, and compelling. It may be surprisingly breezy and lighthearted, an account that refuses to be any more serious than it has to be (readers will sense early on that there is not much that will not be sacrificed for a laugh, and the book delivers many of them). Nevertheless, it is finally no joking matter: Growing up as she did was a perilous business and was painfully hard to understand. Boylan admits that while she has little use for transgender theory, finding the whole academic discourse that surrounds her situation not “especially helpful in terms of explaining what I felt,” she does have faith in the power of a meaningful narrative. “To be honest, just about the only theory I trust is story, and I’m hoping that, before all is said and done, the tale I am trying to tell can stand in for the theory.” It is in telling her story that she hopes to integrate her two lives, to live unhaunted by the past, able to see herself as connected to the confused young man she once was and to feel she has not betrayed him by moving toward a different gender. The memoir ends with the sense that this connection has been achieved, that Boylan’s “transformative powers of blarney” have woven together all the stages of her life into a single fabric that contains past, present, and future. However, it takes years to get there, with many bumps in the road and many frights along the way—frights that begin as the Boylans move into an Addams Family nightmare of a house that right from the start seems luxuriantly outfitted with the entire catalog of occult machinery: creaking stairs, closing doors, undulating curtains, ghostly footsteps, and the vaporous shrouded figures that only Jimmy can see. The teenager is visited by two distinct presences: one a young girl who lived in the house and is said to have drowned, the other a middle-aged woman clad in a nightgown who frequently appears when Jimmy is looking in the mirror. The latter most disturbs him, the vision seeming ominously to ask, “Who are you and what are you doing here?” Only decades later, when as a woman she is once again back in the “Coffin” House and looking into that same mirror, does it occur to her that the floating translucent old woman in white is not a ghost at all but simply her own reflection. As she says, “Against all odds, I had become solid.” She begins to suspect it is far more often the case that hearts, not houses, are haunted; and by confronting the woman in the mirror she begins to understand what the message has been all along: “Don’t be afraid, Jenny, she said. It’s only me.” It is a moving scene, a crucial transformative moment, and, in many ways, the heart of the memoir—this acceptance of self in spite of difference and difficulty. However, it is characteristically edged with humor and permeated with a wry, hard-earned self-knowledge. Boylan handles all of her scenes with this same poised expertise, knowing exactly how to launch them (“The train lurched a little as we ran over the girl”) and keep them in the air. Chapters are divided into short, punchy sections, loaded with amusingly observed detail, and delivered in language unfailingly fresh and snappy. The scene re-

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vealing her father’s cancer diagnosis—when this gentle droll man, a cigarette perpetually poised at his lips and smoke rings circling his head, tells young James that he’ll need to be the man of the family now—is perfectly calibrated to demonstrate both a father’s warm support for an unusual son and a son’s private terror of being a disappointment to a beloved father. It is all handled with deft poignancy and real emotional tact. The scene of the trip to the Hershey chocolate factory with two school friends, on the other hand, is laugh-out-loud funny, a druggy, pop culture-riddled riff ripped from the pages of Mad magazine. Boylan’s account of a summer job as a very ineffectual bank teller—who leaves wads of thousands by the water cooler, who gives patrons hundred-dollar bills instead of tens, who is more intent on finishing his epic poem “The Kiwi” than on reaching the end of the day with a balanced till—shows yet another kind of humor, a sweet pathos wrapping itself around the sitcom high-jinks. Boylan’s pummeling at the hands of thuggish prep school boys who call him “faggot” and mock his willowy body and feminine manner is a vignette of a different sort, quick, graphic, heartbreaking in its depiction of bigotry festering into adolescent violence. Neverthless, Boylan survives all these skillfully rendered moments, living out his secret in the privacy of his bedroom, where he reads Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) in a bra stuffed with grapefruit and confronts the spirits that wander in and out and put to him the puzzling questions that, as Jenny, he will ultimately be forced to answer. As Boylan says, when reflecting on the sad fact that his beloved sister has refused any contact since James became Jennifer, one cannot get a new history with a new body. Therefore, the task is to connect the new with the old, the present with the past. In this respect, Boylan’s story transcends the narrative of one transsexual’s journey and becomes a tale that speaks to all people, since they all carry on these negotiations with their past lives, coming to terms with events that have haunted them, with secrets that have occasionally turned them into masquerading, unreal figures, into ghosts. All people are faced with the need to accept themselves and go about the business of living and loving in the world as they find it. That is the story, related with great humor and admirable candor, that Boylan’s memoir tells. Thomas J. Campbell

Review Sources Entertainment Weekly, January 18, 2008, p. 87. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 22 (November 15, 2007): 1184. Lambda Book Report 16, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Summer, 2008): 11-12. Library Journal 133, no. 2 (February 1, 2008): 68-69. Ms. 18, no. 1 (Winter, 2008): 74-75. People 69, no. 3 (January 28, 2008): 61. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 47 (November 26, 2007): 42. School Library Journal 54, no. 5 (May, 2008): 162.

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IN DEFENSE OF FOOD An Eater’s Manifesto Author: Michael Pollan (1955) Publisher: Penguin Press (New York). 244 pp. $21.95 Type of work: Current affairs, science Pollan offers a different way to think about food, and he exposes the belief system he calls “nutritionism,” an ideology that benefits the food industry and the nutrition industry at the cost of human physical and spiritual health Since the discovery in the late twentieth century of an American “obesity epidemic,” scientists and journalists have explored the question of why the United States, one of the most prosperous and well-educated countries on the planet, should have such a difficult time providing nutritious food for its people or why its people are not making healthy food choices. Responses to this epidemic, and to the food industry that many believe fuels it, have included the international Slow Food movement, which supports small food producers whose work does not harm animals, workers, or the environment, and the so-called locavore movement, which encourages consumers to eat as much locally grown food as possible to avoid the damages caused by shipping, packaging, and mass production. These movements have also produced dozens of books by well-known chefs, journalists, and activists exploring the question of how to eat responsibly. Barbara Kingsolver in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007) and Bill McKibben in Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (2007) describe their family’s determination to avoid industrially processed food and instead eat only food that has been produced locally by small farmers and businesses for a year or a season. Both found that eating this way was at first difficult and timeconsuming, but both found new pleasures in growing and preparing food, working together as a family, and leaving a lighter footprint on the earth. Longtime food writer Michael Pollan contributed fascinating information about where the food most Americans eat comes from in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006). In that book, Pollan traced common foods back to their sources, focusing on industrially farmed food, organic food, and food he grew, hunted, and collected himself. He demonstrated that most of the processed and packaged foods available in a supermarket contain long lists of surprising ingredients (some form of corn, for example, turns up in almost everything), and that a lot of foods labeled “organic” or “natural” are also mass-produced industrial products. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a best seller, presented enough unsettling information to make consumers wonder about the items in their grocery carts, but, as Pollan reports in the introduction to In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, it did not an-

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swer the question on many readers’ minds: “Okay, but what should I eat?” In Defense of Michael Pollan has written five books Food is a thoroughly researched, nonprescrip- and dozens of articles about gardening tive response to that question, and the answer and food for national publications. His boils down to seven words that begin the book previous book, The Omnivore’s and appear frequently throughout its pages: Dilemma (2006), was recognized by both The New York Times and The “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” To explain what he means by “food”—not Washington Post as one of the ten best books of the year. to be confused with the “other edible foodlike substances in the supermarkets”—Pollan devotes the first two of the book’s three sections to exposing the ideology of “The Age of Nutritionism” and delineating “The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization.” After 1977, he explains, when federal dietary guidelines first began to describe nutrients instead of food groups, food labels began touting supposed nutritional benefits. Claims of “high fiber,” “low cholesterol,” or “added vitamins” were featured prominently, and consumers came to believe that they could make healthy food choices by counting one nutrient or another. Today, consumers take for granted that counting calories or grams of particular kinds of fat, carbohydrates, or protein is the key to healthy eating, and they have lost sight of food itself. Even when the conventional wisdom about which nutrient to focus on changes every few years or even every few months, consumers willingly surrender their own good sense about eating to follow the advice of experts. There are several things wrong with this approach, as Pollan argues. For one thing, the food experts do not know as much as they claim to. They observed, for example, that processing wheat into bleached white flour strips the grain of much of its iron, and they successfully reintroduced iron to create “enriched” flour. However, what hundreds of other micronutrients are removed with the wheat germ, and which ones are important to human health? The answer is, no one really knows. Another problem is that consumers tend to focus on only one or two nutrients at a time, thinking of each ingredient as good or bad in itself. Someone counting fat grams might buy low-fat cookies and eat an entire box, ignoring the sugar, processed flour, and other harmful ingredients in those cookies. The result, as everyone has noticed, is thousands of new cases every year of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. To Pollan it seems the more attention the American public pays to trying to eat healthy food, the sicker people become. In addition, most of the pleasure has been taken out of eating, which used to bring families and cultures together. Pollan reports that in one study, when people in France were shown a picture of chocolate cake and asked to comment on it in one word, their most common response was “celebration”; Americans shown the same picture mostly responded “guilt.” Pollan lays the blame for the resulting confusion at the feet of three groups: the federal government, whose shifting food groups and food pyramids promote the ideology of nutritionism; the food industry, which promotes processed and packaged food that promises to deliver on various health claims; and journalists, who report without question each new nutritional “discovery,” from oat bran to omega-3 fatty acids. In

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lucid, often humorous, prose, Pollan describes competing and superseding health claims, market manipulations by the food industry, and sheeplike behavior on the part of consumers. In these analyses, Pollan demonstrates one of his great strengths as a writer: the ability to explain complicated science to a general audience. The way out of the mess Americans find themselves in, he concludes, is to get back to eating food—traditional, recognizable, satisfying, pleasurable food. In “The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization,” Pollan describes the typical American diet and reports on numerous studies linking this diet to so-called Western diseases, including diabetes and cardiovascular disease. He begins with an anecdote about a group of diabetic urban Australian Aborigines who returned to their isolated homeland, took up their traditional diet and way of life, and in only seven weeks dramatically improved their health. Other studies have shown not only that people who eat traditional diets low in processed foods have lower rates of the Western diseases, but that greatly reducing the amount of processed food in one’s diet can reverse damage already done. As Americans have gradually moved from eating whole foods to eating processed and refined “foodlike substances,” from simple foods to artificial and processed foods with dozens of unpronounceable ingredients, from small intensely flavored portions eaten slowly to large megameals devoured in the car, from a large variety of leafy and fruity plants to a few grains, they have sacrificed health for convenience and economy. As Pollan puts it succinctly, industrial agriculture has driven a change “from quality to quantity.” Americans eat more and more calories, sampling a small portion of the seventeen thousand new foods products brought to market each year, but they derive less and less nourishment from the foods they eat. While the food industry provides Americans with empty calories and new epidemics, and the nutrition industry presents a series of conflicting solutions, another industry steps up to the rescue: the medical industry, with its medications, procedures, and equipment aimed at treating the new diseases. Pollan achieves a remarkable blend of passion and rationalism in this book; he is persuasive because he knows how to build a logical case and because he has lived the changes he wants to see. Still, it must be said that there are passages in the first sections of In Defense of Food that sound just like the books for which Pollan sees his work as an alternative. All of the popular diet books explain calmly why the books that came before have missed some essential truth about eating, and they all present a rational explanation for their own proposals. The smart ones take the time to show how their diet is more natural, or more traditional, or more like what the Europeans or Japanese eat, and they find a way to make following their advice seem virtuous, not just vain. Pollan accomplishes all of this and only occasionally sounds as though he is offering the latest scientific breakthrough diet, a testimony to the clarity of his vision and the preciseness of his language. In fact, his “Manifesto” aims much higher and much deeper than that of a diet book, and it nearly always hits its mark. Having shown persuasively what is wrong with the way Americans eat, Pollan makes several modest proposals in his third section, “Getting over Nutritionism.” At the heart of the proposals is his seven-word motto: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly

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plants.” He revisits the word “food,” offering rules of thumb to help readers recognize food when they see it. One should not eat anything, he advises, that would be unknown to one’s great-grandmother; in other words, one should stick to the outer walls of the grocery store and avoid most of the packaged, processed, enriched, preserved foodlike substances in the aisles. Even simple foods such as meat and dairy should be avoided if they contain more than five ingredients or ingredients that the ancestors would not recognize, including the ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup. Pollan advises avoiding foods that contain strange-sounding chemical ingredients, and he lists the few basic ingredients in the loaf of bread his grandmother would have baked and then the more than thirty-five ingredients in a loaf of Sara Lee Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread. The contrast is sharp and persuasive. Next, Pollan offers advice that he admits sounds counterintuitive: “Avoid food products that make health claims.” The analysis he has already presented in the first two sections of the book makes his comment that “health claims have become hopelessly corrupt” seem entirely reasonable. At the end of In Defense of Food, Pollan returns to the ideas that concluded The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Consumers should grow as much of their own food as they can and buy as much of the rest from farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture programs (CSAs). If most of what a person eats is food (“Eat food”), as Pollan defines it, and portions are reasonable (“Not too much”), then specific menus should not matter much, as evidenced by the wide variety of traditional diets found in healthy cultures around the world. For several reasons, including the health of the environment and a desire to make healthy food available equitably, Pollan encourages readers to eat “mostly plants,” especially leafy plants. He also advises readers to learn about soils, drink wine, eat the best-quality food they can afford, cook at home—from scratch—and eat only full meals at a table. Since the publication of In Defense of Food, Pollan has faced criticism for seeming to ignore the many people who lack the time and the money to follow his advice, and that criticism is partially fair. He acknowledges that many Americans eat poorly because sugar and fat have become so inexpensive, thanks to industrialized food processing and government indifference, but in this book he speaks more to individual choice than to political action. Pollan is calling for nothing short of a complete overhaul of the American way of eating, but his manifesto is addressed primarily to those educated and well-off readers who are already members of the choir. Cynthia A. Bily

Review Sources American Scientist 96, no. 3 (May/June, 2008): 243-245. Booklist 104, nos. 9/10 (January 1, 2008): 30. The Christian Science Monitor, April 1, 2008, p. 14. Commentary 126, no. 1 (July/August, 2008): 68-73.

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Entertainment Weekly, December 21, 2007, p. 87. Food Management 43, no. 3 (March, 2008): 14. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 22 (November 15, 2007): 1194. National Catholic Reporter 44, no. 12 (February 8, 2008): 7a. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 4 (March 20, 2008): 23-24. Newsweek 151, no. 4 (January 28, 2008): 48. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 47 (November 26, 2007): 41. The Saturday Evening Post 280, no. 3 (May/June, 2008): 18. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 27 (February 2, 2008): W8.

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INDIGNATION Author: Philip Roth (1933) Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (Boston). 233 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1951-1952 Locale: Newark, New Jersey, and the fictitious Winesburg College in rural Ohio Setting his story against the background of the Korean War, Roth tells of a young man whose single-mindedness, ambition, and naïveté render him vulnerable to a series of increasingly disastrous mishaps Principal characters: Marcus Messner, the narrator, a nineteenyear-old, first-generation college student with dreams of being class valedictorian, avoiding the draft, and becoming a lawyer Mr. Messner, Marcus’s overprotective father, a kosher butcher living in Newark, New Jersey Mrs. Messner, Marcus’s stoical and loving mother, a homemaker Olivia Hutton, a beautiful but deeply troubled sophomore transfer student whose sexual savvy both enthralls and baffles Marcus Sonny Cottler, popular member of an all-Jewish fraternity who tries unsuccessfully to induce Marcus to pledge Hawes D. Caudwell, dean of men at Winesburg College and Marcus’s chief nemesis

Indignation, Philip Roth’s twenty-ninth novel, shares with his other recent fictional efforts, Everyman (2006) and Exit Ghost (2007), a spare narrative structure and a thematic concern with human frailty. Unlike those astringent, wintry novels, however, Indignation concentrates on the experiences of a young man, nineteen-year-old Marcus Messner, as he leaves his hometown college in Newark and transfers to Winesburg College, a conservative Christian liberal arts institution in rural Ohio. (The school’s name alludes to Sherwood Anderson’s classic Winesburg, Ohio, with its assortment of smothered provincial lives offered as a gallery of “grotesques.”) Indeed, in this novel Roth seems to be going back to the period he mined so profitably in such earlier works as Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), both of which deal with the rites of passage undergone by a young Jewish man struggling to achieve independence from his overweening parents and to find his way among the Gentiles generally and shikses (WASP females) in particular. It was a period in the author’s life also treated in his autobiography, The Facts (1988), in a section titled “Joe College.” It is instructive to compare the straightforward account of Roth’s separation and initiation experience as presented in the autobiography with his protagonist’s vicissi-

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tudes in Indignation. In The Facts Roth tells how he graduated from high school in 1950 at age sixteen, working for the next nine months as a stock clerk in a Newark department store, before enrolling at a downtown branch of Rutgers University while still living at home with his parents. Though an exemplary student, he felt increasingly “suffocated” by his father’s inclination to control his private life, and so he determined to get away from home. “I didn’t care where ‘away’ was—one colPhilip Roth has won numerous literary lege would do as well as another.” As it hapawards, including National Book Awards for Goodbye, Columbus (1959) pened, a neighborhood friend was then a student at Bucknell University, located in the and Sabbath’s Theater (1995), the small town of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral recommended it to Roth. A campus visit con(1997), the PEN/Faulkner Award for vinced him—despite the college’s location in Operation Shylock (1993), National Book Critics Circle Awards for a small rural town, its Baptist roots, its rePatrimony (1991) and The Counterlife quirement of weekly chapel attendance for (1986), the National Medal of Arts in underclassmen, and its paucity of other Jew1998, and the Gold Medal in Fiction ish students—to enroll. Outwardly, these cirfrom the American Academy of Arts cumstances parallel those in which Marcus and Letters in 2002. Messner finds himself in the novel. He, too, transfers from a state college in Newark after his freshman year in order to escape his father’s strictures. The latter are much enlarged upon in the novel, for Mr. Messner’s determination to keep a tight rein on his son’s every move derives from an irrational and increasingly obsessive fear that, left to his own devices, Marcus could be victimized or even killed at any moment, a fear greatly exacerbated by the Korean War, which looms over the entire story like a malevolent Fate. In addition, Marcus’s reasons for choosing the bucolic Winesburg College are more whimsical than Roth’s for choosing Bucknell. Marcus is attracted not only by the college’s distance from his home but also by its All-American, crew-cut and white-bucks image as depicted on promotional brochures, seemingly oblivious to the rigid restrictions and requirements that would later prove so troublesome. Once they have matriculated at their new schools, Marcus’s and Roth’s careers follow different paths. For Roth, the college presented a series of opportunities to grow socially as well as academically. He pledged a fraternity (resigning from it after a year), formed close friendships with other students and several young faculty members, made the dean’s list for academic achievement, coedited a campus literary magazine, and had a steady girlfriend during his junior and senior years. An article he wrote attacking the campus newspaper earned him a browbeating by the dean of men and censure from a board overseeing student publications, but such clashes with authority only validated his growing independence and self-confidence. In Marcus’s

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case, the situation is far more desperate. From almost the beginning of the academic year he is effectively isolated, in short order rejecting two sets of roommates until finally securing a single room where he can study in peace. He spends most of his waking hours immersed in his studies, earning pocket money working part time as a waiter in a local watering hole (where he tries to ignore anti-Semitic slurs from fellow students). When approached by Sonny Cottler, a prominent member of the one Jewish fraternity at Winesburg, and encouraged to pledge, Marcus firmly rebuffs him. As this behavior suggests, Marcus’s isolation is to a large extent self-imposed. To get straight A’s and eventually become class valedictorian, to enroll in the campus ROTC program so as to enter the Army as an officer after graduation, to earn enough to lessen the financial burden on his family—these are his only goals and, with one exception, he doggedly refuses to consider various opportunities for personal growth made available by college life. His unwillingness to compromise his goals, which creates conflicts between Marcus and his roommates and the fraternity members, amounts to the kind of unconventional behavior that attracts attention from the bastions of conformity empowered to protect the status quo in a small college, especially in the 1950’s. The single exception to Marcus’s willed isolation is his brief affair with an attractive coed, Olivia Hutton, whom he meets in American history class. On their first date, she startles him by her readiness to perform oral sex on him, an act so far beyond anything Marcus has before experienced that he is even more bewildered than he is inflamed with erotic desire. While his attraction to her is enhanced by her being a shikse, the long scar on her left wrist and revelations about a troubled past—including alcoholic binges, sexual promiscuity, a broken home, and a psychological breakdown—soon present Marcus with complications with which he is clearly ill prepared to deal. In effect, though she appears genuinely attracted to Marcus, her pathology and his tunnel vision are such that there is no real chance for them to establish an enduring relationship. When Marcus is hospitalized after an emergency appendectomy, Olivia visits his room and again provides sexual satisfaction. Instead of feeling transported by pleasure, however, he is burdened by guilt and confusion, and these are only compounded by a visit from his mother and her resolute opposition to Olivia as Marcus’s girl. For her part, Olivia abruptly disappears from the college and from the novel, apparently after suffering another breakdown. Marcus never hears from her again. He learns of Olivia’s departure from the dean of men, Hawes D. Caudwell, who has been monitoring Marcus’s behavior and twice calls Marcus into his office for accusatory talks. In the first meeting, the dean takes Marcus to task for changing roommates and refusing to pledge a fraternity or to try out for the baseball team, acts that go against the grain of college “tradition.” Made increasingly angry by what seem to him trivial criticisms, Marcus takes the opportunity to voice his fervent objections to the mandatory chapel rule, which only makes him seem even more rebellious in the dean’s eyes. Their second meeting takes place after Caudwell learns of Marcus’s affair with Olivia (a nurse had walked in on them in the hospital room). He is only too willing to presume that the boy is responsible for her pregnancy, which precipitated

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the breakdown, though the reader knows he is not. Added to the “case” against Marcus is Caudwell’s knowledge that Marcus has paid another student to take his place in chapel and forge his signature on the attendance sheet. These confrontations provide the dramatic fulcrum of the novel, resulting in Marcus’s dismissal from the college for violating the student code of conduct. His understandable indignation at this climactic injustice elicits the emotion that gives the novel its title. Marcus’s encounter with the dean occurs on the same day as another kind of confrontation, a panty raid that quickly turns into a near riot. Though Marcus does not participate in this collective eruption of aggression, eighteen of his fellow students are dismissed afterward. The juxtaposition of these scenes carries the implication that both are somehow the result of the suppression of youthful energies characteristic of the period. To reinforce this suggestion, Roth appends a “Historical Note” in which he updates the picture of Winesburg College, pointing out that after student demonstrations of the 1960’s, culminating in the week-long occupation of the dean’s office, “the chapel requirement was abolished along with virtually all the strictures and parietal rules regulating student conduct that had been in force there for more than a hundred years. . . .” On a global level, the violent unleashing of pent-up urges is expressed in the ongoing war in Korea, which claimed the lives of some 54,000 Americans. One of the book’s biggest surprises is the offhand revelation, about fifty pages in, that Marcus, the narrator, believes he is dead. In “Out from Under,” the brief final chapter narrated in the third person rather than by Marcus himself, the reader learns that Private Messner has indeed been mortally wounded—“bayonet wounds . . . had all but severed one leg from his torso and hacked his intestines and genitals to bits”— on the battlefield in Korea, some four months after his abrupt departure from Winesburg. The narrative preceding this disclosure, entitled “Under Morphine,” is the drug-induced dream of his life, a fact that necessarily casts doubt on its veracity. Such narrative legerdemain is typical of Roth’s fiction, which is now grouped into the novels of Nathan Zuckerman, David Kepesh (both fictional alter egos of the author), Philip Roth, and “others.” Whether the “postmortem” device succeeds in Indignation is an open question. The novel has received mixed reviews, some praising its narrative economy in rendering the protagonist’s inexorable doom, others faulting it for sketchy characterization and thematic contrivance. Critical consensus may ultimately depend on whether readers recognize that Indignation is not intended as a fully represented fictional action, which would entail a cast of three-dimensional characters and a complex, “realistic” plot. Rather, it is most fruitfully read as a kind of moral fable or apologue, in which the fictional material is scrupulously selected and organized so as to convey, as powerfully as possible, a central truth. In this case that truth, which is formulated several times and repeated in the book’s final lines, ironically confirms the basis of Mr. Messner’s fears for his son’s life: “the terrible, the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.” Or, as the father warns his son at another point, “It’s about life, where the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences.” Marcus’s story embodies this perception with maximum force, inducing indignation in the reader as well as in Marcus. Indeed, indignation (“the most beautiful word in the English lan-

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guage,” Roth calls it) is at once the cause and the consequence of Marcus’s fate. Mutatis mutandis, it is a state of mind that animates virtually all of the author’s literary output. Ronald G. Walker

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 302, no. 3 (October, 2008): 111-114. Booklist 104, no. 17 (May 1, 2008): 6. The Boston Globe, September 14, 2008, p. 5D. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 11 (June 1, 2008): 12. Los Angeles Times, September 16, 2008, p. A7. The New Republic 239, no. 7 (October 22, 2008): 32-35. New Statesman 137 (September 22, 2008): 86-88. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 15 (October 9, 2008): 4-8. The New York Times Book Review, September 21, 2008, p. 1. The New Yorker 84, no. 30 (September 29, 2008): 91. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 19 (May 12, 2008): 37. Time 172, no. 18 (November 3, 2008): 75-79. The Washington Post, September 14, 2008, p. T6.

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IROQUOIS DIPLOMACY ON THE EARLY AMERICAN FRONTIER Author: Timothy J. Shannon (1964) Publisher: Viking Press (New York). 272 pp. $22.95 Type of work: History Time: The eighteenth century Locale: The Mohawk Valley and Finger Lakes district in what became New York State Shannon describes how this Indian Confederacy used diplomacy with the French and British to further its own interests Principal personages: Joncaire, a French Canadian who learned the Iroquois language as a Seneca captive, then became France’s chief Indian agent until his death in 1739 Canasatego, a chieftain who expanded Iroquois power in the 1740’s Hendrick (Tee Yee Neen ho Ga Row), a principal spokesman for the Mohawks during King George’s War, who visited London in 1710 William Johnson, an Anglo-Irishman who became the most important colonial intermediary with the Indians, 1746-1774 Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), a Mohawk ally of Britain during the American war for independence Molly Brant, William Johnson’s common-law wife and an advocate of war against the Americans George Clinton, the New York governor who worked to dispossess the Iroquois of their lands after 1783 Cornplanter, a Seneca war chief who sided with the British, then did what he could to save his people from the consequences of defeat Henry Knox, Washington’s secretary of war, who protected Indian rights by asserting federal authority over all relationships with the tribes

In Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier, an elegantly written contribution to the Penguin Library of American Indian History, Timothy J. Shannon explains why Dutch, French, British, and American diplomats had such difficulties in negotiating treaties with the Iroquois. Europeans were accustomed to dealing with monarchs who could sign binding agreements. This was an inappropriate approach to tribes, which had no equivalents of kings, no hereditary succession, and, most important, no expectation that every individual would agree to promises made by their leaders. Indians believed that if any individual disliked a decision, he could move away or just ignore it. The idea that if one Sachem made a trade agreement that tribal members did not like, they could switch allegiance to a new Sachem essentially invalidated

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whatever agreements the first chief had made. Indians addressing a governor as “father” con- Timothy J. Shannon earned a sidered this only a recognition of his giving bachelor’s degree at Brown University gifts to his children, not a symbol of subjec- in 1986 and a doctorate in history from tion. Europeans, unwilling to believe that such Northwestern University in 1993. He anarchy was possible, persisted in trying to has published widely on American impose their schema on the Native Ameri- Indian history in the colonial era and is currently chair of the history cans. department at Gettysburg College. The Iroquois were a confederation of five tribes (later six), which developed customs that minimized conflicts among themselves and maximized their military potential. At a time when disease was running rampant through all of America, but especially among the Indians, the Iroquois were able to use firearms obtained by trade in furs to drive their weakened competition out of the Ohio country, intrude into the pays d’en haut (Great Lakes), and take captives to replenish their diminishing numbers. They made themselves into a third force that could balance the French against the British and keep war at a distance. Although they may not have been as powerful as they thought, the colonial powers were reluctant to challenge their claims. The Iroquois saw diplomacy as a continuing process that emphasized renewal and condolence ceremonies, not as a business transaction. Europeans misinterpreted Iroquois expectations of gifts as thoroughly businesslike—the exchange of gifts was so one-sided that Europeans assumed they were buying the Indians’ alliance much as they rented mercenaries from minor German princes. The symbol of Iroquois practice was the Covenant Chain, a recitation of past discussions as recorded on wampum belts, the exchange of gifts, and the linking of arms. The long speeches around the council fire would be concluded with a drinking bout of considerable length and enthusiasm. After the foundation of Montreal in 1642, the French extended their fur trade into Huron country, undermining the Iroquois monopoly of trade with the interior. The Iroquois attacked, successfully, until the arrival of French troops in 1666. Peace was reestablished, but a renewal of war in the 1680’s ended with half the Iroquois warriors dead and the survivors divided, most looking to the British for trade and aid, a significant minority looking to the French. By 1700, the balance of power had shifted to the Europeans, but the Europeans were such intense rivals that the relatively small number of Iroquois exercised enormous power, as long as war did not come to their homes and destroy them. Iroquois delegations visited Albany and Montreal frequently, trading furs for European products (knives, clothing, guns, and powder), taking home valuable gifts, and usually complaining that they were insufficient. The French won more friends because their governors were allotted more funds than were their British counterparts, and because their governors were both better informed by fur traders and missionaries and because they did not have the distractions of dealing with a growing and independent-minded populace. However, the British paid higher prices.

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By 1720, Iroquois power had extended south as well as west. This was first apparent in Pennsylvania, where the Delaware were being tricked out of their lands by William Penn’s descendants (the famous Walking Purchase), then coerced into acquiescence by the Iroquois. Some of the Pennsylvania tribes sank into poverty, and others turned to the Iroquois for protection. The Iroquois lorded it over these new dependents, taunting that they had made women of them and that they could do whatever they wished. At the same time, they informed Europeans that they were newcomers with no rights to the lands they currently held. At a great conference in Lancaster in 1744, the Iroquois sold lands they did not possess. The governors were quite willing to assume that they had thereby acquired the equivalent of a title of those lands. Who was the greater swindler: the colonial governors or the Sachems? This alliance of native and newly arrived thieves angered more distant Indian tribes, driving them into the arms of the French. Meanwhile, war parties were raiding south as far as the Carolinas. This led to more extensive diplomatic contacts with Virginia and the extortion of more gifts. By the 1750’s, when Virginians were thinking of settling the Ohio country, the Iroquois influence was at its height because they were able and willing to sell lands belonging to the tribes living there, a practice that alienated the affected tribes, especially the Shawnee. As the Western tribes sought help from the French, it seemed inevitable that the French would build forts to protect them. Fort Duquesne, constructed where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers joined to form the Ohio, was a direct challenge to Iroquois authority over the Ohio region, and other forts in the Lake Champaign region and around Niagara threatened to surround the Iroquois. If the British could not break this chain of fortifications, they would have to cede the interior to the French and probably the Iroquois, too. The result was the French and Indian War. At the beginning of this contest, in 1754, there was a great conference at Albany. There Benjamin Franklin vainly proposed a union of the British colonies interested in the region. This led to a later myth that the American Constitution was based on Iroquois practices, which demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the Iroquois Confederation as well as the process by which the Constitution was written. William Johnson kept most Iroquois loyal to Britain and ignored the bloody campaign against Fort Duquesne; he and his supporters saw the challenge to the north as much more serious. Unfortunately for them, the French and their Indian allies were far too strong. The British sympathized little with the Iroquois and did not easily accept the correct explanation of why some Iroquois warriors had chosen to fight alongside the French: They could not control their young men. Nor could the Iroquois warriors see any point in sieges, toe-to-toe combat, or discipline. When denied the right to pillage and plunder captured towns, they went home. When the string of British victories in 1759 ended French control of Canada, the British saw no reason to credit the Iroquois with having contributed to the triumph. Even Johnson subsequently negotiated directly with Western Indians, not through the Iroquois; and the Iroquois remained neutral during Pontiac’s War. The Proclamation of 1763 guaranteed the Indians possession of the lands west

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of the Allegheny Mountains, but there were already so many colonial settlers in western Pennsylvania that it took a treaty in 1765 to draw a more realistic boundary. There were no British troops stationed on the frontier to keep settlers out. Accepting trade goods for peace seemed to be all that the Indians could do. Not receiving the plentiful gifts of yore, the Iroquois now gladly sold more Western lands, lands they did not own. It fell to the Shawnee to lead the armed struggle against the newcomers. Intervention in the American Revolution was inevitable: The British demanded it, the legacy of Johnson required it, and American migration across the Alleghenies had to be opposed. Joseph Brant used the crisis to advance his personal status, but an epidemic caused the Oneidas to declare that there was no longer a council fire, making it impossible to work out a united policy. Seneca women, led by Molly Brant, demanded war, and young men hired themselves out to the British. However, the British invasions from Canada failed. With greater Iroquois support, they might have succeeded, but the battle at Oriskany showed what the high cost in lives would be. The warriors had been told that they could sit down, smoke their pipes, and watch, but when the shooting started, it involved Iroquois against Iroquois. Mutually destructive raids drove many into Canada, and in 1779, when the American armies were free to turn to the West, the Senecas could only retreat ahead of them. The beautiful villages and fertile fields were abandoned to destruction, and the returning Seneca faced starvation. There never had been a clear alternative. The Iroquois had been divided—some counseled peace, others war—and the wish of the majority for neutrality was impossible. Once the French had vanished, there was no way to play one party against another, and when the British realized that their allies were far weaker than they had expected, they abandoned them. Once the crown conceded American independence, the Iroquois were at the mercy of their recent enemies. All the Iroquois could do was play the cupidity of delegations from Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania against each other. Meanwhile, dispirited Indians turned to hard spirits. Worn down by alcoholism and poverty, they accepted cash, presents, and private pensions in return for their lands. There had always been a chasm between those who wanted to learn American ways and those who preferred to live as before, even if that meant poverty and death. This chasm now deepened. Some Iroquois went to Canada, others accepted reservations, and some merged with other Indian groups. Cornplanter spoke for those wishing to accommodate the victors. Meanwhile, new Indian nations had appeared in the West, nations that challenged American claims to the Ohio region. Even as those tribes inflicted defeats on American armies, the Iroquois firmly refused to join in the war. It was a wise decision, because the Americans were too strong and too numerous to be held back long. In the end George Washington’s administration rewarded the Iroquois with new and more favorable treaties and, by enforcing its new constitutional authority, prevented the states from forcing them to give up their lands. This friendship faded quickly as American attention was drawn farther west, but

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the principle that Indian tribes retained sovereign rights was maintained. The Iroquois remained a nation within a nation. William L. Urban

Review Sources Library Journal 133, no. 9 (May 15, 2008): 115. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 12 (March 24, 2008): 59.

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IT’S GO IN HORIZONTAL Selected Poems, 1974-2006 Author: Leslie Scalapino (1947) Publisher: University of California Press (Berkeley). 241 pp. $16.95 Type of work: Poetry A startling and distinctive selection of poetry from one of America’s most innovative contemporary poets Leslie Scalapino’s It’s Go in Horizontal introduces readers to one of the most challenging and provocative American poets currently writing. This collection is part of the New California Poetry Series, which is edited by Robert Hass, Calvin Bedient, Brenda Hillman, and Forrest Gander and which has published such thought-provoking poets as Mark Levine, Fanny Howe, Harryette Mullen, and Ron Silliman. Scalapino gained recognition for her experimental approach to writing during the 1970’s in San Francisco, and over the length of her career, she has been linked to the Language poets, exhibiting her fascination in the different ways that language can be perceived. Scalapino is a writer of many talents. While she has published several volumes of poetry since the mid-1970’s, she also has found the time and energy to write plays, fiction, and nonfiction. As a student, she studied French poetry, becoming enamored with the works of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. During this period, Scalapino also came under the influence of the poet Philip Whalen, who had studied Eastern religions. One of the central points of her writing is the necessity to sabotage what she considers a very male-dominant language. She considers it her duty to alter language in every way possible in order to neutralize this dominance. As the poet sees it, language can be used to either reinforce the power base or subvert it. Scalapino wishes to tip the language scales, to allow all female and minority voices to be heard. Her first poetry collection, O, and Other Poems, published in 1976, was dedicated to the great modernist writer Virginia Woolf. It was obvious at the outset of her literary career that Scalapino was a multidimensional poet, clearly driven by philosophical, political, and spiritual ideas. She was determined to juggle linguistic complexities with a visual perspective, so that in reading her poetry the reader should internalize Scalapino’s linguistic patterns and observe and inhale her words visually. The poet challenges both herself and the reader, and words and images tantalize those who encounter her on her own terms. Collaboration among various art forms plays a vital role in her approach to literary expression. On several occasions, the poet has combined her words with a visual artist in order to create a richer tapestry. Never less than provocative, Scalapino consistently has merged images with words. She has stated that it is imperative to express both a “social” as well as a “political” vision. The purpose of the literary journey is “to get to the inner relation of events,” and in so doing,

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the poet creates something fresh and unique. As Scalapino sees it, a sequence that may look similar to something from the past has essentially been pared down, made smaller and more particular. During the 1970’s, Scalapino published four small-press volumes of poetry. In 1982, she published her first major volume, Con sidering How Exaggerated Music Is, through North Point Press. This included poems that were first published in her earlier small-press volumes. It’s Go in Horizontal opens with poems from the 1970’s. Portions of the long poem “hmmmm” introduce the reader to the world of Scalapino. First published in the 1976 volume The Woman Who Could Read the Minds of Dogs, it was chosen also to be included in her 1982 North Point Press collection. The full poem is made up of a series of disjointed narratives that dwell on surreal sexual matters. There is much fantasy, while the tone of the poem remains neutral. The provocative elements are presented in a matter-of-fact manner, as in: “I mean I see a man/ (in a crowd such as a theatre) as having the body of a seal in the way/ a man should, say, be in bed with someone, kissing and barking,/ which is the way a seal will bark and leap on his partly-fused hind limbs.” Throughout the series, the poet describes individuals as being other creatures and as having the attributes of these creatures. The bending of gender roles and of reality continues throughout the poem “Instead of an Animal.” Scalapino turns the act of suckling into a surreal expression of identity. In the poem, there are many examples of alternate realities. There are two women “suckling at the teats of the nursing mother; the/ infant being left to whine while the mother endured these females/ feeding off of her.” It even gets “[s]tranger when it is the male opening his shirt in public,/ and applying an infant to his chest as if he had breasts.” The poet turns stereotypes upside down, proposing several alternatives for the reader to ponder, including: “Some children of seven to ten years of age or so/ were letting each other open their shirts and dresses/ and suck on each others’ nipples.” For the poet, gender roles definitely are worth questioning and looking at with new eyes. Scalapino wishes to take stock of what makes individuals truly human, and she refuses to accept cultural dictates at face value. In her writing, the poet takes aim at all preconceived notions, even down to individual words and how they are placed on the page. She subverts the conventional lyrical approach to poetry. Heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy as she was growing up, Scalapino has attempted to present through her writing something other than a Western perspective of self. In her work, she has been described as being concerned not with “subject” or “ego” but with the “active self.” This active self is revealed in the mere “seeing” of it. Out of this approach, Scalapino has come to value “relativism.” The poet plays with experience and with convention. A person becomes an entity in physics that will reveal different characteristics, depending on which direction it takes. As a writer, Scalapino has been highly influenced by the visual arts, espe-

Leslie Scalapino is an award-winning author who has established herself as one of the leading avant-garde poets of her generation. In addition to her poetry, she has published several important books of fiction, drama, and nonfiction.

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cially film and video. It is important for the reader to absorb her poetry visually. She will place sections of a poem on various spots on the page, and the reader must be alert to placement and to spacing. It is not possible for the reader to assume that there is an inherent wholeness to any of her poems. Part of her nonfiction work, How Phenomena Appear to Unfold, is included in It’s Go in Horizontal in order to delineate some of her rationale for writing. In “Note on My Writing, 1985,” Scalapino states that a “segment in the poem is the actual act or event itself” and that the “self is unraveled as an example in investigating particular historical events, which are potentially infinite.” The point also is made that “[t]he self is a guinea pig,” suggesting that the poet has created an artifice. She refuses to adhere to Western tradition, to be a pawn of the male-dominant culture or language, and to look for what can be termed “closure.” At one point in How Phenomena Appear to Unfold, Scalapino drives home the point that perception of what is occurring at any particular moment is what is important. For the poet, history is created by what is perceived, what is seen in the moment. With that in mind, there is no beginning, middle, or conclusion. There is only what Scalapino has described as “a constant recurring and beginning.” While Scalapino shares elements with the Language poets, she is not limited by any school. Her avant-garde tendencies cannot be saddled by static thought patterns, and it is her intention to break all fixed patterns, whether social, cultural, or biological. Through “poetic innovation,” Scalapino supposes that it is possible not only to alter human identities but also to eliminate them altogether. In her 1985 collection That They Were at the Beach, the poet examines the nature of gender differences. For the poem “A sequence,” Scalapino speaks of the sex act and how the private parts normally covered by clothes look, when exposed, leopardlike. The sex act itself has made flesh and organs become like those of a leopard. This poem appears in block paragraph form, including repetition for added impact. The same collection also includes what the poet calls the “chameleon series.” Parts of this series, which have been selected for It’s Go in Horizontal, are dramatically different in form from “A sequence.” This is made obvious by the way in which the images are presented on the page, such as “men who’re/ poor and aren’t/ doing anything// standing in/ the sun/ by a housing project// their/ living in/ a motionless way// having been/ led later/ on// in the social/ world.” These lines appear on one page. On other pages there may be fewer lines included. Such a spare page draws attention to the few words that inhabit the page. Each snapshot, each word, and each image, therefore, carry an immense weight. While Scalapino’s images may appear fragmented and her tone deadpan, she still produces quite jarring and provocative poetry. Her approach can be traced to such innovative writers as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. Scalapino’s poetic form has been called “serial” because of its use of “discrete units of text that are potentially infinite in number.” Some readers may struggle with Scalapino’s flat and repetitive poems, devoid of an emotional link and, therefore, disorienting for the reader who may have been socially, politically, and culturally trained to respond to certain subjects and images in a certain way. Her erotic poetry may not elicit what the reader expects—such as excite-

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ment—from eroticism, leading to disappointment. For Scalapino, the erotic nature of the poem is not supposed to excite the reader. The current collection includes a selection from many of the poet’s most important volumes. Her 1988 book Way won an American Book Award, and It’s Go in Horizontal features from it the “Bum Series,” “The Floating Series,” and the “Delay Series.” In each of these, the poet provides the reader with snapshots of a reality that is altered with each snapshot. The “Bum Series” opens with “the men—when I’d/ been out in cold weather—were/ found lying on the street, having/ died—from the weather; though/ usually being there when it’s warmer.” This tragic setting is introduced matter of factly, without a sense that anything can be done to remedy the situation. Each fragment in the series serves as another part of the human fabric. It ends with “the bums—/ found later—in the whole setting/—though when the car/ hadn’t been repaired—and so/ their grinding and/ movement in relation to it.” Scalapino presents a “way” to see the world, to see how language can create its own social significance. It’s Go in Horizontal includes poems and parts of poems from more than ten collections, and in so doing has presented a stimulating introduction to a leading innovator of contemporary American poetry. While some readers may take issue with being allowed to encounter only excerpts of several major works, this remains a striking volume that should be savored by those who value what modern poetry can deliver. Jeffry Jensen

Review Source Publishers Weekly 255, no. 16 (April 21, 2008): 38.

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THE JEW OF CULTURE Freud, Moses, and Modernity Author: Philip Rieff (1922-2006) Publisher: University of Virginia Press (Charlottesville). 224 pp. $34.95 Type of work: Sociology The final volume of Rieff’s Sacred Order/Social Order trilogy, this book presents a selection of Rieff’s writings from the early 1950’s through the 1990’s loosely organized around the theme of “the Jew of Culture” as an ideal type in Rieff’s vision of the nature of social order The Jew of Culture is a posthumous work by cultural theorist Philip Rieff. Presented as the final volume of Rieff’s Sacred Order/Social Order trilogy, it contains selections of Rieff’s work published from 1952 through 1982, plus a previously unpublished essay written about 1994. Before his death in 2006, Rieff agreed that his former student, Arnold M. Eisen, would assemble these writings around the concept of “the Jew of Culture.” Eisen worked with coeditor Gideon Lewis-Krauss to shape a work that is essentially a retrospective on Rieff’s intellectual career. Rieff explicitly introduced the idea of “the Jew of Culture” in the 1970’s, at the time when his writing style had taken a turn toward oracular pronouncements and his attitude toward modern culture had become sternly disapproving, if not condemnatory. By that period in his work, Rieff considered a culture a way of ordering and organizing individuals around principles and practices that had to be sacred if they were to be meaningful. Rieff was Jewish by heritage, and he saw Judaism as a primal culture of Western civilization. Christianity had emerged from Judaism, and Christianity had defined itself either as a continuation of Judaism or as an opposition to Judaism. Therefore, the Jew of Culture, in Rieff’s perspective by the 1970’s, was not just a Jewish intellectual or cultured individual, but a representative of the oldest tradition of sacred order underlying Western civilization. The selections in this book can be read both as representatives of the Jew of Culture idea and as illustrations of the development of this idea in Rieff’s thinking. The first piece, on British novelist and statesman Benjamin Disraeli, was written at the beginning of the author’s career. Although Disraeli had been baptized into the Church of England when he was twelve years old, he had been born a Jew. Rather than deny his Jewish heritage in frequently anti-Semitic Victorian England, he took pride in it and often seemed to dwell on it, even after he rose to the position of prime minister. Rieff argues that Disraeli was able to conceive and pursue a vision of England as the New Israel because of his nostalgic attachment to the Old Israel. The Disraeli chapter introduces Rieff’s view of religious tradition as the source of order and structure in life, bringing individuals into a social existence, and it hints at the special importance

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Rieff attributes to Judaism as a religious tradition. The second chapter is a brief review of the book Büchlein vom gesunden und kranken Menschenverstand (1921; Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, 1953) by the littleknown Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig. The editors include it to demonstrate Rieff’s interest in Jewish religious thought and to show the development of his thinking in preparing to write about a much greater influence on Western culture, Sigmund Freud. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, first published in 1959, was Rieff’s first major work. In this key revisionist study of Freud, Rieff argued that the father of psychoanalysis occupied a position at the center of an intellectual revolution that shifted attention away from the perspective of society shaping the individual and toward that of the individual creating society out of instinctual conflicts. Although Rieff was ambivalent about the heritage of psychoanalysis in this work and critical of Freud’s successors, Rieff regarded Freud as an intellectual pioneer. The Jew of Culture reprints the preface to the second edition of his book, followed by a section from the book entitled “The Religion of the Fathers.” In these pages, Rieff wrote at length on the role of Judaism in Freud’s life and thought. Religion, in Rieff’s view, organizes the character of individuals by means of faith. Freud attempted to develop a new theory of culture, based on the idea of the primacy of the individual, to address the decline of religion as a source of social organization. However, Rieff maintained in this preface, Freud ignored the role of the Jewish tradition and of his own complex identification with Moses in making possible the rethinking of the relationship between the individual and society. In Freud as a “psychological Jew,” Rieff found a basic contradiction. A heritage from a religiously based culture established the organization of Freud’s personality and intellectual creativity, but that creativity turned the relationship around and began with the individual rather than with culture. Rieff praised Freud as a thinker, and specifically as a Jewish thinker, but he was pessimistic about the consequences of Freud’s thought. In Rieff’s second major book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (1966), the pessimism deepened. By making the individual, rather than the social order, the organizing principle of human society, Freud created what Rieff called “the therapeutic ethos.” This ethos dictated that therapy, a set of techniques for promoting the well-being of the individual, replaced the cultural organization of personality, which shaped individuals around the idea of the pursuit of virtue. Rieff saw this ethos as undermining social order and the placement of individuals in the social order. He argued that it was therefore ultimately suicidal in character because only a social order can give life the necessary meaning and structure. In this 1966 book, Rieff devoted chapters to analytical psychologist Carl Jung, rad-

Philip Rieff was a cultural theorist who received his doctorate from the University of Chicago. He taught at several universities but spent most of his career as the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Sociology and University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was appointed professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania upon his retirement in 1992.

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ical psychotherapist Wilhelm Reich, and novelist D. H. Lawrence as advocates of various forms of the destructive therapeutic ethos. The Jew of Culture summarizes this argument about the therapeutic ethos by reprinting the first, introductory chapter of The Triumph of the Therapeutic, “Toward a Theory of Culture.” In this selection, Rieff began with a meditation on the famous poem “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats, which opens: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Rieff maintained that the center of Western culture could not hold and that the things held together by it were indeed falling apart. He argued that a culture survives because of the ability of its institutions to direct people by sinking motivations so deeply into their thoughts that they would be held together in common understandings. The modern type of second coming, or search for salvation, appeared through the emergence of the psychological personality seeking individual well-being. The “Jew of Culture” theme behind this volume is least evident in this chapter, although Rieff does refer to Christian and Jewish cultures as connected ways of organizing character. From the publication of The Triumph of the Therapeutic in 1966 to the early 1970’s, Rieff’s attitude toward contemporary society became much harsher, more judgmental, and more deeply conservative. This may have been a reaction to the tumults of the era as well as Rieff following the logic of his own argument about the therapeutic ethos. His writing style also changed. The Rieff of the early 1950’s, who wrote the chapter on Disraeli, used a sharp, clear style and straightforward argument. The author of the books on Freud and the therapeutic dealt with sophisticated concepts but still used a fairly comprehensible vocabulary, introducing a limited amount of specialized jargon. By the opening of the 1970’s, however, Rieff had adopted the knotty, enigmatic style and twisting, nonlinear form of exposition that characterized most of his late works. In 1971, Rieff arrived at Skidmore College for an interview on the subject of “psychological man” that would later be published in a special issue of the journal Salmagundi. However, Rieff was dissatisfied with the transcript of the interview, which he thought did not adequately represent his views. In place of the interview, he wrote an essay that was later expanded into the slim book Fellow Teachers (1973). The editors of The Jew of Culture have put together excerpts from that book, under the title “Fellow Teachers,” which can give the reader a feel for the complexity of the full version. Rieff described contemporary America as a cultureless society, utterly given over to the anarchy of the therapeutic. While some of his work seems nostalgic for the order that he suggested premodern Christianity provided, in the passages of “Fellow Teachers” he portrayed Christianity as “transgressive,” as a rebellion against its parent Judaism, as well as a continuation and transformation of the Jewish cultural order. He cast teachers as rabbis, in the position of carrying on the work of culture in a society that had turned against all culture. Rieff made a brief return to some of his old clarity in an essay on Oscar Wilde published in Salmagundi in 1983 and later reprinted in the collection entitled The Feeling Intellect: Selected Writings, edited by Jonathan Imber and published in 1991. “The Impossible Culture: Wilde as a Modern Prophet” used the approach of The Triumph of the Therapeutic by presenting an intellectual figure as a representative of a cultural

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trend. After describing Wilde’s trial for sodomy, Rieff discussed the wit’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” written in 1891, which Rieff considered Wilde’s greatest essay. Under socialism, according to Wilde, all the constraints on humanity would dissolve, and each human personality would grow to its perfection. Rieff argued that this was impossible because it is precisely the constraints that shape personality and give life to society. With the future dissolution of boundaries prophesied by Wilde, according to Rieff, people would not become innocent children but demons freed of the authority inherited from past systems of belief. The final chapter—entitled “Is Not the Truth the Truth?”—is the only previously unpublished piece in The Jew of Culture. It is a commentary on Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (1991). Yerushalmi had pondered Freud’s considerations of Moses, a figure from Jewish history who had fascinated the psychoanalyst. In his late work Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion (Moses and Monotheism, 1939), published in 1938, Freud maintained that Moses was actually not a Hebrew but an Egyptian who had adopted the monotheism of Pharaoh Akhenaten. Rieff, who by the time he wrote this was much more critical of Freud than he had been at the time of his first book, argued that in turning against Moses, Freud had also turned against Jewish culture. Rieff drew parallels to Adolf Hitler’s attacks on the Jews in the war that began in that same year, 1939. The linking of Freud and Hitler in this last piece should raise questions about whether the progression of thinking summarized in this book led Rieff to dramatic rhetorical overstatements in his writings after 1970. Readers might ask whether there really was any past time of social order shaped by religious culture that made life better or more meaningful than it is today or than it is likely to be in the future. Rieff made a valuable contribution in pointing out the rise of the therapeutic approach to life in modern society, and the focus on individual well-being instead of social order may pose some genuine problems. Still, these problems hardly seem to warrant condemning modern Western society as a suicidal anticulture. Carl L. Bankston III

Review Source Reference-Research Book News, August, 2008.

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JOHN MILTON Life, Work, and Thought Authors: Gordon Campbell (1944) and Thomas N. Corns (1949) Publisher: Oxford University Press (New York). 496 pp. $39.95 Type of work: Literary biography Time: 1608-1674 Locale: London and Cambridge, England An exacting account of Milton’s life that reshapes conceptions of the man, as a thinker, a political and religious activist, and a poet Principal personages: John Milton, a poet and activist Thomas Young, a schoolmaster and clergyman, his early teacher and friend Charles Diodati, likely Milton’s closest friend Edward Phillips, his nephew and pupil, chief amanuensis of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and his biographer Mary Powell, his first wife Cyriack Skinner, his pupil, lifelong friend, and biographer William Laud, the archbishop of Canterbury, 1633-1645 Charles I, the king of England, 1600-1649 Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of England, 1653-1658 Charles II, the king of England, 1660-1685

John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought by Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns significantly distinguishes itself from previous biographies of Milton because its account of the poet’s life derives from firsthand inspection of all available contemporary documents and life records. It parallels the effort of David Masson in his sevenvolume The Life of John Milton: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time (1859-1894). In addition, it builds upon the two major biographical works of the twentieth century, J. Milton French’s fivevolume Life Records of John Milton (1949-1958) and William Riley Parker’s twovolume Milton: A Biography (1968), a work that Campbell revised in 1996. The quantity and complexity of material concerning Milton, so much of it discovered since the time of Masson, as well as French and Parker—not to mention the tasks of locating, digesting, and evaluating it—make the achievement of Campbell and Corns a landmark in Milton studies. Furthermore, the authors examine the primary material in its immediate social and cultural setting. They note how the language of those sources, though perhaps ordinary in its time, is ambiguous today. Accordingly, they define and describe wide-

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ranging implications that the factual record has for Milton’s emergent personality and his daily life—goals, tasks, associations, conflicts, and developing skills as a writer of poetry and prose. They make the same scrupulous analysis of the accounts of the poet’s life written by those who knew Milton or who acquired information from others who did—Edward Phillips, John Aubrey, Cyriack Skinner, Anthony Wood, and John Toland. They note, however, that the early studies of Milton owe much to his own prose writings. Consequently, they extend their detailed and comprehensive study of primary materials to the autobiographical passages in Milton’s prose tracts, setting them in context as polemics. They scrutinize his habit of fashioning his life, actions, and persona to varying rhetorical demands. Further, since Milton reveals private aspects of himself in his poetry, the authors note how literary language, dependent upon layers of cultural assumptions, is even more ambiguous than nonliterary language. The authors probe connections between Milton’s role as author in numerous genres and in his religious, artistic, and political views. In addition, Campbell and Corns recognize that archival, verified, and confirmed facts and records represent only a fragment of the wide, unrolling panorama of the past. Accordingly, they distinguish their biography through the latest Stuart, Commonwealth, and Restoration historiography. They draw upon demographic, economic, commercial, legal, theological, and sociological scholarship. Through their attention to the language of the original sources and to its historical contexts, they not only describe Milton’s life, work, and thought but also re-create it, step by step, contrasting expectations with outcomes. Readers look through Milton’s eyes, becoming immersed in the pulse of his life. They observe his personal, public, artistic, and theological decisions amid the dynamics of Puritanism, republicanism, radicalism, and dissent, with the labels carefully reappraised. With the skill of novelists, they evoke Milton’s present as it moves forward in time. The sheer range of the assembled materials is astonishing. They tend, however, to avoid combining physical time with subjective or psychological time, the mysterious inner processes that accompany sequential acts of the observational world. The sharp clarity of a moment fades with the advance of other moments. The authors limit their probing of time’s nonlinear effects upon Milton, keeping to the light of present awareness. Campbell and Corns write that the stages of Milton’s “radicalization” are the spine that runs through their study. With unrivaled precision, they describe Milton’s progression as poet, political writer, and theologian, there being no final stasis, contrary to conventional views. Given aspects of Milton’s life as scholar, family man, teacher, religious and political reformer, public servant, and poet, the authors describe influences of social organizations, such as higher education, art and culture, church and

Gordon Campbell, professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Leicester, and Thomas N. Corns, professor of English at Bangor University, are both Fellows of the Royal Historical Society. They were appointed general editors of a proposed eleven-volume Oxford Milton, and both have been elected as Honored Scholars of the Milton Society of America.

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state. Their concerns—pressing, urgent, and direct—arise from the political texture of his actions and his writings. They focus on the revolutionary decades of the 1640’s and 1650’s, with Milton’s support of Puritan church reform, the execution of King Charles I, the civil wars, and Milton’s role in the Parliamentary government, largely under Oliver Cromwell. Prolific and versatile, Milton emerges in Campbell and Corns’s work as a leading pamphleteer and political thinker. They indicate how the accumulated weight of Milton’s revolutionary politics shaped Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671). Further, they show that the major poems grew out of the creative and spiritual strength of his Christian belief, affirming his stance as poet-prophet unique in moral authority and exalted in function. The authors tend to underestimate, however, the practical effects of Milton’s radical view of the church. For him, faith based on authority of Scripture and on personal, inward prompting of the Holy Spirit supersedes the visible church. The “paradise within thee, happier far,” the reacquired paradise or inner Eden of Paradise Lost, results from the Holy Spirit’s teaching alone. God prefers “[b]efore all Temples th’ upright heart and pure,” his anticlericalism remaining firm. In depicting Milton’s public life during his tumultuous times, Campbell and Corns make an incomparable analysis of the themes, language, and characteristics of Milton’s political prose. They indicate, for instance, that Milton’s emerging Christian theology gives humans, as God’s creatures, self-evident and undeniable rights, and they explain reasons for his secular approach to attaining those rights. Moreover, they explore matters that appear only in hindsight of more than three centuries. Milton’s political writings, they believe, sufficiently advanced the cause of freedom and human rights to label him a founding father of America. Still, they find that Milton’s ideas of freedom, justice, and equality did not go far enough, limited to a few virtuous elite, similar to the Christian humanism of the medieval period, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. The authors hesitate to resolve ambiguities of his role in the Commonwealth government, as with Cromwell’s punitive military expedition to Ireland in 1649. They suggest, through his apparent silences, that at times Milton’s official duties caused him either to separate his religious conscience from his politics or to realize that he must do what he could, given the world as it was, and leave the rest to God. His final years, in which he made a limited return to politics, suggest the latter course. Campbell and Corns indicate that, in his duties as polemicist for the Commonwealth government, Milton did conform to political realities. He combined high learning and bold speculation with the need to descend to the level of opponents, to be poised and polished and yet harsh and sharp. He functioned as an attacker against all attackers. He knew that in politics what began as pure in motive can be tarnished in application. Politics involved, for instance, the ambiguities of the death of Charles I, the distinct agonies of civil war, the ever-shifting alliances of revolutionary leaders, and the eventual dissatisfaction with the Commonwealth. Campbell and Corns describe how Milton’s challenges to the social norms—his commitments, his risks, and his consequences—made him into a pioneer who learns from pioneering, a true forerunner of the American experiment.

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Campbell and Corns, while objective, find Milton flawed, self-contradictory, selfserving, ruthless, ambitious, and cunning, but they do not reconcile their conclusions with other features of Milton’s personality. They reveal him as dauntless, moral, compassionate, resourceful, loyal, and genuine in spiritual matters. They also indicate his enthusiasms, for the culture of Italy, for music, for art, for mathematics, for literature (ancient and modern), for a Renaissance ideal made real, tender, and refined, but always human. To that list should be added Milton’s devotion to political, religious, and intellectual liberty, all three then bound together. They meant self-sacrifice and uninhibited boldness, for which he would lose his sight in 1652 and nearly his life at the restoration of King Charles II in 1660. In addition, Campbell and Corns illustrate Milton’s conviction that the poet must exemplify moral and religious integrity and universal learning, that wisdom, goodness, and justice can be the poet’s themes only if they are the poet’s life. They indicate how that idealism, a purity of mind and body, found expression in Milton’s early poems, first published in 1645, such as “Arcades,” “A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle,” and “Lycidas.” Campbell and Corns, though seeking to judge him by his own values and those of his day, found in Milton awkward contradictions. With more sympathy, Campbell and Corns chart Milton’s preparation as epic poet, his questioning of career and abilities, especially given his impending blindness. They indicate patterns of stress, peculiar to people like Milton who, living a life of chastity and disciplined effort, believe they have extraordinary abilities they must use well, for the good of humanity, and yet not allow themselves to be destroyed by a crisis of emotion. Milton’s concerns for that good, founded in a republican form of government, with wide religious toleration and civil liberties, delayed his intended vocation as author, his intuition of special, solemn poetic destiny. The authors describe how Milton’s poetic hopes, long deferred, earnestly and uncommonly sought, reach fulfillment: The divine muse, with undiminished moral, imaginative, and spiritual energy, comes to the prepared mind of the blind Milton in his fifties, when he is beset by personal and public loss and poor health, surrounded by enemies. He writes the sacred epic for which he had been preparing his entire life, reconciling salvation history with the individual soul. Campbell and Corns, finely detailing Milton’s changing convictions and his fulfillment as self-declared poet-prophet, tend to underestimate the impression certain events had upon him early in his career. For example, they note that during his 16381639 trip to Europe, Milton met with Galileo Galilei, and they declare that Galileo’s cosmology had little or no effect on Milton. For several reasons, their conclusion seems mistaken. Along with explorer Christopher Columbus, Galileo is among the few contemporaries of Milton cited in Paradise Lost. Moreover, in that poem, the archangel Raphael describes both the Ptolemaic and Copernican universe. The latter led the Inquisition to condemn Galileo, a fact Milton includes in Areopapitica (1644), his classic defense of the freedom of thought, learning, and utterance. The conclusion that Campbell and Corns reach regarding Galileo appears to be indicative of their treatment of Milton’s view of physical science. They see him as unsympathetic to its method of rational inquiry, even though Milton takes all knowledge

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for his province in Paradise Lost. Moreover, Campbell and Corns tend to overlook the intellectual daring, the open-mindedness, and the mistrust of institutions, religious and secular, that pervade Milton’s poetry and prose—all of which, for Milton, Galileo may have symbolized. Still, in John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought, Campbell and Corns, in faithfulness to an ever-expanding body of verifiable fact, have produced of biography of Milton that supersedes all others, full of new insights, observations, and invitations to reflection. Both well-proven Milton scholars, they know that the facts of Milton’s wondrous life need no embroidery. Fittingly, their biography coincided with the fourhundredth anniversary of Milton’s birth in December 1608. Timothy C. Miller

Review Sources Library Journal 133, no. 18 (November 1, 2008): 66. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 44 (November 3, 2008): 53.

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JOHNNY ONE-EYE A Tale of the American Revolution Author: Jerome Charyn (1937) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 479 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1776-1784 Locale: In and around Manhattan, New York City This novel depicts both imaginary and real characters of the Revolutionary War era, providing unique insights and three-dimensional characterizations of major historical figures Principal characters: John Stocking (Johnny One-Eye), a teenage boy who spies for both sides in the war between the American colonies and the British monarchy George Washington, commander in chief of the American rebels and one-time lover of Johnny One-Eye’s mother, Gertrude Gertrude Jennings, owner of a notorious Manhattan brothel, mother to Johnny-One Eye and spy for her great love, General Washington Clara, a mixed-race prostitute with regal bearing, with whom men from both armies fall in love Sir William Howe, British general and commander in chief

An unusual and refreshingly human look at famous historical figures, Johnny OneEye is an engrossing and readable novel. With the action concentrated largely in Manhattan, New York City, Jerome Charyn blends empirical evidence with interesting and entertaining fictional characters that fit believably into the customs and events of the time period. The book opens with the narrator and primary character, John Stocking, also known as Johnny One-Eye, about to be hanged for attempting to poison General George Washington’s soup. Intelligent and wily, seventeen-year-old Johnny believes he has outsmarted his captors. Though the “poison” he put in the general’s soup was harmless, Johnny finds himself in a dreary dungeon of a jail nonetheless. Johnny is in fact a double agent, spying for both the British and the Americans during the early days of the Revolutionary War. He came by his nickname after losing an eye in battle under the command of American General Benedict Arnold. Hired as Arnold’s secretary, Johnny was only briefly embattled before becoming wounded. Johnny does not know who his father is; his mother, Gertrude Jennings, is the proprietress of a brothel named Holy Ground because of its proximity to a nearby Catholic church. Her workingwomen are thus referred to irreverently as “nuns.” In addition to being a brothel, Holy Ground is a favorite meeting place for high-ranking American and British combatants, not least of which is General Washington, commander

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in chief of the rebels, and General William Howe, commander of the British forces. Wash- A Guggenheim Fellow, Jerome Charyn ington is married to wealthy Martha Custis, has authored more than thirty books. who is home at Mt. Vernon, their famous Vir- His novel Darlin’ Bill (1980) garnered ginia plantation. A farmer and the highest- the Rosenthal Award from the ranking American soldier, Washington is said American Academy and Institute of to have come to Holy Ground merely to play Arts and Letters. cards. In fact, he has been in love with Gertrude since their meeting years earlier in a roadside tavern where she was a waitress. Becoming aware of the previous relationship between his mother and Washington, Johnny convinces himself that the general is his father; his mother neither denies nor confirms the veracity of her son’s wishful deduction. In contrast to the wide and varied spectrum of Washington’s historical legacy, ranging from hyperbolic praise for mythical qualities to debunking as emotionally weak and militarily bumbling, author Charyn portrays the general as kind, equitable, and humble, although he is strong and ruthless in battle. In short, he is an extraordinary human being who rose to the momentous challenge of fighting a revolution for his country and his fellow citizens. The main protagonist of the book, John Stocking (Johnny One-Eye) is a teenager advanced beyond his years by the remarkable era and circumstances in which he lives. Raised in a brothel with a less-than-attentive mother, surrounded by prostitutes and their powerful clients amid the uproar of rebellion, Johnny is boyish and mature at the same time. In addition to his perilous and exciting existence as a double agent, Johnny’s life is complicated by his desperate love for Clara, the most popular and elusive of the prostitutes at Holy Ground. Fleeing her homeland and sexually abusive stepfather in Dominica, Clara was taken in as a homeless waif by Gertrude to be pampered at Holy Ground. An Octoroon (mixed race) with dark skin, blond locks, and piercing green eyes, Clara is at once enigmatic and profoundly practical. She becomes an obsession for love-struck, endlessly hopeful, and loyal Johnny. Johnny occupies a precarious position among the intrigues and destruction of personal lives brought about by the war. Himself a “changeling,” an ostensibly illegitimate boy with shifting loyalties, he received an education at King’s College, where his tuition was paid by the British monarchy. His heart, though, leads him toward the cause of the American rebels, especially since he believes that General Washington is his father. At home in Holy Ground, Johnny is in close contact with high-ranking British and American officers who frequent the brothel—a unique position for a double agent. He is also in great danger of being killed by either side. General Washington, in particular, has a great deal of use for Johnny. First encountering the boy as a result of the attempted soup poisoning, Washington sets up a ruse of hanging him, but what the general really wants, and gets, is Johnny’s service as a dedicated spy for the American rebels. Johnny becomes enamored of Washington. The general’s integrity and resilience

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are impressive, but the possibility that he is Johnny’s father is an irresistible force for the boy. Johnny hears an enticing tale by a British loyalist and frequent visitor to Holy Ground: Many years earlier, Washington was a young man returning to his farm after fighting in the Indian Wars. He was a striking and charismatic man, uncommonly tall, with impeccable manners and a melancholy air about him, having recently survived an unrequited love affair with his neighbor’s wife. Having financial problems, George became engaged to wealthy Martha Custis; still, he was a lonely man, pining for his former lover. It was during this time that he met Gertrude Jennings, a waitress at a tavern in the Virginia Tidewater country. The two were sporadic lovers until George arrives one day to find Gertrude gone without a trace. Gertrude had found her way to Manhattan, pregnant and impoverished. Her good looks, ample charms, and intelligence propelled her into prosperity as a brothel madame, and Holy Ground was launched. More than a decade passed before Washington discovered Gertrude’s whereabouts. Having become wealthy and married in the intervening years, Washington, as leader of the Revolutionary army, was camped in New York, battling the British occupation of Manhattan. Holy Ground was recommended to him as the best place in town to socialize and to play vingt-et-un, a favorite card game. There he and Gertrude were reunited. With British military personnel in charge of Manhattan, Washington and his troops are miserably outnumbered and poorly provisioned. Holy Ground is a good diversion, and it is an excellent place to pick up information and military plans. Unknown to Johnny for a long while is that his mother is also a spy—for Washington. British commander General Sir William Howe also frequents Holy Ground, as does his brother, Admiral Dick Howe. Sir William takes for a mistress the wife of a scurrilous loyalist citizen, but he patronizes the brothel for social and military contacts. Dick becomes enchanted with the lovely Clara, much to Johnny’s envious chagrin. Johnny’s loyalties shift for a time, but the more he is exposed to the legendary General Washington, whom he presumes to be his father, the more Johnny forms an allegiance to the American rebel cause. Washington is besieged by worries and seemingly insurmountable military odds, which he must face with a raggedy army of hungry and often-contentious men. Still, the good general is devoted to his men, doggedly determined to face and defeat the British occupiers of his beloved country. In a scheme to capture General Washington, British General Howe invites him to Holy Ground for a game of vingt-et-un, which is nearly an obsession for both men. Through brothel spies, Washington learns that the invitation is a trap. He attends anyway, wins the game, and leaves unharmed, because Admiral Dick Howe, who claims it is not an honorable way to vanquish an enemy, has shamed his brother William into letting Washington leave. Johnny is in the thick of the action as events swirl around him. Imprisoned on a battleship under horrific and inhumane conditions, manipulated into overseeing his African American friends in backbreaking labor for the British Army, and generally running into mayhem and heartbreak at every turn, Johnny finds his life is exciting but constantly in danger. Though ridiculed as the bastard son of a notorious whore,

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Johnny is more educated and chivalrous than most of his torturers. The constants in his life include his ambivalence toward his mother, his desire to know his paternity, and his deep love and respect for Clara. In a surprisingly disappointing denouement, Johnny discovers his real father is a cutthroat thief, a lowlife whose character could not be less like the heroic figure of General Washington. Not so surprising is Johnny’s eventual attainment of Clara, the woman of his dreams. The battles and eventual outcome of the Revolutionary War are well known to most readers, and no searing revelations on that topic are offered in this novel. There is, however, a deeply poignant nostalgia and melancholy for the life of General Washington after the Revolutionary War and his extremely well regarded tenure as the first president of the newly formed United States of America. Author Charyn’s affection for the time period and for larger-than-life heroes is apparent in this work. Characterizations of real-life figures such as Arnold and Alexander Hamilton are neither revealing nor stirring. Washington is clearly Charyn’s favorite founder; this is an empathetic and compelling portrayal of a man often regarded as stern, aloof, and annoyingly esoteric. Although Johnny One-Eye occasionally and subtly veers off plot, it is a highly readable and enjoyable book. The colloquial dialect is applied unevenly, though consistently enough to create a word picture of the diverse backgrounds of the population of the fledgling American colonists and their British counterparts. Johnny, the main protagonist through whose “one-eye” is seen all other characters, appears as a likable, literate rogue who finally overcomes all odds, gets the girl, and enjoys a happy ending. Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of the American Revolution makes a familiar historical saga come alive with a fresh look at well-known characters and events. While crowded with characters that sometimes seem a bit superfluous to the story, the dramatic dissection of the main players is riveting. Charyn’s novel is a good choice for readers who enjoy historical fiction, with its compelling mix of factual data embellished with overt drama and satirical levity. Twyla R. Wells

Review Sources Booklist 104, nos. 9/10 (January 1, 2008): 42. Entertainment Weekly, February 22, 2008, p. 100. Library Journal 133, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 81. The New Yorker 84, no. 5 (March 17, 2008): 83. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 45 (November 12, 2007): 32. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 39 (February 16, 2008): W10.

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JUST AFTER SUNSET Stories Author: Stephen King (1947) Publisher: Charles Scribner’s Sons (New York). 384 pp. $28.00 Type of work: Short fiction Time: The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries Locale: The United States A collection of thirteen stories by King, twelve of which originally appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Postscripts, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other magazines and anthologies between 1977 and 2008 and one that first appears in this book Principal characters: Willa, a young woman Emily Owensby, a young mother whose baby daughter has recently died Harvey Stevens, a sixty-year-old stockbroker John Dykstra, a college English professor who writes hard-boiled detective stories Richard Sifkitz, a thirty-eight-year-old commercial artist Scott Staley, a former insurance company employee Janice Gandolewski, a high school student N., a psychiatric patient John Halston, a professional killer Anne, a widow Monette, a traveling salesman Ayana, a blind African American girl Curtis Johnson, a stock investor

Stephen King prefaces his first short story collection since 2002’s Everything’s Eventual with a quote from Arthur Machen’s 1890 story “The Great God Pan.” In Machen’s story, except for a scientist who appears at the beginning and at the end, the characters are ordinary people living ordinary lives until they encounter Evil. King sees horrors in mundane items such as port-a-potties and stationary bikes and at common places such as highway rest stops. King also finds terrors in the events of a normal life, such as the deaths of close relatives and pets, and his characters suffer from high blood pressure and cholesterol, prostate cancer, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Notes at the end of the book explain the circumstances surrounding the writing of each story. “The Things They Left Behind” (2005) concerns survival guilt in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, when hijackers crashed two passenger jets into the World Trade Center in New York and a third into the Pentagon outside of Washing-

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ton, D.C. The main character is Scott Staley, an insurance company employee who worked on the 110th floor of the World Trade Center but heard a voice in his head early on 9/11 telling him not to go into work. He paid attention to the voice and called in sick that day. A year later, the belongings of his deceased coworkers appear at his apartment, and he can hear the bits and pieces talk about the last day in their owners’ lives. Although Staley tries to throw the items away, they keep reappearing. In “Stationary Bike” (2003), Richard Sifkitz Stephen King has written more than is a commercial artist diagnosed with high two hundred short stories and forty cholesterol. He buys a stationary bike, but he novels, mostly in the horror genre. He finds working out boring. He then paints a received O. Henry and World Fantasy mural on the wall facing the bike and imag- awards for his 1994 short story “The ines that he is biking down a road leading Man in the Black Suit,” and he has through a forest to a mountain and populated edited the anthology The Best by road workers that he names Berkowitz, American Short Stories 2007. Carlos, Freddy, and Whelan. Sifkitz then finds that he is inspired to create some pictures just for himself rather than merely executing commissions for others. Eventually, his daydreams become more and more real, and Sifkitz gets the feeling that someone is following him. He finally discovers that the road workers have unique personalities and independent lives of their own. The premise is similar to one in King’s novel Duma Key (2008), in which the process of painting gives the main character a kind of extrasensory perception. A dream disrupts the lives of Harvey Stevens and his wife in “Harvey’s Dream” (2003). Of all the stories in this collection, it is the most literary, which is not surprising considering that it first appeared in The New Yorker. It is also the one that has had the best critical acceptance, being nominated for the Bram Stoker Award and selected for the 2003 The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthology. In his notes at the end of the book, King writes that it was inspired by one of his own dreams and that he wrote it in a single sitting. “Graduation Afternoon” (2007) was inspired by another of King’s dreams in which he envisioned a nuclear mushroom cloud over New York City. The main character, Janice, is dating a boy from a family much wealthier than hers and is visiting that family on the day he graduates from prep school. They live outside the city, so the bomb does not kill them immediately. In “Mute” (2007), Monette, a middle-aged traveling salesman and lapsed Catholic, explains to a deaf-mute hitchhiker the demise of his twenty-six-year marriage, although it turns out that the hitchhiker is really not deaf. Monette later recounts the incident while confessing to a priest. This is the kind of story that used to appear on the old television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents that King watched when he was

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young. The hitchhiker thinks he is helping the salesman by killing his wife and her lover. “Ayana” (2007) is a blind miracle worker that King uses to explore the question of why some people are cured of illnesses and others die. When the title character, a young African American girl, walks into the hospital room of the father of the story’s narrator, the girl kisses the old man’s cheek, and he miraculously recovers from terminal cancer. The girl also kisses the narrator, who later finds that he has received healing powers of his own. It is somewhat reminiscent of King’s 1996 novel The Green Mile, in which the character John Coffey has mysterious healing powers. In 1998, King and his wife Tabitha bought a winter home near Sarasota, Florida, and the state is turning up more and more as a setting for his fiction. Duma Key is set around Sarasota, and he also uses Florida settings in Just After Sunset with “A Very Tight Place” (2008), “Rest Stop” (2003), and “The Gingerbread Girl” (2007). The last story is the longest in this collection. Emily Owensby takes up running after the death of her baby daughter, then leaves her husband, and finally takes up residence in her father’s house on Vermillion Key off Florida’s Gulf Coast. She immerses herself in the fiction of John D. McDonald, Ed McBain, and Raymond Chandler, but she does not read a newspaper, turn on the television, or even power up her father’s personal computer to surf the Web. After working up to running seven miles a day, she finds a dead body while on a run and quickly discovers that she has crossed paths with a serial killer. A portable toilet is a plot device in “A Very Tight Place,” and a rest stop becomes the site of a major event in a man’s life in “Rest Stop.” The former concerns a feud between neighbors over a piece of land, and the latter is about a man witnessing a crime. King once used a portable toilet on a Florida beach, and it almost tipped over. When it occurred to him that one could be used as a murder weapon, he wrote “A Very Tight Place.” King has often said that he would not hesitate to gross out a reader if it made the story more effective, and he does his best in this combination of the first-person narration of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Premature Burial” (1844) and the way in which someone lures another person into a trap as in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846). The two neighbors live on a barrier island off Florida’s Gulf Coast. One wants to develop a piece of land on the island, but the other wants it left alone. “Rest Stop” was inspired by an incident King witnessed while driving from St. Petersburg to Sarasota and is one of the many stories and novels King has written in his career in which the main character is a writer. John Dykstra, who writes suspense novels under the pseudonym of Rick Hardin, is a meek, mild-mannered college English professor. The story plays on King’s habit of speaking of his pseudonym Richard Bachman as if he were a real person with an existence independent of King’s. When Dykstra stops at a rest area on Interstate Highway 75 en route to Sarasota, he sees an abusive husband beating up his wife and has to decide whether to get involved and then what to do. His solution is to channel his Hardin personality and act like a private eye in a hard-boiled detective novel. “The Cat from Hell” is the oldest story in this collection, first published in Cavalier in 1977, just after King’s books started to appear on the best-seller lists. This is the

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first time it has been included in any of his short story collections. It concerns a hit man who accepts a contract to kill a cat, but finds that it is not so easy. The cat has supernatural powers. A train derailment has stranded a group of passengers in the middle of Wyoming at the beginning of “Willa” (2006), but eventually this tale becomes a ghost story. The ghosts mean no harm to the living, and their existence can be pleasant if they can find a nice place to haunt, in this case a country music nightclub. At least Willa and her fiancé accept their deaths, unlike the others who died in the train accident and are still waiting for a rescue. In Danse Macabre, King’s 1981 informal study of horror in fiction, film, and television, he devotes ten pages to the old television series The Twilight Zone. “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates” (2008) is the kind of story that would not have been out of place in that anthology television series, because the main character is a woman who has just lost her husband in a plane crash, but then receives a cell phone call from him. In his notes, King explains that while he has abandoned the Methodist religion of his childhood, he still feels that somehow the soul will survive a person’s physical death. In both “Willa” and “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates,” the recently dead find themselves in train stations, but they can choose to leave. The single story that has never appeared elsewhere is “N.,” and it is the one that connects most fully with King’s earlier work and with some of his literary ancestors. King cites Machen’s “The Great God Pan” in the story, and both that story and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall Paper” (1890) in his end notes. N. lives in Castle Rock, a town in southwestern Maine that King created for much of his early fiction. (The town’s name comes from William Golding’s 1954 fiction Lord of the Flies, King’s favorite novel.) The title character is a psychiatric patient suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, like the narrator of Gilman’s story, but the underlying cause, N.’s therapist discovers, is that N. is holding back creatures from another dimension that want to invade our world. N.’s use of a camera is the inverse of a camera’s function in King’s 1990 novella, “The Sun Dog,” another Castle Rock story. In “The Sun Dog,” a camera provides a gateway for a demonic dog to come into this world, and in “N.,” a camera helps the title character hold back the creatures. If N. had read some of the other stories in this collection, then he would have known that the demons are already among us. Thomas R. Feller

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 2 (September 15, 2008): 5. Entertainment Weekly, November 14, 2008, p. 77. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 17 (September 1, 2008): 908-909. Library Journal 133, no. 15 (September 15, 2008): 51.

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The New York Times, November 5, 2008, p. C1. The New York Times Book Review, November 23, 2008, p. 17. People 70, no. 21 (November 24, 2008): 53. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 35 (September 1, 2008): 35. San Francisco Chronicle, November 30, 2008, p. M7. USA Today, November 11, 2008, p. D6.

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KNOCKEMSTIFF Author: Donald Ray Pollock (1954) Publisher: Doubleday (New York). 206 pp. $22.95 Type of work: Short fiction Time: The mid-1960’s to the late 1990’s Locale: Knockemstiff, a hamlet in Ross County, southcentral Ohio Eighteen loosely connected stories about the desperate underclass denizens of a backwater Appalachian town in southern Ohio Most new American literary sensations tend to be young, sophisticated, middle-class or upper-class graduates of elite writing programs. Author Donald Ray Pollock comes from a starkly different place: the desolate world of Appalachian rural poverty. A high school dropout, Pollock worked at a paper mill in Chillicothe, Ohio, for thirty-two grueling years before becoming a writer in his middle age—an almost unheard-of career trajectory that lends his debut story collection, Knockemstiff, an extraordinary degree of blue-collar verisimilitude. In eighteen gothic stories set in and around Knockemstiff (a real though now moribund township in southern Ohio), Pollock explores the crude, damaged, often grotesque lives of the American backwoods poor. His choice of subject matter places him in a long and distinguished literary tradition whose practitioners include Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Harry Crews, Breece D’J Pancake, Carolyn Chute, Russell Banks, Pinckney Benedict, Annie Proulx, Dorothy Allison, and many others. What is unique about Pollock’s fiction is its powerful blend of exceedingly grim (sometimes horrifying) content, economy and precision of form, and utter neutrality of tone—a combination that makes these stories vivid, enigmatic, Kafkaesque nightmares that linger in the imagination. Though they feature a diverse array of characters, the stories in Knockemstiff share some common themes and concerns. All of Pollock’s characters are losers: poor, uneducated, venal, coarse, lonely, impulsive, despairing. Woefully ill equipped to cope in modern society, the denizens of Knockemstiff devote their energies not to improving themselves—a prospect that seems remote if not impossible—but to escaping their miseries any way they can, without regard to consequences. The prime means of escape are the usual ones chosen by the dispossessed in every land and epoch: cathartic violence, cheap sex, chronic drug and alcohol abuse, and inane wish-fulfillment fantasies (often centered on revenge of some sort). Moreover, many of Pollock’s dissolute characters eventually succumb to what psychiatrists rather euphemistically term decompensation, the functional deterioration of mental health with attendant loss of cognition and memory. In sum, a gradual but ineluctable entropy rules in Pollock’s universe; in every instance, things go from bad to worse as polluted minds

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and bodies weaken, wither, and die. However, Pollock’s aim is not to wallow in depravity and ruin. A closer examination of these stories reveals a deep interest in the vagaries of human psychology. Pollock’s characters suffer all manner of humiliation, deprivation, and trauma—conditions that give rise to unpredictable forms of displacement (the term in psychology for an unconscious defense mechanism whereby the mind redirects affect from an object felt to be dangerous or unacceptable to an object felt to be safe or acceptable). It might be said that displacement is the subject of Pollock’s book. Violence against the weak, unsuspecting, and vulnerable is the most common form of displacement practiced by Pollock’s down-and-outers. In “Real Life,” an ignorant father thinks he is doing his son a service by infecting him with the worst legacy imaginable: mindless, reactive aggression. Bobby, the first-person narrator, recalls an incident he witnessed when he was seven: his brutal, alcoholic father, Vernon, beating a man half to death in the men’s room of a drive-in motion-picture theater after the man admonished him for cursing in front of his son. If that were not enough, Vernon encouraged Bobby to attack and beat up the man’s son, which Bobby did, to his father’s great pride and delight. In “Schott’s Bridge” neediness collides with predation when Todd Russell, a lonely, timid gay man, forms an ill-advised friendship with Frankie Johnson, a local homophobic tough who displaces his own masculine insecurities by visiting numerous acts of physical and emotional sadism on Todd, culminating in a particularly vicious beating and rape, and the theft of Todd’s car and all of his money. At the end of the story, Todd, drugged, ravaged, and dazed, contemplates jumping off Schott’s Bridge—a man destroyed only because he dared to want love. “Assailants” also deals with displacement. Delbert “Del” Murray’s mentally impaired wife, Geraldine (also known as “The Fish Stick Girl” because she carries fish sticks in her purse), has developed agoraphobia and panic attacks after being assaulted and nearly strangled in front of Tobacco Friendly by a man with a paper sack over his head. Flirting shamelessly with a young female clerk at the local Quikstop, Del mentions his wife’s assault, but the clerk dismisses her as “some kind of nutcase, homeless person or something.” To displace his own embarrassment, shame, and rage Del returns to the store with a paper sack over his own head to frighten the clerk. Unfortunately, his ruse is too effective: Startled, she pitches from her stool, hits her head on a display case, and is knocked unconscious, perhaps dead. Thus, ironically, Del takes the violence visited upon his wife and carries it forward onto another innocent victim. “I Start Over” deals with a somewhat similar case of displacement and its violent effects. Big Bernie Givens, “fifty-six years old and sloppy fat and stuck in southern

A native of Knockemstiff, Ross County, Ohio, Donald Ray Pollock quit high school at seventeen to work in a meatpacking plant. He spent thirty-two years employed by the Mead Paper Mill in Chillicothe, Ohio, and battled drug and alcohol addictions until he achieved sobriety in 1986. In 1994, Pollock earned a B.A. in English from Ohio University-Chillicothe and started writing fiction in 1999. Knockemstiff is his first book.

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Ohio like the smile on a dead clown’s ass,” cannot deal with the fact that his adult son, Jerry, has been permanently rendered a drooling vegetable after a three-day boozeand-drug binge. Displacing his intense sorrow and frustration causes Givens to lose his job when he assaults a coworker. Now homicidal and suicidal, Bernie again engages in displacement when he viciously assaults some teenagers who make fun of him and Jerry at a drive-through restaurant. As the story ends, the police are pursuing Bernie’s car after the incident; he will most likely “start over” as a convicted felon. Not all violence in Knockemstiff is a result of displacement. Sometimes it is merely self-serving or opportunistic. In “Dynamite Hole,” the first-person narrator, Jake Lowry, a half-demented, middle-aged hermit who lives in an abandoned school bus, confesses to two heinous acts. In the first instance, Jake—who was evading the draft in World War II by hiding in the hills—deliberately leads two pursuing soldiers into a swarming nest of copperhead snakes; one of them is fatally bitten. In the second, more recent instance, Jake comes upon fifteen-year-old Truman Mackey copulating with his own sister. After murdering Truman with a rock to the skull, Jake rapes and murders the boy’s sister. He then hides the bodies in an underwater cave, and they are never found. No one suspects that he is a killer. What is particularly chilling is that the rape and double-murder do not come out of malice or rage; they are only the banal results of Jake taking advantage of a convenient opportunity to end his own virginity, no doubt rationalizing that the incest he discovered gave him moral carte blanche. A different kind of displacement—expressed through desperate, perverse sex—is another hallmark of Pollock’s stories. A glaring feature of “Dynamite Hole” and “Schott’s Bridge,” predatory sex is the central theme of “Hair’s Fate.” Daniel, a fourteen-year-old boy with “old-people glasses and acne sprouts and a bony chicken chest,” resorts to sex in the outhouse with “Lucy,” his sister’s carnival doll. As punishment, Daniel’s father brutally cuts off his prized long hair with a knife, a crushing humiliation that prompts Daniel to run away from home. A fat, slovenly trucker named Cowboy Roy picks up Daniel while he is hitchhiking and takes him back to his grimy house trailer. There, Cowboy Roy feeds Daniel amphetamines and, as the story closes, is about to molest him. In “Fish Sticks” Del recounts an incident that happened almost thirty years before. In the mid-1970’s, Del (age fifteen) develops a case of wanderlust after reading a trashy paperback, Jack W. Thomas’s Reds (1970), about young drug addict drifters. Del convinces his friend, Randy, to escape Knockemstiff and take a bus to Florida. In St. Petersburg they meet Leo, a fat, sloppy street hot dog vendor who promises to pay the boys for fellatio. After a dispute about compensation, Del swings a lamp at the fat man’s head, perhaps killing him. As is typical in these stories, sex and violence often merge and become indistinguishable. If dangerous affect cannot be displaced onto harmless objects, it can always be anesthetized. Illicit drugs are on a par with sex and violence for ubiquity in Knockemstiff. Almost unbelievably, the first-person narrator in “Bactine” recalls regularly huffing Bactine, the topical antiseptic-anesthetic that, inhaled in spray form, is a deadly, mind-twisting toxin. The unnamed first-person narrator of “Blessed” recounts his precipitous downward spiral after becoming addicted to OxyContin (also known as “Hillbilly heroin”). Illegal anabolic steroids destroy Randy, Del’s friend in

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“Fish Sticks,” and Sammy Coburn in “Discipline.” Avid bodybuilders, Randy and Sammy sacrifice their health and ultimately their lives for the dubious, short-term benefits of macho narcissism. In “Pills” middle-aged Robert “Bobby” Shaffer recounts an incident that occurred when he was sixteen. He and his friend, Frankie Johnson, steal four bottles (240 pills) of Black Beauties (pharmaceutical amphetamines) from Wanda Wipert, the bartender at Hap’s Bar and a drug dealer on the side. Their plan is to drive to California in Frankie’s “muscle car,” a 1969 Dodge Coronet Super Bee, but they end up staying in Knockemstiff, high on speed for five solid days and nights. “Pills” nicely illustrates another abiding theme in Knockemstiff: the endless desire to escape from the town and the hideous life it affords, juxtaposed by the endless futility would-be escapists encounter. Alcohol, drugs, sex, violence, travel, and fantasy— all produce a temporary release that leaves the person who partakes further weakened and more deeply trapped, like one who struggles in quicksand only to hasten the sinking process. What becomes clear as these incredibly bleak but fascinating stories unfold is that Knockemstiff is much more than a geographic or a socioeconomic trap; it is a state of mind probably best described as unconscious (and therefore ineluctable) nihilism. In other words, Pollock’s grotesques—to borrow a term from Sherwood Anderson—have unwittingly but quite understandably equated the depredations of a brutal society with the nature of life itself. Their total loss of faith in the fundamental goodness of life probably pervades a terrifyingly sizable portion of the American underclass. Nevertheless, Pollock does not caricature or condemn the fictive citizens of Knockemstiff; his tone is scrupulously even-tempered and nonjudgmental. The deeply unsettling effect rendered is akin to what psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud termed “the uncanny” (German Das Unheimliche—literally “un-home-ly”), the concept that something is at once both vividly familiar and foreign, recognizable yet also strangely unrecognizable. While Pollock is never overtly political, these stories, in all of their horror, stand as a searing indictment of an entire civilization. Robert Niemi

Review Sources Entertainment Weekly, March 21, 2008, p. 65. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 12. Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2008, p. F7. Minneapolis Star Tribune, March 16, 2008, p. F14. New Statesman 137 (July 14, 2008): 59. The New York Times Book Review, March 23, 2008, p. 17. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 46 (November 19, 2007): 31. USA Today, March 20, 2008, p. 7D. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 33 (February 9, 2008): W1.

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THE LAST DAYS OF OLD BEIJING Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed Author: Michael Meyer (1972) Publisher: Walker (New York). Illustrated. 355 pp. $25.99 Type of work: Memoir, history Time: 1995-2007 Locale: Beijing, China The experiences of a Peace Corps teacher who stayed on in Beijing and witnessed the preparations for the Olympics in 2008 Principal personages: Michael Meyer, the author, a fourth-grade English teacher at Beijing’s Coal Lane Elementary School The Widow, the author’s neighbor who lives in a cloud of smoke from her Flying Horse cigarettes and pampers him with pork dumplings Miss Zhu, one of Meyer’s Coal Lane colleagues

In The Last Days of Old Beijing, Michael Meyer, or Teacher Plumblossom, as he came to be known by his fourth-grade students, recounts how he went to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1995, fresh out of the University of Wisconsin. His assignment was in Neijiang in southwestern Sichuan Province, a backwater town known for its sugar cane and heroin trade. For two years he commuted with pigs and vegetables across the Tuo River to train English teachers at the local technical institute. He taught “lively and intelligent” students eight hours a week and learned Chinese. His term as a U.S.-China Friendship Volunteer ended in 1997, and he moved to Beijing to teach English at Coal Lane Elementary. Meyer describes Beijing’s facelift for the Olympics with a rueful realization that “no one should have to live in poverty, no matter how picturesque.” Sixty Starbucks, a couple hundred McDonald’s, a matching number of Kentucky Fried Chickens, and dozens of Pizza Huts accommodate the hungry citizens, who have been accustomed to such local dishes as Feng’s boiled tripe and Chen’s stewed intestines at Langfang Second Lane. Other Beijing culinary favorites include “knife-shaved” noodles, broad strands of pasta boiled in pork broth, and vermicelli with shredded pork and peppers known more colloquially—and mysteriously—as “ants climbing trees.” As more and more cars pour onto the streets every day, the site of his school amid luxury homes and strip malls convinces Meyer to move to the Dazhalan community in central Beijing in 2005, where he is ideally positioned to witness the intense preparations for the Summer Olympics of 2008. He lives in a two-room apartment in a hutong, one of the many ancient lanes crisscrossing Beijing’s center, an area of prime real estate for developers. Dazhalan’s 114 hutong are home to fifty-seven thousand residents in its

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half-square-mile area; the shortest hutong is ten yards long, the narrowest is fifteen inches. Red Bayberry and Bamboo Slanted Street, where Meyer lives, runs eight hundred yards through the neighborhood. Life in Dazhalan is colorful. On his way to the men’s latrine, Meyer passes a vegetable stand, a hairdresser, and a gathering of mah-jongg players. The latrine presents four slits in the floor and the admonition No Spitting, No Smoking, No Coarse Language, No Missing the Hole. The campaign to “Say Farewell to Dangerous Housing” means the end for the crowded hutong as more and more neighborhoods are razed. Everyone dreads the Hand, the symbol pronounced chai that means “raze.” When it appears on a dwelling, the residents have to move. Meyer tells the story of Mr. Yang and his family, who bo ght their courtyard in 1945, but after the Liberation (Mr. Yang’s word) in 1949 they subdivided the rooms and sold them for fear of being labeled capitalists. Then during the Cultural Revolution, the rooms were divided again and given to workers, leaving Mr. Yang’s parents one small room. The end comes when the Hand paints chai on the wall one night. The authorities offer about one thousand dollars per square meter for an apartment, much of which is stolen by a conspiracy between the evaluator and the omnipresent developers. Mr. Yang cries when he describes the razing of his home to make way for rubble-bordered office towers christened Investment Plaza and Corporate Square. A Ritz-Carlton hotel was in the hutong’s future. Another family victimized by the Hand was the Hans, owners of a small shop on Langfang First Lane. Mrs. Han tended the shop while Mr. Han repaired cell phones at the back of the store. They worked twelve hours a day and lived in one small room in Meyer’s courtyard. The Hans had left their six-year-old son with his grandparents and migrated from China’s northeast a year earlier and had used their life savings to buy a new store on a busy location and were saving money when the Hand left its mark in spring of 2006. Meyer gives a colorful account of the Evening News, his favorite tabloid among Beijing’s eight daily newspapers. For five mao (seven cents) he gets at least fifty pages, much smaller than the record 208-page issue that the publisher discontinued when the vendors learned it was worth more for scrap. The Evening News enjoyed a circulation of 1.2 million and was “fattened” by supplements advertising “health powders” and other miracle products touted as guaranteeing a woman’s sexual success. The paper’s contents remind Meyer of the weekly community paper he grew up reading in Minnesota, with announcements plastered on the front page and the inside stuffed with stories of crimes and other misdeeds. The police section in the Evening News always features shocking incidents such as “Girl lights gasoline on sleeping boyfriend” and “Forty prostitutes arrested at karaoke club.” Guns were outlawed but crimes with knives were a regular feature of the Evening News, with such items as a

Michael Meyer is a teacher and a writer who has won the Lowell Thomas Award for travel writing. His work has been published in Time, Smithsonian, and other magazines. In China he trained the nation’s UNESCO World Heritage site managers in preservation practices.

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foot-massage-parlor operator who fatally stabbed a customer for sexual harassment and a woman who sliced up her mother-in-law’s head during an argument. Meyer confesses to studying the missing person ads every day, “despite knowing better.” Some of the missing are elderly people with physical problems or alcohol addiction; many are children (the paper ran seventeen ads one day); and one mentally retarded couple ran away together. Meyer judges the rewards surprisingly low, the highest being ten thousand yuan ($1,333) for finding an eighty-two-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s disease. Missing dogs generally bring in three thousand to five thousand yuan. Many of the stories recount bizarre events, such as those about a woman who got her hand stuck in a latrine hole for an hour, a man who strangled a neighbor’s cat after it ate his bird worth one thousand dollars, and a man who offended his fellow passengers by airing his smelly shoes and socks out an open window on the bus. Meyer describes his Beijing friends fondly. The eighty-year-old Widow who lives next door comes and goes freely, looking after him and feeding him his favorite pork and chives dumplings. They have lived side by side for two years, but one day she tells Meyer she is to be relocated in a high-rise. At that time, Meyer coaxes the Widow’s remarkable life story out of her. She was born in Port Arthur, now Dalian, on the Yellow Sea, where her father was a railroad engineer. When she was fifteen, the family moved to Beijing, living first near Fresh Fish Junction and then on Big Ear hutong. Life under the Japanese was spartan, but it got worse when her father married her off to an army officer who abandoned her during her second pregnancy. The People’s Liberation Army arrived in 1949 and gave her more than a hundred pounds of rice, a sack of noodles, and eleven pounds of flaxseed oil. “The Communist Party welcomed me with an open door. The Party’s great kindness to me is something I can’t ever completely express or finish attempting to.” When Chairman Mao died, the Widow cried; when Zhou Enlai died, she not only cried but could not eat for the entire day. One of Meyer’s most stubborn hutong acquaintances is Old Zhang, whom he meets in the street one cold night and who tells him of witnessing a young woman being brutally evicted and hauled away in cuffs. Old Zhang is seventy-three and teaching himself English. After almost fifty years of living in Fresh Fish Junction, he wakes one morning to find the Hand has left the chai symbol on his wall. Old Zhang continues to live in his house, fighting the Heavenly Street Development Company and insisting that he can survive on cabbages and radishes. In the final showdown with the arbitrator, Old Zhang accepts 580,000 yuan ($77,333), not the 800,000 yuan he had asked for but a good deal under the circumstances. Meyer’s chapter on “Springtime” yields some observations about the new WalMart opening near Dazhalan. Old people like the moving ramps because escalators make them nervous, but on the ramps “grandmothers balanced like surfers.” Spring also brings ten dust storms to Beijing, dumping 330,000 tons of sand on the city. The worst storm produced an air pollution index of a toxic 500, whereas 150 is judged so dangerous people should stay indoors. After the dust storms the city is “blanketed” by allergy-breeding willow and polar seeds. Since 2001, only male species have been planted, but one million female species live on.

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Frustrated by the unimaginative rote lessons at Coal Lane Elementary, Meyer takes his fellow English teachers to the International School of Beijing to observe the more demanding teaching methods used there. Coal Lane relies on a reading primer featuring a character named Mocky, whose simple activities are summed up in a chant. When he carries a plate of greens, for instance, the children chant: “We’ll go and visit uncle. It’s very, very far. We’ll take some salad with us, and go there in a car.” Miss Zhu observes the teaching strategies closely and changes her approach to include more individual initiative in reaching answers. A visit to China’s largest bookstore, Book Mansion, with 230,000 titles taking up 172,000 square feet, wins the full attention of Meyer’s students: “a seated bundle of green, hand-knit sweaters, black pigtails, and bowed heads” concentrating on Calvin and Hobbes and a Garfield English-Chinese dictionary. Translations of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003) and Robert C. Atkins’s Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution (1972) nudge up against Woody Allen’s The Whore of Mensa (1974), and a book on love in the English language explains that “‘I’m bored’ really means ‘Do you want to have sex?’” When Meyer sees Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) among Book Mansion’s offerings, he calls the translator, Wen Chu’an, who teaches Beat Studies at Sichuan University and asks why the Beats are so popular. Wen explains that young readers are inspired by the Beats’ “ardent love of freedom in action and speech.” Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) sold thirty thousand copies, but translations of management guides such as Larry R. Donnithorne’s The West Point Way of Leadership (1994) swamped all the Beat works. Meyer’s thirty-fourth birthday is celebrated with a “spongy yellow cake” complete with a yellow cardboard crown, hand-drawn cards, and a jar of Nescafé Gold instant coffee from Miss Zhu. Meyer cites Jane Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and Herbert Gans’s description of Boston’s West End as not a slum but a “stable, low-rent area.” For Meyer, Dazhalan and Fresh Fish Junction are just such stable neighborhoods, and he sympathizes with Jacobs’s claim that they are doomed because nobody is exploiting them for fortunes. The hutong, in Meyer’s view, are like the New York sidewalks in the safety that comes from all eyes being on them, in the feelings of community they foster, and in the lessons in living they teach children. Whenever there is anything comic in his situation, Meyer can see it. One morning he awakes in the dark with a spider as large as his hand probing his ear. He crushes the creature, jumps for the tap, and knocks over a row of empty beer bottles before tragedy strikes: “My dinner of braised fatty pork and twice-fried spicy green beans awoke within; I needed a toilet.” He runs in “minced, clenching steps” for the toilet down the lane, but he does not make it in time. He kicks his boxer shorts into the pit and goes home thinking that perhaps he would be glad to see the Hand painted on his door. Meyer has a sharp eye for character and incident, and he presents it in a fresh and irresistible prose style. Frank Day

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Review Sources Booklist 104, nos. 19/20 (June 1, 2008): 26. The Economist 388 (August 2, 2008): 85. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 11 (June 1, 2008): 93. Library Journal 133, no. 7 (April 15, 2008): 96. New Statesman 137 (August 18, 2008): 50-51. Newsweek 151, no. 24 (June 16, 2008): 63. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 14 (April 7, 2008): 5. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 150 (June 27, 2008): W10.

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THE LAST FLIGHT OF THE SCARLET MACAW One Woman’s Fight to Save the World’s Most Beautiful Bird Author: Bruce Barcott (1967) Publisher: Random House (New York). 313 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Environment, history, natural history, nature Time: 2002-2005 Locale: Belize An exploration of the environmental, economic, and political forces involved in an attempt to save a river, its valley, plants, and wildlife from a dam and the lake it would impound Principal personages: Sharon Matola, manager of the Belize Zoo and primary opponent of the dam Said Musa, prime minister of Belize during the planning and building of the dam Ralph Fonseca, finance minister of Belize during the planning and building of the dam Tony Garel, Matola’s long-time assistant at the zoo Jacob Scherr, a lawyer working with the Natural Resources Defense Council Ari Hershowitz, member of the Natural Resources Defense Council Stan Marshall, chief executive officer of Fortis, the Canadian company that contracted to build the dam

The book’s title, The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, may be somewhat misleading since the scarlet macaw (Ara macao) is neither endangered nor threatened. It is widespread in Central and South America, and it is not on the verge of extinction. Author Bruce Barcott knows that fact and says so, although he also makes the point that the Belizean subspecies (Ara macao cyanoptera) is endangered in some ranking systems. That is the bird about which he is writing, and this dual classification introduces the question of whether subspecies should be considered for protection under endangered-species legislation or whether such laws should concern only species. In response to that question, Barcott explores some related aspects of biological taxonomy (the classification and naming of animals and plants). He employs a strategy similar to this throughout the book. He is telling a story, but when the story line comes to a topic he thinks needs explanation, he interrupts to fill the reader in on the tangential topic, which is always interesting and important. Working under the assumption that this subspecies is worthy of special conservation efforts, the book details the attempt of an American woman to block construction of a dam that would flood the valley in which the overwhelming majority of the scar-

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let macaws in Belize live. Sharon Matola runs a zoo in Belize, and, esoteric as it may seem, Bruce Barcott lives in Seattle with his the taxonomic question posed above becomes wife and two children and writes for a real problem for her. She uses the local sub- Outside magazine, The New York species’s status to argue against the dam, ar- Times, Sports Illustrated, Mother guing that you cannot flood the only habitat in Jones, and other magazines. A former Belize that supports this endangered subspe- Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental cies. Stan Marshall, chief executive officer Journalism, Barcott has also written The Measure of a Mountain (1997) and (CEO) of Fortis, the Canadian company that Northwest Passages (1994). wants to build the dam, challenges her on the basis of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Red Data Book, which considers the species and not the subspecies. This publication, a gold standard in endangered-species listings, recognizes the scarlet macaw as a widespread and abundant species, and so it is not one requiring special treatment in planning a dam or other environment-disrupting activity. Barcott describes Matola as a maverick who is not afraid to rock the boat, even when it is clear that she is the one most likely to be spilled overboard. She chooses to enter the fight over the dam to be built on the Macal River, and her opposition triggers the cascade of events explored in the book. Barcott’s exploration involves economic as well as ecologic problems and the trade-offs inherent in questions such as the effects of dams and other situations in which conservation and economics seem at loggerheads. These questions are particularly troublesome in developing countries such as Belize. Barcott also explores the political intrigue that often accompanies such problems, wherever they occur. In setting the stage, Barcott outlines the history of Belize (formerly British Honduras) and makes a point of describing the resentment that natives of Belize hold against the British for the way they stripped the natural resources from the country and left nothing in exchange. Belize was the last Latin American country to achieve independence, one that is still incomplete in some ways. This resentment extends to foreigners in general, which made it impossible for Matola (a citizen of the United States) to lead a grassroots opposition to the dam. It also weakened the impact of Jacob Scherr and Ari Hershowitz of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), as they joined in the fight against the dam. Tony Garel, a native Belizean who worked at the zoo, and others tried to fill the native-leadership role in Matola’s place. In keeping with his proclivity to fill in the background for his story, Barcott outlines the history of dams and dam building, including a historical sketch of the North American dam-building era. In the “Epilogue,” he compares the story he tells in the book with John Muir’s attempt to save Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park from a dam. He suggests that the massive development of dams was not a good thing, because dams often do not pay for themselves (even in strictly economic terms), and they often collect silt so rapidly that they become worthless and fall into disuse or must be restored, at great expense, in just a few years. Barcott’s bottom line: Dams kill rivers. Still, dams have been built for many different reasons: for flood con-

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trol, for hydroelectric power, for a reliable water supply for human consumption and irrigation, and for recreation, such as boating and fishing, on the lake formed. He acknowledges disagreements about the usefulness of dams, though his convictions are quite clear. The dam on the Macal, called Chalillo, was primarily planned to generate electricity, converting the kinetic energy in the flow of water into electrical energy. Barcott outlines the science and history of hydroelectric power. Barcott explores the projected electrical production and economic contribution of the Chalillo dam and the alternative options for producing the electricity without the dam. The alternatives included burning oil purchased from Mexico and burning the organic material left over from the production of sugar. Analysis suggested that the dam would not solve Belize’s shortfall in electric energy, although it would contribute to the electricity supply of the country. He explains Matola’s argument for an alternative economic contribution of the Macal valley. Recognizing that the Belize economy is based on tourism, especially ecotourism, she suggested that a pristine, wildlife-filled Macal valley with the ecotourist income it would produce might be a more significant contribution to the economy of Belize than a dammed, water-filled valley and the electricity it would produce. Barcott reports that studies on the structural integrity of the valley walls did not suggest that it was a good site for a dam. Although the valley walls were said to be granite in the site’s Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), which was commissioned by the parties determined to build the dam, independent surveys demonstrated that there was no granite in the area. In addition, some of the rock present was soft and susceptible to shifting and collapse under the weight of the dam. However, the most damning indictment of the EIA concerned a map that accompanied the report. A fault line found on the original geological map of the Macal valley was missing on the map turned in as part of the EIA. Earthquakes develop along fault lines, and fault lines do not spontaneously disappear from maps, so this was clear evidence of dishonesty and a callous disregard for human life. If the dam failed, anyone living downstream would be exposed to a flash flood. Duke Energy, a company based in the United States, was indirectly contracted by the Belizean government to build the dam when it bought a host of Latin American contracts from another American power company. The above disclosures, a letterwriting campaign directed at Duke Energy, and a statement adopted by the IUCN, all playing on the company’s desire to improve its environmental image, gave Duke Energy second thoughts. When it hesitated, Fortis, a Canadian company that primarily did small hydroelectric projects and that had purchased Belize Electricity Limited (BEL), jumped at the chance to take on the project. Stan Marshall, Fortis CEO, assured the interested parties that Fortis would not build a dam that was not economically, structurally, and environmentally sound. However, the contract between the company and the government of Belize freed Fortis from all liability even if the dam failed, not an encouraging sign of corporate responsibility. Political intrigue resulted in the dam going forward despite these warning signs. Barcott appears to be evenhanded in reporting on the struggle, and he clearly believes that corruption in the Belizean government and Fortis, the Canadian firm contracted

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to build the dam, was involved in the decision to go ahead, with little consideration of the potential problems discussed above. Additional evidence of corruption is found in the heavy-handed tactics employed by the Belizean government. When it became clear that Matola was determined to fight the dam, the government planned to construct a landfill adjacent to the zoo, and the landfill’s drainage would contaminate the zoo’s water supply. In addition, the proximity of the landfill would detract from the zoo’s desirability as a recreational destination. As with the dam, the location was far from ideal for a landfill even if the zoo were not there. There were better locations available on the basis of landfill requirements alone. The plan to locate the landfill next to the zoo was a ploy attributed to Said Musa, the Belizean prime minister, and Ralph Fonseca, another official of the government; both were supporters, and presumed beneficiaries, of the dam site in the Macal valley. The proposed location of the landfill was thought to be their response to Matola’s opposition to the dam and an attempt to neutralize her. Other evidence of the heavy hand of the Belizean government, suggesting how serious the authorities were about constructing the dam, occurred when an antidam rally Matola planned was poorly attended, although disenchantment with the dam was known to be widespread. The simple explanation for the poor attendance was that the same power brokers spread the word that things would not go well for those seen at the rally. In another context in the book, a native Belizean made the point that because Belize is such a small country, everyone knows everyone, and he declared that to be one of the good things about Belize and simultaneously one of the bad things about Belize. In this context, it played out as a bad thing; Belizeans did not want to be subject to governmental reprisals because they attended the rally. In the end, the landfill was established at another location, not next to the zoo. However, the dam was built, despite an intriguing attempt to block its construction through a British court. It was intriguing because Belize had been independent of Great Britain since 1981, but it still had laws that allowed appeal to a British court called the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Barcott explains that situation, the events related to the appeal, and the court’s judgment. Barcott weaves this and more together into an entertaining story, interspersed with brief but informative histories and scientific fundamentals related to Belize, taxonomy, endangered species, dams, hydroelectricity, and the Privy Council. The book is well written and carefully edited; any errors escaped notice in this reading. There is a helpful map of Belize, and the description of sources is thorough and helpful to the reader looking for more detail on a topic. However, there is no index, an unfortunate omission in a book as full of information as this one. The reader wishing to revisit a topic is reduced to a haphazard search through the book. Chapter titles would have helped in this regard, and the abbreviated table of contents is as useless as the absent index. Though poorly served by these shortcuts, the book is an excellent addition to the library of anyone interested in environmental problems, politics, Belize, or the other topics considered in the book. Reviews of the book have been enthusiastic. Carl W. Hoagstrom

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Review Sources Audubon 110, no. 2 (March, 2008): 154-156. Booklist 104, no. 11 (February 1, 2008): 10. Discover 29, no. 2 (February, 2008): 72. The International Herald Tribune, February 16, 2008, p. 15. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 19. Natural History 117, no. 3 (April, 2008): 52-53. The New York Times Book Review, February 17, 2008, p. 1. Orion, March/April, 2008, p. 76. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 47 (November 26, 2007): 38-39. Scientific American 298, no. 3 (March, 2008): 100. The Washington Post Book World, March 2, 2008, p. BW09.

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LAVINIA Author: Ursula K. Le Guin (1929) Publisher: Harcourt (New York). 279 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Novel Time: Several years after the fall of Troy, traditionally dated to 1184 b.c.e. Locale: the region of Latium (modern Lazio) in Italy A back story from Vergil’s Aeneid is transformed into the fictional autobiography of the Italian princess who became the bride of the Trojan Aeneas after a bitter war for her hand on Italian soil Principal characters: Lavinia, the only surviving child of an Italian king Latinus, Lavinia’s father and king of Laurentum in Latium, Italy Amata, Latinus’s wife and queen who has gone insane because of the death of her young sons Turnus, prince of the neighboring Rutulians and suitor for Lavinia Aeneas, leader of a band of Trojan exiles Ascanius, Aeneas’s son by his Trojan wife Creusa The Poet, the ghost of Vergil, author of the Aeneid

Ursula K. Le Guin, a prolific writer of fantasy, generally directs her great storytelling skills to worlds such as Earthsea, created entirely in her own imagination. In these fantasy worlds, Le Guin is able to examine issues of gender and spirituality from unique and unusual perspectives. Her protagonists, such as Luz Marina Falco Cooper in The Eye of the Heron (1983), are often strong females who must deal with difficult moral and intellectual issues amid societies in conflict. As she did with Tenar in Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990), and with the women in Searoad: The Chronicles of Klatsand (1991), Le Guin creates in Lavinia another strong, independent female protagonist who struggles to find her way in a world dominated by men. Like many of Le Guin’s protagonists, Lavinia responds with regret, determination, and hope as the familiar world of her childhood is transformed into a very different place by war and by time. In Searoad Le Guin used the Greek myth of Persephone to tell the stories of several generations of women in the fictional town of Klatsand, Oregon. In Lavinia Le Guin turns for inspiration to Roman myth and tradition and especially to Vergil’s Aeneid, the great first century b.c.e. epic poem about the journey of the Trojan Aeneas to found a new kingdom in Italy after the Trojan War. Vergil’s poem provides only a bare frame for Le Guin’s tale, which centers around a key but silent character from the Roman epic. While nearly half of the twelve books

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of the Aeneid deal with the war fought between Aeneas and the Italian prince Turnus for the hand of an Italian princess, Lavinia plays only a passive role in the Roman story. In the Aeneid she is at the mercy of her father, who, by custom, must choose her husband. She is also at the mercy of the Fates and of her gods, who prophesy that she is destined to marry not a native Italian but a foreigner. Lavinia’s parents both play important speaking roles in Vergil’s poem, but Lavinia says nothing. Her most dramatic appearance is a The American writer Ursula Le Guin is scene in which her hair catches fire at a relibest known for her series about the gious sacrifice—an event understood by Verfantasy world of Earthsea, especially Wizard of Earthsea (1968). She was the gil and his readers as an omen supporting Aeneas’s claim. Vergil ends his poem with recipient of a Library of Congress Aeneas’s frenzied slaying of Turnus on the Living Legends award in 2000 and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of battlefield, not with the marriage that would America Grand Master Award in 2003. inevitably follow this victory. From these few details, Le Guin weaves Lavinia’s fascinating tale. Le Guin’s Lavinia gains her own voice as she tells her life story and puts the events described in Vergil’s Aeneid into the larger context of her autobiography. Le Guin’s Lavinia narrates her life from the perspective of old age and approaching death. In addition to her postAeneid life as wife, mother, and widow, Lavinia describes the joys and sorrows of her youth. Her childhood friendships, delightful romps in the Italian countryside, and, especially, her close relationship with a loving father are contrasted with the early deaths of her two younger brothers and the growing insanity of her mother Amata, who responds to the death of her sons with increasing resentment toward her daughter. Amata’s madness has some support from Vergil’s poem, but the other details of Lavinia’s childhood are, for the most part, drawn from Le Guin’s own imagination and powerful narrative skills. So, too, are substantial portions of the novel that deal with events following those described in the Aeneid, namely, Lavinia’s marriage to Aeneas, her difficult relationship with her stepson Ascanius, her worries about her fatherless son Silvius, and her decision to withdraw at the end of her life to a secluded spot in the country. Unlike Vergil, Le Guin creates in Lavinia a strong-willed woman who is able to find personal freedom and self-identity even within the confines of a traditional society, in which daughters must obey their fathers and accept husbands chosen for them. Le Guin’s princess is no passive pawn. With the support of her father, she uses and even manipulates religious signs to avoid marriage with the unappealing Rutulian prince Turnus, despite strong maternal pressure to accept Turnus’s offer of marriage. Instead, Lavinia herself chooses marriage with the Trojan prince Aeneas, even though it will mean leaving the home of her beloved father and even though she knows from

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prophecy that her marriage with Aeneas will be cut short by his untimely death. As a widow, Lavinia works out an uneasy relationship with her stepson Ascanius, while ensuring the safety and position of her son Silvius (who will be the ancestor of Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome). In Lavinia Le Guin has captured the deep Italian respect for tradition, custom, and values. Lavinia understands and affirms the obligations that society imposes on her as daughter of the king. She shares with her Trojan husband a strong piety, that is, a compelling sense of duty or obligation to one’s gods, fathers, and fatherland. A close bond with ancestors and an intense love for the Italian countryside permeate not only Le Guin’s novel but also Vergil’s Aeneid, as well as much of Roman literature. Le Guin’s Italian princess is rarely happier than when she is wandering as a girl in the fields and the sacred woods of her beloved Latium. It is in these woods that she chooses to end her days after the death of Aeneas and the majority of their son Silvius. Lavinia’s story is steeped in the religious traditions of early Italy, which Le Guin has researched carefully. Lavinia’s religion begins in the home, where she, as her father’s only daughter, has the responsibility for maintaining the household gods and their daily worship. Upon her marriage to Aeneas, Lavinia must abandon her father’s gods for those of her new husband, but she makes this transition freely and willingly, guarding Aeneas’s Trojan household gods as religiously as she had those of her father. Le Guin describes in detail many traditional Roman beliefs and religious practices, including omens, prophecies, agricultural rites, and, especially, animal sacrifices, which will seem strange to many modern readers. In traditional Roman religion, the whole world is sacred and the gods permeate all aspects of life. Not only does Lavinia perform daily religious obligations in her father’s or her husband’s houses, but also she sets out on many pilgrimages to worship in the countryside. In particular, she frequents an ancient grove of trees in Albunea, where her ancestors have worshiped from time immemorial. It is here, on pilgrimages with her father, that she meets, first, her divine ancestor Faunus and, later, her “poet,” a shadowy figure whom Lavinia realizes comes from the future and who will tell her story. It is near this sacred spot that she chooses to return to spend her final days. This poet, unnamed in Lavinia, is Vergil (70-19 b.c.e.), who will not live for many centuries following the events described in Lavinia. At the time of his conversations with Lavinia, the Aeneid has already been written and Vergil is facing death from illness. From her poet, Lavinia learns in detail about the savage war that will be fought for her hand and of her marriage to Aeneas (destined to last only four years because of the hero’s death). From his conversations with Lavinia, the poet comes to realize that he did not do justice to the strong-minded Italian princess in the Aeneid and regrets that his impending death leaves him no time to revise his depiction. On his deathbed, Vergil is said to have directed that the Aeneid be burned. Readers of Lavinia are perhaps intended to imagine that Vergil’s supernatural encounter with Lavinia in Le Guin’s novel led the poet to this brutal request, so fortuitously countermanded by the emperor Augustus. The poet empowers Lavinia. With her knowledge of the future, she is able to un-

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derstand and to navigate the many challenges of her life. She is able to embrace Aeneas as her husband the first time she sees the hero. She understands the inevitability of the war that follows Aeneas’s arrival. She accepts with resignation the shortness of their marriage, and for this reason, she relishes with delight every sweet moment with her husband, even as she hopes that somehow she has misunderstood the poet’s words and that her husband will not die so prematurely. Lavinia’s knowledge of the future is also a great burden. She cannot change what is fated. She is unable to warn her husband of his impending death. Rather, she must live with the inevitability of that death silently in her heart. She alone can understand the mysterious scenes engraved on her husband’s great shield, made, according to Vergil, by the blacksmith god Vulcan at the request of Aeneas’s divine mother Venus. These scenes depict future events made possible by Aeneas’s victory in Italy, including the founding of Rome and the great battle of Actium, in which the future Augustus defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra and became sole ruler of the Roman Empire in 31 b.c.e. Lavinia recognizes the meaning of all these scenes, but she is unable to share them with those around her, just as she cannot warn Aeneas of his death. Lavinia’s foresight also cannot help her console Aeneas regarding the savage war fought for her hand and especially regarding the brutal slaying of Turnus, with which Vergil had ended the Aeneid. Aeneas’s instinct had been to spare his antagonist’s life; however, seeing around Turnus’s waist a sword belt that the Rutulian prince had plundered from the body of Pallas, one of Aeneas’s Italian allies, Aeneas angrily thrusts his sword into Turnus’s chest. Lavinia had had Turnus’s death foretold to her by Vergil, but this knowledge is of little use, as she watches her husband agonize over his brutal action on the battlefield and over his conflicting loyalties toward virtuous action, which would have spared Turnus, and toward piety, which demanded the Rutulian prince’s death. Aeneas died without resolving this conflict, which also remains unresolved in Vergil’s Aeneid. In Lavinia Le Guin thus merges the present time of Lavinia’s life with the future time of her poet, Vergil. As she did with Pandora, the protagonist in Always Coming Home (1985), who lives both in the past and in the future, Le Guin enables Lavinia to live not only in the present but to anticipate future events. In this way, Lavinia’s future is not only the Roman future of Vergil’s Augustan world but also a more timeless future in which she seeks to avoid oblivion and gain immortality through the words of Vergil. For Lavinia, physical death is less important than obliteration of her memory. In Vergil’s poem, and perhaps even in Le Guin’s novel, Lavinia has gained that immortal fame. Thomas J. Sienkewicz

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Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 14 (March 15, 2008): 28. Bust 51 (June/July, 2008): 104-104. Entertainment Weekly, April 25, 2008, p. 121. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 4 (February 15, 2008): 166. Library Journal 133, no. 4 (March 1, 2008): 74. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 51 (December 24, 2007): 24. School Library Journal 54, no. 5 (May, 2008): 161. Science Fiction Studies 35, no. 2 (July, 2008): 349-352.

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THE LAZARUS PROJECT Author: Aleksandar Hemon (1964) Publisher: Riverhead Press (New York). 294 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1908 and the present Locale: Chicago, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, and Bosnia Hemon’s second novel uses alternating chapters to tell the story of a Jewish refugee killed by the chief of police in Chicago in 1908 and a contemporary Bosnian immigrant who retraces the young Jew’s steps through Eastern Europe Principal characters: Vladimir Brik, a writer and Bosnian immigrant Lazarus Averbuch, a nineteen-year-old Jewish immigrant Olga Averbuch, Lazarus’s sister George Shippy, Chicago chief of police Ahmed Rora, Brik’s friend, a photographer Mary Brik, Brik’s wife, an American-born neurosurgeon Isador Maron, Lazarus’s friend William P. Miller, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune Hermann Taube, a prosperous Jewish lawyer Rambo, a guerrilla leader during the siege of Sarajevo Miller, an American journalist posted in Sarajevo Iuliana, Brik’s guide to the Jewish history of Chisinau Seryozha, a pimp who drives Brik and Rora from Chisinau to Bucharest Azra Halilbaši, Rora’s sister, a surgeon in Sarajevo

Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project begins dramatically, with a factual account of how, on March 2, 1908, Lazarus Averbuch, an impoverished nineteen-yearold Jew, was shot seven times when he showed up unexpectedly at the home of George Shippy, the Chicago chief of police. Why the indigent young outsider was calling on Shippy at his affluent address remains a mystery, though the chief’s assumption that Averbuch was an anarchist intent on violence became the official verdict. Though he is not Jewish (or, for that matter, Muslim, Serb, or Croat), Vladimir Brik, a sparsely employed writer who left Bosnia for Chicago in 1992, before the war that finally put an end to Yugoslavia as a federated republic, becomes intrigued by the enigmas of the century-old case. Financed by a grant, he determines to write a book that will bring the immigrant Lazarus, like his Biblical namesake, back to life again. As accomplice in his Lazarus project, Brik recruits a former classmate in Sarajevo, a photographer named Ahmed Rora, just as Hemon appropriates the photographs of Velibor Bozovic to accompany his text. Rora, an extroverted, energetic fellow, is

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fond of telling jokes and yarns and uses his camera to insert himself into the lives of oth- Aleksandar Hemon was visiting the ers. Brik determines that in order to under- United States in 1992 when the war in stand and write about Lazarus, who had fled Bosnia prevented him from returning anti-Semitic violence in Europe, he will re- home. He settled in Chicago and began trace Lazarus’s steps before arriving in the mastering English. His first book was United States. “I needed to follow Lazarus the short-story collection The Question all the way back to the pogrom in Kishinev, of Bruno (2000), and his first novel, Nowhere Man (2002), was a finalist for to the time before America,” he explains. “I the National Book Critics Award. needed to reimagine what I could not retrieve; Hemon was awarded a Guggenheim I needed to see what I could not imagine. I Fellowship in 2003 and a MacArthur needed to step outside my life in Chicago and Foundation grant in 2004. spend time deep in the wilderness of else where.” During the eventful journey through Eastern Europe, Rora, who came to Chicago after the Balkan wars, provides Brik with lurid details of violence and duplicity during the siege of Sarajevo. Rora claims he fought in a guerrilla group under the command of a flamboyant bully who called himself Rambo. Himself an immigrant to Chicago from Serbia who was determined to learn English well enough to forge a literary career in it, Hemon deftly deploys his adopted language to create a complex fiction about storytelling, identity, and survival. In chapters that alternate between 1908 and the present, the novel suggests parallels in bloodshed and xenophobia. In each era, a dishonest reporter named Miller provides a distorted version of events. In 1908, William P. Miller, reporting for the Chicago Tribune, sensationalizes the death of Lazarus Averbuch, concocting inflammatory prose that heightens communal mistrust. During the siege of Sarajevo, a war reporter also named Miller is a journalistic buccaneer more intent on getting scoops than getting the story right. Lazarus Averbuch’s killing occurs on the eve of a visit to Chicago by the notorious anarchist leader Emma Goldman, and those with power and privilege, still smarting from the destructive turmoil of the Haymarket Riot of 1886, are suspicious of outsiders, especially if they are poor, Jewish, and freethinking. For most of Chicago, the stranger’s death is framed as a victory over anarchy. Olga Averbuch, however, is devastated by the death of her beloved younger brother, whose move to America she had encouraged and had sponsored. Though the authorities decide to dispose of his body unceremoniously in a pauper’s grave, she stubbornly insists on having him reburied in a respectful Jewish ceremony. She refuses consolation from radicals who, claiming him as a martyr useful to their cause, are indifferent to his individual human life. She is approached by Hermann Taube, an urbane lawyer representing the prosperous, assimilated Jews of Chicago, who urges her to cooperate with the police in order to avert an outbreak of anti-Semitism. Like her brother Lazarus, Olga has survived the deadly Kishinev massacre of 1903, three days of anti-Semitic rioting in which hundreds of houses were looted and destroyed and dozens of Jews were murdered, and Taube warns her that, unless she cooperates, the incident with her brother could incite a similar pogrom in Chicago. However,

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Olga mistrusts him and allows her brother’s friend, Isador Maron, whom the police are pursuing as a dangerous accomplice of the dead Jew, to hide in her apartment. Meanwhile, Brik’s journey through Eastern Europe immerses him in a shabby, squalid world populated by gangsters, cheats, and prostitutes. In the Moldovan capital Chisinau, formerly known as Kishinev, he visits the Jewish cemetery, where a local resident named Iuliana tells him about the atrocities committed against the Jewish community a century ago. He imagines the ordeal that young Lazarus, traumatized by the violence in his native town, experienced as he fled his home for a refugee camp and then moved on, passing through the same route Brik takes, on his way to Chicago. Brik breaks his hand helping Rora beat up an unsavory Romanian pimp named Seryozha who drives them from Chisinau to Bucharest and plans to sell an attractive young woman into prostitution. In addition, Brik witnesses a shooting, with seven bullets, that is every bit as shocking, senseless, and deadly as the shooting that puts an end to Lazarus’s life. “My country’s main exports are stolen cars and sadness,” says Brik, who is a sad specimen of Bosnia’s exports to the United States. He also becomes uncertain of just what his nationality is. Brik’s opening statement (at the beginning of the second chapter, which is the first chapter set in the present tense) announces his divided identity: “I am a reasonably loyal citizen of a couple of countries.” Crosscutting between 1908 and 2008 and between Chicago and Eastern Europe, the structure of Hemon’s novel emphasizes the theme of duality. Ill at ease in Chicago, where he fails to find a satisfying job or way of life, Brik travels back to Europe, describing himself as “ready to enter the parallel universe of iniquity and murder.” When he first settled in the United States, Brik had embraced a vision of human good will. Marrying the American-born Mary, a neurosurgeon who is by profession committed to benevolence, he had tried to share her belief in fundamental goodness. Her conviction, according to Brik, is that: “Humans could not be essentially evil, because they were always infused by God’s infinite goodness and love.” However, though his wife contends that the Americans who tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib were decent but misguided kids, he argues that they were instead sadists who reveled in power over others. Rejecting her willful naïveté, he reports: “I told her that to be American you have to know nothing and understand even less, and that I did not want to be American.” It is in part Brik’s disgust with American innocence that sends him to Europe to confront traces of unmitigated evil, while his wife stays behind in Chicago. Brik’s strained phone calls to Mary indicate that his marriage to her—and to America—is disintegrating, even as he remains estranged from Europe. Rora never abandoned his Bosnian cynicism. “Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it” is his blunt verdict. However, despite—or because of—his grim subject matter, Hemon’s writing style is playful. An example of the dark humor often generated by the linguistic cunning of an author still in awe of a language he has learned as an adult occurs one morning in Chicago. Entering his kitchen in order to make himself some coffee, Brik recalls: “I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS.” Nevertheless, after quickly realizing that the word on the label is not SADNESS but SARDINES, he does not feel relieved to discover his error: “It was too

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late for recovery, for sadness was now the dark matter in the universe of still objects around me: the salt and pepper shakers; the honey jar; the bag of sun-dried tomatoes; the blunt knife; a desiccated loaf of bread; the two coffee cups, waiting.” The Lazarus Project is ultimately a self-begetting novel, a work that recounts its own genesis; it tells the story of how Brik becomes ready to write a work very much like The Lazarus Project. However, it also undermines the credibility of narrative. Scattered throughout the novel are several examples of storytelling that are exposed as shams—the sensational journalism of the two reporters named Miller; the letters that Olga writes to her mother back in Europe to reassure her that everything is fine with Lazarus; Rora’s fabricated adventures in Sarajevo during the war. Can readers trust any storyteller, including Hemon? A parable on how to read The Lazarus Project is inserted in the form of Brik’s recollection of his blind Uncle Mikhal, who used to ask his young nephew to read nonfiction to him. Brik reveals that he delighted in embroidering passages with contrivances of his own, about nonexistent subatomic particles and miraculous survivals of shipwreck. “I would experience a beautiful high,” he recalls, reflecting the exhilaration of authorship, “because I was constructing a particular, custom-made world for him, because he was in my power for as long as he listened to me.” Brik feels guilty about this deception, until he realizes “that my uncle might have been aware of my deception, that he might have been complicit in my edifice-building.” Brik realizes, too, that such complicity can create even richer fictions than those of a mendacious storyteller manipulating a gullible listener. In the larger story that he presents his reader, Brik never solves the mystery of Lazarus nor resolves the dichotomies between America and Europe, past and present. However, in laying bare its own artifice, The Lazarus Project invites a careful reader to participate in an uncommonly invigorating inquest into human malevolence and fallibility. Steven G. Kellman

Review Sources Bookforum 15 (April/May, 2008): 23. Booklist 104, no. 15 (April 1, 2008): 26. Esquire, May, 2008, p. 36. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 5 (March 1, 2008): 211. Library Journal 133, no. 6 (April 1, 2008): 76. New Statesman 137 (August 11, 2008): 50-51. New York 41, no. 17 (May 12, 2008): 70-71. The New York Times Book Review, May 25, 2008, p. 13. The New Yorker 84, no. 22 (July 28, 2008): 82-85. Poets & Writers 36 (July/August, 2008): 61. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 12 (March 24, 2008): 53. The Times Literary Supplement, August 8, 2008, p. 19.

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LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality Author: Martha C. Nussbaum (1947) Publisher: Basic Books (New York). 406 pp. $28.95 Type of work: Law, religion, philosophy, current affairs In a wide-ranging study of the sources and results of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom, a noted philosopher finds a guiding principle in the dual concepts of fairness and of respect for the demands of each individual citizen’s conscience Each era of American history has been wracked by controversy over the limits of religious liberty. Although this matter was supposedly settled by the First Amendment to the Constitution, multiple questions arise over interpretation of its provisions. Although many issues tend to recur regularly in slightly different form, the book’s author, Martha C. Nussbaum, believes that the twenty-first century has seen a subtle trend toward national endorsement of a religious worldview. Liberty of Conscience sprang from the author’s wish to counteract this trend. The First Amendment proscription against the entanglement of church and state is contained in two clauses—the establishment clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”) and the free exercise clause (“or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”). By and large these provisions have served the nation well. However, the relationship between government and faith has always been more problematic than the simple phrase “separation of church and state” implies. This book explores the philosophical basis for these unique American principles and for the conflicts that occur around their margins. Roger Williams is known to most Americans as the founder and first governor of colonial Rhode Island. In a persuasive opening to the book, however, Nussbaum lays out a case for Williams’s thought as the core philosophy behind American thought on the proper relationship between state power and the individual. In his early life, Williams received a classical education and took priestly orders in the Church of England. Uneasy with the treatment being meted out to English dissenters in the 1630’s, he migrated to the New World. At first he found a welcome and a congregation in Salem, but his beliefs got him into trouble with the Massachusetts Bay Colony, too. He was forced to flee to Rhode Island, where he formulated guidelines for a new colony with true religious freedom. Williams’s basic concern was protection for the individual conscience. He equated conscience with the soul, counting it the most distinctive human trait. He had spent much of his early life in settings where not only religious practice but also belief was prescribed by civil authorities. Such compulsion, he said, was “soule rape”—worse than the foulest crimes. Nussbaum notes that this high valuation for individual con-

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science grew out of Protestant thought, but she adds that most religions hold a similar re- Martha Nussbaum holds a spect for each human’s moral faculty. This Distinguished Service Professorship at tradition goes all the way back to the Romans. the University of Chicago, with joint A central feature of Stoic philosophy was its appointments in law, philosophy, and belief that every human, regardless of gender, divinity, and she has written numerous education, or station in life, contains a spark books on topics related to these fields. of the divine in the capacity to make moral Her book The Clash Within (2007) deals with democracy and religious choices. violence in India. Under Williams’s leadership, Rhode Is land was the only American colony that allowed complete religious liberty. In a century when the principle was very much an exception, the colony received two successive royal charters granting such freedoms. It is noteworthy that Charles II, having come to the English throne after unprecedented political-religious chaos, would not risk such leeway in Britain. However, he seems to have harbored some willingness to experiment elsewhere, and faraway Rhode Island benefited. The scope of Williams’s respect for conscience was unusual for his time. He had spent much time with the Narragansett Indians, and hence he realized that religious diversity extended further than the differences that brought English settlers to the New World. The colony’s charter protected not only belief and its expression in opinion but also in acts of worship and other practices, as long as the adherents behaved “peaceablie.” Although Williams was alone among influential colonists of his generation in his concern for everyone’s religious liberties, the colony’s example and Williams’s extensive writings percolated through the intellectual life of all the American colonies. Most settlers of the Middle and Northern colonies had immigrated at least partly for religious freedom, so they could relate to Williams’s sentiments if not to the details. In the century and a half of British presence in North America before nationhood, American political philosophy came to diverge more and more from the European model. Kings and nobles were far away. The church establishments that bolstered their status became increasingly irrelevant. Instead, the concept of equality flourished. A state could not logically support equality if certain citizens were “more equal than others” because of religious affiliation. Williams’s core ideas found an especially receptive audience in the men who framed the Constitution. Their personal belief systems varied widely—the author makes sure to point this out—but all were strongly committed to the ideals of liberty and equality. Even under the relatively weak established churches existing in some colonies, events occurred to show their incompatibility with American values. “Dissenters” could be—and occasionally were—jailed for refusing to pay taxes to support the church. They were routinely excluded from office-holding and also from university entrance. After giving this illuminating background, Nussbaum examines the writing of the First Amendment. She gives little attention to Thomas Jefferson’s part in the Virginia

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Act for Establishing Religious Freedom. Rather, she presents an in-depth study of James Madison’s thought, expressed most powerfully in his “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” (1785). In this essay, Madison argued against any state support for religions, no matter how broadly based or “nonpreferential” it is. The mere fact of state support has the subtle effect of making citizens who belong to religions outside the enumerated ones or to none at all feel excluded. Madison also argued that automatic support tends to make any religious group static, indolent, and bureaucratic. His reasons carried the day, in Virginia against Patrick Henry’s proposal and later on the national scene, when the Bill of Rights was being written in 1789. Madison’s thinking was not entirely incorporated into the First Amendment, however. Nussbaum outlines its various drafts and the issues involved. She notes that the final text is a committee construct. Compromises had to be made with advocates for states that still had established churches. She suggests that its framers left many matters on the margin of church-state relations deliberately vague, relying on the judgment of history to sort them out. The remaining chapters of Liberty of Conscience examine some of the major church-state controversies and court cases that have dotted American history. Nussbaum’s approach is more topical than chronological. Unlike the early section, which is hard if rewarding going for readers not versed in political philosophy, the cases she discusses are likely to ring a bell with the general reader who has an interest in churchstate issues. “Accommodation” is a term for cases where the law may have to bend when it conflicts with citizens’ informed conscience. In a society where matters of employment, education, and military service are increasingly surrounded by regulations with the force of law, such clashes occur often. Nussbaum examines the Sherbert case, a Supreme Court ruling in which unemployment benefits were ultimately granted to a Seventh Day Adventist textile worker who refused to work on Saturday. She also looks at Employment Division v. Smith, a 1990 ruling that denied similar benefits to a Native American drug counselor fired for his sacramental use of peyote during religious rites. The latter decision outraged such a wide cross section of American society that Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Subsequently the Supreme Court took umbrage at this end-run around its decision, and it attempted to nullify the act’s applicability to the states. The issue remains in flux. Accommodation issues have also arisen over Amish schooling, the sanctity of the confessional, and other knotty issues. Under “Fearing Strangers,” the author analyzes controversies pitting “minority” religious groups against the prevailing culture. One example given is Roman Catholic parents’ objections to public school practices, which in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often included the pro forma recitation of Protestant prayers and versions of the Bible. In discussing this issue, Nussbaum states that Catholics have been subjected to the most long-lasting and virulent mistreatment of any group in the United States. She mentions only one relevant case in support of this statement—a school disciplinary case that never reached a court—and gives little other documenta-

Liberty of Conscience / nussbaum

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tion. In light of the country’s past mistreatment of African Americans, American Indians, and other minority groups, this is an astounding statement to find in an otherwise well-reasoned book. In any event, Roman Catholics solved the immediate problem of their children’s indoctrination by creating a system of parochial schools. The persistence of fear-based prejudice ebbed as Catholic immigrants achieved economic power and social status, a process that Mormons are now also undergoing. Mormonism is discussed at length, almost entirely in terms of the late nineteenth century struggle over polygamy. There was a Supreme Court case about Mormon polygamy, Reynolds, brought in 1874. Nussbaum shows that it was argued on chauvinistic and racist grounds that would not be admissible in any court today. She does not note, however, that the Mormons’ status was part of a larger debate about the future of the Western states, only solved by political compromise some two decades later. She also makes a somewhat bizarre argument for the Mormon polygamists on feminist grounds, saying the plight of Mormon plural wives was no worse than that of other married women of the era, who likewise had no independent rights or property. Although in strictly legal terms this may be true, this argument ignores the greater power imbalance in polygynous marriages supported by religion. In subsequent chapters Nussbaum takes a brief look at many recent, recurring controversies. School prayer, public display of religious symbols, and evolution versus creation narratives in public schools are all discussed, with Nussbaum’s analysis usually matching the conclusions of Supreme Court cases and mainstream opinion. One partial exception is her study of the Kiryas Joel Village District case in 1994. This was the episode in which a public-school district was drawn to coincide with a village of the Satmar Orthodox Jewish sect. Many scholars found this an impermissible breach of the separation principle. Nussbaum, on the other hand, describes the extreme problems faced by autistic or otherwise handicapped Satmar children in coping with a regular public-school environment that made no allowance for their naïveté, strange (and hence mockable) dress, and mannerisms, and which thoroughly confused them. Since the law requires public support for disabled children’s education, and since special education teachers cannot be paid from public money while working at parochial schools, Nussbaum concludes that such districting provided equal treatment to children for whom nothing else has worked. At minimum, this is an illuminating sidelight on a difficult case. Liberty of Conscience brings a scholarly perspective on church-state issues to a general audience. Even those not well versed in legal or philosophical arguments can follow the author’s clear explanations and appreciate the “facts behind the headlines” which she offers in discussing newsworthy cases. Her attempt to find a unifying principle to the unique American relationship between church and state is not totally successful, but the effort throws light on its very complexity. Overall, the book is a good introduction to the constantly shifting landscape of church-state jurisprudence. Its main failure is its neglect of historical or sociological factors in the conflicts it explores. This is magnified by some over-the-top statements made without documentation, such as those about Mormon polygamy or about the persecution of Roman Catholics. The text is meticulously documented in the sections on philosophy and on

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Supreme Court decisions, so this lack is strange. It would also have been interesting to read the author’s impressions of current issues, such as the evangelistic presence at the U.S. service academies or present-day Mormon polygamists, but space limitations probably account for such gaps. In a concluding chapter, the author deplores the attacks on religious liberty that have appeared in American politics in recent years. As she has shown, they are nothing new, and on balance Nussbaum is optimistic. She believes that the American people have maintained, and even grown, in their respect for fellow citizens’ rights to follow their own beliefs in a diverse society. Emily Alward

Review Sources America 198, no. 17 (May 19, 2008): 22-23. The American Prospect 19 (May, 2008): 37. Booklist 104, no. 12 (February 15, 2008): 17. First Things 180 (February, 2008): 35. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 23 (December 1, 2007): 1235. Library Journal 133, no. 3 (February 15, 2008): 110. The Nation 286, no. 22 (June 9, 2008): 42-48. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 8 (May 15, 2008): 24-27. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 51 (December 24, 2007): 48.


MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2009 Essay-Reviews of 200 Outstanding Books Published in the United States During 2008

With an Annotated List of Titles

Volume Two Lib-Z Edited by

JOHN D. WILSON STEVEN G. KELLMAN

SALEM PRESS Pasadena, California Hackensack, New Jersey

Cover photo: © Warren Rosenberg/Dreamstime.com

Copyright ©2009, by Salem Press All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews or in the copying of images deemed to be freely licensed or in the public domain. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997). Library of Congress Catalog Card No. ISBN (set): 978-1-58765-547-0 ISBN (vol. 1): 978-1-58765-548-7 ISBN (vol. 2): 978-1-58765-549-4

first printing

printed in canada

CONTENTS

Complete Annotated List of Titles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . li The Library at Night—Alberto Manguel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Life Class—Pat Barker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature—Jonathan Rosen . . Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America— Allen C. Guelzo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Line upon a Wind: The Great War at Sea, 1793-1815—Noel Mostert The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street—Charles Nicholl . . The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia— and How It Died—Philip Jenkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lulu in Marrakech—Diane Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lush Life—Richard Price . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld— Misha Glenny. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn—Solomon Volkov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Man in the Dark—Paul Auster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom— Simon Winchester . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus—Joshua Kendall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maps and Legends—Michael Chabon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Mercy—Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Miracle at Speedy Motors—Alexander McCall Smith . . . . . . . The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry—Adam Kirsch . A Most Wanted Man—John le Carré . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . My Revolutions—Hari Kunzru. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . My Sister, My Love—Joyce Carol Oates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769-1799—Philip Dwyer. . . . . . . . . Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature—David Quammen Nazi Literature in the Americas—Roberto Bolaño. . . . . . . . . . . . . Netherland—Joseph O’Neill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Collected Poems—Eavan Boland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1948: The First Arab-Israeli War—Benny Morris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 581 Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America— Rick Perlstein. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 586 Nothing to Be Frightened Of—Julian Barnes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 591 Old World, New World: Great Britain and America from the Beginning— Kathleen Burk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Olive Kitteridge: A Novel in Stories—Elizabeth Strout . . . . . . . . . . . One More Year: Stories—Sana Krasikov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama— Pico Iyer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Original Sin: A Cultural History—Alan Jacobs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America—Tom Buk-Swienty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories—Tobias Wolff . . . . . . . . A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir—Donald Worster . . People of the Book—Geraldine Brooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Person of Interest—Susan Choi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood—Mark Harris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Plague of Doves—Louise Erdrich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Post-American World—Fareed Zakaria . . . . . . . . . . . . Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography—Stanley Plumly . . . . The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America—Maury Klein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Private Patient—P. D. James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Pyramid—Henning Mankell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian—Scott Douglas . . . . . . . 671 The Reavers—George MacDonald Fraser. . . . . . . . . . . . . Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West—Benazir Bhutto Red Bird—Mary Oliver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45—Max Hastings . . . . Rising, Falling, Hovering—C. D. Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Road Home—Rose Tremain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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675 679 684 688 693 697

Save the Last Dance—Gerald Stern . . . . . . . Say You’re One of Them—Uwem Akpan . . . . Sea of Poppies—Amitav Ghosh . . . . . . . . . The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal—Gore Vidal Selected Poems—Frank O’Hara . . . . . . . . . Shakespeare’s Wife—Germaine Greer . . . . .

