Magill's Literary Annual 2010: Essay-reviews of 200 Outstanding Books Published in the United States During 2009 With an Annotated List of Titles

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2010 MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2010 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 2010

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2010 Essay-Reviews of 200 Outstanding Books Published in the United States During 2009

With an Annotated List of Titles

Volume One A-LIT Edited by

JOHN D. WILSON STEVEN G. KELLMAN

SALEM PRESS Pasadena, California Hackensack, New Jersey

Cover photo: Courtesy, U.S. Senate

Copyright © 2010, 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, [email protected]. ∞ 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): 978-1-58765-655-2 ISBN (vol. 1): 978-1-58765-656-9 ISBN (vol. 2): 978-1-58765-657-6

first printing

printed in the united states of america

CONTENTS

Publisher’s Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Complete Annotated List of Titles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Contributing Reviewers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxv Author Photo Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxviii A. Lincoln: A Biography—Ronald C. White, Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science—Richard Holmes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 All Other Nights—Dara Horn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone— D. D. Guttenplan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life—Adam Gopnik . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 The Antelope’s Strategy: Living in Rwanda After the Genocide— Jean Hatzfeld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 The Anthologist—Nicholson Baker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back—Reynolds Price . . . . . . . . . 33 The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution—Denis Dutton . . . . 37 Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F.—Stefan Aust . . . . . . Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock—Pete Fornatale . . . . . Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace—Ayelet Waldman . . . . . . . The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography—Robert Crawford . . . . . . . . The Believers—Zoë Heller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America— Timothy Egan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience—Jeremy Mynott . Blame—Michelle Huneven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Blood’s a Rover—James Ellroy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys—Lilian Pizzichini . . . . . . . . . The Book of Night Women—Marlon James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Book of Samuel: Essays on Poetry and Imagination— Mark Rudman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World—Paul Collins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

. . . . 42 . . . . 46 . . . . 50 . . . . 54 . . . . 58 . . . . . .

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63 68 72 77 81 85

. . . . 90 . . . . 94


Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi— Timothy R. Pauketat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems— John Felstiner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal— Julie Greene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Castle—J. Robert Lennon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Catcher: How the Man Behind the Plate Became an American Folk Hero—Peter Morris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Cheever: A Life—Blake Bailey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 Chronic—D. A. Powell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Chronic City—Jonathan Lethem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Cold: Adventures In the World’s Frozen Places—Bill Streever . . . . . . . . . 133 Collected Poems—C. P. Cavafy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Columbine—Dave Cullen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 The Cradle—Patrick Somerville . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Crossers—Philip Caputo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression— Morris Dickstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution—Adrian Desmond and James Moore . . Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5—Christopher Andrew . Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South— Lacy K. Ford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music— Amiri Baraka. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto—Mark Helprin . . . . . . . . . . Don’t Cry: Stories—Mary Gaitskill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror—John Merriman . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eating Animals—Jonathan Safran Foer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays—Chinua Achebe 1848: Year of Revolution—Mike Rapport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815— Gordon S. Wood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Endpoint: And Other Poems—John Updike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England— Keith Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Every Man Dies Alone—Hans Fallada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned—Wells Tower . . . . . . . Evidence—Mary Oliver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi

. . 156 . . 160 . . 166 . . 171 . . 175 . . 180 . . 184 . . 188

. . . . . 192 . . . . . 196 . . . . . 201 . . . . . 206 . . . . . 211 . . . .

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215 220 225 229

CONTENTS

The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food— Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating, and Drinking Wine in California—Jonah Raskin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor—Brad Gooch . . . . . . . . . Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City— Greg Grandin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Future of Liberalism—Alan Wolfe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gabriel García Márquez: A Life—Gerald Martin . . . . . . . . . . A Gate at the Stairs—Lorrie Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China—Jay Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Generosity: An Enhancement—Richard Powers . . . . . . . . . . Genesis—Bernard Beckett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness— Joan Roughgarden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible—David Plotz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Good Fall—Ha Jin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme—Tracy Daugherty The Hindus: An Alternative History—Wendy Doniger . . . . . . . Homer & Langley—E. L. Doctorow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan—Doug Stanton. . . . . House Of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street—William D. Cohan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization—Jonathan Lyons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War—Alexander Waugh . The Housekeeper and the Professor—Yoko Ogawa . . . . . . . . . How Rome Fell—Adrian Goldsworthy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How to Paint a Dead Man—Sarah Hall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Humbling—Philip Roth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . 237 . . . . 242 . . . . 246 . . . . 251

. . . . . . 256 . . . . . . 261 . . . . . . 265 . . . . . . 270 . . . . . . 275 . . . . . . 280

. . . . . . 285 . . . . . . 289 . . . . . . 294 . . . . . . 299 . . . . . . 304 . . . . . . 308 . . . . . . 313 . . . . . .

. . . . . .

Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris: Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry—Leanne Shapton . . . . . . . . . . In Other Rooms, Other Wonders—Daniyal Mueenuddin . . . . . . . . In Such Hard Times: The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu—Wei Ying-wu. . . . In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect—Ronald Kessler . . vii

. . . . 233

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318 322 327 331 336 340

. . . . 345 . . . . 349 . . . . 354 . . . . 358


Inherent Vice—Thomas Pynchon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia—Jonathan Brent . Invisible—Paul Auster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It Will Come to Me—Emily Fox Gordon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Italian Shoes—Henning Mankell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

364 369 374 379 383

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi—Geoff Dyer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387 Judas: A Biography—Susan Gubar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391 A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx—Elaine Showalter . . . . . . . . . . . 396 The Kindly Ones—Jonathan Littell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . King’s Dream—Eric J. Sundquist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling—Charles Allen Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic—Michael Scammell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . 400 . . . 405 . . . 410

The Lacuna—Barbara Kingsolver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laish—Aharon Appelfeld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lark and Termite—Jayne Ann Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Last Rites—John Lukacs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Rider’s Masterpiece—Jane Hamilton . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Le Cid” and “The Liar”—Pierre Corneille . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents—Minal Hajratwala . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leavings: Poems—Wendell Berry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I: 1929-1940—Samuel Beckett Life in Space: Astrobiology for Everyone—Lucas John Mix . . . . The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty— Peter Singer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lit: A Memoir—Mary Karr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

viii

. . . 415

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420 425 429 433 437 442

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447 452 457 462

. . . . . . 466 . . . . . . 470

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Magill’s Literary Annual, 2010 is the fifty-sixth 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 busy librarians 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, 2010 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, where available • 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 readers 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 2010, 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, 2010. Our special thanks go to the editors for their expert and insightful selections: John D. Wilson is the editor of Books and 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. • • • •

x

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

VOLUME 1 A. Lincoln: A Biography—Ronald C. White, Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 This biography of the sixteenth U.S. president incorporates new perspectives regarding Abraham Lincoln’s formative years and development, including the role of his religious beliefs in shaping his life and work The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science—Richard Holmes. . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Holmes provides sequential biographies of some of the key figures in British exploration and science during the Romantic period, highlighting their impact on the literature and poetry of the age All Other Nights—Dara Horn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 This Civil War tale follows the life of a young Jewish American spy as he deals with assignments that ask him to betray those closest to him and that challenge his understanding of his own identity American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone—D. D. Guttenplan . . . . 15 An intellectual biography of American political journalist I. F. Stone, with emphasis on the broader political contexts that shaped Stone’s work and legacy as an independent radical reporter Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life—Adam Gopnik . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 This study of the nineteenth century reveals significant and surprising parallels between the lives of English biologist Charles Darwin and U.S. president Abraham Lincoln The Antelope’s Strategy: Living in Rwanda After the Genocide— Jean Hatzfeld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Hatzfeld’s third book about the 1994 Rwandan genocide uses testimony from Tutsi survivors and Hutu perpetrators to assess how they are coping with the devastation that both links and divides them

xi


The Anthologist—Nicholson Baker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 In Baker’s novel, writer Paul Chowder muses on poetry, and on life while trying to write an introduction to an anthology of rhymed poetry he has been commissioned to compile Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back—Reynolds Price . . . . . . . . . 33 This third volume of Price’s autobiography is a graceful and elegiac view of his life in the 1950’s as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and his return to his native South to teach writing and literature at Duke University The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution—Denis Dutton . . . . 37 An exploration of the origins of the arts within the context of Darwinian evolutionary science and the ways that this intellectual perspective changes contemporary art theory and criticism Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F.—Stefan Aust . . . . . . . . . . 42 Aust provides a detailed account of the activities of the Red Army Faction (RAF), a group of urban terrorists operating in Berlin and West Germany for more than a decade Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock—Pete Fornatale . . . . . . . . . 46 Based on the recollections of dozens of participant observers, a legendary rockand-roll disc jockey reconstructs the story, and considers the legacy, of the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace—Ayelet Waldman . . . . . . . . . . . 50 An offering of motherhood, its joys and impossible goals, on the altar of public opinion The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography—Robert Crawford . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Published on the 250th anniversary of Burns’s birth, Crawford’s biography traces the many influences on Burns’s poetry and thought; Crawford also explores the writer’s various relationships and his efforts to provide for himself and his family The Believers—Zoë Heller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 After noted radical lawyer Joel Litvinoff is felled by a stroke, the lives of his wife and three children unravel, but they eventually achieve significant psychological and spiritual transformations

xii


The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America— Timothy Egan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Egan presents a popular history of the origins of the United States Forest Service, and its heroic but doomed battle against a massive firestorm in 1910 Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience—Jeremy Mynott . . . . . 68 Mynott sets out to determine what humans appreciate about birds and what that appreciation teaches humans about themselves Blame—Michelle Huneven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 A story of guilt and redemption, in which a brilliant young history professor’s life is changed by her involvement in a fatal automobile accident and her subsequent prison sentence Blood’s a Rover—James Ellroy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 In the third volume of James Ellroy’s Underworld U.S.A. trilogy, following American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, Ellroy tells the story of three men who struggle to surface through the mire of late 1960’s and early 1970’s police, government, and underworld corruption The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys—Lilian Pizzichini . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 This portrait of the author of Wide Sargasso Sea is more an evocation of Jean Rhys rather than a detailed, scholarly examination of the facts of her life. Omitting any analysis of her novels, it focuses on Rhys as a troubled and troubling woman The Book of Night Women—Marlon James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Women slaves on the Montpelier sugar plantation plot secretly at night to raise an insurrection against the violent and cruel British owners The Book of Samuel: Essays on Poetry and Imagination—Mark Rudman . . . . 90 Rudman assesses the literary achievement of a wide range of authors, examines their influence on other writers (including himself), and provides autobiographical accounts of his travels inspired by their works The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World—Paul Collins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Evaluation of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, which preserved the work of England’s most famous playwright, including much that could have been lost, and which also began a great industry of Shakespeareana

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Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi— Timothy R. Pauketat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 The story of a Native American city that flourished more than a thousand years ago and whose inhabitants built more than two hundred pyramid mounds Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems— John Felstiner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 A series of essays engaging British and American poems of the past two centuries that respond to the natural world, demonstrating how environmental concerns were central to the poets’ visions of human existence The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal— Julie Greene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 A prominent historian describes the daily experience of the workers who constructed the Panama Canal, as well as the social structure created for them Castle—J. Robert Lennon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 A man returns after a considerable absence to his hometown in upstate New York and is beset with a series of mysteries and inexplicable threats Catcher: How the Man Behind the Plate Became an American Folk Hero— Peter Morris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 A sprightly history of the catcher’s changing role, from baseball’s formative years to the beginning of the modern era Cheever: A Life—Blake Bailey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 An exhaustive and insightful study of one of the leading American short-story writers of the twentieth century, a man whose happiness was always shadowed by selfdoubt Chronic—D. A. Powell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 A striking poetic examination of how to survive tragedy and heartbreak in a world where AIDS, turmoil, and personal angst seemingly are always close at hand Chronic City—Jonathan Lethem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 The protagonist of this simultaneously surreal and satirical novel begins to understand himself and the nature of reality in a city that experiences multiple disasters Cold: Adventures In the World’s Frozen Places—Bill Streever . . . . . . . . . 133 Streever explains how most living creatures on Earth are affected by and cope with cold and with winter and tells the history of polar explorations and the science of cold xiv


Collected Poems—C. P. Cavafy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 A translation by a noted memoirist and historian of Cavafy’s published, repudiated, and unpublished poems, together with an introduction and extensive notes Columbine—Dave Cullen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 Cullen, an acknowledged national authority on the massacre at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, explores events leading up to the massacre, examines the psychological makeup of the perpetrators, and presents in chilling detail an account of the massacre itself The Cradle—Patrick Somerville . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 What begins as a quest for a long-lost cradle ends with the healing of old wounds and the restoration of broken familial relationships Crossers—Philip Caputo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 In Caputo’s novel, a recent widower moves to Arizona seeking solace only to find himself caught up in violence related to drug trafficking Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression— Morris Dickstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 With this book, Dickstein, whom Norman Mailer has lauded as “one of our best critics of American literature,” advances his credentials as the prime chronicler of U.S. cultural history from the end of the 1920’s to the start of the 1970’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution—Adrian Desmond and James Moore . . . . 160 In a revisionist account of the provenance of Charles Darwin’s revolutionary ideas on human evolution, the authors emphasize his detestation of slavery and his conviction about the basic unity of all races of humankind Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5—Christopher Andrew . . . 166 An authorized, massively detailed account of the growth of the British Security Service during the first century of its existence that objectively considers its failures and successes Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South— Lacy K. Ford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 A study of southern ideas, arguments, and debates on the question of slavery, from the drafting of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 to the age of Andrew Jackson in the mid1830’s

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Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music— Amiri Baraka. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 In this important collection of essays published since 1989, Baraka argues persuasively that jazz, as created and developed by creative African American composers and musicians from Scott Joplin to the present, constitutes the authentic classical music of the United States Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto—Mark Helprin . . . . . . . . . . . . 180 A memoir of Helprin’s development as a writer, a defense of copyright law, and an explication—occasionally intemperate—of his distrust of the Internet and its supporters, which distrust had its origin in a venomous response to one of Helprin’s articles Don’t Cry: Stories—Mary Gaitskill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184 Ten new stories of longing, love, and loneliness by the American writer famous for the collection Bad Behavior The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror—John Merriman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 This study recounts the anarchist movement in fin-de-siècle Paris, with special attention to the “propaganda by the deed” anarchist Émile Henry; it also addresses the issue of why terrorists kill innocent victims Eating Animals—Jonathan Safran Foer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 This nonfiction exploration of vegetarianism and animal welfare by novelist Foer includes interesting stories and some subtle observations, but in the end becomes a polemical attack on modern industrial agriculture The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays—Chinua Achebe . . . . . 196 In this collection of autobiographical essays, Achebe reflects on his life and work, exploring the role of the artist as a recorder of truth in the African diaspora 1848: Year of Revolution—Mike Rapport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 A country-by-country history of the revolutions and political reactions that swept continental Europe in 1848 Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815— Gordon S. Wood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 The latest addition to the prestigious Oxford History of the United States, this work provides a scholarly and balanced narrative of the years traditionally classified as the early national period, from George Washington’s inauguration as president until the end of the War of 1812 xvi


Endpoint: And Other Poems—John Updike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Collection of poems, written mostly during the last decade of Updike’s life, that focus on the writer’s considerations of old age and death The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England— Keith Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 Thomas examines six qualities to which Englishmen and women in the early modern period aspired as means of achieving fulfillment in their lives Every Man Dies Alone—Hans Fallada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 Written soon after World War II, Fallada’s novel chronicles how Otto and Anna Quangel resisted the Nazis by distributing subversive anonymous postcards through much of Nazi-controlled Berlin Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned—Wells Tower . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Tower’s debut collection of nine stories entertains and surprises as it depicts ordinary people coping with lives that are gradually unraveling or suddenly exploding around them Evidence—Mary Oliver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Beloved poet and nature writer Oliver offers forty-seven new poems tracing the paths of love, grief, and spirit through the natural world The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food— Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Masson’s well-reasoned, well-researched, and persuasive arguments for eating a diet free from animal products Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating, and Drinking Wine in California—Jonah Raskin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 A memoir and exploration of the slow food approach to growing and eating local food that describes the owners, workers, consumers, and cooks whom Raskin met while adopting this approach Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor—Brad Gooch . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242 Gooch’s detailed biography draws connections between the life and fiction of American writer O’Connor, although some of those connections are strained Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City— Greg Grandin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246 Ford established rubber plantations and two small cities in Brazil in order to develop an independent supply of rubber for his automobile factory, as well as to export his vision of an ideal American town to South America xvii


The Future of Liberalism—Alan Wolfe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 A thoughtful analysis and defense of the liberal ideology, including its history, its characteristics, and its continued relevance Gabriel García Márquez: A Life—Gerald Martin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256 Martin’s is the first authorized biography of one of the most distinguished writers of the second half of the twentieth century, and it should serve as the standard portrait of García Márquez for some time A Gate at the Stairs—Lorrie Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Celebrated author Moore’s first new book in more than a decade is the story of a young woman’s coming of age in the shadow of September 11 The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China—Jay Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Taylor’s thorough biography of Chiang Kai-shek, China’s Nationalist leader and the great adversary of Mao Zedong, portrays Chiang as a multifaceted man of great endurance and patience who ultimately turned Taiwan into a success after losing mainland China to the Communists Generosity: An Enhancement—Richard Powers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270 In Powers’s novel, despite living a life filled with tragedy, uncertainty, and dislocation, Thassadit Amzwar, an Algerian college student studying in Chicago, is so irrepressibly happy that a noted geneticist wishes to examine and patent the genes that account for her unique ability to deal with and overcome the horrors that have marked her life Genesis—Bernard Beckett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 Beckett’s dystopian tale resurrects Plato’s Republic in a postapocalyptic future when humanity, though extinct, continues to plague a culture of androids The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness— Joan Roughgarden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280 An argument that evolutionary processes are better understood in terms of social selection rather than sexual selection Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible—David Plotz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 An enlightening and irreverent book-by-book examination of the Old Testament from a secular Jewish reader whose previous knowledge was limited to traditional Bible stories xviii


A Good Fall—Ha Jin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289 In his fourth short-story collection, Chinese American author Jin reflects upon the cultural, generational, and relationship conflicts experienced by several Chinese immigrants trying to make better lives for themselves in an immigrant neighborhood located in the Queens borough of New York City Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme—Tracy Daugherty . . . . . . 294 A first-time biographer writes the first biography of one of America’s most innovative writers—who was also the biographer’s college writing teacher The Hindus: An Alternative History—Wendy Doniger . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 An interpretive history of Hindu beliefs and practices from the prehistory of the Indian subcontinent through recent years Homer & Langley—E. L. Doctorow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304 A fictional exploration of two of history’s most famous recluses, the Collyer brothers of New York City Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan—Doug Stanton. . . . . . . . . . . 308 A detailed account of the first group of U.S. forces deployed to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda after the attacks of September 11, 2001 House Of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street—William D. Cohan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313 A narrative of the March, 2008, collapse of Bear Stearns, the fifth largest investment bank in the United States and the first victim of the subprime mortgage debacle that would grow into a global financial disaster The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization—Jonathan Lyons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318 By uncritically contrasting Islamic learning and sophistication on the one hand and European ignorance and barbarity on the other, Lyons argues that Muslim scholars preserved and built upon the intellectual heritage of classical Greece, thus making possible the European Renaissance The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War—Alexander Waugh . . . . . . . 322 A biographical study of the powerful Wittgenstein family of Vienna, which included concert pianist Paul Wittgenstein and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein The Housekeeper and the Professor—Yoko Ogawa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 A reclusive mathematics professor introduces his housekeeper and her son to his ideal world of prime numbers, while they help him reconnect to the everyday world xix


How Rome Fell—Adrian Goldsworthy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 Goldsworthy argues that the Roman Empire collapsed in the West because recurrent civil wars wasted Roman resources and led Roman leaders to focus on personal survival rather than the common good How to Paint a Dead Man—Sarah Hall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336 A novel in which four lives are intertwined by art, change, and tragedy The Humbling—Philip Roth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340 An account of the last days of Simon Axler, a sixty-five year-old actor who loses his “magic,” desperately seeks happiness with a younger woman, and ultimately fails to find a reason to keep living Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris: Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry—Leanne Shapton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345 Illustrator, writer, and photographer Shapton’s innovative second novel traces the arc of a love affair through the device of an auction catalogue In Other Rooms, Other Wonders—Daniyal Mueenuddin . . . . . . . . . . . . 349 Mueenuddin’s debut collection of short stories, written with irony and affection, presents an intimate view of modern Pakistani life in a postfeudal society In Such Hard Times: The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu—Wei Ying-wu. . . . . . . . 354 This collection of 175 poems finally translates into English about one-third of Wei Ying-wu’s surviving poetry, whose unobtrusive beauty earned it very high esteem in imperial China In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect—Ronald Kessler . . . . . . 358 A critical and anecdotal examination of the protective mission of the U.S. Secret Service, with special attention to challenges that the agency faces because of inadequate funding Inherent Vice—Thomas Pynchon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364 In Pynchon’s latest novel, a drug-abusing private investigator involved in a complex murder-kidnap plot traverses Southern California discovering plots and corruption everywhere he goes Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia—Jonathan Brent . . . 369 A memoir of Brent’s work with Russian archivists to set up the Annals of Communism series for Yale University Press combined with observations about both the archival contents and the deteriorating condition of Russia xx


Invisible—Paul Auster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 374 A successful novelist becomes fascinated with a manuscript left behind by a dead college classmate that seems to be a puzzling mixture of memoir and fiction It Will Come to Me—Emily Fox Gordon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379 In Gordon’s novel, an unfulfilled faculty wife named Ruth takes readers on a bumpy but illuminating exploration of dark psychic corners in her life and those of her husband and other campus characters at the Lola Dees Institute Italian Shoes—Henning Mankell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383 The life of a reclusive former physician who lives alone on a remote island is disrupted when a lover of forty years ago suddenly appears and leads him on an eyeopening journey Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi—Geoff Dyer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387 In Dyer’s novel, aimless, middle-aged journalist and critic Jeff Atman takes two trips; the first is an amorous yet ultimately meaningless adventure in Venice, and the second is a deeper, more profound realization of self in Varanasi Judas: A Biography—Susan Gubar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391 An analysis of the many interpretations of the story of Jesus and his betrayal by Judas put forward by theologians, religious leaders, artists, novelists, poets, and playwrights A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx—Elaine Showalter . . . . . . . . . . . 396 A comprehensive, perceptive, if flawed, effort to encompass a history of American women writers while at the same time identifying the best work that deserves to be included in the canon of American literature The Kindly Ones—Jonathan Littell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 400 An epic novel of the Holocaust that painstakingly describes the bureaucratic and military machinery developed by Hitler and his henchmen for the annihilation of the Jews and other minorities, told years later by a former SS officer living in France under an assumed identity King’s Dream—Eric J. Sundquist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405 Sundquist’s close reading of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech reveals the essence of the Civil Rights movement in America Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling—Charles Allen . . . 410 An account of Rudyard Kipling’s early life, mostly spent in India, and the role India played in his emergence as a writer xxi


Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic—Michael Scammell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415 A biography of one of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century The Lacuna—Barbara Kingsolver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 420 This novel tells the life story of Harrison Shepherd, who balances Mexican and U.S. nationalities, against the backdrop of the major political upheavals in the two countries from the 1920’s through the 1950’s Laish—Aharon Appelfeld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425 A picaresque novel narrated in the first person by an orphan boy describing a group of Jews traveling by wagon train from Eastern Europe toward Jerusalem Lark and Termite—Jayne Ann Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429 Phillips brings together the multiple strands of a West Virginia family’s story in order to show the mysterious effects the past has on the present and the future Last Rites—John Lukacs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 433 The historian Lukacs’s autobiography sums up his life and times and provides his final reflections on how to study the past and its significance Laura Rider’s Masterpiece—Jane Hamilton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 437 A fictional exploration of the complexities of marital faithfulness and unfaithfulness and of the relationship between the public and private spheres in the Internet age “Le Cid” and “The Liar”—Pierre Corneille . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 442 Former American poet laureate Richard Wilbur provides vibrant new translations of seventeenth century French playwright Corneille’s most famous tragedy, about an eleventh century Spanish hero, and one of his witty comedies, about contemporary Parisian society Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents—Minal Hajratwala . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447 Highlighting individual narratives based on extensive research, Hajratwala traces generations of her family from their common roots in the Indian state of Gujarat through migrations around the world and, in so doing, unfolds the story of the Indian diaspora Leavings: Poems—Wendell Berry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 452 Using clear, everyday language and various poetic forms, Berry continues his lifelong advocacy of living close to the land and criticism of the devastation wrought by industrial society xxii


The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I: 1929-1940—Samuel Beckett . . . . . . 457 The first of a projected four-volume series of Beckett’s letters containing, according to the author’s instructions, only those letters whose contents have some bearing on his work Life in Space: Astrobiology for Everyone—Lucas John Mix . . . . . . . . . . 462 Mix explains how astrobiology, drawing from the discoveries of many physical sciences, addresses such fundamental questions as the nature of life and its role in the universe The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty— Peter Singer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 466 Singer deploys powerful ethical arguments to support the view that many Americans could and should increase their donations to save and improve the lives of people in low-income areas of the world, presenting information to help make such donations cost effective Lit: A Memoir—Mary Karr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 470 The third of Karr’s memoirs describes her battle with alcoholism, as well as her unraveling marriage and her experience of motherhood

VOLUME 2 The Little Stranger—Sarah Waters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475 A fateful boyhood visit to a local country estate leads a doctor to insinuate himself into the owners’ lives thirty years later in this quasi-Gothic tale of desire born of class differences Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy—John R. Hale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 480 This historical study reveals that, when the Athenians created a navy, they had to extend political participation to the landless poor The Lost Art of Gratitude—Alexander McCall Smith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 485 In McCall Smith’s sixth book featuring his popular philosopher and editor, Isabel Dalhousie, she faces ethical issues of investment banking, trust, and plagiarism

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The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon— David Grann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489 Recounts Grann’s hunt for the truth about the disappearance of the explorer Percy Fawcett in Brazil in 1925, as well as the author’s own journey to the Amazon basin in search of a solution to the mystery surrounding the lost City of Z The Lost Symbol—Dan Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 493 Brown’s follow up to The Da Vinci Code finds Professor Robert Langdon in the U.S. capital, embroiled in kidnapping and political intrigue involving Masonic mysteries and a maniac willing to kill in order to achieve a kind of mystical knowledge and transcendence Louis D. Brandeis: A Life—Melvin I. Urofsky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 498 A comprehensive and scholarly biography of a remarkable man who made significant contributions in four interrelated areas: the legal profession, the reforms of the Progressive period, the Zionist movement, and above all, the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court Love and Summer—William Trevor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 503 A chance meeting at a funeral leads to a summer romance between a photographer and a farmer’s wife in this novel set against a broadly painted canvas of rural Irish life Lowboy—John Wray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 507 In Wray’s compelling thriller, a paranoid schizophrenic teenager escapes from his caretakers into New York City’s subway system on a delusional mission to save the world from global warming Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon— Buzz Aldrin with Ken Abraham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 512 This sequel to Aldrin’s 1973 autobiography Return to Earth describes his second and third marriages, his battles with depression and alcoholism, and his life from 1969 to 2009 Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son—Michael Chabon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 517 In this collection of subtly interconnected essays, the author contemplates what it means to be a man in the twenty-first century Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels— Tristram Hunt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 522 A portrait of Engels, who held an important position in his German family’s Manchester textile firm for twenty years, all the time playing the English foxhunting gentleman while supporting Karl Marx and writing his own revolutionary works xxiv


The Mechanics of Falling: And Other Stories—Catherine Brady . . . . . . . . 527 Eleven stories, all but one from a female point of view, about the difficulty of finding something to cling to or believe in Mercury Dressing: Poems—J. D. McClatchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 532 Well-known poet McClatchy provides formal, lyrical reflections on mythic subjects and human emotion in this graceful collection Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary—Miri Rubin . . . . . . . . . . 536 The most comprehensive and detailed account of the devotional response to the Virgin Mary at varying social and cultural levels through the centuries Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding—Sarah Blaffer Hrdy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 541 A noted anthropologist and primatologist surveys nurturance and coparenting in humans and related species and offers an answer to the question, “What makes humans human?” The Museum of Innocence—Orhan Pamuk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 546 In Pamuk’s first novel since being awarded the Nobel Prize, an engaged man becomes obsessed with another woman My Father’s Tears: And Other Stories—John Updike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 551 Updike’s final collection of short fiction features stories focusing on growing up, marriage, divorce, travel, and philosophical speculation on the value of an individual human life Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity—Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor . . . . . . . . . . . 555 Graham and Kantor present a compelling account of the struggles of French and Russian mathematicians who addressed one of the most vexing problems in the field of mathematics, the nature of infinity Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology—Mark V. Barrow, Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 560 A study of the changing attitudes of American naturalists toward the concept of species extinction and the growing concern of the scientific community with preventing extinctions, culminating in the 1973 Endangered Species Act A New Literary History of America—Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors . . . . 564 This history surveys a broad range of literary works and many other types of cultural objects in order to convey a more capacious sense of American culture xxv


Nine Dragons—Michael Connelly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 569 Harry Bosch investigates the murder of a liquor store owner, and his pursuit of a powerful Chinese gang becomes especially vengeful when his daughter, living in Hong Kong, is abducted—which may or may not be related to the crime in Los Angeles Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans—Dan Baum . . . . . . . . . . . . 574 Baum’s linked profiles—based on a million words of interviews with nine representative New Orleanians—span the period between the recovery from Hurricane Betsy to that from Hurricane Katrina and show the courage, character, and even heroism of Orleanians of all kinds in surviving difficulty and disaster Nobody Move—Denis Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 579 Johnson skillfully employs the fundamental elements of the classic American crime novel in a gripping narrative concentrated on characters as memorable as those that have distinguished his previous work On Moving: A Writer’s Meditations on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again—Louise DeSalvo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 584 DeSalvo’s reflections on the experience of moving houses and making homes Once on a Moonless Night—Dai Sijie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 589 In their shared dedication to recovering the separated halves of an ancient Buddhist scroll, a Frenchwoman and a Chinese scholar fall in love and gather stories that shed light on the history of China Once the Shore: Stories—Paul Yoon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 594 A debut collection of eight lyrical stories of human separation and loss, all set on an island off the southern coast of the Korean peninsula following World War II One D.O.A., One on the Way—Mary Robison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 598 Robison’s multisectioned novel combines narrative, interior monologue, black comedy, and realist descriptions of New Orleans to examine the blighted cultural and spiritual fabric of the city post-Katrina One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World—Gordon Hempton and John Grossman . . . . . . . . 603 Hempton narrates his cross-country journey to search for places where natural silence still exists and to advocate for the preservation of some areas of natural silence in the United States

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One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict— Benny Morris. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 608 In pursuit of a viable resolution to the long-standing dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, an Israeli scholar reviews the conflict’s ideological history from the late nineteenth century to the present and reveals what he believes to be the only genuinely plausible solution The Original of Laura—Vladimir Nabokov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 612 Nabokov’s last work, published posthumously, is about a scholar allegedly wishing to end his life in search of life after death Orlando Furioso: A New Verse Translation—Ludovico Ariosto . . . . . . . . 616 A comic epic poem of the Italian Renaissance translated by a gifted American poet and satirist Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue—William Logan . . . . . . . . . 620 A collection of Logan’s previously published reviews and essays, many of them attacking contemporary poets and poetry, written in the learned poet-critic’s colorful shock-and-awe style A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster—Rebecca Solnit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 624 In her tenth book, Solnit portrays the aftermath of five major disasters that have occurred in North America and recounts how the people most affected by these disasters recovered from them and rebuilt despite colossal governmental bungling and examples of ineptitude that bordered on criminality Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line—Martha A. Sandweiss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 629 This excellent case study of late nineteenth century race relations recounts the tale of a renowned explorer and geologist who lived a double life for thirteen years, marrying a former slave and claiming, despite fair skin and blue eyes, to be African American Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire—Flora Fraser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 634 A narrative of the life and times of one of Napoleon’s sisters Poems, 1959-2009—Frederick Seidel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 639 A bizarre, often salacious, and brilliantly controversial poet’s complete works Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong—Terry Teachout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 644 A well-researched modern biography of the most influential jazz musician of the twentieth century xxvii


The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess— Andrei Codrescu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 649 An account of the origins of Dadaism, its founding figures, its continuing relevance, and its tensions with other major twentieth century movements, including Surrealism, Futurism, modernism, and communism Practical Water—Brenda Hillman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 654 Hillman’s challenging new collection of poems explores the element of water in all its real and mythic manifestations The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger—Alec Wilkinson . . . 658 A brief biographical portrait of an icon of twentieth century American folk music, based largely on conversations Wilkinson had with Seeger and focusing as much on the subject’s politics as on his musical career A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq—Mark Moyar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 662 A study, resulting from the author’s teaching on counterinsurgency at the Marine Command and Staff College, of nine counterinsurgency operations, in order to determine how best to succeed at such operations in the future Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life—Carol Sklenicka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 667 This expansive biography of twentieth century American author Carver offers a thorough life history of the significant and controversial writer, as well as a critical appraisal of his short fiction and poetry The Reason for Crows: A Story of Kateri Tekakwitha—Diane Glancy . . . . . 672 The seventeenth century “Lily of the Mohawks” narrates the story of her short life, complemented by the voices of various Jesuit priests who came to the New World seeking converts Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigrants, Islam, and the West—Christopher Caldwell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 676 Caldwell presents an insightful and gloomy assessment of the ways in which the mass migration of Muslims to Europe is transforming the heartland of the modern West Rhyming Life and Death—Amos Oz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 681 During one long evening in Tel Aviv, a prominent Israeli author meets his readers and exposes the sources and subterfuges of his art

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Sag Harbor—Colson Whitehead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 686 Benji Cooper, a privileged African American teenager, spends the summer in Sag Harbor with his friends, trying to discover how to live his life The Scarecrow—Michael Connelly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 691 Pursuit of a serial killer by a dedicated, old-style male journalist and a female FBI agent, set against a background of self-serving corporations and bureaucracies, as well as cybertechnology that dehumanizes people as well as empowering them The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d’Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon—Veronica Buckley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 696 Buckley recounts the life of the morganatic wife of Louis XIV of France in a broad historical context, elucidating the role played by Madame de Maintenon in the king’s life and also providing insights into life at all social levels in seventeenth century France The Seven Deadly Sins: And Other Poems—David R. Slavitt. . . . . . . . . . 701 In a direct and efficient poetic style, employing various forms, learned allusions, and translations, the author comments wisely and wittily on sleep, Yiddishisms, his fiftieth Yale reunion, the seven deadly sins, the phoenix, and other topics Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work— Matthew B. Crawford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 706 Crawford, a practicing motorcycle mechanic and professional philosopher, reflects on the epistemological status and social importance of skilled work performed in small shops, garages, and plants—places where a commitment to practical excellence makes possible both authentic fellowship and self-reliance. A Short History of Women—Kate Walbert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 711 Five generations of women descended from a single Anglo-American family struggle in this novel to define and understand their lives in a gendered minefield whose contours change but whose traps remain The Siege—Ismail Kadare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 716 A novel describing the siege of an Albanian fortress by invading Ottoman Turks The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels—Janet Soskice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 721 The story of the Scottish Smith twins—their lives, education, travels, and monumental manuscript discoveries in the Middle East—woven into the religious, social, and scientific controversies of the late Victorian age

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The Skating Rink—Roberto Bolaño . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 726 Bolaño’s crime novel explores the interrelation of sex, obsession, political corruption, immigrants, and homelessness in a Spanish resort city Slang: The People’s Poetry—Michael Adams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 730 Adams provides an extended definition for “slang,” as distinct from other forms of informal language, and explains how slang helps speakers claim membership in some groups and separate themselves from others The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream—Patrick Radden Keefe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 734 Keefe examines in detail the human smuggling operations of the 1990’s that brought thousands of illegal immigrants from Fujian Province to the United States, detailing the roles played by individuals as well as the politics of immigration law Sonata Mulattica—Rita Dove . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 738 A set of poems that create a fictionalized biography for a real historical figure, George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, a violin prodigy born of an African father and Polish mother who was mentored by Joseph Haydn and then by Ludwig van Beethoven, who later discarded him The Song Is You—Arthur Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 742 A middle-aged man’s obsession with a young rock singer fuels this story about art and commerce, and human relationships broken and restored, in the digital age South of Broad—Pat Conroy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 746 Ten high school friends help break down social and racial barriers in Charleston, South Carolina, unite to help a friend in need twenty years later, and struggle to ward off a threat from a psychopath intent on killing them all The Spartacus War—Barry Strauss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 750 This historical study recounts in detail the revolt of enslaved gladiators under the leadership of the Thracian Spartacus against their Roman masters; the rebels attracted thousands of followers and terrorized the Italian peninsula for two years Stone’s Fall—Iain Pears . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 755 When a young reporter is hired to find a missing person, he enters a web of intrigue that includes espionage, arms trading, and market manipulation A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families—Michael Holroyd . . . . 760 A group biography of the brilliant theatrical clan that dominated the English stage from the mid-Victorian era to the beginning of World War I xxx


The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom— Graham Farmelo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 764 Despite emotional damage due to possible autism and a tyrannical father, Dirac’s belief that equations in physics should be beautiful enabled him to help create quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics and to predict such pivotal discoveries as that of the positron Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness—Tracy Kidder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 768 The biography of a Burundian medical student who survives the East African genocides of 1993-1994, remakes his life in the United States, and returns to help rebuild his country Summer World: A Season of Bounty—Bernd Heinrich . . . . . . . . . . . . . 773 Writing with enthusiasm, sensitivity, and a zeal for all of nature, Heinrich has observed closely a dazzling variety of vertebrates, insects, and plants in an effort to unlock some of the mysteries of how they evolve, exist, and coexist Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson— Wil Haygood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 778 A fascinating account of boxing’s greatest middleweight champion and of Harlem in the mid-twentieth century Talking About Detective Fiction—P. D. James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 783 In a compact work of historical criticism, James surveys the origins of British detective fiction, traces its development, assesses the contributions of its most prominent writers, analyzes its form and technique, and responds to its most outspoken critics The Tanners—Robert Walser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 788 In Walser’s first novel, the young Simon Tanner roams in a zigzag journey from the country to the city, from job to job, and from sibling to sibling, learning though never fully embracing lessons about the nature of freedom, love, and the meaning of life Tea Time for the Traditionally Built—Alexander McCall Smith . . . . . . . . 793 The tenth book in McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, this novel places Mma Ramotswe in an investigation of possible game-fixing in a Botswana football club and introduces a disturbing menace to the happiness of her assistant, Mma Makutsi The Thing Around Your Neck—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. . . . . . . . . . 798 A collection of twelve short stories depicting Nigerians living in Africa and in the United States, but who are at home in neither place xxxi


Tiepolo Pink—Roberto Calasso . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 802 A renowned Italian publisher, Calasso applies his formidable learning to the paintings and etchings of Tiepolo, a Venetian artist famed for his effortless technique, and finds fascinating complexities in the works To Be Read in Five Hundred Years—Albert Goldbarth . . . . . . . . . . . . . 807 An informative, touching, and prodding volume of poetry that examines what civilization should truly treasure Too Much Happiness: Stories—Alice Munro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 811 Ten new stories by one of the most accomplished North American short-story writers currently practicing that underrated art form The Tourist—Olen Steinhauer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 815 Unusual circumstances pull a deskbound CIA agent back into the field and into a complex conspiracy Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy—Keith Waldrop. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 820 A bold and revelatory collection of poems that touches on the power of memory in the pursuit of navigating through daily life Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary—Bertrand M. Patenaude . . . . . . . . 824 The story of Leon Trotsky’s last years in Mexico, from his arrival in that country in January, 1837, to his assassination in August, 1940 True Compass: A Memoir—Edward M. Kennedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 829 In this historic memoir, the scion of one of America’s most powerful political families shares his extraordinary story about his controversial personal life, as well as his work in the Senate on the major issues of five decades Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories—Kevin Wilson . . . . . . . . . . 834 This debut collection of eleven stories is filled with strange and wonderful premises about modern society and the lonely adolescents who live in it The Unfinished Poems—C. P. Cavafy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 838 The first English version of thirty incomplete drafts by Cavafy from the Cavafy Archives as prepared for publication by Renata Lavagnini and translated by Daniel Mendelsohn Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington—Robert J. Norrell. . . . 843 A favorable account of the life and career of a former slave who became the dominant African American leader and educator of his time xxxii


The Vagrants—Yiyun Li . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 849 The execution of a woman counterrevolutionary and what it reveals about life in a provincial town of the People’s Republic of China A Very Brief History of Eternity—Carlos Eire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 854 Eire traces the development and metamorphoses of the concept of eternity in Western thought, exploring the social, political, and economic impact of the definition of eternity and the human need for immortality A Village Life—Louise Glück . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 858 An extremely compelling meditation on the universality and transience of life and experience, using evocative imagery, moving themes, and profound insights into the human condition Wanting—Richard Flanagan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 863 In Flanagan’s novel, Lady Jane Franklin, Charles Dickens, and an aboriginal girl called Mathinna are linked across time and space by the disappearance of Sir John Franklin during an expedition to find the Northwest Passage Wedlock: The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore—Wendy Moore. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 868 A biography of a woman who was tricked into marriage with a brutal adventurer and suffered years of horrific domestic abuse before bravely winning a divorce in a male-dominated society When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order—Martin Jacques . . . . . . . . . . . . 873 An attempt to assess the impact of China’s economic growth and magnitude on world economic conditions, politics, and diplomacy that argues that the “end of the Western world” is not imminent, and the shape of the new global order is vague Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman—Jon Krakauer . . . . . 878 Its publication delayed a year while Krakauer embedded himself with U.S. combat troops, this impeccably researched odyssey of professional-football-player-turnedsoldier Tillman chronicles minute-by-minute his death in Afghanistan by what the military finally acknowledged was friendly fire Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector—Benjamin Moser . . . . 883 Moser’s engaging and magisterial biography reveals for the first time the fascinating public and private worlds of Lispector, peering behind the myths that surround her life and unveiling the remarkable woman who converted her struggles into compelling and powerful art xxxiii


The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America—Douglas Brinkley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 888 An account of the impact and consequences of the activities of Roosevelt on the preservation of America’s birds, animals, and wilderness areas The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation—Fanny Howe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 893 Howe describes her intellectual and spiritual journey as a thinker and writer, reflecting on the experiences, people, and ideas that influenced her, using a method of exploration and analysis that focuses on connections rather than chronology The Winter Vault—Anne Michaels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 897 In her first published work in over a decade, Michaels masterfully weaves the dichotomies of loss and discovery, destruction and creation, sorrow and happiness, as she follows the lives and relationship of Avery Escher and Jean Shaw across cultures and continents The Women—T. Coraghessan Boyle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 902 A fictionalized reverse saga of world-renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s tangled and often scandalous relationships with four women, three of whom he married Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West—Anthony Grafton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 907 A collection of essays concerning the nature and status of occidental scholarship, from the Renaissance to the present Writing the Rapture: Prophecy Fiction in Evangelical America— Crawford Gribben . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 911 The first to discuss prophecy or “Rapture” novels in their historical context, this study offers insights into this branch of Christian literature and discusses its roots in the evangelical Christian tradition The Year of the Flood—Margaret Atwood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 916 A companion volume to 2003’s Oryx and Crake, this novel tells the stories of two women who survive a pandemic induced by corporate greed and environmental destruction Zeitoun—Dave Eggers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 921 Eggers recounts the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his family, who were caught up in Hurricane Katrina, and the role of various governmental agencies in turning their lives into a nightmare in the storm’s aftermath

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CONTRIBUTING REVIEWERS

Michael Adams City University of New York Graduate Center Richard Adler University of MichiganDearborn Thomas P. Adler Purdue University M. D. Allen University of WisconsinFox Valley Emily Alward Henderson, Nevada, District Libraries

Robert P. Ellis Harold Branam Savannah State University Worcester State College (retired) (retired) Northborough Historical Peter Brier Society California State Thomas R. Feller University, Nashville, Tennessee Los Angeles Thomas J. Campbell Pacific Lutheran University Edmund J. Campion University of Tennessee Henry L. Carrigan, Jr. Northwestern University

Rebecca Hendrick Flannagan Francis Marion University Roy C. Flannagan South Carolina Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics

Charles L. Avinger, Jr. Washtenaw Community College

Sharon Carson University of North Dakota

Dean Baldwin Penn State Erie, The Behrend College

Mary LeDonne Cassidy South Carolina State University

Carl L. Bankston III Tulane University

Dolores L. Christie John Carroll University

Jean C. Fulton Landmark College

Milton Berman University of Rochester

C. L. Chua California State University, Fresno

Ann D. Garbett Averett University

Richard Hauer Costa Texas A&M University

Janet E. Gardner University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

Cynthia A. Bily Adrian, Michigan Margaret Boe Birns New York University Franz G. Blaha University of NebraskaLincoln