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701 705 709 713 717 721

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CONTENTS

The Silver Swan—Benjamin Black. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sitting Bull—Bill Yenne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sleeping It Off in Rapid City: Poems, New and Selected— August Kleinzahler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Solitary Vice: Against Reading—Mikita Brottman . . . . . . . . . . The Soul Thief—Charles Baxter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Spies of Warsaw—Alan Furst . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Step from Death—Larry Woiwode. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Story of a Marriage—Andrew Sean Greer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Story of Edgar Sawtelle—David Wroblewski . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade—Christopher Benfey . . . . . . . . . . Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller—Steve Weinberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America—David Hajdu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century— Philip Bobbitt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . That Little Something—Charles Simic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius—Detlev Claussen . . . . . . . . . There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories—Ch’oe Yun . . . . . . . . . . This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War— Drew Gilpin Faust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)— Tom Vanderbilt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind, and Ecology—Robert Bringhurst 2666—Roberto Bolaño . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Unaccustomed Earth—Jhumpa Lahiri . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 815 The Waitress Was New—Dominique Fabre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wallace Stegner and the American West—Philip L. Fradkin . . . . . . . Wellsprings—Mario Vargas Llosa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir— Haruki Murakami . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . When You Are Engulfed in Flames—David Sedaris . . . . . . . . . . . Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe—James J. Sheehan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson—Brenda Wineapple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The White Tiger—Aravind Adiga . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Widows of Eastwick—John Updike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xlix

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Willie Nelson: An Epic Life—Joe Nick Patoski . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Winter War: Russia’s Invasion of Finland, 1939-40— Robert Edwards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Without Saying: New Poems—Richard Howard . . . . . . . . . . . . Woman’s World—Graham Rawle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Word of the Lord Is upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr.—Jonathan Rieder . . . . . . . . . . . . The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul— Patrick French . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . World War I: The African Front—An Imperial War on the African Continent—Edward Paice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform—Martin J. S. Rudwick. . . . . . . . . . . . . The Writer as Migrant—Ha Jin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . 856 . . . . 861 . . . . 866 . . . . 870 . . . . 874 . . . . 878 . . . . 883 . . . . 888 . . . . 893

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body—Neil Shubin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 897 Biographical Works by Subject. Category Index . . . . . . . . . Title Index . . . . . . . . . . . Author Index . . . . . . . . . .

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903 905 910 913


VOLUME 1 Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life—Kathleen Norris . . . 1 Norris examines the concept of acedia from its ancient understanding in monastic spirituality through its more recent role in philosophy, psychology, literature, and American culture and also in her spiritual, marital, and writing life The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008—Sean Wilentz. . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 A fast-paced, well-documented analysis of the rise of Ronald Reagan, his presidential administration, and his impact on American politics Ajax—Sophocles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 A fast-paced contemporary rendering of Sophocles’ tragedy Alfred Kazin: A Biography—Richard M. Cook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 This first comprehensive literary biography of one of the most notable literary critics of his age chronicles Kazin’s emergence while still in his twenties as a critic of considerable note, and it relates this emergence to the intellectualism that abounded in New York during the 1930’s Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed—Martin Evans and John Phillips . . . . . . 19 A thoughtful and well-researched study that explains clearly why Algerian governments, since independence from France in 1962, have failed to meet the expectations and needs of the vast majority of Algerian Muslims All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems—Linda Gregg . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 This collection of Gregg’s older and new poems incorporates elements of classicism, nature, and contemporary life All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well—Tod Wodicka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Burt Hecker, a widower who has lived his entire life out of step with his family and his surroundings, attempts to find peace as he journeys across Europe in search of his lost son

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All the World’s a Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare—John Reed. . . 31 A conflation of parts of several of Shakespeare’s tragedies formed into a new tragedy with additional dialogue Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof . . .—Roy Blount, Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Underlying this eclectic, hilarious consideration of language is the author’s conviction—with examination and examples—that the meanings of words and their constructions are not arbitrary America America—Ethan Canin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 A young man from a working-class family becomes involved with a wealthy landowner and the senator he is supporting for president in 1972 American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House—Jon Meacham . . . . . . 43 Meacham explores the character of one of America’s early heroes during the years that Jackson served as president of the United States, examining his role in redefining the office of president Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and His World—Jed Perl . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Perl explores history, artistic creation, symbols, and the human condition by examining Antoine Watteau’s paintings. The book, in the form of an alphabet primer or dictionary, elucidates the influence of Watteau and his work The Appeal—John Grisham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 After a Mississippi jury returns a verdict against Krane Chemical for dumping toxic waste into the town of Bowmore’s water supply, the company appeals to the Mississippi Supreme Court, whose newest member has been hand-picked by Krane Chemical Armageddon in Retrospect, and Other New and Unpublished Writings on War and Peace—Kurt Vonnegut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 A collection of short works, primarily fiction, relating to issues surrounding the endings of wars, with special focus on the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in 1945 Atmospheric Disturbances—Rivka Galchen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Galchen’s debut novel chronicles what happens when a psychiatrist becomes convinced that his wife has been replaced by a double Austerity: Britain, 1945-51—David Kynaston. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 The first volume of Tales of a New Jerusalem, a history of Britain from VE Day to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, focuses on the way in which the victorious 1945 Labour government shaped Britain over three decades lii


The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer—David Goldblatt . . . . . . . . 69 Goldblatt’s comprehensive book intertwines the history of soccer with the general political and social history of the countries around the world where soccer has been an important popular sport The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition— Thomas P. Slaughter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 This biography of Quaker saint and social reformer Woolman traces his spiritual development, analyzes the roots of his activism, documents the changes he helped bring about, and recognizes his continuing relevance to issues such as racism, economic justice, cruelty to animals, and simple living Behind My Eyes—Li-Young Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 A profound and haunting collection that touches on isolation, love, loss, and spiritual growth The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century—Steve Coll . . . 83 Coll illuminates the life of Osama Bin Laden by setting it against the rise to unimaginable wealth of his family, builders to the Saudi royal family at a time of unprecedented development The Bishop’s Daughter: A Memoir—Honor Moore. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Moore explores her complex relationship with her father, the revered Episcopal bishop of New York, Paul Moore, Jr., and the impact that his hidden homosexual life had on his priesthood and his family The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Keep the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics—Leonard Susskind. . . . . . . . . . 93 A partly historical, partly autobiographical account of a recent controversy in theoretical physics by one of the physicists involved The Boat—Nam Le. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Le’s first book offers seven short stories that cover the globe and feature an amazingly varied cast of central characters; his plots include assassinations in Colombia, a failed family reunion in New York City, religious festivals in Iran, and escape from Communist Vietnam Books: A Memoir—Larry McMurtry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 A semiautobiographical account of the author’s life as a bookman, providing glimpses into the arcane and complex trade of bookseller and highlighting interesting books, characters, and personages he has known

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The Brass Verdict—Michael Connelly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Connelly’s two sleuths, defense attorney Michael Haller and police detective Harry Bosch, share the spotlight in this novel about the murder of a Hollywood mogul’s wife, her lover, and the film producer’s lawyer Breath—Tim Winton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 A coming-of-age story about a young man who learns about life and death from a guru surfer and his American wife But Didn’t We Have Fun? An Informal History of Baseball’s Pioneer Era, 1843-1870—Peter Morris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 A comprehensive social history of baseball’s formative age when modern rules were codified and fraternal clubs such as New York’s Knickerbockers and Cincinnati’s Red Stockings began to employ professionals Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession—Anne Rice . . . . . . . . . . 120 Rice traces her journey from Catholic believer to atheist to committed Christian in this account of spiritual and literary transformation Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen—Philip Dray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 A study of the Reconstruction of the American South with emphasis on the contributions of black congressmen and other black officials Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan— Donald Keene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 An autobiography concentrating primarily on Keene’s early interest in the Orient, his specialization in Japanese, his role as a translator in World War II, his education at Columbia, Harvard, and Cambridge, his association with Japanese writers and playwrights, as well as his discussion of some of the many books he published The Collected Prose of Robert Frost—Robert Frost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 An intriguing assortment of prose pieces from one of America’s most honored twentieth century poets The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday—Alexander McCall Smith . . . . . . . . . 137 Scottish philosopher Isabel Dalhousie seeks to save the reputation of an Edinburgh physician as she worries about her own relationship with her lover Jamie The Commoner—John Burnham Schwartz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 A commoner who finds that by marrying a prince she has lost her freedom and her identity later helps another woman to escape from the same fate liv


Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction—Amy Laura Hall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 An exploration of Protestant—especially Methodist—popular church literature in the twentieth century, showing significant capitulations to such anti-Christian trends as eugenics, the corporate control of motherhood, and the campaign to present nuclear power as benign and inevitable Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City—Mark Kingwell . . . . . . . . 152 The questions that Kingwell asks in this cultural essay on the transnational global city—New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, Toronto—are “How do cities shape people?” and “How do people shape cities?” The Craftsman—Richard Sennett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 Sennett envisions a material culture in which human beings—through better understanding the process of making things—can skillfully craft their own places in the world Credit and Blame—Charles Tilly. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 This study of giving and receiving credit and blame places an emphasis on the relationship between those who assign and receive credit and those who assign and receive blame, essentially defining such relationships as ultimately seeking justice in human relationships The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball— Nicholas Dawidoff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 Dawidoff’s autobiographical coverage of his attempt, through an identification with the Red Sox and with literary characters, to cope with his absentee father Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories—Steven Millhauser . . . . . . . . . . . 170 Millhauser’s eclectic collection of short fiction, ranging from accounts of towers built to heaven to stories about uncontrollable laughter The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals—Jane Mayer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 An account of the events and personages of the United States’ interrogation policies of the “war on terror” in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 David Mamet: A Life in the Theatre—Ira Nadel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 The first full-length biography of a prominent contemporary American dramatist, who is also the writer of screenplays, novels, essays, and children’s books

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Day—A. L. Kennedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 A former Royal Air Force sergeant looks back on his life in order to see a way, if any, ahead The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction—Charles Lane . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 A compelling and scholarly account of the brutal killings of more than sixty African Americans, the criminal convictions of three white supremacists, and the overturning of their convictions by the U.S. Supreme Court Death with Interruptions—José Saramago . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 Saramago offers a fictional exploration of what life would be like in a country where people suddenly stopped dying; from this simple premise, the story touches a great many aspects of modern society, suggesting that a world without death would not be as perfect as might be supposed Delusion: A Novel of Suspense—Peter Abrahams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198 A woman and her family struggle with the repercussions of a testimony that put an innocent man behind bars for murder when that man is set free De Niro’s Game—Rawi Hage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202 Best friends since childhood, two young men come of age in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war; only one escapes as brutality, criminality, and betrayal bring their relationship to a tragic end Design in the Age of Darwin: From William Morris to Frank Lloyd Wright—Stephen F. Eisenman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 A book of essays and photographs of objects that explores the interaction of design and the concepts of evolution in nineteenth century England and the United States The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler— Leslie Fiedler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 This sampling of Fiedler’s criticism shows how he anticipated recent trends in literary analysis and studies of popular culture Diary of a Bad Year—J. M. Coetzee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 This novel fuses three narratives into one, describing the writing process and examining relationships among neighbors, coworkers, lovers, and generations. Coetzee takes advantage of the physical paper by placing each story on the same page and separating it by a single line

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Dictation: A Quartet—Cynthia Ozick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 Four long stories link several themes characteristic of the author’s work in both her fiction and her literary criticism Did Lincoln Own Slaves? And Other Frequently Asked Questions About Abraham Lincoln—Gerald J. Prokopowicz . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Informal but nonetheless authoritative study of President Lincoln written in the form of question-and-answer discussions by a noted scholar The Draining Lake—Arnaldur Indriðason . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 This Nordic crime fiction deftly solves the mystery at its center and also reveals the inner turmoil of its characters Eternal Enemies—Adam Zagajewski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234 The enemies named in Zagajewski’s title are love and time, enemies which the poet reconciles in this meditative collection of poems that moves the reader through many places and people he has loved Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard— Richard Brody . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 A biography of the French film director that places particular emphasis on how life and art are commingled in the methods he has used to produce one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary cinema Experiments in Ethics—Kwame Anthony Appiah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 The author looks at traditional theories of ethics and their contemporary relevance through the lens of empirical research in the social sciences The Eye of the Leopard—Henning Mankell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Shifting between Africa and Sweden, this novel explores the interplay between destiny and choice Fault Lines—Nancy Huston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 Psychological trauma is engendered and replicated within a single family over four generations as a consequence of a Nazi project that uprooted children from homelands occupied by the Germans during World War II Fidelity—Grace Paley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255 In plainspoken but often witty poetic style, Paley comments on growing old, loss of family and friends, her own illness and death, feminism, war and peace, and hope for the future

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Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3—E. Annie Proulx . . . . . . . . . 260 Proulx’s third collection of Wyoming-based fiction adds to her impressive repertoire, with more stories from an author who knows the hardscrabble West Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems—Mark Doty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264 This collection combines twenty-three new poems and a selection of Doty’s best poems from seven previous volumes Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater—William F. Buckley, Jr.. . . . . 269 Buckley’s posthumously published book describes the “grand time” that he and Goldwater had leading the counterrevolution against the orthodoxies of the Left and against those Republicans the two conservative stalwarts perceived as accommodating those orthodoxies The Forever War—Dexter Filkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 Prizewinning New York Times correspondent Filkins presents a compelling and brilliantly written account of his experiences reporting on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America—Steven Waldman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278 An examination of the Founding Fathers’ relationship to their faiths and the growth of religious tolerance in the United States Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II—Stanley G. Payne . . . 283 Payne, an authority on European fascism and the history of modern Spain, debunks conventional wisdom about Spanish neutrality during World War II, documenting Francisco Franco’s admiration for Adolf Hitler, Spain’s alliance with the Third Reich, and its ambivalence toward Jews facing Nazi annihilation A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties— Suze Rotolo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288 A touching memoir of Greenwich Village during the 1960’s through the eyes of Bob Dylan’s girlfriend at the time Friends of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeuscz Kokciuszko, and Agrippa Hull—A Tale of Three Patriots, Two Revolutions, and a Tragic Betrayal of Freedom in the New Nation— Gary B. Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292 The authors examine Kokciuszko’s relationships with Jefferson and Hull, focusing on their ideas and actions regarding slavery in the early American republic, with Hull’s life providing a fascinating example of the black experience in those years lviii


The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession—Adam Leith Gollner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 Gollner travels around the world in search of exotic fruits largely unknown in North America, and explores the scientific, historical and sociological origins of fruits and of humans’ obsession with them Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life—Paul Mariani. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 Mariani’s critical biography examines the literary and religious commitments that led Hopkins to his extraordinary poetics and to his insistence on the efficacy of God’s love The Ghost in Love—Jonathan Carroll. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 When Benjamin Gould refuses to die at his appointed time, he takes control of his own destiny with all of its idiosyncrasies The Given Day—Dennis Lehane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310 Lehane’s eighth novel and first foray into historical fiction is an epic-length saga of political and social unrest in 1919 Boston, a city plagued by influenza, reeling from the implications of World War I, terrorized by anarchist bombings, and bracing for an impending police strike God and Race in American Politics: A Short History—Mark A. Noll . . . . . . 315 A relatively short survey of the interconnections among race, religion, and politics in the history of the United States Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres—Ruth Brandon. . . . 320 Brandon gives an account, based on the lives of six women, of the demographic, economic, and social forces that led to the rise and fall of the governess, who thrived in England from the beginning of the nineteenth century into the twentieth century Gustav Mahler: A New Life Cut Short (1907-1911)— Henry-Louis de La Grange. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 In this culminating volume of his monumental biography of Mahler, La Grange gives a painstakingly detailed, revisionist account of the musical genius’s work as the conductor at the Metropolitan Opera and for the New York Philharmonic and as the composer of such momentous creations as Das Lied von der Erde and Symphony No. 9 The Hakawati—Rabih Alameddine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330 Upon his return home to Lebanon, the narrator is inspired to recount stories from his family history and to retell ancient Arabic tales that are an integral part of his heritage lix


Happy Trails to You—Julie Hecht . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 The female narrator, a professional photographer putting together a collection of her work, tries to cope with the modern world and the unwelcome changes coming to Nantucket Island Havana Gold—Leonardo Padura . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340 In Padura’s second novel in his Havana Quartet featuring Lieutenant Conde, the policeman must find the rapist and murderer of a teacher in the high school that Conde had attended years earlier The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family— Annette Gordon-Reed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344 A landmark work of history and biography, reconstructing not only the history of an African American family born into slavery but also the emotional life of the slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson, who presided over so much of the family’s destiny His Illegal Self—Peter Carey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349 The story of a young boy taken from his privileged New York City life to a life among 1960’s rebels and hippies on the run from American and Australian authorities A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances, and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century—John Burrow . . . 354 A history of the writing of history, from the first Greek historians to the major trends in history writing of the late twentieth century Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life— Timothy W. Ryback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358 Of the sixteen thousand books owned by Adolf Hitler, some twelve hundred reside in the Library of Congress, and another eighty at Brown University; Ryback analyzes the books that defined and directed the development of Hitler’s major attitudes and beliefs Home—Marilynne Robinson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363 This companion to Robinson’s novel Gilead recounts the Boughton family’s struggle for reconciliation and healing amid disappointed hope and irretrievable loss Homecoming—Bernhard Schlink . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368 A German man born in 1945 and raised after World War II struggles to make a life for himself while pursuing clues that his supposedly dead Nazi father lives on, clues that eventually lead to the highest circle of American academia

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Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God, and Diversity on Steroids—Julie Salamon . . . . . . . . . 373 Salamon’s account of a year in the life of Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, told through the lives of administrators, doctors, staff, and patients, captures the day-to-day drama of large metropolitan hospitals, struggling to survive in a broken health care system The House on Fortune Street—Margot Livesey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 378 Two young women and two men are variously defeated in the pursuit of ideal love How Fiction Works—James Wood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 382 Rather than suggesting how aspiring fiction writers should write, Wood, by engaging in close, analytical readings of representative passages from their writing, analyzes how a broad spectrum of writers from ancient times to the current century write Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching—Paula J. Giddings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387 A comprehensive biography of this journalist, lecturer, feminist, reformer, and public intellectual, a forceful advocate of civil rights, social justice, woman suffrage, and the antilynching cause, that provides an overview of Jim Crow racial violence and African American citizenship and activism in the post-Reconstruction and Progressive eras I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted—A Memoir— Jennifer Finney Boylan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 392 Boylan’s touching but humorous account of growing up as a young male haunted by the secret knowledge of his true female identity In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto—Michael Pollan . . . . . . . . . . 396 Pollan offers a different way to think about food, and he exposes the belief system he calls “nutritionism,” an ideology that benefits the food industry and the nutrition industry at the cost of human physical and spiritual health Indignation—Philip Roth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401 Setting his story against the background of the Korean War, Roth tells of a young man whose single-mindedness, ambition, and naïveté render him vulnerable to a series of increasingly disastrous mishaps Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier—Timothy J. Shannon. . . 406 Shannon describes how this Indian Confederacy used diplomacy with the French and British to further its own interests

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It’s Go in Horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006—Leslie Scalapino . . . . . 411 A startling and distinctive selection of poetry from one of America’s most innovative contemporary poets The Jew of Culture: Freud, Moses, and Modernity—Philip Rieff . . . . . . . . 415 The final volume of Rieff’s Sacred Order/Social Order trilogy, this book presents a selection of Rieff’s writings from the early 1950’s through the 1990’s loosely organized around the theme of “the Jew of Culture” as an ideal type in Rieff’s vision of the nature of social order John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought—Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419 An exacting account of Milton’s life that reshapes conceptions of the man, as a thinker, a political and religious activist, and a poet Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of the American Revolution—Jerome Charyn . . . . 424 This novel depicts both imaginary and real characters of the Revolutionary War era, providing unique insights and three-dimensional characterizations of major historical figures Just After Sunset: Stories—Stephen King . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 428 A collection of thirteen stories by King, twelve of which originally appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Postscripts, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other magazines and anthologies between 1977 and 2008 and one that first appears in this book Knockemstiff—Donald Ray Pollock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 433 Eighteen loosely connected stories about the desperate underclass denizens of a backwater Appalachian town in southern Ohio The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed—Michael Meyer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 437 The experiences of a Peace Corps teacher who stayed on in Beijing and witnessed the preparations for the Olympics in 2008 The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman’s Fight to Save the World’s Most Beautiful Bird—Bruce Barcott . . . . . . . . . . . . . 442 An exploration of the environmental, economic, and political forces involved in an attempt to save a river, its valley, plants, and wildlife from a dam and the lake it would impound

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Lavinia—Ursula K. Le Guin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447 A back story from Vergil’s Aeneid is transformed into the fictional autobiography of the Italian princess who became the bride of the Trojan Aeneas after a bitter war for her hand on Italian soil The Lazarus Project—Aleksandar Hemon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 452 Hemon’s second novel uses alternating chapters to tell the story of a Jewish refugee killed by the chief of police in Chicago in 1908 and a contemporary Bosnian immigrant who retraces the young Jew’s steps through Eastern Europe Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality—Martha C. Nussbaum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 456 In a wide-ranging study of the sources and results of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom, a noted philosopher finds a guiding principle in the dual concepts of fairness and of respect for the demands of each individual citizen’s conscience

VOLUME 2 The Library at Night—Alberto Manguel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 461 In this collection of bookish essays, Manguel explores the fascinating life of libraries from antiquity to the present Life Class—Pat Barker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465 Novelist Barker returns to a World War I setting in this story of a small group of art students in London who have their assumptions about art and life called into question by the arrival of the Great War The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature—Jonathan Rosen . . . . . 469 In his exploration of bird watching and its interaction with and impact on everything else in life, Rosen explores many aspects of his life, putting them into a perspective obtained from watching birds Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America— Allen C. Guelzo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 474 In a series of seven debates over a period of four months, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, candidates for an Illinois seat in Congress, defined the issues which in less than three years would result in civil war, with Lincoln taking the first steps which would lead to his becoming a national figure

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The Line upon a Wind: The Great War at Sea, 1793-1815—Noel Mostert . . . 479 A naval history of Britain’s wars with France and the United States during the Napoleonic period, with an emphasis on tactical developments The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street—Charles Nicholl . . . . . 483 In his sixth book about the writers of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, journalist Nicholl explores the nuances of a legal deposition that William Shakespeare made at the end of his career, a record of the only words he is known to have spoken offstage The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia— and How It Died—Philip Jenkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 488 A history of the often-overlooked Eastern Christians, a third branch of Christianity as influential and pervasive during the first millennium of the faith as Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism became in later Christian history Lulu in Marrakech—Diane Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 494 In this novel, Johnson examines the cultural clashes among French, American, English, and Islamic residents and visitors in contemporary Morocco from the perspective of Lulu Sawyer, spy Lush Life—Richard Price . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 498 The two worlds of contemporary urban life in Manhattan’s Lower East side collide when a jumpy Latino teenager murders a young white would-be hipster during a mugging gone wrong McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld— Misha Glenny. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 503 Glenny describes the operations of organized crime elements throughout all parts of the world and examines the causes and consequences of their activities and their impact on governments and law-abiding citizens The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn—Solomon Volkov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 508 Volkov describes the often contentious relationship between government leaders and practitioners of the literary, visual, and performing arts during the turbulent century in which the Soviet Union rose and fell Man in the Dark—Paul Auster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 513 A seventy-two-year-old widower, living with his daughter and granddaughter, suffers from insomnia and invents stories as he lies awake in the dark

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The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom— Simon Winchester . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 518 A biography of Joseph Needham, the world’s leading figure in the historiography of Chinese science The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus—Joshua Kendall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 523 A biography of the physician who created the English-speaking world’s most successful thesaurus by attempting to classify and quantify everything in the known world Maps and Legends—Michael Chabon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 528 A collection of essays examining different facets of genre fiction, sometimes presented as literary criticism and sometimes as autobiography A Mercy—Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 532 Morrison’s ninth novel explores the lives of a range of women and men—some free, some enslaved—in the American colonies of the late seventeenth century The Miracle at Speedy Motors—Alexander McCall Smith . . . . . . . . . . . 537 In this ninth novel in the series that began with McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Mma Ramotswe has several problems to contend with, including a woman who is looking for her family The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry—Adam Kirsch . . . . . 541 This collection of twenty-six previously published critical essays offers perceptive, hard-hitting commentary on poetry written in English during the postmodern period and on many of the leading poets A Most Wanted Man—John le Carré . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 545 Le Carré’s twenty-first novel of international intrigue and espionage, focusing on the human cost of the “war on terror” and the practice of “extraordinary rendition” My Revolutions—Hari Kunzru. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 550 A historically based novel whose major characters were centrally involved in the anti-Vietnam War protests in London in the late 1960’s; the main action of the novel is set in the last decade of the twentieth century, with orchestrated flashbacks and updates

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My Sister, My Love—Joyce Carol Oates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 554 Oates weaves the story of an unsolved child murder into a portrait of modern American consumer culture and the families caught up in it Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769-1799—Philip Dwyer. . . . . . . . . . . . 558 Dwyer presents a compelling picture of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, portraying him as an opportunist reacting to events and cleverly shaping his heroic image through the mass media Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature—David Quammen . . . 563 A new edition of Quammen’s 1985 collection of essays on nature, scientists, the history of science, and human interaction with the environment Nazi Literature in the Americas—Roberto Bolaño. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 567 This fictional literary encyclopedia of invented North and South American fascist authors includes the lives, works, creative significance, and historical context of these imaginary figures Netherland—Joseph O’Neill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 572 A Dutch banker struggles to move forward with his family in post-9/11 New York New Collected Poems—Eavan Boland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 576 An inclusive edition of Boland’s poetry, containing all the poems in nine previous volumes, reversing exclusions from the Selected Poems, adding two books that were not included in an earlier Collected Poems, and containing a brief excerpt from an unpublished verse play 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War—Benny Morris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 581 Considered by some as a “revisionist” historian, Morris addresses both the military conflict that followed the declaration of the State of Israel and the underlying politics driving both the Jewish and Arab antagonists Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America— Rick Perlstein. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 586 An insightful examination of forces that polarized America, commencing with the mid-1960’s urban riots and the escalation of the war in Vietnam, making possible the amazing political comeback of cunning, tormented Richard M. Nixon and culminating in his 1972 landslide reelection victory Nothing to Be Frightened Of—Julian Barnes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 591 By embarking on a thoughtful journey through his family background and intellectual history, Barnes gradually zeroes in on the causes of his lifelong fear of what will happen when he dies lxvi


Old World, New World: Great Britain and America from the Beginning— Kathleen Burk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 596 A large and comprehensive narrative account of the cultural, economic, and diplomatic relations between Americans and the British, from John Cabot’s explorations of North America of 1497 until the Iraq War of the early twenty-first century Olive Kitteridge: A Novel in Stories—Elizabeth Strout . . . . . . . . . . . . . 601 The title character, a prickly, outspoken woman, plays a major role in this collection, which deals with the lives and the relationships of the people who live in a small Maine town One More Year: Stories—Sana Krasikov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 605 Krasikov’s first collection of short stories depicts experiences and travails of immigrants from Georgia and Russia, torn between their native country and the new one The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama— Pico Iyer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609 Iyer traces the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s life from their first meeting in 1974, describing the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism’s activities in Dharamsala, India, and in his worldwide travels Original Sin: A Cultural History—Alan Jacobs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 613 The author samples beliefs about the origins and nature of sin in cultures from the ancients to contemporary sages The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America—Tom Buk-Swienty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 617 A life of Riis, whose articles, books, and photographs taught the American public about abysmal immigrant living conditions, helping spur urban reform in the Progressive Era Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories—Tobias Wolff . . . . . . . . . . 622 A selection of stories from Wolff’s previous collections, along with ten previously uncollected new stories A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir—Donald Worster . . . . . . . . 626 A definitive new biography of one of the United States’ foremost naturalists, conservationists, and environmentalists People of the Book—Geraldine Brooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 631 A valuable Jewish manuscript, dating from medieval Spain, has been preserved at the National Museum in Sarajevo, Bosnia; this fictional story imagines how the book might have survived through five hundred years of historical turmoil lxvii


A Person of Interest—Susan Choi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 636 Choi’s story of a professor, whose life changes dramatically when a colleague is killed in the adjoining office and he becomes a “person of interest” to the federal agents trying to identify who mailed the deadly bomb Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood—Mark Harris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 640 Five films released in 1967 reflect major changes in Hollywood The Plague of Doves—Louise Erdrich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 645 The long-ago slaughter of a white family casts a shadow over the inhabitants of a small North Dakota town and the nearby Ojibwa reservation The Post-American World—Fareed Zakaria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 649 Newsweek editor-columnist Zakaria presents a breathtaking picture of the emergence of the non-West to create a rich composite of the two hemispheres; his welltitled book envisages not the United States’ decline but the gradual suspension of hegemony for accommodation to what he calls the global “stakeholders in the new order” Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography—Stanley Plumly . . . . . . . . . . 653 Plumly’s meditation on the final eighteen months of John Keats’s life and posthumous reputation brings the dying poet and his work to life The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America—Maury Klein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 657 A panoramic history of the development and application of steam power and electric power, with biographic information on leading figures and attention to social, economic, financial, and technological dimensions The Private Patient—P. D. James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 662 The eighteenth crime novel by the “Queen of Detective Fiction” features James’s recurring detective team and includes the distinguished octogenerian author’s insights into old age’s redefinition of self, reflecting a continuing refinement of her elegant, restrained prose style that accords perfectly with the subject matter The Pyramid—Henning Mankell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 667 Although the first Kurt Wallander mystery appeared in 1991, these five stories cover the years between 1969 and 1989 and present Wallander as a young policeman by illustrating some of the cases that made him into a master detective

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Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian—Scott Douglas . . . . . . . 671 Douglas writes about his personal transition from aimless college student to professional librarian during a time when libraries and librarianship are also experiencing a critical transition The Reavers—George MacDonald Fraser. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 675 In a comic novel marked by wordplay, anachronisms, and outlandish events, the Scots and the English unite to defeat a vicious Spanish plot Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West—Benazir Bhutto . . . . . . . 679 Bhutto’s vision for reconciling differences within the Muslim world and between the Muslim world and the West was finished just days before her assassination in December, 2007 Red Bird—Mary Oliver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 684 In this collection of sixty-one new poems, well-known poet and nature writer Oliver observes the Cape Cod landscape from the perspective of her seventy years, encompassing love and loss, happiness, and grief Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45—Max Hastings . . . . . . . . . . . 688 Japan was losing the war, and Japanese intransigence, arrogance, and brutality were bringing retribution Rising, Falling, Hovering—C. D. Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 693 Wright blends motifs of her private life and details from a trip to Mexico to create a vehicle through which to express her anguish and rage over the U.S. war in Iraq The Road Home—Rose Tremain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 697 An immigrant tries to adjust to his new surroundings despite his yearning for the home and the family he left behind Save the Last Dance—Gerald Stern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 701 Stern’s lyrical poems delve into the diffuse worlds of dreams and memory, dwelling especially on feelings of vacancy and loss Say You’re One of Them—Uwem Akpan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 705 Akpan’s stunning collection reflects the unspeakable events that have taken place in some modern African nations, as perceived through the eyes of children

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Sea of Poppies—Amitav Ghosh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 709 The lives of Deeti, Zachary Reid, Paulette Lambert, and Raja Neel Rattan Halder become intertwined as their various paths lead them to the ship Ibis bound for Mauritius with a cargo of indentured laborers The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal—Gore Vidal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 713 A choice collection of works from one of the United States’ most prolific and provocative writers Selected Poems—Frank O’Hara . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 717 O’Hara wrote electric poetry expressing the spirit of the mid-twentieth century New York art world, and this new selection of his work showcases his unique gift Shakespeare’s Wife—Germaine Greer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 721 Greer recounts what is known about the life of Ann Hathaway, who became Ann Shakespeare, and speculates on other possibilities that her life might have included The Silver Swan—Benjamin Black. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 725 The husband of a drowned woman implores an old schoolmate to ignore protocol and suspend an autopsy on the body, which leads the doctor into a private criminal investigation that produces unexpected results Sitting Bull—Bill Yenne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 729 A narrative account of the life and times of Sitting Bull, probably the best-known Native American leader of all time Sleeping It Off in Rapid City: Poems, New and Selected— August Kleinzahler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 734 A probing and blunt collection from a poet whose restless spirit has taken him to various spots around the world The Solitary Vice: Against Reading—Mikita Brottman . . . . . . . . . . . . . 738 Brottman takes aim at the glorification of reading, suggesting that books (at least some books) are not as good as some people make them out to be The Soul Thief—Charles Baxter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 742 Divided into four parts, the novel follows the course of a single character from graduate school until middle age in an effort to examine the notion that identity theft may be as much an internal as an external threat

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The Spies of Warsaw—Alan Furst . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 747 Furst weaves a complicated and rich web of spies, passion, and intrigue in the period immediately preceding World War II A Step from Death—Larry Woiwode. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 751 Woiwode’s memoir juxtaposes a series of traumatic accidents against the composition of his most important novel, Beyond the Bedroom Wall The Story of a Marriage—Andrew Sean Greer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 755 An unusual triangle is at the center of this novel about love and war, told from the point of view of a black woman transplanted from a Midwestern farming community to the city The Story of Edgar Sawtelle—David Wroblewski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 759 The mute Sawtelle grows up in rural Wisconsin, helping his parents raise and train highly intelligent dogs A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade—Christopher Benfey . . . . . . . . . . . . . 764 Benfey describes the intersecting lives of some of the most famous American writers and artists of the Gilded Age, and he examines their artistic responses to the changing post-Civil War world Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller—Steve Weinberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 769 This dual biography traces the trajectories of two great American lives and their collision over the proper role of business in the nation’s economy, politics, and morality The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America—David Hajdu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 774 Hajdu describes the suppression of comic books in the immediate aftermath of World War II Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century— Philip Bobbitt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 779 Bobbitt argues that the nature of terrorism is largely misunderstood because it is adapting to globalization and to the market orientation of the terrorists’ primary target, secular democracies

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That Little Something—Charles Simic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 783 An accomplished poet of the vaguely ominous moves closer to the dark heart of history and human behavior Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius—Detlev Claussen . . . . . . . . . . . . 788 A student of Adorno at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in the 1960’s, Claussen has written a sweeping survey of Adorno’s career and valuable accounts of many of Adorno’s associates There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories—Ch’oe Yun . . . . . . . . . . . . . 793 Three lyrical stories by one of South Korea’s most respected writers This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War— Drew Gilpin Faust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 797 An examination of how the unprecedented carnage caused by the Civil War changed the American perceptions of death and dying Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)— Tom Vanderbilt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 801 Vanderbilt draws upon wide-ranging research to describe the complexity of traffic, the technology and infrastructure making it possible, and the often ill-advised behavior of drivers The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind, and Ecology—Robert Bringhurst . . . 805 Thirteen lectures delivered by Canadian poet, translator, and linguist Bringhurst at universities and academic institutions cover the relationship of Native American oral literature to other world literatures, emphasizing their unappreciated similarities, their narrative methods, their prosody and literary form, and their connections to the natural world 2666—Roberto Bolaño . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 810 Bolaño’s five-part saga centers on the vicious murders of young women in a northern Mexican city and the life of a mysterious German writer, Benno von Archimboldi Unaccustomed Earth—Jhumpa Lahiri . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 815 An exquisite collection of eight stories focusing on the Indian diaspora in generation 1.5, those who were either born in the United States or immigrated as young children The Waitress Was New—Dominique Fabre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 819 In Fabre’s novel, Pierre, the barman at Le Cercle, recounts the events of his final three days at the café, during which his entire lifestyle slips away from him lxxii


Wallace Stegner and the American West—Philip L. Fradkin . . . . . . . . . . 823 Fradkin’s detailed study of Stegner includes valuable discussions of the American West, conservation, Western writers, and the relationship between region and literature Wellsprings—Mario Vargas Llosa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 827 In seven essays, Peruvian novelist and essayist Vargas Llosa critically examines the literary, cultural, and political “wellsprings” of his work What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir— Haruki Murakami . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 831 A famous Japanese novelist describes how his lives as a distance runner and a writer overlap When You Are Engulfed in Flames—David Sedaris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 835 A collection of autobiographical essays that reveal absurdity in the mundane Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe—James J. Sheehan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 839 Sheehan examines the radical shift of Western Europe after World War II from a collection of competitive, warring states to an interconnective, peaceful society White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson—Brenda Wineapple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 843 Wineapple traces the friendship between Emily Dickinson, the reclusive poet of Amherst, Massachusetts, and her more worldly friend, the older, former pastor, soldier, essayist, and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson The White Tiger—Aravind Adiga . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 847 Adiga’s compelling story of the coming of age of a young man caught in the tension between wealth and poverty in a newly globalized India examines deeply questions about human nature and its struggles with good and evil, justice and injustice, equality and inequality The Widows of Eastwick—John Updike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 851 In his final novel, Updike continues the story of the women first introduced to readers in The Witches of Eastwick, tracing their lives as they return to Eastwick and attempt to atone in some ways for their past transgressions Willie Nelson: An Epic Life—Joe Nick Patoski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 856 A country-western music journalist with thirty-five years of experience writing about Willie Nelson tells the singer’s epic story lxxiii


The Winter War: Russia’s Invasion of Finland, 1939-40— Robert Edwards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 861 Edwards explores in daunting detail the events, political and social, that led up to Russia’s invasion of Finland in 1939 and the ensuing war that lasted from late November, 1939, until March 12, 1940 Without Saying: New Poems—Richard Howard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 866 In his fourteenth collection of poetry, Howard provides more of his famous dramatic monologues, supplemented by a number of other poems filled with wit and wordplay Woman’s World—Graham Rawle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 870 A cutup novel of a 1960’s British woman with a terrible secret The Word of the Lord Is upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr.—Jonathan Rieder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 874 An exploration of the various modes of speaking that King employed in communicating in particular situations, with a special emphasis upon distinctions between public and private, black and white audiences The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul— Patrick French . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 878 This authorized biography of Naipaul—an East Indian, West Indian Trinidadian turned British citizen of the world—examines his life and canon set against the history of colonialism as he moved from island scholarship lad to Oxford graduate to controversial author and Nobel Prize winner World War I: The African Front—An Imperial War on the African Continent—Edward Paice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 883 Paice describes a grueling campaign of World War I on a nearly forgotten front, East Africa Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform—Martin J. S. Rudwick. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 888 Through an analysis of the work of such scientists as Charles Lyell, Rudwick shows how geologists, through their discoveries and search for causes, constructed an accurate, consistent, and enlightening history of the earth with a periodization and directional sweep characteristic of the reconstructive histories of ancient Greece and Rome

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The Writer as Migrant—Ha Jin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 893 A collection of three essays, originally delivered as lectures, by Ha Jin, who is an eminent immigrant translingual writer, on writers like himself who have moved between countries and languages Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body—Neil Shubin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 897 Retracing studies in paleontology, genetics, and cellular and molecular biology, Shubin draws upon his own experiences and the history of seminal experiments to demonstrate how mammalian anatomy can be traced back to the anatomy of fishes living between three and four billion years ago

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THE LIBRARY AT NIGHT Author: Alberto Manguel (1948) First published: 2006, in Canada Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). Illustrated. 376 pp. $27.50 Type of work: Essays, literary history In this collection of bookish essays, Manguel explores the fascinating life of libraries from antiquity to the present In 2002 Alberto Manguel, son of the former Argentine ambassador to Israel and longtime bibliophile, moved to a French village south of the Loire. Here, adjacent to his fifteenth century rectory, Le Presbytère, he rebuilt a dilapidated stone barn into a proper home for his thirty thousand books gathered throughout his life. During the day, he works in his library; at night he reads and listens to the ghosts whispering from the shelves. The fifteen essays in The Library at Night reflect on his personal collection and on libraries in general. Much of the opening chapter, “The Library as Myth,” discusses the greatest library in antiquity, that of Alexandria. Here Ptolemy I created an institution that he and his successors hoped would embody the memory of humanity. Whenever a ship docked at the port, agents of the ruler would search for manuscripts, which would be seized and copied. The copy, likely to contain scribal errors, would then be returned to the owner and the original kept. Ptolemy III Euergetes borrowed from Athens the official texts of the city’s tragedians, including the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. To secure these, he gave the large security of fifteen gold talents. He then made copies of these plays, kept the originals, and returned the transcriptions, gladly forfeiting his deposit. However, as Manguel notes, of this attempt to enshrine the thoughts of the world, nothing remains: not a single manuscript, not even a sense of what the building that housed them looked like. Judging from the fragmentary remains of the Pinakes of Callimachus, that library probably was organized by genre, such as epic or tragedy or philosophy. In “The Library as Order” Manguel discusses his own various efforts to sort his collection. As a child he owned about a hundred volumes, which he repeatedly rearranged: by height, by subject, by language, by color, and, most logical of all, by the degree of his affection for them. All these methods, except perhaps the last, have historical antecedents. The author Valéry Larbaud had his books bound in different colors to indicate the language in which they were written. In the third century c.e., the Chinese Imperial Library used a similar color-coded scheme: green bindings for canonical or classical texts, red for history, blue for philosophy, and gray for literature. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Harvard University’s library and the three thousand volumes of the seventeenth century diarist Samuel Pepys were organized by height. Nov-

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elist George Perec listed a dozen ways to arrange books, including by alphabet, by date of purchase, by date of publication, by language, and by the owner’s reading preferences. As Manguel points out in “The Library as Space,” regardless of the order one chooses, books always outgrow their allotted bound aries and so require new arrangements. To cope with this problem, the poet Lionel Johnson suspended shelves from his ceiling like chandeliers. Manguel tells of a friend who devised four-sided rotating bookcases. Even the largest tax-funded institutions confront “biblio-congestion” and have turned to technology for a solution that Manguel, along with Nicholson Baker in his book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001), reveals as sadly unsatisfactory. The Library of Congress and the British Library have tranferred to microfilm long runs of old newspapers and then discarded the originals, only to discover that the copies are incomplete. Moreover, the shelf life of microfilm is questionable. Even more problematic are computer files. Manguel points out with grim satisfaction that the 1986 computerized copy of the eleventh century Domesday Book was unreadable by 2002, whereas the thousand-year-old original can still be consulted without difficulty. Another way to cope with the question of space is to restrict holdings, a method Manguel considers in “The Library as Power.” He tells of the seventeenth century mathematician, philosopher, and librarian Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, coinventor of calculus, who argued for the collecting of only scientific books. Leibnitz also favored small books because they required less shelf space. Callimachus had expressed the same sentiment two thousand years earlier, writing Mega biblion, mega kakon, (a great book is a great evil), reflecting his dislike of unwieldy scrolls. In the next chapter, “The Library as Shadow,” Manguel examines examples of biblioclasm, such as the destruction of the texts of the Incas and Aztecs by the proselytizing Europeans. He includes pictures of book-burnings in Nazi Germany and in Warsaw, Indiana. He returns to this subject later in “The Library as Oblivion.” He describes the destruction of the Turgenev Library, established in Paris in 1875 by the Russian expatriate novelist Ivan Turgenev for émigré students from his homeland. According to the novelist Nina Berberova, it was the finest Russian library outside Russia; it has vanished. In 2003, in the aftermath of the American invasion of Iraq, that country’s national library was looted as American troops stood by idly. Lost were clay tablets dating back millennia, medieval manuscripts, and later examples of Arabic calligraphy. Still, as Manguel discusses in “The Library as Survival,” some works escape even the most determined efforts to destroy them. He tells of a Jewish prayer book for the Sabbath that he owns; the work was printed in Berlin in 1908. On May 10, 1933, the Nazis held the first of their many book-burnings that targeted Jewish authors and Jewish books, though not limited to them. Nevertheless, somehow this prayer book survived. So did the volumes of the Sholem Aleichem Library in Biaua Podlaska, Poland.

Alberto Manguel was born in Argentina and lived in Canada for twenty years before moving to France in 2002. His books include A Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980), with Guadalupi Gianni, and A History of Reading (1996).

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Manguel tells of its librarian, who hid its holdings in an attic, where they were found after World War II. These books serve as witnesses to the atrocities perpetrated on their readers. For all the books that have been written and survived, many others exist only in the realm of the imagination. Manguel discusses these in his thirteenth chapter. Manguel used to read to Jorge Luis Borges, the blind Argentine author who served as head of the Buenos Aires National Library and who wrote about imaginary works such as the romances by the fictional Herbert Quain, the eleventh volume of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön, or a play by Jaromir Hladik called The Enemies. One of Borges’s bestknown tales concerns the fictional “Library of Babel,” which contains all books. A less comprehensive but no less imaginary collection appears in the seventh chapter of Pantagruel (1532) by François Rabelais. Here the eponymous hero visits the actual Library of St. Victor in Paris, which contained theological works of no interest to humanists such as Rabelais. He therefore satirized the holdings by creating his own catalog. Entries include Bragueta juris (the codpiece of the law), Ars honeste petandi in societate (the art of farting decently in public), and The Knavish Tricks of Ecclesiastical Judges. The seventeenth century English writer Sir Thomas Browne published a list of imaginary books in 1653. Included here were Greek poems by Ovid, composed while he was in exile on the shore of the Black Sea, and a Spanish translation of the works of Confucius. Manguel relates that at Gad’s Hill, the novelist Charles Dickens created a trompe l’oeil collection with such titles as Hansard’s Guide to Refreshing Sleep and a ten-volume Catalogue of the Statues to the Duke of Wellington. Paul Masson, who worked at the Bibliothèque Nationale, supplemented its limited holdings in fifteenth century Latin and Italian books by adding fictional entries to the catalog. Some fictional libraries contain real books. Such is the collection of Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1869-1870; Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1873) or the one destroyed early in the first part of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605, 1615). Manguel keeps a list of imaginary books that he would like to own should they ever be written. As he points out in “The Library as Identity,” one’s holdings and wish lists reveal much about a person. One looks over the shelves of a personal library not only to find unfamiliar titles but also to learn about the owner. Jay Gatsby, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), understood that a library was essential for anyone pretending to gentility, though he did not feel obliged to read any of the books he owned and so left the pages uncut. Petronius’s Trimalchio similarly sought prestige and the appearance of learning by declaring that he owned three libraries, one Greek and the others Latin. These fictional characters differ from Gordian II, the third century Roman emperor whom Edward Gibbon describes as having had twenty-two concubines and sixty-two thousand volumes and whose productions show that both were intended for use rather than for show. Manguel’s wide-ranging survey of books and libraries provides delightful reading and demonstrates that, like the younger Gordian, Manguel has gathered his books for use rather than for ostentation. Into such a work, the occasional error is bound to creep. Manguel celebrates the endurance of the Domesday Book, written, he says,

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with ink on paper. In fact, the Domesday Book was written on parchment. The caption of a picture of a bookcase once owned by Samuel Pepys locates the diarist’s library at Oxford; his collection and bookcases are at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Seventy of Pepys’s manuscripts are, however, at the Bodleian. Manguel places the Codex Sinaiticus among the manuscripts owned by the English renaissance bibliophile Robert Cotton. This early manuscript of the Bible in Greek remained at the monastery of St. Catherine until 1859 and came to England only in 1933. The caption to the reproduction of the 1644 title page of Gabriel Naudé’s Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (Advice on Establishing a Library, 1950) describes it as belonging to the first edition of the publication, even though the title page states “Seconde Edition”; the first edition had appeared seventeen years earlier. These are cavils, but Yale had more than a year to correct these errors after the first edition appeared in 2006 in Canada. Still, all bibliophiles will enjoy dipping into Manguel’s work in their libraries at night. Joseph Rosenblum

Review Sources Canadian Literature, no. 193 (Summer, 2007): 163-164. The Daily Telegraph, May 24, 2008, p. 28. The Globe and Mail, October 7, 2006, p. F10. Library Journal 133, no. 12 (July 1, 2008): 112. Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2008, p. E1. National Review 60, no. 15 (August 18, 2008): 52-53. New Statesman 137 (May 19, 2008): 55-56. The Spectator 308 (November 22, 2008): 43. The Times Literary Supplement, November 14, 2008, p. 29. The Toronto Star, November 12, 2006, p. D6. The Virginia Quarterly Review 84, no. 4 (Fall, 2008): 271. The Washington Post Book World, April 6, 2008, p. 10 The Wilson Quarterly 32, no. 2 (Spring, 2008): 94-96.

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LIFE CLASS Author: Pat Barker (1943) Publisher: Doubleday (New York). 311 pp. $23.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1914-1915 Locale: London, England, and Ypres, Belgium Novelist Barker returns to a World War I setting in this story of a small group of art students in London who have their assumptions about art and life called into question by the arrival of the Great War Principal characters: Paul Tarrant, an art student and later a Red Cross hospital orderly Elinor Brooke, an art student Christopher “Kit” Neville, an artist and later a Red Cross ambulance driver Teresa Halliday, an artists’ model

Though trained as a historian, Pat Barker began writing novels in 1982, but she first gained wide readership and critical acclaim with the 1991 release of her fifth novel, Regeneration. That book and the two that followed, collectively referred to as the Regeneration Trilogy, were set against the backdrop of World War I and chronicled the horrors of the war as well as the seismic shifts that it brought to English society. Most readers associate Barker with this war, and she returns to it with Life Class, after more than a decade during which she published novels on more contemporary subjects. Life Class is divided into two sections, the first of which opens with a scene in a life drawing class at the famous Slade School of Art in London. Readers are introduced to Paul Tarrant, a young student who apparently has some talent but is not progressing with his art at the rate that he or his teacher, the stern and overbearing Henry Tonks, would like. Paul has a friendship with, as well as some romantic interest in, his fellow student Elinor Brooke, who is also being wooed by recent Slade graduate and rising artistic star Kit Neville. The three, along with others from London’s art scene, frequent the Café Royal, where Paul meets and becomes involved with Teresa Halliday, an artists’ model whose physical charms and sexual frankness captivate him, despite his haunting sense that she is hiding something and despite the fact that her estranged husband stalks and threatens the lovers. The world in which Paul and his compatriots move is filled, as he thinks, with “the sense of witty, significant things being said by interesting people,” but it has a certain shallow, self-involved quality. It is also not without its worries or its serious side. Sexual and romantic tensions boil between Paul and Teresa, Paul and Elinor, and Kit and Elinor. Kit worries that Paul is a rival for Elinor’s affection, though both are uncertain

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if her commitment to her art and to her independence precludes romantic involvement. Her virginal detachment from all suitors suggests either an unlikely puritanical ethic or a complete lack of interest in sex. Meanwhile Paul, with his working-class northern roots, is intimidated by much in the gentrified world of art, notably Kit, who outstrips Paul with his class privilege, his apparent (though illusory) confidence, his sexual conquests, and particularly his artistic success. Throughout the novel’s early chapters, Paul struggles with the question of whether or not to continue his studies at the Slade or to accept that he is unlikely ever to succeed as an artist. Meanwhile, he is plagued with nightmares about the loss of his mother at an early age. Behind these personal tensions, though, rumbles a far greater concern. All of Europe waits in anxiety as the once-distant possibility of war begins to resolve into a near certainty. The rumblings can be heard even in the fairly sheltered circles in which the characters travel. Near the end of the book’s first half, Paul, Kit, and Elinor are visiting her family’s country home when the news comes that war has finally broken out. Immediately discussions ensue as to how deeply and how soon England will become involved, who will enlist, and what all of this will mean to the future. The two parts of the novel, then, hinge neatly on the moment when World War I begins, the moment when Europe and the world are forever changed. When the second part begins, Elinor is back in London, continuing her studies at the Slade, while Paul is away at war. After attempting to enlist, he was rejected because of his weak lungs, so he joins the Red Cross and soon finds himself working as an orderly at a Belgian field hospital a mere two miles from the front. After this point in the novel, Paul and Elinor begin to embody opposing attitudes toward art. Paul is strangely given new impetus to create by his hospital work, where he attends the maimed and dying, bearing witness to unspeakable miseries. Though this work leaves him physically exhausted and emotionally drained, he nonetheless rents himself a studio and finds the time and energy to paint and draw in his off hours, choosing as subjects the scarred land and the human misery that surround him every day. These are subjects that he knows have no commercial viability, yet for the first time he is satisfied with his own work. He comes to see his own and his friends’ relatively sheltered lives before the war as “contemptible.” It is only here that the irony of the novel’s title becomes clear, for his art school life class could never have taught Paul the life lessons he needs finally to create art of lasting value. Elinor, meanwhile, remains in London and continues to attend the Slade, largely depopulated since most of the male students have enlisted or otherwise committed themselves to the war effort. Her social circle, now that her male friends are serving overseas, comes to include pacifist society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, and though she does not go so far as to denounce the war, Elinor does all she can to ignore its in-

Pat Barker’s first novel, Union Street, was published in 1982, and her trilogy of World War I novels—Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995)—earned her numerous literary accolades, including the prestigious Man Booker Prize for the final volume. Her work draws heavily on her early training as a historian.

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fluence. She continues to study and to paint, holding firmly and defiantly to her belief that art is the highest human endeavor. She insists that war and suffering are unfit subjects for art, which should be about “the things we choose to love.” Barker thus invites the reader to ponder the question of whether, and to what degree, art continues to matter in a world torn apart by irrational violence and unbearable suffering. Unexpectedly, every separation in space and ideology that divides Paul and Elinor allows their former friendship to blossom into something more. Once Paul is stationed near the front, he and Elinor begin to write frequent and increasingly emotional letters, until it becomes clear they are, or at least imagine themselves to be, in love. The novel at this point alternates conventional narrative chapters with epistolary chapters made up of these letters. Elinor even manages, by pretending to be a volunteer nurse, to cross over into “the forbidden zone” and visit Paul for several days in Ypres, where they consummate their sexual relationship and argue about the role of art in the world. Even the bombing of the town, though, and firsthand exposure to the death and destruction it brings are not enough to shake Elinor’s faith in the rightness of her belief that art is a thing apart, unassailable by the horrors of war. Suffering a leg wound, Paul is sent home, but the man who returns to London is not the one who used to live there. At the end of the book, readers are left to wonder if Paul and Elinor have any hope of surviving as a couple or whether the war and their differing reactions to it have placed them too far apart to ever bridge the gap. Has Elinor really managed to escape the war and its consequences to the degree she believes? Will Paul’s newfound confidence and skill as a painter be enough to sustain a career, and will he find suitable and compelling subjects now that he has left behind the horrors that inspired him in the first place? The war has irrevocably swept away the world of cafés and painting scholarships and glittering surfaces, leaving behind only a series of questions. On a philosophical level, Life Class touches on many subjects, not the least among them issues of class and gender. Paul’s early insecurities as an artist arise at least partly from class anxieties and the knowledge that his family does not regard art as real work. By contrast, it is Kit’s easy upper-middle-class manner that allows him to appear supremely confident to those around him despite his deep insecurities. Elinor, meanwhile, is sheltered by both class privilege and gender from the expectations the men face to participate in the war effort. Ironically, it is her gender as well that makes it so difficult for her to be taken seriously as an artist or as an independent person and for her friends and family to believe she has aspirations beyond marriage and motherhood. In addition, the novel is about the nature of art, and whether art, love, or anything else, for that matter, should be immune from the ravages of war. As she has in previous novels, Barker brings the real world of 1914 London to the pages of her fiction in part by the inclusion of minor characters—anatomist and art teacher Tonks, socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell, artist Augustus John—drawn from history. The principal characters are based on composites of real artists as well. This and the gritty, nightmarish realism of the war and hospital scenes remind readers that the larger philosophical questions are not mere intellectual gymnastics but genuine problems, the answers to which go a long way toward helping people figure out how to live their

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lives. Barker’s novels, then, ask her readers to contemplate many of the same questions that her characters do. Critical reception of Life Class was mixed, certainly nowhere near as positive as that lavished upon Barker’s earlier World War I novels, in part because it lacks the tight narrative structure that guided those books. The perspective in the first part of the novel drifts a bit, making it unclear at times whether Paul, Elinor, or Kit is meant to attract the reader’s main focus. Characters and subplots—such as Paul and Teresa being stalked and harassed by her violent, estranged husband, or the story of a French soldier at the Red Cross hospital suffering from a self-inflicted gunshot—become central for a time, only to be dropped without a further mention. Many critics also found the conclusion too open-ended to be ultimately satisfying. Nonetheless, as a portrait of believable people struggling to answer complicated questions and living through a dark and difficult moment in history, Life Class has much to offer a reader. Janet E. Gardner

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 3 (October 1, 2007): 5-6. Commonweal 135, no. 9 (May 9, 2008): 28-29. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 20 (October 15, 2007): 1064. Library Journal 132, no. 19 (November 15, 2007): 48. New Statesman 136 (July 16, 2007): 64. The New York Times, February 29, 2008, p. 31. People 69, no. 4 (February 4, 2008): 47. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 42 (October 22, 2007): 34. The Spectator 304 (August 4, 2007): 33. The Times (London), July 7, 2007, p. 5. The Times Literary Supplement, July 6, 2007, p. 23. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 20 (January 25, 2008): W2.

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THE LIFE OF THE SKIES Birding at the End of Nature Author: Jonathan Rosen (1963) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 326 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Environment, history of science, natural history, nature In his exploration of bird watching and its interaction with and impact on everything else in life, Rosen explores many aspects of his life, putting them into a perspective obtained from watching birds Principal personages: Jonathan Rosen, American author and bird watcher Edward O. Wilson, American ant expert, sociobiologist, and conservationist Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin, English explorers and naturalists, cofounders of the principle of natural selection, the mechanism of evolutionary change Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, American poets who wrote poems about birds Henry David Thoreau, American naturalist and author of Walden John James Audubon, naturalized American who set out to paint every bird in North America David Kullivan and Gene Sparling, American outdoorsmen who believe they saw ivory-billed woodpeckers, long after they were thought to be extinct

Jonathan Rosen, an avid bird watcher, introduces the pastime in a never-beforeseen way. In The Life of the Skies, he connects birds and bird watching to almost everything in his life, including the life of the United States and the problems of the world. In the process, he explores the history of ornithology and bird watching (though he denies that the book is such a history). He also contemplates aspects of the literature of North America, Jewish culture in North America and Israel, the creationevolution debate, and the broader question of the existence of a spirit world. He considers human abuse of the natural world, and he argues for the preservation of that world. These and other topics are invariably connected to bird watching. Reader credulity is strained by some of these connections, but for Rosen they work in interesting ways. The most poignant of those connections is his habit of walking in New York City’s Central Park after visits with his dementia-stricken father. While bird watching in the park, he simultaneously loses himself in the birds and consciously attempts to stave off his father’s fate by exercising his brain to remember bird names and bird songs. In this context, too, Rosen recalls the discovery that new nerve cells are formed in the

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brains of adult birds. Before that discovery, adult vertebrate brains were thought to be incapable of regenerating nerve cells and so incapable of repair. The discovery brings hope to victims of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other diseases caused by brain-cell death, and it connects birds (and bird watching) to Rosen and his father even more firmly. Though it would be incomplete as such, the book is a better history of bird watching, ornithology, and conservation than Rosen’s denial suggests. He outlines Alexander Wilson’s career, calling him the father of North American ornithology. He identifies John James Audubon as the father of North American bird watching. Both murdered birds with wild abandon so that they would have models to describe and paint. He finds it interesting that the Audubon Society, from its inception a bird-preservation organization, chose Audubon’s name for its namesake. Rosen reasons that Wilson and Audubon were acting out of love for the birds, but that the expression of that love differed because of the times in which they lived. For Audubon, Wilson, and other early naturalists, nature seemed to afford endless resources in need of study, and the key to understanding them was, at first, a specimen at hand for study. The Audubon Societies formed later, at a time when the finite nature of all natural resources was becoming evident. To them, nature was a treasure to be preserved from impending decimation. Undoubtedly, Audubon’s name was chosen for the organization because of his paintings, not his marksmanship. Rosen recognizes the important contribution hunters have made to conservation, paying considerable homage to U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt’s role in this regard. However, the destruction of birds by the eighteenth and nineteenth century collectors and hunters may have been the beginning of the “end of nature” scenario Rosen warns about in the book. Judging from the book’s subtitle, a primary purpose of this work is to present the troubled state of nature and its birds and to encourage action to bring about their preservation. However, it is not always easy to identify this goal in the myriad subplots. Each subplot is interesting and informative in its own right, and losing the book’s theme (if the subtitle does reflect it) from time to time is probably harmless. The “Epilogue” brings the subtitle’s point into focus, and a look back through the book after reading the “Epilogue” illuminates the other chapters’ contribution to that point. Several of the subplots become themes and are revisited throughout the book. One of the most persistent of these is the ivory-billed woodpecker story. The book contains a brief history of the ivory-bill’s presumed extinction and rediscovery in North America. Last seen there (at least last documented scientifically) in 1944, the bird was declared extinct, and that conviction was so profound that the ivory-bill is not included in some of the field guides to North American birds. It does appear in other field guides, but always with a note about its probable extinction. Rosen explores the claims of ivory-billed woodpecker sightings in Southern swamp forests in 1999 (by David Kullivan) and in 2004 (by Gene Sparling). He describes his own trips

Jonathan Rosen lives in New York and works as the editorial director of the Web site Nextbook. He has written two novels, the memoir The Talmud and the Internet (2000), and a number of articles for The New Yorker and The New York Times.

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to those Southern swamps to get a good look at the big woodpecker, but he was unsuccessful in sighting one. Although the evidence gathered since the Kullivan and Sparling presumed sightings has not been definitive (despite a paper in Science, the premier North American research journal, declaring the woodpecker’s rediscovery), Rosen expresses a belief (or at least a hope) that the ivory-billed woodpecker still lives in the swamps of the southeastern United States. In addition to the decimation of the ivory-billed population, he describes the extinctions of the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet and considers their causes (overhunting and overcollecting by people such as Audubon and Alexander Wilson). He ponders the situation facing the birds he is writing about, those facing “the end of nature,” likely to be caused by habitat destruction, the atmospheric greenhouse, and other less direct human impacts. Other themes or subplots woven into the book involve literary efforts about birds. Walt Whitman chooses poetry for his life’s work on the basis of a male mockingbird who sings all night, night after night, after losing his mate. As a boy, Whitman went out at night to listen and later addressed a poem to the bird. Whitman, the mockingbird, and the poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), make recurrent appearances in The Life of the Sky to support the central nature of bird watching as a human activity. Robert Frost’s ovenbird asks “what to make of a diminished thing” in a poem named for the bird. The ovenbird seems to be asking the central question of Rosen’s book. In Rosen’s interpretation, the “diminished thing” is nature. Frost and the ovenbird are repeatedly called upon to remind the reader of Rosen’s concern about the decimation of the natural world. Henry David Thoreau’s move to escape civilization at Walden Pond is almost belittled in the book. According to Rosen, Thoreau made frequent trips to his mother’s for supplies, and the pond he lived near and cabin he lived in were at the edge of the town and near civilization. According to Rosen, Thoreau was escaping, but he was not isolated, and Rosen considers it dishonest of Thoreau to write of a wilderness experience while living adjacent to town. Nevertheless, Thoreau’s Walden (1854) is held up as an exemplary piece of nature writing. He considers other examples of dishonesty among naturalists and nature writers. According to him, Audubon fabricated parts of his personal history. Rosen even apologizes for his past indiscretion in this regard: not including his Jewish heritage in the story of his introduction to bird watching. He is probably being too hard on himself, because the story does not inherently demand such a disclosure. Thoreau, on the other hand, may deserve the castigation: After all, he was writing of the evils of civilization and the freedom he gained in escaping to Walden Pond, when, if Rosen has it right, Thoreau maintained intimate contact with civilization throughout the Walden experience. The most dangerous dishonesty that Rosen observes in some nature writers is their attempt to separate humans from nature. Some had to get away from people to feel they were in communication with nature. Rosen argues that the separation is unnatural, that humans are a part of nature and the preservation of nature must include the presence of humans. However, in other parts of the book he warns that humans can no longer afford to dominate the natural world as they have tended to do in the past.

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In another recurring theme, Rosen outlines the saga surrounding the discovery of natural selection, the mechanism driving the evolutionary process, and explains the role birds and bird watching played in that discovery. Charles Darwin’s version was inspired, to a great extent, by the Galapagos finches, a group of bird species descended from one or a few original colonizers of the island group. Alfred Russell Wallace formed his ideas, in part, while seeking and studying birds of paradise. Rosen contrasts the two founders’ behavior in sorting out and claiming credit for the idea, and in Rosen’s mind Wallace fares better. He contrasts Darwin’s loss of faith and rejection of spiritualism with Wallace, who also lost faith but embraced spiritualism. In this context, Rosen discusses Edward O. Wilson’s books that explore evolution, conservation of nature, and religion. Rosen expresses admiration for the work of Edward O. Wilson, Darwin, and Wallace, but he tends to disagree with them on the question of faith, explaining his own convictions in this context. These episodes are rarely covered in a single block of print, although most are introduced in a thorough discussion that seems to close the topic. However, many topics return in other contexts, to which they provide support, frequently adding substance to their original context as well. Rosen lives in New York City, near Central Park, which is his favorite local birdwatching spot, and to which he returns repeatedly, in person and in the book. He outlines the history of Central Park, including the eviction of a colony of African Americans from the area when the park was created; the introduction of starlings to the park and thus to North America (where they became a classic example of the unfortunate consequences of introducing nonnative, especially invasive, species); and the planting of large numbers of trees in the new park (which leads him to ask if the park is natural). He expresses his concern for the Central Park birds, for which he has a special affinity. He also describes bird-watching trips to wilder places—in Israel, in the southeastern United States, and in other locations—and he discusses the national parks. His appreciation of these larger pieces of nature suggests that, despite his love for Central Park, it would bother him if natural areas were reduced to a collection of Central Parks, one possible “birding at the end of nature” scenario. Although it might seem these revisited subplots would fragment the book, as Rosen fears civilization will fragment (and perhaps end) nature, the author always recovers continuity. In the “Epilogue” he brings many of the threads together in his most direct plea for an effort to preserve an appreciable part of nature, rather than letting it continue drifting, or even pushing it, toward the end alluded to in the subtitle. He concludes, on a hopeful but tenuous note, that there is still time to make the required adjustments in human behavior in order to preserve the functional remnants of the natural world. The book is well written and carefully edited. Only two harmless errors were noticed in this reading. The illustrations and “Sources” section are helpful. Regrettably, there is no index. Reviewers have been appropriately kind to the book. Carl W. Hoagstrom

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Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 8 (December 15, 2007): 11. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 22 (November 15, 2007): 1195. Library Journal 133, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 129. Los Angeles Times, February 17, 2008, p. R2. The National Post, March 8, 2008, p. WP17. The New York Times Book Review, March 9, 2008, p. 12. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 44 (November 5, 2007): 56. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 50 (March 1, 2008): W8.

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LINCOLN AND DOUGLAS The Debates That Defined America Author: Allen C. Guelzo (1953) Publisher: Simon & Schuster (New York). 383 pp. $26.00 Type of work: History Time: August-October, 1858 Locale: Illinois In a series of seven debates over a period of four months, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, candidates for an Illinois seat in Congress, defined the issues which in less than three years would result in civil war, with Lincoln taking the first steps which would lead to his becoming a national figure Principal personages: Abraham Lincoln, Illinois lawyer and congressman who challenged the expansion of slavery Stephen Douglas, U.S. senator from Illinois and advocate of “popular sovereignty” on the issue of slavery Henry Clay, U.S. senator from Kentucky whose advocacy of compromise on the slavery issue was carried on by Douglas

As recounted in Lincoln and Douglas by Allen C. Guelzo, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had seemingly settled, at least for a time, the issue of the expansion of slavery in the western territories of the United States. Crafted by Kentucky senator Henry Clay, the compromise had provided for the establishment of slave territory south of the southern boundary of the newly established state of Missouri. Clay’s compromise only bought time. As settlers moved into new territories west of the Mississippi River, they brought with them the issue of slavery. The annexation of the Republic of Texas as a slave state in the 1840’s brought the issue again to a head. Democratic senator Lewis Cass of Michigan, the party’s 1848 candidate for president, inserted into the argument the concept of “popular sovereignty,” the idea that the decision of whether a future state should be “free” or legalize slavery should be left to a vote of the citizens within the territory rather than to a decision of Congress. Clay once again attempted to craft a compromise that would avert possible secession and war. However, elderly and in poor health, Clay was limited in what he could accomplish. Clay died in 1852, and the leadership for the issue of popular sovereignty fell to Stephen Douglas. In this manner, Guelzo, a leading Lincoln historian, provides the background to the issues that undergirded what were arguably the most important debates in American political history. Judge Douglas, the incumbent senator from Illinois in 1858, had taken a strict constitutional interpretation on the issue of slavery: Only the people di-

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rectly affected could decide the issue. As long as only Texas or the Southwest was affected, Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce desert lands largely uninhabitable, the North Professor of the Civil War Era at was willing to ignore the issue. However, Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, when slavery threatened to expand into the Pennsylvania. He is the author or Nebraska Territory, potentially leaving Con- coauthor of numerous books and gress under the control of slave states, the is- articles on the intellectual history of sue again became one of national importance. the church as well as those publications for which he is most noted, Division of the Nebraska Territory into the Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President future states of Nebraska and Kansas in 1854, (1999) and Lincoln’s Emancipation the bill for which was shepherded by Doug- Proclamation: The End of Slavery in las, resulted in an explosion of blood. What America (2004), receiving the Lincoln became known as “Bleeding Kansas” was Prize for each. the answer to popular sovereignty as settlers, both for and against slavery, moved into the territories and created a de facto civil war. Making the issue even more volatile as a national issue was the Dred Scott decision, in a portion of which the Supreme Court ruled that the “right” of slavery could not be legally outlawed. In 1858 Abraham Lincoln was still a relatively unknown politician outside of his adopted state of Illinois. Elected to the state legislature as a Whig in the 1830’s, Lincoln first came into conflict with Douglas when he campaigned on behalf of his law partner, John Stuart, running against Douglas for a congressional seat in 1838; allegedly Lincoln and Douglas were also competitors for the hand of Mary Todd, Lincoln’s future wife. In 1846 Lincoln was elected to a single term in Congress, where, except for an ill-conceived opposition to President James Polk, he generated minimal notice. Lincoln began his vocal opposition to Douglas’s support for popular sovereignty at Douglas rallies throughout Illinois in 1854. As Guelzo points out, the effect was to galvanize antislavery elements in the state, but it accomplished little in uniting the Whig Party. At the same time, the strength (and growing popularity) of Lincoln’s arguments brought him to the notice of the newly established abolitionist Republican Party. The seat held by Senator Douglas became available in 1858, and Lincoln was the primary opposition to Douglas for that seat. In describing the background to Lincoln’s candidacy for the Senate, Guelzo notes the two major problems Lincoln faced. First, the Republicans’ chances in any election required the support of other disaffected voters, principally disaffected Whigs. Second was the question of whether Douglas was strongly committed to the Democratic Party, or whether he was willing to join the Republicans in exchange for their support of candidates allied with Douglas’s position on the issue of slavery. To most, the idea of Republican support for Douglas was anathema. There is evidence Douglas may have been serious about such proposals. At this point early in the election year of 1858, Lincoln’s job was to convince the state Republican Party that Douglas was no supporter of its position. One method to carry this out was to hold a series of state conventions or “mass meetings,” preferably

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in each of the nine federal congressional districts, in which the Republican candidate would address such concerns. The first business for the party would be to decide on its candidate, and in mid-June the state Republicans met in the statehouse in Springfield for that purpose. A resolution introduced by Charles Wilson nominated Lincoln as the party’s candidate; the nomination was accepted unanimously. Lincoln’s speech in which he accepted the nomination ranks among the most important in American history. Although his phraseology is often linked with the Douglas debates, it was not directly associated. Rather it outlined the primary difference between the view of Douglas and the Democratic Party on the issue of the existence as well as the expansion of slavery and the view of the new Republican Party. Its prediction that the issue would have to be settled sooner rather than later was prescient: We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy [popular sovereignty] was initiated, with the avowed object . . . of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

Guelzo continues with his analysis of the implication of these paragraphs. As the most prominent advocate of popular sovereignty, Douglas had argued that this solution had never been given a chance, given the near insurrections that had taken place in the Nebraska Territory. Using the imagery of the New Testament (Matthew 12:25), Lincoln argued that neither a government nor a nation could survive under such circumstances: that one way or another, the issue of slavery would be resolved. Much of Lincoln’s “house divided” speech reviewed the recent history of the arguments and attempted compromises over slavery. Finally, he addressed the candidacy of Douglas himself. Lincoln made clear that Douglas’s views were not those of the Republican Party, and to believe so was merely a delusion. The response to Lincoln’s speech, unlike that of history, was mixed. Though Lincoln disagreed, the Republican leadership’s interpretation was that Lincoln had presented an abolitionist tract, one certain to divide both the party and the country. The state Democrats were overjoyed, but, as Guelzo points out, there was no question as to whom, and to what policy, any vote for the Republicans in that year’s election would represent. During the nineteenth century, U.S. senators were elected not by popular vote but by the respective state legislators. Therefore, the candidates were campaigning not just for themselves but for the election by the people of legislators supportive of their positions. The goal of the state Republicans was to create a state legislature that would in turn select Lincoln for the Senate seat. Guelzo summarizes the upcoming Republican strategy by addressing the demographics of the state. The northern portion of Illinois consisted primarily of antislavery or outright abolitionist voters who would vote solid Republican. The southern portion of the state comprised just the opposite: former Southerners who still retained strong Southern, and therefore proslavery, sympathies. It was in the central portion of the state that the election would be decided. Lincoln’s reference to a “house divided” was problematic. As Guelzo points out

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several times, some interpreted Lincoln’s meaning as an invitation for war, and Lincoln suggested at times that the prediction might have been foolish. There was also the issue of the intent of the nation’s founders—Douglas’s interpretation being that these men accepted division on the issue, while Lincoln firmly believed they “tolerated division over slavery in order to finish building the house in the first place.” Lincoln’s speech at Cooper Union in New York during the 1860 election would lay out his views on this issue in significantly greater detail. Lincoln had preferred not to enter into a series of debates with Douglas, a renowned orator. It was, however, the decision of the state Republican Committee to move forward. In that way, the background for the debates was set. The immediate decision as to where the debates would be held centered on each of the nine congressional districts. Nevertheless, in July Lincoln and Douglas each addressed crowds in Chicago and Springfield in a preliminary for the upcoming electioneering. It was decided the official debates would be held in towns from each of the other seven districts, beginning with Ottawa, seat of La Salle County, on August 21. The sole issue of contention was slavery, specifically whether the doctrine of popular sovereignty as argued by Douglas should be accepted, and Lincoln’s view that to do so would result in the perpetuation of this evil. However, what of Nebraska and Kansas? Douglas began the first debate by quoting the resolution of the Republican Party at its first Illinois convention in 1854: “to exclude slavery from all the territories . . . and to resist acquirement of more territories, unless the practice of slavery therein forever shall have been abolished.” It was a trap to see if Lincoln would endorse the resolution of his party, in effect inviting war, or to hesitate and be exposed as a hypocrite, the thesis of his one-hour speech. Worse, in Douglas’s view, Lincoln wanted black equality. Lincoln was equally adept in defending his position. He was not present when the resolution was passed, but he stated that “even if the black man was not my equal in many respects, it was also true that a great many white people were not each other’s equals. So long as the black man is a man, he has a natural right to eat the bread . . . which his own hand earns. And in that respect he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.” The applause signaled he had defended himself well. Guelzo follows Lincoln and Douglas through the election season, providing an analysis for each of the six ensuing debates. History indicates that in the election on November 2, Douglas came out ahead. It was, however, a short-lived triumph, and the vote was significantly closer than initially apparent. Guelzo’s last chapter contains an extensive analysis and breakdown of the vote. First, the turnout was substantial even for the times. Pro-Lincoln House votes probably exceeded those for Douglas by twenty-four thousand, but because of the apportionment in the state legislature, proDouglas districts had greater representation and the ultimate decision on the Senate race. The text of the debates was later published, providing an annoyance to Douglas and national recognition to Lincoln. Two years later, the two men faced off again. Lincoln won, and the war came. Richard Adler

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Review Sources America 199, no. 5 (September 1, 2008): 26-27. The Atlantic Monthly 301, no. 3 (April, 2008): 106. Booklist 104, no. 12 (February 15, 2008): 25. Christianity Today 52, no. 5 (May, 2008): 70. Journal of American History 95, no. 2 (September, 2008): 540-541. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 23. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 47 (November 26, 2007): 39. Time 171, no. 6 (February 11, 2008): 84. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 37 (February 14, 2008): D7.

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THE LINE UPON A WIND The Great War at Sea, 1793-1815 Author: Noel Mostert (1930) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 774 pp. $35.00 Type of work: History Time: 1793-1815 Locale: Portsmouth and London, England; Paris, Boulogne, Brest, and Toulon, France; Cape St. Vincent, Portugal; Tripoli, Libya; Algiers, Algeria; Naples, Italy; Acre, Syria; Alexandria, Egypt; Copenhagen, Denmark; Cadiz, Cape Trafalgar, Tarragona, and Catalonia, Spain; Quebec, Canada; Detroit, Michigan; Washington, D.C; New Orleans, Louisiana A naval history of Britain’s wars with France and the United States during the Napoleonic period, with an emphasis on tactical developments Principal personages: Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson, commander in chief of the Mediterranean fleet and Britain’s greatest naval hero Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France William Pitt, the Younger, prime minister of Britain Captain Lord Thomas Cochrane, a British naval officer who achieved notable success in opposing the French along the Spanish coast William Hoste, a Royal Navy captain renowned for his skills in close inshore fighting in the Adriatic Sea

In spite of its deadly consequences, war remains one of the principal driving forces of history, and the story of the victor and the vanquished often makes for enthralling reading. Never was this more applicable than in the Napoleonic wars, a twenty-twoyear period of conflict that is the subject of Noel Mostert’s The Line upon a Wind: The Great War at Sea, 1793-1815. As Mostert’s engaging text makes clear, this was the first true world war, one that involved an ever-shifting series of coalitions that pitted the constitutional monarchy of Great Britain against revolutionary France. Since it was the first global conflict, it has inevitably generated a veritable library of historical studies, from the economic and political causes of the war to the resulting armed engagements. Books of the modern era that deal with the naval aspects of the war range from C. Nepean Longridge’s The Anatomy of Nelson’s Ships (1955) to N. A. M. Rodger’s The Command of the Ocean (2004). However, these works are largely concerned with Britain’s Royal Navy. With so much material already in print on this subject, it is a challenge for anyone to say anything new on the subject. Without significant new source material coming to light, Mostert is forced to mine such well-thumbed

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publications as The Naval Chronicle, a British periodical written by maritime professionals that appeared throughout much of the war. What distinguishes Mostert’s work from that of his predecessors is the sheer comprehensiveness of his book. Although he opens with a description of the first naval action between the British and the French in 1793, the inital section, “The Tactical Evolution,” is nothing less than a synopsis of the history of naval warfare. Beginning with the trireme of the ancient world, Mostert proceeds to the armed medieval cog, the galleon, the development of the modern concept of a navy in the seventeenth century, and what would prove to be the most important ship in the Napoleonic wars, the frigate: a fast, flushdecked craft that mounted a single row of cannons on each side. Mostert’s approach to his subject is a curious one, and it says much about his background and his intended audience. Had this book been written by an academic historian, it is likely that it would have focused on a narrowly defined aspect of the naval war, perhaps a heavily researched monograph on a particular battle, or on a shorter span of years within the overall conflict. However, Mostert, a journalist by training, brings a reporter’s sensibility to the subject matter. Rather than just assume the reader’s familiarity with the Western naval tradition, he provides a synopsis of it. When he wants to convey the feeling of what it was like to experience naval warfare firsthand, he freely—and effectively—resorts to eyewitness accounts of battles. All of this suggests that The Line upon a Wind is designed with the armchair sailor in mind, someone who wants a fairly comprehensive one-volume history of Napoleonic naval warfare. It is probably no coincidence that W. W. Norton, the publisher of Mostert’s book, is also responsible for the American edition of Patrick O’Brian’s superb twenty-novel Aubrey/Maturin series about the Royal Navy of the same period. Given the book’s wealth of detail, one could regard it as the ultimate gloss on O’Brian’s fiction. The development of naval tactics forms the subject of the first section of Mostert’s work and constitutes an important thread that runs throughout this lengthy volume. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the concept of how a sea battle should be fought had reached a critical stage. Naval traditionalists held that the opposing forces should form two parallel lines and do battle broadside to broadside. The result was a ponderous danse macabre, a stalemate in which neither side could hope to achieve a decisive victory. It was not until the 1780’s that a solution was proposed by John Clerk: This amateur tactical theoretician declared that, instead of matching battle line for battle line, the goal should be first to break the enemy line and then to capture or to destroy its vessels. It was a brilliant insight, and Mostert conveys both the effectiveness of the new tactic and the hidebound nature of naval tradition that resisted its implementation. This new, chaotic style of warfare was anathema to a culture obsessed with order. Instead of merely recounting the winners and losers in the numerous naval

A former U.N. correspondent for the Montreal Star, Noel Mostert won the National Magazine award in 1975 for his articles in The New Yorker. His nonfiction writing includes a book about oil tankers, Supership (1974), and a history of his native South Africa, Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People (1992).

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engagements, Mostert characterizes battles in terms of tactical lessons learned or ignored. In describing the Battle of June the First in 1794, Mostert vividly makes clear what a paradigm shift this new mode of fighting required of the participants. When British commander Earl Howe signaled his order to break the French line and attack, most failed to follow it—including the vessel that was supposedly leading the fight, Anthony James Molloy’s ship Caesar. Howe managed to bring the fleet to close action only by cutting through the enemy line himself. While this new style of fighting exposed the attacking vessels to numerous broadsides, close engagement with the enemy deployed maximum destructive power at point-blank range. When the British vessel Queen Charlotte caught the French ship Montagne off guard, the latter sustained three hundred casualties. With new short-range weapons, such as the carronade and ammunition loads that included hundreds of musket balls or even metal pieces and nails, close-range warfare dislodged showers of deadly splinters, shredded sails, and dismasted ships in a matter of minutes. Crucial to this new type of warfare was the man who would become Britain’s most famous sailor: Horatio Nelson. Rather than just laud him as the hero of the Battle of Trafalgar, The Line upon a Wind demonstrates how Nelson’s mastery of tactics enabled Britain, despite its inferiority in both ships and guns, to prevail against the French, who allied with the Spanish. This is made apparent in Mostert’s account of the naval action that established Nelson’s reputation, the Battle of Cape St. Vincent in 1797. Although British admiral Sir John Jervis had signaled for his ships to form a line preparatory to battle, Nelson immediately realized that elements of the Spanish fleet (headed for a French port) were attempting to square off their entire twenty-fiveship force against Britain’s tiny fifteen-ship squadron. Instead of taking his place in battle order as most other commanders would have done, Nelson performed the audacious tactic recommended by Clerk: He took his seventy-four-gun ship Captain and single-handedly attacked the most powerful warship in the world, the 130-gun Santissima Trinidad. Displaying the visceral intensity of a war correspondent, Mostert exquisitely conveys the resulting shock and disarray that soon spread throughout the Spanish fleet. With his seizure of the tactical initiative, Nelson became a model for his fellow captains, many of whom proceeded to provide him assistance or follow his own daring example. The result was a stunning and badly needed victory for the British, although Mostert suggests that the true prize was the affirmation of their tactical superiority. This was Nelson’s singular contribution to the war. If nothing else, The Line upon a Wind proves that all of Nelson’s subsequent naval victories were the result of the intense tactical training he provided to his subordinates. When he commanded a fleet at the Battle of the Nile, Nelson prepared his captains by rigorously schooling them in the tactical options open to them. Realizing that the smoke and noise of battle renders communications with other ships difficult, if not impossible, Nelson drilled his commanders in likely battle scenarios so that they could take independent action rather than needlessly wait for his approval. It was a strategy that resulted in decisive victories for the British at the Nile, at Copenhagen, and at Trafalgar, the encounter that established British supremacy at sea for the next one hundred years. These are oft-told tales, but Mostert deserves praise both for his mastery of the

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minutia of naval life and for the narrative power with which he conveys the thrill and horror of sea battles. As an island nation with a relatively small standing army, Britain was compelled to rely upon its navy not only for homeland defense but also as a partner to its land-based forces. More than any other book on the period, The Line upon a Wind demonstrates the fact that the nature of naval warfare changed after Trafalgar. With the majority of French ships destroyed or blockaded in port, naval engagements shifted from great fleet actions to single vessels providing support to land-based forces. Among the latter, the daring exploits of captains such as Thomas Lord Cochrane along the Spanish coast and William Hoste in the Adriatic ensured the ultimate victory of Britain and its allies over the French. Sailors were often called upon to seize fortresses or perform such Herculean tasks as hauling cannons up mountain peaks. The only flaw in Mostert’s approach to his material concerns the problem of what to include or exclude from such a rich era. On the one hand, his inclusion of the peninsular campaign is the pertinent due to the supporting role of the navy in the struggle for Spain. Then there is the problem of the War of 1812. The Second War for Independence, as it is also known, generated its own list of naval battles, both at sea and on the Great Lakes. Mostert is correct in stating that this was the conflict that established America as a rising naval power, and his vivid description of the Battle of New Orleans is undoubtedly one of the best in print. It is also to his credit that Mostert carefully interweaves this American war into the fabric of the larger world conflagration. However, one cannot help agreeing with Roger that this was really little more than a distraction in what was essentially a European contest. More serious is Mostert’s failure to make more than a passing reference to the role of privateers in the Napoleonic wars. Although the notion may seem foreign to the modern concept of warfare, privateers were commercial raiders that were sanctioned by a government with a document known as a letter-of-marque. These privately owned vessels, which attacked and seized enemy commerce for profit, played a significant, if subordinate, role in harassing enemy shipping. These are small complaints regarding an otherwise enjoyable, informative book. The Line upon a Wind is one of the best one-volume histories of the zenith of the age of fighting sail. Cliff Prewencki

Review Sources Booklist 104, nos. 19/20 (June 1, 2008): 26 Contemporary Review 290 (Summer, 2008): 253. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 8 (April 15, 2008): 408. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 18 (May 5, 2008): 54.

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THE LODGER SHAKESPEARE His Life on Silver Street Author: Charles Nicholl (1950) Publisher: Viking Penguin (New York). 378 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Literary biography, literary history Time: 1603-1612 Locale: London In his sixth book about the writers of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, journalist Nicholl explores the nuances of a legal deposition that William Shakespeare made at the end of his career, a record of the only words he is known to have spoken offstage Principal personages: William Shakespeare (1564-1616), England’s greatest playwright Christopher Mountjoy (d. 1620), a maker of headdresses Marie Mountjoy, his wife Mary Mountjoy, their daughter, later Mary Belott Stephen Belott (d. 1646), their apprentice, later their son-in-law Simon Forman (1552-1611), astrologer consulted by the Mountjoys George Wilkins, brothel-keeper and playwright, Shakespeare’s sometime collaborator

When he turned forty in 1604, William Shakespeare was lodging in the house of a London merchant who made “tires”: decorative headwear for the aristocracy, members of the upper middle class, and, very likely, theater companies. According to The Lodger Shakespeare by Charles Nicholl, Shakespeare stayed for a season or two before moving. Eight years later, he gave a deposition in a lawsuit brought against his former landlord. Ironically, the playwright whose verbal memory has long amazed critics said he could not recall the terms of an agreement about which he was asked to testify. The court papers were discovered a century ago, in the Public Records Office in London, and have been studied by biographers such as Samuel Schoenbaum, whose documentary life of Shakespeare is considered the standard study. The bare facts of the case seem unpromising. Christopher Mountjoy, tire-maker, had settled a dowry on his only child when she married his former apprentice Stephen Belott. Something went wrong between the two men, and Mountjoy refused to pay what Belott claimed he had promised. Belott took the matter to the Jacobean equivalent of small-claims court, naming Shakespeare as a witness to the contract. The famous playwright testified, though probably not as Belott anticipated. Shakespeare said that Belott was a fine young man but that he could not recall the promised sum. As Nicholl puts it, he weaseled out, displaying a memory more selective than defective.

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Nicholl has written about the legal ordeals of Shakespeare’s contemporaries Thomas Nashe, the pamphleteer, and Christopher Marlowe, the author of Doctor Faustus (pr. 1588) and Shakespeare’s early rival. Indeed, he has come close to writing the case for the prosecution of the shadowy figures responsible for Marlowe’s early death, under suspicious circumstances, in a tavern brawl. The case of Belott v. Mountjoy is tamer by far, but Nicholl finds more interesting tidbits than one might reasonably expect. Following the first law of forensic science, that “every contact leaves traces,” he discovers a world of detail concerning the people whose lives touched Shakespeare. The case involves a good deal of bickering over household items to be included in the dowry and money to be settled on the bride. After hearing from the plaintiff and defendant, the court held three sessions to hear from witnesses. At each session, a set of interrogatories, or questions, was put to each witness. Shakespeare testified at the first session and seems to have signed his recorded account in haste: “Willm Shaks.” Nine witnesses appeared in all, some of them more than once. (Shakespeare did not return.) Then the court took statements from the plaintiff and defendant on separate dates, including Belott’s rejoinder to Mountjoy’s final plea. Almost six months after the case opened, the court made a ruling of sorts. It ordered Mountjoy to pay Belott a small sum, representing only a fraction of the money in question, and sent the matter to arbitration. Both Mountjoy and his former apprentice belonged to London’s large community of Huguenots, French Protestants seeking refuge from religious persecution. Although each was formally affiliated with a different parish church near his place of residence, both were known to the larger body of the French Church, if only for nonattendance at Mass. The records of that body indicate that Mountjoy was summoned a year later to explain why he had not yet paid the amount awarded to Belott. He refused to recognize the church’s authority, and he was excommunicated until such time as he repented the various scandals of his life, including two children born out of wedlock. By all appearances, he never settled the debt, for he wrote his will in such a way as to leave his daughter as little as was legally possible. The Lodger Shakespeare has seven sections of roughly equal length. These sections move from Shakespeare at forty to the house where he lodged on Silver Street, the members of the household, and the business carried on in the house. Moving outward from Silver Street, they pass through the larger communities to which the Mountjoys belonged, including their French neighbors in London and their diverse clientele. The family’s contacts include such colorful people as Simon Forman (the astrological physician whose casebooks have been studied by Shakespeareans such as A. L. Rowse) and George Wilkins, a caterer, or victualler, who served for a time as a playwright for Shakespeare’s acting company. Following these contacts, Nicholl

Charles Nicholl has written books on Elizabethan alchemy and portraiture as well as on Shakespeare’s contemporaries Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and Sir Walter Ralegh. He has also written lives of Leonardo da Vinci and Arthur Rimbaud and travel books and articles.

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learns about problems in the Mountjoy marriage from notes taken by the astrologer and about Wilkins’s criminal record as a brothel-keeper with a history of violence against women. A final section on marriage arrangements brings the story back to Shakespeare and his role in the legal dispute. The book ends, where it starts, with the elusive “Mr. Shakespeare.” Just before Shakespeare gave his testimony, another witness reported that Mountjoy asked his famous lodger to speak with Belott after marriage negotiations had broken down. The witness added that Shakespeare helped to settle the dowry and saw the agreement “Solempnized.” Nicholl infers from this that Shakespeare performed the private ceremony known as troth-plighting or “handfasting”—in which the engaged join hands and promise to be true to each other for life. In Shakespeare’s time, the ceremony had quasi-legal force; marriages were often consummated between the troth-plighting and the subsequent church wedding. The complications arising from such arrangements figure prominently in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, first performed in 1604 and likely written under Mountjoy’s roof. In that play, an interim ruler condemns a man to death for fornication while spurning his own fiancé and arranging to have premarital intercourse with another woman. Both men have in fact plighted their troth, but the one in power chooses to ignore the prior commitments, a sure sign of corruption in the state. The years when Shakespeare lodged on Silver Street correspond to the period of his darker comedies or problem plays. Many of them involve domestic relations far closer to everyday experience than those in the great comedies of his earlier career— forced marriage, for example, and infidelity. Nicholl draws many parallels between events in the Mountjoy house and scenes from Shakespeare’s plays of this period. For example, the character Parolles in All’s Well That Ends Well (1623) is said to be a marriage counselor, albeit with a rather sour message. Partly because his name means something like “Mr. Words,” Nicholl fancies that he may be “Shakespeare’s own mocking self-portrait.” One play from this period, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, was not included in the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays, published posthumously in 1623. One possible reason for the omission is Shakespeare only wrote parts of it, perhaps completing or improving the work of another playwright. Nicholl is not the first to suggest that other author was George Wilkins, but he adds details about Wilkins’s life outside the theater and his connections with the newlywed Belotts, who took lodging in his tavern when they fled the house on Silver Street. Such detail helps readers appreciate the dilemmas that the play’s heroine faces when she is sold to a brothel-keeper. Nicholl makes a congenial guide to a vanished world, leading readers through the streets and alleys of Jacobean London. He estimates the annual rent that Mountjoy paid on the large house where he kept his shop and lived with his family, apprentices, servants, and lodgers (equivalent to between 2,000 and 2,500 British pounds today). He describes the shops of London’s burgeoning costume trade, points out the equipment used there, and even speaks the argot of the different crafts. Such details could become tedious with a less knowledgeable and entertaining guide, but Nicholl is never boring. His credentials are those of a journalist, not an academic. He has written

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about the drug cartels of Colombia, the market for precious gems in Burma, and sex tourism in Thailand, among much else, and he makes the business of wigs and headwear just as interesting. He never seems to tire about what lies beneath the streets of London today. The house on Silver Street was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. The entire area, just inside the old city wall near its northwest corner, was obliterated during the Blitz bombing of 1940. The street where silversmiths had congregated in the Middle Ages no longer exists. After pacing off the distance, Nicholl has determined that a large underground parking garage now occupies the space where the tiremaker’s house once stood. Throughout the long section on “Sex and the City,” where Nicholl tells about Forman and Wilkins, he resists any temptation to guess about Shakespeare’s sex life. Some gifted novelists have attempted to imagine what that life was like—notably James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) and Anthony Burgess in Nothing Like the Sun (1964). It would have been easy for Nicholl to draw implications about Shakespeare’s forced marriage to the pregnant Anne Hathaway or his relations with London women such as Mrs. Mountjoy, who told Forman that her marriage was unhappy and that she had taken a lover. He has chosen instead to concentrate on the father-daughter relations that permeate plays such as Pericles, Prince of Tyre and King Lear (pr. 1605-1606). Nicholl does engage in speculation, however, and readers with scholarly scruples may think he sometimes goes too far. He speculates, for example, that Shakespeare may have first encountered Wilkins when the Belotts lodged at his tavern. He wonders if Shakespeare may have thought of Mountjoy’s daughter when he wrote in Pericles, Prince of Tyre of a woman who “weav’d the sleided silk/ With fingers long, small, white as milk.” There is no evidence to support either conjecture. Wilkins worked for other acting companies before he came to Shakespeare’s, and Shakespeare wrote about “sleided silk” in a poem published a decade before Pericles, Prince of Tyre. With such speculation Nicholl is reaching beyond the academic market to capture the popular imagination. In addition to scholarly notes and a full bibliography, there are sixteen glossy pages of black-and-white illustrations and an appendix containing transcripts of all legal papers. Here as elsewhere, Nicholl preserves the original spelling for the historical “brogue” that it adds, but inserts letters missing from abbreviated words (thus “pl” becomes “plaintiff”). He also translates any statements made in French. Reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic praised the ingenuity and perceptiveness of Nicholl’s literary sleuthing. The Spectator remarked that his “unerring eye for telling circumstantial detail is as much poetic as forensic.” History Today praised the reconstruction, remarking that it was highly evocative though necessarily conjectural rather than conclusive. In addition, the audiobook version distributed by Audible has won high praise and an award from AudioFile magazine. The young British actor Simon Vance cleverly modulates his voice to indicate the numerous quotations and the different voices in dramatic dialogues. He even reads the dull court documents with a zest that matches Nicholl’s delight in presenting them. The Lodger Shakespeare is detailed enough to be of value to scholars interested in

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the minutiae of the celebrated playwright’s world. Its style is sufficiently engaging, and its contents are so arranged, that it should be of interest to anyone who values a good visit to a bygone world. Thomas Willard

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 11 (February 1, 2008): 15. The Christian Science Monitor, February 26, 2008, pp. 14-15. History Today 58, no. 1 (January, 2008): 65. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 22 (November 15, 2007): 1193. London Review of Books 30, no. 9 (May 8, 2008): 10-11. The New York Times, February 8, 2008, p. 38. The New Yorker 84, no. 2 (February 25, 2008): 74-76. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 43 (October 29, 2007): 41. The Spectator 305 (November 17, 2007): 52-53. The Times Literary Supplement, December 14, 2007, p. 25.

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THE LOST HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died Author: Philip Jenkins (1952) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 315 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Religion, history Time: 300-2007 Locale: Syria, Iraq, Iran, and North and East Africa A history of the often-overlooked Eastern Christians, a third branch of Christianity as influential and pervasive during the first millennium of the faith as Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism became in later Christian history Principal personages: Nestorius, fifth century patriarch of the Assyrian Christian church in what is now Iraq and Iran Jacobus Baradaeus, sixth century patriarch of the Syrian Orthodox church Timothy, patriarch of the late eighth and early ninth centuries who led the Church of the East, about a quarter of the Christians in the world at that time Jacob of Edessa, seventh century historian and biblical interpreter; the Jerome of the East George of Akula, Jacob’s successor, commentator on Aristotle, and bishop to Arab nomads in Mesopotamia Michael Syrus, twelfth century Jacobite patriarch of Antioch and influential medieval historian Gregory Bar-Hebraeus, thirteenth century Jacobite scholar of Mosul who authored a history of the world, a commentary on Aristotle, and works on logic, astronomy, and theology Markos, Nestorian monk born in China who, under the name of Yaballaha III, became patriarch of the Nestorian church from 1281 until 1317 Bar Sauma, Nestorian monk who returned from China with Markos, served as diplomat in Catholic Europe seeking military alliance between Kublai Khan’s Mongol regime and Catholic forces for an assault on Muslim Egypt Timur, Muslim warlord of the 1360’s whose custom was to pile the skulls of his victims into a pyramid outside the cities that resisted him

The world’s first Christian state was not in Europe but in Osrhoene, Northern Mesopotamia. Its king converted around 200. Its capital, Edessa, was the center of the earliest Christian scholarship. Bordering Armenia, which converted around 300, remains Christian to this day. Armenia’s capital, Ani, was known as the city of 1001 churches.

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Nearby Georgia also converted around this time. Other ancient churches outside the Born in Wales and educated at purview of the West included the African Cambridge University, Philip Jenkins churches of Nubia, which lasted from the sixth has been a professor in history and through the fifteenth centuries, and Ethiopia, religious studies at Pennsylvania State once called Abyssinia, which converted early University since 1980. He has written and remains strongly Christian after eighteen many books, including The Next Christendom (2002) and The New centuries. Anti-Catholicism (2003). Philip Jenkins’s The Lost History of Chris tianity reads initially like an alternative-history science fiction book. It supplies a bewildering number of unfamiliar names, covers thousands of miles of geography, and reviews a couple of thousand years of time. It even includes a map on its dust cover that looks more like a three-leaf clover than a map of the world. With Jerusalem in the center, surrounded by the three lobes of Europe, Africa, and Asia, this Middle Ages cartography asserted not geographic reality but an article of faith: the influence of Christ’s sacrifice in Jerusalem extended throughout the entire world. It also underscored what has been largely forgotten: that two-thirds of early Christendom lay outside of Europe. Jenkins’s method is to force a reconsideration of the history of Christianity, putting its Eastern branch at the center of early development. After all, he argues, the Asian church lasted a thousand years, spread over a million square miles, and nourished hundreds of churches. Moreover, it was Semitic in flavor and language, like the earliest Christianity, and developed without either the hindrance or help of the powerful Roman Empire. It developed a church hierarchy not unlike Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism, and its evangelical fervor propelled missionaries along trade routes, including the Silk Road that stretched from Syria to Northern Persia into Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, Bukhara, Samarkand, and China: all told some 4,500 miles. Asian Christianity, then, is a third branch of the faith that extended from the Holy Land, not westward as did the Orthodox and Catholic churches, but north and eastward. There is more heard about the latter two branches because they survived, and the Eastern church did not. Jenkins skillfully puts often strange new facts into perspective. Jerusalem, he notes, is an equal distance from Merv in the East and Rome in the West, and it is actually closer to central Asia than it is to France. Geography alone logically suggests that Christianity would have moved as far east as it did west. In fact, Jenkins shows that, in the first thousand years of Christendom, the Asian churches moved more quickly to evangelize the world, and their influence was without parallel. He argues persuasively that history is distorted when it forgets this Eastern faith. Merv, in what is now Turkmenistan, is a dead city today, but in the Middle Ages it was, as Jenkins details, one of the largest cities on earth with some two hundred thousand people. Situated on the Silk Road, it was also one of the greatest centers of Christianity: Nestorian, or Eastern, Christianity, that is. By 420, it had a bishop; by 544, it had become a metropolitan see. It sent missionaries as far away as China. It had a

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school and translated Greek and Syriac texts—from Aristotle to the New Testament—into Asian languages. It flourished as a center of Christianity until the thirteenth century, much of that time under Muslim rule. Jenkins notes that Merv does not fit the Western paradigm of the spread of Christianity, developing much earlier than Western Christianity and lasting much longer than expected. It retained the Semitic roots of the faith long after they were thought to have been lost. Christianity in Merv developed without the aid of the Roman Empire or the sponsorship of a European king; it was a tolerated minority faith under Muslim rule. The most influential ancient Christian groups in Asia were the Nestorians and Jacobites. They originated in the Near East and used the Syriac language, which was related to the Aramaic of Jesus. Although both dissented to some degree from the Orthodox Church, Jenkins is adamant that they not be considered fringe groups for three reasons: They agreed with the Western church on most essential points—the trinity, incarnation, baptism, the Eucharist, the two testaments, Resurrection, eternal life, the return of Christ, and the last judgment; they accepted the Council of Nicaea; and they accepted the faith as handed down from the apostles. If those are not sufficient reasons for taking them seriously as Christians then one must consider that they, very simply, outnumbered the Western churches. The Nestorians took their name from the Patriarch Nestorius. They differed with the Orthodox Church on the nature of Christ. They agreed that He had two natures but did not agree that they were absolutely united in the mystical sense. The Jacobites took their name from Jacobus Baradaeus, who in the sixth century organized a group called Monophysites: those who asserted that Jesus had only one nature, a divine one. This group was declared heretical by the ecumenical council of Chalcedon and thus was split from the Orthodox Church. Egyptian Copts and Syrians (Suriani) were Monophysites, and Jacobus organized them into an underground church. They were dominant in what is now Syria, and Nestorians prevailed in the modern states of Iraq and Iran. The heirs of the Jacobites are called Syrian Orthodox, and the Nestorians became the Assyrian Church. These two faiths, far away from Constantinople and the power of Orthodoxy, developed independently into powerful rivals of the Western church. The Nestorians were based in Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the capital of the Persian empire. The Jacobites were based in Edessa. However, these centers were not alone. Jenkins paints for his readers an Eastern landscape that, between 500 and 1200, was thick with churches and monasteries from Egypt and Syria to Iraq and Iran. Missionary ventures followed the trade routes as far as Sri Lanka and the western provinces of China as early as the sixth century. Compared to Western expansion into Europe, the Eastern churches moved more rapidly. The Eastern churches had their own liturgies, monastic traditions, missionaries, and centers of learning. They also had their own particular brand of Christian teaching and heritage. Mysticism, familiar to modern readers because of interest in the gnostics, was a routine part of Eastern Christianity, but unlike heretical gnosticism, Eastern mysticism was folded into church teaching. To Eastern Christians, the notion of deification—that is, becoming like God—was a common goal of the spiritual life.


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Tradition in the Eastern Church held that Christ Himself sent the disciple Addai (Thaddeus) to Edessa. Although it may only be legendary, it has at least some plausibility since Edessa was one of the earliest and therefore most closely connected churches to Christ and his followers. There was also a tradition of healing and miracles that set Eastern Christianity apart from more rationalistic Muslim contemporaries. Jacobite philosopher Yahya ibn $Adi knew that “signs” were the most potent means of evangelizing. Jenkins is particularly enthusiastic about the centers of learning associated with the Eastern churches. As in the West, they focused on translation, not only of Christian texts but also of Aristotle and other important works of the ancient world. Christianity was polyglot. In the East, the primary language of the faith was Syriac. By the second century, there was a Syriac Bible. Centers of Christian scholarship, such as Edessa and Nisibis, rivaled the great universities of the West. By 1300, texts by more than one hundred Christian Syriac authors were available. With names unfamiliar to most Western Christians, they were the great Christian thinkers of their time and place: from the seventh and eighth centuries, historians Jacob of Edessa and George of Akula; from the twelfth and thirteenth, Michael Syrus of Antioch, Jacob Bar Salibi of Amida, Abd Yeshua of Nisibis, and Gregory Bar-Hebraeus of Mosul. Through much of his book, Jenkins addresses the relationship between Christians and Muslims in the East, and in the process, he is able to shed light on the ancient origins of twenty-first century controversies. First, he notes a significant difference between the Eastern and Western churches. While the West had to negotiate its way with the Roman Empire, the East coexisted for hundreds of years with Islam. The two religions influenced each other and had inextricable ties. Many Eastern Christian traditions, such as apocryphal texts, architecture (now associated with mosques), the raised pulpit, fasting, prostration during prayer, veiling and head covering, saints, shrines, and the importance of Jesus were adopted by Muslims. If Islam was built, sometimes literally, on the ruins of Christianity, it also philosophically developed in dialogue with the older faith. Jenkins finds evidence that Christian and Muslim leaders sometimes debated each other with mutual respect. Some Eastern Christians saw Islam as an advance over pagan polytheism and Zoroastrianism (a dualistic religion), and they found it more open-minded than hostile Orthodox Christianity. Even if critical of Islam, Eastern Christians saw it as more of a Christian heresy than a strange, hostile newcomer to the region. Accounting for this early amicability, Jenkins notes that it took centuries for Islam to define itself, and the many similarities with Judaism and Christianity created early common ground. Unfortunately, as it did define itself, Islam became periodically more intolerant of Christianity, and the fourteenth century virtually ended the thousand-year flourishing of Eastern Christianity. Repressive measures by Muslim courts in the 1290’s made minorities’ lives more and more miserable. Non-Muslims were soon subject to dhimma, wherein they had to wear badges or clothing identifying themselves as outside the faith. Dhimmis, or outsiders, were tempting targets for discrimination and persecution. Many Christians converted to avoid this discrimination; if they continued to practice Christianity, it was covertly. By 1321, Muslim mobs were looting and

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destroying Coptic churches. Similar conditions prevailed between 1290 and 1330 in Syria and Mesopotamia. Mob violence, forcible conversions, and looting were common. The Turks spread their oppression to Armenia and Georgia. In 1354, the Muslim rulers under whom many Eastern Christians had lived peacefully began a campaign of persecution that over the period of a century wiped out their churches. By 1480, Jenkins illustrates through one account, fifty-one metropolitanates, eighteen archbishoprics, and 478 bishoprics were decimated, as were the three great patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Jenkins challenges recent efforts to portray Islam as a tolerant faith. The persecution, massacre, and general ethnic cleansing of the fourteenth century belie that characterization, he argues. On the other hand, he balances his account by pointing out the centuries in which Christians had lived relatively peacefully inside Muslim regimes. His conclusion is that persecution was not an integral part of Islam rule, but it became, at various points, and most fatally in the fourteenth century, aggravated for particular reasons. The Crusades, for example, begun in 1095 by the pope to recapture the Holy Land from the Turks, had the unfortunate side effect of increasing persecution of minority Christians who were viewed with increasing suspicion in Muslim areas. Jenkins analyzes many other, later examples of the effects of Muslim persecution on the Eastern Christians, such as Turkey’s ethnic cleansing of 1.5 million Armenians and other Christian minorities in 1915. He notes that the term genocide itself was coined in response to the Muslim attacks on Nestorian Christians in Iraq in 1933. The relative sudden destruction of these churches launches Jenkins into philosophical questions about why churches die, how they survive, and what implications such questions have for faith itself. Does such annihilation occur for providential reasons or by simple chance and brute force? He notes an assumption in Christian circles that the faith has been on a providentially patterned trajectory of ever-widening expansion, with modern inroads into China and Africa as miraculous examples. That view, however, as Jenkins persuasively argues, ignores the thorough destruction of the Eastern churches after a flourishing thousand-year history. As Jenkins notes, when a millennium of gospel expansion was virtually wiped out in one century and further remnants rooted out in a mere decade, it becomes clear to an objective historian that Christianization is neither inevitable nor a one-way road. Jenkins balances his position, however, with an acknowledgment that, although churches end in one region, they spring up in another. European and American expansion of the faith occurred as, or not long after, the Eastern churches were disappearing. Jenkins plausibly notes that the “Church” continues even as individual “churches” die out. As the Jews’ return to Palestine suggests, some exits are not terminal. Furthermore, as the Old Testament demonstrates, the chosen people of God suffered many reversals at the hands of neighboring enemies, sometimes being chastened and sometimes being triumphant and vindicated. Jenkins wonders whether positives such as these can arise from the ashes of the Eastern church’s defeat. He cites the example of China, where Christianity had many false starts and was thought to be virtually dead at various points in history. Nevertheless, today, under a political system hostile to it, there are some fifty to ninety million Chinese Christians. Jenkins


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reminds his readers that Christians were never promised control of the governments that ruled them. Instead of marveling over the suppression and extermination of faith, he wonders if perhaps one should consider any peaceful coexistence with the world’s rulers remarkable for its exceptionalism. The Lost History of Christianity is an eye-opening survey of a history that until now has been largely confined to scholars. It both enlightens and stimulates further reading on an essential subject. William L. Howard

Review Sources America 200, no. 1 (May 5, 2009): 30-31. Booklist 105, no. 3 (October 1, 2008): 16. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 16 (August 15, 2008): 69. Library Journal 133, no. 11 (June 15, 2008): 73. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 28 (July 14, 2008): 61-62.

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LULU IN MARRAKECH Author: Diane Johnson (1934) Publisher: E. P. Dutton (New York). 307 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The early 2000’s Locale: Marrakech, Morocco In this novel, Johnson examines the cultural clashes among French, American, English, and Islamic residents and visitors in contemporary Morocco from the perspective of Lulu Sawyer, spy Principal characters: Lulu Sawyer, a novice intelligence operative whose mission is to explore money routes to Islamic extremists while seemingly working for a literacy foundation Ian Drumm, Lulu’s lover and a person of interest to her employers Suma Bourad, a French Algerian who flees Paris because her family wants to have her killed after she loses her purity Amid Bourad, Suma’s brother who is accidentally killed during a failed kidnapping Gazi Al-Sayed, a Saudi wife who unexpectedly leaves her husband Posy Crumley, an English woman who gives birth to her first child while staying at Ian Drumm’s house in Morocco. Robin Crumley, Posy’s husband, a famous English poet Sefton Taft, Lulu’s case officer in Spain Desi, a young Moroccan girl who is implicated in a potential terrorist bombing

Diane Johnson’s Lulu in Marrakech is the first-person story of Lulu Sawyer, a newly recruited intelligence operative who is sent to Morocco to investigate how money given to charities there ends up in the hands of Islamic extremists elsewhere. Her sojourn in Marrakech is only her second espionage assignment in the organization, so she is, in effect, learning to be a spy on the job. The novel, however, does not always follow the typical trajectory of a spy thriller. Though Lulu does suggest that she knows how to wiretap rooms and make impressions of keys, her mission requires her to observe the people in her surroundings and send reports of their behavior back to her superiors—human intelligence, as she refers to it. Lulu does not fit the stereotype of an intelligence operative. Rather, Johnson depicts her as equal parts spy and romance novel heroine—part of her cover story for visiting Morocco is to stay with her lover, Ian Drumm, a man she had met and had begun a relationship with during her previous mission. Lulu also symbolizes the American abroad, thrown in with an unusual mixture of Europeans, Middle Easterners, and locals in Morocco. Though the novel works well as a story exploring cultural differences or as a spy text, Johnson’s

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intermix of these two genres creates some problematic plot and character developments Diane Johnson taught for many years at the University of California at Davis. that diminish the novel’s effectiveness. Several of Johnson’s previous works ex- She has written eleven novels, five plore the ramifications of this combining of works of nonfiction, including a different lifestyles and mores in close quar- biography of Dashiell Hammett, and ters, most notably her 1987 Pulitzer Prize- numerous reviews. Her collection of nominated Persian Nights and her French essays and book reviews, Terrorists and Novelists (1982), was nominated for a trilogy—L’Affaire (2003), Le Divorce (1997), Pulitzer Prize, as was her 1987 novel and Le Mariage (2000). In all four of these Persian Nights. novels, Johnson juxtaposes a slightly adrift American abroad with the more understated and subtle culture of France, in the French trilogy, and of Iran, in Persian Nights. Typically, the American character misreads cultural signs and symbols, is frequently criticized for her American qualities, but eventually learns to appreciate the foreign culture, eventually valuing her Americanisms and the new aspects of her personality brought to life by immersion in the foreign climate. Lulu in Marrakech follows many of these same patterns, as Lulu settles into the Moroccan lifestyle. There, she must navigate through many different groups: the visiting French and English with their summer homes in Marrakech, the Algerian refugees, the Islamic cooks, the Islamic Americans, and the runaway Saudis. The cultural melting pot allows Lulu a look into several cultures, but, unlike Johnson’s previous narrators who seem to gain in understanding the foreign culture, Lulu never seems to come to terms with the Moroccan way of life. The odd mixing of cultures in Marrakech highlights its diversity, but in the context of the novel, it creates a cultural confusion that Lulu never quite masters. As in Persian Nights, Johnson also tackles tough political issues, though the political climate of Lulu in Marrakech is a bit more extreme. Lulu becomes involved in the rendition and torture of a perceived Islamic extremist, and this highlights the most pressing concern of the novel: the general fear that the moderate Islamic culture’s resistance to Islamic extremists is corroding. Thus, everyone is considered suspicious and a potential terrorist. Johnson seems to ask: How does an intelligence operative infiltrate such an environment? Though Persian Nights looks at the naïveté of Chloe Fowler, an American visiting a foreign culture and not really understanding the inherent danger, Lulu examines the culture of Marrakech from the opposite extreme. Whereas the narrator in Persian Nights cannot imagine men shooting at a crowd in a tourist area and believes that Americans and other foreigners in Iran will be safe because they are not natives, in Marrakech, no one is that naïve, particularly in the post9/11 world of the novel. Though Lulu acknowledges many of the potential dangers in the area, she ignores the possibilities that her lover might be involved in espionage as well. Thus, she is like some of Johnson’s previous narrators in her naïveté, although, ironically, her job title suggests that she should be more well informed. As the main character, Lulu is a complex blend of an emotionally immature and insecure woman who is also an intelligence agent, a person one would expect to be more decisive and

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serious. Though Lulu will not ask her lover Ian how he feels about her, or question his romantic loyalty to her even when she spies him with another woman, she continues to seek information regarding money transfers and suspicious characters. Though the story is told from Lulu’s perspective, her attitude about her business and her relationships seems clipped and emotionally sterile, thus distancing her from the other characters in the novel. Although this keeps her from becoming a likable heroine, such a temperament seems more suited to her profession. In addition, Lulu resembles other Johnson heroines in her decided inability to know what she wants and how to go about getting it. Given the vast social and spiritual differences between the Western and the Eastern inhabitants of Marrakech, Johnson voices some of the feminist arguments against Islamic culture, but only in a cursory way, primarily focusing on Posy Crumley’s declarations about the culture’s violence against women and the Islamic male’s fixation on a woman’s virginity as a sign of purity. A subplot of the novel concerns Suma Bourad, who is pursued, perhaps, by her brother Amid, because of her lost virginity. Amid’s threat to kill Suma as well as Gazi Al-Sayed’s flight from her Islamic husband position the women in the novel to address issues of female autonomy within the Islamic culture. Though Posy and Lulu are outraged at the treatment of Islamic women, and Lulu expresses an interest in Islamic women and children being taught to read, somehow these feminist concerns are only tangentially referenced in the novel and neither of the women form close attachments to any of the Islamic women. Despite the political and social dissonances that Johnson explores, much of the surface-level plot involves the romance between Ian and Lulu. Even here, Johnson does not seem to have the right formula. When Lulu first arrives in Marrakech and finds her situation with Ian a bit less romantic than she expected, she does not question him. Part of this reticence, she explains later in the novel, is that she is not “emotionally possessive,” meaning that she does not need to know the motives for his actions. However, because Lulu never explores Ian’s motivations, he remains a onedimensional character whose presence is diminished by her lack of description. In fact, one could say that Lulu is a bad observer. The reader does not get the sense that she really sees beneath the surface of any of the concerns in the novel, leaving the reader to wonder if this is the nature of intelligence. In several conversations with her contact Taft, he indicates that he does not want Lulu to analyze anything; rather, she needs simply to report about the people she has befriended, her “pickets” and informants, and “storekeepers, waiters, and the like whose opinions would be useful.” Since her job is merely to report, she is trained to avoid analysis. In the one instance when she does analyze actions—deducing that the young Moroccan girl Desi’s heavy coat at a concert suggests that she is loaded with explosives—Lulu is chastised. In keeping with the spy theme, the novel is filled with various cloak-and-dagger subplots, such as the one involving Gazi Al-Sayed, a Saudi wife attempting to leave her husband Khaled by first hiding out at Ian’s house, then finding a way to get across the border into Spain. Lulu also meets operatives in the market who give her enigmatic messages containing code words and names. Johnson humorously references other popular culture spy favorites to highlight Lulu’s locale and romantic situation.

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By the end of the novel, when Gazi flees, the plot resembles that of the film Casablanca (1942): Like Ilsa, who needs letters of transit to be able to leave Morocco, Gazi needs her passport. In keeping with the spy plot, at two separate points of the novel, Lulu is compared to Ingrid Bergman’s character Alicia Huberman in the film Notorious (1946), a spy who must sleep with a man in order to get information. Like Bergman, Lulu is recruited partially because of her sexual availability. Johnson further focuses on spy culture by including a number of epigraphs from a book detailing intelligence plans, Intelligence Requirements for the 1980’s, Volumes 1-7 (1979-1986), which she acknowledges as a source for some of Lulu’s references. In addition, the epigraphs about intelligence-related information that head several chapters hold the novel together. This use of epigraphs to begin chapters is a Johnson earmark, found in her last four novels, though their use in the previous works did not seem as critical a tool for understanding the plot. Ironically, focusing the attention on the background of spying allows Johnson to draw notice to the problems of the American spy system. In many ways, Lulu serves as an example of the inept spy whose actions, and those of her group, bungle matters in such a way that terrible things happen, such as the death of Amid Bourad, perhaps not an Islamic “person of interest” at all, but a French intelligence operator. Furthermore, the lack of continuity between what the intelligence texts suggest and what Lulu does in the novel underscores the difficulty of spying and the entrenched nature of the profession. Though many of Johnson’s previous novels take bold, dramatic turns toward violence from the sometimes lighthearted romance or urbane discourse, the move in Lulu in Marrakech from her romance-infused sojourn with some lightweight spying to her involvement in rendition and torture seems odd in the midst of an otherwise engaging novel of manners. This disconnect showcases the limits of mixing the two genres, despite Johnson’s efforts to make Lulu more cinematically palatable. Spying is ultimately nasty business and no amount of romantic whimsy or dinnertime banter can alter that central fact. Rebecca Hendrick Flannagan

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 22 (August 1, 2008): 38. Elle 24, no. 3 (November, 2008): 242. Entertainment Weekly, October 3, 2008, p. 79. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 16 (August 15, 2008): 41. Library Journal 133, no. 13 (August 1, 2008): 68. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 19 (December 4, 2008): 41-43. The New York Times, October 24, 2008, p. C32. The New York Times Book Review, October 26, 2008, p. 8. O, The Oprah Magazine 9, no. 10 (October, 2008): 220. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 27 (July 7, 2008): 34. Vogue 198, no. 10 (October, 2008): 278.

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LUSH LIFE Author: Richard Price (1949) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 455 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 2007 Locale: Lower East Side, New York City The two worlds of contemporary urban life in Manhattan’s Lower East side collide when a jumpy Latino teenager murders a young white would-be hipster during a mugging gone wrong Principal characters: Ike Marcus, a young would-be writer and murder victim Billy Marcus, Ike’s father Steven Boulware, Ike’s friend, a young, alcoholic would-be actor Eric Cash, a would-be writer, ten years older than Ike and Steven Matty Clark, detective assigned to the murder case Yolonda Bello, Clark’s partner Harry Steele, a successful businessman Tristan Acevedo, a teenager who kills Ike during an attempted robbery

Lush Life by Richard Price is not only an exploration of the diverse characters affected by a robbery-gone-wrong on New York City’s Lower East Side but also an exploration of the contemporary nature of the area itself, in which upscale young people have been uneasily braided into the neighborhood’s earlier identity as an urban ghetto. Price takes full advantage of the satiric potential for this social phenomenon, depicting new would-be artists in the neighborhood as living in a protected bubble that not only insulates them from the darker realities around them but also makes their very obliviousness one of the neighborhood’s darkest realities. The bars and boutiques that cater to the privileged youngsters seem to blind them to the downmarket bodegas and housing projects that surround them; the surreal absurdity of this richman, poor-man setting is made more striking by the heartless arrogance of the young hipsters, demonstrated especially by Ike Marcus, the young would-be writer whose murder by a stressed-out young Latino sets the narrative in motion. The tragedy occurs in the early morning hours, when, after a night of drinking, Ike is helping home his inebriated friend, Steven Boulware. Along for the ride is Eric Cash, who had recently hired Ike as the new bartender for the trendy restaurant he manages for successful businessman Harry Steele. When the stumblebum trio are approached by two young Latinos, Ike’s glib, high-handed manner does not shut the situation down, as perhaps it would in a Hollywood film in which he imagines he has been cast as the hero; instead, his response triggers the violence.

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Ike’s fatal arrogance is anticipated by an important previous episode, involving what appears to be the image of the Virgin Mary in the mist on a bodega’s refrigerator door. When business at Steele’s restaurant is threatened by the crowd attracted to this apparition, Eric and Ike are dispatched to take care of it. While Eric surprises himself by hanging back, Ike unhesitatingly allows a bit of warm air to dissolve the Madonna; an unbeliever himself, he has no respect for the tradition or the culture of those to whom this image mattered. This Richard Price was born and raised in episode also suggests he has little respect for the Bronx, New York. He is the author boundaries; he is never aware of when he is of seven novels, including Clockers crossing the line. The devastation of this im- (1992), Freedomland (1998), and promptu icon anticipates Ike’s future run-in, Samaritan (2003), and numerous and it is prefigured by the site of a recently screenplays. He won a 2007 Edgar collapsed synagogue Eric and Ike barely reg- Award for his writing on the HBO ister on their way to the bodega. That Ike’s series The Wire. grandparents once attended such a synagogue has no impact on Ike, who has no connection to his family’s traditions or to the history of the immigrants who once populated the Lower East Side. The endemic cluelessness of the privileged young is also demonstrated at Ike’s memorial service, orchestrated by his media-savvy friend Steven. After a medley of pop songs, the service allows Ike’s friends to unwittingly reveal in their eulogies both their own narcissism as well as that of the deceased. Steven ends the service by dancing in the streets in a state of near-ecstasy, making an impression that is less sacred than profane or perhaps simply hollow and meretricious. While Ike and his friends appear largely free of guilt and anguish, there are those in the novel who do undergo crises of conscience. The primary soul-searcher is Eric Cash, an older and more jaded version of the younger artistic types around him. Eric is at first suspected of murdering Ike, not only because of misleading circumstantial evidence but also because of the self-loathing that has overtaken him as a result of his feeling that he has done nothing of value in his life. The turning point for Eric comes after the murder of Ike, when he is briefly a suspect and is subjected to a searing, lengthy interrogation by detective Matty Clark and his partner Yolonda, an experience that breaks down every illusion by which Eric had been able to continue to live on the Lower East Side. When Matty describes Eric as little more than a selfish, self-pitying, envious, and cowardly failure, who would not be above an enraged and resentful murder of chance acquaintance Ike, Eric is devastated. Now thirty-five, Eric realizes he must accept the end of his youth and the promise of his literary ambitions; furthermore, he sees the hipster downtown life as one that simply allows him to lie to himself about who he is and what he has become.

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Overwhelmed by the realization that the future he had anticipated for himself will never come to pass, Eric begins to steal the tips owed his coworkers to fund his getaway from a world he now finds alienating and even frightening. As he slides weakly into the criminality Clark has suspected in him all along, Eric is rescued by his conscience. Along with his growing fear is a deepening sense of guilt so powerful that it is only when a group of thugs rob and brutally beat him that Eric begins to feel a satisfactory sense of expiation. Eric’s active conscience is something that appears to distinguish him from his friends and coworkers; in addition, unlike the others, Eric has always felt that the Lower East Side in which he has been living for eight years is haunted by the ghosts of the past, of those who were part of the old traditions brought over from Europe. The posh apartment of his boss Harry Steele is a desanctified synagogue and clearly a triumph of gentrification, and Eric is as uneasy in this contemporary tribute to the good life as he was when confronting the refrigerator Madonna. His reserve suggests that he is sensitive to issues of presumption and disrespect in a way that distinguishes him from those around him. The morally ambiguous Steele does, however, come close to being a much-needed father figure in Eric’s life, and it is Steele who gives the penitent Eric if not a second chance than at least a way out of the Lower East Side. Steele references the issue of fathers, which is one of this novel’s important subjects. Like the fathers and father figures in this novel, Steele lives a life at a distance from that of his confused surrogate son Eric; similarly, Ike’s father, Billy Marcus, divorced from his son’s mother, is overcome by the realization that he has selfishly distanced himself from his son. The childish Billy ironically demonstrates even more adult dereliction after Ike’s death by drinking too much, abandoning his second wife and stepdaughter, and making a perfect pest of himself with the police force. The death of Ike, however, has forced Billy to own up to his faults, even as his determined downward spiral seems to be yet another bad move. Billy finds something of a soul mate in the investigating detective, Matty Clark. In pursuing this case, Matty, whose name echoes Billy’s, must face the fact that he has been wrong to distance himself from his two sons, who are about to become callow criminals; he understands that he must do something about it before it is too late. Although by the end of this novel pervasive guilt has been established, the story does specify the orphaned Tristan Acevedo as the teenager who pulled the trigger on the gun. With his mother dead and his father absent, Tristan is living in a housing project with a callous stepfather and his new wife, who seem to retain him only because of his value as an unpaid caretaker for their small children. Tristan is given an opportunity to demonstrate some street “cred” when he is asked to join an older friend in a prowl of the neighborhood in search of likely prey, who turn out to be Ike and his buddies. The usual social pattern had ensured that Tristan and Ike are virtually invisible to each other, divided as they were along class, cultural, ethnic, and racial lines; it is only as a victim of crime that Ike finds himself face-to-face with Tristan. However, like Ike, Acevedo is unlucky in his choice of friends; it is his bullying pal who provides the inexperienced Tristan with the handgun with which he shoots Ike. In the aftermath, as was the case with Steven and Ike, the friendship is also tested and found empty. In ad-

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dition, Tristan, like Ike, has artistic aspirations. He is a would-be writer of hip-hop lyrics, his voice and the voices of those like him mix in a jazzy way with the novel’s cop lingo and its patois of privileged youth. In fact, it is Price’s special talent to allow his characters to exist within their various voices, which blend and clash in a way that brings to life the entire spectrum of urban life, its low life, its high life, and its “lush life,” the last a phenomenon that suggests that the high life is never very far from its opposite. The final major urban tribe in Price’s novel functions in a way that is both very near and quite far from such small-time criminals as Tristan. This tribe consists of the police, who keep an eye on the kids from the projects and run them to ground when necessary. The police see Ike and his friends as essentially well-to-do children on a protracted spring break, on occasion becoming the victims of the edgy teenagers from the housing projects. The job of the police is the surveillance and control of this latter group—the novel begins, in fact, with something called the Quality of Life Task Force, who patrol the Lower East Side in an unmarked car looking for likely black and Hispanic perpetrators. It is the perspective of the police, in fact, that supplies this story with its tension and structure; this novel is on the face of it a police procedural, and there is considerable time spent seeing this world through the eyes of the troubled detective Matty and his more grounded and empathic partner, Yolonda. Although an exciting, expertly executed crime novel on the surface, Lush Life is also a novel of conscience, both social and psychological. As a moralist, Price shows that, while the young people of any race or class have yet to develop a sense of consequence, older voices recognize that, with age and time, the wrong life will call down suffering and remorse. As a novelist with a social conscience, Price is sensitive and satiric, and at times he seems a stern Old Testament prophet, warning of numbered days. In Lush Life the police are hardly on top of very much, and even the detective of record is living a life that he must put into turnaround. In fact, each story suggests that this time in everyone’s life is about to be over or that time is running out. When the hip, downtown-Manhattan neighborhood depicted has been transplanted by novel’s end to Atlantic City as part of a new theme park, it suggests not a definitive end of days but a final, irreverent evaluation of a cultural landscape that has broken many hearts and has already lost its soul. Its shining hour seems to have lasted little longer than a New York minute. Margaret Boe Birns

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 7 (December 1, 2007): 5. Chicago Tribune, March 15, 2008, p. 4. Entertainment Weekly, March 7, 2008, p. 94. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 12. Library Journal 133, no. 4 (March 1, 2008): 75-76.

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Los Angeles Times, March 2, 2008, p. R1. The Nation 286, no. 22 (June 9, 2008): 48-52. New York 41, no. 9 (March 10, 2008): 144-145. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 7 (May 1, 2008): 28-31. The New York Times, March 4, 2008, p. E1. The New York Times Book Review, March 16, 2008, p. 1. The New Yorker 84, no. 8 (April 7, 2008): 79-81. Newsweek 151, no. 10 (March 10, 2008): 50-52. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 3 (January 21, 2008): 151. World Literature Today 82, no. 6 (November/December, 2008): 64-65.

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McMAFIA A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld Author: Misha Glenny (1958) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 375 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Current affairs Time: 1985-2007 Locale: Worldwide Glenny describes the operations of organized crime elements throughout all parts of the world and examines the causes and consequences of their activities and their impact on governments and law-abiding citizens Misha Glenny begins McMafia with the story of a young British woman gunned down in 1994 at her front door in a London suburb. A subsequent investigation revealed that the real target of this seemingly senseless crime had been her sister, who was married to an Armenian embroiled in the illegal arms trade. In the previous five years, that business had grown exponentially to supply groups in Eastern Europe, where civil wars raged incessantly. Apparently the Armenian had fallen out with his partners in crime, and apparently the traffickers had decided that murdering his wife would be an effective way to express their displeasure. Unfortunately, his sister-in-law was the one who ended up dead. The circumstances leading to this unfortunate woman’s death are indicative of the kinds of activities happening around the world in what Glenny describes as an exponential rise in the global shadow economy. Managing this vast enterprise of illegal businesses is a network of organized crime groups whose reach extends across the continents and whose annual net profits run into the billions. This new generation of criminals is the subject of Glenny’s extensive, well researched, and at times provocative study. As Glenny is quick to point out, however, there have been underworld elements in virtually every country for decades, even centuries. These have ranged from bands of hoodlums to more sophisticated groups with well-defined hierarchies and elaborate mechanisms for handling their illicit income. What has changed during the last decades of the twentieth century is the propensity for regional or national groups to establish ties with organized crime elements in other countries, creating in effect international cartels for the production, distribution, and sale of illegal goods and services—and for the equally important task of “laundering” money, transferring funds into legitimate businesses or investments to erase any trace of the activity from which they were originally obtained. The activities of organized crime have been aided—unintentionally, perhaps—by the worldwide trend toward globalization. Liberalized rules in international financial markets have made it possible for criminal groups to operate around the world, banking their ill-gained profits with little fear of discovery by law-enforcement agencies.

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Glenny finds the seeds for the rise of this new criminal class in the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he says ushered in this wave of transnational organized crime. Criminal enterprises sprang up in Bulgaria, in the countries that once made up Yugoslavia, in the Ukraine, in Moldova and its rebellious Transnistria province, and inside Russia itself, where a handful of new oligarchs robbed the state of its assets and made personal fortunes taking advantage of the vacuum created by the absence of strong law-enforcement agencies. Having explained in broad terms how these new international networks have emerged to capitalize on political instability, Glenny then takes his readers on a worldwide tour of countries where organized crime has set down roots and prospered: India, Dubai and other sovereignties in the United Arab Emirates (a favorite place for criminals to bank their earnings), Nigeria, South Africa, Colombia, Brazil, and a number of African nations, including Angola and Nigeria. One seemingly unlikely place is Israel, where recent Russian immigrants have brought with them the dubious skills they learned in the lawless environment that existed in their home land for more than a decade after the Soviet Union fell apart. Another is western Canada, which Glenny identifies as a center of drug operations in North America. The variety of activities in which criminal organizations have become involved is truly mindnumbing, ranging far beyond the more sensational and obviously reprehensible activities such as extortion, robbery, drug trafficking, prostitution, and gambling. Glenny provides example after example of ways enterprising criminals have made fortunes in smuggling legal goods such as cigarettes and caviar into countries where tariffs are high or quantities available through legal means are low. He also explains in some detail the newest form of illegal activity, cybercrime—identity theft, bank fraud, and numerous scams aimed at separating unsuspecting citizens (especially in America and Europe) from their cash. The expansion of the Internet to all corners of the world, considered by many as a great boon, has made it possible for crime elements to communicate more effectively and avoid detection by law-enforcement agencies that have neither the staff nor the expertise to deal effectively with this new phenomenon. An accomplished journalist able to get people on both sides of the law to speak freely with him, Glenny displays an unusual ability to ferret out the criminal infrastructure in countries as widely different as Bulgaria and western Canada and to explain with exceptional facility and clarity the machinations involved in laundering money in an international financial market. Always interested in putting a human face on his tale, he provides brief biographical sketches of a rogue’s gallery of criminals whose brazen disregard for the law seems to strain the limits of readers’ credulity. He also relates the stories of some of the more notable or pitiable victims whose lives

Misha Glenny is the author of The Rebirth of History (1990); The Fall of Yugoslavia (1992), for which he won the Overseas Press Club award for best book on foreign affairs; and The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804-1999 (1999). He has covered Central Europe for the British Broadcasting Corporation and served as a consultant to various governments on Balkan issues.

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have been ruined by the reckless behavior of overlords and underlings in the business of organized crime. There are portraits, too, of some of the people who have dedicated their lives to fighting these criminals, truly brave men and women whose efforts have occasionally resulted in the elimination of a major figure on the world’s “Most Wanted” list. Unfortunately, Glenny points out, because most modern organized crime networks are carefully structured to limit the group’s dependence on any one individual, taking down a crime boss frequently results in only a temporary setback for the organization. Glenny is insistent that international organized crime presents a serious threat to the stability of governments and individual citizens everywhere. This shadow economy siphons off billions of dollars from legitimate businesses and deprives governments of taxes on goods and services. Criminal activity poses a real threat to those who get caught up in the web being spun by individuals whose rapacity for everincreasing sums of money drives them to consider harm to innocent victims as mere collateral damage. Glenny insists, too, that virtually everyone on the planet is touched in some way by organized crime. Some are apparent: A portion of everyone’s taxes must go to support law-enforcement efforts, and some neighborhoods become unsafe when members of organized crime groups set up business there. What may not be so obvious is the way people rely on organized crime to supply their needs or to support their lifestyles. It is not just those dependent on drugs or in search of illicit sexual encounters who make payments to these Mafiosi. Everyone who uses a cell phone may have been contributing, albeit indirectly, to the continued success of organized crime—because every cell phone requires coltan, a mineral obtained almost exclusively in Africa, where mining and trading have been controlled by criminal elements. Only recently have serious efforts been undertaken to delink the mining of this precious mineral from the unsavory characters that have profited for decades from sales to legitimate businesses for legitimate purposes. Glenny’s analysis of organized-crime activities suggests that historically the ability of organized crime networks to become established and to prosper is almost always linked directly to some action by government, whether that has been prohibiting the sale of certain commodities or failing to provide certain services or an acceptable level of security for its citizens. While he has little good to say about the hoodlums who profit from others’ misery, Glenny is equally harsh in his critique of established governments, especially those in the First World, that seem to be doing all the wrong things in managing their economies or combating crime. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his excoriation of the United States for what he considers an ill-conceived policy regarding drug use and abuse. By criminalizing substances such as marijuana and cocaine, the United States is providing a reason for the establishment of criminal groups that see a way to make a substantial profit by supplying banned narcotics to a population whose demand for drugs is growing. Even worse, measures employed by U.S. officials to coerce cooperation in its worldwide effort to stamp out illegal drugs from countries where drugs are produced, specifically those in Latin America, have actually been counterproductive—and sometimes ludicrous. In one stinging example, Glenny points out that the United States built a library in a Colombian village as a re-

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ward for the government’s efforts to drive out the drug cartels. Unfortunately, illiteracy is rampant in that area—as is poverty—and the building remains locked and empty. Meanwhile, drug cartels have continued operating with impunity throughout the country, often supported by a population that sees its own government doing little to alleviate harsh living conditions. The European Union is no better. Glenny blames those countries (along with the United States) for policies that deprived states in the Balkans from generating revenues through exports during the Balkan conflicts of the 1990’s, giving crime groups a golden opportunity to solidify their operations in the area by bribing local governments to ignore what they were doing. Smuggling is an epidemic in Europe because criminals are supplying Western Europeans what they are willing to purchase: drugs, prostitutes, cheap cigarettes, caviar, ivory, even human body parts. What may be even worse, countries in Western Europe want cheap labor but do not want to ease their restrictions on immigration, so mob bosses arrange to bring in labor illegally, at a great profit to them but at great personal cost to the unfortunate men and women who frequently end up being little more than slaves. On this topic Glenny abandons all pretense of journalistic objectivity, insisting that the West’s attempt to support “globalism” will work only when labor is allowed to move freely across borders and people are compensated appropriately for the work they perform. McMafia is an extended effort in advocacy journalism, the effort of a highly respected and often personally brave writer to expose the problems transnational organized crime has created and offer some suggestions on what might be done to curb its influence. Glenny’s proposals are certain to provoke controversy, primarily because he argues from an economic rather than a moralistic (he would say falsely moralistic) position on many of these matters. For example, he believes the influence of the Mafia in drug trafficking has grown in direct proportion to the efforts of the United States and numerous other countries to regulate drugs and go after those who manufacture or distribute substances classified as illegal. Glenny’s recommendation is to legalize most of these narcotics, thereby taking away the need for people to obtain them from organized crime groups. On the other hand, noting how easy it is for Mafia outfits to launder money and play fast and loose in the financial arena, he calls for much tighter global regulation on financial markets. Making financial markets more transparent, especially banking operations in places such as Dubai and Switzerland, would make it much more difficult for organized crime groups to disguise their financial transactions. Recommendations such as these are sure to annoy people who believe that many of the activities in which organized crime is active are morally reprehensible. They will also not sit well with more conservative politicians who have joined forces with the moralists in fighting crimes such as prostitution, gambling, and drug abuse, but who retain a strong sense that there is already too much regulation in financial matters. Hence, it is unlikely that Glenny’s proposals will get a fair hearing in any Western nation any time soon. Nevertheless, it is hard to discount the persuasive argument he makes that current policies have failed to stem the tide of organized crime, and that only by looking for bold new ways of addressing the problems caused by the interna-

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tional Mafias can nations and individuals hope to rid themselves of this global scourge. Laurence W. Mazzeno

Review Sources The Christian Science Monitor, April 22, 2008, p. 13. The Economist 382 (April 12, 2008): 92. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 3 (February 1, 2008): 129. London Review of Books 30, no. 13 (July 3, 2008): 3-6. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 16 (October 23, 2008): 52-55. The New York Times Book Review, May 25, 2008, p. 12. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 3 (January 21, 2008): 163. The Spectator 307 (May 3, 2008): 40-41. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 86 (April 12, 2008): W9. The Washington Post Book World, April 13, 2008, p. 15.

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THE MAGICAL CHORUS A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn Author: Solomon Volkov (1944) Translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 333 pp. $30.00 Type of work: History Time: 1900-2000 Locale: Russia and the Soviet Union Volkov describes the often contentious relationship between government leaders and practitioners of the literary, visual, and performing arts during the turbulent century in which the Soviet Union rose and fell Principal personages: Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist Anton Chekhov, Russian playwright Vladimir Lenin, born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, leader of the Russian Revolution of 1916-1917 and leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.), 1922-1924 Maxim Gorky, Russian poet and political activist Joseph Stalin, born Iosif Vissarionovich Jugashvili, leader of the Soviet Union, 1927-1953 Anna Akhmatova, Russian poet Mikhail Sholokhov, Russian novelist Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union, 1953-1964 Boris Pasternak, Russian poet and novelist Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the Soviet Union, 1985-1991 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian novelist and essayist

The Ukranian poet Anna Akhmatova once described the group of young poets living and working in Leningrad after World War II as a “magical chorus.” Solomon Volkov borrows the phrase for the title of his book on twentieth century Russian cultural history, a work in which the dissident Akhmatova figures prominently. Using material from official records, personal memoirs, scholarly publications, newspaper accounts, and interviews with many of the people whose stories he relates, Volkov creates a lively and at times poignant narrative of struggle in which alienated artists are constantly pitted against superior forces bound to make them conform or be silent. In Volkov’s estimation, the writers, performers, and visual artists living in Russia— which for most of the century was the centerpiece of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or the Soviet Union—were somehow endowed with a kind of magic, allowing them to raise their voices against various forms of oppression that affected not only the arts community but also the population as a whole. Hence The Magical Chorus is cultural history, but with a decidedly political slant. When Volkov speaks of “culture,” he means “high culture” in the sense it has been

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defined in the West by writers such as the nine teenth century British critic Matthew Arnold Born in the Soviet Union during World and the twentieth century American schol- War II, Solomon Volkov emigrated to ars Lionel Trilling, Allan Bloom, and E. D. the United States in 1976. An Hirsch. Although Volkov pays some atten- accomplished musicologist and tion to the genre in which individuals worked aesthetician, he is the author of St. and at times comments on individual works Petersburg: A Cultural History (1995) or performances, he is interested principally and Shostakovich and Stalin (2006). He also published Testimony (1979), a in the relationship between individual artists controversial book purported to be the and the state—or, more appropriately, the vari- memoirs of Russian composer Dmitri ous dictators in charge of Russia’s govern- Shostakovich but which some claim to ment. Whether writing about Nicholas II, the be Volkov’s original work. last czar to rule before Vladimir Lenin and his supporters ousted the monarchy and set up their Communist utopia, or about the men who succeeded Lenin as head of state—Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, and Mikhail Gorbachev the most prominent among them—Volkov stresses the important role these leaders had in shaping the direction of the arts in Russia and determining the fate of individual artists. Like their counterparts in other countries, Russian artists began the twentieth century struggling to define the nature of art. There were clashes within the various communities of writers and performers as proponents of modernism, expressionism, and abstract art challenged supporters of traditional realism, itself a tradition less than three centuries old in fiction and even newer in the visual arts. In addition to battles over aesthetics, however, Russian artists seem always to find themselves engaged in conflict with the various forms of authority. In the early years of the century Leo Tolstoy, one of the world’s most distinguished novelists and a figure revered throughout his homeland, was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church for his heretical views on religion. Unfazed, Tolstoy went on trying to tell anyone who would listen what Russia (and all humankind, for that matter) must do to achieve personal and social salvation. Nicholas II ignored Tolstoy’s advice on government, but the czar took some interest in art being produced in the country. The czar seemed to favor realistic art that celebrated traditional (that is, monarchist) values, and he was averse to allowing subordinates to make life difficult for those who were experimenting with new forms of expression. Despite the crackdown by Nicholas’s forces, avant-garde writers, dramatists, musicians, and painters seemed to be gaining the upper hand by the time Lenin’s Red Army defeated the czar’s supporters. For a brief period, these artists held a privileged place in society, seen by Communist leaders as harbingers of a new style that was replacing the moribund practices of traditionalists, whose ties to the old regime were apparent in many ways. Eventually, however, these men and women came under suspicion for what Lenin and his followers described as subversive and decadent practices; it was not wise, leaders thought, to let people interpret art or anything else as they might wish. By the time Stalin had firmly established his control over Soviet pol-

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itics in the 1930’s, “socialist realism” became the only approved form of art. Plays, novels, poetry, musical compositions, paintings, and sculptures all had to celebrate the achievements of the proletariat in order to receive public recognition and support. Concurrently, those who challenged the ideals of communism or protested the practices of Stalin or his successors often found themselves shuffled off to labor camps or, in the worst case, executed on trumped-up charges of crimes against the state. Volkov provides insightful and sometimes heartwrenching sketches of dozens of writers whose careers rose and fell at the whim of Stalin. Even Stalin’s trusted adviser Maxim Gorky came under a cloud of distrust, and only death may have prevented him from suffering further humiliation—or worse. While writers who had fled Russia for other countries in Europe or America before or shortly after the Bolsheviks came to power lamented the fate of their fellow artists suffering under Stalin’s repressive regime, those who remained put up what Volkov describes as a heroic struggle to write or perform, even at the risk of personal safety. Volkov also explains why some writers chose to adapt to the rules laid down by Communist leaders, and why works by these men and women have been underappreciated by those in the West who would dismiss “socialist realism” as inherently inferior art. Particularly interesting is Volkov’s discussion of the Soviet government’s attempts to have the Nobel Prize awarded to a Russian writer—specifically, to someone such as the novelist Mikhail Sholokov, of whom Stalin approved—and the political fallout when the first Russian to win the prize was the exiled Ivan Bunin. The government took little joy in several subsequent awards to Russian authors and went to great lengths to ensure that the poet and novelist Boris Pasternak did not go to Sweden to be honored upon being named the winner in 1958. The artistic community took hope when Stalin died and there appeared to be some movement to release the stranglehold that government officials had on the production of art. It was during one of those brief moments of liberalization that Khruschev, working hard to paint Stalin in a bad light, in 1962 allowed the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1963), a scathing account of the forced labor camps to which Stalin had exiled millions of Russians. That brief, halcyon period of détente between Khrushchev and Russian artists did not last, however, and the situation did not improve under Khrushchev’s successors. Although Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his efforts to reveal the horrors of the Soviet labor-camp system, authorities found his portrait of the government a bit too embarrassing, and by 1974 he was exiled. Even under the seemingly open and reform-minded Gorbachev, those whose work hinted at nonconformity suffered at the hands of state agents. Sadly, when the Soviet Union fell, Volkov notes, those who had suffered for the sake of their art found competition from an even more menacing foe: popular culture, and especially rock music, imported from the United States, which seemed to captivate the younger generation of Russians and make them oblivious to the art produced by those who clung to less commercial forms of expression. Having begun with a discussion of Tolstoy’s advice to the czar, Volkov deftly brings his narrative full circle by closing with a discussion of Solzhenitsyn’s advice to

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Russia’s leaders as they tried to reorganize the country after the fall of communism. Once again, Volkov notes sadly, the writer of international reputation found himself unheeded at home. Having spent his entire writing life trying to point out the evils of the Soviet system, Solzhenitsyn seemed to modern Russians sadly out of touch with contemporary realities. In this sweeping survey of Russian cultural history, no one writer dominates Volkov’s landscape. Though some are discussed more extensively—Tolstoy and his contemporary Anton Chekhov, Gorky, Akhmatova, and Solzhenitsyn—Volkov weaves into his narrative stories of the careers of poets Alexander Blok, Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky, dramatist Konstantin Stanislavsky, and composers Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich. They are, indeed, a magical chorus of artists who seemed to sing the same tune, a song of protest against authorities who would limit their creativity. Hence, on some meta-level, Volkov’s book is a tale about repression versus freedom of expression. As he notes on more than one occasion, Soviet authorities frequently gave legitimacy to, and conferred status on, artists whose work might have otherwise gone unnoticed had government officials not chosen to harass them. There were some truly subversive works, but as Volkov notes in discussing a number of musical compositions and novels, it was sometimes hard for artists or their publics to distinguish what was actually seditious from work that simply displeased an official who had the power to censor it. It is clear that Volkov likes some people—both artists and politicians—better than others, but throughout The Magical Chorus he strives for objectivity, saying to his readers: Here is what happened, make what you will of it. He does offer some controversial judgments about individuals whose reputation in the West is, in his opinion, unfairly distorted. At the top of that list is Stalin, whom Volkov portrays as a considerably more complex and thoughtful figure than others have made him out to be. Volkov insists that, unlike most other Soviet leaders, Stalin read voraciously and understood the propagandistic value of the arts. In some ways, these qualities make Stalin an even more menacing figure, as one can see him manipulating writers, painters, and performers often for no other reason than that he had power to do so. In these and other provocative assessments lies the particular strength of Volkov’s portrait of twentieth century Russia. His well-researched, highly readable, and engaging account does much to expose for Western audiences some of the hidden wellsprings of the Russian character and culture and to make sense of its politics. Laurence W. Mazzeno

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Review Sources America 198, no. 4 (April 28, 2008): 40-42. Booklist 104, no. 14 (March 15, 2008): 23. The Christian Science Monitor, March 11, 2008, p. 17. Commentary 125, no. 5 (May, 2008): 50-52. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 2 (January 15, 2008): 84-85. The New Leader 91, no. 2 (March/April, 2008): 21-22. The New York Times Book Review, May 4, 2008, p. 18. Russian Life 51, no. 3 (May/June, 2008): 62.