Frank Day Clemson University Francine A. Dempsey College of Saint Rose

Donald R. Franceschetti The University of Memphis Raymond Frey Centenary College

Leslie E. Gerber Appalachian State University Sheldon Goldfarb University of British Columbia

Pegge Bochynski Salem State College

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Sidney Gottlieb Sacred Heart University

Timothy Lane Louisville, Kentucky

Karen Gould Austin, Texas

Eugene Larson Los Angeles Pierce College

Lewis L. Gould University of Texas, Austin Jay L. Halio University of Delaware Diane Andrews Henningfeld Adrian College Carl W. Hoagstrom Ohio Northern University (retired) John R. Holmes Franciscan University of Steubenville Joan Hope Palm Beach Gardens, Florida Jeffry Jensen Glendale Community College Fiona Kelleghan University of Miami Steven G. Kellman University of Texas, San Antonio Howard A. Kerner Polk Community College Grove Koger Boise, Idaho, Public Library Margaret A. Koger Boise, Idaho James B. Lane Indiana University Northwest

Leon Lewis Appalachian State University Thomas Tandy Lewis St. Cloud State University Bernadette Flynn Low Community College of Baltimore CountyDundalk R. C. Lutz Madison Advisors Janet McCann Texas A&M University

Charles E. May California State University, Long Beach Laurence W. Mazzeno Alvernia College Vasa D. Mihailovich University of North Carolina Timothy C. Miller Millersville University Robert Morace Daemen College Daniel P. Murphy Hanover College John Nizalowski Mesa State College

Joanne McCarthy Tacoma, Washington

Holly L. Norton University of Northwestern Ohio

Andrew Macdonald Loyola University, New Orleans

Robert J. Paradowski Rochester Institute of Technology

Gina Macdonald Nicholls State University

David Peck Laguna Beach, California

Margaret H. McFadden Appalachian State University

Marjorie J. Podolsky Penn State Erie, The Behrend College

S. Thomas Mack University of South Carolina-Aiken

Cliff Prewencki Delmar, New York

Maureen J. PufferRothenberg David W. Madden Valdosta State University California State University, Sacramento Edna B. Quinn Salisbury University Paul Madden Hardin-Simmons Thomas Rankin University (emeritus) Concord, California

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CONTRIBUTING REVIEWERS

R. Kent Rasmussen Thousand Oaks, California

Marc Rothenberg National Science Foundation

Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman Charleston Southern University

Barbara Schiffman Vanderbilt University

Mark Rich Cashton, Wisconsin Dorothy Dodge Robbins Louisiana Tech University Bernard F. Rodgers, Jr. Bard College at Simon’s Rock Stephen F. Rohde Los Angeles, California Carl Rollyson City University of New York, Baruch College Joseph Rosenblum University of North Carolina, Greensboro John K. Roth Claremont McKenna College

Theresa L. Stowell Adrian College Paul Stuewe Green Mountain College

Barbara Kitt Seidman Linfield College

Paul B. Trescott Southern Illinois University

R. Baird Shuman University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Jack Trotter Trident College

Thomas J. Sienkewicz Monmouth College Charles L. P. Silet Iowa State University Amy Sisson Houston Community College Roger Smith Portland, Oregon Ira Smolensky Monmouth College George Soule Carleton College Maureen Kincaid Speller University of Kent at Canterbury

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William L. Urban Monmouth College Sara Vidar Los Angeles, California Shawncey Webb Taylor University Thomas Willard University of Arizona John Wilson Editor, Christianity Today James A. Winders Appalachian State University (retired) Scott D. Yarbrough Charleston Southern University

Author Photo Credits

Chinua Achebe: Rocon/Enugu, Nigeria; Buzz Aldrin: Courtesy, NASA; Aharon Appelfeld: ©Jerry Bauer; Ludovico Ariosto: Library of Congress; Margaret Atwood: ©Washington Post; reprinted by permission of the D. C. Public Library; Paul Auster: ©Jerry Bauer; Amiri Baraka: Library of Congress; Samuel Beckett: ©The Nobel Foundation; Wendell Berry: Dan Carraco; T. Coraghessan Boyle: Courtesy, Allen & Unwin; Philip Caputo: ©Stephen Ellis/Courtesy, Simon & Schuster, Inc.; Michael Chabon: ©Patricia Williams/Courtesy, Random House; Michael Connelly: Courtesy, Allen & Unwin; E. L. Doctorow: ©Barbara Walz; Rita Dove: Fred Viebahn; Richard Flanagan: Peter Whyte; Diane Glancy: Courtesy, University of Arizona Press; Louise Glück: James Baker Hall/Library of Congress; Albert Goldbarth: Michael/Pointer/ Courtesy, Graywolf Press; P. D. James: Courtesy, Allen & Unwin; Ha Jin: Kalman Zabarsky; Ismail Kadare: Sophie Bassouls/Sygma; Barbara Kingsolver: Annie Griffith Belt/Courtesy, Allen & Unwin; Alexander McCall Smith: Chris Watt/Courtesy, UCLA; Alice Munro: ©Jerry Bauer; Vladimir Nabokov: Library of Congress; Amos Oz: ©Miriam Berkley; Jayne Anne Phillips: ©Jerry Bauer; Reynolds Price: Margaret Sartor; Philip Roth: ©Nancy Crampton; John Updike: ©Davis Freeman

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1

A. LINCOLN A Biography Author: Ronald C. White, Jr. (1939) Publisher: Random House (New York). 796 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Biography Time: 1809-1865 Locale: Illinois; Kentucky; Washington, D.C. This biography of the sixteenth U.S. president incorporates new perspectives regarding Abraham Lincoln’s formative years and development, including the role of his religious beliefs in shaping his life and work Principal personages: Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), sixteenth president of the United States Mary Todd Lincoln (1818-1882), Lincoln’s wife Jefferson Davis (1808-1889), president of the Confederacy during the Civil War Stephen Douglas (1813-1861), Lincoln’s Senate rival in 1858, debates with whom first brought Lincoln to national attention Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), final commander of the Union armies during the Civil War John Nicolay (1832-1901), Lincoln’s secretary and a source of early material about the president William Seward (1801-1872), Lincoln’s political rival for the presidential nomination and subsequent secretary of state

There have been an estimated sixteen thousand publications about the life and times of Abraham Lincoln, and a number of comprehensive biographies appeared during the Lincoln bicentennial birth year of 2009. Thus, while Ronald C. White, Jr., is among the most important of contemporary Lincoln scholars, it is reasonable to question whether A. Lincoln: A Biography stands out from the sizeable collection of analogous material. White provides a fresh approach by integrating Lincoln’s “log cabin” origins with his religious views to develop a more comprehensive account of the politician’s influences. He traces the effects of these influences both on his early political career and on his years in the White House. Lincoln’s early years have long been a subject of his numerous biographies. He was born February 12, 1809—the same day as Charles Darwin, the towering nineteenth century scientific figure—in Kentucky, not Illinois, which is sometimes mistaken for Lincoln’s birthplace. His earliest recorded English ancestor, Samuel Lincoln, arrived in New England in 1637, one of thirteen thousand people who left Europe during that decade. Samuel Lincoln’s descendents traveled progressively farther south and west, moving through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and eventually Kentucky, where

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Magill’s Literary Annual 2010

the future president’s grandfather and namesake, Abraham Lincoln, settled near what is now Louisville. Lincoln’s grandfather was killed during a Shawnee raid, leaving the sixyear-old Thomas Lincoln fatherless. A man of average height, Thomas Lincoln was a typical young pioneer of the day—an active (Baptist) church member, a member of the local militia, and a man who believed the path out of poverty was through the accumulation of property. When he was twenty-six years old, Thomas Lincoln married Nancy Hanks in 1806. They moved to Elizabethtown, where Thomas built a log cabin on property he owned. Their first child, Sarah, was born the following year, followed a year later by Abraham. In his 1860 autobiography, Lincoln described his family as “undistinguished.” Neither Thomas nor Abraham himself had any more than a rudimentary formal education—which was hardly atypical for the time. Though he had purchased land equivalent to three farms, Thomas Lincoln became a victim of the indeterminate surveying methods used in many of the regions west of the mountains. Titles were frequently in error, and sales routinely involved overlapping properties. Like many of the settlers in the region, Lincoln lost title to the property he had purchased. Rather than disputing the issue in court, the Lincolns moved to Indiana. Two major issues influenced the early settlers to the region and ultimately shaped the thinking of the future president. One was the search for open land. The other was that of slavery. Slaves were owned by relatives or households in the families of both of Lincoln’s parents. Little is recorded concerning Thomas and Nancy Lincoln’s feelings about slavery, but indirect evidence suggests that both opposed the practice. White’s contribution to the Lincoln story begins with this story of the future president’s roots. The biographer attempts to answer questions about Lincoln’s interior thoughts and beliefs, such as his true feelings about slavery and African Americans. He also addresses much more personal inner questions, such as Lincoln’s feelings about his wife Mary and their marriage. In some respects, White discusses these questions in the context of twenty-first century culture and attitudes. Dissection of Lincoln’s evolving private thoughts is a challenge. His law partner, William Herndon, considered Lincoln “the most . . . shut-mouthed man that ever existed.” Mary Lincoln burned much of their correspondence before leaving for Washington. As White points out, however, while Lincoln kept no diary, he did compose and keep a large volume of notes on whatever subject was on his mind at the time. Many of these primary sources were later used by Lincoln’s secretary John Hay in the biography he composed following the president’s death. White arguably addresses Lincoln’s view of religion in greater depth than do other biographers, discussing both Lincoln’s beliefs and the role those beliefs played in shaping his political and personal life. Lincoln invoked religion and God in his most important speeches, including the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural ad-

Ronald C. White, Jr., is the author of two previous best-selling histories about Lincoln: The Eloquent President (2005) and Lincoln’s Greatest Speech (2002). White has taught at several universities, is a fellow of the Huntington Library in California, and has presented hundreds of lectures on Lincoln.

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dress. Religion was a portion of what White calls the future president’s “intellectual curiosity.” Relatively uneducated, at least by modern standards, Lincoln nevertheless read widely—poetry, history, books addressing morality, and the Bible. Anecdotal evidence supports the notion that Lincoln practiced the morality about which he read. A friend of Lincoln, David Turnham, described how Lincoln, while walking home after a full day threshing wheat, encountered a sleeping drunk on the road. Lincoln carried the man to a home, built a fire, and kept the man warm. The family of the young Abraham Lincoln joined the Little Pigeon Baptist Church in Indiana, though Lincoln himself did not become a member. That he did not was unusual. White’s view is that Lincoln’s intellectual curiosity instilled a sense of questioning in the young man’s mind, including a need to question religious denominations in which he saw rivalry rather than a source of comfort. Lincoln’s skepticism of organized religion was likely influenced by his readings of political philosopher Thomas Paine and poet Robert Burns, both of whom attacked either the Church (Paine) or particular teachings (Burns). White describes one occasion on which a paper Lincoln wrote expressing some of his views was thrown into a fire by a friend, presumably to save Lincoln from embarrassment in their small town. Lincoln’s estrangement from any organized church later created problems when he was preparing to marry Mary Todd. The Todd family had members in both the Presbyterian and Episcopal churches; both churches would have been skeptical of Lincoln, who considered himself a deist. Mary later joined the First Presbyterian Church in Springfield, partly in an attempt to reprise the religious experience of her own youth. Her impetus for joining was the comfort provided to her by the church’s minister, the Reverend James Smith, following the death of the Lincolns’ son Eddie in 1850. Lincoln himself began to attend services on a more regular basis as well. During the final illness of Thomas Lincoln, Abraham’s words of comfort to his father reflected the words of consolation he likely heard from the Reverend Smith’s sermon following the death of Eddie. The Lincolns continued their membership in the Presbyterian Church after moving to Washington, joining the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. White refers to Lincoln’s description of a “people’s God” in his second inaugural address: “Both [North and South] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.” Lincoln’s view of God was perhaps best expressed in his farewell address to the people of Springfield as he left for Washington. White points out that 63 of the 152 words Lincoln spoke then described the role of God. White argues that Lincoln believed in a personal God, one who was present at the beginning of the country and who would accompany Lincoln to Washington. Lincoln’s significance as the sixteenth president derives from the two defining events of his political career: his view toward slavery and the African American people and his role as commander in chief during the four bloody years of the Civil War. By modern standards, Lincoln’s view toward African Americans was decidedly mixed and certainly reflected the racism of the times. Lincoln repeatedly indicated he did not consider African Americans to be the equals of whites; he even considered the possibility of repatriation of slaves back to Africa. Lincoln’s view of slavery, how-

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ever, was clear, and during his debates with his political rival Stephen Douglas he reiterated the point that, while African Americans might not be his social equals and while he might not approve of an African American as his wife, “in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands . . . she is my equal, and the equal of all others.” One anecdote, likely apocryphal, holds that a young Lincoln, upon observing the treatment of slaves at a Mississippi River dock, stated that if he ever had the opportunity to end the practice he would do so. True or not, the story accurately depicts Lincoln’s view toward the practice. While the causes of the Civil War were complex, the issue of slavery remained the single most important divisive factor between Northerners and Southerners. While Lincoln may have detested slavery, it was also his view that, under the Constitution, he was unable to arbitrarily end the practice. Several books address in detail the evolution of Lincoln’s thinking, resulting in emancipation, and White provides a clear overview of that process: Lincoln’s original idea was a “compensated emancipation,” the idea that owners would receive payment in return for the gradual emancipation of their slaves. The idea failed, both because of the potential cost and because of the policy’s social implications. The widening war made the issue largely moot as well. The Emancipation Proclamation was released following the Battle of Antietam in September, 1862. The timing resulted from the advice of Secretary of State William Seward; emancipation would take effect on January 1, 1863. White addresses the question of exactly which slaves were emancipated, as the edict only affected regions beyond the control of the Union army. Lincoln recognized the consequences of making the highly controversial proclamation a war measure: It would not only spell the beginning of the end for a practice that had divided the country since its birth but also, at least in the minds of some, change the war into one for freedom. It is often overlooked that the Emancipation Proclamation had the additional significance of allowing African Americans to join the military. Lincoln’s role as commander in chief has been discussed in greater detail than in A. Lincoln in the numerous books dedicated wholly to that subject. White describes the path Lincoln followed in often vain attempts to find a man capable of leading the Union armies. In an army often dominated by politics, Lincoln’s first choice as commander of the Army of the Potomac, General George McClellan, proved highly capable of training an army but woefully inept at actually using it. At times, McClellan seemed more interested in becoming a dictator than in winning the war. Lincoln’s patience and his willingness to allow his generals significant leeway has no better example than his dealings with McClellan. In time, however, even Lincoln gave up, replacing each commander who failed to do the job until he found Ulysses S. Grant. Lincoln barely had time to relax following the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Grant in April, 1865, before he was assassinated. Many excellent authors have covered the highlights of Lincoln’s life and presidency. White provides with a view of the man, his private thoughts and beliefs, and the impact of those beliefs on his life. Richard Adler

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Review Sources American History 44 no. 2 (June, 2009): 69. Booklist 105 (January 1-15, 2009): 38. Journal of American History 96, no. 2 (September, 2009): 549-550. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 22 (November 15, 2008): 1195. Library Journal 133, no. 20 (December 1, 2008): 139. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 14 (September 24, 2009): 58-60. The Washington Post, February 8, 2009, p. BW03.

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THE AGE OF WONDER How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science Author: Richard Holmes (1945) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 552 pp. $40.00 Type of work: Biography, history of science Time: 1769-1840 Locale: Great Britain Holmes provides sequential biographies of some of the key figures in British exploration and science during the Romantic period, highlighting their impact on the literature and poetry of the age Principal personages: Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), early explorer of Tahiti, later president of the Royal Society George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), poet with a lively interest in science, acquainted with Herschel and Davy Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), poet, essayist, and opium addict Sir Humphrey Davy (1778-1829), chemist, inventor, and lecturer at the Royal Institution Michael Faraday (1791-1867), chemist and physicist, Davy’s assistant and successor at the Royal Institution Caroline Herschel (1750-1848), German-born English astronomer, one of the first two women elected to honorary membership in the Royal Society Sir Frederick William Herschel (1738-1822), German-born English astronomer and musician Mungo Park (1771-1806), Scottish physician and explorer Mary Shelley (1797-1851), novelist and essayist, known principally as the author of Frankenstein Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), her husband, a poet and essayist Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753-1814), Massachusetts-born English scientist, inventor, and adventurer

Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder examines the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a time of remarkable discovery and intellectual ferment in Great Britain. Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1453; On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, 1939) had already delivered a blow to the human ego, demonstrating that the universe did not literally revolve about humanity. This initial revolutionary insight was developed by subsequent explorers, astronomers, botanists, and physiologists, whose work revealed that the world was vaster,

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older, and more varied than earlier thinkers might have imagined. Holmes makes a dis- Richard Holmes has written extensively tinction between the first scientific revolu- about the Romantic period. His tion—led by aristocratic scholars who wrote Shelley: The Pursuit (1974) received in Latin and, in England, held membership in the Somerset Maugham Award, while the Royal Society—and the second scientific Coleridge: Darker Reflections (1998) revolution, characterized by exploration and was a New York Times Book Review open to a broader literate public, including Editors’ Choice. women. According to Holmes, the second scientific revolution, or “age of wonder,” falls between 1768, when Captain James Cook began his circumnavigation of the globe on the HMS Endeavour, and 1831, when Charles Darwin began his own voyage around the world on HMS Beagle. Scientific discoveries of the period helped shape its literature and poetry, which in turn defined the mental and emotional world, as well as the public image, of the “scientist,” a term that would be coined a few years later. The personages participating in this revolution are many, and Holmes focuses on two, Sir William Herschel, who with his sister greatly broadened the scope of astronomy, and Sir Humphrey Davy, a physician’s apprentice who became one of the most important chemical discoverers and expositors of science to the public. Tying together much of Holmes’s narrative is the career of Sir Joseph Banks, who, as president of the Royal Society from 1778 to 1820, was in a unique position to know about and encourage scientific developments throughout England. The Royal Society—founded in 1662 and enjoying, at least nominally, the patronage of the monarch—was then, as now, the most prestigious scientific society in England. Under Banks, it became the key organization in recognizing and supporting scientific achievement. Holmes argues that the age of wonder was characterized by a number of interrelated trends. Government, in the person of the monarch, became active in providing financial support and recognition for scientific projects. Working-class individuals found various means of pursuing scientific careers. Training in classical Latin and Greek was no longer indispensible for the natural philosopher. Institutions such as the Royal Institution were established to popularize scientific concepts. Women could make scientific contributions without using pseudonyms, and popular books about science were penned by both male and female authors. Poets and other writers during this period wrote about scientific developments and often socialized with scientists. Scientists, including the key individuals in Holmes’s narrative, often wrote and sometimes published verse and speculative prose themselves. Throughout the age, new ideas on religion were propagated. Some scientists became freethinkers, others remained conventionally religious, and some vacillated between these extremes. Holmes begins his story with the exploration of Tahiti in 1769 by Banks, who accompanied Cook at his own expense as the Endeavour’s botanist. Banks was a classically educated Englishman of independent means who, before his departure, was

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considered to be the fiancé of Harriet Blosset, a proper young Englishwoman. However, his voyage, and perhaps the relaxed sexual mores of the Tahitians, increased his yearning for adventure to the point that he begged off the engagement on his return, precipitating a scandal. Scandal notwithstanding, Banks was invited to Windsor in August of 1771 and quickly formed a friendship with his near contemporary, King George III. By 1773, he was in effect the director of the Royal Gardens at Kew and was cohabiting with a young woman named Sarah Wells. In 1778, he was elected president of the Royal Society and began courting an heiress, Dorothea Hugessen, after “tactfully and generously” parting from Wells. The great adventurer Banks suffered recurrent attacks of gout beginning in 1787, eventually becoming chair-bound. His physical incapacity did not limit his enthusiasm for science and discovery, which he encouraged as president of the society for forty years. One of the first major scientific personalities to emerge during Banks’s tenure was William Herschel. A German-born musician, astronomer, and telescope builder, Herschel settled in Bath in 1766 when he obtained the post of organist at Bath Chapel. He was joined by his sister Caroline Herschel in 1772. William’s interest in music theory led him to study optics and to build his own telescopes, which eventually surpassed those at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich in quality. William trained Caroline as his assistant, and together they recorded extensive and very precise observations of the night sky. In 1781, William discovered the planet Uranus, the first new planet since ancient times, which he originally proposed to name after George III. He was promptly made a member of the Royal Society, awarded its Copley Medal, and granted a salary as the king’s astronomer. In 1785, Herschel announced plans to build a telescope of unprecedented power, a Newtonian reflector 40 feet long and 5 feet in diameter. One of Banks’s signal achievements was persuading King George to fund the entire construction and then provide four years’ operating budget. While the big telescope was under construction, Caroline discovered a comet on her own and described it in a letter to the secretary of the Royal Society. The discovery was promptly confirmed at the Royal Observatory, and Caroline’s letter was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. This rare publication by a woman correspondent confirmed Caroline’s standing as an astronomer in her own right and made her something of a celebrity. Over the course of his highly productive career, Herschel studied distant stars and nebulas, arguing that the nebulas were in fact located far beyond the Milky Way galaxy. This would be confirmed by the telescopic researches of Harlow Shapley and Edwin Hubble in the twentieth century. Herschel also occasionally gave free rein to speculation, proposing in a 1795 paper that the interior of the Sun was cool enough to be inhabited. Humphrey Davy, a lad from rural Cornwall, began his career as apprentice to physician Thomas Beddoes, who quickly recognized his talent. In 1798, Davy was appointed to the Pneumatic Institute, founded by Beddoes to research and popularize the medicinal uses of gases. There, he discovered the properties of nitrous oxide as an anesthetic and intoxicant. Among the individuals to experience nitrous oxide intoxi-

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cation were Davy himself and the poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who became close friends. After three highly productive years, Davy took the post of assistant lecturer and director of the chemical laboratory at the Royal Institution, which had recently been founded by Count Rumford. He remained associated with the institution for the rest of his life. While the Herschels explored the skies and explorers such as Mungo Park turned their attention to South America, Africa, and the South Pacific, a further revolution in chemistry, physiology, and ultimately physics was taking place. The Italian Luigi Galveni discovered biological electricity, and his compatriot Count Alessandro Volta invented the Voltaic pile, or battery. Volta’s pile provided the first dependable source of continuous electric current. Davy wasted no time in putting the new technology to use. He chose “Galvanism” as the topic for his inaugural lecture at the Royal Institution and performed some spectacular demonstrations involving sparks and explosions. The demonstrations greatly entertained his audience, which was more aristocratic and included more ladies than had been anticipated. Davy had become a scientific showman, even a star. Later, he would develop friendships with George Gordon, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelly, and Mary Shelley. The demonstrations of biological electricity performed under Davy’s auspices played a role in inspiring Mary’s novel Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). Michael Fraraday, a young bookbinder’s apprentice also attended and was inspired by Davy’s lectures. Faraday took very detailed and neat notes, with illustrations, bound them at his place of work, and presented them to Davy as his application for a position. Davy made Faraday his apprentice, thus beginning one of the most famous and troubled apprenticeships in scientific history. Faraday proved to be a quick study and was soon delivering lectures on his own. He made a number of chemical discoveries and, despite a complete lack of formal training in mathematics, conducted fundamental research in electricity and magnetism. Among Faraday’s many discoveries was the law of electromagnetic induction, which allowed the development of the large-scale electric generators upon which the modern energy economy came to be based. In 1815, Davy was urged by the Coal Mines Safety Committee to look into the problem of the gas, or “fire damp,” explosions that took the lives of groups of miners with some regularity. Before the invention of the electric light, miners were dependent on flames for illumination, and the flames from the miners’ lamps could ignite methane gas in the mines. Davy and Faraday worked on the problem almost exclusively for three months. They determined the chemical nature of the gas and the critical concentration necessary for an explosion to occur. The eventual result was the Davy safety lamp, a mesh-enclosed flame that could exchange gas with the surrounding atmosphere and burn the methane within the mesh, without ever becoming hot enough on the surface to ignite the gas outside the mesh. Despite their common working-class origins, Davy and Faraday accepted their success on very different terms. Holmes describes Davy as a persistent flirt who may have had a number of affairs with prominent women before settling into a more conventional marriage. Faraday, by contrast, was a member of the fundamentalist

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Sandemanian sect, lived modestly, and would eventually decline Queen Victoria’s offer of a knighthood. Davy became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1808 and its president in 1820, succeeding the infirm Sir Joseph Banks. Faraday became a candidate for membership in 1823 but was blackballed by Davy. After several attempts, he was elected in 1824, with Davy casting the only dissenting vote. Holmes provides extensive appendixes in his volume, including more than seventy short biographies of scientific and literary figures of the period, as well as a detailed bibliography for each chapter. While professional historians of science will already be acquainted with much of his material, this book will be a useful starting point for students and teachers of either the sciences or literature. The twentieth century worked a separation between these two realms of knowledge, as the humanities and the science became institutionally separated as what C. P. Snow would describe in 1959 as “the two cultures.” The Age of Wonder confirms, however, that the gap between these cultures was often remarkably small during the Romantic period and that it was in fact a modern invention. Donald R. Franceschetti

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 21 (July 1, 2009): 17 Contemporary Review 291, no. 1694 (Autumn, 2009): 398 Economist 392, no. 8639 (July 11, 2009): 86-87 Harper’s Magazine 319, no. 1911 (August, 2009): 73-74 Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 11 (June 1, 2009): 593 Library Journal 134, no. 9 (May 15, 2009): 95 New Criterion 28, no. 1 (September, 2009): 66-68 New York Review of Books 56, no. 13 (August 13, 2009): 15-18 The New York Times, July 9, 2009, p. 1. The New York Times Book Review, July 19, 2009, p. 1. The New Yorker 85, no. 24 (August 10, 2009): 81. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 22 (June 1, 2009): 1. Wilson Quarterly 33, no. 4 (Autumn, 2009): 107-109.

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ALL OTHER NIGHTS Author: Dara Horn (1977) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 363 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1861-1865 Locale: New York; New Orleans; New Babylon, Virginia; Holly Springs, Mississippi This Civil War tale follows the life of a young Jewish American spy as he deals with assignments that ask him to betray those closest to him and that challenge his understanding of his own identity Principal characters: Jacob Rappaport, a young Jewish American soldier serving as a spy for the North Charlotte Levy, the oldest Levy daughter, who is suspected of being a Rebel spy and who has been engaged numerous times Eugenia (Jeannie) Levy, the second Levy daughter, whom Jacob is sent to marry because she is suspected of being a spy Phoebe Levy, the third Levy daughter, a talented wood-carver Rose Levy, the youngest Levy daughter, who is skilled in wordplay Philip Levy, father of the girls who are suspected of being spies Harry Hyams, Jacob’s uncle and the instigator of an assassination plot against Lincoln Judah Benjamin, second in command of the Confederacy

Jacob Rappaport, the protagonist of All Other Nights, has led a privileged life as the son of a wealthy businessman in New York. He has been given everything he needs; however, Jacob’s confused relationship with his father has run the gamut from hero worship, to embarrassment, to frustration. In the beginning years of the Civil War, Jacob has begun to recognize that he is no more than a trophy for his father to show off to his business acquaintances. When his father agrees to marry Jacob off to the developmentally handicapped daughter of one of his colleagues, Jacob decides that he must break free. He runs away to join the Union army. During his first few months serving the Union army, the nineteen-year-old Jacob is called to the office of three prestigious generals. In his youthful conceit, he is convinced he is going to be promoted. Instead, the generals reveal their knowledge of his family connection to Harry Hyams, a Jewish Rebel who is allegedly part of a plot to assassinate Lincoln. They assign Jacob the task of removing this danger to the president and send him to New Orleans to kill his uncle. Jacob struggles with memories of Hyams as a gentle, loving man who seemed to care more for him than his own father had. He has difficulty seeing his uncle as a danger to the country. Once he reaches New Orleans, hidden in a barrel and dressed as a Rebel soldier,

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Jacob goes to his uncle’s home and joins in a Passover Seder. Jacob’s conflict becomes more complicated when he finds out that Judah Benjamin, the second in command of the Confederacy, plans to join the Hyams family for the ceremonial meal. He wonders if he should poison Benjamin, one of the most powerful figures in the South, rather than his uncle. However, after overhearing his uncle arguing in favor of assassinating Lincoln while Benjamin rejects the plan, Jacob realizes that his uncle is enough of a villain to be a threat to the country, so he takes the opportunity to add poison to Hyams’s drink. Returning to New York, Jacob is admonished by his superiors for killing his uncle rather than Benjamin. Their disregard of his guilt over poisoning a man that he had held in high regard reinforces Jacob’s confusion about patriotic duty versus humanity. His ability to follow orders despite the personal cost, however, leads to a second assignment. He is sent to New Babylon, Virginia, to infiltrate the family of Philip Levy, one of his father’s business associates. Levy has four daughters, and the oldest two are suspected of spying for the Confederacy. Jacob’s assignment is to marry Eugenia, the second daughter. Upon entering the Levy home, he is immediately confused by the Levy women. The eleven-year-old Rose speaks only in word puzzles. She twists everything she is told or that she wants to communicate into code. Phoebe, a fifteen-year-old, has taken up the scandalous hobby of wood carving. Eugenia (Jeannie), has been a professional actress, performing in front of audiences of hundreds. The oldest daughter, Charlotte (Lottie), has been engaged numerous times, even to several men at the same time, but she has never married. Despite his bewilderment at the women’s behavior, Jacob revels in the family life of the Levys. He infiltrates the heart of the family, gaining the father’s trust and helping him run his business. As he thinks he is building Philip’s trust, he watches the women closely for evidence of espionage. His failure to discover their plots is relieved only by accident when he finds a coded message revealing his identity as a spy. He destroys the message just before his marriage to Jeannie. At the wedding ceremony, the Levy family’s life changes. William Williams, Jeannie’s former beau and fellow spy, threatens to unmask and then kill Jacob. Philip Levy saves Jacob by shooting Williams himself. He is immediately sent to prison. Jacob holds the family together during their father’s incarceration and learns several things. First, Jeannie reveals the women’s espionage on their wedding night. Then, Philip tells Jacob that he has known all along that Jacob was a spy and has wanted a man who would save Jeannie and her sisters from the dangers of spying. Shortly after Philip’s incarceration, Charlotte discovers Jacob’s identity and turns him in to the authorities, so he must flee for his life. Desperate to keep Jeannie safe, Jacob reports that Charlotte is the spy when he returns to the Union generals. His efforts result in the arrest of Charlotte and Jeannie

Dara Horn was chosen as one of the Granta Best Young American Novelists in 2007. She has also won the the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, and the National Jewish Book Awards’ First Time Author Award.

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and the disappearance of Phoebe and Rose. Immune to his protestations of Jeannie’s innocence, the generals send Jacob to Mississippi, where he will be away from notice. On his way to the new post, Jacob reads a news article that reports the death of his wife. He withdraws emotionally, functioning only as needed to survive. He is overwhelmed with guilt at his role in delivering the woman he loved into the prison where she died. Meanwhile, Jacob’s assignment in Mississippi ends when he almost dies in an explosion. He is disfigured in both face and body and sent home to his parents to die. Upon recovering enough to function, he resumes a role in his father’s firm. A period begins in Jacob’s life when he is forced to mature. He reconnects with Philip Levy, who reveals that Jeannie is alive. He implores Jacob to find his daughters and give them a message. Ironically, this plea coincides with another undercover assignment from the generals. Jacob is sent back to the South with orders to infiltrate Judah Benjamin’s office. He does this with some ease and takes the role of a trusted clerk to Benjamin. He serves until the night Benjamin and other Confederate officials flee Richmond on the eve of the war’s end. Jacob discovers Jeannie’s location and is reunited with her in a scene that is almost anticlimactic. He has become deserving of Jeannie partly because he is now physically inferior to her, as he has always been emotionally and intellectually inferior. The impending end of the war further frees Jacob from the need to make any true decisions. Dara Horn delves into the realm of feminism in history, as she models the Levy sisters after a number of female spies from the Civil War. The novel’s limited omniscient narrative focus on Jacob, however, somewhat restricts the impact of the women’s lives and sacrifices. Because Jacob’s previous relationships with women have been limited to those with his mother, his aunt, and his handicapped fiancé— women who were submissive to the men in their lives—Jacob’s expectations of a woman’s place reinforce a patriarchal mind-set. This is changed only marginally as Jacob is immediately confronted with four independent, strong, thinking women upon reaching the Levy home. Jacob is sure the young Levy women are insane. His opinion begins to evolve as he lives with the family and falls in love with Jeannie. The issue of slavery is a central theme in this novel about the Civil War. Though a Union soldier, Jacob does not have strong views against slavery when he enters the Army. He is first confronted with hatred from slaves in his uncle’s home, where the slaves are insubordinate and where one slave observes him adding the poison to his uncle’s drink but does not interfere. Life with the Levy daughters, whose mother was shot by a slave, further complicates his opinions of the institution. Philip Levy’s willingness to rescue a slave who is imprisoned with him confounds Jacob until he meets the man and purchases his freedom at Philip’s urging. This slave, ironically, saves Jacob’s life by providing him with safe passage back to the North when Charlotte reveals his identity to the authorities. Later in the novel, Jacob recognizes the intelligence of slaves when he becomes Judah Benjamin’s aide. One of the most striking aspects of the novel is the revelation of the Jewish American involvement in the Civil War. Jacob’s religious heritage is a key element in his ability to infiltrate the South. Among other connections, he realizes the irony of the

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Passover recitation—which celebrates the release of the Jews from their enslavement in Egypt—as he plots to kill his uncle. Further, he is able to connect with Judah Benjamin because Benjamin recognizes him as a fellow Jew. The novel meanders, sometimes slowly, through a period of four years and often includes superficial characters. Readers follow Jacob from immature conceit; to depressed maturity, after he reads the false report of Jeannie’s death; to scarred hero, after he is trapped in an exploding building. Despire the narrative’s focus on Jacob, his motivations seem superficial throughout. He spies because he is told to do so. Though he loves Jeannie, he marries because he was ordered to do so. He learns that slaves are human because Philip Levy is able to forgive and ask for another man’s freedom. He even searches for his wife because his father-in-law implores him to find his daughters. Jacob rarely takes initiative to do anything for himself. Jeannie’s personality is equally frustrating at points. When readers first meet her, she is outspoken, flirtatious, and brave. She is seemingly an active part of a spy ring involving all three of her sisters. She performs publicly in theaters and the homes of the wealthy. However, at the end of the novel, she disappoints by returning to Jacob with the excuse that her previous actions had only been a result of her sister’s influence. Though she had been an important part of the Confederate war effort, she confesses that the war had never been her driving force. Theresa L. Stowell

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 16 (April 15, 2009): 29. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 5 (March 1, 2009): 42. Library Journal 134, no. 6 (April 1, 2009): 70. Los Angeles Times, April 12, 2009, p. 7. National Post 11 (May 16, 2009): WP13. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 5 (February 2, 2009): 29. Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2009, p. W8. Washington Post, April 14, 2009, p. C06

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AMERICAN RADICAL The Life and Times of I. F. Stone Author: D. D. Guttenplan (1957) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 570 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Biography Time: 1907-1989 Locale: United States An intellectual biography of American political journalist I. F. Stone, with emphasis on the broader political contexts that shaped Stone’s work and legacy as an independent radical reporter Principal personages: I. F. Stone, independent radical journalist Esther Roisman Stone, his wife J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972), director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1935-1972 Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957), U.S. senator from Wisconsin, 19471957 Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), U.S. president, 1933-1945

As a skilled journalist writing political biography, D. D. Guttenplan uses American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone to advance his own arguments, which are aimed squarely at the present day. He sees a critical press as essential to healthy democracy, while independent journalism is perpetually endangered by the machinations and obfuscations of entrenched political power. I. F. Stone’s life and work as an American political thinker and iconoclastic journalist demonstrate for Guttenplan “the compatibility of [Stone’s] beloved Jefferson and his equally beloved Marx,” and he seeks through this biography to show that an extended study of one remarkable life can illuminate the tensions inherent in history while sparking fresh political insight and the energy for democratic political action. Guttenplan does not argue that the legacies of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), philosopher of the American Revolution, and Karl Marx (1818-1883), philosopher of socialism, coexist easily in either the history of the United States or the life of I. F. Stone, nor does he ignore the deeply contradictory historical trajectories of these legacies. He does, however, show that Stone’s life and work demonstrate that it was, and remains, possible in the United States to fuse and nurture the best elements of both political traditions while standing up to challenge the worst historical developments evolving out of each. American Radical is not only a meticulously detailed analysis of an exemplary twentieth century life but also a book seriously engaged with political realities of the twenty-first century. A cover-to-cover reading will reward a variety of readers holding an extremely wide range of political perspectives.

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I. F. Stone was born Isadore Feinstein in 1907 to Jewish immigrant parents whose struggles with pressures to assimilate shaped Stone’s lifelong stance as an essentially skeptical and “outsider” social critic. Guttenplan’s sketch of Stone’s childhood shows clearly the formation of this future reporter’s critical interpretive lens, while highlighting the Yiddish cultural atmosphere of Stone’s upbringing and his precocious early passion for books, ideas, writing, and left-oriented politics. Guttenplan very effectively draws out key formative moments for Stone’s life within the broader historical context of early twentieth century American culture and politics. Stone’s lifelong critical engagement with the American and international left is described in extended detail throughout the book, which not only relates that engagement to his work as a political journalist but also forcefully argues that Stone is best understood, not primarily as an iconic journalist, but rather in broader terms as a political thinker, writer, and activist. For decades, Stone worked with, argued with, and criticized his political allies and opponents across the spectrum of American and international politics. He worked on and wrote about issues related to labor organizing, economics, the Great Depression, the New Deal, the Popular Front, World War II, the Korean War, African American civil rights, the formation of Israel, the resulting displacement of Palestinians, the Vietnam War, and the New Left. One of Guttenplan’s several significant journalistic accomplishments in American Radical, in addition to his own exhaustive archival research, is represented in the collection of interviews he conducted for the book. The list of his interviewees presents a fascinating portrait of twentieth century intellectual history. It includes thinkers as diverse as Isaiah Berlin, Murray Kempton, Victor Navasky, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Clancy Sigal, Paul Sweezy, Edward Said, and Andrew Kopkind. Guttenplan spends considerable narrative time analyzing two key dimensions of Stone’s political involvement. First, he places Stone’s writing and activism in relation to left politics generally to Stone’s evolution more specifically as an American radical responding to the Soviet Union, the Popular Front against international fascism, and American communism. Second, Guttenplan catalogs Stone’s ferocious and lifelong defense of civil liberties in opposition to efforts by the U.S. government to suppress free speech, especially the free speech and free press of those Americans on the Left or liberal-left. Stone was a democratic socialist for most of his life, and, like many on the American left, his assessment of the Soviet Union and especially of Stalin and later the Cuban Revolution vacillated between early optimistic support and later full-scale critical condemnation. As Guttenplan extensively documents, Stone was right in the middle of key political conflicts and shifts among American leftists from the 1930’s until his death in 1989, and much of the persisting controversy about Stone’s career and legacy has swirled around his participation in a host of political activities in addition to his writing.

D. D. Guttenplan writes regularly for the Nation, as well as various magazines and journals in the United States and Europe. Guttenplan is the author of The Holocaust on Trial (2002). He received a doctorate in history from the University of London.

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As American Radical makes clear, what is less debated and utterly consistent is Stone’s long advocacy for civil liberties. During the 1940’s and 1950’s, he resisted directly investigations launched by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the persecutions of leftist and left-leaning American citizens by Senator Joseph McCarthy and others, as well as ongoing efforts by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover to harass activists on the left and in the labor and Civil Rights movements. Even when Stone sharply criticized the Communist Party and dismissed American incarnations of Marxism-Leninism and Stalinism, he defended the First Amendment freedoms of communist activists and writers. In the wake of his lost confidence in the Soviet Union and the Cuban Revolution, Stone did not abandon his commitment to socialism in democratic forms. In fact, his life serves as a reminder of the long existence of a democratic left in the United States. American Radical places Stone’s journalism squarely within these political crosscurrents related to free speech, political dissent, and democratic criticism of government. The biography charts the intellectual context and evolution of Stone’s writing, from his early years writing for smaller independent political papers to his work on the New York Post, PM, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and especially his own paper, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, which Stone published from 1953 to 1971. Guttenplan extensively documents Stone’s well-known willingness to question official versions of events, to track down documents in obscure files, and to criticize openly players across the political spectrum. Guttenplan’s account of Stone’s seemingly indefatigable labors on behalf of democratic dissent creates an implicit argument for the continued importance of such work. Indeed, a key strength (and occasional weakness) of American Radical is Guttenplan’s truly impressive detailing of historical context, events, people, and issues related to Stone’s life and work. There are moments in the book where detail derails the focus a bit too much, and readers may return from an extended digression a bit weary from too much tangential information. Most of the time, however, Guttenplan’s meticulous detail builds the book as an exemplary intellectual biography, with all the depth and historical illumination possible in the best of the genre. In many sections, readers are happily rewarded for their patient attention with glimpses of American historical events that are too often forgotten. For example, Guttenplan links the landmark Supreme Court desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education (1954) with an account of activist educator Myles Horton being hauled out of Senator John Eastland’s anticommunist hearings in New Orleans in 1954. Horton, a Christian socialist who had studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, was also a founder of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which also became a target of FBI harassment. The Highlander Folk School was started in 1932 as a community school for labor organizers, but it was also a place where Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights activists received training in nonviolent activism prior to their more public careers. Through a short narrative interlude drawing the links between these people, places, and events, Guttenplan also illuminates the links in American history between labor and civil rights organizing, while reminding readers of the twin perils of suppressed free speech and repressed civil liberties.

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A second strength of American Radical is Guttenplan’s effective rhetorical engagement with contemporary American political life, which he accomplishes by framing particular episodes in Stone’s life in ways that are suggestive of persisting issues and problems facing citizens and journalists in twenty-first century democracies. This rhetorical use of Stone’s biography is especially evident as Guttenplan analyzes Stone’s journalistic work related to the Korean and Vietnam wars. In these sections, Guttenplan highlights Stone’s indictment of coopted journalism, his impatience with failed Democratic Party liberalism and political quietism among American citizens, and his repeated warnings about the potentially catastrophic consequences of these failures for American civil liberties at home and foreign policy abroad. In his chapter “An American Tragedy,” Guttenplan foregrounds Stone’s persistent investigative dismantling of official deception related to American military intervention in Vietnam. He offers this account from I. F. Stone’s Weekly, written after Stone’s visit to Saigon in 1966: To watch the young Ivy Leaguers arriving briskly at the Embassy of a morning is to feel oneself on the eve of the Harvard-Yale game. The team spirit is bursting out all over; it demands optimism; patriotism is equated with euphoria . . . Under the supposed benevolence of our policy one soon detects a deep animosity to the Vietnamese and a vast arrogance. We assume the right to remold them, whether they choose to be remolded or not. It is significant that those like Gen. Lansdale and Colonel John Paul Vann who would approach the Vietnamese as people soon find themselves sidetracked, suspect and frustrated. The machine instinctively reacts against the human, and what we are running, or what is running us, is a bureaucratic war machine.

Guttenplan introduces the quote with this phrasing: “[Stone] evoked, unforgettably, the tone of empire, American-style.” Readers of American Radical who have also read dissenting journalistic accounts of the 2003 U.S-led invasion and occupation of Iraq or who have read books such as Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (2007), will find themselves invited via Guttenplan’s prose to translate Stone’s language across time and place, to more recent wars and their tragic landscapes. American Radical has been extensively reviewed and will continue to draw political interest as the legacy of Stone’s work is debated by new generations of readers and journalists. The lingering controversy over Stone’s alleged but unproven link to Soviet agents has distracted some reviewers from the sweep of Stone’s life. Guttenplan offers a fair and duly considered discussion of that controversy toward the end of American Radical and argues that it would matter very much to have final resolution to the question of Stone’s integrity and honesty. The attacks on Stone help to remind us not just of what he was, but of what he represented—an independent radical who kept hold of his ideals, and kept faith with his comrades, without renouncing his freedom to speak his mind. Destroy that credibility, and you have destroyed more than a man, more than a reputation. But grant his credibility— grant him the compatibility of his beloved Jefferson and his equally beloved Marx—and I. F. Stone remains, even in death, a dangerous man.