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MAN IN THE DARK Author: Paul Auster (1947) Publisher: Henry Holt (New York). 182 pp. $23.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 2007 Locale: A house in Vermont A seventy-two-year-old widower, living with his daughter and granddaughter, suffers from insomnia and invents stories as he lies awake in the dark Principal characters: August Brill, a seventy-two-year-old book reviewer and critic Miriam, his forty-seven-year-old daughter and a scholar Katya, his twenty-three-year-old granddaughter who grieves for a dead lover Titus Small, Katya’s former boyfriend Owen Brick, a character of Brill’s imagination who finds himself a central figure in a civil war

The novel Man in the Dark begins ominously: “I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.” That wilderness is Vermont, where August Brill has moved after a serious car accident has left him disabled. He resides with his divorced daughter, Miriam, and her college-aged daughter, Katya, who mourns a dead lover. Brill is oppressed by a collection of personal sorrows, and to cope with those difficulties he seeks diversion through elaborate stories he concocts in his head. His most recent, and most compelling, concerns Owen Brick, a professional magician in Queens, New York, who works under the stage name of the Great Zavello. Brick is an otherwise unprepossessing figure, a quiet man, living a quiet life, married to a woman named Flora, who is expecting his first child and who frets over his humble means. Inexplicably, though, he awakens suddenly to find himself in a deep hole, of which he has no memory of entering and no means of escape. When he is finally extricated, his commanding officer informs Brick that he is fighting in a civil war in America and that he has been chosen to assassinate the one man responsible for the conflict, “because he owns the war. He invented it, and everything that happens or is about to happen is in his head. Eliminate the head, and the war stops. It’s that simple.” Brick seeks to avoid this responsibility, but after each attempt to escape or elude his superiors, he is beaten or dragged back into the conflict. When Brick protests that he does not recognize this war or this version of the United States, one that never endured 9/11 or the Iraq conflict, he is informed that he lives in different, parallel

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worlds, a condition postulated by a sixteenth century Italian philosopher who reasoned that because of God’s infinitude there exists an infinite number of worlds. Brick is allowed to return briefly to his former life, where he resumes his quotidian existence but also begins researching the writings of his putative victim, who is now revealed to be Brill himself. Brick is soon visited by his tormentors, as the two worlds collide, and he has a brief affair with a woman from his past With The New York Trilogy—City of who has been sent to persuade him to accept Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The his mission. When he refuses yet again to parLocked Room (1986)—Paul Auster ticipate in murder, he is eliminated. established his reputation as an At this point, a restless Katya visits her experimental writer. His other novels grandfather and insists he describe his marinclude In the Country of Last Things riage and explain why he once divorced his (1987), Moon Palace (1989), Leviathan (1992), Mr. Vertigo (1994), The Book wife and then lived with her once again after of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn leaving his second wife. During their late Follies (2005), and Travels in the night colloquy, the reader also learns about Scriptorium (2007). He has published Katya’s grief and the guilt she feels over the essay collections and screenplays. murder of her boyfriend. Paul Auster has a reputation for being one of American letters’ premier metafictionists, a title that has led to criticism in some quarters and to praise in others. European readers have especially appreciated Auster’s fictional experiments as evidenced by granting him the prestigious Prix Médicis Etranger and the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. Man in the Dark is in many ways a continuation of the self-reflexiveness established in the novels, published in 1985 and 1986, included in Auster’s New York Trilogy and extending over his next ten novels. This novel is located squarely in the creative consciousness of a writer, in this case a former book reviewer and critic. Unlike other writers, though, Brill does not create because of a vacancy he seeks to fill but rather from the press of heart-scalding losses that demand his attention. In short, Brill creates to divert or escape. Whereas metafictions typically revolve around the story of someone creating the story itself— its methods, its means, its shortcomings, its false starts—the narrative, though sometimes convoluted, remains focused on the story of the story. Man in the Dark is similar, but with a significant difference. It presents an intricate nest of stories that parallel and compete with one another. Thus, one finds the narratives of a mother and daughter troubled by lovers lost and of a writer overwhelmed by his own personal loss and inability to assuage the sorrows of those he loves. Additionally, there is the invented protagonist—Brick—who wanders between two worlds and carries the burden of making peace for all those oppressed by war and death. Finally, there is Brill’s failed memoir that comes to life only in a nightlong reminis-

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cence for his granddaughter. Interspersed with these stories is a handful of brief anecdotes that Brill has acquired from relatives and friends as well as the synopses of films that he and Katya watch together in their home. On the surface, these narratives seem to lack coherence, until one considers Brill’s meditation on the possibility of multiple realities that Giordano Bruno postulated as issuing from the fecund imagination of the supreme creative consciousness. “There are many worlds [read also narratives], and they all run parallel to one another, worlds and antiworlds, worlds and shadow-worlds, and each is dreamed or imagined or written by someone in another world.” These parallel experiences become a fitting metaphor for Brill’s existence, both lived and invented. Beneath the contortions of the stories sliding in and out of one another is the narrative of a post-George W. Bush United States. In Brick’s invented United States, the Twin Towers remain intact, there are no wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Iran is a forgotten threat. However, there is still war, this time a second American civil war, a conflict precipitated by the Supreme Court decision to suspend the Florida vote count and award Bush the presidency. As a result, sixteen blue states have seceded, becoming the Independent States of America, an entity internationally recognized, and they do battle with the Federal States in a war resulting in the deaths of twelve million people. Brill’s America is hardly a salubrious alternative. Here people deal with daily suffering: Miriam’s loss of a feckless husband, Brill’s loss of his wife of thirty-nine years to cancer, and his incapacitation as a result of a traffic accident. There is, however, the chaos of 9/11 and the horrible specter of Iraq in the tragedy of Titus Small’s execution, which will remind readers of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and various contract workers executed for being caught in a war zone. Auster’s title takes on further resonance in this context: Not only is Brill a man literally awake in the dark of night but also all humanity resides in the dark of bad behavior, callousness, and cruelty. As Brill says of his daughter’s naïveté, “I wish to God she would learn that the rotten acts human beings commit against one another are not just aberrations—they’re an essential part of who we are.” Thus Auster’s novel suggests that politics as a construct of order and justice is ultimately dubious; instead, politics is simply the mass representation of human venality and cruelty. Throughout his career, Auster has revealed a strong existential concern with issues of alienation and personal identity in an absurd world. In this novel, Brill, his daughter, and granddaughter suffer from severe alienation, most obviously in their separation from spouses and lovers and in their vain attempts to evade memory and feeling. They find themselves living in “a house of grieving, wounded souls.” Locked in their sorrow and in the house where they reside, they are furthermore alienated from the world around them, in the same way that Brick finds himself alienated in a deep hole that offers no exit. Perhaps the most striking embodiment of their alienation comes in Katya’s theory about the way in which master directors convey profound human emotions: through inanimate objects. Each family member seeks some evasion from his or her emotions and would prefer forgetfulness or inanimate objects to feeling.

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The search for identity is another longstanding concern of Auster that can be traced back to his earliest works. His characters are often confused about their identities, or their identities are confusing to others, and this shifting of identity is particularly evident in Brill and his alter ego, Brick. Brick exclaims at one point, “Someone’s inside my head. Not even my dreams belong to me.” The enduring existential question— Who am I?—bedevils Brick, and he is never able to settle the issue before his extinction. Similarly, Brill wonders who he is and what legacy he will leave after what he regards as a fractured, inconsequential life. In his infamous essay “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” (1989), Tom Wolfe criticized his contemporaries by proclaiming they had renounced the true subject of the traditional American novel for solipsistic concerns and clever constructions. The essay presented a deeply flawed argument—that American novelists had renounced the importance of the historical moment—but if it did have any marginal validity, that position has been eroded in recent years by fictions such as Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), and even Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), to name just a few prominent examples. The criticism, in slightly different form, appeared again in 2008 when Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize Committee, confidently declared that American writers were too insular and absorbed with issues of mass culture. Man in the Dark, the work of one of the United States’ supreme metafictionists, puts the lie to these glib assertions of fictional self-involvement. Auster’s hall-ofmirrors narratives are not the novel’s flash and filigree but integral components of a deeply humane vision. The strongest assertion of the novel’s profound humanity comes at the end of Brill’s late-night monologue when he proposes that he and Katya take her love of films and his dedication to language and create their own film, “something light—a frothy bagatelle, as frivolous and diverting as possible. If we really put our minds to it, we might have some fun . . . what I’m proposing is a cure, a remedy to ward off the blues.” David W. Madden

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 18 (May 15, 2008): 5. The Guardian, September 19, 2008, p. 38. International Herald Tribune, August 28, 2008, p. 20. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 9 (May 1, 2008): 447. Library Journal 133, no. 10 (June 1, 2008): 89. Los Angeles Times, August 24, 2008, p. F9. New Statesman 137 (September 15, 2008): 58-59. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 19 (December 4, 2008): 36-38. The New York Times Book Review, September 21, 2008, p. 21. The Observer, September 7, 2008, p. 24.

Man in the Dark / auster

Publishers Weekly 255, no. 21 (May 26, 2008): 35. The Times Literary Supplement, August 22, 2008, p. 21. The Village Voice 53, no. 35 (August 27, 2008): 40. The Washington Post, August 31, 2008, p. T2.

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THE MAN WHO LOVED CHINA The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom Author: Simon Winchester (1944) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 316 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Biography Time: 1900-1995 Locale: London and Cambridge, England; Chongqing (formerly Chungking), China A biography of Joseph Needham, the world’s leading figure in the historiography of Chinese science Principal personages: Joseph Needham, a scientist and historian Lu Gwei-djen, his mistress and second wife

Joseph Needham’s monumental Science and Civilisation in China, which continues to be published after his death in 1995, runs to twenty-four individual volumes, with more to come. Within a decade of the appearance of the initial volume in 1954, Needham’s name teemed in China bibliographies. His reputation as the scientisthistorian who brought to light the immense accomplishments of traditional Chinese technology and science grew steadily. While his name is widely known, however, the strange, often captivating, and at times morally problematic man behind it is not. Simon Winchester has done a signal service in bringing to light Needham’s character and the saga behind his epic scholarship. Needham was born in London at the dawn of the twentieth century, an only child of Scots lineage. His father was a physician, and his mother was a composer and a music teacher. His school years brought Needham’s immense intellectual prowess to the fore. By the time he was seventeen, he was aware that science was his principal interest, and, thinking to follow his father in the field of medicine, he applied to Cambridge University. He entered Caius College in 1918, and three years later he took his first degree, followed in 1924 by a master’s and a Ph.D. As Winchester reveals, Needham was notorious for his eccentricities, which included nudism and the practice of Morris dance, a form of English folk dancing. By the 1930’s, he was driving sports cars at breakneck speeds through the English countryside. He liked his morning toast burnt black, and he had a strict rule never to smoke before noon. Thereafter, he smoked constantly, nevertheless living to ninety-four. His politics ran to the far left. In 1917 he welcomed the Bolshevik coup in Russia and maintained far-left views throughout life, devoutly supporting socialism. At the same time, he was decidedly of a religious bent, belonging to a Catholic Brotherhood from 1922 to 1924. He balked at celibacy, however, and dropped out.

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He was fluent in seven languages, including Polish. Needham’s initial academic field was chemistry, though his interest in biology was, if anything, greater. Eventually, he combined the two in biochemistry. For more than twenty years, he worked in embryology and morphogenesis, publishing distinguished works. His marriage in 1924 to fellow biochemist Dorothy Moyle was of a piece with his unconven- Simon Winchester studied geology at tionality. While still engaged, both announced St. Catherine’s College, University of to friends that their union would be of a thor- Oxford, and spent twenty years as oughly “modern” variety, excluding sexual fi- foreign correspondent for The delity. Needham later fulfilled this pronounce- Guardian, before turning to ment at a key moment in his life. independent full-time writing. He has That moment came in 1937, when several written on such subjects as the 1906 female Chinese scientists visited Cambridge. San Francisco earthquake, the 1883 One of them, also a biochemist and four years karate explosion, and conflict in the his junior, was Lu Gwei-Djen, daughter of a Balkans. Nanjing pharmacist. Lu, who had come to study with Needham’s wife, attracted his amorous attentions. The two became fast friends, then more than friends, even as Needham carried on as (“modern”) husband. Lu stimulated in Needham a passion for all things Chinese, leading him to prodigious feats of learning in Chinese, both written and oral in Mandarin. She also presented him with an enigma, known as “the Needham’s Question,” that preoccupied him for the rest of his life. Why, Lu asked, was China so successful in science and technology for so much of its history, only to fall hopelessly behind the West in recent centuries? In 1948 Needham put the question this way: “Why did science [in China] always remain empirical, and restricted to theories of primitive or mediaeval type?” He never found an answer. Needham’s consuming interest in China led him to plan, with the help of Chinese associates, a history of Chinese science, including medicine and technology. First, however, he had to get there. In late 1939 he and like-minded academics took up China’s cause after Japan decimated more than fifty percent of the nation’s colleges. How, Needham and others asked, could Chinese intellectual life, especially its science, be preserved in the midst of such destruction? Someone needed to travel to China, investigate the situation, and recommend to the British government how to preserve Chinese science. With linguistic ability and keen interest, Needham was a logical choice to lead such an inquiry. It took eighteen months of persuading the Foreign Office and more months of waiting, but in the end Needham was sent to China’s wartime capital, Chongqing, becoming director of a Sino-British Science Cooperation Office. From this vantage he was to survey the condition of Chinese science and make recommendations to prevent

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its collapse. Accordingly, early in 1943, he traversed the “air bridge” (provided by American Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers) over the “Hump” from India over the Himalayas, arriving first in Kunming, and then proceeded on to Chongqing in March, 1943. Making Chongqing his base camp, Needham conducted a series of assaults on China’s enormous geography. He was thrilled to be in China, whatever its wartime hardships. During his travels “he kept discovering again and again,” Winchester reveals, that the Chinese “had the longest imaginable history of invention, creation, and the generation of new ideas.” He came to believe he found pieces of the history of Chinese science unknown even to the Chinese. In the process of his travels and discoveries, he met a young Chinese man, Huang Hsing-tsung, who would become his secretary, confidant, and companion during years of travel in China. Huang was an English-speaking college graduate who had arrived in China from Malaya during the war. Needham found him teaching at a Chengdu boys’ school, not far from Chongqing. This association, invaluable to Needham in collecting the materials that formed the basis of his great work, resulted half a century later in Huang’s production of an entire volume of Science and Civilisation in China. Aided by his Man Friday, Needham undertook a series of expeditions, eleven in all, during which he encountered numerous human and documentary sources for a history of science in China and collected prodigious numbers of books, manuscripts, and other materials that became the foundation of his masterwork. These items were shipped back to Cambridge, sometimes in diplomatic pouches. Seven of his journeys were relatively short trips a few hundred miles from Chongqing. Others were prodigious odysseys, involving thousands of miles and weeks or months of arduous trekking, some of it risky or even foolhardy during wartime. Needham and Huang managed to survive journeys that took them, for example, to the Silk Road, skirting the Gobi Desert, reaching Xinjiang, still occupied by the emperors’ successors today. By the time he left for England in 1946, Needham had visited some 296 Chinese institutions of higher learning and had laid the foundations for a diplomatically sanctioned organization for the support of Chinese science. Returning to England, Needham soon found himself involved in a United Nations organization to further education, science, and culture: UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. He spent two years in Paris heading its Natural Science division. His communist background alarmed Washington, D.C., where the Central Intelligence Agency informed President Harry Truman that communists were infiltrating UNESCO, though its director-general, Julian Huxley, pronounced Needham a “good communist.” Thus delayed, Needham returned to Cambridge in 1948 and went about the arduous business of shaping the volumes that would occupy the rest of his life and elevate his professional stature to a high level. He was fortunate to receive the assistance of Dr. Zhu Kezhen, a Chinese university president whom he had met during his travels and whom he informed of his intention to publish a history of Chinese science. Realizing that he was in a unique position to help, Zhu collected vast numbers of books and papers and shipped them to Cambridge, where they arrived unheralded, out of the

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blue. These included an 1888 distillation of the whole of Chinese knowledge, contained in some two thousand books. Although in the early 1950’s Needham experienced a temporary fall from grace among his Cambridge colleagues because of a sorry episode in his leftist politics, Needham’s great project steadily took shape. The first volume was issued by Cambridge University Press in 1954. For thirty years Needham assumed sole authorship of successive volumes. As he aged, however, he needed increasing assistance, and in 1985 a volume by his friend Huang appeared with a note from Needham acknowledging that the era of his sole authorship had passed. After his wife died in 1987, Needham and Lu Gwei-djen were at last free to wed. The marriage was cut short by Lu’s death at age eighty-seven, two years after they wed. Needham himself lasted into his ninety-fifth year, passing away in March, 1995. He had the rare honor of being a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the British Academy. While his chef d’oeuvre was unfinished, its concluding parts progressively saw the light of day, overseen by Cambridge University’s Needham Institute. In 2004 the twenty-fourth individual volume appeared, with more in preparation. Winchester’s treatment of this remarkable life is sometimes troubling. Rather than writing a biography revolving around the serious issues of Science and Civilisation in China and the moral issues of Needham’s fulsome acceptance of and support for Chinese communism under Mao Zedong and his chief lieutenant, Zhou En-lai, Needham’s close personal friend, Winchester has written an entertaining, but seldom critical, description of the three-ring-circus that was Needham’s life. The consequences of such periods of Chinese communism as the Great Leap Forward, the famine that followed, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (CR) were deeply tragic: Tens of millions of lives were lost. Winchester relates that when Needham returned from travel to China in 1964 following the Great Leap famine, Needham’s faith in Chinese communism was unshaken. He made no protest during the CR, when many of its horrors were known in England and the British Embassy in Beijing was burned to the ground. It took two years after Mao’s death before Needham said anything critical about him, and then it was confined to Mao’s effects on science. He denounced the repressive Gang of Four leaders, but only when all of China was doing the same. Winchester does not hide Needham’s views, but the moral problems that arise from them are glossed over. Worst of all was Needham’s 1952 role in verifying evidence that supported Soviet and North Korean charges of American germ warfare in Korea. The “evidence,” definitively proved in 1998 to be fabricated, was more than questionable, but that did not stop Needham from finding America guilty. He paid a price in temporary social ostracism and public derision. Winchester provides factual description but little critical commentary on his hero’s central role in libeling the United States. The writer is far more interested in beating the dead horse of McCarthyism. What of Needham’s failure to denounce Mao for crimes committed against the Chinese people in the name of “socialism”? In Winchester’s hands, both Needham and China largely get a pass. Does Winchester suffer from some form of moral fatigue, or is it merely political bias?

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A further problem is Winchester’s frequent habit of gratuitously defending and aggrandizing China. Is it really necessary to state that “China is neither poor nor backward anymore,” especially since it is no more than a half-truth? China has upward of five hundred million indigent rural people living on less than one dollar a day. Two hundred million more deeply impoverished internal immigrants live in cities. The arrogant, unrestrained embrace of Chinese communism (corrupt from the very outset) has wrecked much of the landscape and ecology of both China and Tibet. Human rights were and are a shambles. Winchester’s gushing prose shows little of these facts. The author appends a list of Chinese inventions and discoveries, not all of which are necessarily Chinese in origin. Attribution of chess to China, for example, is questionable at best. China first used movable type for printing, but it was independently invented in Europe. Despite its flaws, The Man Who Loved China remains the absorbing saga of a prodigiously energetic scientist and historian who changed the West’s view of traditional China and added immeasurably to respect for Chinese civilization prior to the nineteenth century. Charles F. Bahmueller

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 14 (March 15, 2008): 4. Christianity Today 52, no. 7 (July, 2008): 54. The Economist 387 (June 7, 2008): 95. The Humanist 69, no. 1 (January/February, 2009): 42-43. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 6 (March 15, 2008): 297. Library Journal 133, no. 8 (May 1, 2008): 76. Maclean’s 121, no. 19 (May 19, 2008): 63. New Scientist 199 (July 19, 2008): 47. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 13 (August 14, 2008): 48-50. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 10 (March 10, 2008): 68. Scientific American 299, no. 2 (August, 2008): 106.

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THE MAN WHO MADE LISTS Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus Author: Joshua Kendall (1960) Publisher: G. P. Putnam’s Sons (New York). 304 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Biography Time: 1779-1869 Locale: England, Europe A biography of the physician who created the Englishspeaking world’s most successful thesaurus by attempting to classify and quantify everything in the known world Principal personages: Peter Mark Roget, the physician who became famous for the publication of Collection of English Synonyms Classified and Arranged (1805), later known simply as Roget’s Thesaurus Catherine (Romilly) Roget, his mother Ann (Annette) Susanne Louise Roget, his sister Mary (Hobson) Roget, his wife John Lewis Roget, his son Catherine Mary (Kate) Roget, his daughter Samuel Romilly, his uncle Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who developed the classification system for plants and animals still in use today Georges Cuvier, the French biologist whose work in comparative anatomy and paleontology helped later scholars classify animals by genus and species Thomas Beddoes, the English physician with whom Roget worked on early experiments testing ether’s effectiveness as an anesthetic Jeremy Bentham, the English utilitarian philosopher who hired Roget in an unsuccessful attempt to develop prolonged techniques of refrigeration Dugald Stewart, the Scottish philosopher and mathematician who became one of Roget’s most influential professors Pierre Étienne Louis Dumont, the French political writer and longtime friend of Roget’s uncle Anne Louise Germaine (Necker) de Staël-Holstein (Madame de Staël), the Swiss author whose salons exchanged ideas among the most important intellectuals of her day

The Man Who Made Lists by Joshua Kendall is not only an account of the creation of Roget’s Thesaurus (which occupies only a small section of the book) but also an exploration of the conditions that made such a book possible. Peter Mark Roget

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was born in London to a family with strong Swiss roots. His uncle, Samuel Romilly, helped shape Roget’s personality but also nearly cost his nephew his career. Thoughout Roget’s youth, Romilly’s fame as a legal reformer helped provide access to new opportunities; yet when Romilly, in despair at his wife’s death, committed suicide while under Roget’s care, the fledgling physician found it all but impossible to attract new patients. He gave up his practice and directed his attention to the academic side of medicine. Kendall’s treatment of Roget opens with this incident, depicting this moment as the turning point in Roget’s life. Thus, out of a family tragedy arose what would become a reference work found wherever English was spoken. Even before Romilly’s death, however, Roget was already viewing the world as a perfectly ordered machine that simply needed human reason in order to be understood. His teachers, such as his uncle’s close friend Dugald Stewart, encouraged him in this direction, and a great deal of Enlightenment philosophy seemed to reinforce Roget’s outlook and temperament. For instance, the Thesaurus owes much to eighteenth century works such as the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot, which similarly sought to organize and classify the entire known world under the principles of reason. Moreover, by Roget’s day, earlier scholars such as Carl Linnaeus and Georges Cuvier had already paved the way with a taxonomy of plants and animals that would soon provide support for the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin and lead eventually to Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev’s creation of the periodic table of the elements and the development of historical linguistics. In creating his Thesaurus, therefore, Roget was not seeking merely to provide a handbook of synonyms, but he was following the common intellectual trend of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to classify everything in human experience. Try as Roget might to apply only pure reason to his efforts, however, elements of his final scheme owed much to his personal preference for harmony and symmetry. Thus when Roget’s original plan for the Thesaurus resulted in an untidy 1,002 major concepts, Roget simply reorganized his system until it resulted in a more aesthetically pleasing 1,000 categories. As a way of immersing readers into Roget’s philosophical system, Kendall uses several of these concepts, such as “place of habitation,” “weariness,” and “scholar” as subheadings for his chapters and sections. Kendall’s image of Roget is that of a man whose obsessions went far beyond words alone. He insisted on cleanliness and order, losing respect for individuals such as the philosopher Jeremy Bentham for failing to meet his standards for hygiene. Most of all, Roget sought to bring order to his world by keeping lists. As a child, he learned Latin by listing names for plants and animals, tabulating verbs related to reading or writing, and not so much reading texts as dissecting them. His lists included the

Joshua Kendall is a freelance journalist and author whose work has appeared in publications such as Business Week, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. Kendall has also served as coauthor on three academic books dealing with psychology. For his outstanding reporting on psychiatry, he has received national journalism awards from the National Mental Health Association and the American Psychoanalytic Association.

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dates when important people in his life died. He was extremely parsimonious about this list, and few of even his closest relatives and friends made the cut. Kendall accounts for Roget’s obsessive creation of lists and tables by seeing these efforts as the author’s way of coping with life in a family in which his father died at an early age and several members demonstrated signs of severe depression. His mother, uncle, and eventually his daughter would be incapacitated by prolonged bouts of despair, and Roget may have viewed his lists as one part of his life that he could control. Other family tragedies shaped Roget’s personality. His sister had a form of neurosis, and Roget had to watch his thirty-eight-year-old wife Mary die painfully of cancer. Mary’s father also died after a long and debilitating illness, and, late in Roget’s life, his sister Annette died. By this time he was turning increasingly to religion for comfort in much the same way that he had earlier sought life’s meaning in his work. Throughout his life, Roget, in Kendall’s view, classified the world rather than allowed himself to be touched by it. Out of this personal approach to the world, he developed an educational philosophy that he passed on to his students. Hired in 1802 to provide “the grand tour” to fifteen-year-old Nathaniel and sixteen-year-old Burton Philips, Roget exposed them to what soon became a bookkeeper’s exploration of France and Switzerland. He appears to have spent very little time encouraging his young charges to expand their horizons through conversations with local citizens or contemplating great works of art. Rather, they spent most of the journey measuring, recording, and counting everything they saw. Their letters home record the heights of monuments, the number of windows or spires seen on various buildings, attendance figures at parties (with a further breakdown of the number of people who danced), and the number of steps and organ pipes that could be found in places such as the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. Despite this unusual experience (or because of it), the Philips boys seem to have developed genuine affection for Roget, as did he for them. Their letters repeat with approval his judgments about which lodgings were clean and which cities were chaotic. The tour came to an abrupt end, however, when Napoleon’s conflict with England led to the imprisonment of all adult Englishmen within French territory. The two young students were allowed to leave because of their age, and Roget narrowly escaped after he hastily secured evidence of Swiss ancestry because of his father’s Huguenot lineage. Roget published his Thesaurus only after his medical career was over, and his book became an unexpected success. In addition to bringing him a substantial income, it made Roget something of a celebrity late in life. Today Roget is so well known for the Thesaurus that his other important contributions—such as the log-log scale (which made the slide rule possible) and his discovery that the retina interprets rapid sequences of still images as continuous movement (which made films possible)—were all but forgotten. In his own day, Roget received a certain amount of acclaim for writing the fifth Bridgewater Treatise (1834). This work, officially titled Animal and Vegetable Physiology, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, attempted to reconcile science and religion in a manner that greatly appealed to American writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, and it used the phrase “intelligent design” in its argument that the universe demonstrates what appears to be an exter-

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nally imposed order. Although the Thesaurus was not the first book of synonyms ever published in English, it proved to be so comprehensive and to reflect a philosophy so harmonious with its times that its predecessors have fallen into obscurity. Kendall’s style throughout The Man Who Made Lists is simple and direct, with relatively few flashbacks or forward glances. Kendall frequently draws parallels between aspects of Roget’s personality and the content of his Thesaurus, such as when he notes that Roget, who was so obsessed with work that he never had time for hobbies, did not include “avocation” as either a major concept or even an acceptable synonym in his book. The Man Who Made Lists also includes numerous black-and-white illustrations and eight pages of index. The book does not, however, include notes of any kind, and so it is difficult to determine from precisely which source any particular piece of factual material has been derived. Moreover, for scholars wishing to pursue aspects of Roget’s life further, the absence of notes makes it all but impossible to ascertain where the historical record ends and Kendall’s imaginative reconstruction of events begins. Kendall’s lengthy list of acknowledgments makes it clear, however, just how extensive was the research that made his book possible. As a result, while The Man Who Made Lists provides a valuable complement to D. L. Emblen’s biography of Roget, Peter Mark Roget: The Word and the Man (1970), it does not completely supplant that earlier work. One of the most intriguing parts of Kendall’s biography comes in the epilogue, which deals with the history of Roget’s Thesaurus since its original publication. To date there have been only six editors of the book, the first two of whom were the original author’s son and grandson. Kendall observes, “Over the last century and a half, Roget’s has lost ten concepts—it is down to 990—but it has gained a couple hundred thousand new words.” Many of the words added to the Thesaurus, such as “Viagra” and “cybersex,” did not even exist in Roget’s day. As a result, each new addition continues to be a snapshot of the ideas, concepts, and values that characterize its generation. Moreover, each new word brings a potential challenge to Roget’s original organization of his work by essential categories. If a new word does not appear to fit in well with the author’s conceptual scheme, does the editor modify Roget’s concepts or assume that the word is likely to be too transitory to merit inclusion? In the past, decisions have been made on each side of this alternative, and thus the editors of the Thesaurus continue both to reflect the world they encounter and to shape that world since the resource they are developing affects the writers and opinion makers in so many fields. In this way, the man who began making lists to avoid the painful realities of his own world continues to have a lasting influence on our own. Jeffrey L. Buller

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Review Sources American Libraries 39, no. 7 (August, 2008): 84-85. Booklist 104, no. 8 (December 15, 2007): 10. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 23 (December 1, 2007): 1232-1233. Library Journal 132, no. 20 (December 15, 2007): 118. The New York Times Book Review, March 16, 2008, p. 9. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 45 (November 12, 2007): 43-44. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 68 (March 22, 2008): W10. The Wilson Quarterly 32, no. 2 (Spring, 2008): 102-103.

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MAPS AND LEGENDS Author: Michael Chabon (1963) Publisher: McSweeney’s Books (San Francisco). 222 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Essays, literary history, literary criticism A collection of essays examining different facets of genre fiction, sometimes presented as literary criticism and sometimes as autobiography This collection by novelist Michael Chabon draws together sixteen nonfiction essays that explore the reading and writing of what is generally known as genre fiction. The book’s title (sharing, but perhaps not taken from, a 1980’s song by the rock band R.E.M.) evokes mythology and adventure—a sense strengthened by the unusual three-layer dust jacket with illustrations of sea monsters, giants, mystics, spies, and other characters. In essence, Chabon explores the geography and terrain of genre fiction through a piecemeal travelogue, taking time along the way to uncover various tales that spring from the landscape. Perhaps the legends are not so much stories as the cartographer’s device of the same name, helping to explain the symbols on the literary map. Either way, the maps and legends promised in the book’s title are delivered to the reader. (The acknowledgments page provides a literal example, employing a form of scatterplot map to show the relative contributions of “inspiration, opportunity, editing, and help” by twentytwo individuals.) Collectively, the essays reveal the author’s philosophy of writing, with particular attention to the relationship between the author and the reader. The pieces range from academic discourse to the somewhat more effective autobiographical narrative. Most of the essays were previously published, often in the pages of The New York Review of Books or as commissioned introductions to other volumes. As such, the collection lacks the degree of coherence and integration that one might assume from a book billed as Chabon’s “first book of nonfiction.” Nevertheless, the essays, which follow no clear ordering principle, make recurring visits to several broad literary themes. The title’s themes are most explicitly addressed in the first two essays. The first, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” is derived from an introduction Chabon wrote for a collection of short stories. In it, he holds up the short story as an especially effective category of maps for transporting ideas from the writer to the reader, but he protests that these maps are used too selectively and conventionally by readers and writers alike. He argues, then, against the strict compartmentalization of fiction into distinct territories, as most graphically revealed in the floor map of a modern bookstore. He celebrates instead writing that exists at “the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore.” Above all, he defends genre fiction as a legitimate form of literature—a theme

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that is taken up in later essays as he celebrates horror stories, science fiction, detective fiction, comic books, and other genres. The second essay, from which the book’s title is drawn, describes how a map depicting the then-unbuilt housing development in Columbia, Maryland—an idealistic experiment that would contain Chabon’s childhood home—could convey ideas and values and promises and dreams. On its surface, the essay is not explicitly about writing (except that the various neighborhoods of the housing de- Michael Chabon received a B.A. from velopment happened to be named after writers the University of Pittsburgh and an and poets). However, the underlying theme— M.F.A. in creative writing from the about “the power of maps to fire the imagina- University of California, Irvine. His tion”—clearly reinforces the idea of stories as thesis, subsequently published as The maps and of maps as stories. Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), became From there, the theme of maps becomes a best seller and earned critical less prominent as the volume turns to an es- acclaim. His next novel, Wonder Boys say—part literary history, part appreciation— (1995), was made into a motion on the Victorian-era writer Arthur Conan picture. In 2001, his third novel, The Doyle and his famous literary creation, Sher- Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and lock Holmes. (In a subsequent essay, Chabon Clay, won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. reveals his abiding affinity for Doyle and Holmes and his dedicated effort as a young man to copy Doyle’s literary “voice.”) The essay reveals an intimate familiarity with the Holmes stories, and it provides a brief but compelling assessment of why they have remained so well-loved more than 120 years after they first appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual. The so-called detective fiction genre may have been invented a half-century earlier by Edgar Allan Poe, but it was Doyle who popularized it and outfitted it with the iconic persona of Holmes. Beyond this, Chabon credits Doyle with “completely reengineering” the short story’s presentation of chronology, and with emboldening the coy, implicit assertion of verisimilitude that accompanies all fiction. Another genre that Chabon both analyzes and celebrates is the comic book. Though not perhaps a conventional form of genre fiction, Chabon makes a compelling case for its rich storytelling potential. The topic featured prominently in Chabon’s third novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), which centered on a fictional pair of young cousins who conceived, wrote, and drew a number of commercially successful comic book series during the medium’s heyday in the 1940’s and 1950’s. A quarter of the sixteen essays in this collection center on comic books. One is based on a keynote speech Chabon delivered at a comic books awards ceremony, urging practitioners of the craft to reorient comics in a way that recaptures children as readers. Another focuses on the comic book series American Flagg and its

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creator, Howard Chaykin. Another features a postmodern newspaper comic strip by Lawrence Weschler, and a fourth describes comic book impresario Will Eisner, whom Chabon studied and interviewed as part of his research for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Together, these essays offer a warm, enthusiastic, nostalgic celebration of a medium that is seldom discussed alongside the likes of Doyle and F. Scott Fitzgerald (the latter figuring notably in Chabon’s essay about authors who captured his imagination early on). It is the autobiographical information Chabon provides that holds together the various essays into a partly coherent collection. Revelations by Chabon about himself, appearing here and there throughout the volume, help to connect disparate topics and moods. For example, the importance of Chabon’s intimate familiarity with Doyle’s Holmes stories (illustrated in the third essay) is illuminated a dozen essays later when Chabon explains that he was “born a second time [at age ten] in the opening pages of [Doyle’s] ‘A Scandal in Bohemia.’” This remark, in turn, is better understood when, in the final essay, Chabon reveals that at age ten he wrote his “first sustained work of fiction” that featured a meeting between Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo and Doyle’s Holmes, in which Chabon consciously tried to adopt Doyle’s literary style and ended up virtually channeling the Victorian writer. Similarly, the genesis of the author’s sixth novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (2007), is finally revealed in the penultimate essay, “Imaginary Homelands,” which bemusedly speculates about the kind of nonexistent land that could justify the existence of a Yiddish phrase book he happened upon in a bookstore. In addition, the influence of Chabon’s two marriages (one failed, one successful) becomes clearer with the cumulative information revealed by the autobiographical essays. Jewishness is another theme that suffuses these essays. The motif of Chabon’s and others’ Jewish heritage—of the shared history of a lost promised land, of golems, of the Holocaust—is neither smug nor especially self-deprecating. Instead, the theme simply seems to exist, organically, in the soil of Chabon’s literary world. At times this is used to especially powerful effect, as when Chabon uses the metaphor of the Jewish golem (a mystical being created from clay by man) to explain the process, joys, and risks of creating stories to be read by others. Of particular interest is Chabon’s repeated references to the boundary between truth and lies. He introduces this theme in the first essay, asserting “just because you have stopped believing in something you once were promised does not mean that the promise itself was a lie.” The theme is explored implicitly and explicitly throughout the essays, and by the final essay Chabon, returning to the image of maps, concludes that “it is along the knife-narrow borderland between those two kingdoms, between the Empire of Lies and the Republic of Truth, more than along any other frontier on the map of existence, that Trickster makes his wandering way . . . .” Chabon frequently identifies with the Trickster, admitting in essence that his job as a novelist is to present fiction as fact, so that by the end of this “nonfiction” volume, when Chabon asserts that “naturally, I’m still telling lies,” we are not sure what to believe. Perhaps that is the point. Perhaps Chabon’s coyness in matters of separating fact from fiction is not merely impishness, but rather a manifestation of the belief (not

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unique to Chabon) that fiction holds its own kind of truth and facts their own kind of fiction. Taken together, these essays reveal an author who is a highly literate and expressive master of the language; who is observant, insightful, and thoughtful; and who is remarkably self-aware. This last point, which is least evident simply from reading his novels, helps to explain much of Chabon’s writing. He worries, for example, that readers will assume he shares the characteristics, such as homosexuality, of characters in his novels, and this might explain the extraordinary care that Chabon takes in describing such characters. As another example, he admits to worrying about employing the proper pronunciations of words that are typically mispronounced—that proper diction might result in being scorned as a pedant or, worse, being mocked by those who mistakenly think his is the wrong pronunciation. Such must be a common worry for one with a vocabulary as extensive as Chabon’s. Evidently he tends to come down on the side of grammatical integrity, misguided critics be damned. The few times that he strays from his master-of-the-English-language approach to employ the occasional vulgarity or slang term comes across as an awkward, forced pose. Taken as a whole, the collection serves best to illuminate the background, beliefs, experiences, philosophy, and purposes of the author, and only secondarily does it provide instruction on literary history and criticism. This will be of interest to readers who have enjoyed Chabon’s novels. Those who approach this collection more for its insights into genre fiction may be less satisfied. In the end, however, this is an engaging and entertaining book about reading and writing by someone intimately familiar with both. Steve D. Boilard

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 13 (March 1, 2008): 28. Library Journal 133, no. 5 (March 15, 2008): 72. The New York Times Book Review, June 29, 2008, p. 21. O, The Oprah Magazine 9, no. 4 (April, 2008): 188. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 3 (January 21, 2008): 163-164.

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A MERCY Author: Toni Morrison (1931) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 167 pp. $23.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1682-1690 Locale: The mid-Atlantic region of the American colonies Morrison’s ninth novel explores the lives of a range of women and men—some free, some enslaved—in the American colonies of the late seventeenth century Principal characters: Florens, a young female African slave Lina, a Native American woman Sorrow, a servant girl Rebekah Vaark, wife of Jacob and mistress of their farm Jacob Vaark, husband of Rebekah, master of the farm, trader in rum The Smith, a free black man who helps Jacob build his grand mansion

Throughout Toni Morrison’s nine novels, certain key themes consistently appear, marking each book regardless of differences of setting, plot, character, and historical period. No issue is more significant to Morrison than the relationship between mother and daughter. Her most famous rendering of this remains Beloved (1987), in which a mother chooses to cut her daughter’s throat rather than allow her to be returned to a life of slavery. Morrison’s novel A Mercy has as its defining moment a similar horrible choice for a mother to make about her daughter’s life. The novel asks “What is the cost and what is the measure of a mother’s love?” A Mercy revisits many of the major concerns and motifs of Morrison’s work and also many defining scenes. Morrison continues to imagine certain pivotal moments in her fictional world—the experience of the middle passage, the terror of being a hunted woman in the wild, the passion of men and women who give themselves wholly to each other—while re-visioning her past projections of these experiences. The result is a novel of impressive depth and great imaginative invention, not without its weaknesses, but offering fresh elements in Morrison’s work. The structure of A Mercy is intricate but not nearly as complicated or baffling as her novels Beloved, Jazz (1992), or Paradise (1998). The book consists of twelve chapters, five of which are directly narrated by one of the characters, Florens. The other chapters are each devoted to one of the other characters, narrated by an unnamed third person whose view is generally limited to the consciousness of that chapter’s character. The Florens sections are shorter than the chapters devoted to others, serving as interludes to connect the different characters. By the novel’s end, the reader learns that Florens is writing her “telling” with a nail on the floor of her dead master

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Jacob Vaark’s unfinished mansion. It is pos sible, then, to conceive of the entire novel as being told by Florens, and that the book is in some sense the very structure of Jacob’s unfinished house, literally marked by the words of Florens. Morrison has never before explored the historical period of A Mercy, which is late seventeenth century in colonial America. The novel is prefaced by an antiquarian map of what is now the long stretch from Connecticut to the Carolinas, marked throughout with Toni Morrison is the author of nine the Native American place and river names. novels. She received the National Book For A Mercy is also a cartography, an explora- Critics Circle Award for Song of tion of the land that is to some in the novel a Solomon in 1977, the Pulitzer Prize for brave new world and to others a very ancient Beloved in 1988, and the Nobel Prize and familiar landscape. For Jacob, English in Literature in 1993. She is the Robert colonist, farmer, and now trader in rum and Goheen Professor of the Humanities, other goods, the land is an opportunity for Emerita, at Princeton University, a great achievements, for establishing his pos- position that she has held since 1989. terity, and for creating a lasting domain. For Rebekah, his wife who answers his advertisement for “a healthy, chaste wife willing to travel abroad” and travels six weeks by ship from London to the colonies, the land is a chance for relative freedom, a different mastery: “her prospects were servant, prostitute, wife, and although horrible stories were told about each of those careers, the last one seemed safest. The one where she might have children and therefore be guaranteed some affection.” Together, with a purchased Native American servant, Lina, a homeless orphan girl, Sorrow, and the slave girl, Florens, whom Jacob accepts in lieu of debt from a Spanish planter, they constitute for a time an idiosyncratic but functioning family unit. Jacob is the prime mover of this family, a true patriarch as his forename suggests. The women revolve around him because in the economic and religious structure of the novel’s time, they must. Jacob begins with the aspiration to be a farmer, but a growing restlessness compels him to seek other means to wealth. He begins trading in “goods and gold,” and he is repelled by the commodity slave trade that he witnesses in Maryland. Nevertheless, he envies the plantation owner’s ornate house and thus seeks greater riches, and thus he begins trafficking in rum. Jacob is thereby implicated in the barbaric molasses-rum-slaves triangle, deriving his wealth from precisely such a bloody business. Not long after he expands his business interests, his infant sons and his daughter die. In the midst of this, Jacob determines to build “a grand house of many rooms rising on a hill” that will rival the plantation demesne he envies. When Rebekah tells him they do not need such a house, he responds, “’Need is not the reason, wife . . . . What a man leaves behind is what a man is.” This becomes a chilling epitaph for Jacob, for, like the literary predecessors he resembles—William Faulk-

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ner’s Thomas Sutpen and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby—Jacob leaves behind a shell, a mockery of the deathless house he envisioned. In the novel’s present, Jacob has recently died of smallpox, and his widow, Rebekah, has contracted the disease as well. Sorrow has survived the pox, cured by the remarkable free black man known only as The Smith. Consequently Rebekah sends Florens through the wilderness to find The Smith and bring him back to the farm, in the hopes that he can cure Rebekah, too. Florens’s narrative interludes are told while she is journeying to find The Smith, a journey that in some ways mirrors young Sethe’s desperate search for freedom in Beloved. Florens is on an archetypal quest, made more complicated because she is desperately in love with The Smith—a consuming, overwhelming passion reminiscent of Jadine and Son in Tar Baby (1981) and Hagar’s adoration of Milkman in Song of Solomon (1977). Florens travels through a series of portraits of the have-nots, the historical ciphers by and upon whom America was built: indentured servants, people who are the property of others, the poor and dispossessed or never-possessed, and Florens, a slave of African descent and first-generation African American (before America even existed). The result is a thicker concept of enslavement than Morrison has heretofore offered, even in her stunning portraits of American slavery, suggesting that America is precisely the product of a range of human enslavements. Mastery and dominion constitute one of the novel’s major themes, and Lina observes of The Smith: “He had rights, then, and privileges, like Sir. He could marry, own things, travel, sell his own labor.” Such radical freedom is remarkable in this narrative of the enslaved, and he might well be the only character in the novel with such freedom. Hence the novel’s nearly final words: “to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.” The Smith constructs the magnificent and enigmatic iron gates to Jacob’s unfinished mansion. These gates—“three-foot-high lines of vertical bars capped with a simple pyramid shape” and “crowned by a flourish of thick vines” that turn out to be serpents’ mouths—function much like the powerful and elusive symbolism of the Oven in Paradise. The women of the novel oscillate between their founding figure, Jacob, and their salvation figure, the Smith, who is certainly one of the more compelling characters in Morrison’s oeuvre. This, however, suggests one of the novel’s weaknesses: One wants to hear more about the background and story of the Smith. Several elements in the novel suggest that other stories are lurking here, as if A Mercy is part of an unfinished epic. Indeed, the book certainly bears the major elements of epic, from its central quest to its concern with the founding of a nation to its flawed but magnificent heroes. It might have worked better had Morrison extended it, explored its unfinished elements. The result, then, might have been more akin to Beloved or Song of Solomon, whereas A Mercy in length is Morrison’s shortest novel and its many intriguing vistas remain merely glimpses. Like all of Morrison’s work from Beloved onward, A Mercy is powerfully concerned with issues of religion, portraying an impressive array of late seventeenth century religious communities: Anglicans and Quakers in England, Anabaptists and Presbyterians in the colonies, Roman Catholicism in its most decadent and liberating

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forms, and a blend of Native American, African, and European beliefs in the figure of Lina. The portrayal of Christians is certainly dispiriting, as nearly all seem more concerned with who deserves punishment than with any question of salvific grace or charity toward one’s neighbor. Rebekah reflects that “Religion, as [she] experienced it from her mother, was a flame fueled by a wondrous hatred.” The radical Separatists who live near Jacob left their original congregation “over the question of the Chosen versus the universal nature of salvation”—a version of one of the great Morrison questions, and the one that dominates Paradise, her most overtly religious novel. In both novels, such discriminating theology reveals the hypocrisy of the believer. Morrison offers a memorable tableau of this drama when Florens happens upon a religious community that thinks some of its female members are “the Black Man’s minion,” in a scene that recalls Nathaniel Hawthorne and Arthur Miller’s portrayals of the Salem communities. Ultimately, these experiences lead Rebekah to conclude that God does not care about them: “We are not on his mind,” she tells Lina. This theological position underscores the novel’s defining act, when Florens’s mother gives her to Jacob, rather than allow her to grow to womanhood in the nightmarish world of the tobacco plantation. Florens is haunted by this memory of “me peering around my mother’s dress hoping for her hand that is only for her little boy.” It impels her on her quest to find the Smith, which is also a quest for a sense of home and belonging lost to her in this original “expel.” The reasons for her mother’s choice are not revealed until the novel’s closing chapter, when the reader receives her voice and memory. “There is no protection,” she communicates to Florens. “To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal.” The mother hopes that Jacob will be a kinder master to his daughter than the Spanish planter: “One chance, I thought. There is no protection but there is difference . . . . Because I saw the tall man see you as a human child, not pieces of eight.” To give her daughter away is the only way to save her, and this becomes the mercy of the novel’s title. Even this mercy, however, is dispiriting in its insistence that God has abandoned these people: “It was not a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human.” Morrison’s vision, while it may redeem our view of the abandoning mother, suggests that in a world without God, there is no protection. Marc C. Conner

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 1 (September 1, 2008): 5. The Boston Globe, November 9, 2008, p. K7. Entertainment Weekly, November 14, 2008, p. 75. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 17 (September 1, 2008): 912. Library Journal 133, no. 17 (October 15, 2008): 58. Los Angeles Times, November 16, 2008, p. F1. Ms. 18, no. 4 (Fall, 2008): 73-74.

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The New Republic 239, no. 11 (December 24, 2008): 36-39. The New York Times, November 4, 2008, p. C1. The New York Times Book Review, November 30, 2008, p. 1. The New Yorker 84, no. 35 (November 3, 2008): 112-113. Newsweek 152, no. 24 (December 15, 2008): 8. O, The Oprah Magazine 9, no. 11 (November, 2008): 190. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 37 (September 15, 2008): 42.

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THE MIRACLE AT SPEEDY MOTORS Author: Alexander McCall Smith (1948) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 214 pp. $22.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The first decade of the twenty-first century Locale: Botswana, Africa In this ninth novel in the series that began with McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Mma Ramotswe has several problems to contend with, including a woman who is looking for her family Principal characters: Mma Precious Ramotswe, founder of the detective agency Mr. J. L. B. Matekom, her husband, owner of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors Motholeli, their adopted daughter Mma Grace Makutsi, assistant to Mma Ramotswe Phuti Radiphuti, son of the owner of the Double Comfort Furniture Shop, engaged to marry Mma Makutsi Mma Manka Sebina, woman who comes to see if Mma Ramotswe can find her birthparents or other family members Mma Potokwane, director of a home for orphaned children Charlie, a young apprentice at the Speedy Motors garage Mr. Polopetsi, a part-time worker in the garage and a part-time worker in the detective agency Violet Sephotho, a former student with Mma Makutsi at Botswana Secretarial College

Mma Precious Ramotswe is becoming recognized in her capital city Gaborone and other areas of Botswana as the founder of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and as someone who can solve problems for others. Such is the case with Mma Manka Sebina, who, in Alexander McCall Smith’s The Miracle at Speedy Motors, comes to the detective agency to see if Mma Ramotswe can trace some family members for her. She starts by mentioning specific times and places she has seen Mma Ramotswe, and just as Mma Ramotswe is beginning to think of the word “stalker,” Mma Sebina explains that some people just stand out, and that everybody knows about Mma Ramotswe, the only woman detective in Botswana. Mma Ramotswe silently agrees this is reasonable, especially since most people have an unreasonable idea of the glamour of what a private detective actually does. When Mma Ramotswe asks who the relatives are that Mma Sebina wants located, there is some confusion when Mma Sebina says she does not know. Mma Ramotswe wisely asks her assistant, Mma Grace Makutsi, to put on the kettle to make some tea for the three of them. Tea almost always makes thing easier, she knows. Mma Sebina

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was adopted, and both of the parents who raised her are now “late,” meaning dead. What she is seeking, then, is to find out who her birthparents are and to find any living relatives. Mma Ramotswe soon starts tracking down people who knew her adoptive parents in order to get leads on her birthparents. The persons she speaks to do not all tell the same story about the biological parents. Mma Ramotswe then visits her old acquaintance, Mma Potokwane. It was from Mma Potokwane’s farm for orphaned children Alexander McCall Smith is that Mma Ramotswe’s husband, Mr. J. L. B. internationally acclaimed for his No. 1 Matekom (whom Mma Ramotswe always reLadies’ Detective Agency novels. He is fers to and addresses by that full designation), the author of three other series, had adopted two children, a boy, Puso, and a children’s books, and academic works. girl, Motholeli, before Mma Ramotswe agreed He was a law professor at the University of Botswana and is to marry him. When she did, she considered professor emeritus of medical law at them her dear children, too. Mma Potokwane the University of Edinburgh in remembers Mma Sebina as a little four-yearScotland. old girl, and she tells Mma Ramotswe the name of an older brother, adopted by a different family. Mma Ramotswe locates him and introduces him to his long-lost sister, only to have Mma Potokwane tell her a few days later that she was wrong, and there was no brother. This case, nearly the only client case in the novel, is complicated enough, but there are several other problems Mma Ramotswe has to deal with, one concerning her specifically and several concerning her family or the employees of the agency and the garage. The problem that relates directly to Mma Ramotswe is that someone is sending her anonymous threatening letters. Although she would prefer not to let this bother her, she is rightly disturbed, and she is not sure how to find the culprit. The letters are not sent through the mail but left at the building that houses both the detective agency and the Speedy Motors garage. It is even possible that they could be coming from her part-time helper, Mr. Polopetsi, who also works part time at the garage. She certainly does not want to believe that of him, since she was the one who hired him. Mma Makutsi, ever mindful of her distinction of making the highest score in the history of the Botswana Secretarial School, consistently thinks she should be promoted to a higher rank in the detective agency, and she sometimes makes decisions without consulting Mma Ramotswe. She takes great pride in the fact she is engaged to a successful businessman, referring to him as the owner of the Double Comfort Furniture Shop, although his father is still the owner. Mma Makutsi thinks this engagement will show some of the others in her secretarial school class who had laughed at her, such as Violet Sephotho, that she is not someone to be considered beneath them socially. Currently, however, she has a problem concerning a fancy new bed that her

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fiancé, Phuti Radiphuti, has bought in anticipation of their still unscheduled wedding. Should she admit to Phuti what happened to the bed? How will he react? Why have they not agreed on a date for the wedding? When she does marry Phuti, will she still want to work at the agency? Charlie, one of Mr. J. L. B. Matekom’s apprentices, never seems willing to settle down and finish his apprenticeship. He tends to be lazy; he would rather tease and play tricks than to work and develop his skills as a mechanic. Mma Ramotswe is reluctantly admitting what everyone who rides with her says—that her tiny white van she loves to drive is making too many knocking noises and not providing the power it formerly had. Could Charlie be relied on to fix it, instead of Mma Ramotswe bothering Mr. J. L. B. Matekom, who has said the van needs to be replaced? That issue is not resolved, but it is in fact Charlie who is central in leading to the identification of the writer of the threatening letters. Most serious and disturbing of the problems is Mr. J. L. B. Matekom’s belief, based on the claims of a doctor whose car he had fixed, that his adopted daughter, Motholeli, could be given medical treatment for her paralyzed legs. The doctor believes that a new medical procedure offered by a particular clinic could repair her spinal cord and make it possible for her to walk instead of needing a wheelchair. Finding out if this is possible will mean Mr. J. L. B. Matekom going with Motholeli to the clinic the doctor has recommended and staying with her for at least two weeks of testing and treatment. The clinic is outside the country, in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the procedure is very expensive. The cost will be more than Mr. J. L. B. Matekom can afford, but he disregards that. He believes the doctor, and he also believes that if there is any chance Motholeli can walk again, it must be pursued. In addition to the cost, however, there is the problem of potentially unrealistic hope and what it will mean to Motholeli and to the rest of the family if, after all, nothing can be done, and she remains wheelchair bound for the rest of her life. Mma Ramotswe does not think the treatment can help. It is clear that this would be a good time for some miracles around Speedy Motors, although miracles do not always appear just because they are wished for. Sometimes, almost playfully, they come when no one has even thought about them, or they come in disguise. The same could be said of Mma Ramotswe. She knows that her success as a detective is often no more dramatic than checking the telephone directory or the public records about court cases. What it really takes, she repeatedly demonstrates, is a willingness to help people and to use her energy and her common sense to do so. She listens carefully to others and is always respectful of their sense of self and their pride. She is not always right in her initial assessments, but before acting rashly she is willing to enlist the aid of others, particularly her family and acquaintances, to gain more information and insight into the problem. She is also sensitive to the fact that while most issues can have satisfactory solutions, even if the solution is different from what might be anticipated, occasionally there must be only acceptance of the situation. Mma Ramotswe also knows that one must make time for reflection and for one’s own well-being. In addition to her trusty bush tea breaks, Mma Ramotswe likes to sit

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by herself outdoors in the garden of their home on Zebra Avenue, if not for a few minutes in the morning, then in the evening. Almost exactly halfway through the novel, when the series of crises has built up, she tells the others that she will be gone for the day, and she drives her tiny white van far outside the city to Mochudi, the area where she was born and had grown up. She stops along the edge of the road on a hill overlooking her village and gets out of the van. She sits looking at the plains below and the large sky above, and a sense of peace flows through her as she recognizes that, when viewed from above, human striving seems small. Worries could be allowed to float up into the sky. Some of the details may remain to be tended to, but general solutions to the problems she has been fretting over come to her: They require simplicity and the basics of love, truth, understanding, and respect for others. It is this protagonist, Mma Ramotswe, and her basic philosophy of life, that has been enjoyed by literally millions of readers around the world. Throughout the series, she has been surrounded by a continuing and developing cast of characters: Mma Grace Makutsi, Phuti Radiphuti, Mma Potokwane, Mr. J. L. B. Matekom, the adopted children, the apprentices, and Mr. Polopetsi, all of whom are interesting and have their own distinct mixed characteristics. Added to this is the landscape of Botswana itself, often unfamiliar and amazing to those outside southern Africa. Mma Ramotswe loves her country and its people, and she is forever guided by the memory of her beloved and respected father, who raised cattle, taught sensible lessons, and always wished the best for his only child. It is not the plots that readers tend to remember from the novels, but the characters and the country. Smith’s simple style includes the rather formalized speech patterns of the characters and consistently entertains with light humor and the goodheartedness of Mma Ramotswe. He has three other series, mostly written and published concurrently with this series: the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, the Sunday Philosophy Club series (better known as the Isabel Dalhousie series), and, most recently, the 44 Scotland Street series. All are popular, but none as immensely popular as the consistently best-selling series featuring the admirable, indomitable, lifeaffirming Mma Ramotswe. Lois A. Marchino

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 13 (March 1, 2008): 30. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 6 (March 15, 2008): 274. Library Journal 133, no. 6 (April 1, 2008): 78. Publishers Weekly 225, no. 8 (February 25, 2008): 48. The Washington Times, May 4, 2008, p. B7.

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THE MODERN ELEMENT Essays on Contemporary Poetry Author: Adam Kirsch (1976) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 352 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Essays, literary criticism, literary history This collection of twenty-six previously published critical essays offers perceptive, hard-hitting commentary on poetry written in English during the postmodern period and on many of the leading poets With The Modern Element and his previously published The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets (2005), Adam Kirsch has established himself as a critical force on the American literary scene. He examines the leading, sometimes difficult poets of the postmodern period and sums them up with a youthful confidence grounded in a solid critical education, “the pragmatic tradition of Aristotle and Horace, Johnson and Arnold.” A student of scholar-critic Helen Vendler and a 1997 graduate of Harvard, Kirsch widened his impressive knowledge base and honed his critical skills by working as assistant literary editor of The New Republic and book critic of the now-defunct New York Sun. He combines a scholarly background with a general-audience style: The essays in The Modern Element originally appeared in such publications as The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Times Literary Supplement. One advantage of this style is that it is accessible and readable rather than weighted down by scholarly vernacular and academic jargon. The style also allows Kirsch to express his opinions sharply and memorably. Besides writing criticism, Kirsch writes poetry, in the tradition of poet-critics such as Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) and T. S. Eliot (1888-1965). He has published two collections of poetry: The Thousand Wells (2002), winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize, and Invasions (2008). Both collections use traditional forms, including meter and rhyme, which is consistent with the traditional leanings in his criticism. Kirsch takes his title The Modern Element from a lecture by Arnold, who, like Eliot later, defined “the modern element” in poetry as a response to the complexities of the modern age. Modernism and postmodernism are two phases of that response. Most of the postmodern poets about whom Kirsch writes in The Modern Element are either dead or aging, their careers often reflected in collected works. However, Kirsch seems to see contemporary poetry, which includes other, younger poets who in America are mostly graduates of creative writing programs, as a continuation of trends— not all good—noted in the postmodern poets whom he analyzes. Although a collection of essays written at random over ten years, The Modern Element focuses on American poets and, together with The Wounded Surgeon (which

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covers Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, and Sylvia Plath) offers a fairly comprehensive introduction to postmodern American poetry. The Modern Element also looks at a number of postmodern English, Irish, Caribbean, and Australian poets plus (in English translations) émigré poets from Poland and Russia. The last essay is on a literary critic, Yvor Winters. Kirsch’s analyses of individual poets enable him to form some conclusions about postmodern poetry in English that are scattered throughout his book but concentrated in the opening and closing sections. Kirsch takes the common view that postmodern poetry is both a continuation of and a reaction to modernist poetry. However, he seems to agree with LithuanianPolish émigré poet Czesuaw Miuosz, whom he quotes at length, that modernism was not so much a startling new movement after World War I but instead a culmination of centuries of thought and tradition. Modernism, with its fractured techniques in the arts, was the broken phase of Western civilization that mourned the passing of old myths, beliefs, practices, institutions, and meanings. After modernism, what was a postmodernist poet to do except continue the mourning, use the new fractured techniques, and search for meaning among the shards? Kirsch further defines these two movements by juxtaposing two famous representative poems in one essay: modernism is represented by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), which mourns the sterility of modern Western civilization, and postmodernism is represented by Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), which celebrates a wild counterculture of pleasure-seeking excesses. Other postmodern poets in The Modern Element are shown seeking meaning in various ways, groping about in the darkness of a shattered, piecemeal world. One favorite way is retreating into the self, which is then spilled out in autobiographical and confessional poetry. Kirsch accuses Louise Glück of making poetry out of her selfdramatizing ego, Frederick Seidel of exposing his surreal inner consciousness, and Sharon Olds of obsessing about a religion of sex. He sees other poets cataloging the sufferings of their dull workplaces (Irish poet Dennis O’Driscoll) and loveless lives (English poet Philip Larkin). Still others, says Kirsch, unload on readers their prevailing temperament, joyous affirmation for Richard Wilbur and melancholy for Donald Justice. Another way some poets deal with the splintered postmodern world is by grounding themselves in their provincial roots. Two of the poets Kirsch most admires do this: Caribbean poet Derek Walcott and Australian poet Les Murray. One might argue that poets of the New York School, represented in The Modern Element by Kenneth Koch, belong in this category: Kirsch characterizes Koch as a zany celebrant of cliquish New Yorker “Augustans” who make the “easy assumption of their own and their city’s centrality.” Still another way some poets operate in the postmodern ambience is by reaching

Adam Kirsch is author of The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets (2005); two collections of poetry, The Thousand Wells (2002), winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize, and Invasions (2008); and a biography, Benjamin Disraeli (2008).

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back and trying to connect with important cultural remains. For example, Kirsch notes that Billy Collins and English poet Geoffrey Hill build on the literary background they share with their educated audiences, Glück and A. E. Stallings draw on ancient Greek myth, Polish poet Adam Zagajewski (available in English translation) pursues mysticism, and James Merrill cultivates aestheticism, art for art’s sake. Finally, some poets such as Miuosz survive in the postmodern milieu by celebrating the ordinary. Kirsch places Collins with this group as well as Wilbur, who delights in life, simple pleasures, and the gifts of this world (maybe because as a fighting soldier in World War II, he saw the other side). However, Kirsch also calls Wilbur a “Transcendentalist” who senses a spiritual energy and beauty in the world similar to the secular holiness Miuosz finds and the mystical epiphanies Zagajewski seeks. Much less flattering is Kirsch’s evaluation of Charles Simic, who over his career went from a “Kafkaesque childhood” in Yugoslavia to “a bourgeois appreciation of life’s little pleasures” in America. Kirsch is hard on some of these poets, but perhaps he is hardest on Collins, probably America’s most popular poet. While acknowledging Collins’s popularity, his educated audiences, and his wit, Kirsch describes Collins’s “devotion to the ordinary” as “a peculiarly American form of mental laziness.” Collins’s “[r]elentless joking can be a way of discouraging curiosity, ambition, and endeavor, without which there is no greatness in art.” Kirsch especially gets incensed at Collins for making fun of William Wordsworth’s poem “Tintern Abbey” the same way he does of the Victoria’s Secret catalog (thus targeting “not only mass culture but genuine culture”), and he accuses Collins, an apostle for accessible poetic style, of not knowing “there is a place for difficulty in poetry.” As Kirsch notes in his introduction, Eliot argued that difficulty in poetry was necessary in response to the complex modern world. When Kirsch is faced with a number of difficult poets, however, he condemns pretentiousness and obscurity as much as does Collins. Among the difficult poets are John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, and C. D. Wright. Kirsch feels that Ashbery’s poetic epiphanies emerge from pages of playful triviality and nonsense. On the other hand, he claims that Graham and Wright have grown progressively more obscure over the course of their careers mainly by withholding information. Kirsch argues that all three poets push their techniques too far, sacrificing poetic communication and music, and that difficulty should be reserved for complex matters. These poets and their many imitators might contend that their difficult techniques mirror postmodern reality and the workings of the poetic mind trying to grasp and communicate it. Here Kirsch draws on what Yvor Winters called “the fallacy of imitative form,” blasting the idea that poets should load their confusion onto their readers. Kirsch opts for a return to music and form in poetry: Poetry should shape experience, not be mugged by it. Dividing poets into courteous and discourteous communicators, Kirsch notes that difficult techniques can go along with mundane matter, as he finds in the poetry of Wright. However, Wright has been a tremendous influence on younger poets, who might have even less to say but whose rush to be avant-garde betrays what Kirsch damns as a commodification of poetry. The poets whom Kirsch admires tend to stand apart from the avant-garde, write po-

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etry out of significant life experiences, and have an old-fashioned sense of form. His admiration for Walcott from the islands and Murray from the outback has already been noted: As provincials, colonials, and outsiders, Walcott and Murray seem to have developed well on their own. Murray is so far out of the mainstream that his masterpiece is a picaresque verse novel, Fredy Neptune (1998), a postmodern anomaly. Murray shares a working-class background with Theodore Roethke and James Wright, both of whom distrusted literary artifice and relied on intense feeling and the “deep image,” a hit-ormiss approach that produced a number of poems admired by Kirsch (and the world). Kirsch also admires Wilbur, whose joyous affirmation is another anomaly amid the gloom and doom of postmodernism. As noted earlier, Wilbur’s appreciation for life might be in part a reaction to his battlefield experiences in World War II (he started writing poetry as therapy), but as a poet, like others whom Kirsch admires, he developed mastery of verse and metaphor. Another admired poet is Miuosz, who lived through World War II in Warsaw, Poland, and developed a postmodern humanism in which art serves life and poets are witnesses to history. Nevertheless, while it seems to help, poets do not have to live through earth-shaking historical events in order to write important poetry. Two more whom Kirsch praises in The Modern Element are Irish poet Dennis O’Driscoll, the witty and dark chronicler of the office and middle-class existence, and English poet Philip Larkin, who, writing about similarly gloomy subjects, such as “provincial bachelordom,” produced “some of the best English poems of the twentieth century.” Both of these poets show superb mastery of the English language and poetic form. Thus, with a messianic zeal, Kirsch identifies the virtues and vices of postmodern poetry and sorts out the sheep from the goats. At the same time, while not a complete survey of postmodern poetry in English, The Modern Element is a good introduction to the range of poets and techniques. Kirsch makes some excellent observations about individual poets and postmodern poetry as a whole, and he is fun to read. Besides offering readers a handle on this body of work, he also suggests some useful advice for beginning and would-be poets: Writers of poetry must begin with imagination, facility with language and metaphor, a sense of form, and something to say growing out of their life experiences. Then they need to practice a lot. Kirsch ends with this classical advice from Horace: “Of writing well, be sure, the secret lies/ In wisdom: therefore study to be wise.” Harold Branam

Review Sources Booklist 104, nos. 9/10 (January 1, 2008): 36. Library Journal 133, no. 4 (March 1, 2008): 82. The New York Times Book Review, August 31, 2008, p. 15. Poetry 192, no. 2 (May, 2008): 154-163. The Times Literary Supplement, November 14, 2008, p. 33.

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A MOST WANTED MAN Author: John le Carré (1931) Publisher: Charles Scribner’s Sons (New York). 323 pp. $28.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The present Locale: Hamburg, Germany Le Carré’s twenty-first novel of international intrigue and espionage, focusing on the human cost of the “war on terror” and the practice of “extraordinary rendition” Principal characters: Issa Karpov, an enigmatic young Muslim of Russian or Chechen descent Tommy Brue, the owner-manager of the British private bank of Brue frères in Hamburg Annabel Richter, a young, attractive German lawyer who works for a German refugee support organization Günther Bachmann, head of the Foreign Acquisitions Unit of the Joint Steering Committee that coordinates German intelligence services Leyla Oktay, a Turkish widow who is a legal resident of Germany living in Hamburg with her son Melik Oktay, a top athlete who is torn between his Turkish heritage and his new country Dr. Faisal Abdullah, a well-known Muslim scholar living in Germany whose charities are suspected of funneling money to terrorist organizations.

If author John Updike was correct when he asserted wishfully in 1995 that the end of the Cold War would put an end to Cold War thrillers, John le Carré’s career as a writer of international intrigue should have come to an end with the publication of his novel Our Game (1995). However, Updike’s term “Cold War thriller” is not appropriate even for le Carré’s early novels, from Call for Dead (1960) to The Secret Pilgrim (1991). The spy thriller dramatizes the conflict between “us” and “them” and operates in a clearly defined moral and ideological landscape, where the Western democratic forces clash with various “axes of evil,” after World War II identified with the Communist Soviet Union and its satellites. This conflict tolerates no equivocation or indifference: 5 percent evil negates the other 95 percent of virtue or human weakness. Even in his first novels but particularly in his first major success, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), as well as in his Karla trilogy (1974’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, 1977’s The Honourable Schoolboy, and 1980’s Smiley’s People), all set against the background of the Cold War, le Carré leaves the confines of genre fiction and elevates his novels of espionage into the realm of the mimetic. His protagonists

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are not stereotypical superspies in the James Bond mold or demonic villains such as Dr. No. Instead, le Carré shows the world of espionage to be populated by foolish or misadvised politicians, ambitious and jealous spy masters motivated more by thoughts of advancement and internecine agency quarrels than by patriotism, willing to sacrifice their field agents and any innocent bystanders to pad their résumés. It is a world in which empathy, sentimentality, and ethical considerJohn le Carré has refused to enter his ations not only have no place but also are cruworks into competitions for literary prizes and rejected a peerage in protest elly punished in the end, with the protagonists either dead without having achieved anything against his country’s participation in or frustrated and disillusioned for having been the invasion of Iraq. He worked in the deceived and thwarted by their superiors. British Secret Service even after his What Updike could not have known in first novel, Call for the Dead (1961), was published. 1995 was that, far from being dead, the Cold War thriller would be revived with a new set of “thems.” The fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent rapprochement of the new Russia and the Western democracies left a brief vacuum during which both politicians and authors were looking for a new set of villains. After some brief excursions in the international arms trade and the machinations of large, multinational corporations, 9/11 and the “war on terror” provided the current set of villains—that is, Islamic terrorists—and authors of spy thrillers have begun to make full use of the subject. David Hagberg’s Soldier of God (2005) and Allah’s Scorpion (2006); Kenneth Floyd’s The Painted Man (2006); and Brad Thor’s Scott Harvath series, beginning with The Lions of Lucerne (2001), all are essentially carbon copies of the Cold War thriller with a different set of villains in a slightly changed physical environment. A Most Wanted Man, in contrast, is not a thriller, but a masterfully crafted political novel in which le Carré convincingly expresses his anger and sadness at the sacrifice of humanity and civil liberty in the “war on terror,” for which he lays the main blame on the United States, although the novel is set in Hamburg, Germany, the city where several of the 9/11 conspirators had gathered and prepared for the attack on U.S. targets. The fact that they were not discovered is considered a stain on the reputation of the city and German intelligence services. When Issa Karpov, a young Muslim with a connection to Chechen rebels, is discovered to have been smuggled into the city, after having escaped from a Turkish prison, the German authorities are doubly eager to apprehend him to avoid another disgraceful failure. Issa—his name is the Islamic form of Jesus—however, insinuates himself into the care of Leyla and Melik Oktay, who shelter him, in obedience to the commands of their religion, because he is ill and clearly has been tortured. Although he carries with him documents and a key that would entitle him to millions of dollars deposited at a private British bank in Ham-

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burg, his avowed goal is to be allowed to stay in Germany and go to medical school. To this purpose, he seeks the help of Annabel Richter, a young lawyer working for Sanctuary North, a nonprofit agency dedicated to helping refugees and undocumented aliens gain residency in Germany. Annabel, in turn, gets in touch with Tommy Brue, the owner of the bank that holds Issa’s money in a secret, passworded account. As in many other le Carré’s novels, a powerful motive for the main characters in A Most Wanted Man is the wish to escape from the clutches of a fraught relationship with a dominating father. Issa rejects his dead father, a former Soviet colonel who had worked for British intelligence in the waning years of the Soviet empire, and who had lavished his ill-gotten money on Issa to atone for his responsibility in the death of his Chechen mother. Annabel refutes her upper-class father and his elitist notions of the law to dedicate herself to the sort of clients for which her father would have felt contempt. In addition, she sees Issa as a chance to redeem herself for having failed a previous client whom she had to watch being taken away in shackles and deported to certain torture and death. Tommy Brue is trying to escape from yet another failed marriage and from the bank his father had turned into a moneylaundering vehicle for British intelligence, in return for receiving an Order of the British Empire honor. In addition, he has fallen in love with Annabel. To a degree, this rejection of father figures—le Carré fictionalizes his own fraught relationship with his con man father in A Perfect Spy (1986)—also stands for a rejection of the older generation’s confrontational Cold War mentality and its stereotyping of people and countries. Apart from the enigmatic Issa—the reader is never conclusively told whether he has, indeed, engaged in terrorist activities or has been only falsely accused of them by the Russians—the most complex character of the novel is Günther Bachmann, the head of a German spy agency designed to recruit “human assets” in the fight against international terrorists. Bachmann genuinely wants to combat terrorism by going to the source: the big financiers. While he temporarily coerces and persuades minor villains or even innocent people into his service, he plans to let them go back to their normal lives after they have served their purpose. This gets him into conflict with his superiors in the Joint Steering Committee, the German equivalent of Homeland Security, whose main concern is revenge, body count, funding, and one-upmanship. Bachmann persuades Annabel to deliver Issa to him, in order to gain access to Dr. Faisal Abdullah, a Muslim scholar who runs charities to aid needy people in Islamic countries, but whom he also suspects of funneling money to terrorist organizations. Tommy has also been forced to assist British intelligence, which wants to cover up its past associations with his father in the laundering of funds paid to its spies, including Colonel Karpov, Issa’s father. Bachmann’s scheme, which would allow Issa to stay in Germany and go to medical school and release Dr. Abdullah after having discovered the destination for the 5 percent of his charitable funds that go to suspected terrorists, is approved by his superiors, in consultation with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). At the climactic moment of the novel, however, everything goes terribly wrong.

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Expecting them to be released shortly afterward, Tommy and Annabel accompany Issa and Dr. Abdullah to the bank, where Issa signs away his inheritance, around twelve million dollars, to Dr. Abdullah’s charities, which they immediately transfer into the appropriate accounts, including fifty thousand dollars into the account of a shipping company in Cyprus that the CIA suspects of supporting terrorism. When they leave the bank, Bachmann must watch with Tommy and Annabel as Issa and Dr. Abdullah are apprehended, handcuffed, and thrown into a delivery van. If there is any doubt about their destination, it is dispelled by Newton, the CIA operative on the scene who explains to him that they are headed for “extraordinary rendition,” in other words, they will be taken to another country—the agent refers to “some hole in the desert”—and tortured until they admit that they are terrorists. Newton calls this process with no lawyers around to pervert it “American” justice. Bachmann realizes impotently that he has been used in the destruction of the innocent Issa and the misguided Dr. Abdullah. Even Leyla and Melik, the good Samaritans, will suffer: Although they are legal residents, German immigration will not let them return from a family wedding in Turkey, because they have harbored a “known” terrorist. Though A Most Wanted Man certainly makes for suspenseful reading and does not lack gripping plot development, it is above all a morality play, not a spy thriller. Its focus is not a battle between “us” and “them,” but on the conflict in and between “us.” It is an attempt to answer the question—much debated in the media and in academe— whether a noble goal, such as the defeat of international terrorism, justifies even the most abhorrent means, or whether in pursuit of this goal the moral high ground is lost. Le Carré poses this question sensitively and with great skill. The majority of his characters are complex, fallible humans whose instinct it is to come to the aid of their fellow humans, although they are not always clear about their own motives for doing so. Even though their own situation is precarious, Leyla and Melik take in Issa because he is confused and battered and because their religion commands them to do so. They choose to believe his story, although it is unlikely and contradictory. Annabel compromises her own safety and her career because, against her father’s advice, she is willing to follow her feelings and instincts without always controlling them. Tommy wants to save himself from a disastrous marriage and from becoming an unprincipled social climber like his father. In this way, Issa has indeed become their redeemer, despite being crucified himself. The only less-than-human characters in the novel are the spy masters, especially the members of the CIA who are asked to play the role of the traditional villain, though maybe a little too stereotypically. Historical events may eventually relegate A Most Wanted Man to the back shelves, yet it is a sensitive and engaging dramatization of one of the great moral dilemmas of the early twenty-first century. Franz G. Blaha

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Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 22 (August 1, 2008): 8. Library Journal 133, no. 14 (September 1, 2008): 119. New Statesman 137 (October 20, 2008): 53. The New York Times, October 7, 2008, p. 1. The New York Times Book Review, October 12, 2008, p. 1. People 70, no. 16 (October 20, 2008): 51. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 31 (August 4, 2008): 43. The Times Literary Supplement, September 26, 2008, p. 22. The Wall Street Journal 252, no. 88 (October 13, 2008): A17.

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MY REVOLUTIONS Author: Hari Kunzru (1969) Publisher: Dutton Penguin (New York). 288 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The 1960’s to 1998 Locale: London, England, and towns in surrounding areas; Thailand; South of France A historically based novel whose major characters were centrally involved in the anti-Vietnam War protests in London in the late 1960’s; the main action of the novel is set in the last decade of the twentieth century, with orchestrated flashbacks and updates Principal characters: Chris Carver, the central character, a former 1960’s radical who for decades has lived under the assumed identity of Michael Frame Miranda Martin, his enterprising capitalist wife, who does not know her husband’s true identity or his history Samantha Martin, Miranda’s daughter and Chris’s adopted daughter Anna Addison, a former lover of Chris and a leader of the antiwar movement Miles Bridgeman, a journalist and photographer whose loyalty to the antiwar movement is not sincere Sean Ward, lover of Anna Addison and a leader of the antiwar protest movement Pat Ellis, a former antiwar radical now running for Home Secretary

Hari Kunzru’s third novel, My Revolutions, is difficult to categorize, since it fits into several categories, none of which dominates the others. It is something of an historical novel, a political treatise, a coming-of-age work, and a pseudo-autobiography, all packaged in one work. The main character is Michael Frame, something of a househusband living in the London suburbs, where he is married to the successful businesswoman Miranda Martin and where he also serves as father to her daughter Samantha. The opening event of the novel is preparation for Michael’s fiftieth birthday. Slowly, readers learn that he is not Michael Frame, because this is an assumed identity, and that it is not really his fiftieth birthday. His real name and his previous life had been that of Chris Carver, a product of lower-middle-class English society who during the 1960’s had been a student at the London School of Economics. While there, he became involved in protests against the Vietnam War, and, subsequently, he became more than a student radical; he became a political terrorist, robbing banks and blowing up the post office. He has been in hiding for most of three decades, and one day he is spotted by a former associate from those days in the 1960’s. Time catches up with him at long last.

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The narrative is unusually complicated and sometimes difficult to follow because the Hari Kunzru, who is of mixed author intermingles the present—1998—with parentage (English and Kashmiri flashbacks and updates; moreover, he does Pandit), is a British journalist and not always cue the reader as to the changes in novelist who lives in East London. His time, location, and event. The only consistency work has received several awards, most here is point of view, which is always that noteworthy of which is from Granta of Michael/Chris. This rather dysfunctionally magazine, who identified him as one of the twenty best young British novelists organized plot is at first confusing, and it rein 2003. His first two novels, The mains so. Still, it serves well to reflect the Impressionist (2002) and Transmission chaos of the times and the fractured nature of (2004), were well received; My the main character’s life. Revolutions is his third novel. As something of a historical novel, My Revolutions has at its base the 1971 bombing of the London Post Office by a group known as the Angry Brigade. Kunzru has also taken, very loosely, historical events surrounding the Stoke Newington Eight trial in 1972, for which several defendants received lengthy prison sentences for their politically motivated, yet highly illegal, activities. As a work about politics and the political system, the novel is full of characters who voice differing opinions and ideologies. They are concerned with the problems of the system, the best means for correcting it, and the most effective manner to get “the people” involved in this would-be “revolution.” Michael is the character most torn: While he had given his youth to this revolution that never happened, he is now living a false life as a kept member of the capitalist society who is in no way doing his part to support himself or anyone else. His wife takes care of him financially; his part-time job at the bookstore is little more than a daily planned escape from the home. Chris never comes of age, even as he grows into his new identity as Michael; nor does he as Michael, the suburbanite househusband and father. Unable to accept himself as Michael, who is being “outed” by Miles Bridgeman, a slippery character from those days in the 1960’s, and, similarly unable to acknowledge himself even as the ex-Chris, he fumbles along, running from both the past and the present. All of this is accomplished in a work that reads largely as an autobiography, though, clearly it is not: Kunzru was born only in 1969; this aspect of the story line, while completely manufactured, is done so successfully. The first major flashback occurs during the preparations for Michael’s fiftieth birthday party, when he recalls a recent vacation he and Miranda made to France. While walking along in a small town, looking at the architecture and enjoying the sunshine, he sees a woman he thinks is Anna Addison, his former lover and a leader of a radical and terroristic antiwar movement who was killed in 1975 while invading an embassy in Copenhagen. Michael is sure that it is she, and the conviction efficaciously and relentlessly propels the past into the present. This resurrection of a character from the past reflects the overall attempt of the novel to deal not only with historical and political matters but also with the dual identities of the main character. The main thrust of the action (in the present of 1998) is for Michael to run from

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Bridgeman, who is forcing a return of the Chris who will have to pay for terrorist crimes committed some thirty years earlier. Michael cannot bring himself to do this, so he steals his wife’s car and takes their credit cards and escapes briefly to France where he believes he can find Anna and reunite with her, though it is not clear why he desires this. It is ironic that this run from reality, like his entire life as Michael, is funded by the business successes of his wife, who sells the ultimate of useless, bourgeois products: beauty creams. This life Michael leaves behind forms one of the numerous “revolutions” referred to in the novel’s title. Chris first revolts against his parents’ middle-class, mindless existence and the standard upbringing they have given him. Next, as a college student at the London School of Economics, he revolts against the entire system, initially the institution of education. However, he comes to understand that education is only one institution abetting the causes of the paramount institutions of society, government, and politics. He takes on the cause of protesting against the Vietnam War, but this movement evolves into protesting about housing problems of the poor and other injustices caused by poverty and the inequitable distribution of wealth. He and his group occupy a tenement house, give out free food, organize rallies, and so on. During this time of the “peace movement,” he and his group adopt a countercultural lifestyle, living in flats where walls are torn down and doors removed (including the door to the toilet) and where people come and go, sleeping and making love on mattresses that have been deliberately moved close to each other to avoid all pretense of privacy. This is done so that individual identities are subsumed into the identity of the group. Chris revolts against this method of protest and life when he realizes that all successes are only momentary and that only great acts will accomplish great deeds. He begins to rob banks and bomb the post office, persuading himself that if deaths occur, they are a necessary evil, the price to be paid for a greater good. On the run and about to be caught, he escapes for several months to Thailand, where Buddhist priests cure his drug addiction and help redefine his character. In the process, Chris redefines his identity, so he returns to England as Michael Frame. This revolt is a success for two decades, as Michael falls in love with Miranda and marries her, and his past remains buried. However, Bridgeman discovers him and has need of him. Bridgeman wants to sink the political aspirations of Pat Ellis, a woman running for Home Secretary, and Michael must be “un-Framed” so that he can expose Ellis and derail her political campaign. The reasons for doing so are never known. Michael revolts against Bridgeman’s plot and flees to France, eventually to discover that the woman he saw was not Anna, who really had died in 1975, just as the newspapers had reported. Accordingly, he then commits his final revolt of the novel. He telephones Miranda, informing her that he will finally tell her his story and face the consequences of his radical crimes and of the problems wrought by his double life and his double identity. Kunzru has written an undeniably intriguing story with an engaging plot and subject matter. However, at the end, it has moved only to irresolution: Michael’s decision to return to England and face his past is not a moral act but rather one necessitated by desperation. There is no sense of rounding off to the narrative and the dilemmas de-

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picted in the main character’s life and being. Rather, the author provides well-crafted phrasing that dismisses Michael, rather than embraces or endorses him. At the end, his final thoughts go to the role and validity of love in his life, and he thinks of Miranda before calling her, presumably to return to England as Chris. The phone call to her and his return to England are credible, but not the shallow thoughts about love being the reason. The politics of the novel are also left dangling in the air. Chris’s youthful radicalism has got him nowhere in life and has simply denied him life: He has no identity that is real. The movement of which he was a part did perhaps contribute to the ending of the Vietnam War, but it did not further other causes, such as eliminating poverty and hunger. The world of 1998 is arguably worse than that of the late 1960’s in a number of ways, specifically, the threat of terrorism, and Michael has done nothing but accept the situation and make no waves. Finally, if this is a coming-of-age story, Chris never comes of age. He simply grows older and haunted by the problems of his past, but there is never any sense of dealing with them maturely and responsibly. The character is left hopelessly revolving and revolving, with never a stop at a final resolution. Carl Singleton

Review Sources Booklist 104, nos. 9/10 (January 1, 2008): 44-45. Entertainment Weekly, January 25, 2008, p. 72. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 22 (November 15, 2007): 1172. Library Journal 132, no. 20 (December 15, 2007): 101. The Nation 286, no. 16 (April 28, 2008): 36-39. New Statesman 137 (September 10, 2007): 55-56. The New York Times Book Review, February 10, 2008, p. 12. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 8 (February 25, 2008): 72. The Times Literary Supplement, August 24, 2007, p. 24. The Virginia Quarterly Review 84, no. 3 (Summer, 2008): 286.

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MY SISTER, MY LOVE Author: Joyce Carol Oates (1938) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 562 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1990-2007 Locale: Northern New Jersey Oates weaves the story of an unsolved child murder into a portrait of modern American consumer culture and the families caught up in it Principal characters: Skyler Rampike, a teenager narrating the story of his sister’s unsolved murder Edna Louise “Bliss” Rampike, his sister, murdered in 1997 when she was six and Skyler nine Betsey Rampike, their mother, a needy and ambitious suburban housewife Bix Rampike, their father, a business executive who is often absent from home Pastor Bob, a leader of an evangelical church who helps Skyler in his search for answers

In Joyce Carol Oates’s My Sister, My Love, the central character Skyler Rampike is crippled in a number of ways. An accident in gymnastics when he was six has left him with a permanent limp, he has been through several treatment centers and schools for special needs kids, he has been a drug addict, and he now lives, at age nineteen, in a rundown rooming house in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in self-imposed exile from his parents and trying to write the story of My Sister, My Love. The novel is subtitled “The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike,” however, for while he is attempting to unlock the mystery of his sister’s death—“One day, Skyler has to reveal all he knows of his sister Bliss’s life/death. It is Skyler Rampike’s responsibility”—he is also trying to decipher the meaning of his own life in order to save it. “Dysfunctional families are all alike,” Skyler writes in the novel’s first line. “Ditto ‘survivors.’” In the process of trying to solve the decade-old crime, Skyler reveals the dysfunction of his family and exposes the pain of his childhood, including the social and familial forces that led to the murder of his sister and the disintegration of the Rampike family following that crime. The novel is painful to read, and at the same time its story is compelling. My Sister, My Love shares many elements with the JonBenet Ramsey story, the six-year-old child beauty queen who was murdered in 1996 and whose death and murder investigation became front-page tabloid stories. Bliss Rampike is a six-yearold child ice skater who has been pushed into competition by her ambitious and needy mother. The Rampikes have moved after every promotion that Bix Rampike achieves

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in his corporate job, and they now live in a mansion in Fair Hills, New Jersey, where Betsey Rampike knows no one and her husband is away on business most of the time. Trying to win the love of her workaholic husband, she focuses all of her anxieties on her two children, especially training and outfitting Bliss as a child skater and leading her into the sordid world of preteen skating competitions, an arena inhabited by other needy, unhappy parents and an audience of obsessed fans. “Our daughter is our destiny,” Betsey Joyce Carol Oates is the author of tells her husband, after changing Bliss’s name dozens of novels, story and poetry from Edna Louise to make her even more collections, dramas, and works of glamorous. Bliss is almost illiterate, and, like criticism. She is the Roger S. Berlind her mother and brother, also heavily medi- Distinguished Professor of the cated, but for a few brief years she is famous, Humanities at Princeton University, and her fame shines on her family as well. and she has been a member of the Mothers who have ignored Betsey in the past American Academy of Arts and Letters call to invite her to join their clubs, and school- since 1978. mates even start to talk to Skyler, whom they earlier called “weird,” but only because of his sister. Soon after becoming the youngest “Little Miss Jersey Ice Princess” in 1996, however, Bliss is found dead in the furnace room of the basement. As in the Ramsey case, the police are unable to solve the brutal murder, even after repeated investigations, and the Rampike family rapidly dissolves into even deeper dysfunction. The murder intensifies the pain Skyler has experienced since he was an infant. He was the first victim of his parents’ ambitions; Skyler’s father, a college football star, was embarrassed by his son’s lack of athletic ability and pushed him into gymnastic training that ended in an accident that broke bones and left Skyler with a limp. Skyler’s memoir traces his unhappy journey from childhood through a series of schools and then treatment centers, as the drugs he took as a child to mask his physical pain become the hard drugs he uses as a teenager to blunt the pain that fills his mind. In a sense, the novel is Skyler’s therapy, for in it he works out his problems: his guilt as the “survivor” who abandoned his six-year-old sister to her “fate,” his fear that he may have committed the murder himself, and his inability to understand why she died and he ended up in this condition. He has been estranged from his family for some years; after Bliss’s death, his parents split up, his father remarried and started another family, and Betsey turned her grief into a series of popular books (such as Pray for Mummy: A Mother’s Pilgrimage from Grief to Joy) and then into a line of beauty products aimed at what Skyler calls “the Christian-consumer community.” Seeking to recover her youth and beauty, Betsey dies during the last of a series of cosmetic surgeries hours before Skyler rushes to her seeking reconciliation. This final trip to see his mother, however, leads to the beginning of Skyler’s recovery, for at the funeral he

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sees his father for the first time in years, learning the truth about his sister’s death and beginning the process of healing that starts with forgiveness. My Sister, My Love is a fragmentary and nonlinear memoir or confession into which a novice writer pours his heart and his mind. The novel is made up of six books, each containing multiple chapters of varying length, and an epilogue. Often there is a hallucinatory tone to the work, for Skyler is deeply troubled (“And something in my brain is wrong,” he admits) and a recovering junkie, subject to panic attacks and bouts of unconsciousness. Bright and at times self-aware, Skyler is also a beginning writer whose doubts often lead him to change direction in his writing or even cancel what he has written. He shifts his narrative point of view constantly from first person to third, he appends notes to his editor as well as to his reader, and his pages often contain footnotes that explain the text but also reveal his uncertainty about himself and his writing. He also misspells words, especially foreign phrases he is attempting to use: pince-nez, for example, becomes “pinch-ney” while gauche becomes “goosh.” In Book V, Skyler inserts a fifty-five-page romance novella about his love for a schoolmate when he was sixteen: “First Love, Farewell: A Teen Memory of Lost Love.” Heidi Harkness, the girl, is, like Skyler, a victim of a celebrity murder, and their brief idyll only highlights the hell they inhabited as children and will probably face as adults. Each of the books here starts as a journal page, and the novel is clearly a written therapeutic record in which Skyler is trying to unravel his multiple problems. It is also, however, a murder mystery, and the careful reader can follow the clues and solve the crime before Skyler does. Oates has had her finger on the American pulse for more than forty years, and her stories and novels often dissect social follies and tragedies with surgical and satirical precision. While her novels sometimes contain violent and gothic strains, they also get to truths just beneath the surface of American life. She has also based some of her novels on real-life American tragedies; Black Water (1992), for example, followed the outline of Senator Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick story, while Blonde (2000) traced the tragic life of Marilyn Monroe. Similarly, My Sister, My Love has elements from the Ramsey story, but Oates uses them not to sensationalize but rather to uncover family patterns that led to what Skyler calls the “Tabloid Hell” that usually follow such incidents. Oates has always written perceptively about family life and especially about children, about the unique way they experience life and how they view the adult world— often in fright or flight—and My Sister, My Love confirms this talent. The children here—not only Skyler and Bliss but also Skyler’s schoolmates and play-date companions—are telling portrayals. Like Oates’s previous portraits of troubled childhood and adolescence in novels such as Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993) or The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007) and in stories such as “In the Region of Ice” (1996), “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1996), and “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again” (1969), Oates is particularly effective in dealing with teenagers like Skyler and picturing their world from the inside out, how they think and feel. In spite of certain romantic elements in her plots, Oates’s characters are usually realistic depictions of ordinary Americans, and this is certainly true of those in My Sis-

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ter, My Love. Skyler is a tortured young man struggling, against enormous odds, to discover who he is and to find the strength to continue to live. The key to Skyler’s identity is hidden in the tragedy of his sister’s murder almost ten years before. Only by uncovering the truth surrounding that crime can Skyler begin to establish his own identity, free of the fears that followed it. Skyler’s novel is the literary search for those answers. At the end, after a failed reunion with his parents, Skyler seeks help from the charismatic Reverend Bob, the leader of an urban evangelical church who helps addicts such as Skyler, but Bob has no simple answer either; Skyler must find his happiness in locating it for others. In the epilogue to the novel, readers watch Skyler as he takes his first stumbling steps in his journey toward redemption. Some of the character traits or plot incidents here seem overblown because My Sister, My Love is also a satirical take on contemporary American life, especially families, and as such it exaggerates the faults Oates sees within it. Skyler suffers not only from attention-deficit disorder (ADD) but also from premature depression disorder (PDD), chronic anxiety disorder (CAS), repetitive compulsion disorder (RCD), and a host of other psychological conditions that child therapists have diagnosed, and he takes as many medications as he has diagnoses. By the end of Bliss’s life, Betsey has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on skating outfits, on trainers, on acupuncturists, on nutritionists, on therapists—the list is almost endless. Bix resists his wife’s ambition only when she plans electrolysis to raise the hairline of their six-year-old daughter. Clearly, there is a large element of truth in Oates’s portrait of upper-middleclass American ambition, but she is also having fun, through her narrator, pointing out the absurd extremes of this lifestyle, for example, lampooning the Rampikes’ cars—a black Reaper and a Road Warrior SUV—and Skyler’s elementary school, which has an H.I.P track, for “Higher Ivy Potential.” The satire and the realism mesh easily in Oates’s detailed and accurate account of life at the turn of twenty-first century America when parents turn their children’s innocence and talent into a ladder for their own personal and social advancement. David Peck

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 15 (April 1, 2008): 5. The Boston Globe, June 23, 2008, p. 4. Elle 23, no. 11 (July, 2008): 89. Harper’s Magazine 317 (July, 2008): 81. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 9 (May 1, 2008): 455. Library Journal 133, no. 8 (May 1, 2008): 59. The New York Times Book Review, August 10, 2008, p. 8. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 14 (April 7, 2008): 40. School Library Journal 54, no. 11 (November, 2008): 157. The Times Literary Supplement, October 3, 2008, p. 20.

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NAPOLEON The Path to Power, 1769-1799 Author: Philip Dwyer (1957) Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). 651 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Biography, history Time: The 1760’s to 1799 Locale: Corsica, France, Egypt, and Italy Dwyer presents a compelling picture of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, portraying him as an opportunist reacting to events and cleverly shaping his heroic image through the mass media Principal personages: Napoleon Bonaparte, a successful general who seizes control of France in 1799 Joseph Bonaparte, Bonaparte’s older brother Lucien Bonaparte, Bonaparte’s younger brother Josephine Beauharnais, Bonaparte’s wife Christoforo Saliceti, a government commissioner and political patron of the young Bonaparte Paul Barras, a politician who promoted Bonaparte’s military career

Philip Dwyer’s Napoleon: The Path to Power—the first volume of an extended biography of Napoleon Bonaparte—will be appreciated by readers familiar with the Napoleonic saga as well as by those encountering the life of the great conqueror for the first time. Although Dwyer is a distinguished scholar and an expert on the Napoleonic period, and the book, published by Yale University Press, is intensively researched and heavily footnoted, Dwyer’s vigorous prose transcends the merely academic. He has managed the difficult feat of having something new to say about one of the most familiar stories in modern history. Bonaparte has been the subject of countless studies since his famous final defeat at Waterloo. The record of his spectacular rise and fall is inherently dramatic. In the midst of an age of revolution, when aristocracy was slowly being supplanted by liberalism and a rising bourgeoisie, Bonaparte was the ultimate self-made man. He came from obscurity to dominate the continent of Europe as the ruler of a new French Empire. Though a thoroughgoing tyrant, his ascendancy spread the French Revolution’s ideal of equality before the law. While most of Europe eventually rebelled against his quest for power, he was for a time seen by many as a shining avatar of progress. Bonaparte achieved all this through a record of military success that earned him a place with the greatest leaders of history. He developed an unparalleled facility in maneuvering his troops, rapidly concentrating overwhelming force on a point of enemy

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weakness. His speed and tactical aggressive ness seemed brilliantly innovative compared Philip Dwyer teaches at the University to the more stately rhythms of eighteenth cen- of Newcastle in Australia. He is the tury warfare. Building on the individual ini- editor of numerous books on the tiative and ideological fervor fostered in the Napoleonic period, including The citizen armies of the French Revolution, he French Revolution and Napoleon: A cultivated a special bond with his soldiers, en- Sourcebook (2002), with Peter abling him to demand more of them than McPhee. could other commanders of his day. So superlative were Bonaparte’s martial gifts that from early in his career he was universally regarded as a military genius. Bonaparte was fortunate to win this reputation at the height of the Romantic movement. As a supremely gifted individualist, he fit the pattern of the Romantic hero, struggling to express his superior gifts in a sea of mediocrity. His final defeat ironically sealed his authenticity as a Romantic hero, leaving him unbowed and defiant despite rejection and misunderstanding. He is the very model of a “great man” attempting to bend history to his will. Bonaparte forced himself on the imagination of his contemporaries, and his life has never lost its fascination. Dwyer’s contribution to this vast Napoleonic literature provides a penetrating analysis of Bonaparte’s evolving sense of self and his active contribution to the growth of his own legend. Dwyer does not see Bonaparte as the Romantic hero out of step with his inadequate times. Instead, he portrays Bonaparte as a work in progress: as a youth, torn between his Corsican homeland and an adoptive French identity; as a young man, trying to balance enthusiasm for the French Revolution with an innate desire for order. Bonaparte evolved through trial and error, and though his course was often diverted by personal disasters and sometimes propelled to success by strokes of luck, he displayed a growing adaptability and egotism. As he shed old enthusiasms and ideals, his interest and energies became increasingly focused on what was left: himself. Dwyer ends this first installment of his biography with the 1799 military coup through which Bonaparte seized power in France. By this point in his life, just past the age of thirty, the Bonaparte of legend was taking shape. Already an ambitious and cynical opportunist, he was confident enough in his abilities to challenge fate and grasp the reins of power. Facilitating his rise was an instinctive gift for self-promotion. The young Bonaparte was an indefatigable networker, ever on the alert for a connection that could prove useful. Early in his career as an army commander, he grasped the propagandistic power of the media, carefully managing his image. In his dispatches back to France, he shamelessly lied about his reverses and exaggerated his successes. Bonaparte skillfully manipulated the newspapers, even starting some of his own to sing his praises. He encouraged a proliferation of portraits and prints of himself and his exploits to reach a nonliterate audience and to help make him a hero in France. One of the strengths that Dwyer brings to his biography is a mastery of the organs of late eighteenth century French popular culture that helped lay the ideological foundations of Bonaparte’s dictatorship. Dwyer devotes a great deal of attention to Bonaparte’s Corsican roots. Corsica was

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a Mediterranean island that had long been loosely governed by the Italian mercantile republic of Genoa. In the 1760’s France established control over the island, and Bonaparte was born there on August 15, 1769, shortly after the French had decisively defeated a Corsican independence movement led by Pasquale Paoli. Bonaparte’s father Carlo fought with Paoli, but after the French victory Carlo promptly accommodated himself to the new regime. The Bonapartes quickly acquired a collaborationist taint, and Bonaparte’s mother Letizia may have even become the mistress of the French governor. Carlo worked assiduously to ingratiate himself with the French authorities in order to secure places for his eight children in the new system. Through his lobbying, he attained scholarships for the eldest to attend exclusive schools in France. At the age of nine, Bonaparte was enrolled at the military academy of Brienne, a small school of 110 students that prepared young men for service as officers in the army. About half the pupils were scholarship students, most the sons of aristocratic families too poor to afford an education proper for their station in life. The young Bonaparte figured among these. According to the mythic narrative that Bonaparte later encouraged, he was an outcaste at Brienne, routinely persecuted because of his Italian accent. Dwyer is skeptical of these stories. There is no hard evidence that Bonaparte was singled out for mistreatment. What Dwyer finds more significant is the alienation from others that Bonaparte experienced from an early age. An inveterate loner, Bonaparte as a boy felt little loyalty to the monarchy that he was being trained to serve; instead, he identified himself with his Corsican heritage. He revered the freedom fighter Paoli and shed few tears when his hard-working father died young of stomach cancer. Ironically, Bonaparte came to resemble his father in his relentless efforts to advance the fortunes of his many siblings, usurping the role of head of the family that rightfully belonged to his elder brother Joseph. Bonaparte’s devotion to his family, which continued into his days as the emperor of France, would be the last manifestation of the Corsican in him. Bonaparte was a lieutenant in the artillery when France was engulfed in the revolution that began in 1789. He became an enthusiastic supporter of the revolutionary program, having no attachment to the old regime. In the early years of the revolution, Bonaparte embroiled himself in Corsican politics. He hoped that Corsica could achieve political autonomy in association with France. These hopes seemed within reach when Paoli was allowed to return to his homeland. Unfortunately, Paoli proved to be an autocratic ruler. He disapproved of the increasing radicalism of the French government, and he would never fully trust any member of Carlo’s family. In the end, Bonaparte was forced to flee Corsica with his mother and his siblings. His disillusionment in Corsica helped prepare him for the political shoals that he would be forced to navigate in the coming years. By the time Bonaparte and his family reached France in 1793, the country was in the grip of revolutionary terror. The king and queen had been executed, a republic declared, and the Jacobins who controlled the government were ruthlessly using the guillotine to consolidate power. In an effort to rally support for the revolution, the government had declared war on the hostile monarchies surrounding France. It also faced insurrections at home, as a large number of French people rose up against the

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Jacobin ascendancy. Bonaparte went to war for the government, using his skills as an artilleryman to subdue the counterrevolutionary movement in the port of Toulon. Such was his identification with the radicals in Paris that he was briefly arrested when Maximilien Robespierre and his faction of Jacobin leaders were overthrown and guillotined. Bonaparte quickly bounced back, as the Directory, a less bloodthirsty regime, came to power. He benefited from the patronage of a fellow Corsican, Christoforo Saliceti, a government commissioner with the army, and Paul Barras, one of the Directors. He also strengthened his political position by helping thwart a royalist coup attempt in 1795. In March of the next year, he was appointed commander of the army of Italy, charged with bringing some energy to a desultory campaign against the Piedmontese and Austrians. In Italy Bonaparte came into his own. Up to this point in his career, he had proven himself a capable soldier, but he had not yet demonstrated signs of military greatness. Now, with a significant command of his own, he stunned Europe with a brilliant campaign that over the course of a year and a half established France as the dominant power in Italy. Dwyer traces the course of these battles, but military history is not his chief concern. Instead, he explores the ways in which command and power shaped Bonaparte’s personality. The young general discovered a taste for waging war. Repeated victories enhanced his self-confidence and revealed abilities and qualities in himself that he had not known before. He came to enjoy exercising the power that he had won, and he began wielding an authority in Italy greater than that normally accorded a general. He bought immunity for this by sending to Paris a stream of confiscated gold and art treasures that would later be the glories of French museums. Bonaparte also used the riches that he exacted from the conquered Italians to buy the publicity that made him a hero as well as a victor to the French. His experiences in Corsica and in the revolution had stripped him of idealism. Further souring his mood was the infidelity of his beloved wife Josephine Beauharnais. Bonaparte now saw the world through cold and self-centered eyes. From this point on, he would pursue the power that he treasured with singular determination and ruthlessness. Bonaparte followed his exploits in Italy with an invasion of Egypt in 1798. This was the linchpin of a grandiose plan to disrupt the growth of the British Empire in India. Bonaparte’s expedition included a large contingent of scholars and scientists, because he wanted to be seen as an apostle of enlightenment and progress as well as a conqueror. Bonaparte won control of Egypt through some initial victories, one glamorously fought in sight of the pyramids. Then his campaign fell apart. The British admiral Horatio Nelson destroyed Bonaparte’s fleet at Aboukir Bay, and Bonaparte was checked in a foray into Syria, during which he displayed a cruelty to Turkish prisoners shocking even to a more rough-hewn age. Fortunately, he was able to defeat a Turkish landing at Aboukir Bay, and this enabled him to return to France as a hero, even though the army that he had abandoned in Egypt was doomed to certain defeat and capture. Perhaps recognizing the transient nature of his acclaim, Bonaparte threw himself into a plot with opponents of the corrupt Directory. With the crucial assistance of his politician brother Lucien, he seized control of the government on November 10, 1799. This was the first military coup in modern history, and it became the

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model of many to come. Bonaparte, a man who in eighteenth century terms had come from nowhere, was master of the most powerful nation in Europe. In the next volume of his biography, Dwyer will explore what Bonaparte made of this unexpected opportunity. Together with Napoleon: The Path to Power, it should provide contemporary readers a compelling and useful portrait of Bonaparte. Daniel P. Murphy

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 14 (March 15, 2008): 23-24. Library Journal 133, no. 7 (April 15, 2008): 92.

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NATURAL ACTS A Sidelong View of Science and Nature Author: David Quammen (1948) First published: 1985, in the United States Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 350 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Essays, science, history of science, nature, natural history A new edition of Quammen’s 1985 collection of essays on nature, scientists, the history of science, and human interaction with the environment This revised and expanded edition is a marriage of two distinct and different collections of essays. The first half of the book consists of nineteen essays, divided into three sections, taken, without revision, from the first edition of Natural Acts, which was published in 1985. The second half contains seven essays originally published within the last decade. The first half shows the young, exuberant David Quammen, still learning his craft, but entertaining and educating his reader with a different view of the natural world. The essays of the second half are those of a mature, sure craftsman, still taking a sidelong view of science, but now a master of his field. Confident in his skill to persuade, there is little of the showoff that is evident in the earlier writing. Both sets of essays look at the same set of themes: nature, the place of humans in nature, communities and relationships, and the life of the individual researcher in the history of science. The early essays originally appeared between 1981 and 1985 and, with three exceptions, were first published as a column in the magazine Outside. Quammen’s early columns are characteristically short (limited by the format in Outside), informal, wander a bit, challenge prior preconceptions, and ask unusual questions. In the introduction to the original edition, he describes his point of view as “oblique” and “counterintuitive,” which is a good way to put it. That is one of the chief attractions of these early works: They force the reader to rethink his or her position on nature. For example, the essays collected in the section entitled “All God’s Vermin” look sympathetically at creatures most of his audience probably had little love or appreciation for, such as the mosquito and the black widow spider. At the time of these early efforts, Quammen was conscious of what he perceives to be his outsider’s position in respect to one well-known and acknowledged community of popular science writers, the scientist-essayists. He lacked, he pointed out in the original introduction, the scientific training and research experience of the masters of the genre, such as the anthropologist Loren Eisley, the paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould, and the biomedical researcher Lewis Thomas. To contrast himself with these practitioners of the craft, he emphasized, in his autobiographical introduction, the important roles of his personal curiosity and his love of nature

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instead of literary research. His utilization of the published literature in these early essays was often limited to a handful of sources. His essay on the black widow spider, for example, relied, apparently, on only two sources, while that on the octopus used three. In addition, in what may have been an overreaction, he used language that emphasizes the distance between him, the lover of nature, and the researchers, with their technical knowledge and their efforts to reduce nature to numbers. A simple, extremely insightful algebraic expression used by ecologists becomes an “ugly cryptogram,” highlighting and conveying both Quammen’s lack of appreciation for the beauty of mathematics and its presumed impenetrability, while Robert J. Oppenheimer’s team of atomic scientists and ingenious engineers become “a coven,” invoking images of witchcraft and evil doing. The essay on the mosquito, the earliest chronologically in the collection and the first in the book, captures, not unexpectedly, all of the early Quammen’s strengths and weaknesses. His love of all nature, even aspects of nature that are commonly viewed negatively by most observers, is evident. So is his somewhat off-center point of view and his willingness to ask singular questions. Rather than limiting his account to the life history and feeding habits of the insect, or simply acknowledging or repeating the massive destruction that the mosquito has done to humans over recorded history, he asks what some readers may consider a ridiculous question. Is the insect truly just a horrible pest at best, and a conveyor of deadly diseases at worst, or are there any positive attributes of the mosquito? Does the mosquito have redeeming features? His insightful answer is that the mosquito is worthy of praise and defense, and it has been a true hero in the struggle for the protection of the environment. His argument is that this otherwise nasty insect helped ensure the survival of the tropical rainforests into the late twentieth century, long after other forest ecosystems were destroyed through economic exploitation, by limiting human activity in that ecosystem. As in his essay on the crow, which contends that the problem with crows is that they are highly intelligent birds who suffer from boredom, or the essay analyzing the rumors, never confirmed, of giant anaconda snakes in the Amazon River basin, Quammen thinks outside the box and forces his reader to do the same. It can be an exhilarating experience. Evident in the mosquito essay is another of Quammen’s traits in his early essays: his use of the unusual or questionable turn of phrase or analogy. In this case, he concludes his discussion by drawing an analogy between the mosquito and the Viet Cong, the Communist guerrilla force of the Vietnam War, and in doing so he seems to be making a strong political statement perhaps out of place in nature essays. The mosquito is presented as a jungle-loving, bloodthirsty anticolonialist, stopping Europeans and Americans from exploiting its habitat. Is that his picture of the Viet Cong? How does that fit in the historical debate over the nature of the Viet Cong? An analogy that conjures conflicting responses among readers is not the best. The limitations of Quammen’s early work come out clearly in his excursions into

The author of eleven books and numerous uncollected magazine articles, David Quammen has won the National Magazine Award three times. He is the Wallace Stegner Professor in Western American Studies at Montana State University.

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the history of science. His essay on Tycho Brahe, the sixteenth century Danish astronomer, is the weakest of the collection. It is underresearched, with only four sources cited, and shows a lack of understanding of the complexity of the man. When Quammen’s portrait of Brahe is contrasted to the wonderful, multidimensional portraits he draws of living subjects that he has interviewed and has had the opportunity to interact with, such as George Ochenski, the Montana river-snorkeler, and John R. Horner, the paleontologist, who, despite a limited formal scientific education, has been a key actor in the development of a revolutionary view of dinosaurs, the difference is unquestionable. In the case of Brahe, Quammen had difficulty extracting the living person from the historical record. There is such a great contrast between the early essays and the ones that follow in the final section of the book that at first glance one might wonder if they were the work of two different writers. In the introduction created for this edition, Quammen acknowledges his growth as a researcher and a writer during the more than two decades of essays collected in this book, touches upon all the major differences between his early and later writing, and admits that illustrating those differences was one of his motives in including both sets of essays. These later seven essays, originally published between 1998 and 2007 in a variety of magazines, are much longer, much more developed, more sophisticated, and better researched than their predecessors. From comments in the introduction, Quammen appears to have identified “Planet of Weeds,” his essay on species extinction that opens the second half of the book, as the most important of his later writings that appear in this collection. Based on extensive research in both the scientific and the popular literature (there are more than one hundred items in the list of sources, by far the most for any essay in the volume) as well as interviews with scientists, this essay explores the possibility of a mass extinction of species triggered by human action, resulting in a massive loss of biodiversity. As the result of such a mass extinction, the earth would be inhabited primarily by the so-called weedy species. These are the plant and animal species, including humans, that are survivor species, able to take advantage of whatever opportunities are presented and possessing a high tolerance for a broad range of habitat conditions. Pessimistically, Quammen warns that the coming of what he calls the “Planet of Weeds ” may only be a few human generations away. The essay serves as a clarion call. Three other essays in this section demonstrate the diversity of Quammen’s later writing and his great skills. The longest piece, some fifty pages, and originally published in three parts in National Geographic, is an account of J. Michael Fay’s onethousand-mile trek across central Africa. Although Quammen does a fine job of explaining how Fay’s expedition is a serious and important step in conservation studies in a relatively unstudied portion of Africa, by pinpointing the location of ecosystems, what makes the essay fantastic reading is how the author captures the spirit of a man who, in Quammen’s words, “just loves to walk in the wilds.” The description of Fay’s expedition, which focuses on a larger than life personality, can be contrasted with the shortest piece in this section, an account of Quammen’s relationship with his wife’s dog, Wiley. Through Wiley’s life and death, Quammen explores how humans become, and recognize the fact that they are, part of a commu-

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nity. If the essay on Fay represents fascination with the stubborn individual who overcomes all obstacles through personal will, the essay on Wiley demonstrates the human need for the companionship and the support of others. In his account of Carl Linnaeus, the eighteenth century Swedish naturalist who developed the most influential artificial system of biological classification, Quammen has distanced himself from the weaknesses demonstrated in his Brahe essay of two decades earlier. The historical essay is based on considerably more research, including eleven printed sources, correspondence, and a visit to Linnaeus’s home. He takes the time to understand the historical actor in the same way he strives to understand contemporary scientists, and the result is an essay in which the long-dead scientist does come alive. In the last twenty-five years, Quammen has evolved from an opinionated, somewhat atypical nature columnist to a significant and insightful commentator on American life, science, and the natural world. The essays collected in Natural Acts document that evolution. As Quammen states in his introduction, by collecting his work in book form, he has ensured the survival of the best of his otherwise ephemeral magazine writings. Marc Rothenberg

Review Sources Geographical 81, no. 1 (January, 2009): 63. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 14 (April 7, 2008): 48. Scientific American 298, no. 3 (March, 2008): 100. SciTech Book News 32, no. 2 (June, 2008).

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NAZI LITERATURE IN THE AMERICAS Author: Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) First published: Historia de la literatura Nazi en America, 1996, in Spain Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews Publisher: New Directions (New York). 227 pp. $23.95 Type of Work: Novel Time: 1900-2030 Locale: Latin America and the United States This fictional literary encyclopedia of invented North and South American fascist authors includes the lives, works, creative significance, and historical context of these imaginary figures Principal characters: Roberto Bolaño, the narrative voice of the encyclopedia and a character in its final entry Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce, poet and patroness of Argentina’s right-wing literary movement Luz Mendiluce Thompson, daughter of Edelmira, bisexual fascist poet whose most cherished possession is a photograph of herself with Adolf Hitler Irma Carrasco, a Mexican poet who flees her abusive Marxist husband to join the Falangist movement in Spain during its civil war Max Mirebalais, a Haitian author with many pseudonyms who attempts to merge black identity with Nazism in his writings Argentino Schiaffino, Argentinine poet, novelist, and violent soccer fan with right-wing sympathies Carlos Ramírez Hoffman, Chilean pilot and poet who participates in brutal assassinations and torture during the Pinochet regime

When Roberto Bolaño’s Los Detectives salvajes (1998; The Savage Detectives, 2007) appeared, it made its author a literary celebrity in the Spanish-speaking world. His readers declared him the leader of a new Latin American literary movement that would replace the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez, the author of Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970). However, two years before, critics had already noted Bolaño’s greatness when he published Nazi Literature in the Americas, a biographical encyclopedia of thirty fictional fascist authors from North and South America. Whereas The Savage Detectives is a decidedly Dionysian work with a strong Beat influence from Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road (1957), Nazi Literature in the Americas owes more to Apollonian flights of intellectual imagination such as Labyrinths (1962) by Jorge Luis Borges and Le città invisibili (1972; Invisible Cities, 1974) by Italo Calvino. However, Savage Detectives and Nazi Literature in the Americas share Bolaño’s concerns about the

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relationship of the writer to society and history. Nazi Literature in the Americas derives from the Latin American genre of literary encyclopedias that catalog a group of writers of one particular nationality or creative movement, but not in an objective fashion. Rather, the encyclopedia’s author colors the entries with his or her own critical biases. The unique aspect of Nazi Literature in the Americas is that Bolaño does not catalog real authors; instead, he creates a menagerie of invented fascist authors. In essence, the entries in Nazi Literature in the Americas form a collection of thirty short stories. To give his work greater realism, Bolaño infuses it with references to real writers. So, for instance, the fictional, homophobic American poet Jim O’Bannon beats up Allen Ginsberg when Ginsberg, the author of Howl (1956), makes sexual advances. Bolaño’s right-wing thug and detective author Amado Couto meets the real Brazilian mystery writer Don Rubem Fonseca and finds his “gaze was harder than his own.” To complete his illusory reality, Bolaño includes three appendixes under the heading “Epilogue for Monsters”: secondary figures, publishing houses, and books. Bolaño creates this parallel realm of imaginary fascist authors in order to explore the nature of evil. Sometimes he finds it banal, even foolish, as with Luz Mendiluce Thompson’s obsession over a photograph of herself as a baby held in the adoring arms of Adolf Hitler, a picture she would sacrifice everything to save, or Zach Sodenstern’s novel Candace, which includes a character named Flip, “a mutant, stray German Shepherd with telepathic powers and Nazi tendencies.” Sometimes evil can even evoke bravery, as when Jesús Fernández-Gómez stoically recovers in a Riga hospital from war wounds inflicted on the Eastern Front, or when Ignacio Zubieta dies in the streets defending Nazi Berlin against Soviet troops. Aways there is a deep horror lurking underneath the seemingly benign aspects, like a bloody gash hidden by a bandage. Couto ponders literature as he tortures enemies of a dictatorial Brazilian government. Poet John Lee Brook murders seven people—a poet, three pornographers, a shady art dealer, and the dealer’s two bodyguards. Throughout Nazi Literature in the Americas, Bolaño reveals fascists whose lives are pathetic or even amusing, but they embrace chilling genocidal beliefs or commit dreadful atrocities. In this way, he demonstrates that, even in the most prosaic person, evil can be potent and dangerous. What ultimately makes Nazi Literature in the Americas an important and troubling contemporary work is Bolaño’s exploration of the intersection of art and evil, of how creative souls can accommodate or revel in a totalitarian philosophy. On one hand, Bolaño can identify with his characters, for in their striving to create literary art in the face of critical hostility, he mirrors his own youth in Mexico City, when he was a Trotskyite and the fiery leader of the Infrarealism poetry movement, sabotaging readings and writing diatribes against major mainstream authors such as Octavio Paz, author of El laberinto de la soledad (1950; The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1961). Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño grew up in Mexico but returned to his Chilean homeland, where he was briefly imprisoned by the Pinochet government. While living in exile, he wrote seventeen books of poetry and prose, and he became one of the leading Latin American writers of his generation. He died in 2003.

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probably feels sympathy for Luiz Fontaine Da Souza, who writes a dozen sixhundred-page works on philosophy, only to be met with a “sepulchral silence,” or for Agentino Shiaffino, who has to self-publish his poems on Argentine soccer. He may even admire Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce for building a replica of Edgar Allan Poe’s concept of the perfect room, complete with crimson windowpanes, thick silver curtains, rosewood couches, and an octagonal table of gold-threaded marble. Bolaño’s comic empathy, however, goes only so far. While these characters may appeal with their heroic creative efforts and misbegotten lives, the darkness of their souls ultimately chills the reader’s heart. Fernández-Gómez and Zubieta perform their acts of bravery for Francisco Franco and Adolf Hilter—two of the most bloody totalitarians in human history. Philosopher Da Souza’s work includes tracts claiming that miscegenation will be the downfall of Brazil, and one of his works hints at his murder of a lover, an act concealed by his powerful family. In between writing soccer poetry, Shiaffino pens an essay titled “Jews Out,” and he blows up a bus carrying fans of a rival soccer team. Just after de Mendiluce builds her Poe room, she helps Nazis fleeing the collapse of Germany to slip illegally into Argentina, and she starts the Fourth Reich Press, a major fascist publisher. Even more disturbing are Bolaño’s depictions of the active relationship between fascism and the literary arts. History provides many examples of Nazism seducing creative minds and hearts—most notably Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect; Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaker who directed Triumph des Willens (1935; Triumph of the Will), Richard Strauss, the composer of Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), and Ezra Pound, the American poet who broadcast pro-Mussolini propaganda from Italy throughout World War II. Bolaño’s fictional encyclopedia allows him to generate new examples of creative artists pandering to fascism. Thompson’s most famous poem is “I Was Happy with Hitler.” Fernández-Gómez writes a novel glorifying fascism and Franco’s side of the Spanish Civil War titled The Fighting Years of an American Falangist in Europe. Silvio Salvático’s books promote “the re-establishment of the Inquisition; corporal punishment in public; a permanent war against the Chileans, the Paraguayans, or the Bolivians as a kind of gymnastics for the nation; polygamy; the extermination of the Indians to prevent further contamination of the Argentinean race; curtailing the rights of any citizen with Jewish blood”; and many other extreme, far-right concepts. Science-fiction author Sodenstern writes the highly popular Fourth Reich saga, which includes The Simbas, “a surreptitious manifesto directed against African Americans, Jews, and Hispanics.” Another science-fiction author, Harry Sibelius, writes a 1,333-page novel that describes a parallel history wherein the Third Reich conquers the United States and establishes a Nazi state. The entire piece precisely parallels Arnold J. Toynbee’s Hitler’s Europe (1954), and it includes chapter titles such as “The Political Structure of Hitler’s America.” By the end of Nazi Literature in the Americas, the reader feels overwhelmed by all this creative energy turned toward such a malevolent cause. The literary community views writing as an almost sacred profession, and it tends to believe that creative artists lend their talents to only noble, democratic causes. In Nazi Literature in the Amer-

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icas, Bolaño starkly shows that the literary arts can and have lent themselves to movements as darkly violent and destructive to democracy as Nazism and fascism. The book’s climax arrives with the final entry, “The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman.” Here, Bolaño utilizes his own experiences during General Pinochet’s coup, and in this section, the connection between poetry, fascism, and violence is at its most unsettling. Born in Chile, Bolaño moved with his family to Mexico, but he returned to his birth country in 1973 to help defend the democratic socialist Salvador Allende government. Arriving just as Pinochet seized the nation, Bolaño was briefly jailed, and he might have been executed, except for a guard who recognized him from childhood and ordered his release. “The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman” begins just before the coup. Bolaño describes a poetry circle that includes María and Magdalena Venegas, girls in their late teens, and Ramírez Hoffman, who is María’s lover. When the coup begins, the Venegas sisters, associated with the leftist poet Juan Cherniakovski, flee the city of Concepción for their aunt’s home in the country. Two weeks later, Hoffman shows up, and the girls invite him to stay. They do not realize that Hoffman has become an informer for the Pinochet regime, and in the night, after Hoffman has made love to María, he slits the aunt’s throat and then lets in two of Pinochet’s agents who proceed to rape and slaughter the girls. Meanwhile, Bolaño has been arrested and interred in a makeshift prison in Concepción. While Bolaño is out in the prison yard, Ramírez Hoffman, who has been studying to be a pilot, flies overhead and writes poetry in the sky, with lines that include “GOOD LUCK TO EVERYONE IN DEATH” and “LEARN FROM FIRE.” With this grandiose form of public poetry, Hoffman becomes famous. One day, some of Pinochet’s top generals ask Hoffman to present something truly astounding. He obliges, first with his skywriting poetry, but a thunderstorm rips apart the letters. Still, he manages to write a series of lines that begin, “Death is friendship.” After the skywriting, Hoffman invites a select few to an apartment set up as a gallery, there to view photographs that he calls “the art of the future.” While Bolaño does not describe the photographs, from the horrified reactions to the pictures, they are probably depictions of the Venegas girls’ rape and murder. In this moment, Hoffman perfects the link between poetry, sadism, death, and fascism. In all of his horrifying glory, Hoffman is the supreme fascist artist. Soon after, Hoffman is kicked out of the air force and wanders around Chile, writing for obscure literary magazines and staging various artistic and theatrical events. Eventually he leaves Chile for Europe, and by the early 1990’s, when Chilean democracy had been restored, he is summoned to various trials. He never appears, and he cannot be found. Everyone assumes he is dead, until Abel Romero, a private detective who ferrets out torturers, assassins, and other criminals of the Pinochet regime, with Bolaño’s help, finds Hoffman in France making sadomasochistic films. Romero assassinates Hoffman, and the most infamous fascist author discussed in Nazi Literature in the Americas dies, as it were, by his own sword, thus ending the book with the chilling reality beneath its thirty invented entries. John Nizalowski

Nazi Literature in the Americas / bolaño

Review Sources Entertainment Weekly, February 29, 2008, p. 65. The Globe and Mail, March 8, 2008, p. D7. The Nation 286, no. 12 (March 31, 2008): 29-32. The New York Times Book Review, February 24, 2008, p. 9. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 49 (December 10, 2007): 34-35. Review of Contemporary Fiction 28, no. 2 (Summer, 2008): 166-167. The Times Literary Supplement, February 22, 2008, p. 19. The Village Voice 53, no. 50 (December 10, 2008): 44. The Washington Post Book World, March 2, 2008, p. BW10.

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NETHERLAND Author: Joseph O’Neill (1964) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 272 pp. $23.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1999-2006 Locale: New York City and London A Dutch banker struggles to move forward with his family in post-9/11 New York Principal characters: Hans van den Broek, a Dutch banker Rachel van den Broek, Hans’s wife, who is a lawyer Jake van den Broek, Hans and Rachel’s young son Chuck Ramkissoon, an enterprising immigrant from Trinidad Anne Ramkissoon, Chuck’s wife Eliza, Chuck’s mistress Mike Abelsky, Chuck’s shady Russian business partner

Joseph O’Neill’s third novel, Netherland, delves into the immigrant experience, post-9/11 New York, and troubled personal relationships. The novel has rightfully drawn much critical attention. It was long-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize and won the PEN/Faulkner Award. In addition, Netherland was named by The New York Times as one of the top ten books of 2008. O’Neill, born in Ireland, raised in Holland, and living in New York, draws on his immigrant experience, his crosscultural background, and his love of cricket to color the novel. In addition, he demonstrates a finely honed sense of post-traumatic stress, and the way such stress insidiously undermines individuals and relationships. Indeed, O’Neill seems to be saying, all who experienced such a cataclysm might find themselves as outsiders in their own lives. O’Neill underscores the sense of isolation and paralysis that permeates the novel through every available means, including even his sentence structure. He uses long, perfectly crafted sentences, befitting his main character’s penchant for thinking rather than acting. As a result, the book is dense, internal, and even sometimes claustrophobic. The main character, Hans van den Broek, tells the story almost entirely through his thoughts and memories, severely limiting the point of view. The technique, however, is highly effective, an example of craft and tone mirroring content. Hans’s quiet adventure occurs entirely in flashback. Home with his family in London, years after the events of 2001, Hans learns of the death of Chuck Ramkissoon, a mysterious figure Hans knew during his time in New York City when he lived there without his family. From this point on, Hans reminisces about the time he calls “unbearable,” in New

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York, living at the Chelsea Hotel while his family lives in London. Hans also recalls his Joseph O’Neill was born in Ireland, friendship with Chuck, the people who lived grew up in Holland, received his law at the Chelsea, and his time playing cricket in degree from Cambridge, and now New York. He also flashes back to earlier resides in New York. He also plays times, as a child in The Hague, as a young cricket with the Staten Island Cricket man in London, and as a man experiencing Club. Netherland is his third book and his mother’s death not long before September the most widely acclaimed. 11, 2001. In flashback, Hans reveals himself to be a Dutch banker, married to Rachel, an Englishwoman and attorney, living in New York City prior to and immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He is profoundly affected by the collapse of the Twin Towers and finds himself lost, floating above his world. His disconnection to his life may also trace back to the recent death of his mother, his only relative except for his wife and son. At the time of the attack, his family lives in an apartment in TriBeCa, a neighborhood in lower Manhattan. Forced out by the authorities, they live in fear at the Chelsea Hotel, unsure of what will happen next. Hans acknowledges that he is unprepared for this new New York, where everyone has an opinion about the world and current events, stating: “In short, I was a political-ethical idiot. Normally, this deficiency might have been inconsequential, but these were abnormal times.” He is insular, not unconcerned but overwhelmed, living primarily for his family and his work. His wife, finding herself unmoored as well, responds by withdrawing, as she regrets their move to New York and becomes increasingly hysterical about world events and the role of the United States. As a consequence, Rachel moves back to London, taking their young son Jake with her, leaving Hans at the Chelsea, bereft and alone. Being alone is nothing new to Hans, however, who has been an outsider since he left The Hague, first for London and then for New York. O’Neill effectively develops the theme of Hans’s disconnection by placing Hans above the earth: He constantly floats over his home, either through Google Earth, or the London Eye, or on a plane. His sense of belonging exists only when he is with his family, which has been made even smaller by the death of his mother. His relief at Rachel’s statement to their therapist that she “stayed married to me . . . because she felt a responsibility to see me through life, and the responsibility felt like a happy one” illustrates not a passionate love affair, but rather a familiar and comfortable companionship, one that speaks of obligation, not abiding love. In this way, O’Neill develops a common post-9/11 theme: the need for the familiar during a time of great fearful change. Hans does not seek adventure or excitement but rather sameness. He wants nothing more than his family, a job, and a home. As he says after the attacks, he and Rachel must figure out whether they are in a “pre-apocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the ’30’s or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near apocalyptic, like that of the cold war inhabitants of New York, London, Washington, and, for that matter, Moscow.” For Hans and Rachel, whether the world is really ending or whether it only feels like the world is

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ending is a slim distinction and ultimately one that separates the couple due to their contradictory responses to the disaster: The only thing Hans wants is Rachel and Jake, and the only thing Rachel wants is to run away. Separated from his family, Hans essentially shuts down and wanders through the next year of his life. However, while Hans pines for what he has lost, he meets Chuck, a Trinidadian immigrant who has a dream of opening a cricket arena in New York. They are drawn together by their love of cricket and Chuck’s forceful personality. Hans speaks of cricket with a longing and love he usually reserves for his young son. He had played for a local club in The Hague from the time he was seven years old, and by chance he is invited by a cabdriver to play with a Staten Island team. Through cricket, Hans meets Chuck and the other side of New York, far from his Wall Street office. Usually the only white man on the team, Hans plays with primarily West Indians and Asians. They play a slightly different type of cricket, adapted to the inferior fields on which they are forced to play. Although Hans initially resists the change, soon he becomes more comfortable with his fellow cricket players than with his coworkers at his bank. Chuck loves his adopted country and is given to long, unironic speeches about the United States and freedom. Hans has to check regularly to ascertain if Chuck is joking, though he usually is not. In response to a speech about the nobility of the eagle versus the turkey, Hans says, “From time to time, Chuck actually spoke like this.” Chuck and Hans spend time together as Chuck teaches Hans to drive and lets Hans drive him to his various business locations. In addition, they spend time together tending the grounds on the field Chuck has purchased for his cricket arena. Hans’s emotional distance during this time becomes clear only later, when he describes some of his work for Chuck to Rachel. He explains a time when he dropped off Chuck at a location and later saw a man there beaten up and his office overturned. Rachel is appalled, and particularly so when she realizes Hans continued to spend time with Chuck after this potentially dangerous occurrence. Hans, however, cannot understand why Rachel finds this to be a problem as he experienced only minor uneasiness at the time. Chuck also has wide-ranging business interests, including the running of a numbers game. He works with Mike Abelsky, a shady Russian immigrant. In both cases, it is difficult to tell if Chuck and Mike are truly involved in dangerous pursuits, or if they are relatively harmless. There are clues that others, and perhaps Hans, see Chuck as a ridiculous character with grand ideas not based in reality. However, since the book begins with the discovery of Chuck’s body, a thread of tension about Chuck’s “work” and his friends runs through the book, introducing an element of danger to Hans’s world. Hans sees Chuck for the last time at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade when Hans and Chuck’s mistress, Eliza, lose him in the crowd. Two years later, when Hans hears of the discovery of Chuck’s body, it becomes clear Chuck was murdered not long after this encounter. However, this tension dissipates with Hans’s return to London and his inability to look into Chuck’s death from abroad. Hans’s failure to act and his unwillingness to change his situation can be both frustrating and heartbreaking. “Night after night” Hans gets on the computer and uses Google Earth to fly from New York City to London to see his son’s dormer window,

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but, he notes, with “no way to see more, or deeper. I was stuck.” At the same time, his memories of his life with Rachel prior to 9/11 are of a cold wife who withheld love and emotional support, even at the time of the death of Hans’s mother. Rachel’s conflict, as reflected through Hans, seems to be of a woman who has fallen out of love with her husband. However, Rachel’s character is also portrayed as somewhat condescending and cruel. While Hans claims to love her, he seems unsympathetic to her concerns and her reasons for withholding love. He acknowledges his own distance after the death of his mother, but he denies a link between that and the failure of his marriage. Their relationship, though repaired by the end of the novel, seems fragile and unstable. It is difficult to know what deep fissures remain in the structure of their marriage and whether the two will be able to regain a degree of normalcy in their lives. Netherland is a beautifully written book with detailed descriptions of The Hague, New York, and cricket. O’Neill’s contemplations on love and family are ultimately redeeming if difficult. The novel, however, is driven by character, not plot, and the main character is forever stuck, unable to move forward or backward, trapped within his consciousness and malaise. Indeed, this sense of paralysis ultimately and ironically makes the book compelling. It seems O’Neill’s intent in Netherland is to illustrate how monumental catastrophe plays out in individual lives. In the postdisaster confusion, the characters are frozen in their incapacity to make right what has been irrevocably changed. Kathryn E. Fort

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 16 (April 15, 2008): 26. The Daily Telegraph, May 24, 2008, p. 26. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 6 (March 15, 2008): 265. Library Journal 133, no. 9 (May 15, 2008): 93. London Review of Books 30, no. 14 (July 17, 2008): 20-22. Los Angeles Times, May 27, 2008, p. E1. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 14 (September 25, 2008): 54-56. The New York Times Book Review, May 18, 2008, p. 1. The New Yorker 84, no. 15 (May 26, 2008): 78-81. The Observer, June 1, 2008, p. 19. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 9 (March 3, 2008): 28. The Washington Post Book World, June 1, 2008, p. BW06.

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NEW COLLECTED POEMS Author: Eavan Boland (1944) First published: 2006, in Great Britain Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 320 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Poetry An inclusive edition of Boland’s poetry, containing all the poems in nine previous volumes, reversing exclusions from the Selected Poems, adding two books that were not included in an earlier Collected Poems, and containing a brief excerpt from an unpublished verse play The title of Eavan Boland’s New Collected Poems is particularly appropriate for a poet whose work has continued to evolve so that each edition as it was published was a commentary on previous work, as well as an expression of her most current sense of herself as an Irishwoman writing poetry. Boland was born in 1944; her mother was an artist, and her father was an Irish diplomat assigned to various locations outside their home country. Her education was essentially traditional, so that her initial idea of poetic form was built on the model of European and British writers. Her early work was admired for Boland’s ability to use these forms with competence and to find subjects suitable for a poet working in a familiar tradition. One of her most celebrated poems from this time was “The War Horse,” the title poem of a collection published in 1975. The poem is written in rhyming couplets, all the lines beginning with capital letters, the horse a symbol of mindless destruction: He stumbles on like a rumour of war, huge, Threatening; neighbours use the subterfuge Of curtains; he stumbles down our short street Thankfully passing us. I pause, wait, Then to breathe relief lean on the sill And for a second only my blood is still

The slant rhymes are small variants, acceptable alterations within a standard structure. The central image is of some uncontrollable force disturbing the community as sectarian violence in the United Kingdom casts Northern Ireland and England in tableaux of strife that the poet observes with a wary trepidation. For Boland, this mode, which earned her considerable praise, became progressively unsatisfactory. “There was a nineteenth century shadow on the poetry world when I first knew it,” she recalled, “a certain kind of well-structured poem was around me in the air.” She understood the necessity for mastering the requirements of this kind of poem, and her early work was evidence of her skills. Then, in 1985, in a striking

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declaration of poetic purpose that she called “Writing the Political Poem in Ireland,” she identified her problem with the kind of poetry she was writing by asserting, “For a long time Irish poetry kept an almost nineteenth century order” wherein “there was an apparent decorum about it all” that signified a consensus rarely challenged. Boland had reached a point where the idea of the feminine in Irish poetry, “the nationalization of the feminine, the feminization of the national,” required the kind of scrutiny that would permit the “woman poet Eavan Boland is director of the in Ireland” to move “from being the object of Creative Writing Program at Stanford Irish poetry to being its author.” This star- University and the author of ten tling, unexpected reversal and expansion “had volumes of poetry and a collection of caused real disruption,” she felt, and in spite essays. Her work has been chosen for a of her previous successes, she was ready to Lannan Foundation Poetry Award and employ it as the dominant element of her own an American Ireland Fund Literary Award. poetic practice. From then on, her work continued to evolve in three specific areas—subject, style, and structure. In addition to an active engagement with the accelerating political transformation of Irish life in the latter decades of the twentieth century, Boland wanted to write from her location as a mother raising two young children in a suburb of Dublin, to “find a private history within the public one”—a direct echo of one of Virginia Woolf’s notable intentions. This required the development of a voice that had no precedent in Irish poetry, but that was also beginning to emerge—given the individual qualities of her contemporaries Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Medbh McGuckian— as more than an isolated instance and as a part of a growing awareness of Ireland becoming an integral state in modern Europe. To register her “voice” as an authentic instrument of this culture, the measured rhetoric of her earlier poems was replaced by versions of the vernacular and by less conventional, more inventive structural arrangements. Boland anticipated this in “The Muse Mother” from Night Feed (1982), in which she sees from her window “a woman hunkering—/ her busy hand/ worrying a child’s face.” The poet is aware of her separation from something fundamental that she misses as “my mind stays fixed.” She imagines a connection with the woman on “this rainy street” who “might teach me/ a new language” so that the poet would be “able to speak at last/ my mother tongue.” The multiple meaning implicit in the classic formulation “mother tongue” suggests the task she had set for herself: how to speak for and from a distinct cultural location, with a language that she must fashion capable of conveying her immediate, personal experience as an Irishwoman with two young children living at the turn to the twenty-first century. A crucial component of this undertaking was her understanding that language and form are linked in ways that demand attention to both simulta-

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neously, the kind of composition that American poets since Charles Olson have regarded as basic to their craft. “I sought out American poetry because of that powerful, inclusive diversity,” Boland observed, although this was complicated by her relationship to Irish history and its rendering in some powerful and memorable poetry, as indicated by her acknowledgement of W. B. Yeats in what might seem an almost compulsory quote preceding the early volume New Territory (1967). As one of Boland’s most perceptive critics, Pilar Vellas-Argaiz, has put it, a central concern for Boland “has been to unearth the untold horrors of Irish history, to retell in a more accurate way the true stories of the famine, of suppression and suffering, without romanticizing them any further.” Boland’s recent volumes, according to Vellas-Argaiz, dwell “more on rootlessness and non-identity than on the formation of a centered grounded self” so that the poet’s later work is characterized by “a context of fluidity and dissolution” that has become her way of expressing her Irishness, while also exploring the meaning of Irishness. Boland has said, “Poetry begins—as all art does—where certainties end,” accounting for the shift from fixed forms and established tropes to a place where “imagination is rooted: in ambiguities and darkness.” This position has enabled Boland to overcome an earlier concern that she was “doubly oppressed” as a woman writing poetry in Ireland, dealing with “a heroic tradition on which it was difficult to write your name” amid poems in which women were “passive objects or decorative emblems.” Boland’s differing approaches to the river Liffey, its uses by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake (1939) looming over everything following, and its symbolic essence as feminine life force and emblem deeply embedded in Irish culture is indicative of her poetic development. Boland has “retrieved two poems from 23 Poems, a chapbook which came out in 1962 when I was eighteen” for the New Collected Poems. The poems are “Liffeytown”—a local term for Dublin—and “The Liffey Beyond Islandbridge.” The first is a lyric paen to homeground, with a wistful folkloric chorus, “O swan by swan my heart goes down/ Through Dublin town, through Dublin town,” while the second is a young person’s celebration of a cheerful riverscape, until a prospect for a future “Further beyond the river bend/ Are spaces teemed with cities which must/ Strike a destiny” arises and then recedes in the poet’s view. The Liffey here is a comforting, placid presence, alive with inviting associations. The third section of In a Time of Violence (1994) is named “Anna Liffey,” a longer poem covering pages 230 to 235. The river is no longer a mystic flow rife with historic implications. Now, the river-spirit is alive and addressable, recalled from legend: Life, the story goes, Was the daughter of Cannan, And came to the plain of Kildare. She loved the flat-lands and the ditches And the unreachable horizon. She asked that it be named for her. The river took its name from the land. The land took its name from a woman.

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The poet, like the woman-river, is engaged in the process of naming, a basic of poetic functions reaching to the dawn of time. Boland makes the connection between the poet and the river-spirit tangible, asserting in the second stanza: “A woman in the doorway of a home./ A woman in the city of her birth./ There, in the hills above my house./ A river in the city of her birth.” The image of the woman is a tonal complement to Adrienne Rich’s poem about the astronomer Carolyn Herschel, “Planetarium,” from The Will to Change (1971)—“A woman in the shape of a monster./ a monster in the shape of a woman”—which depicts a woman seen as a threat to male prerogatives, likened to mythical monsters as in male-drawn constellations. Boland is establishing an identity with other pioneers who were not confined to traditional boundaries restricting women scientists and artists, her fusion with the river-spirit like an invocation to the muses: Maker of Places, remembrances Narrate such fragments for me: One body. One spirit. One place. One name. The city where I was born. The river that runs through it.

Just as Yeats wrote himself into the history of a nation during its creation in “Easter, 1916,” Boland is prepared to see herself “Becoming a figure in a poem,” an audacious assertion that the poem itself must substantiate. The last section of the poem is less a conclusion than a summarizing of circumstances. “In the end/ It will not matter/ That I was a woman,” Boland states, implying that the poetry may endure, just as the image in the sky fixed by human mapping remains beyond its individual origins. In a paradoxical proposition, Boland says that “When language cannot do it for us,” there are still “these phrases/ Of the ocean/ To console us.” The limits of language are evident, and yet the entire universe for humans is apprehended through the means of language. Her conclusion, “I was a voice,” is like an acceptance of restriction while proclaiming the value of intention. Although it is not so dramatic a transposition as to describe Boland’s poetry following “Anna Liffey” as radically different, there was a liberation that permits Boland to continue in modes that are not predictable from the early books. The last two books in New Collected Poems, The Lost Land (1998) and Against Love Poetry (2001) are marked by a continuing reduction of conventional rhetorical devices, by an inquiry about the lingering effects of a colonial condition, and by a further exploration of individual and national identity. Anna Liffey reappears at times, an “Emblem of this old,/ torn and traded city” in “The Scar” (from the first section, “Colony,” of The Lost Land) whom the poet addresses almost as a sister, “One flawed head towards another.” The idea of a mother tongue is explored in the title poem of The Lost Land and in “Mother Ireland” (on facing pages) where motherhood (“I have two daughters”) implies caring, as well as a desire to be cared for as a child of the city. Her facility with

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a lyric is apparent in “The Proof That Plato Was Wrong,” where a succession of images in a surge of rhythmic expression serves as a reminder for those who have “forgotten what/ song is”: I have come here to find courage in the way this dawn reaches slowly down the canal and reveals a drowned summer which is almost over.

The title Against Love Poetry is meant to be provocative, an “argument with traditional or conventional love poetry,” Boland explained, saying she wanted to get at “the stoicism of dailyness.” The eleven-poem sequence called “Marriage” includes the book’s title poem, composed in the form of a compact paragraph, beginning “We were married in summer, thirty years ago. I have loved/ you deeply from that moment to this,” and continuing in similarly direct, crisp “sentences” not set apart as “lines.” The block of print enhances the intensity of the thought and feeling and poses as its central query the conundrum that the deep love for her husband does not contradict the fact that “marriage is not freedom.” This sets the tone of the sequence, an investigation that does not diminish the value of her marriage. The final poem, “Lines for a Thirtieth Wedding Anniversary,” regathers the sources of deep love epitomized as “All those years, all those years together,” and concludes “through it all/ this constancy: what wears, what endures.” It might stand as a motto for Boland as well as for her commitment to her craft, and it posits a direction for poems still to come. Due to publishing requirements, New Collected Poems does not include her volume Domestic Violence (2007), which shows Boland sustaining the strengths of her later work and offers a promise of the value of the next edition of collected poems that will continue to extend and expand what is already a distinguished and important achievement. Leon Lewis

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 13 (March 1, 2008): 44. Poetry 193, no. 2 (November, 2008): 149. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 3 (January 21, 2008): 156. The Times Literary Supplement, October 27, 2006, p. 24.

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1948 The First Arab-Israeli War Author: Benny Morris (1948) Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). 524 pp. $32.50 Type of work: History Time: 1947-1948 Locale: Middle East (Palestine/Israel) Considered by some as a “revisionist” historian, Morris addresses both the military conflict that followed the declaration of the State of Israel and the underlying politics driving both the Jewish and Arab antagonists Principal personages: David Ben-Gurion, first prime minister of the State of Israel Yigal Allon, one of the founders of Israeli forces and primary commander in 1948 Abdullah ibn Hussein, king of Transjordan John Glubb, British general and commander of the Arab Legion Farouk I, king of Egypt Yitzhak Rabin, operations officer for Israeli forces Moshe Sharett, Israeli foreign minister Yigael Yadin, Israeli commander Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel

The end of World War II in Europe in May, 1945, brought the full extent of the Holocaust to the attention of the world. Some six million Jews had perished at the hands of the Nazis. In the aftermath, as Benny Morris relates in 1948, the concept of a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, originating with the Balfour Declaration by British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour in 1917 and envisioned by a generation of European Jews, found international support with the United Nations Partition Resolution on November 29, 1947. Palestine was still under British control, the result of a postWorld War I mandate, but as events unfolded the British increasingly desired to simply vacate the region. Both Jews and Arabs had their own claims on Palestine. For the Jews the land represented their national homeland. More immediately, it represented the land to which survivors and displaced persons could emigrate after the war. Certainly no country, even the United States, showed any desire to incorporate hundreds of thousands of European Jews. Both the Franklin Roosevelt administration and that of Harry Truman initially avoided any strong support for the Jews. However, as the level of events in Europe became known, Truman modified his views to one of support for the resettling of displaced Jews into Palestine.

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Arab support for the Allied armies had been minimal. At most, some six thousand had fought with the Allies, and many of those had deserted. Political support among the Arabs for the Allied cause grew only with the recognition of who the victors would be. In contrast, more than thirty thousand Palestinian Jews fought with the British army. The disparity in land was equally glaring. The five Arab countries in the Middle East encompassed more than one million square miles; the British mandate of Palestine included approximately 10,500 square miles and a popu lation of approximately 1.6 million, two-thirds of whom were Arabs, at the end of the war. Numerous books have been written on the subject of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, or nakba (catastrophe) as it has been called by their Arabic adversaries. Most of this material has been written from the perspective of the victorious Israelis, with an obvious, if not unexpected, bias. In part this has been the result of the availability of primary sources: Israeli sources have been readily accessible, while Arabic sources have been limited. Those sources, which are believed to exist in Egypt or Syria, remain largely inaccessible. Morris divides the period between the earliest Jewish settlements (circa 1915) and the war of independence into three parts. The first, titled “Staking Claims,” provides the background to the conflict during the period from the end of the war until the U. N. vote on partition in November, 1947. The Israeli nascent defense forces consisted of the Haganah, the paramilitary defense force, and the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the National Military Organization that evolved into a more or less terrorist organization often at odds with the Haganah. For the Arabs, the British support for pan-Arab unity resulted in the formation of a League of Independent Arab States, signed in a seven-nation pact in March, 1945. Among the demands of the Arab League was the cessation of further Jewish immigration into Palestine and the establishment of an independent state of Palestine. The second portion of Morris’s account covers the civil war that ensued between the Arabs and Jews in the aftermath of the vote on partition in November, 1947, and lasting until the Israeli formal declaration of independence in May, 1948. Caught in the middle were the British occupying forces. The theoretical disparity in potential forces among the adversaries was most apparent during this period. The Arabs had a combined population of some forty million, while the nascent Jewish state had a population of fewer than seven hundred thousand. The numbers were misleading. Not least among the Arab difficulties was the lack of any central command structure. During this period of civil war, volunteers from a number of the Arab states formed the Arab Liberation Army (ALA), a force of between four and five thousand men led by a mix of retired officers from their respective states. Much of the Arab military, how-

Benny Morris is a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. In addition to contributions to numerous literary publications, Morris has written The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1989), Israel’s Border Wars, 1949-1956 (1997), Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (2001), The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004), and Making Israel (2007).

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ever, consisted of local militias raised by isolated villages. Weapons were often obsolete, and often these villages were as willing to help the Jews, in expectation of whom the victors would be, as they were to join their Arab brethren. Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, the declaration being read at four in the afternoon by David Ben-Gurion, who would become the state’s first prime minister. Minutes later Truman announced the recognition of the state. The Pan-Arab invasion that followed constitutes the third and largest portion of this book. Morris attempts to “read” the Arab mind through a combination of first-person Arab accounts in this period and his interpretation of policy and military decisions that subsequently took place. To his credit, Morris has attempted to be evenhanded, and he is in no small part handicapped by limited Arab sources. For all of their bluster, the Arab armies were largely unprepared for the war that followed. As Morris points out, a portion of the dilemma lay in the roles played by the British and the French in the region. Arab armies were useful in maintaining internal order, but they were not meant to serve as a military force. This changed with the beginning of the Cold War, when both the British and the French began a modernization of those armies as a bulwark against Soviet forces. The invasion in anticipation of declaration of the Jewish state was approved at the end of April. The initial plan was limited in scope: an attack in the eastern Galilee. However, as Morris points out, the greatest handicap to the Arab armies was a lack of central command or a semblance of unity. At the last moment, Lebanon in the north declined to participate, and both the Syrian and Egyptian invasion plans were changed. Abdullah, king of Transjordan, had little adherence to his Arab allies. The goal of his army was to take the western bank of the Jordan. As pointed out by Morris, Abdullah was arguably the most reasonable of the Arab leaders. In November, 1947, he met secretly with Golda Meir, future Israeli prime minister and at the time acting head of the Jewish Agency Political Department, and he met again with her the following May. Abdullah would likely have been satisfied with some form of de facto partition, similar to that agreed upon by the United Nations, for the region, and he had reluctantly participated in the war. Abdullah was certainly not “pro-Jewish,” by any stretch of the imagination; he had been among the most vocal critics of any nascent Jewish state. However, Abdullah was also a realist who recognized the Jews could quickly evolve into an effective fighting force, while Arab armies would remain divided. His willingness to negotiate with representatives of the Jewish state would cost him his life several years later. Morris attempts to provide a balanced account of the struggle that began with the Arab invasion of the new state. He begins with an assessment of the two sides: the Arabs holding the initiative and, at least in the beginning, the larger force as well as heavier weapons. Further, much of the high ground was Arab territory. The Haganah, the Jewish force, fighting largely on interior lines—albeit often surrounded—had greater motivation and, with a cadre of war veterans, was often better trained and led. The role played by Ben-Gurion is clearly pointed out in Morris’s account. Unification and training of the army began well in advance of independence. Between the end of 1947 and independence in May, 1948, the number of full-time soldiers was expanded

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from two thousand to more than sixty thousand. By then known as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), it incorporated not only the fighting force of the Palmach but also the Irgun, and, more important, it was organized under a unified general staff and a command structure of a modern army. At the same time, an effort was made on an international scale to obtain the weaponry, equipment, and airplanes necessary to defend Israel. The effort, obviously opposed by the Arab states, had to take place in the face of the British, who were opposed to the arming of the new state as well. As noted by Morris, by the end of the fighting, the Haganah outnumbered the Arab forces. The vastly outnumbered forces fighting to establish a Jewish state is not the only historical myth addressed in this book. Each side has its own stories of the massacre of civilians as well as of captured fighters, the Arabs describing the killing at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem in April, 1947, as a massacre, and the Israelis likewise reporting the killing of Jewish prisoners and civilians during the course of the fighting. Morris is evenhanded in his approach to this sensitive topic. Events that took place at Deir Yassin continue to reverberate decades later. The British and Arab estimate that upward of 250 villagers had been murdered was significantly inflated; the actual number was probably around a hundred. Nonetheless, the incident remains an atrocity, even at the lower number. Morris notes the long-term significance of the murders was its effect on the Arab population at large. Arab villagers were panicked, fleeing from areas which in the partition were meant to remain in Arab hands. Further, the accounts of events at Deir Yassin resulted in similar reprisals from Arab forces; shortly afterward, a ten-vehicle convoy of Jewish nurses and doctors traveling to Hadassah Hospital was ambushed. The British refused to intervene, and nearly eighty people were murdered, many burned alive. These events were more the exception than commonplace during the fighting. Morris suggests several reasons for this. First, the opportunity for indiscriminate killing on the part of the Arabs was probably limited, since most villages had been overrun by Jewish fighters early in the conflict; more Arabs were probably killed by Jewish fighters than the reverse. Second was the nature of the soldiers themselves. During the civil war portion of the fighting—pre-May, 1948—few prisoners were taken by either side. Morris notes only two “true” Arab massacres: forty workers at a Haifa oil refinery, and 150 unarmed Haganah fighters at Kfar Etzion. However, as Jewish militias were replaced by the IDF, and the Arab armies were being manned by regular, disciplined soldiers, killing of civilians and prisoners became less common. Morris concludes 1948 with an extensive summary of the war. The Jewish fighters were indeed outnumbered, at least at the outset. However, their war aims were simpler: to survive. As the war progressed, the burgeoning Jewish state began to expand beyond the boundaries set by the United Nations in the vote for partition. The Arab armies, meanwhile, remained divided, with no true central command. Morris points out the failure of the Palestinians to acknowledge their defeat by this “ragtag Jewish militia.” Could things have been different? For decades prior to 1948, Arab leaders refused any form of territorial compromise. Jewish settlements captured during the civil war were routinely destroyed, the Jewish inhabitants expelled. Whichever side one

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supports, and arguments can be made for both, the events of 1948 continue to have an impact generations later. Richard Adler

Review Sources The Chronicle of Higher Education 54 (May 16, 2008): B6. Foreign Affairs 87, no. 5 (September/October, 2008): 148-156. History Today 58, no. 7 (July, 2008): 64. Journal of Military History 72 (July, 2008): 978. Library Journal 133, no. 6 (April 1, 2008): 94. The New York Times Book Review, May 4, 2008, p. 19. The New Yorker 84, no. 12 (May 5, 2008): 72-77. Publishers Weekly, May 9, 2008. The Times Literary Supplement, June 20, 2008, p. 25.

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NIXONLAND The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America Author: Rick Perlstein (1969) Publisher: Scribner (New York). 881 pp. $37.50 Type of work: History Time: 1965-1972 Locale: The United States An insightful examination of forces that polarized America, commencing with the mid-1960’s urban riots and the escalation of the war in Vietnam, making possible the amazing political comeback of cunning, tormented Richard M. Nixon and culminating in his 1972 landslide reelection victory Principal personages: Richard M. Nixon, thirty-seventh president of the United States Spiro T. Agnew, Nixon’s vice president Hubert H. Humphrey, Democratic candidate for president in 1968 George McGovern, Democratic candidate for president in 1972 Ronald Reagan, governor of California

“This country is going so far to the right you are not even going to recognize it,” attorney general John Mitchell uttered in 1970 at a party while drunk. A sequel, in a sense, to the author’s earlier book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001), this harrowing tale examines the causes of the late-1960’s conservative revival foreshadowing the “Reagan Revolution” of the 1980’s. Perlstein focuses on so-called swing voters “who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else, at least that particular Tuesday in November, seemed to court civilized chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason.” Few would have foreseen that the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles would go up in flames just days after Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, or that President Lyndon B. Johnson would escalate “that bitch of a war,” as he called it, in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Poised to profit from the resultant “backlash” was an unlovable two-time loser (the presidency in 1960, the California governorship in 1962) nicknamed “Tricky Dick.” Languishing in a New York law firm, Richard Milhous Nixon confided to partner Leonard Garment that he’d do anything to become president “except see a shrink.” The son of an Irishman who felt the world had it in for him, Nixon resented bluebloods and pretty boys who played by a different set of rules than outsiders such as himself. At Whittier College in California, the in-crowd belonged to the Franklins. Nixon started a rival club of strivers and commuter students, the Orthogonians (square shooters). He got elected student body president by promising to repeal a

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campus ban on dancing. At Duke University in North Carolina, the dogged law student, A University of Chicago graduate and nicknamed “Iron Butt” for putting in long, authority on how American politics uninterrupted hours at the library, graduated came to be fractured in the 1960’s, third in his class. Even so, establishment law Rick Perlstein has written for The firms spurned him. No connections. Ditto the Village Voice and The New Republic Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the Navy and is a Senior Fellow at the Campaign his patience paid dividends in barracks poker for America’s Future. marathons. Running for Congress in 1946, Nixon labeled the voting record of opponent Horace J. “Jerry” Voorhis “more Socialistic and Communistic than Democratic.” He dogged the heels of former New Dealer and State Department official Alger Hiss during House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings until he tripped up the supercilious witness. Nixon employed “hardball” smear tactics his entire career. His 1950 Senate campaign literature included a pink-colored sheet that branded opponent Helen Gahagan Douglas the “Pink Lady,” right down to her underwear. Relishing the role of hatchet man as Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower’s 1952 running mate, he charged Ike’s rival Adlai E. Stevenson with being a graduate of the “College of Cowardly Communist Containment.” His aggrieved Orthogonian sensibility, an admixture of rage and piety, carried him to within a heartbeat of the presidency by age forty. Liberal Harvard economist and Stevenson speechwriter John Kenneth Galbraith coined the word “Nixonland” to describe “a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win.” In 1960, however, it was the Democrats, particularly in the Windy City of Chicago and in Texas hill country, who used fraudulent practices to deny Nixon the presidency. Two years later, blaming a loss to California Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown on a biased fourth estate, he petulantly renounced elective politics. Not for long, however; it was too much in his blood. By 1964 he was maneuvering to accept a party draft in the event Goldwater’s bid fizzled. In 1966, after Reagan defeated Brown, Nixon advised the California governor-elect to foreswear running for president two years hence. The former actor slyly demurred. Leading up to the 1968 primary season, Nixon benefited from Michigan Governor George Romney’s naïve claim to have been brainwashed during a trip to South Vietnam and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s indecisiveness over throwing his hat into the ring. To prevent Southern delegates from defecting to favorite son Reagan, whom most preferred, Nixon promised racist Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina that he’d tolerate all-white schools and place “strict constructionists” on the Supreme Court. Enhancing Republican prospects exponentially were Robert F. Kennedy’s violent death and Democratic convention turbulence in the streets of Mayor Richard R. Daley’s Chicago. Leaving nothing to chance, Nixon attempted to sabotage the Paris peace talks through intermediary Anna Chennault. It wasn’t necessary. Johnson had no plans for an “October surprise” to end the war, having lost respect for his vice president, who he said cried too much and whose pecker, he bragged, was in his pocket. Johnson and Nixon, Perlstein writes, “shared a need to humiliate, but a

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horror of being humiliated—and that nagging sense that the worst humiliations always, always, came at the hand of some damned Kennedy or another.” This morbid insecurity festered even after Nixon reached the pinnacle of political success, as Watergate tapes attest. Nixonland documents in chilling detail the widening racial rift that made the rest of the country more and more like the rebel South. Boston “Southies” defied the law, hoping to keep their schools all white. New York City Italian Americans formed SPONGE, the Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything. In New Mexico, vigilantes harassed “longhairs” and burned down hippie communes. Rogue cops in Newark and Detroit beat with impunity black people trapped in riot zones. The liberal press glamorized “Woodstock Nation” and the “New Morality”—New York Times film reviewer Renata Adler raved over Wild in the Streets, a 1968 farce about a rock star who becomes president and force-feeds everyone over thirty pills of LSD—but ignored the “blue collar” envy of privileged collegians and poked fun of “Decency” rallies attended by tens of thousands of “Middle Americans” in Miami, Cleveland, and Baltimore. Hundreds of New York City construction workers went on a rampage after Mayor John Lindsey ordered the flag lowered to half-staff in the wake of the Kent State killings. Nixon, who had recently called student protesters “bums,” confided to an aide, “Thank God for the hard hats,” and invited a delegation to the White House. Here was an opening to create a permanent Republican majority. Armed with the power of the Oval Office, he ordered aides, as he privately put it, to “get down to the nut-cutting.” In September, 1970, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew’s alliterative-laced tirades charging media bias and questioning dissenters’ patriotism signaled the most active White House off-year election since 1938, when Franklin D. Roosevelt had failed to purge Southern “Copperheads” from his party. Agnew told a partisan crowd: “We have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club—the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” Utah’s Frank Moss was “the Western regional champion of the Eastern establishment” and a friend of the “Spock-marked generation.” Agnew compared liberal New York Senator Charles Goodell to sex-change celebrity Christine Jorgensen. Paid plants shouted obscenities at Republican rallies, red meat for the partisan faithful. Nixon passed the word: “If the vice president were slightly roughed up by those thugs, nothing better could happen for our cause. If anybody so much as brushes against Mrs. Agnew, tell her to fall down.” In San Jose, California, the president leaped onto his limousine and flashed the “V” sign at protesters, afterward bragging, “That’s what they hate to see.” The only trouble was, with few exceptions (Tennessee’s Albert Gore the most notable), Democrats targeted for defeat survived. The strategy backfired: “Mighty Spiro had struck out.” Tired of overheated rhetoric, voters responded to chisel-faced Senator Edmund S. Muskie’s telecast plea for reason and calm. Nixon became so paranoid about his reelection chances against Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 running mate that he gave the green light to reckless criminal activities that derailed Muskie’s subsequent presidential campaign but ultimately destroyed his own presidency and place in history.

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Nixon took little interest in domestic policies—or, as he privately put it, “building outhouses in Peoria.” Foreign affairs was the arena where he hoped to make his legacy. An advocate of secret diplomacy, he set out surreptitiously to normalize relations with China. As part of the complicated scenario to accomplish this laudable goal, Nixon cooperated with an autocratic Pakistani regime that slaughtered ten thousand civilians in Bangladesh. To his mind they were expendable. To facilitate the extrication of American troops from Vietnam, he authorized bombing missions into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam that killed millions of civilians. An avid football fan who suggested plays to Washington Redskins coach George Allen, Nixon gloated after authorizing devastating air strikes code-named Operation Linebacker: “What distinguishes me from Johnson is that I have the will in spades.” On election eve 1972, he declared: “The leaders in Hanoi will be watching . . . . Shall we have peace with honor or peace with surrender?” Earlier Nixon had persuaded Alabama demagogue George Wallace not to become a third party candidate by having federal tax fraud charges against his brother dropped. He successfully courted the crusty boss of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, George Meany, who lamented that the Democratic Party had been taken over “by people named Jack who look like Jills and smell like johns.” This comment is reminiscent of Reagan’s definition of a hippie as someone “who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.” Watergate operative G. Gordon Liddy even tried (unsuccessfully) to bug Democratic Party nominee George McGovern’s campaign headquarters. After electronic expert James W. McCord was caught red-handed and provided Watergate Judge John Sirica with names of White House higher-ups as part of a plea bargain, Nixon railed that McCord must be a double agent. He always expected the worst from enemies. Though eschewing the GOP label during the campaign, he expressed amazement that “the coattail thing” hadn’t worked. Republicans lost two Senate seats (down to forty-three) and only picked up a dozen in the House, where Democrats still dominated, 243 to 192. Gloomy despite carrying forty-nine states, Nixon would soon be facing scrutiny from hostile congressional investigative committees. The scandal known as Watergate encompassed multiple wrongdoings. Had it not been for a botched break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters, Nixon might have successfully covered up the crimes. His toxic legacy remains part of the American political landscape. Perlstein’s lively writing style brings to life an era that diminishing numbers of readers experienced firsthand. He acknowledges an intellectual debt to J. Anthony Lukas’s Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (1976) and Paul Cowen’s Tribes of America: Journalistic Discoveries of Our People and Their Cultures (1979). Atlantic Monthly reviewer Ross Douthat praised Nixonland for weaving social and political history into “a single seamless narrative, linking backroom political negotiations to suburban protests over sex education in schools to the premiere of Bonnie and Clyde” in 1967. Commonweal’s Melissa Mattes noted the “impressive knack for details—everything from the fire alarm set off by irate feminists at the 1972 Democratic convention that sent scantily clad Playboy bunnies onto the convention floor to the presidential commercials showing a blank page in Nixon’s passport.

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‘There are still places to go,’ it announced. ‘Friends to be won. That’s why we still need President Nixon. Now, more than ever.’” James B. Lane

Review Sources The American Spectator 41, no. 9 (November, 2008): 70-74. The Atlantic Monthly 30, no. 4 (May, 2008): 83-86. Booklist 104, no. 16 (April 15, 2008): 23. Commonweal 135, no. 17 (October 10, 2008): 21-22. The Economist 387 (May 10, 2008): 93-94. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 5 (March 1, 2008): 236. The Nation 287, no. 6 (September 1-8, 2008): 39-44. National Review 60, no. 11 (June 16, 2008): 49-53. The New Republic 239, no. 4 (September 10, 2008): 16-23. The New York Times Book Review, May 11, 2008, p. 1. Newsweek 151, no. 20 (May 19, 2008): 48-50. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 10 (March 10, 2008): 70. The Wilson Quarterly 32, no. 3 (Summer, 2008): 98-99.

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NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF Author: Julian Barnes (1946) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 244 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Memoir Time: 1943 to the present Locale: London and the United Kingdom By embarking on a thoughtful journey through his family background and intellectual history, Barnes gradually zeroes in on the causes of his lifelong fear of what will happen when he dies Principal personages: Julian Barnes, the author Kathleen Mabel Barnes, his mother, a vain, controlling woman Albert Leonard Barnes, his father, a long-suffering schoolteacher Jonathan Barnes, his older brother, a professional philosopher

Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a clever, learned, and at times somewhat repetitive exercise in whistling in the dark, as Julian Barnes gingerly creeps up on the fear of death that he admits provoked occasional anxiety in his younger years but has now become a serious preoccupation for this distinguished literary senior citizen. Born in 1946, Barnes has had a fruitful career as a writer of elegant fiction and ruminative essays, and he has not previously demonstrated any discernable tendency to balk at humanity’s inexorable march toward the graveyard. Recently, however, his thoughts have turned to speculations as to what awaits on the other side of corporeal existence, and the result is a combination of essay and memoir that compulsively interrogates this question. Barnes begins Nothing to Be Frightened Of jauntily enough by joking that “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.” This mildly flippant tone continues through the first of the book’s several considerations of his family history, as he initially serves up a light, amusing sketch of his parents and their forebears that only occasionally foreshadows the darker reflections to come. His mother, an atheist, and his father, an agnostic, passed away in the modern, antiseptic surroundings of a residential home and a hospital, respectively, and as Barnes begins to think about how he will meet his death, it becomes clear that something about their manner of going deeply disturbs him. The first step in what turns out to be an extended tour through Barnes’s personal and intellectual history is an autobiographical reminiscence of his failure to develop any sort of religious faith, a perfectly understandable consequence of his parents’ attitude toward religion. His mother, who claimed not to fear death, refused to have any of what she called “that mumbo-jumbo” at her completely secular funeral; his father, her henpecked and submissive husband, was so dominated by her that he seemed to

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have few views of any substance about anything, or at least none that his children could perceive. Even when Barnes went through his phase of adolescent rebellion, he had little against which to rebel, and so he came away with the impression that religion was a mildly foolish set of superstitions in which a few misguided people found consolation. Although Barnes never puts it in quite such unequivocal terms, one senses that for the first time in his life he has begun to have doubts about being a doubter, and he is now troubled by the fact that, having never had Julian Barnes has written ten novels, faith, he can never return to it as a source of two short-story collections, and two consolation. Deprived of confidence in a fucollections of essays. He won the ture life, he clearly feels a sense of urgency Somerset Maugham Award for his concerning the achievement of some sort of novel Metroland (1981) and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his personal equilibrium—whether it be based on novel Flaubert’s Parrot (1984). In 2004, logic, conviction, or simply the opinions of he won the Austrian State Prize for respected authorities—that will enable him to European Literature. conquer, or at least control, his anxiety re garding his existence after death. Barnes’s consequent search for peace of mind is conducted through a series of inquiries that, in an often repetitive manner that at times borders on the obsessive, engages with his favorite authors and his sole remaining close relative as the likeliest sources of meaningful answers to his queries. The relative in question is Barnes’s brother Jonathan, an academic philosopher who, in the portrait on display here, impresses as a cold, unsympathetic, and on the whole extremely unsatisfactory source of spiritual comfort. His responses to his brother’s requests for advice are unfailingly dismissive and at times contemptuous: Jonathan denies any knowledge of their parents’ emotions, claims to be uninterested in (and therefore immune to) his own doctor’s health warnings, and fobs Barnes off with injunctions to read Aristotle and David Hume when serious philosophical issues are raised. After several such interactions, one cannot help but wonder about the point of these humiliations. Is Barnes simply adding to the sense of dread that his inability to deal with death has engendered, or is he settling a fraternal score with a lifelong source of irritation? Whatever the answer, Jonathan is a strange and inexplicable presence in what purports to be a meditation on facing the threat of nonexistence—definitely “someone to be frightened of” rather than not. Fortunately, for himself and his readers, Barnes’s revisiting of the literary, philosophical, and religious texts that he has come to love offer a much more substantial gathering of advice to the lifelorn. His enjoyment and understanding of French literature, most prominently displayed in the wonderful fiction-based-on-fact Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), is here enlisted in the service of his struggle against death. He finds

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particular solace in the writings of Jules Renard (1864-1910), a successful novelist whose journals chronicle a lifelong fascination with questions of mortality. Like Barnes, Renard was profoundly moved by the deaths of his parents; unlike Barnes, he seems to have achieved a stoic equilibrium that enabled him to consider nonexistence philosophically: “All I feel is a kind of anger at death and his imbecile tricks,” he wrote, after his brother’s sudden demise added to the catalog of the Renard family’s sorrows. A less prominent but still influential presence is that of the French novelist and short-story writer Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897), whose La Doulou (1930) Barnes translated in 2002 as In the Land of Pain. This book records Daudet’s slow and, as noted by outside observers, agonizing death from tertiary syphilis, but it does so in an unemotional, objective, and at times even whimsical literary style that embraces death as a new territory to be explored with curiosity and wonder. Reflecting on Daudet’s experience in Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Barnes admires the relative calm with which the French author passed away after fifteen years of excruciating suffering but finds himself unable to share such philosophical placidity. “I do not expect such luck, or such calmness,” he concludes with regard to what he expects to undergo before death. Such thoughts are repeated frequently throughout Nothing to Be Frightened Of, and one must admire Barnes for the honesty of his sentiments in a culture where narratives of heroic resistance to death and disease constitute the conventional wisdom as to how our extinction should be met. In acknowledging that from his point of view death certainly is something to be frightened of, he is performing a different sort of heroic act: showing the courage to confess feelings that the censorious and hypocritical will brand weak and cowardly, but which many others will welcome as an expression of solidarity with those who suspect that their body’s demise marks the irreversible termination of their existence. Nevertheless, Barnes is not one to accept such a gloomy prospect without exhausting all possible avenues of escape. Although Nothing to Be Frightened Of frequently cites, in addition to the authors already mentioned, relevant quotations from Gustave Flaubert, Michel de Montaigne, Somerset Maugham, and Émile Zola, this reliance on literary sources is punctuated with additional candid anecdotes drawn from Barnes’s family history—for which his introductory sketches of his parents and brother have already prepared the reader—as well as personal reflections that meditate upon the meaning of it all. As far as the family-history passages are concerned, the circumstances under which his parents died return several times as part of the larger pattern of alternation and repetition that holds Nothing to Be Frightened Of together. Time and time again, Barnes adds new thoughts and observations as to the manner of their passing after intervals of concentrating upon the literary quotations and philosophical musings that constitute the other two main sources of the book’s content, as he crafts a work whose unusual tripartite structure rejects the conventions of linear narrative. As a result of this repetition and recycling, the sections of Nothing to Be Frightened Of that concern his parents are much more dramatically powerful than the literary and philosophical material that surrounds them, and so tend to cast the latter into the emo-

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tional shade. Almost halfway through the book, for example, Barnes describes in graphic detail the effects of the series of strokes that left his father, a French teacher, unable to communicate, and then he adds to the pathos of this account by depicting his mother’s insensitive treatment of her husband as a kind of defective household appliance that had stopped working properly. Fifty pages later, after an intervening series of literary quotations and philosophical thoughts, he returns to the subject of his father’s death in a harrowing passage that emphasizes both his mother’s callousness and his father’s frustration with his inexorable mental and physical breakdown; another fifty pages on, after more literary and philosophical interludes, Barnes relates his mother’s death in a way that stresses his awkward inability to relate to her at the same time as it dwells on the bodily decline that turns a sentient human being into someone confused, frightened, and suspicious of even their loved ones. It could be argued that the decision to present these moving accounts of parental decline and death separately makes sense in contrast to the opposing strategy of combining them into a longer and more coherent unit; they are, without question, the most affecting element in the tale Barnes has to tell, and dispersing them throughout the book provides the reader with periodic, and unpredictable, moments of compelling drama. On the other hand, this material is so much more engaging and absorbing than its literary and philosophical accompaniment that it emphasizes just how relatively ineffectual the latter is. It results in a narrative that offers occasional moments of riveting intensity parceled out among more distanced reflections that, although often elegantly written, must necessarily pale in comparison. There is a sense that Barnes has written three rather different books here, and there are quite a few moments when one wishes that his materials had been more coherently organized. If Nothing to Be Frightened Of disappoints in terms of its consistency and its sometimes awkward transitions between different kinds of content, it still provides a frequently gripping and always fluently expressed collection of experiences and thoughts on a topic of presumably universal interest. Barnes has written an unusual, thoughtful, and often intriguing response to questions about death, and the reader hopes that he has sufficiently resolved his fears to return to the writing of fictions that engage with the entirety of the human spectrum. Paul Stuewe

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 22 (August 1, 2008): 26. The Boston Globe, August 31, 2008, p. C5. The Guardian, March 8, 2008, p. 9. Harper’s Magazine 317 (October, 2008): 79. JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association 300, no. 12 (December 24, 2008): 2922-2923. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 12 (June 15, 2008): 93.

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Los Angeles Times, September 29, p. E6. New Statesman 137 (March 10, 2008): 56. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 15 (October 9, 2008): 38-40. The New York Times Book Review, October 5, 2008, p. 1. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 28 (July 14, 2008): 56. The Times Literary Supplement, March 28, 2008, p. 13. The Washington Post Book World, August 31, 2008, p. BW10.

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OLD WORLD, NEW WORLD Great Britain and America from the Beginning Author: Kathleen Burk (1946) Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press (New York). 797 pp. $35.00 Type of work: History Time: 1497-2005 Locale: Mostly the area that is now the United States A large and comprehensive narrative account of the cultural, economic, and diplomatic relations between Americans and the British, from John Cabot’s explorations of North America of 1497 until the Iraq War of the early twenty-first century With the contemporary emphasis on multiculturalism and on minority studies, it has become rather commonplace for academic historians and social scientists to denounce Eurocentric and Anglocentric perspectives. Increasingly, colleges and universities have replaced requirements in general American and European history with courses devoted to issues of race and ethnicity, often emphasizing the theme of “white privilege.” This point of view has promoted a strong tendency to minimize, sometimes even to deny, the importance of the Anglo-American relationship and the influences of Britain on American civilization. In Old World, New World, Kathleen Burk reminds us that for hundreds of years Britain was the primary source of the nation’s dominant culture and the model for its political institutions, as well as its most important trading partner and economic rival. Into the early twenty-first century, despite cultural differences and frequent disagreements, the two countries “were, nevertheless, more alike than any other two powers on the globe. And this instinctive feeling persists: there is a true love-hate Anglo-American special relationship.” Historical accounts of bilateral relations between two countries have often been rather dull, but this is certainly not true of Burk’s lively written book. Based on fifteen years of teaching Anglo-American relations and more than seven years of research and writing, the book is filled with interesting details and hundreds of anecdotes. A partial list of notable topics includes the “lost colony” on Roanoke Island; the establishment of Virginia, Massachusetts, and other English colonies; the causes, battles, and outcome of the American Revolution; the War of 1812; disputes and agreements concerning the Canadian border; perceptions of British travelers in America; tensions that grew out of the U.S. Civil War; the Venezuelan Boundary Dispute; the SpanishAmerican War; the two world wars of the twentieth century; cooperation and conflict during the Cold War; and the various components of the contemporary war on terrorism. Old World, New World is a book that can be read with pleasure from cover to cover. In addition, it is also an excellent reference source for dependable and interesting summaries about particular topics.

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When discussing the thirteen British colo nies that became the United States, Burk em- Born and raised in a California winephasizes their great diversity in religion, eco- making family, Kathleen Burk studied nomics, and geographical challenges. In spite history at the University of California of their diversity, however, she writes that at Berkeley and at Oxford. Currently a they shared a number of things in common, professor of modern history at including “an urgent and even reckless desire University College in London, she to own land.” All the colonists, moreover, en- previously published several wellrespected works, including Britain, joyed the benefits of the British Constitution, America, and the Sinews of War, 1914which included the Bill of Rights of 1689, and 1918 (1985) and Troublemaker: The they took pride in “being part of a liberal Life and History of A. J. P. Taylor empire, one whose power and glory derived (2002). from those very liberties which the Ameri cans claimed as part of their birthrights.” Colonial charters typically promised that American settlers would “enjoy all liberties and immunities of free and natural Subjects . . . as if born within the Realm of England.” The charters recognized their right to have elected assemblies with the power to enact their own laws and tax policies. Readers might reasonably take issue with some of Burk’s interpretations, such as her rather negative description of the Mayflower Compact of 1620. The Puritans affirmed that their purpose was the “advancement of the Christian faith” and “the honor of our King and country,” and they promised to establish “just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and officers” that were to be “convenient for the general good of the colony.” Burk denies that there was anything democratic about the Mayflower Compact. Rather, she writes that “the intention was to preserve authority in the hands of the self-chosen few. It was to be an oligarchy, not a democracy.” Everyone will agree, no doubt, that the Puritans shared seventeenth century political notions, envisioning neither women’s suffrage nor political participation by religious dissidents. Nevertheless, in view of the small number of voters in England at the time, it appears significant that forty-one of fifty-one male settlers signed the compact. Although vague about how the government would be organized, the wording of the compact appears to imply the idea of popular sovereignty, at least to some extent. There are, after all, degrees of democracy, and idealistic words, which are open to various interpretations, can have unexpected consequences for future generations. Burk observes that the American Revolution has frequently served as an “American Foundation Myth,” a story of bravery and a contest between tyranny and liberty. Like most contemporary historians, she acknowledges that the historical reality was “infinitely more complicated” than this. At the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, the British debt totaled 132.6 million pounds—requiring an annual interest of 5 million pounds—whereas the crown’s annual income was only 8 million pounds. Since the burden on British taxpayers was already unacceptably high, it only seemed fair that the Americans “should contribute to their own defense.” Following a series of conflicts over taxation, British officials were naturally angered by the destruction of property during the Boston Tea Party, and they were even more upset by their inabil-

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ity to find those responsible. The prime minister, Lord North, decided to use the event “to restore full authority in the colonies, because if they did not, this authority would continue to bleed away.” Thus, he pushed Parliament to enact the so-called Coercive Acts of 1774, which were denounced as tyrannical measures in the Declaration of Independence. Although Burk is careful not to express chauvinistic views, she acknowledges that there were democratic elements to the American Revolution. She points out, for instance, that the intent of parts of the Coercive Acts “was to curtail the more ‘democratic’ elements of New England government.” An important difference between the British and the Americans, moreover, was the voting franchise. In eighteenth century Britain, only about 15 percent of adults were able to vote, compared with approximately 63 percent in America. Such structural differences in political systems were “fundamental to the growing conflict between the imperial center and its colonies.” The greater opportunities of Americans to participate in government, no doubt, was one of the main reasons that the concept of “direct representation,” reflected in the slogan “no taxation without representation,” was taken so seriously by the colonists, whereas persons living in Britain were predisposed to be satisfied with the theory now called “virtual representation,” meaning that the Parliament represented both voters and nonvoters alike. In summarizing why Americans declared independence, Burk succinctly writes: “Fundamentally, the war was fought over a constitutional issue: who was to control the American colonies, Parliament or the colonies’ own legislative assembles?” Following the war for independence, the Paris Treaty of 1783 “set the stage for a century of unfriendly and sometimes threatening relations.” Although Jay’s Treaty of 1794 was extremely unpopular, Burk defends U.S. negotiator John Jay for following instructions, for preventing an Anglo-American war in the short term, and for finally resolving the issues of the Western forts and the war debts. In interpreting the War of 1812, she asserts that U.S. leaders had two main objectives: first, to conquer Canada, and, second, to eliminate the power of the Indians to block western expansion. Although unable to take Canadian lands, the United States benefited from the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, “a remarkable achievement for the U.S., a country internally divided, militarily weak, and nearly bankrupt.” Burk writes that the foreign minister at the time, Lord Castlereigh, was “the first British statesman to recognize that the friendship of the United States was a major asset to Britain.” From the mid-1820’s until the 1840’s, the forces of Manifest Destiny resulted in considerable Anglo-American boundary disputes, but the two countries were eventually able to reach peaceful compromises on the Canadian boundaries as well as with Maine and the Western states. Burk quotes David Reynolds’s statement that Britain’s “dominance of the world economy in the mid-nineteenth century was greater than that of the USA at its peak a century later.” The country remained “the only true global power” until at least the 1890’s. With 2 percent of world’s population, it produced 20 percent of manufacturing output. However, the global balance of power was shifting westward. In 1895, when the United States supported Venezuela in its boundary dispute with British Guiana, Secretary of State Richard Olney sent a blistering note, asserting that “the United

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States is practically sovereign on this continent,” because “its infinite resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and practically invulnerable as against any or all other powers.” Like most historians, Burk believes that there never was an imminent threat of war in 1895. About this time, in fact, “the concept of the ‘special relationship’ was gradually developing, at least on the British side.” American annexation of foreign colonies in the late nineteenth century helped popularize the concept of a common “Anglo-Saxon race,” which sometimes was combined with the Social Darwinian concept of “survival of the fittest” to promote support for imperialism. During many historical periods, the Anglo-American relationship has been influenced by the personal interactions of individual political leaders. During World War II, for instance, the close friendship between British prime minister Winston Churchill and U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt was significant to the formation of many important policies, including the wording of the Atlantic Charter, the creation of the Lend-Lease Act, and the founding of the United Nations. During the war, informed British leaders became conscious that their small country was no longer wealthy or powerful enough to defend its interests without allies. Part of their solution “was to try to co-opt American power, a policy which would continue after 1945.” By the war’s end, the United States had clearly emerged as “a global superpower of unparalleled wealth and strength.” Although Burk is moderately favorably toward Anglo-American policies during the Cold War, she writes that one unfortunate characteristic that the British passed on to the Americans was a sense of “self-righteousness,” and that Americans’ “conviction that they were the guardians of democracy entrenched the self-perception of righteousness.” She views the Marshall Plan, nevertheless, as a success, allowing the United States to acquire “a reputation for a caring generosity which contributed substantially to its attractiveness for decades.” During the difficult period of the 1950’s, the British feared that U.S. policies in the Korean War could expand into a larger conflict, and they were also deeply offended by President Dwight Eisenhower’s opposition to their use of force during the Suez Crisis. The Vietnam War was also a source of disagreement. In the 1980’s, U.S. president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher were “ideological soulmates,” although the British public was generally hostile to Reagan’s anti-Communist rhetoric and military buildup. During the premiership of Anthony “Tony” Blair, from 1997 to 2007, the AngloAmerican relationship was again at center stage in the international arena. Whereas his predecessor, John Major, wanted to stay out of the Balkan conflict, Blair formed a close alliance with U.S. president Bill Clinton and enthusiastically encouraged Clinton to bomb Kosovo and Serbia in the attempt to stop genocide against the Albanians of Kosovo. It was Blair who came up with a “doctrine of international community,” holding that military intervention in other countries was justified when the goal was to stop genocide. Quoting several other writers, Burk argues, not entirely persuasively, that the bombing campaign was not decisive. More important than bombs, she asserts, the Anglo-American threats of sending ground troops into the region convinced Slobodan Miloševi6 to negotiate a withdrawal from Kosovo.

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Living in Britain during the presidency of George W. Bush, Burk saw firsthand the extent to which Blair’s close relationship with Bush became extremely unpopular among the British public, resulting in his being ridiculed as “Bush’s poodle.” Although Blair’s endorsement for the campaign against the radical Taliban and their allies in Afghanistan did not severely damage Blair’s standing, his cooperation with Bush in the Iraq War was widely denounced in Britain as well as throughout Western Europe. Even though Blair remained loyal in his commitment to the war effort, Burk comments that the Bush-Blair “relationship was clouded by their differing approaches to foreign policy, in particular since Blair sometimes treated it as a moral issue.” Thomas Tandy Lewis

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 1 (September 1, 2008): 17. Foreign Affairs 87, no. 6 (November/December, 2008): 164-165. History Today 58, no. 9 (September, 2008): 66. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 15 (August 1, 2008): 118. Library Journal 133, no. 15 (September 15, 2008): 67-68. Political Quarterly 79 (July, 2008): 438-458. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 29 (July 21, 2008): 153. The Times Literary Supplement, March 21, 2008, p. 31.

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OLIVE KITTERIDGE Author: Elizabeth Strout (1956) Publisher: Random House (New York). 288 pp. $25.00; paperback $14.00 Type of work: Novel, short fiction Time: The late 1970’s through the early 2000’s Locale: Crosby, Maine; New York City The title character, a prickly, outspoken woman, plays a major role in this collection, which deals with the lives and the relationships of the people who live in a small Maine town Principal characters: Olive Kitteridge, a seventh-grade mathematics teacher Henry Kitteridge, her husband, a pharmacist Christopher Kitteridge, their son, a podiatrist Ann Kitteridge, his second wife Denise Thibodeau, a cashier at Henry’s pharmacy Kevin Coulson, a young man formerly from Crosby Angie O’Meara, a middle-aged woman and a piano player in a cocktail lounge Harmon, the owner of a hardware store Daisy Foster, a widow and Harmon’s mistress Louise Larkin, a mentally ill woman and the mother of a murderer Marlene Bonney, the widow of a grocer Jack Kennison, a widower and Olive’s lover after Henry’s death

The title character in Elizabeth Strout’s novel Olive Kitteridge is not an altogether likable person. As a widow in her seventies, Olive is just as difficult as she was three decades earlier, when she terrorized her seventh-graders. During their long lifetime together, she routinely opposed and criticized her kindly, long-suffering husband Henry, and she effectively drove away their only child, Christopher. However, Olive does elicit respect, if not always affection, from the other residents of Crosby, Maine, for though she is tactless, she is incapable of pretense, and sometimes she can be surprisingly kind. In any case, Strout evidently realized that though Olive is a fascinating character, a novel written entirely from her perspective would be difficult to read. Wisely, the author chose to organize her work as a collection of connected short stories. In that way, she could avoid having the book dominated by Olive, and, by changing frequently from one point of view to another, she could present both the title character and the other people in her village from several different perspectives. Thus the initial story, or chapter, is told not from Olive’s point of view but from that of Henry. As the title “Pharmacy” suggests, his work is of central importance in Henry’s life. As a pharmacist, he can help others, not only by carefully filling

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their prescriptions but also by simply listening to them. Moreover, when he is at the pharmacy, he does not have to deal with Olive’s fits of temperament or her gratuitous cruelty, which she displays in dozens of ways (for example, by stubbornly refusing to accompany him to church, despite the fact that he is embarrassed by her absence). Olive’s comment about Henry’s new clerk, Denise Thibodeau, is typical: The girl is unimpressive, Olive points out, and her posture is poor. When Henry invites Denise and her young husband over for dinner, Olive objects, and then, after Henry overrides her veto, she serves her guests nothing but a plateful of baked beans and a scoop of vanilla ice cream. However, Denise proves to be the bright spot in Henry’s life. Though he is much too principled to be unfaithful to Olive, he commits a kind of adultery by letting thoughts of Denise occupy his mind, by having imaginary conversations with her, and even by pretending that it is Denise, not Olive, to whom he is making love. Then Denise’s husband is accidentally killed, and she remarries and moves away. Over the next two decades, Henry continues to feel guilty about his feelings for her. When a note comes from Denise, suddenly Henry understands why Olive had been so inconsolable when a male colleague was killed: Obviously, she had loved him just as Henry had loved Denise. With that realization, Henry’s long-standing guilt is replaced by a new understanding of Olive and new feelings of tenderness toward her. Though the stories in Olive Kitteridge vary greatly in tone—some of them nostalgic, others sad, and others humorous—all of them end as “Pharmacy” did, with an epiphany. One of the saddest stories, “A Different Road,” illustrates how little it takes to mar a relationship. When Olive and Henry are held hostage at the local hospital, they say things in front of their captor that they know they will never be able to forget. In the final story, “River,” for the first time Olive admits her own shortcomings, especially in her treatment of Henry, and she regrets that she cannot go back and make amends. Nevertheless, old habits die hard. When Jack Kennison, a widower, happens along, Olive’s inclination is to look for his flaws. With some amusement, Kennison recognizes the fact that as a well-to-do Republican, he represents everything that Olive loathes. However, after seventy years of finding fault with everyone but herself, Olive finally has to admit that she is not always right. When Jack phones and asks her to come over, she knows that she will end up in bed with him. Almost too late, she has realized that life is short and that love is too important to be wasted. Nevertheless, love, or desire passing for love, accounts for a good deal of the misery in Olive Kitteridge. One of the funniest stories in the collection is “Ship in a Bottle.” After the groom decides that he does not want to be married after all, the bride’s mother takes after him with a rifle, only to discover that her daughter has run off with the man who jilted her. “The Piano Player” has a different tone. After twenty-two years as the mistress of Malcolm Moody, Angie O’Meara realizes that he no longer seems to care about her, and she telephones him to break off their affair. When she ar-

Elizabeth Strout’s first novel, Amy and Isabelle (1999), won both the Los Angeles Times book award for first fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. Her second novel, Abide with Me (2006), was also a national best seller.

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rives at her house after work, Angie finds Malcolm waiting for her, furious because she called him at home, and his insults make it clear that he has never thought of her as anything but a convenient whore. By contrast, in “Starving,” what begins as desire is transmuted into love. After his wife Bonnie announced that she was finished with sex, Harmon began stopping by every Sunday at the home of an attractive widow, Daisy Foster. Over time, they find that they cannot live without each other. Unless fate and his bad heart intervene, Harmon will divorce his wife and marry Daisy. One of the points that Strout makes in Olive Kitteridge is that one cannot predict how someone will react to a particular situation. In “Winter Concert,” Jane Houlton’s discovery that her husband had spent a night with another woman while he was away on business somehow diminishes her marriage. She had believed that, whatever happened, they would at least have each other; now she realizes that what she believed was a perfect relationship is something less. The wife in “Basket of Trips” has a different reaction. At her husband’s funeral, Marlene Bonney is told by her drunken and disreputable cousin Kerry Monroe that she slept with Ed Bonney at least once. After Kerry passes out, Marlene puts her to bed, then sits beside her holding a paring knife, trying to decide whether or not to kill her. Fortunately, Olive happens along, and in this instance, she remains calm, quietly encouraging Marlene to put down the knife. Instead of stabbing Kerry, Marlene destroys the basket full of travel brochures that Ed had perused during his last days, as his wife helped him to pretend that he was not dying. What amazes Olive is that instead of being furious with her unfaithful husband, Marlene feels guilty because she was not honest with him about the impossibility of his recovering. Olive’s sympathy for Marlene is just one instance of her being genuinely kind to someone in trouble. In “Incoming Tide,” sensing that there is something wrong with a former student, she insists on getting into his car and talking with him. She had no way of knowing that he had been contemplating suicide. Similarly, in “Starving,” Olive arranges help for a young girl who is dying because she could not conquer her anorexia. In “Tulips,” after Henry has had a stroke that leaves him blind and mute, Olive tries to escape from her own depression by paying a visit to Louise Larkin, whose son is in prison for murdering his wife. However, in this instance, Olive’s kindly gesture has an unfortunate result: Though at first Louise is polite, the presence of a willing listener propels her into a rage so violent that Olive realizes she can be of no help to her. Where Olive fails most miserably, however, is in her relationship with those she loves most. Although Olive has always thought she was a good mother, her irrational, violent outbursts during his childhood frightened Christopher so much that he became deathly afraid of her. In “Pharmacy,” Christopher is shown as a troubled and bitter adolescent, one who might well have turned to drugs, run away, or committed suicide. In other stories, the reader learns that, after leaving home, he managed to make a life for himself, but he could maintain his equilibrium only by remaining at a distance from his mother. In “A Little Burst,” Christopher, who is now middle-aged and a successful podiatrist, is marrying a gastroenterologist who is as opinionated as his mother. Naturally, Olive dislikes her, and the feeling is mutual. After she overhears the bride criticizing her home-made dress, Olive tampers with the young woman’s

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clothing in a spiteful effort to make her doubt her sanity. The couple move to California, and, not surprisingly, they are soon divorced. However, every time Olive suggests that she visit him, Christopher finds an excuse to keep her away. In “Security,” which appears near the end of the novel, Olive finally gets her invitation, and she goes to New York, where Christopher lives with his easygoing second wife, Ann, who is heavily pregnant, and their two children. Though she likes Ann, Olive gets tired, succumbs to self-pity, loses her self-control, screams at her son, and leaves ahead of schedule, thus destroying any chance of ever having a close relationship with him. One might be tempted to see Olive’s failure with Christopher as just another example of her destructive tendencies. However, in story after story, Strout has shown that Olive is not unique, for one of the flaws in human nature is the tendency to hurt those one loves most. Judged fairly, then, Olive is not an oddity but an Everywoman or, more appropriately, an Everyperson, often unthinking and unwise in action, frequently betrayed by her emotions, consistently guilty of the sin of pride, and far better at seeing the faults in others than her own flaws. The epiphanies that end the individual stories add up to a grim definition of human existence, for they include betrayal, spitefulness, broken relationships, and diminished expectations. However, Olive Kitteridge is not a pessimistic book. While, like Olive, the author insists on honesty, she also includes in her stories instances of compassion, forgiveness, and humility. The dominant theme of Olive Kitteridge, then, is what Olive realizes in her own epiphany: that personal happiness comes as the result of accepting and appreciating others just as they are. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 302, no. 1 (July/August, 2008): 140. Booklist 104, nos. 9/10 (January 1, 2008): 46. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 3 (February 1, 2008): 113-114. Library Journal 133, no. 2 (February 1, 2008): 65. The New York Times Book Review, April 20, 2008, p. 13. The New Yorker 84, no. 12 (May 5, 2008): 77. People 69, no. 14 (April 14, 2008): 46. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 49 (December 10, 2007): 31. San Francisco Chronicle, April 9, 2008, p. E5. USA Today, April 24, 2008, p. 7D.

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ONE MORE YEAR Stories Author: Sana Krasikov (1979) Publisher: Spiegel & Grau (New York). 196 pp. $21.95 Type of work: Short fiction Time: The second half of the twentieth century Locale: Ukraine, Georgia, and northeastern localities of the United States, especially New York City and suburbs Krasikov’s first collection of short stories depicts experiences and travails of immigrants from Georgia and Russia, torn between their native country and the new one Principal characters: Ilona Siegal, a middle-aged immigrant from Tbilisi, Georgia Earl, Ilona’s seventy-year-old husband Maya, an immigrant from Tbilisi. Gogi, her son on a visit from Tbilisi Gulia, a woman in love with Rashid, a Muslim Rashid, a New York carpet factory owner, Gulia’s husband Nasrin, a femme fatale in Rashid’s life Anya, an immigrant from Russia, married to Rayan Rayan, an American drifter, difficult to live with Lev, a successful businessman in New York who is from Tbilisi Sonya, Lev’s niece, visiting her uncle Dina, Lev’s suspicious wife Victor, a computer expert, an immigrant from Russia Alina, an immigrant Victor meets in New York Grisha Arsenyev, an IBM and Morgan Stanley employee, who prefers life in Russia Lera, Grisha’s wife, commiserating with him Larisa Lebedeva, a good-hearted elderly woman, typical of her Slavic race Regina, an Americanized young Russian woman

The first book by Sana Krasikov, One More Year, consists of eight different stories that share something in common. In this sense, they evoke a collection of stories by the Russian author Ivan Turgenev, Zapiski okhotnika (1852; A Sportsman’s Sketches, 1932). The main connecting feature is the fact that the main characters are females. The protagonist of the first story, “Companion,” Ilona Siegal, is followed by leading characters in other stories: Maya (“Maya in Yonkers”), Gulia (“Asal”), Anya (“Better Half”), Sonya (“Debt”), Alina (“The Alternate”), Lera (“The Repatriates”), and Regina (“There Will Be No Fourth Rome”). Most of these women have left their native country—the Soviet Republic of Georgia, Russia, or Ukraine—and often their lovers

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by immigrating to the United States. In their thoughts, however, they live on two continents, the one they came from and the one they are anxious to adjust to, no matter how difficult. Most of them belong to the middle class. A former nurse in Tbilisi, Ilona Siegal works in America in a urologist’s office, where she deals with older males, including her seventyyear-old husband Earl. Maya, a former accountant, has been unemployed for three years and now takes care of an elderly woman. Anya is working as a waitress in a diner while attending college. Sonya is helping her husband open a restaurant, where she would cook. Another similar feature in the stories is conflicts the protagonists endure in adjusting to the new world. Among other things, they seem not to understand the ways of American business. As seen in “Debt,” Sonya and her husband Meho visit her welloff uncle Lev and his wife Dina in New York, talking roundabout until Dina figures out the real reason for their visit—obtaining a loan to start a restaurant. When Sonya finally reveals the size of the needed loan, Lev tells her he is not a bank. He rightfully suspects they will never visit them again, let alone repay the loan. Another common element is the conflict between generations. In “Maya in Yonkers,” perhaps the best story in the collection, Maya, an immigrant from Georgia, brings her son Gogi from Tbilisi for a visit. Much of the story deals with Maya’s attempts to find rapport with her son. She can tolerate the usual commotion, misunderstandings, and hassles with bureaucracy, but it disturbs her peace of mind that Gogi is unsatisfied with things in New York, expressing his displeasure with almost everything his mother suggests. In reality, he resents her leaving him behind in Tbilisi. For example, on a visit to the city, he begs her to buy him an expensive jacket, which she refuses. When his grandmother buys it for him, he returns to Tbilisi happy but still lacking an understanding of his mother, in a typical generational conflict. By far the greatest problem in the stories is love affairs. Some of the women have left their lovers, even husbands, back in the old country. Not only do the women find it difficult to deal with American counterparts, they have trouble with their immigrant compatriots as well. In “Better Half,” Anya’s marriage to Rayan is filled with love, hate, and constant fighting. Even though Anya is Rayan’s Russian Queen, his Pot of Gold, he treats her with jealous contempt. Anya is trying to stay legally in America on account of her marriage, but their constant fighting is making it more difficult. After he hurt her in a physical attack, she obtained a restraining order against him. He tries to heal the rift, but to no avail. Yet, Anya still feels attracted to him. Whenever she sees him at a distance, she thinks of what might have been. The love relationship between immigrants is also difficult, as Gulia experiences in “Asal.” She struggles with accepting the fact that her husband Rashid is a Muslim, already married, and with be-

An Ashkenazi Jew, Sana Krasikov was born in Ukraine and raised in the former Soviet republic Georgia and the United States, where she immigrated when she was nine years old. She graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines. She received a Fulbright Scholarship to Moscow and the O. Henry Award.

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ing tormented by his other wife, Nasrin. Gulia tries relationships with other men, but she thinks of Rashid all the time. When Rashid finally divorces Nasrin, he and Gulia try to resume their marriage. For him she has always been his “Asal”—“honey darling.” However, when Nasrin survives a suicidal self-immolation, Rashid refuses to leave her, which brings a definite end to the love affair between “Asal” and Rashid. A sudden romantic break-up followed by a lingering attraction is a recurrent motif in this collection, adding complexity to the love element in the stories. At the same time, the protagonists sometimes show rather lax attitudes in their love affairs. Ilona has no qualms about having an extra lover or two. To be sure, her liaison with Earl is difficult, mainly because of the difference in their ages and his failing health. He is like “a dog” to her, as she explains to the landlady on the phone. Thus, the search for an acceptable companion turns out to be a problem rather than a solution. In “There Will Be No Fourth Rome,” Regina has a troubled relationship with Conrad, who is married. Seeing similar relationships among her acquaintances in Russia, she realizes that such behavior is basically human. In this sense, she finds that the two cultures have something in common after all. “The Alternate” is a story about what has been but cannot be resurrected. After being guests at a wedding of friends, Victor and Vera return home, thinking but not talking about Victor’s youthful relationship with Mila in St. Petersburg. The two almost got married, but he left for the United States to look for a better life and she was killed in an automobile accident back in the old country. Victor meets her daughter, Alina, who had also immigrated to the United States. At a dinner, they reminisce about Victor and Mila, and Victor wonders if, by meeting with Alina, he is trying to resurrect in some strange way his longpast affair with Mila. Alina, however, does not respond. They part amicably, and Victor continues to be burdened with his memories of his early love and with accepting his present wife Vera as an alternate. Again, love is a many-splendored thing, but not always with pleasant results. The difference between the two cultures, American and Russian, is also a recurrent motif. In “The Repatriates,” Grisha Arsenyev, who works for IBM and Morgan Stanley in the United States, considers his immigration to the United States to be the great anticlimax of his life. He believes that America has no culture or spirituality, and he refers to his life in Russia as being superior to American emptiness. He would like to work not only for his own wealth but to better American life where it is needed. After his return to Russia, he would like to use his American experiences in real estate and the mortgage business on the stock market. His wife Lera joins him in Russia, and they observe that the bureaucracy, inefficiency, rudeness, fraud, deceit, and other shortcomings remain. As one character says, there is no decency anymore. Lera realizes she has only two options: to leave Russia again or to pretend not to know. In his despair, Grisha invests most of his money in the restoration of an old church and leaves Lera, who returns to New York, hurt but still feeling compassion for Grisha. The juxtaposition of the two cultures, Russian and American, is depicted again in “There Will Be No Fourth Rome.” Regina, an accountant, visits the city of her childhood, Moscow. She relishes her impressions of changed Russia and the people she remembers. The people seem unable to live without human companionship, no matter

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what the circumstances. While Regina is appalled by some primitive aspects that still plague her native land, she feels deep sympathy for the basic goodness of its people and their love for each other, displayed especially by old Larisa. Stylistically, the stories in One More Year mix straightforward realism with complex psychological elements. Krasikov holds on to the main sinews of the plot, although she gets away from it sporadically by change of locality or by flashbacks. The plot centers around the protagonist, although secondary characters often receive a fair share of attention. Sometimes the stories seem a bit too long, yet in many cases the length is justified with emphasis on the psychological probing that sheds more light on the character or on the nature of the conflict. The author shies away from tendentious or engaged writing. For example, when Meho (“Debt”) complains about Home Depot’s Jewish way of doing business, it is the only reference to anti-Semitism in the entire collection, although there are hints at other intolerances. Reviews of One More Year have been almost entirely positive, with a few minor criticisms. For such a young author, Krasikov is hailed as a surprisingly mature storyteller, and her first book is a stunning accomplishment. Vasa D. Mihailovich

Review Sources Booklist 104, nos. 19/20 (June 1, 2008): 43. Entertainment Weekly, August 15, 2008, p. 71. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 8 (April 15, 2008): 5-8. Library Journal 133, no. 8 (May 1, 2008): 58. The New Leader 88, no. 6 (2008): 54-55. The New York Times Book Review, September 7, 2008, p. 15. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 14 (April 7, 2008): 38. The Village Voice 53, no. 33 (August 13, 2008): 48.

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THE OPEN ROAD The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama Author: Pico Iyer (1957) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 275 pp. $28.00 Type of work: Biography Time: 1959-2008 Locale: Tibet, India, and the global community Iyer traces the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s life from their first meeting in 1974, describing the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism’s activities in Dharamsala, India, and in his worldwide travels Principal personage: The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, born Tenzin Gyatso, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism

Pico Iyer has reported on Tibet and the Fourteenth Dalai Lama in major publications for twenty years. Iyer first met the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism in India in 1974, when the author was seventeen. Iyer’s father, Indian by birth, and the Tibetan shared an interest in Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi, one as a scholar, the other determined to employ nonviolence as a response to China’s 1959 military takeover of Tibet. One result of their conversations was that the forward to Iyer’s father’s book about Gandhi was written by the Dalai Lama, and the book was dedicated to Pico Iyer and “those of his generation for whom there will be no curtain.” A common desire to see artificial barriers between people and cultures come down became the bond of friendship for Iyer and the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. During the next thirty years, as Iyer and the Dalai Lama watched the development of a world more and more connected economically and technologically, they dreamed of finding the emerging global community’s spiritual and ethical foundation. Iyer traveled the world as a journalist and became increasingly dissatisfied with the media’s constant reporting about the mechanics of human connections across the globe, looking for something more spiritual. Disturbed by that same lack, the Dalai Lama took to his message of spiritual interconnectedness outside of Dharamsala. As both journeyed the world, Iyer often met his friend in private, and when the Dalai Lama began his public mission, Iyer attended many lectures. Always the reporter assessed the impact of the spiritual leader’s words on himself and on others. In The Open Road, the writer reports and critiques these conversations and lectures, concluding that the Dalai Lama’s ever-larger audiences around the world seek, as Iyer does, a spirituality for the emerging global community, The strength of Iyer’s narrative lies partly in a tone that combines deep affection for his subject and continued questioning of the teacher’s message. Callng himself a

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“skeptical journalist and non-belonger,” Iyer relates his own spiritual journey, his walking alongside the Dalai Lama on an “open road.” Although Iyer’s view of the Dalai Lama is subjective, this quality and especially the many private conversations the author retells allow the reader to expand his or her own percep tions of Buddhism and global spirituality. The resulting narrative is very readable, as informal as its subject, whose gestures, words, and laughter break down any barriers between him and his listeners, whether one or many thousands. Iyer divides his study into sections titled “In Public,” “In Private,” and “In Practice.” In the first section he observes the Dalai Lama as an idealized, iconic, although puzzling figure who attracts followers from all over the world. In the second section, the writer brings the reader into his private conversations with the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan Buddhists, some of whom dispute what their leader is promoting. The third section recounts Iyer’s final extended visit to Dharamsala; in this section, Iyer presents some of his conclusions. Most valuable to one seeking additional information on the Dalai Lama, Tibet, and Tibetan Buddhism is the final chapter of The Open Road, “Reading.” The Dalai Lama, who was born in 1935, was selected to be Tibet’s spiritual leader when he was two years old. Leaving home and family, he moved to Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, to begin a monastic life dedicated to long days of praying, studying, debating, and practicing Tibetan Buddhism. In 1950 he assumed leadership of his people. The country he ruled had been isolated from the world for centuries. Tibet was not part of the industrial age, and even in the first half of the twentieth century, the country by choice adapted almost nothing from the advances of modern science and technology. Indeed, to the outside world Tibet, which allowed few visitors, was a hidden and mysterious land of myth. When the Chinese army invaded the country in 1949, Tibet lacked any defense against the well-armed invaders. As a result, an estimated ten million Tibetans died, and many more were imprisoned and tortured. The Chinese destroyed several thousand Tibetan monasteries and burned most of their treasured ancient Buddhist texts. In 1959, following many of his people, the Dalai Lama fled over the Himalayan mountains to India, where that country granted the Tibetans a new home in Dharamsala. Exile from Tibet and separation from ninety-eight percent of his people did not sever the Dalai Lama from his Buddhist roots, but it did, he believed, allow for some needed changes in the way he would lead his people. In India he could more easily end any idea that he was a deity high above ordinary people. In doing this, he emphasized that despite his people’s perception of him as their god, he was simply their spiritual leader for this time in their history. Further, rather than continue the hierarchical government structure that had existed in Tibet, he wanted to empower his people to move toward a democratic form of government in which they would take more responsibility for themselves and their future. He would use their exile to “set up whole settlements, with central monasteries and lay

Pico Iyer, a journalist, has published two novels and six works of nonfiction. He has reported on Tibet for Time, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books for two decades.

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people around them” everywhere, but without Tibetan culture as it had been. The basics of that culture should go on, especially the Buddhist ethos of the interconnectedness of all things and compassion for all. The Dalai Lama also hoped that individuals practicing different kinds of Buddhism around the world would unite around their commonalities. Such changes, he believed, would not dilute Buddhism but strengthen its “original, classic, authentic” teachings of compassion for others, daily meditation, and responsibility for oneself and one’s world. The Dalai Lama saw clearly that the tragic events that had overtaken Tibet were caused in large part by Tibet’s many centuries of self-imposed isolation from other countries and cultures, from the world outside and what it could have taught Tibet. He asked his people in exile not to waste time blaming others for their problems, but rather to look inward and realize that they had to become part of the world community. This did not mean that the Dalai Lama would forget his people still in Tibet. Rather, he had two complementary goals: first, reforming Tibetan Buddhism and “constructing a new more durable Tibet outside Tibet”; second, ensuring the rights of Tibetans in the homeland while respecting the rights of the Chinese who were occupying Tibet. The problem of China must be settled nonviolently, he insisted and continues to insist; and when that happened, he would immediately implant his reforms of Tibetan government and life there. However, other effects of the exile, Iyer suggests, weakened the Tibetans’ basic identity. Forty-five years after the Dalai Lama’s exile began, Iyer notes, no progress has been made in freeing Tibet. Rather, Iyer observed when he visited Tibet, the Chinese were trying and in some cases succeeding in making Tibetans into Chinese. Also, he observed that in India some Tibetan refugees were losing their own culture and adapting their host country’s ways. Further, because people from around the world could come freely on pilgrimage to Dharamsala to see the Dalai Lama, and came in large numbers, some settling there, the Tibetan refugees, especially the youngest who had never lived in their homeland, saw the possibility of other lifestyles and found ways to move away from their roots in body and sometimes in spiritual outlook. Thus some looked for opportunities to secure jobs in more economically developed parts of the world, competed for scholarships in other countries, and found various ways to connect with visitors who might assist their escape from Dharamsala. Some refugees wanted to rescue Tibet from China’s control and return. Paradoxically, their spiritual leader who disapproved of any violent action to save Tibet gave his approval to his people joining the Indian army to aid the host country in its war with Bangladesh to repay India’s kindness. When Iyer attended in Dharamsala a meeting of the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC), considered by many “the official voice of the unofficial Tibet in exile,” that is, an organization separate from the government that is headed by the Dalai Lama, he discovered the rebellious thirty-thousand plus members wanted immediate Tibetan independence from China even by violent means. Still, Iyer learned, they revered the Dalai Lama—their source of spiritual strength, “their leader, their hero,” and “the incarnation of a god it would be a sacrilege to go against.” A further paradox that Iyer points out is that while the leader counsels his people to trust in themselves, he also wants them to accept his way of freeing Tibet.

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Iyer also looks at the causes of the Dalai Lama’s decision to travel the “open road” on a “global journey” of spiritual leadership. When he arrived in Dharamsala, lowering from his traditional high position, the Dalai Lama for the first time walked the streets and countryside, meeting people from all walks of life informally. As the years passed, Dharamsala became a pilgrimage site for visitors from all parts of the world, where those of all faiths and of all economic backgrounds, became, in Iyer’s words, “as compressed and bittersweet an image of the global village as I have ever seen.” At the same time, the Dalai Lama studied modern science, met with scientific experts, and heard daily about the growing economic and technological inventions that made human connections easier and faster each year. Thus he found the mission that started him on a journey to so many countries of the world. In his travels, Iyer writes, the Tibetan spiritual leader consistently spoke on behalf of his fellow Tibetans controlled by the Chinese invaders, saying to the world, “If you really think we inhabit a global universe, then your welfare depends on Tibet, as much as its welfare depends on you.” This was but one example of the ethical system he taught. In the Dalai Lama’s vision, if the world adopted a lifestyle that included the practices of compassion for all, deep meditation, and responsibility, this would become a better world. Connectedness is the basic truth of Buddhism that the world needed, providing a foundation of a global ethics for the global city. The Dalai Lama did not say that the citizens of the global community must become Buddhists. Rather, everyone, no matter what his or her faith tradition, had within the possibility of taking the “open road” by practicing that stillness and meditation that leads to finding that “everything is linked in a pulsing network.” Then all individuals would become compassionate and responsible. How many of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s listeners would follow his teaching? How long would it take for his teaching to bring about this transformation of the world? The readers of Iyer’s book, like the audiences of his spiritual teacher, are invited to choose the “open road.” Each time that path is chosen, the world is a better place. Francine A. Dempsey

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 13 (March 1, 2008): 31. The Economist 386 (March 22, 2008): 93-94. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 6 (March 15, 2008): 287-288. Library Journal 133, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 74-75. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 9 (May 29, 2008): 46-49. The New York Times Book Review, April 6, 2008, p. 12. The New Yorker 84, no. 7 (March 31, 2008): 120-123. Outside 33, no. 4 (April, 2008): 31. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 2 (January 14, 2008): 53.

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ORIGINAL SIN A Cultural History Author: Alan Jacobs (1958) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 286 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Ethics, history The author samples beliefs about the origins and nature of sin in cultures from the ancients to contemporary sages Original Sin is a slippery concept. Is it some inherited and resistant stain on the soul of each person that must be washed carefully in baptism? Is it a quaint biblical notion, an artifact from the clueless behavior of the first lady and her partner, not to be taken seriously in a postmodern world? Is it a reality located within the person’s nature or experience? Is it merely the influence of negative social context on behavior? Is it the result of some devil tempting a weak individual into immoral but alluring action? In Original Sin, Alan Jacobs considers these questions in his engaging and rich cultural study of the subject. He is clear in the introduction that his task is cultural rather than theological. His interest is in describing the serious wrestling with the question of sin’s origins across the ages of human history. The author begins his examination with six stories that deal with the origins of evil and the differences that various cultures play in interpreting and vanquishing it. They depict the potency of evil in historical contexts and in imagination as well as the need in some way to expiate that evil. They illustrate the hope for a better future even in the face of seemingly insurmountable evil. Much of Christian thinking about Original Sin is saturated with the theological positions of Saint Augustine, the fourth century bishop of Hippo, in northern Africa. Often drawing his conclusions through the lens of Paul the apostle, Augustine conceives of Original Sin as a tangible reality “inherited” from the first sinful father, Adam. Augustine’s theory damns unbaptized babies to hell, consistent with his idea that human beings are totally unable to achieve salvation without the intervention of God. He does not believe that human beings alone are capable of transcending the power of evil in their lives. Augustine’s position on Original Sin may very well have become polarized because of his dealings with certain contemporary heretical movements, notably those of the Donatists and the Pelagians. It is equally possible that Augustine’s thinking is rooted in his personal negative views on sex. Sexual desire, when not regulated by the will, is a reminder of the shame of Adam and Eve’s sin, in that it “reenacts Adam’s disobedience.” Predictably Augustine’s frame of reference is his youthful firsthand experience of the difficulty controlling his sexual activity. Jacobs believes that Augustine’s somewhat odd conclusions about the connections of sin and sex have en-

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dured in centuries of theology that postulates a conjugal relationship between sexual pleasure and seminal sin. Besides ancient stories that grapple with the experience of sin, there exist many other attempts to describe and dissect this fundamental reality. Jacobs examines not only the biblical account found in the book of Genesis but also the accounts of such well-known writ ers as John Milton, in Paradise Lost (1667), and C. S. Lewis, particularly in his Perelandra (1943). Over the centuries, many authors have written about sin, evil, and the devil. Some of these had primarily literary concerns, while others wrote with heavy political or ideological agenda. Jacobs samples both, putting the works in their cultural contexts. Often fundamental evil is personified in some sort of Satan or devil. From Milton’s Lucifer to the modern comic-book fictional demon Hellboy, from the conniving snake that beguiled Eve to the diminutive but disastrous demon who perches on the shoulder of the confused agent and offers evil—a variety of representations that personify the human tendency to commit evil are examined. Is the Devil real, an entity with horns or cloven hooves or devoid of thumbs? Is the Devil, as psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud believed, a projected externalization of the inner conflicts that plague the human psyche? Jacobs points out that modern psychological takes on the Devil are not so different from the conclusions at which Paul or Augustine arrived. Both recognize the struggle between good and evil that human beings wage within themselves. Still not clear, however, is whether people have real choices to make. Can Hellboy undergo a change, a metanoia, to become a good person? Can Lucifer repent his break from God to reemerge as the angel of light? Is the struggle to be good truly under human domination, or is the person controlled by nature or by some external coercion (“the devil made me do it”) with no real free will? Another question concerns the essence of salvation and damnation. Jewish belief in the communal nature of humanity leads to the conclusion that all are ultimately saved (or damned). Accounts in the Hebrew scripture see God as saving the total people, no matter what the good behavioral titer in the population seems to be. Nevertheless, in some instances, the whole people are condemned (the “punishment” of the various biblical exiles, for example). The first conclusion fits nicely with the egalitarian notion of universal sin: All sin, but all are eventually saved. The collective consequence of universal redemption is not unreasonable, given that an inherited universal stain is not a Jewish idea. Rather it is a Christian interpretation of the ancient story found in Genesis. The Jewish position, however, leaves the difficulty of what to do with confirmed sinners, if they are considered apart from the whole. Should there be a punishment fitting to the serious crimes people commit? A sense of justice seems to indicate that evildoers should not get away with conscious malice. Later Jewish thought indicates that sinners can be separated from the saved and condemned to eter-

Alan Jacobs is professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois. He is the author of several books, including The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis (2005). Besides his longer works, he has written for The Boston Globe, American Scholar, First Things, and The Oxford American.

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nal damnation; or, alternatively, they are “retrained” in some kind of reincarnation (as the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition believes). Jacobs sees a clear pattern in human history. In some periods human beings are believed to have great moral potential, even though the counterpoint of ubiquitous human bondage to Adam’s sin is always lurking in the background. Pelagius argues for human potential to achieve the good; Jonathan Edwards argues that even infants are “young vipers” and infinitely more hateful because they are not in Christ. Even Augustine attributes infants with an “inborn sinfulness, ” which is demonstrated in their inherent selfishness and willfulness. A romantic picture of primitive people painted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, largely the idea of Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is that of the “noble savage.” An innate innocence and goodness, unstained by evil, characterizes those who live in harmony with nature. Perhaps children and primitive people are not worse than vipers after all. Perhaps this pristine innocence could be true of all citizens if a society were properly organized without private property. Perhaps there is no need for a universal religious doctrine of Original Sin, because people are by nature good. Perhaps it is religion itself that is responsible for human evil. To do away with religion is to do away with sin. Jacobs makes an interesting observation about the persistence of the doctrine of Original Sin. It is the universal leveler, the “binding agent” that links all people one to another. Why not, the author suggests, take as fundamental and paramount the idea that humanity is made in the image of God? Is this not an equally strong assertion about humanity found in the scripture, and would it not work as well? Jacobs makes this almost poignant observation (is it a plea?) in his discussion of the work of Louis Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist, who was among the last major scientists to repudiate Charles Darwin. Agassiz rejects the idea that there was a universal primordial parent—a first sinner. His rejection, sadly, is rooted in his personal experience in a Philadelphia hotel, which left him unable to identify himself as a brother to all. The hotel staff were “men of color.” Agassiz could not countenance the idea that these people, in his view so foreign and offputting in appearance, could be of the same human stock as he. They were members of a “lower race” who should not be allowed to have their blood “flow freely into that of our children.” His position leads logically to a theory of polygenesis. The belief that there was more than one set of human parents destroys the belief that there exists a single “original” sin. Jacobs believes that, in some ways, a theory that all human beings participate in a universal sinfulness is a uniquely democratic assertion. It is exquisitely egalitarian to think that everyone has the same stain or tendency or reality. As the Christian feast of All Souls implicitly proclaims: All sin, but all have the promise of salvation. Heaven is not reserved for the rich or the hyper holy (saints), but it is open to all sinners, that is, all people. The invitation is universal, based on the ubiquitous effect of sin on the human population. This equality under God, particularly in the strictly stratified society of most of Europe from Roman times until fairly recently, is acutely countercultural. Ultimately the book eludes a definitive answer to the questions posed. As the sands

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of history shift, so do theories about Original Sin. Certain approaches come down on the side of some primordial episode whose result is an inherited stain or weakness. This real event makes people either unable to achieve salvation through human endeavor or so weakened by the father’s flaw that they cannot perform good actions. Original Sin is the ticket to hell, unless it is washed away by an ecclesial action— baptism. Other approaches deny the Adam and Eve fall as definitive, yet persist in defining people as defective and impotent. Sin becomes the owned action of the individual, not some ancient legacy. Alternately, the imperfection is an environmental disposition toward evil that can be metaphorically breathed in and consequently compromising of the good in people. While the whole book smells of Augustine, Jacobs takes pains to move beyond Augustine’s theory of Original Sin. The work is chock-full of interesting tidbits of history and insight. The reader is delighted by the tantalizing yet accessible erudition of the material. Jacobs does a fine job of summarizing difficult and disparate historical material. He informs the reader without overwhelming. His range of material—biblical stories, fiction, biology, and serious theological commentary—is extensive. Although he sometimes moves to material not quite on target, even this fascinates and informs. Happily, instead of cumbersome footnotes, the author has included a chapter-bychapter bibliography. In many ways the doctrine of Original Sin is one of anthropology rather than theology. Here the author is on the right track. The doctrine transcends political systems, all of which Jacobs asserts ultimately fall within its scope of judgment. What human beings are at root is a study of reality. Even without a definitive answer to the nature of Original Sin, Jacobs’s look at the span of cultural interpretations of Original Sin offers much insight into the question. Dolores L. Christie

Review Sources America 199, no. 9 (September 29, 2008): 39. Booklist 104, no. 17 (May 1, 2008): 57. The Christian Century 125, no. 25 (December 16, 2008): 24. Christianity Today 52, no. 7 (July, 2008): 53-54. Library Journal 133, no. 3 (February 15, 2008): 109. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 8 (February 25, 2008): 68-69. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 138 (June 13, 2008): A13. The Wilson Quarterly 32, no. 3 (Summer, 2008): 107-108.

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THE OTHER HALF The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America Author: Tom Buk-Swienty (1966) First published: Den Ideelle Amerikaner: En Biografi om Journalisten, Reformisten og fotografen Jacob A. Riis, 2008, in Denmark Translated from the Danish by Annette Buk-Swienty Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 331 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Biography, history Time: 1849-1914 Locale: Denmark and the United States A life of Riis, whose articles, books, and photographs taught the American public about abysmal immigrant living conditions, helping spur urban reform in the Progressive Era Principal personages: Jacob Riis (1849-1914), Danish American journalist and photographer Elisabeth Giørtz Riis (1852-1905), his first wife Mary Philips Riis (1877-1967), his second wife Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), president of the United States, 1901-1909

Tom Buk-Swienty first learned about Jacob Riis in a course on the Progressive Era when he was an exchange student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Although a history major, Buk-Swienty had never heard of Riis, who was relatively unknown in Denmark. Intrigued by the idea that a Danish American strongly affected American social history, he found an old copy of Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) and was fascinated by the power of Riis’s language and photographs depicting New York City’s squalid slums. Seeing an exhibit of Riis’s photographs in the 1990’s stimulated Buk-Swienty to research and write The Other Half. Using diaries and letters, and stressing the historical context of Riis’s activities, Buk-Swienty provides the reader with an informative narrative of Riis’s life. He devotes the first fifty pages of his book to Riis’s life in the stuffy, somnolent town of Ribe. Buk-Swienty notes that Riis later romanticized the town in his memoirs, contrasting life there to crowded city slums and ignoring how unhealthy Ribe actually was. Only three of his parents’ fourteen children reached adulthood, most dying of tuberculosis. Riis rebelled against his father, a stern village schoolmaster, dropped out of school at fifteen, and apprenticed himself to a carpenter. That same year he fell in love with twelve-year-old Elisabeth Giørtz, the adopted daughter of the richest man in town. Buk-Swienty covers Riis’s love affair in detail, through its various vicissitudes to a final happy ending. Upon completing his apprenticeship in October, 1869, Riis pro-

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posed to Elisabeth, who flatly rejected him. Since Riis had fantasized about her during his five-year apprenticeship in Copenhagen, he was totally unprepared for her refusal. He fell into a deep depression, and he decided to seek his fortune in the United States. On May 1, 1870, he left Ribe with forty American dollars, some clothing, and a locket containing a picture of Elisabeth and a lock of her hair given to him by a sympathetic friend. The author narrates Riis’s life in America as a rags-to-riches story, from deep poverty in the 1870’s to affluence and fame in the 1890’s. His first job at a mining company in Pennsylvania, working as a carpenter building miners’ huts, paid only $10.63 for the month. He returned to New York City, where his money ran out. Riis wandered the streets, homeless, begging for food at the back door of restaurants and contemplating suicide. While he was sleeping at a police station sheltering homeless men, someone stole the locket with Elisabeth’s hair. When Riis angrily protested the loss and fought with police, they subdued him and put him on a ferry to New Jersey. Riis walked to Philadelphia, where a sympathetic Danish consul sent him to Jamestown, New York. Riis found temporary jobs, and he proved to be a successful traveling salesman. When paid less than the promised commission, Riis headed back to New York City in 1873, hoping to train as a telegraph operator, a well-paid occupation. Despite the deep depression following the Panic of 1873, Riis found a night job as a reporter at ten dollars a week to pay for his training, thereby stumbling on his true calling. In 1874, he became editor of a Brooklyn weekly, writing all four pages himself for twenty-four dollars a week. Buk-Swienty admiringly notes that, unlike most adult immigrants who rarely acquire more than rudimentary fluency in English, in four years Riis had become sufficiently at home in his new language to become a successful journalist. In May, 1873, he heard that Elisabeth had become engaged to a war hero of the Danish-German War, which infuriated Riis, who still hoped she would change her mind once he had succeeded in America. He concentrated on his American career. When the owners of his paper agreed in January, 1875, to sell it to him for $675, payable in installments, he became owner of the South Brooklyn News. Late in 1874, Riis learned that Elisabeth’s fiancé had died of tuberculosis before the marriage could take place, rekindling his hopes. In August, 1875, he wrote to Elisabeth, eliciting an angry rejection letter that she gave to Riis’s mother, who decided not to forward it. Elisabeth was estranged from her family and working as a governess to support herself, a position she disliked. In October, she reconsidered her rejection and wrote to Riis explaining that, although she was not in love with him, she appreciated his long devotion to her and would be willing to marry him and try to be a good wife. The two were married in the Ribe cathedral on March 5, 1876. When the couple arrived in

Tom Buk-Swienty was American bureau chief for the Danish newsweekly Weekendavisen for ten years covering the presidential elections of 1996, 2000, and 2004. He returned to Denmark to teach journalism at the University of Southern Denmark. His first work on American themes, AmerikaMaxima, became a Danish best seller in 1999.

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New York early in 1877, Elisabeth was already pregnant with their first son. The marriage became an affectionate union. Elisabeth ran the home and took responsibility for raising the children while Riis devoted long hours to journalism. The paper proved so prosperous under Riis’s management that the previous owners bought it back for three thousand dollars. In 1878, the New York Tribune assigned Riis to the police beat, where his hard work and investigative bent produced scoops that pleased his editors but made him unpopular with fellow reporters, who preferred to depend on police handouts. Spending his working hours at police headquarters in the heart of the slum district, going on raids with police that penetrated deep into the worst areas of the city, and following health inspectors on their rounds, Riis saw aspects of poverty and degradation more dire than he had before experienced. The great Eastern and Southern European migration to the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century poured millions of Italians, Poles, and Jews fleeing Russian pogroms into the city. Landlords provided minimal rents by crowding in as many people as possible. To Riis, the worst was the area he called Mulberry Bend, perhaps the most heavily populated area in the world—less than three acres in size, it held 2,047 people per acre (Buk-Swienty cites in contrast the twenty-first century population density of New York City as 104 per acre). When the district ceased to be desirable, landlords carved single-family homes into small apartments and built ramshackle houses in the back yards, creating a warren of noisome alleys. Even cellars were rented, with entire families living in an underground room without ventilation. Crime and disease flourished, and frequent epidemics ravaged the area, killing especially children and elderly. Buk-Swienty asserts the tenement district both fascinated and repelled Riis. He determined to alert the public through lectures where he could reveal the true extent of the problem more completely than in daily news bulletins, hoping to stimulate immediate reform efforts. Riis was not alone in his endeavor. Settlement house workers aware of conditions in the blighted areas, architects appalled by what they saw, who produced plans to raze and rebuild the tenements, ministers and social workers active in the slums, all shared the same goal as Riis. Buk-Swienty depicts these lectures as particularly powerful because Riis took advantage of a recent technological advance in photography, flash powder. Until then photographers had been limited to taking pictures in daylight or indoors at long exposures under lights. Igniting the powder while the camera lens was open permitted stop-action photography under the dimmest conditions. Amateur photographers interested in testing the new process accompanied Riis on night expeditions, taking pictures at Riis’s direction in the darkest attics and cellars and in the murkiest alleys in the slums. The images were sensational, though of little interest to photographers who thought them ugly; satisfied with the results of their test after a few nights, they withdrew. Riis then trained himself as a photographer, continuing to record the people and living conditions in the slums. Riis never called himself a photographer, claiming he was not very good at taking pictures, but he made photographic history as a pioneer photojournalist. Buk-Swienty asserts this was the first use of photography designed to portray ugliness, dirt, and wretchedness rather than beauty.

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For his lectures, Riis turned the photographs into lantern slides. Projected on a large screen, they provided powerful images that moved people more effectively than the written or spoken word. While continuing his job as a reporter, Riis lectured widely in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. In 1889, Scribner’s Magazine’s Christmas issue printed a twenty-page article based on his lectures, illustrated with woodcuts of his slides. Scribner’s then commissioned a book on the topic. In ten months, while working full time as a reporter, Riis produced How the Other Half Lives: Studies of the Tenements of New York (1890). He explained how previously healthy areas of New York City became slums and then took the reader on a tour of the tenement district, describing the area and introducing the reader to various slum inhabitants. Riis used narrative techniques he had learned from an admired author, Charles Dickens, to put a human face on the horrors he recorded. The impact of Riis’s words was multiplied by fortyfour searing photographs of slum living conditions that shocked reviewers and readers with images they had never seen nor even imagined. Photographs convinced viewers as drawings never could. Buk-Swienty admits that How the Other Half Lives is disfigured by Riis’s frequent use of racist group stereotypes, which make the book uncomfortable to read today. He ascribes the stereotypes to the conventions of the day, arguing that Riis’s descriptions of individual slum residents are usually positive, carrying the message that people who might not look like the reader really shared much in common with the reader. The book became a best seller in 1891, launching Riis’s national reputation as a social critic and reformer. Theodore Roosevelt, then police commissioner of New York City, sought out Riis after reading his book and accompanied him on visits to the worst of the slums. The two teamed to improve police relations with slum dwellers and to call for tenement house reform and elimination of the worst areas. Riis was particularly proud of his role in achieving destruction of Mulberry Bend in 1897 and its transformation into a muchneeded park. The two remained friends throughout Riis’s life. In 1903, Riis published a laudatory campaign biography of Roosevelt and campaigned for him in 1912. Riis produced many books and articles on urban problems in the 1890’s and early twentieth century. His autobiography, The Making of an American (1901), was a major best seller, producing sufficient income for Riis to devote himself to his books and magazine articles. His wife died in 1905 of pneumonia. Two years later, at the age of fifty-eight, he married his thirty-year-old secretary, Mary Phillips. Riis was diagnosed with coronary artery disease in late 1912 and died almost two years later. Buk-Swienty believes that although Riis actively participated in many reform organizations, his major contribution to social reform was as a writer of exposés. He was an early example of the Progressive Era journalists and authors called muckrakers. Although Riis thought of himself as a writer and not a photographer, the rediscovery of his original plates and prints has led to a reevaluation of his achievements and a recognition that he was an accomplished pioneer in that field as well. Milton Berman

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Review Sources American History 43, no. 5 (December, 2008): 68-69. Booklist 104, no. 22 (August 1, 2008): 30. Houston Chronicle, September 7, 2008, p. 14. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 11 (June 1, 2008): 70. Library Journal 133, no. 11 (June 15, 2008): 65. The New York Sun, August 27, 2008, p. 11. The New Yorker 84, no. 29 (September 22, 2008): 91. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 21 (May 26, 2008): 48. San Francisco Chronicle, September 21, 2009, p. M4. The Wall Street Journal 252, no. 47 (August 25, 2008): A11.

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OUR STORY BEGINS New and Selected Stories Author: Tobias Wolff (1945) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 379 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Short fiction A selection of stories from Wolff’s previous collections, along with ten previously uncollected new stories Although Tobias Wolff is probably best known as the author of the memoir This Boy’s Life (1989), an account of his youthful struggles with a brutal stepfather that was made into a 1993 film starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, his critical reputation rests largely on his three collections of short stories. Our Story Begins includes stories from each of these books, as well as ten new ones. His first collection, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981), was well received by critics, several stories becoming favorite anthology pieces read widely by university students. The title story centers on a female history professor who goes for a job interview, only to find out that she has been invited merely to satisfy an affirmative-action requirement. When she presents a public lecture as part of the interview, she ignores her prepared paper and launches into a passionate account of how the Iroquois once captured two Jesuit priests in the area, graphically describing the tortures they suffered. She quotes one of the priests who, just before his agonizing death, tells his torturers to mend their lives. When the professorial audience tries to shout her down, she continues to exhort them to turn from power to love, to walk humbly. She even turns off her hearing aid so she will not be distracted. The story is an example of what Wolff has called “winging it,” which he describes as a kind of “lifting off, letting go,” listening to the voice within and speaking with the “magic of that voice.” Wolff’s most famous example of “winging it” is the concluding story of In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, “The Liar,” for it describes a sixteen-year-old boy who creates his own fictional world, precipitated by the death of his father, with whom the boy identifies because he coped with his fears by telling lies. The story ends with a poetic scene on a bus trip to Los Angeles, during which the boy tells his fellow passengers that he works with refugees from Tibet. When a woman asks him to speak some Tibetan, the others passengers lean back in their seats and close their eyes, while the boy, who knows no Tibetan, sings to them “in what was surely an ancient and holy tongue.” The story is a fiction-writer’s manifesto, a lyrical evocation about the human need to create an imaginative reality that bonds people together even as it asserts one’s own unique identity. “Hunters in the Snow,” another favorite anthology piece from Wolff’s first collec-

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tion, is a caricature of the macho-male buddy story. Tubby is the butt of jokes that his name suggests, stumbling clumsily with hidden snacks falling out of his hunting garb. Kenny is the bullying, sadistic practical joker. Frank is the central consciousness, the philosophic one, who talks of “centering” and going with the “forces” in the natural world, but who has romantic illusions of escaping a loveless marriage by running off with the baby sitter. This comedy of errors culminates when Kenny says Tobias Wolff, the author of eight books, he hates a dog they encounter and then shoots has won the PEN/Malamud Award and it. When he turns to Tub and says he hates the Rea Award for his short fiction. In him, too, the frightened Tubby shoots Kenny addition, he has won the Los Angeles in the stomach. As Tub and Frank make comi- Times Book Prize and the PEN/ cally clumsy attempts to get Kenny to the Faulkner Award. hospital in the back of their pickup, they stop at a cafe for coffee and get into a satiric conversation about friendship and being “really in love,” while Kenny is freezing outside. They both get a big laugh when Frank reveals to Tub that the dog’s owner asked Kenny to shoot it. Because of further comic mistakes and other stops, it seems clear that they will never get Kenny to the hospital in time to save him. However, that seems less important than Tub coming clean about his obsessive eating and Frank spouting still more clichés about love and friendship. The final joke is the last line, when, as Kenny mumbles he is going to the hospital, the reader discovers that he is wrong, for the two men had “taken a different turn a long way back.” In Wolff’s second collection of stories, Back in the World (1985), “Soldier’s Joy” focuses on the search for camaraderie in the army, as one character insists that the Vietnam War was a fulfilling experience for him because it provided a home where he was with friends. Being back in the States, or “back in the world,” he says, lacks order and meaning. The final story in the collection, “The Rich Brother,” another frequent anthology favorite, is, Wolff has said, the closest thing to a fable he has ever written. The prodigal brother Donald is humane, generous, and a financial failure; the older brother Pete is successful, unfeeling, and dissatisfied. In the story, Pete comes to rescue Donald as he has in the past, but Pete gives up on his brother when once more he throws away his money on foolish fantasies and the needs of others. Nevertheless, the story ends with a redemptive change of heart. Wolff demonstrates his careful control of the short-story form best when he follows Anton Chekhov’s famous dictum that it is better to say too little than too much. “Say Yes,” also from Wolff’s second collection, is a short, deceptively simple, piece. The initiating situation is a trivial, domestic one, and the characters, ordinary people, exist primarily to illustrate the points of view important to the story’s conflict. The simple situation soon develops into a significant universal conflict for no other reason

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than the participants are husband and wife, and therefore, in the tenuousness of that relationship, they are always hovering on the edge of conflict and collapse. The story is not about a minor conflict in the life of a particular couple, but rather it is an exploration of the ultimate strangeness of others, no matter how confident an individual may be that he “knows” another individual. The story suggests that strangeness or difference is not skin-deep but profound and universal. Wolff’s third collection, The Night in Question (1996), received more positive reviews than Back in the World. It would seem that Wolff also likes these stories better than his earlier ones. He includes only four or five stories from each of the first two collections, but he includes twelve from the third one. Wolff continues to explore a favorite theme in this collection: the substitution of an imaginative reality for the unsatisfactory or unworthy real one. For example, in the story “Firelight,” a boy and his mother play fantasy shopping games by trying on clothes they know they cannot afford. When the boy finds out that his mother once turned down a marriage proposal from an all-American football player, he scolds her, complaining that they could be rich now. Wolff also continues to focus on another favorite theme here—the importance of story itself. In “The Night in Question,” the story is not a simple moral exemplum but a complex challenge to one’s own reason for being. However, some of the stories in Wolff’s third collection suggest a slackening from his earlier work. Some are merely concept stories, clever and well told, but predictable and pat. “Mortals” is a “what if” story, based on the premise of “what if” an obituary writer, acting on misinformation, writes an obituary for a man who has not died? “What if” the misinformation came from the man himself? What would such a story reveal? Not a great deal, as it turns out, when the two men get together and reflect on the limits of their own lives. Similarly, “The Chain” develops the implications of what would happen if a man committed an act of revenge for another man, who later feels compelled to commit an act of revenge in return. What if these acts set into motion other, unforeseen acts that continue in an unbroken chain of reverberations? Another “what if” story in the third collection is “Bullet in the Brain,” a sort of writer’s revenge tale about a book critic, who, while waiting in line at a bank, cannot resist critiquing the dialogue of a bank robber, ridiculing his use of such language as “dead meat” and “capiche” as clichés, until the robber shoots him in the head. Wolff then explores in the moments before the critic dies all those things he did not remember, singling out one seemingly inconsequential incident in his youth, the kind of moment that only a writer would remember. The ten new stories included here, which originally appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Playboy, suggest a man who has accepted himself as a professional writer, who knows he can get well paid for publishing stories in such places, who is comfortably established in residence at Stanford University, who knows how to exploit the short-story form well, but who does not always challenge himself to go beyond his obvious competency. For example, “A White Bible” is a conventional story that hooks the reader with pop-fiction suspense when a young female teacher is kidnapped by a man as she re-

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turns to her car after a night drinking with friends. However, the reader’s anxiety that the woman is going to be brutally assaulted is defused when the story changes into a thematic tale of cultural conflict. The kidnapper is a Middle Eastern immigrant whose son has been flunked in the woman’s class, and he is demanding that the teacher not have the boy expelled. She quickly takes control of the situation, even eliciting an apology from the contrite man. The weakest story in this new set is “Her Dog,” an inconsequential piece about a man whose wife has died and who now cares for her dog, a dog that he ignored when she was alive. Although the theme is potentially significant, Wolff’s treatment, in which the reader is privy to the dog’s thoughts about how faithful he has always been, is sentimental and a bit banal. There is, nevertheless, still some of the old Wolff evident in these stories. “Awaiting Orders” is a complex story about a gay sergeant who tries to help a woman whose brother, recently sent to Iraq, has neglected his duties to his child. The sergeant’s kindness and the woman’s tough hillbilly strength create a memorable confrontation. Similarly, “A Mature Student,” an encounter between a female ex-soldier and her art professor, an immigrant who betrayed her friends during the Russian invasion of Prague in the 1960’s, is a subtle exploration of the nature of cowardice. In the final story, “Deep Kiss,” Wolff returns to his signature theme—the superiority of the imagined life over the merely real—as a man lives a “submerged life” parallel to his actual existence. This story’s theme is one that Chekhov explored definitively in his classic “Lady with a Pet Dog,” about a man who leads a double life—one in public, full of conventional truth, and another that “flowed in secret.” Wolff’s stories, like many great short stories, reflect the secret of the form that Chekhov knew well: “Every individual existence revolves around mystery.” Charles E. May

Review Sources America 198, no. 14 (April 28, 2008): 31-33. The Atlantic Monthly 301, no. 3 (April, 2008): 107. Booklist 104, nos. 9/10 (January 1, 2008): 45. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 5 (March 1, 2008): 217-218. Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2008, p. R1. New Criterion 26, no. 10 (June, 2008): 87-89. The New York Times, March 28, 2008, p. 29. The New York Times Book Review, March 30, 2008, p. 10. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 48 (December 3, 2007): 46-47. Review of Contemporary Fiction 28, no. 2 (Summer, 2008): 170-171. The Times Literary Supplement, August 1, 2008, p. 19. The Washington Post Book World, April 13, 2008, p. BW06.

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A PASSION FOR NATURE The Life of John Muir Author: Donald Worster (1941) Publisher: Oxford University Press (New York). 533 pp. $34.95 Type of work: Biography Time: 1838-1914 Locale: Scotland, Wisconsin, and California A definitive new biography of one of the United States’ foremost naturalists, conservationists, and environmentalists Principal personages: John Muir, an American naturalist, conservationist, and environmentalist Daniel Muir, his father Ann Muir, his mother Louie (Strentzel) Muir, his wife John Burroughs, a friend and fellow American naturalist Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth U.S. president and a friend of John Muir

One of the great figures in the nineteenth century American conservation movement, John Muir is most often identified with California, where he spent most of his adult life and where he came to be identified so closely with the Sierra Nevada and Yosemite Park that his formative years tend to be neglected. Now environmental historian Donald Worster has written A Passion for Nature, sure to become the definitive Muir biography, in which he chronicles Muir’s childhood and early years that helped to shape his deep passion for the natural world. The first Muir biography to meet modern standards of scholarship, this book makes use of Muir’s hitherto unavailable private correspondence. Worster describes how Muir’s love of the outdoors grew out of a rebellion against his strict, fundamentalist upbringing, his early interest in botany, the natural beauty of the Wisconsin frontier, and his strong desire to explore exotic places, including Florida and California. Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, on April 21, 1838, the third of eight children of a zealous and restless Scotsman, a successful grain merchant who impulsively decided to immigrate to America in 1849 to enjoy greater freedom to practice his extremely fundamentalist Campbellite beliefs and try his hand at homesteading in the Midwest. As the oldest son, Muir suffered from his father’s heavy-handed patriarchal rule, with its strict work ethic, harsh physical punishments, and many prohibitions, based on his Calvinistic view of human nature. He later remembered the Scottish countryside as his one escape from the oppressiveness of his home life. Arriving in the frontier of central Wisconsin, the Muir family homesteaded in

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a sandy tract of land in Marquette County near the confluence of the Fox and Wisconsin Donald Worster is the Hall Rivers. The eleven-year-old Muir was at first Distinguished Professor of American exhilarated by “that glorious Wisconsin wil- History at the University of Kansas and derness,” as he later called it, but he was soon the author of many books, including A worn down by the physical rigors of pioneer River Running West: The Life of John life and his father’s expectation that his sons Wesley Powell (2001); The Wealth of would bear the brunt of clearing the land and Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (1993); Dust removing the stumps. The frequent whippings Bowl: The Southern Plains in the and sermons Muir endured as an adolescent 1930’s (1979), winner of the Bancroft strengthened his rebellion and his determina- Prize; and Nature’s Economy: A tion to leave home as soon as possible. Though History of Ecological Ideas (1977). the Muir children were obviously bright, they received little formal schooling beyond scriptural readings, so with his meager earnings Muir bought himself a small private library and developed an interest in travel narratives. Muir showed an early mechanical aptitude that promised an escape from the drudgery of farm work. His exhibition of his homemade inventions at the Wisconsin State Fair led to an invitation to study at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, though he could not afford to stay to finish his degree. Instead, he left for Canada to avoid the Civil War draft and worked in Ontario for two years before returning to the United States. An unfortunate industrial accident in an Indianapolis carriage factory left Muir temporarily blinded and in 1867 motivated him to embark on a thousand-mile botanizing walk through the South to Florida, where he stopped in Key West to recuperate after contracting malaria and then sailed for Cuba. He had hoped to follow Alexander Von Humboldt’s footsteps and explore the Amazon, but instead he changed his plans and sailed to California in 1868. After arriving in San Francisco, Muir headed for Yosemite Valley and spent his first summer in the Sierras as a shepherd. That experience awakened in him a deep passion for the California mountains, and he recorded in his journals: “I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer.” Though he hated the destructiveness of the sheep, Muir appreciated the freedom to wander in and explore Yosemite Valley and its surroundings. He had enormous physical strength and vitality, and he could hike all day on nothing but bread and water. He often risked life and limb in scaling perilous cliff faces and glacier fields. Once he climbed a tall sugar pine to swing back and forth, experiencing the exhilaration of a Sierra windstorm. Muir settled in Yosemite and worked as a tour guide as he began to ponder the geology of these mountains and how they had been shaped. He took part in several scientific surveys and gradually became a knowledgeable, self-taught field geologist. An accomplished mountaineer, he climbed most of the high peaks in California, including Mount Ritter, Mount Whitney, and Mount Shasta. During his field excursions, Muir carefully noted the signs of recent glaciation and gradually developed his glacial theory of the formation of Yosemite Valley and the California Sierras, which

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was at odds with the conventional Uniformitarian theories of the time. He was later vindicated by other scientists. An abstract of his field studies of glaciers was published by the American Academy of Sciences. He collected alpine plant specimens for the distinguished Harvard botanist Asa Grey. After he returned to San Francisco, he began to publish travel and natural history essays about the California Nevadas in The Overland Monthly, Harper’s, and The Century. The spiritual influence of the mountains also gradually led him to abandon his orthodox fundamentalist Christianity and embrace a mystical pantheism. He felt a deep connection to the rest of nature. “Come to the mountains and get their glad tidings,” he proclaimed. He believed that climbing mountains elicits intellectual and spiritual elevation. He came to “worship all of God’s works” because, for him, “the laws of Nature were only another way of saying the laws of God.” He began to write travel and natural history essays for California newspapers and magazines extolling his wilderness ethic. A fervent egalitarian, Muir linked democracy and nature in his mind. At Yosemite he discovered that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” He became a firm Darwinist and rejected all biblical notions of Creation, though toward the end of his life he became more conventionally religious, more of a Deist than a pantheist. When Ralph Waldo Emerson traveled to California in 1871, he asked to meet Muir, who guided him through Yosemite Valley. Muir began to be viewed as the Transcendentalist successor to Emerson and Henry Thoreau. Muir gradually became more active in California conservation efforts. He protested the destruction of California’s forests and the hydraulic mining that ravaged forests and rivers. He spoke out to save the last groves of sequoias from cutting, including the largest, the General Sherman Tree. In addition, he protested against the burning of forests by sheep men and the destruction of mountain meadows and wildflowers by the ravening hordes of sheep. In 1879, Muir made the first of his seven trips to Alaska, where he risked his life exploring the glaciers in Glacier Bay to find evidence of glacial activity. He returned with the famous story of Stickeen, the heroic dog who accompanied him on his explorations of the glaciers. About this time, Muir was introduced to his future wife, Louie Strentzel, the only child of parents who owned a large fruit and vineyard ranch in the central California valley. After their marriage in 1880, Muir took over the daily operation and management of Alhambra, the Strentzel estate, but that did not prevent him from making annual excursions, though his wife preferred to remain at home with their two daughters, Wanda and Helen. In 1881, he was invited to accompany an official American survey along the Alaska coast. Muir would spend the next twenty years alternating between his farming responsibilities and his desire to return to the wilderness. He became active in the Grange Movement and gradually assumed increasingly important leadership roles in the state and national conservation and parks movements. He was one of the founding members of the Sierra Club in 1886, and he used his influence to promote a public appreciation of the outdoors. Muir believed that “there is a love of wild nature in everybody.” In 1893, he was urged by his admirers to collect his magazine articles and essays

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into his first book, The Mountains of California, which was published in 1894. Despite his reputation as an eccentric loner, Muir was actually a warm, gregarious person and a great conversationalist who had many friends and admirers. His vitality and exuberant love of nature taught Americans of the Gilded Age to enjoy outdoor exercise and natural history. Wealthy businessmen and prominent leaders sought his company on their wilderness excursions, including the railroad baron Edward Harrison, as well as Emerson and Theodore Roosevelt, both of whom became close friends of Muir. Muir’s prominence as an author and naturalist gradually drew him into the controversies over the formation of Yosemite National Park and the fate of Hetch Hetchy Valley, which Muir believed should be preserved because it was as spectacular as Yosemite Valley. Despite his efforts, it was ultimately dammed in 1913 to create a reservoir for the city of San Francisco. Muir advocated public ownership of wilderness and spent the last decade of his life fighting to preserve the legacy of the parks and conservation movement after it split into the “wise use” and preservationist factions. He was one of the United States’ first and best park naturalists and guides. Along with his friend John Burroughs, Muir became a prominent voice during the Progressive Era, developing a love of nature and the outdoors into a post-Calvinistic wilderness ethic. Muir split with his old friend Gifford Pinchot over the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley and the extent of mining and logging that should be permitted on federal lands. Though Muir understood that some resource extraction was inevitable, he fought to protect national parks and forests from uncontrolled greed and avarice. Muir saw the publication of four of his major books during his lifetime—The Mountains of California, Our National Parks (1901), The Yosemite (1912), and The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913)—and he left several other book manuscripts to be published posthumously, including A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916) and My First Summer in the Sierras (1916). Otherwise, his last years were marked by illness and loss. His wife Louie died of pneumonia in 1905, and Muir and his daughter Helen wintered in Arizona for health reasons. Muir’s lung problems were persistent, and he eventually died of pneumonia in Los Angeles in 1913. Despite this book’s overall excellence, Worster does not present a literary biography. Instead, his A Passion for Nature presents Muir more as a public figure than as an author or natural history writer. Worster does not sufficiently evaluate Muir’s literary reputation or importance as an American nature writer. After all, Muir was considered an important enough writer to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1912, and he received honorary degrees from Harvard and University of California at Berkeley. The issues of how Muir developed the post-Transcendentalist tradition of American nature writing and the extent of his legacy as a nature writer still need to be addressed. Andrew J. Angyal

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Review Sources American Scientist 96, no. 6 (November/December, 2008): 508-510. Booklist 105, no. 14 (October 15, 2008): 7. Library Journal 133, no. 16 (October 1, 2008): 91. Science 322 (November 7, 2008): 859-860.

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PEOPLE OF THE BOOK Author: Geraldine Brooks (1955) Publisher: Viking Penguin (New York). 372 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1480 and 1492; 1609; 1894; 1940, 1996, and 2002 Locale: Tarragona and Seville, Spain; Venice, Italy; Vienna, Austria; Sarajevo, Bosnia A valuable Jewish manuscript, dating from medieval Spain, has been preserved at the National Museum in Sarajevo, Bosnia; this fictional story imagines how the book might have survived through five hundred years of historical turmoil Principal characters: Hanna Heath, a young woman from Australia, an expert on medieval manuscripts Ozren Karaman, librarian at the Sarajevo National Museum who rescued valuable artifacts during the Serbian siege Lola, a Jewish girl who joins the partisans in fighting against the German occupation Serif Kamal, the chief librarian at the National Museum, a Muslim Lela Kamal, his wife who befriends Lola General Faber, a German commandant who directs the ethnic cleansing of the city Franz Hirschfeldt, a Jewish physician who treats clients having venereal diseases Florien Mittl, a bookbinder with advanced syphilis Judah Aryeh, a Jewish rabbi Domenico Vistorini, a Catholic priest who censors books suspected of containing heresy Reyna de Serena, a wealthy Jewish woman who pretends to be a Catholic convert King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, rulers during the Spanish Inquisition David ben-Shoushan, a Jewish scribe Ruti, his daughter Reuben, his son, who converted in order to marry a Catholic girl Zahra, an African slave girl who has a talent for artwork The Emir, a tyrannical Muslim ruler with a harem of concubines and eunuchs Nura, a Catholic young woman in the harem, captured in war Netanel ha-Levi, a respected Jewish physician Benjamin, his son who is deaf and dumb

Geraldine Brooks is an accomplished writer with a broad repertoire. She wrote for The Wall Street Journal as a foreign correspondent, reporting from Bosnia, Somalia,

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and other locations of conflict. Her observations as a journalist formed the background for two books about current international issues. More recently, she made a name for herself with two novels of historical fiction. One of these, a Civil War novel entitled March, received the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for 2006. People of the Book is based on the remarkable survival of a fifteenth century Jewish haggadah, a manuscript that tells the story of the exodus from Egypt, to be used at the anGeraldine Brooks, born and raised in nual Passover celebration. This book, with its Australia, was a correspondent for The colorful illustrations, somehow survived the Wall Street Journal in Bosnia, Somalia, and other war zones. She has published Spanish Inquisition, the Catholic Church’s book burnings in Italy, looting by German two works of nonfiction: Nine Parts of troops during World War II, and the SerbianDesire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (1995) and Foreign Bosnian civil war in the 1990’s. While Brooks Correspondence: A Pen Pal’s Journey was a correspondent in Sarajevo, Bosnia, she from Down Under to All Over (1998). heard the dramatic, true story of the Muslim Her Civil War novel, titled March librarian who put himself into personal dan(2005), won the Pulitzer Prize. ger to rescue the book from destruction. She was inspired to write an imaginative account of the people who might have been involved in creating and preserving this cultural treasure through five centuries of human history. The story begins in 1996 in Sarajevo, shortly after U.N. troops had brought an end to the three-year Serbian siege of the city. Hanna Heath, a feisty, young Australian woman who is an expert in preservation of medieval manuscripts, has been called in to prepare the haggadah for a public exposition. Hanna is picked up at the Sarajevo airport by a U.N. armored car and is driven to the bank where the manuscript was hidden in a vault when Serbians were shelling the city. Brooks gives a vivid description of the destruction of the once-beautiful city as seen through Hanna’s eyes: “We passed an apartment block that looked like the dollhouse I’d had as a girl, where the entire front wall lifted off to reveal the rooms within. In this block, the wall had been peeled away by an explosion . . . . As we sped by, I realized that people were somehow still living there, their only protection a few sheets of plastic billowing in the wind.” At the bank, Hanna is introduced to Ozren Karaman, the chief librarian at the Bosnian National Museum. During the Serbian bombardment, he personally had carried various valuable objects, including the haggadah, from the museum to the bank for storage. Karaman symbolizes the human suffering of civilians in wartime, his wife having been killed by a sniper and his son left in a coma because of a brain injury. Hanna works for several days on the technical aspect of repairing the manuscript, but she becomes fascinated by several unusual clues that give hints where the book may

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have been during its five-hundred-year history. Among the pages she finds a white hair, an insect wing, a reddish stain, and the signature of an Italian book censor, and she notes that the clasp to hold the pages together is missing. Each clue leads to a fictional episode in the history of the book. The first episode takes place in 1940 after German troops had marched into Sarajevo. General Faber, the Nazi commandant, had orders to cleanse the city of Jews and Serbs by deporting them to labor camps. Lola, a teenage Jewish girl who escapes by wearing a Muslim headscarf that hides her face, is rescued by Serif Kamal and his wife, who pretend that she is their family servant. Serif works at the National Museum, where the haggadah is one of its most valuable treasures. General Faber wants to confiscate the book for himself, but the museum director tricks him into thinking that the museum no longer has it. Serif then carries the manuscript to a nearby village, where a butterfly wing accidentally is caught between its pages. Serif finds a perfect hiding place for the haggadah in the library of the local mosque between two volumes of Islamic law. Lola survives the Nazi genocide and the manuscript survives confiscation only through the courageous efforts of a dedicated Muslim. The next episode takes place in 1894 in Vienna, Austria, where the haggadah had been sent from the regional museum in Sarajevo for rebinding. Brooks gives a negative description of fashionable Vienna toward the end of the nineteenth century as a “capital of carnality,” with frequent sexual scandals in the news. Franz Hirschfeldt is a Jewish doctor who treats wealthy, aristocratic clients for venereal disease. Florien Mittl is a bookbinder who is desperate for medical help to treat his advanced case of syphilis. The museum has given him the job of rebinding the haggadah. Since he does not have the money for a treatment, he gives Hirschfeldt in payment the ornate silver clasp of the manuscript. The clasp that was missing when Hanna inspected the manuscript a hundred years later was made into a beautiful set of earrings. As a participant in Vienna’s casual morality, Hirschfeldt has both a wife and a mistress, putting him into a frivolous quandary as to which woman deserves the earrings more. Going further back in time, the third episode in the history of the haggadah takes place at Venice, Italy, in 1609. Judah Aryeh is a Jewish rabbi who has formed a friendship with a Catholic priest, Domenico Vistorini, who was appointed by the Vatican as the official censor of heresy. (To create the character of Aryeh and his life in Venice, Brooks gives credit to a 1988 book titled The Autobiography of a Seventeenth Century Venetian Rabbi.) In the story, a wealthy woman, Reyna de Serena, makes a generous donation to Aryeh for support of Jews in the ghetto, and she also entrusts him with her haggadah in order to obtain the censor’s approval for its content. During the Carnival season just before Lent, people can wear masks in public, which hides their identity. Aryeh, who has an unfortunate addiction to gambling, puts on a mask that enables him to leave the ghetto after curfew and to enter a Venetian gambling parlor where Jews are not permitted. Brooks gives a vivid description of Aryeh’s emotions as he first doubles Serena’s money but eventually loses everything. The haggadah then becomes the focus of an intense, theological argument between the rabbi and the priest in which both men reach a personal crisis. The fourth fictional episode takes place in Spain in 1492, when the Spanish Inqui-

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sition was at its worst. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella believed that the just completed defeat of the Muslim infidels at Granada was “a sign of divine will that Spain be a Christian country. It is then their intention to thank God for their victory by declaring Spain a land where no Jew may remain.” The king signs a decree of expulsion, stating that all Jews either have to convert to Christianity or have to leave the country immediately. The family of an elderly Jewish scribe, David ben-Shoushan, is caught in this situation. David is preparing a haggadah in Hebrew script for his nephew’s wedding. To accompany the text, he has purchased a set of biblical illustrations. His son, Reuben, who has converted to Catholicism in order to marry a Christian girl, has been arrested by the Inquisition. The explicit description of what his torturers do to him makes for gory reading. David’s daughter, Ruti, is away from home when soldiers come and kill her father. Ruti survives the persecution by wearing a Christian woman’s clothing. She carries the haggadah to the harbor at Tarragona, Spain, from where some of the more fortunate Jews were able to escape to Italy by ship. In the final episode, Brooks imagines how the colorful illustrations that accompany the haggadah might have been created. Zahra is a young African girl who is captured by Berbers, taken to Spain, and sold as a slave. Her new owner instructs her how to draw, using a single white hair from a cat, tiny pictures on a grain of rice. Her talent as an artist brings her to the palace of a despotic Muslim emir who demands a painting of the current favorite concubine in his harem. When the emir is overthrown by a revolt, Zahra is taken in by a Jewish doctor’s family, which includes a deaf-mute son, Benjamin. She hears Bible stories read from the Old Testament, some of which parallel those in the Qur$3n. Zahra makes it her mission to illustrate the biblical narratives so that Benjamin can understand and appreciate the history of his people. The five episodes in People of the Book are independent short stories, tied together by the survival of a valuable manuscript. A similar format was used successfully in the popular novel The Girl in Hyacinth Blue (1999) by Susan Vreeland, in which fictional anecdotes were used to trace a painting back to the time of the seventeenth century Dutch artist Jan Vermeer. Brooks has created a series of memorable characters who struggle with problems of intolerance, persecution, and the social upheavals of their time. There is a subplot in the book that deals with the life and personality of Hanna, the Australian woman who had come to Sarajevo to examine the manuscript. As a teenager, she had rebelled against a domineering mother, and that conflict had never been resolved. Hanna’s story seems extraneous to the historical episodes, which are the core of the novel. Brooks is a talented storyteller whose writing gives an engrossing view of the human drama in its historical settings. Hans G. Graetzer

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Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 3 (October 1, 2007): 5. The Christian Century 125, no. 25 (December 16, 2008): 26. Elle 23, no. 5 (January, 2008): 77. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 21 (November 1, 2007): 1116. Library Journal 132, no. 18 (November 1, 2007): 58. New York 41, no. 3 (January 21, 2008): 94. The New Yorker 84, no. 1 (February 11, 2008): 153. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 39 (October 1, 2007): 34. School Library Journal 54, no. 4 (April, 2008): 172. The Times Literary Supplement, February 22, 2008, p. 120. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 9 (January 11, 2008): W2.

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A PERSON OF INTEREST Author: Susan Choi (1969) Publisher: Viking Penguin (New York). 356 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: Unspecified year in the first decade of the twentyfirst century Locale: A small college town in Midwest United States Choi’s story of a professor, whose life changes dramatically when a colleague is killed in the adjoining office and he becomes a “person of interest” to the federal agents trying to identify who mailed the deadly bomb Principal characters: Lee, an Asian-born professor of mathematics in his late sixties Rick Hendley, a popular young mathematics professor, victim of a bomb in his office Lewis Gaither, a graduate student with Lee decades earlier Aileen, Gaither’s wife, who married and divorced Lee prior to her death John Gaither, son of Lewis and Aileen born shortly after Aileen left Lewis Michiko, Lee’s second wife, long since divorced Esther, Lee and Aileen’s daughter, estranged from Lee Jim Morrison, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who tracks Lee Frank Fanso, a former colleague Lee had admired but was not close to The Brain Bomber, the media nickname for killer who writes manifesto saying the smartest scientists should be destroyed

Lee, whose first name is never given, was born in an unspecified Asian country but has been in the United States most of his life. He is in his late sixties, nearing the end of a rather mundane career in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at an undistinguished university in a small town in the Midwest. He lives alone, and he is in general distanced from the community and the college. Not ready to retire from teaching because he has nothing else to do, he foresees none of the upheavals that will change his set routines and force him to reevaluate his entire life history. As Susan Choi’s novel A Person of Interest opens, Lee is realizing that he had never liked the bomb victim, his colleague Professor Hendley, and that much of that dislike was because, unlike himself, Hendley was young and popular with students. Their offices were next to each other, and Lee jealously noticed that students seldom came to see him, but there were often lines of students eager to talk with Hendley. Both professors, however, are alone in their offices when Hendley opens a small packet he has received through campus mail and it explodes in his face. Lee is knocked over by the blast, and it is a student who first sees Hendley and calls for help.

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Hendley is taken to intensive care at the local Susan Choi has a B.A. in Literature hospital, where he dies a few days later. No culprit is immediately identified, and from Yale University and an M.F.A. rumors abound. Lee is startled when it begins from Cornell University. In addition to to appear that he is being singled out for more three novels, she has published several than routine questioning by the FBI agents short stories and coauthored with who are pursuing the case. Lee does not at- David Remnick an anthology of stories tend the campuswide memorial ceremony for from The New Yorker. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2004. Hendley, and his absence is noticed. Soon, all the office staff, so important in every department, are avoiding him, and faculty and students in groups suddenly stop talking when he appears. Attendance in his classes dwindles. Although Lee has had tenure for more than twenty years, the chair of the department informs him that another faculty member will take over his classes for the remainder of the spring semester and will teach his summer class. Things become even worse when the FBI refers to him as “a person of interest,” not necessarily a suspect but someone who has information about the case. Agent Jim Morrison believes Lee knows a lot more about the case than he has told them. Television and newspaper media pick up on this aspect, and Lee’s name is always mentioned in conjunction with the fatal explosion. When major newspapers and journals across the country publish an anonymous manifesto by someone, now referred to as the Brain Bomber, who says that all the brightest scientists should be killed before they create more harm in the world (there would have been no atom bomb without an Albert Einstein, for example), Lee finds himself not just ostracized but constantly plagued by the media and the FBI agents. He is forced to take a polygraph test, which first seems to exonerate him but then is discarded because statistics suggest that the “lie detector” is not reliable when administered to people from certain groups, including Asians. Complicating things for Lee and for the investigating agents is that immediately after the fatal bombing, Lee receives a long, unsigned letter, although Lee knows its source. The letter is from a disliked acquaintance from his past, Lewis Gaither, who says he has read about the bombing and wants to know if Lee is safe. Lee knows there is more to it than apparent concern; it is a taunting and an unwelcome reminder of long-ago events. In an extended flashback, the reader learns that decades earlier Lee had been in graduate school with Gaither, and what started as a tentative friendship between them had ended badly. Gaither, less capable at math than Lee, was an ardent fundamentalist Christian who always wanted to convert people. He had insisted Lee accompany him and his wife to an evangelical gathering, but the result was unexpected. When Lee met Aileen, he learned she was equally antithetical to Gaither’s religious fervor, and they soon began a secretive affair. When Lee learned that Aileen was pregnant with Gaither’s child, he ended their relationahip. Aileen, however, had no wish to stay with Gaither, and soon she left him and wrote to Lee. They married, but Gaither insisted on having the baby boy, John, and tricked Aileen into signing a document that gave him

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full custody. Lee now remembers with shame that he was glad not to have Gaither’s baby around, and, although he and Aileen eventually had a baby girl, Esther, he knows Aileen had wanted her son, too. Lee blames Gaither for the unhappiness of his marriage, though he eventually recognizes it was in large part because of Lee’s resentment at having a wife who had been Gaither’s. Aileen died when their daughter Esther was fourteen. Lee thinks his second marriage, to Michiko, a Japanese woman who, it turned out, primarily wanted a way to become an American citizen, was also tainted by his distrust in the idea of closeness as manifested in his relationship with Aileen. Lee is guilt-ridden and angry at the letter from Lewis. He writes back, but his letter is returned, addressee unknown. The FBI agents, who have been checking all campus mail, ask Lee about the letter, and Lee lies and says he has thrown it away. The agents search his house. Jim Morrison becomes increasingly interested in what Lee might be hiding. Lee is certain now that Gaither is the bomber, and he tells this to Morrison. A few days later, Morrison claims that Gaither is dead, so Lee must still be withholding information. Lee becomes increasingly disoriented, stressed, and insomniac as the FBI pursues him. He has no friends, and the only lawyer he knows is his divorce lawyer, who tells Lee this case is beyond his expertise. Lee would like to believe his daughter Esther would be among those who read about his situation and somehow come to rescue him, but for many years he has not even known her whereabouts. Frank Fanso, a former colleague who had left for a more prestigious university, does read about him and phones Lee, but there is little Frank can suggest to solve the case and thus remove Lee as a suspect. Often operating only at the level of hallucination and panic, Lee knows he is the one who needs to find the Brain Bomber, but he has no idea how to do so. Another mail delivery brings further complications. Lee receives a brown envelope that contains a page from his dissertation—a page, not a duplicated copy. He surreptitiously sneaks into the university library to the section that contains one of only three copies of his dissertation, and he finds that indeed the page has been cut from his work. Why is Gaither or, if he is dead, someone else determined to stalk and frame him so thoroughly? What the novel does brilliantly is to take the reader into the increasingly tortured mind of a fairly ordinary man when he is faced with the perilous unknown. At one point, Lee is hiding in his bedroom. From his bed, he looks in the mirror on the dresser, seeing the reflected images of part of the windows and beyond to the crowd of neighbors outside who are gathered to watch with glee the FBI agents and television reporters coming to the house of someone they do not know but are ready to consider guilty. What mathematician Lee sees in the mirror is, he thinks, “the simplest geometry, the angles of incidence and reflection,” but clearly it is also symbolic of his entire situation at this point. The unexpected incidents that have occurred have forced him to reflect on what led to his being in his present miserable situation. Only by exhaustive examination of his past and of the kind of person he really is (apart from the idea of himself that he has created) does he have a chance to do anything to ameliorate the current predicament.

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In addition to Lee’s intense self-examination, which leads him to revise his view of himself and others when secrets he has buried even from himself are unexpectedly uncovered, another theme that resonates throughout the novel is the ease with which outsiders can garner information about anyone. The Brain Bomber clearly has access to intimate knowledge of Lee and his career as well as his current address and situation. The media, insatiable in the quest for sensational copy related to the case, are careless of truth in what they print and report. The FBI has no qualms about searching Lee’s house, tailing him (sometimes as many as six cars follow him around), tapping his telephone, or intercepting his mail. His garbage containers are suddenly emptied on a day when the sanitation department is not due. He does not have a cell phone, but if he did his every location could be easily traced, and similarly if he used a computer his e-mail and all Internet activity could be tracked. Fingerprints on letters become an issue, and if there were DNA evidence that, too, would be under scrutiny. Even more glaring, concerning human rights, is the fact that Lee is essentially used as bait in the effort to capture the killer. Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student (1998), won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, and her second, American Woman (2003), loosely based on the life of Patty Hearst, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. A Person of Interest has been widely reviewed and critically acclaimed and was a finalist for the PEN/ Faulkner Award. Increasingly, her fiction is particularly noted for its literary style and for her often poetic use of language. In A Person of Interest, Choi repeatedly demonstrates that she knows how to use language to build tension and suspense, although the whodunit detective fiction aspect of the novel is less in the foreground than her creation of the main character, Lee, and her in-depth portrayal of his mental state as the plot unfolds. Lois A. Marchino

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 8 (December 15, 2007): 24. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 21 (November 1, 2007): 1117. Los Angeles Times, February 3, 2008, p. R3. The New York Times Book Review, February 17, 2008, p. 9. The New Yorker 84, no. 3 (March 3, 2008): 83. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 44 (November 5, 2007): 41. The Village Voice 53, no. 5 (January 30, 2008): 47. Vogue 198, no. 2 (February, 2008): 25. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 15 (January 18, 2008): W2. The Washington Post Book World, February 24, 2008, p. BW07.

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PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood Author: Mark Harris (1963) Publisher: Penguin Press (New York). 490 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Film Time: 1963-1968 Locale: Los Angeles, New York City, Texas, Illinois, Tennessee, England, St. Lucia Five films released in 1967 reflect major changes in Hollywood Principal personages: Warren Beatty, actor and producer Arthur Penn, director Robert Benton, screenwriter David Newman, screenwriter Mike Nichols, director Buck Henry, screenwriter and actor Dustin Hoffman, actor Norman Jewison, director Stirling Silliphant, screenwriter Hal Ashby, film editor Sidney Poitier, actor Rod Steiger, actor Stanley Kramer, director and producer Katharine Hepburn, actor Spencer Tracy, actor Arthur P. Jacobs, producer Leslie Bricusse, screenwriter and composer Rex Harrison, actor Jack Warner, studio executive Darryl F. Zanuck, studio executive

Film scholars have long contended that 1967 represented a turning point for American films. Since the advent of television in the early 1950’s, the Hollywood studios had been struggling to retain their audience, trying gimmicks such as 3-D, widescreen processes such as CinemaScope, and large-scale biblical epics, adventure films, and musicals, anything to make Americans think they were missing something bigger and better by staying at home and staring at the tiny, usually black-and-white box. American films remained aimed at the mythical average viewer, meaning white, middle class, and middle aged. As a result, the studios continued in the 1960’s to turn out products that imitated each other, whether Doris Day sex comedies or James Bond spy thrillers. According to Mark Harris in Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, “emotional ambiguity and grown-up sexuality

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were virtually black market items in Ameri can films of the time.” When The Sound of For fifteen years, Mark Harris was a Music (1965) became the all-time box-office writer and editor covering films, champion, the studios rushed to make more television, and books at Entertainment big films based on Broadway musicals. Hol- Weekly, where he now writes the Final lywood faced, writes Harris, “a creative low Cut column. Pictures at a Revolution is his first book. A graduate of Yale point in the sound era.” What the Hollywood executives refused University, Harris lives in New York City with his husband, playwright Tony to recognize was that there was not one audiKushner. ence but a cluster of audiences: men, women, children, teenagers, college students, African Americans, and others defined by age, ethnicity, sexuality, education, and income. Then along came two films that no one initially wanted to produce—Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, both released in 1967—to shake the foundations of the studio system. Harris examines these two films and contrasts them to the three other films nominated for Academy Awards as the best pictures of 1967: the interracial romance-family drama Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the family musical Doctor Doolittle, and the murder mystery with racial overtones In the Heat of the Night. The heroes of Harris’s engrossing tale are the Bonnie and Clyde contingent of screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman, director Arthur Penn, and, especially, producer-star Warren Beatty; director Mike Nichols, screenwriter Buck Henry, and star Dustin Hoffman of The Graduate; and Sidney Poitier, star of both In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The villain is Rex Harrison, the egotistical star of Doctor Doolittle. Harris also offers sympathetic portraits of Arthur P. Jacobs, bumbling producer of Doctor Doolittle, and the somewhat-out-oftouch Stanley Kramer, director-producer of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. In his evenhanded, nonjudgmental manner, Harris shows how complicated film production is, a process too often marred by compromise, infighting, jealousy, insecurity, incompetence, and the unexpected, as with the unpredictable weather and uncooperative animal performers plaguing the already-over-budget Doctor Doolittle. Harris provides a detailed production history for each film, from inception to financing to completion to public display and beyond. Benton and Newman took the mythical American story of 1930’s bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow and imbued it with such influences as the films of French Nouvelle Vague directors François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard to make it a completely different kind of crime film. The screenwriters wanted Bonnie and Clyde to be the first American film made in the New Wave style, with an elliptical narrative and strong sexual content, and they wanted to turn the protagonists into antiestablishment antiheroes. Truffaut and Godard were both initially interested in directing the film before abandoning the project for complicated reasons Harris painstakingly explains. Once Beatty joined the project as producer and star, he persuaded a reluctant Arthur Penn, with whom he had worked on Mickey One (1965), to take charge. Comedian-turned-stage-director Nichols was committed to The Graduate, based

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on Charles Webb’s 1963 novel, before making his first film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). The major problems facing Nichols, also influenced by European films, were coming up with a workable script (several screenwriters preceded Henry) and casting, especially the lead, a sensitive and confused recent college graduate. One of the highlights of Pictures at a Revolution is Harris’s long account of how unlikely unknown Hoffman got the part, painting the actor as almost afraid of success. While Doctor Doolittle is clearly inferior to the other nominees, Harris makes the story of how this lumbering musical, based on Hugh Lofting’s children’s books, came to be as fascinating as his accounts of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate. The film’s budget slowly swelled into one of the biggest in history as Darryl F. Zanuck of Twentieth Century-Fox watched in horror. Leslie Bricusse, the screenwriter, composer, and lyricist, struggled to appease everyone in the production while a never-to-bepleased Harrison threw tantrums. The big story of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was less its plot than the casting of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy as the supposedly liberal parents whose daughter, played by Hepburn’s niece, Katharine Houghton, plans to marry an African American doctor, played by Poitier. The film was the ninth and final pairing of Hepburn and Tracy, whose casting was the main reason that Poitier agreed to an underwritten role. Kramer’s challenge as director was to keep the film going despite the obviously serious illness of Tracy, who died shortly afterward. The other problem with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was the timid approach to the theme of interracial marriage taken by Kramer and screenwriter William Rose, an American expatriate long in England who knew nothing about American cultural changes since World War II. Harris shows how Kramer and Rose created a sanitized vision of racial relations that reviewers ridiculed, yet the film was Columbia Pictures’ biggest hit ever, partly because of its star power and the growing black audience and perhaps even because of its inoffensiveness during the era of race riots in cities such as Detroit and Newark. Harris’s account of the making of In the Heat of the Night is less dramatic than those about the other four films. He recounts the changes screenwriter Stirling Silliphant made in John Ball’s 1965 novel, the casting of Rod Steiger as the sheriff of a small Mississippi town, the efforts of Poitier, as a visiting Philadelphia policeman, to meet the challenge posed by Steiger’s powerhouse performance, and the many contributions of film editor Hal Ashby, who took on extra duties, including casting and finding locations for director Norman Jewison. Though the film was shot in Sparta, Illinois, a few scenes involving a cotton plantation had to be shot in Tennessee, creating considerable uneasiness for Poitier, given the racial mood of the time. While America was caught up in a period of vast social change and conflict, involving the restlessness of African Americans and women, the turmoil of the Vietnam War, and the protests against the war, Hollywood itself was also in a period of flux. Since the 1930’s, American films had been restrained by the Motion Picture Production Code, which placed great restrictions on sexual activity, profanity, violence, and the depiction of criminal and antisocial behavior. Several films in the mid-1960’s, particularly Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Blow-Up (1966), offered strong

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challenges to the code, weakening it so severely that it became obvious that the antiquated system was on its way out. Harris examines how the ongoing changes helped Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate be more mature than they could have been just a couple of years earlier. These changes resulted in the film rating system, which began in the fall of 1968. In 1967 and afterward, Doctor Doolittle and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner were seen as relics of a Hollywood resistant to change, while Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate were at the other extreme. Except for having a black hero solve a crime in the South and showing some discreet nudity, In the Heat of the Night was somewhere in the middle, essentially a conventional murder mystery. Jack Warner and other Warner Bros. executives hated Bonnie and Clyde, seeing it merely as an excessively violent B-film. When it opened in August, 1967, many of the film reviewers agreed, notably Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who attacked it relentlessly, leading to his removal as the newspaper’s primary film reviewer at the end of the year. Joseph Morgenstern of Newsweek gave the film a harsh review, had second thoughts, saw it again, and reviewed it again, this time enthusiastically. Bonnie and Clyde gradually became a cause célèbre, with Time offering a cover story to explain its wide appeal, and Pauline Kael publishing a lengthy rave in The New Yorker, after the essay was rejected by The New Republic. Despite critical support and good box office, Warner Bros. was reluctant to give the public a chance to see the film, opening it only in locales scattered about the country and closing it in places such as New York City where it was doing booming business. Not until the Academy Award nominations were announced in February, 1968, did Bonnie and Clyde finally receive wide distribution. Nichols arranged screenings of The Graduate for friends who did not know what to make of it and who were puzzled by the casting of the ordinary-looking Hoffman. Few of its first viewers understood The Graduate, and many of its reviewers saw it as an attack upon “their standards, their notion of what a well-made picture should be, their ability to control a cultural conversation that they suddenly felt was slipping out of their grasp.” The mainstream press that bemoaned hippies and antiwar demonstrators saw Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate as further evidence of the decline of American values. One can imagine their horror when The Graduate became the thirdhighest-grossing film of all time, trailing only The Sound of Music and Gone with the Wind (1939). When young audiences rushed to theaters and returned for multiple viewings of both Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, what the press termed “the film generation” was launched, and the studios began making more films, such as Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970), about the outsiders or antiestablishment types with whom the young could identify. Pictures at a Revolution has an outstanding companion piece in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bull: How the Sex-Drugsand-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (1998), which chronicles what Harris calls “a second golden age of studio filmmaking.” The Academy Award voters, up to a point, recognized the quality of the two outsider films, bestowing ten nominations on Bonnie and Clyde and seven on The Grad-

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uate. Even its makers were surprised when, despite unenthusiastic reviews and weak box office, Doctor Doolittle received nine nominations. This was still an era, soon to end, when studios were able to control large blocs of votes, and Twentieth CenturyFox employees showed their support despite the film’s poor quality. The members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finally voted with their hearts, however, giving In the Heat of the Night five Oscars, including Best Picture, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner two. Bonnie and Clyde won two Oscars, for Burnett Guffey’s cinematography and Estelle Parsons’s supporting performance as Beatty’s sister-in-law, and The Graduate won one, for Nichols’s direction. The most unjust loss was seen to be the choice of Rose’s clichéd script over the originality of Benton and Newman’s. Pictures at a Revolution is not just film history but a perceptive character study. Harris excels at describing Beatty’s difficult personality, especially his constant battles with Penn; Hoffman’s insecurities; Nichols’s perfectionism; and the burden placed on Poitier as the main representative of his race for much of the world. Kramer was a mediocre director because he thought “like a producer, concentrating on the overall package rather than the shaping of individual scenes, performances, and moments.” Harris does not just report the facts but interprets them, placing them within their historical context and making certain his readers understand what might seem inexplicable more than forty years after the events. Michael Adams

Review Sources Booklist 104, nos. 9/10 (January 1, 2008): 32. Cineaste 33, no. 4 (Fall, 2008): 72-74. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 22 (November 15, 2007): 1188. Library Journal 132, no. 19 (November 15, 2007): 61. The New York Times, February 11, 2008, p. 9. The New York Times Book Review, February 17, 2008, p. 13. Newsweek 151, no. 8 (February 25, 2008): 50. People 69, no. 8 (March 3, 2008): 46. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 43 (October 29, 2007): 40.

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THE PLAGUE OF DOVES Author: Louise Erdrich (1954) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 314 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1896-1980’s Locale: Pluto, North Dakota The long-ago slaughter of a white family casts a shadow over the inhabitants of a small North Dakota town and the nearby Ojibwa reservation Principal characters: Evelina (Evey) Harp, a young partOjibwa woman Seraph Milk (Mooshum), her maternal grandfather Shamengwa Milk, Mooshum’s crippled younger brother Geraldine Milk, Evey’s maternal aunt Antone Bazil Coutts, a judge, hopelessly in love with Geraldine Corwin Peace, Evey’s ne’er-do-well boyfriend Billy Peace, Corwin’s uncle, a powerful evangelist Marn Wolde, the young white wife of Billy Peace Sister Mary Anita Buckendorf, Evey’s sixth-grade teacher Father “Hop Along” Cassidy, a Catholic priest Holy Track, an Ojibwa youth who is hanged as a killer Neve Harp, Evey’s paternal aunt, the town historian Cordelia Lochren, a physician

In The Plague of Doves, Louise Erdrich returns to the familiar plains of North Dakota, but with a completely new cast of characters who offer, as usual, a continual surprise. This time her setting is the small town of Pluto (named for the former planet, not for the god of the underworld), where the sparse population consists of Germans, Norwegians, and Metis, the descendants of French-Canadian settlers who intermarried with Ojibwa (also called Chippewa) from the neighboring reservation. This is a story of connections, mixing regional and human history with fiction and elements of the supernatural. Typically for Erdrich, time is fluid; the present is filled with dizzying relationships, interspersed with tales from the past that reveal the origin and history of the community. The novel begins with a horrific glimpse of a 1911 bloodbath that only an infant survives, then immediately shifts back fifteen years to the time when a sudden plague occurs—brown doves blacken the skies like locusts and settle over the land, devouring everything. Ironically, these frequent emblems of peace are viewed as invaders, and desperate people attempt to drive them away. As the local Catholic priest organizes a procession of the mixed-blood population to pray for deliverance, his young half brother, Seraph Milk, then an altar boy, seizes the re-

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sulting confusion to run off with his future wife and become the progenitor of the MilkHarp family. Erdrich employs three main story lines as well as several minor ones. The first belongs to Evelina (Evey) Harp, granddaughter of Seraph Milk, who is now known as Mooshum (Grandfather). Evey, who comes of age in the novel, is one of several narrators, revealing her childhood crushes on a mischievous classmate, Corwin Peace, and on her sixth-grade teacher, Sister Mary Anita Buckendorf, whom the children call Sister Godzilla. Both will Louise Erdrich, an enrolled member of figure in her later life. Evey, who reads Albert the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwa, Camus’s La Chute (1956; The Fall, 1957) and has authored twelve novels, including adores all things French, will attend college, Love Medicine (1984), winner of the become a psychiatric aide in the state mental National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Last Report on the Miracles at hospital, have a brief relationship with one of Little No Horse (2001), a finalist for the patients, and eventually sign herself in as the National Book Award for fiction. a patient after a bad experience with the LSD that Corwin gives her. (In an Erdrich novel, someone is always slightly mad.) Mooshum is another of Erdrich’s delightful and rascally old men, as is his crippled brother Shamengwa, an untutored artist who plays a magical violin in spite of his “folded-up” arm, damaged by the kick of a cow. (As it was foretold in a dream, Shamengwa received that ancient instrument when it floated directly to him in an otherwise empty canoe, and when his cherished violin is finally stolen, Shamengwa suspects the culprit is Corwin, by then grown, good looking, and reckless.) The two elders delight in teasing Mooshum’s strict daughter by sneaking forbidden whiskey past her, which they can manage whenever the unpopular white priest Father Cassidy comes calling in an attempt to save their souls. Shamengwa’s conversion is hopeless, since he long ago left the church to return to traditional beliefs, but Mooshum enjoys sparring with the priest and watching his frustration. Later, Father Cassidy eulogizes the wrong brother at a funeral and earns the enmity of the whole family. One of the tales that Mooshum relates to Evey is a shameful secret widely known in the community yet seldom spoken of—the story of a thirteen-year-old boy who was a distant relative of her grandmother. The youth’s pious mother, who was dying of tuberculosis, nailed wooden crosses to her son’s boot soles to protect him from the disease, so that his footprints revealed a cross, a holy track, which then became his nickname. Holy Track, whom Erdrich has modeled on a historical figure of the same name, was one of four innocent Ojibwa captured and lynched by an angry mob of Pluto’s white citizens, who believed them to be responsible for the brutal murders of the baby’s family. Descendants of the mob, as well as of their victims, still live side by side in the area; one of them is Sister Mary Anita. The unspoken bitterness between

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whites and Indians still remains in Pluto, but silence helps to preserve the amenities of everyday living. A parallel story line, that of the family of Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, mirrors the history of this region in another way. He explains, “Nothing that happens, nothing, is not connected here by blood.” In the past the judge’s grandfather, Joseph Coutts, a classics teacher, joined a surveying party on a whim to explore town sites in Dakota for the projected railroad. (Elsewhere, Erdrich indicates that this doomed expedition actually took place in 1857.) This group was guided by two Ojibwa brothers, ancestors of Corwin. Unfortunately, both the real and the fictional expeditions chose to leave Minnesota in January to get a head start on other parties. Challenged by bonechilling temperatures and insufficient provisions, most of which were lost in prairie blizzards, members of the surveying party barely survived. The two Peace guides saved the life of Joseph Coutts near the site that would become Pluto; he then turned to the practice of law, as did his son and grandson after him. At present, Antone maintains tribal law on the tribal land, observing that “the entire reservation is rife with conflicting passions. We can’t seem to keep our hands off one another.” Neither can the judge, usually a deliberate man, keep his hands off Evey’s unmarried aunt, Geraldine Milk, eagerly courting the tribal enrollment specialist in spite of his ongoing relationship with a married woman. Still a third story line is narrated by Marn Wolde, the farmer’s daughter who marries Corwin’s uncle. Marn is only sixteen when she encounters the charismatic Billy Peace, who has already served in the Korean War and is now a minor traveling evangelist. He invites her to a camp meeting where he and others preach and where he prays in tongues over the main speaker’s dying mother. Smitten, Marn admits she is “too young to stand against it” and soon marries Billy; they have two children. Eventually they and Billy’s followers move back to her family farm, which abuts the reservation and where her parents live with her elderly great-uncle. Billy cajoles Marn’s father into signing over his power of attorney to her and thereby to him. After Billy is suddenly struck by lightning, he seems transformed into a kind of monster, physically expanding as his fame and appetites increase (he can eat a whole cake a day). He grows more inflexible as a healer and a prophet, while his burgeoning organization, known as the kindred, becomes a full-blown cult whose members live in a compound on the farm. He controls their behavior through his rigid Manual of Discipline, ultimately taking away even their names. Marn herself has a bent toward the supernatural with what she calls her “pictures” or visions. As a form of solace, she has taken up beautiful but poisonous serpents, handling them as a test of faith. The snakes make her feel powerful for the first time, perhaps because Billy is afraid of them. After the copperhead bites her, thus warning her to leave her fanatical husband, Marn recognizes that her life has become a trap, and she plans an escape for herself and for her children. Her final retribution against her husband is melodramatic but nevertheless satisfying. In terms of style, Erdrich exhibits effortless skill with language. For example, with the arrival of the doves, “the people woke . . . to the scraping and beating of wings, the murmurous susurration, the awful cooing babble, and the sight . . . of the curious and

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gentle faces of those creatures.” In another section, Marn introduces her narrative with a lyrical paragraph as she awaits a storm: “The wind came off the dense-grassed slough, smelling like wet hair, and the hot ditch grass reached for it, butter yellow, . . . each stalk so dry it gave off a puff of smoke when snapped.” The involvement of the reader’s physical senses renders these images vividly and perfectly. Having a faultless memory would be helpful in order to follow the frequent time shifts and muddled relationships of these various characters. There are so many diverse threads to the story that it is easy to get lost or confused, and the plot is so densely woven that at first a reader may have difficulty making connections. However, by the end of the book, Erdrich skillfully pulls these threads together. The novel follows Evey’s observation: “When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.” In the end, everything seems to come back to the tree that stands on the farm owned by Marn’s parents and that also graces the dust jacket. This is the same tree that was filled with doves during the plague of 1896 and where birds continue to roost in the present—a Tree of Life. After a lengthy search in 1911, this tree was finally selected by the town vigilantes (even though the vote was never unanimous) as sturdy enough for the lynching of Holy Track and his three companions; thus, it is a Hanging Tree. It is also a Funeral Tree, for in its branches the cross-soled boots of Holy Track still dangle as a kind of memorial. While it symbolizes the interrelationships of the extended family tree that so many of these characters share, it remains a tree of bitter, even biblical, knowledge, an emblem of a great wrong and of a reconciliation. Joanne McCarthy

Review Sources Booklist 104, nos. 9/10 (January 1, 2008): 21. Elle 23, no. 9 (May, 2008): 174. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 3 (February 1, 2008): 106. Library Journal 133, no. 3 (February 15, 2008): 90. Ms. 18, no. 2 (Spring, 2008): 71. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 12 (July 17, 2008): 37-38. The New York Times, April 29, 2008, p. E1. The New York Times Book Review, May 11, 2008, p. 9. People 69, no. 17 (May 5, 2008): 53. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 2 (January 14, 2008): 36. The Women’s Review of Books 25, no. 5 (September/October, 2008): 12-13.