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It seems clear that after such a lengthy exploration of Stone’s life as that of an exemplary independent radical—and given that he ends American Radical with an explicit call for a revitalized, critically independent, and activist public—Guttenplan is himself convinced of Stone’s integrity. While not ignoring the contradictions and controversies of the past, American Radical is rhetorically pitched to the present and future, concluding with the suggestive argument that it would be wise to follow Stone into the better legacies of both Jefferson and Marx. Sharon Carson

Review Sources Columbia Journalism Review 48, no. 2 (July/August, 2009): 60-61. The Economist 391, no.8631 (May 16, 2009): 90. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 14 (September 24, 2009): 79-82. The New York Times, July 5, 2009, p.BR12. The New York Times, July 10, 2009, p.C26. The New York Times Book Review, July 12, 2009, p. 18. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 12 (March 23, 2009): 53. Village Voice, June 2, 2009, p. 32. The Wall Street Journal 253, no. 125 (May 30, 2009): W8.

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ANGELS AND AGES A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life Author: Adam Gopnik (1956) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 211 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Biography, history Time: 1809-1882 Locale: England; United States This study of the nineteenth century reveals significant and surprising parallels between the lives of English biologist Charles Darwin and U.S. president Abraham Lincoln Principal personages: Charles Darwin, English biologist and theorist of evolution Emma Wedgwood Darwin, his wife Annie, Darwin’s second child and his favorite Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States Willie, Lincoln’s favorite child Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s friend and secretary of war

Most readers of Angels and Ages will recognize Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln as two of the great men of the nineteenth century, a century that produced many great men. Darwin posited a theory of evolution. Lincoln, his contemporary, served as president of the United States during the Civil War and in 1862 issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Few readers, however, would have thought to compare these two men. Adam Gopnik does, however, with significant results. The comparison begins with the fact that both were born on the same day, February 12, 1809. This observation might have seemed to be a gimmick if made by another writer, but it does not in Gopnik’s hands. Darwin grew up in the beautiful county of Shropshire in western England. He was a conventional-appearing man from a well-to-do and intellectually prominent family; his grandfathers were the biologist and poet Erasmus Darwin and the potter and liberal advocate Josiah Wedgewood. Gopnik stresses that, besides becoming well-read in biology, geology, and poetry, Darwin’s peculiar strength was to look at things— especially living things—with great intensity and sensitivity. He compares Darwin’s powers of close observation to those of John Ruskin in The Stones of Venice (18511853). In addition to Darwin’s powers of observation, Gopnik argues, the biologist had an ability that many good observers lack: He was able to think productively about what he saw. He concluded that the old view, that God created everything at once, was false, and he replaced it with a theory by which elementary life-forms developed

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over time by adapting to new circumstances. Those forms that did not adapt perished. Those Adam Gopnik has been a New Yorker that did adapt lived on. This portion of his writer since 1986. In 1995, he became theory Darwin called “natural selection.” Dar- the magazine’s Paris correspondent. win’s evolutionary theory pointed to no moral His essays from Paris were collected as or spiritual force or plan driving life’s devel- Paris to the Moon (2000). He has written a children’s novel, The King in opment. God was not mentioned. After his trip to the Galapagos to study the Window (2005). various species, Darwin was silent for many years, perhaps thinking that the world was not ready for his revelations. Perhaps he did not want to offend his very religious wife Emma. (In the end, Emma read what he wrote and made helpful comments.) In these years and later, Darwin was not idle. He theorized that adaptation was made possible by living organs changing their functions, as when the bladders of fish become the lungs of mammals. He continued his scientific research. Darwin performed this research, not in the Pacific, but in his own backyard, at his house just southeast of London, where he studied worms. In The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits (1881), Darwin wrote: Worms have played a more important part in the history of the world than most persons would at first suppose. . . . When we behold a wide, turf-covered expanse, we should remember that its smoothness . . . is mainly due to all the inequalities having been slowly leveled by worms. . . . It may be doubted whether there are many other animals that have played so important a part in the history of the world as have these lowly organized creatures.

Darwin knew there would be great resistance to his idea. As Gopnik puts it, “There isn’t a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, but try telling that to the sparrows.” Darwin was so great a scientist that he knew his theory was not final. It did not yet account adequately for intermediate species, as he had found no evidence of slow mutations between primitive and advanced organisms. In his writing, he tried to give conflicting theories their due by summarizing them as sympathetically as he could and by inviting discussion. He was also limited by the fact that deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) had not yet been discovered; he could not figure out how traits were inherited. An important aspect of Gopnik’s thesis concerns prose style. Darwin and Lincoln both instinctively departed from the rather formal language of those who wrote earlier in the century, to write in less florid and sparer styles. Darwin chose to write, not in the accepted polysyllabic professional style, but in a style that any literate person could read. He could inspire and argue as well. He particularized everything and allowed his generalizations to rise from the details. What was more, he was a gifted storyteller, much like the great Victorian novelists, such as his friend George Eliot. Thus, he helped form a prose style for the modern democratic and liberal age. In assessing Darwin’s achievement, Gopnik thinks that the theory of natural selection would have emerged soon even if Darwin had not proposed it. Because Darwin’s

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style made his ideas understandable and because he told the story of these ideas so dramatically, however, he allowed the theory of evolution to be accepted must faster than it might otherwise have been. Gopnik’s treatment of Lincoln develops from his title. When Lincoln died in a small room across from Ford’s Theater, his friend and secretary of war Edwin Stanton made a remark that has been variously recorded as either “Now he belongs to the ages” or “Now he belongs to the angels.” In other words, now Lincoln will be part of history—or part of God’s heaven. Gopnik details many telling parallels between Lincoln’s and Darwin’s life. Unlike Darwin, Lincoln was American and was famously born into poverty in a log cabin in Kentucky. He trained himself in the law. He rose to prominence as a lawyer and then as a legislator. He married a woman who was much higher socially than he was. Like Darwin, he knew great sadness: His favorite son Willie, like Darwin’s favorite daughter Annie, died young. Both Lincoln and Darwin were opposed to slavery, but Lincoln had to contend with John Brown. Brown’s code of action was Southern, nearly feudal in its concern for revenge and honor. Gopnik argues that Lincoln was driven by what he knew best: He had a passion for law. He was against war and violence, but when the law, the federal union, was violated, he responded with force. He did not sign the Emancipation Proclamation because slavery was illegal (it was legal in many states) but because secession went against the law. To die in battle, for Lincoln, was not to die in an aristocratic game, but rather in an act of sacrifice. Darwin’s universe had no God. For Lincoln, God was not the God of justice and mercy but the fierce God of the Old Testament. (Gopnik is very interesting on how new secular customs regarding the treatment of the dead evolved during the Civil War. These customs sought to ennoble the actions of the fallen. Black clothes were emphasized, and embalming was developed.) Like Darwin, Lincoln wrote in a new prose style. Unlike earlier writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Lincoln employed a style that was plain, moving to monosyllables. Gopnik uses as an example of this monosyllabic tendency The Gettysburg Address: “the world will little note . . . what we say here . . . ” This address was lampooned—probably because its brevity and its style offended the president’s old-fashioned critics. Earlier, Lincoln had defeated Stephen Douglas in debate, partly because his spare style was appealing to a democratic audience, whereas Douglas’s oratory was heightened in the traditional fashion. Lincoln’s style differed from Darwin’s. Lincoln was influenced by the Bible, Mark Twain, and William Shakespeare. Like Harry Truman almost a century later, he was fascinated by the toxic effects of ambition as dramatized in Claudius, the fratricidal usurper in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601, pb. 1603). Claudius reflects on murdering his brother and asks “May one be pardoned and retain th’ offence?” Claudius was clear-sighted enough to understand that one could not. Lincoln’s effect on his world was immense. Gopnik considers what might have happened if he had not been assassinated. For one thing, the postwar Reconstruction would likely have been much different. The freed slaves might not have been forced

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to become essentially serfs. Restrictive laws might not have been passed. As it was, Lincoln’s death froze him in time. His transformation into a saint of liberty was due in part to the fact that he was cut down in midlife. The effects of Lincoln’s memory, functioning as a symbol of liberty, were not as potent in the United States as they were in Europe. In Great Britain, the symbol of Lincoln’s martyrdom to liberty helped pass the Reform Bill of 1867; in France, it helped shape events following the fall of the Second Empire, as the French sought to determine the best form of government to replace that instituted by Napoleon III. Angels and Ages is a brilliant book. It explains the cultural history of the nineteenth century in an original and persuasive way. One paragraph of Gopnik’s contains as many arresting and compelling ideas as a whole chapter of most books of this kind. Moreover, Gopnik succeeds in doing what literary criticism often tries to do, but fails: he shows how ideas are intricately tied to the styles in which they are expressed. He also demonstrates that—in the case of his two stylists—both their ideas and their style point ahead to the modern era. Gopnik practices what he preaches. His own style is lucid and forceful. He regularly backs up his points with specific examples. Perhaps his most moving passage is the one connecting Lincoln’s idea of liberty to events in France later in the century. Gopnik writes that “The Statue of Liberty, though it has been incorporated into our history of immigration, stands in New York Harbor as a testament from one free country to another that liberty, after two thousand years, really does light the harbor. When we look at it, we should see our grandparents arriving. But we should think of Lincoln too.” Not many history books end like that. George Soule

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 8 (December 15, 2008): 4. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 23 (December 1, 2008): 1241. Library Journal 134, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 99. New Scientist 201, no. 2694 (February 7, 2009): 49. The New York Times Book Review, February 1, 2009, p. 11. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 46 (November 17, 2008): 54-55. Wired 17, no. 1 (January, 2009): 64.

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THE ANTELOPE’S STRATEGY Living in Rwanda After the Genocide Author: Jean Hatzfeld (1949) First published: La Stratégie des antilopes, 2007, in France Translated from the French by Linda Coverdale Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 242 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Current affairs, ethics, history Hatzfeld’s third book about the 1994 Rwandan genocide uses testimony from Tutsi survivors and Hutu perpetrators to assess how they are coping with the devastation that both links and divides them Principal personages: Eugénie Kayierere, Rwandan genocide survior Jean Hatzfeld, documenter of the genocide and its aftermath Innocent Rwililiza, another survivor, Hatzfeld’s friend and interpreter Ignace Rukiramacumu, one of the perpetrators of the genocide whom Hatzfeld interviews

No crime is more human or inhumane than genocide, the intended destruction of one national, ethnic, racial, or religious group by another. Other creatures do not make and enact such catastrophic plans. In particular, genocide is alien to the fleetfooted and vulnerable antelopes that are widespread in Africa. Nevertheless, it becomes clear that The Antelope’s Strategy is an apt title for Jean Hatzfeld’s latest report about Rwandan life after the 1994 genocide. Hatzfeld’s chapter “Forest Exploits” focuses on Eugénie Kayierere, who “gave the most prodigious athletic performance” ever known to him. This performance took place not in a sporting event but in a five-week run for her life in the Kayumba Forest during April and May of 1994. Kayumba Forest stands on the hills above Nyamata, a town about twenty miles south of Kigali, the Rwandan capital. In 1994, the Nyamata district was a Tutsi-dominated region in the small, predominantly Christian country—the most densely populated in Africa—whose people numbered approximately eight million. Some 85 percent of the population was Hutu. Systematic killing of Tutsis began in Nyamata on April 11, after Juvénal Habyarimana, the Hutu president of Rwanda, was assassinated in a missile strike against his airplane. The identity of the strike’s perpetrators is still under dispute. However, the April 6 attack inflamed preexisting ethnic prejudices and violence, as the extremist Hutu leadership feared that a Tutsi takeover was imminent. Thus, Hutu troops, supported by militias known as interahamwe (“those who attack together”)

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and soon augmented by large numbers of lo cal Hutu men, unleashed a planned—and in Born in Madagascar, the son of Jews their eyes justifiable—slaughter of the Tutsi who fled the Holocaust, Jean Hatzfeld people, whom Hutu propaganda dehumanized is a journalist and prize-winning author who concentrates on upheavals as “cockroaches.” Genocide engulfed the Nyamata district, as in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, frenzied massacres left fifty thousand Tutsis and Africa. He is best known for his dead. Five of every six Tutsis in the region were accounts of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, featuring testimony from the murdered, including five thousand who were survivors and perpetrators of that killed in or around Nyamata’s main church crime. and an equal number who met the same fate in another church at nearby Ntarama. By May 12, the genocide in Nyamata was over, as Hutus fled from the troops of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), who returned from exile to take control of the country. The RPF arrived too late, however, to prevent the national death toll from reaching 800,000. Nearly all of the dead, including moderate Hutus and about one-third of Rwanda’s eighty thousand Twa (commonly known as Pygmies), were butchered by machetes wielded by tens of thousands of Hutus. Two of Hatzfeld’s earlier books documented this history. Concentrating on the Nyamata district, Dans le nu de la vie: Récits des marais rwandais (2000; Into the Quick of Life: The Rwandan Genocide—The Survivors Speak, 2005; better known as Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda Speak, 2006) presented testimony by Tutsi survivors. Saison de machettes (2003; Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, 2005; also as A Time for Machetes—The Rwandan Genocide: The Killers Speak) was Hatzfeld’s stunning account of ten Hutu men from the Nyamata area— friends and neighbors, mostly in their twenties and thirties—who became machetewielding killers, hunting their Tutsi prey day after day in the marshes and hills and profiting from the loot that mass murder brought them. Eventually captured, tried, and imprisoned in the penitentiary in Rilima, not far from their homes, these killers spoke with Hatzfeld freely, if not always honestly. They anticipated neither release from their sentences nor further recriminations resulting from the testimony they gave him. In early January, 2003, however, President Paul Kagame decreed that thousands of perpetrators whose confessions had been accepted and who had served at least half of their prison sentences would be released from captivity. By early May, most of Hatzfeld’s interview cohort was home again. Throughout Rwanda, known perpetrators and survivors of their onslaughts had to live together. Hatzfeld felt compelled to return to Rwanda, reestablish contact with friends and acquaintances in the Nyamata district, and document how the Hutu-Tutsi encounters were unfolding in the genocide’s aftermath. Those decisions led him to tell Eugénie Kayierere’s story, a vital part of his book’s message according to Hatzfeld, and to reflect on the antelope’s strategy. Hatzfeld notes that his earlier books scarcely mentioned the killings in Nyamata’s hilltop forests, sparse with “thorny shrubs and stunted eucalyptus trees.” Unlike the

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thick marshes in Nyamata’s lowlands, Rwandan hilltop forests such as the one at Kayumba lack hiding places. Hatzfeld estimates that equal numbers of Nyamata’s Tutsis fled to the marshes and to the forests to escape their Hutu predators. However, those who survived in the slime and muck of the swamps far outnumbered the few who escaped the Hutu killers in the forested hills. Hatzfeld thinks that only “twenty people out of six thousand survived the hunting expeditions in the Kayumba Forest.” One was Innocent Rwililiza, who became Hatzfeld’s trusted interpreter and close friend. Two others, the only women among them as far as Hatzfeld knows, were Eugénie Kayierere and Médiatrice, “then a desperate little eleven-year-old who sneaked back down the hill after twelve days to lose herself amid the Hutu population of Nyamata.” When the killings began in the Nyamata district, Eugénie and her husband ran for their lives but lost each other in the panic. Surrounded by interahamwe, Eugénie and some of her neighbors hid in the bush for four days, not moving even to relieve themselves. On the move at night, they reached the forest, where thousands of Tutsis sought refuge. Hutus had carried out pogroms against Tutsis before. Some Tutsis thought that the violence soon would subside, making it possible for them to return home. Their hopes proved too optimistic. For five weeks, a lethal routine brought Hutu hunters—sometimes two thousand of them—to the forest at 9:00 each morning. Tutsis who had not been “cut” by 4:00 in the afternoon might live another day, but staying alive required outrunning the killers. As Innocent put it, “We ran for about six hours during the day. Some days threatened more than others, but never, never, was there a day without an attack.” Chances for survival were minimal at best and nonexistent for the elderly, young children, and mothers with babies. These chances depended not only on stamina and speed but also on sticking together with those who knew the terrain or tactics that might confuse the hunters. “You had to latch onto a gang that kept up its morale,” says Eugénie, but “when the killers seemed to be upon us, we’d scatter in all directions to give everyone a chance: basically, we adopted the antelope’s strategy.” (A variation on this strategy was also employed in Rwanda’s marshes, in imitation of antelopes called sitatungas that may elude danger because they are able to run fast in the muck or submerge themselves in the swamp water.) Eugénie recalls “the hiss of the machetes swiping at your back.” She thinks she escaped more by luck than by strategy or speed. One day, she recalls, “I was trapped by a neighbor I’d known for a long time. Our eyes locked so suddenly that his first blow missed me, and I ran off.” Another time, when she ran from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.— “sprinting, dodging, leaping”—her group started with one hundred members and ended with thirty survivors. “We knew we were racing toward death,” she adds, “but we wanted to dodge through life for as long as possible.” Hatzfeld takes the title of his book from Eugénie’s comment about the antelope’s strategy and calls her story vital to his message. He neither emphasizes nor discounts that her narrative contains elements of a “happy ending.” Eugénie survived the genocide, found her husband alive, established a popular cabaret filled nightly with folks drinking urwagwa (banana beer), and gave birth to the first of her six children only

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ten months after returning from the forest. With those children at the center of her attention, she says that “the genocide simplified happiness for me.” Eugénie does not forget the genocide’s brutality or the people who were “chopped up so viciously.” She thinks it dishonors and humiliates the dead to give “details about how they were stripped naked or cut short, how they dragged themselves along, how they pleaded for mercy, how they screamed or groaned or vomited or bled.” Without her saying so, however, such details afflict her “simplified happiness,” a point crucial to Hatzfeld’s message and to the antelope’s strategy in post-genocide Rwanda. Neither the antelope’s strategy nor the book’s message brims with hope about reconciliation, justice, or trust—three of the most challenging themes threaded through the book. Government policy, international influence, and everyday necessities in post-genocide Rwanda suppress Tutsi desires for revenge and Hutu regrets that the genocide was incomplete. Hatzfeld finds Tutsis and Hutus living and working together, even to some extent socializing and worshiping together. This civility is not superficial, for Tutsis and Hutus need each other to sustain a viable economy in Rwanda, but relationships and respect between Tutsis and Hutus do not yet run deep enough to assuage the grief and grievances that linger and fester after all that happened in Rwanda’s swamps, forests, and other slaughter sites. The gaçaça proceedings, which in Nyamata began on Thursday mornings in 2002, seem to be an exception to this rule. Gaçaça, meaning “soft grass,” refers to the locations where tribal people’s courts sat for centuries until they were largely supplanted by colonial courtrooms. When the genocide left Rwanda’s justice system in ruins, the government reinstituted gaçaça deliberations, hoping that their organized encounters between perpetrators and survivors would advance accountability, rebuild trust, enhance reconciliation, and restore at least some sense of justice. These aims are essential if Rwandan life is to move beyond its genocidal past. To some extent they are being achieved, but Hatzfeld’s conversations with Tutsis and Hutus underscore that success is sporadic and fragile. While time’s passage will bring some mending to Rwanda, Hatzfeld suggests that many of Rwanda’s wounds are beyond healing. The ongoing predicament is how Tutsis and Hutus will live together in those circumstances. The antelope’s strategy contributes to the dilemma. Tutsis and Hutus continue to “run” in their ethnic groups. As the past pursues them into the future, those groups stick together, but unavoidably individuals must go their own ways, as Eugénie said, to give everyone a chance. That dynamic means that the genocide remains—one could even say continues—inside individuals, ultimately leaving them alone to cope with its memories and effects as best they can. The results of that struggle do little to encourage trust, reconciliation, or hope for justice. A survivor named Berthe Mwanankabandi speaks for many in Nyamata when she says that “justice finds no place after a genocide.” Innocent Rwililiza tells Hatzfeld that when Tutsis “talk among ourselves, the word forgiveness has no place,” even though the international humanitarian organizations active in Rwanda insist on the importance of reconciliation. Ignace Rukiramacumu, one of the killers interviewed

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by Hatzfeld, claims that “convincing a Tutsi you are telling the truth is impossible,” and his fellow perpetrator, Alphonse Hitiyaremye, adds that “the real truth, the atmosphere, if I may say so, cannot be told.” A survivor named Claudine Kayitesi would agree with Alphonse. “The future has already been eaten up by what I lived through,” she laments with profound awareness of how much is lost “when you cannot trust those who live close by.” Appropriately, Hatzfeld offers no one-size-fits-all summation for the personal testimonies in his book; their perspectives and contents are diverse and at times conflicting. The Antelope’s Strategy, however, moves unrelentingly to a telling conclusion: trust between Tutsis and Hutus, tenuous as it has long been, remains damaged beyond repair by the genocide and its aftermath. Hatzfeld’s message is as sober as it is vital: the cost of genocide is incalculable. Innocent says that living through the genocide brought him “no enriching knowledge,” but he has learned “to be ready for anything, to think on the alert. . . . I always want to know what’s going on behind what’s going on.” The Antelope’s Strategy runs in those directions, making the book incisive about ethics as well as about history and current events. John K. Roth

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 11 (February 1, 2009): 12. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 2 (January 15, 2009): 69. New Criterion 26, no. 6 (February, 2008): 64-69. The New Republic 240, no. 16 (September 9, 2009): 35-42. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 1 (January 5, 2009): 40-41.

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THE ANTHOLOGIST Author: Nicholson Baker (1957) Publisher: Simon & Schuster (New York). 245 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 2008 Locale: A farm outside Portsmouth, New Hampshire In Baker’s novel, writer Paul Chowder muses on poetry, and on life while trying to write an introduction to an anthology of rhymed poetry he has been commissioned to compile Principal characters: Paul Chowder, poet, anthologist, and blocked writer Smacko, his dog Roz, the woman who shared his home for eight years, but who left because he was going nowhere Nanette, his nearest neighbor, who is going through a divorce Raymond, her son Chuck, her new boyfriend Victor, a poet and housepainter Tim, his friend Marie, a friend of Tim

The dust cover of Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist displays the words “A Novel” in very small type after the title. The small font seems appropriate because, although there is a definite narrative thread throughout the work, on the whole it reads much more like an essay as that form was originally conceived by Michel Eyquem de Montaigne: a leisurely, wandering exploration of a theme or idea. In this case, the focus is poetry, rhymed and unrhymed. Baker’s novel also resembles Montaigne’s essays in that Baker represents a mind in conversation with itself, a thinker who diagnoses and anatomizes his own mind as he goes. Although this approach is risky, the narrative voice is likable, despite being frustrating and self-absorbed at times. Over all, the voice is whimsical, witty, knowledgeable, and sympathetic, so reading the novel comes to seem like reading the journal of a very dear friend, a guilty pleasure. Baker’s protagonist, Paul Chowder, is a middle-aged poet who is not writing. He has been commissioned, and received an advance, to put together an anthology of rhymed poetry (he himself writes free verse) and write an introduction. With much angst, he has managed to decide which poems to include, but he cannot bring himself to write the introduction. He lives on a farm that he has inherited, and he has set up his study in the loft of the barn, where he goes to struggle with his demons. His failure to write has led Roz, his live-in girlfriend of many years, to leave him in frustration, and

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it has also placed him on the brink of bankruptcy. The action of the novel is mostly an account of Chowder moving from place to place on the farm, from barn to hayloft, from brook to stream, looking for his muse. He also makes a brief foray into playing badminton with a friendly neighbor, her lover, and her son, and he does some manual labor for the same neighbor to earn a bit of money. He cares for his dog Smacko and very occasionally sees his former lover. He does a reading in Cambridge. He goes to a poetry conference in Switzerland and gives a master class. The suspense in the novel is generated by the question of whether he will ever write his introduction. The delight of reading The Anthologist comes from Chowder’s musings on poetry—rhymed and unrhymed, metrical or not—including rants on iambic pentameter (according to him, a French form not appropriate to English); discourses on the counting of beats, including rests; and thoughts on some of the greatest poems of the past and present, as well as some of the greatest poets from Horace, through Geoffrey Chaucer, to John Ashbery. To say that Chowder’s ideas about poetry are at times eccentric is to make an understatement, but they are also informative. For example, he has a revelation about the translation of Horace’s carpe diem as “seize the day.” According to Chowder (and, by extension, Baker), the proper translation is “pluck the day,” an insight that leads him to produce a page and a half of commentary on typos, mistranslations, and the true meaning of Horace’s poem, all of which is both elegant and edifying. The title of Chowder’s anthology is Only Rhyme, an allusion to the novelist E. M. Forster’s famous epigraph to Howards End (1910), “Only connect.” Chowder’s dilemma is that although he connects totally with poetry, there is nothing much else he is connecting with, try though he may. He sleeps in his bed accompanied only by piles of his favorite poetry collections, which are strewn between the sheets. He is utterly blocked in his own writing, spending days watching reruns of sitcoms such as The Dick Van Dyke Show and Friends. He decides that the sitcom is a new, underappreciated, and totally American art form. Chowder is so distracted by his major losses—of his girlfriend and his ability to write—and by his pending loss of everything he owns through bankruptcy that he injures himself, not once but three times. He cuts his finger in a series of freak accidents, beginning with carrying a computer down a flight of stairs. These accidents serve to underscore his problem: He cannot write, so he injures the digits with which he writes. Occasionally, one of Chowder’s rants will seem a bit too easy, too cute, or simply not clever enough to sustain itself, but most of his opinions are fresh, witty, and revelatory. Another device that is less successful, though, is his spotting of famous dead authors in various places around his town and elsewhere: Edgar Allen Poe in a launNicholson Baker has published six novels and received a National Book Critics Circle Award for his nonfiction book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001). He lives with his wife and two children in South Berwick, Maine.

The Anthologist / baker

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dromat in Marseilles, France, Theodore Roethke walking up the street with just one shoe on, Algernon Charles Swinburne at a bookstore. These minor quibbles do not detract from the cleverness of the novel as a whole, nor from the wealth of insight it offers not only into the world of poetry but also into the world of the frustrated writer, the blocked poet, and the author who recognizes that he will always be second tier and therefore never become immortal. Chowder has opinions on everything that pertains to poetry, not just rhyme, rhythm, and meter. He has his favorite poets, favorite magazines (The New Yorker is his holy grail), and favorite styles and rhythms. He makes a list of “People I’m jealous of” that includes such disparate individuals as Sinead O’Connor, Jon Stewart, Lorenz Hart, and Billy Collins, the former poet laureate whom he marvelously sums up with “Charming, chirping crack whore that he is.” It is hard to resist such a narrator. Although at times he appears too opinionated, too agonized, or too depressed, his comments are so interesting and informed that one reads on and wishes him well, hoping that in the end, once he finishes his introduction, he will find love and happiness and someone to pick the fleas off his beloved dog. Baker knows his readers, especially those who peruse, ponder, and collect books of poetry. As Chowder says in an attempt to cheer himself up and reestablish his place in the world: “I think I’m going to go to RiverRun Books and look at the poetry shelves. When I see new books for sale there that I already own, it makes me happy. It makes me feel that there’s part of the world that I really understand.” Chowder’s understanding is quite real: Although one might disagree with his opinions at times, the extent of his knowledge is both broad and deep. He has lived a life steeped in poetry and feels the need to share it with others. The text of the novel features a number of postmodern elements—although some of these elements date back to Lawrence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. (1759-1767; commonly known as Tristram Shandy), published in the eighteenth century. The book is self-reflective, but, beyond that, it also has musical notes incorporated into it to allow readers to hear the songs that Paul Chowder makes up to prove his points about the rhythmic qualities of poetry. In addition to sightings of dead poets, it incorporates conversations with people who are not there. Baker has his main character offer not only advice on how to read and understand poetry; definitions of poetry; and insights into the work of Latin, English, and American poets throughout the centuries but also tips on how to write poetry (although, with himself as an example, Chowder does not always strike one as a reliable narrator). What finally frees Chowder is a trip to a poetry convention in Switzerland, before which he visits Roz and asks her if he should have an affair while there. He is trying unsuccessfully to be light and flirtatious. However, after she advises him not to, she tells him that she loves him. While at the conference, he gives a master class. His main piece of advice during it is to find the best moment of a day and write about it. Then, having quoted Amy Lowell, who called poetry a young man’s job, he bursts into tears. Although he apologizes, the outburst ends his session. Afterward, Chowder climbs up a mountain and, while sitting on a bench, becomes aware of a certain slant of light, which is the best moment of his day. (He does not

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have an affair, as there is no chance to.) When he begins his trek home, he is suddenly free of his block. He writes twenty-three poems on the airplane back and, once home, sits down to write the introduction to his anthology. He finishes it in three days, sitting at his kitchen table in the same shirt the whole time. After that, he calls Roz. Though she will not move back in with him right away, she invites him to dinner. He starts restoring his finances by painting houses. Summer is over and so is his drought. Chowder’s introduction to the anthology is almost the same length as Baker’s novel. Thus, almost inevitably, the novel seems to become the introduction with which Chowder has been struggling. It certainly would serve in many ways as a suitable introduction to rhymed poetry, one from which a student of poetry would benefit. As in Montaigne’s essays, Chowder’s dialogue has taken place with the ideal reader, as it is with himself. For anyone who loves poetry, this novel is a pleasure not to be missed. Mary LeDonne Cassidy

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 21 (July 1, 2009): 25. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 13 (July 1, 2009): 671. Library Journal 134, no. 13 (August 1, 2009): 64. New Statesman 138, no. 4966 (September 14, 2009): 46. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 16 (October 22, 2009): 22-24. The New York Times, September 10, 2009, p. 7. The New York Times Book Review, September 6, 2009, p. 10. The New Yorker 85, no. 29 (September 21, 2009): 95. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 21 (May 25, 2009): 33. The Times Literary Supplement, August 21, 2009, pp. 5-8.

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ARDENT SPIRITS Leaving Home, Coming Back Author: Reynolds Price (1933) Publisher: Charles Scribner’s Sons (New York). 408 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Autobiography Time: 1955-1961 Locale: Great Britain; United States This third volume of Price’s autobiography is a graceful and elegiac view of his life in the 1950’s as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and his return to his native South to teach writing and literature at Duke University Principal personages: Reynolds Price, a novelist and short-story writer David Cecil, one of Price’s mentors at Oxford Helen Gardner, an aloof Oxford don who fascinates Price Michael Jordan, Price’s closest friend at Oxford Eudora Welty, a fellow Southern writer who acknowledges Price’s talent early in his career Stephen Spender, one of Price’s literary mentors John Gielgud, a famous British actor who befriends Price Matyas, a British academic who becomes Price’s lover

Ardent Spirits begins its narrative just after Reynolds Price’s father has died of lung cancer at fifty-four and Price has been awarded a Rhodes scholarship to study in England at Oxford University. Already determined to be a scholar and writer, the precocious Price embarks on his first major journey. He is concerned about leaving his mother and younger brother but also driven to make his mark by ambitiously attempting to write both short fiction and a major study of Milton’s poetry. Academia never quite suits Price, even though he will remain in it all his working life. Thus, his academic study of Milton seems in this memoir to be more an idea than a fully realized project. Price seems far more engrossed in his fiction—even when he puts off writing it to fulfill academic requirements. As narrator, Price provides wonderful insight into his younger self, the budding young writer trying to make a name for himself who nearly gets into serious trouble when two journals accept the same story for publication. Although Price studies hard at Oxford, he also engages in a full social life, making a few lifetime friendships and taking the time to tour Italy with a British friend. Price portrays himself as an earnest young man already encouraged by major writers such as Eudora Welty and renowned scholars such as Lord David Cecil. Cecil comes alive as a caring teacher very much attuned to his student’s sensibility. He is also an excit-

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able lecturer who inadvertently spits on his students. Oxford don Helen Gardner, on the other hand, is inscrutable. She seems inexplicably to thrive among many male scholars who do little to make her welcome. Price clearly wishes that she had opened up to him during his time at Oxford, but her very mystery speaks volumes about the repressive Oxford milieu, which the outgoing Price negotiated with surprisingly little angst. By contrast, Price treats Welty with too much reserve. A Reynolds Price has taught at Duke literary icon, she appears without much color University since 1958. His novel A in the memoir, as though Price—in an effort Long and Happy Life (1962) won the to preserve her privacy—has censored his William Faulkner Award, and his novel otherwise candid commentary on his friends Kate Vaiden (1986) won the National and acquaintances. Book Critics Circle Award. Although only in his early twenties, Price has already secured an agent. He keeps an eye on the literary world, even as he adopts the mannerisms of a British scholar. Price describes Great Britain as a country still recovering from the ravages of World War II. Compared to the culinary sophistication Britain would later flaunt, the land in Ardent Spirits serves bland food, lacks central heating, and is populated with people who wash rather infrequently. At Oxford, Price puzzles over the lack of showers for students and the mysterious absence of toilet paper dispensers, but he treats these shortcomings with considerable understanding. He is there, after all, to learn from the world’s greatest scholars and writers—although he is noticeably eager to leave for his Italian vacation. Thus, Price lives a bifurcated life in England, juggling academics with social and literary endeavors. A young man of extraordinary poise, he makes friends with literary greats such as Stephen Spender—who becomes a lifelong friend—and with famous actors such as John Gielgud. The latter emerges as a sensitive, openhearted man who welcomes the young American. Even with the distractions of his busy social life, Price manages to earn a B.Litt degree and to return home a success. Price deals with his homosexuality in a straightforward way, while acknowledging that, during the years he was at Oxford, this was hardly a subject that could be broached in public in England—or even among close friends. Some of Price’s male friendships seem charged with sexual tension, but Price describes only one long-term relationship with a British academic. In a highly amusing incident, Spender dines with the distinguished American critic Lionel Trilling, who is the object of some amusement for Price’s British literary friends because Trilling published a book about the novelist E. M. Forster without realizing that his subject was homosexual. According to Price, Spender clearly wanted to sleep with him, although the details of Spender’s advances to the young writer form no part of Price’s narrative. Price seems eager to avoid accusations that he has sensationalized his autobiography.

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Critics have noted that homosexual themes and characters do not appear often in Price’s nearly forty published books. Price has responded that his concern has been with extended families and long-term relationships that most often occur in the heterosexual world. Then, too, he admits that he has wanted to reach audiences that might very well have no particular interest in the lives of homosexuals. As a practical matter, in other words, he has wanted to appeal to as many readers as possible. David Leavitt and Edmund White, two writers openly identified as gay, have taken exception to Price’s comments in their reviews of his autobiography. White has even suggested that Price’s fiction might have been better if it had reflected the same degree of effervescence that suffuses Ardent Spirits. For whatever reason, however, Price has not wanted to make his sexual orientation an integral part of his creative work, even though it emerges as an important determinant of his experiences in his autobiography. Perhaps because Price sensed as early as the age of seven what his sexual orientation would be, homosexuality per se was never an issue that caused him grief. Indeed, his early attraction to literature and his reading of the gay novelist Andre Gide seem to have steadied Price, reinforcing an identity with which he seems always to have been comfortable. Price does get exercised, however, over the term “gay.” Like many homosexuals of his generation, he dislikes the term because he believes it suggests a frivolity and irresponsibility that has been attached to gays, especially in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. He prefers the term “queer.” Price’s friendship with Michael Jordan is presented as without sexual implications—just a deep bond that the two men maintained long after their Oxford years and without the encouragement of proximity. Jordan seems to have provided a kind of anchor for Price, the cruiser and man about town, although Price never puts it this way. Perhaps he sees such assessments as too facile, too abstracted from his actual experience. Price simply allows the story of his relationship with Jordan to unfold in its natural order without undue speculation about its meaning. After returning to the United States, Price accepts a three-year contract at Duke University, expecting that he will have to look elsewhere for employment once his contract expires. However, the English Department chair, impressed with Price’s fiction, suggests that his plan to move and to earn a Ph.D. will not be necessary if Price continues to produce work of such high quality. The memoir ends as Price returns for another year at Oxford—not to earn a degree but to work on his fiction and renew the rewarding friendships that he formed three years earlier. The American portion of Ardent Spirits seems a little flat compared to the section recounting Price’s journey of discovery at Oxford and on the Continent. (At one point in Rome, he is misdirected to a brothel and mistakes it for a pension.) Although Price mentions students such as Fred Chappell and Anne Tyler who would go on to become noteworthy writers, he again seems entirely too circumspect (as he was with Eudora Welty) when he ventures so close to home. Not even creative writing seems to inspire Price. He doubts the utility of teaching writing since he sees it as an activity best cultivated by the independent minded in solitude. His down-to-earth advice to writers is that they keep regular hours and concentrate on daily output. Price avoids delving into his experience of academic routins and the backbiting

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and paranoia common in English departments. Duke University, Price’s lifetime employer, is accorded a level of discretion that lessens the problems plaguing even the best academic departments. Certainly this seems to have been Price’s experience. If in this period he had significant contact with the Duke faculty, he does not divulge what it was. Missing from the American section are enticing cameos such as those set in England. Price recounts W. H. Auden leaving his Oxford rooms in a shambles (the British would refer to such behavior as shambolic), and he details encounters with the witty essayist Cyril Connolly and the cheerfully encouraging Sonia, George Orwell’s widow. Price takes his title from a remark Thomas Jefferson made about the “ardent spirits” (hard liquor) he kept only for those friends who required them. The title seems an appropriate one for a life spent with lively and engaging friends. Price has enjoyed— indeed required—the company of such ardent spirits, and, as an ardent spirit himself, he writes a narrative full of ebullience and joie de vivre. Questions arise, however, as to whether the memoir is entirely accurate. Indeed, Price himself raises this question, alluding to controversies involving other memoirs that have turned out to be more fiction than fact. Price acknowledges the fallibility of memory and writers’ tendencies to embroider stories, yet at the same time he claims considerable accuracy for his own version of events. In part, he relies on his letters, which form a record that he has used to reconstruct this period of his life. He apparently writes, moreover, without fearing contradiction from those who are still alive and could dispute his recollections. He seems confident that he has not distorted the past. This confidence may derive from his level-headed prose, which is devoid of the melodrama and searing revelations that have undone other memoirs. Unlike the authors of those works, he seems unmotivated to manipulate chronology or invent details in order to heighten the human interest of his narrative. Instead, he seems entirely content with the accretion of details and episodes that do not succumb to embellishment so much as to the nuanced style that Price has perfected. Carl Rollyson

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 17 (May 1, 2009): 56. Boston Globe, May 24, 2009, p. 7. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 7 (April 1, 2009): 366. Library Journal 134, no. 6 (April 1, 2009): 76. Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2009, p. E5. The New York Review of Books, July 2, 2009, pp. 22-23. The New York Times, May 13, 2009, p. C4. The New York Times Book Review, May 17, 2009, p. 8. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 13 (March 31, 2009): 42. Washington Post, May 4, 2009, p. 9.

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THE ART INSTINCT Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution Author: Denis Dutton (1944) Publisher: Bloomsbury Press (New York). 278 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Philosophy, fine arts, music, literary criticism, anthropology, science Time: Prehistory to the early twenty-first century An exploration of the origins of the arts within the context of Darwinian evolutionary science and the ways that this intellectual perspective changes contemporary art theory and criticism Denis Dutton begins The Art Instinct by asserting that most art history, criticism, and theory of the last century has been premised, either explicitly or (more often) implicitly, on the idea that artistic production falls in the category of “learned behavior.” Culture, including the arts, has appeared to exist in “a realm of free creativity” that falls into “the uncontested domain of the humanities untouched by biology.” Recently, Denis says, this viewpoint has been changing in ways that affect critics’ understanding of the underlying foundations of the arts. Evolutionary psychology has introduced lines of inquiry and methodology that are applicable to studying the place of the arts within an evolutionary context. Even more, the fields of anthropology and ethnography offer both evidence and theory that can help situate the artistic impulse and art production within an evolutionary framework. For example, the work of cultural anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake in books such as Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (1992) and Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (2000) has delved into these issues. The theory of evolution has also found its way into literary theory and criticism as “literary Darwinism.” None of these evolutionary explorations into the origins of various art forms has yet brought together their ideas to form a broad philosophy of art. The Art Instinct takes on that ambitious project. Dutton’s thesis is that art is a natural instinct in humans. He argues that the arts are evolutionary adaptations that, in Darwinian terms, were necessary for the survival and evolutionary development of humans. It may seem from a modern perspective that the arts belong to a more rarefied category of activity that demands high levels of complex abilities in both artistic creation and appreciation. Dutton, however, believes that all artistic experiences rest on deep foundations in the evolutionary origins of the human animal. His book embraces all of the arts, including the visual arts, music, dance, drama, and literature. To examine his premise, Dutton takes a global cross-cultural approach. His examples range from the earliest prehistoric evidence of art to contemporary multimedia art and technology. In the first four chapters, Dutton lays the groundwork for his study by discussing

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several basic features of art. The chapter “Art and Human Nature” brings together views ranging from Greek philosophy to evolutionary psychology to introduce the idea that art seems to be a universal capacity of the human mind. This propensity toward art does not, in and of itself, prove that art reaches the Darwinian standard of a trait that contributes to the survival of the species. However, the universality of the arts in human culture suggests for Dutton the possibility that art springs from deep evolutionary roots. In the chapter “What Is Art?” Dutton establishes a method for examining the nature and basic characteristics of art, not by trying to define art, but rather by “treating art as a field of activities, objects, and experience that appears naturally in human life.” He presents twelve “cluster criteria” that appear universally in the arts throughout the historical and global spectrum of human culture. These criteria are: direct pleasure, skill and virtuosity, style, novelty and creativity, criticism, representation, special focus, expressive individuality, emotional saturation, intellectual challenge, art traditions and institutions, and imaginative experience. He points out that each of these twelve characteristics, taken individually, overlaps with nonart experiences. A significant cluster of the criteria are needed for an object or activity to qualify as art. Chapter 4, “‘But They Don’t Have Our Concept of Art,’” confronts the arguments of various art theorists and anthropologists about cultural relativism, a view that different cultures have distinct concepts and practices of art that do not translate crossculturally. In part, some of these positions arise in response to what might be regarded as the hegemony of Western cultural values. In each case, Dutton rebuts these arguments to demonstrate that the art instinct is, indeed, universal and cross-cultural. Finally, beginning with Chapter 5, “Art and Natural Selection,” Dutton arrives at the centerpiece of his thesis: that the arts arise from evolution of the human species in the terms that Charles Darwin set forth in his most famous work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). Much of this chapter is concerned with the process of categorizing human traits or activities as either adaptations or by-products of adaptations. As Dutton explains:

Denis Dutton is a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. He the founder and editor of several Web sites, including Arts & Letters Daily, and a journal, Philosophy and Literature.

The gold standard for evolutionary explanation is the biological concept of an adaption: an inherited physiological, affective, or behavioral characteristic that reliably develops in an organism, increasing its chances of survival and reproduction.

Some, perhaps most, evolutionary psychologists would classify the arts as byproducts. Dutton, in contrast, would like to put the arts in the category of adaptations, thereby situating the arts firmly within the “gold standard” of Darwinian evolutionary science. However, he appears to back away from this position when he first questions

The Art Instinct / dutton

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then abandons the very distinction between adaptations and by-products in the context of the arts. Dutton says: My arguments are built on the idea that a vocabulary of adaptions versus by-products cannot make sense of the ancient origins and present reality of aesthetic and artistic experience.