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THE POST-AMERICAN WORLD Author: Fareed Zakaria (1964) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 292 pp. $25.95 Type of Work: History Time: “Three tectonic shifts” in world geopolitical history over the last five hundred years—the rise of the Western world, beginning in the fifteenth century and accelerating in the late eighteenth; the rise of the United States at the close of the nineteenth century; “the rise of the rest” in the last years of the twentieth and first decade of the twenty-first centuries Locale: The major nations of the West—the United States, England, Russia, Germany, and France; the emerging countries of Asia, South America, Africa— notably China, Japan, India, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, North Korea, Brazil, and South Africa Newsweek editor-columnist Zakaria presents a breathtaking picture of the emergence of the non-West to create a rich composite of the two hemispheres; his welltitled book envisages not the United States’ decline but the gradual suspension of hegemony for accommodation to what he calls the global “stakeholders in the new order” Principal personages: George W. Bush, two-term U.S. president of whose foreign policy Zakaria is critical Winston S. Churchill, Britain’s World War II prime minister, who possessed “superhuman energy and ambition” Bill Clinton, U.S. president during whose tenure American power became more apparent Indira Gandhi, “combative” Indian prime minister, daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru Saddam Hussein, long-time dictator of Iraq whose ouster Zakaria at first favored Ronald Reagan, U.S. president in 1982 when Zakaria immigrated to the United States and seen by the author as the “embodiment of a strikingly open and expansive country” Zheng He, fifteenth century Chinese admiral who, eighty-seven years before Christopher Columbus, began the first of seven expeditions to the New World with 317 vessels and 28,000 men

In 2003, a young British historian posed an impertinent question for Americans. In his cocktail-table book Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, Oxford’s Niall Ferguson, who is also Herzog Professor of Financial History at New York University, asks, “Hasn’t the time come for the U.S.

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to rethink its historic distaste for colonies and play an imperial role?” Less formally, Ferguson acts like the son-in-law from an eminent family who wishes to persuade his bride’s lately powerful family to follow the long outof-fashion traditions of his own people. In 2008 came another scholar—an émigré to American shores—to answer the question in the emphatic negative. Writing in The PostAmerican World, India-born Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, columnist for its parent magazine, and CNN commentator, presents convincing evidence that any “imperial role” for America or any other country is anachronistic in today’s world; not even with its military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan ought the United States assume a presence like Great Britain’s in its “empire” days that ended with World War II. Zakaria begins his survey of the multipolar world with the undisputed hegemony (“multipolar” is Zakaria’s favorite buzz word; “unipolar” and “hegemony” are his most pejorative words) that the United States enjoyed at the time of Soviet communism’s meltdown. Since then, there has occurred the phenomenon that provides the title of chapter 1: “The Rise of the Rest,” whose opening sentence is one Zakaria will never let readers forget: “This is a book not about the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else.” However, this is not essentially a book about “declinism,” whose heyday came about two decades ago with Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), which concluded that the United States’ dominance was fast eroding. A skilled journalist such as Zakaria has fascinating ways of raising the bars of distinction for emerging nations without explicitly lowering those of the United States. He notes the tallest building is now in Taipeh, the richest man is Mexican, the largest publicly traded corporation is Chinese, the biggest plane is built in Russia and Ukraine, the leading refinery is under construction in India, the largest factories are all in China, and the United Arab Emirates is home to the most richly endowed investment fund. Often by deft positioning Zakaria will leave the reader applauding America after he seemingly has downgraded her. After devoting fifteen lines to Europe’s “significant challenge” to U.S. superiority in the economic line, he accords more than double to the United States as the first to create a “universal nation, made up of all colors, races, and creeds, living and working together in considerable harmony.” In a previous book, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (2003), Zakaria argued that too much democracy can be counterproductive. In his new book he is critical of the manner in which the Bush administration pushed its democracy agenda forward, relying on elections in Iraq, the Palestinian Authority, and Lebanon as the solution to these countries’ problems and minimizing the building

Fareed Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek International and writes a weekly column on international affairs. Born in Mumbai, India, he moved to the United States to attend college at Yale. After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard, he became the managing editor of Foreign Affairs. His previous book was The New York Times best seller The Future of Freedom (2003). A naturalized U.S. citizen, Zakaria lives in New York City.

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of the institutions of law, governance, and liberty. He bashes what he sees as Bush’s fear-based policies on terrorism, immigration, and trade, arguing that beyond Bush the world needs an open and confident United States. Today he observes a move away from American dominance in every dimension with the exception of military power. He defines this post-American world as one shaped by many people in many places—his prime mover, multipolarity, center stage, everywhere. Zakaria finds success stories for globalized capitalism wherever he looks. In addition, he is at pains to add, this success is all the United States’ doing because for the last sixty years it has been urging the world to open up to free markets and develop new industries and technologies, training their best and brightest in U.S. universities: “The natives have gotten good at capitalism.” Rampant outsourcing, viewed as a plague by both of the most recent presidential hopefuls, is lightly mentioned in this book. Zakaria proudly notes that India has more billionaires than any other Asian country but does not mention the proportion of U.S.-trained Indian doctors who have become rich while remaining to practice medicine in the United States. Zakaria concentrates on China and India as the world’s current success stories. While India—handicapped by “messy” democracy—will have the third-largest economy by 2040, China’s astonishing rise is already here, having compressed two hundred years of Western industrial development into thirty and still growing faster than any major economy in recorded history. It makes two-thirds of the world’s photocopiers, microwave ovens, and shoes, with the average Chinese personal income rising 700 percent in the last thirty years. Thus has the world’s largest country also become its largest manufacturer, second-largest consumer, biggest saver, and, probably, second-largest military spender. Development on such a scale adds “a wholly new element to the international system,” he writes. In outlining the rise of China, referred to as “the challenger,” and India, whom he proudly calls “the ally” to honor its democratic traditions, Zakaria marshals his facts scrupulously and to dramatic effect. Of China, the reader learns that it manufactured two hundred air conditioners in 1978 and forty-eight million in 2005; that its exports to the United States have zoomed 1,600 percent in the last fifteen years; and that it had twenty-eight billion square feet of space under construction in 2005, five times the figure for America in the same year. In India, the revenue from auto parts went from under six billion dollars in 2003 to more than fifteen billion dollars in 2007. Zakaria has no fear that China’s challenge to the United States for world hegemony could lead to military aggression. He says that China, like India, wants “to gain power and status and respect, for sure, but by growing within the international system, not by overturning it. As long as these new countries feel they can be accommodated, they have every incentive to become ‘responsible stakeholders’ in this system.” In a crucial dialectic, noted by Zakaria, the neoconservative writer Robert Kagan implicitly questions whether powerful autocratic regimes such as China’s can really be accommodated in global economic institutions without undermining either its own autocratic powers or the liberal democracies. The author, instead of heeding Russia’s recent incursions against several small democracies, takes refuge in such American

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efforts at international cooperation as the League of Nations, United Nations, and the Marshall Plan. “The chair of the board who can gently guide a group of independent directors is still a very powerful person,” Zakaria observes. This prophetic scenario has been attacked by some as an attempt to darken the United States’ outlook for continuance as world leader. Nevertheless, a reader can only guess how much more dire Zakaria’s prospectus might have been had it been published after the worldwide financial crisis began in autumn of 2008, rather than six months before. While charting the economic and soft-power rise of the European Union, India, and China, he also marks the seemingly enduring American advantages in productivity, demographics, research and development, and overall economic and cultural vibrancy that will keep the other comers, with dismal problems of their own, just that for a good half century at least. Richard Hauer Costa

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 18 (May 15, 2008): 10. Business Week, May 19, 2008, p. 80. Commentary 126, no. 2 (September, 2008): 64-68. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 5 (March 1, 2008): 241-242. Library Journal 133, no. 7 (April 15, 2008): 99-100. National Review 60, no. 14 (August 4, 2008): 47-48. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 16 (October 23, 2008): 59-62. The New York Times Book Review, May 11, 2008, p. 31. The New Yorker 84, no. 10 (April 21, 2008): 126-130. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 8 (February 25, 2008): 63. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 106 (May 6, 2008): A21.

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POSTHUMOUS KEATS A Personal Biography Author: Stanley Plumly (1939) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 392 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Literary biography, literary criticism Time: 1818-1917 Locale: England and Italy Plumly’s meditation on the final eighteen months of John Keats’s life and posthumous reputation brings the dying poet and his work to life Principal personages: John Keats, an English poet Tom and George Keats, his brothers Anna Angeletti, his landlady in Rome Fanny Brawne, his fiancée James Clark, his doctor in Rome Charles Armitage Brown, his friend and neighbor, an artist Charles Wentworth Dilke, another friend and neighbor, a clerk and author Robert Benjamin Haydon, an artist Joseph Severn, an artist John Taylor, Keats’s publisher

At a writers’ conference in 1980, Stanley Plumly met Deborah Digges, a poet like himself, who had a passion for John Keats. The feeling soon became mutual; they would wake each other up in the middle of the night to share passages by the Romantic writer. In the early 1980’s, Plumly wrote a poem, “Posthumous Keats,” which takes its title from the last letter Keats wrote. It was addressed to Charles Armitage Brown, one of his closest friends, dated November 30, 1820, from Rome, when the poet had fewer than three months to live. Here Keats laments, “I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.” Plumly’s poem describes the autumn journey that Keats and his companion, Joseph Severn, made from Naples to Rome. Keats rode in a carriage. Severn, to give his dying friend more space and to avoid the jolting of the vehicle, often walked alongside. The artist was enthralled with the wildflowers filling the countryside. He would pick armloads of them and then, having no place else to put them, deposit them in the carriage with the poet. By the time Keats reached Rome, his carriage resembled a flowerfilled hearse. Plumly then embarked on a book-length account of Keats’s last eighteen months, after Keats had composed the great odes that would render him immortal, after he had stopped writing poetry and knew that he was dying. After some twenty-five years and much alteration, Posthumous Keats marks the fruition of Plumly’s project, which

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lasted about as many years as Keats lived (1795-1821). This book is not a biography of the poet, nor even a chronological account of his final months. Rather, in seven chapters, each divided into seven sections, Plumly reflects on various aspects of Keats’s life and reputation. Some chapters explore a single theme. The first examines various images of the poet. Plumly most likes those executed during Keats’s life. Among Plumly’s favorites is Benjamin Haydon’s image that he included in his book Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem (1817). Haydon placed some of his friends among the onlookers. A lively Keats stands next to the older Romantic poet William Wordsworth in this group portrait of historical and living figures. The year before, Haydon had made a life mask of Keats. Another picture that Plumly praises originated on the Isle of Wight. In July, 1819, Keats and Charles Brown were visiting there, the one to write, the other to draw. On July 31, 1819, Brown sketched his friend. The other drawing that Plumly admires is that by Severn; it is another quick sketch, executed by Severn a few weeks before Keats died. After Keats’s death, his portrait was painted more than a hundred times. The images became increasingly idealized, as artists sought to re-create not the lively young man or the individual dying of tuberculosis but instead the general idea of the poet. Even Severn became a victim to this tendency as he repeatedly reproduced his original drawing but in altered form. According to Plumly, artists in the nineteenth century fell into one of two errors. They presented either a Keats who was too effeminate and ethereal to live in the real world or one too solid for the world to affect. Plumly includes in his strictures the portrait by William Hilton that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. This painting, based on an 1819 sketch, presents a reflective writer untouched by illness. In his second chapter, aptly entitled “Cold Pastoral,” the phrase Keats uses to describe a Grecian urn, Plumly looks at other unhappy attempts to immortalize the poet. Keats knew for about a year that he was dying of tuberculosis, the disease that had claimed his mother and his brother Tim and that would also kill his other brother, George. Keats asked Severn for a monument shaped like a Greek lyre with four broken strings. Shortly before his death, hearing the Roman fountain playing outside his window and thinking of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s line in Philaster (pr. 1620), “All your better deeds/ Shall be in water writ,” Keats told Severn that the only inscription he wanted on the memorial was, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” There were to be no name, no dates. Severn and Charles Brown wanted a longer epitaph. In the winter of 1823 Keats’s tombstone was erected in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. It includes a lyre, but atop a base resembling a Greek altar. The inscription reads:

Stanley Plumly has published nine volumes of poetry, including Old Heart, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 2007. He also has written a critical study of poetry, Argument & Song: Sources & Silences in Poetry (2003). He is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland.

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This Grave contains all that was Mortal of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET Who on his Death Bed in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water” Feb 24th 1821

Brown and Severn, who devised the inscription, were using it to attack the Tory John Gibson Lockhart of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and John Wilson Croker of the Quarterly Review, whose negative comments about Keats’s poetry they blamed for the young man’s death. Twenty years later, Brown conceded that the inscription had been a mistake, that Keats’s wishes should have been heeded. This same image of Keats as a spirit too frail to withstand the assaults of obtuse critics appears in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais (1821) and Byron’s semiserious lament for Keats in stanza sixty of canto eleven of Don Juan (1823). The latter reads: John Keats, who was killed off by one critique, Just as he really promised something great, If not intelligible, without Greek Contrived to talk about the Gods of late, Much as they might have been supposed to speak. Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate; ‘Tis strange the mind, that fiery particle, Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.

Shelley in his elegy likened Keats to “a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished” and called him “a frail Form.” William Hazlitt, another Romantic author with no love for Tories, referred to Keats as “the tender bloom” blighted by Tory criticism. In “the Advertisement” to the 1820 edition of Keats’s Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, the publishers claimed that Keats had stopped work on Hyperion because of the negative reviews of Endymion (1818), even though Keats abandoned the poem because he was unhappy with it. Like some nineteenth century artists, these writers thus contributed to the image of the young poet as a sensitive plant. In chapter 3 Plumly examines Keats’s relationship with his bothers George and Tom. Plumly regards George as the practical brother, Tom the ethereal one, and argues that Keats is a combination of these traits. Plumly links the death of Tom (December 1, 1818) with Keats’s poetic flowering in 1819, the year in which he wrote the great odes that ensured that his name would not be writ in water. This chapter also traces Keats’s 1818 walking tour of northern England and Scotland, which the poet undertook with Brown. Keats hoped to gain experience and images that would

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aid his poetry; Plumly examines some of the sonnets Keats composed during this excursion. Elsewhere Plumly discusses Keats’s search for a paying profession (chapter 4) and his relationship with Fanny Brawne (chapter 5). These sections are less coherent than other chapters. They recall Keats’s description of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s conversation when they walked together on Hampstead Heath on April 11, 1819: “In those two miles he broached a thousand things.” Chapter 6 describes Keats’s last months in Rome at 26 Piazza di Spagna, which in 1909 became the Keats-Shelley Memorial House. Keats was initially strong enough to walk and to ride. Then, on December 10, 1820, he suffered the first of many severe hemorrhages. Dr. James Clark, following the standard medical practice of the time, bled him further and prescribed a starvation diet: an anchovy and small piece of toast a day. Keats rallied, declined, rallied, and relapsed. On February 23, 1821, at about eleven at night, he died in Severn’s arms. The final chapter returns to the subject of Keats’s posthumous memorialization. Interspersed among the chapters are discussions of Keats’s poems; these analyses make the reader wish that Plumly had devoted more attention to the works. For example, he offers tantalizing comments about assonance and alliteration in “Ode to a Nightingale” and “To Autumn” and about the relationship between these two great poems. One also wishes for better proofreading. Still, this book will delight any lover of Keats and will turn any of its readers into an admirer of the poet. Joseph Rosenblum

Review Sources American Scholar 77, no. 3 (Summer, 2008): 152-153. The Economist 388 (August 23, 2008): 72. International Herald-Tribune, August 15, 2008, p. 22. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 5 (March 1, 2008): 236. Library Journal 133, no. 7 (April 15, 2008): 85. Literary Review 52, no. 1 (Fall, 2008): 192-194. Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2008, p. R8. The New York Times, August 8, 2008, p. 25. The New Yorker 84, no. 20 (July 7, 2008): 92-95. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 16 (April 21, 2008): 36. The Times Literary Supplement, December 19, 2008, pp. 8-9. The Washington Post Book World, April 20, 2008, p. BW7.

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THE POWER MAKERS Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America Author: Maury Klein (1939) Publisher: Bloomsbury Press (New York). 543 pp. $29.99 Type of work: History, technology Time: 1700-1939 Locale: Primarily the United States A panoramic history of the development and application of steam power and electric power, with biographic information on leading figures and attention to social, economic, financial, and technological dimensions Principal personages: Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), one of America’s most famous inventors Oliver Evans (1755-1819), American inventor and automation pioneer Samuel Insull (1859-1938), British-born American entrepreneur and holding-company organizer Frank J. Sprague (1857-1934), American engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), Croatian-born American inventor Elihu Thomson (1853-1937), British-born American teacher, inventor, and entrepreneur James Watt (1736-1819), Scottish machinist and inventor George Westinghouse, Jr. (1846-1914), air-brake inventor, electrical pioneer, creator of eponymous company

Tracing the challenges and achievements of entrepreneurs and inventors is a noble enterprise. As our economy evolves toward increasing emphasis on services, it is well to be reminded of the material basis of modern civilization and the people who formed it. In The Power Makers, Maury Klein does this very well: He is a superb storyteller, taking the time to delineate the personalities of the many principals, putting their activities in the context of their times, and making a painstaking effort to explain the various technological developments. Perhaps nonspecialist readers can’t fully grasp the differences between direct current and alternating current, but they will readily follow the way in which the competition between these was personified in the careers of Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, Jr., and what a landmark it was when the two systems were successfully blended. Klein’s decision to cover both steam power and electric power follows the logic that steam power is a major basis for generating electricity. It also makes for a long book and increases the likelihood that some people’s favorite parts of the story may

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appear neglected. Improvements in iron metallurgy were critical to facilitating the upgrading of steam engines, and the problems encountered in moving from steamboats to locomotives probably warrant more attention. The tubular boiler and the steam blast receive only passing mention. Klein’s integration of steam and electrical narrative does pay off when he analyzes the development of the steam tur bine soon after 1900. A large proportion of the book deals with the period between 1880 and 1920—the heyday of Edison and Westinghouse. The narrative is benchmarked with details on the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 and the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. We learn in detail about the evolution of central-station power generation, electric lighting, electric motors, and street railways. There is a titillating aside on the emergence of electrocution—but railroad fans might have enjoyed more on the impressive development of electric trains on intercity and commuter routes in the Northeast. The description of the development of Niagara Falls hydroelectric power properly salutes the rapid rise of electrochemical firms (notably Alcoa) at that site. The electrical industries largely created the modern emphasis on research and development as central elements in business strategy. Naturally much of the narrative focuses on the career of Edison. Eccentric and compulsive, he determined at age twenty-two, after five years as a telegrapher, to devote himself to invention. In 1876, he established his laboratory in the “obscure hamlet” of Menlo Park, New Jersey, to which he attracted a team of talented associates. Successful inventions relating to the telegraph, the telephone, and the phonograph yielded revenue and prominence. By 1879, he successfully had addressed the problem of subdividing electric current to serve incandescent light bulbs. This led in 1882 to the vastly more important development of the central generating station at Pearl Street in New York. Edison was the central figure in a bewildering sequence of companies, many of which were brought together in Edison General Electric (GE) Company, incorporated in 1889. Edison’s work concentrated on direct current. His contemporary and rival, George Westinghouse, Jr., saw the potential for alternating current, which could allow highvoltage transmission facilitated by step-up transformers at the generating end and step-down transformers at the applications end. Klein focuses heavily on the Edison-Westinghouse rivalry in developing electric lighting systems—systems that embraced generation, transmission, and final application. Though electric lighting spread rapidly, the process encountered vigorous competition from the gas industry, which was also innovating significantly. Inexpensive “water gas” was produced by blowing steam through red-hot coke, and the Welsbach mantle provided an incandescent reading light. While working for Edison, Frank Sprague began experimenting with electric mo-

Maury Klein is professor emeritus at the University of Rhode Island. He is the author of fourteen other books, including The Life and Legend of Jay Gould (1986); Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War (1999); and Rainbow’s End: The Crash of 1929 (2001).

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tors. Since Edison was preoccupied with lighting, Sprague left in 1884 to start his own company, which led the way in creating electric-powered street railways, beginning with Richmond in 1887. By 1889, there were 180 electric railway systems in the country. Sprague’s electric railway company was merged into Edison General Electric in 1889. Sprague also pioneered the development of electric elevators, which facilitated the emergence of skyscraper architecture. Elihu Thomson was a clever technician who was able to improve on many devices originated by Edison and others, and he developed a rival business installing dynamos and lighting systems. In 1883, he became part of Thomson-Houston (TH) Electric Company, which by 1891 had become highly profitable as a manufacturer. By then electrical manufacturing was dominated by TH, Edison GE, and Westinghouse. As part of a wave of mergers throughout American industry, TH and Edison GE merged in 1892 to form the modern General Electric Company, a combination motivated in part by the opportunity to combine conflicting patents. The merger shifted power to finance and marketing specialists, leaving the inventors with a diminished role. Edison, who opposed the combination, feared that innovation incentives would be weakened by the decrease in competition. GE and Westinghouse became a durable dominant duopoly. In 1896, GE and Westinghouse pooled their patents. The royalty arrangements reinforced a program of market sharing to limit competition. One of the most exciting sections of the book comes toward the end, as Klein follows the career of Samuel Insull. An Englishman, Insull had become Edison’s private secretary in 1881 at age twenty-one. Though not a scientist or engineer, he developed an extraordinary degree of insight into the economic and financial dimensions of electric power. In the process, he discovered the “public utility concept.” Generation of electricity was subject to extreme economies of large-scale operation, so large operations had lower unit costs. Fixed capital and overhead costs were a large part of total costs. To Insull, the ideal form of organization would be for a monopoly of generating operations, in order to achieve minimum costs. Appropriate government regulation would grant long-term franchises, to restrict entry and to protect customers against exorbitant rates. As state governments adopted this model, it produced rich benefits for the franchised monopolies. Rates were based on historical costs, but because of the rapid technological improvements and rapid expansion of demand, costs were always lower than they had been when rates were set, yielding handsome profits. However, Klein does not develop the story of public-utility regulation. Likewise, although patents figure prominently in much of the story, Klein does not reflect on the patent system. His narrative makes it clear that at many points technical innovations were being developed by numerous people, and that strategies of patenting that incorporated considerations other than pure technological progress were evolving. Insull came to his insights about the public-utility concept after an audacious career move. Breaking away from Edison, he became president of the Chicago Edison Company, a generating operation, at age thirty-two. He proceeded aggressively to acquire rival companies, construct larger facilities, and drive down costs and rates. He discovered the importance of the “load factor”: generating capacity had to accommo-

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date the peak of production, but the marginal cost of producing during off-peak hours was very low. Pricing adjustments could be made to attract off-peak customers. Insull also developed a complex network of public-utility holding companies, ingeniously designed to transmute the modest profit-rate targets of regulated companies into much higher rates of return for the unregulated holding companies. Insull’s story occupies more than forty pages of the book, and it is easy to understand why. Insull had come early to the vision of an electrified America, and he had the energy and skills to make a huge contribution to creating it. In particular, he helped bring about the suburbanization of America. Fortunate cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago developed networks of electric transportation along which grew residential areas such as Westchester and the Main Line. Considering that Klein has written at least five books on railroads, they receive surprisingly little attention here. The collapse of Insull’s financial empire was one of the many dramatic aspects of the catastrophic economic downturn that followed 1929. He became a scapegoat and was the target of a series of criminal indictments. Although he was ultimately exonerated on all counts, he emerged from the process a broken man. Klein’s play-by-play tapers off with the 1920’s. A brief final chapter uses the New York World’s Fair of 1939 as a showcase for the nation’s electrical achievements, contrasting the emphasis on household appliances with the earlier stress on generators and other equipment. It is doubtful that any other period in American history brought about such profound and rapid change in the way Americans lived as the one between 1900 and 1930, when the electrical revolution proceeded at maximum intensity. To be sure, the coming of the automobile was a big contributor. While the internal-combustion engine depended on the electric spark, this was a relatively unsophisticated contribution. In combination, electric train, trolley, and car facilitated the separation of workplace and living place. Electric light reclaimed the nighttime hours for recreational reading and, perhaps more important, for homework for school and work. Welllighted workplaces could operate around the clock, exemplified by the morning newspaper, with its inputs from telegraph and telephone, its electrically driven Linotypes and presses. By 1930, the up-to-date suburban home was not only lighted by electricity but furnished with an electric refrigerator, a radio, an electric stove, even thermostatically controlled heating. According to Klein, “we have [largely] become what our technologies made us.” Jill Leflore, reviewing Klein’s book for The New Yorker, reminds us that “a longstanding tradition argues against the inescapability of our machine destiny” and implies that Klein is unaware of this fact. However, Klein does acknowledge that “the consequences of a new technology can never be predicted.” In particular, one cannot predict the extent to which consumers will choose to adopt innovations—consider the electric toothbrush and electric slicing knife featured by GE in its advertising in the mid-1960’s. By implication, Leflore is challenging the proposition that economic “progress,” economic growth, and rising real income—all facilitated by technological innova-

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tion—represent basic improvement in people’s lives. The apologist economist points to longer and healthier life spans, wider choices in jobs and consumption, greater leisure. However, not everyone makes good choices—the debt-propelled consumption boom that began in the 1990’s affirms that. In addition, the atomic bomb ended once and for all the illusion that all technological innovation makes the world a better place. Klein’s perspective is perhaps simple minded by Leflore’s standards, but it is congruent with pervasive American values. He is less concerned with large ideas than with telling a good story. Paul B. Trescott

Review Sources Booklist 104, nos. 19/20 (June 1, 2008): 18. Foreign Affairs 87, no. 6 (November/December, 2008): 165. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 7 (April 1, 2008): 346. Library Journal 133, no. 6 (April 1, 2008): 94. New Scientist 198 (May 31, 2008): 49. The New Yorker 84, no. 13 (May 12, 2008): 118-122. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 16 (April 21, 2008): 47-48. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 130 (June 4, 2008): A19.

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THE PRIVATE PATIENT Author: P. D. James (1920) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 352 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The present Locale: London and Dorset, England The eighteenth crime novel by the “Queen of Detective Fiction” features James’s recurring detective team and includes the distinguished octogenerian author’s insights into old age’s redefinition of self, reflecting a continuing refinement of her elegant, restrained prose style that accords perfectly with the subject matter Principal characters: Adam Dalgliesh, commander of the Metropolitan Police working out of New Scotland Yard on serious cases that might have political or social ramifications, a skillful detective and navigator of the police bureaucracy, and an admired poet Inspector Kate Miskin, who is struggling with her relationship to former colleague Piers Tarrant and her yearning for Dalgliesh, an impossible romantic match Francis Benton-Smith, the junior member of Dalgliesh’s team, ambitious like Kate but, unlike her, having had a privileged educational background Emma Lavenham, Dalgliesh’s fiancé, a Cambridge Victorian Studies literature professor, as usual put off in every sense by his call to a murder investigation Rhoda Gradwyn, the first victim, a successful middle-aged investigative journalist whose decision to have a childhood facial scar removed at Cheverell Manor clinic triggers events Robin Boyton, a failed actor and black sheep of the wealthy Westhall family who has been excluded from an inheritance he felt he deserved Mr. George Chandler-Powell, a renowned Harley Street plastic surgeon who operates a clinic at Cheverell Manor, a great house in Dorset, which he bought to fulfill his need for a country-squire identity Candace Westhall, an academic pushed out of her university teaching position by supposed reforms who is now living in Stone Cottage on the Cheverell Manor grounds Marcus Westhall, Candace’s brother, a surgeon who also resides on the grounds, assists Chandler-Powell, but desires meaningful medical service in Africa Helena Haverland, née Cressett, whose family owned Cheverell Manor for nearly four hundred years but who now is a woman-of-allwork there

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Lettie Frensham, Helena’s old governess who now is in charge of the office Flavia Holland, head of nursing at Cheverell Manor and ChandlerPowell’s mistress Dean and Kim Bostock, cooks for Cheverell Manor but ambitious to be chefs Sharon Bateman, née Shirley Beale, who killed her younger sister in an inexplicable childhood rage and now is working under a new name as a servant at Cheverell Manor The Cheverell Stones, a Neolithic circle of upright stones next to the Manor where Mary Keyte was burned as a witch in 1654 and a haunting presence for the contemporary characters

In the great crime story tradition of Agatha Christie, P. D. James’s The Private Patient isolates a toxic mix of characters at a four-hundred-year-old manor house haunted by a mini-Stonehenge-like stone circle in an adjoining meadow. There a young girl was once sacrificed and burned alive. James kills off one character, then another, and provides credible-seeming alibis for most of the possible miscreants. The plot threading through the novel is ingenious and varied, involving anger over inheritances possibly tainted by fraud, sexual jealousy, long-distant but unresolved childhood violence, mysterious motives, and a looming sense of impending violence. As in the best of English detective fiction, setting acts as character, supplying motive and mood rather than simply backdrop scenery. Cheverell Manor, named after the stone circle most of the characters visit almost obsessively throughout, has acquired a new identity as a cosmetic surgery clinic for the wealthy, a private great house in rural Dorset where Mr. George Chandler-Powell (British surgeons use Mr. rather than Dr.) can reinstate lost youthful appearances and repair the damage of accidents in complete privacy, while patients enjoy gourmet food prepared by Kim and Dean Bostock, chefs trained in London. Chandler-Powell has himself aspired to a new identity, finding solace in the Great Hall of the Manor as he escapes the pressures of his busy Harley Street London second practice. He plays country squire on his days off, buoyed by workers and servants, all deferential to his brilliance and his deserved reputation. For all the apparent calm in this elegant setting, however, Chandler-Powell has surrounded himself with an unstable mix of helpers. His chief surgeon, Marcus Westhall, idolizes his mentor but also feels stifled; he has no future at Cheverell Manor and is pursuing more consequential work in Africa, where surgery saves lives rather than appearances. Marcus’s sister Candace, a resident of Stone Cottage on the Manor premises, is marking time while the siblings await the resolution of probate in their father’s inheritance. Candace cannot return to university teaching—her position has been dumbed-down by a heedless government bureaucracy—and she is emotionally worn after nursing her emotionally brutal father for two years as he lay dying in Stone Cottage. Chandler-Powell’s head of nursing, Flavia Holland, is also his mistress, but, dissatisfied with her status, she pushes the divorced surgeon to marry her. Robin Boyton, a black sheep in the Westhall family, makes return visits to his cousins Marcus

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and Candace, not out of love but in hopes of passive-aggressively gaining a financial settlement. Sharon Bateman, a nondescript servant girl working under an assumed name, horrifically murdered her sister at age twelve. Helena Haverland, a member of the Cressett family that originally owned Cheverell Manor, seems settled in her work as an administrator of the complex medical and residence operations, but the reasons for her satisfaction with this role are not readily apparent. Even the Bostocks, Kim and Dean, hopeful young married chefs from London, might well move on: Oxford-born P. D. James worked for He misses big-time cooking in London, and the National Health Service and then she wants a baby. the Home Office. A Fellow of the Royal Rhoda Gradwyn’s fateful decision to have Society of Literature and of the Royal Chandler-Powell repair her disfigured cheek Society of the Arts, a one-time chair of the Society of Authors, and a member at the Manor clinic—she asserts she no lonof the Detection Club, she has received ger “needs” the scar, the result of a brutal the Decorated Order of the British swipe with a bottle by her drunken father— Empire (1983) and awards for crime sets off an unpredictable cascade of events. It writing from Britain, the United States, shakes the unstable social structure of the Italy, and Scandinavia. Manor’s permanent staff and leads to whole sale changes in their lives. Boyton learns of Gradwyn’s surgical intentions and turns up at the Manor in pursuit of his interests. Dalgliesh and Kate later speculate (no one is left alive to explain motives and intentions) that Boyton and perhaps Gradwyn were trying to ascertain if Candace Westhall had mimicked the plot of a real-life detective novelist, one not invented by James, Cyril Hare, whose Untimely Death (1980) hinges on the body of a wealthy man dead by natural causes being kept in a freezer to satisfy a quirk in inheritance law about date of death. Gradwyn may also have intended an exposé of wealthy plastic surgery patients and practices; the obscurity of motives becomes a theme at the end of the book. Whatever Gradwyn’s reasons, her strangulation in her room after surgery brings in Dalgliesh’s team and instigates the unraveling of the Manor’s social fabric. The Metro Police team is typically frustrated by the suspects’ reluctance to cooperate fully and sometimes by their outright hostility. The police fan out, searching Gradwyn’s London house and interviewing people who know the suspects’ back stories. Emma Lavenham, Dalgliesh’s fiancé, turns up unexpectedly, in distress about the rape and beating of a friend, but she realizes she cannot intrude on the investigation and leaves. Only after Boyton is found dead do personal histories and motives begin to converge, as Kate and Benton help Dalgliesh fill in possible scenarios for the killings. The ending to the murder mystery plot comes quickly, as the culprit tries to duplicate the burning of Mary Keyte and leaves an apparently complete confession.

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Dalgliesh, however, is dissatisfied, and in a coda to Book Four he visits an elderly lawyer privy to secrets that throw a different light on the killer’s motives. The point is not a new one in James: appearance and reality rarely jibe completely, but here human motive is purposely obscured, both by the murderer and by at least one other character. Dalgliesh speculates several times about the arrogance, even the impertinence of presuming to know the whole truth. He ends up resigned to his limited view, and there are intimations that he is considering retirement. As if to drive home the point that one is able to see only incompletely, strenuous investigation notwithstanding, a short Book Five reprises the notion as ChandlerPowell, a figure epitomizing control, dominance, and even arrogance, submits docilely to Helena Haverland’s plans for his future: He has quite possibly been manipulated from early on, and Helena appears in a different light. The remaining chapters of Book Five wrap up other loose ends. The reader learned earlier that Kate and Piers Tarrant are reuniting romantically. Lettie Frensham makes a decision to turn down the security offered by a permanent position at the Manor to engage risk through traveling the world. The last chapter is Dalgliesh’s wedding as conveyed through the point of view of Clara, Emma’s former student and friend, who quotes Jane Austen for her final word: In the end, all we can hope for is love. As with all of James’s novels, the sum is far greater than the resolution of plot lines and character prognoses. With each book, her prose style becomes more refined and lucid, and her economy of phrasing, always admirable, becomes in this novel a model for writers: Not a word is wasted. Like Dalgliesh, the prose is logical, orderly, inexorable, leading to definite but suitably restrained conclusions. As with Dalgliesh’s worries about the arrogance and impertinence of presuming too much about the unknowable human animal, James keeps her prose on a short leash. James’s philosophical vision is similarly reserved and restrained. Nighttime strollers to the Cheverell Stones hear noises from the surrounding woods, screams of terror and pain as small predators feed on prey. This is not the cozy countryside of many British mysteries but nature tooth and claw, a metaphor for the human jungle in which James’s characters compete for advantage. Civilized exteriors conceal a humankind still capable of terrible acts, which Dalgliesh and his team must witness and respond to. However, all is not gloom in this worldview, as the descriptions of the Manor’s furnishings and architecture attest: Art, like love, can redeem human misery. There is comedy, too: Dalgliesh’s interview with Emma’s father about the detective’s suitability as a son-in-law owes much to Oscar Wilde’s Mrs. Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). The most affecting episode in The Private Patient is Dalgliesh’s questioning of an elderly lawyer, Philip Kershaw, who has information about Candace Westhall. Kershaw lives near Bournemouth in Huntingdon Lodge, an institution that James says is careful not to distress visitors with words such as “retirement,” “elderly,” “nursing,” or “home.” Huntingdon Lodge is single-minded in its anti-institutional layout and decor, but nevertheless cloyingly sentimental in ornamentation. It is clean and well intentioned but, for Dalgliesh, depressingly reminiscent of prep school. Kershaw is still sharp of mind, but frail and without a social role in this institution that

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separates “clients” from each another. The old are warehoused in such institutions, James implies, their identity only a shadow of their past. Kershaw’s younger brother keeps him informed about the family firm, but he does no work. He and his fellow “guests” at Huntingdon Lodge (there are no “patients”) have long since exhausted conversational topics and are out of reach of human life below them on the shore front. James spent much of her nonliterary working life supervising institutions; in her own old age, she casts a sharp discerning eye on how institutions for the old dehumanize and depress, robbing people of what means the most to them: their place in society. Andrew Macdonald

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 2 (September 15, 2008): 5. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 18 (September 15, 2008): 979. Library Journal 133, no. 17 (October 15, 2008): 63. New Statesman 137 (August 25, 2008): 52-53. The New York Times, November 20, 2008, p. 7. The New York Times Book Review, December 14, 2008, p. 26. People 70, no. 21 (November 24, 2008): 56. The Times Literary Supplement, September 26, 2008, p. 22. USA Today, November 13, 2008, p. 3D. The Washington Times, December 14, 2008, p. M29.

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THE PYRAMID Author: Henning Mankell (1948) First published: Pyramiden, 1999, in Sweden Translated from the Swedish by Ebba Segerberg with Laurie Thompson Publisher: New Press (New York). 392 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Short fiction Time: 1969-1989 Locale: Ystad, Sweden Although the first Kurt Wallander mystery appeared in 1991, these five stories cover the years between 1969 and 1989 and present Wallander as a young policeman by illustrating some of the cases that made him into a master detective Principal characters: Kurt Wallander, an alienated police investigator in Ystad, Sweden. Mona Wallander, his wife Linda Wallander, his daughter The elder Wallander, his quirky artist father Hemberg, his boss Hannson, his colleague Rydberg, his mentor and colleague

When Swedish police detective Kurt Wallander first appeared in Moerdare utan ansikte (Faceless Killers, 1996) in 1991, he was a well-seasoned police officer who had just turned forty. However, his personal life was chaotic. His wife, Mona, had left him. His grown daughter, Linda, was busy with her own life, and his quirky artist father barely talked to him. His poor eating habits and solitary drinking had caused him to develop diabetes. Although he dreams of escaping from dark and dreary Ystad, Wallander remains in the city year after year vigilantly solving cases that stump his colleagues. The Pyramid, a chronological series of five short works, serves as a prequel to author Henning Mankell’s popular Wallander detective series. The book presents Wallander as a young police officer intent on solving the crimes that will make him into a master detective. The first story, “Wallander’s First Case,” is set in 1969. It deals with the twentyone-year-old uniformed patrolman Wallander who is so intent upon solving his first case that he disregards safety precautions. Indeed, as the story begins, Wallander is fighting his way out of a coma, recalling the events of the past week when, after finding the body of his shadowy next-door neighbor named Hålén, he took it upon himself to find the killer. Although his superiors announce Hålén’s death as a suicide, Wallander does not agree, especially after a fire is set in the man’s apartment, as he

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sees it, to cover up evidence. Wallander becomes so involved in the case that he is late picking up his girlfriend Mona, and when he does manage to get to the ferry landing, he finds she has left him. He is devastated when she tells him later that evening that she wants to take a weeklong break. No matter how hard he tries, over and over again Wallander will forget about Mona when duty calls. Similarly, he will disregard his elderly father who has been feeling ignored and put aside. Wallander is amazed to find that his father has sold his childhood home and moved to a remote area in a house he has not even seen. Eventually, Wallander discovers that the victim, Hålén, had been a sailor. In Brazil, he and a buddy named Rune had come across some jewels. However, after Rune was arrested, Hålén absconded with the jewels and hid out back home in Sweden, hoping that Rune would spend the rest of his life in a Brazilian prison. However, Rune returned to Sweden intent on revenge, and he stabs Wallander in an altercation. When Wallander comes out of the coma, Mona is smiling. In the first story, Mankell cleverly foreshadows the Wallander couple’s future. Their love is fragile and their marriage is doomed. In addition, the author begins a theme that will continue in the entire Wallander series: the encroachment of outside negative forces—in this case from Brazil—that affects all of Swedish society. Wallander’s problems with his father illustrate how contemporary Sweden is forgetting its past. In the next short story, “The Man with the Mask,” Wallander is a new father on his way home from work to his wife, Mona, on Christmas Eve. When he stops at a grocery store—someone called earlier to report a suspicious stranger—he discovers the body of the elderly owner, Elma Hagman. Suddenly, he is hit from behind and, after he gains consciousness, discovers a silent young man wearing a mask standing over him holding a gun. Something has gone terribly wrong in a simple robbery, Wallander realizes, and he attempts to talk to the young man. He knows Mona will call the office to find out why he is late, the police will show up, and things could get out of hand. For a long time, the young man does not say a word, but finally he removes the mask and speaks. His name is Oliver, and he has fled South Africa after his father resisted the government and was executed. Wallander attempts to coax Oliver into putting the gun down, but when sirens are heard in the distance, the terrified young man raises the gun and, yet again, Wallander fears for his life. However, instead of shooting Wallander, the desperate man shoots himself. In this sad tale, Wallander continues to illustrate how violent outside forces moving into Sweden affect the previously peaceful country. “The Man on the Beach,” the third story in The Pyramid, concerns an elderly man

Swedish writer Henning Mankell worked as a dramatist before publisheing his first novel in 1973. He lives in both Sweden and Maputo, Mozambique, where he has worked as a director of Teatro Avenida since 1985. Mankell’s Wallander series has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, and the British Broadcasting Corporation began airing The Kurt Wallander Mysteries, starring Kenneth Branagh, in 2008.

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named Alexandersson whose body was found in the back seat of a taxicab. On the surface, the death appears to be the result of an ordinary heart attack, but an autopsy reveals that the man, who was on vacation, died from ingesting poison. At first, Wallander is stumped, but eventually he traces the case to a very cold beach and the house of an elderly doctor named Stenholm. It seems Alexandersson has been taking a cab from Ystad to the same seaside spot every day and returning again in the evening. The doctor pleads ignorance; his wife is upstairs, he claims, in bed dying from cancer. Wallander continues to dig and learns that years ago the victim’s only son died in a violent crime. The doctor’s wife, it turns out, was the district attorney in charge of his son’s case and Alexandersson believed she was at fault for not pressing harder to bring the killer to justice. For years the Stenholms have not known a moment of peace. They have been hounded continuously by the heartbroken father. In an effort to bring some peace to his dying wife, Stenholm poisons the old man simply to get him to stop stalking them. In this touching story, Mankell demonstrates that the rise of violent crime in Sweden in recent times has deeply affected the older generation, in this case two respectable families, who are left confused, angry, and ultimately helpless. In the fourth story, “The Death of the Photographer,” Wallander is newly separated from his wife, Mona, who has moved away to Malmö with their daughter, Linda. Sad and lonely, he has turned to food and solitary drinking for comfort. He investigates the death of mild-mannered photographer, Simon Lamberg, who takes studio portraits in a store on the main town square and who finds satisfaction in distorting and diminishing the faces of famous people at night. The photographer does this, it can be supposed, to make himself feel more important. Why, Wallander wonders, would anyone want to murder such a harmless man who was known to everyone? Lamberg had been married for years but lived with his wife in name only. The wife hardened toward him after he put their only child Matilda away in a home for the mentally challenged. When Wallander finds out that a mysterious woman has for years been visiting Matilda, he puts the facts together that Lamberg had been having an affair with a minister’s wife whom he had he met on a bus tour of Continental Europe. In a fit of rage, the minister had entered Lamberg’s studio late one night and killed him. In this story, Mankell poses the idea that leaving Sweden, such as on a bus tour in another country, leads to dangerous changes and influences that can damage Sweden’s delicate social fabric. “The Pyramid,” the fifth and final story in the prequel series, is set in 1989 and leads Wallander to, of all places, Egypt. He follows his vacationing father who has been arrested there, incurring a steep fine after attempting to climb a pyramid, an act forbidden by Egyptian law. His father, an artist, has been living alone in the country, painting the same landscape motif over and over. Deep into the investigation of two puzzling, seemingly unrelated cases, Wallander has to take a loan to pay for the trip to Egypt. One case involves a small plane crash and the other the murder of two old sisters who owned a small sewing store. There is no record of the flight and the plane is unmarked, and how, the dismayed Wallander wonders, could anyone kill the two old Eberhardsson sisters, the most innocent of victims?

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After a grueling flight, Wallander is welcomed by an Egyptian police officer named Radwan who helps him untangle his father’s mess. When Wallander considers that his father could have died in an Egyptian jail, he begins to soften toward him. He comes to appreciate his father a bit more, and after paying the fine in court, the two enjoy sharing an Egyptian adventure together. Since his wife Mona has left him, Wallander suffers from loneliness and physical neglect. He has taken up with another woman, named Emma Lundin, but he does not care for her that much and is too nice, or too cowardly, to end it. After he returns to his solitary apartment in Ystad, Wallander dreams of a pyramid, and when he awakens he finds he is able to use the model of a pyramid to put the building blocks of both cases he has been working on together. Through this process, he discovers that the plane that crashed came in under the radar and was involved in drug smuggling, and that the two seemingly innocent old Eberhardsson sisters are really sharks with a safe full of loot and a villa in Marbella, Spain: They arrange the shipments of drugs into Sweden. In this brilliant story, Wallander again illustrates how forces outside Sweden, in this case drug smugglers, are infiltrating his country and destroying its once-wholesome society. Although Wallander is not the best family man, he is a highly admirable, indeed a remarkable character. At times moody and irritable, he nevertheless is deeply troubled by the crimes he witnesses and feels an inner determination to solve them, not merely for self-satisfaction or to advance his career, but because he is concerned about contemporary Swedish society. Indeed, Wallander’s marriage parallels Sweden’s problems and the breakup of the traditionally solid Swedish family. This anxious concern deepens as Wallander becomes older and witnesses a Europe very different socially and culturally from the one in which he grew up. For thousands of years, Sweden has been more or less isolated geographically and socially from mainstream Europe. Not so any more. Wallander anxiously worries about how to control the criminal forces that continually penetrate his country’s borders. Indeed, in the forward to The Pyramid, Mankell claims that the Wallander series should be subtitled “novels of Swedish anxiety.” M. Casey Diana

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 22 (August 1, 2008): 46. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 14 (July 15, 2008): 8. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 30 (July 28, 2008): 56. The Times Literary Supplement, October 24, 2008, p. 21.

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QUIET, PLEASE Dispatches from a Public Librarian Author: Scott Douglas (1978) Publisher: Da Capo Press (Cambridge, Mass.). 330 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Memoir Time: 2001-2004 Locale: Anaheim, California Douglas writes about his personal transition from aimless college student to professional librarian during a time when libraries and librarianship are also experiencing a critical transition In Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian, author Scott Douglas chronicles his first three years working in a small Anaheim, California, public library. During this time Douglas earned a master’s degree in Library and Information Science (MLIS) from San Jose State University and was promoted from library page, to technician, to librarian. Douglas had not planned to become a librarian; majoring in English literature at college, he had no specific plans for his future. By chance he saw a classified advertisement for a job as a library page, and he applied partly because of his love of books and reading and partly because he had nothing else in mind. During his first few months in the library, an older male library clerk suggested Douglas pursue a professional degree because he was more familiar with new technologies than many librarians and because the clerk felt outnumbered by women on the staff. Promoted to library technician, Douglas applied to San Jose State’s graduate program and began thinking more seriously about library work. Noting that he started in his new position on September 11, 2001, as the United States was attacked by terrorists, Douglas recounts how various regimes throughout history—the Germans in 1914 Belgium, the Nazis in Poland during World War II, the Taliban in Afghanistan—have destroyed libraries and other cultural artifacts in their attempts to conquer foreign cultures. As a library-school student, he began to notice how people searched for information about the September 11 attacks, and how critical they were (or were not) about what they found. He also noted that historically communities, not librarians, rebuild and reestablish destroyed libraries. This sequence is typical of Douglas’s digressive but entertaining writing style, moving from the personal to a historical observation or extended factoid, then back again to his own story. Douglas completed a two-year MLIS program, and he is fairly critical of the education he was offered in library school, raising an ongoing argument in librarianship about its professionalization and the value of theory versus practice. Typically, Douglas found much of his formal education would not help him with practical, dayto-day library work (his final project is to write a report about terrorism in Southeast

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Asia); at the same time, on the job he began to appreciate the skills and knowledge of library workers who did not have professional degrees. Beginning his career just as personal computers were becoming a staple of library service, Douglas worked with librarians and staff who were unable to make the transition to providing online service or to cope with an influx of young, unruly library patrons who Scott Douglas has published articles in came to use computers. At first library emmagazines, including School Library ployees knew nothing about computers or the Journal and The Door Magazine, and Internet and could only look on as patrons he blogs about his experiences as a surfed the Internet, used e-mail, and launched public librarian in Anaheim, programs unfamiliar to anyone on the staff. California. Quiet, Please is his first The library also encountered a new surly attibook. tude on the part of younger patrons and the ad vent of Internet pornography (Douglas opens his first chapter with a remark about patrons masturbating while viewing Internet pornography, a common situation in libraries allowing public access). Douglas entered the profession just as libraries were losing patrons to bookstores and Internet resources they could access at home, and he argues that libraries must change radically to compete with these threats. He suggests the classification systems used to arrange library materials should be jettisoned in favor of clearly labeled subject areas typical of bookstores, and he points out that many libraries have fallen behind in making online resources available and providing ways for users to plug in their own laptops and other electronic peripherals. However, Douglas also believes public libraries serve their communities in ways that cannot be replaced by retail outlets or the Internet. He gives many examples showing how libraries are important in the lives of senior citizens, the mentally disabled, children, teens, the homeless, and immigrant families. Objecting when his library starts giving away free bags of popcorn, Douglas is told that for some children the popcorn will be the largest meal they have that day. Two years later he is ready to argue not only that patrons should be allowed to eat and drink in the library but also that libraries should sell food, claiming that the damage food and drink can cause to books, computers, and the physical environment is minimal compared to the comfort and convenience that might make the library more attractive to users. A library promotion for a fast-food restaurant, which disgusts him because the library is encouraging consumption of unhealthy food, shows him how desperate some families are to earn coupons for free hamburgers, filling out multiple reading logs to trade for coupons and even completing reading logs for infants. Library employees provide role models and emotional support to teenagers from troubled homes, companionship to the homeless and elderly, and social practice to the developmentally disabled.

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Quiet, Please is characterized by its dual view of library workers and patrons. Douglas is ambivalent about most library users, who can be difficult—sometimes even frightening—to deal with, but at the same time they offer wisdom, amusement, and social interactions he values highly. His reactions to elderly patrons range from empathy and concern to dread and disgust. He loves to hear the stories older patrons can tell and appreciates the perspective they have on life, realizing they are often lonely and come to the library just to chat. At the same time, he notes that elderly patrons often refuse to learn skills for using the Internet, might ask the same question every day, and are the most likely to approach him with complaints. Douglas is brutal in describing his coworkers, who use library computers for personal projects and arrive for work reeking of pot—although even the most mean-tempered library clerk serves a valuable purpose in customer service by commiserating with elderly patrons who need someone to whom they can freely complain. Douglas has doubts about becoming a professional librarian, linked to his ideals and sense of purpose, but more practically to the hazards of working in a publicaccess library. Douglas recounts several instances when patrons threatened him with physical harm. Teenagers become angry when asked to turn off blaring rap music; a homeless patron accuses Douglas of stealing his belongings; a man talking loudly on his cell phone in a public area threatens Douglas when asked to end the call. Occasionally Douglas betrays a limited exposure to varieties of librarianship. Two or three years into his job, he is ready to assert that many librarians do not read, either because they do not have time or because at the end of the day, they are simply weary of dealing with books. Douglas also declares that cataloging (the creation of records that enable patrons and librarians to search for books) is obsolete, footnoting several “meaningless” cataloging terms he was expected to learn in library school (several of which are in daily use in libraries larger than his own). Quiet, Please is refreshingly politically incorrect and irreverent, but sometimes jarring. Douglas uses “dick” liberally to describe patrons, coworkers, and himself. He is surprisingly open about the frustrations of customer service, often speaking the unspeakable: suggesting that older patrons would be less troublesome if they would just die, describing his initial discomfort with disabled patrons as a dislike for the handicapped, or calling one patron “a stupid old man in a wheelchair.” His account of an obese patron’s refusal to leave the men’s room contains a bizarre footnote describing a fearful fantasy of being trapped with the patron and sexually assaulted: “I had dreams that one day I would go into the bathroom and he would . . . rape me,” and it ended with him “killing and eating me.” Quiet, Please began as a more formal version of short essays Douglas wrote for an online magazine, and as a book developed from an Internet project it reflects a willingness to play with styles and formats as well as with a conviction that trivial personal information is worth posting. One chapter is presented as a screenplay, inexplicably introduced as an intermission during the film Ben-Hur (1959) while assuring the reader that the entire chapter serves no purpose and could be skipped. Douglas’s account of his foray into MySpace.com, where he finds an online community of other young librarians, transcribes information from his MySpace page, including schools

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he attended from high school forward, lists of his favorite television programs, recording artists and books, and a personal profile listing his zodiac sign and telling whether he smokes. The book is heavily and frivolously footnoted, usually with brief humorous comments that could have been incorporated into the text. In a few cases Douglas creates several back-and-forth interactions between his text and footnotes within a sentence or two, distracting the reader in an attempt to serve as his own straight man. A few footnotes provide factual information, which, again, might have been incorporated into the text, and are distinguishable from the sidebars only in their relative brevity. Detachment from one’s work is typical of contemporary humor, and Douglas frequently disparages his own text and suggests his readers are wasting their time. Numerous sidebars titled “For Shelving” allow Douglas, by nature an information scientist, to tell what he knows about history (of libraries, of children’s literature, of eugenics, and of Anaheim and Disneyland), statistics (the economics of obtaining, then having, a college degree), and odd miscellany (evidence that the first moon landing was a hoax; the difference between a hobo and a bum; which country allows people to marry their pets; what scientists have discovered about boredom). In a footnote Douglas says these sidebars are pointless and are meant as little breaks from his main text, allowing the reader to “regroup and return to the pages with a fresh sense of interest.” Douglas learns that the purpose of the library is to support the community as well as to provide access to books. In many cases library purchases and policies are driven by economic considerations, as administrators decide how to satisfy the largest, most vocal, or most powerful community group. In his first years as a librarian, Douglas continually reviews his choice. Having joined the profession by default, he looks for the kernel of purpose in his job, always rediscovering where his responsibilities lie. His job is not to protect materials owned by the library, show people where to find titles, or even to like library patrons, but to serve the people who use the library in whatever way he can. Maureen Puffer-Rothenberg

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 15 (April 1, 2008): 102. Los Angeles Magazine 53, no. 4 (April, 2008): 92.

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THE REAVERS Author: George MacDonald Fraser (1925-2008) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 268 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The late sixteenth century Locale: The border between England and Scotland In a comic novel marked by wordplay, anachronisms, and outlandish events, the Scots and the English unite to defeat a vicious Spanish plot Principal characters: Archie Noble, an English secret agent masquerading as an outlaw Ebeneezer “Bonny” Gilderoy, a Scottish secret agent and a highwayman Lady Godiva Dacre, a tall, red-haired, strong-willed young heiress and part-time secret agent Mistress Kylie Delishe, her pretty little companion The Wizard, later revealed to be La Infamosa, leader of the conspiracy against James VI Don Collapso Regardo Baluna del Lobby y Corridor, the Spanish ambassador to Scotland and a conspirator Lord Anguish, a Scottish traitor Frey Bentos, a Spanish monk and conspirator, formerly Lord Waldo Dacre’s chaplain Clnzh, an Amazon pygmy and a conspirator James VI, the king of Scotland

George MacDonald Fraser begins his “Foreword” to The Reavers by asserting that “This book is nonsense,” a “rebuke” to a society he insists is obsessed with doom. This work, he explains, is written in the same spirit as his previous novel, The Pyrates (1984). Certainly both books share some of the same elements that made Fraser’s twelve Flashman novels so popular: historical settings, roguish heroes, voluptuous noblewomen, buxom barmaids, deep-dyed villains, and an assortment of outlaws. The Flashman novels also include plots, abductions, barroom brawls, and pitched battles, all staged to display the heroes’ reckless courage and their magnificent swordsmanship. However, though the tone of the Flashman novels is satirical, they are essentially adventure stories with a historical setting; by contrast, The Reavers defies history and denies probability. It is indeed a romp of unreason. However, this most irrational comic novel has a carefully reasoned structure. It is divided into twelve chapters of equal length, all but the first preceded by Fraser’s commentaries on what has transpired or what is to come. These comments are designed to suggest that the action is not planned but improvised; for example, after chapter 1, Fraser discards several other ideas for the next segment before it strikes him

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that what he needs now is some glamorous women. Fraser’s success in making The Reavers appear to be a spur-of-the-moment lark is indicated by the fact that a number of reviewers insist that the book has no real plot. Admittedly, it is difficult to follow the story, in part because one incident follows another in a seemingly random fashion, and in part because the author introduces so many characters and describes them in such vivid detail that it is hard to tell which members of his cast are important. The direction of the plot does not become evident until the third chapter of the book, in which the author introduces his villains—a set of Spaniards and Spanish sympathizers who have met in a cave in order to fine-tune a vicious plot—and their plan to substitute an impostor for James VI, the reigning Scottish king, who after the death of Queen Elizabeth I will take her place as the ruler of England. The leader of the conspirators first appears as a wizard but is later revealed to be the malignant La Infamosa. Another member of the group is Don Collapso Regardo Baluna del Lobby y Corridor, the Spanish ambassador to Scotland. A Scottish traitor, Lord Anguish, and an Amazonian pygmy called Clnzh are also present at the meeting. One of the most important conspirators is Frey Bentos, a Spanish monk, who somehow managed to convince the late Lord Waldo Dacre that he was neither Spanish nor a monk, was appointed chaplain to that prominent aristocrat, and used his position to obtain information that would aid the cause of Spain. In the third chapter, Fraser makes it clear that as rambunctious as The Reavers may be, its plot line has a solid foundation: the conflict between good (England, Scotland, and Protestantism) and evil (Spain and Catholicism). At this point, the author sets out to identify the heroes and heroines in this struggle. Though all of them appeared earlier, they are now shown as both more important and more complex than they seemed. Archie Noble, for example, was introduced as a man who had just been paroled after being imprisoned for vagrancy and was wandering about with no protector and no means of support. Only his dexterity in disposing of the fearsome Scottish gang leader Black Dod Pringle suggested that Noble might be more than a minor outlaw. As the plot progresses, Noble has to admit that he is in fact an English secret agent, and subsequently he is always in the forefront of the action. Another seemingly unlikely hero is the highwayman Ebeneezer “Bonny” Gilderoy, who, though an accomplished swordsman, is best known for being able to kiss any female into acquiescence. Now, however, he has to admit to Noble that he is a Scottish secret agent. The relationship between the two men is never easy. On a personal level, Noble clearly resents Gilderoy’s unique gift, especially when the two heroes desire the same woman. Moreover, in the past their two countries have often been bitter enemies. However, Noble and Gilderoy realize that now they have a common cause: protecting James VI from the

George MacDonald Fraser is best known as the author of twelve comic novels about Harry Flashman, a fictional nineteenth century adventurer. Fraser’s script for The Three Musketeers (1973) won him the 1974 Writers Guild of Great Britain award for best comedy screenplay. Among his other screenplays was the James Bond film Octopussy (1983). The Reavers was Fraser’s final work.

The Reavers / fraser

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Spanish conspiracy. They know that if a puppet of Spain replaced James on the Scottish throne and later became king of England, the results would be disastrous for both nations. Not only does The Reavers have two heroes, but it also has two heroines. Lady Godiva Dacre, a tall, handsome, and wealthy young lady, first appears in the second chapter of the novel, as one of two passengers in a coach that is stuck in the mud on the road to Carlisle, Scotland. It seems that Lady Godiva was sent away from court because the queen viewed the red-haired beauty as a competitor. Though her own estates are in East Anglia, Lady Godiva is making her way north to see about the property of her grandfather, Lord Waldo Dacre, who has recently died. The other passenger is Lady Godiva’s friend and companion Mistress Kylie Delishe, a small but wellendowed young woman with an overactive libido. While the coach is halted, some of the local bandits decide that it would be an ideal time to steal the horses and rob the passengers. However, the handsome, well-dressed highwayman Gilderoy comes to the rescue, drives off the bandits, retrieves the horses, and brings back Godiva’s servants, who had fled from their attackers. Gilderoy swears his undying love to Godiva, favoring her with one of his famous kisses. However, while she is in ecstasy, Gilderoy is busy taking her jewels. When she discovers what he has done, she is furious, but Gilderoy refuses to give them back, arguing that his reputation as a highwayman would be ruined if he did so. At this point in the novel, it is not clear that Godiva will emerge as a heroine, though she has demonstrated that she has the spirit, or at least the temper, to qualify her for the role. Later, however, she admits to being a part-time secret agent, reporting to Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth I’s secretary of state (1573-1590) and one of the few historical personages in the novel. It later turns out that the jewels of which Gilderoy relieved Godiva were supposed to provide funds for Walsingham’s agents and specifically for those who are attempting to outwit the Spaniards. These revelations make it evident that Godiva is more than the spoiled rich girl she at first appears to be. She is also much more than the passive heroine whom men must rescue. As the novel proceeds, she fights beside the heroes, thus proving herself to be both as clever and as courageous as they are. Kylie Delishe, too, at first appears to be a superficial character, defined by her obsession with sex. Kylie’s primary function seems to be that of the confidant in French drama: to enable the heroine, in this case, Godiva, to express herself. However, Kylie, too, proves to have heroic qualities. Late in the novel, she outwits Clnzh, seizes a knife, and frees Noble, along with one of his bandit allies, thus setting in motion the events that lead to the defeat of the Spanish conspiracy. Though it has the plot structure of a traditional novel, with characters lined up on both sides of a clearly defined conflict between good and evil, in other respects The Reavers is truly extraordinary. The language alone qualifies it for that description. The book begins with the hackneyed phrase “It was a dark and stormy night,” which proves to be the beginning of a sentence that goes on for some thirty lines, rambling from phrase to phrase like an Elizabethan gossip. From that point on, Fraser indulges in language, often mischievously piling up as many verbs or nouns as come to mind,

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and just as often inserting contemporary slang in the midst of the “forsooths” and “eftsoons” that one would find in a bad novel with an Elizabethan setting. The author switches at will from one dialect to another, then comes back to standard English just when his readers have begun to find their way through a dialect. As a reviewer in The New York Times pointed out, in The Reavers Fraser also ignores the rules of punctuation. He keeps his sentences going long after any other writer would insert a period, and he scatters dashes and dots with wild abandon. There are enough sentence fragments to give a freshman English teacher apoplexy. What makes the difference is that unlike the student, the author knows exactly what he is doing. Fraser takes particular pleasure in inserting contemporary slang, references to recent events, and even allusions to modern technological devices such as DVDs into his narrative. He seems to take special delight in introducing anachronistic references at the most dramatic moments. For example, just before the conspiracy is to come to fruition, he shows Lord Anguish and the Scottish Sir Prising hammering out a contract that will decide the distribution of the profits from James’s memoirs as well as from commemorative souvenirs such as T-shirts, cups, and stickers. The Reavers is not a novel that everyone will enjoy. It is exhausting to read; there are so many characters, so many twists in the plot, so much swordplay, and so much sexual innuendo, and such frequent interruptions for authorial comments that one may be tempted to put down the book and turn to a work that is less taxing. However, the reader who can suspend disbelief and join the author in simply having fun will find The Reavers truly delightful. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 13 (March 1, 2008): 30. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 5 (March 1, 2008): 209-210. Library Journal 133, no. 6 (April 1, 2008): 74-75. The New York Times Book Review, June 8, 2008, p. 24. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 8 (February 25, 2008): 48-49. The Washington Times, April 20, 2008, p. B06.

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RECONCILIATION Islam, Democracy, and the West Author: Benazir Bhutto (1953-2007) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 328 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Current affairs, history Bhutto’s vision for reconciling differences within the Muslim world and between the Muslim world and the West was finished just days before her assassination in December, 2007 Principal personages: Benazir Bhutto, prime minister of Pakistan (1988-1990, 1993-1996), the first woman to lead an Islamic state Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of the Pakistan People’s Party in 1968, president of Pakistan (1971-1973), and first prime minister elected in Pakistan (served 1973-1977 and reelected in 1977) President Ayub Khan, president of Pakistan in the 1950’s and 1960’s General Yahya Khan, commander-in-chief in 1969 and president and military dictator until 1971 General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, general who imposed military rule in 1977, became president in 1978, and executed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979 General Pervez Musharraf, Army chief of staff who seized power in Pakistan in 1999 and who was president (2001-2008)

According to her collaborator, Mark A. Siegel, Benazir Bhutto believed that two major world issues would dominate this millennium: the struggle between democracy and dictatorship and the struggle between moderation and extremism. Reconciliation, published after her death, explores these struggles from “a modern Muslim woman’s view.” It includes historical and contemporary perspectives that are critical to understanding the worldwide confrontation between Muslim extremists and the West. Bhutto’s avowed purpose in returning home to Pakistan in 2007 was to further democracy and moderation in that country. She describes in detail her dramatic return to Karachi on October 18, after a self-imposed exile of eight years, to a tumultuous welcome by three million supporters. Their enthusiastic support reminded her of her emotional return to Pakistan in 1986, after two years abroad, when she assumed the leadership of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). Bhutto makes it clear that she understood the danger of returning to Pakistan. Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the founder of the PPP and Pakistan’s first elected prime minister, had been executed in 1979 by General Zia-ul-Haq, the military dictator who deposed him. Many of the same forces that ended democracy and conspired to kill her father and two brothers were still in power, and General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s military dictator in 2007, warned

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that suicide squads threatened to assassinate her. Bhutto, anticipating elections scheduled for January, 2008, was willing to take a calculated risk. On October 19, 2007, the progress of her cavalcade was marked by two bomb blasts that killed almost two hundred people. She suspected that Musharraf was in collusion with her enemies, doing little to provide her security. Bhutto escaped this attempt on her life, but she was assassinated by extremists two months later, on December 27, 2007. Ironically, Siegel received the manuscript of Reconciliation on the day she died. Bhutto devotes a chapter in Reconciliation to conflicts within the Muslim world. The Islamic world faces both internal and external crises. If the internal struggles in Muslim society are not resolved, conflicts will “degenerate into a collision course of values spilling into a clash between Islam and the West.” The history of Islam and the differences between the beliefs of the Sunnis and Shias and their various sects are many, but overriding these differences are two major tensions within Islam: democracy versus dictatorship and moderation versus extremism. Bhutto finds it ironic that moderate Muslims, who were outraged by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, have little to say about Muslim-on-Muslim violence. Arguing for moderation and democracy, she debates the fundamentalists’ interpretation of the Qur$3n . She argues that the Qur$3n must be interpreted from a modern understanding of Islam and related to its historical context or a given situation. Citing the Qur$3n, Islamic scholars, and historical precedent, she argues that extremists distort the message of Islam and enforce many restrictive traditions derived from ancient tribal values or medieval interpretations of Islam. They use the Qur$3n to suppress women and enforce strict dress codes, but women are equal to men; and men, as well as women, are admonished by the Qur$3n to guard their modesty. Although terrorists call their violence jihad (holy war), jihad literally means a struggle to follow the right path—either in an internal struggle or in an external struggle that is defensive or against persecution. Historically, in a region of constant warfare, Islam outlawed war except for jihad; violence was a last resort. “Holy war” was never intended to be used again monotheists (Christians and Jews or “the people of the Book”). Indeed, today some Muslims believe that the materialism, corruption, and hedonistic values promoted in the Western-dominated media require a jihad, but armed conflict must be constrained. Osama bin Laden and other terrorists equate suicide, which is prohibited by the Qur$3n, with dying for a just cause. They want to unite the Muslim world politically and to provoke a clash of values with the West. A clash between Muslim and Western civilizations, however, is not inevitable. Islam, unlike the caricature portrayed in the Western media, is not incompatible with democracy, which is a universal longing. Tolerance, justice, rationality, and gender equality are inherent in true Islam.

Benazir Bhutto, the first woman to lead a Muslim state, was prime minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990. Reelected in 1993, she was forced to resign in 1996, when the military assumed control of the government. She returned to Pakistan in October, 2007, and was assassinated by extremists two months later. In 2008, she was one of seven winners of the United Nations Human Rights Prize.

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Although Muslim societies have contributed to their own problems because of internal strife and Muslim-on-Muslim violence, Bhutto lays responsibility for the failure of Muslim countries to develop democratic governments at the door of the Western powers, especially France, Britain, and the United States. In a concise and reasoned history of Western interference in Muslim countries, she shows, country by country, how Western governments have meddled in the affairs of Muslim societies and exploited them in their self-interests. By supporting dictators and failing to foster true economic and democratic development, they have created resentment and hostility, leading to the current instability and violence in the world. Pakistan, a case in point, has been in turmoil for most of its sixty-year history. It is now “ground zero” in the world confrontation between radical Islamists and the West, due to its nuclear capability and its political and economic instability When the British pulled out of India in 1947, the country was hastily partitioned into two states, India and Pakistan, roughly along religious lines (Hindus and Muslims), with the disputed territory of Kashmir separating East and West Pakistan. Geography and serious ethnic and linguistic differences separated East and West Pakistan. Distrust over elections for the constituent assembly in 1969 and irreconcilable political differences with the PPP resulted in war in 1971. India entered the war on East Pakistan’s side and defeated Pakistan in 1971. East Pakistan became Bangladesh in January, 1972. From its beginning, Pakistan has been plagued by wars, poverty, a lack of educational and economic resources, religious extremism, and frequent military coups, dictatorships, and assassinations. The mind-boggling problems caused by the ethnic and linguistic diversity of the country have been exacerbated by the arrival of millions of Muslim immigrants (muhajirs) from India, uprooted in 1947, and by the concentration of Afghan refugees on its border with Afghanistan. When Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the father of independence, died soon after the partition, General Ayub Kahn became president and was in power in the 1950’s and 1960’s. He imposed a state of emergency in 1965, when Pakistan went to war with India over Kashmir and there was widespread dissent and violence. In 1968, after an assassination attempt, he arrested opposition leaders, including Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir’s father and founder of the PPP. Ayub Kahn resigned in 1969, handing over power to General Yahya Khan, the military commander-in-chief, who assumed the title of president and imposed martial law. Yahya Khan called for elections in December, 1970, and resigned in 1971 after his invasion of East Pakistan led to defeat by India. Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, became the undisputed leader of Pakistan. He was president from 1971 to 1973 and became Pakistan’s first elected prime minister in 1973. He instituted a policy of Islamic socialism. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was reelected 1977, but his campaign had been marked by violence. Protests by the opposition—alleging discrimination, fraud, and corruption and demanding new elections—resulted in General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s deposing Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and imposing military rule. Zia-ul-Haq assumed the presidency in 1978, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was arrested on charges of attempted murder. His execution in 1979 was the turning point in his daughter Benazir’s life. She felt compelled to assume her father’s mantle. (She ignores accusations that he became very au-

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tocratic, suppressing criticism and jailing opponents. She claims that her father was falsely accused and executed because he was the only politician of mass appeal and there was no political alternative.) Bhutto became the leader of the PPP and became prime minister in 1988, serving until 1990, and again from 1993 to 1996. Her government was accused of massive corruption, and she was imprisoned and later exiled. Bhutto’s political history is informative, but biased, fragmented, and selfjustifying. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December, 1979, the United States began channeling massive arms supplies through Pakistan to the Afghan mujahideen (freedom fighters) who were waging guerrilla warfare. After the mujahideen established bases in northern Pakistan, thousands of refugees fled to Pakistan. The United States supported Zia-ul-Haq with massive aid programs between 1987 and 1992, in exchange for his cooperation. A zealous Muslim, Zia-ul-Haq increased the Islamization of Pakistan and aligned Pakistani intelligence agencies with radical elements of the mujahideen. He destroyed political parties, eliminated the independent judiciary, and suspended human rights. In 1999, the army’s chief of staff, Musharraf, seized power in a coup, naming himself president in 2001. He also accepted U.S. aid, but he was unable to control political extremists. The invasion of Afghanistan by the United States after 9/11 alienated Muslim tribal people and increased support for the Taliban and unrest in Pakistan. Political pressure forced Musharraf to resign as army chief in 2007, and he agreed to hold elections in 2008. Although he allowed Bhutto to return to Pakistan, he imposed martial law in 2007. Bhutto was hopeful he would relinquish power. He was forced to step down in 2008. In “A Clash of Civilizations?” (an essay published in 1993), Samuel P. Huntington predicted an unalterable opposition between the West and the Muslim world. Bhutto reasons that such a clash is not inevitable. To believe Huntington’s theory would make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Both camps must seek reconciliation. The Muslim world must seek reform and learn to deal with modernity. The West must foster democracy and economic progress in Muslim countries. Bhutto proposes more cultural exchanges, based on the tenet that “the more you know about others, the less likely you are to fear them.” Critics argue that this commonly accepted notion is debatable, citing the example of the suicide bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11 by terrorists who were educated in the United States. This book could be a wonderful primer for Muslims and Westerners who seek to understand the historical, cultural, and theological tensions within the Muslim world. Most Westerners are ignorant of how their governments have contributed to the present world crisis by trying to control Muslim countries. Unfortunately, the historical and political complexity of the Muslim world and the numerous unfamiliar names, terms, and organizations present a challenge to the reader. There is no index, and there are no chapter headings at the tops of pages, which makes it difficult to access information. A map of the subcontinent of Asia would also have been helpful. Despite these problems, Bhutto makes an informative and persuasive case for an urgent need to address problems and forge creative solutions in order to avoid a clash

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of civilizations. Given the problems in Pakistan and her failure to establish a truly democratic government in the past, Bhutto may not have been able to accomplish much, had she become prime minister again. This book may be her greatest legacy. Edna B. Quinn

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 13 (March 1, 2008): 28. Library Journal 133, no. 13 (August 15, 2008): 126. Los Angeles Times, February 12, 2008, p. E1. New Statesman 137 (March 3, 2008): 54-55. The New York Times, January 7, 2008, p. 2. The New York Times Book Review, April 6, 2008, p. 16. The Times Literary Supplement, June 13, 2008, p. 27. The Washington Post, February 12, 2008, p. C1.

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RED BIRD Author: Mary Oliver (1935) Publisher: Beacon Press (Boston). 78 pp. $23.00. Type of work: Poetry In this collection of sixty-one new poems, well-known poet and nature writer Oliver observes the Cape Cod landscape from the perspective of her seventy years, encompassing love and loss, happiness, and grief In her twelfth book of poetry, Red Bird, Oliver breaks new ground while still offering readers what they love best: the sharp image, the keen observation, and the near-mystical identification with the natural world. From the opening poem, “Red Bird,” to the closing poem, “Red Bird Explains Himself,” Oliver weaves together the journey of her life, through love, through sorrow, and back again to an embrace of the world. In 2005 Oliver’s beloved companion, Molly Malone Cook, died at the age of eighty. The two had shared an oceanside home on Cape Cod for more than forty years. Oliver’s 2006 collection, Thirst, was heavy with the grief of that loss. In 2006, as a tribute to Cook, Oliver selected a representative sampling of Cook’s photographs and published them along with her own prose in a book titled Our World. Now, through the words of Red Bird, Oliver emerges from her grief to once again open her arms, her vision, and her heart to all of the creatures of the natural world. Nonetheless, her vision is slightly shifted from her earlier work; the poems of Red Bird carry with them a subtle, dark undercurrent. It is as if her understanding of the world is being severely tested. While her earlier work demonstrates her connectedness to all living things, Red Bird lays bare a grief over the death of one particular person. Further, whereas in earlier work, Oliver has many times portrayed the deaths of creatures large and small, it is in this book that she integrates into her worldview the necessity of death. To do so, she must enlarge her scope, finding sympathy for the fox and the mouse, the bear and fish, paradoxically and equally. She must confront herself squarely as an aging woman who will surely experience her own death, more likely sooner than later. Despite these thematic concerns, it would be wrong, however, to depict Red Bird as a sad or sorrowful book, although there is surely both sorrow and sadness within the pages. The book is filled with wonder, some laughter, many sharp images, and evidence of the redemptive power of nature. The red bird of the title signals Oliver’s return to the land of the living, “firing up the landscape/ as nothing else could do.” In the winter of the spirit and the heart, the passion that the red bird represents continues to call all creatures to life, even the poet herself. In “Self-Portrait,” Oliver claims that she is “still/ in love with life. And still/ full of beans.” Even at seventy, she finds the strength and the purpose to tramp the woods and hills. Her characteristic joy in life in all its varieties, including her own, is evident here and throughout the book.

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Early in the collection, however, Oliver strikes another, more somber note. In “Night Mary Oliver is one of the best-known and the River,” Oliver describes the scene of a poets and essayists in the United States. bear fishing along a river. Without first nam- The winner of the 1998 Lannon ing the bear, she creates his power: The bear Literary Award, Oliver also won the has “great feet leaping in the river,” and she Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive sees “the sudden fire of his mouth” as he eats (1983) and the 1992 National Book a fish. It is as if the power of the bear exists Award for New and Selected Poems. Born in Ohio, Oliver lives in separately from his physical body. For Oliver, Provincetown, Massachusetts. this is a beautiful, yet terrifying, experience, one that she is not sure how to explain or understand. “I could not tell/ which fit me/ more comfortably, the power,/ or the powerlessness.” Once the fish has been consumed and the bear leaves, Oliver is left only with the story of the event, one that is “a difficult guest” in her home. The story is like the river, never stopping, but continuing to sing the same song, over and over and over. At the same time, however, the story “sounds like a body falling apart.” In this poem, Oliver addresses head on the theme she has hinted at in previous volumes, such as Owls and Other Fantasies (2003): Death is a gory but necessary business. It is as if Oliver has butted up against the hard truth that no matter how much one revels in the natural world and in the abundance of life, all life ends in death, and often the weak lose their lives to the strong. Even more unsettling, life requires death. Thus the difficulty of the story she brings home from the river: The bear’s life depends on the fish’s death. The fish was a beautiful creature, and the bear, too, will someday face death. Oliver again returns to this theme in the poem “Another Everyday Poem.” Oliver’s first stanza reads, “Every day/ I consider/ the lilies—/ how they are dressed—,” a graceful and clear response to Matthew 6:28-29: “And why are you so anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all of his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Christians read this verse as an admonition to trust God in all things, and not to worry about the necessities of life, since God will provide. For Oliver, however, the consideration of the lilies of the field moves her not to a greater trust in God but rather to a consideration of the ravens, and “how they are fed.” Scavengers of carrion, ravens feed off death. The juxtaposition of glorious lilies and voracious ravens hungry for meat demonstrates two sides of the same coin, two examples from the natural world of the interdependence of life and death. For Oliver, the mystery is not that all will die, but that “such brevity—/ makes the world/ so full, so good.” In spite of her understanding of the oneness of all nature and the coexistence of life and death, Oliver is not above or beyond fear. In several poems, the trembling of trepidation is palpable. For example, in “Maker of All Things, Even Healings,” Oliver writes of the fox, who “moves through the darkness/ with a mouthful of teeth/ and a reputation for death.” In this poem, Oliver clearly sides with the hunted mice as she pleads with the Maker of All Things to let her “abide in your shadow.”

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In what might be the most disturbing poem of the collection, “Sometimes,” Oliver describes a cat-headed creature that rises from the water that she immediately associates with death, or perhaps with God: “I don’t know what God is./ I don’t know what death is./ But I believe they have between them/ some fervent and necessary arrangement.” This paradox, this necessary deal between the creator of all and the destroyer of all, is the puzzle Oliver returns to again and again. The poem is divided into seven segments. After the eerie opening, Oliver reports “sometimes/ melancholy leaves me breathless.” She is not one to linger in that dark state, however, and soon she finds herself in the middle of a storm, filled with the creative energy of primordial soup, thunder, and lightning. The penultimate segment reads like a prayer: She asks God to strengthen her and to take away her need for answers. Finally, after fear and prayer, she reaches reconciliation, noting that “Death waits for me, I know it, around/ one corner or another.” This thought does not trouble her, nor does she find it ironic. It simply is. Toward the end of the book, Oliver stretches her poetic persona by including a number of poems about love, including the touching poem cycle, “Eleven Versions of the Same Poem.” The poems move from the assertion that the poet is lost without the companion she loves, to the contemplation of how the heart heals. Even in healing, however, the heart is not without pain, something made abundantly clear in poems such as “There you were, and it was like spring.” The recollection of love causes the poet to cry out, “Why are we made the way we are made, that to love is to want?” In the final two segments of the cycle, Oliver announces her intention to return to the world or at least to try. In the poem “I Will Try,” she calls herself “a woman whose love has vanished,/ who thinks now, too much, of roots/ and the dark places.” In spite of this darkness, she nevertheless feels a singing inside her, and she calls upon the totemic red bird, the bringer of passion, song, and life. While most of the poems in this book are lovely nuggets of life, love, and the mystery of death, some of them turn to larger issues of the world. Oliver takes the United States and its government to task for war and cruelty in poems such as “Of the Empire,” and “Iraq,” among others, and she warns everyone that humans are rapidly destroying the flora and fauna of the planet in “Showing the Birds.” These poems do not seem to work as well as others in the collection. There is no doubt that the thoughts expressed are sincerely held and worthy of serious consideration. Nonetheless, the poetry is less effective than in her other poems, largely because often the language falls into pronouncement and admonishment, as opposed to the subtle and effective intimations of the other works. Contrasted with the delicate and profound poetry of “Ocean,” for example, the polemic poems seem heavy handed. At the end, it might be the Percy poems, written about her dog, that hold the best instructions for reader and poet alike. Oliver places the three poems roughly equidistant one from the other in the book. These wry little gems offer a dog’s eye view of the world. In “Percy and Books,” readers discover a talking Percy who passes his judgment on literature: “Books? says Percy. I ate one once and it was enough.” In the next Percy poem, Oliver describes how the dog acts when he knows that a friend is coming to the door. Again, she opposes the world of language, words, and ideas, the world of

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literature and Ralph Waldo Emerson, with the world of a dog who runs trustingly into the future without need for thought or explanation. Taken individually, the three poems offer some gentle comic relief and lighthearted fun. Taken as a sequence, however, the three Percy poems are a kind of evolving theology for Oliver. For Percy, life is immediate, lived in the present moment. He does not experience the melancholy of loss or a fear of the future. He tells Oliver to love, run fast, sleep, and trust. Red Bird closes with a final appearance of the red bird that makes its presence felt throughout the collection. In “Red Bird Explains Himself,” Oliver gives voice to the bird that tells readers that its “true task” is “to be the music of the body.” The music of Red Bird will linger with the reader long after the book is closed. Diane Andrews Henningfeld

Review Sources America 198, no. 14 (April 28, 2008): 38-40. Booklist 104, no. 13 (March 1, 2008): 44. The Christian Science Monitor, April 15, 2008, p. 13. Los Angeles Times, January 6, 2008, p. R10. Weekly Standard 14, no. 9 (November 17, 2008): 43-44.

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RETRIBUTION The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 Author: Max Hastings (1945) First published: Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-1945, 2007, in Great Britain Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). Illustrated. 615 pp. $35.00 Type of work: History Time: 1944-1945 Locale: Asia and the Pacific Japan was losing the war, and Japanese intransigence, arrogance, and brutality were bringing retribution Principal personages: Chester Nimitz, commander of U.S. naval forces in the Pacific Douglas MacArthur, commander of the U.S. Army in the Far East Curtis LeMay, Army Air Force commander who directed the B-29 raids on Japan Chiang Kai-shek, generalissimo of the Chinese armies, recognized leader of China Mao Zedong, leader of the Chinese Communists, isolated in the far north of rural Yan’an province, but building a base among the peasantry Winston Churchill, prime minister of Great Britain and author of best-selling histories of World War II Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union who hurried to grab Japanese possessions before the war ended Harry Truman, president of the United States after Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April, 1945 Hirohito, emperor of Japan

The original British title of this much-praised book was Nemesis. The subtlety of the title change is important. Retribution emphasizes Allied (essentially American) revenge; Nemesis emphasizes the Japanese responsibility for their own suffering. Max Hastings demonstrates repeatedly the failures of the Japanese government and military leaders to plan properly for such a great conflict. It was one thing to occupy Manchuria and the coasts of China, something else to take on the greatest industrial power in the world, and yet something else to awaken the American giant by a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Those misjudgments head a long list of mistakes made by the Japanese militarists. They failed to use submarines against American supply lines, they neglected preparation for the American submarine campaign, and they did not build sufficient tankers to bring oil to Japan or escort vessels to protect the tankers that survived. What was in their minds? Most of all, a belief that will was the essential

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ingredient to victory and that the racially and socially superior Japanese people would al- Max Hastings was educated at Oxford ways prevail over the inferior races facing and was a foreign correspondent for leading British newspapers. Knighted them. Even today’s understanding of the war rein 2002, he is the author of more than flects the Germany-first emphasis of Allied fifteen books, including Bomber planning, then the dramatic naval battles of Command (1979) and Overlord: D-Day the central Pacific. Pearl Harbor eclipses the and the Battle for Normandy (1984). Japanese preoccupation with natural resources and the fascistic militarism that lay behind Japan’s seizure of Manchuria, its invasion of China, and its lust for the French, British, and Dutch colonial riches. The Japanese advances of 1941-1944 swiftly humiliated British and American armies and navies—then everything went wrong. The Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere was not Asia for Asians, but Asia for the Japanese. Arrogance and lack of planning by the new occupiers made their predecessors look relatively good; to support their armies and supply the home islands, the Japanese brought not liberation but starvation and fear. Then, as the Allied counteroffensive began, desperation set in. Few Japanese would (or dared to) admit it, but by 1944 it was obvious that the war was going badly. On the home front, Japanese civilians were short of food, heating oil, raw materials, and even soap. Bombs were falling on new cities each day; most important, firebomb raids were incinerating tens of thousands per raid. Nevertheless, there was no peace movement and no talk of surrender or even of peace talks. Both the American and Japanese military planners made major blunders. Neither applied the lessons of the U-boat successes until late in the war, when American submarines practically annihilated Japan’s merchant marine, and the Japanese wasted their own vessels in vain attempts to supply isolated island garrisons. While Americans went to great lengths to rescue downed pilots, Japanese let theirs drown. American blunders were distractions, prolonging the war, but Japanese miscalculations were disastrous. The Japanese economy could not match that of their enemies, while the Americans could fight simultaneously two wars on opposite sides of the globe and win. The Japanese expected to prevail—if not in set battles, then by exhausting the Westerners. The Japanese knew that their soldiers and sailors would sacrifice everything for victory, or, if not victory, then for honor, while their opponents would not. The Westerners would surely conclude that a compromise peace was better than suffering more casualties, and that the compromise peace would leave Japan with most of its conquests. The result was a series of dreary and now-almost-forgotten campaigns: Burma, New Guinea, and the Philippines. Most of those campaigns were unnecessary, because the Americans could have bypassed the isolated garrisons, but the combination of pride, the desire for revenge, the need to use the forces available, and ambition drove the Americans forward. The foremost personality of these destructive but indecisive campaigns was Douglas MacArthur, the most visible public hero of the era and

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the general most despised by military historians. In the background was Winston Churchill, whose slim hopes to preserve the British Empire seemed to depend on making some contribution to the war, but whose efforts were largely spurned by the Americans. When American forces landed on the Philippines, the Japanese began the first of the suicide attacks that became more formidable the next year. First, there were the forlorn efforts of the Japanese fleet to challenge the overwhelming numbers of American naval vessels, and then came the more deadly kamikaze attacks—explosiveladen airplanes diving onto American ships. They might as well, it was reasoned. Japanese aircraft that had been superior at the start of the war became hopelessly outclassed by American fighters, and Japan had lacked the resources to bring out improved models. It was a tactic of desperation, but it worked. There were plenty of pilots ready to die, and they did not even need to be well trained. Rooting the Japanese out of the Philippine mountains was a foretaste of Okinawa and what could be expected in the home islands. Surrender was a rarity, and soldiers who seemed to want to surrender were likely to throw a grenade at their captors. This discouraged American soldiers from taking risks to bring them in alive. The American commanders were mediocre at best in dealing with the difficult terrain and the challenges of the climate; they hardly knew what to do with an enemy who would not quit when obviously beaten, but even increased the foolish sacrifice of men. Chester Nimitz had the right strategy—to drive straight toward Japan, cut off the home islands from food and oil, force the imperial navy to come onto the high seas where it would be destroyed, then impose a blockade until Japan surrendered. However, even he agreed to costly assaults on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and he lacked the personality to dominate the talks on strategy. Instead, MacArthur was allowed to run his own parallel war, one which drew Nimitz’s forces to the Philippines instead of moving on Japan. America was rich enough to finance two strategies, so why not? There was not much thought in Washington about the Pacific theaters compared to that given to the European war. The Americans placed much hope on China. After all, the bulk of the Japanese army was there, and the Chinese had an almost unlimited supply of men. Chiang Kaishek and Mao Zedong, however, were both quite willing to stand on the defense. They understood that the Americans would defeat their common enemy; meanwhile, they would husband their resources for the civil war that would follow. It was an unbelievably cruel war, fought in obscurity. Few Western reporters were present, and no Japanese newspapers dared print any criticism of the official press releases. B-29 operations were much more complicated than was publicly revealed. The aircraft were delicate, prone to malfunctions, and more effective at low altitudes than high ones. The Australians, praised at the time for their valor in the Near East and in the early stages of the war, lost enthusiasm for this war as the dangers waned. Australian dockworkers went on strike; the Australian merchant marine worried about the nonexistent Japanese submarine threat. (Australians have not been pleased by this chapter in the book.)

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Hastings’s style is to use anecdotes, the personal stories that emphasize the tragedy and the suffering. Quoting from memoirs, letters, and interviews, he draws an unremittingly depressing picture of both military and civilian life. There were no meaningful victory parades, few comfortable billets, and few memories of anything but heat, humidity, bugs, disease, and isolation, unless it was rain, mud, and cold. There were heroes, but most soldiers were simply doing their duty, hoping to get the job over with as quickly as possible in order to return home. Hastings has little patience for those who complain that the United States should not have used the atomic bomb. Those criticisms are offered in a historical vacuum, he feels, with no willingness to look at the options available. The kamikaze attacks and the casualties of the Okinawa campaign made clear what awaited the troops in an invasion of Japan, and Japanese leaders relied on this sacrificial spirit to obtain a favorable peace settlement; moreover, Japanese leaders were aware that fanatics in the officer corps would assassinate anyone who advocated surrender. The massive death tolls from firebomb raids, the collapse of the economy, the potential for starvation— none of these were having the desired effect. The alternative was the starvation of millions, the death of more millions of Chinese and others in Japanese occupation zones, and the end of the last hope of rescuing prisoners of war. The atomic bomb ended the deadlock, while simultaneously warning Joseph Stalin that America had won the war and America would decide the peace terms. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria did not have the effect that was imagined at Yalta and Potsdam, but it helped demoralize what was left of Japanese militarism. As the Red Army had done in Europe, it raped its way across Manchuria and into Korea, then stripped all machinery and infrastructure for use in Russia. Japanese resistance was inept and ineffective, but heroic in the insane manner that had characterized the army’s behavior in the last year of the war. The emperor finally intervened, broadcasting a message to his people that caused the fanatics to commit suicide and everyone else to breathe a sigh of relief. Contrary to what propaganda had predicted, the Americans did not plan on exterminating the people or reducing them to slavery. MacArthur was a model administrator, making a good end to a war badly fought. This important book is the culmination of a lifetime of research into aspects of World War II. No reader will put the book down wishing he had been there, yet none should conclude that it did not matter who won. The war resulted in an Asia for Asians. It was not as the Japanese planned it—an Asia that worked for Japan—but the old colonialism could not be resurrected. It was not just that the Japanese had beaten Europeans and Americans, but in the first year of the war they had beaten them so soundly. Japanese efforts to establish quisling regimes failed miserably; it was obvious that new masters had taken over, masters who believed themselves superior to the colonial peoples in every way. Most important, the Japanese considered honor the essence of life and war the essence of honor. These were not beliefs shared by anyone in their short-lived empire. There is a strong current throughout the book that the Japanese had begun the war foolishly, had conducted it badly, had misbehaved everywhere (if misbehaved is the

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right word for countless atrocities and crimes), and at the end refused to believe that the war was lost. The Japanese had earned what they got. It was “retribution.” William L. Urban

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 13 (March 1, 2008): 46. Commentary 126, no. 2 (September, 2008): 74-76. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 2 (January 15, 2008): 76. Library Journal 133, no. 4 (March 1, 2008): 92. Military History 25, no. 1 (March/April, 2008): 72-73. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 7 (May 1, 2008): 24-27. The New York Times Book Review, March 30, 2008, p. 14. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 62 (March 15, 2008): W10.

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RISING, FALLING, HOVERING Author: C. D. Wright (1949) Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, Wash.). 96 pp. $22.00 Type of work: Poetry Time: 2003-2008 Locale: The United States and Mexico Wright blends motifs of her private life and details from a trip to Mexico to create a vehicle through which to express her anguish and rage over the U.S. war in Iraq Readers of C. D. Wright’s poetry have called the last decade a period of great growth in her work. Beginning with Just Whistle: A Valentine (1993), the work that marked the start of her collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster, and followed by Deepstep Come Shining (1998), a book-length poem that grew from a road trip she and Luster made through the Deep South, Wright began to move to longer lines in less narrative poems. Wright moved on to work with Luster again in One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2003), an extended poem (or perhaps a number of long and intricately interrelated poems) and photographs of men and women incarcerated in Louisiana prisons. This poetic growth reduced narration in Wright’s poems and showed her increased interest in extended poems which, although they may still use fragmented narrative, rely heavily on image, language, and repetition. Rising, Falling, Hovering is the next flowering of this growth. The volume’s long title poem is in two parts. Three poems introduce the volume, followed by the first thirty-three pages of “Rising, Falling, Hovering.” Two poems then form a bridge to the last twenty pages of the title poem. The volume concludes with an additional nine poems, some of which are completions, or perhaps alternate versions, of earlier poems. The titles of the shorter poems are almost all introduced with the word “like,” suggesting that they offer metaphors (simile is too limiting a term for these suggestive works) for the long work they encapsulate. Scholars have called Wright’s early poetry narrative and have suggested that her interest in language reduced the narrative element in her work. However, the framework of “Rising, Falling, Hovering” describes a trip to Mexico, a friend’s health crisis, and the speaker’s son’s visit to Mexico, and all of this is infused with the speaker’s anger about America’s invasion of Iraq, much of which she observes on Mexican television. In addition, the Mexican setting brings to light her painful awareness of the relationship between the inhabitants of a wealthy United States and the Mexicans who attempt to immigrate to al otro lado, the other side of the border. (Appropriately, the poem is threaded with Spanish words and phrases.) Wright suggests that the U.S. presence in Iraq, like its presence in Mexico, is based on the power of American economic interests. Wright’s narrative, however, is never focused on anecdote or elements of plot. In-

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stead, fragments of events appear and disappear, elusive as memory. Events that one might expect to be explained or amplified instead remain half-limned, to draw their power from their evocative incompleteness. It is this technique that allows Wright to merge images from disparate settings. Some of the early parts of the poem, for example, suggest Wright’s intense early relationship with poet Frank Stanford: He would appear central in her book then go off on his own meanwhile no one but themselves in the kitchen’s recessed lighting in their underpants Drinking warm beer not taking calls

Wright’s affair with Stanford and its tragic ending with his suicide have often appeared in her work. In this poem, the presence of that lover seems to morph into the figure of the partner who accompanies the speaker to Mexico. On the flight, perhaps, the speaker sees the newspaper report that warns her “the number of their dead to remain unknown,” a motif that threads through the poem as the speaker repeatedly compares the unnumbered Iraqi dead with the statistics of dead Americans. The first segment of the poem ends with the ominous statement that “This is no time for poetry.” Before the pair travel into Mexico City, other scenes appear briefly—an old man in a hut or on a burro, a woman (his wife?) who has a special dress she once wore “on the other side,” a petal fallen on the arm of a laborer who holds the statue of a saint. In the hotel the “ghoulish glow from a muted TV” shows pictures of the wreckage of Baghdad and its people, “shelled into the memory hole,” obliterating a rich past. That past and Mexico’s own rich past seem to create an ironic counterpoint. While the headlines cite the number of bombs “blooming in Baghdad,” in the city square, the flower market is blooming into a peace demonstration. A short-line passage follows this, offering images that juxtapose growth and life (a pomegranate tree, the courtyard of independence fighter Miguel Hidalgo) with death and decay (a pariah dog, a casket merchant, a desk clerk watching war news on television). The poem’s next segment introduces a boy, perhaps the speaker’s son, and a woman whose bones “soften and thin,” perhaps the sick friend. The boy uses “choplogic” on the speaker who returns a “hail of words” that seem to bounce off his eardrums. In a flash forward, the speaker seems to have returned home to discover there none of the destruction that Iraq experiences: “The glorious photographs of their son were not stolen/ from their secondhand frames” nor have any other disasters occurred. Still, “to be ashamed is to be American,” she says. “As of Friday 850 of our members/ will be Forever Young.” The headlines haunt her, and the ironic “Forever Young” mocks the government’s blithe acceptance of the many deaths on both sides. As the poem opens up, the focus shifts to “her suddenly-grown-tall son” who has long since left behind the child he once was, the one who wanted his mother to read to him. Now a distance seems to have grown between them. “In the event of our death,” the poet says, and here she inserts a long space mid-line, “you will have to roll your own poetry.” His mother tells the young man he cannot smoke in the house and that he must turn down his stereo’s sound, but she is met only with his blank stare. Throughout these

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sketchy scenes, some phrases and images re appear—dogs (most of them black), shoes, C. D. Wright has published twelve and the injunction “Do not think him healed” collections of poetry and prose, (which may apply to the son or to the count- including collaborations with less wounded sons of war). Interspersed in this photographer Deborah Luster. are passages that seem to describe the suffer- Professor of English at Brown ings of the pollos (chickens), the name for University, she won a MacArthur grant those undocumented immigrants who strug- in 2004. Wright was the poet laureate of Rhode Island from 1994 to 1999. gle to come to this side of the border. “Juan e Juana Doe” Wright calls them, and they endure the hellish heat, thirst, hunger, and fear of the migras (the immigration officers who patrol the border). “Like they say in Iraq Now fear up harsh” ends this section. In the second portion of the poem, the son has been sent to take classes in Mexico where he is supposed to stay with the friend who seems to be going through chemotherapy. Instead, he opts to rent a room in a private home where he takes up with another student, “call-him-Al,” as Wright identifies him. They make a midnight bus trip to the beach, the son loses his wallet, and they struggle back to town in time for class. The speaker recalls that she and her husband once had similar adventures in the same part of Mexico, but these memories do not diminish the fear she feels for the boy’s safety. “If you cannot or do not wish to perform/ this function you shouldn’t be in this century,” the narrator remarks wryly. Although the son is now a sophomore in college and “Walmex” has conquered Mexico, in five portentous one-word lines Wright warns “Poetry/ Doesn’t/ Protect/ You/ Anymore.” The images of the undocumented workers, of the low pay that produces the low prices at Walmex, and of the U.S. economic interest in Iraq where, with a reference to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Wright says bodies are decomposing in the garden blend in a damning passage where the military “Operation” becomes the key word: Operation hold the line Operation don’t drink French wine Operation embed the press and let them wear the sexy new gear Operation burn the boots with the sand niggers’ feet inside Operation product endorsement

All these operations culminate in a description of the official U.S. government definition of torture, including references to white phosphorous (“not a chemical weapon,” Wright notes bitterly, quoting the military definition). These join with imagery connected to the undocumented immigrants and to the pain of chemotherapy. The poem concludes with Wright’s indictment of the “current occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania” whose “monosyllabic surnames” she cannot bear to name, and whose twin daughters will never be sent to invade countries such as Iraq. Wright’s poetic formats for the many sections of this poem vary from short lines to long, most of them double spaced. Some segments are single spaced in prose. Throughout, she uses spaces within the line as a sort of punctuation; they often appear

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where one might expect commas or dashes and they sometimes seem to set off a particularly ironic or shocking statement. The volume’s other poems make at most oblique reference to the themes of the title poem. In “Re: Happiness, in Pursuit Thereof,” the first poem in the volume, the speaker says: “We are running on Aztec time,” a time that enjoins the reader to “be ice. Be nails. Be teeth./ Be lightning.” The title images of the next two poems suggest ineffable sensations of disorientation: “Like Having a Light at Your Back You Can’t See but You Can Still Feel (1),” suggesting an episode explained in the second poem with this title, and “Like Hearing Your Name Called in a Language You Don’t Understand,” a poem that makes reference to many specifics from the trip to Mexico. In one of the last poems in the volume, “Or: Animism,” Wright weaves in references to the refinery storage tanks that line the highway near her home. They suggest the oil that may be the motive for the war in Iraq, and, like the dead, they are numberless. “Have you ever reeled under the magnitude of petroleum’s ruin,” the speaker asks. Surveying the age, she concludes: “There must be a reset button for this machine./ Let’s be realistic. We are never coming back.” In Nadia Herman Colburn’s biographical essay about Wright for Ploughshares (Winter, 2002/2003), she quotes Wright as saying, “I am not easy, but I am worth knowing.” The same might be said for her poetry. It is not easy, but it is worth knowing. Her voice and vision linger in the reader’s thoughts well after the volume is closed. Ann D. Garbett

Review Sources Library Journal 133, no. 6 (April 1, 2008): 87. The New Yorker 84, no. 11 (April 28, 2008): 79. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 16 (April 21, 2008): 37.

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THE ROAD HOME Author: Rose Tremain (1943) Publisher: Little, Brown (New York). 411 pp. $24.99 Type of work: Novel Time: Early in the twenty-first century Locale: A small, unnamed Eastern European country; London An immigrant tries to adjust to his new surroundings despite his yearning for the home and the family he left behind Principal characters: Lev, a forty-two-year-old widower and an immigrant to England from Auror in Eastern Europe Rudi, his best friend in Auror and the proud owner of a Tchevi Maya, Lev’s five-year-old daughter Ina, Lev’s sixty-year-old mother and Maya’s caregiver in Auror Lydia, a thirty-nine-year-old translator and another expatriate Christy Slane, an Irish plumber and Lev’s landlord Sophie, a restaurant worker and Lev’s lover Gregory (G. K.) Ashe, a thirty-five-year-old restaurant owner and Lev’s employer Ruby Constad, an elderly resident of Ferndale Heights and Lev’s benefactor

Rose Tremain is known for her sympathetic treatment of ordinary people experiencing isolation, loneliness, and loss. The lutenist in Music and Silence (2000) yearns hopelessly for the woman he loves; the courtier in Restoration (1989) feels that he cannot survive the loss of his place at court; and the immigrants in The Colour (2003) find themselves alone and adrift in their new country. In The Road Home, Tremain tells the story of a man who enters a world of strangers in order to provide for those he loves. The novel begins on a bus from Eastern Europe to London. Lev begins talking to Lydia, a woman from his country who happens to be sitting next to him. Lev’s home is in the little village of Auror, he explains, but he had been working at a sawmill in the nearby town of Baryn. When the sawmill closed, he could not find another job. Therefore, he decided to go to London, where he was certain that he could earn enough to support his family, which, since his wife Marina had died recently, now consists only of Ina, his mother, and Maya, his five-year-old daughter. After the bus arrives in London, Lydia and Lev part company, but she has given him her telephone number in case he finds that he needs help. It is not long before Lev realizes that the money he has brought with him will not last long. The one job he finds—delivering leaflets for a friendly Arab—pays so little that he cannot afford to rent a room. Dragging his bag of

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belongings, he sleeps in doorways, hoping that no one will tell him to move on. Cold, filthy, and dizzy from hunger, Lev decides to call Lydia. Though she is staying with friends, she arranges for them to take him in, and from that time on, his life changes for the better. With Lydia’s help, Lev finds a place to live, a room in the apartment of Christy Slane, an Irish plumber. Lev also gets a job as a kitchen porter in an upscale restaurant. His industry so impresses G. K. Ashe, the temperamental chef and owner, that he promotes Lev to vegetable preparation. Lev seizes this opportunity to learn all that he can about cooking and restaurant management. Meanwhile, he embarks on a passionate affair with Sophie, another restaurant worker. Through her, he meets the elderly residents of Ferndale Heights, where Sophie volunteers on Sundays. One of the more difficult residents, Ruby Constad, becomes especially fond of Lev. Unfortunately, as soon as G. K. finds out about Lev’s affair with Sophie, he fires Lev, explaining that he does not approve of romantic involvements in the workplace. Lev’s next job is as an asparagus picker in Suffolk. It is there that he has an epiphany: He will save his money, return to Baryn, and open up a restaurant. Back in London, he starts working two jobs, cooking both at Ferndale and at a Greek restaurant. A generous gift from Mrs. Constad helps Lev to attain his financial goal, and at the end of the novel, he is back in Baryn as the proprietor of a successful restaurant. Though almost all these events take place in England, and primarily in London, The Road Home gives the impression of having not just one setting but two. In his dreams and in his reveries, Lev re-creates his courtship and his happy life with Marina, and in his nightmares, he watches helplessly as those he loves face some peril from which he cannot save them. In his wanderings around London, he is always looking for something he can buy to send to his daughter Maya, for though it saddens him to hear how much she misses him, he also worries that she will forget him. Even though the money he sends home constitutes his mother’s primary means of support, Ina is too negative by nature or perhaps just too defeated by life to appreciate the sacrifices Lev is making or to encourage him in his efforts. Instead, whenever he telephones her, she voices her complaints about whatever gift he has sent her, tells him how miserable Maya is without him, and, evidently incapable of understanding that he went to England in order to support her and his daughter, insists on his coming home. It is hardly surprising that instead of telephoning his mother, Lev sometimes chooses to call Rudi, his best friend back home. Lev, who has always considered himself a passive person, admires Rudi for his energetic nature. Moreover, unlike Ina, Rudi is an inveterate optimist. Some of the funniest scenes in the novel involve Rudi and the “Tchevi” that he bought, evidently untroubled by the fact that the only vehicle he had ever driven was a heavy hauler at the sawmill. Rudi is confident that he can

Among the many awards won by Rose Tremain are the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Prix Femina Etranger for Sacred Country (1992), the Whitbread Prize for Music and Silence (1997), and the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction for The Road Home.

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drive the car home, and indeed he does, though he later admits to Lev that the car is defective because it keeps bumping into things. Whenever he telephones Rudi, Lev is likely to hear the latest development in the Tchevi saga. Rudi fell in love with the Tchevi at first sight, despite such obvious defects as faulty doors and four bald tires. However, he did have in mind a practical use for the vehicle, and with it he actually begins to operate his own taxi service. Unfortunately, the Tchevi develops one serious flaw after another, a broken-down transmission, for example, and finally Rudi has to report to Lev that he is out of business. The demise of his beloved Tchevi, along with the news that Auror is to be flooded when a new dam is built, puts the once-irrepressible Rudi into a state of despair. Ironically, this time it is Lev who rescues Rudi. Back in Baryn, Lev transmits his new confidence to Rudi, with the result that Rudi becomes his old, optimistic self again, as well as an invaluable employee in the new restaurant. Throughout most of The Road Home, the mere mention of Rudi suggests that what follows will be comic in tone. However, other segments of the novel are clearly satirical. Functioning as a naïve foreign observer, Lev finds that the London he had thought of as a promised land is shockingly hostile to immigrants. Instead of bringing him the warm welcome he had anticipated, his foreign accent makes him an object of suspicion. Thus he is stopped and cross-examined by policemen and ordered off the premises when he accidentally ventures into a private park where children are playing. To Lev, the British seem to be a people obsessed with money and status, ready to condemn a stranger for any misstep. When his cell phone rings at a concert of Edward Elgar’s music to which Lydia has taken him, the audience reacts so angrily that Lev rushes out and, to Lydia’s dismay, does not return. However, while mistreatment by strangers is distressing, what most seems to support Lev’s negative impression of the British is his experience with Sophie. At first, she seems truly attached to Lev, but as soon as she has a chance, she deserts him for a celebrity and the glittering, amoral world in which the celebrity lives. Whenever an author utilizes the device of the fictitious foreign observer, the implication is that the observer’s impressions have a considerable degree of validity. Through Lev, Tremain points out some serious defects in her society. In addition, the fact that Lev survives and eventually succeeds is due in large part to the kindness of people who have no connection to him. Admittedly, Lydia is at least from the same country as Lev, though she did not know him until they met on the bus. Early on, she is evidently attracted to Lev, but after he rejects her sexual overtures, she continues to be concerned about his welfare. It is true that when Lev turns to Lydia for the money he needs to finance his restaurant, she turns him down, but by that time her own situation has changed, and her refusal on that one occasion does not diminish her importance in his life. Another chance acquaintance who helps to make Lev feel less alone in London is his Irish landlord, Christy. Christy has his own problems: His wife, who has left him, makes it difficult for him to see their young daughter, whom he adores. Christy’s situation makes him uniquely able to sympathize with Lev, who misses Maya so much. Even Ashe, the restaurant owner who fires Lev, plays an important part in Lev’s success. Not only does he learn to cook by working for Ashe, but when Lev decides to open his own restaurant, Ashe helps him with the practical details,

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such as working out lists of the equipment that must be purchased and figuring out how much Lev must save up for his initial investment. Lev’s chance contacts with the crotchety residents of Ferndale Heights also turn out to be beneficial. Their enthusiastic response to the meals he plans and cooks helps him develop confidence in his culinary skills as well as in his ability to run a kitchen and even to manage a restaurant. Though he appreciates the residents’ praises, Lev does not expect anything more substantial from them than his wages; Mrs. Constad’s generous gift to him, which is totally unexpected, is still another proof that despite Lev’s first impressions, there are people in England who have open minds and kind hearts. With its dual settings and its variations in tone, The Road Home is a more complex book than it might at first appear to be. However, this reflects the author’s intent to explore all the ramifications of the immigrant experience and of the nature of human connections. Tremain’s skill in creating believable characters and in developing realistic incidents, along with her intellectual honesty, are again evident in this awardwinning novel. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 21 (July 1, 2008): 37-38. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 16 (August 15, 2008): 49. Library Journal 133, no. 8 (May 1, 2008): 60. The New York Times Book Review, August 31, 2008, p. 10. The New Yorker 84, no. 30 (September 29, 2008): 91. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 16 (April 21, 2008): 30. The Times Literary Supplement, June 22, 2007, p. 19.

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SAVE THE LAST DANCE Author: Gerald Stern (1925) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 91 pp. $23.95 Type of work: Poetry Stern’s lyrical poems delve into the diffuse worlds of dreams and memory, dwelling especially on feelings of vacancy and loss Vacancy and loss take central place in the deeply felt, lyrical poems of Save the Last Dance. Rarely directly evoked, except in the discursive long poem “The Preacher,” which ends the volume, this sense of absence—in Gerald Stern’s life and in other lives—takes a variety of forms. The most poignant expressions appear during his meditations upon other, senior poets or in his recollections of his early years. The personal flavor of these lyrics leads the reader to regard the “I” of the poems not as an anonymous speaker, but as Stern himself. In the short poems that make up most of the volume, he infrequently looks on the world immediately outside, for the one within him more pressingly holds his attention. He turns senses inward to rediscover his past—although it seems a past he can only look around and not see directly or hold. In many of the poems, what strikes the reader is that the absences are more powerfully “present” than the people or objects that are, in Stern’s elusive lines, supposedly being presented. A particularly effective poem, “One Poet,” speaks of an old poet now in his sixties and expresses Stern’s yearning for actions never completed and perhaps never initiated. Stern remembers wanting to tell the “one poet” of reading his book and of treasuring what he found there, “but I couldn’t tell him that/ nor did I ever write, since I lost his/ letter.” Stern then dwells upon that letter, which he remembers putting into an inside pocket, alongside some pens, and then he imagines how he might have lost it— while looking for something else he has lost: his keys. In dreamlike fashion, his memory then shifts again, and he recalls how the poet, apparently upset at Stern, “barked,” ignorant of Stern’s strong feelings for the poet’s work. In another dreamlike turn, Stern then visualizes a dog that has attacked a park pigeon and has blood on its face. “One Poet” seems to present a series of individual moments revolving around a real individual in Stern’s life, and other poems do make direct, pointed reference to his contemporaries and elders. Nevertheless, the “one poet” remains anonymous— out of discretion, the reader might think. Stern may not have wanted to point out the one who “barked at me not knowing/ how much I loved his work.” The poem resists such a reading, however, because of the almost inexplicable first words of the opening lines: “As if one poet then who was in his sixties/ I wanted to tell him that I read his book.” The words “As if one poet then” change the reader’s understanding of the poem’s title. While they might be read as turning the poem back upon the author him-

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self, they even more strongly expand the character of the “one poet” to a more generalized being, perhaps a composite of the various respected poets Stern had encountered without making adequate connection. The strong sense of regret—depicted as moments of missed opportunity and embodied in misplaced items of importance—seems greater than a sorrow over a single missed chance. It applies not to one moment but to all such moments, and it applies not just to a lost letter but to the very “keys”—the essential items of a life. Stern presents other poems about poets or inspired by thoughts and memories of poets—including “Wordsworth” and “Lorca”— that have for their taking-off points literary, not personal, memory. The poem “Rukeyser” is among the most effective in the volume, framing Stern’s meditations on absence in terms of a “visit with Muriel in her New York apartment,/ helping her into the kitchen, making her tea.” Rukeyser is obviously frail, and their meeting is brief—“we were alone for an hour until her nurse/ came back and scolded her for leaving her bed.” The reader senses that Stern’s presence in the room is brought about by a sense of devotion—to Rukeyser and to the idea of poetry itself. When he sees her look of “abandonment,” however, and then is seized by an image of “when she let/ her poems fall on the floor in Philadelphia,” the room becomes someplace he must flee: “but I never finished my tea and I escaped/ before the nurse could get to me and I/ turned west, for the record, near Lexington, I think,/ against the sun, for it was March already.” In these closing lines Stern brings the reader around to a sense of time passing swiftly, hurrying on to bring the poet not so much the experience of the new as the loss of the old. All loss in these poems is not entirely on the side of the poet; and all is not debit against achievement or memory. In “Lost Shoe,” the title refers not to the loss of the poet’s shoe but rather to the finding of one: for the shoe appears like a gift “where there had been/ a feather only a day or two before.” “Lost Shoe” is akin to a paean to innocence, to the claiming of the everyday moment in its radiant simplicity. The poem that gives rise to the book’s title, “Save the Last Dance for Me,” adroitly combines the senses of recovery and of loss. The poet recalls his “first act of mercy,” at age twelve, when the opportunity arises to rescue a Chihuahua that has fallen into a sewer. The act is not heroic, since the poet has descended into that sewer before, but it is a descent into “muck.” This reliving of the past is deeply sensory. The Chihuahua has a nearly palpable existence, as do other aspects surrounding the rescue—the lifting of the sewer lid with a hammer, the dog’s affection, the offering of the dog’s towel for cleaning off the sewer muck—yet the poet finds himself, in retelling the tale, being asked the dog’s name, which he does not know, and perhaps never knew. The fullness of memory seems to narrow, and its importance seems to diminish, when this question is raised. At the mention of names, the poet finds himself blurring the picture Gerald Stern, chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, is winner of the National Book, National Jewish Book, and Wallace Stevens awards and of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. He has taught at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence, among other universities and colleges. Until his retirement in 1995, he taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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of his “act of mercy” into the larger picture of his youthful life, and the image of the dog falling into the sewer becomes juxtaposed with “our lives the last/ few years before the war”—a time of limited opportunity when “there were four flavors of ice cream/ and four flavors only.” These were the years of the Great Depression. The poet decides on a name for the dog, only to have new questions arise. What was the name of the dog’s owner, who had given him the towel to clean himself? Then he must ask himself: “and who was I?/ and what is love doing in/ a sewer, and how is disgrace/ blurred now, or buried?” Stern is not passively viewing the past. A certain amount of decision comes into this revisiting, and he seems even to acknowledge a certain danger in facing backward, as in the poem “Traveling Backwards.” To go backward in time offers him no difficulties, “for here is the brain,” Stern says—stating, in essence, with what time machine he accomplishes the feat: “for here is the brain and with it I have relived/ one thing after another but I am wavering/ at only reliving though what is hard is being there—.” Stern admits hesitation, perhaps even trepidation—“but I am wavering.” Some risk attends the act of leaving behind the current moment: for to relive the past is one matter, while to live in the past is another. There is, Stern says, a “rose explaining it”—with the rose being equated with the question of Being versus Not-Being, a bringing together of idea and image that conjures Hamlet’s famous indecision at the point of responsibility. The act of looking back seems to nudge the poet, or the reader, back to some “coruscating” time before any such moment of crisis. Reality intrudes, all the same, with the poem’s final words: “then came everything.” With that conclusion, the normal, forward-flowing course of time seems restored. The book ends with a longer work, “The Preacher,” preceded by a short prose introduction and followed by footnotes. “The Preacher” contains a loose set of reflections, similar to the ones that fill the first two-thirds of the book, and mixed into those reflections are elements of a dialogue taking place between Stern and fellow poet Peter Richards. The speakers dwell upon the theme of absence by speaking of “holes” of all kinds—and also upon the King James Bible’s figure of “the Preacher,” the speaker in the book of Ecclesiastes. While interesting in its conversational wanderings and insights, “The Preacher” captures little of the lucid brightness of Stern’s other works. The heart of the book is contained in those short, lyrical meditations on absence and memory. Short though most are, the poems of Save the Last Dance are not for the impatient. Stern composes his works with the least suggestion of story and with as much floating imagery, reference, and statement as the lines will contain. These disparate thoughts and images are further diffused by being run together into single, long sentences— typically as long as the poem itself. This sometimes gives the poems a breathless quality, as if they were rapid, impulsive statements arising in an utterly natural manner. Stern’s mode of expression is distinctive and appealing, in that it leaves the reader with a feeling of freshness. At the same time, it can become disconcerting and can occasionally even seem artificial, as in parts of “The Preacher.” That diffusion of reference and allusion accounts for the poems’ lightness and for their dreamlike quality, which Stern draws up to the foreground in poems that seem to be dreams, or

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hauntings. In “Asphodel,” the poet communes with a Korean veteran: “He was dead so he was only a puff/ of smoke at the most . . . ” That Stern brings dreams into the foreground makes it seem he, too, may wonder if all this backward-gazing might be much the same as dreaming. In “Rapture Lost” he focuses upon that which cannot be focused upon: “The very thing I was trying not to see was/ so close to my nose that I couldn’t see anything/ else . . . ” Diffusion itself becomes what he must hold to: “and the smoke crawled to the middle in such a way/ that I had to depend on smoke alone, and fog,/ and clouds and steam and such to light the way.” Stern’s indistinct or unmoored sentences and his piquant but elusive expressions on occasion leave the reader at sea. At such times, the sense of vacancy can overcome the lyricism, so that the words seem to be circling around a physical absence, not a poetic one. At such moments the words seem to point more away from meaning than toward it. However, in many, if not most, of his poems, Stern’s technique proves itself—as it does to notable effect in “One Poet,” “Traveling Backwards,” or “Rukeyser.” The diverse elements of the poems, however vague and unrelated they may seem at first, assemble themselves in the reader’s mind into finished pictures or completed comprehension. In these coalescing moments of understanding, the power of Stern’s method and vision shines through with striking clarity. Mark Rich

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 18 (May 15, 2008): 16-17. Library Journal 133, no. 6 (April 1, 2008): 86-87. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 11, 2008, p. E7. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 20 (May 19, 2008): 36.

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SAY YOU’RE ONE OF THEM Author: Uwem Akpan (1970 or 1971) Publisher: Little, Brown (New York). 356 pp. $23.99 Type of work: Short fiction Time: The 1990’s to the early 2000’s Locale: Kenya, Benin, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Rwanda Akpan’s stunning collection reflects the unspeakable events that have taken place in some modern African nations, as perceived through the eyes of children Uwem Akpan, a Nigerian who was educated in Africa and in the United States, is a surprisingly powerful writer. Say You’re One of Them is his first book, in which each of five stories is set in a different African nation. In all cases, a child is either the narrator or the point of view. Akpan, who writes in English, has traveled and lived in several African countries and has done meticulous research on local settings and dialects. His characters speak French, English, and various local languages, and his stories contain only physical details that he has personally observed. When he mentions red earth in his work, it is there. Akpan’s first published story, “An Ex-Mas Feast,” initially appeared in the 2005 Debut Fiction issue of The New Yorker, offering a glimpse of a family’s grim subsistence on the streets of Nairobi, Kenya. The parents, Baba and Mama, their six children, and pregnant dog live in a makeshift shanty of tarpaulin and plastic sheeting at the end of an alley. Although Akpan employs understated humor, his style is mostly naturalistic—from the reek of insecticide fumes inside the shanty, ineffective against the mosquitoes, to the way family members take turns sleeping in the midst of huddled bodies to avoid the cold. Gangs of children also sleep on these streets, where “garbage had spread all over the road: dried fish, stationery, trinkets, wilted green vegetables” and no one can be trusted. Baba is a pickpocket, Mama drinks, and they all sniff glue to ease their hunger (except the two-month-old baby, asleep in a cardboard box). The oldest daughter, angry twelve-year-old Maisha with her bleached hair and skin, longs to go to school but cannot because, as a prostitute who mostly serves white tourists, she is the true support of the family. Whatever she earns goes toward her younger brother Jigana’s school fees and uniform so that he, being a boy, can continue his classes. The underweight and nameless baby is used as a prop to extract sympathy from passers-by whenever Mama or the children go begging. Every Ex-Mas, Mama follows the tradition of reading the family names inscribed in their battered Bible—a catalog of misfortunes, inasmuch as all are missing or dead. Desperate as they are, the parents still fret over what Christmas gift to give their neighbors—should it be petrol or glue? On this Ex-Mas morning, a disheveled Maisha arrives in a taxi with a feast that she has labored all night to obtain for the fam-

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ily. Immediately afterward, she moves out to “try full-time” in a brothel, where her income will be less problematic. Naema, ten years old and very pretty, intends to go on the street in her sister’s place, even though Maisha disapproves. A much longer story follows, bearing the cryptic title “Fattening for Gabon” and touching upon several social problems. The tenyear-old narrator Kotchikpa and his obstinate younger sister Yewa, both spirited and smart, speak a patois of English, French, and native Idaatcha. They live with their Fofo (Uncle) Kpee in a poor border village on the coast of Benin, because their parents, dying of AIDS in another village, can no longer care for them. Fofo Kpee survives by smuggling people across the Nigerian border, a delicate task made much easier by the new motorcycle that he has just purchased with money given him by a man known as Big Guy. Even though Big Guy sometimes wears the uniform of an immigration officer, the children are uncertain who he is. In reality, he is only a go-between, being paid by the same secret benefactors whom Fofo identifies as the children’s “godparents.” These so-called benefactors are human traffickers in prostitution or slavery, to whom Fofo has sold his charges. The adults fully understand this, but the two children do not. Soon the godparents Papa and Mama, an older man and a beautiful woman, visit Fofo’s house, bearing a wonderful array of food. Both children are mesmerized by Mama, who tenderly cuddles the sulking Yewa. Mama renames the children Mary and Pascal, urging them to speak only French. Two other scrawny children are then brought into Fofo’s house for a great feast, all to be fattened for their journey to French-speaking Gabon, where they are told they will live with their godparents. The two are soon taken away, but when other children join the group, they will sail together to their fine new home in Gabon. Fofo teaches his niece and nephew the programmed answers they must have ready for their new life. They must also learn to drink seawater for survival, in case they are put into the sea if their ship is searched. He begins to suffer terrible nightmares, stemming from his decision to betray them into a situation he understands far better than they. When he offers an awkward attempt at sexual instruction, another effort to prepare them, the uneasy youngsters can only suspect he has drunk too much gin. Finally, yielding to conscience, Fofo decides to cancel the arrangement, but several policemen threaten him and he seems to lose heart. Kotchikpa slowly realizes that his uncle’s promises are not what they seem. A brief story, written in second person, provides some relief from all this intensity. “What Language Is That?” is an account of two small Ethiopian girls—one Christian, one Muslim—who live on the same street and are best friends in spite of festering religious and political discord in their little town. While their families are friendly, even attending events together, the sudden riots, burning buildings, and vandalism in the streets force the parents to terminate their daughters’ friendship for their safety.

An ordained Jesuit priest, Uwem Akpan earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Michigan in 2006. His story “My Parents’ Bedroom” was a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2007.

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This story is told in short, simple sentences, like the language of a young child. The artistic risk here is that the girls’ limited perception downplays the gravity of the situation. All that one sheltered youngster can understand is that her family servants have disappeared and that she will not be allowed to see her friend again, so that a reader may be tempted to dismiss this simply as the story of a broken friendship, a temporary sadness in any child’s life. However, the careful reader can see beyond this to the deeper turmoil of a nation. “Luxurious Hearses,” another lengthy story, takes place in the turbulent period after Nigeria’s military government has converted to civilian rule. This story is the most ambitious but at the same time least successful, perhaps because the author tries to cover so much ground. At this time, Sharia—Muslim law—is being imposed in northern Nigeria. Sixteen-year-old Jubril, a conservative Muslim, has barely escaped death in religious riots after his childhood friends suddenly turned against him, beat him, and tried to burn him alive. Terrified, he flees the sectarian violence to seek refuge with his father’s Christian family in the south. As an infant, he was baptized a Catholic there before his Muslim mother escaped with him to the north. Now he has adopted that Christian identity for his own safety. However, because his right hand has been amputated (a Muslim punishment for theft), he hides his stump in his pocket to avoid recognition and death from the Christians and attempts to mask his northern accent. At a motor park, Jubril finds a seat on the last of the great southbound buses, called “Luxurious” because one can travel all night on them. While the driver goes to buy black-market petrol, the police insist on bribes and lock Jubril on the bus with many Christian refugees. This Luxurious Bus contains a microcosm of passengers with different, often comic, accents, each representing a particular group, crammed together rather like an African version of the John Ford film Stagecoach (1939). Among these is the elderly Chief Ukongo, a “royal father,” a proud old man who insists on sitting in Jubril’s seat even though he has no ticket; two quarreling young women; a dying man; a contentious passenger; a nursing mother (the source of great discomfort to the Muslim boy); a maddened soldier; and various religious fanatics. The Chief, who favors traditional beliefs, serves also as a vehicle to explain the complex history of the region. Since the bus is equipped with working television sets, the unruly passengers are temporarily unified by viewing pirated footage from other countries that shows film of the rioting unavailable on the official government station. Jubril watches his own city of Khamfi, two hours from the motor park, become “the corpse capital of the world.” The contentious man apparently has a religious fit and is thrown off the bus. Then Luxurious Buses filled with dead Muslims arrive from the south. Their bodies, originally sent home for burial, have been refused and are being returned to the north. The foreign television monitors the continuing riots in the poverty-stricken south, where the deposed generals permit them. Next comes an announcement that corpses can no longer be ferried from place to place but must remain wherever they died. Jubril realizes that his fellow northerners are trying to escape from the south, where persecution exists as well. The title of the book comes from the warning given to Monique, a nine-year-old Rwandan girl, in the most brutal but perhaps finest story, “My Parents’ Bedroom,”

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during the blood-smeared genocide of 1994 in which an estimated eight hundred thousand people died. As the daughter of a dark-skinned Hutu father and a lightskinned Tutsi mother, Monique is instructed that, no matter who asks for her identity, she must “say you’re one of them” to avoid problems. Her parents, both of whom cherish her and her little brother Jean, speak to each other in code so that the children will not fully understand the danger they all face—possible death at the hands of either ethnic group, even from members of their extended family. Previously, Monique’s father had gone with his brother, Tonton André, who also married a Tutsi. Her mother apparently leaves, too, but André returns, tricking the girl into opening the door and allowing in a crowd of Hutus to search the house. When a drunken man attacks Monique, her Hutu great-uncle, the powerful Wizard, rescues her. Next morning, although Monique does not understand what has happened, her little Twa friend crawls to the door, seriously wounded. There is blood on the walls, and someone is hiding in the attic. Monique and her little brother flee. Critical praise for these stories has been almost unanimous. Four of them deal with the bitter political ramifications of intermarriage and conflict between religious and ethnic groups, and all are affected by poverty. By using children as his protagonists, Akpan is able to reveal events through their innocent eyes even as they struggle to comprehend their world—breathtaking in its madness, heartbreaking in its cruelty, with its darkness lightened by a stubborn glint of humor. Even though these children face a precarious future, what keeps their stories from utter despair is the full humanity of the characters. In a stroke of brilliance, the book jacket displays the photograph of a barefoot African girl running down a dirt road, away from the viewer. By the end of the book, the reader understands why she is running. Joanne McCarthy

Review Sources America 199, no. 4 (August 18, 2008): 24-25. Booklist 104, no. 21 (July 1, 2008): 37. Chicago Tribune, May 31, 2008, p. 4. The Christian Century 125, no. 21 (October 21, 2008): 34-37. Entertainment Weekly, June 13, 2008, p. 72. Essence 39, no. 2 (June, 2008): 82. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 8 (April 15, 2008): 379-380. The New York Times, June 27, 2008, p. 27. The New York Times Book Review, July 27, 2008, p. 16. People 69, no. 23 (June 16, 2008): 47. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 15 (April 14, 2008): 36-37. School Library Journal 54, no. 10 (October, 2008): 177. Time 171, no. 25 (June 23, 2008): 127. The Washington Post, June 29, 2008, p. T3.

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SEA OF POPPIES Author: Amitav Ghosh (1956) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 528 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1838-1839 Locale: Ghazipur and Calcutta, India The lives of Deeti, Zachary Reid, Paulette Lambert, and Raja Neel Rattan Halder become intertwined as their various paths lead them to the ship Ibis bound for Mauritius with a cargo of indentured laborers Principal characters: Deeti, also known as Kabutri-ki-ma and later as Aditi, wife of Hukam Singh, later common-law wife of Kalua Zachary Reid, mulatto freedman from Baltimore, originally ship’s carpenter on the Ibis, but now second mate Raja Neel Rattan Halder, zemindar of Rashkali, whose estates are bankrupt Paulette Lambert, also known as Puttli and Puggli, daughter of an unworldly botanist, Pierre Lambert; her mother died in childbirth, and she was raised by an Indian woman, mother of Jodu, who became Pierre Lambert’s mistress Kalua, later known as Madhu and Maddow Colver, ox-cart driver, former prizefighter, and common-law husband of Deeti Benjamin Burnham, owner of an import-export company dealing in the shipping of goods, including opium, and legal guardian of Paulette Lambert

In Amitav Ghosh’s novel Sea of Poppies, Deeti lives in a village four hundred miles from the Indian coast. She has never seen the sea or a ship, and she has never left her home district. One day she has a vision of a sailing ship and she knows that it is a sign, although she is not yet certain what it portends. Deeti’s life is neither happy nor unhappy; it is a ceaseless round of back-breaking work. She does not love her husband, Hukam, who was injured in battle and now, disabled, works in an opium-processing factory. He has become an opium addict. Their daughter, Kabutri, was in fact fathered by his brother, Chandan, after Deeti was drugged and raped with the family’s connivance. Deeti has unexamined feelings for Kalua, a member of the leather workers’ caste, whom she rescued, without his apparent knowledge, from a beating. However, when Deeti’s husband dies, and she determines to commit sati (throw herself on Hukam’s funeral pyre) rather than marry Chandan, it is Kalua who rescues her from the fire and then leaves the village with Deeti, determined to find sanctuary elsewhere. Eventually, they find their way to Calcutta and, aware that Deeti’s in-laws are still

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searching for her, determine to leave for Mauritius to become indentured laborers. The ship in Deeti’s vision is later identified as the Ibis, a former slave ship, in poor condition, that has been sold to Benjamin Burnham and is now being taken to Calcutta for refitting. Zachary Reid, a mulatto freedman from Baltimore, has signed on as ship’s carpenter because he cannot find employment in his home town. The voyage to India is little short of disastrous, thanks to the ship’s condition. Illness breaks out, and Reid finds him self inadvertently rising to become, at one point, the ship’s de facto captain. He is helped by a group of lascar sailors, led by the mysterious Serang Ali, who effectively run the ship and who clearly have plans for the newly minted Zakri Malun. They make over Reid’s wardrobe so that he can play the part of a gentleman, and he learns their language and their various ways, coming to appreciate their food as well. What Serang Ali’s plans are for Reid remain unclear throughout the novel. Having brought the ship safely to Calcutta, Reid finds himself among a colorful collection of “old India hands,” who represent themselves as understanding the ways of the Indians and the lascars but whose apprehension of local ways is quite different from Reid’s. In turn, they look askance at him because he seems able to engage with all segments of the population on apparently equal terms. As a result, they view him with the deepest suspicion. Eventually, the new first mate of the Ibis, Mr. Crowle, discovers that when Reid first joined the Ibis he had been described on the manifest as “black” and so seeks to blackmail him. As a presentable member of the crew, and because of his gentlemanly ways, Reid is invited to dine with the Burnhams, and it is here that he encounters Paulette Lambert, whom he previously met when he rescued her foster brother, Jodu, and gave him a place on the ship. Reid and Paulette inhabit a similar place in society, neither native nor gentry. While Reid has been assimilated into the culture of the lascars, Paulette has been brought up by an Indian woman and prefers Indian habits. Her father was a freethinker, and she did not receive a religious education. When she is adopted by the Burnhams, their concern is to rectify this perceived lack rather than to properly understand their new ward. They remain unaware of Paulette’s abilities as a scholar, a linguist, and a naturalist, not least because she has the wit to realize that she is best advised to keep quiet. However, Paulette is bored by the enforced lack of occupation that is expected of a white woman. Marriage is the only option, but while Paulette realizes she is attracted to Zachary, she finds to her horror that Judge Kendalbushe, an elderly Englishman, wishes to marry her. Between this and the unwanted attentions of Benjamin Burnham himself, Paulette determines to escape, hidden, on the Ibis when it sails. However, her appeals to Zachary for help fall on deaf ears. Raja Neel Rattan Halder has, by contrast, led a life of almost complete indolence, Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and India. He has studied at the universities of Delhi and Oxford. His first novel, The Circle of Reason, was published in 1986, and since then he has published five more novels. The Calcutta Chromosome (1996) won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, while Sea of Poppies was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

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governed by intricate custom and practice, which is vitally necessary that he maintain in order to preserve his position as zemindar of Rashkali, for his own sake as well as for the sake of the people who look to him for guidance. However, he is well aware that his world will disintegrate because he is in financial difficulties. When he is wrongly found guilt of forgery, Neel finds himself imprisoned and sentenced to be transported to Mauritius on the Ibis. Neel shares his imprisonment with an opium addict, Ah Fatt, and almost his first task, having accepted that his life has changed irrevocably, is to nurse Ah Fatt through an enforced withdrawal from the drug. Through this, the two men form an uneasy bond as they await transportation. Though this disparate group of protagonists provides a microcosm of India in the early nineteenth century, Ghosh presents the reader with an intricate portrait of a multilayered society circumscribed at all levels by convention. It is also a society heavily dependent on one industry for its income; everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, is affected by the opium trade. No one is immune to its effects, economic or otherwise. As the narrative shows, however, this carefully constructed society rests on a fragile foundation. If the opium industry collapses, what will happen to these people? As the group sails to Mauritius on the Ibis, various of its members are beset by danger, most particularly by the fear that they will be revealed to be something other than they have pretended to be. Despite their different backgrounds, the passengers and prisoners gradually form a community, mirroring that of the lascar seamen, and the ship gradually comes to stand for a new India, in which the poor and helpless fight for their rights when they are badly treated by the mostly white officers. Eventually, during a long night of brutality and revelation, the senior officers lose control of the ship, and some are killed. The community is broken asunder, with Serang Ali, Jodu, Neel, Ah Fatt, and Kalua fleeing the ship in a small boat and leaving behind Paulette and Deeti. At this point, the novel draws to a close, but it is intended to be the first part of a trilogy of novels, the Ibis trilogy, in which Ghosh will explore the colonial history of India, principally through the portrayal of the opium industry but also through the transportation of indentured labor to Mauritius and to other British colonies. His approach is necessarily panoramic, with one character representing an entire social group, and yet he manages to portray society as a whole on a personal level. The reader identifies with and cares for the characters, knowing that whatever they have suffered so far is nothing compared to what they are going to experience as they take to the open sea and begin their long voyage into what is, effectively, a new society. Already there are hints that they are, however unintentionally, part of a grander story in which some of them will found dynasties and be remembered. In this novel, Ghosh also explores the ways in which people are perceived in the world, through language and appearance. People are easily persuaded that Zachary is a gentleman by the clothes he wears, although he is acutely aware that he might at any point be found to be not only a mere ship’s carpenter but also a mulatto. By the same token, Reid understands far more of the languages used by the lascars than the English officers who command the ship and who attempt to teach him how to speak properly to the seamen. In fact, the English colony prides itself on its ability to communicate with the Indian

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people, and yet Ghosh deftly shows the ways in which the Englishmen mangle the languages they try to speak because they do not learn them properly. The tragedy of the society that Ghosh portrays is that its disparate parts cannot communicate with one another. The community creating itself on the Ibis points the way forward, and it offers hope, although a fragile one. Maureen Kincaid Speller

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 4 (October 15, 2008): 23. The Economist 387 (May 24, 2008): 108. Far Eastern Economic Review 171, no. 7 (September, 2008): 71-72. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 17 (September 1, 2008): 907. Library Journal 133, no. 16 (October 1, 2008): 56. New Statesman 137 (May 5, 2008): 58-59. The New York Times, November 6, 2008, p. 1. The New York Times Book Review, November 30, 2008, p. 8. The New Yorker 84, no. 34 (October 27, 2008): 87. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 33 (August 18, 2008): 38. The Times Literary Supplement, June 6, 2008, p. 19. The Wall Street Journal 252, no. 93 (October 18, 2008): W8.

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THE SELECTED ESSAYS OF GORE VIDAL Author: Gore Vidal (1925) Edited by Jay Parini Publisher: Doubleday (New York). 458 pp. $27.50 Type of work: Essays Time: 1953-2004 A choice collection of works from one of the United States’ most prolific and provocative writers Gore Vidal is that rarest of men, one who consistently resists labels in an age of increasing categorization. With the publication of his first novel, Williwaw (1946), he immediately established himself as a serious writer by dealing with the then-taboo subject of homosexuality. Had he chosen to do so, he could have continued to produce more groundbreaking novels in the same manner: small works for a select audience that would have eventually found their way into the college classroom. Instead, Vidal went on to excel in every major literary form save poetry. In the 1950’s, he had no compunction about writing for the new medium of television, and he even crafted part of the screenplay for one of the most popular films of the period, Ben-Hur (1959). On a parallel track to his literary career, Vidal gained a considerable reputation as a political commentator and as a frequent guest on the television talk show circuit in the 1960’s and 1970’s. It is as an essayist, however, that Vidal has made his presence felt in the literary world. The essay—at once the most personal and digressive of the traditional forms in the genre of nonfiction—has found in Vidal an impressive and enduring master. It is for this reason that The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal is such a welcome addition to any bookshelf. While it is true that an earlier and far more comprehensive volume, United States: Essays, 1952-1992, was published in 1993, it was an omnibus collection of 114 pieces. Vidal’s reputation is probably better served in this new volume, edited by Jay Parini, which contains essays representing the best of the recurring themes in his work. In addition to Parini’s helpful introduction, the book is divided into two sections, consisting of thirteen and eleven essays respectively. In “Part One: Reading the Writers,” Parini presents a group of essays dealing with a variety of literary matters spanning the period from the 1950’s to the 1990’s. Two significant themes emerge in this section: one concerns Vidal’s astute analyses of his fellow fiction writers; the other deals with his critiques of other critics. Among the latter, “Novelists and Critics of the 1940’s” introduces what has proven to be a common Vidal theme: his lifelong contempt for academic critics. “They tend . . . to be absolutists. They believe that by a close examination of ‘the text,’ the laws and the crafty ‘strategies’ of its composition will be made clear and the findings will provide ‘touchstones’ for a comparative criticism of other works.” He then proceeds to point out that this is more effective with metaphysical poetry than with the more open-ended format of the novel.