Rather, his evolutionary aesthetics is based on the importance of “reverse-engineering” the artistic experience to help find and understand how the underpinnings of the arts “directly address and satisfy ancient, persistent interests and longings.” Of all the arts, he says, the literary art of fiction has the most potential to be seen as an evolutionary adaption. In the chapter “The Uses of Fiction,” Dutton identifies three adaptive advantages of fiction that could plausibly contribute to the survival and reproduction of the human species from the Pleistocene era. First, fictional stories provide low-risk rehearsals for life experiences and thus are “preparations for life and its surprises.” Second, fictional stories can have didactic purposes of conveying information. Third, fiction can expand the mind in ways that encourage social interaction and “provide regulation for social behavior.” These features of stories and storytelling do support the argument that fictional production could have provided humans with evolutionary advantages. However, two major problems remain to be addressed in establishing a case for “evolutionary aesthetics.” First, all of the arts, not just fiction, need to be considered. Second, the arts would need to contribute to the reproduction of the species by sexual selection. Dutton expands his inquiry into both of these issues in the next chapter, “Art and Human Self-Domestication.” He addresses the apparent problem that all of the arts utilize and often emphasize lavish display, excess, ornamentation, and other traits that are costly in terms of both resources and human effort. Such excessive efforts to achieve what appears to be beauty for its own sake contradicts the economy and functionalism required for natural selection for survival. In The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), Darwin struggled with an analogous problem in the animal kingdom: the famous example of the peacock’s tail, which seems to serve only to make the male peacock more vulnerable. However, when considered from the standpoint of mating and sexual selection, the tail indicates to the peahen not so much attraction as fitness, “a signal of health and high-quality genes.” Dutton expands on this idea, augmenting it with arguments put forward by the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller in The Mating Mind (2000) to advance the proposition that the evolutionary roots of art contain elements of this same social function of sexual selection, which has integrated the need for displays of beauty and extravagance into the human mind. In the last three chapters, Dutton takes on various problems and issues in aesthetics to show how “evolutionary aesthetics” can unravel some of these conceptual tangles. One chapter examines three problems: artistic intention, forgery, and the twentieth century artistic movement known as Dada. In each case, however, Dutton’s analysis

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seems to be only tangentially connected with a Darwinian view of aesthetics. As a result, his conclusions fail to persuade. In the example of Dada, Dutton evaluates Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917)—a urinal displayed on a plinth—to ascertain whether his system of cluster criteria would classify the work as art. For each of the twelve criteria, the conclusions end up being ambiguous. In talking about the direct pleasure criterion, for example, Dutton says that the urinal as object “would supply no pleasure in perception, direct or indirect.” However, he also says that “as a Dadaist gesture . . . the object can be a source of great pleasure.” Discussions of the other cluster criteria in relation to Fountain are similarly inconclusive. One important element of Darwinian evolutionary science is contingency. Dutton examines this issue in the chapter “The Contingency of Aesthetic Values.” Contingency in cultural terms means that culture is a “mental blank slate” where “accidents” of history and locale combine with “free creativity” to produce the broad field of culture in which the arts play a large role. In Darwin’s theory of evolution, the biological aspects of human nature are also products of contingency arising from random mutation and selection. While it would seem that contingency forms a common ground that unites biology and culture, Dutton seems to continue to separate the two. He concludes that “art may seem largely cultural, but the art instinct that conditions it is not.” A book of such sweeping scope has both strong and weak points. One difficulty is that, although Dutton grounds his ideas about evolution on the work of Charles Darwin, he never fully explains what Darwinism is. The first several chapters focus on establishing Dutton’s concepts about art, and indeed, these chapters, especially when developing cluster criteria for discussing the arts, are some of the best parts of the book. An additional chapter that thoroughly engages the basic concepts of Darwinian theory and the development of those concepts since their introduction would have provided a stronger intellectual foundation for Dutton’s exploration of evolutionary aesthetics. As it stands, it is difficult to determine in some cases the extent to which Dutton fully embraces evolutionary theory. Sometimes, Dutton seems to be arguing that the arts are adaptions and not by-products of adaptions or cultural contingencies. At other times, Dutton seems to move away from a strict adherence to the Darwinian position. For example, Dutton’s ideas about the place of sexual selection as a component of the art instinct is controversial. Dutton admits, especially in the case of music, the explanatory element of sexual selection “misses a great deal of the art itself as we understand it today.” Taken overall, the book presents a new and challenging way of looking at the arts. Many of Dutton’s ideas about evolutionary aesthetics introduce stimulating ideas and insights about not only the origins of the arts but also how humans experience the arts in their present and constantly evolving forms. The Art Instinct is filled almost to overflowing with many new ideas to explore and debate in the future. Karen Gould

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Review Sources American Scholar, February 24, 2009, pp. 121-125. Booklist 105, no. 9/10 (January 1, 2009): 34. Commentary 127, no. 4 (April, 2009): 74-76. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 21 (November 1, 2008): 1146. New Scientist 201, no. 2693 (January 31, 2009): 44. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 15 (October 8, 2009): 22-24. The New York Times Book Review, February 1, 2009, p. 12. Philosophy and Literature 33 (2009): 204-220. The Times Literary Supplement, March 20, 2009, pp. 10-11. The Wilson Quarterly 33, no. 2 (Spring, 2009): 109-110.

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BAADER-MEINHOF The Inside Story of the R.A.F. Author: Stefan Aust (1946) First published: Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex, revised edition, 2008, in Germany Translated from the German by Anthea Bell Publisher: Oxford University Press (New York). 478 pp. $29.95 Type of work: History Time: 1960’s-1970’s Locale: West Germany and Berlin Aust provides a detailed account of the activities of the Red Army Faction (RAF), a group of urban terrorists operating in Berlin and West Germany for more than a decade Principal personages: Andreas Baader, cofounder and leader of the RAF Ulrike Meinhof, a leader in the RAF Gudrun Ensslin, a leader in the RAF Jan-Carl Raspe, a key participant in the RAF Holger Meins, a key participant in the RAF Irmgard Müller, a key participant in the RAF Peter Jürgen Boock, a leader of the second-generation RAF Brigitte Mohnhaupt, a leader of the second-generation RAF Hanns Martin Schleyer, a businessman kidnapped by the RAF

In the 1970’s, it was not uncommon for German travelers to exit the autobahns (freeways) only to be brought to a dead stop by a cadre of law enforcement officials. Cars waited in line while officers armed with automatic weapons made a thorough search of the passenger compartment, trunk, and undercarriage. This scene was reminiscent of something one might have expected to see in one of Eastern Europe’s police states. The West German government found such drastic measures necessary, however, to counter the most serious internal threat since the rise of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party nearly half a century earlier: the Red Army Faction (RAF). From 1970 until 1977, this band of armed urban guerrillas terrorized the citizens of West Germany and West Berlin, conducting a series of bank robberies, car thefts, kidnappings, and even murders of public officials. The RAF carried out these attacks in the name of armed revolution against a state that its leaders declared to be nothing more than a corrupt and dictatorial reinstatement of the fascist regime that had led Germany into World War II. Frequently referred to by law-enforcement and political officials as the Baader-Meinhof gang, the group was led by Andreas Baader, a disaffected ne’er-do-well who lived outside the law in order to combat the many social ills he believed were plaguing West Germany and other Western nations. Joining Baader

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in the inner circle of RAF leaders were Ulrike Meinhof, a leftist journalist who eventually Stefan Aust is a journalist and former abandoned her family (including twin daugh- editor of Der Spiegel, one of Europe’s ters); Gudrun Ensslin, the daughter of a Prot- most popular magazines. He is the estant pastor; and a handful of other young author of more than a dozen books on radicals, including Jan-Carl Raspe, Holger recent German history and culture. Meins, and Irmgard Müller. Baader’s active participation in criminal activities was relatively brief. In the late 1960’s, ostensibly to protest the government’s support of right-wing regimes and activities against oppressed peoples throughout the world, he organized a small group of like-minded individuals to call attention to what he perceived as the State’s drift back toward fascism. A 1967 visit to Germany by the shah of Iran provided the impetus for Baader to launch a crime spree that eventually landed him in prison. At this point, Baader might have been considered little more than a common criminal and a nuisance to law-enforcement officials, who were relieved that he was now in custody. In 1970, however, Ulrike Meinhof was recruited by Baader’s followers to help organize a plot to break him out of jail. For the next two years, Baader and Ensslin, who was his girlfriend and the second in command of his fledgling organization, built up the group’s membership and carried out crimes against key organizations within the West German state. Baader also found a highly visible international target for his anger in the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. After the U.S. government mined Hanoi harbor and began bombing North Vietnam, he escalated his group’s activities to include bombings in which a number of innocent civilians were injured and even killed. This loss of life did not seem to bother Baader, although some members of the group took issue with the indiscriminate nature of the RAF’s activities. Meanwhile, Meinhof began composing a series of political tracts laying out the intellectual foundations to justify the RAF’s actions. Over the next few years, a number of disaffected young people found this leftist propaganda and the lure of life outside the law attractive. Among them were Peter Jürgen Boock and Brigitte Mohnhaupt, who became leaders within the RAF. German law enforcement quickly infiltrated the RAF. Within months after Baader was freed from prison, members of his gang were being arrested and incarcerated. By the end of 1972, all the leaders were in custody, and for the next five years the German government systematically developed a case against them for their terrorist activities. Eventually, all of them were brought together in the high-security Stammheim prison outside Stuttgart. While the government was building its case, lawyers for the jailed RAF leaders assisted their clients in communicating with members of the group who were still conducting operations. Surprisingly, as late as 1975 when the trial of Baader and his associates began, a notable portion of the West German population saw some justice in their complaints against the state. The government’s decision to conduct the trial of the RAF’s leaders outside the public gaze only fostered suspicions that the defendants were being treated unfairly.

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Records of the proceedings demonstrate, however, that RAF leaders were decidedly uncooperative with the court—and sometimes with their own attorneys. Complicating the proceedings for the government, Meinhof committed suicide while the trial was in progress. After more than a year, Baader and his chief lieutenants were found guilty of a string of crimes and sentenced to long prison terms. Prompted by the court’s decision, RAF members still at large staged two bold actions intended to force the German government to release the incarcerated leaders. Under Boock and Mohnhaupt’s leadership, in the fall of 1977, RAF members kidnapped Hanns Martin Schleyer, head of the West German Employers’ Association. The RAF also assisted a group of Middle Eastern terrorists in the hijacking of a Lufthansa jetliner en route to Frankfurt from Mallorca. Over the next few days, the aircraft flew to several countries before landing in Mogadishu, Somalia, where German commandos stormed the plane and freed the passengers. When this news reached the jailed leaders, Baader and Raspe took their own lives by putting guns to their heads, and Ensslin managed to hang herself. Müller plunged a knife into her chest but survived. When news of this mass suicide was made public, the RAF executed Schleyer. How four high-profile prisoners in solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison were able to obtain the weapons they needed to commit suicide is just one of the many mysteries veteran German journalist Stefan Aust solves in Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. Aust has had a lifelong interest in the RAF, and he published his first book about the group in 1985. In fact, the 2009 Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. is a reworking of that 1985 volume, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex (The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon, 1985), a detailed account of the group’s activities published within a decade of their leaders’ suicides. Aust began his career at Konkret, a socialist periodical for which Ulrike Meinhof had worked before going underground in 1970. In retelling the story of the RAF in this extensively revised edition, Aust makes use of new documents that came to light after the publication of the first edition, most notably files made available when the East German government fell in 1989. Baader-Meinhof reveals the extensive role played by Stasi, the East German’s secret police organization, in facilitating the mayhem created by the RAF. Aust also details the extensive relationships built between Baader’s group and various Middle Eastern terrorist organizations, particularly the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which helped train several of the original members of the RAF and participated with them in the ill-fated airplane hijacking attempt in 1977. Baader-Meinhof is written as a series of vignettes, loosely organized to follow the chronology of the gang’s activities from 1970 through 1977. Aust concentrates on what people did and said, avoiding extensive speculation about the ideology that motivated hundreds of disaffected young men and women to go underground and follow the caustic yet charismatic Baader. Undeniably, however, Aust’s account of the RAF is a group portrait. Dozens of young radicals are introduced, as Aust offers a brief description of their upbringings and reasons for joining the urban guerilla group before launching into a narrative of their actions. More attention is naturally paid to the

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group’s leaders. Separate chapters are devoted to discussing their backgrounds and offering some insight into their motives for joining Baader in active struggle against the state. A careful reading suggests that Aust has formed opinions about several of the RAF’s leaders, although he seldom states these opinions directly. For example, Holger Meins is portrayed as a committed follower whose belief in the cause led him to heroic self-sacrifice: He died during a hunger strike staged by the prisoners at Stammheim (during which Baader had food smuggled to him). Gudrun Ensslin is presented as a thoughtful, sensitive individual whose dedication to Baader served as motivation enough to engage in acts of terrorism—but whose belief in her cause ran on a parallel track with her sensitivity for others’ feelings. In what might seem a surprising twist, Ulrike Meinhof is treated quite sympathetically, albeit within limits. Aust goes out of his way to separate her from the group intellectually, presenting her as someone whose thoughtful criticisms of the state motivated her to actions that seem at times totally out of character. He even quotes extensively from her letters to her two daughters to suggest that her maternal instincts ran deep, even if her commitment to radicalism ran deeper. Nevertheless, Aust reminds readers that Meinhof was quite adept at carjacking and participated willingly, even enthusiastically, in a number of violent criminal actions. Aust has virtually no sympathy for Baader, whom he portrays as self-aggrandizing, pompous, callous, and egomaniacal, evincing virtually no concern for anyone but himself. In many respects, Baader appears to be a classic sociopath. As Aust notes in his final chapter, the deaths of Baader and his closest associates in 1977 did not end the group’s terrorist activities. For the next twenty years, remaining RAF members continued to carry out bombings, kidnappings, and even murders. Not until 1998 was there any indication that the group had officially disbanded and that the people of Germany were finally free from the threat posed by this homegrown guerrilla force. By that time, there had been a change in Germany’s government. Ironically, it was not the democratic state in West Germany that fell but instead the totalitarian socialist establishment in East Germany, the same regime that had assisted the RAF to bring terror to the streets of Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, and other German metropolises. Despite Baader’s best efforts, capitalism and democracy won out in the end. Laurence W. Mazzeno

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 14 (March 15, 2009): 4. Christianity Today 53, no. 3 (March, 2009): 62. Library Journal 134, no. 6 (April, 2009): 72. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 13 (March 30, 2009): 29. Wall Street Journal 253, no. 77 (April 3, 2009): A15. Washington Post, April 12, 2009, p. B7.

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BACK TO THE GARDEN The Story of Woodstock Author: Pete Fornatale (1945) Publisher: Simon & Schuster (New York). 303 pp. $24.99 Type of work: History, music Time: 1969, especially August 15-18 Locale: Bethel, New York Based on the recollections of dozens of participant observers, a legendary rock-and-roll disc jockey reconstructs the story, and considers the legacy, of the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair In Back to the Garden, Pete Fornatale reconstructs the story of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, August 15-18, 1969 (known to most people simply as “Woodstock” or the “Woodstock Music Festival”). He assembles hundreds of eyewitness statements from participant observers into a roughly chronological account of the festival’s legendary three days of “peace and music.” While Fornatale’s roster of witnesses includes a handful of ordinary spectators, it is heavily weighted toward Woodstock’s movers and shakers. These include such luminaries as John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, the neophyte entrepreneurs who financed the Woodstock festival; Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld, who put the festival together; John Morris, the beleaguered (and by all accounts heroic) production manager of the festival; Sam Yasgur, son of Max and Miriam Yasgur, on whose farm the festival took place; and Michael Wadleigh, the filmmaker who made the Academy Award-winning documentary that has immortalized Woodstock for many millions of viewers in the United States and around the world. Fornatale, who was not present at the event, also provides testimony from numerous artists who performed at the festival, some triumphantly, others far less so. He strings together these eyewitness accounts (based on interviews conducted for the book, as well as published sources) with his own somewhat modest narrative. The accounts and the story combine to create a picture of an event that was conceived as a profit-making venture, narrowly averted disaster, and became one of the major cultural events of the mid-twentieth century. Just how this seemingly miraculous outcome came about is one of the themes of Woodstock, as it exists both in the American public consciousness and in Fornatale’s book. Woodstock was planned as a three-day music festival to be held in rural upstate New York, originally in the town of Wallkill. The audience was projected to number between 50,000 and 200,000 people. Upon learning the crowd would be so large, officials at Wallkill pulled out of their agreement just a few weeks before the festival was scheduled. This left the organizers with tens of thousands of tickets sold and no place to hold the event.

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This first stage of near disaster was averted when Max Yasgur offered to rent part of his Pete Fornatale became a farm in Bethel for the festival. Nevertheless, groundbreaking disc jockey in New the change of venue had its costs, putting York City in 1969. In 1983, he won the preparations for the festival permanently be- Armstrong Excellence in Broadcasting hind schedule. In addition, the festival orga- Award. He has written Radio in a TV nizers far underestimated the throngs of mu- Age (with Josh Mills, 1980), The Story sic fans that would attend the festival. While of Rock ‘n Roll (1987), and Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends (2007). no precise estimate of the festival’s peak au dience has been made, it is generally agreed that the number of attendees climbed into the range of one-half million people. This throng led to the second and far more serious stage of near disaster: a severe shortage of the food, water, medical supplies, and sanitation facilities needed to service a crowd the size of a decent-sized city’s population. In fact, the Bethel area was declared a disaster area by Sullivan County, though casualties were ultimately kept to a minimum. As Fornatale details, the flood of people arriving for the festival also led to three additional problems. Attempting to sell tickets at the gate or separate ticketed from unticketed attendees became a logistical nightmare. Potential conflicts arose between the invading hippie horde and the local residents, who were anything but hippies. Similarly, potential conflicts arose among audience members, who were forced to stay in cramped quarters without ample supplies. The organizers dealt quickly with the ticket issue, reading the situation accurately and declaring the proceedings to be a “free concert.” The problem of culture clash between concertgoers and townsfolk was resolved by the principals involved: Both groups found the graciousness to make the best of the situation, with hippies displaying respect for their hosts and townsfolk showing great generosity toward their bedraggled interlopers. Meanwhile, little violence broke out among the audience members, because the crowd overwhelmingly acted in accordance with the values of the 1960’s counterculture, enjoying the music, getting high on drugs, and “making love not war.” The situation was further helped by the fact that crowd control was managed by members of the Hog Farm, a commune that had provided similar services in a noncoercive way at previous events. Police and other officials also suspended the enforcement of drug laws and other regulations that would have put them at odds with the audience and the festival organizers. Even the U.S. Army cooperated by flying in emergency medical supplies. In sum, the organizers, government officials, festival attendees, and locals all behaved prudently and compassionately. As a result, and despite the additional failure of the weather to cooperate (there were sporadic rainstorms throughout the weekend, causing Woodstock to be closely associated with mud), there was little or no violent crime, no riots, and no mass starvation. In short, the people involved achieved a small miracle of human cooperation. Fornatale describes the effects of logistical problems on the performers as well as the attendees. Like the other people involved, performers faced transportation challenges and shortages of food and drink (though, apparently, not of illicit drugs). In ad-

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dition, there were serious problems with equipment and serious safety issues because of the weather. Some of the performers succumbed to these conditions, but others responded with festival-saving performances. These latter included Richie Havens, who got the concert off to a late but rousing start after previously scheduled performers had either failed to appear, refused to go on, or been in no shape to perform. Country Joe McDonald, Melanie, Arlo Guthrie, and Joan Baez all helped to set a nonviolent and antiwar political tone for the proceedings. Santana, Sly and the Family Stone, The Who, Ten Years After, and Jimi Hendrix all provided memorable artistic highlights that helped keep the crowd focused on the music rather than their own discomforts. In return, many of these artists received important boosts to their careers. For example, Santana had not yet released a record album when they performed at Woodstock. With a legendary Woodstock performance under the group’s belt, their first album was a winner even before it was released. Melanie and Ten Years After also had their careers propelled forward. On the other hand, artists such as the Incredible String Band missed an opportunity to expand their fortunes. Some established stars, such as The Who and Jimi Hendrix, merely deepened their already legendary status. Fornatale, a longtime New York City disc jockey, is both an aficionado of and a significant figure in the rock music business. He devotes ample text to assessing the relative experiences of the performers, as well as the effects Woodstock had or failed to have on their careers. Nor is he hesitant to express his own views on which artists made good choices or mistakes along the way—and which had good or bad fortune through no fault of their own. As a result, many readers will learn things about their favorite muscians and other performers that they did not know before. Fornatale is less thorough and also less direct in his assessment of what, after all the media hype and myth-making, Woodstock has actually meant to American society. Like the creators of the Woodstock movie, he gives a balanced view of what went on, registering the positive aspects of the festival—connected with the collective triumph over adversity—as well as its negative aspects, such as mass drug overdoses, the utter dependence of Woodstock attendees on the kindness of strangers, and the self-destructive behavior that would bring early deaths to prominent Woodstock figures such as Jimi Hendrix, Allan “Blind Owl” Wilson, and Janis Joplin. Overall, it is clear that Fornatale wants to believe that something significant happened at Woodstock. This is indicated by the book’s inclusion of an enthusiastically pro-Woodstock foreword by Country Joe McDonald. McDonald pleads—perhaps only playfully— for a return to the 1960’s. Ironically, McDonald’s plea signifies the failure of Woodstock as a transformative event in American history: If Woodstock had successfully transformed American society in accord with the values of the 1960’s counterculture, then a plea to return to those values would be superflous. Even so, the spirit of Woodstock is a part of American identity forty years after the event. To be sure, the cultural and political stew of which the spirit of Woodstock is a part is hopelessly complex and dauntingly fluid. It is probably unrealistic to expect anyone to sum up exactly what the United States is

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and where it is going. Thus, it is equally unrealistic to expect any author to say conclusively what Woodstock means or will mean. What Fornatale does provide is a lot of different (sometimes contradictory) perspectives on what happened forty years ago at Woodstock and what it has meant to different people, most of whom played a role in making Woodstock happen. To gain a better understanding of the audience’s point of view, one would be well served to complement Fornatale’s book with Woodstock Revisited: Fifty Far Out, Groovy, Peace-Loving, Flashback-Inducing Stories from Those Who Were There by Susan Reynolds. For the nuts and bolts of how Woodstock came together, the text of choice would be The Road to Woodstock by Michael Lang. Fornatale’s version has its own unique place in the Woodstock literature, however. As a young disc jockey in 1969, Fornatale brought great passion to his work. He strung songs together in a way that made his audience listen carefully to, and think hard about, their lyrics. He often found artistic pay dirt in places others had deserted. He was, for example, a big supporter of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys when, for most other progressive disc jockeys, they had become passé and worthy only of smug dismissal. For Fornatale, the musical awakening of the late 1960’s was all about opening minds, not closing them. Indeed, listening to Pete Fornatale in 1969 was very much like attending Woodstock, only without the mud, excrement, and body odor. In that light, Fornatale’s take on Woodstock conveys special significance, particularly for those who have tuned into his radio shows over the last four decades. Ira Smolensky

Review Sources Boston Globe, July 19, 2009, p.5. International Herald Tribune, August 8, 2009, p. 18. New York Daily News, July 7, 2009, p.24. The New York Times Book Review, August 9, 2009, p. 6. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 26 (June 29, 2009): 118.