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For those unfamiliar with the history of Western academic criticism, Vidal’s comments require some explanation. What he is describing is what came to be known as New Criticism, a formalist approach to literature that attempted to divorce a work from its historical and cultural context in order to examine it as an isolated artifact. The best-known exponent of this type of critical approach was Cleanth Brooks, whose book The Well Wrought Urn In addition to many short stories and (1947) was very influential in the academy. screenplays, Gore Vidal has published Brooks provided a powerful new tool with two memoirs, five plays, twenty-four which to examine verse; indeed, the book’s tinovels, and more than two hundred tle derives from John Donne’s poem “The essays. He won the National Book Canonization.” Vidal’s comments on the subaward in 1993 for United States: ject highlight both the strengths and the weakEssays, 1952-1992. nesses of his writing. On the positive side, Vidal early on recognizes some of the inherent shortcomings in a critical technique that was fast taking root in American universities, and he delivers his verdict with a wit that is as acerbic as it is incisive. As an iconoclast (literally, a destroyer of sacred images), he relishes the opportunity to deflate what he perceives to be the pervasive selfimportance of the academy. To be fair, it must be pointed out that, even in its heyday in the 1950’s, New Criticism was rarely practiced in its purest form. Good critics then and now employ theory as a tool to be used with caution and not as an intellectual fetish. It should also be noted that New Criticism arose in reaction to the critical strategies of the preceding generation, which centered upon historical and biographical approaches. The severity of Vidal’s tone is probably linked to the fact that even then he recognized the gradual demise of such freelance critics as Edmund Wilson, who wrote voluminously about literature from a perspective outside the academy. Nevertheless, Vidal seizes upon what has long been recognized as the primary weakness of academic criticism. While a roving critic such as Vidal espouses what he feels are valuable insights about literature, the academic critic is compelled to do so in order to further his or her own career. It is this “publish or perish” nature of English department criticism that earns Vidal’s often scathing remarks. That his comments are as prescient as they are insightful is witnessed in his later essay, “The Hacks of Academe.” When he reviews a volume of essays by lauded academics, it is evident that the nascent and rather modest theories of the New Critics have been further developed by notably less gifted successors. Vidal obviously enjoys picking apart jargon and poorly written articles that often yield little in the way of genuine textual insights. He dispenses with the editor of the book, John Halperin, and proceeds to dispose of the essays themselves. As entertaining as Vidal’s comments often are, the fact remains that he reveals a fundamental weakness in the generation of knowledge in American universities. By

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adopting questionable theories in an institution that mandates critical production, Vidal claims, academe does a lasting disservice to literature, creating a closed loop in which academics and their students are imprisoned by a self-regulating rhetoric that is ultimately unproductive. Vidal’s comments, however, concern only the generation and practice of literary theory, which represents only a part of the academy and which is mostly confined to the nation’s larger Ph.D.-granting institutions. One could argue just as forcibly that in recent decades academic study has successfully enlarged the canon, the body of works that are studied and valued, from a narrow group of male writers to include many works that were neglected in the past. Feminist studies generated by the academy have rescued the once-popular novels of nineteenth century writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick and the groundbreaking early realism of Rebecca Harding Davis. Vidal seems to forget that it was the persistence of a doctoral candidate rummaging through a trunk of old papers that led to the discovery of Herman Melville’s last great masterpiece, Billy Budd (1924), and the recognition of Moby Dick (1851) as one of the greatest works of the American Renaissance. Vidal can be forgiven for being so tough on his fellow critics if only because he himself is so gifted in this field. Surely no one concerned with the serious study of literature would challenge his assertion that a critic’s role is to “comment intelligently from his vantage point in time on the way a work appears to him in a contemporary, a comparative, or a historic light.” Vidal’s own record as a critic is impressive. As early as 1953, he recognized the genius of writers who later came to be viewed as modern masters: the plays of Tennessee Williams, the stories of Paul Bowles, and the novels of Carson McCullers. That Vidal makes no distinction between high and low art is evidenced by the catholicity of his interests. In the “The Top Ten Best-Sellers According to the Sunday New York Times as of January 7, 1973,” he gleefully disparages the pervasive influence of the Hollywood dream factory upon popular literature. His analysis of Herman Wouk’s novel The Winds of War (1971)—one of the most popular books of the 1970’s—is an instructive, funny examination of the pitfalls of appropriating the hackneyed themes of film romance by a writer who has little understanding of the milieu he describes at tedious length. The reason Vidal’s criticism is so effective, aside from his dazzling intellect, is the impressive range of his literary knowledge. Thus, while many praised the publication of Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Avgust chetyrnadtsatogo (1971; August 1914, 1972), Vidal is careful to distinguish the honorable life of this Soviet dissident from what he regards as writing that borrows too heavily from Leo Tolstoy. Even if one disagrees with some aspects of his critiques, one has to admit that in his position as an independent critic Vidal is free to make observations that are next to impossible for academics. While writing of the French influence upon American writers of the postwar period, he dismisses James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) for what he regards as an unsuccessful use of Greek mythology to structure this lengthy narrative. Given the fact that some academics have devoted entire careers to the study of this novel, such comments within the academy would no doubt constitute professional suicide. The essays in the second section of the collection, “Reading the World,” exhibit

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the same contrary personality dealing with social and political ideas. Vidal is nothing if not forthright. As an unapologetic, lifelong liberal with a deep attachment to the nation’s capital, Vidal was a prominent observer of and participant in the social upheavals of the postwar period. Not surprisingly, he openly questions the establishment’s opposition to one of human society’s oldest vices, pornography. He engagingly argues that in an overpopulated world, sex can no longer be regarded solely as a means of procreation. If sex is no longer exclusively reserved for this function, then society should be free to accept homosexuality and bisexuality, the latter being a characteristic he attributes to all human beings. Some will no doubt question Vidal’s view of pornography as a harmless human activity, but most will applaud his demand for tolerance in sexual preferences. It is this very call for acceptance, however, that runs counter to evangelism, a topic he explores in “Monotheism and Its Discontents.” Whatever one’s opinion of Vidal’s social views, one cannot help admiring both his courage and the skill with which his impressive intellect tackles such a controversial subject. Rather than simply question the rising power of American evangelism, he challenges the very basis of the world’s three monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Asserting that these desert-born religions all worship an intolerant “sky-god,” he deems the paternalistic deity of these religions to be an authoritarian who frowns upon liberal ideas. He also contends that American evangelism is a kind of perversion of the Founding Fathers, who he claims “were not enthusiasts of the sky-god. Many, like Jefferson, rejected him altogether and placed man at the center of the world.” In reality, the Founders expressed a variety of religious views; most of them felt that religion was necessary on some level for a moral and just society, and Jefferson even crafted his own Bible from selected excerpts from the standard text. Nonetheless, this does not in any way mitigate the substance of Vidal’s argument, which is that the rising tide of American evangelism in the 1990’s challenged the notions of tolerance upon which the nation was founded. Although many question his provocative ideas, no one doubts Vidal’s considerable rhetorical skills. The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal will find a ready audience for all who value good writing. Cliff Prewencki

Review Sources Library Journal 133, no. 8 (May 1, 2008): 67. The Nation 287, no. 13 (October 27, 2008): 58-62. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 14 (April 7, 2008): 50.

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SELECTED POEMS Author: Frank O’Hara (1926-1966) Edited by Mark Ford Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 265 pp. $30.00 Type of work: Poetry O’Hara wrote electric poetry expressing the spirit of the mid-twentieth century New York art world, and this new selection of his work showcases his unique gift Frank O’Hara was one of the experimental poets of the mid-twentieth century, associated with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and other innovative artists that lived and worked in New York City during the 1950’s and 1960’s. O’Hara’s work is flamboyantly original, capturing the details of the cityscape and the lifeblood that ran beneath it. His energetic and vibrant poems are filled with names and places and events of the time, and even while celebrating life, they hold an elegiac undertone. This new selection presents the essential O’Hara. The poet’s life was tragically short—he was killed at forty in a freak accident. This collection begins with a poem written in 1949 or 1950 (the editor does not know which year) and ends with a poem written in 1966—ironically, an elegy for another poet, Antonio Machado. Thus O’Hara’s writing, or at least his publishing, life spanned about sixteen years—long when compared with John Keats’s but short if compared with most writers. O’Hara wrote prolifically—editor Mark Ford said of Donald Allen’s edition of O’Hara’s Collected Poems (1971), “I weighed it on my kitchen scales and found it came in at just over three and a half pounds.” It seems appropriate to weigh this poetry on a scale, like produce. There is not a lot of change in the poetry—O’Hara’s distinctive voice speaks consistently in the same tones, at least most of the time, although the effect is never dulled. The subject matter and style vary, providing different takes on the same life and place. The selection includes useful material beyond the poems. The verse play Try, Try is here, and so are a few prose pieces, including the famous manifesto on Personism, the school of poetics O’Hara founded on a whim, as well as other poetics statements and brief memoirs. Interesting in themselves, the editor’s introduction and the concluding chronology help present a poet who has less currency among today’s poetry readers, and they consider some of the popular O’Hara myths. These poems emanate a fiery energy, exploding on the page with a force and a visceral presence, as though the poet were in a small room with you, dancing around with excitement and explaining something crucially important in his life. They flow from line to line without stopping for breath; when they do stop, they are often punctuated with exclamation marks or commas or nothing at all. Nevertheless, the line endings seem appropriate, providing an invisible check to the current of language, reminding the reader that these are poems, that they have a form to guide their flow.

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Their topicality ensures these poems are fresh rather than dated. The density of proper nouns in O’Hara’s poems is high—many wellknown people are addressed directly, or evoked otherwise, always involved in some action that is characteristic. The reader is pulled through a series of rambling speculations that rejoice in the flux and flash of the artistic life, although sometimes glimpsed through the effervescence of the poems is a sadness. This effect is heightened for today’s reader beFrank O’Hara helped found the Poet’s cause of the names of stars and artists long Theatre and through this work met a since faded. Suggestions of transience were variety of postmodern poets. He received an M.A. from the University of always a part of the poems, through their refMichigan and then moved to New York, erences to news headlines, flowers, and fruit and through their direct descriptions of the where he worked for the Museum of persistent awareness of time’s passage. Modern Art. In 1966, he was run over and killed on Fire Island while waiting O’Hara’s most anthologized poem may be for the replacement of a disabled beach “Poem [Lana Turner Has Collapsed],” in taxi. which the intensity of physical, personal pres ence communicates itself through the imagined connection between the speaker’s world and the star’s. The speaker is “trotting along” through New York’s rainy, snowy weather on his way to meet a friend or lover when he sees a headline, “LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED.” He thinks about the different weather where she is and comments: there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up

This poem catches the fast movement of life and its eccentric, electric connections. It appears in many resources, yet it is only one of many similar poems that feature the characteristic O’Hara current that allows the reader to feel invaded by the 1950’s and 1960’s and carried off. The poems in this collection are all different, despite their shared voice, and they depict a world in which everything is likely to shift at any moment, and this instability is what provides life’s savor. Whether O’Hara is doing a riff on Sergei Rachmaninoff (“Onset, Massachusetts. Is it the fig newton/ playing the horn?”) or taking delight in the differences among New York men’s rooms in “Homosexuality,” he projects a sense of nowness—as though complete immersion in the moment would immortalize it. Ideas and images hurtle past. Most of O’Hara’s poems are short, a page or less, catching the feel of events flying by. Nev-

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ertheless, even the very long “Biotherm” maintains the sense of rush from the beginning: The best thing in the world better be gone tomorrow

but I better be quick about it

better be gone last night and next Thursday better be gone better be always or what’s the use the sky the endless clouds trailing we leading them by the bandanna, red

An atypical poem is “To the Harbormaster,” which catches the downside of this flux. The speaker is on his way in his ship to meet the harbormaster, but the ship “got caught in some moorings.” His intentions were good, he says, but his actions were ineffective. He is not able to achieve the goal of his journey. In storms and at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide around my fathomless arms, I am unable to understand the forms of my vanity or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder in my hand and the sun sinking. To you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage of my will.

He makes an offering, then, of self, and despite his lack of progress in the right direction, he realizes that he is still sailing, not out of danger. He finally comments that there may be a reason for his failure to arrive: “Yet/ I trust the sanity of my vessel; and/ if it sinks it may well be in answer/ to the reasoning of the eternal voices,/ the waves which have kept me from reaching you.” The humble exploring soul is not seen much in this work, but it is there, and this apology for not connecting with the harbormaster has a powerful appeal. The tone is quiet, and the extended metaphor is rare and unusual. This other side to O’Hara gives his work a metaphysical dimension, even if he denies its presence elsewhere. Opening the book at almost any point provides a jolt. The poet is open and clear about everything in his life, including his love affairs with men, but there is nothing graphic here—the reader gets the desire, the sense of immediacy, the realization that everything is always subject to change. His delight in the world and his place in it is a major element in the first poem, “Autobiographic Literaria,” which begins with a tale of a dull and lonely childhood in which the solitary boy had little companionship: “ . . . animals were/ not friendly and birds/ flew away.” The expansive conclusion comes in the style of Walt Whitman: “And here I am, the/ center of all beauty!/ writing these poems!/ Imagine!” The poems say “Imagine!” in various ways, again and again, in untoward or in eccentrically happy or unhappy circumstances. The play Try, Try may be included to show that O’Hara, like T. S. Eliot and other poets, wrote plays, although it is less compelling than anything else in the book, in-

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cluding the prose. Try, Try seems to make fun of heterosexual love in the deliberately affected interchange among two lovers and her former love who has returned from the war. Like Eliot’s plays, it makes for tedious reading, and while it does begin with an Eliot-like situation—infidelity—its concluding acceptance of infidelity as simply how things are is anything but Eliot-like. The play has a curiously flat effect next to the poems—the effervescence missing and the clever, whimsical dialogue lacking persuasiveness. However, the poetics statements are intriguing, partly because they show where O’Hara placed himself as a poet—a force against the cult of Eliot and against the poetry of denial (of the world, of the self, of pleasure in the moment). “I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures,” he said in “Personism: A Manifesto,” dismissing the literary theories in Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and the poetry as well. O’Hara said, “I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve.” O’Hara believed in expressing the self in moments of heightened consciousness and providing a crackling linkage of network with other selves. This book demands to be read in short snatches, because all that energy all the time is too much for sustained attention. Editor Ford is a poet who has also written a critical biography, Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (2000). He teaches at University College London and contributes to both The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books. Ford’s selections are well chosen and will preserve the reputation of this exciting poet for generations of readers. The sensibility of a young poet completely immersed in the New York artistic life provides an insider’s look at the movements involved, and the balance of energy and implied elegy remains a powerful force. With the possible exception of the play, everything in this book bears study and rereading, and the whole presents a positive impression of O’Hara as a spokesman for and beyond his time. The Collected Poems is a daunting volume that would put off many potential readers; this carefully edited selection is vast enough to satisfy O’Hara’s fans and to draw new ones. Janet McCann

Review Sources The New Republic 238, no. 9 (May 28, 2008): 47-51. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 14 (September 25, 2008): 28-34. The New York Times Book Review, June 29, 2008, p. 1. Review of Contemporary Fiction 28, no. 2 (Summer, 2008): 172.

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SHAKESPEARE’S WIFE Author: Germaine Greer (1939) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 406 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Biography Time: 1556-1623 Locale: Shottery and Stratford, Warwickshire, England Greer recounts what is known about the life of Ann Hathaway, who became Ann Shakespeare, and speculates on other possibilities that her life might have included Principal personages: Ann Hathaway Shakespeare, a woman who married England’s greatest writer William Shakespeare, her husband Susanna Shakespeare, the elder Shakespeare daughter John Hall, a medical doctor and Susanna’s husband Hamnet Shakespeare, son of Ann and William Judith Shakespeare Quiney, daughter of Ann and William and twin sister of Hamnet Richard Hathaway, a farmer in Shottery and Ann’s father Mary Hathaway, Ann’s stepmother John Shakespeare, a glove maker and William’s father Mary Shakespeare, William’s mother

“Anyone steeped in Western literary culture must wonder why any woman of spirit would want to be a wife.” Thus Germaine Greer begins Shakespeare’s Wife. Coming from one of the best known of living feminist writers, the statement is hardly surprising, but it is not what one expects at the beginning of a biography of a sixteenth century woman with only limited control of her destiny. It is not, however, an entirely immaterial point in this book about a woman whose life had never been competently and open-mindedly studied. Ann Hathaway would have been taught that God instituted wifehood as the principal calling of a woman. She spent thirty-four years as William Shakespeare’s wife, and she must be recognized as a person who stood closer to him than any future Bardolater and who understood him better than any such latterday expert. Not much is known about her spirit or how much she wanted to be a wife, but Ann is a part of Western literary culture, and her life is a piece of evidence for Greer’s hard-nosed assertion. A Shakespearean scholar, Greer cites the works of many others, often caustically, as for example Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004). She refers to his comments on the marriage nine times, sometimes approvingly but usually negatively, primarily for his assumption that William Shakespeare tired of his wife after, or as a result of, the confinements related to the births of the couple’s three children and that he therefore “contrived” to leave her.

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There is no convincing evidence that William did any such contriving, but Greenblatt and others have offered many such uncomplimentary assertions about the woman. To lead Ann into a more favorable light, Greer draws on studies of women and family life, some of them by female scholars such as Alice Clark, author of The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1982); Lisa Jardine, author of Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (1983); and Alison Plowden, author of Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners (2002). Being fair to Ann is not an easy task, with so many aspects of her life little or completely unknown and likely to remain so. Any writer of integrity who deals with Ann at any length must use expressions such as “perhaps” and “probably,” “would have” and “might have” many times over. Thus they have done, and thus Greer does. She has performed her task more systematically than other scholars, treating the stages of her subject’s life in chronological fashion from the standpoint of an observer determined to avoid making easy—and particularly condescending—assumptions about her subject. Since any biography of a subject such as Shakespeare’s wife must speculate, what besides a pitifully small cache of facts does the biographer have at hand? Greer uses available facts pertaining to other young women of that time and place as well as what Shakespeare himself and writers of his time said. No Shakepearean letters are known to exist, and most of what Shakespeare wrote on the facts of life and on modes of thought of his era emanate from the several hundred characters in his plays and poems. This is dangerous territory; most people then, as now, did not think like Lady Macbeth or Iago. What more representative characters in the plays have to say, especially in a more-or-less offhand way, doubtless gives more insight into social norms, and it is interesting to read Greer’s compilation of what Shakespeare’s characters have to say about the many aspects of common concerns. One example is the wedding. Although no record has been found, Greer believes that the marriage of William and Ann would have been appropriately solemnized. In her sixth chapter on the events of the big day, she quotes from a song of the period, “The Bride’s Goodmorrow,” and from Edmund Spenser’s account of his own wedding to Elizabeth Boyle in 1594. Then Greer presents a selection of wedding details from The Merchant of Venice (pr. c. 1596-1597), As You Like It (pr. c. 1599-1600), The Taming of the Shrew (pr. c. 1593-1594), and Twelfth Night (pr. c. 1600-1602). None of this proves that Shakespeare was recalling the celebration of his wedding in these works, but it reminds the reader that the dramatist took the wedding ceremony and its components seriously. Everyone has noticed that Shakespeare was only eighteen when he married Ann and that she, almost surely pregnant, was eight years older. Many assumptions can be fashioned from these facts, and most of them remain firmly in the realm of specula-

Germaine Greer earned a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. She contributed to Oxford University Press’s volume on William Shakespeare called Past Masters (1986), and she wrote or edited seventeen other books. Her career as a leading feminist dates from the publication of her international best seller The Female Eunuch (1970).

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tion. Was Ann desperate for marriage? Greer notes that many women of Stratford did not marry at all, and some—such as Shakespeare’s younger daughter Judith, who married at thirty-one—did not tie the knot when young. Was either Ann or William forced into the marriage? Greer argues that he could have escaped. If Shakespeare’s parents had disapproved of Ann thoroughly, they could have stopped the marriage— but they did not. Could Shakespeare have been in love with another woman when he married Ann? A record has been found in the Bishop of Worcester’s register of a license for a marriage between “Wm Shaxpere et Annam Whateley,” while procedures for William’s marriage were underway. There were, however, “lots” of William Shakespeares in Warwickshire in 1582. Greer expresses surprise that no one has speculated that the child who would become Susanna Shakespeare was not his. Even that unlikely possibility could not be established one way or the other. Shakespeare’s “lost years,” the later 1580’s and early 1590’s, may have been spent in Stratford or in London. One of the sonnets attributed to him, 145, has plausibly been suggested as referring to Ann, especially on the basis of its closing couplet, “I hate from hate away she threw,/ And saved my life saying, not you,” with language suggesting both her maiden and first names. Some critics refuse to accept this lackluster poem as Shakespeare’s, but if it is, it surely must be an early effort, plausibly about his relationship with Ann. If he was spending his time composing such trifles during the couple’s early years, Ann might well have sent him off to London, where literary efforts might, for all she knew, be appreciated, especially if he was otherwise idle and unproviding. Greer finds that Shakespeareans have tended to conclude that Ann was illiterate, “that they want her, need her to have had no inkling of the magnitude of her husband’s achievement.” She could, however, have been able to read and write; her husband might even have taught her. Considering how little evidence establishes William’s presence in Stratford after fathering the twins, Hamnet and Judith, in 1584, was Ann an abandoned woman? Had he deserted her, Greer argues, William would have been a fugitive from the law, unless she did not denounce him. If she did not under those circumstances denounce him, then she was protecting him. Many men spent years away from their wives earning their living, which is what William was doing for most of the time from 1592 until 1610. No Shakespearean scholar, Greer points out, has suggested that William missed his wife and children, but perhaps he did. That Ann had to support herself during those years seems likely. Greer rejects the notion that she lived with her in-laws and reviews the activities by which women supported themselves: cleaning, washing, tailoring, brewing, malt-making, baking, spinning, weaving, farming, and various other work. There is no evidence of what Ann did, but evidence of what other women did is relevant. William can be associated with Warwickshire again in his late years, including the well-to-do Combe family, one of whom, in 1614, was seeking to turn much of the open land around Stratford into pasture and thereby endanger the livelihood of farmers who worked that land. Women and children went out, at night, Greer presumes, and, as recorded in a 1602 source, they filled in 275 yards of land that had been ditched as part of the enclosure movement. The law held that if a man had organized an effort of this type,

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both he and his accomplices could be prosecuted, but if the women had acted spontaneously, the law could not act against them. The temptation was to find a man, guilty or not, to accuse as the instigator, However, in this instance, with women having little legal status, these women were never arraigned, and the Stratford commons were not enclosed. By this time Ann was in her late fifties and both Shakespeare daughters were among the housewives of the area. Whether or not any of these women were involved no one knows, but the event calls attention to the resourcefulness of Tudor females. William’s will introduces another interesting aspect of the relationship between him and his wife. She was not named executor, but Greer refuses to be surprised that he did not name a sixty-year-old woman to this task. Much has been made of the fact that Ann is mentioned only in connection with his “second best bed.” It is possible that he left Ann with nothing, but he also might well have given her other property beforehand. Greer doubts that the will represents anything near a full distribution of his possessions. Does Greer fall into her own unwarrantable and condescending suppositions? Yes, she does, but these suppositions are aimed not at her subject but reflect her judgments of the motives of the Shakespearean scholars who utter their own unflattering surmises anew or repeat old ones indiscreetly. She claims more than once that male scholars have a positive and presumably masculine need to downgrade the woman whom the very young William chose to be his wife. It is curious and unconventional to write a book about a person not only obscure but also almost completely undocumented. If it had to happen, however, Ann Shakespeare was an excellent choice, for she is a woman often speculated about, either carelessly or, as Greer believes, contemptuously. In a sense, this book is less about Ann and more about the possibilities of obscure women to be more worthy and more enterprising than posterity is inclined to recognize. A book such as this one is not going to convince most Shakespearean scholars that Ann was a force with which to be reckoned, but they may well become more cautious in dismissing her as a nonentity. Robert P. Ellis

Review Sources Booklist 104, nos. 9/10 (January 1, 2008): 21. The Boston Globe, May 28, 2008, p. E8. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 3 (February 1, 2008): 130. Library Journal 133, no. 6 (April 1, 2008): 83. London Review of Books 29, no. 19 (October 4, 2007): 29-30. Maclean’s 121, no. 14 (April 14, 2008): 80. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 6 (April 17, 2008): 6-10. The New York Times Book Review, April 27, 2008, p. 12. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 5 (February 4, 2008): 46. The Times Literary Supplement, January 25, 2008, p. 10. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 80 (April 5, 2008): W1-W4.

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THE SILVER SWAN Author: Benjamin Black (pseudonym of John Banville, 1945) Publisher: Henry Holt (New York). 308 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The early 1950’s Locale: Dublin, Ireland The husband of a drowned woman implores an old schoolmate to ignore protocol and suspend an autopsy on the body, which leads the doctor into a private criminal investigation that produces unexpected results Principal characters: Garret Quirke, a middle-aged Dublin pathologist with an insatiable curiosity Billy Hunt, university classmate of Quirke whom he has not seen in years and only barely remembers Deirdre Hunt, also known as Silver Swan, Billy’s much younger wife who has drowned in Dublin Bay Phoebe Griffin, Quirke’s estranged daughter Leslie White, Deirdre’s business partner and lover Kate White, Leslie’s disaffected wife Hakim Kreutz, a spiritual healer and drug dealer

The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black begins in the middle of things with the protagonist, Quirke, puzzling over a note from someone who seems vaguely familiar but whom he does not recall until they meet in a bar. Billy Hunt, a former athletic classmate, informs Quirke, a Dublin pathologist, that his wife has drowned, and Billy pleads that her beautiful body not be disfigured by an autopsy. Quirke reluctantly agrees, only to renege on the promise when he finds a tiny puncture wound on her arm. At an inquest, Quirke insists that the cause of death was drowning, though he harbors suspicions and spends the rest of the novel learning more than he expected about a host of lives and uncovering the sad truth about Deirdre Hunt’s life and death. His investigation uncovers exploitation, blackmail, drug use, and murder, and his primary motivation has less to do with issues of legality or justice than with simple curiosity and protectiveness. The novel assumes a knowledge of characters and situations that transpired in the first Black mystery, Christine Falls (2007), with these events occurring about two years later. Quirke has lost his wife, has remained thoroughly alienated from a daughter he abandoned in childhood, and has betrayed his adoptive father, a judge, who has hidden behind his office. Additionally, although Quirke has given up the drink, he must continually struggle with alcoholic urges that haunt him, just as the novel’s events and his shattered life obsess him.

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John Banville, who writes his mystery and detective fiction under the nom de plume Benjamin Black, has had a long and distinguished career, writing challenging fictions dating back to 1970. His fourteen novels have garnered serious critical attention, defining him as one of the most subtle and sophisticated of postmodernists. In addition to having won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Whitbread Prize, he was awarded the prestigious Man Booker Prize for The Sea in 2005. In 2007 he surprised many with his next project, Christine Falls, a noir murder mystery set in 1950’s Dublin that he published, as an open secret, under the pen name of Black. That novel was a finalist for the 2008 Edgar Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thrillers. Banville has launched a Benjamin Black Web site in which he interviews his alter ego and reveals that to write these latest novels he has rented a small apartment in the Temple Bar area of Dublin, which has encouraged the temporal setting and unique atmosphere of his mysteries. In that interview, Banville admits, “The 1950’s fascinates me. It was a remarkable time, here and in America, paranoid, guilt-ridden, beset by fear and loathing, and still shuddering in the after-effects of the war. A perfect period for a novel, if you incline toward a dark view of human beings.” This careful attention to place is a major component of all successful detective fiction, whether it be the village world of Agatha Christie or the mean streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Black knows this genre, and while he seeks to incorporate the atmosphere of hard-boiled writers such as Chandler and James M. Cain, he is not content to strictly imitate them. Quirke is anything but a tough guy—he is stocky and physically maladroit, far from a ladies’ man, and someone who not so much solves a case as he worries it to death, engaging everyone in elliptical conversations. Most detective fictions conclude with the protagonist wrapping up the stray clues, identifying the least-likely suspect, assigning guilt, and solving the case. Quirke puts matters together, to be sure, but he jumps to some erroneous conclusions and essentially argues to let sleeping dogs lie. He is full of suspicions, but in the end he is a thoroughly fallible hero who falls off the wagon and spends a sodden night on a park bench. Perhaps Quirke’s closest association with traditional detective heroes is his individual code of ethics, which places him in conflict with the law and the criminals alike. His fascination with corpses and his overwhelming personal pain make Quirke a complex, distant character. He even regards himself as a divided personality: “For there was another version of him, a personality within a personality, malcontent, vindictive, ever ready to provoke, to which he gave the name ‘Carriklea [the orphanage of his youth].’ Often he found himself standing back, seemingly helpless to intervene, as this other he made him set about fomenting some new enormity.” On the other

John Banville, who sometimes writes as Benjamin Black, worked as a copy editor for the Irish Press and then as literary editor at the Irish Times. He began his writing career in 1970 with the publication of Long Lankin, a series of nine short fictions, and then embarked on his career as a novelist in 1971 with Nightspawn. The Sea (2005) won for Banville the Man Booker Prize.

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hand, his sense of justice forces him to turn his adoptive father over to the authorities and public humiliation. Hard-boiled fictions typically center on a subjective narrator whose deepest feelings and personal ruminations provide as much drama as the plots themselves. Banville is an author who has often emphasized the tortured terrain of his narrators’ most intimate thoughts, but Black chooses instead the distance of a third-person narrative consciousness. This narrator, though it favors Quirke, does not focus exclusively on him. Black’s narrator is a chameleon, a voice that can often impersonate each of the other characters, and thus whole chapters are often given over to the point of view of different figures. Perhaps the most interesting of these chapters appears at the conclusion, when the reader is allowed purchase into the mind of the killer, someone not as clever as he thinks he is but still eerily perceptive, as for instance when he ruminates on the inevitability of his role as a killer, “Maybe if you looked at anything, any event, closely enough you would see the future packed into it, folded tight, like the tight-folded elastic filling of a golf ball.” The novel develops three separate stories simultaneously—Quirke’s, his daughter Phoebe’s, and Deirdre’s. Each is revealed as a sorrowful figure, burdened by personal guilts and humiliations, and none can rid himself or herself of the embarrassing residue of the past. The three narratives snake uneasily around and through one another, and the principal characters independently become involved with one another. On the surface, such intricate interconnections may seem contrived and unlikely, but these complicated coincidences are ultimately part of Black’s atmospheric purpose. At one point, when Phoebe and the lascivious Leslie White are discussing some of these relationships, Phoebe remarks that in Dublin, “Everyone knows everyone else’s business.” James Joyce and many other Dubliners have complained that their city, in fundamental ways, is a small town where everyone appears to know one another and their most private secrets. Black seems to insist that a mid-twentieth century Dublin is no different from the place where Joyce escaped because of its narrow and oppressive culture. The gray, damp fog and omnipresent smoke that surround the action become powerful metaphors for the claustrophobic fog of a society that denies privacy and personal independence. As Banville explains in another interview, “All that fog, all the cigarette smoke, all the Catholic guilt, all those secrets buried deep behind the facade of respectability—[these are] perfect for noir fiction.” While all of the characters yearn for escape—through sex, drugs, and tawdry adventures—Quirke chooses the very means that will intrigue yet ultimately depress him. “Do nothing, his better judgment told him; stay on dry land. But he knew he would dive, headfirst, into the depths. Something in him yearned after the darkness down there.” Banville has announced repeatedly in interviews that writing as Black has been a liberating experience. Instead of laboring endlessly over a perfectly wrought sentence, Black writes quickly and spontaneously in a way that brings its author immense joy. Nevertheless, while the style is indeed looser, the novel is laced with many delightful and carefully crafted sentences. For instance, passages devoted to death produce evocative results. When Phoebe ponders the incomprehensibility of suicide, she describes it as

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the ring of a hammer falling on a dull lump of steel. Perhaps the fascination of it, for her, was merely that she had never known anyone personally, or in the flesh, at least . . . who had vanished so comprehensively, who had become non-flesh, as it were, by one sudden, impulsive dive into darkness.

Quirke also meditates on death in a beautiful passage, nearly reminiscent of Banville: Over every scene of violent death Quirke had attended in the course of his career there had hung a particular kind of silence, the kind that falls after the last echoes of a great outcry have faded. There was shock in it, of course, and awe and outrage, the sense of many hands lifted quickly to many mouths, but something else as well, a kind of gleefulness, a kind of startled, happy, unable-to-believe-its-luckness. Things, Quirke reflected, even inanimate things, it seemed, love a killing.

Banville-Black is a remarkably adroit, perceptive writer. The Dublin he has created in his Quirke novels is thoroughly Irish and an original setting for noir mysteries. The characters in The Silver Swan are convincingly believable human types, which the figures in the Banville novels are often not, being cerebral projections of overwrought consciousness. Like another of his inspirations, Georges Simenon, Black brings a strong sense of existential angst to his creations, even his most vile villains. In keeping with these existential leanings, the crime, while not insoluble, is never neatly resolved, and the cost of the investigation, at least for Quirke, is high, paid in the coin of the soul. The toll, from one novel to the other, is palpable. The Black novels remind readers that of all life’s mysteries and secrets, those of the human soul are the most complex and elusive. David W. Madden

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 11 (February 1, 2008): 32. The Boston Globe, March 10, 2008, p. C6. The Christian Science Monitor, March 28, 2008, p. 14. Houston Chronicle, March 20, 2008, p. 1. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 24 (December 15, 2007): 1254. Library Journal 133, no. 2 (February 1, 2008): 51. Los Angeles Times, March 5, 2008, p. E1. The New York Times Book Review, April 20, 2008, p. 17. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 1 (January 7, 2008): 36. Sunday Times, November 18, 2007, p. 20. The Times Literary Supplement, November 23, 2007, p. 21.

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SITTING BULL Author: Bill Yenne (1949) Publisher: Westholme (Yardley, Pa.). 379 pp. $29.95 Type of work: Biography Time: The 1840’s to 1890 Locale: Mostly the Great Plains of the United States A narrative account of the life and times of Sitting Bull, probably the best-known Native American leader of all time Principal personages: Sitting Bull (1831?-1890), famous spiritual, military, and political leader of the Lakota nation William “Buffalo Bill” Cody (18461917), soldier, bison hunter, and showman James McLaughlin (1842-1923), Indian agent at the Standing Rock Reservation George Armstrong Custer (1839-1876), lieutenant colonel killed at Little Big Horn Crazy Horse (1842?-1877), most famous of the intransigent Lakota warriors Red Cloud (1822?-1909), Lakota leader who accepted reservation life after 1868

In addition to telling the fascinating story of Sitting Bull’s life, Bill Yenne’s biography, Sitting Bull, presents an excellent introduction to the history and culture of Native Americans living on the Great Plains during the nineteenth century. Much of the book necessarily focuses on the violent clashes between two fundamentally different cultures. When Sitting Bull was a young man, he and other indigenous peoples of the region were still living as they had for centuries. They practiced a nomadic way of life without fixed settlements, obtaining their food and other needs by following the great buffalo herds across the plains. Sitting Bull loved everything about this lifestyle, and he grieved to see Euro-Americans (or “wasichu”) slaughtering the buffalo and coercing the tribes to settle into reservations. Ironically, the year Sitting Bull was killed, 1890, was the same year in which the census bureau announced that the United States no longer had a definable frontier (or line between settled and unsettled lands) in the American West. Like any writer on the subject, Yenne sometimes finds it difficult to separate historical facts from legends. He observes that Sitting Bull’s “legacy survives in two worlds, with one foot in history, where he remains complex and difficult to understand, and the other foot in popular history.” Although dependable knowledge about Sitting Bull’s early life is limited, Yenne concludes that Sitting Bull was probably

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born in 1831, close to where the Grand River enters the Missouri River in present-day South Dakota. He was initially given the name Jumping Badger, and then he was called Slow because of his careful and deliberate behavior. At about the age of fourteen, he was allowed to take his father’s former name, Sitting Bull (or Tatanka Iyotanka), after he first “counted coup,” the dangerous practice of touching a person from an enemy tribe with a stick. The Lakota word tatanka referred to a buffalo bull, and the word iyotanka implied that the bull was stubborn or intractable. The name also referred to the first stage in a traditional allegory about the four stages of life. Sitting Bull belonged to the Hunkpapa branch of the Lakota tribal group—commonly known as the Western Sioux. The Hunkpapa (which means “head of the camp”) acquired the name from their practice of defending the campsite at large assemblies of Plains Indians. The Lakota people in language and culture are closely related to the Nakota and Dakota (all three names mean “friends” or “allies”). The three tribal groups did not like to be called Sioux, a name that means “snakes” or “enemies” in the Ojibwa (or Chippewa) language. The Lakota-Nakota-Dakota were famous for their skill and organization in warfare, which was the basis for their hegemony over a large portion of the Great Plains, spanning from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River and from Manitoba to Nebraska. In contrast to romantic writers who have described Native Americans as living together in peace and harmony, Yenne acknowledges that they frequently engaged in violent conflict. He writes, for instance, that warfare with the Crow tribe was deeply embedded in the Lakota culture. Like many indigenous peoples, the Lakota considered the “scalps of women and children, as well as those of defeated warriors, . . . legitimate trophies long before the wasichu set foot on the plains.” Sitting Bull did not object to the violent methods of U.S. Cavalry, but he was not impressed with their military skills. He said, “The white soldiers do not know how to fight. They are not lively enough. They stand still and run straight; it is easy to shoot them.” In addition, he described the wasichu warriors as heartless: “When an Indian gets killed, the other Indians feel sorry and cry, and sometimes they stop fighting. But when a white soldier gets killed, nobody cries, nobody cares; they go right on shooting and let him lie there.” Until the second half of the twentieth century, a large percentage of white Americans looked upon Sitting Bull as a villain opposed to progress and as the person responsible for the death of General George Armstrong Custer. By the late twentieth century, in contrast, it had become commonplace, especially among intellectuals, to perceive him as a hero who had defended an oppressed people and who had fought against imperialism. Yenne writes that “the truth is more complicated than either stereotype.” His thesis is that Sitting Bull can be considered a “composite of many reali-

Bill Yenne is a San Francisco-based author who has published more than two dozen nonfiction works, including Indian Wars: The Campaign for the American West (2005), The Opening of the American West (1993), and The Encyclopedia of North American Indian Tribes (1986).

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ties.” Among his different and complex roles, he was “a warrior, a leader, a shaman, and an ‘Indian chief’…a father, and an inspiration to his people.” As a spiritual leader, Sitting Bull was believed to have possessed exceptional and mysterious powers. The Lakota term for such a person was eikasa Wakan, commonly translated as “medicine man” by white Americans and as “shaman” by anthropologists. When on a vision quest, Sitting Bull would usually go into a remote location to quietly meditate, but at other times he would participate in a communal Sun Dance, which included singing, fasting, praying, staring at the sun, and pulling skewers through the flesh. According to Lakota spiritual beliefs, revelations came from Wakantanka, or the “Great Spirit,” which Yenne defines as the “sacred and mysterious entity” that is “roughly analogous to the Judeo-Christian understanding of an omnipotent God.” For much of his adult life, Sitting Bull had the title of “itancan,” which denoted a high position of political and military leadership. The choice of an itancan was not based primarily on heredity; rather, it was achieved from the subjective qualities of character, charisma, and the ability to lead. Much of his prestige, moreover, derived from his outstanding skills as a warrior. By 1869, the year that he finished drawing the story of his life in pictograms, he claimed to have counted coup sixty-three times. Yenne tells about several incidents in which Sitting Bull viciously killed enemies on the battlefield without remorse, although the biographer also describes other times in which Sitting Bull recommended against the killing of prisoners, especially women and children. Following the signing of the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868, the Lakota people were divided into two major factions. The more moderate elements, led by Red Cloud, were willing to move onto reservations and make accommodations with the American government. In contrast, the committed traditionalists were determined to fight to preserve their nomadic existence. In 1869 a large assembly of Lakota traditionalists elected Sitting Bull as their “itancan-in-chief.” For a few years, the off-reservation Plains Indians were temporarily allowed to live and hunt in the large region of the Yellowstone River and its tributaries. In 1876, however, President Ulysses S. Grant ordered that all Indians of the region must move to reservations. As the U.S. Cavalry was preparing to enforce the edict, Sitting Bull, after losing consciousness in a sun dance, had his famous vision of soldiers falling like grasshoppers. On June 2526, when Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his 210-man command were killed at the battle of the Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull did not participate in the fighting, and, contrary to legend, he never came into close proximity of Custer. Yenne suggests that it is symbolic that Sitting Bull was “concerned with and looking after the welfare of the weakest among his people, especially the young children.” After the battle, as the U.S. Cavalry pursued Sitting Bull and other off-reservation Indians, he dictated a note expressing his strong desire to be left alone. “You scare all the buffalo away,” he complained. “I want to hunt in this place. I want you to turn back from here. If you don’t, I will fight you again . . . I am your friend, Sitting Bull.” In October, he agreed to meet with General Nelson “Bear Coat” Miles, but when Miles told him it was inevitable that all Indians would be forced to move onto reserva-

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tions, he reportedly answered that God had made him an Indian, and that he would rather die than survive as an “agency Indian.” Sitting Bull expressed particular abhorrence to the idea of farming and taking food and housing from the wasichu. By this time, however, buffalo herds were quickly disappearing, in large part because of the wasichu’s strategy of destroying the food source of the Plains Indians, thereby forcing them to adopt a sedentary way of life. Escaping to Canada in 1877, Sitting Bull initially had a camp of more than a thousand families. As food became increasingly scarce, however, many of his comrades, including Gall and Spotted Eagle, returned to the United States. By 1881, after Sitting Bull’s camp had dwindled to about 125 families, he agreed to surrender at Fort Buford, about fifty miles south of the Canadian border. With sadness, he told the commanding officer that he had yielded “not on my own account, but because my women and children are starving.” After spending some time in detention, and then touring with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1885, he eventually settled into his new life on the Standing Rock reservation, near the place of his birth. Yenne emphasizes that Sitting Bull did not actively participate in the Ghost Dance movement of the late 1880’s. Yenne is highly critical of the stubborn mindset of Indian Agent James McLaughlin, who viewed the aging itancan as a dangerous troublemaker and ordered his arrest in 1890. This unenlightened approach appears to have resulted in the unnecessary deaths of Sitting Bull, his son Crow Foot, and thirteen other Indians. Yenne especially condemns the way in which the Indian police murdered Crow Foot simply because he was Sitting Bull’s son. Yenne’s account includes a well-written summary of the Wounded Knee massacre of that year, but it does not add anything new about the tragic event. In concluding his book, Yenne discusses the Standing Rock reservation, Sitting Bull’s descendants, and the robbery of his grave. One the most valuable contributions of the book is its report on the status of Sitting Bull’s so-called Hieroglyphic Autobiography, which consisted of about sixty-three pictograms that symbolically recorded his memory of major events from 1846 to 1869. Almost all of the drawings depicted battles with warriors of enemy tribes, particularly Crows. Although the original portfolio was destroyed in 1870, Sitting Bull reproduced selective drawings while in captivity, and they are now in different locations: the National Naval Medical Center, the Smithsonian Institution, and a historical museum in Niles, Michigan. Yenne writes that “Sitting Bull’s originals may still be out there somewhere.” Like most contemporary historians, Yenne does not try to justify the Indian policies of the U.S. government. Referring to the doctrine of assimilation as “cultural genocide,” he condemns the “well-intentioned paternalism” that was based on the idea that Indians “could be saved only by eliminating the essence of their unique language and culture, their ‘Indian-ness.’” He especially denounces the practice of taking children away from their parents and punishing them if they spoke their native languages. Yenne, however, appears to recognize that the demise of the nomadic culture was inevitable because of its incompatibility with the modernization of North America, and his account makes it manifestly clear that traditionalists such as Sitting Bull would not have adopted a sedentary culture without coercion.

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Yenne’s book is the third serious biography to be published about Sitting Bull. The first, Stanley Vestal’s Sitting Bull: Champion of the Sioux (1932), was a pioneering work that is often quoted by Yenne. Vestal’s greatest contribution was to record numerous interviews with survivors who had known Sitting Bull and remembered events from his time. Vestal, however, was primarily interested in writing a literary work, and he did not always utilize critical historical methods. The second major biography, Robert Utley’s The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull (1993), is a scholarly work that is detailed and richly documented in hundreds of footnotes. Although Yenne does not provide footnotes for documentation, he frequently tells in the text where he has acquired his information. For general readers, Yenne’s volume is more concise, better organized, and written in a clearer and livelier style. It is an example of popular history at its best. Thomas Tandy Lewis

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 16 (April 15, 2008): 23. The New Yorker 84, no. 16 (June 2, 2008): 77. Wild West 21, no. 4 (December, 2008): 71-72.

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SLEEPING IT OFF IN RAPID CITY Poems, New and Selected Author: August Kleinzahler (1949) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 234 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Poetry A probing and blunt collection from a poet whose restless spirit has taken him to various spots around the world Over the years, August Kleinzahler has established himself as a poet with an almost boundless curiosity for travel, for seeking greener pastures, for taking leaps into the unknown. Certain literary critics have noted that he is itching constantly for the “new,” the “different.” There certainly is a “restlessness” that pervades his poetry. For the poet, standing still can be “endured” at best. For decades, Kleinzahler has written concise observations of people and places from the far reaches of the world. He has spent time on a number of continents, and in each he has written with precision and with wit. Kleinzahler is the author of several poetry collections. His first volume, A Calendar of Airs, was published in 1978. He is at his best when he is laudatory and critical in the same breath about a place to which he has traveled. Starting in New Jersey—the place of his birth—the poet expanded his reach as his dreams grew larger. Poetry has allowed him to flex his muscles but not in a self-conscious way. He does not, however, blindly circumnavigate the wide landscape or reserve judgment; he allows himself to make harsh—and at times brutal—pronouncements. Kleinzahler’s new volume, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, is divided into five sections. There are new poems and various selected works from previous volumes. These distinctions are not made clear, so for the uninitiated reader all poems will be new. Kleinzahler studied with Basil Bunting, an English poet who must be categorized as a modernist and who had a major influence on his pupil. In later years, Kleinzahler was influenced by the poet Thom Gunn, from whom he learned the paramount importance of writing honestly about a subject. Whatever subject matter the poet chooses, it must be treated with respect and approached directly, without exaggeration and without flinching. While the poet has felt driven to travel far and wide, Kleinzahler began in New Jersey. In the poem “Snow in North Jersey,” he presents rich details of a region that he knows well, opening with: “Snow is falling along the Boulevard/ and its little cemeteries hugged by transmission shops/ and on the stone bear in the park/ and the WWI monument making a crust/ on the soldier with his chin strap and bayonet.” As the poet observes, the snow plays no favorites, not sparing the people and places that are most vulnerable to the natural elements. The region also gets center stage in the poem “Gray

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Light in May,” in which it becomes obvious that although the elements can be gloomy, August Kleinzahler is the author of places and people can be transformed be- several poetry collections, including tween the rains. A richness bursts forth, fill- Storm Over Hackensack (1985), ing the poem with vivid images, as in: “The Earthquake Weather (1989), Live from soft gray light/ The still moist air/ The azaleas the Hong Kong Nile Club: Poems, in these yards/ Under the canopies of leaves/ 1975-1990 (2000), and The Strange Fiercely abloom in this gray light/ Between Hours Travelers Keep (2003), which was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize. rains/ Almost stereoscopic/ The broad green He also is the author of the memoir leaves overhead as well/ Painters know it, pho- Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and tographers too.” Just as painters and photogra- Strange Places, Gently Explained phers, poets also recognize the beauty. While (2004). William Carlos Williams is probably the most famous poet from New Jersey, Kleinzahler appreciates the Garden State, as his home is known, although he has written about it with brutal honesty, too. These poems take him back to his beginnings, so that the reader can see where the poet earned his toughness and built his masculine world from the ground up. Kleinzahler is the fly on the wall, the anonymous observer who just happens to be on the scene. He does not call attention to himself or take himself too seriously. He is a record keeper, the man who is keeping score. In the role of the poet, Kleinzahler is concerned about being honest in his observations, and he does not pull any punches. There is an urgency in his writing, a burning to be totally accurate. He is less concerned with academic boundaries and popularity and more concerned with precision and toughness of thought in his writing. Kleinzahler loves details almost to a fault, and in this regard, the poet can be compared to Ezra Pound. This is evident in the title poem “Sleeping It Off in Rapid City.” It opens: “On a 700 foot thick shelf of Cretaceous pink sandstone/ Nel mezzo . . . / Sixth floor, turn right at the elevator/ “The hotel of the century”/ Elegant dining, dancing, solarium/ Around the block from the Black Hills School of Beauty.” There is a rich tapestry presented for the reader to examine, to decipher with great care. Although Kleinzahler has little respect for stuffy academia, he does not “write down” to an audience. He expects the reader to bring something to the experience, to relish what is presented. Over the years, the poet has held several positions in the academic world, including teaching creative writing at Brown University, at the University of California at Berkeley, and at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. In addition, Kleinzahler has taught homeless veterans in San Francisco and has worked as a building manager, a taxi driver, and a locksmith. Each of these endeavors has served him well in his poetry. Kleinzahler is best described as an amalgam of various influences, including jazz music, Imagism, and Abstract Expressionism. With his ear constantly pressed to the earth and to the wall and pointed toward everyone who passes within shouting distance, Kleinzahler has, with his endless curiosity, created a unique style of poetry. His poetic temperament has compelled him to travel off the beaten path, and in the poem

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“Traveler’s Tales: Chapter 13,” the reader discovers details about another place in time. There are “bicycle paths” that “are busy with peddlers, humorless and good,/ speeding down their privileged corridors,/ kinetic emblems of an enlightened state,/ efficient, compassionate and on the go.” “On the go” is an apt description of the poet, who finds that the world rarely stands still. In “Poetics,” Kleinzahler finds inspiration in the air. He “loved the air outside Shop-Rite Liquor/ on summer evenings/ better than the Marin hills at dusk/ lavender and gold/ stretching miles to the sea.” The air at this location is “full of living dust:/ bus exhaust, airborne grains of pizza crust/ wounded crystals/ appearing, disappearing/ among streetlights and unsuccessful neon.” Although this atmosphere may not be healthful, it is a part of life and says something about the human condition. Kleinzahler has stated that he hopes the reader “trusts” him that he would not intentionally lead the reader astray. If a poem at first glance seems difficult, it is not written that way to frustrate the reader but to ask the reader to take a poetic journey that will be enriching. For Kleinzahler, the writing process is invigorating; he has described the writing of a poem as being in a “trance,” simultaneously “thrilling” and “very exhausting.” Kleinzahler has voiced strong opinions in his writing and in public forums, becoming “pugilistic” in poetic matters. On occasion, he has become involved in fights at poetry readings. This tough mentality is evident in his poetry. For several years, Kleinzahler has made the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco his home, and he has written about this area in such poems as “Sunset in Chinatown.” It opens with “The massive cable turns on its spool, pulling/ carloads of tourists to the city’s crest// as the sun sits low/ in the hills above Chinatown, exploding// suddenly in the window of Goey Loy Meats, high/ along the top of the glass,// showering light over barbecued ducks.” Kleinzahler adds poignance to the strength of his poetry as he presents his perspective on the world. More than willing to defend his point of view, he considers himself an outsider in the world of poetry. There is little that is genteel about Kleinzahler, and for that reason he has been compared to the rambunctious Los Angeles poet Charles Bukowski. Kleinzahler is also a mischief maker who believes that he is worthy of attention. For some literary critics, Kleinzahler’s gritty urban portraits are more “ugly” than “poignant.” One of the poems noted for its revolting subject matter is “Meat,” in which the poet asks “How much meat moves/ Into the city each night/ The decks of its bridges tremble/ In the liquefaction of sodium light/ And the moon a chemical orange.” By the end of the poem, the reader is confronted with the horrors of the “meat” trade: “Hauling tons of dead lamb/ Bone and flesh and offal/ Miles to the ports and channels/ Of the city’s shimmering membrane/ A giant breathing cell/ Exhaling its waste/ From the stacks by the river/ And feeding through the night.” While Kleinzahler’s tendency to almost revel in the seedier aspects of modern society may not earn him many devoted readers, this multifaceted poet is capable of writing in several voices. A poet of extremes—one part braggart, one part technical expert, one part cultural provocateur, one part sensitive observer—Kleinzahler is revealed in all these aspects

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in Sleeping It Off in Rapid City. It should garner this underappreciated American poet just praise from a far wider audience. Jeffry Jensen

Review Sources Library Journal 133, no. 9 (May 15, 2008): 106. London Review of Books 29, no. 4 (February 22, 2007): 18. Los Angeles Times, July 28, 2008, p. A1. The New York Times Book Review, May 25, 2008, p. 15. The New Yorker 84, no. 11 (April 28, 2008): 79. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 8 (February 25, 2008): 53. The Times Literary Supplement, July 11, 2008, pp. 11-12.

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THE SOLITARY VICE Against Reading Author: Mikita Brottman (1966) Publisher: Counterpoint (Berkeley, Calif.). 233 pp. $14.95 Type of work: Literary criticism, memoir Brottman takes aim at the glorification of reading, suggesting that books (at least some books) are not as good as some people make them out to be It might seem odd of Mikita Brottman to write a book against reading called The Solitary Vice; in truth, she is not against all reading or all books. In fact, she claims to have been a great reader all of her life—too much as an adolescent, when she tried to escape the horrors of family life by immersing herself in gothic horror stories such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. She confesses to have been addicted to reading, and in parts her book reads like an account of a recovering addict warning against the horrors of her particular drug. However, though she begins by seeming to warn against all reading, or at least to mock the campaigns in favor of reading (which say that as long as you read, it makes no difference what you read), it soon becomes apparent that she is actually intent on changing what people read rather than have them stop reading altogether. Surprisingly, given her youthful addiction to horror stories, those are not the books she warns against. Indeed, she recommends horror stories, though now she is an advocate of true crime stories rather than the fictional tales she devoured as a youth. What she inveighs against are not gothic novels but the classics, from Sophocles through Beowulf (c. sixth century) to Geoffrey Chaucer and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605, 1615), all the books she was made to read at university. Forget the classics, she says; if you really must find out about them, watch a film version or read CliffsNotes, a startling point of view from a professor of literature, but her point seems to be to shock or startle and to get readers thinking about what they read and why. In the end, Brottman says that the point of reading is to learn about other people and oneself, and the best books for that, in her view, are not the classic novels of the past, but nonfiction of various sorts. In addition to true crime stories, which perhaps can instruct about the dark side of life, though mostly they seem as escapist as the gothic fiction of Brottman’s youth, Brottman recommends literary memoirs (which in a way is what her book is) and Hollywood gossip, along with psychological case studies, such as the ones Sigmund Freud produced early in his career. Her interest is in details, because through details one can understand others’ lives

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and measure one’s own against them. She is especially interested in the lives of writers, Mikita Brottman is a literature though she delights in puncturing the notion professor at the Maryland Institute that writers are superior sorts of beings; in College of Art and author of High fact, she says, they are mostly unpleasant in Theory/Low Culture (2005). She is also real life, though she raises the question of a psychotherapist and the author of what real life is for a writer: Which is the real Funny Peculiar: Gershon Legman and personality of the writer, she asks, the one re- the Psychopathology of Humor (2004), which was nominated for the Gradiva vealed in his or her books or the one in the Award of the National Association for person one meets on the street? the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. Brottman is also interested in reading about Hollywood celebrities, and she launches into an analysis of celebrity that seems only tenuously connected to reading. America has become a land of celebrities, she says; celebrity is the true American religion, and celebrities are the true elite, but they are a powerless elite whose worshipers love to read about their setbacks and sufferings. Brottman says that people like to read about the failings of celebrities because it makes them feel stable and healthy in comparison, and it is interesting that the books she recommends tend to focus on the dark side of life, from true crime to Hollywood gossip to the case studies of sufferers from psychological disorders. She is quick with generalizations and not too concerned about evidence, which may prompt some of her readers to wonder about her accuracy. Brottman, however, is writing a polemic, perhaps partly with tongue in cheek, and so the fact that some people might want to read more uplifting stories and enjoy others’ successes is not mentioned. It is perhaps part of her method to go to such an extreme in order to provoke her readers to think of counter-examples. On a small scale, for instance, her assertion that everyone agrees that the best way to read is stretched out on a bed seems open to challenge. Her assertion that readers remember not just books in themselves but the situation in which they read them may also warrant challenge. Brottman does seem to believe, or she pretends to believe, that her experience is universal. She mostly draws on her own experiences or on those of people in a very small survey that she conducted. Brottman also can get almost hysterical at times, for instance, in attacking the reading habits of the popular singer Art Garfunkel and bibliomaniacs, book collectors more interested in books as physical objects than in things to read. Here she seems to be the representative of one cult (the cult of escapist reading) attacking another (the cult of book fetishism). For all of her digressions and self-absorption, and her brief consideration of Garfunkel and the bibliomaniacs, Brottman does raise serious questions about reading. Why should it be so highly valued, for one thing? On this point, she usefully notes that it was not always so highly valued. In fact, reading was for many years the Internet of its day, a dangerous activity often warned against as distracting people from real relationships in real life. It is amusing to read Brottman’s brief account of how the criticisms now made of new media—often by people who recommend

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reading and who warn of how new media are a threat to books—used to be leveled against books. Regarding the threat to books today, Brottman notes that there have never been so many books published, and though she characteristically has few statistics to back up this claim, it seems a fair statement. This does raise the question of why some people see such a threat to reading and why various influential figures—from Oprah Winfrey to President George W. Bush’s wife Laura—made it a point to campaign for reading. Perhaps it is an example of moral panic, the sort of thing Brottman talks about in connection with serial killers in the 1980’s. Why a moral panic now? Or is it not really such a new thing to worry about the death of reading or books? A more scientific study might be needed to lay out the true history of this issue, but Brottman does not intend to be scientific but to puncture complacent, commonplace views. Video games are more useful than books, she says, and she casts doubt on the claims of the probook campaigners that books can cure depression or make you a better person. Nevertheless, Brottman is a great reader. It seems to be the campaigning and the worshiping to which she objects. It is as if a devotee of crossword puzzles were suddenly to realize that there was a major campaign promoting crossword puzzles as the solution to the world’s problems. Brottman wants to read books because she enjoys them, not because they are somehow good for her. She wants her reading to be a guilty pleasure, which is perhaps why she warns away from the uplifting classics and promotes the dark, trashy, sordid forms of literature. Reading, Brottman says, should be done for pleasure, not because it ought to be done. She warns against reading books one “ought” to read; one should read only what one wants to read, and if a book disappoints, the reader should not feel obligated to finish it. In effect, Brottman is trying to demystify books, to make them more everyday and less sacred, so that a reader feels free to take them or leave them and to abandon them half read. This may be seen as liberating for readers or as an abandonment of discipline and restraint. It is, in any event, a different point of view from the more common “reading is good for you” approach, and perhaps it is useful to hear that reading is not necessarily good for you, though it is somewhat ironic that this message should come from a book. Equally ironic is the fact that when Brottman does finally suggest what reading might be good for—to understand the world and other people—the reader is not entirely ready to agree. Remembering Brottman’s account of her teenage years, in which reading was a means of escaping from the world and other people, the reader of this book may think that perhaps the best way to understand the world and other people is to go out into the world and mix with other people. Brottman’s title alludes to masturbation, and her introduction explicitly compares reading to masturbation. They are both done alone, in private, often at night, and in bed. Both involve fantasy and imagination, and both can be addictive. Both were once seen as dangerous, and now, if Brottman is to be believed, both are being excessively promoted. Brottman’s view is that both these practices should be performed in moderation.

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Sexual knowledge, including self-knowledge, can be useful, she says, just as reading can be if not taken to addictive extremes. It is an ironic lesson to take from a book such as this. Sheldon Goldfarb

Review Sources Publishers Weekly 255, no. 44 (November 3, 2008): 24-34. San Francisco Bay Guardian 42, no. 29 (April 21, 2008). Shelf Awareness 1, no. 616 (February 20, 2008).

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THE SOUL THIEF Author: Charles Baxter (1947) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 210 pp. $20.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The 1970’s to the present Locale: Buffalo, New York; Newark, New Jersey; Los Angeles Divided into four parts, the novel follows the course of a single character from graduate school until middle age in an effort to examine the notion that identity theft may be as much an internal as an external threat Principal characters: Nathaniel Mason, the novel’s protagonist and presumed narrator, good-looking, athletic, and emotionally and psychologically vulnerable Jerome Coolberg, the title character, an enigmatic figure that seeks to fill an essential emptiness in his life by inhabiting other people’s narratives Theresa, a beautiful poseur, Coolberg’s temporary accomplice, and Nathaniel’s occasional erotic playmate Jamie, a lesbian sculptor and the object of Nathaniel’s youthful devotion Catherine, Nathaniel’s sister, the victim of verbal aphasia after the untimely death of their father Laura, Nathaniel’s wife and the mother of his two sons Jeremy, Nathaniel’s older son, a teenager coveting predictability Michael, Nathaniel’s younger son, a precocious youth imaginatively embracing the plasticity of identity

In the first of four sections of The Soul Thief, Charles Baxter opens up a time capsule of student life during the waning years of the Vietnam War when young people were intent on finding new ways to reshape their world. In this time of social and sexual experimentation, protagonist Nathaniel Mason attends, rain-soaked and barefoot, a free-form party abuzz with intellectual discussion and charged with sexual promise. From room to room he wanders, his transit mirroring the trajectory of graduate study as he takes up and discards snippets of overheard conversations on a variety of topics, all the while seeking to reconnect with a young woman, Theresa, whom he met only moments before on his way to the party but about whom he already feels the jolt of “love-lightning.” When he does find her, Theresa is part of a rapt audience gathered around the charismatic Jerome Coolberg, physically unprepossessing but compelling because of the strength of his verbal discourse and the intensity of his interest in Nathaniel. What the reader eventually discovers is that Theresa serves as little more than bait

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in Coolberg’s scheme to possess Nathaniel’s soul. Lacking any inner life of his own, this Charles Baxter, a college teacher and archetypal role player and “virtuoso of cast- an author, began as a poet, but his off ideas” seeks to mine the core of other peo- critical reputation now rests with his ple’s identities to see if there is anything of fiction, both short stories and novels, value for his use. Coolberg begins his aggres- including The Feast of Love (2000), sive examination of Nathaniel by intense peep- which was a finalist for the National ing and probing; he eventually raises the stakes Book Award. by hiring a junkie to burglarize the protagonist’s apartment. Thereafter, Coolberg can be seen around the city, narrating bits of Nathaniel’s biography and wearing some of his stolen clothes. As subtext to Coolberg’s incremental appropriation of Nathaniel’s identity are numerable literary and visual references to the nature of selfhood. Early in his affair with Theresa, for example, Nathaniel takes her to visit the Mirrored Room, a 1966 installation by contemporary Greek American artist Lucas Samaras. Visitors to the AlbrightKnox Art Gallery in Buffalo can enter this mirrored eight-foot-by-eight-foot cube and sit on a mirrored chair and rest their hands on a mirrored table. Nathaniel and Theresa react differently to the experience. She is turned on, perhaps because her identity itself resides in surfaces and she finds the multiplication of her own physical image intoxicating. Nathaniel, however, regards the space as “monstrous, meant to undermine the soul by wrapping it in reflections.” Even as a graduate student in literary studies, trained in a multiplicity of critical perspectives and therefore comfortable with the concept of the relativity of meaning, Nathaniel still retains the hope of some consistent inner life, some unchanging selfhood. Perhaps this is the essence of his attraction to the seemingly unattainable Jamie, whose basic orientation is not heterosexual; he loves her for her spirit, embodied in the “skeletal flying machines” that she fashions in her studio. His longing is also reflected in the condition of his sister Catherine, with whom he converses by phone each Sunday; in these “conversations,” Nathaniel does all the talking because she has lost the power of speech after the premature death of their father. Despite the fact that Catherine does not audibly respond to his weekly, serial narratives, Nathaniel assumes that his sister’s essential self, the being that resides within the mute shell, needs to hear his voice. Most reviewers agree that it is this first part of the novel that packs the most punch because of Baxter’s ability to evoke a place and time, a city redolent of the “noble shabbiness of industrial decline” in the early 1970’s, and because of the suspense he generates regarding the possible fate of his much too accessible protagonist. In the second part of the novel, set in New Jersey some thirty years after the events in Buffalo, the reader learns that it is Catherine who restores Nathaniel to himself after he suffers a nervous breakdown caused, in part, by Coolberg’s machinations and prompted, in part, by the rape of Jamie, an act that he suspects Coolberg has instigated. Catherine ventures east from a halfway house in Milwaukee to the Manhattan apartment of their mother and stepfather where Nathaniel has been taken after he “fell

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into the mirror and swam in the glass,” a reference to French artist Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film La Belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast), wherein a mirror serves as a portal between different planes of reality. His sister reads to him from novels until he eventually can “tell the difference between the actual things and the imaginary ones.” Over time Nathaniel feels well enough to tackle a series of mundane jobs, and this “consensual relationship with routine” restores the order of his life and makes it possible for him to reach out to others. In contrast to the romantic passivity of his graduate-school days, Nathaniel now actively cultivates what passes for middle-class normalcy. He marries Laura, an expert in quilts, products of the piecing together of the fragments of material existence, and they raise two boys. The older one appears straightforward and self-directed; the younger is termed a “wily pipsqueak shape shifter,” trying on for size a host of different personae. Nathaniel’s sons represent the polarities of his personal selfhood, the lure of the predictable and the call of the unexpected. Nathaniel sums up the before-and-after nature of his biography when he says that in his youth his “soul was mortgaged” but that in his mature years he has “paid it off through regularity, routine, and hard work.” The third part of the novel necessitates a change of scene, from the suburban backdrop of “a time-server in suburban New Jersey” to the Technicolor dreamscape of Southern California, because Coolberg reenters Nathaniel’s life with a surprise invitation to revisit his past. No more suitable working environment could be chosen for Coolberg, who continues to inhabit the lives of others, this time by hosting a radio program that gives him license to seduce his guests into sharing the “secret heart” of their personal narratives. Armed with a free plane ticket and the promise of a room at the aptly named Fatal Hotel, Nathaniel prepares to confront his nemesis. The perceptive reader, however, may wonder if Coolberg really is a villain or just a projection of some aspect of Nathaniel’s own personality. Back in their graduateschool days, Coolberg tries to justify his theft of Nathaniel’s property, both mental and physical, by arguing that he is doing research for a book in which his fellow student figures prominently. The volume in question is tentatively titled Shadow, and the reader may be tempted to see Coolberg as the embodiment of that darker side of the unconscious self defined by modern psychologist Carl Jung. If Coolberg is the shadow, Jamie must surely represent Nathaniel’s anima or life force; time and time again, the reader is informed that Nathaniel is attracted to her because of the vitality of her soul. When she is raped and hospitalized, Nathaniel loses his way. Nathaniel regains his equilibrium only after he assumes a series of roles, not just that of serial employee (postman, insurance adjuster, assistant newspaper editor, bill collector, service representative for the gas and electric company, and grant writer for a local arts agency) but also that of husband and father. “I am in disguise,” he admits. In other words, he has constructed a persona, perhaps at odds with elements of his inner self. He rejects his shadow, as represented by Coolberg’s fluid approach to personal identity, and he suppresses his anima, as represented by his loss of contact with Jamie and by his subsequent abandonment of poetry and music, two of the mainstays of his student days. During his youth he acknowledged that “if he didn’t live in his

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imagination half the time, he wouldn’t be himself.” The carefully constructed sanctuary of his middle-class, middle-aged life is made possible only by living not from within but from without. Nathaniel may indeed offer a case study in the failure to integrate one’s inner and outer life. His own story, which Coolberg provides to him in a typed manuscript at the end of the third section of the novel, may offer corroboration of Coolberg’s contention that all Americans are “pretenders” and that in constructing a persona from fragments of other people’s biographies, real and imagined, any such individual is “just being a good American.” Like the film industry, which dominates the city where he has taken up residence, Coolberg has made a career of making reference, largely without attribution, not only to other people’s lives but also to artifacts of high and low culture, from the novels of twentieth century British author E. M. Forster to the scripts of popular films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960); he is someone who claims other people’s ideas, images, and experiences as his own. Coolberg’s penchant for appropriation underscores the ambiguity of the novel’s fourth and final section, which begins with these two sentences: “Nathaniel Mason enters the silent house. I can easily imagine it.” The reader is left to ponder whether Nathaniel’s homecoming is just another Coolberg script or whether Nathaniel is indeed the author of his own independent narrative. The Soul Thief joins Baxter’s other works of fiction—novels such as Saul and Patsy (2003) and collections of short stories such as Believers (1998)—that explore how the apparently quiet lives of everyday people can be forever altered by a chance encounter or comment. In these narratives, the main character’s resulting shift in direction often occurs because some external happenstance triggers a subversive predilection that had heretofore lain dormant. In essence, any loss of rudder, any drastic recalibration in the individual’s previously predictable course in life can be attributed to forces that are both external and internal. The theft of Nathaniel’s soul, for example, may be attributed not only to Coolberg but also to Nathaniel himself, just as the burglarizing of his apartment might be part of Coolberg’s plan, as Theresa avows, or the result of Nathaniel’s own impractical desire to merge his life with Jamie’s. In support of the latter contention, Coolberg asserts that Nathaniel emptied his own place to feed the fantasy of his eventual cohabitation with and eventual conversion of his lesbian lover. “Willful incomprehension” is, according to Coolberg, Nathaniel’s greatest survival tactic, and, by extension, such “convenient amnesia” or “strategic forgetting” is symptomatic of the general American experience. In Coolberg’s eyes, this country can be seen as a nation built by people unwilling or unable to look within and take responsibility for their own decisions and deeds. As a consequence, Americans rob themselves of their souls. S. Thomas Mack

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Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 8 (December 15, 2007): 26. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 23 (December 1, 2007): 1211. Library Journal 133, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 77-78. The New Yorker 84, no. 6 (March 24, 2008): 83. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 44 (November 5, 2007): 40. Review of Contemporary Fiction 28, no. 1 (Spring, 2008): 168-169.

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THE SPIES OF WARSAW Author: Alan Furst (1941) Publisher: Random House (New York). 266 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1937-1940 Locale: Poland, France, and Germany Furst weaves a complicated and rich web of spies, passion, and intrigue in the period immediately preceding World War II Principal characters: Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, widower, decorated war hero turned military attaché Armand Jourdain, political officer and Mercier’s friend Albertine Mercier, the colonel’s cousin Edvard Uhl, senior engineer at a munitions plant and reluctant spy Countess Sczelenska, also known as Hana Musser, Uhl’s lover Anton Vyborg, Polish military intelligence agent and lover of doughnuts Anna Szarbeck, a lawyer for the League of Nations and Mercier’s sometime companion Marek, Mercier’s quiet and complicit driver Dr. Lapp, Abwehr (Black Front) officer in Warsaw Malka and Viktor Rozen, Russian secret service agents August Voss, major in the Nazi SS counterintelligence office

As the nations of Europe posture and prepare for war in the autumn of 1937, an intricate subculture of spies and sumptuous living thrives. Initially Alan Furst’s The Spies of Warsaw appears to be a rather mundane tale of the daily life of mediocre agents: clandestine meetings, bits and pieces of boring information exchanged in protracted secret. Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier has retired from distinguished military service during the war to end all wars (World War I) and has settled into a bureaucratic job. Although it is not his beloved France, there are some gastronomic and other perks seasoned with a dash of minor espionage to be found in Warsaw. Mercier meets periodically with Edvard Uhl, an engineer at an ironworks that produces tanks for the Germans. Uhl proves to be a skittish spy, who only reluctantly provides seemingly innocuous information about tank production. “Hotel Europejski” starts slowly. The author paints the scenes with care and exquisite detail. Situated in the heart of prewar Warsaw, the hotel is the site of periodic trysts between Uhl and his mysterious mistress, Countess Sczelenska. She captures Uhl’s heart but also manages to snuggle comfortably into his pocketbook. She explains to him that, unless he helps to subsidize her living arrangements, her desperate

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financial situation will force her to move in with her aunt, who resides in Chicago. He does not want to lose her or at least the comfort of her loving. He agrees to a proposal that the countess suggests: her cousin knows a man who hires “industrial experts.” Poor Uhl is hooked. The new but profitable liaison introduces him into a game of espionage and fear. The countess’s identity is somewhat in doubt: Is she really of aristocratic blood, or is she a part of the shadowy network of spies and intrigue that weaves itself in and out of the novel’s pages? Uhl’s life becomes more complicated. His anxiety over what he is doing causes him to appear nervous as he rides the train across the Polish border back home to Breslau. Although he successfully avoids a compromising encounter with Nazi SS officers, a dutiful citizen, Frau Schimmel, reports his suspicious behavior to the authorities. The tentacles of German intelligence, controlled by August Voss, reach out to encircle poor Uhl. Will the contact with Mercier bring him disaster or salvation? At the very least it will become clear that his spying and philandering days are behind him, as is his life as a family man and ordinary engineer of Breslau. The pace of the book heats up as Mercier moves in “On Raven Hill.” Determined to discover the specifics of Adolf Hitler’s plans for the invasion of Europe, Mercier travels in his trusty Buick with his faithful and resourceful driver, Marek, to the PolishGerman border. The colonel’s goal is to ascertain the most likely point of German invasion, which he assumes will be launched with tanks. He ventures into the forest through which he speculates Germany will invade. However, tanks do not go into forests, at least that is the firm opinion of Mercier’s superiors. Quick page turning promises to resolve for the reader the questions of whether Mercier’s forays into enemy territory will be discovered, whether he will be caught, and whether his assessment of the location of the looming threat is accurate. The action of the book heats up as additional persons of interest come on stage. Viktor and Malka Rozen, known to be Russian spies, are among the guests at the lavish cocktail party hosted by the Polish Foreign Ministry. Such parties provide ample opportunity for tidbits of rich food as well as of random bits of intelligence, as the guests intermingle in the rich tapestry of spydom. One never knows whom one will meet or whether a morsel of cocktail chitchat is a clue to some important information. The seemingly casual encounter between Mercier and the Rozens illustrates such an exchange. It opens the way to more danger, more clandestine information, and a broadening of Mercier’s scope of work into much more dangerous areas than the insignificant bar where money and blueprints are swapped between him and the illfated Uhl. Eventually Mercier is placed in contact with the Black Front, a subversive group of German patriots who are dissatisfied with the leadership and goals of Hitler. Mercier’s toe in the door is a mysterious Dr. Lapp, who introduces himself to Mercier at

Alan Furst is considered a master of the historical spy novel. His work, which includes Night Soldiers (1988), Dark Star (1991), and The Polish Officer (1995), has been translated into seventeen languages. A New Yorker by birth, Furst divides his time between Paris and Long Island.

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yet another dinner party. This encounter opens a treasure trove of interesting information about the war plans of Hitler’s regime and introduces him to people who will put Mercier’s life and theirs in greater danger. He moves in and out of territory under the control of the Germans, often right under their noses or their probing spotlights. He risks his own life and safety, as he helps to bring his contacts to freedom and security. The final pages of the novel are increasingly under the “Shadow of War.” By spring of 1938, the Allies more and more expect the Germans to move against them. Mercier himself is shadowed by the tenacious Voss. Because of the affair with Uhl, Mercier has made himself a virulent enemy. During a visit to an outlying factory, Mercier is brutally attacked by a group of thugs. This assault is a function of Voss’s private vendetta rather than a discovery of Mercier’s work. Although Mercier narrowly escapes, due to the quick action of his faithful chauffeur, Malek, this is not the end of his troubles. A foray into Berlin, to make contact with members of the Black Front, will ratchet up the danger for Mercier as well as the anxiety of the reader. Plots involving gathering information about the invasion, attempts to engineer the escapes from Germany of two men who agree to supply information to Mercier, and close encounters with the bad guys are all well played out. Exquisite description drips from every page of the book. The lavishness of the scenery, with details on everything from the soft texture of the earth that hides tank traps in a border forest to the entertainment at a lavish party (a magician as well as a songstress), presents a vivid canvas into which the reader can almost step. One can smell the fragrance of the ponczkis, the irresistible jelly doughnuts that inevitably insert themselves between Mercier and Polish intelligence officer Anton Vyborg whenever they meet. One can almost taste the select wine, the perfectly cooked sole, the Polish chicken soup with heavy twisted noodles, the pork and sauerkraut. The reader is left drooling for more, even as the characters in the book are sated and push away their plates. Even Mercier’s lady’s lacy underwear—another “black front”—is carefully described, leaving little to the imagination. The author uses an occasional interlude into Mercier’s family life perhaps to allow the reader to rest from the novel’s constant sense of danger and foreboding. He tells of Mercier’s boyhood introduction to sex by his cousin, the assertive Albertine. He details the loneliness and longing of the widowed colonel, which is eventually abated by the beautiful Anna Szarbek in a passionate affair. Furst opens a window to the family holiday celebrations as well as to the aristocratic history of the Mercier family. With the introduction of Mercier’s two daughters, now living in other countries, some insight into the foreshadowing of war is seen from the perspective of countries less prominent in the lead-up to the war. Detailed is the selling of Jewish assets, the general fallout of Hitler’s corrosive projects. The Spies of Warsaw is not just a compelling story of intrigue and sometimes caricatured behavior. It is a lavish picture of a certain slice of international life in the late 1930’s, which draws the reader into the intimacy of the private life of its main character and the vast reach of the world scene of the time. The wine, the six-course dinners, the sets at the tennis club, the clandestine sexual encounters—all provide the reader with a savory picture. It is no wonder Furst is known as the master of the spy novel.

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His marvelous descriptions of great food and drink show why he is featured in the Absolut vodka commercial. His work is absolutely satisfying. Occasionally the author comes close to sinking into clichés that might have been stolen from hackneyed spy films. There are the required false-bottom suitcases, the exchange of secret messages, the stereotypical SS men, the message left on a certain page in a specified phone book. Even so, the author holds himself to an effective discipline of structure. A minor annoyance is the surfeit of characters, which forces the less diligent reader to page back in order to remember. The author would have done well to use the technique of reestablishing the identity of those who come and go in the many pages. Perhaps that is part of the intrigue of the spy novel, however. One never quite knows who is who and who will turn out to be someone—or something—else than they appear. The many layers of the book—family and personal stories, the extravagant description, and the shivers of danger under the cold shadow of impending war—hold the attention of the reader throughout. Likely, with some conflation of several characters, the novel will find its way to a successful film. One is eager to see Vyborg’s ponczkis and Anna’s black lace underwear on the big screen. Dolores L. Christie

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 14 (March 15, 2008): 6. Forbes 182, no. 7 (October 13, 2008): 20. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 8 (April 15, 2008): 383. Library Journal 133, no. 6 (April 1, 2008): 75. The New York Times, June 14, 2008, p. 7. The New York Times Book Review, June 29, 2008, p. 9. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 15 (April 14, 2008): 35. The Times Literary Supplement, July 25, 2008, p. 20.

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A STEP FROM DEATH Author: Larry Woiwode (1941) Publisher: Counterpoint (Berkeley, Calif.). 272 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Memoir Time: The present and the 1970’s Locale: North Dakota Woiwode’s memoir juxtaposes a series of traumatic accidents against the composition of his most important novel, Beyond the Bedroom Wall Principal personages: Larry Woiwode, an author, farmer, and part-time professor Care Woiwode, his wife Joseph Woiwode, his son Everett Woiwode, his father William Maxwell, his friend, an editor at The New Yorker magazine

Larry Woiwode’s memoir A Step from Death is more a successor than a sequel to his first memoir, What I Think I Did: A Season of Survival in Two Acts (2000). Much like its predecessor, A Step from Death is a loosely structured and meandering memoir focused on ideas more than a simple recounting of a straightforward, linear narrative rendering a particular time in an author’s life. As such, the book’s shifting structure is anchored by two conceits. First, the book is presented as a letter to the author’s son, Joseph, in the tradition of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1791). The book begins, “So, dear son, where to begin?” As reviewers have noted, this conceit becomes slightly tenuous at times because Woiwode, in telling stories from his past, must recount and elaborate upon events and circumstances that his son Joseph presumably would already know about in some detail. Nevertheless, Woiwode explains both his aim and his method when he addresses his son and readers, stating, Every detail I stumble over or move away to clear a path to the exit is a fragment of memory, and memory is a contract between the past and our instinct to shape it into a story that will cohere far into the future. A memoir should recognize that contract and dissolve the distance between us, and by that I mean not only the attentive reader, my soul’s semblance, my mirror, my brother or sister, but mostly you, Joseph, my only son.

The other tactic used in A Step from Death to build a thematic and idea-focused memoir (as opposed to a conventional chronologically organized narrative) is the story’s springing back and forth between an alarming number of traumatic accidents. Woiwode tells of a recent tractor accident in which he is almost killed that requires him to endure painful rehabilitation for months; another time, he is involved in an almost-fatal car wreck. His son Joseph is a victim of so many accidents that he seems to

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be prone to them: He is seriously injured by a horse, suffering brain damage and lying in a coma for a time; he is shot in the leg by a loaded gun that falls to the floor and discharges; he burns down the barn with his brother; and he almost loses part of his hand in a lawn-mower accident. Despite the use of the two conceits as thematic guideposts, the book’s structure is wandering and scattered, operating scene by scene and vignette by vignette in an almost streamLarry Woiwode has won the William of-consciousness way, although Woiwode’s Faulkner Foundation Award for What sentence-to-sentence prose style is as clear I’m Going to Do, I Think (1969), a and as carefully crafted as ever. However diGuggenheim Fellowship (1971-1972), the John Dos Passos Prize in 1991, and verse and random the varied narratives telling the back and forth of Woiwode’s life, on a the Southern Review Award for Short thematic level the stories build upon each Fiction. His book Beyond the Bedroom Wall (1975) was nominated for the other and slowly help the reader to grasp the National Book Award and the National author’s subtle but evident aims. Even as the Book Critics Circle Award. He was memoir depicts Woiwode’s tractor accident designated the North Dakota Poet (when a power takeoff shaft on a baler pulled Laureate in 1995. his loose jacket down into the device, slam ming him against the implement, binding him brutally, breaking a number of ribs, and savagely wrenching his arms) and then his subsequent difficulties with recovery, the narrative springs back to his early days as a newly successful writer, having completed What I’m Going to Do, I Think (1969) and moving on into the series of vignettes that would eventually cohere into Beyond the Bedroom Wall (1975). In many ways, the memoir is about this tractor accident (just as it is about fathers and sons and the everpresent reality of death and writing): It is about the things that wrench, bind, and hurt individuals—and how they can free themselves from such bonds. As Woiwode recounts the early days and his work on his novel, he emerges as a man obsessed with his work and driven to write and rewrite his book over many years. He describes (in perhaps too little detail) how his singular focus on completing his book almost destroyed his marriage and how he eventually learned to place the things in his life in their proper priority. Even as the book bounces between Larry and Joseph Woiwode’s various accidents and a fragmented portrait of the artist as a young man, father, and husband emerges, the setting of the old farm purchased by Woiwode and his wife remains central to the story. Woiwode and his wife strove to maintain the place as a working farm, raising “organic” produce even before that label became popularized. His various academic positions seem to fall short in his estimation when compared to working the farm, and, as he puts it, the farm and working on the land represent an Edenic escape. One never knows how much weight to place on metaphors in a work of nonfiction,

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but in this case the figurative link is undeniable: Even as a farmer must nourish and nurture his land to make it fruitful and profitable, Woiwode, as both artist and man, had to maintain a grip on the things in life that truly nourished him, such as his wife and children, his North Dakota farm, and his connection to the land. Only through keeping matters in perspective could he truly grow and prosper. As much as the book is a memoir, it is also—as indicated by how it is addressed to Woiwode’s son, Joseph—a book about fathers and sons. Chapters are titled “Sonship,” “Child as Father,” and “Father as Child.” Woiwode’s thoughts about Joseph (and Joseph’s near brushes with death) lead him to think about his own father and his conflicted feelings, equal parts reverence and resentment. As he states, “I was not a dependable son, no stalwart behind my father. It was too easy for me to find flaws in him, and this blurred my ability, I believe, to be transparent with you, Joseph, as the best fathers are.” Not only does Woiwode think about his father (a man twice widowed—Woiwode’s mother died when he was a young man, similar to how the Neumiller children lose their mother in Beyond the Bedroom Wall), but also he spends a good deal of time describing famous New Yorker magazine editor and novelist William Maxwell, a surrogate father figure and a father to the artistic side of Woiwode’s life. The focus upon fathers and sons, when considered alongside the various times that Woiwode and Joseph are “a step from death,” perhaps shows how the scattered and varied pieces of the puzzle of A Step from Death can be placed into a coherent and cohesive whole. As his career grew, Woiwode became known as a spiritual writer, and at heart A Step from Death is a spiritual book. Woiwode describes how, after having pushed his wife as far as he could in his need to finish the sprawling Beyond the Bedroom Wall, she finally confronted him, saying, “I’ve stood by you all these years. . . and this last year was the worst. I need a spiritual connection!” When Woiwode asks her, “What do you mean, ‘a spiritual connection’?” she tells him, “God, you ass!” At some level, the focus throughout the book on fathers and sons—including Woiwode’s almost adulatory stance toward his son (a helicopter pilot serving in Iraq at the time of the book’s writing), his relationship as a son to both his biological father and his artistic one, William Maxwell—perhaps relates to his spiritual growth and relationship with God, his heavenly father. If, as the memoir suggests, life is fleeting and short, and death can take anyone at any time and in any way (a horse can fall on a boy, a farmer’s jacket can catch in a spinning shaft, a driver can lose control of a car on an icy road, a loaded gun can fall and discharge a bullet into its owner), then life is that much more precious. Lives must be worth living, and they must stand for something when they are over. In some ways, the author clearly has regrets, and he lists more moments of embarrassing failure and immature actions on his part than he does his successes. He gets drunk and makes an abortive attempt at seducing his agent, he is unkind to his father, and he even drives away his young wife. His son Joseph, on the other hand, is liked by all, an eternal optimist, a hard worker, and intent on dedicating himself to helping others. Ultimately, the author’s decision to springboard between vignettes and proselytiz-

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ing commentaries anchored by thematic unities (brushes with death, ruminations upon fatherhood, the importance of farm life, the problems with academics) is both a strength and a weakness. A certain tension builds as the writer rotates back to his crisis when bound against the hay baler or to his son’s comatose state and slow recovery after his accident with a horse, and the sporadic shifts help highlight the thematic connections among the various scenes. On the other hand, there are too many instances in which the memoir fails to adequately follow through on a topic, not fulfilling a reader’s reasonable expectations. For example, the memoirist’s reconciliation with his wife in the waning days of his work on Beyond the Bedroom Door is given short shrift, although presumably this time would have been the beginning of a period of spiritual awakening for him. In the end, A Step from Death is the kind of book a reader would expect from a writer who had previously published books about men driven to the edge by their obsessions (as in What I’m Going to Do, I Think), a book composed of a series of thematically related sequences and scenes (as in Beyond the Bedroom Wall) and a book on modern Christianity (Acts, published in 1993). Despite its structural complexity, it serves as a memoir not so much of a particular time in a writer’s life so much as an explanation of how he became who he is today—in heart and in soul. Scott Yarbrough

Review Sources America 199, no. 4 (August 18, 2008): 26. Booklist 104, nos. 9/10 (January 1, 2008): 21. The Christian Century 125, no. 13 (July 1, 2008): 41. Christianity Today 52, no. 8 (August, 2008): 58. Entertainment Weekly, March 21, 2008, p. 63. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 34. Library Journal 133, no. 4 (March 1, 2008): 83. The New York Times Book Review, March 30, 2008, p. 17. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 2 (January 14, 2008): 52. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 56 (March 8, 2008): W8.

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THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE Author: Andrew Sean Greer (1970) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 195 pp. $22.00 Type of work: Novel Time: World War II to the late twentieth century Locale: San Francisco An unusual triangle is at the center of this novel about love and war, told from the point of view of a black woman transplanted from a Midwestern farming community to the city Principal characters: Pearlie Cook, the narrator of the novel Holland Cook, her teenage sweetheart and later husband Charles (“Buzz”) Drumer, a white man who befriends Holland in the war Sonny (“Walter”) Cook, Pearlie and Holland’s only child Alice and Beatrice, Holland’s elderly cousins, considered his “aunts”

The year is 1953, and when Pearlie Cook, the narrator of Andrew Sean Greer’s quietly affecting novel, The Story of a Marriage, sits down each morning, she dutifully clips the bad news from the paper to prevent her husband, Holland, from reading anything that would upset his supposedly delicate health. There is, at this time in America, much that she needs to censor: the Korean War and the Cold War spread of nuclear weapons; the House subcommittee hearings on Communist sympathizers and the entrapment of sexual deviants who might prove a special threat to national security; the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of spying for Russia, and Eisenhower’s refusal to commute that sentence; the regulations against burying Negro soldiers in certain cemeteries, Ku Klux Klan cross burnings, and racial discrimination in housing. The last items are of interest because Pearlie and Holland are black. Greer masterfully limns this background against which the story of the Cooks’ marriage plays itself out, reminding readers that the early 1950’s, with their fear and paranoia, were not nearly as placid as they often have been portrayed. Pearlie and Holland met each other when they were growing up in rural Kentucky during World War II. A bright girl who memorized poetry but accounted herself as less than attractive, Pearlie was smitten by something as simple as Holland holding her hand. When Holland’s mother—for this is partly a story about how women try to keep their men from having to go off to war—hid him from the draft until an illness necessitated calling in a doctor, Pearlie visited and read to him. After he was drafted, a government official persuaded her to go to California and work in an airplane factory, where she could gather evidence of any unpatriotic behavior. After Holland returns

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shell-shocked from a naval attack in the Pacific, they meet again by accident in San Francisco, where Pearlie immediately feels an urge to care for the ashen-faced, despairing exsoldier, who still exudes “masculine grace” and seductive beauty. Holland, like many soldiers craving the normalcy of civilian life, has a desperate need that she marry him. So they do marry and settle down in the barely integrated community of Ocean Beach. His maiden “aunts,” Alice and Beatrice, who fabricate a Hawaiian rather than an African American ancestry and prefer to live in a segregated area, hint at Holland’s “bad blood” and “crooked heart” that must be protected. By 1953, after having fathered Sonny, who contracts polio, Holland is sleeping in a separate bedroom. It is not until a mysterious white stranger, Charles “Buzz” Drumer, appears on their doorstep bearing a gift of silver top-hat cufflinks for Holland’s birthday and confesses to having been “together” with Holland as lovers during the war that Pearlie finally understands what has been eating at her husband’s heart that the two cousins refused to name. It is recalling the shock of this newfound awareness that propels Pearlie’s retrospective meditation—by the time she tells the tale, Holland is long dead from kidney failure and Sonny is fifty years old—on how lovers, at base, remain always strangers to one another. Greer has Pearlie assert this insight at the novel’s beginning and reiterate it several times throughout. As the story opens, Pearlie remarks about being able to love only “the poor translation” she has made of the other, without being able to “get past it to the original.” Later she comments on the loneliness and heartbreak that come from the “silence and lies” between even husband and wife that make their life at best “a fiction.” Still later she muses about how, in the face of the heart remaining hidden, the lover re-creates the loved one according to how she wishes him to be. Pearlie, in fact, comes to know Buzz Drumer better than she ever knew her husband, though perhaps she just fails—or consciously chooses not—to report more of what goes on behind the closed doors of their marriage. If Holland fought in the war only because he was dragged off to it, Buzz, who now owns a profitable business that makes women’s foundation garments but lives sparely in a rooming house, was a conscientious objector. Sent to a Quaker-run work camp rife with bigotry and prejudice that was as much a prison as a site for enforced labor clearing tree stumps, he apparently found there gay companions before he was chosen to participate in a medical experiment designed to see how little food war refugees needed to survive. Starved and emaciated, so that no one could possiby love him, he eventually plunged into a kind of madness, finally eating off his little finger. It is thus that he comes to share a room in a veterans’ hospital with Holland and their affair begins. Now he reappears in Holland’s life and tries to wrest him away from Pearlie. Instead of demanding that Holland reject the interloper and throw him out, Pearlie

Andrew Sean Greer, who lives in San Francisco, has published a collection of short stories, How It Was for Me (2000), and two earlier novels, including the acclaimed best seller The Confessions of Max Tivoli (2005). He has been awarded the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award.

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somewhat surprisingly insists he make a choice between her and his former lover. Knowing that Holland, whom she describes as physically “beaten out of gold,” has always been an object of admiration and alluring to the eyes of both sexes, she wants him to name his desire rightly. The “aunts,” who have always known more of the truth than they let on, caution her against jealousy and counsel her to avert her eyes from the unpleasant facts. Pearlie, who feels that she has at times tried to pass for white, even surreptitiously visits a gay bar in North Beach to see what she calls “the changeling boys,” transvestite dancers forced to wear badges announcing their true gender to ward off being arrested. Ready to be won over by Buzz’s need, she entertains his offer of financial security for her and Sonny, which makes her feel little better than her “husband’s procuress.” She and Buzz even concoct a plan to turn Holland’s attentions away from a white woman, Annabel, to whom, in his sexual uncertainties, he seems to be attracted. They report her fiancé Walter, who has been excused from the draft because of a clerical error that lists his brother as already serving overseas, to the authorities, only to suffer guilt when he is seriously injured in boot camp and returns home permanently disabled. Given the chance, however, to be free of his marriage, at the last minute Holland, after a physical altercation, decides to stay with her and Sonny. If Holland remains unknowable to her, so, too, was Pearlie a “greater mystery” to him: Believing she wanted what only Buzz could give her, he “got [her] wrong.” When thinking back on how she defined her role, Pearlie calls upon the example of two of “history’s wives” who also did not speak out against their husbands: Eslanda Goode Robeson, who took the Fifth Amendment rather than incriminate her actor husband Paul, and, especially, Ethel Rosenberg, who was forced to bear with her husband the shame of the whole affair and to see her silence blamed for war, communism, death, and possible annihilation. Pearlie, who shed tears that it took two shocks to kill Ethel (after she had bloodied her hands on the mesh screen that kept her apart from Julius), wonders why she did not confess to save her life, concluding that Ethel remained steadfast to the principle of “the smallest atom of a wife that cannot be split apart.” More than forty years later, Buzz unexpectedly reenters Pearlie’s life, through a chance meeting of Sonny, long after Sonny had been called upon to make his own difficult choices during the tumultuous period of the Vietnam War, whose peace demonstrations and draft card burnings are tellingly sketched in by Greer. Pearlie punctuates her narrative by remarking that although it began as a story of love and marriage, “the war has stuck to it everywhere like shattered glass,” providing a perspective on three different conflicts: World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Holland’s mother tried to keep him safe from a war that was not “our war,” referring to the fact that blacks were even segregated in the armed forces. Pearlie, on the other hand, in a misguided moment, effectually sent Walter off to fight in Korea. When it comes time for Sonny to be drafted, however, she supports his decision to flee to Canada, where he has a child by a Chinese woman. Men either go to war or do not go to war: During World War II, men felt both fear of and shame over not serving, and threats to their manliness on both counts; during the Vietnam War, personal integrity might require a quite different response. Women either send their men to war or, in Greer’s hands, do everything

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in their power to protect them from it. In this case, Pearlie decides to shelter Sonny from something else as well. Now an executive with a nonprofit agency in the East, married to a white woman, and father of a son, he comes to San Francisco on business, inviting his mother to breakfast and to renew her acquaintance with Buzz. Questioned by Sonny about the nature of her relationship with this other man, she is unwilling to admit the truth and does nothing to disabuse her son of the notion that she and Buzz must once have been lovers. And so the true nature of Holland’s sexuality remains hidden, even to his son. She cannot confront Buzz again after all these years, unwilling to tell him that Holland “loved [her] more.” Of the three central players in Greer’s triangle, Holland is the most elusive, with the reader never really let into his life—even though it is told by the one he chose to stay with and who remained with him until his death. This, however, may well be a deliberate strategy on the author’s part. Not only does it reemphasize the unknowability of the loved one to the lover, but it foregrounds the closeted nature of Holland’s existence in mid-twentieth century America. He was black, and being homosexual as well made him doubly the outsider. So the nature of Holland’s love puts him at war with himself. Forced into a heterosexual marriage that accorded with society’s norms, he could never truly be himself or articulate an identity in keeping with his nature. As Greer writes in a haunting line that introduces the final section of this understated short novel with its masterful control of first-person viewpoint, “America, you give a lovely death.” Thomas P. Adler

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 17 (May 1, 2008): 73. Entertainment Weekly, May 9, 2008, p. 67. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 5 (March 1, 2008): 210. The New York Times Book Review, May 11, 2008, p. 35. The New Yorker 84, no. 12 (May 5, 2008): 78-79. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 4 (January 28, 2008): 38. The Times Literary Supplement, June 27, 2008, p. 20.

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THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE Author: David Wroblewski (1959) Publisher: Ecco Press (New York). 566 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1919 to 1970 Locale: Wisconsin and South Korea The mute Sawtelle grows up in rural Wisconsin, helping his parents raise and train highly intelligent dogs Principal characters: Edgar Sawtelle, a mute boy Gar Sawtelle, his father, a dog breeder Trudy Sawtelle, his mother, a dog trainer John Sawtelle, his grandfather, a dog breeder Mary Sawtelle, his grandmother Claude Sawtelle, Gar’s mysterious brother Doctor Page Papineau, a veterinarian Glen Papineau, his son, a sheriff Henry Lamb, Edgar’s friend Doctor Frost, a physician Almondine, a dog who becomes a second mother to Edgar

Few first novels receive the kind of attention afforded David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. The forty-nine-year-old writer’s initial effort won glowing reviews, reached the top of The New York Times best-seller list, and was chosen by Oprah’s Book Club, a guarantee of good word of mouth and brisk sales. A coming-ofage story, a dog tale, and a nostalgic look at America’s recent past, the book is also highly literary. After opening with a prologue set in South Korea during 1952, an episode that seems to have little relation to the rest of the novel until midway through, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle traces the evolution of the Sawtelle family’s dog-breeding enterprise. After John Sawtelle fails as a dairy farmer near Mellen, Wisconsin, in the 1920’s, he discovers he likes having the seven puppies of his dog, Violet, around, and he has a vision of breeding perfect dogs by following the theories of geneticist Gregor Mendel: “dogs so unlike the shepherds and hounds and retrievers and sled dogs he used as foundation stock they became known simply as Sawtelle dogs.” Much of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle examines the disappointments of family life experienced by John’s son Gar, his wife Trudy, and their mute son Edgar during the early 1970’s. A foster child, Trudy has a strong need for family ties, and she is crushed by a miscarriage before Edgar is born in 1958. His muteness is a small price to pay for his survival. Then there is Gar’s estranged brother, Claude, who returns after an absence of many years to help with the dogs, despite fluctuating tensions between the

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brothers: “Edgar got the idea that Claude and his father had slipped without their knowing it into some irresistible rhythm of taunt and reply whose references were too subtle or too private to decipher.” Wroblewski explains the troubles between the brothers a bit at a time, and when matters seem resolved, the unexpected arrives. The narrative seems to flow smoothly for long periods only to backtrack upon itself with each new surprise. Wroblewski describes the daily activities with the dogs in detail: feeding, training, exercising, playing, observing, cleaning their quarters in the barn. No time off is possible from “the work that never ended.” Because of the immaculate records they keep, Gar and Trudy have photographs of every dog they have raised but none of themselves. These records form a strong bond between Edgar and the past, which he explores in an effort to understand the present. When Edgar is finally old enough to be given a litter to look after, he takes delight in naming them, consulting The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language to find fitting names: Baboo, Essay, Finch, Opal, Pout, Tinder, and Umbra. The boy counters his muteness with pleasure in the meanings and sounds of words. Language is a means of exerting some control over his life, and not being able to hear or read words when circumstances force him to run away with three dogs makes him feel even more isolated. As he ages and takes on more responsibilities, Edgar realizes how much he is like his father, “so certain he was right,” and comes to see the possibly malevolent Claude with Gar’s suspicious eyes, realizing there is “not one Claude but many.” Trudy’s acceptance of Claude’s presence leads to further tensions. Because of Edgar’s muteness, the dogs must learn a modified version of the signs he uses to communicate with his parents, signs he first tests on Almondine, the family’s only pet. These signs become especially important when Edgar runs away. Much like Charles Frazier did in Cold Mountain (1997), whose style and pace The Story of Edgar Sawtelle resembles, Wroblewski shifts his narrative focus several times. Edgar’s adventure in the Wisconsin woods, similar to the homeward journey of Frazier’s hero, is the most tightly constructed and gripping part of the novel, as Edgar steals food from vacation cabins, hides from the police, and is injured in a freak accident. Again like Frazier, Wroblewski is an outstanding storyteller, embellishing his narrative with literary archetypes, such as the symbolic uses of fire and water, which can both purify or destroy. Several of the dogs are almost as fully developed as the humans. Almondine assumes responsibility for the infant Edgar, instinctively realizing his silence means he needs extra care. His earliest memory is of her beside his crib. During the following years, she is always there to love, to help, even to scold, becoming like a second mother. Edgar exults in having different relationships with Trudy, Gar, and the dog:

David Wroblewski grew up in a dairy region near the Chequamegon National Forest, where The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is set. After studying acting at the University of Wisconsin, he switched to computer science and worked in software development for twenty-five years. He has a degree from the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers in North Carolina and lives in Colorado with writer Kimberly McClintock.

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“If he managed to share one secret with his father and a different one with his mother and yet another with Almondine the world felt that much larger.”A mysterious stray dog spotted several times in the woods seems to be the reincarnation of an earlier Sawtelle dog and also has parallels with Claude. Wroblewski’s style often echoes the short, simple declarative sentences of another Midwestern writer, Ernest Hemingway: “They walked into the dark kitchen together. The kitchen clock read 2:25. Almondine lay near the porch door.” Wroblewski’s evocation of nature, specifically the glories of the American Middle West, recall the descriptive writing of Hemingway in such stories as “The Big Two-Hearted River” (1925). In addition to conveying the sights, sounds, and smells of the land, Wroblewski presents rural Wisconsin as a calming, peaceful place until humans interfere. Edgar considers his home a self-contained world where everything has a degree of logic. When this is no longer true and he leaves, his universe expands in surprising ways. As in Hemingway’s story, nature offers the possibilities of escape and of healing. However, like Hemingway’s hero, Edgar must return to a more threatening reality. Edgar identifies with Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894), but the major literary influence does not become clear until Gar’s death, with similarities to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (pr. c. 1600-1601). Shakespeare’s play and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle share treatments of discord and suspicions within families, revenge, and the psychological turmoil of their protagonists. Edgar is Hamlet; Gar, or Edgar, Sr., is the ghost of Hamlet’s father, also named Hamlet; Trudy is Gertrude; Claude is Claudius; Page Papineau, the family veterinarian and business investor, is Polonius; his son, Glen, the sheriff, is Laertes; and Almondine, in an unusual twist, resembles Ophelia. Wroblewski does not allow his homage to become predictably mechanical, with some character similarities and plot developments much stronger than others. For example, Edgar’s biggest dilemma, like Hamlet’s indecision, is “To wait and watch or to run away.” The Hamlet subplot, although significant, is also only a portion of a larger canvas on which Wroblewski paints his characters and their way of life. Familiarity with Shakespeare’s masterpiece is not essential to appreciating The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, though the novel’s conclusion will make more sense to those who know Hamlet’s story. Wroblewksi’s prose is often poetic, as with this prophetic description of Gar: “As he passed through a stand of aspen saplings he seemed to shimmer into place between their trunks like a ghost.” A disused car gives “the impression of an animal that had crawled to within inches of its lair before expiring.” When John buys the farm where he will breed his dogs, he receives a telegram from his lawyer: “OFFER ACCEPTED SEE ADAMSKI RE PAPERS.” Edgar periodically looks at this document, and every time he takes out this telegram, a word falls off until only ACCEPTED is left. Wroblewski pays close attention to such details throughout the novel, making such minutiae reflect the larger picture. Compared with such popular nonfiction dog books as John Grogan’s Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog (2005), The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is

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full of touching moments but is generally restrained, more in keeping with the tone of Jon Katz’s A Dog Year: Twelve Months, Four Dogs, and Me (2002). In addition to Almondine’s touching devotion to Edgar and her ability to experience an even deeper grief than the humans, owners bring their Sawtelle dogs to Gar’s funeral, both in tribute and in showing an awareness that these dogs have an active emotional life. Wroblewski makes the almost human qualities exhibited by the dogs, with their distinct personalities, credible by constantly reinforcing how they differ from ordinary dogs: “From the moment they opened their eyes the dogs were taught to watch and listen and trust. To think and choose. This was the lesson behind every minute of training. They were taught something beyond simple obedience: that through the training all things could be spoken.” In a pivotal scene late in the novel, some dogs are faced with making an important decision and, after seemingly weighing their options, make the right choice. Edgar both teaches the dogs and learns from them, becoming an unusually keen observer, a characteristic central to his quest to distinguish between possible versions of the truth. This quest leads him to using the dogs to stage a canine variation of “The Mousetrap” scene from Hamlet. Wroblewski creates vivid characters with seeming ease. In addition to Edgar and Trudy, the most sympathetic characters, there is Henry Lamb, a lonely man Edgar meets well into his journey away from home. The guileless, trusting Henry serves as counterpoint to the moral confusion Edgar is fleeing. The way the dogs take to him proves he is a good man. Henry is, however, far from a sentimental creation: He is a forlorn defeatist who retreats from life after his fiancé rejects him for being too ordinary. He and Edgar help each other become wiser and more alive. The sequence in which Edgar cleans out Henry’s crammed, untidy shed only for his friend to decide to put everything back is a miniaturization of the novel’s treatment of the importance of work and the need to impose order on chaos. Trudy tells Edgar about a theory of Doctor Frost, their family physician, that all people have flaws in their veins and arteries that can be fatal, though no one knows why only some are affected. These flaws are metaphors for the lives of Wroblewski’s damaged, imperfect characters, each of whom responds differently to the crises in their lives. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle celebrates the commonplace while gazing at the mysteries lurking within the ordinary. Wroblewski summarizes his theme after a series of important decisions have been made: “Life was a swarm of accidents waiting in the treetops, descending upon any living thing that passed, ready to eat them alive. You swam in a river of chance and coincidence. You clung to the happiest accidents—the rest you let float by. . . . You looked around and discovered the most unusual thing in the world sitting there looking at you.” The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is about the value of work, about balancing independence with the need for companionship, and it never pushes its themes too hard. Equally compelling as a family drama, an adventure story, and a murder mystery, the novel deserves its lavish praise. Michael Adams

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle / wroblewski

Review Sources Booklist 104, nos. 19/20 (June 1, 2008): 45. Entertainment Weekly, June 13, 2008, p. 75. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 7 (April 1, 2008): 329. Library Journal 133, no. 5 (March 15, 2008): 65. New Statesman 137, no. 4907 (July 28, 2008): 51. The New York Times, June 13, 2008, p. 23. The New York Times Book Review, August 3, 2008, p. 6. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 7 (February 18, 2008): 132. USA Today, June 19, 2008, p. D4.

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A SUMMER OF HUMMINGBIRDS Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade Author: Christopher Benfey (1954) Publisher: Penguin (New York). Illustrated. 288 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Literary biography, literary history Time: 1860-1900 Locale: Amherst, Massachusetts; Jacksonville and St. Augustine, Florida; New York City; various capitals of Europe Benfey describes the intersecting lives of some of the most famous American writers and artists of the Gilded Age, and he examines their artistic responses to the changing post-Civil War world Principal personages: George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), the British Romantic poet whose life and writings captivated Americans in the nineteenth century Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), her brother, the most popular preacher in America Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), an American landscape painter Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), the reclusive Amherst poet Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), the writer to whom Dickinson first sent her poems Mark Twain (1835-1910), the comic writer and member of several New England social and literary circles Henry James (1843-1916), American novelist, who lived most of his career in Europe Mabel Loomis Todd (1856-1932), a painter, a writer, the lover of Emily Dickinson’s married brother Austin, and the editor of the poet’s work after her death Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), an American artist known for his surrealist boxes

The Civil War was a watershed in American history. Before the war, American life was built upon a series of religious and social truths few people questioned. After the war, America began its transformation into the modern world, and the pre-war certainties gave way to doubt and instability. The exploding growth of the Gilded Age following the Civil War was accompanied by intellectual tremors set off by Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and other skeptics of inherited Calvinist ideas. Historians have

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charted this transformation in the second half of the nineteenth century in a number of dif- Christopher Benfey has written Emily ferent ways, but in A Summer of Humming- Dickinson: Lives of a Poet (1986), The birds, Christopher Benfey has found a unique Double Life of Stephen Crane (1992), Degas in New Orleans (1997), and The expression of the change. He follows a group of American artists and Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, writers linked by family and friendship, trac- Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening ing their responses to the changing postbellum of Old Japan (2003). He writes for The New York Times Book Review, The world through their poetry and art, their moNew Republic, and The New York tifs and metaphors, and in particular the strik- Review of Books. Benfey is Mellon ing image of the hummingbird. “In science Professor of English at Mount Holyoke and in art, in religion and in love, they came to College. see a new dynamism and movement in their lives, a brave new world of instability and evanescence. This dynamism, in all aspects of life, found perfect expression in the hummingbird.” Benfey divides his study into three parts: from conflict (images of the Civil War), through confinement (images of prison), to release (images of flight or of escape). Part One is called “An Oblique War,” from a phrase Emily Dickinson used in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1863, and focuses on the effects of the Civil War on this group of writers and artists. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote the antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin that President Abraham Lincoln claimed had started the Civil War, had a son, Captain Fredric Stowe, permanently wounded in the war in 1863. Stowe was drawn to the image of the fragile hummingbird, and in fact she painted one in 1864, a figure, Benfey suggests, that may have reminded the writer of her vulnerable son. The war was actually a stimulant to Dickinson, for she produced many of her greatest poems in a burst of creative energy during the war, although most would not be published until after her death. Her famous line “I taste a liquor never brewed,” for example, was written in 1861; the hummingbird narrator of the poem was for Dickinson a figure of “ecstasy,” Benfey writes; the same figure for Stowe was one of “vulnerability.” Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous minister in America, and the brother of Harriet, collected stuffed hummingbirds, while the artist Martin Johnson Heade in 1863 headed to Brazil—where the greatest number of species of hummingbirds lived—to try to become the John Jay Audubon of the bird. Part Two, “At the Hotel Byron,” opens with Stowe on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the setting for Lord Byron’s popular 1816 poem “The Prisoner of Chillon,” which tells the story of the sixteenth century hero of Swiss independence, François Bonnivard, who was imprisoned for six years in the Castle of Chillon, and, when released, hesitated to leave his familiar dungeon. The romantic Byron was a favorite with American readers. “He represented, with his passions and his flair, an escape from the prison of Puritan repression,” Benfey suggests. Lyman Beecher (Harriet and Henry’s father) preached a funeral sermon when the poet died in 1824, while Harriet called his popularity in America “Byronic fever,” modeled the heroic Augustine St.

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Clare in Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the poet, and later published a book-length defense of the wife abandoned by the poet, titled Lady Byron Vindicated (1870). Henry James used Chillon as a crucial setting in his novella Daisy Miller (1879), when the title character visits the castle with a potential suitor. Finally, Mark Twain made fun of the castle and its famous prisoner in his narrative of travel through Europe, A Tramp Abroad (1880), claiming Bonnivard should have amused himself with the swarms of tourists Twain encountered on his visit there three centuries later. Benfey finds a deeper significance in the image of the prison that its frequent use by artists and writers only hints at. Dickinson, for example, who spent the two decades after the war as a virtual self-prisoner in her house in Amherst, was also drawn to the poetry of Byron: “What Byron’s poetry promised—for Stowe, Dickinson, and Henry James—was escape from the wintry prison-house of custom and Calvinism, and access instead to nature and feeling.” The literature produced in the United States after the Civil War, and in particular the realism of James and Twain and other writers who would come to dominate fiction, demonstrated that escape from literary and social custom and convention in numerous ways. Part Three, “Transits of Venus,” completes the study’s triptych with its theme of release, flight, and escape, all three as much physical as artistic. Martin Johnson Heade created his most accomplished paintings, including those of hummingbirds, after the war. Heade was in love with Mabel Loomis Todd, the wife of astronomer David Todd, a member of the commission charting the rare passage of Venus between the earth and the sun in 1882. Heade pursued her, unsuccessfully, to Amherst during the summer that Mabel became the lover of Dickinson’s married brother Austin. Apart from her extramarital affairs, Mabel recognized the importance of Dickinson’s poems and edited the first selection of them, with Higginson’s help, after the poet’s death in 1886. The links are even closer, Benfey reveals: Mabel’s recognition of Dickinson’s talent “was shaped and nurtured by her apprenticeship with Martin Johnson Heade. It was in Heade’s studio in Washington that Mabel saw what could be done with a few hypnotic images—flowers, mysterious lights on meadows, hummingbirds.” As critics have noted, Dickinson’s poetry often has a painterly perspective, including the effect of light on landscape that artists such as Heade were trying to achieve at the time. The changing light is only one of the ways the new “dynamism” of the Gilded Age was illuminating and transforming American life. Henry Ward Beecher, who collected stuffed hummingbirds and knew Heade and bought at least one of his paintings, was the subject of one of the most sensational trials in America in the 1870’s, resulting from his affair with his parishioner Elizabeth Tilton. Benfey’s last chapter, “Florida,” includes an account of the construction of the lavish Hotel Ponce de Leon that industrialist Henry Morrison Flagler built in St. Augustine and where he installed Heade as one of the resident artists. James later stayed there, writing that the hotel “comes as near producing, all by itself, the illusion of romance as highly modern, a most cleverly-constructed and smoothly-administered great modern caravansary can come.” Passion and romance were spilling out all over America by the end of the nineteenth century, giving way, at times, to extravagance and ostentation. The Gilded Age was becoming the Age of Excess.

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In his “Epilogue,” Benfey turns to another American artist, the twentieth century collagist Joseph Cornell, and studies his affinity for the writers and artists of the previous century. “In Cornell’s work, the familiar romantic objects of Beecher and Stowe and Dickinson—birds and flowers and jewels and planets—reappear with a ghostly majesty and strangeness.” Benfey calls “Toward the Blue Peninsula (For Emily Dickinson)” (c. 1953), a collage of wire and cage, “the single most trenchant interpretive response, in all of American art, to the meaning of her life and work.” Benfey’s thesis is not new, but his exploration of it certainly is. “This book is about a cluster of American artists and writers adrift during the seismic upheaval of the Civil War and its wrenching aftermath,” artists and writers who “found meaning in the shifting light on a river at dawn, or the evanescent flash of a hummingbird’s flight.” At times, however, Benfey’s focus gets lost in his complex story. A Summer of Hummingbirds recounts numerous episodes from the lives of Twain, Dickinson, Beecher, Stowe, and a dozen other artists and writers, and it is easy to lose sight of Benfey’s focus—that these creative people found themselves caught between the Calvinist prewar world of convention, custom, and restraint, and a more romantic postwar world in which nature and passion prevailed. Fortunately, Benfey starts this study with a three-page “Dramatis Personae” that gives brief biographies of the fifteen major characters in the book, which helps readers to keep them straight. His focus on tropes and motifs, however, and particularly the figure of the hummingbird— an image “of freedom in a world of captivity,” as he writes—sometimes seems too fragile to carry all the weight that Benfey wants it to hold. There are a number of ways of dramatizing this shift in nineteenth century America. Benfey begins his study with a glance at Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1882), which represents a stronger metaphor, as Twain contrasts life on the great river before the war, when he was a cub riverboat pilot, and after it, when he returned to discover the Mississippi swamped by commercial traffic as the United States opened westward. Many studies such as Benfey’s are overweighted by theory, and his tends to err on the side of narrative detail and metaphor. Benfey does evoke powerfully the mid-nineteenth century literary and artistic world—particularly the cloistered life of Dickinson, and the nomadic journeys of Heade—and shows how intertwined that world became. The book also contains a number of photographs and reproductions of the artworks Benfey studies by Heade, Stowe, and Cornell. Benfey helps to unlock the complex artistic and intellectual links among this talented and passionate group of Americans, and he uses their art and literature to show the transformation the United States was undergoing through the end of the nineteenth century. David Peck

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Review Sources ARTnews 107, no. 9 (October, 2008): 50. The Atlantic Monthly 302, no. 1 (July/August, 2008): 141. Booklist 104, no. 16 (April 15, 2008): 18-19. Library Journal 133, no. 6 (April 1, 2008): 83. The New York Times Book Review, May 4, 2008, p. 20. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 7 (February 18, 2008): 144. The Times Literary Supplement, January 2, 2009, pp. 7-8.

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TAKING ON THE TRUST The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller Author: Steve Weinberg (1948) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 256 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Biography Time: 1839-1944 Locale: Titusville, Pennsylvania; Cleveland, Ohio; New York City This dual biography traces the trajectories of two great American lives and their collision over the proper role of business in the nation’s economy, politics, and morality Principal personages: John D. Rockefeller, the founder of the Standard Oil Trust William Avery Rockefeller, his conman father Eliza Davison Rockefeller, his pious mother Henry Flagler, his Florida business partner Ida Tarbell, one of the United States’ first investigative journalists Frank Tarbell, her father, an oil refiner, and the inventor of oil storage tanks Esther Tarbell, her supportive mother S. S. McClure, the founder of McClure’s Magazine, the venue for many of Tarbell’s articles Theodore Roosevelt, the first president to attack trusts such as Standard Oil

The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) remains Ida Tarbell’s lasting contribution to the development of American journalism. An indefatigable researcher and fearless reporter, Tarbell assembled a painstaking and unassailable case against the Standard Oil Trust, accusing it of ruthlessly ruining its competition, fixing railroad shipment rates, and engaging in other anticompetitive practices that made it impossible for independent oil producers and refiners to make a profit. Prone to biographical interpretations of history, Tarbell viewed the Standard Oil Trust as the embodiment of John D. Rockefeller’s rapacious personality. After publishing her landmark book, she followed up with a profile of Rockefeller in McClure’s Magazine, suggesting that his various charities were merely a public relations front to rescue the reputation of a man who engaged in restraint of trade and other unethical practices that contributed to his company’s monopolistic control of the refining of oil in the United States and abroad. In Taking on the Trust, Steve Weinberg emulates Tarbell’s biographical approach insofar as he regards the clash between Tarbell and Rockefeller as deeply rooted in their family backgrounds, the former deeply influenced by her entrepreneurial father

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and strong mother, the latter influenced by his mother’s religious convictions and his father’s deceitful business practices. Both were innovators. Early on in her education at Allegheny College, Tarbell learned the value of consulting primary sources—the documents that could establish the truth be hind the stories people told her. Before taking on the enormous task of investigating Rockefeller and Standard Oil, Tarbell researched the lives of European and American historical figures, notably the biography of Abraham Lincoln. She searched courthouses and other public institutions for records of Lincoln’s life and found much new evidence overlooked by the president’s authorized biographers. Indeed, Tarbell can rightly be considered one of the inventors of American unauthorized biography, since she began with no one’s sanction or approval but rather with a series of questions and issues that she pursued with relentless determination and ingenuity. Heretofore, biography had been a rather staid genre—distinguished, to be sure, by a few biographers such as James Parton—but lacking in the kind of undaunted and resourceful independence that Tarbell patented. Weinberg shows that Tarbell’s initiative derived from close observation of her father’s experiences in the oil business. Frank Tarbell knew at first hand about Rockefeller’s efforts to intimidate his competition. Tarbell’s mother, Esther, early on recognized that her daughter would not fit the conventional mold of the conforming, sedate, and conventional nineteenth century woman. In sum, Tarbell had the staunch support of her family that enabled her to pursue her radical search for truth. At nearly the same time, Rockefeller arose from a family marked by a curious blend of the raffish and the religious. His father was often away from home on business trips, indulging in sexual affairs, and bent on bilking others in get-rich-quick schemes. Rockefeller never acknowledged his father’s unethical and illegal behavior or that he may have learned a trick or two from dad. On the contrary, Rockefeller overly identified with his mother’s piety. A devout Christian, Rockefeller apparently believed that his business dealings were honorable. Like Tarbell, Rockefeller showed remarkable initiative. He pioneered better ways to refine oil, and he was constantly making other improvements in the exploration and distribution of fuel at a time when other refiners relied on shoddy equipment that often led to fires and other industrial accidents. A keen appraiser of talent, Rockefeller employed the best executives, often drawn from the companies Standard Oil took over. Drawing on the later scholarship of writers such as Allan Nevins and Ron Chernow, Weinberg shows that Tarbell had an excessively narrow view of Rockefeller’s personality. It seems unlikely—as Tarbell supposed—that Rockefeller established his charitable foundations out of guilt or in an effort simply to restore the reputation Tarbell had denigrated. Rockefeller often provided funding for worthy projects without expecting publicity or any sort of public acknowledgment.

Steve Weinberg has written seven books and dozens of investigative reports for magazines and newspapers. He teaches at the top-ranked University of Missouri Journalism School and lives in Columbia, Missouri.

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Tarbell did not merely attack Rockefeller. She acknowledged that he had done much to improve the oil business. She was not against big business per se but rather against the abuses of the capitalist system. Indeed, her reporting led to court cases and legislation that made illegal what was, in Rockefeller’s early years, only unethical. How Rockefeller viewed himself is difficult to say since his autobiography is reticent and he left behind no documents that decisively reveal his inner life. He rarely answered his critics directly and took care—as Weinberg demonstrates—to make sure his name appeared on very few internal company documents. He rarely mentioned Tarbell by name, but on those few occasions when he did defend himself (he hired an interviewer for precisely this purpose), it is clear he had Tarbell in mind. At one point, he did refer to her directly, suggesting she was misguided, although he acknowledged that in some respects her book presented a favorable view of Standard Oil. Like Rockefeller, Tarbell produced an autobiography, and yet she revealed little about her inner or private life. Why did she not marry? Did she have lovers? Neither Weinberg nor previous biographers can tell. Consequently, Tarbell, like Rockefeller, remains something of a mystery. Weinberg, a superb journalist, does not attempt to psychoanalyze his subjects or to speculate unduly about their motivations. Weinberg began his work intending a full biography of Tarbell, but given the paucity of material about her inner life, it is understandable why he turned to this dual biography. It provides him with the opportunity to do full justice to his main story and to the events that led to the clash between Rockefeller and Tarbell. While these two figures never met, they remained to the end of their days aware of each other. After all, Tarbell’s work influenced Theodore Roosevelt and others to condemn the monopolistic practices of Standard Oil and other trusts. In addition, Tarbell was certainly one of the principal reasons why in 1912 the Supreme Court rendered a decision that effectively broke up the Standard Oil Trust. The irony, however, is that the breakup made Rockefeller richer—the richest man in the United States, in fact—because he had stock in all the companies carved out of the Standard Oil leviathan. Tarbell’s career flourished and Rockefeller remained the chief symbol of ravenous big business. He was never able to rectify the damage Tarbell had done to his reputation. Weinberg shows that Tarbell’s legacy consists of much more than her classic work on Standard Oil. She not only pioneered the craft of investigative journalism but also insisted on the meticulous analysis of documents, becoming at the same time the first woman and perhaps the first journalist to join the staff of a major magazine (McClure’s) to concentrate exclusively on in-depth and well-researched articles. For Tarbell, there was no such thing as received wisdom. She argued that reporters should begin afresh, jettisoning opinions and looking for new material. When Lincoln’s son denied her access to his father’s papers, and one of Lincoln’s secretaries, John Nicolay, rebuffed her, Tarbell pursued her own quest for documents and scoured newspapers for leads. Impressed with her efforts, the son, Robert Todd Lincoln, eventually provided some assistance, persuading sources to speak with her. In this way, Tarbell built up a network of contacts that led her to collectors of Lincoln material that had not been shared with other biographers.

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Weinberg uses a phrase (the “era of heroic biography was fading”) that demarcates the changes Tarbell promulgated in American biography and journalism. He notes that she “glossed over Lincoln’s faults” but with Rockefeller she “went to great lengths to pull back the curtain.” In other words, she was on her way to making biography itself a more critical genre a full generation before iconoclasts such as Lytton Strachey would do so in Eminent Victorians (1918). It is no longer standard practice for biographers to quote large portions of their subject’s prose. The contemporary fashion is to write swiftly moving narratives peppered with brief sound-bite quotations. Weinberg does quote a few extended passages from Tarbell, however, that reveal what a marvelous writer she remains. However much her biographies have been superseded by later research, her prose repays study. Here is just one pithy example from her McClure’s profile of Rockefeller: “Mr. Rockefeller may have made himself the richest man in the world, but he has paid. Nothing but paying ever ploughs such lines in a man’s face, ever sets his lips to such a melancholy angle.” This is a devastating portrait, combining moral judgment and observation, sound, sense, and imagery in just two sentences. The pacing of such prose never ages. Although Tarbell could claim many “firsts” as a woman working in what was still mainly a man’s occupation, she rarely adopted a feminist viewpoint. To be sure, she wrote about women’s issues, but she was not keen, for example, on votes for women. In this respect, she took a rather staid, nineteenth century old-fashioned view of women who should shy away from the rough-and-tumble of the political world. Somehow a woman’s authority as above or beyond the fray appealed to her, although she herself hardly provided a good example. Nevertheless, she did not think women’s involvement in politics would change the world all that much. In another sense, like Rockefeller, Tarbell remained a conventional American tied to her family. She took an active interest in her relatives and often supported them even when her income (derived solely from writing) diminished. Similarly, Rockefeller devoted himself to family, sometimes even taking part of a day off to return home and play with his children. Even though both resided in New York City for long periods, Rockefeller saw himself as rooted in the Cleveland of his youth just as Tarbell remained at heart a citizen of Titusville. Given their antagonism, it was impossible for one to see the other’s full humanity. This, however, is the work of biography, and one that Weinberg accomplishes with admirable dexterity, compassion, and perception. Carl Rollyson

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Review Sources The Boston Globe, April 3, 2008, p. C7. The Christian Science Monitor, April 22, 2008, p. 17. Columbia Journalism Review, March/April, 2008, p. 58. Journalism History 34, no. 3 (Fall, 2008): 180. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 24 (December 15, 2007): 1288. Library Journal 133, no. 2 (February 1, 2008): 84-85. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 50 (December 17, 2007): 42. St. Petersburg Times, March 7, 2008, p. 1E. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 73 (March 28, 2008): W5. The Washington Post Book World, April 27, 2008, p. 8.

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THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America Author: David Hajdu (1955) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 434 pp. $26.00 Type of work: History Time: 1890 to the 1960’s Locale: The United States Hajdu describes the suppression of comic books in the immediate aftermath of World War II At the end of World War II, the enemy defeated and the peace secured, the United States was poised to enjoy a period of security and prosperity. While the country did experience a sustained economic growth into the 1960’s, growth unparalleled in modern times, a sense of security seemed to elude the postwar generation, according to The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu. The American nuclear monopoly, which ended the war with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was shattered by the Soviet Union’s development of its atomic bomb and nuclear arsenal. Internal security was challenged by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against what he claimed was widespread domestic subversion by Communists in the federal government, the entertainment industry, and the Army. Estes Kefauver, a senator from Tennessee, chaired governmental investigative committees that examined the growing concern with domestic crime and juvenile delinquency. Paranoia appeared to reign throughout the land. On April 22, 1954, postwar paranoia coalesced in two U.S. Senate hearings. As Hajdu points out, both were decisive but in contrary ways. In Washington, Senator McCarthy’s probe into Communist infiltration of the Army marked the end of a movement in decline and destroyed the credibility and reputation of the junior senator from Wisconsin. The other Senate hearing was conducted in New York by Robert C. Hendrickson, a first-term Republican from New Jersey, into the link between juvenile delinquency and comic books that boosted a crusade on the rise that would prove devastating to the comic-book industry. Comic books that would raise such outrage and concern in the late 1940’s and into the mid-1950’s began innocently enough as the brainchild of Joseph Pulitzer in order to increase the circulation of his New York World by creating a largely visual feature that would appeal to the paper’s non-English reading public. “The Yellow Kid” was set in the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side where the multiple boxes of drawings depicted the adventures of a gang of slum kids. Created by Richard Felton Outcault, the Kid became a caricature of the immigrant poor. He and his pals were vulgar stereotypes, inarticulate, violent, violators of the social order, in short, as Hajdu points out, juvenile delinquents. The popularity of the Yellow Kid, who also

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incidentally gave his name to “yellow” jour nalism, was enormous, and it gave birth to David Hajdu teaches at the Journalism dozens of newspaper cartoons, some based on School at Columbia University. He the Kid himself. In their earthiness, freedom, writes a column on music and popular and challenge to authority, these early news- culture for The New Republic and paper comics spoke directly to the burgeon- contributes to The New Yorker, Vanity ing immigrant population swelling the major Fair, and The New York Times. His American cities, and because of their subver- books Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (1996) and Positively Fourth siveness they attracted the attention of civic Street: The Lives and Times of Joan groups and local do-good societies. Similar to Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, the criticisms directed at the dime novels of and Richard Farina (2001) were the nineteenth century, comics were found in- National Book Critics Circle Award fantile, brutal, unsophisticated, subliterate, all finalists. of the things that offended the cultural arbitra tors of the time. The syndication of the popular strips plus the creation of new ones in local newspapers across the country spread the new visual form. Soon tear-outs were being printed to be sold with the newspaper or as separate newspaper promotions. Comic strips were collected and printed as separate publications. As their popularity grew, so did the characters and the formats diversify. Historically, the first comic book has been identified as Funnies on Parade, from 1933, and it was not for sale but rather was a free premium for Procter & Gamble. In February of 1935, Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson published a thirty-six-page, black-and-white, tabloid-sized collection of never-before-published comic strips. He thus created the first published for-sale, stand-alone comic book that was designed for syndication and future sales. The comic book was born. By the late 1930’s, Wheeler-Nicholson’s idea had given rise to several comicbook studios, most of them located in New York City, which allowed them to take advantage of the city’s concentration of artistic talent, much of it unemployed or underemployed because of the Depression. For a low cost, comic-book entrepreneurs could turn out dozens of comic books a month. The contents of these books varied, and as the market expanded so did the stories, eventually to include everything from romance to science fiction to adventure and crime, Westerns, kiddie cartoons, and war. In June of 1938, in Action Comics, there appeared a caped crusader with superhuman powers dedicated to right and the American way. Superman was to be followed by dozens more superheroes (and superheroines) that are still present today, both in print and on the large screen. The physical strength, gallantry, and moral righteousness of the superhero moved the comic book beyond the tawdriness of the early newspaper days. As Hajdu puts it, if the Yellow Kid appealed to the newly arrived immigrant at the turn of the century, Superman celebrated the virtues and goodness of American life of the 1930’s. The newfound success of the comic-book superheroes provided a financial stability that allowed expansion of the industry. As the business grew, and more and more children spent their nickels and dimes on the millions of comics churned out each

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year, the cultural establishment maintained its vigilance and the sniping at comics continued unabated. Articles with titles such as Stirling North’s “A National Disgrace” appeared regularly in up-culture journals. His “The Antidote to Comics” was published in the magazine of the National Parent-Teacher Association, claiming comics promoted a pre-fascist pattern for American youth. What bothered many of the prewar critics was the turn comics had taken toward the depiction of crime and criminal behavior. As would happen when comics turned to horror in the early 1950’s, this new venture would provoke a substantial backlash. The comic-book “problem” was exacerbated by their appeal not only to the young but also to adults. This appeal became especially evident during World War II when soldiers bought huge numbers of comic books, apparently preferring them to other more elevating reading matter with which they were provided. All of this must also be placed in the context of the ongoing modernist conflict involving the confluence of popular and high art, a movement that obscured the differences between the two and called into question traditional hierarchies of aesthetic taste and conventions of aesthetic evaluations. If comic books could be considered art, what did that say about other forms of popular expression? Elevating the popular arts was the thin edge of the wedge and complemented various other forms of paranoia that flourished in the aftermath of World War II. The postwar years brought rapid and often socially upsetting cultural change. The expansion of the opportunities of the war years for African Americans and women laid the foundation for both the women’s and Civil Rights movements of the 1950’s. The emergence of a teen culture in the war’s aftermath also was unsettling for many, and much of the individuality in dress, music, and language that teenagers exhibited was attributed to the reading of comic books, especially those featuring crime and horror. This perception made it easy to tie together the rise of juvenile delinquency and comic-book reading and set the stage for the crackdown on comic books and their publishers, writers, and illustrators. From the late 1930’s through the war years and into the early 1950’s, there was a persistent movement to suppress comics. There were local and even national drives to have kids collect their comic books to be publicly burned. The similarities with the Nazi book burnings were not lost on critics of the practice; nor was the more than a whiff of anti-Semitism in the crackdown since so many of those involved in the making and distributing of comics were Jewish. Nevertheless, municipalities passed laws to forbid the sales of certain comic books or certain categories of comics. Local bodies, including churches and service organizations, were especially involved, often making up a list of offensive titles to aid in the control of those comics thought offensive. The graphic detail of the drawings illustrating many of the crime and horror stories contributed to the fear that comics were creating a depraved generation of readers. Senator Hendrickson’s 1954 hearings delivered a devastating blow to the comicbook business. The excessively gruesome covers and stories of the horror comics, the continued appearance of crime in the ten-cent magazines, and the increasing public fear of crime, communism, and the bomb finally resulted in a more concerted effort to

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clean up the industries’ product. Civic committees across the country drafted lists of unacceptable titles, which were then distributed to newsstands and cigar stores that sold comic books. Youths were exhorted to seek more wholesome reading matter; the comic book had reached the end of an era. In order to stem the tide of criticism, the comic-book publishers formed the Comics Magazine Association of America, which issued a code of standards for comic-book contents. The group agreed to an independent overseer, and the position was offered to Fredric Wertham, author of the Seduction of the Innocent (1954), his “study” of the effects of comic books on the psyches of American youth, a book much influential at the time but now largely discredited. The subversiveness and edginess of comics that had appealed to kids was sapped from the publications. There were spinoffs in other formats, such as Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad magazine, and comic books did continue, but it would be years before some of the old moxie returned. Now there flourishes a healthy business in comics, fantasy books, and graphic novels. Even the original artwork from the postwar years fetches healthy prices in the art-auction market. The content and graphic display in many of today’s illustrated publications, as well as video games, would make Hendrickson and Wertham spin in their graves. In The Ten-Cent Plague, Hajdu has written a fascinating study of a little-remembered episode in American history. Certainly the postwar years and the paranoia that produced the Communist hysteria of the House Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthy have been widely researched and written about, but the comic-book slice of that history has not been. Examining the depth and breadth of the controversy extends knowledge of this truly strange period in American history. Hajdu has also performed a wonderful service by interviewing many of those artists and editors who worked in the field, some of them from the 1930’s and the beginnings of the boom period, before their stories were lost through failing memory or health. The stories they tell are at the same time informative, funny, and outrageous. It would have been a shame to have lost this oral history. For those readers who remember the period and the subversive fun of saving up dimes and buying the comics their folks did not want them to read as well as those readers who may be shocked to learn how widespread was the postwar fear and paranoia, The Ten-Cent Plague is an enjoyable read as well as an instructive one. Charles L. P. Silet

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 12 (February 15, 2008): 18. Entertainment Weekly, March 21, 2008, p. 62. The Humanist 68, no. 4 (July/August, 2008): 40-41. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 23 (December 1, 2007): 1230. Library Journal 133, no. 9 (May 15, 2008): 86. Mother Jones 33, no. 2 (March/April, 2008): 93.

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The New Yorker 84, no. 7 (March 31, 2008): 124-128. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 49 (December 10, 2007): 44. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 61 (March 14, 2008): W2. Washington Monthly 40, no. 4 (April, 2008): 54-56.

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TERROR AND CONSENT The Wars for the Twenty-first Century Author: Philip Bobbitt (1948) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 672 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Current affairs, history, law Bobbitt argues that the nature of terrorism is largely misunderstood because it is adapting to globalization and to the market orientation of the terrorists’ primary target, secular democracies The most stirring part of Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent is its discussion of the latter. Bobbitt reminds readers that government legitimized by the consent of the governed—all of them, not just those of a particular party, creed, gender, or race—is relatively new in human history and precious. It can exist only in nations that have constitutionally guaranteed human rights and the rule of law. However, in the twenty-first century, despite the triumph of democratic governments over fascism and communism in the wars of the previous century, consent is imperiled. Variously political analysis, historiography, outline for reform, and plea, this intriguing, provocative tome identifies the peril: a new form of terrorism that is global in its reach, technologically sophisticated, decentralized, indiscriminate, and capable of havoc. However, it is not just terrorist organizations that Bobbitt addresses. Terror itself is his worry. Accordingly, Bobbitt defines terrorism functionally: “use of violence in order to advance a political agenda by preventing persons from doing what they would otherwise lawfully do.” Terror is a threat from those to whom the free consent of a nation’s people is unimportant, or even anathema, because the terrorists derive their authority from some other source: for instance, god, ideology, or ethnicity. There is simultaneously the worrisome possibility that free, democratic societies, out of the need to protect themselves from the likes of al-Qaeda, might resort to terror. For this reason, Bobbitt says the great conflict of this age is not a war on terrorism, as the administration of George W. Bush termed it, but “Wars on Terror,” which he might just as well have called “Defense of Consent.” In this way of looking at it, terror includes more than violence or the threat of violence. It includes the disenfranchising of a group (such as women or atheists), restriction of rights (such as freedom of assembly), reduction of opportunity (by, for example, limiting education or access to the Internet), isolationism, and abnegation of legal due process. Terror is so deadly, Bobbitt argues, because it preys upon countries such as the United States and federations such as the European Union at a time when the internal and external nature of the state is changing. The developed nations of the twentieth century were “nation-states,” whose primary duty was to foster a national identity and the welfare of citizens as a whole; the nation-state was protectionist and

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maintained entitlement programs for its citizens, such as welfare, to promote equality. Now the nation-state is evolving into the “market state” because of the telecommunications revolution and the globalization of markets. Shifting away from the old entitlements and internal market protections, such as tariffs, the market state behaves more like a multinational corporation, relying less on regulations and laws and more on incentives in order to provide its citizens with the means for self improvement (economically, intellectually, or socially, for instance). It seems as if the famous appeal of President John F. Kennedy is to be reversed: Citizens should now ask what their country can do for them. The greater ease of travel and trade, the vastly increased access to information through the Internet and communications through such inventions as the cell phone, the diasporas of ethnic groups, and the decentralization of power that underpin the market state—in a term, globalization—also create vulnerabilities. Attack any of these, and the market state cannot ensure opportunities to its citizenry; attack or threaten to attack the citizens and they cannot avail themselves of the opportunities. Such is the strategy of al-Qaeda: to destroy the means and ends of consent. As alQaeda leader Osama bin Laden asserted in the mid-1990’s, any member of a nation of consent is responsible for the actions of the government and so is a legitimate target. The duty of the government is to foil this strategy and prevent attacks. Bobbitt recognizes, however, that it is not only terrorists that threaten the free exercise of consent and pursuit of opportunities. In one of his book’s most telling arguments, he points out that natural disasters—deadly hurricanes or earthquakes, for example, or a pandemic—have the same effect. The government of a market state must therefore equally prepare for such disasters and handle them with greater efficiency than was the case for Hurricane Katrina in 2005. (Bobbitt’s review of that debacle is scathing.) In both cases—preventing or responding to terrorism and preparing for natural disasters or restoring order after them—a government must not employ such draconian, exceptional emergency measures that it itself prevents its citizens from enjoying their human rights, in effect creating terror. This restraint is particularly difficult because terrorists may soon get their hands on weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)— nuclear, chemical, or biological. It is only a matter of time, Bobbitt darkly warns. Either a nuclear-armed state that aids terrorists, as Iran may become, or the black market will make WMDs available. Neither Bobbitt nor the many experts whom he cites doubt that, once acquired by terrorists, WMDs will be used against ordinary people. Compounding the problem is the new character of terrorism. Al-Qaeda has adopted many of the structural properties of multinational corporations. It is decentralized, franchising its violent operations to local affiliates; it exploits the networking capacities of the Internet and telecommunications; and regional commanders, al-

Philip Bobbitt taught at Oxford University and King’s College, was a counselor to the president of the United States and Senate, and advised on strategic planning at the National Security Council. He is the Herbert Wechsler Professor of Federal Jurisprudence and director of the Center for National Security at Columbia University.

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though adhering to a master strategy to establish a Muslim hegemony, have wide leeway in deploying forces to attack states of consent. It is elusive and flexible, and although by its very nature al-Qaeda has no fixed territory, Bobbitt considers it to be a “virtual state,” an evil shadow of the market states that it seeks to intimidate. Accordingly, to fight it, new tactics are needed. Bobbitt spends the first section of Terror and Consent considering needed basic innovations. For instance, military forces must not only defeat their enemy on the battlefield but protect the population from guerrilla reprisals, kidnapping, and suicide attacks. The Iraq War is his example of failed tactics: After a brilliant campaign to oust Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration bungled the occupation by committing too few troops to keep the peace, allowing nationalists to create an insurgency and an al-Qaeda affiliate to infiltrate. Iraq became a proving ground for terrorism, which threatens to stymie the creation of a government of consent. Bobbitt insists that military and police duties will have to overlap for free governments to protect their citizens, and the conception of “victory” will change. There will be no decisive event followed by peace. In fighting terrorism, victory is a process: the process of never losing. It will be a long process, too. Bobbitt believes that al-Qaeda is but a forerunner of more deadly and sophisticated terrorist networks. After his reelection in 1864, President Abraham Lincoln remarked, “It has long been a grave question whether any government, not too strong for the liberties of its people, can be strong enough to maintain its own existence, in great emergencies.” In Bobbitt’s analysis the answer yet hangs in the balance, and it is up to states of consent to decide it. That is his major theme, and the fundamental tool that protects a democracy is the rule of law. A widely experienced legal expert himself, he has great faith in the law and decries governments that slight, ignore, or twist either constitutional provisions or statutes. That does not mean, however, that Bobbitt wants to restrict governments’ activities by emphasizing civil liberties. On the contrary, he calls for the strengthening of security powers through well-made laws. Above all, he wants nations to wed law to strategy in combating terrorism. That means reforming constitutions to accord with security measures, clarifying intelligence-gathering powers, finding leaders who understand the full import of their obligation to protect citizens, and allocating power to branches of government. In addition, it requires engaging in alliances based on a set of international standards, something the United States has been reluctant to do. Bobbitt offers suggestions for reform. As he acknowledges, among them there is something for everyone to dislike, but as such they are starting points for debate. At the level of abstract policy he insists that extreme public danger excuses extreme methods—in other words, that ends can justify the means, including preemptive wars such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq. More particularly, he endorses the proposal that the United States ought to have an emergency constitution that, invoked for limited periods during national disasters, clarifies and expands the powers of the executive branch. Additionally, he recommends a broader isolation and quarantine statute, the use of a national identity card, the repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act that restricts use of military forces within the United States, the presidential authority to declare a national emergency, data mining (after judicial authorization), the preventive detention

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of suspected terrorists, a constitutional amendment to hasten the replacement of dead or disabled members of the House of Representatives, the revision of the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 to remove the Speaker of the House and president pro tempore of the Senate from the line of succession (they are currently second and third in line after the vice president), provisions for emergency succession for the Supreme Court, the restriction of information about dangerous diseases, a special federal court to try terrorist cases, and statutes protecting the assets of private companies that share information with the government about their customers. Moreover, Bobbitt calls on the United States to draw more on such nongovernmental sources of information, engage with other countries to reform the laws of war, and reconsider the nature of sovereignty. Terror and Consent is challenging to read. Bobbitt strives to lay out his ideas with precision, especially in legal matters, because, as he notes, how a problem is solved depends upon how it is framed. This effort entails use of legal and political-science terminology in extended definitions and distinctions that may try the patience of readers. Given the book’s basically earnest, practical-minded tone, Bobbitt’s occasional attempts at historiography (for instance, in adapting Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s theory of “antimonies”) seem to burden rather than clarify the discussion. His occasional bursts of sarcasm and outrage betray his deep worry about the state of the world. If challenging, Terror and Consent is yet rewarding for readers interested in grasping the terms of change in contemporary politics and war. It would be a mistake to read it as a prospectus for the twenty-first century. Certainly, beyond its purview lie important concerns that are sure to shape nations of consent and their response to war and terrorism, notably dwindling resources for an expanding human population and whether consumerism and market dynamics should be the foundation of global culture. Bobbitt makes only passing reference to such matters, but then he should not be expected to address everything. The book is long enough as it is. Rather, its value lies in stimulating rational debate and instilling both a sense of urgency and of opportunity. Roger Smith

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 16 (April 15, 2008): 11. The Economist 387 (April 5, 2008): 87. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 5 (March 1, 2008): 225-226. National Review 60, no. 9 (May 19, 2008): 50-52. New Statesman 137, no. 4902 (June 23, 2008): 54-56. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 19 (December 4, 2008): 15-18. The New York Times Book Review, April 13, 2008, p. 1. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 8 (February 25, 2008): 67-68. The Spectator 307 (May 24, 2008): 33-34. Sunday Times, June 1, 2008, p. 4. The Times Literary Supplement, July 25, 2008, pp. 8-9.

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THAT LITTLE SOMETHING Author: Charles Simic (1938) Publisher: Harcourt (Orlando, Fla.). 73 pp. $23.00 Type of work: Poetry An accomplished poet of the vaguely ominous moves closer to the dark heart of history and human behavior Whimsy, usually defined as “curious, quaint, or fanciful humor,” has a contract with oddity, and the “odd” has a way of flirting with the darker side of experience. One does not think of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) or Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia (1823) as dark works, and this is because their whimsy falls just short of embracing oddity too warmly. Alice is constantly stepping back from the darker aspects of the oddity forced on her at every turn. She walks out on the Hatter’s “Mad Tea-Party” at just the point where highjinks turn into mayhem: —the last time she saw them, they were putting the Dormouse into the teapot. “At any rate I’ll never go there again!” said Alice, as she picked her way through the wood. “It’s the stupidest tea-party I ever was in all my life!”

Charles Simic rarely gives his readers the choice to escape the darkness of his whimsy in his collection That Little Something. Rather than implicit, the darkness is explicit and no more avoidable than the owlish laughter that resonates long after his poems are read. That laughter is often silent, largely because his poetry does not invite a voiced reading. Without rhyme and often flat in diction, the metrical precision of his verse bites into the mind and holds the reader’s thinking on a tight leash. After leapfrogging from quaintness to terror, his poems usually leave readers thinking thoughts that they cannot always easily connect or explain to their deepest selves. In this collection, one of several eight-line poems describes this effect perfectly: Thoughts frightened of the light, Frightened of each other. They listen to a clock ticking. Like flock of sheep led to slaughter, The seconds keep a good pace, Stick together, don’t look back, All worried, as they go, What their shepherd may be thinking.

What are these “thoughts” that Simic forces on the reader? The first poem of this new collection, “Walking,” invites readers to take a prosaic stroll through the proverbial old neighborhood, a place that everyone knows intimately but where the speaker can “find nothing remotely familiar.” The “trees . . . the bus that passed this way . . .

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the greengrocers and hairdressers,” all the ordinary things and places he remembers cannot be found. Things become desperate when, despite his inability to find any of the things his memory tells him should be there, he realizes that he has “no return ticket/ To wherever it is I came from earlier this evening.” The whimsical absurdity produced by the misalignment of memory and experience gives Charles Simic, born in Belgrade, was way to the terrifying discovery that memory sixteen years old when his family deceived can actually cut one off from the exemigrated to the United States in 1954. perience of the present. One relies on the past He has published nineteen books of to flesh out the moment at hand. Robbed of poetry, won the Pulitzer Prize, and that past, one has nowhere to go—or to be. received a MacArthur Foundation This is the kind of primal anxiety Simic’s grant. Simic was appointed the fifteenth poetry brings into comic relief again and poet laureate of the United States in again. He makes readers grin, almost fever2007. ishly, at their helplessness. Often the sensa tion is dreamlike, a nightmare brought under control with wit and humor. Phantasmagorical images abound. In “The Elevator Is Out of Order,” a “monkey dressed in baby clothes” and an “old man, with a face powdered white” frighten a protagonist “frazzled and descending in a hurry” down the staircase of what seems to be the proverbial house of life. When the elevator is not working, one has to keep one’s eyes open in the stairwell, and suppressed memories rise up from nowhere. If the past is both elusive and overpowering, the future is no less maddening. The future is not dependent on memory, but it teases one into thinking that it is moored in the past. In the poem “Clouds,” which sails by in three perfectly balanced stanzas— very much like a series of clouds in a quiet sky—the future seems at first to be riding the crest of Nature’s being: “To those worried about the future,/ You bring tidings,/ Shapes that may recall things/ Without ever shedding/ Their troubling ambiguity.” Even Nature seems to be playing games: “Like a troupe of illusionists/ Traveling in circus wagons/ You play hide-and-seek with the light/ In country fairgrounds/ Until overtaken by the night.” Although above and beyond the self, the clouds fall into the same darkness that Simic’s whimsy cannot avoid. They do not belong to themselves. Nature’s voice is no more independent than the bemused speech of the bracketed poet: “Taking a break from prophecy/ Over small prairie towns/ In company of dark trees,/ Courthouse statues, crickets,/ And other amateur ventriloquists.” The odd marriage between past and future can propel one into illusions about the present. Here is the first stanza of “Crickets”: “Blessed are those for whom/ Time doesn’t run/ Into dark of night,/ But drags its feet . . . ” Those who allow themselves a prolonged stasis, who give in to the moment, who embrace the stationary, and who give up “walking,” “staircases,” and fleeting “clouds” in the sky are “blessed”—for the moment. They think they can es-

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cape the “dark of night” and have wrestled “Time” to a halt. Simic puns on the illusory self-deception of the mind when it believes in the possibility of diverting “Time” from its relentless progression: “Time . . . drags its feet.” The metrical feet, indeed, drag their accents in the second stanza: “A moment’s captive,/ Like a lone sail/ At sunset/ Suspended on the bay . . . ” Simic’s imagery has been compared to Edward Hopper’s bleak and lonely depictions of American rooms and offices. This stanza’s seascape recalls Hopper’s early paintings of sailboats etched against linear shores and monochromatic blue skies. Note that the “moment” is not captured (by poet, painter, or reader) but rather the moment has captured the viewer into believing in a form of liberation from Time’s progress, which is a kind of imprisonment, a loneliness and isolation approaching extinction (“lone sail . . . sunset . . . suspended”). The last stanza ends in muted, sardonic laughter: “A few gulls in the sky/ Keeping it company,/ And closer to home,/ Crickets, crickets, crickets.” The gulls keep the illusion of fleeting “company,” but the relentless and monotonous chirping of the crickets is the dominating music for those who have chosen the false blessing of detachment. There is no way out from under the “darkness” that closes in on every human experience. The endless dialectic between imagination and reality, however, precludes the “darkness” from having the last word. Simic’s boyhood in postwar Yugoslavia was not a carefree experience, to say the least. It toughened him to the point that he acquired what can be called a muscular anxiety, a tolerance for contradiction and alienation, an acceptance of history’s bad faith. In the poem “House of Cards,” Simic recalls the unsettling everyday reality of his family’s life in a police state. The title is ironic. It underscores the fragility and vulnerability of the family’s home, while at the same time it invokes the solace provided by a family game of cards. He remembers the “shut lips of my mother” and the “held breaths” of the family “as we sat at a dining room table.” The mother deals out the cards, and as they wait “for them to fall . . . the sound of boots in the street” makes them all “still for a moment.” The last stanza emphasizes the terror and hopelessness of the moment. Even Nature seems to have turned her back: “There’s no more to tell./ The door is locked,/ And in one red-tinted window,/ A single tree in the yard,/ Leafless and misshapen.” What is astonishing about this poem is its first two lines: “I miss you winter evenings/ With your dim lights . . . ” One takes Simic at his word. He does “miss” the closeness of that family scene despite the terror that provides its context in time and memory. Memory makes that moment precious. It may be whimsical to think of it as a moment one would want to live again, but to imagine a life without a moment like it is to give up the reality of life itself. Simic has enlarged his whimsical worldview into a wide lens that collapses history, European and American sensibilities, humor and tragedy, into a panorama on a kitchen table. He can bring together different worlds without a shattering collision; often he seems to suggest a consanguinity of emotions and feelings where most would turn away in confusion, distrust, fear, or boredom. He does it by insisting on the relevance of the ordinary. Indeed, one could argue that he establishes the metaphysical authority of the ordinary. Without the ordinary, the extraordinary could not exist.

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“The Late Game” records what happens when the tension of a prolonged baseball game dissolves into the physical demands of fatigue, hunger, lust, and urination. Ironically, it is not the players who succumb to these ordinary reminders of the body’s needs. Instead, the fans, mere observers of the sport, are the impeded agents. A waiter carrying “burgers and fries” is described as “sleepwalking” as he takes the food out of the restaurant and brings it to the “small field across the road” where “the baseball game . . . has gone past midnight . . . because the score is tied/ And now someone’s hungry.” In the poem’s last stanza, the speaker imagines what must be happening “In the near-empty bleachers,/ Or out in the back/ Where couples make out in the bushes/ Young boys smoke reefers,/ And take long pees side by side.” The ordinary game of life overwhelms the unusually prolonged game of baseball. The poem’s title, “The Late Game,” resonates strangely once the poem is read to the last line. However ominous the tone and imagery in Simic’s poems, they are firmly rooted in aesthetic values. There is a trade-off between the overpowering anxieties of life and the equally demanding but sustaining laws of poetic order. The metrical control is matched by subtlety in the shading of light and colors. Images, often prosaic or banal, are carefully arranged and distributed as if they were parts of a painterly composition. Yes, most of Simic’s “paintings” recall the detached realism of Hopper, but Simic is also capable of reaching toward brighter and more vivid effects for purposes of ironic contrast. A good example is “Waiting for the Sun to Set.” The title itself plays with an image—sunset—that has strong associations with beauty in Nature and is therefore poised and ready to fulfill an aesthetic function in the poem. Note that the speaker is “waiting.” The distance between the beauty of the moment and the speaker’s mindset is the measure of Simic’s thematic distance from the very aesthetic statement that he is intent on making. In the first stanza “palm trees . . . white villas . . . white hotels fronting the beach and the sea” all seem out of tune with the speaker’s mood and mental state. The entire scene seems “most improbable” to him. All the luxuries of the scene—the laziness of the afternoon, the “cane rocking chair” in which he is comfortably ensconced on a “small secluded veranda” that is overrun “with exotic flowers”—are foreign to his nature, sensibility, memory, and experience. The mariner of troubled seas (a skeptical soul with a traumatic childhood), Simic is tossed up on the beach of the Lotus Eaters. It is not his scene. He does not even “know the names” of the flowers: “Raised as I was by parents/ Who kept the curtains drawn,/ The lights low, the stove unlit.” However, just when the darkness seems to have taken over and Simic’s ironic deflation is about to eclipse the beauty of the sunset with the dark memories of his youth, the “waiting” of the poem’s title is redeemed. The speaker cannot remove himself from the scene; he cannot stop the sun from setting. He cannot deny the splendor about him any more than he can erase the memories of the past. So he is left with a guarded perception, a vision that remains true to his nature but permits itself the sublimation of art. In this case, the art seems to derive from images associated with Matisse. After the drawn curtains and lowered lights of his par-

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ents’ home, Simic’s speaker is left “wary as they’d be/ At first seeing oranges in a tree,/ Women running bare breasted/ Over pink sands in a blue dusk.” Peter Brier

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 13 (March 1, 2008): 44. Library Journal 133, no. 3 (February 15, 2008): 108. The New York Times Book Review, May 18, 2008, p. 22. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 11 (March 17, 2008): 51. World Literature Today 82, no. 6 (November/December, 2008): 73.

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THEODOR W. ADORNO One Last Genius Author: Detlev Claussen (1948) First published: Theodor W. Adorno: Ein leztes Genie, 2003, in Germany Translated from the German by Rodney Livingstone Publisher: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass.). Illustrated. 440 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Biography, philosophy Time: 1903-1969 Locale: Frankfurt, Germany; Oxford, England; New York City; Los Angeles A student of Adorno at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in the 1960’s, Claussen has written a sweeping survey of Adorno’s career and valuable accounts of many of Adorno’s associates Principal personages: Theodor Adorno, a sociologist and music theorist prominent in the Frankfurt School Walter Benjamin, a critic who died trying to escape from Nazi Germany Max Horkheimer, a sociologist who in 1930 became the director of the Institute for Social Research Siegfried Kracauer, an early mentor of Adorno with whom he read Immanuel Kant György Lukács, the author of influential Marxist studies Jürgen Habermas, a student of Adorno at the Frankfurt School in the 1960’s Ernst Bloch, an early associate who clung to Soviet communism

Detlev Claussen has designed the biography Theodor W. Adorno so that each chapter stands on its own, and he views Theodor Adorno’s work as a “palimpsest” of overlapping ideas. He begins his account of Adorno’s life and work by immediately introducing the name of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, an “exemplary genius” to whom he compares Adorno, the One Last Genius of the subtitle. The precocious Adorno was born on September 11, 1903, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His father, Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund, was a prosperous wine merchant, and his mother, Maria Barbara, born Calvelli-Adorno, was a talented musician. His father was an assimilated Jew, and his mother was a Catholic. In 1933 Adorno was expelled by the Nazis. Adorno’s comfortable bourgeois childhood was spent on the Frankfurt street known as Schöne Aussicht (beautiful prospect). In his teens, Adorno became close to

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Siegfried Kracauer, fourteen years his senior and from a lower-middle-class background Detlev Claussen teaches social theory, that, Claussen surmises, must have “discon- culture, and sociology at the University certed” the “adored prodigy” Adorno. Claussen of Hanover in Germany. Rodney stresses the importance for Adorno’s early Livingstone has translated books by years of the poet Heinrich Heine, who as a Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and successful Jew represented a “social meta- Max Weber, among others. phor” for the aspiring Jewish middle classes but whose memory was desecrated by the Nazis. The main themes of Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1972), Adorno’s major work, written with Max Horkheimer, are foreshadowed in Heine, Claussen says, referring to “the idea of the inexorable advance of a modern, enlightened culture that liberates self-destructive forces.” Felix Weil, born in 1898, was to play an important role in the lives of both Adorno and Horkheimer. He was heir to millions from his family’s huge trade in grain, and in 1918 he joined the short-lived Workers and Soldiers Council in Frankfurt. This experience eventually led him to financing in 1923 the Institute for Social Research, “the product of the spirit of practical socialism” and the professional home for many years of Adorno and the other Critical Theorists, especially Horkheimer, who became its director in 1930. The ideology of the Institute for Social Research soon became clear with the declaration of the First Marxist Work Week, an event that brought the Hungarian aristocrat György Lukács into prominence. Adorno and Kracauer had already read Lukács’s early Die Théorie des Romans (1920; The Theory of the Novel, 1971), an indictment of science for its influence on thought that was followed in 1923 by Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness, 1971), an idealizing version of communism. Adorno earned a doctorate from Frankfurt University in 1924, and in 1925 he went to Vienna to study musical composition with Alban Berg, an admirer of the brilliant composer Arnold Schoenberg. The brief sojourn in Vienna did not work out well for the immature Adorno, but it proved a turning point in his life, and it was at this time that he met Lukács. Lukács’s influence can be seen in Adorno’s Habilitationsschrift (dissertation) in 1931 on Søren Kierkegaard, in which he rejects idealism as the prime bourgeois ideology, a theme that was to appear repeatedly in Negative Dialektik (1966; Negative Dialectics, 1973) and other works. The failure of the bourgeois class to change the world made social critics of Adorno, Kracauer, and Lukács, as well as of Adorno’s new friend Walter Benjamin, and for them “Marxism” meant the exhaustion of bourgeois society. It was a nervous Marxism, however, for, as Claussen notes of Benjamin, he closer he came to orthodox communism, the more he felt repelled by what it meant in practice. After three years in New York, Adorno became Thomas Mann’s neighbor in Los Angeles, and Claussen devotes a whole chapter to Adorno’s contribution to the composition of Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus (1947; Doctor Faustus, 1948), the story of a composer, Adrian Leverkün, whose musical inventions “in reality” belong to Schoen-

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berg. The relationship, however, was not without some clash of egos, with Mann’s daughter, Erika Mann, faulting Adorno for his account in 1962 of their working routines. Mann and Adorno both knew that Doctor Faustus would be “the last bourgeois novel in the German tradition,” as Claussen calls it. Adorno thus speaks of his being “non-identical,” a younger man than Mann and a different one. He was different in a further sense, for in 1942 he had dropped the surname Wiesengrund and become simply Theodor Adorno. Claussen tells the stories of two of Adorno’s friends in his chapter on “Transitions.” Hanns Eisler and Adorno collaborated in 1944 on Komposition für den Film (Composing for the Films, 1947), but the original edition caused a great stir when it was published a year after Adorno’s death in 1969. It had been published in 1947 under Eisler’s name alone, a subterfuge necessitated by the radical political activities of Eisler’s brother, Gerhart, and Adorno’s desire to avoid being smeared by the notoriety. Adorno and Eisler were friends of long standing, but the Cold War split them, with Eisler living in the German Democratic Republic and Adorno returning to the Federal Republic. Eisler, like the dramatist Bertolt Brecht and the Marxist critic Ernst Bloch, had been careful, however, to spend the Stalinist period in the United States. Another close California associate of Adorno was film director Fritz Lang, whom he met in Hollywood and who remained a good friend until Adorno’s death. Lang helped Brecht immensely, not least by financing his escape from Vladivostok to California in 1941, but Lang ran into financial problems and returned to West Germany. Later, in the 1960’s, European cinema theorists took up his work in publications such as Cahiers du cinema and the Frankfurt Filmstudio. When Horkheimer left New York to live in California, the Institute for Social Research, now housed at Columbia University, was taken over by Paul F. Lazarsfeld, an ambitious Viennese who had established himself as director of the Princeton Radio Research Project. In that capacity, he hired Adorno as music director, a job unsuited to a theorist with no background in empirical research. One of Adorno’s later conclusions about music insisted that the distinction between serious music and light was the result of America’s capitalist division of labor, an observation that reveals something about the depth of Adorno’s grasp of American music culture. After his return to Frankfurt, in 1953 Adorno published “Perennial Fashion—Jazz,” an account of jazz as obsolete. In the chapter on the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment, jazz is treated as one of the running sores of advanced capitalism. Claussen observes, “Again and again Adorno’s critique of jazz establishes a far from convincing linkage of jazz and sadomasochism, utility music and castration.” Adorno stayed in the United States, mostly in California, from 1938 till 1949, but even after returning to Frankfurt he made periodic trips to Los Angeles, partly to keep his American passport. He never again returned to the United States after 1953. The volume of wide-ranging essays titled Prismen (Prisms, 1967), published in 1955 soon after his return to Frankfurt, marked the beginnings of Critical Theory. Previously restrained in his political commentary except when excoriating Soviet cultural policies, Adorno speaks out bluntly in his essays in Prisms. He attacks directly the “politicization of intellectuals” encouraged by Karl Mannheim in his advancement of a so-

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ciology of knowledge, a direct descendant of the bourgeois sociology of such thinkers as Max Weber. He saw in Germany the revival—the reification—of a culture presenting itself as timeless, and he soon settled into a role as “the critic of a schizoid restoration of culture.” Adorno’s relationship with Horkheimer was long and fruitful for both men, with Adorno following Horkheimer to New York in 1938. The great achievement of their California period was Dialectic of Enlightenment. Back in Frankfurt in 1956, they contemplated a new version of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Manifestder Kommunistischen Partei (1848; The Communist Manifesto, 1850) that would address the issues of their times. Horkheimer was disturbed by the collectivization of agriculture just undertaken in China, fearing a repeat of the Soviet collectivization of the 1930’s. He was especially shocked by the reports of twenty million victims of Chinese industrialization, and his political awareness exceeded Adorno’s. Horkheimer had been alert to the viciousness of Stalinism from early on. He told Benjamin in 1942 that the degradation of traditional Marxism into the commodity fetishism of the Stalin era was an aspect of authoritarian states like fascism and communism. During the 1950’s Adorno stayed in Frankfurt, minding the Institute for Social Research and becoming a public figure, while Horkheimer commuted occasionally to teach at the University of Chicago. Indeed, he broke mildly with Adorno on the latter’s indictment of the Culture Industry, opining that it would be best to retain America’s achievements. When Adorno sneered at television programs, Horkheimer responded that it was the most progressive workers who were buying television sets. In their relationship, Horkheimer continued to favor the nontheoretical side of radical theory as opposed to Adorno’s determined updating of theory. After the war, back in Frankfurt, Adorno revived several old relationships, especially with Bloch and Kracauer. Bloch had alienated Adorno with his defense of the Moscow trials, but he was cautious enough to escape to the United States through Prague. Bloch remained, along with Brecht and Eisler, an unrepentant champion of Soviet communism. Adorno could not accept Bloch’s optimism. He sharply criticized Bloch’s Erbschaft dieser Zeit (1935; Heritage of Our Times, 1991) on its publication, and the controversy over it was resumed in the 1960’s, although Adorno continued to praise Bloch’s first book, Geist der Utopie (1918; Spirit of Utopia, 1970). Adorno’s relationship with Kracauer was a different story. Adorno hoped to arrange Kracauer’s assimilation back into German intellectual currents by convincing Suhrcamp to publish his volume of essays Das Ornament der Masse (The Mass Ornament, 1991) in 1963. Adorno’s 1964 essay on Kracauer, “The Curious Realist,” in which Claussen says he “drip-fed the memory of inextinguishable mass atrocities,” resonated with the many discussions held by the exiled intellectuals of the prewar period. In addition, Kracauer’s perceptive 1930 study of white-collar workers, Die Angestellten (The Salaried Masses, 1998) was reissued in 1959. Nevertheless, despite the collaboration involved in these publishing successes, Kracauer and Adorno grew apart in their thinking before Kracauer’s death in 1966. Adorno’s early years of teaching at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt must have been satisfying, because he enjoyed the respect of his students and a grow-

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ing public reputation. In 1957 his assistant, Jürgen Habermas, debuted as a political theorist with a “brilliant” essay on “The Philosophical Discussion Around Marx and Marxism,” but he was soon forced out of the Institute for Social Research by Horkheimer. Horkheimer’s wife, however, once remarked that “Teddie (Adorno) is the most monstrous narcissist to be found in either the Old World or the New,” and Claussen observes that in 1996 “Adorno was widely regarded as an academically obsolete elitist aesthete from an indeterminate epoch lying in the remote bourgeois past.” For the last two years of his life, Adorno struggled to establish good relations with Herbert Marcuse, whose student followers preached hope for the future. The protest movement in Frankfurt peaked in the spring of 1969, and when the students occupied Frankfurt University Adorno and his colleagues could only call on the police for support. Horkheimer denied that these conflicts hastened Adorno’s death, but in 1969, he escaped to the Hotel Bristol in Zermatt, Switzerland, and there he died on August 6. Frank Day

Review Sources Library Journal 133, no. 4 (March 1, 2008): 84-85. London Review of Books 30, no. 12 (June 19, 2008): 9-10. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 6 (February 11, 2008): 64. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 91 (April 18, 2008): W5.

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THERE A PETAL SILENTLY FALLS Three Stories Author: Ch’oe Yun (1953) First published: Chogi sori opsi hanjom kkonnip i chigo, 1992, in South Korea Translated from the Korean by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton Publisher: Columbia University Press (New York). 192 pp. $24.50 Type of work: Short fiction Time: 1980 to the present Locale: South Korea Three lyrical stories by one of South Korea’s most respected writers Ch’oe Yun is a professor of French literature at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea, where she was born and where she studied Korean language and literature. After graduation, she studied in France where she received a doctorate. Her first publications were critical essays on literature, but in 1988, her first fiction, a novella entitled There a Petal Silently Falls, appeared. Since then, she has won a number of awards. Although her first story in this collection of three depicts the aftereffects of the 1980 Kwangju massacre, she denies that she is an ideological writer, arguing that all literary works, no matter how neutral, have a message. She also denies that her work is experimental, as often suggested by critics. She says that to depict a constantly changing reality one must use a unique language and form because you cannot change the world with conventional methods and language. Because writing is a struggle to transcend time, she cherishes her novella There a Petal Silently Falls more than any of her other works for its timelessness and universality. The story focuses on a fifteen-year-old girl whose brother, a victim of the repressive military government, has disappeared and whose mother has been killed in the 1980 Kwangju massacre. The riots took place a few months after a military coup, when students and labor activists engaged in a series of nationwide demonstrations, insisting on democratic elections and an end to martial law. Paratrooper units of Korea’s Special Forces Command were ordered into the city of Kwangju, killing a number of people; the government says less than two hundred; the survivors say nearly two thousand, claiming that the military burned many bodies and dumped the rest into the sea. Influenced by her study of the critic Mikhail Bakhtin, Ch’oe Yun creates a story of several voices in polyphonic counterpoint told from three viewpoints: the young girl who has been driven half mad by her losses; a man who takes her in and abuses her; and a small group of her brother’s friends who search for her. The story begins with a cautionary warning about a young girl haunting the

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gravesites in the city who may follow you (especially if you are a young man in your twenties), crying, “Brother.” The story then moves to a man who is followed by the girl. Unable to get rid of her, he takes her in and has sex with her, although she remains silent. The story shifts to the voice of the girl, as she recalls her mother lying in the street, shot, and a black curtain falling over her mind. The voice of the girl reflects her loss of contact with reality and her increasing hallucinations. She recalls the previous year, when two men came to her house and told her mother something about her brother that made her mother scream and cry. The story shifts to the point of view of some of her brother’s friends who are searching for her, describing how she turns up in Okp’o and is made an errand girl. When the perspective shifts back to the girl again, she is not sure whether she is experiencing reality or a dream, as she finds refuge in a cave where she has to fight off a horde of beetles as big as toads. She walks for days in the mountains until she is taken in by a mute who feeds her, washes her clothes, and has sex with her, which she describes as a bluebird entering between her legs. However, once again, she cannot be sure if this happened or it if was an illusion. In one crucial scene, she describes being on a train and seeing the face of a woman in the window, which she eventually recognizes as her own. The face in the glass becomes that of a monster that says it is going to open up her skull and remove the black curtain, until she shatters the window with her head. She now accepts the fact that she has created the black curtain to cover up everything that happened on the day her mother was killed. In the penultimate section of the story, the girl has a hallucinatory conversation with her brother, telling him what happened on the day of her mother’s death. She confesses her mother did not want her to come with her, but that she insisted and ran after her. She feels guilty that when her mother is shot, the girl must step on her mother’s arm to free her hand, feeling the slippery blood under her feet. She laments that she can never return to that day when she committed the terrible crime of stamping on her mother’s arm so she could get away and live, feeling she has no place to go now but to the grave with her brother. The story ends with the point of view of the young men who continue their search for the girl. A year after the death of the brother, they see a photo of the girl that a man has put in the paper, and they go to talk to him, recognizing a similarity to the girl’s brother. They are not sure why they have engaged in this search—to comfort their lost friend that they had found her, to pacify the soul of her departed mother, or to fulfill their sense of obligation. Maybe, they think, they were only indulging in cheap humanitarianism. The second story in the collection, “Whisper Yet,” is also a polyphonic piece, this time alternating back and forth in time as a mother talks with her young daughter and

Ch’oe Yun is professor of French literature at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea. She received the 1992 Tongin Literature Prize and the 1994 Yi San Literature Prize. Her works have also been translated into French and Spanish.

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remembers her childhood, especially her relationship with a farmhand, Ajaebi, a former prisoner of war and a fugitive from the South Korean government, who lived with her family. When her father, who left North Korea because he hated communism, becomes ill, Ajaebi nurses him. The two men become like brothers, practically inseparable, often whispering together. When the young woman goes home from school for the summer, Ajaebi gives her a folded slip of paper, asking that she deliver it to a house. Before depositing the message she reads its one line—“No time for the moon to rise on the water of the stream.” In her internal monologue to her child, the woman warns her it is a war out there and says she wants her to become a poet who turns ugly words into beautiful ones. She recalls the notebooks that Ajaebi left after his death, filled with lines of poetry. In a ten-year period, she delivered one-line poems to five different houses for Ajaebi, learning that the recipients were his wife and his young son, from whom he has been separated because he faces a death sentence from the Korean government. The story ends with the mother’s brief internal monologue to her daughter, saying she has much to whisper to her, asking what kind of story she should tell, a story of tears, of laughter, of days gone by, of days yet to come—a story like she told her unborn child when the two were one body. The third story, “The Thirteen-Scent Flower,” has a different tone. Although it retains some lyrical beauty, it changes at the end into a satire on bureaucrats and academics who try to commercially appropriate beauty. The story begins with a young man, aged twenty, who comes to Seoul to work as a truck driver. However, his dream is to live in the Arctic. Each evening he lies in bed and looks at a map on his wall and dreams of walking the Arctic wastes by himself. He names himself Bye, which he says means “a man who walks the Arctic flats.” A young girl, aged sixteen, is introduced hiding by the side of the road. She is from a remote mountain village; her parents are dead, she has no siblings, and she was raised by her grandmother, who named her Green Hands because she did such good work producing crops in stony ground. Death seems to her to be a nymph hovering to solve her problems. When she sees a truck with only one headlight coming toward her, she starts to run out in front of it when it sputters to a stop. In typical fairy-tale inevitability, the driver is Bye, and the young girl rides away with him. The two fall in love and decide to seek out a desert island where they can live. After driving for several months, they arrive at Green Hand’s ancestral home. In fairy-tale fashion when they arrive, the grandmother, who has waited for the girl’s return so she could die, asks that they plant some seeds on her grave. In the coldest part of the winter, a flower grows from the seeds. After discovering that the flower, which they name wind chrysanthemum, prefers dark, cold earth, they devise a propeller that simulates an Arctic wind, making the flower give off powerfully strong scents. Unable to sell the flowers, they decide to leave one with each family in the village. As a result of the flower’s magical scent, several people move to Land’s End, where the young couple lives. The story continues in the fairy-tale mode, as people come from far and wide to smell the scent of the wind chrysanthemums. A forty-two-year-old man named Ko

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comes to study the plant, saying he suffers from low-altitude sickness and that, like the wind chrysanthemums, he needs cold air and strong mountain winds to stay alive. With the arrival of Ko, who seems to be the only person in the world who has low-altitude sickness, the story shifts to the comic and the satiric. The wind chrysanthemum becomes a craze; a man writes a poem about it, which is then made into a song that everyone sings. Reporters and photographers come to Land’s End. Horticultural specialists offer Bye and Green Hands money for rights to cultivate the wind chrysanthemums. People come to buy the essence of the flower’s scent for perfume. Ko decides to write a history of Bye and Green Hands’s cultivation of the flower, titled Everything You Wanted to Know About the Wind Chrysanthemum. Pharmaceutical experts come to procure the flower’s scents, which they say have healing properties, for alimentary and urinary ailments. Plans are even made for a theme park near Land’s End. Horticulturalists battle over rights to give the flower a Latin name. Inevitably, a reaction sets in and articles appear in magazines warning that if you smell the flowers your hair will fall out. As if they know that the wind chrysanthemums only exist in the realm of fairy tale, Bye and Green Hands drive to the seashore and walk into the waves. Ch’oe Yun is a major new Asian fiction writer whose stories have the formal delicacy of fairy tale and legend, carefully controlled, perhaps as a result of her academic training. Her fabulistic formality is beautifully sustained by her translators. Charles E. May

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 18 (May 15, 2008): 22. Publishers Weekly 225, no. 13 (March 31, 2008): 38.

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THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING Death and the American Civil War Author: Drew Gilpin Faust (1947) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 346 pp. $27.95 Type of work: History Time: 1861-1865 Locale: The United States An examination of how the unprecedented carnage caused by the Civil War changed the American perceptions of death and dying Principal personages: Walt Whitman, an American poet who dedicated himself to visiting the wounded and dying in Civil War hospitals Ambrose Bierce, an American writer who served in the Civil War and wrote about his experience Clara Barton, an American nursing pioneer who devoted herself to identifying the Civil War dead Edmund B. Whitman, assigned to locate and identify Union dead after the war Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, the author of The Gates Ajar, a best-selling nineteenth century novel

In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust demonstrates how the unprecedented carnage, both military and civilian, caused by the Civil War forever changed American assumptions about death and dying, and how the nation and its people struggled to come to terms with death on an unimaginable scale. As Faust explains, “Death transformed the American nation as well as the hundreds of thousands of individuals directly affected by loss.” The war created a veritable “republic of suffering,” in the words that Frederick Law Olmsted chose to describe the wounded and dying arriving at Union hospital ships on the Virginia Peninsula. Her chapter titles—“Dying,” “Killing,” “Burying,” “Naming,” “Realizing,” “Believing and Doubting,” “Accounting,” “Numbering,” and “Surviving”—succinctly yet vividly portray the United States’ ordeal and transformation during and after the war as the country struggled to invent new ways of dealing with the onslaught of death. The scope of death caused by the Civil War is almost incomprehensible today. Between 1861 and 1865, an estimated 620,000 soldiers died, a number approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Mexican War, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. The rate of death was six times that of World War II, about 2 percent of the population, which would total six million dead in a war today. Confederates died at a rate three times that of Union soldiers; in fact, one in five Southern men of military

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age died in the war and more than fifty thousand civilians also perished. This unprecedented loss of life was neither expected nor prepared for as the war began. The Union army assumed it would make short work of the rebels, and it made no provisions to deal with the carnage that was to ensue. Until 1864 the Union army did not even have an ambulance service. More than two weeks after the battle at Antietam, a horrifying number of corpses remained unburied on the battlefield, stacked in rows a thousand long. Fol lowing the battle at Gettysburg, more than six million tons of animal and human bodies were left for disposal. There was no provision for burying the dead, a job which usually fell to the victorious army, which often had neither the will nor time to take care of its own dead, let alone those of the enemy. The Union and Confederate armies did not have a process in place for burying their dead, and they had no procedure for identifying the bodies or informing the families of deceased soldiers. There were no dog tags or any other official means of identification, no procedure for counting the dead, and no national cemeteries in which to bury them. Only officers had access to coffins; at best, enlisted men might be wrapped in a blanket before being buried in a mass grave, and others were left where they fell. Chaotic record keeping led to reports of deaths of soldiers who were still alive. Nurses and hospital volunteers did their best to contact family whenever possible, but often family members traveled to battlefields in search of news of their loved ones. The poet Walt Whitman regularly visited hospitals to write letters for wounded soldiers to their families, and he made every effort to inform them when their son, husband, father, or brother had died. Nursing pioneer Clara Barton devoted her time after the war to identifying the war dead as well. In the mid-nineteenth century, people generally died at home, surrounded by family members and comforting rituals. It was thought that the way one met death indicated one’s state of readiness to meet God and was crucial to one’s successful passage into Heaven. In this so-called good death, the dying person was expected not only to express an awareness of his impending fate and acceptance of it but also to state his belief in God and salvation. These last words were considered critical to achieving the good death. The war, however, forced Americans to redefine a good death, since their fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers were dying in unimaginably horrible ways, alone and far from home. In order to reassure their family that they met a good death, many soldiers wrote letters that they carried with them, assuring their families that they were at one with God and prepared to meet their fate should the occasion arise. The letters written to families by nurses, volunteers, and fellow soldiers describing the deceased’s last moments have an eerie similarity, as if they were completing a mental checklist of the good-death requirements.

Drew Gilpin Faust earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in American civilization at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2001, she became the founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Faust was appointed president of Harvard in 2007 following controversy regarding then-President Lawrence H. Summers. She is an eminent scholar of the Civil War and the antebellum South.

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With pressure from grieving mothers, wives, and sisters, who could not bear not knowing how their loved ones faced death, the government ultimately took up the task of identifying and caring for the remains of its war dead. After the war the federal government gathered the Union dead from Southern battlefields and buried the bodies in new federally funded national cemeteries. It took six years to complete this job, and, at its conclusion in 1871, 303,536 Union soldiers, nearly half of whom were never identified, had been buried at a cost of four million dollars. This massive effort of identifying and burying the war dead created a federal bureaucracy that forever changed the relationship between the individual citizen and the government, and, contends Faust, it helped to create our modern American state. This federal program, however, covered only Union soldiers, not the Confederate dead, and while Union soldiers were returned from Southern battlefields and buried in the national cemeteries, the Confederate bodies were left where they fell, often still unburied. Southern women took up the cause of taking care of their deceased soldiers, raising funds to gather up and bury their dead in private cemeteries. The resentment caused by the government’s treatment of Southern casualties helped to foster the strong feelings of separatism that linger in the South to this day and to promote the cult of the Lost Cause. The war’s overwhelming death counts also caused a crisis of faith in this country. In a world that allowed such terrible, often anonymous deaths, God’s benevolence was questioned, and a search for meaning ensued, including new ideas of heaven and earth. Profound spiritual and intellectual questions were raised, some of which previewed modernist disillusionment. Some writers, such as Ambrose Bierce, a soldier himself, wrote of his war experiences in an unromanticized manner, rejecting an idealistic view of the war. At the opposite extreme, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, in The Gate Ajar (1868), the second-best-selling book of the nineteenth century after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), reimagined heaven not as a kingdom of winged angels playing harps but rather as a place similar to home, where families were brought together again, husband and wives were reunited, and Abraham Lincoln blessed fallen soldiers, bringing comfort to those who had lost loved ones in the war. As Faust notes, “Men and women approach death in ways shaped by history, by culture, by conditions that vary over time and across space. Even though ‘we all have our dead,’ and even though we all die, we do so differently from generation to generation and from place to place.” Before the war, death was an accepted part of life, accompanied by familiar rites and traditions, but with death now happening to young, healthy men, it took on a whole new meaning. Although Americans of the era may have been culturally prepared to die, they were not prepared to kill. They were not morally ready to take the lives of their fellow Americans, and many found killing more difficult than dying. Snipers, who caused the majority of deaths during the war, were considered immoral by their fellow soldiers because they did not face their victims. Only by being absolutely certain of the rightness of their cause could the young men bring themselves to take a human life. This Republic of Suffering is a masterful study of American history and culture, revealing not only fascinating historical details on nearly every page but also new in-

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sights into the American psyche. As absorbing as an engrossing novel, This Republic of Suffering captivates and excites the reader at every turn. Examining the Civil War through the lens of death provides a unique and revealing perspective on American culture. As Faust explains: Americans had to identify—find, invent, create—the means and mechanisms to manage more than half a million dead: their deaths, their bodies, and their loss. How they accomplished this task reshaped their individual lives—and deaths—at the same time that it redefined their nation and their culture. The work of death was Civil War America’s most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.

Mary Virginia Davis

Review Sources America 198, no. 16 (May 12, 2008): 32-34. American Historical Review 113, no. 4 (October, 2008): 1108-1110. American History 43, no. 2 (June, 2008): 67. American Scholar 77, no. 1 (Winter, 2008): 120-123. The Christian Century 125, no. 13 (July 1, 2008): 40-41. Journal of American History 95, no. 3 (December, 2008): 808-809. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 20 (October 15, 2007): 1083. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 40 (October 8, 2007): 45-46. The Times Literary Supplement, July 25, 2008, p. 7. The Wilson Quarterly 32, no. 1 (Winter, 2008): 98-99.

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TRAFFIC Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) Author: Tom Vanderbilt (1968) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 402 pp. $24.95 Type of work: History, sociology, technology, psychology Vanderbilt draws upon wide-ranging research to describe the complexity of traffic, the technology and infrastructure making it possible, and the often ill-advised behavior of drivers It just may be as most drivers, at some point or other, come to suspect: Motor vehicle traffic is part miracle, part mass psychosis, and, if a person is to survive, a matter of oblivion to statistics. While Tom Vanderbilt’s marvelous exposé, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), does not exactly confirm that dark surmise, it does consider why perfectly agreeable, well-socialized, intelligent people undergo a transformation behind the steering wheel and behave in ways contrary to their own interests and safety. Partly that arises from advances in technology and infrastructure supporting ground transportation. As Vanderbilt shows, however, traffic is above all things a social act, but one in which participants are inhibited from divining the intentions of each other through the means that normally smooth social intercourse. Added to this problem is the paradoxical nature of traffic. The focus of Traffic is largely on modern cars (although Vanderbilt discusses transportation history) and their drivers. “In traffic,” he writes, “we struggle to stay human.” Why this should be so is the most fascinating theme in the book. Essentially, isolation, inattention, frustration, and conceit cause the trouble. For one thing, drivers can see what others do but cannot convey what they think about it. For another, the eye contact that usually mediates social interaction is seldom possible in traffic. Each driver, alone in a car, becomes identified with the car. Unable to converse directly with others on the road, drivers make up independent narratives about their behavior and that of others based wholly on what they see cars do. The narrative easily segues into moral drama when the behavior of one driver makes another feel victimized. Worse, the anonymity of drivers, cocooned in their vehicles, increases aggressiveness in traffic, often expressed in an unfocused need to dominate. On top of such impulses, drivers have many distractions: talking to passengers, making cell phone calls, eating, drinking, smoking, fiddling with the radio, gaping at the scenery, even reading. All the while each driver typically believes that he or she is more law-abiding and skillful than those nearby. (The well-established “Baker’s law,” formulated by crash expert J. Stannard Baker, contends that drivers want to explain away their traffic mishaps by reporting circumstances of “lowest culpability compatible with credulity.”)

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The impulse to drive assertively, the inattention, and the susceptibility to taking umbrage, as if other drivers are intentionally set upon harming each other, lead to anger, and anger impairs judgment. Every driver has had enough upsetting encounters to recognize that the following hypothetical incident on a fourlane highway, however absurd, is yet possible. Driver A, while talking on a cell phone, glances into the rear-view mirror, glimpses an opening into the faster traffic of the lane to the left, and swerves into it, flicking on the turn signal in the process. Satisfied the maneuver was legal and safe (because successful), Driver A moves on. At the beginning of the maneuver, however, Driver B, in the fast lane, is singing along to a rock-and-roll classic so that when Driver A swerves in front, Driver B is startled and reflexively taps on the brake. Driver C, meanwhile, impatient with Driver B for poking along in the passing lane, has edged close to Driver B’s rear bumper (and is annoyed to read there a bumper sticker with a disagreeable political slogan). Interpreting Driver B’s brake light as a message to back off (passive-aggressive braking), Driver C is irked. Accordingly, Driver C accelerates into the space vacated by Driver A, pulls even with Driver B, and makes an uncomplimentary hand gesture. Astonished and offended, Driver B replies in kind, unconsciously pressing down on the accelerator. The ensuing minor rear-end collision between Driver B and Driver D results in a rush-hour traffic jam that slows the progress of hundreds. Driver A, blithely unaware of what lies behind, is not among them. Even relatively minor collisions can prove deadly, given high speeds and dense traffic. In 1999, for example, some forty-one thousand people died in crashes. Although that number represents a decline in fatalities since the 1950’s, it still leaves traffic as a leading killer of healthy Americans. (In countries such as China and India, which have had a sudden influx of new drivers and inadequate infrastructure and driving customs, the numbers of fatalities and injuries are shocking.) Given the vast improvement in car technology, especially safety features, and the expansion of roadways, it is still surprising that so many crashes occur. Naturally, much of the responsibility lies with drivers. Lulled by the illusion of firm control behind the wheel, some, believing that they drive better than they do, drive carelessly, drive in a state of “selective awareness,” and, essentially, do any number of things that make crashes unpreventable. “[T]he safer cars get,” writes Vanderbilt, “the more risks drivers choose to take.” Still, a share of the problem lies in the sometimes paradoxical nature of traffic itself, a fact complicating the task of engineers to increase safety. Vanderbilt opens his book with a brilliant example: when to merge because of a lane closure. The majority of drivers merge as soon as they see the warning sign of a closure ahead, feeling that they have done the socially correct thing, and then seethe as a few mavericks forge on past them and cut in right before the choke point, slowing everyone behind. Is merg-

Based in New York City, Tom Vanderbilt writes and lectures on architecture, design, technology, and science. He is a contributing editor to the design magazines I.D. and Print and contributes to numerous publications, such as Wired, The New York Times, The Wilson Quarterly, and Rolling Stone.

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ing early really the right thing to do, though? As Vanderbilt points out, if everyone merges early, one entire lane is left unused. It would be more efficient for both lanes to be filled right up to the choke point and then have cars move into the unobstructed lane with a “zipper merge.” So in the case of merging, the socially considerate action (merging early) decreases, rather than increases, efficiency. There are many other examples: More roads mean more traffic, not less, because they encourage use by those who would otherwise have stayed home to avoid traffic. Narrow roads are safer than wide roads, because they force drivers to slow down. Traffic circles are less dangerous than intersections for much the same reason. In altercations between truckers and car drivers, the latter are in the wrong the overwhelming majority of the time. Large, high cars, such as SUVs, are less safe than small cars because it is more difficult to judge speed and the distance to the next car; accordingly, drivers regularly exceed safe speeds for their vehicles’ design. Women are more likely to crash than men but are less likely to be in fatal crashes. In heavy traffic, slower speed can get drivers to their destinations faster, because there is less braking, and braking has a cascading effect, slowing traffic in general until it lapses into “stop-and-go” behavior. Perhaps it is a testament to human adaptability that traffic proceeds as smoothly as it does. At all events, Traffic argues, remedies exist for many current deficiencies. Primary is to slow down and to pay attention. Beyond that, engineers are becoming aware that designing highways only for speed can be counterproductive. Some propose controversial measures, such as narrowing lanes and shoulders, especially in congested areas, or reducing signage, or making pedestrian crossing easier. Another proposal is congestion pricing on toll roads—that is, charging higher tolls during high-use periods to discourage driving. Vanderbilt also mentions, although is skeptical of, new technology, such as navigation devices that detect highway congestion ahead and propose alternative routes. Vanderbilt is engaging and writes plainly. When he must quote the jargon of engineers or psychologists, he frequently accompanies the quotation with a punchy translation. He avoids euphemisms, for instance, using “crash” instead of the mushy, often disingenuous “traffic accident.” He is sententious (“affluence breeds traffic”), witty, and provocative. Consider just two chapter titles: “Why Ants Don’t Get into Traffic Jams (and Humans Do): On Cooperation as a Cure for Congestion” and “Why You Shouldn’t Drive with a Beer-Drinking Divorced Doctor Named Fred on Super Bowl Sunday in a Pickup Truck in Rural Montana: What’s Risky on the Road and Why.” He ranges widely in coverage, discussing traffic behavior in China, India, Europe, and Latin America as well as in the United States. Still, Traffic has limitations. Vanderbilt admits that the environmental effects of traffic are an important topic but, unfortunately, declines to address it. The focus of the book is trained largely on car drivers (they do, after all, constitute the largest share of traffic), yet after learning that tractor-trailer drivers are usually the victims of mishaps rather than the cause, readers may well want to learn more about them, if only to understand how to behave near them. About one matter readers must particularly prepare themselves: statistics. Traffic draws heavily on psychology, economics, and sociology. All three disciplines rely on statistical analyses of data, and so does Vanderbilt. Even though the statistics in his

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book are not stultifyingly dense, they sometimes seem incongruent and so can create a cognitive traffic jam of their own, with a 31.4 percent chance of sudden comprehension failure for readers unwilling to slow down and proceed through them cautiously. Intriguingly, Vanderbilt shows how traffic both reflects and amplifies larger cultural trends. Greater mobility expands the distances that people are willing to travel for simple chores. Accordingly, shopping malls, huge discount stores such as WalMart and Costco, and supermarkets, all with acres of parking, were built to accommodate them. Between 1983 and 2001, trips to malls alone increased twofold. School districts save money by building fewer, larger schools because children can come from farther away. Fast food restaurants featuring drive-through lanes attract diners who do not want to get out of their cars for meals. These shifts in behavior not only meant the end of the corner grocery store, a great reduction in children walking to school, and the decline in home cooking but also increased and redistributed traffic: heavier traffic in the morning as school buses and parents transporting students join in the rush hour and more traffic spread through the day as shoppers fan out. In a phenomenon called “trip-chaining,” drivers now regularly stop en route to a traditional daily destination, such as a job site, to drop off children at day care, take clothes to the cleaners, pick up breakfast, and the like. The related “Starbucks’ effect” involves stops simply so that people (increasingly men) can have some time to themselves away from job and family—by, for example, sipping a latte. Traffic astonishes, sometimes amuses, and frequently corrects misconceptions, but its real contribution lies in demonstrating—in concrete, familiar detail—the plasticity of modern society. People adapt to cars as cars are adapted to them, and traffic, remarkably, flows. Moreover, the book has some crossover value as cultural analysis. For instance, it is nearly impossible, while reading Traffic, not to be reminded of the financial market, another human activity that inspires reckless self-interest yet seems to move with miraculous facility—until, that is, there is a crash. Roger Smith

Review Sources Booklist 104, nos. 19/20 (June 1, 2008): 4-5. Discover 29, no. 8 (August, 2008): 74. Entertainment Weekly, September 19, 2008, p. 79. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 11 (June 1, 2008): 75. Library Journal 133, no. 11 (June 15, 2008): 83-84. The New Republic 239, no. 2 (August 13, 2008): 36-39. The New York Times Book Review, August 10, 2008, p. 1. The New Yorker 84, no. 25 (August 25, 2008): 81. Newsweek 152, no. 6 (August 11, 2008): 10. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 20 (May 19, 2008): 43. Time 172, no. 5 (August 4, 2008): 23.

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THE TREE OF MEANING Language, Mind, and Ecology Author: Robert Bringhurst (1946) First published: The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks, 2006, in Canada Publisher: Counterpoint (Berkeley, Calif.). 336 pp. $28.00 Type of work: Literary criticism Thirteen lectures delivered by Canadian poet, translator, and linguist Bringhurst at universities and academic institutions cover the relationship of Native American oral literature to other world literatures, emphasizing their unappreciated similarities, their narrative methods, their prosody and literary form, and their connections to the natural world Principal personages: Robert Bringhurst, the author, whose personal experiences with Native American oral poets are recounted throughout the lectures Emile Petitot, a French missionary who first wrote down the songs and stories of Lizette K’atchodi, Big Rabbit Woman, the first Native Canadian woman recorded in her own language Franz Boas, the father of modern anthropology, trained in physics and geography but bringing scientific analysis to Native American oral poetry, especially by transcribing the rapidly disappearing oral poems largely ignored by experts in Indian languages Q’elti´, ranked by Bringhurst with Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens, whose oral performances were first recorded by Boas in the 1890’s Skaay, of the Qquuna Qiighawaay lineage, and Ghandl, of the Qayahl Llaanas line, Haida oral poets Bringhurst ranks as among the best in any language, possibly equal to Homer John Swanton, Boas’s student who transcribed Skaay’s poems Edward Sapir, another student of Boas who went on to do groundbreaking work in Native American languages and who is considered by Bringhurst a true humanist, in comparison to more technically oriented modern linguists Bill Reid, a Haida sculptor and artist of worldwide renown who is the subject of one of the memorial lectures

The thirteen lectures in The Tree of Meaning were delivered by Robert Bringhurst at eminent Canadian, U.S., and European universities and academic venues, including the University of British Columbia, Vancouver; the University of Victoria, British Columbia; the College of France, Paris; and the Universidad de la Laguna, Tenerife (delivered in Spanish). At least five were named memorial lectures. While all are

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serious academic performances, the tone and style vary, ranging from fairly casual and relaxed student-centered talks about vocation to a sensitive and nostalgic memorial to a deceased Haida artist friend to uncompromisingly scholarly anatomies of Native American prosody and literary technique, rife with extensive quotations from any number of languages, including Native tongues. (Translations follow all quotations.) All are unified by Bringhurst’s charm, articulate speech, and engaging ideas, but even more so by continuing threads and themes returned to with fresh perspectives in each talk. There is no repetition or recycling; even when Bringhurst refers to earlier work, the new context changes our understanding artfully. The goal is to provide what amounts to a unified field theory, not of physics (the term was coined by Albert Einstein), but of language and literature, and especially of North American Native languages and literatures. A Theory of Everything, as field theories are sometimes called jokingly, attempts to explain how disparate phenomena and systems work as a meaningful whole, a particularly relevant exercise given the scores of indigenous American languages, their fearsome appearance when transcribed phonetically, and the seemingly bizarre myths and creation stories they tell. How do these apparently alien works couched in inaccessible languages fit in to world literature? The traditional response has been to say they do not, relegating the thousands-of-years traditions of the first American literature to quaint folklore or puzzling religious myth. Bringhurst credits Franz Boas (1848-1942), the progenitor of modern anthropology, with taking the first step toward understanding in the late nineteenth century. Boas was a physicist and later a geographer; he pushed his students, occasionally against their will, to record phonetic versions of disappearing oral narratives. Bringhurst is a kind of modern version of Boas, born to a widely traveled family and beginning as a physics student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (19631964) and finishing at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City (1964-1965). Bringhurst studied Arabic at the Defense Language Institute, Monterey, California (1966-1967) and served in the U.S. Army in California, Israel, and the Panama Canal Zone (19671969). He worked as a journalist in Beirut, Lebanon (1965-1966), before beginning a long residence in Canada, mostly in British Columbia, where he taught at a number of universities and practiced his main profession, poetry. Now a Canadian citizen, Bringhurst is widely admired as among the best practicing Canadian poets, with nearly thirty books to his credit, including A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (1999). He is the author of The Elements of Typographic Style (2004), a respected work on print graphics now in its third edition. Though an expert in oral literature, Bringhurst wrote an important book about print, seemingly contradicting the emphasis of his primary interest, orally delivered poetry. In like manner, his linguistic accomplishments defy easy categorization. Like Robert Bringhurst is one of Canada’s most published poets, a translator of Haida and other Native American oral works, a frequent lecturer on literature and humanistic issues, an environmental advocate, and an expert in typography. He lives on Quadra Island, off the east coast of Vancouver Island.

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Boas and Sapir, European-trained experts who became consumed with the study of North American languages, Bringhurst brings to his New World languages and literatures insights from the Old. He has translated the ancient Greek writer Parmenides, reads Arabic, delivered one of the lectures from his book in Spanish, and seems familiar with Chinese and Japanese. In every case, unlike many modern linguists he criticizes, he has mastered these languages for the insights their poetry and literatures provide, not simply as a technical exercise in phonetics and syntax. Bringhurst rightly sees much linguistic research limited by its refusal to consider issues that extend beyond the sentence; language students often observe that the focus on what happens between the capital letter that initiates the sentence and the period that ends it has produced wondrous insights into grammar but has left the relationship between sentences—the “grammar” of paragraphs, for example, and the semantics of metaphor— relatively unexplored. Bringhurst is highly persuasive in arguing, especially in “Prosodies of Meaning: Literary Form in Native America,” the tenth lecture, that understanding how oral poets hold the attention of their listeners requires attention to larger units of form than end rhyme, assonance, and the sometimes decorative discrete metaphors of Western poetry. The Native genius is not with artful figures of speech and conceits, as with seventeenth century metaphysical poet John Donne, for example, but rather with structural repetitions in threes, fours, or fives, repetitions that ironically were sometimes deleted by early translators as ritualized beginnings and endings. While Westerners search for the jewels in the crown and find them missing, they fail to examine the crown itself and misunderstand its purpose. The units of discourse, according to Bringhurst, are larger than those of much poetry in the Christian and Islamic traditions. It should be evident why someone with polymath interests and a spectacularly diverse resumé should aspire to a unified field theory that connects his enthusiasms. Bringhurst’s other great passion is the environment, and he is eloquent about how colonialism despoiled an edenic North America, killing its animals (the buffalo), parceling up the land (a process ongoing even on the small island where he lives), turning the natural into the profit-making and uniform (old growth becoming factory tree farms), and eradicating the ancient cultures and languages that had longer histories than the modern European countries that destroyed them. He is particularly hard on the missionaries who translated Native languages but only to proselytize, not to listen and learn. Bringhurst argues that language and poetry have an existence beyond the humans who speak it, evolving and changing; the language speaks through humans rather than the other way around and is in fact possibly prehuman. Language and poetry are life forces reflected in plant and animal biology and are not simply a cultural product, the sum total of speakers; humankind is not the measure of all things, says Bringhurst, refuting the statement of philosopher Protagoras as ethnocentric and selfserving. “Elemental biological mechanisms really are linguistic,” and human language is simply one expression of this force. This Platonism goes well beyond the suggestions of Noam Chomsky, the preeminent linguist of our time, that human language may have some biological basis, a readiness in infants to accept the input of a given culture, the vocabulary of Japanese

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or the syntax of German. Bringhurst looks at the natural world as a whole, with humans one small part of it, a part out of control, like a cancerous growth, he would argue. Language, poetry, art—all are manifestations of deep biological-natural instincts (or Forms? Ideas?) which cannot be parsed away or nailed down to a firm definition. “Stories” seem to be able to exist outside language: Trees have their own stories, for example, as do landscapes. Bringhurst uses the word “language” in a variety of ways, speaking of the language of music, of mathematics, and so on. While such usage is common as metaphor, the theory of language here is far broader, in direct opposition to the more conventional view of language as a cultural artifact. Bringhurst’s ideas about language and poetry might be thought to be attuned to Native American philosophy, although he does not make this claim and is in fact far too sophisticated to practice such reductionism: There are many Native cultures and competing philosophies. He is excellent at explaining how individual storytellers leave the imprint of their own lives and personalities on their cultural productions, introducing the personal into the seemingly monolithic. What is evident is that The Tree of Meaning attempts to show the reader through a charming, witty, and engaging series of views of its varied subjects how to think about poetry and language anew, as having deep roots in all cultures at their most elemental, biological levels, expressing the essence of what it means to be living and human. Bringhurst certainly learned from his oral storytellers how to hold an audience, but his ideas, beyond giving due respect to nature and advocating reduction of the huge colonial-capitalistic footprint, seem to be mostly his own. Some critics of unified field theories such as Bringhurst’s point out that such attempts to explain everything usually fail and more important can be dismissed with the phrase, “Who cares?” His proposals can be frustrating: Many students of far more accessible languages than Haida, Navajo, or Cree will blanch at Bringhurst’s suggestion that the curriculum include readings in the original Native languages, a formidable task for most. Bringhurst might answer that attempts to understand are always admirable (the colonizers and proselytizers made little or no attempt to understand the Native culture or languages) and that in a period of overpopulation and scarcity people must care, learning to respect nature rather than taming it. While The Tree of Meaning reflects Bringhurst’s poetic identity much more than his other identities as an expert on print and a master of the mechanics of language, he provides an intellectual challenge that is difficult to dismiss. Yes, the theory of language and poetry is heavily metaphorical, but as he points out in his last lecture, the interplay between the two parts of all metaphors, the similarities and disparities between tenor and vehicle, forces people to reexamine the world and revise their thinking. Returning to his first field of study, he notes that cutting-edge physics hypothesizes about unseen subatomic worlds and alternate universes that make Native American creation myths look tame. Metaphors all, the hardest science shares much with Bringhurst’s poetic view. The Tree of Meaning also reflects Bringhurst’s enthusiasm for fine printed copy: The book is a lovely artifact, printed on soft, creamy paper with fine print faces that create a very readable text. The books sits happily in the hand, has markers front and

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back, and each graphic is perfectly placed after its first reference in the text, allowing the reader to look forward to view the example. The advocate of oral communication also thought through this print version of his lectures. Andrew Macdonald

Review Sources Canadian Literature, no. 196 (Spring, 2008): 127-128. Poetry 191, no. 5 (February, 2008): 438-440. University of Toronto Quarterly 77 (Winter, 2008): 451-453.

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2666 Author: Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) First published: 2004, in Spain Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 898 pp. $30.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1920 to 2001 Locale: Europe, the United States, and northern Mexico Bolaño’s five-part saga centers on the vicious murders of young women in a northern Mexican city and the life of a mysterious German writer, Benno von Archimboldi Principal characters: Benno von Archimboldi, the nom de plume of German novelist Hans Reiter Jean-Claude Pelletier, Manuel Espinoza, Piero Morini, and Liz Norton, literary critics and Archimboldi scholars Oscar Amalfitano, a professor of literature at the University of Santa Teresa, Mexico Quincy Williams, also known as Oscar Fate, an African American journalist Juan de Dios Martínez, a detective for the Santa Teresa police Sergio Gonzalez, a newspaper reporter Klaus Haas, a German-born American businessman and murder suspect Azucena Esquivel Plata, a Mexican congresswoman Lotte Reiter, Archimboldi’s sister

Nearly nine hundred pages long in Natasha Wimmer’s superb translation, Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 pieces together diverse types of fiction—among them murder mystery, war story, love story, portrait of an artist, and police thriller—into a story as garish, moving, and perplexing as a ralli quilt. Above all, it concerns families and friendship. In each of its five parts the narrative resolution involves some decisive action intended by one person to save a loved one, often from one of the most hellish places ever conceived in modern literature. That place is Santa Teresa, a Mexican border city in the Sonora Desert. Fictional, Santa Teresa is nevertheless closely modeled on Ciudad Juaréz, which lies across the border from El Paso, Texas. Like Juaréz, Santa Teresa is a city rapidly expanding with workers attracted to its maquiladoras (assembly factories for foreign companies); like Juaréz, it is a violent, corrupt place, overrun by drug gangs. Most of all, from the early 1990’s onward, Santa Teresa witnesses the unsolved rape-murders of hundreds of

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girls and young women, whose bodies, of ten mutilated, are discovered unburied in the desert. The major characters in 2666 come here, for one reason or another, and its atmosphere of motiveless menace alters them all. If there is a mysterious city at the heart of the novel, there is also a mystery man, a novelist, who is its antipode. As in Los detectives salvajes (1998; The Savage Detectives, 2007), Bolaño makes this literary figure, legendary and elusive, the object of a quest. “The Part About the Critics” introduces him in the first Before his death in 2003 in Barcelona, sentence: “The first time that Jean-Claude Spain, Roberto Bolaño gained a Pelletier read Benno von Archimboldi was reputation as the greatest Latin Christmas 1980, in Paris, when he was nine- American novelist of the late twentieth teen years old and studying German litera- century. Born in Santiago, Chile, and ture.” Pelletier is soon joined in his interest raised in Mexico City, Bolaño wrote by three other literature professors—Manuel short stories, poetry, and essays as well Espinoza in Spain, Liz Norton in England, as novels. and the wheelchair-bound Piero Morini in Italy. Together they bring Archimboldi’s novels to international academic prominence, to the point that he is listed for the Nobel Prize. At the same time, the four critics form a tight-knit group, a family of sorts. Pelletier, Espinoza, and Norton carry on a ménage à trois, and all four are constantly in close contact. Meanwhile, Archimboldi remains a shadowy figure to them, eluding all of their attempts to track him down until a chance remark suggests that he has gone to Santa Teresa, Mexico. Espinoza, Pelletier, and Norton set off in pursuit. After scouring the city for weeks, they despair of finding him. At the same time, the horrendous city depresses them, as does their erratic sex life. They leave—Norton to move in permanently with Morini in Italy, Pelletier to brood, and Espinoza to consider marrying a Santa Teresa teenager. Their quixotic pursuit of the novelist illustrates how art eludes criticism, and, more, it reveals a group of people who form a family that at least succeeds in freeing them from a literary obsession. The critics’ host at the University of Santa Teresa is Oscar Amalfitano, a professor of literature, and he becomes the protagonist in “The Part About Amalfitano,” the shortest of the five sections. Born in Chile and educated in Spain, he has come with his college-age daughter, Rosa, to Santa Teresa from Barcelona to escape his insane wife and crumbling career. He finds only growing despair for himself, symbolized in what at first is a impulsive joke: hanging a copy of a geometry book on the clothesline, as if logic itself is left to dry and fade in Santa Teresa. For Rosa, he fears the near certainty of kidnap and murder. Her rescuer arrives in the next section, “The Part About Fate,” in the person of African American journalist Quincy Williams, also known as Oscar Fate. His magazine has sent him to Santa Teresa as a last-minute replacement for a sports reporter to cover a boxing match. He falls in with a group of

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Mexican journalists, learns of the murder epidemic, grows interested, and through them works his way deep into the chillingly sleazy underworld of the city, which, he concludes, exists as if “outside of society.” At the boxing match, Williams meets Rosa Amalfitano and falls in love with her. Not long afterward, he comes across her in a drug house and, when it appears she is on the verge of becoming another victim, leads her away and, with her father’s approval, spirits her across the border into the United States. “The Part About the Crimes” is the longest and most excruciating section of the novel to read. Several subplots run through it, but its overriding power comes from the short subsections describing the discovery of individual victims—dozens of them, presented for the most part one by one. They read like police case reports, detached in tone and gruesomely detailed. Coming sometimes ten in a row, these case reports have the effect of saturating the reader’s compassion and overcoming all emotional responses except revulsion. It is a devastating technique, relentlessly used. Furthermore, behind the reports, readers perceive the hundreds of families bereft of daughters, the police connivance, shadowy organized crime, and a thoroughgoing indifference among Santa Teresans (except worried mothers of young daughters and a handful of protesters). As a reporter comments, “No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.” Among the subplots, three particularly highlight the twisted mentality of the city. One follows the outbreak of another crime spree: the desecrations of Catholic churches in the city. The vandalism is investigated by a Mexico City reporter, Sergio Gonzalez, and Santa Teresa detective Juan de Dios Martínez. A second subplot follows a loveless affair between Martínez and a much older psychiatrist. He is looking for love, but the psychiatrist wants only to be desired by a younger man as a way to hold on to her vanity and vitality. A third involves the leading suspect in the murders, a German-born American named Klaus Haas. As he fights to keep alive in a brutal Mexican jail, his lawyer falls in love with him, he holds press conferences, his trial is repeatedly delayed, and the murders continue without him. The section comes to an end with a twist that is strange even by this novel’s tangled standards. Azucena Esquivel Plata, a member of the national congress, recruits Gonzalez to help her investigate the Santa Teresa murders. She has become interested because of the disappearance of a childhood friend. Esquivel is estranged from her wealthy family, and the friend, practically the only acquaintance from her coddled youth in the Mexican aristocracy, is the person to whom she feels most obligated. The ensuing private investigation turns up a horrific surprise. The friend has been running a prostitute ring serving orgies for drug lords, and she may have gone even further by helping kidnap girls in Santa Teresa. Although she is beyond redemption, Esquivel tries to find her. Together these and other narrative strands form a bewildering portrait of a hellhole. Even the scenery conspires to terrorize: “The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.” The last section, “The Part About Archimboldi,” begins almost as if it is a fairy tale. Hans Reiter, born in 1920 to a one-legged war veteran and a one-eyed woman, grows up in a small northern German village with his adoring younger sister, Lotte.

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His mother works as a servant to the local baron. Accompanying her one day, he meets the baron’s nephew, an artist, who starts young Reiter reading. Dropping out of school, the boy educates himself, after a fashion, and runs away to improve his life. He ends up in Berlin, working as a factory night watchman until he joins the German army. Fighting in Poland, France, and then Russia, he is decorated for bravery and wounded; he witnesses horrific brutality, including the murderous campaign against Jews by Germany’s death squads, known as Einsatzgruppen. At war’s end, he is in an American prisoner-of-war camp. Hidden among the soldiers are Nazi war criminals. Reiter murders one of them before escaping and working as a bouncer at a bar in Cologne. He rents a typewriter and begins writing novels in his spare time under the name Benno von Archimboldi. One after another he publishes them, at first to little success but eventually attracting a cult following. By the time that the critics in the first section of 2666 discover him, Archimboldi has left Germany and roams the Mediterranean, haunted by his past and living for little other than his writing. Meanwhile, Lotte, whom Archimboldi has not seen since she was ten years old, grows up among hardship and loss, marries a mechanic, and works her way into the German middle class, a solid postwar success story. Her son, however, is a scapegrace. After getting in trouble with the police, he leaves Germany for the United States and changes his name and citizenship. Then he disappears. Late in life, Lotte tries to track him down, and in 1995 she locates him in the Santa Teresa jail. He is Klaus Haas, accused of the Santa Teresa murders. Over the next six years, Lotte bends all of her efforts to freeing her son. While on a plane trip, she happens to read a novel that exactly describes her childhood. She contacts the publisher and learns that the author, Archimboldi, is Hans Reiter, her brother. After nearly fifty years, they reestablish contact. In the novel’s last line, Archimboldi sets off for Santa Teresa in an attempt to help his nephew, a gesture of hope that brings him back into his family and a gesture of commitment by the writer to confront evil directly. “All eloquence springs from pain,” one of Bolaño’s characters insists. The pain of history, both social and personal, and the obligations of love are the thematic counterpoints of 2666. Before he died in 2003, Bolaño left instructions to issue each major part as a separate novel. His publisher decided to bundle them together (a decision defended in an epilogue, along with speculation about the novel’s enigmatic title). Readers may well regret that decision. The long, repetitious, often surreal, crushingly cruel “Part About the Crimes” so dominates 2666 that reading all five parts straight through may leave the reader with the impression that to Bolaño humanity as a whole is irredeemably self-destructive. Read individually, however, each of the five parts manifests Bolaño’s confident faith in the power of literature to refresh awareness of the deepest human bonds. Roger Smith

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Review Sources Esquire 150, no. 5 (November, 2008): 28. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 18 (September 15, 2008): 967-968. The Nation 287, no. 19 (December 8, 2008): 13-22. The New York Times, November 13, 2008, p. 1. The New York Times Book Review, November 9, 2008, p. 1. The New Yorker 84, no. 37 (November 17, 2008): 105. Newsweek 152, no. 21 (November 24, 2008): 60. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 30 (July 28, 2008): 52. Time 172, no. 21 (November 24, 2008): 60. The Times Literary Supplement, September 9, 2005, p. 23.

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UNACCUSTOMED EARTH Author: Jhumpa Lahiri (1967) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 333 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Short fiction Time: The present Locale: Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington State, London, Rome, and Thailand An exquisite collection of eight stories focusing on the Indian diaspora in generation 1.5, those who were either born in the United States or immigrated as young children Principal characters: Ruma, a lawyer who has abandoned her profession to tend to her husband, Adam, and son, Akash, in Seattle Ruma’s father, a widowed, retired biochemist living in Pennsylvania Pranab Chakraborty, an engineering student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Aparna, a married woman who befriends Pranab and falls in love with him Amit Sarkar, a medical editor who had been left behind at the Langford Academy when his parents moved back to Delhi Megan, Amit’s physician wife Rahul Mukherjee, a college dropout who continually disappoints his family Paul, a Harvard graduate student who takes an obsessive interest in the romantic tribulations of his Indian housemate Kaushik Choudhuri, a photojournalist who wanders the globe on assignment Hema, a classics professor who knew Kaushik as a child in Massachusetts and encounters him again in Rome

“Indians are everywhere these days,” observes a native of Calcutta after returning home to Pennsylvania from a tour through Italy. South Asian Americans and their children populate and animate Jhumpa Lahiri’s second collection of short fiction, a gathering of eight exquisite stories. If her Indians are everywhere, they are at home nowhere. “He was furious that we left,” says a father who moves his son from Massachusetts to Bombay and back to Massachusetts, “and now he’s furious that we’re here again.” Unaccustomed Earth is a wistful record of people who, even while retaining traces of their ancestral customs, have lost their roots. In addition to one billion in south Asia, Indians have a diaspora numbering some twenty-five million worldwide, three million in the United States. Authors of Indian background—including Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, and Anita and Kiran Desai—are prominent and proliferating.

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With her first book, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), a story collection that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, Lahiri emerged as the Bernard Malamud, Aleksandar Hemon, and Junot Diaz of Indian emigrant experience. The Namesake, a 2003 novel that was adapted into film by Mira Nair, consolidated Lahiri’s reputation. Unaccustomed Earth arrived next as that rare phenomenon, a triumph both commercially and artistically. It debuted as number one on The New York Times best-seller list, and critics have been virtually unanimous in its praise. Lahiri’s third book has earned the admiration it inspired. Unaccustomed Earth takes its title—and epigraph—from the essay that serves as preface to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850). In “The CustomHouse,” as the preface is titled, human nature is compared to potatoes, which cannot flourish if planted and replanted “in the same worn-out soil.” Hawthorne’s narrator declares: “My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.” Lahiri’s characters strike their roots in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington State, corners of the earth unaccustomed to Bengalis. However, the transplantation does not produce the vigor Hawthorne expects in relocated tubers. Most of the characters in these pensive stories are transplants who never find a soil in which to thrive. Lahiri was born in London, to Bengali parents, but she has lived in the United States since age three. Her characters belong to generation 1.5; children of immigrants, they were either born in the United States or arrived too young to have formed an Indian identity. They tend to be affluent professionals—doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors—educated at prestigious American colleges such as Harvard, Swarthmore, Columbia, and Princeton. Though dragged along on family visits to Calcutta, they lack an appetite for Indian foods, languages, and spouses. In “HellHeaven,” when Pranab Chakraborty, an engineering student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, announces his engagement to an American named Deborah, it so upsets his parents back in Calcutta that they disown him. In “A Choice of Accommodations,” Amit Sarkar is deposited in a New England prep school when his ophthalmologist father decamps for a position in a Delhi hospital. The only Indian at Langford Academy, Amit falls in love with the headmaster’s daughter, Pam, and later with a medical student named Megan. In the title story, “Unaccustomed Earth,” Ruma, a lawyer who cannot read Bengali and has lost the Asian habit of eating with her hands, marries a hedge-fund manager named Adam. Though Adam adores the Bengali dessert called mishti, Ruma’s mother, who met her father through an arranged marriage, regards her daughter’s conjugal choice as treason: “You are ashamed of yourself, of being Indian, that is the bottom line.” In “Hema and Kaushik,” the sequence of three connected stories that concludes the entire volume, Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri was born in London and at age three moved with her family to Rhode Island, where a kindergarten teacher found it easier to call her by her pet name, Jhumpa. Lahiri graduated from Barnard with a degree in English literature and earned three master’s degrees, in English, creative writing, and comparative literature, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance studies from Boston University.

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Kaushik, who spends his childhood shuttling between Massachusetts and Bombay, becomes a professional nowhere man, a freelance photojournalist who wanders the world recording others’ misfortunes and expunging any evidence of his own existence. The final pages of the book take Lahiri’s chararacters beyond the United States and India, to Rome and Thailand, where a catastrophic historical event links them at last, tenuously, to other victims. For Lahiri’s characters, the tension between Old World and New World identities is often embodied in the generation gap between parents who look back to India for models of behavior and of thought and of children who strive, however futilely, to pass for unhyphenated Americans. “Unaccustomed Earth,” the story that leads the volume, turns on Ruma’s unsuccessful effort to persuade her widowed father, a retired biochemist who clings to the customs of the country he was born in, to move in with her family in Seattle. The discovery of her father’s secret romance, with a Long Island Bengali named Mrs. Bagchi, reinforces the realization that, despite the rapport he establishes with his young grandson, father and daughter inhabit separate solitudes. The narrator of “Heaven-Hell” lacks sympathy for her mother, trapped in a loveless marriage in the suburbs and missing India, as well as the Indian student, Pranab, who had not reciprocated her affections: “I began to take my cues from my father in dealing with her, isolating her doubly. When she screamed at me for talking too long on the telephone, or for staying too long in my room, I learned to scream back, telling her that she was pathetic, that she knew nothing about me, and it was clear to us both that I had stopped needing her, definitively and abruptly, just as Pranab Kaku had.” In the volume’s final fictional sequence, after Kaushik’s widowed father imports a second wife and her two daughters to the United States, Kaushik maintains a glacial distance from them all. Nevertheless, even if they savor salads instead of chorchoris or refuse to embrace a match made in Asia, Lahiri’s Indians in America are expected to make their parents and siblings proud of their achievements. However, in “Nobody’s Business,” not only does Sangeeta, a graduate-school dropout who works part time at a Harvard Square bookstore, rebuff all calls from eligible Indian suitors but also she loses her heart to a callous Egyptian philanderer. In “Only Goodness,” Lahiri offers an even more acidic portrait of an Indian American ne’er-do-well. After dropping out of Cornell and moving back home, where he works in a Laundromat, Rahul disgraces himself through public drunkenness: “And so, he became what all parents feared, a blot, a failure, someone who was not contributing to the grand circle of accomplishments Bengali children were making across the country, as surgeons or attorneys or scientists, or writing articles for the front page of The New York Times.” My son the slacker is not a boast that Lahiri’s Old World mothers are eager to make about their American children. Nevertheless, even those children who manage to attain worldly success are haunted by a sense of loss. In “Hell-Heaven,” though Pranab sacrifices his family ties to make Deborah his wife, the marriage ends in divorce. After the breakup, Deborah confesses that she envied a Bengali friend “for knowing him, understanding him in a way I never could,” as if Americans and Indians who long for concord are doomed to failure at achieving it. In “A Choice of Accommodations,” Amit Sarkar, attending a

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wedding, reveals to a stranger the hollowness of his own marriage to Megan. Though Hema, in “Hema and Kaushik,” grows up to become an accomplished scholar, resourceful and independent, she accedes to a traditional arranged marriage to a Punjabi, one that she realizes will not bring genuine fulfillment. However, the problem for Lahiri’s characters is only in part an unbridgeable chasm between cultures. She depicts a world in which to be human is to fail. In an interview with Bookforum, Lahiri explained that “bits and pieces” of the stories in Unaccustomed Earth are drawn from her own family and acquaintances. However, though she is fated to be categorized as an author of the Indian diaspora in the United States, she also insisted that the characters and experiences she depicts are universal: The thing I took for granted when I was growing up is that I was living in a world within a world. It was a tight world, but I knew a lot of people and was privy to the whole spectrum of types and personalities and characters. To me, they don’t represent immigrants or anyone specific. They just represent the human condition.

Built upon the patient accumulation of detail and spare, incisive sentences, Lahiri’s stories lack the spectacular effects found in Rushdie or Roy. Her style approaches tragical—not magical—realism, a clinical but gracefully poised account of lives unmoored and thwarted. The devastating epiphany that concludes “Only Goodness” is downright Chekhovian in Lahiri’s ability to expose a universal anguish not unique to Indian Americans. At the conclusion of the story, when the full extent of Rahul’s failure—as a son, brother, and responsible adult—is exposed, the reader is suddenly left with: “the fledgling family that had cracked open that morning, as typical and as terrifying as any other.” Steven G. Kellman

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 11 (February 1, 2008): 5. The Boston Globe, April 6, 2008, p. C6. The Christian Science Monitor 100, no. 88 (April 1, 2008): 17. Entertainment Weekly, April 4, 2008, p. 64. Library Journal 133, no. 2 (February 1, 2008): 65. Los Angeles Times, March 30, 2008, p. R1. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 8 (May 15, 2008): 28-29. The New York Times Book Review, April 6, 2008, p. 1. Newsday, April 20, 2008, p. C24. People 69, no. 13 (April 7, 2008): 49. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 4 (January 28, 2008): 39. USA Today, April 3, 2008, p. 5D. The Washington Post Book World, April 6, 2008, p. BW06.

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THE WAITRESS WAS NEW Author: Dominique Fabre (1960) First published: La Serveuse était novelle, 2005, in France Translated from the French by Jordan Stump Publisher: Archipelago Books (New York). 117 pp. $15.00 Type of work: Novel Time: Contemporary to 2005 Locale: Asnières suburb of Paris In Fabre’s novel, Pierre, the barman at Le Cercle, recounts the events of his final three days at the café, during which his entire lifestyle slips away from him Principal characters: Pierre, a fifty-six-year-old barman at Le Cercle café Henri, his boss, café owner Isabelle, Henri’s wife Sabrina, the waitress at Le Cercle Madeleine, the new waitress at Le Cercle Amadée, the Senegalese cook at Le Cercle Roger, Pierre’s friend who also works as a barman

In Dominique Fabre’s The Waitress Was New, the main character Pierre, a barman at Le Cercle, gives the reader a first-person account of the events that lead to the closing of the café. Pierre is fifty-six years old, he lives alone, and he has worked as a barman the greater part of his life. He has one good friend, Roger, also a barman. Although Pierre is an ordinary man who works at an ordinary job, Fabre captures readers’ interest by creating the special world in which Pierre lives. Pierre performs routine tasks every day; however, his life has significance as he interacts with his boss, his boss’s wife, the other employees, and the customers. Pierre knows his clientele: He is not only a good listener but also, as every barman must be, a keen observer. Pierre provides the reader with detailed descriptions of the various regular customers and the ones who stop occasionally or only once. There is the young man always dressed in black, who reads Primo Levi. There is the regular Mr. Dilman, who has not paid his bill for some time. It is Pierre who takes care of the matter and remains on good terms with the customer while collecting the bill. There is the beautiful young woman whom Pierre notices walking outside the café. Pierre rarely looks outside, as he says what interests him is in the café, seated at the bar. Somehow, he had a need to look outside as she passed. She has a coffee at the café, and Pierre is very intrigued by her. He almost creates a fantasy about her, but, calling himself “Pierrot, my friend,” he tells himself that she is too young and too beautiful for him.

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The plot of the novel is simple, almost thin. Sabrina, the regular waitress, is off work, supposedly ill. The temporary waitress, Madeleine, arrives and meets Pierre and Amadée the cook. The boss leaves the café that morning and does not come back. No one knows where he has gone. He is apparently having some sort of midlife crisis, and his wife Isabelle is disconsolate, fearing he has left her for another woman. How will the café run without the boss? Where is the boss? Pierre is the cog that keeps everything runDominique Fabre published his first ning at the café. When Madeleine arrives, Pinovel, Moi aussi, un jour j’irai loin, in erre immediately looks her over, worried that 1995. He received the Marcel Pagnol things may not run smoothly with a new waitPrize for his novel Fantômes in 2001. ress. He is relieved when she appears to get The Waitress Was New, published in along well with the Senegalese cook Amadée. France in 2005, is his first work to appear in English. He has written nine As the day wears on, Pierre’s life becomes novels. more and more complicated. Isabelle is so pre occupied with where her husband has gone that she is little help, leaving only Pierre, Madeleine, and Amadée to keep the café functioning. Pierre knows that without the boss, the café will have to close. Pierre desperately needs the café; it is his life. He may just be a barman, but he is a barman with routine duties, with an organized existence that occupies his mind and protects him from life. Each night the café closes, but Pierre’s existence does not stop. It is at these moments that Fabre poignantly portrays Pierre assailed by his fears of aging, by loneliness, by helplessness, by the agonizing human condition. Pierre must somehow get the boss back to the café. Pierre comes up first with the solution that Henri is with Sabrina. Isabelle has also thought of this possibility but refused to pursue it. Pierre goes to Sabrina’s apartment, where he finds she really is ill and the boss is not there. She admits to having an affair with Henri, but she has no idea where he is. Pierre then finds another solution: Henri has gone to visit his daughter in England. Isabelle, however, has talked to the daughter, and Henri is not there. Then, Isabelle tells Pierre that she is closing the café for a week. She asks him to accept the deliveries on Tuesday; he agrees, but he has a week to get through without a job. He checks his eligibility for his pension and finds he has thirteen more trimesters to work. Pierre goes to the café each day, wiping down the bar, checking on everything. Then, at the end of the week, Pierre is alone in the closed café when the telephone rings and he recognizes his boss’s voice. The café has been sold. Pierre feels betrayed and refuses to tell Amadée. After the phone call, alone in the café, he lets out a yowl. His life as a barman there is over. In a self-indulgent response to this devastating blow, he opens the café for business. Soon the regulars, including the young man who reads Levi, begin to come into

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the café. Amadée arrives and Pierre serves free drinks to everyone. They close at nine-thirty, and Pierre is alone with the café. He wipes down his bar, cleans the glasses, takes out the trash, and when everything is in excellent order, he locks the café door, taking the key with him. Pierre has had one last time as a barman, one last existence. After that, he avoids going home as long as possible. Once home, unable to read and unable to think of anything else to do, he goes to bed. Fabre’s use of description, of monologue, and of Pierre’s relationship with objects fleshes out the novel, making it more than a “slice-of-life” work. Through his descriptions of the lights of the café, the street lights, the dead leaves on Isabelle’s Audi, and the poorly pruned sycamore trees, he creates strong visual impressions that give the novel qualities of a painting. Pierre’s monologues, recounting his thoughts during the three days that drastically change his life, give the novel a philosophical depth. Pierre is really trying to figure out what life is about, why things happen as they do. It is in Pierre’s thoughts, as he attempts to deal with his life, that Fabre emphasizes the helplessness of the human condition. Here, also, he examines the problem of loneliness and the difficulty of lasting commitment to other human beings. Pierre was married but soon divorced. All of his love affairs have been of short duration. This does not mean that Pierre is lacking in compassion for other people. He tries to help the distraught Isabelle by taking her to dinner and listening to her talk about her life with her husband; he is concerned for Sabrina, a single mother with children. He likes Amadée and his regular customers. However, Pierre refers to the regulars at his bar as people he listens to but does not know. He remains always separated from them. His only enduring friendship has been with Roger, a fellow barman who is possibly a reflection of Pierre. Pierre’s strongest relationships are not with people: His apartment, his possessions within it, and his housekeeping tasks occupy a good part of his time when he is not at Le Cercle. He wants things a certain way; the condition of his surroundings is always important to him. The café Le Cercle is as much a character in the book as Amadée or Sabrina. For Pierre, wiping down his bar is an essential part of his existence. He is a barman and a barman takes care of his bar. Pierre’s dream adds to the texture of the novel. His dream life is almost always frightening to him. He would like to dream about the beautiful young woman he noticed outside of the café, but instead he dreams about Le Cercle locked with its tile floor covered with dead leaves. Inside he glimpses Sabrina and her children, who flee when they see him at the door. He does not like the dream and fears its return. However, the novel is neither morbid nor pessimistic—it simply portrays life as it is for an ordinary man such as Pierre. Fabre adds a tone of levity to his novel in the many comments Pierre makes as he accepts how things are and his inability to change them. The overlapping or folding structure of the work makes it seem longer than its 117 pages. Events and observations constantly trigger memories in Pierre’s mind, and he takes the reader to earlier moments in his life and to past experiences in such a way that there is almost another story within the novel. Pierre’s life unfolds along with the story of the search for the boss.

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The novel is the first of Fabre’s works to be published in an English translation. It has been successful among American readers and critics, elciting hopes that more of his novels will be translated into English. Shawncey Webb

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 8 (December 15, 2007): 27. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 24 (December 15, 2007): 1258. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 42 (October 22, 2007): 33. The Village Voice 53, no. 9 (February 27, 2008): 49.

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WALLACE STEGNER AND THE AMERICAN WEST Author: Philip L. Fradkin (1935) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 370 pp. $27.50 Type of work: Literary biography Time: 1909-1993 Locale: Various locations in the West, especially Palo Alto, California; Greensboro, Vermont Fradkin’s detailed study of Stegner includes valuable discussions of the American West, conservation, Western writers, and the relationship between region and literature Principal personages: Wallace Stegner, a writer, teacher, and conservationist Mary Stegner, his wife for almost sixty years Page Stegner, their only child, a writer and teacher Bernard DeVoto, the American literary critic and conservationist who was one of Stegner’s early mentors Stewart L. Udall, the Secretary of the Interior in the administration of President John F. Kennedy in the early 1960’s David Brower, the controversial president of the Sierra Club when Stegner worked with the organization in the 1960’s

Wallace Stegner was the first writer in the twentieth century to turn “Western” into a positive adjective in front of “writer” or “literature.” He founded the creative writing program at Stanford University in 1945, and for twenty-five years he shepherded through it students who would become some of the finest writers in America: Wendell Berry, Terry Tempest Williams, Ernest J. Gaines, Robert Stone, and dozens of others. His books opened up Western landscapes for both fiction and nonfiction, debunking the romantic myths about the West and revealing the truth about its vast plains and deserts. Finally, his work with the Department of the Interior, the Sierra Club, and other conservation groups helped to preserve those Western locales that had given him such a sense of place, and the personality out of which he would teach and write for more than half a century. Philip Fradkin’s biography is significant not only for uncovering Stegner the man and a writer who has grown in reputation since his death in 1993 but also for providing the larger canvas: Stegner’s pivotal role in establishing the literary and ecological West in the American imagination, the literary shift of power between the West and the East Coasts in the second half of the twentieth century, and the sense of place that so grounded Stegner on both coasts. In writing an authoritative biography of a great Western writer, Fradkin has redefined the terms of the debate about region and literature in American letters. Stegner’s roots were nourished in shifting soil. His father was a gambler and

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drinker who moved the family all over the West. Stegner was born in Iowa, but he spent time in Great Falls, Montana, in an orphanage in Seattle, and on a homestead in Saskatchewan, before settling with his family in Salt Lake City, still not a teenager. He attended the University of Utah and launched himself from there: to the University of Iowa for an M.A. and a Ph.D. in English, and then through a series of teaching jobs at the University of Wisconsin, Harvard University, and back to the University of Utah. He also began to produce short stories and novels (The Big Rock Candy Mountain in 1943 was his first substantial work), to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference near Middlebury, Vermont (he went eight times over fifteen years after 1938), and in 1945 he was brought to Stanford to found the academic unit that would become one of the most famous and successful creative writing programs in the country. Until 1971, when he retired to devote more time to his own writing, Stegner helped dozens of writers, from Edward Abbey, Ivan Doig, Barry Lopez, and Harriet Doerr, to William Kittredge, Ken Kesey, and Larry McMurtry—many of them Western writers and most with a natural taste for Western topics—to establish themselves in American literature. As Fradkin shows in detail, Stegner had another career as a conservationist, through both his writing and his personal efforts. His early biography of one of the most important explorers of the West, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (1954), has become a classic in Western history, for it identified the land and the water issues that continue to be so crucial in the West. Later his famous “Wilderness Letter” helped to define the terms on which environmental battles would be fought for the next half century. “We simply need that wild country available to us,” he wrote about wilderness in that piece in 1961, “even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.” He worked under Secretary Stewart Udall at the Department of the Interior, where he helped to shape New Frontier environmental policy such as the Wilderness Act of 1964, as well as federal cultural policy that would lead to the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities. He worked with organizations such as the Sierra Club and the National Parks Advisory Board for years. Besides lobbying on national issues, Stegner fought locally to halt the spread of Silicon Valley developers into the Los Altos Hills above Palo Alto where he and his wife Mary had built their first house and raised their son Page. The changes to that locale finally drove him away; he died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1993, and his ashes were scattered near his summer home in Greensboro, Vermont. All of his writing reveals his crucial relationship to the land and his recognizable sense of place. Angle of Repose (1971), the novel for which he is probably best known, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and helped to establish the West as a fitting subject for modern fiction. The Spectator Bird (1976) moved between California and Philip L. Fradkin has been a reporter with the Los Angeles Times, where he shared a Pulitzer Prize, and he was Western editor of Audubon magazine. He has written more than ten books, including A River No More: The Colorado River and the West (1996).

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Denmark and won the National Book Award for fiction, and Crossing to Safety (1987) bridged the continent in subject between his two coastal residences, in California and in Vermont. Stegner won three O. Henry prizes for his short stories over his career, and his Collected Stories were published in 1990. In 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements. The conflict between East and West is one of the threads running through Fradkin’s story. For much of the twentieth century, the East Coast literary establishment (epitomized by The New York Times Book Review) treated California and the West as a kind of literary frontier, denigrating or ignoring literary efforts on the West Coast by referring to West Coast writers as “regional.” (If California writers were regional, then why did not the same label apply to East Coast writers such as Philip Roth, John Updike, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.? The New York Times never recognized this double standard.) Stegner helped to break that stigma. His fiction revealed the rich literary resources of the West, as in Angle of Repose, for which he used historical documents—the memoirs and letters of California writer Mary Hallock Foote—as the basis for a moving fictional re-creation of the life of a mining engineer and his young family in California and other Western states in the second half of the nineteenth century. His nonfiction—his book about growing up on the isolated Saskatchewan prairie, Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (1962)—like his study of Powell helped to establish the standards for American nature writing. It is significant that so many of the writers who came through Stanford’s creative writing program—including Abbey, Williams, and McMurtry— would continue this tradition of exploring the West’s possibilities in both fiction and nonfiction. In the process of establishing the West as a rich resource for writers, Stegner also demystified it, debunking the cowboys and Indians romance of the West in order to establish the truth of its history and its culture: the limits of its land, its lack of water, its differences from and similarities to the East Coast. In his introduction to Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, Stegner’s friend Bernard DeVoto writes at length about the romantic misconceptions historians hold about the West that Stegner so tellingly put to rest in the biography. Although Stegner destroyed many of the myths about the West, he elevated the region as a literary resource. If Fradkin has a thesis, it is this influence of place on his subject, “the effect of landscape—meaning nature—on human destiny, history, culture, and character.” He spends the first seventy-five pages of this biography placing the young Stegner in the various locales that would be so influential, especially the patch of the Saskatchewan plains where his family tried to homestead for four years before 1920 and a little later Salt Lake City and southern Utah, which “remained central to who he was and what he thought about the West” throughout his career. In both his “Prologue” and his “Epilogue,” Fradkin describes visiting the various locations where Stegner settled, from Palo Alto to Greensboro, places where Stegner found “a convergence of nature and human history.” The biography of the writer thus becomes a meditation on the complex relations between American regions and American literature. The only place Fradkin goes off track in this admirable study is in detailing the

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controversy following the publication of Angle of Repose. Stegner used historical documents—including the reminiscences of Foote and her letters purchased by Stanford University in 1955—receiving only vague permission from heirs. However, his transformation of these materials into fiction was both less and more than what he had asked for or what he acknowledged in the brief prefatory note to the novel. A critical scuffle broke out soon after the novel appeared that has continued, at least in scholarly journals, for more than thirty years. Fradkin is clearly proud to be relating the “full story—told here for the first time” in the longest chapter in the book (forty-five pages). Because the controversy is less important than Fradkin thinks it is, that chapter tends to outweigh its subject. The lines between fiction and nonfiction have been deeply eroded in the twenty-first century—Stegner’s work may have helped to erase them—when novelists routinely drop historical figures into their fiction, and nonfiction writers take fictional license in their work by creating characters and imagining conversations between them. Therefore, Fradkin’s editorial judgment in spending such an inordinate amount of time on the matter must be questioned. In spite of this imbalance, Fradkin’s study stands as a major accomplishment, not only in bringing Stegner’s life and career into focus but also in showing how that life and career represented larger themes that continue to be important in American culture and literature. David Peck

Review Sources Audubon 110, no. 4 (July/August, 2008): 86-88. Booklist 104, no. 12 (February 15, 2008): 31. The Boston Globe, March 30, 2008, p. C7. The Chronicle of Higher Education 54, no. 28 (March 21, 2008): B19. International Herald-Tribune, May 22, 2008, p. 10. Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 10, 2008, p. 2. The New York Times Book Review, May 18, 2008, p. 18. The New Yorker 84, no. 4 (March 10, 2008): 123. Outside 33, no. 3 (March, 2008): 30. The Wilson Quarterly 32, no. 3 (Summer, 2008): 102-103.

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WELLSPRINGS Author: Mario Vargas Llosa (1936) Publisher: Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass.). 202 pp. $17.95 Type of work: Essays, literary criticism In seven essays, Peruvian novelist and essayist Vargas Llosa critically examines the literary, cultural, and political “wellsprings” of his work Since the publication of his first novel, La ciudad y los perros (1962; The Time of the Hero, 1966), more than forty years ago, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has become one of the modern world’s most important writers. Not only has he written sixteen diverse novels, from political thrillers such as Fiesta del Chivo (2000; The Feast of the Goat, 2001) to a contemporary retelling of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) titled Travesuras de la niña mala (2006; The Bad Girl, 2007), but he has also written critical essays on topics ranging from fellow Latin American novelist Gabriel García Márquez to Flaubert in La orgía perpetua (1975; The Perpetual Orgy, 1986) and the craft of writing in Cartas a un joven novelista (1997; Letters to a Young Novelist, 2002) and A Writer’s Reality (1991). Like many Latin American novelists, Vargas Llosa has been politically active, running for president of Peru in 1990, and many of his novels and essays focus on the intricate ways that politics often intertwine with everyday life. The essays in Wellsprings range over writers as diverse as Miguel de Cervantes and Jorge Luis Borges, Isaiah Berlin and José Ortega y Gasset, exploring topics as wide-ranging as the dangers of nationalism and the challenges of liberalism. At least two of the essays explore the dangers of totalitarian approaches to political or religious thinking and the challenges to freedom of such approaches. In all of his writings, Vargas Llosa has experimented with different styles, from literary modernism to postmodernism. His novels and essays demonstrate that he is one of the most playful, inventive, and thoughtful contemporary Latin American writers. At first glance, the essays in Wellsprings seem to be disparate meditations on a variety of unrelated topics. Nevertheless, while each essay can indeed be read as a discrete reflection on a particular topic, the essays do exhibit a thematic unity. Much like Milan Kundera’s essays in Le Rideau (2005; The Curtain, 2007) and L’Art du roman (1986; The Art of the Novel, 1988), Vargas Llosa’s essays in Wellsprings attempt to explain the development of the novel against the backdrop of politics, history, and culture. In the first two essays in the collection, Vargas Llosa cites the two writers, Cervantes and Borges, who have influenced not only his own writing but also Spanish literature, in particular, and world literature, in general. He calls Borges a liberating force for Latin American fiction, and he declares that Borges’s fiction is the most ex-

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citing and important event for imaginative writing in the Spanish language in modern times. In canny fashion, Vargas Llosa shifts his gaze from fiction to politics in essays on nationalism, Ortega y Gassett, Berlin, and Karl Popper. The novel, according to Vargas Llosa, acts as an arbitrary organization of human reality that protects individuals against the anxiety unleashed by the political or social disorder that is part of their everyday lives. The greatest novelists—Marcel Proust, Henry James, Leo Tolstoy, William FaulkPeruvian essayist, politician, and ner—ingeniously construct orderly fictitious journalist Mario Vargas Llosa’s novels worlds where life flows with order and coherinclude La tía Julia y el escribidor ence and which encourage confidence in indi(1977; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, viduals that they can know themselves, their 1982), El hablador (1987; The Storyteller, 1989), and Travesuras de la world, and their hopes. niña mala (2006; The Bad Girl, 2007). Wellsprings opens with Vargas Llosa’s reHis collections of critical essays flections on Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605, include La orgía perpetua (1975; The 1615), “Four Centuries of Don Quixote.” In Perpetual Orgy, 1986) and La tentación the manner of Dante and William Shakede lo imposible (2004; The Temptation speare, Cervantes uses his writing to explore of the Impossible, 2007). the nature of humanity, questioning the extent to which illusion intrudes on reality. Don Quixote is a perfect example of Vargas Llosa’s notion that fiction provides an order that the real world cannot provide. Such an order is not always perfect, though, since Quixote and his sidekick, Sancho Panza, not only humorously tilt at imaginary windmills but also destroy villages and injure people in their adventures. At best, Don Quixote enriches the reader by showing that individuals, through artistic creation, can overcome the limitations of their existence and achieve a nobility and an immortality. Thus, just as Hamlet remains forever a model of indecision, Quixote will live eternally as a model of the good-hearted but inept hero, dreaming of a better world. At the same time, however, Cervantes makes writers feel small with his glorious creative accounts of Quixote and Panza. Vargas Llosa praises Cervantes for taking the Spanish language to new heights as well as creating a challenge for those who write in Spanish. The powerful model of Don Quixote demonstrates for Vargas Llosa the nature of fiction. While fiction is entertaining and magical, it is also an escape from the prison of everyday life. The novel, like many others, provides individuals with an opportunity to step out of their worlds and into another world where they can play roles that are richer or more sordid than the lives they are destined to live. Using Don Quixote as his starting point, Vargas Llosa proclaims that fiction is at once a witness to and a foundation of our nonconformity. After four centuries, the most enduring image of Cervantes’s novel is that odd couple, Quixote and Panza, riding through the novel’s

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pages and their adventures, revealing the remarkably rich power of the human imagination in re-creating individual’s lives. Vargas Llosa continues to explore the nature of fiction and the writers who have influenced him in his second essay, “The Fictions of Borges.” Much like Cervantes, the twentieth century Argentine writer elevated the artistic bar for Latin American writers. According to Vargas Llosa, Borges brought to an end the timidity of Latin American writers who felt that their fiction could deal only with provincial subjects. Before Borges, Latin American writers shrank from writing novels or stories that might deal with universal themes. Embraced by European and North American writers, Borges’s fiction opened the doors for Latin American writers to enter into a larger cultural conversation without feeling foolish or deluded about their writing. Borges’s prose is revolutionary because it contains almost as many ideas as words, and he is precise and concise in the execution of stories such as “The Circular Ruins,” “The Theologians,” and “The Aleph.” Borges’s manifesto for fiction—that the habit of writing long books to state an idea that can be expressed in a few minutes is a laborious and exhausting enterprise—reveals his theory of fiction. As much as Vargas Llosa disagrees with Borges—if Vargas Llosa had emulated Borges’s theory, Vargas Llosa’s novels would have been the length of short stories—he does find it useful as a way of thinking about the central issues of Borges’s fiction (conjecture, speculation, theory, doctrine) and its broad appeal to novelists of ideas. Without Cervantes and Borges, Latin American literature, in particular, and world literature, in general, would have been impoverished, for, as Vargas Llosa so elegantly illustrates, each writer opens the windows on imagination and freedom. In a final essay devoted to the nature of fiction, “Fiction and Reality in Latin America,” Vargas Llosa explores the relationship between fiction and history while at the same time praising one of his mentors, Raúl Porras Barrenechea, a historian who was working on a history of the conquest of Peru by the Spaniards at the time of his death. According to Vargas Llosa, Barrenechea masterfully turned history into story, anecdote, and adventure. Barrenechea, in Vargas Llosa’s telling, is something of a comic character—a potbellied little man with a large forehead—who resembles the character Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874). Like Casaubon, Barrenechea spent his career so intently collecting documents related to the conquest of Peru that he never got around to writing his book on the subject. Vargas Llosa served as his assistant one semester and spent his time looking over chronicles of conquest and discovery; in those documents he discovered the source of much of the magical fiction that eventually grew out of Latin America. Without these chronicles, books such as García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970) and Julio Cortázar’s short stories would not have been possible. These chronicles, which purport to be historical accounts of certain events, are in fact a type of writing that weaves together literature and history, fiction and reality, truth and falsehood, in ways that create new ways of looking at the world. More important, though, for Vargas Llosa are the lessons that these chronicles teach. The chronicles reveal the stories that Peruvians made up to vilify the conquistadors and persuade the Peruvians that their problems had been imposed from abroad. As fiction, the chronicles mask

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the historical fact that, as Vargas Llosa points out, the Peruvians defeated themselves. Once again, Vargas Llosa demonstrates the power of fiction to change the world. The remainder of the essays in Wellsprings are less compelling than those on fiction, exploring mostly political topics, and range from portraits of the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset (“Ortega y Gasset and the Revival of a Liberal”), Berlin (“Isaiah Berlin, a Hero of Our Time), and Popper (“Updating Karl Popper”) to an examination of the dangers of an unbridled nationalism (“The Challenges of Nationalism”). In “The Challenges of Nationalism,” Vargas Llosa uses the examples of the suppression of the Catalans and the Basques in modern Spain to challenge stridently the elevation of a national identity that suppresses the freedoms of the various groups that make up the nation. Returning to the creative spirit, he declares that the only legitimate role of any government is to create the conditions in which cultural life can flourish. Governments ought not to interfere with such cultural life, and they should guarantee freedom of expression and the free flow of ideas as well as foster the arts and provide access to education. Any government that suppresses the creative spirit in the jingoistic spirit of nationalism invites its own demise, leading often to the silencing of the very voices that might provide the most ingenious solutions to political issues. Vargas Llosa’s most powerful essays in Wellsprings focus on the power of literature and the relationship between imagination and reality. These essays reveal Vargas Llosa’s tenacious commitment to the power of storytelling and to the ability that writing and art have to transform individuals. His compelling essays on Cervantes and Borges encourage individuals to savor those writers and their fiction, by rereading them or by picking them up to read for the first time. Vargas Llosa asks readers to consider the task of good fiction. Does it succeed in offering an alternative to the disorder of the worlds and offer an orderly and coherent world into which a reader can escape to lead a richer life? Does the fiction of Borges offer a sufficiently coherent world into which readers may retreat to find themselves and reorder their lives? What can philosophical fiction or the novel of ideas offer readers? Vargas Llosa’s political essays, while not as powerful as his literary ones, nevertheless form a unity with his literary essays. It is the power of fiction and literature, for Vargas Llosa, that can indeed challenge the sometimes misguided doctrines and policies of governments. Vargas Llosa’s Wellsprings will persuade readers that the freedom of expression keeps political regimes from calcifying, and the imaginative spirits of novelists and artists are a necessary feature of all cultures that value their futures. Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

Review Sources Hispanic 21, no. 11 (November, 2008): 72. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 8 (February 25, 2008): 60-61. The Times Literary Supplement, November 7, 2008, p. 29.

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WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING A Memoir Author: Haruki Murakami (1949) First published: Hashiru koto ni tsuite kataru toki ni boku no kataru koto, 2007, in Japan Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 180 pp. $21.00 Type of work: Memoir Time: 1978-2007 Locale: Tokyo, Hokkaido, and Murakami City, Japan; Kauai, Hawaii; Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York City; Athens and Marathon, Greece A famous Japanese novelist describes how his lives as a distance runner and a writer overlap Haruki Murakami is arguably the most popular Asian writer in the world because of such novels as Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru (1995; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1997) and Umibe no Kafuka (2002; Kafka on the Shore, 2005). His often whimsical accounts of the struggles of ordinary, usually young people to understand the vicissitudes of daily life have moved international readers. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is ostensibly an account of his twenty-five years as a serious distance runner, yet it reveals much more. The leisurely, free-association book is as much about Murakami the artist and, in his words, the difficult individual as about his athletic exploits. While runners may find something of interest here, the book is primarily for Murakami’s fans seeking more insight into his character and creative process. Murakami got the idea for the book from an International Herald Tribune article about what marathoners said they thought about while running. It took him ten years to decide upon a suitable approach. Writing the book during 2005-2006, he quickly discovered that writing about running was the same as writing about himself, so the project took the form of a memoir, alternating accounts of running with what he calls “life lessons,” what he has “learned through actually putting my own body in motion, and thereby discovering that suffering is optional.” Running is essential for his mental well-being, clearing his mind of the pressures of creating. He claims not to think of anything while running. Murakami describes how he had an epiphany during a 1978 baseball game between the Yakult Swallows and the Hiroshima Carp and decided he could be a novelist. Ironically, the idea came to him when an American player, Dave Hilton, got a hit. It is perhaps understandable that Murakami has been criticized in Japan for letting American culture have too great an influence on his writing. After publishing his first two novels, Kaze no Uta o Kike (1979; Hear the Wind Sing, 1987) and 1973-nen no Pinboru (1980; Pinball 1973, 1985), Murakami decided to close the jazz club he and his wife had been operating and write full time. Realizing good health would be es-

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sential to a long career as a novelist, he quit his sixty-cigarettes-a-day habit and took up running. He began running seriously in 1982, running almost every day and competing in at least one marathon a year with occasional other long-distance races. Although he played baseball and soccer as a young man, he never felt comfortable with team sports or with the competitive nature of one-on-one sports such as squash, but he found peace with the solitude of running. He competed in his first road race, a five-kilometer event, in 1983 and gradually built up his endurance to try marathons. Training for long-distance events resembles his approach to writing, which involves driving himself physically and devoting considerable time and effort. When “a mental gap” began to develop between him and running, he accepted the challenge of the triathlon, adding swimming and cycling to his routine. Contemplating this challenge made him think that his entire life up this point had been “a total waste.” Murakami’s normal routine is to run an hour a day, six days a week, while listening to rock by such performers as the Beach Boys, Beck, Credence Clearwater Revival, Gorillaz, the Lovin’ Spoonful, and Red Hot Chili Peppers and occasionally to jazz. Of running to the songs from Eric Clapton’s album Reptile (2001), he writes, “It’s not too brash or contrived. It has this steady rhythm and entirely natural melody. My mind gets quietly swept into the music, and my feet run in time to the beat.” Music figures prominently in Murakami’s fiction, with his characters constantly listening to and discussing jazz, rock, and classical music, and several of his titles are drawn from pop music, as with Dansu dansu dansu (1988; Dance Dance Dance, 1994) and Noruwei no mori (1987; Norwegian Wood, 2000). Hearing popular music from the 1960’s brings back memories of his youth, though he admits there is nothing special about them. Throughout What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami is modest and self-deprecating: “Those kinds of memories—unpretentious, commonplace. But for me, they’re all meaningful and valuable . . . the accumulation of these memories has led to one result: me.” Strenuous exercise is necessary for Murakami because he sees writing as an unhealthy enterprise, releasing “a kind of toxin that lies deep down in all humanity.” As a result writers and other artists are often antisocial or decadent. Despite attempts at grumpiness, Murakami often makes fun of himself, as when a seventy-year-old woman passes him during a sixty-two-mile ultramarathon in Japan and shouts, “Hang in there!” What I Talk About When I Talk About Running deals with the similarities between running and writing. When training for a marathon, he increases his pace each day while shortening the amount of time “to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day.” While writing a novel, “I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more.” The worlds of Murakami the athlete and Murakami the writer collide when a woman spots him running by in Tokyo and shouts that she has been a fan for twenty years.

Haruki Murakami has published novels, short fiction, and nonfiction. His many awards include the Yomiuri Literary Award for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. He has taught at Princeton and Tufts universities.

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Much of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is concerned with Murakami’s life as a writer. He tries to explain what enables him to be a writer: “It’s precisely my ability to detect some aspects of a scene that other people can’t, to feel differently than others and choose words that differ from theirs, that’s allowed me to write stories that are mine alone.” Being an essentially lonely person helps him deal with the solitude of both writing and running. The qualities making him a writer, he claims, also make him a difficult person to deal with: “I just can’t picture someone liking me on a personal level. Being disliked by someone, hated and despised, somehow seems more natural.” Murakami considers his highest priority to be his writing, not dealing with other people, though he calls his most “indispensable relationship” to be with his readers. Because readers have responded to his books, he gained the freedom to write “the kind of things I wanted to write, exactly the way I wanted to write them.” Though Murakami writes in his usual style, occasionally there are echoes of other writers, at least in Philip Gabriel’s sometimes colloquial translation. A paragraph about running is full of short sentences and compound sentences with short independent clauses, as if trying to approximate the rhythm of running. It begins, “It rained for a short time while I was running, but it was a cooling rain that felt good.” Just as Ernest Hemingway’s characters merge with their landscapes, Murakami feels at one with the weather, the terrain, and whatever he sees while running. His seemingly simple style also recalls that of Hemingway’s friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald. While translating Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), Murakami marvels at how the novel nourishes him, how he discovers something new each time he reads it, and how mysterious the creative process is. He still cannot understand how Fitzgerald accomplishes what he does. Murakami contrasts the physical peak reached by athletes when young with the productivity of Fyodor Dostoevski and Domenico Scarlatti in their fifties. Murakami repeatedly addresses the question of aging: “Mick Jagger once boasted that ‘I’d rather be dead than still singing “Satisfaction” when I’m forty-five.’ But now he’s over sixty and still singing ‘Satisfaction.’ Some people might find this funny, but not me.” Most of Murakami’s characters are young people, and he clearly continues to identify with them, seeing himself as a slightly wiser version of the man he used to be. While running is a means of staving off some of the consequences of aging, he is reconciled to the inevitability of change and that it is not a laughing matter. While What I Talk About When I Talk About Running consists mostly of Murakami’s seemingly random thoughts, there are many wonderful passages illustrating why he has such a lofty reputation. One describes his 1983 trip to Greece and a lonely run from Athens to Marathon to experience what the ancient Greek messenger did on his journey that gives the sport its name, though Murakami chose to run in a direction opposite that of the original. He deals with speeding traffic, encounters dead cats and dogs, and develops an intense thirst for a beer, becoming angry at the placid calm of the grazing sheep he passes. When he finishes this, his first marathon, and goes to a café for the longed-for beer, it does not taste as good as the one he had been imagining. The descriptive passages in this section are matched by his account of the change from brisk autumn to much bleaker weather in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he

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trained for the New York City Marathon in 2005. He creates a vivid image of a homeless man pushing a shopping cart and singing “America the Beautiful.” Throughout his writing Murakami uses sports metaphors. In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running he compares the modifications necessitated by aging that every writer goes through to a baseball pitcher who relies upon fastballs learning to be more clever and learning a changeup. As in his fiction, Murakami’s major points of reference are the arts. During the ultramarathon he spots clouds “like something out of a nineteenth century British landscape painting.” Occasionally, historical references are called for, as when his body rebels during this grueling race: “Like Danton or Robespierre eloquently attempting to persuade the dissatisfied and rebellious Revolutionary Tribunal, I tried to talk each body part into showing a little cooperation.” In his afterword, Murakami says that he thinks of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running “as a kind of memoir,” allowing him “to sort out what kind of life I’ve led, both as a novelist and as an ordinary person, over these past twenty-five years.” He wrote the book to discover something about himself, and, when he had finished, he felt a weight had been lifted. Murakami takes his title from Raymond Carver’s shortstory collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), which he has translated into Japanese. While Carver’s stories focus on the often insurmountable burdens life places upon his characters, Murakami’s book celebrates an individual’s struggle to make sense of his life and his art by exerting control over every facet of his daily existence. Michael Adams

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 16 (April 15, 2008): 5. Christianity Today 52, no. 10 (October, 2008): 104. The Economist 388 (July 26, 2008): 95-96. Entertainment Weekly, August 8, 2008, p. 73. Library Journal 133, no. 11 (June 15, 2008): 69. Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 27, 2008, p. 2. Nature 454 (July 31, 2008): 583-584. The New York Times Book Review, August 10, 2008, p. 16. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 19 (May 12, 2008): 43. Sports Illustrated 109, no. 4 (August 4, 2008): 26. The Times Literary Supplement, September 12, 2008, p. 5.

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WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES Author: David Sedaris (1956) Publisher: Little, Brown (New York). 336 pp. $25.99 Type of work: Essays, memoir A collection of autobiographical essays that reveal absurdity in the mundane As a writer, David Sedaris relates personal experiences that he exaggerates for comic effect and from which he draws insights about the human condition. A witty and wry observer of everything from natural childbirth to forensic pathology, Sedaris has earned a loyal following, periodic speaking tours, and various awards. Using the first-person voice, Sedaris unabashedly describes himself self-critically, not just admitting but perhaps magnifying his shortcomings. This sometimes comes across simply as self-deprecating humor, but cumulatively Sedaris’s essays create a picture of a man who is manipulative, wheedling, lazy, greedy, petty, dishonest, arrogant, and hypercompetitive. Even in stories intended to be funny, these revelations can at times make it hard for the reader to feel sympathy for Sedaris. Sedaris’s writing is defined by a deadpan delivery, exquisite word choice, and colorful imagery. The first of these—a narrative voice that is composed and straightfaced—becomes itself a source of humor as his stories become increasingly absurd, as when he describes in some detail an “external catheter” that is marketed to people who desire to sit through an entire football game without having to get up to go to the bathroom. His writing is also defined by a precise vocabulary and a good feel for vernacular that allows him to convey experiences and feelings with precise shading that comes alive for the reader. He describes a flight during which he sat next to a richly dressed senior couple whose conversation was filled with foul-mouthed complaints about the airline: “It was as if they’d kidnapped the grandparents from a Ralph Lauren ad and forced them into a David Mamet play.” Sedaris’s imagery is always evocative: a hotel room for smokers that “smells like a burning mummy”; a woman with hair “the color of a new penny”; the difference between a regular and a “mild” cigarette is “the difference between being kicked by a donkey and being kicked by a donkey that has socks on.” The essays in When You Are Engulfed in Flames can at times be slightly weightier than those in Sedaris’s previous collections. Still, the style and attitude that built his reputation in previous volumes remain largely the same. In this sixth of his published collections of essays, Sedaris focuses primarily on three areas: his childhood and coming-of-age experiences; his life (mainly living in France) with his longtime partner, Hugh; and his efforts to quit smoking. In his previous volumes, Sedaris’s most poignant humor is drawn from his childhood. The son of a Greek Orthodox father and a Protestant mother, Sedaris and his

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five siblings grew up in the 1960’s in Raleigh, North Carolina. His past experiences have provided rich material for Sedaris to train his wit on suburban life, family relations, alcohol and drug abuse, sex, school, and myriad other topics. In the current volume, however, Sedaris offers only one story exclusively about his childhood—an especially rich and entertaining topic in many of the essays in earlier collections. In the single childhood essay in the current volume—“The Understudy”—Sedaris describes the time his parents went away for a week and left the eleven-year-old David and his sisters with a lazy and tyrannical “sixtyyear-old woman who was not just heavy but fat, and moved as if each step might be her last.” It’s difficult to know which details in the story are genuine. Was this woman really dropped off at Sedaris’s house in a jalopy driven by a shirtless teenager? Did she really cook nothing but Sloppy Joes for them the entire week? Did she really tell them “First rule is that nobody touches nothing, not nobody and not for no reason”? However, separating factual details from fictional ones and slight exaggerations from outright fabrications misses the point of Sedaris’s work. Each story illuminates some aspect of humanity—especially the shortcomings and failings in interactions with one another. The story of the tyrannical sitter is not important in its particulars, but rather in what it says about how children view an adult from the other side of the tracks. Among the several coming-of-age stories in this volume, one stands out for its authenticity and sensitivity. “Road Trips” describes the author’s coming out as a gay man. There are many ways such a story could go wrong, either falling into smug selfcongratulation or proselytizing about social and moral issues. Instead, Sedaris manages to share his inner conflict and discomfort without making a cloying play for the reader’s sympathy and without delivering a polemic about society’s treatment of homosexuals. He simply offers his story with honesty and weary bemusement, in a way that readers of any sexual orientation could identify with. Another contribution in the coming-of-age vein is “This Old House,” in which Sedaris describes how he became infatuated with a romanticized ideal of the past and contrived for himself a wardrobe and lifestyle from the early twentieth century. His outfits supposedly included knickers, suspenders, and a top hat, and he moved into a boarding house run by a woman with a similar desire to live in the past. Even allowing for the author’s tendency to exercise exaggerated self-deprecation, one gets the sense that Sedaris was losing his connection with present reality. The only essay in this volume that clearly misses its mark is “What I Learned,” which Sedaris delivered as a commencement address at Princeton in 2006. The story completely overreaches, which is an unusual departure from his typically well-paced and balanced storytelling. The essay amounts to a fake reminiscence about attending

David Sedaris became well known in 1992 after reading his essay about working as a Christmas elf at Macy’s on National Public Radio. Since then, his essays have been collected into books appearing on The New York Times best-seller lists and collectively selling more than seven million copies. In 2001, he received the Thurber Prize for American Humor and was named Time magazine’s “Humorist of the Year.”

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Princeton so long ago that Jesus Christ had not yet been born and students worshiped a god named Sashatiba during the daily compulsory prayer. (Sedaris never in fact attended Princeton.) It describes in a singularly humorless fashion how students were burned alive if they failed a class; how the school mascot was a sabertooth; and how Sedaris himself majored in literally killing his parents. If Sedaris is trying to satirize certain aspects of Princeton or of higher education in general, it is not at all clear what these might be. The story lacks any evident kernel of truth that would allow it to make a larger point. A large portion of the essays in this volume are drawn from Sedaris’s life with his partner, Hugh Hamrick. The two have been together since 1990, and much of their time has been spent in Paris. Unlike most of Sedaris’s family members and acquaintances, Hamrick is treated kindly in these essays. He comes across as a calm, sensible, and capable individual, and as such he does not figure into much of the humor in this volume. Instead, it seems his main purpose in these essays is to serve as a straight man to Sedaris’s neurotic, hyperactive self. Many of these stories focus on Sedaris’s life in France, suggesting a fish-out-ofwater theme. “In the Waiting Room,” for example, recounts confusion and mishaps caused by Sedaris’s limited French vocabulary. “Keeping Up” starts out by describing American tourist couples that Sedaris observes from his office window, then segues into a (supposedly grudging) tribute to Hamrick. A fuller and more unabashedly loving tribute to Hamrick is offered in “Old Faithful,” in which Sedaris describes how the two of them met and became what Sedaris describes as a fairly conventional, monogamous couple. Sedaris certainly makes no effort to hide or downplay his homosexuality, but it is incidental to this relationship between two loving individuals. Especially poignant is “That’s Amore,” an essay about an elderly, foul-mouthed, and combative woman who lived in the same apartment building as Sedaris and Hamrick in the 1990’s. (The story actually takes place in New York rather than Paris.) Despite various ups and downs, Sedaris and the woman became friends of sorts, and by the end of the story it becomes evident that Sedaris truly cared for her. The final essay, “The Smoking Section,” is the longest and the one from which the book’s title is drawn. It is written in three parts. “Before,” “(Japan),” and “After.” The first section describes the author’s life as a smoker, from when he smoked his first cigarette at age twenty until his mid-forties, when he found smoking to be increasingly intolerable. The trouble was not so much the health effects or cost, but rather society’s mounting restrictions on where smoking remained permissible. Thus, it was not watching his mother dying of smoke-induced cancer that drove him from cigarettes, but rather it was being excluded from decent hotels, which one by one converted to smoke-free environments. Sedaris’s frank description of his smoking addiction is as entertaining and as illuminating as it is painful and revolting. It is a singularly honest, firsthand description of powerful addiction. The second section of the essay takes place in Japan, where Sedaris lived for three months as a way to reinforce his decision to give up smoking. He had read that a change of scene would make it easier to stick with his decision to give up his smoking habit. This section is written as a diary, with entries from throughout his three-month

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stay. While entertaining, this section offers relatively little insight into Sedaris’s struggle to give up smoking, instead focusing to a large extent on his efforts to learn the Japanese language and immerse himself in the Japanese culture. The entry for January 31, for example, opens with “Four weeks without a cigarette,” and then goes on for three paragraphs about English translations in Japanese marketing. The concluding, short section feels as though it should sum up some larger truths about smoking, addiction, or kicking the habit, but instead it mainly focuses on Sedaris’s feelings about litter. He offers that his only real regret about having smoked for so many years is that he’d generated so much litter in the form of cigarette butts, and he goes on to describe how he was once arrested for littering. It’s not much of a conclusion for such a long essay, but it’s in character for this writer who specializes in the mundane. Steve D. Boilard

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 16 (April 15, 2008): 5. Entertainment Weekly, June 6, 2008, pp. 66-68. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 8 (April 15, 2008): 412. Lambda Book Report 16, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Summer, 2008): 13. Library Journal 133, no. 14 (September 1, 2008): 179. New Statesman 137 (July 28, 2008): 49. The New York Times, June 10, 2008, p. 7. The New York Times Book Review, June 15, 2008, p. 5. People 69, no. 22 (June 9, 2008): 55. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 17 (April 28, 2008): 128.

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WHERE HAVE ALL THE SOLDIERS GONE? The Transformation of Modern Europe Author: James J. Sheehan (1937) Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (Boston). 284 pp. $26.00 Type of work: History, current affairs Time: 1900-2007 Locale: Europe Sheehan examines the radical shift of Western Europe after World War II from a collection of competitive, warring states to an interconnective, peaceful society The pendulum between peace and war among the major European states has swung slowly during the last four centuries. The two centuries of almost consistent warfare among these nations—from the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618 until the fall of Napoleon in 1815—was replaced by a relatively peaceful century, stretching until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Most striking, from 1871 to 1914, there was peace among all the great powers, the longest stretch without fighting among the larger European countries in three hundred years. That tranquillity was replaced by the bloodbath of World War I, which drew in every major and most minor European nations. Then came two decades of uneasy international peace, a period Sheehan calls the “Twenty-Year Truce,” marked by internal social and political revolutions. The truce was broken in 1939, and the resulting conflict almost destroyed Europe. The peace established in 1945, however, has held, resulting in the longest recorded period of noncombat among the major European powers. This study, by a senior scholar of German history, provides the historical background, context, and explanation for these two generations of peaceful coexistence. Sheehan also looks at the challenges that Europe must overcome if the transformation that occurred after World War II will continue into the twenty-first century. This is not an interpretation based on the uncovering of new documentary evidence. Instead, Sheehan has reexamined, synthesized, and reinterpreted previous research. The result is a fresh and insightful examination of the history of modern Europe. Europe at the turn of the twentieth century was a world, as Sheehan puts it, “living in peace, preparing for war.” It was a time of relative civil and international tranquillity, but it was also a time of widespread militarism. According to Sheehan, nations at the turn of the twentieth century believed their essential responsibility was national defense. The major powers of Europe were what he called war states, with large citizen armies. The public face of the nation—whether it was Germany, Austria-Hungary, or even France—was the soldier. Because of the great expense of maintaining large armies in time of peace, an expense that included both the direct costs of equipping and otherwise paying for the armies and the indirect expense of the drain a large standing army made on the manpower available for the civilian economy, the nations

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utilized a system of mass reserves. (The exception to this rule was the United Kingdom.) Conscripts were initially brought into the military system for a relatively short period of time for training, and then they returned to the civilian workforce, ready to be called back to military service should the need arise. Communications and transportation technology and elaborate and sophisticated planning were ad ditional essential elements in the evolution of the large citizen armies. Large reserve forces needed to be recalled from civilian life, equipped, and deployed swiftly. The result was a similar political and social system throughout Europe. Sheehan emphasizes that this was a period that actually encouraged a sense of optimism in the future. War was accepted as a possibility that hung over everyone’s head, but internal violence was limited, and standards of living for many Europeans rose during the century. At the same time that Europe was involved in a massive military buildup and in perfecting a system of deploying mass armies, nations and individuals were also trying to develop ways of restraining the destruction of war. Ironically, alongside the growing militarism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a growing and strong pacifist strain. Writers such as the Polish industrial warfare expert Ivan Bloch and the British journalist Normal Angell warned of the destructive nature of modern warfare. Their argument for turning away from war was not, unlike the Quakers, for example, based on any moral objection to war. Instead, they argued that modern war was so horrible that it would destroy social and economic stability. There were also some stirrings among governments. In 1899 and again in 1907, international peace conferences were held in The Hague, in the Netherlands. Sheehan, however, interprets these conferences, especially the later one, as little more than window dressing. Pacifism and militarism struggled for the soul of European governments during the first decade of the twentieth century, but militarism won. Although governments did not want to appear publicly opposed to efforts to find lasting peace, they did not want to have their ability to wage war restricted. This led to a certain amount of hypocrisy. For example, the Germans signed the convention in 1907 guaranteeing neutral territory, despite the fact that German war plans already included an invasion of neutral Belgium in order to defeat France. Sheehan emphasizes that he is only speaking of what might be considered the central core of Europe when he writes of relative domestic and international peace. The rest of the world continued to be a violent and dangerous place. Throughout the peaceful century in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, there was fighting in Africa and Asia as European nations expanded their colonial holdings or defended economic rights. Violence was also more likely to be the norm in life in the periphery of Europe. In Ireland, Spain, southern Italy, and the Balkans, for example, there was continuing conflict between nations or between the national government and elements of the population. Sheehan points out that conditions in the periphery of Europe resembled

The Dickason Professor in Humanities at Stanford University since 1986, James J. Sheehan is the author, editor, or coeditor of eight other books focusing on German history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He was president of the American Historical Association in 2005.

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those of the colonial world: underdeveloped economies, inhospitable terrain, weak state institutions, communal or kinship loyalties, and feeble identification with the nation. In such circumstances, violence was a way of life. One of the perennial questions confronting historians of twentieth century Europe is why did the assassination of the heir to the Hapsburg throne, the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, lead to World War I? Having described an environment of violence (in the periphery of Europe) and militarism (among the great powers), Sheehan responds to the question by asking whether war in 1914 was inevitable. He concludes that given the atmosphere and the stresses being placed on the European powers during the second decade of the century, some sort of conflict between the major European states was probably unavoidable. However, diplomacy might have avoided war during the summer of 1914. More important, the conflict needed not, as it did, engulf every major European country. The war that came left behind two different views of the place of war in European culture. For many Europeans, perhaps the majority, World War I proved the truth of the prophecies of Angell and Bloch. War was far more destructive than many had anticipated, and the lesson learned was the need to develop means to prevent a future large-scale European conflict. For other Europeans, probably fewer in number than the first group, but perhaps more energetic in seeking their objectives, and possessing political philosophies that required violence to succeed, such as the Communists and the Fascists, there was a belief in the “regenerative value of violence.” War was a positive good. In the end, the advocates of violence won, and the world was plunged into a second world war, this one of unparalleled destruction, especially in the east of Europe, where the total war between the tyrannical governments of Germany and the Soviet Union was characterized by a complete disregard for human life. When the conflict finally ended, it left the surviving population of Europe hungry, displaced, and disoriented. In Western Europe at least, there was a demand for a new approach to political and social life. The views of Angell and Bloch were firmly in ascendance. That new approach is what Sheehan calls the “Rise of the Civilian State.” In a sharp contrast to their pre-World War I counterparts, national defense was no longer the most important obligation of the post-World War II European states. Instead, public welfare was the highest priority on the minds of most European citizens. According to Sheehan, in the postwar period “the legitimacy of every Western European government depended upon its capacity to sustain growth and prosperity.” Thanks to the economic cooperation among the European nations and the time of peace, the quality of life improved manifold. Consumer goods and automobiles, foreign travel, and secure retirement became commonplace. For those unable to take advantage of the economic boom, there is an expectation of government-provided social services, such as education, pensions, health care, and subsidized housing. A number of factors allowed Europe to move in this direction. The most significant was the continuing presence on the European continent of the military might of the United States. The United States took on a significant portion of the defense burden of Western Europe in the confrontation with the Soviet Union. Another was the

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rapid decolonization that took place during the fifteen years after the end of World War II. Attempts to reestablish or maintain colonial empires were met with violent opposition by the indigenous peoples. The important point, according to Sheehan, was not that the Europeans suffered military reversals. That had happened before. However, instead of returning to the fray with renewed determination, the Europeans eventually admitted defeat. By letting go of their colonies, they were able to turn inward and focus on the welfare of Europe. In many respects, the postwar history of Europe is a great success story. At the time Sheehan wrote, the European Union was the largest economic bloc in the world. Life was never so good for so many in a material sense, and this was accompanied by a historically low level of political violence. There remains, however, one significant problem: external security in a dangerous world. When Europe had to confront a military issue on its own, such as the ethnic conflict in Bosnia in the early 1990’s, it failed miserably. Only when NATO, with leadership from the United States, intervened by bombing the Bosnian Serbs was the fighting ended. For Europe to truly take its place as a major power in the world, it needs an independent security system. Sheehan, however, believes that this is unlikely to happen because of cost and other factors. The transformation of Europe from militant to peaceful may continue to be dependent in the future, as it has in the past, upon the protective umbrella of the United States. Marc Rothenberg

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 2 (September 15, 2007): 22. Commonweal 135, no. 6 (March 28, 2008): 22-23. Foreign Affairs 87, no. 3 (May/June, 2008): 147-148. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 20 (October 15, 2007): 1092-1093. Military History 25, no. 4 (September/October, 2008): 68-69. The New York Times Book Review, February 10, 2008, p. 26. The New Yorker 83, no. 45 (January 28, 2998): 83. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 38 (September 24, 2007): 56. The Virginia Quarterly Review 84, no. 1 (Winter, 2008): 258. The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 14 (January 17, 2008): D7.

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WHITE HEAT The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson Author: Brenda Wineapple (1949) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 416 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Literary biography, literary history Time: The nineteenth century Locale: New England, especially Amherst, Massachusetts Wineapple traces the friendship between Emily Dickinson, the reclusive poet of Amherst, Massachusetts, and her more worldly friend, the older, former pastor, soldier, essayist, and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson Principal personages: Emily Dickinson, a nineteenth century American poet Edward Dickinson, her father Livinia Dickinson, her sister William Austen Dickinson, her brother Susan Dickinson, her sister-in-law Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a nineteenth century man of letters, soldier, editor, abolitionist, and early editor of Emily Dickinson Mabel Loomis Todd, a poet and friend of Emily and her early editor

On April 17, 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, minister, soldier, and man of letters, received a curious letter from a retiring spinster of Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson. The letter asked his advice about the writer’s poetry and enclosed were three of her poems. Wentworth was used to receiving such letters, especially after the publication of his essay “Letter to a Young Contributor,” in which he gave advice to would-be authors. Nevertheless, he was not prepared for this particular letter, with its query about whether or not her poetry was “Alive,” or for the strange poems enclosed. Thus began one of the most unusual literary correspondences of the nineteenth century, or of any century, and it forms the basis for this scrupulously researched and documented, fascinating, and wonderfully written study of nineteenth century American literary culture. Thomas Wentworth Storrow Higginson (he was called Wentworth) was born in 1823, descended from seven generations of a New England family, beginning with the Reverend Francis Higginson, who arrived in the New World from England in 1629. He settled in Naumkeag, which he renamed Salem, and established the village’s first church. Cotton Mather would describe him as the Noah of New England. Wentworth’s ancestors were involved in the banishing of Quakers from Massachusetts, in the witch trials in Salem, but also in promoting freedom of the press, the antislavery movement, and education reform. Wentworth’s father helped to found the Harvard Divinity

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School, but he later lost his post when state funds were withdrawn, partly because of the rise of Unitarianism at the school. Nevertheless, Wentworth grew up in Cambridge surrounded by the atmosphere of Harvard. Later, as a Harvard student, he studied under a stellar group of academics and made contacts among the next generation of intellectual leaders. In 1844, he enrolled in Harvard Divinity School but left to pursue a life of poetry and social action, especially in the burgeoning abolitionist and women’s rights movements. His subsequent life would be torn between direct social action on behalf of both women and slaves, and his desire to live the more private and secluded life of a man of letters. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born December 10, 1830, some two hundred years after the first Dickinson had arrived in Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her antecedents in the New World had been in Massachusetts as long as Wentworth’s, even if they were not as prominent. Emily’s grandfather settled in Amherst, Massachusetts, and became one of the town’s leading citizens. Her father, Edward, helped to found Amherst College as a bulwark against the religious liberalism of Harvard Divinity School, and when the state legislature pulled its financial support for Harvard, Wentworth’s father lost his job with the Divinity School. As Wineapple notes, it was one of the connections, albeit an odd one, between the two correspondents. Emily received some education in the local schools and then passed a year at Mount Holyoke Seminary in nearby South Hadley. Then she returned to Amherst, her father’s house, and the domestic retreat of her family, which for the most part she left only infrequently as a young woman and less frequently as she grew older, ultimately becoming a virtual recluse. They met only twice, and Wentworth visited Amherst only three times in all the years of their correspondence, twice to see Emily and once to attend her funeral in 1886. He confessed that the two visits left him drained, for in the face-to-face contact her intensity simply sapped the energy from him, an experience that he wrote about later. Apparently, it quite frightened him. Emily appears to have been somewhat passive-aggressive, distant and reclusive but needy and obsessive, in her relationships with men. Throughout their long correspondence, she would send him poems asking for his help and then ignore his suggestions. An incredibly busy man, with his writing and with the various social causes he supported, Wentworth at times seems to have been perplexed as to how to respond to her queries. For her, the letters were a way to relate to the outside world, reaching beyond her family’s garden. As they lived their separate lives through the history of their times, they shared periodically their thoughts on verse, on their families, on the Civil War, and more: he directly; she obliquely. She would send often-obscure poems that mirrored or com-

Brenda Wineapple wrote the awardwinning Hawthorne: A Life (2003), Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner (1989), and Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (1996). Her essays and reviews appear in The New York Times Book Review and The Nation. Wineapple has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation and teaches creative writing at Columbia University and the New School.

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mented on something he had stated previously or had published. He wrote of the times, of history, of events of the wide world. She wrote of her garden, of her family, of the diurnal world of Amherst. She chided him for not coming to visit her, and he put off the visits for various reasons, one of which Wineapple speculates was a growing affection Wentworth was developing toward his correspondent. He apparently had had several relationships of varying depths with female acquaintances that annoyed his bed-bound wife. Emily, too, seems to have invested the epistolary friendship with an intensity that became apparent during Wentworth’s two visits. After his second marriage, things cooled between them, and Emily developed another passion, this time with a local widowed judge, Otis Lord. Her friendship or relationship, however described, with Wentworth does appear to have been her longest one with a male not of her family. One of the main purposes of this study is to recast the relationship between the two correspondents. The major biography of Emily is by Richard Sewall, who paints a rather unflattering portrait of Higginson that Wineapple is at some pains to revise. Much of the current literary opinion of Wentworth comes from his relationship with Emily, as his own voluminous writings are nearly forgotten. In addition, the negative opinion of him in some measure originates with the three-volume edition of the poet’s work in part edited by him. After Emily’s death, Mabel Loomis Todd and Wentworth gathered her poems that for the most part she had steadfastly refused to publish. Emily did publish a few under her name and, during the Civil War, several more anonymously. However, she published only one after the war. Ralph Waldo Emerson described such writers as “portfolio poets,” those who wrote only for themselves and not to be published, presumably keeping their poems in a portfolio for their eyes only. Wentworth helped with the initial volume, wrote an introduction, and quarreled with Todd, who insisted on editing the poems by adding punctuation marks, rearranging the lines, and in some cases rewriting the texts. Wentworth opposed this practice, a fairly common one during the nineteenth century, but he appears in his later years to have lost much of his earlier spunk and, perhaps faced with Todd’s insistence, seems to have caved in to her meddling. He had little or nothing to do with the next two volumes of poetry. When Emily’s work was rediscovered in the early twentieth century, those early volumes of the poems were widely criticized, and rightly so, for the liberties taken with the poems. According to the details provided in White Heat, Wentworth appears to have been unfairly criticized all these years for not understanding the genius of his correspondent or not providing her with sufficient support during her lifetime. Wineapple supplies ample evidence that Wentworth offered what encouragement he could, given Emily’s eccentric behavior and her unique poetic style. Nothing in the nineteenth century literary culture could have prepared him for the eccentricity and advanced style of her prosody. He seems to have done the best he could under the circumstances, and apparently he did genuinely appreciate her poetic gifts, however strange they may have appeared. He encouraged her to publish, but when she was reluctant, he respected her wishes. The calumny heaped on him later by literary critics seems unnecessarily harsh.

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White Heat is a carefully documented, well-written book that presents a compelling history of the strange friendship between the worldly activist, soldier, and writer Wentworth and the reclusive poet Emily, a relationship carried on primarily through letters. The fascinating frisson between the correspondents makes for an interesting collision of sensibilities. Wentworth brought to the self-isolated Belle of Amherst news of the outside world, through his letters and through the vast literary journalism he produced throughout his career. Emily saw the world close and, as she put it, “slant,” and that perspective, delivered in the prose of her letters and in the poems she sent him, somewhat expanded his literary world. She exposed him to a poetry so unlike any he had experienced that it broadened, even if only privately, his literary horizons. Wineapple has created in her study a marvelous dance of sorts between the enclosed world of Emily’s household, with her extraordinarily inventive poetic style that would not be fully appreciated until deep into the twentieth century, and the active and open world of Wentworth, with his full participation in the central events of his time: the antislavery movement, the fight for women’s rights, the expanded freedom of expression in the arts, the reform of education. The interaction between these two worldviews makes for a compelling narrative, and it also allows Wineapple to provide a survey of nineteenth century culture—religious, political, social, and literary—that enlarges the book from its simple discussion of the correspondence of two literary figures. The reader glimpses a broad sweep of nineteenth century American history, with its religious denominational conflicts, its various literary tensions, and its political tensions, especially following the emancipation and during the Reconstruction. In addition, there is the Civil War itself, in which Wentworth made history and which interacts with Emily’s letters and life, providing a heart-rending close-up of the sufferings of the home front, albeit at a slant. White Heat offers an eminently readable study of two literary figures at the opposite ends of the genteel tradition in American letters. Wineapple has written a fascinating book, one that will educate as well as entertain. Charles L. P. Silet

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 21 (July 1, 2008): 28. The Economist 388 (July 26, 2008): 96-97. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 12 (June 15, 2008): 64. New Criterion 27, no. 5 (January, 2009): 76-78. The New Yorker 84, no. 23 (August 4, 2008): 68-72. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 25 (June 23, 2008): 48-49. The Wall Street Journal 252, no. 40 (August 16, 2008): W6. The Wilson Quarterly 32, no. 4 (Autumn, 2008): 100-101.

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THE WHITE TIGER Author: Aravind Adiga (1974) Publisher: Free Press (New York). 276 pp. $24.00; paperback $14.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Delhi and Bangalore, India Adiga’s compelling story of the coming of age of a young man caught in the tension between wealth and poverty in a newly globalized India examines deeply questions about human nature and its struggles with good and evil, justice and injustice, equality and inequality Principal characters: Balram Halwai, also known as the White Tiger, the young narrator raised in poverty who becomes the chauffeur for a wealthy landlord Ashok, the wealthy landlord and the White Tiger’s employer Pinky Madam, Ashok’s wife Mongoose, Ashok’s brother

In October, 2008, Aravind Adiga became the second youngest writer to win the prestigious Man Booker Award. He beat out fellow Indian writer Amitav Ghosh for A Sea of Poppies as well as the Irish writer Sebastian Barry for The Secret Sculpture, among others. Winning thrust Adiga, a former Time correspondent and freelance journalist, into the limelight for his acerbic and satiric look at contemporary India, especially the great divide between castes and classes that the drive toward globalization and wealth in the South Asian country has exacerbated. Reminiscent of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Satanic Verses (1988), Adiga’s novel teems with the assorted misfits, ragamuffins, and other denizens of the slums, back alleys, and gleaming corporate towers of the new India of the twenty-first century. When Balram Halwai learns that Wen Jiaboo, the premier of China, plans a visit to India to learn more about the country’s success with capitalism, Halwai sets out to offer the premier his own insights into the nature of the modern India. Over the course of seven days and nights, Halwai writes letters to Jiaboo, providing details into his life of entrepreneurship and chronicling the way that he was able to move from poverty to wealth. These letters paint a picture of an India divided by wealth, a class of workers enraged by their treatment and striving to overcome their lowly position for a piece of the wealth, and a political system that is so corrupt that murder can go unpunished if enough money can be paid to the police. Although a statue of Gandhi stands in the center of Bangalore, where Halwai lives, Gandhi’s memory is more mocked than venerated. To succeed in the new India requires cunning, desire, and the will to power.

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Without these, life, according to the narrator, is a joke. Halwai is no stranger to poverty. Born in the village of Laxmangarh to a rickshaw driver, he does not even have a name until he begins school. On the first day of school, when the teacher asks the pupils their names, Halwai replies that his name is “boy.” When the teacher further questions Halwai, the narrator says that everyone in his family called him that and that they had no time to give him another name. The teacher then names the boy Balram, which means “sidekick to Krishna,” one of the many gods of Hinduism. Even though the narrator possesses a religious name, he hardly feels religious. His family’s poverty is so pressing that all he feels is the darkness of the India in which he lives. This poverty becomes even more crushing when Balram’s father dies of tuberculosis, and he soon finds himself working in a tea shop to help his family make ends meet. He gets his last name, Halwai, or “sweetmaker,” from his new job at the tea shop. Although his destiny seems settled, he eventually is hired as a chauffeur for one of the wealthiest men in the village, and his education about the nature of humanity and the deep political and social fissures in India soon begins. Mr. Ashok, Balram’s new employer, represents the new wealth in India. Although the sources of his wealth are mysterious, he has enough money to hire servants and to keep ostentatious living quarters in the wealthy section of Delhi. He is also able to use his money to help, or try to help, influence political elections and to hire Western prostitutes. A fat man whose wealth has not made him especially happy, Ashok is married to a demanding Westerner named Pinky Madam, who makes life hell for her husband and his servants. Although Ashok’s family did not approve of his marriage to Pinky Madam, Ashok went ahead with the marriage. When Balram becomes Ashok’s driver, he soon begins to learn what life is like in the part of India that lives in the Light, away from the darkness of poverty and the superstition bred from centuries of religious observance. When Ashok’s brother, Mongoose (his real name is never revealed; this is the name that Balram gives the brother in order to represent the brother’s personality), meets Balram, he tells this new driver that the road is a jungle and that he will soon learn that he will have to roar to get ahead on it. When Balram moves with Ashok and Pinky Madam to their home in Delhi, he sees the great gap between the two Indias—the Light (rich) and the Dark (poor)—and he plots a way to make his move from the darkness to the light. Ashok attempts to be an enlightened master to his hired help, and he treats Balram the way he thinks Balram wants to be treated, as a member of his family. Pinky Madam and others around Ashok recognize Balram for the servant he is, and they encourage Ashok to treat this young chauffeur accordingly. Ashok refuses, but Balram does not think of Ashok’s treatment as kind; he feels as if his employer is patronizing him and becomes angry.

Aravind Adiga studied at Columbia University—where he was salutatorian in 1997—and Oxford University. Before becoming a novelist, he served as a South Asia correspondent for Time. His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. The White Tiger, Adiga’s first novel, won the Man Booker Prize. He lives in Mumbai, India.

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Balram’s anger is exacerbated as he watches his employer engage in political corruption as he tries to influence an election and as he tries to frame Balram for a hit-andrun accident for which Pinky Madam is responsible. Late one night on the way home from the mall, a drunken Pinky Madam demands to drive the car, and Ashok allows her to do so. Racing down a dark street, she hits and kills a young child. The next day, Ashok’s brother makes Balram sign a statement admitting that Balram was the driver when the accident occurred. After this incident, Balram begins to look for ways to betray and finally to escape Ashok. Balram recognizes that having a great deal of money is the only way to survive in the jungle that is the new India. In order to escape his servitude, he begins to steal in devious ways small amounts of money from Ashok, whom he has now come to hate. When his employer withdraws a large amount of money from the bank, Balram decides to murder him and steal the money. One night on a deserted road, Balram succeeds in his plan, and he escapes undetected to southern India. He sets himself up as an example of entrepreneurship to Jiaboo because he took this first step to wealth. Once he gets to his new home, he hatches a plan to provide taxi service to employees leaving early in the morning from their jobs in new industries such as telemarketing. When he discovers that such car services already exist, he buys off the local police— who talk to him about this plan even though he is standing next to a wanted poster of himself in the police station—and they arrest the drivers in the taxi companies for having expired licenses. Balram’s company begins to thrive, and he survives in the jungle like a white tiger, that unique animal that is born only once every several years, whose roar is loud, and whose desire for conquest is unquenchable. Like Pip in Great Expectations, Balram has succeeded in far greater ways than he ever imagined; in his success he now resembles his now-dead ex-employer and can live in the Light and never again in the Dark. Much like Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, The White Tiger explores the tremendous disparities between rich and poor, Muslim and Hindu, that exist in post1947 India, when the newly independent country is struggling to define itself and to establish its power. As Balram asserts in The White Tiger, the old India was like a well-kept and orderly zoo where every animal knew its place. In those days cowherds tended to cows and women wore veils and kept their eyes averted from strangers’ faces. When the British pulled out in 1947, the doors to the cages were suddenly opened and the animals began to destroy one another. The law of the jungle replaced the law of the zoo, and the most ferocious animals ate the others and grew big bellies. In Balram’s experience, there are now only two castes: men with big bellies and men with small bellies. Destiny in the new India is to eat or to be eaten. Thus, as in Rushdie’s novel, where in a famous scene the Indian immigrants to England become animals such as snakes and water buffaloes, Balram sees everyone around him in terms of their animal nature and gives them animal names. He is the white tiger because of his cunning; when he sees a white tiger at the zoo, he faints because he realizes he can no longer live in the cage of his existence. His employer’s brother is the Mongoose because of his fearlessness and his deceitful ways; his employee’s father is the Stork because of the length of his legs. In addition, Balram tells his grandmother

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that men and women in Bangalore live like animals in a jungle. Balram likens Bangalore to a chicken coop in which the animals’ movement is limited. Ironically, in order to break out of the chicken coop, he must embrace his animal nature—which he has tried to rise above in believing that obedience and humility were virtues—and eat rather than be eaten. Balram’s new India is one of deep contradictions. On the one hand, there is the wealth of the new middle classes brought about by globalization and the creation of middle management positions in jobs outsourced from Western countries at businesses such as call centers. On the other hand, the suffocating poverty of rural villages and of slums in the cities exists in the shadows of these new jobs. Class warfare continues to define India in a way that even Ashok is unable to see or admit. His patronizing treatment of one of his own countrymen resembles the way that a British colonial governor would treat one of his Indian servants. Balram’s murder of Ashok is both an act of class warfare and an act of individual entrepreneurship that enables Balram to get ahead. Thus, the greed that drives the new middle class in India touches the lower classes, making greed the consuming trait of the new India. In a world where life is a joke, as Balram tells Jiaboo early in the novel, even the act of murder can be seen as a self-congratulatory act of getting ahead in life. As many of the reviews of the novel pointed out, Adiga’s novel is often simplistic and the characters are not fully developed. Neither of the two main characters— Balram or Ashok—is complex or thoughtful; they are instead symbols of the poor and the rich. Each is driven by an almost physical desire to consume and conquer and thus is reduced to his animal nature. The contest between these two animals is exactly the point of Adiga’s novel, and he succeeds by using parody and satire to draw readers into the arena to watch this battle. Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

Review Sources The Economist 388 (September 13, 2008): 94. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 4 (February 15, 2008): 159. Library Journal 133, no. 3 (February 15, 2008): 89. New Statesman 137 (March 31, 2008): 59. The New York Times Book Review, November 9, 2008, p. 13. The New Yorker 84, no. 9 (April 14, 2008): 75. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 2 (January 14, 2008): 37. The Times Literary Supplement, April 11, 2008, p. 21.

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THE WIDOWS OF EASTWICK Author: John Updike (1932-2009) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 308 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 2006-2007 Locale: Canada, China, Egypt, and Rhode Island In his final novel, Updike continues the story of the women first introduced to readers in The Witches of Eastwick, tracing their lives as they return to Eastwick and attempt to atone in some ways for their past transgressions Principal characters: Alexandra Farlander, a widow living in New Mexico Suzanne (Sukie) Mitchell, a widow living in Connecticut Jane Tinker, a widowed Boston socialite Christopher Gabriel, an Eastwick resident Greta Neff, a longtime resident of Eastwick

A sequel by its nature invites comparison with its predecessor, and John Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick is no exception. The novel picks up the stories of the three principal characters Updike first created in his 1984 best seller The Witches of Eastwick, a mixture of graphic realism and magical fantasy set during the early 1970’s in a socially conservative Rhode Island seaside community. In that novel Alexandra Spofford, Jane Smart, and Sukie Rougemont, all in their thirties, seem to possess the ability to perform black magic. When they come under the spell of the mysterious Darryl Van Horne, a stranger recently relocated to Eastwick, they begin engaging in a series of sexual orgies and rites of black magic that wreak havoc on people who cross their paths. This tale of powerful women, published when discussions of feminism and women’s roles in society were still center stage in the American consciousness, was widely popular at the time of its publication—although it was heavily criticized by many ardent feminists for treating serious women’s issues with a certain sense of patronizing smugness. Additionally, millions who never read the book became familiar with the story through the 1987 film adaptation starring a trio of screen celebrities—Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer—as the witches, and legendary film star Jack Nicholson as Van Horne. Some of the same attractions—and faults—of the earlier novel are present in The Widows of Eastwick, which picks up the stories of Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie as they find themselves alone, widowed after years of marriage to men whom they met after fleeing Eastwick some three decades earlier. It is possible to read this novel without knowing anything about Updike’s earlier story featuring these characters. Enough hints are provided in The Widows of Eastwick to let readers know what had happened thirty years before to explain why the return of these women to Eastwick would be

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cause for concern, not only to the townspeople but to Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie as well. To resurrect these characters who were once examples of female power involves quite a gamble, but Updike manages to use these women to elucidate new themes about the problems of growing old in American society. At the same time, readers familiar with Updike’s earlier novel will find his portrait of the aging witches particularly poignant. These once-strong women are now merely aging grandmothers whose everyday struggles with John Updike had a highly successful failing health add to their deep awareness of career as a novelist, poet, and essayist. their inconsequential presence in a society The author of more than fifty books, he that values youth and physical fitness. received numerous honors, including The first third of the book focuses on atthe Pulitzer Prize, the National Book tempts by all three women to fill the void in Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Howells Medal, and their lives created by the deaths of their husthe 2007 Gold Medal for Fiction from bands. The opening scenes trace the journey the American Academy of Arts and of Alexandra, widow of New Mexico potter Sciences. Updike died of lung cancer Jim Farlander, through the Canadian Rockies, shortly after the publication of The where she tries with mixed success to enjoy Widows of Eastwick. the scenery and the company of fellow travel ers, one of whom seems to take a romantic interest in her. Not ready for new commitments, she returns home to New Mexico and shortly thereafter reestablishes contact with former friend (and fellow witch) Jane Tinker, who has recently lost her husband, a rich Bostonian. The two arrange for a trip to Egypt, during which they reminisce about their days in Eastwick, Rhode Island. Although the excursion is not as pleasant as Alexandra had hoped it would be, within a short time the two find themselves traveling together again, this time in the company of their Eastwick friend Sukie Mitchell, also a recent widow, who prompts them to join her for a tour of China. These journeys allow readers to see how the women have changed in thirty years. They are also intended as prelude for a more important trip that takes the three back to Eastwick, where they had originally met and where, under the influence of the diabolical Van Horne, they had virtually abandoned their families (and eventually divorced their first husbands) to engage in a series of sexual orgies that had allowed them to demonstrate to themselves and the community their newfound freedom and power as independent women. Unfortunately, they are painfully aware that their earlier experience had ended in disaster: Several people lost their lives, and the three women were convinced that their magic had led to these deaths. As a result, in the sequel, the three agree to return to Eastwick, where they hope to make amends for the calamities they had helped bring about. They manage to rent space in the same mansion Van Horne had owned—now refurbished into apartments—where they intend to

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reconstitute their witches’ coven to see if they can reverse some of the damage they had caused. The plan has problems from the outset, as the townspeople in Eastwick prove to have long memories, and the women are not welcomed back into the community. Among those most outraged by their return are Greta Neff, whose husband had been seduced by one of the witches, and Chris Gabriel, who believes that his teenage sister Jenny died as a result of a spell cast on her by the three. Greta and Chris are still living in Eastwick, and when the witches return the two decide to exact revenge. Chris takes an active role in stalking the witches and even issues some veiled threats against them. Only when Sukie manages (somewhat improbably) to thwart Chris’s scheme by seducing him do the three women feel they are out of danger and can attempt to re-create the magical rite, hoping they might conjure some permanent good. Instead, at the height of the ceremony, Jane suffers an aneurysm and dies. Their coven fractured, the two remaining witches leave Eastwick, making what they both sense are empty vows to meet again for future travels. It is a sobering farewell to these once-powerful figures whose earthy seductiveness has been replaced by a sentient awareness of their own frail mortality. As complicated as the foregoing plot summary may appear, it does not do full justice to the complexity of this novel. The Widows of Eastwick is filled with humor, irony, and pathos. Updike deals directly with the problems of aging in American society and seems to call out, as Linda Loman does over the body of her dead husband Willy in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (pr. 1949), that “attention must be paid” to these women who might otherwise be shunted aside by a culture that no longer values what they can contribute—or even wishes to acknowledge their existence. While it is clear that Updike intended to deal seriously with an important problem in American society, his use of the language of sophisticated comedy to express a serious and sensitive topic and his insight into his principal characters were almost immediately challenged by the first reviewers of this novel. Quite a few criticized it as a serious falling-off from Updike’s earlier achievements such as the Rabbit Angstrom novels or even The Witches of Eastwick (which also received mixed reviews when it first appeared in 1984). Three principal criticisms emerge from these early critiques. First, some attacked the novel as being formless, dismissing the first third of the book as a well written but irrelevant travelogue. This observation seems to miss the point Updike is making in the early sections of the book. The descriptions of the Western Rockies, the Egyptian pyramids, and the Chinese antiquities are rendered in such detail as to make them almost tiresome at times, but that seemed to be Updike’s intention, since he has the women themselves complain about the tedium of their journeys. It seems clear that these excursions serve an important function in the novel, demonstrating the desperation that the widows experience as they try to replace the husbands whom they have recently lost. A second charge reflects a larger problem that Updike had faced at least since the publication of Couples (1968), a novel that deals frankly and playfully with American sexual mores. While a few more straitlaced critics have complained about his gratuitous descriptions of sexual activities (almost totally absent in The Widows of Eastwick), what has bothered many is Updike’s rather glib handling of women’s is-

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sues and what some have described as his inadequate understanding of the psychological makeup of his female characters. Similar complaints were almost immediately launched against The Widows of Eastwick; one reviewer was particularly put off by Updike’s inability to depict the emotional dimensions and even the social interests of older American women. A third charge is that the exceptional vitality which characterized The Witches of Eastwick is missing from the sequel. Perhaps, however, such criticisms are driven by the expectations of the reviewer as much as by anything Updike has done or failed to do. The Widows of Eastwick lacks vitality precisely because it reflects the sad state in which the three witches find themselves. Where once these women could (literally) work magic, they are now unable to influence their own lives, or those of others, through their special abilities. What is clear is that in this novel Updike is attempting to present characters who suffer immensely not only from guilt for past transgressions but also from the feeling of powerlessness that accompanies advancing age. Although it may be possible to answer the charges of early reviewers regarding the novel’s organization, treatment of women, and lack of vitality, one significant problem remains for those trying to comprehend Updike’s intentions in this novel. The same problem exists for those trying to make sense of The Witches of Eastwick as well. It evolves from what might be called a confusion of genres, rooted in Updike’s decision to move fluidly between the worlds of realism and fantasy, particularly in his willingness to treat witchcraft as a part of the real world. His three protagonists believe they can affect others’ lives (and their own) through conjuration, and events do seem to happen as a direct result of their casting of spells. In the 1984 novel, badminton shuttlecocks are turned into bats, and people are made to spit out feathers and other debris when they cough. More seriously, two deaths in that book are brought about as a result of the witches’ malevolent activities. In the sequel, even though the witches fail in their major attempt to reverse some of their earlier malevolent work, their good offices do seem to cure a young woman of infertility. Is this really magic, or is there another explanation? Additionally, one is never certain how to understand the notion, expressed more than once in the book, that the three women conjured up their new husbands when they all fled from Eastwick. If they did, could they not have used their powers to prevent those husbands from dying? Is this conjuring simply a metaphor, suggesting that conventional feminine wiles are somehow akin to magic? If it is, then should other events of witchcraft be interpreted metaphorically as well? Unfortunately, these questions remain unanswered, perhaps intentionally. For witchcraft is a mystery that remains unfathomable, one among many that Updike deals with in this and other novels: sex, religion, and, most notably in The Widows of Eastwick, death. (Updike himself died of lung cancer three months after the novel’s publication.) As the witchesturned-widows of Eastwick come to realize, they cannot hold back the forces of time, and their attempts to come to grips with their own mortality give readers some insight into the greatest of all of life’s mysteries, one for which Updike—despite his exceptional ability to offer insight into the human condition—is unable to provide answers. Laurence W. Mazzeno

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Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 22 (August 1, 2008): 8. Commonweal 135, no. 22 (December 19, 2008): 20-21. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 16 (August 15, 2008): 15. Library Journal 133, no. 14 (September 1, 2008): 123. The New York Times Book Review, October 26, 2008, p. 1. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 30 (July 28, 2008): 48. The Spectator 308 (November 1, 2008): 46-47. The Times Literary Supplement, October 31, 2008, p. 19. The Washington Post Book World, October 26-November 1, 2008, p. 7.

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WILLIE NELSON An Epic Life Author: Joe Nick Patoski (1951) Publisher: Little, Brown (New York). 567 pp. $27.99 Type of work: Biography A country-western music journalist with thirty-five years of experience writing about Willie Nelson tells the singer’s epic story Principal personages: Willie Nelson, the legendary maverick of country-western music Bobbie Lee Nelson, Nelson’s older sister, who is also his pianist and his close friend Alfred Nelson, grandfather of Willie and Bobbie, who raised them with his wife, taught them faith, and gave them a love of music Nancy Nelson, Alfred’s wife, grandmother of Willie and Bobbie Paul English, Nelson’s lifelong friend, bodyguard, and drummer Waylon Jennings, the famous country-western singer, cofounder with Nelson of “Outlaw Country”

With Willie Nelson: An Epic Life, Joe Nick Patoski has fulfilled a lifelong quest for knowledge, not only about a legendary singer but also more broadly about the Texas milieu they share. The biographer’s family moved to Texas when he was two years old, and he has been “trying to figure out Texas and Texans ever since . . . . I realized the answer had been right in front of me for most of my life,” meaning in the person of Willie Nelson. Most people would probably agree with Patoski that Nelson is the quintessential Texan. Patoski also has the professional background to write this story. He has written two other book-length biographies, numerous magazine and newspaper articles as a staffer or freelancer, and liner notes for nearly a dozen country-western albums; he has served as a radio commentator on the country-western scene, manager of two country bands, and Grammy Awards judge for the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. These qualifications, personal and professional, should satisfy those wondering why a new book about Nelson joins some seventeen others already published, including Nelson’s autobiography. Patoski offers something extra for those who share his thirst for knowledge: a wealth of details on the history of American music, whose particulars must be recounted if the reader is to understand Nelson’s place in it. For educational value, Partoski’s chapters on Nashville and Austin are outstanding. The biographer presents Nelson’s life in chronological order, titling each chapter

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with a place name and a year, such as “Abbott [Texas], 1933” (the year of Nelson’s birth) or “Nashville, 1960.” At key points, however, the author interrupts this sequence to provide background on the Nelson family, the development of American folk music, or the intricacies of the music business. Thus, in a chapter titled “East of Western Grove on Pindall Ridge, 1925,” Patoski reveals that “[m]usic was in the Nelson blood long before Texas, back in the rugged hills of north central Arkansas.” Another chapter, on Fort Worth, describes Western swing as an amalgam of popular American music—country, of course, swing, jazz, pop, Dixieland, and country blues—tailored for dancing, with a strong Texas flavor. Swing in Fort Worth wasn’t just a western thing, either. It was the hometown of big-band orchestra leader Paul Whiteman and numerous other swinging big-band musicians.

As for Nelson’s life, the broad outlines will be familiar to most fans; they include an impoverished but contented childhood, an early stint in a Western swing band, service in the Air Force, work as a disc jockey, and writing wildly successful songs in Nashville, Tennessee. However Nelson’s efforts to record his own work, on his own terms, were disappointing. Nashville was “the promised land” to Nelson and hundreds of other country musicians. “The home of the Grand Ole Opry and Music Row was where country music’s stars shined brightest and where the hits were made,” but Nashville was “much more than that,” as Patoski shows in generous detail. He relates that it was the city’s African American community that first established its position as a music center. Patoski describes the Nashville recording industry, the participating artists, and even the studios where they played. The radio program that was to become Grand Ole Opry, he says, was launched in November, 1925, as WSM Barn Dance. As Nelson found it in 1960, the Grand Ole Opry was “a friendly, folksy, and family-oriented showcase of all styles of southern, western, and mountain music, in a tightly regimented format.” Nevertheless, he would have to work hard to break into the Grand Ole Opry and the Nashville recording scene. Nelson’s first job in the city was selling encyclopedias door to door. In time, the popular Faron Young asked to record Nelson’s song “Hello Walls,” which rose to the top of the country singles chart in 1961 and soon yielded Nelson an initial roy alty check of $14,000. Joe Nick Patoski began writing about Nelson was on his way as a songwriter. AfWillie Nelson in 1973. He has also ter “Hello Walls,” Nelson penned, in short orauthored the biographies Stevie Ray der, “Crazy,” “Night Life,” and “Funny How Vaughan: Caught in the Crossfire Time Slips Away,” all of which made their (1993) and Selena: Como la Flor way into the iconic book Heartaches by the (1996). He has written for Country Number (2003), listing the five hundred best Music, Rolling Stone, Spin, and The country songs. Still, it was other singers who New York Times, among other made these songs famous. Nelson wanted des- publications. Patoski has served as a perately to present his music according to his Grammy Awards judge for the National own vision. He formed his own band and Academy of Recording Arts and toured the country. In 1964, he enjoyed the Sciences. prestige of Grand Ole Opry membership, but

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he left abruptly when he realized he could not fulfill his contractual obligation to perform twenty-six Grand Ole Opry dates a year and still maintain his road-tour schedule—his larger source of income by far. Moreover, although the Grand Ole Opry was hospitable to all country genres, on Nashville’s Music Row these genres had to be kept strictly separate. As Patoski notes, many Texan performers tend to switch or blend musical genres; Nelson found a model from earlier years in Bob Wills. Stylistic diversity, however, was not acceptable to Music Row’s record producers, who favored the commercially safer single-genre formula. That made conflict between Nelson and them virtually inevitable. As if this were not enough, Nelson’s voice and appearance also counted against him with the Nashville music companies. Finally, in exasperation, Nelson returned to Texas in 1965. Many thought this move would destroy his career, but he persisted and defied the odds. For years, Texas fans, especially in Austin, provided support and revenue even when Nelson’s record sales elsewhere were slow. Paradoxically, the song that turned around his performing career a few years later was not one of Nelson’s compositions. It was “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” written by Fred Rose in 1945 and recorded previously by Hank Williams, Gene Autry, and Elvis Presley. Nelson’s cover was part of his 1975 Columbia Records debut, Red Headed Stranger. The first recording produced by Nelson, this stripped-down concept album was initially greeted with skepticism in the music industry, but it became a popular triumph, bringing Nelson some measure of financial security and a new credibility that freed him to create the kind of music he had long envisioned. As a single, “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” reached the top of the country-western charts before moving onto the pop charts, where it shortly reached number 21. With this fresh start, Nelson pioneered “Outlaw Country” with his close friend Waylon Jennings, not only loosening the hold of Nashville but also winning over large numbers of new country-western fans, especially among rock enthusiasts. Nelson had seen possibilities in Austin’s rapidly developing “hippie” music scene, dominated in the 1970’s by the city’s Armadillo World Headquarters music hall. Soon Nelson built his own Pedernales Studio near Lake Travis in Austin. He realized his dream of playing and recording his own brand of country music, strongly influenced by rock and roll, jazz, Western swing, and folk. The “crossover” phenomenon at the heart of Patoski’s tale is one reason for the subtitle “An Epic Life.” Indeed, like the hero of Homer’s Odyssey (725 b.c.e.), Nelson has lived by his wits and taken things as they came. Epic heroes also tend to have flaws, however, and, notwithstanding his clear admiration of his subject, Patoski duly details those of his epic hero. One such flaw was Nelson’s tolerance of gun-toting by some members of his staff, leading to tension in the “hippie-oriented” venues where he performed, including the Armadillo. Conversely, the biographer also notes how Nelson’s forbearance of “scalawags” can make the way thorny for the honest members of his circle. Patoski also examines Nelson’s marital infidelities and his periodic financial and emotional neglect of his family. He reports that Nelson’s eldest son, Billy, committed suicide in 1991. Much of the hardship in Nelson’s life, however, had other origins than his personal

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shortcomings. In the early 1990’s, a failed tax-shelter investment—one his accountants had told him was perfectly sound and legal—led to his arrest by Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents who seized all of his property for back taxes. He acknowledged the debt and paid it all, auctioning much of his land and selling his 1992 album The IRS Tapes: Who’ll Buy My Memories? via late-night television commercials. His friends and admirers did what they could to minimize Nelson’s humiliation, for example by bidding up land prices at the auctions. Many of his supporters wanted to repay the kindness he had shown with his famous Farm Aid concerts. To Kinky Friedman, a longtime associate, the important thing about Nelson’s payment of the tax debt was that “[h]e didn’t do it the easy way and plead bankruptcy. He did it the cowboy way.” Patoski does an excellent job of showing how, despite setbacks, Nelson exhibits a quiet resolve and an untiring focus on the goal, which has helped him to artistic success. The writer also traces clearly Nelson’s gradual but steady evolution into the gentle, laid-back secular saint he has become. Patoski is plainly elated at having produced such an authoritative biography, based on more than one hundred interviews and scrupulous research. Nelson’s loyal fans will appreciate the wealth of detail Patoski shares about all aspects of the singer’s life. However, at times too much detail is crowded into the narrative, as in the meticulous descriptions of the singer’s real estate transactions during the 1970’s. In addition, the accumulation of detail sometimes can make for awkward syntax, as in this passage from the chapter “Fort Worth Again, 1958,” about a publishing deal with disc jockey Jack Rhodes: [Rhodes] had cowriting credits with Red Hayes on “A Satisfied Mind,” which Porter Wagoner, Jean Shepard, and Red and Betty Foley had just recorded, and would share credits on ‘“Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” and “Woman Love,” which were covered by the likes of Hank Snow, Sonny James, Ferlin Husky, Jim Reeves, Porter Wagoner, and Gene Vincent. Before that, Rhodes led the Western swing band Jack Rhodes and His Lone Star Buddies (“Mama Loves Papa and Papa Loves the Women”), formerly Jack Rhodes and His Rhythm Boys, which featured Rhodes’s stepbrother Leon Payne, whose loose style influenced Willie.

Even so, in a book the size of Patoski’s—especially one purporting to relate a truelife epic—something had to be left out. The author has concentrated on the history of Nelson’s music and its antecedents but has not truly plumbed the depths of Nelson’s artistry and creative process. After all, it was Nelson’s music that made possible one of his most epic accomplishments—bringing together disparate, potentially clashing audiences with his blend of musical genres and compassionate portrayals of human life. Nelson bared his heart concerning his musical endeavors in 1988 with Willie: An Autobiography, and, given the consummate success of that autobiography, Patoksi’s omissions may have been for the best. Arguably, a reader needs both books to understand the full significance of Nelson’s life and work. Patoski most certainly has accomplished what he explicitly set out to do: understand Texans and Texas, the strange land to which he was transplanted so young. In an

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“Author’s Note” at the end, he describes how writing the biography of Nelson helped him understand that “Texans by nature are independent, free-thinkers, open, outgoing, and friendly. Iconoclasts, they respect tradition but are not beholden to it. Whether it’s God or sin, they tend to embrace excess. The good ones have a whole lot of heart.” He adds, “I can now safely say that no single public person living in the twentieth or twenty-first century defines Texas or Texans better than Willie Hugh Nelson.” As portrayed by Patoski, Nelson in the twenty-first century is pretty much the same old guy that Waylon had described years ago: “He’ll give you everything, say yes to anybody and trust events will turn out fine.” For all the hurt, emotional scars and financial challenges he had endured, he hadn’t changed that much. More often than not, his instincts had proved right. What Willie started almost thirty years earlier [the merging of musical genres, with peace between their respective fans] . . . was still in play.

Thomas Rankin

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 14 (March 15, 2008): 4. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 5 (March 1, 2008): 235-236. Rolling Stone, May 1, 2008, p. 22. Texas Monthly 36, no. 4 (April, 2008): 64. The Village Voice 53, no. 16 (April 16, 2008): 77.

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THE WINTER WAR Russia’s Invasion of Finland, 1939-40 Author: Robert Edwards (1955) Publisher: Pegasus Books (New York). Illustrated. Maps. 319 pp. $26.95 Type of work: History Time: 1915-1945 Locale: Finland, Sweden, and northwestern Russia, especially Leningrad Edwards explores in daunting detail the events, political and social, that led up to Russia’s invasion of Finland in 1939 and the ensuing war that lasted from late November, 1939, until March 12, 1940 Principal personages: Baron Carl Gustav Emil von Mannerheim (1867-1951), a Finnish military leader and statesman Kurt Wallenius (1893-1984), a Finnish major general, a superb military leader Kliment Voroshilov (1881-1967), an overconfident Soviet commissar for defense Wipert von Blücher (1883-1963), German minister to Finland in the 1930’s Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), Nazi dictator Joseph Stalin (1897-1953), Soviet dictator Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940), British prime minister, 1937-1940 Winston Churchill (1874-1965), British prime minister, 1940-1945 and 1951-1955 Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), president of the United States, 1933-1945

The winter war that the Soviet Union launched against Finland in 1939 grew out of territorial disputes that had existed between the two nations for more than two hundred years. Their common border extended for eight hundred miles from an area west of Leningrad to Lake Ladoga, the largest lake in Europe, and northward to the Arctic Ocean and seaport city of Murmansk on the Soviet side of the boundary. Russian-Finnish political involvements date back to before the time of Peter the Great, the Russian czar from 1682 until his death in 1725. The eight-hundred-mile border that the two countries share has always been a bone of contention. In the early eighteenth century, Czar Peter, in an alarming statement whose subtext suggested that sex-starved Finnish barbarians were on the verge of invading St. Petersburg and raping its women, warned that “[t]he ladies of St. Petersburg could not sleep peacefully as long as the Finnish frontier ran so close to our capital.” He used this fear, ungrounded and irrational, as a means of justifying his invasion and con-

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quest of Viipuri and Karelia. The tensions between the Russians and the Finns were ever palpable during the two hundred fifty years separating Czar Peter’s warning from the 1939 invasion of Finland by the Soviets. Just as Peter feared for the safety of St. Petersburg, Joseph Stalin, two hundred years later, had similar fears for the city, under the Soviets renamed Leningrad. Twenty years before the winter war, Stalin produced a document that called for six provisions that would presumably assure the safety of Leningrad. His document called upon Finland to lease the entire Hanko peninsula to the Soviets for thirty years so that they could establish a Soviet naval base there. Fortified by artillery, this base would, in essence, seal off the Gulf of Finland and all the entrances to Leningrad by sea. Stalin called upon the Finns to permit the Baltic fleet to use the Lapvik Bay as an anchorage and to cede the Gulf islands, as well as Björk, to the Soviet Union. Stalin demanded that the Soviet-Finnish border on the Karelian Isthmus be altered in such a way as to place it further from Leningrad than originally sited. He also called for the dismantling of the Finns’ fortifications on the isthmus and for Finland to cede the western reaches of the Fisherman’s peninsula to the Soviets. Stalin’s confiscatory proposals incensed the Finns, who were building their nation into an economic utopia during the globally bleak years of the Great Depression. Finland was the only European country that prospered during the1930’s: With the country’s brisk foreign trade, Finland had paid off most of its World War I debt, the only European country to do so, and it had a manageable unemployment rate of slightly more than 2 percent. It spent as much on education as it did on defense, achieving a literacy rate approaching 100 percent. As war clouds gathered over Europe in the late 1930’s, Finland was poised between the Nazis, who were clearly aligned with the political right and fascism, and the Soviets, their untrustworthy neighbors, who were aligned with the political left and socialism. Adolf Hitler and Stalin clearly distrusted each other. Finland, whose populace included substantial numbers of supporters on both sides of the political spectrum, attempted to observe the Nordic neutrality that had served the country well during the early 1930’s. With Germany’s invasion of Poland in September, 1939, a glaring violation of the nonaggression pact that Great Britain’s prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, signed with Hitler just months before, it became clear that Hitler could not be trusted. Chamberlain, soon to be replaced as prime minister by Winston Churchill, had lost credibility by attempting to deal diplomatically with Hitler’s fascist tactics. Meanwhile, the Finns were enduring pressure from the Soviets, a development closely monitored by the German minister to Finland, Wipert von Blücher, who kept

Robert Edwards, in his own words, “resides in a damp, collapsing farmhouse in Somerset, England.” The Winter War is his first book on military history. An occasional contributor to the Daily Telegraph and to Motor Sport, Edwards holds a degree in international politics from the University of Wales and spent two decades as a financial analyst and a trader in London and on Wall Street.

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the Germans informed of Finland’s looming threat from the Soviet Union. As Soviet pressure on the Finns increased, they were faced with a Hobson’s choice in which no alliance would be to their advantage. Their preferred course of neutrality was no longer viable. Tension between the Soviets and the Finns quickly reached a boiling point, and in November, 1939, the winter war between the Soviets and the Finns began as more than a million Soviet troops were deployed to Finland. The Soviet aggressors outnumbered their Finnish opponents by ten to one. In view of being so incredibly outnumbered, the resistance of the Finnish army under the outstanding leadership of Baron Carl Gustav Mannerheim and General Kurt Wallenius was remarkable. The Finns stood their ground against the Soviet troops for 105 days in mid-winter, a truly extraordinary feat. Even though the Finnish commander, Wallenius, was a heavy drinker, he was an accomplished military strategist. Often forced to make crucial decisions when he was intoxicated, he somehow managed to keep a clear head when he was called upon to make strategic judgments. The Soviet forces were led by Klimert Voroshilov, the Russian commissar of defense, who had an overblown vision of the strength of his forces and of his ability to lead them. Robert Edwards describes him in striking detail: “It is hard to identify a more overrated figure in military history than Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov. A year older than [Chief of the General Staff Boris] Shaposhnikov, he had, in a long and undistinguished career, progressed from semiliterate roustabout to marshal of the Soviet Union without delivering a single example of leadership or military vision, instead taking the easier route of becoming a symbol of rugged Bolsevik ‘soundness.’” In this description, Edwards skillfully highlights the internal problems that had long afflicted the Soviets. Theirs had become essentially a government of personalities rather than one based on demonstrated performance. Voroshilov was a striking example of this weakness that, in the long run, proved devastating in many Soviet military and political undertakings. The Soviet Union’s terrible losses in the winter war forced Stalin to purge the high command of the Soviet army. Voroshilov had substantially underestimated the difficulties involved in invading Finland during the winter, particularly in view of the fact that his Finnish opponents were well accustomed to functioning in the brutally cold weather and pervasive darkness that typify Finnish winters. Given the climatic conditions, the Soviets could not have chosen a less favorable time of year to begin their assault on Finland. The Finns traversed their country’s difficult terrain effectively, often moving about on skis, transporting with them automatic weapons and the devastating mortars they fired with great precision against the enemy. Edwards relates how they completely disabled most of the Soviet’s sixty field kitchens by hurling mortars at them and making direct hits, rendering them useless and unable to prepare meals to feed Soviet troops that were starving and suffering from sleep deprivation because of Finnish attacks in the dark of night when, with temperatures approaching minus thirty degrees Celsius, trees exploded loudly around them as their sap froze. Soviet troops resorted to building log fires to warm themselves and to cook their food. This, however, was a hazardous thing to do because Finnish troops, perched in

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nearby trees, used their automatic weapons to shoot the soldiers clustered around these fires. There was no shortage of vodka among the Soviet troops, and most of them partook generously of it. Edwards remarks on this, writing “a high alcohol consumption in cold weather merely produces the illusion of warmth and comfort; in reality, it has the effect of opening the pores of the skin and the consequent loss of body heat, with no reliable sources of external warmth save the suicidal log fires, can be terminal, even over as short a period as that endured by the 44th Division.” Edwards is at his best in describing vividly and in detail the field conditions and the terrain in which the winter war was waged. He is fully in command of the details of how the Finns fought the enemy. His extensive command of the political convolutions that led to the war is comprehensive and reveals much information that was not available to earlier students of the winter war. Väinö Tanner’s landmark study Olin ulkoministerinä talvisoldan alkana (The Winter War: Finland Against Russia, 1939-1940, 1957) was published in 1951, and Eloise Engle and Lauri Paananen’s useful study The Winter War: The Russo-Finnish Conflict, 1939-40 was published in 1972 and reissued in 1992 as The Winter War: The Soviet Attack on Finland, 1939-1940. Since then, Russia has opened archives to which these earlier scholars were denied access. After Germany invaded Poland, the Soviets wanted tangible proof that Finland, then a neutral, democratic country, would work to protect Leningrad from attacks, presumably from Great Britain and France, but in actuality from Hitler’s Germany. When Finland refused to permit the Soviets to establish military and naval bases in its sovereign territory, the Soviet response was a preemptive invasion of Finland. The Soviets anticipated that they would defeat the small Finnish forces quickly and easily, thereby proving to Hitler that the Soviet forces were formidable. Because of the utter ineptitude of the leadership of the invading Soviet forces, the message Hitler received was completely the opposite of what was intended. When, on March 12, 1940, the Finns were finally forced to sign a peace treaty with the Soviet Union after repeated bombings of their country by the Soviet air force and a frontal attack by the Soviets on the Karelian Isthmus, they had no recourse except to cede part of the isthmus to the Soviet Union as well as Vyborg (Viipuri) and some border territory. The world at large, particularly the United States and its president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Great Britain and its prime minister, Winston Churchill, had great sympathy for the Finns, but neither country came forward with tangible help. The League of Nations, by this time a virtually toothless organization, made no attempt to enter into the fray. The winter war was strategically important to Hitler because it revealed weaknesses in the Soviet Union’s armed forces. As a result of this abbreviated war, Hitler concluded that his plan for the German invasion of the Soviet Union, called Operation Barbarossa, was tenable. The long-term result was the siege of Leningrad, an encounter that lasted for a thousand days during which most of the city’s population perished along with hundreds of thousands of the German aggressors.

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In June, 1941, warfare resumed between the Finns and their Russian neighbors, but this conflict became a part of World War II. In this war, the Finns again demonstrated their strength and determination. Edwards’s research for this book was exhaustive. Although at times one might wish the author had presented his account with less information, the accumulated details provide evidence of Edwards’s comprehensive command of his subject. His writing style, aside from frequent parenthetical intrusions that can prove distracting, is appealing and happily leavened by his unfailing wit. R. Baird Shuman

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 13 (March 1, 2008): 46. Kirkus Reviews 105, no. 6 (March 15, 2008): 283. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 16 (April 21, 2008): 47.

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WITHOUT SAYING New Poems Author: Richard Howard (1929) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 265 pp. $30.00 Type of work: Poetry In his fourteenth collection of poetry, Howard provides more of his famous dramatic monologues, supplemented by a number of other poems filled with wit and wordplay Principal personages: Henry James, a major American-British novelist L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) Edith Wharton, another major expatriate novelist, an American who lived in France Hugh Walpole, a British novelist and key member of a London literary clique

Richard Howard is known as a poet and a translator with an uncanny agility with language; as a young man he worked briefly as a lexicographer. He is best known for dramatic monologues that not only capture the spirit of a time period but also explore subtleties of character of historical literary figures, often Victorian, whose complex works have made them part of the canon. In his thirteen previous collections, these sparkling monologues have been most frequently commented on, anthologized, and honored. They carry with them the richness of the era as well as insights into how the most profound thinkers and artists confronted the problems in their lives. Beginning with his first book of poems, Quantities (1962), Howard has been compelled by the dramatic monologue. The monologues are perhaps most concentrated in his 1969 book, Untitled Subjects, which gives the voices of Oscar Wilde, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and others. For Untitled Subjects, Howard used Victorian photographs as the spur for a series of poems involving imagined speeches and letters by people photographed by Nadar, whose real name was Gaspard-Felix Tournachon. Nadar was a nineteenth century photographer who believed in reading the sitter’s character into the photograph; he noted that “[i]n teaching photography it’s this immediate contact which can put you in sympathy with the sitter, helps you to sum them up, follow their normal attitudes, their ideas, according to their personality, and enables you to make not just a chancy, dreary cardboard copy typical of the merest hack in the darkroom, but a likeness of the most intimate and happy kind.” Howard grafted his own understanding of his subjects onto Nadar’s likenesses, and his book, which included some of the Nadar likenesses, won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize. Howard’s poetry often seems preoccupied with the question of how events turn into history—with the sense of disjuncture between experience and record. His po-

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ems trace constructions and reconstructions of historical truth, playing with story and life. Richard Howard studied at the The minute detail with which he creates peo- Sorbonne and worked briefly as a ple and events makes the reader both feel a lexicographer. A graduate of Columbia part of his scenes and a secret listener in the University, he has taught at his alma shadows. Many of his works either mention mater. His awards include the Pulitzer or identify themselves as physical records— Prize for Untitled Subjects (1969), a letters, books, tapes, pages. One has a strange PEN translation award, and an American Book Award for translating sense of walking into a picture through its Charles Baudelaire’s works. He has frame and yet knowing that it is a framed pic- been poetry editor of The Paris Review ture, not life, one is walking into. The sepia and Western Humanities Review and background remains sepia. The museum feel chancellor of the Academy of American is deliberately maintained. Poets. Howard’s monologues are very different from those of other current practitioners of the popular medium, as they are all one voice and at the same time separate voices. The penetrating intelligence they share and the mixture of wisdom and cynicism appear in poem after poem, yet the personal idiosyncrasies, the quirks, of each character come through. The poems are also visually intriguing as he uses a flexible blank verse in some, experimental designs in others, and occasionally rhyme. The appearance of the poems on the pages reinforces the sense that different individuals are being portrayed who speak in different tones although their language may be similar. Without Saying: New Poems contains more historical monologues as well as other voices, of myth figures and of Howard’s other selves. The title is teasing, evoking the cliché “It goes without saying”—which is always followed by full disclosure. There are all sorts of ways silence speaks in these poems, too—one hears things that would not or could not be said and witnesses failed communications and missed connections, whether these involve an aborted meeting between two writers, telephone messages to an absent recipient, a teacher who gets across unintended lessons, or a Nobel Prize that is not awarded to the desired recipient. A major figure in this collection is Henry James, who features in the opening and closing sequences. The first sequence, “Only Different,” is set in 1904, and James is threatened, for the edification of all involved, with a meeting with L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Since both writers were staying at the Hotel del Coronado, near San Diego, California, young relatives of James—his niece Peg and her fiancé, Stanford professor Bruce Porter—thought it would be a favor to the two writers if they would meet at a luncheon party. Each writer was invited to read the other’s works, after which each rejected with horror the prospect of meeting the other, leaving their would-be introducers with egg on their faces. The imagined reception of the work of the popular children’s writer by the hypercerebral James is particularly funny. The last poem is a long discussion supposedly from the journal of a young Hugh Walpole. Edith Wharton has led a major effort to have the Nobel Prize awarded to

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James, but it has been given instead to “a writer known (in Belgium) as/ the Belgian Shakespeare, Maurice Maeterlinck.” The lengthy poem, “Notes of an Industrious Apprentice, or What the Master Knew,” contains twenty-four pages of eight-line stanzas exploring the attempt to garner the prize, the behavior of Wharton in giving the bad news to her friends, and Walpole’s attitudes toward James. The poem is a subtle study of literary sonship and the nature of the relationship between Walpole and James. James had intuited and understood a great deal about Walpole’s personal life, which he used in his criticism of Walpole’s works. James had in fact interacted with Maeterlinck and had a certain appreciation for him; this he shared with Walpole. Moreover, James had referred to Maeterlinck in The Wings of the Dove (1902). Walpole, who finds Wharton too crude and unsubtle in her adulation of James, is baffled, awed, and overwhelmed by James, but can give him only the silent reverence of reading and understanding his work. Another poem filled with delights is “School Days,” probably based on Howard’s early education in an experimental school that seemed to mix permissiveness, neglect, and quirkiness. The speaker is addressing the teacher, Mrs. Masters, on the subject of field trips and other learning experiences. The students are far more vivid than the teacher, whose progressive attitudes and practices seem without understanding of the child mind and the unexpected uses to which lessons may be put. The final segment has the students propose a sex-free world as a project. It is entertaining to see how the typical worldly wise Howard speaker is slightly adjusted to produce cynical, worldly wise children. When Howard presents what are apparently his own childhood memories, too, the child seems to know too much, too soon. Other poems include “Ediya, an Interview,” recording an interview with Medea’s mum on the subject of her daughter’s untoward behavior, and “Exposures,” revealing monologues presented as messages on an answering machine. All Howard’s devices objectify and distance the major human issues the poems narrate, and it is appropriate to find recordings as messages—the medium of the tape suggests that the message is passed somehow anonymously, without interaction or connection. The message is given and received but without true communication. There is little of the face-to-face in Howard’s constructed world. “Ediya, an Interview” gives the responses of Medea’s crone mother, a self-indulgent, rather silly old socialite with a lapdog, to the questions a reporter poses, presenting a superficial analysis of how her daughter came to be the person she is. More sustainedly comic are “Exposures,” three complex narratives left by callers on the answering machine of “Richard,” all of which involve stripping or unclothing in some way. The funniest is the third, which tells of a woman speaker’s adventures with the “Backscatter Body Scanner” at the airport. The recorded confessional outburst catches the play with disclosure, exposure, concealment, and revelation that is echoed throughout the collection. The speaker wants the recipient of the message to keep it for her.

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And isn’t recognizing sacrilege (by which I mean my feeling of outrage caused by that Backscatter Body Scanner) somehow recovering the meaning of the Sacred? Richard, didn’t I tell you it was a religious experience? Would you please save this message for me: I’d like to read it over and avoid making a fool of myself next time

So much of Howard’s poetry involves the passion for keeping things—often small, unimportant things, but also items and words that were part of the world’s furnishings, for a given person, in a certain time. His characters are frantic to keep mementos of their lives, as if saving an object, a letter, or a record could prevent the passage of time. The irony of their desire to save themselves by saving these aspects of their worlds enhances the museumlike atmosphere often present in the poems. The poet is also a collector of things from the past. This book is filled with glittering wit and acute psychological insight, and some passages actually provoke laughter, with humor ranging from the intriguing double meanings of the titles to something close to farce. These poems will be savored and reread; they give the reader the sense of overhearing turn-of-the-century literary gossip. They show a version of the early twentieth century elite literary society that is entertaining and persuasive; the characters are often petty, insufferable, and grandiloquent. The reader is glad to experience them at some remove. These poems do not have the banked passions of some of the earlier Howard Victorian monologues, such as “A Pre-Raphaelite Ending”—a poem from Untitled Subjects that makes a reader awaken at midnight and hunt for the book, having suddenly recognized one more allusion. The narratives in this collection, however, are appealing for the tales they tell. Their dexterity, their capsule characterizations, and their glimpses into an era make them poems to which a reader desires to return. Janet McCann

Review Sources Antioch Review 67, no. 1 (Winter, 2009): 191. Booklist 105, no. 1 (September 1, 2008): 26. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 29 (July 21, 2008): 142.

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WOMAN’S WORLD Author: Graham Rawle (1955) First published: 2005, in Great Britain Publisher: Counterpoint (Berkeley, Calif.). 440 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The 1960’s Locale: Great Britain A cutup novel of a 1960’s British woman with a terrible secret Principal characters: Roy Little, a young man in love with Eve Norma Little, who calls herself Norma Fontaine and is actually Roy’s alter ego Mary, who may be Roy and Norma’s mother or their housekeeper Eve, Roy’s fiancé Mr. Hands, a photographer who tries to seduce Norma

In Woman’s World, Graham Rawle presents an authoritative example of the cutup technique initially made popular by William Burroughs with the Nova trilogy, consisting of The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964). Rawle’s novel, published in Great Britain in 2005 and in the United States in 2008, is the culmination of years spent cutting up women’s magazines from the 1960’s and painstakingly assembling a 437-page tale from bits of text. The result is visually striking as typography and psychologically compelling as narrative. Whereas Burroughs conformed the content of his cutup novels to the pieces he cut out of magazines, Rawle in Woman’s World shaped the tale while the cutup text determined the actual phrasing. Rawle drafted Woman’s World in a word processor, while also collecting text from magazines and organizing it by topic. Then he entered the magazine text into a computer database, enabling him to substitute this magazine text for phrases in his original draft. Using the result as a guide, he physically pasted the magazine cutouts into the draft he ultimately submitted to publishers. The entire project required five years. The story’s protagonist, Norma Fontaine, is a recluse who believes that “as a woman, you must never look less than your loveliest.” Her chief pastime at home is to read up on “the latest fashions, beauty tips, and handy hints for the home” in women’s magazines. She reflects, I really must think about starting a scrapbook. My dressing room is piled high with all the women’s magazines I have saved over the years. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to collect together my favourite fashion features, all the hints and tips on glamour and etiquette that I have found especially useful, and keep them together in one big book?

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Her loving brother, Roy, has learned as much from the magazines as has Norma; he is con- Graham Rawle is a British writer and tinually bringing the housebound woman ex- artist who has contributed series of stories, word games, and visual puzzles quisite dresses, scarves, and cosmetics. With text scissored from old magazines to newspapers The Guardian, The and creatively spliced into narrative, Rawle Observer, and The Sunday Telegraph can make Norma’s choice of words read like Magazine, some of which have been advertising copy, often with amusing effect: collected in book form. He has exhibited his artwork in Great Britain Raindrops fall like “chocolate-covered Payne’s and around the world. Woman’s World Poppets thrown from the branches above them is his first novel. by playful confectioners.” Sometimes her di alogue, though awkward, is more inventive than commonplace expressions: She describes someone as tiptoeing “with the stealth of a cartoon mouse.” She recalls that when her brother, Roy, failed to meet up with a woman who has strongly attracted him, “his heart had slipped deep into the lining of his overcoat.” Despite this hilarity, an ominous undertone soon becomes apparent in the story, and the book’s title begins to seem ironic. The perfect “woman’s world” of Norma’s magazine-fueled imagination clashes with the realities outside her home. She shows up to interview for a delivery job for which her brother is applying. “‘Good morning,’ I began, my voice a light and airy soufflé, straight from the oven. ‘I’ve come about the vacancy.’” Told she is not qualified, she complains to the boss, “You recognize me as the perfect woman, yet you are unable to see me as the perfect man for the job.” Though she nearly spoils Roy’s chance of getting hired, he does land the job, however, and in the process meets Eve, his future wife. Meanwhile, Norma meets a photographer named Mr. Hands, who proves to be the villain of the story. (Rawle, the cutup artist, has said, “I decided on Mr. Hands for my antagonist because the word hands is easy to come by in adverts for nail polish, soap powders, and the like. The name also describes his licentious, groping nature.”) In a familiar ploy, Mr. Hands lures Norma to his apartment by offering to take glamorous photographs of her. Finding the name “Syms” on his apartment-house entrance, Norma wonders if she will be greeted by “Sylvia Syms, star of stage and screen who keeps her skin so young-looking.” Instead, the door is opened by a woman “whose resemblance to Sylvia Syms could be measured in nautical miles . . . . At her feet, a small, highly strung poodle wriggled and worried itself into a rich, creamy lather.” The woman directs Norma to Mr. Hands’s apartment, whose squalid condition alarms her. Her thoughts immediately stray off into magazine home care tips, one of which she recites inwardly as she stares at a filthy lamp shade: “If your shade is only slightly soiled, rub it over with cotton wool dipped in fine oatmeal.” Then, flattered by the photographer’s attention, Norma displays a streak of narcissism, again expressed in the journalistic prose of the day: “My gaze ate into the mirror, fixated as I was by the image of my legflatteringly lovely pose.” However, Mr. Hands assaults her brutally, and, realizing that he has “underestimated the inner strength of the modern woman,” she fights him off and hits him in the head with her Cinderella slipper. Believing she has killed him, she flees.

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Fearing arrest for murder, Norma laments that the magazines offer no guidance for her dilemma. “In all the romantic stories I have ever read in my magazines, not one of the men, and certainly none of the women, has ever killed anyone.” She slips out of Hands’s apartment and makes her way home, to be confronted by Mary, who is either her mother or her housekeeper. Mary reproaches her for “dressing,” and suddenly it is revealed and Roy that Norma are the same person. The relationship between the personae of Roy and Norma is difficult to understand, rooted as it is in multiple forces. The beginning of the book contains a hint that there was a real Norma who in childhood was killed by an automobile, her older brother being at fault for not protecting her from traffic. In that case, in addition to the fascination with cross-dressing noted by some reviewers, Roy may be obsessed with living the life of a lost sibling in parallel with his own. Perhaps Roy has been channeling the spirit of the disembodied Norma. Finally, there is the question whether Norma ever existed or was simply a figment of Roy’s imagination. In any case, Roy and Mary frantically try to get rid of evidence that Norma is connected to Hands’s presumed death, and this comes to mean destroying every indication that Norma has existed at all. When, several days later, Roy spots Hands in a theater and realizes the photographer has survived the blow to his head, Roy decides to burn Norma’s clothing just as, twenty years earlier, he had burned pictures of her along with her childhood drawings and stories. Though greatly relieved that Hands is alive, Roy is now obsessed with the possibility that Hands recognized his “family resemblance” to Norma. Roy has the additional goal of clearing the way for a malefemale relationship with Eve. Still, his life as Norma, bolstered by the women’s magazines, has made him extremely knowledgeable about women’s fashions—much to Eve’s delight, though she is unaware of the source of his education. Then Hands traces Roy to his home. Aware that Roy and Norma are identical, he demands compensation for the injury, even though he had been the aggressor against Norma. Roy and Mary drive Hands away, countering his bluster and threats with bigger threats. However, because of the attendant stress, Norma makes a brief reappearance, her hysteria rising. Further uncertainties arise, however, when at the end of the book Norma, willing to sacrifice herself for the sake of Roy’s marriage to Eve, steps in front of a moving vehicle—a re-creation of her childhood accident. This puts an end to Roy as well as Norma. As the dying Roy imagines Eve forgiving his subterfuge, he and Norma both relinquish their claims to a single body. “In that moment of mutual surrender, bliss touched them with a sweet and gentle hand as they learned from one another the unselfishness of true love.” With this ending, the novel poses deep questions about the nature of gender. Some readers and some reviewers may consider Roy to be just a transvestite eager to learn how to apply lipstick or look demure—giving his alter ego Norma reason enough to peruse the women’s magazines. Another view is that, because Norma’s self-expression is limited to the bland sentiments of the women’s magazines, she has been bound all along to lose out in the real world. Nevertheless, from some source the troubled young man has learned much more than superficial femininity, for in the end he manifests what are commonly regarded as cardinal female virtues, namely, compassion,

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forgiveness, and self-sacrifice. This is one of this story’s paradoxes: that the quest to become an ideal woman, as defined in contemporary magazines, is realized by a man at the moment of his death. Did he have some innate understanding not garnered from the women’s magazines? Or are the virtues generally assigned as female really limited to that sex? The fact is that, despite their use of language culled from ephemeral publications of long ago, Roy and Norma truly are original characters. They cannot be depended upon to remain within the single frame of reference apparently set out for the story. It is true that the borrowed text, with its often decorative type fonts in varying sizes, provides a constant reminder that the characters’ ideas and the language in which they express them are derived from sources outside themselves. In a sense, as an example of cutup fiction, Woman’s World explicitly bears out the assertion of philosopher Roland Barthes that every piece of literature is derivative, “a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.” Barthes made this claim, however, in his essay “The Death of the Author” (1967), to minimize the role of authors as “owners” of their work, with the right to confer fixed meaning upon that work. Woman’s World, in fact, shows an authorial intelligence juxtaposing the novel’s text bits in such a way that the whole conveys different, and even deeper, meanings from those originally intended. In recombining the clichés of 1960’s women’s magazines, Rawle brings forth highly inventive expressions, many of them hilarious and some of them subversive of their original spirit. In the end, through the same technique, he also reveals something noble and affecting in his characters which they could never have absorbed solely from popular magazines. Thomas Rankin

Review Sources Bitch Magazine: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, no. 39 (Spring, 2008): 70. Gay Times, no. 325 (October, 2005): 91. New York 41, no. 11 (March 31, 2008): 63. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 45 (November 12, 2007): 33. The Spectator 299 (November 26, 2005): 44.

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THE WORD OF THE LORD IS UPON ME The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Author: Jonathan Rieder (1948) Publisher: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass.). 394 pp. $29.95 Type of work: Sociology, biography Time: 1950-1968 Locale: The United States, primarily the South An exploration of the various modes of speaking that King employed in communicating in particular situations, with a special emphasis upon distinctions between public and private, black and white audiences National heroes, once they become enshrined as such, tend to flatten out into one-dimensional paragons of virtue. Now that almost every major city in the United States has named a street for Martin Luther King, Jr., and the country celebrates his birthday as a national holiday, King has clearly entered the pantheon of great Americans, and in the process he has lost some of his sharper edges. In the short span of forty years since his death, King’s image has shifted from that of a controversial civil rights leader (mainly associated with African Americans) to a universal representative of freedom and good will. Jonathan Rieder’s The Word of the Lord Is upon Me aims to recapture the complexity of King. He argues correctly that “the idolatry of King has come at a cost; it has sifted out the unsettlement that King inflicted, and meant to inflict, on a nonchalant, often clueless nation.” King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 aimed at highlighting harsh racial injustice, pointing out the faults in the United States. Now the endless replays of that speech, especially on the holiday of his birth, subtly imply that King’s dream has been mostly fulfilled and that his words describe what is rather than what one day might be. Rieder’s book shows that there is much more depth to King than one would glean from the famous lines spoken in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Through an analysis of King’s rhetoric, Rieder points to how difficult it is to describe King in sound bites. Rieder focuses upon four different arenas in which King communicated: the company of fellow African American leaders, the black church pulpit, the mass meetings of the Civil Rights movement, and the broader, general public that included white Americans. Depending on the audience, King crafted his speech in startlingly different forms. Among his close circle of friends, almost all of whom were also black preachers, King could sound earthy and even vulgar. In his public addresses and published essays, he achieved a high degree of refinement and erudition. When he took the pulpit of a black Baptist church, King’s language would fall within the black idiom, in content and style. When whites were part of the audience, he leaned toward universal language and universal humanity.

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Some might call this pandering, but Rieder is careful to demonstrate that such a charge Jonathan Rieder is a professor of would be wrong. During his lifetime King sociology at Barnard College. His sometimes received criticism from those who research centers on the sociology of thought he sold out by making overtures to race, culture, and ethnicity. He is the white audiences. (Here is the most obvious author of Canarsie: The Jews and difference between King and Malcolm X, who Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism almost always remained confrontational.) Less (1985) and coeditor of The Fractious Nation? Unity and Division in sharply, other critics have said that King’s taiContemporary American Life (2003). loring of his message to white audiences was essentially window dressing. This type of critique separates King’s authentic self as a “race man” from his masked self as someone who appealed to white audiences for pragmatic purposes. Rieder’s book convincingly demonstrates that any attempt to separate the authentic King from the inauthentic, based on how he delivered his message, overlooks the complexity of the man. His capacious mind and his deep commitment to both black Americans and humanity in general precludes any facile compartmentalization of King into a stereotype. Although he recognizes that King had a chameleonlike ability to appeal to a myriad of audiences, Rieder emphasizes that King’s message had a consistent center. As he states, “the core of the man was the power of his faith, his love of humanity, and an irrepressible resolve to free black people, and other people, too.” Rieder contributes to King scholarship by demonstrating both the coherency of King’s message and the contingent manner in which King clothed his message, depending upon his audience. In every speaking situation, King’s context gave meaning to the content. The fullness of King’s meaning derives from the larger rhetorical situation. In order to do justice to the depth of King’s speeches, therefore, Rieder consistently frames King’s language within the conventions in which they were spoken. The most intriguing sections of the book are those in which Rieder engages in a close rhetorical analysis. One prime example that illustrates the modulations in King’s rhetoric is the famous “kitchen experience” as told in written and sermonic form. During the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, a man telephoned King and threatened him. This phone call broke King’s spirit temporarily as he groped for a way to withstand enormous persecution and pressure. In his written narration for his book Stride Toward Freedom (1958), King describes his emotional process movingly but with detachment: “At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying, ‘Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.’” Rieder contrasts this account with the way King described the same experience in a sermon entitled “Why Jesus Called a Man a Fool.” In the oral performance, King lengthens the story considerably, adding particulars such as the details of the threat (“we’re going to blow your brains out”), King’s concern for his infant daughter, and the failure of academic theology to assuage his fears. The climax of the sermon sounds remarkably different from the written word. He said that he

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heard the voice of Jesus (not “the Divine”) call him by name and that voice promised to fill him with the spirit. Then, in a poetic elaboration that Rieder shrewdly writes as poetry, “And I’ll tell you,/ I’ve seen the lightning flash./ I’ve heard the thunder roll./ I felt sin-breakers dashing,/ trying to conquer my soul./ But I heard the voice of Jesus/ saying still to fight on.” In these distinct rhetorical situations, King’s capacity to tune his message to various audiences is evident. The narrative in the book, geared toward a mixed-race audience of non-religious and religious folk, contains only a small dose of racial tension. Furthermore, King tempers the overt spirituality of the experience (“it seemed as though . . . ”) and comes to a quick resolution of his inner conflict. In the sermon, he displays his vulnerability much more. Rieder shows that as the sermon reached its climax, King’s voice wavered, re-creating the emotion that he felt on the evening of the phone call. The expanded story in the sermon often evokes the dynamics of racism and its devastating effects. The sermon, in other words, is pointedly directed toward the black community and evokes in the audience feelings of sympathy and empathy. King seems to live the experience of St. Paul, who described his own task—which, like King’s, centered upon proclamation as follows: “I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.” Neither King nor Rieder quotes this passage from 1 Corinthians, but it captures the heart of the “righteous performances” of the book’s title. Rieder presents a portrait of a man committed to an ideology but determined not to project himself as an ideologue. In almost every situation, King displayed pragmatism without cheapening his core beliefs. On a superficial level, the main thesis of Rieder’s work is not surprising. King spoke in different modes to different audiences, but every public figure at least attempts to adapt his or her rhetoric to the situation. The great value of this book lies in the analysis of how King executed these modulations and his uncanny success in doing so. Rieder presents King almost as a classical orator in the tradition of Cicero or Quintilian, a person so aware of the dynamics between audience and message that he can blend the two. So, for example, Rieder recounts the story of Willie Bolden, a convert to the civil rights struggle whom King first met at a Savannah pool hall. King could both talk tough with Bolden and preach gently to him. To cite another of Rieder’s examples, King became close to Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Polish Jew who became one of the most influential religious leaders in the United States. King drew on their shared commitment to the Hebrew prophets to forge a relationship that eventually led to Heschel taking part in the Selma marches. In forging relationships with different individuals, King employed rhetoric that crossed boundaries and built bridges. Throughout Rieder’s work, one gains the sense that King’s goal in speech was twofold: to connect to his audience and then to make them consider a position opposed to their own. To his church congregations, King admitted that it was hard to love white people (thereby emphathizing with his listeners) and then he would point out faults in the black community (thereby challenging them). To an uneducated audience in a mass meeting, he would lapse into unschooled dialect and then spring a quote from an intellectual such as Søren Kierkegaard. King

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fulfills the role of a prophet, a person very much a part of a community whose goal is to critique it from within. The different situations in the book show that King was a prophet to a variety of communities, from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery to the United States itself. Although Rieder’s book is not explicitly biographical, it is easy to see that King’s own life mirrored his rhetorical personae. Three influences combined to shape King—the black church, the racist South, and liberal Protestantism—and he drew from all three of these formative influences. Many Southerners who move North renounce their Southern roots or, alternatively, dig them deeper. Religious students who attend academic seminaries shun their formative spirituality or reject the more liberal teaching they encounter in their studies. King never settled for seeing himself on one side of a binary opposition. He much preferred “both/and” to “either/or.” Many of Rieder’s chapters highlight King’s willingness to straddle oppositions such as secular/sacred, intellectual/emotional, white/black, raw/refined. This allowed him to speak movingly to so many audiences and to encourage them to widen their horizons. It sounds simple enough, but it is difficult to think of another figure who has embraced the tensions of modern America the way King did. To use Rieder’s words, King had a remarkable “forte for translation,” and this book admirably shows what a great and difficult feat translation can be. Kyle Keefer

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 11 (February 1, 2008): 22. Library Journal 133, no. 6 (April 1, 2008): 88. Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2008, p. R3. The Nation 286, no. 19 (May 19, 2008): 36-41. The New York Times Book Review, April 27, 2008, p. 17. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 5 (February 4, 2008): 49-50. The Washington Post Book World, April 6, 2008, p. BW05.

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THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul Author: Patrick French (1966) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 487 pp. Illustrated. $30.00 Type of work: Literary biography Time: 1498-2001, particularly 1932-1996 Locale: The Caribbean islands (Trinidad in particular), England, Scotland, Argentina, India, Pakistan, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and more This authorized biography of Naipaul—an East Indian, West Indian Trinidadian turned British citizen of the world—examines his life and canon set against the history of colonialism as he moved from island scholarship lad to Oxford graduate to controversial author and Nobel Prize winner Principal personages: V. S. Naipaul, author and winner of many prizes, including the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature Kamla Naipaul, his elder sister, a scholarship student at Benares Hindu University, her brother’s primary family link, adviser, confidant, and critic with free access to his inner self Shiva Naipaul, his younger brother, a successful writer of whom Naipaul felt protective, mourning his early death greatly Margaret Gooding, Naipaul’s Argentine mistress, who reveled in their sadomasochistic relationship Droapatie “Ma” Capildeo Naipaul, his mother, from whom he inherited his strength and tenacity, although they drifted apart over his relationship with Margaret Seepersad Naipaul, his father, his favorite author, and a lasting influence, who spurred his love of literature, taught him the art of precision (a stylistic feature of Naipaul’s writing) and of Brahmin values (vegetarianism), and influenced his belief that women should serve men but sexual desire should be quashed Soogee “Nanie” Capildeo, his grandmother and ruling matriarch of his extended family Peter Bayley, a Fellow of English at University College, who assured Naipaul’s admittance to the university and who guided his scholastic career Patricia “Pat” Hale Naipaul, Naipaul’s first wife from 1955 until her death in 1996, who thwarted her family to marry an impoverished outsider in whose potential she believed; Pat’s diaries provide one of the most complete records of Naipaul’s

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life and show how affected she was by his manner, his temperament, and his personal drive to succeed at all costs Hugh and Antonia Fraser, friends originally introduced to Naipaul by long-term supporter Francis Wyndham and who offered him largesse, hospitality, and social connections Andre Deutsch, publisher who printed most of Naipaul’s works despite constant confrontations with the writer Diana Athill, Naipaul’s attentive editor at Andre Deutsch, one of the first to recognize his publishable material Anthony Powell, an early patron and friend, whose writing Naipaul later attacked viciously Samuel Selvon, a black Trinidadian writer who had an affair with Kamla Naipaul Henry Swanzy, Irish editor of “Caribbean Voices” in the early 1950’s Paul Theroux, American author of Sir Vidia’s Shadow (2001) and of Patricia Naipaul’s obituary, a longtime would-be friend Derek Walcott, a Caribbean intellectual and rival, whom Naipaul has debated since the 1930’s and who once dubbed him V. S. Nightfall

Patrick French’s The World Is What It Is indirectly links V. S. Naipaul’s canon (style, themes, characters) to his personal and familial history, showing readers how Naipaul has infused his art with his special vision of reality as a displaced, Oxfordeducated East Indian, West Indian, Trinidadian and world wanderer. However, French does not read Naipaul’s works as biographical projections but instead, through discerning, intuitive discussions, confirms Naipaul’s enormous creative output, as he alternated fiction and nonfiction and turned from Trinidadian themes to close observation of the cultural and political realities of Argentina, India, the Caribbean, Central Africa, the Muslim world, the American South, and the English countryside. French’s title reflects his approach to biography, an open look at an outrageous and controversial figure, probing his fears, his self-doubts, his genius, his disturbing personal life, and his character flaws. This is Naipaul as he is: troubled, paradoxical, controlling, needy, brilliant, selfish, exploitive, patronizing, yet solicitous of patronage, an impish and often vicious masquerader whose insights shock and English journalist Patrick French met compel, a cruel taskmaster, and an enigmatic Naipaul while working for The New narcissist. Yorker. He wrote Younghusband: The Fully committed to taking a cold, objective Last Great Imperial Adventurer (1995), look at unpleasant realities, Naipaul provided Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to French unrestricted access to his carefully pre- Independence and Division (1997), and served wealth of personal papers (fifty thou- Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a sand documents in the University of Tulsa, Lost Land (2003). French won the Oklahoma, collection, including his wife Pat’s Sunday Times Young Writer of the diary), introductions to important figures in Year Award, the Royal Society of his life, and no-holds-barred, candid, face-to- Literature Heinemann Prize, and the face interviews. He did so without reserva- Somerset Maugham Award. tion, but requested that the book end abruptly,

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with Pat’s death and his second marriage. The biographer concurred that the years thereafter need distance to evaluate. French provides an uncompromising yet empathetic portrait of the struggling writer, even at the top of his form methodically and obsessively controlling his art, producing twenty-nine books (history, linked stories, literary criticism, novels, travel writing, fused autobiography-fiction) while his personal life deteriorates, with friendships destroyed and enemies cultivated. In the main, French lets words and deeds speak for themselves, recording evidence gleaned from numerous interviews, direct quotations, and carefully cited sources while mostly avoiding psychological analysis and personal opinion. French’s title is from Naipaul’s powerful 1979 novel A Bend in the River, written in the style of Joseph Conrad: “The world is what it is. Men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” The title reflects the biographer’s thesis that, in the world’s view, the young Naipaul was a “nothing” who chose, with sheer determination, struggle, and self-assertion, to become something: a much declaimed and proclaimed author, a British knight, and a Nobel Prize winner. The chapter headings trace the movement: the young Trinidadian Vido suffers “Like Oliver Twist in the Workhouse,” copes with racism (“They Want Me to Know My Place”) and being undervalued and underpaid (“He Asked for 10 Gns!!”), but transforms himself into the noted, accomplished literary figure V. S. Naipaul, using clear, powerful but progressively elliptical prose (“The Schintsky Method”), highly concrete detail, and a sharp, biting wit (“There Wasn’t Any Kind Remark”). As V. S. Naipaul he challenged the literary dominance of dead white males and modernists with an exacting, excoriating global view eventually at odds with even the developing post-colonialists (“With the Aid of a Cutlass Blade”). He ends as he vowed he would, transformed into an Englishman, in 1990 knighted by the queen as Sir Vidia Naipaul (“Arise, Sir Vidia”), a contrarian praising the virtues of rural England while capturing the zeitgeist of former colonies and beating the English at their own language. French takes almost half the book to reach Naipaul’s thirtieth birthday, studying Naipaul’s journey from “nowhere” to the literary center, suggesting that the writer’s Trinidadian childhood—its quarrels, deprivations, and intrigues—informed his fiction lifelong. After quickly sketching Europe’s role in the Caribbean, he concentrates on Naipaul’s family heritage: his grandfather transported as an indentured cane-cutter; his Catholic grandmother producing a dynasty of strong, domineering women; the family mythology of Brahmin caste origins; his father’s struggles to succeed as an enlightened journalist and novelist, psychologically and professionally ruined by forced bloodletting to appease Hindu gods. Perhaps Naipaul’s finest achievement, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) pays tribute to a father whose own writing shaped Naipaul’s literary style and whose loving concern stayed in his memory despite difficulties reconciling with his family’s past. According to Naipaul, says French, growing up in Trinidad taught the youth the ease with which civilization could be destroyed and drove him to excel at Queen’s Royal College, Trinidad, and, as a depressed, half-starved scholarship student, to earn a bachelor’s degree from Univer-

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sity College, Oxford, England, in defiance of the prevailing attitude toward “wogs” from abroad. Oxford taught the small, dark, asthmatic Naipaul a disdainful, snobbish pose, and working with talented colleagues for the radio program “Caribbean Voices” taught him a writing voice and honed his literary skills. Despite successful publications and literary awards, Naipaul and his wife were impoverished, dependent on Pat’s teaching salary and on generous upper-class patrons such as Hugh and Antonia Frasier. French delineates Naipaul’s relationship with his patrons and with editors: his ability to charm upper-class liberals and ordinary folk whose assistance he needed, the parsimony of Andre Deutsch and Diana Athill at keeping publications payments low, the skill of agent Gillon Aitken at negotiating staggeringly high advances for manuscripts and repeated New York Review of Books assignments. French’s Naipaul is both the victim of racial prejudice and the victimizer, a ruthlessly objective critic of mankind’s heart of darkness but privately fascinated by it. He tested the limits of the novel, merging genres, intertwining fact and fiction, to explore the unfamiliar and shatter easy complacencies. French notes Naipaul’s careful observations and insightful conclusions: his criticism of Indian latrines led to hygiene reforms and prophetic warnings about Islamic threats. French’s most shocking revelations concern Naipaul’s personal life. The biographer describes Naipaul’s complicated relationships with women, beginning in his childhood when the matriarch “Nanie” reigned over a shared household where all women, including his mother, forbade any budding sexuality, leaving him an emotionally and sexually immature but pampered male. This upbringing directly affected his 1955 marriage to Pat Hale at age twenty-two, a “pure” love. Naipaul treated Pat as personal servant and editor throughout their marriage. She helped him through nervous anxiety and attempted suicide, supported him financially, prepared his special diet, organized his daily life, admired, advised, weathered all of his mannerisms, and recorded their experiences in her diary. His abusive insults, however, cut to the core of her self-esteem. She became increasingly apologetic and unsure of her own worth as he cheated on her with prostitutes and took as his mistress of twenty-four years an Argentine mother of three, Margaret Gooding. Although Pat desired children, she never conceived, while Margaret aborted three of Naipaul’s children. Margaret endured ferocious beatings, sadomasochistic sex, and humiliating insults, only to be paid off with a large severance check in her old age. French purposefully elicits sympathy for Pat over Margaret (describing Naipaul cajoling her to listen to his work in progress as she lay on her deathbed), though he recognizes that both women contributed to Naipaul’s writing: stability and editing skill versus passion and inspiration. French suggests that perhaps Pat’s greatest horror was to find elements of herself in both the murder victim and the avenger in A Bend in the River. As Pat was dying of cancer in 1996, Naipaul began an affair with Kenyan-Pakistani journalist Nadira Khannum Alvi, twenty years his junior, and he married her shortly after Pat’s lonely death (possibly hastened by his betrayals). Pat sacrificed herself and her self-respect to his “genius,” loyally providing Naipaul stability and a trusted amanuensis, only to be publicly embarrassed, snubbed, and ultimately rejected at her time of greatest need. French ends with Naipaul’s new bride scattering Pat’s ashes and blessing them

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with a passage from the Qur$3n and a children’s verse, with Naipaul too emotionally distraught to assist. French suggests that Naipaul’s patrician attitudes, his lifetime dependence on others to carry out the daily concerns of life (food, shelter, transportation, travel, interview preparation, editing), his thematic concerns, his basic literary style, and his pleasure in the stinging bon mot all have their roots in his Trinidadian youth. French shows us the human side of a challenging writer, one able to win the confidence and assistance of strangers but loyal only to his art, enigmatic, driven, wickedly funny, and irredeemably flawed. Gina Macdonald and Elizabeth Sanders

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 302, no. 4 (November, 2008): 134-139. Booklist 105, no. 4 (October 15, 2008): 13. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 17 (September 1, 2008): 926-927. Library Journal 133, no. 17 (October 13, 2008): 69-70. Los Angeles Times, November 11, 2008, p. E6. The Nation 287, no. 19 (December 8, 2008): 30-36. The New York Review of Books 55, no. 18 (November 20, 2008): 22-28. The New York Times Book Review, November 23, 2008, p. 1. The Observer, April 13, 2008, p. 23. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 36 (September 8, 2008): 44. Quadrant 52 (September, 2008): 58-63. The Spectator 306 (April 5, 2008): 32-33. Sunday Times, March 30, 2008, p. 39. The Washington Post Book World, November 16, 2008, p. BW10.

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WORLD WAR I The African Front—An Imperial War on the African Continent Author: Edward Paice First published: Tip and Run: The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa, 2007, in Great Britain Publisher: Pegasus (New York). 488 pp. $35.00 Type of work: History Time: 1914-1918 Locale: Africa, principally German East Africa and British East Africa Paice describes a grueling campaign of World War I on a nearly forgotten front, East Africa Principal personages: Colonel (later General) Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, commander-in-chief of German forces in East Africa, 1914-1918 Heinrich Schnee, governor of German East Africa, 1912-1919 General Jan Smuts, commander-in-chief of British and South African forces, 1916-1917 Winston Churchill, First Lord of the British Admiralty, 1911-1915 Captain Max Looff, captain of the SMS Königsberg and colonial troop detachment commander Lieutenant-Commander Geoffrey Basil Spicer-Simson, senior naval officer, Lake Tanganyika Expedition

The first shots by British troops during World War I were fired in a pestilential, little-known German colony in West Africa. Most readers—indeed most history buffs—will be surprised to learn that Africa played a role in that great conflict. However, anyone familiar with The African Queen (1935) by British novelist C. S. Forester or the classic 1951 film version is at least marginally aware that the British and the Germans were facing each other down on what was then still known as the Dark Continent. At the opening of hostilities in mid-1914, almost all of Africa was under the control, real or nominal, of one European country or another. Germany possessed four colonies on the continent: Togo, Cameroons, German South-West Africa, and (largest of all, at 384,170 square miles) German East Africa. Together their area was five times the size of the mother country itself. Opposing Germany and its allies were the Entente Powers, whose combined holdings in Africa were immense. As a result, Germany’s African colonies were surrounded by immediate and potential enemies, and most had little chance of resistance. Tiny Togo in West Africa—the site of those first British shots—surrendered during the first month of the war to a combined Anglo-French force. Its fall was followed by

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that of German South-West Africa, which surrendered to South African forces in July, 1915. Britain had only recently concluded peace with South Africa’s Boer (Dutch) settlers after two bitter wars, and there had been concern about the Boers’ sympathies, but they proved loyal to the British crown. Germany’s other West African colony, Cameroons, capitulated in February of the following year. This left only German East (as English speakers routinely referred to the territory), but that colony was destined to consume the efforts of combined British and Indian forces (with some help from Belgian and Portuguese troops) for four years. Besides their ostensible foes, troops faced a daunting array of “natural” enemies in Africa—cruel terrain, a debilitating climate, and a variety of vexatious and often dangerous animals. (On more than one occasion, swarms of angry bees joined in the melee, attacking both sides indiscriminately.) Endemic diseases included malaria, blackwater fever, dysentery, smallpox, and meningitis. The great pandemic of “Spanish” influenza reached sub-Saharan Africa in late 1918. The European participants were also constrained by a crucial psychosocial factor, the fear that their African subjects, whom they reflexively treated as inferiors, would come to see the Europeans as just another collection of warring tribes—more powerful, certainly, but otherwise no better than themselves. In any case, the colonizers were not constrained for long, using (and ruthlessly sacrificing) native Africans in virtually every capacity. That German East resisted as long as it did was due largely to a single individual— Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who became commander-in-chief of German forces in East Africa in 1914. A veteran of brutal colonial wars in South-West Africa that would today be classified as genocidal, von Lettow-Vorbeck had developed into a skilled, ruthless guerrilla leader determined to win at any cost. He quickly put German East on a war footing, overriding the concerns of timid Governor Heinrich Schnee and in effect assuming control of the colony. On the map, German East’s predicament appeared dire. To the north lay British East Africa (Kenya) and Uganda, while to the southwest were two more British territories, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Off the coast lay the British protectorate of Zanzibar and its sister island Pemba. On the west was the vast Belgian Congo, while to the south was Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique). However, the situation was not as one-sided as it might appear. Although Belgium had been invaded by Germany in early August of 1914, cooperation between its commanders in Africa and their British counterparts left much to be desired. Portugal entered the war on the Allied side only in 1916, but its efforts in Africa proved inept at nearly every turn. Over the next four years the resourceful von Lettow-Vorbeck ranged with remarkable speed over the region, waging a brilliant campaign against forces ten times the size of his own. His primary opponent was General Jan Smuts, a veteran of the Second Boer War

Edward Paice studied history at Cambridge University and spent several years in East Africa before returning to live in England. He is the author of Lost Lion of Empire: The Life of “Cape to Cairo” Grogan (2001) and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

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and the German South-West campaign who was appointed commander-in-chief of British and South African forces in East Africa in 1916. Britain’s war in East Africa got off to a bad start with the battle for Tanga, a port in German East and the terminus of one of the region’s few rail lines. Under the inept command of the hapless Major-General Arthur Aitken, who neglected to reconnoiter the area in which he landed his troops, the British suffered an ignominious defeat. Subsequently the British fared better, but the loss of the battle was a severe blow to morale in Britain as well as in British Africa. Both sides expended much of their energy during the opening months of conflict on SMS Königsberg, a German light cruiser responsible for the first loss of merchant shipping in the war. Under the command of Captain Max Looff, the Königsberg captured the SS City of Winchester, a British cargo ship heading for Britain with a load of Indian tea, on August 6, 1914. Afterward, however, the Königsberg, running short of coal and supplies, sought a safe haven in the vast delta of the Rufiji River, one of the German colony’s major water courses. It slipped out in September to shell and destroy the British cruiser HMS Pegasus, which was laid up in the harbor at Zanzibar, before returning to the delta. The fear of mines kept British ships from following it upstream. Winston Churchill (then First Lord of the Admiralty) became obsessed with the ship, and Britain spent vast sums of money to destroy it. Both sides endured extremes of heat, humidity, and boredom (not to mention the predations of mosquitoes) before the issue was finally resolved. It was thanks to two British monitors, or shallow-draft gunboats, towed from the Mediterranean that the cruiser was blown up. The British also used small planes to direct the attack, the first such use of planes to destroy a warship. However, the Germans managed to salvage ten of the ship’s guns, which they used against the British for the duration of the conflict. In a fitting end, the wreck of the Königsberg was eventually sold for two hundred pounds to the captain of the Pegasus. Several enormous bodies of water lying along German East Africa’s western borders—Victoria Nyanza, Lake Tanganyika, and Lake Nyasa—played key roles in the fighting. Two German craft, the gunboat Hedwig von Wissmann and the tug Kingani, held sway over the waters of Lake Tanganyika during the early months of the war, sinking a Belgian steamer and two British steamers in 1914. The following year they were joined by the Goetzen. This huge steamer had been built in Germany, disassembled, shipped to Dar-es-Salaam on the coast of German East, and then carried by train and porter to the lake, where it was reassembled. One of the Königsberg’s salvaged guns made the ship especially dangerous. In an even more astonishing feat, however, Lieutenant-Commander Geoffrey Basil Spicer-Simpson oversaw the transport of the bizarrely named motorboats Mimi and Toutou on cradles from South Africa to the lake and, with the help of two small Belgian craft, sank the Hedwig von Wissmann and captured the Kingani. With the aid of planes, the smaller, faster Allied craft were able to keep Goetzen at bay in the port of Kigoma, and it was eventually scuttled by its crew. These events inspired Forester to write his famous adventure novel. The armistice ending Germany’s involvement in the war was signed November 18, 1918, yet von Lettow-Vorbeck—who by then commanded only 153 German

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troops—did not immediately learn of his country’s defeat or even believe the news. He clearly would have fought to the last man. After the war he crusaded with Schnee for the return of Germany’s colonies and took part in an unsuccessful 1920 putsch to impose a military dictatorship on Germany. Adolf Hitler decorated him in 1939, and he lived well into the 1960’s. It is possible that, if other Germans had fought with the same determination (or fanaticism, depending on one’s point of view), the outcome of the war might have been different. The campaign in Africa has routinely been dismissed as a “sideshow,” but for a sideshow it was immensely costly. Britain’s bill alone ran to more than four billion dollars in today’s money, and when the cost to India and Britain’s other African colonies is included, the amount was far greater. The war was even costlier in lives. The official death toll among those fighting on the British side in East Africa was one hundred thousand, but the actual number was probably twice that. At least one-eighth of British East Africa’s male population died. German brutality resulted in the death of as many as three hundred thousand African civilians in German East alone. There have been several books in English about World War I in East Africa, including Ross Anderson’s well-received 2004 study The Forgotten Front, 1914-1918: The East African Campaign. However, Paice’s exhaustive history is likely to remain the standard work for the foreseeable future. He has consulted not only printed sources (as his lengthy bibliography attests) but also archives in eight countries. His command of detail is extraordinary, although he suffers from a desire to share everything he knows about his subject. Long, ambitious sentences constructed of multiple clauses and bristling with military abbreviations and references to commanders, armament types, troop strength, and unfamiliar place names may overwhelm all but the most determined reader. Here the book’s glossary, dramatis personae, and maps are a great help, as are the eight appendixes summarizing orders of battle. It is unfortunate, however, that Paice’s editors have not attended to the minor details of their production. The map of colonial Africa at the outbreak of the war incorrectly shows French Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia as parts of French West Africa. The index is incomplete, and there are several incorrect references; an entry for “Somaliland” contains “see also” references to “French Somaliland” and “Italian Somaliland,” but those entries are nowhere to be found. Finally, Paice’s title itself is somewhat misleading, as his book is devoted almost entirely to the campaign in East Africa and neglects the fighting in German Southwest Africa and Cameroons. Thus the definitive history of the African front in World War I remains to be written. Grove Koger

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Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 22 (August 1, 2008): 32. Contemporary Review 289 (Winter, 2007): 529. The Economist 382 (February 17, 2007): 87. Journal of Military History 71, no. 2 (April, 2007): 545-546. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 12 (June 15, 2008): 90. Library Journal 133, no. 11 (June 15, 2008): 81. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 22 (June 2, 2008): 38. The Times Literary Supplement, April 20, 2007, p. 8. The Wall Street Journal 252, no. 34 (August 9, 2008): W8.

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WORLDS BEFORE ADAM The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform Author: Martin J. S. Rudwick (1932) Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Chicago). 614 pp. $49.00 Type of work: History of science, natural history, science Time: 1817-1845 Locale: Europe Through an analysis of the work of such scientists as Charles Lyell, Rudwick shows how geologists, through their discoveries and search for causes, constructed an accurate, consistent, and enlightening history of the earth with a periodization and directional sweep characteristic of the reconstructive histories of ancient Greece and Rome Principal personages: Charles Lyell (1797-1875), Scottish geologist, author of Principles of Geology (1830-1833), and proponent of the uniformitarian theory Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), French comparative anatomist, classifier of fossil animals, and proponent of the catastrophist theory William Buckland (1784-1856), English geologist whose theory of a great deluge was compatible with the biblical flood of Noah Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), Swiss paleontologist and geologist most famous for his theory of an Ice Age Charles Darwin (1809-1882), English naturalist whose early work as a geologist was influenced by Lyell

Books have histories, just as the human race and the earth itself. In the past, Martin J. S. Rudwick devoted much of his career to the history of the natural sciences, through a study of a historical debate, The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge Among Gentlemanly Specialists (1985); a biography, Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes (1997); and an investigation of a specific period, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (2005). The last book is the prequel to Worlds Before Adam. Indeed, Bursting the Limits of Time is the first volume and Worlds Before Adam is the second of an exploration of how a new field, geohistory, originated and developed. In the first volume, Rudwick concentrated on how scientists discovered that the earth had an immensely long history and that its “deep time” could be reconstructed just as historians had been reconstructing the “shallow time” of recorded human history. In this second volume, which can be read independently of the first, Rudwick focuses on how geologists attempted to discover the causes of the principal events of geohistory. He has chosen to study the accomplishments of important geologists, paleontologists, and glaciologists within the historical period after Waterloo (1815) and before the

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1848 revolutions, hoping that they will epito mize pivotal historical trends, such as how a Martin J. S. Rudwick has had a scientific approach to history was central and distinguished career at the University constitutive for the human as well as the earth of California, San Diego, and at sciences. He opposes this approach to certain Cambridge University. Between 1970 traditional treatments that erroneously em- and 2008, he published nine books. In phasized the conflict between science and re- 1988, he received the Sue Tyler Friedman Medal, and in 2007 he was ligion, Genesis and geology. the recipient of the George Sarton Rudwick structures his book in roughly Medal from the History of Science chronological order, though his thematic chap- Society. ters often contain temporal overlaps. Each of the book’s four parts centers on the work of individuals whose discoveries or theories helped to clarify the long and complex history of the earth. Part 1 focuses on Cuvier, who wanted to “burst the limits of time” the way astronomers had “burst the limits of space.” Part 2 deals with those French and English geologists and paleontologists who developed ways of reading the story of the earth through its rock layers and the fossils they contained. Part 3 uses the life and achievements of Charles Lyell to illuminate both the strengths and the weaknesses of his uniformitarian system. Part 4 concludes with an account of how Louis Agassiz’s Ice Age theory presented a challenge to both uniformitarians and catastrophists, and how Charles Darwin was working on a theory of “descent with modification” that would provide a mechanism—natural selection— to explain the origin and development of all species of plants and animals. A major theme of Rudwick’s book is the corrigibility of those observations, ideas, and explanations that are at the heart of the scientific enterprise. He realizes that there are no such things as theory-free facts. For example, Cuvier interpreted extinct creatures, which he had adeptly reconstructed from a paucity of fossil remains, in terms of his catastrophist theory, according to which the earth had, at times, experienced cataclysmic events that had caused mass extinctions and left behind misshapen and shattered strata. However, Cuvier recognized that the rock layers also told a story of long periods of relative tranquillity and of an age of reptiles that had preceded the age of mammals. Cuvier made use of the data gathered by such stratigraphers as William Smith, who saw his task as describing fossils that characterized certain strata, but he did not try to explain their causal origin or their place in geohistory. Unlike early historians of the earth sciences, Rudwick understands that it is his duty to reconstruct the past on its own terms and not through the eyes of a twenty-first century geologist. So-called Whig historians evaluate the past through the present state of scientific knowledge, while dividing early scientists into heroes or villains, depending on how close their ideas mesh with accepted ones in the present. Rudwick will have none of this. Consequently, he treats William Buckland’s views of a worldwide deluge with the respect and the criticism that it garnered during his time. For instance, Cuvier visited Buckland in England where he interpreted a fossil of a lower jaw bone as coming from an extinct giant lizard, or megalosaurus. Unlike scriptural literalists, Buckland, like Cuvier, accepted a very long chronology for the earth before

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Adam. On the other hand, some of Buckland’s critics accepted a geological deluge but not his identification of it with the Noachian Flood. Other critics, who doubted the reality of the deluge and mass extinctions, deplored Buckland for mixing the immiscibles of science and religion. Although scientists with different ideas about the earth’s past agreed that the “actualistic method” of using well-understood present forces was the best way to explain the data gathered from fossil-filled rock layers, some, such as Cuvier, emphasized that this method had limitations, because present causes were unable to account for the worldwide revolutionary events that had punctuated the earth’s past. Lyell, on the other hand, based his geology on the principle that ancient causes were the same as present ones. He applied this uniformitarian principle not only to the gradual changes that characterized long periods of geological history but also to crustal movements, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis that, according to the catastrophists, had had devastating effects on prehistoric plant and animal life. Lyell was certain that the earth had never experienced events more sudden, violent, massive, or violent than the ones that humans had witnessed in recorded history. Furthermore, Lyell contended that the earth, in the present as in the past, existed in a steady state of dynamic equilibrium in which geological and biological changes were cyclic rather than directional. Lyell had critics as well as supporters, though more common were geologists who had mixed feelings about the ideas in the three volumes of his Principles of Geology. While agreeing with Lyell that the basic laws of physics and chemistry had not changed throughout the history of the universe, some critics did not agree that this uniformity meant that the forces that had shaped the earth and influenced its forms of life had always been the same. In fact, evidence from physics and chemistry, as analyzed by Joseph Fourier, showed that the earth had originated in a very hot state and had been cooling ever since. Lyell, to the contrary, believed that cyclic climatic changes had characterized the earth’s history, rather than a consistently downward trend in temperature. Similarly, by studying the increasingly more detailed fossil record, paleozoologists had become convinced that life in the deep past had been vastly different from life in the present. Furthermore, a directionality characterized the progression from the age of fish through the age of reptiles to the age of mammals. Even within the Tertiary period, mammalian fossils exhibited wide variability and stages of development. Lyell, during the time covered by Rudwick, was vigorously opposed to any theory of the transmutation of organisms. Even though Lyell tried to keep his Principles of Geology up-to-date in later editions, by the 1840’s new observations and systems of explanation made his form of uniformitarianism seem outmoded. He had clearly misinterpreted Primary rocks, such as granite and gneiss, and his view that human rationality set Homo sapiens apart from the primates became increasingly untenable when bones of humans contemporary with extinct mammals were uncovered and when the first fossil primates were found. Even Buckland was forced to adjust his views to the new evidence, abandoning his claim that the Noachian Flood should be identified with the geological evidence for a primeval deluge. Just as the history of the earth had its unexpected developments, so, too, did the history of ideas about geohistory. Louis Agassiz was

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responsible for just such an unexpected development. He had begun his career conventionally with a study of fossil fish, proving that an age of fish had antedated the earliest reptiles. However, Agassiz became most famous for his theory of an Ice Age, which he formulated based on the observations of other glaciologists and his own studies of Alpine glaciers. His theory was unexpected because of the nearly total agreement among scientists about the cooling-earth theory. Surprisingly, Agassiz insisted that the evidence revealed that, in the past, the earth had been much colder than at present. Soon evidence accumulated, not only in Europe but also in North America, that supported his contention that much of Europe and North America had been once covered by a thick sheet of ice. Neither the uniformitarians nor the catastrophists had a place for ice ages in their systems. Uniformitarians now had to accept nonuniform, violently cold events and catastrophists had to add gigantic ice sheets to their array of cataclysmic causes of mass extinctions. The reader may also find unexpected the way that Rudwick abruptly ends his book with the controversy over the Ice Age. Agassiz’s theory raised as many questions as it answered, and the major systems of geohistorical explanation, both uniformitarian and catastrophist, had been found wanting. Nevertheless, the geologists by this time had worked out a periodization of geohistory that, by and large, became the framework for future discoveries and theories. Most of the discoverers and theoreticians of this geohistory had been religious, and they had found ways to accommodate their scientific and religious beliefs. Interestingly, Rudwick sees the contingent world of the past that geohistorians created as supportive of a religious view of the universe. Natural theologians had used the world’s contingency as a proof of God’s existence and sovereignty. For Rudwick, the historian, atheist or theist, has the obligation to reveal the connections between the creators of history and what they created, in this case, the vast richness of a “world before Adam.” Appended to Rudwick’s account of early nineteenth century geohistory is a “Concluding (Un)Scientific Postscript,” in which he tries to anticipate and respond to possible criticisms of his book. To those critics who object to any “great persons” approach to history, he responds by stating that his great scientists also serve as exemplars for other, lesser scientists, their social interactions, and the fields that they helped to create. To those who say that he has neglected mineralogy, petrology, economic geology, and other significant fields, Rudwick responds that his approach was never intended to be comprehensive. To those critics who believe that histories of geology have tended to overemphasize British contributions, and Worlds Before Adam is no exception, he points out that, in addition, he deals extensively with the geologists of France, Germany, and several other countries. To those who say that he has downplayed the roles of scientific societies, journals, and cultural as well as historical forces, he responds that he has treated these in the contexts of the individual lives and works he covers. He also admits that other geohistories can be written by using viewpoints different from his own, and that is fine. Just as there is no end to geohistory, there is no end to writing books about geohistory. Robert J. Paradowski

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Review Sources History Today 58, no. 11 (November, 2008): 63. Nature 454 (July 24, 2008): 406-407. New Scientist 198 (June 21, 2008): 55. Science 321 (September 12, 2008): 1447-1448. The Times Literary Supplement, October 17, 2008, pp. 26-27.

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THE WRITER AS MIGRANT Author: Ha Jin (1956) Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Chicago). 112 pp. $14.00 Type of work: Literary criticism A collection of three essays, originally delivered as lectures, by Ha Jin, who is an eminent immigrant translingual writer, on writers like himself who have moved between countries and languages Like Ovid, Dante, and Heinrich Heine, Ha Jin writes in exile. Like Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, and Aleksandar Hemon, he writes in a language other than his native one. What distinguishes Ha Jin from other prominent Chinese American authors such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Gish Jen is the fact that he was born in China and emigrated to the United States as an adult. Though he arrived without fluency in English, he has chosen to make his career in that language, not Chinese. That career was confirmed when, ten years after his decision to settle in the United States, he won both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his 1999 novel Waiting. Invited to serve as guest speaker for the Campbell Lecture Series at Rice University, Ha Jin addressed the challenges faced by writers who live outside their native lands and who, as translinguals, write in adopted languages. Speaking on three successive days in October, 2006, he drew from his own experience and from the lives and works of kindred writers he admires. The Writer as Migrant is a transcript of those three overlapping lectures, titled in turn “The Spokesman and the Tribe,” “The Language of Betrayal,” and “An Individual’s Homeland.” Expatriation is nothing new in world literature. The “Lost Generation” of American writers, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos, made its home, temporarily, in Paris. Much earlier, Rome drew Seneca from Iberia and Apuleius from North Africa, and Latin literature is said to have begun with Livius Andronicus, a Greek slave who wrote a Latin version of Homer’s Odyssey (725 b.c.e.). However, with increased mobility and the globalization of cultures, the phenomenon of the writer as migrant has become more common. Written in lucid, engaging English, Ha Jin’s short book offers a cogent discussion of literary figures who, like its author, find themselves situated between countries and languages. In his opening essay, “The Spokesman and the Tribe,” Ha Jin recalls how, with his first book of poetry, his ambition, despite writing in English in the United States, was to give voice to the voiceless Chinese people. He contrasts his situation to that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, throughout the eighteen years he spent in exile in rural Vermont, continued to write in Russian for the Russian people. He attributes Solzhenitsyn’s ability to work in stubborn isolation to his Christian faith in an afterlife

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but, turning to the case of Lin Yutang, notes that Chinese writers crave community. Ha Jin describes Lin Yutang’s role as cultural ambassador in two directions, from China to the West and from the West to China, and he praises his My Country and My People (1935) as still the best book about its subject, China. However, Ha Jin faults Lin Yutang’s fiction for being too general and didactic; subsuming his individual vision under that of the communities he tried to represent, Lin Yutang, Ha Ha Jin obtained English degrees at Jin contends, forgot the lesson that “great litChinese universities. He was studying erature has never been produced by collecat Brandeis during the Tiananmen tives.” Square massacre and decided not to Encouraged by the way Salman Rushdie’s return to China. His first book was the novel Shame (1983) subverts the clichéd analpoetry volume Between Silences ogy between human beings and trees, as if hu(1990). His novel In the Pond (1998) was followed by Waiting (1999), which man “roots” were anything but a hackneyed received the National Book Award and metaphor, Ha Jin states: “The debunking of the PEN/Faulkner Award. His shortthe tree metaphor makes it clear that human story collections have won the PEN/ beings are different from trees and should be Hemingway Award and the Flannery rootless and entirely mobile.” He contends O’Connor Award. that, unlike Solzhenitsyn and Lin Yutang, who were established authors before they departed their native lands, most migrant writers must accept the fact that they are more like V. S. Naipaul, fundamentally rootless. They must establish new identities within alien cultures. By the conclusion of the first chapter of The Writer as Migrant, Ha Jin recognizes the naiveté of his earlier aim of speaking on behalf of the downtrodden Chinese. While conceding the obligation to take a stand against injustice, he insists that the writer serves society best by pursuing his art: “He must serve on his own terms, in the manner and at the time and place of his own choosing. Whatever role he plays, he must keep in mind that his success or failure as a writer will be determined only on the page. That is the space where he should strive to exist.” Proclaiming the independence of the artist, Ha Jin thus rejects his early aspiration to write—albeit in English—on behalf of the Chinese masses. In the second essay in the book, “The Language of Betrayal,” Ha Jin examines the phenomenon of translingualism, of writing in an adopted language. Contending that the motives for switching languages are often mixed, he attributes his own use of English, rather than Chinese, to the demands of survival—not only the need to earn a livelihood but also the desire to make the best possible use of his talents in the circumstances in which he found himself. Although many of the classic Latin writers adopted the language of Rome instead of their native tongues, he hails Joseph Conrad—who was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Poland but became a major novelist in English, a language he did not learn until he was in his twenties—as

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a pioneer of translingual literature. While noting that betrayal is in fact a theme within Conrad’s fiction, he defends him against charges of cultural treason leveled by champions of Polish. In addition, he discusses the anxiety that Vladimir Nabokov felt about differentiating himself from Conrad. Nabokov, who wrote in Russian, French, and English, was intent on demonstrating greater stylistic virtuosity in English, the language he wrote in after Russian and French. Ha Jin notes the linguistic playfulness that characterizes much of Nabokov’s English fiction, particularly the 1957 novel Pnin, but he maintains that Nabokov’s use of English rather than his native Russian crippled him as a poet. However, he proclaims Nabokov the prose artist “a supreme example of how to adapt writing to the circumstances of displacement, how to imagine and attain a place in the adopted language while still maintaining an intimate relationship with his mother tongue, and how to face an oppressive regime with contempt, artistic integrity, and individual dignity.” Ha Jin identifies the humor in Pnin, based on a disproportionate attention to trivial matters, as Gogolian and praises it as “completely translatable.” In fact, uncomfortable with word play, which is unique to each language, he insists that translatability is the hallmark of successful literature. While mastering the unique idiosyncrasies of a new language, the writer should, according to Ha Jin, strive to create a text that is not dependent upon or limited to those idiosyncrasies. “Therefore,” he claims, “the writer who adopts English, while striving to seek a place in this idiom, should also imagine ways to transcend any language.” However, Nabokov was himself a translator, from Russian to English and from English to Russian. In elaborate commentary he appended to his 1964 four-volume translation of Alexander Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin (1825-1832, 1833; Eugene Onegin, 1881), Nabokov insisted both on the incommensurability of Pushkin’s narrative poem and any English facsimile and on the principle that all translation ought to embody acknowledgment that it is derivative. Addressing Pushkin in his poem “On Translating Eugene Onegin,” Nabokov belittles his own arduous effort as “Dovedroppings on your monument.” Because Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), a novel constructed around a poem and its commentary, makes elaborate use of linguistic play, it resists translation. It is Nabokov’s greatest literary achievement, precisely because it is a consummate marriage of specific words and theme. It is what it is, which it would cease to be if rendered into anything else. It is likely that Nabokov himself would reverse Ha Jin’s contention and insist that a text approaches perfection as it approaches untranslatability. “An Individual’s Homeland,” the third and final chapter in The Writer as Migrant, is largely a meditation on the archetypal wanderer Odysseus. Contending that all of us, migrants or not, seek an Ithaca, Ha Jin begins with a few comments on C. P. Cavafy’s “Ithaka” (1911), a poem in which the Greek island-state functions as a symbol of arrival, not, as in the Odyssey, of return. He notes that Mr. Shimerda in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918), Albert Schearl in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934), and Carlos Chang in Sigrid Nunez’s A Feather on the Breath of God (1995) are all broken by the pain of displacement. He contrasts them with Bertha in Call It Sleep and Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), who

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are both invigorated by exile. He ponders the ambiguity of the word “homeland,” which can refer either to the land of one’s birth or to the land in which one has established residence. Like Thomas Wolfe, who titled his 1940 novel You Can’t Go Home Again, he notes that, for all of Odysseus’s longing to return, he can never go back to the same place as the same person. Things change, and, inevitably, so do people. Ha Jin examines the two most famous accounts of Odysseus’s life after he comes back from the Trojan War, twenty years after departing his native island. In the Inferno from La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802), Dante places the Greek hero in the eighth circle of hell, punished as an evil counselor for the sin of pride in his refusal to accept God’s order and his deceit in persuading others to set out again from Ithaca to sail with him beyond mortal limits. Ha Jin reads Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1842 poem “Ulysses” not, conventionally, as the celebration of a hero determined “[t]o strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” but rather as the portrait of an egotist indifferent to the harm he is causing the mariners he coaxes into joining him for a final, suicidal voyage westward. He also discusses the search for home in Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (1979) and the strategy for artistic survival in exile portrayed in W. G. Sebald’s Ausgewanderten (1992; The Emigrants, 1996). Since global migration is continuous and irreversible, any conclusion to a book called The Writer as Migrant will be abrupt and arbitrary. Ha Jin gains enough trust through his unpretentious style that he can be forgiven for the banality of his pious parting words: “no matter where we go, we cannot shed our past completely—so we must strive to use parts of our past to facilitate our journeys. As we travel along, we should also imagine how to rearrange the landscapes of our envisioned homelands.” Steven G. Kellman

Review Sources The Guardian, December 6, 2008, p. 7. The New Republic 239, no. 11 (December 24, 2008): 40-43. San Francisco Chronicle, November 9, 2008, p. M5. The Spectator 309 (January 24, 2009): 41.

897

YOUR INNER FISH A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body Author: Neil Shubin (1960) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). Illustrated. 229 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Natural history, science Time: From the Devonian Period to the present Locale: Worldwide Retracing studies in paleontology, genetics, and cellular and molecular biology, Shubin draws upon his own experiences and the history of seminal experiments to demonstrate how mammalian anatomy can be traced back to the anatomy of fishes living between three and four billion years ago Where many popular books about the animal kingdom focus on the differences between, for instance, types of primate behavior, or breeds of dogs, or variations in animal psychology and morphology because of ecological habitat, and so forth, Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish focuses on the underlying similarities. As he writes, “When you look into eyes, forget about romance, creation, and the windows into the soul. With their molecules, genes, and tissues derived from microbes, jellyfish, worms, and flies, you see an entire menagerie.” Shubin is an authority on reconstructing the relationships among prehistoric creatures and those living today. In 2004 he discovered a famous “missing link,” a fossil called Tiktaalik roseae, which excited the worlds of both science and the public upon publication of its description in 2006. This creature is a remarkable intermediate between fishes and land-living animals: Though a fish, living in shallow streams and mud-flats, it had arm and leg bones similar to those of a mammal; it was able to do push-ups. While Shubin’s autobiographical anecdotes (chiefly about his work as a paleontologist on site) appear in nonlinear order throughout his text, the book is astutely organized. In the first four chapters he shows how various branches of science prove that various organs within various creatures, ancient or extant, are profoundly related. The following chapters enumerate the resemblances between the designs of bodies, heads, hands, noses, eyes, and ears belonging to most of the denizens of the animal kingdom. “There isn’t just a single fish inside of our limbs; there is a whole aquarium.” Most of the text expounds upon the relationships between unicellular creatures and invertebrates on the one hand and far more complex living forms on the other. His discussion of the hand (or fin or paw) is exemplary, describing experiments by various genetic researchers who tinkered with a gene (which they comically named Sonic hedgehog after a computer game character) in creatures as different as sharks, chickens, and flies. They discovered that Sonic hedgehog is responsible for shaping ap-

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pendages, whether shark fins or human hands, and that if its normal function is interfered with, in the laboratory, the result is a surprising reduplication of digits, such as changing a thumb into a pinkie finger or vice versa. The importance of this finding is that the evolution of fish fins into land-based limbs was not based on the emergence of new kinds of DNA, but, rather, that ancient genes merely recombined in new ways. Shubin’s recollections of his first investi gations in the world of fossil-finding under the tutelage of colleague Dr. Farish A. Jenkins are delightful. He jests about his beginner’s inability to distinguish among tooth, bone, and sandy rocks in the Arizona desert. He recalls the electrifying jolt he felt when he first spotted a tiny tooth, “as glorious as the biggest dinosaur in the halls of any museum.” On a 1984 excursion to Nova Scotia, Shubin felt disappointed by his team’s tiny haul, only to find later that he had brought home a rare specimen: a tooth from a fossilized tritheledont, a remarkable creature that is part mammal and part reptile; it might have resembled a mouse with crocodile teeth or, more precisely, a furry lizard with mammalian carnivorous teeth. Recognizing that his subjects under discussion may be abstruse for some readers, he leavens his scientific jargon with wit, as for instance in his amusing instructions on how to extract DNA in the kitchen, using a piece of steak, salted water, soap, and a few other ingredients. Elsewhere, he remarks jocularly, “The job of teeth is to make bigger creatures into smaller pieces.” Such enjoyable tidbits abound in his book. Shubin references popular culture frequently for clarity. “For those who believed that skeletons began with jaws, backbones, or body armor, conodonts [extinct animals similar to eels] provide an ‘inconvenient tooth,’ if you will”—an allusion to the film An Inconvenient Truth (2006), a documentary about Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore’s attempts to educate the public about the issue of global warming. In another allusion, he writes: “The only thing we can compare it with is the alien creature in the Steve McQueen [1958] film The Blob.” He also writes that, “If we were like sponges, then the Steve Buscemi character who gets minced in the woodchipper in the Coen brothers’ [1996] film Fargo would have been just fine.” In another allusion, “It may have taken the paleontological equivalent of a perfect storm to bring about bodies”—a reference to the book The Perfect Storm (1997) by historian and journalist Sebastian Junger and the 2000 film adaptation of that title. He uses an ingenious array of analogies: the skeleton is like a bridge; molecules may act like rivets, or glue, or like telegraphs sent from one cell to another; genes that fall into disuse do so in the way that photocopies lose their fidelity with repeated copyings; the evolution of the human eye is much like the evolution of a Chevrolet Corvette through decades of variation in model design; equilibrioception (or sense of

Neil Shubin, an evolutionary biologist, holds the titles of Robert R. Bensley Professor at the University of Chicago’s Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy as well as Provost of the Field Museum of Natural History. He rose to fame with his 2004 discovery of a 375-millionyear-old transitional fossil called Tiktaalik roseae

Your Inner Fish / shubin

899

balance) is compared with the movement of white particles within a snow globe; examining “descent with modification” is like opening a time capsule. One problem with simplification for the lay reader in popular science texts—and one that has been frequently commented upon—is that scientific precision may be lost and may suggest that evolution is goal-oriented, whereas evolution actually proceeds entirely by random occurrences and has no “end” in mind. To put it in other words, there is no Mother Nature trying a design, then discarding it for another design, always seeking some final sort of “perfect” design. When Shubin writes, “The new ability came about by modifying the upper jawbone of a fish,” it would be more accurate to state the case otherwise, by writing “came about by gradual modifications over millennia” or something of the sort. Fortunately, Shubin rarely uses phraseology that suggests any ideological determination to explain phenomena by final causes, as he is so much more interested in true causality. Shubin’s method of creating narrative suspense is rather like that of a mystery novelist: He poses a question, recounts an investigation by himself or other scientists, then provides the solution, one that might lead to further questions. For the second step, investigation, Shubin describes many of the seminal experiments in biology that have led to important, ongoing, and sometimes interdisciplinary projects. For example, a question is offered: How and why did vertebrate bodies arise? Shubin explains that biologist Martin E. Boraas showed how a single-celled alga could turn into a colony of bodies (by introducing a predator into the habitat). The significance of this result rests on the fact that for the first 3.5 billion years of the history of Earth, there is no evidence of any kind of life except for micro-organisms. Then the fossil record begins to teem for many millions of years. As Shubin remarks, “If an experiment can produce a simple body-like organization from a no-body in several years, imagine what could happen in billions of years. The question then becomes not how could bodies arise, but why didn’t they arise sooner?” Shubin then proceeds to explain a probable solution to this follow-up riddle (an increase of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere). In another example, he reveals that fully 3 percent of the human genome is devoted to the sense of smell, and he questions why humans need so many genes for odor detection. A related question notes that hundreds of these genes actually do not function at all, so why are they present in the body? The investigation into this mystery comes through study of what is called nasal drift in dolphins and whales: Unlike fishes, who have specialized genes for smelling in water, dolphins and whales have specialized genes for smelling scents in air. The nostrils of ancient cetaceans were located at the front of the face, as with other mammals, but through millennia the nasal passages migrated upward to the top of the head, becoming the blowhole, through which breathing is done, but not smelling. In other words, cetaceans have the full array of olfactory genes, but do not use a single one. The puzzle is solved, then, with the understanding that humans do not need every single olfactory gene, either. Genes for vision have supplanted them. While finding beauty in the great diversity of the animal kingdom and its earliest citizens, Shubin also acknowledges pitfalls:

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Our humanity comes at a cost. For the exceptional combination of things we do— talk, think, grasp, and walk on two legs—we pay a price . . . .Take the body plan of a fish, dress it up to be a mammal, then tweak and twist that mammal until it walks on two legs, talks, thinks, and has superfine control of its fingers—and you have a recipe for problems . . . . In a perfectly designed world—one with no history—we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer . . . we were not designed to live past the age of eighty, sit on our keisters for ten hours a day, and eat Hostess Twinkies, nor were we designed to play football. This disconnect between our past and our human present means that our bodies fall apart in certain predictable ways. Virtually every illness we suffer has some historical component.

He continues to explain some of these problems: the design of the throat (modified from fishes’ gills) that allows humans to speak also allows them to suffer sleep apnea and choking. Tadpoles use both lungs and gills to breathe, but modifications over the millennia have led to the horridness called hiccups. The gonads of most fishes are located near their hearts, but complications arising from the gradual descent of gonads into human testes make men vulnerable to hernias. However, Shubin ends on a positive note: “I can imagine few things more beautiful or intellectually profound than finding the basis for our humanity, and remedies for many of the ills we suffer, nestled inside some of the most humble creatures that have ever lived on our planet.” Shubin’s gift is for sharing his sense of wonder and beauty with readers who may never have given much thought to worms, jellyfish, or flies, but who will henceforth look upon such so-called lowly animals with new respect for the interconnectedness of all living things. This book is best suited to readers interested in paleontology, biology, and physical anatomy, with some understanding of the basics of these subjects. It assuredly belongs in most libraries. Fiona Kelleghan

Review Sources American Scientist 96, no. 3 (May/June, 2008): 257-258. Booklist 104, nos. 9/10 (January 1, 2008): 31. Chicago Tribune, February 18, 2008, p. 1. The Chronicle of Higher Education 54, no. 27 (March 14, 2008): B27. Discover 29, no. 2 (February, 2008): 72. The Globe and Mail, March 29, 2008, p. D5. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 22 (November 15, 2007): 1196. Library Journal 133, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 129. Los Angeles Times, January 13, 2008, p. R6. Nature 451 (January 17, 2008): 245. New Scientist 197 (January 19, 2008): 45. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 43 (October 29, 2007): 41. The Washington Post, February 17, 2008, p. T6.


BIOGRAPHICAL WORKS BY SUBJECT

2009 HEADE, MARTIN Summer of Hummingbirds, A (Benfey), 764 HEMINGS, SALLY Hemingses of Monticello, The (Gordon-Reed), 344 HIGGINSON, THOMAS WENTWORTH White Heat (Wineapple), 843 HITLER, ADOLF Hitler’s Private Library (Ryback), 358 HOPKINS, GERARD MANLEY Gerard Manley Hopkins (Mariani), 301 HULL, AGRIPPA Friends of Liberty (Nash and Hodges), 292

ADORNO, THEODOR W. Theodor W. Adorno (Claussen), 788 BARNES, JULIAN Nothing to Be Frightened Of (Barnes), 591 BIN LADEN, OSAMA Bin Ladens, The (Coll), 83 BOYLAN, JENNIFER FINNEY I’m Looking Through You (Boylan), 392 BROTTMAN, MIKITA Solitary Vice, The (Brottman), 738 BUCKLEY, WILLIAM F., JR. Flying High (Buckley), 269

JACKSON, ANDREW American Lion (Meacham), 43 JEFFERSON, THOMAS Friends of Liberty (Nash and Hodges), 292 Hemingses of Monticello, The (Gordon-Reed), 344

DALAI LAMA Open Road, The (Iyer), 609 DAWIDOFF, NICHOLAS Crowd Sounds Happy, The (Dawidoff), 166 DICKINSON, EMILY Summer of Hummingbirds, A (Benfey), 764 White Heat (Wineapple), 843 DOUGLAS, SCOTT Quiet, Please (Douglas), 671 DOUGLAS, STEPHEN Lincoln and Douglas (Guelzo), 474

KAZIN, ALFRED Alfred Kazin (Cook), 14 KEATS, JOHN Posthumous Keats (Plumly), 653 KEENE, DONALD Chronicles of My Life (Keene), 129 KING, MARTIN LUTHER, JR. Word of the Lord Is upon Me, The (Rieder), 874 KOKCIUSZKO, TADEUSCZ Friends of Liberty (Nash and Hodges), 292

FILKINS, DEXTER Forever War, The (Filkins), 273 GODARD, JEAN-LUC Everything Is Cinema (Brody), 238 GOLDWATER, BARRY Flying High (Buckley), 269

903

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2009 ROCKEFELLER, JOHN D. Taking on the Trust (Weinberg), 769 ROGET, PETER MARK Man Who Made Lists, The (Kendall), 523 ROTOLO, SUZE Freewheelin’ Time, A (Rotolo), 288

LINCOLN, ABRAHAM Did Lincoln Own Slaves? (Prokopowicz), 225 Lincoln and Douglas (Guelzo), 474 McMURTRY, LARRY Books (McMurtry), 103 MAHLER, GUSTAV Gustav Mahler, 1907-1911 (La Grange), 325 MAMET, DAVID David Mamet (Nadel), 179 MEYER, MICHAEL Last Days of Old Beijing, The (Meyer), 437 MILTON, JOHN John Milton (Campbell and Corns), 419 MOORE, HONOR Bishop’s Daughter, The (Moore), 88 MUIR, JOHN Passion for Nature, A (Worster), 626 MURAKAMI, HARUKI What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Murakami), 831

SEDARIS, DAVID When You Are Engulfed in Flames (Sedaris), 835 SHAKESPEARE, ANN HATHAWAY Shakespeare’s Wife (Greer), 721 SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM Lodger Shakespeare, The (Nicholl), 483 Shakespeare’s Wife (Greer), 721 SITTING BULL Sitting Bull (Yenne), 729 STEGNER, WALLACE Wallace Stegner and the American West (Fradkin), 823 STOWE, HARRIET BEECHER Summer of Hummingbirds, A (Benfey), 764

NAIPAUL, V. S. World Is What It Is, The (French), 878 NAPOLEON I Napoleon (Dwyer), 558 NEEDHAM, JOSEPH Man Who Loved China, The (Winchester), 518 NELSON, WILLIE Willie Nelson (Patoski), 856 NIXON, RICHARD Nixonland (Perlstein), 586 NORRIS, KATHLEEN Acedia and Me (Norris), 1

TARBELL, IDA Taking on the Trust (Weinberg), 769 TWAIN, MARK Summer of Hummingbirds, A (Benfey), 764 VONNEGUT, KURT Armageddon in Retrospect (Vonnegut), 56 WELLS, IDA B. Ida, A Sword Among Lions (Giddings), 387 WOIWODE, LARRY Step from Death, A (Woiwode), 751 WOOLMAN, JOHN Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, The (Slaughter), 74

REAGAN, RONALD Age of Reagan, The (Wilentz), 5 RICE, ANNE Called Out of Darkness (Rice), 120 RIIS, JACOB Other Half, The (Buk-Swienty), 617

904

CATEGORY INDEX

2009 AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIRS, DIARIES, and LETTERS . . . . . BIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . CURRENT AFFAIRS and SOCIAL ISSUES . . . . . . . . . . ESSAYS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ETHICS and LAW . . . . . . . . . . . FICTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FINE ARTS, FILM, and MUSIC . . . HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LANGUAGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LITERARY BIOGRAPHY . . . . . . LITERARY CRITICISM, HISTORY, and THEORY. . . . . . . . . . . .

NATURE, NATURAL HISTORY, and the ENVIRONMENT . . . PHILOSOPHY and RELIGION . . POETRY and DRAMA . . . . . . PSYCHOLOGY . . . . . . . . . . SCIENCE, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, and MEDICINE. . . . . . . . . SOCIOLOGY, ARCHAEOLOGY, and ANTHROPOLOGY . . . . TRAVEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . WOMEN’S ISSUES . . . . . . . .

905 905 906 906 906 906 907 907 908 908

. . . .

. . . .

908 909 909 909

. . 909 . . 909 . . 909 . . 909

908

Solitary Vice, The (Brottman), 738 Step from Death, A (Woiwode), 751 What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Murakami), 831 When You Are Engulfed in Flames (Sedaris), 835

ANTHROPOLOGY. See SOCIOLOGY, ARCHAEOLOGY, and ANTHROPOLOGY ARCHAEOLOGY. See SOCIOLOGY, ARCHAEOLOGY, and ANTHROPOLOGY

BIOGRAPHY. See also LITERARY BIOGRAPHY American Lion (Meacham), 43 Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, The (Slaughter), 74 Bin Ladens, The (Coll), 83 Did Lincoln Own Slaves? (Prokopowicz), 225 Everything Is Cinema (Brody), 238 Friends of Liberty (Nash and Hodges), 292 Gustav Mahler, 1907-1911 (La Grange), 325 Hemingses of Monticello, The (GordonReed), 344 Ida, A Sword Among Lions (Giddings), 387 Man Who Loved China, The (Winchester), 518 Man Who Made Lists, The (Kendall), 523

AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIRS, DIARIES, and LETTERS Acedia and Me (Norris), 1 Armageddon in Retrospect (Vonnegut), 56 Bishop’s Daughter, The (Moore), 88 Books (McMurtry), 103 Called Out of Darkness (Rice), 120 Chronicles of My Life (Keene), 129 Crowd Sounds Happy, The (Dawidoff), 166 Flying High (Buckley), 269 Forever War, The (Filkins), 273 Freewheelin’ Time, A (Rotolo), 288 I’m Looking Through You (Boylan), 392 Last Days of Old Beijing, The (Meyer), 437 Nothing to Be Frightened Of (Barnes), 591 Quiet, Please (Douglas), 671 905

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2009 Wellsprings (Vargas Llosa), 827 When You Are Engulfed in Flames (Sedaris), 835

Napoleon (Dwyer), 558 Open Road, The (Iyer), 609 Other Half, The (Buk-Swienty), 617 Passion for Nature, A (Worster), 626 Shakespeare’s Wife (Greer), 721 Sitting Bull (Yenne), 729 Taking on the Trust (Weinberg), 769 Theodor W. Adorno (Claussen), 788 Willie Nelson (Patoski), 856 Word of the Lord Is upon Me, The (Rieder), 874

ETHICS and LAW Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, The (Slaughter), 74 Craftsman, The (Sennett), 156 Experiments in Ethics (Appiah), 243 Hospital (Salamon), 373 Liberty of Conscience (Nussbaum), 456 Original Sin (Jacobs), 613 Terror and Consent (Bobbitt), 779

CURRENT AFFAIRS and SOCIAL ISSUES Bin Ladens, The (Coll), 83 Dark Side, The (Mayer), 174 Forever War, The (Filkins), 273 Hospital (Salamon), 373 In Defense of Food (Pollan), 396 Liberty of Conscience (Nussbaum), 456 McMafia (Glenny), 503 Reconciliation (Bhutto), 679 Terror and Consent (Bobbitt), 779 Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? (Sheehan), 839

FICTION All Shall Be Well . . . (Wodicka), 28 America America (Canin), 39 Appeal, The (Grisham), 52 Armageddon in Retrospect (Vonnegut), 56 Atmospheric Disturbances (Galchen), 61 Boat, The (Le), 98 Brass Verdict, The (Connelly), 106 Breath (Winton), 111 Collected Prose of Robert Frost, The (Frost), 133 Comforts of a Muddy Saturday, The (McCall Smith), 137 Commoner, The (Schwartz), 142 Dangerous Laughter (Millhauser), 170 Day (Kennedy), 183 Death with Interruptions (Saramago), 193 Delusion (Abrahams), 198 De Niro’s Game (Hage), 202 Diary of a Bad Year (Coetzee), 215 Dictation (Ozick), 220 Draining Lake, The (Indriðason), 230 Eye of the Leopard, The (Mankell), 247 Fault Lines (Huston), 251 Fine Just the Way It Is (Proulx), 260 Ghost in Love, The (Carroll), 306 Given Day, The (Lehane), 310 Hakawati, The (Alameddine), 330 Happy Trails to You (Hecht), 335 Havana Gold (Padura), 340

DIARIES. See AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIRS, DIARIES, and LETTERS DRAMA. See POETRY and DRAMA ENVIRONMENT. See NATURE, NATURAL HISTORY, and the ENVIRONMENT ESSAYS Collected Prose of Robert Frost, The (Frost), 133 Design in the Age of Darwin (Eisenman), 206 Library at Night, The (Manguel), 461 Maps and Legends (Chabon), 528 Modern Element, The (Kirsch), 541 Natural Acts (Quammen), 563 Selected Essays of Gore Vidal, The (Vidal), 713 906

CATEGORY INDEX White Tiger, The (Adiga), 847 Widows of Eastwick, The (Updike), 851 Woman’s World (Rawle), 870

His Illegal Self (Carey), 349 Home (Robinson), 363 Homecoming (Schlink), 368 House on Fortune Street, The (Livesey), 378 Indignation (Roth), 401 Johnny One-Eye (Charyn), 424 Just After Sunset (King), 428 Knockemstiff (Pollock), 433 Lavinia (Le Guin), 447 Lazarus Project, The (Hemon), 452 Life Class (Barker), 465 Lulu in Marrakech (Johnson), 494 Lush Life (Price), 498 Man in the Dark (Auster), 513 Mercy, A (Morrison), 532 Miracle at Speedy Motors, The (McCall Smith), 537 Most Wanted Man, A (Le Carré), 545 My Revolutions (Kunzru), 550 My Sister, My Love (Oates), 554 Nazi Literature in the Americas (Bolaño), 567 Netherland (O’Neill), 572 Olive Kitteridge (Strout), 601 One More Year (Krasikov), 605 Our Story Begins (Wolff), 622 People of the Book (Brooks), 631 Person of Interest, A (Choi), 636 Plague of Doves, The (Erdrich), 645 Private Patient, The (James), 662 Pyramid, The (Mankell), 667 Reavers, The (Fraser), 675 Road Home, The (Tremain), 697 Say You’re One of Them (Akpan), 705 Sea of Poppies (Ghosh), 709 Silver Swan, The (Black), 725 Soul Thief, The (Baxter), 742 Spies of Warsaw, The (Furst), 747 Story of a Marriage, The (Greer), 755 Story of Edgar Sawtelle, The (Wroblewski), 759 There a Petal Silently Falls (Yun), 793 2666 (Bolaño), 810 Unaccustomed Earth (Lahiri), 815 Waitress Was New, The (Fabre), 819

FINE ARTS, FILM, and MUSIC Antoine’s Alphabet (Perl), 48 Design in the Age of Darwin (Eisenman), 206 Gustav Mahler, 1907-1911 (La Grange), 325 Pictures at a Revolution (Harris), 640 HISTORY Age of Reagan, The (Wilentz), 5 Algeria (Evans and Phillips), 19 Austerity (Kynaston), 66 Ball Is Round, The (Goldblatt), 69 Bin Ladens, The (Coll), 83 But Didn’t We Have Fun? (Morris), 115 Capitol Men (Dray), 124 Conceiving Parenthood (Hall), 147 Concrete Reveries (Kingwell), 152 Dark Side, The (Mayer), 174 Day Freedom Died, The (Lane), 188 Flying High (Buckley), 269 Forever War, The (Filkins), 273 Founding Faith (Waldman), 278 Franco and Hitler (Payne), 283 Friends of Liberty (Nash and Hodges), 292 God and Race in American Politics (Noll), 315 Governess (Brandon), 320 History of Histories, A (Burrow), 354 Hitler’s Private Library (Ryback), 358 Ida, A Sword Among Lions (Giddings), 387 Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (Shannon), 406 Last Days of Old Beijing, The (Meyer), 437 Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, The (Barcott), 442 Lincoln and Douglas (Guelzo), 474 Line upon a Wind, The (Mostert), 479 Lost History of Christianity, The (Jenkins), 488 907

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2009 Magical Chorus, The (Volkov), 508 Napoleon (Dwyer), 558 1948 (Morris), 581 Nixonland (Perlstein), 586 Old World, New World (Burk), 596 Original Sin (Jacobs), 613 Other Half, The (Buk-Swienty), 617 Post-American World, The (Zakaria), 649 Power Makers, The (Klein), 657 Reconciliation (Bhutto), 679 Retribution (Hastings), 688 Ten-Cent Plague, The (Hajdu), 774 Terror and Consent (Bobbitt), 779 This Republic of Suffering (Faust), 797 Traffic (Vanderbilt), 801 Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? (Sheehan), 839 Winter War, The (Edwards), 861 World War I (Paice), 883

LITERARY CRITICISM, HISTORY, and THEORY Alfred Kazin (Cook), 14 Devil Gets His Due, The (Fiedler), 211 How Fiction Works (Wood), 382 Library at Night, The (Manguel), 461 Lodger Shakespeare, The (Nicholl), 483 Maps and Legends (Chabon), 528 Modern Element, The (Kirsch), 541 Posthumous Keats (Plumly), 653 Solitary Vice, The (Brottman), 738 Summer of Hummingbirds, A (Benfey), 764 Tree of Meaning, The (Bringhurst), 805 Wellsprings (Vargas Llosa), 827 White Heat (Wineapple), 843 Writer as Migrant, The (Jin), 893

HISTORY OF SCIENCE. See SCIENCE, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, and MEDICINE

LITERARY THEORY. See LITERARY CRITICISM, HISTORY, and THEORY

LITERARY HISTORY. See LITERARY CRITICISM, HISTORY, and THEORY

MEDICINE. See SCIENCE, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, and MEDICINE

LANGUAGE Alphabet Juice (Blount), 35

MEMOIRS. See AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIRS, DIARIES, and LETTERS

LAW. See ETHICS and LAW LETTERS. See AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIRS, DIARIES, and LETTERS

MUSIC. See FINE ARTS, FILM, and MUSIC

LITERARY BIOGRAPHY Alfred Kazin (Cook), 14 David Mamet (Nadel), 179 Gerard Manley Hopkins (Mariani), 301 John Milton (Campbell and Corns), 419 Lodger Shakespeare, The (Nicholl), 483 Posthumous Keats (Plumly), 653 Summer of Hummingbirds, A (Benfey), 764 Wallace Stegner and the American West (Fradkin), 823 White Heat (Wineapple), 843 World Is What It Is, The (French), 878

NATURAL HISTORY. See NATURE, NATURAL HISTORY, and the ENVIRONMENT NATURE, NATURAL HISTORY, and the ENVIRONMENT Fruit Hunters, The (Gollner), 297 Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, The (Barcott), 442 Life of the Skies, The (Rosen), 469 Natural Acts (Quammen), 563 Worlds Before Adam (Rudwick), 888 Your Inner Fish (Shubin), 897 908

CATEGORY INDEX RELIGION. See PHILOSOPHY and RELIGION

PHILOSOPHY and RELIGION Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, The (Slaughter), 74 Called Out of Darkness (Rice), 120 Conceiving Parenthood (Hall), 147 Credit and Blame (Tilly), 161 Experiments in Ethics (Appiah), 243 Founding Faith (Waldman), 278 God and Race in American Politics (Noll), 315 Liberty of Conscience (Nussbaum), 456 Lost History of Christianity, The (Jenkins), 488 Theodor W. Adorno (Claussen), 788

SCIENCE, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, and MEDICINE Black Hole War, The (Susskind), 93 Craftsman, The (Sennett), 156 Design in the Age of Darwin (Eisenman), 206 Hospital (Salamon), 373 In Defense of Food (Pollan), 396 Life of the Skies, The (Rosen), 469 Natural Acts (Quammen), 563 Power Makers, The (Klein), 657 Traffic (Vanderbilt), 801 Worlds Before Adam (Rudwick), 888 Your Inner Fish (Shubin), 897

POETRY and DRAMA Ajax (Sophocles), 10 All of It Singing (Gregg), 24 All the World’s a Grave (Reed), 31 Behind My Eyes (Lee), 79 Eternal Enemies (Zagajewski), 234 Fidelity (Paley), 255 Fire to Fire (Doty), 264 It’s Go in Horizontal (Scalapino), 411 New Collected Poems (Boland), 576 Red Bird (Oliver), 684 Rising, Falling, Hovering (Wright), 693 Save the Last Dance (Stern), 701 Selected Poems (O’Hara), 717 Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (Kleinzahler), 734 That Little Something (Simic), 783 Without Saying (Howard), 866

TRAVEL Fruit Hunters, The (Gollner), 297

PSYCHOLOGY Craftsman, The (Sennett), 156 Traffic (Vanderbilt), 801

WOMEN’S ISSUES Ida, A Sword Among Lions (Giddings), 387

SOCIOLOGY, ARCHAEOLOGY, and ANTHROPOLOGY Craftsman, The (Sennett), 156 Credit and Blame (Tilly), 161 Governess (Brandon), 320 Jew of Culture, The (Rieff), 415 Traffic (Vanderbilt), 801 Word of the Lord Is upon Me, The (Rieder), 874 TECHNOLOGY. See SCIENCE, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, and MEDICINE

909

TITLE INDEX

2009 Concrete Reveries (Kingwell), 152 Craftsman, The (Sennett), 156 Credit and Blame (Tilly), 161 Crowd Sounds Happy, The (Dawidoff), 166

Acedia and Me (Norris), 1 Age of Reagan, The (Wilentz), 5 Ajax (Sophocles), 10 Alfred Kazin (Cook), 14 Algeria (Evans and Phillips), 19 All of It Singing (Gregg), 24 All Shall Be Well . . . (Wodicka), 28 All the World’s a Grave (Reed), 31 Alphabet Juice (Blount), 35 America America (Canin), 39 American Lion (Meacham), 43 Antoine’s Alphabet (Perl), 48 Appeal, The (Grisham), 52 Armageddon in Retrospect (Vonnegut), 56 Atmospheric Disturbances (Galchen), 61 Austerity (Kynaston), 66

Dangerous Laughter (Millhauser), 170 Dark Side, The (Mayer), 174 David Mamet (Nadel), 179 Day (Kennedy), 183 Day Freedom Died, The (Lane), 188 Death with Interruptions (Saramago), 193 Delusion (Abrahams), 198 De Niro’s Game (Hage), 202 Design in the Age of Darwin (Eisenman), 206 Devil Gets His Due, The (Fiedler), 211 Diary of a Bad Year (Coetzee), 215 Dictation (Ozick), 220 Did Lincoln Own Slaves? (Prokopowicz), 225 Draining Lake, The (Indriðason), 230

Ball Is Round, The (Goldblatt), 69 Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, The (Slaughter), 74 Behind My Eyes (Lee), 79 Bin Ladens, The (Coll), 83 Bishop’s Daughter, The (Moore), 88 Black Hole War, The (Susskind), 93 Boat, The (Le), 98 Books (McMurtry), 103 Brass Verdict, The (Connelly), 106 Breath (Winton), 111 But Didn’t We Have Fun? (Morris), 115

Eternal Enemies (Zagajewski), 234 Everything Is Cinema (Brody), 238 Experiments in Ethics (Appiah), 243 Eye of the Leopard, The (Mankell), 247 Fault Lines (Huston), 251 Fidelity (Paley), 255 Fine Just the Way It Is (Proulx), 260 Fire to Fire (Doty), 264 Flying High (Buckley), 269 Forever War, The (Filkins), 273 Founding Faith (Waldman), 278 Franco and Hitler (Payne), 283 Freewheelin’ Time, A (Rotolo), 288 Friends of Liberty (Nash and Hodges), 292 Fruit Hunters, The (Gollner), 297

Called Out of Darkness (Rice), 120 Capitol Men (Dray), 124 Chronicles of My Life (Keene), 129 Collected Prose of Robert Frost, The (Frost), 133 Comforts of a Muddy Saturday, The (McCall Smith), 137 Commoner, The (Schwartz), 142 Conceiving Parenthood (Hall), 147 910

TITLE INDEX Gerard Manley Hopkins (Mariani), 301 Ghost in Love, The (Carroll), 306 Given Day, The (Lehane), 310 God and Race in American Politics (Noll), 315 Governess (Brandon), 320 Gustav Mahler, 1907-1911 (La Grange), 325

Life Class (Barker), 465 Life of the Skies, The (Rosen), 469 Lincoln and Douglas (Guelzo), 474 Line upon a Wind, The (Mostert), 479 Lodger Shakespeare, The (Nicholl), 483 Lost History of Christianity, The (Jenkins), 488 Lulu in Marrakech (Johnson), 494 Lush Life (Price), 498

Hakawati, The (Alameddine), 330 Happy Trails to You (Hecht), 335 Havana Gold (Padura), 340 Hemingses of Monticello, The (GordonReed), 344 His Illegal Self (Carey), 349 History of Histories, A (Burrow), 354 Hitler’s Private Library (Ryback), 358 Home (Robinson), 363 Homecoming (Schlink), 368 Hospital (Salamon), 373 House on Fortune Street, The (Livesey), 378 How Fiction Works (Wood), 382

McMafia (Glenny), 503 Magical Chorus, The (Volkov), 508 Man in the Dark (Auster), 513 Man Who Loved China, The (Winchester), 518 Man Who Made Lists, The (Kendall), 523 Maps and Legends (Chabon), 528 Mercy, A (Morrison), 532 Miracle at Speedy Motors, The (McCall Smith), 537 Modern Element, The (Kirsch), 541 Most Wanted Man, A (Le Carré), 545 My Revolutions (Kunzru), 550 My Sister, My Love (Oates), 554

Ida, A Sword Among Lions (Giddings), 387 I’m Looking Through You (Boylan), 392 In Defense of Food (Pollan), 396 Indignation (Roth), 401 Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (Shannon), 406 It’s Go in Horizontal (Scalapino), 411

Napoleon (Dwyer), 558 Natural Acts (Quammen), 563 Nazi Literature in the Americas (Bolaño), 567 Netherland (O’Neill), 572 New Collected Poems (Boland), 576 1948 (Morris), 581 Nixonland (Perlstein), 586 Nothing to Be Frightened Of (Barnes), 591

Jew of Culture, The (Rieff), 415 John Milton (Campbell and Corns), 419 Johnny One-Eye (Charyn), 424 Just After Sunset (King), 428

Old World, New World (Burk), 596 Olive Kitteridge (Strout), 601 One More Year (Krasikov), 605 Open Road, The (Iyer), 609 Original Sin (Jacobs), 613 Other Half, The (Buk-Swienty), 617 Our Story Begins (Wolff), 622

Knockemstiff (Pollock), 433 Last Days of Old Beijing, The (Meyer), 437 Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, The (Barcott), 442 Lavinia (Le Guin), 447 Lazarus Project, The (Hemon), 452 Liberty of Conscience (Nussbaum), 456 Library at Night, The (Manguel), 461

Passion for Nature, A (Worster), 626 People of the Book (Brooks), 631 Person of Interest, A (Choi), 636 911

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2009 Taking on the Trust (Weinberg), 769 Ten-Cent Plague, The (Hajdu), 774 Terror and Consent (Bobbitt), 779 That Little Something (Simic), 783 Theodor W. Adorno (Claussen), 788 There a Petal Silently Falls (Yun), 793 This Republic of Suffering (Faust), 797 Traffic (Vanderbilt), 801 Tree of Meaning, The (Bringhurst), 805 2666 (Bolaño), 810

Pictures at a Revolution (Harris), 640 Plague of Doves, The (Erdrich), 645 Post-American World, The (Zakaria), 649 Posthumous Keats (Plumly), 653 Power Makers, The (Klein), 657 Private Patient, The (James), 662 Pyramid, The (Mankell), 667 Quiet, Please (Douglas), 671

Unaccustomed Earth (Lahiri), 815

Reavers, The (Fraser), 675 Reconciliation (Bhutto), 679 Red Bird (Oliver), 684 Retribution (Hastings), 688 Rising, Falling, Hovering (Wright), 693 Road Home, The (Tremain), 697

Waitress Was New, The (Fabre), 819 Wallace Stegner and the American West (Fradkin), 823 Wellsprings (Vargas Llosa), 827 What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Murakami), 831 When You Are Engulfed in Flames (Sedaris), 835 Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? (Sheehan), 839 White Heat (Wineapple), 843 White Tiger, The (Adiga), 847 Widows of Eastwick, The (Updike), 851 Willie Nelson (Patoski), 856 Winter War, The (Edwards), 861 Without Saying (Howard), 866 Woman’s World (Rawle), 870 Word of the Lord Is upon Me, The (Rieder), 874 World Is What It Is, The (French), 878 World War I (Paice), 883 Worlds Before Adam (Rudwick), 888 Writer as Migrant, The (Jin), 893

Save the Last Dance (Stern), 701 Say You’re One of Them (Akpan), 705 Sea of Poppies (Ghosh), 709 Selected Essays of Gore Vidal, The (Vidal), 713 Selected Poems (O’Hara), 717 Shakespeare’s Wife (Greer), 721 Silver Swan, The (Black), 725 Sitting Bull (Yenne), 729 Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (Kleinzahler), 734 Solitary Vice, The (Brottman), 738 Soul Thief, The (Baxter), 742 Spies of Warsaw, The (Furst), 747 Step from Death, A (Woiwode), 751 Story of a Marriage, The (Greer), 755 Story of Edgar Sawtelle, The (Wroblewski), 759 Summer of Hummingbirds, A (Benfey), 764

Your Inner Fish (Shubin), 897

912

AUTHOR INDEX

2009 ABRAHAMS, PETER Delusion, 198 ADIGA, ARAVIND White Tiger, The, 847 AKPAN, UWEM Say You’re One of Them, 705 ALAMEDDINE, RABIH Hakawati, The, 330 APPIAH, KWAME ANTHONY Experiments in Ethics, 243 AUSTER, PAUL Man in the Dark, 513

BOYLAN, JENNIFER FINNEY I’m Looking Through You, 392 BRANDON, RUTH Governess, 320 BRINGHURST, ROBERT Tree of Meaning, The, 805 BRODY, RICHARD Everything Is Cinema, 238 BROOKS, GERALDINE People of the Book, 631 BROTTMAN, MIKITA Solitary Vice, The, 738 BUCKLEY, WILLIAM F., JR. Flying High, 269 BUK-SWIENTY, TOM Other Half, The, 617 BURK, KATHLEEN Old World, New World, 596 BURROW, JOHN History of Histories, A, 354

BANVILLE, JOHN (as Benjamin Black) Silver Swan, The, 725 BARCOTT, BRUCE Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, The, 442 BARKER, PAT Life Class, 465 BARNES, JULIAN Nothing to Be Frightened Of, 591 BAXTER, CHARLES Soul Thief, The, 742 BENFEY, CHRISTOPHER Summer of Hummingbirds, A, 764 BHUTTO, BENAZIR Reconciliation, 679 BLACK, BENJAMIN. See BANVILLE, JOHN BLOUNT, ROY, JR. Alphabet Juice, 35 BOBBITT, PHILIP Terror and Consent, 779 BOLAND, EAVAN New Collected Poems, 576 BOLAÑO, ROBERTO Nazi Literature in the Americas, 567 2666, 810

CAMPBELL, GORDON, and THOMAS N. CORNS John Milton, 419 CANIN, ETHAN America America, 39 CAREY, PETER His Illegal Self, 349 CARROLL, JONATHAN Ghost in Love, The, 306 CHABON, MICHAEL Maps and Legends, 528 CHARYN, JEROME Johnny One-Eye, 424 CHOI, SUSAN Person of Interest, A, 636 CLAUSSEN, DETLEV Theodor W. Adorno, 788 913

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2009 FRENCH, PATRICK World Is What It Is, The, 878 FROST, ROBERT Collected Prose of Robert Frost, The, 133 FURST, ALAN Spies of Warsaw, The, 747

COETZEE, J. M. Diary of a Bad Year, 215 COLL, STEVE Bin Ladens, The, 83 CONNELLY, MICHAEL Brass Verdict, The, 106 COOK, RICHARD M. Alfred Kazin, 14 CORNS, THOMAS N., and GORDON CAMPBELL John Milton, 419

GALCHEN, RIVKA Atmospheric Disturbances, 61 GHOSH, AMITAV Sea of Poppies, 709 GIDDINGS, PAULA J. Ida, A Sword Among Lions, 387 GLENNY, MISHA McMafia, 503 GOLDBLATT, DAVID Ball Is Round, The, 69 GOLLNER, ADAM LEITH Fruit Hunters, The, 297 GORDON-REED, ANNETTE Hemingses of Monticello, The, 344 GREER, ANDREW SEAN Story of a Marriage, The, 755 GREER, GERMAINE Shakespeare’s Wife, 721 GREGG, LINDA All of It Singing, 24 GRISHAM, JOHN Appeal, The, 52 GUELZO, ALLEN C. Lincoln and Douglas, 474

DAWIDOFF, NICHOLAS Crowd Sounds Happy, The, 166 DOTY, MARK Fire to Fire, 264 DOUGLAS, SCOTT Quiet, Please, 671 DRAY, PHILIP Capitol Men, 124 DWYER, PHILIP Napoleon, 558 EDWARDS, ROBERT Winter War, The, 861 EISENMAN, STEPHEN F. Design in the Age of Darwin, 206 ERDRICH, LOUISE Plague of Doves, The, 645 EVANS, MARTIN and JOHN PHILLIPS Algeria, 19 FABRE, DOMINIQUE Waitress Was New, The, 819 FAUST, DREW GILPIN This Republic of Suffering, 797 FIEDLER, LESLIE Devil Gets His Due, The, 211 FILKINS, DEXTER Forever War, The, 273 FRADKIN, PHILIP L. Wallace Stegner and the American West, 823 FRASER, GEORGE MACDONALD Reavers, The, 675

HAGE, RAWI De Niro’s Game, 202 HAJDU, DAVID Ten-Cent Plague, The, 774 HALL, AMY LAURA Conceiving Parenthood, 147 HARRIS, MARK Pictures at a Revolution, 640 HASTINGS, MAX Retribution, 688 914

AUTHOR INDEX KRASIKOV, SANA One More Year, 605 KUNZRU, HARI My Revolutions, 550 KYNASTON, DAVID Austerity, 66

HECHT, JULIE Happy Trails to You, 335 HEMON, ALEKSANDAR Lazarus Project, The, 452 HODGES, GRAHAM RUSSELL GAO, and GARY B. NASH Friends of Liberty, 292 HOWARD, RICHARD Without Saying, 866 HUSTON, NANCY Fault Lines, 251

LA GRANGE, HENRY-LOUIS DE Gustav Mahler, 1907-1911, 325 LAHIRI, JHUMPA Unaccustomed Earth, 815 LANE, CHARLES Day Freedom Died, The, 188 LE, NAM Boat, The, 98 LE CARRÉ, JOHN Most Wanted Man, A, 545 LEE, LI-YOUNG Behind My Eyes, 79 LE GUIN, URSULA K. Lavinia, 447 LEHANE, DENNIS Given Day, The, 310 LIVESEY, MARGOT House on Fortune Street, The, 378

INDRIÐASON, ARNALDUR Draining Lake, The, 230 IYER, PICO Open Road, The, 609 JACOBS, ALAN Original Sin, 613 JAMES, P. D. Private Patient, The, 662 JENKINS, PHILIP Lost History of Christianity, The, 488 JIN, HA Writer as Migrant, The, 893 JOHNSON, DIANE Lulu in Marrakech, 494

McCALL SMITH, ALEXANDER Comforts of a Muddy Saturday, The, 137 Miracle at Speedy Motors, The, 537 McMURTRY, LARRY Books, 103 MANGUEL, ALBERTO Library at Night, The, 461 MANKELL, HENNING Eye of the Leopard, The, 247 Pyramid, The, 667 MARIANI, PAUL Gerard Manley Hopkins, 301 MAYER, JANE Dark Side, The, 174 MEACHAM, JON American Lion, 43

KEENE, DONALD Chronicles of My Life, 129 KENDALL, JOSHUA Man Who Made Lists, The, 523 KENNEDY, A. L. Day, 183 KING, STEPHEN Just After Sunset, 428 KINGWELL, MARK Concrete Reveries, 152 KIRSCH, ADAM Modern Element, The, 541 KLEIN, MAURY Power Makers, The, 657 KLEINZAHLER, AUGUST Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, 734 915

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2009 PADURA, LEONARDO Havana Gold, 340 PAICE, EDWARD World War I, 883 PALEY, GRACE Fidelity, 255 PATOSKI, JOE NICK Willie Nelson, 856 PAYNE, STANLEY G. Franco and Hitler, 283 PERL, JED Antoine’s Alphabet, 48 PERLSTEIN, RICK Nixonland, 586 PHILLIPS, JOHN, and MARTIN EVANS Algeria, 19 PLUMLY, STANLEY Posthumous Keats, 653 POLLAN, MICHAEL In Defense of Food, 396 POLLOCK, DONALD RAY Knockemstiff, 433 PRICE, RICHARD Lush Life, 498 PROKOPOWICZ, GERALD J. Did Lincoln Own Slaves?, 225 PROULX, E. ANNIE Fine Just the Way It Is, 260

MEYER, MICHAEL Last Days of Old Beijing, The, 437 MILLHAUSER, STEVEN Dangerous Laughter, 170 MOORE, HONOR Bishop’s Daughter, The, 88 MORRIS, BENNY 1948, 581 MORRIS, PETER But Didn’t We Have Fun?, 115 MORRISON, TONI Mercy, A, 532 MOSTERT, NOEL Line upon a Wind, The, 479 MURAKAMI, HARUKI What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, 831 NADEL, IRA David Mamet, 179 NASH, GARY B., and GRAHAM RUSSELL GAO HODGES Friends of Liberty, 292 NICHOLL, CHARLES Lodger Shakespeare, The, 483 NOLL, MARK A. God and Race in American Politics, 315 NORRIS, KATHLEEN Acedia and Me, 1 NUSSBAUM, MARTHA C. Liberty of Conscience, 456

QUAMMEN, DAVID Natural Acts, 563 RAWLE, GRAHAM Woman’s World, 870 REED, JOHN All the World’s a Grave, 31 RICE, ANNE Called Out of Darkness, 120 RIEDER, JONATHAN Word of the Lord Is upon Me, The, 874 RIEFF, PHILIP Jew of Culture, The, 415

OATES, JOYCE CAROL My Sister, My Love, 554 O’HARA, FRANK Selected Poems, 717 OLIVER, MARY Red Bird, 684 O’NEILL, JOSEPH Netherland, 572 OZICK, CYNTHIA Dictation, 220 916

AUTHOR INDEX ROBINSON, MARILYNNE Home, 363 ROSEN, JONATHAN Life of the Skies, The, 469 ROTH, PHILIP Indignation, 401 ROTOLO, SUZE Freewheelin’ Time, A, 288 RUDWICK, MARTIN J. S. Worlds Before Adam, 888 RYBACK, TIMOTHY W. Hitler’s Private Library, 358

STROUT, ELIZABETH Olive Kitteridge, 601 SUSSKIND, LEONARD Black Hole War, The, 93

SALAMON, JULIE Hospital, 373 SARAMAGO, JOSÉ Death with Interruptions, 193 SCALAPINO, LESLIE It’s Go in Horizontal, 411 SCHLINK, BERNHARD Homecoming, 368 SCHWARTZ, JOHN BURNHAM Commoner, The, 142 SEDARIS, DAVID When You Are Engulfed in Flames, 835 SENNETT, RICHARD Craftsman, The, 156 SHANNON, TIMOTHY J. Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier, 406 SHEEHAN, JAMES J. Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?, 839 SHUBIN, NEIL Your Inner Fish, 897 SIMIC, CHARLES That Little Something, 783 SLAUGHTER, THOMAS P. Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, The, 74 SOPHOCLES Ajax, 10 STERN, GERALD Save the Last Dance, 701

VANDERBILT, TOM Traffic, 801 VARGAS LLOSA, MARIO Wellsprings, 827 VIDAL, GORE Selected Essays of Gore Vidal, The, 713 VOLKOV, SOLOMON Magical Chorus, The, 508 VONNEGUT, KURT Armageddon in Retrospect, 56

TILLY, CHARLES Credit and Blame, 161 TREMAIN, ROSE Road Home, The, 697 UPDIKE, JOHN Widows of Eastwick, The, 851

WALDMAN, STEVEN Founding Faith, 278 WEINBERG, STEVE Taking on the Trust, 769 WILENTZ, SEAN Age of Reagan, The, 5 WINCHESTER, SIMON Man Who Loved China, The, 518 WINEAPPLE, BRENDA White Heat, 843 WINTON, TIM Breath, 111 WODICKA, TOD All Shall Be Well . . . , 28 WOIWODE, LARRY Step from Death, A, 751 WOLFF, TOBIAS Our Story Begins, 622 917

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2009 YENNE, BILL Sitting Bull, 729 YUN, CH’OE There a Petal Silently Falls, 793

WOOD, JAMES How Fiction Works, 382 WORSTER, DONALD Passion for Nature, A, 626 WRIGHT, C. D. Rising, Falling, Hovering, 693 WROBLEWSKI, DAVID Story of Edgar Sawtelle, The, 759

ZAGAJEWSKI, ADAM Eternal Enemies, 234 ZAKARIA, FAREED Post-American World, The, 649

918

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