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BAD MOTHER A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace Author: Ayelet Waldman (1964) Publisher: Doubleday (New York). 213 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Memoir An offering of motherhood, its joys and impossible goals, on the altar of public opinion In Bad Mother, Ayelet Waldman asks whether it is possible in contemporary society to be a good mother. The women’s movement of the twentieth century promised women emancipation from the traditional monochromic roles of secretary, teacher, nurse, wife, mother, and grandmother. It promised the freedom to succeed both in marriage and in business, achieving results on a par with one’s partner and one’s professional peers. Sharing in the tasks of taking out the garbage or screwing in a Molly bolt, as well as in the accomplishments and rewards of the workplace, has become an expected norm for married couples. Such multitasking for success takes its toll, however. Motherhood is still an idealized role that is likely to make every actual mother feel guilty for not living up to its image. Young professional mothers exhaust themselves in simultaneous pursuit of perfection in career and caregiving. Waldman, a former public defender and workplace mom, addresses this issue with humor, pain, and good sense. Waldman observes that visions of the ideal mother generally begin in the starryeyed hopes of the mother’s mother, who passes on her own model of motherhood— one that she herself could not match—to her daughters. The author speaks of her own mother, a member of the women’s movement, who advocated and instilled values of freedom and self-determination in her daughter. As she notes, “My mission as her daughter was to realize the dream of complete equality that she and her fellow bra burners had worked so hard to attain.” There was no other narrative available to Waldman. Just as abused children become abusive adults, girls take on the models of how to be a wife and mother from their own mothers’ values and actions. In addition to all the feminist goals presented to the author, her good Jewish mother predictably expected grandchildren—but not too many. She embraced her daughter’s career and her maternity, at least until Ayelet became pregnant with her fourth child. Her mother’s reaction was not positive, demonstrating the extent to which mixed signals can complicate the mother-daughter relationship. Waldman also describes her relationship with her mother-in-law, a relationship she believes fits a universal template. One reads with understanding and empathy as the author describes her tussles with the mother of her novelist husband, Michael Chabon. When Chabon takes his mother to lunch each week, Waldman resents the

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time he spends with her. When they dine to gether as a threesome, she continually and Ayelet Waldman writes for The New triumphantly reminds the older woman that York Times, Salon.com, Elle, and other Chabon is now connected more closely to his publications. Born in Jerusalem and wife than to his mother. The “couple” is the raised in Montreal and New Jersey, she hegemonic unit, and Waldman describes a lives now in Berkeley, California, with universal competition between two women her novelist husband Michael Chabon for the same man, “the stuff of sitcom jokes and their four children. and Greek tragedy.” She recognizes that the future holds a reprise of this war for her, when her son finds his own wife and she becomes the mother-in-law. Waldman grew up in an era shaped by Free to Be . . . You and Me (1972), a record album that challenged the gender stereotypes used to educate children. The recording and the 1974 television special it inspired helped motivate her and many others to share homemaking responsibilities and to put the husband-wife relationship first. Public owning of this position has brought the author many negative comments from women who angrily suggest that her children should be taken away from her (because good mothers put their children first), as well as inquiries from men seeking advice on how to improve their own wives by purchasing lingerie. Waldman’s response to the latter is to suggest that a turn at emptying the dishwasher will do more for a couple’s sex life than changing their underwear. Waldman emphasizes that equal involvement in marital tasks and parenting is not a matter of the man helping out the woman—still seen as the sole primary caregiver— but of owning the equality of responsibility. Even married couples of a former era, those old enough to have parented the author and her husband, may learn a new way of thinking about their relationships from Waldman’s experience. They may also find her opinions threatening. The author asserts that every woman has an innate calling to be part of the “Bad Mother Police.” Violators of good motherhood seem to be everywhere: the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA), the supermarket, even in one’s own home. Although the author has owned the title “bad mother” for herself, this designation does not keep her from searching out and condemning others of her kind wherever she goes. Waldman chronicles her assessment of bad mothers she has encountered and at the same time lists criteria that qualify a woman for accolades as a good mother. She concludes that the prototypical good mother—whether a neatly starched Mary Poppins, who never loses her composure or her charges, or a 1950’s June Cleaver, who remains crisp and smiling at all times—simply does not exist in real life. Despite its impossibility, though, the image of perfect motherhood endures, resembling a latent virus waiting to infect the most competent woman with frequent eruptions of pathologic guilt over her supposed inadequacy. Waldman suggests that the single defining characteristic of “good motherhood” is self-abnegation. Women—even the most emancipated modern women—continue to beat themselves up for not reaching impossible goals. Others follow their lead and do

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the same. Mothers are the cozy rug upon which family members wipe their feet in comfort and confidence, and still, the mothers never quite measure up. No book on motherhood would be complete without a foray into the actual physical reality of carrying and caring for babies. The author does not disappoint. She describes the inevitable exigencies of pregnancy and early motherhood, including bloated ankles, breast pumps, and baby bowel movements. For Waldman, the context of these mundane experiences is her career. She gains the sympathy of juries as she waddles very pregnant into the courtroom and is helped into a chair by her solicitous client. She takes maternity leave but eventually decides to be a stay-at-home mom. Women who have undergone pregnancy, early motherhood, and the juggling of multiple roles will identify. Women who have tried to retrieve their milk in privacy—a sometimes heroic feat—will laugh at the descriptions of Waldman in her office or in the cramped confines of an airplane trying to do so. The book deals with spousal and maternal issues ranging from the trivial to the tragic. Waldman recounts her own struggles with on-time arrival of the preschool snack and the disappointment of trying to place refrigerator magnets on nonmagnetic modern appliances. She agonizes about the fact that her children love dodgeball, a childhood game that gives permission to bully. She wonders what the choice of Halloween costume by each child means. As an aspirant to perfect motherhood, she struggles to accept being the parent of a “loser” on the athletic field or of a “cereal box” on Halloween. She describes her children overhearing the arguments between herself and her husband as well as their marital lovemaking, and she worries about how to teach her children the meaning of sex in the contemporary world. A box of candy-colored condoms in her children’s bathroom is part of the plan. Perhaps the most poignant chapter is the one in which she deals with “Rocketship.” Pregnant with her third child and all packed to go on an idyllic family vacation to Hawaii, Waldman discovers that she may be carrying a boy with Down syndrome. “Rocketship,” the name her older son has given the baby, has genetic trisomy and therefore is not expected to fulfill the promise of the perfect child born to the perfect mother. The description of the couple’s intense fact-finding about the possibilities, debating what to do, and eventually making the decision about whether to terminate the pregnancy will demand sympathy of readers. Although they may not always agree with the author’s positions (on topics including abortion, giving up a career, producing a large family, and condoning and practicing premarital sex), women of all ages can find something in this short volume. For contemporary grandmothers, the book offers insight into how the current generation of parents thinks. Many such grandmothers did not themselves face the daunting task of juggling career, car pools, and caregiving. Many past mothers, unlike the author, did not have to navigate the murky waters of their own history of multiple premarital sexual partners as a background for teaching their children about prudent sexuality. Nor did they have the options of the birth control pill or legal abortion. For contemporary mothers coping with the experience of raising a family larger than today’s norm, Waldman offers some degree of wisdom. She offers a large dose of identification, at least with the challenges if not the conclusions of parenting.

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Waldman concludes the book with her hopes for her children, that they might avoid the ideologies and dangers of modern American society. She knows that these children are not naïve but trusts that they will remain innocent. She wishes for them a faith in people and a hope for justice. She sees a world of promise, even in what she sees as the bleak realities of the present. Finally, this “bad mother” occasionally entertains a hope for another child for herself. While she longs for that wonderful smell and feel of babies, however, she concludes that four is enough. It is difficult to think about a book on motherhood as a page-turner, but Bad Mother manages to be just that. In many ways, it tells the story of a traditional Jewish mother, often the butt of caricature and jokes. In a more profound way, though, it tells the extraordinary tale of a modern Jewish mother who puts her relationship with her husband first. As the dust jacket avows, a good mother “is never too tired for sex.” If she is, though, at least she knows it is fine: Good enough is enough. Dolores L. Christie

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 304, no. 5 (December, 2009): 86-101. Booklist 105, no. 16 (April 15, 2009): 14. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 8 (April 15, 2009): special section, p. 8. The New York Times Book Review, May 10, 2009, p.7. The New Yorker 85, no. 19 (June 29, 2009): 76-79. Newsweek 153, no. 22 (June 1, 2009): 13. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 11 (March 16, 2009): 52.

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THE BARD Robert Burns, A Biography Author: Robert Crawford (1959) Publisher: Princeton University Press (Princeton, N.J.). 465 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Biography Time: 1759-1796 Locale: Scotland Published on the 250th anniversary of Burns’s birth, Crawford’s biography traces the many influences on Burns’s poetry and thought; Crawford also explores the writer’s various relationships and his efforts to provide for himself and his family Principal personages: Robert Burns, poet William Burnes, the poet’s father Agnes Brown, the poet’s mother Jean Armour, the poet’s wife Agnes McLehose, the poet’s close friend, whom he addressed as Clarinda John Murdoch, Burns’s tutor Margaret Campbell, one of Burns’s loves, the “Highland Mary” of his poems James Johnson, editor of Scots Musical Museum

Britain in the eighteenth century wanted an unlettered poet, one who derived inspiration directly from nature rather than from books. Stephen Duck, the thresher poet patronized by Queen Caroline, filled this need in the 1730’s. Similarly, the fictional third century poet Ossian, largely the creation of James McPherson, enjoyed immense popularity in the latter half of the 1700’s and well into the 1800’s. Even before Robert Burns published his first volume of poems, he began calling himself a “bardie,” a diminutive of “bard,” reflecting his desire to cast himself in this mold of the untutored writer. In a verse epistle to the Scottish poet John Lapraik that Burns wrote on April 1, 1785, “Gie me ae spark o’ Nature’s fire,/ That’s a’ the learning I desire.” Henry McKenzie in his magazine The Lounger praised Burns as a “Heaven-taught ploughman,” further fostering the image that the poet himself was cultivating in Edinburgh at the time. He even dressed the part, wearing boots rather than shoes to social events, just as Benjamin Franklin in Passy wore a coonskin cap to create the illusion that he was a provincial among sophisticates. Burns at that time struck the sixteen-year-old Sir Walter Scott as rustic and plain, as well as intelligent, dignified, and self-confident. While Burns did not attend college, he was not “fancy’s child warbling his native wood-notes wild,” any

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more than was William Shakespeare, about whom John Milton wrote those words. Rob- A founding editor of Verse (1984), ert Burns, Jr., noted that his father’s library Robert Crawford has been a professor contained the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, of modern Scottish literature at the Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Milton, Alex- University of St. Andrews since 1989. ander Pope, Oliver Goldsmith, Molière, Vol- He has won the Scottish Arts Council Book Award for Identifying Poetry taire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Robert Crawford devotes much of The Bard (1993) and again for Spirit Machines (1999). He is a fellow of the Royal to discussing the various literary influences Society of Edinburgh. that shaped Scotland’s best-known and most enduring native poet. Crawford observes that Burns’s poetic education began almost at his birth. His mother sang old Scottish songs to him, and his grandmother recited Scottish folktales. Burns remembered these later in life. He also recalled another relative, Betty Davidson, who had a vast stock of tales of the supernatural. Burns’s “Halloween” (1785) pictures a grandmother telling stories; “Address to the Deil” (1785) consists of a collection of folktales. Burns’s formal education began when he was six. Crawford shows how fortunate the future writer was to have eighteen-year-old John Murdoch as his tutor. At school, Burns memorized works that stayed with him into adulthood. He read Arthur Masson’s Collection of English Prose and Verse (1781), which included works by the Scots James Thomson and John Home, whom Burns admired. After Burns left school to help his family work on their farm, Murdoch continued to supply the boy with books, including an English grammar and the poems of Alexander Pope. Burns’s early letters quote from Pope, who also supplied models for Burns’s letters in verse. Pope’s poetry provided the epigraphs for “Holy Willie’s Prayer” (1799) and “The Twa Herds: Or, The Holy Tulzie” (1784). In the summer of 1773, Burns spent a few weeks with Murdoch studying French. Burns returned home with a French dictionary and a copy of François Fénelon’s Les aventures de Télémaque (1699; The Adventures of Telemachus, the Son of Ulysses, 1699). With these two books and Murdoch’s lessons, Burns taught himself to read French. Burns’s father secured books from the Ayr Library Society, and Burns was a voracious reader. Nelly Miller, who dated Robert’s younger brother William, said that she always saw Robert with a book in his hand. Among the first works he read was William Hamilton’s Life and Heroic Actions of the Renown’d Sir William Wallace, General and Governor of Scotland (1722). One of Burns’s most famous poems begins, “Scots, what hae wi’ Wallace bled,” which adapts lines that Hamilton ascribed to the Scottish leader. John Newbery’s Letters on the Most Common, as well as Important Occasions in Life (1756) introduced Burns to important British authors of the early eighteenth century, especially Joseph Addison. Burns attributed his knowledge of manners, literature, and criticism to Addison’s journal The Spectator (1712-1715). Yet another significant book from Burns’s youth was a collection of English songs. Crawford quotes Burns’s statement that he pored over these poems. Two of the most important literary influences on Burns’s poems were Allan

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Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, whose writings Burns encountered about 1784. Crawford cites Burns’s description of Fergusson as “my elder brother in Misfortune,/ By far my elder Brother in the muse.” Fergusson died in an asylum at the age of twenty-four. In 1786, Burns urged the erection of a tombstone for Fergusson and wrote two epitaphs for the dead author. In one of these, he applied to Fergusson the epithet that Mackenzie had used for Burns, “Heaven taught,” thus linking himself with the older man. From Fergusson, Burns took the title of bardie. Fergusson had written about peasant life and folk festivals and had employed the Scots vernacular. Fergusson and Ramsay both used the Standard Habbie stanza, supposedly named for the bagpiper Habbie Simson. This stanza consists of six lines, in which lines 1-3 and 5 are long and lines 4 and 6 are short. The four long lines all rhyme, as do the two short lines. Standard Habbie became the Burns stanza, and Fergusson’s subjects and language became Burns’s as well. Crawford shows that Burns drew inspiration from life as well as from books. As Crawford notes, Burns wrote and adapted many love songs to express his passion of the moment. In the summer and early fall of 1775, he was at Kirkoswald, where he met Margaret Thomson, to whom he addressed his “Song, composed in August” (1783). The love songs addressed to Highland Mary were inspired by Margaret Campbell. Margaret Chalmers served as Burns’s muse for “My Peggy’s Face” (wr. 1787). His affair with Ann Park expressed itself poetically as well as physically; their daughter, Elizabeth, was born in March, 1791, a month before his wife, Jean Armour, gave birth to Burns’s son William Nicol. “Lovely Davies” (1791) refers to Deborah Duff Davies, another woman to whom Burns was drawn. Burns’s amours got him into trouble with the Church. He and Elizabeth Paton, who gave birth to his daughter, another Elizabeth, in May, 1785, had to sit on the “cutty stool” in Tarbolton kirk for three Sundays. This event prompted a poem, and Burns satirized religious conservatives in a variety of other verses. “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” unpublished in Burns’s lifetime, pretends to be a dramatic monologue by the conservative William Fisher, who attacks the unrighteous while at the same time confessing to his own sexual indiscretions. “The Holy Fair” (1785) describes an annual gathering of churchgoers to receive Communion. For Burns, this event is also an occasion for drinking and “haughmagandie” (sex). “To a Louse” (1786) attacks the hypocrisy of those Burns characterized as the “unco guid,” the supposedly uncommonly good, who are in fact as flawed as anyone else. Crawford’s final chapter is titled “Staunch Republicans,” reflecting Burns’s liberal views about politics as well as religion. Crawford does not gloss over the contradictions in Burns’s behavior. In 1786, Burns was having a hard time earning a living, and he resolved to emigrate to Jamaica. The post he secured was that of assistant overseer on a slave-holding plantation. In 1792, he composed “The Slave’s Lament,” supposedly spoken by a Senegalese slave in Virginia and sympathizing with the plight of the captive. Burns’s political views accommodated both Jacobite and Jacobin sentiments. He lamented Scotland’s loss of independence and the Hanoverian succession that ended the Stuart monarchy. At the same time that he mourned these monarchs who believed in the divine right of kings and in their absolute power, Burns wrote po-

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etry celebrating the American Revolution, George Washington, and the French Revolution that abolished royal rule. In March, 1795, he joined the Royal Dumfries Volunteers, a home guard to protect the country against invasion by the French. He was also at that time circulating “A Man’s a Man for A’ That” (1795), a ringing declaration denouncing aristocratic pretension and championing the universal brotherhood of people. That poem contains the line “Its comin’ yet for a’ that,” a translation of the French revolutionary cry ça ira. Crawford justifies Burns’s occasional antirevolutionary behavior by arguing that, as a tax collector, he had to limit his prorevolutionary utterances. Burns’s ambivalence even about his job manifests itself in his poem “The De’il’s Awa wi’ the Exciseman” (1792). Burns’s poetry and sexual exploits suggest that he would have fit in well with the people he describes in “The Jolly Beggars” (1785). Crawford indicates, however, that Burns suffered repeated bouts of depression. One of his earliest poems bears the title “Prayer under the Pressure of Violent Anguish” (wr. 1784). In “On a Scotch Bard Gone to the West Indies” (1786), he writes of being the victim of misfortune and suffering a broken heart. “Gloomy December” (1791) laments his separation from Agnes McLehose. Crawford thus presents a complex character, refusing to gloss over his faults but also noting why his poetry still matters. He shows a man of deep passion who wrote beautifully about love but was hardly faithful to his wife or even his lovers; while pursuing Agnes McLehose, he slept with her servant and had a child with that young woman. He was attracted to cultivated, middle- and upper-class women but slept only with servants and the uneducated. He wrote rollicking lyrics but often battled feelings of despondency. He wrote about and believed in the equality of all while working as a tax collector for a Tory government at war with revolutionary France. Crawford successfully shows all these facets of Robert Burns and thereby makes the man and his poetry live for his readers. Joseph Rosenblum

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 9/10 (January 1, 2009): 35. Daily Mail (London), January 23, 2009, p. 64. Daily Telegraph (London), January 24, 2009, p. 19. London Review of Books 31, no. 5 (March 12, 2009): 3-5. New Criterion 27, no. 10 (June, 2009): 80-82. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 17 (November 5, 2009): 47-49. The New Yorker 85, no. 1 (February 9, 2009): 109. Times Higher Education, January 20, 2009, pp. 46-47. The Times Literary Supplement, January 16, 2009, pp. 3-5. The Washington Post, January 27, 2009, p. A2.

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THE BELIEVERS Author: Zoë Heller (1965) Publisher: Harper (New York). 352 pp. $25.99 Type of work: Novel Time: 1962; 2002 Locale: London; New York City After noted radical lawyer Joel Litvinoff is felled by a stroke, the lives of his wife and three children unravel, but they eventually achieve significant psychological and spiritual transformations Principal characters: Joel Litvinoff, high-powered New York City radical lawyer Audrey Litvinoff, his equally left-wing British wife Rosa and Karla Litvinoff, their daughters Lenny Litvinoff, their adopted son Khaled, Egyptian newsstand owner Chianti, African American teenager Berenice Mason, Joel’s mistress

Joel Litvinoff exists at the center of his family in Zoë Heller’s The Believers, but early in the novel he is rendered insensible by a stroke, leaving a void that intensifies and accelerates a family crisis. Before his debilitating stroke, Joel put himself in a difficult situation by agreeing to defend Mohammed Hassani, an Arab American who is accused of being a member of a terrorist cell. Because Joel is an atheist, there is some casuistry in his defense of his client as an apolitical religious Muslim. His strategy requires him to display strong religious beliefs despite his disdain of religion. Instead of spirituality, Joel grounds his beliefs in the politics of revolutionary socialism. He has been known to return invitations to Jewish religious ceremonies with “there is no God” scrawled on them. It is thus ironic that Joel seeks to cleanse his client of any political convictions in favor of his religious identity. Joel may have been softening his hard-left stance for some time, however: He has been keeping an African American mistress, Berenice Mason, who has New Age religious inclinations. The two have a son, Jamil. When Joel’s already irritable wife Audrey discovers the affair, she is outraged. She realizes that Berenice is not merely one of her husband’s familiar sexual dalliances. Instead, she has been there to provide a perspective otherwise missing in Joel’s life. It is as if he were not only cheating on his wife but also cheating on his own political ideology. If a new center replaces the sidelined Joel, it is Audrey. She began her life with Joel as an unformed British teenager, but she has evolved into a hard-boiled radical, perfectly willing to defend the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States as an ex-

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ample of justifiable political retaliaton against American power. Her husband was a “red Zoë Heller is the author of two diaper” baby; his formative influences as a previous novels, Everything You Know child included a Workers’ Children’s Camp (1999) and What Was She Thinking? at which songs of praise to Stalin were sung Notes on a Scandal (2003), which was around the campfire. However, Audrey, a con- shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in vert to her husband’s cause, is now more of a 2003. true believer. Audrey is the most controversial character in this novel, by dint of her sheer unpleasantness. Priding herself on her utter honesty and on the purity of her politics, Audrey has undergone a sad hardening process as she has aged; she is less a beacon and a standard for her humanitarian causes and more a self-righteous shrew in whom the milk of human kindness has completely disappeared. At times, in fact, she appears to be on the verge of madness. Audrey’s is not the novel’s ruling consciousness, however. Instead, Heller draws her readers to the perspectives of Audrey’s daughters, Karla and Rosa. Rosa, clearly and somewhat comically named for the famous radical Rosa Luxembourg, had formed her identity very much in compliance with that of her progressive father. Like Audrey, she has positioned herself to the left of Joel, accusing her father of ideological timidity and choosing to reside for several years in socialist Cuba. By the end of this sojourn in what she hoped to be a socialist utopia, however, Rosa has completely lost her faith in her father’s political ideology. No longer a convinced socialist, she also begins to feel that her upbringing has left her surprisingly unformed and unsophisticated. Working with underprivileged young girls in New York City does nothing to restore Rosa’s faith. In fact, she finds she cannot bear the way in which she believes the ideologies of both sexual revolution and the self-esteem movement have corrupted her charges. She finds Chianti, one of the girls in her program, particularly incorrigible. She especially finds the salacious choreography Chianti has created for her dance project upsetting not only in itself but also because of the welcome it receives on the part of her more liberal coworkers. Unhappy with what she perceives as the sleazy sexuality of youth culture and unsatisfied with her own sex life, Rosa finds herself returning to her parents’ religious roots in Judaism. Shunning the more modern forms of Jewish faith, Rosa finds herself drawn to Orthodox Judaism, even as this interest throws her into crisis since there are aspects of this faith that seem to undermine her hard-won feminist identity. Her father’s stroke, his subsequent death, and the general unraveling of her family and all their previous identities bring Rosa to a crossroads. She is inspired to once again leave home, this time choosing not the Cuba of her parents’ socialist dreams but instead their worst nightmare—an Orthodox community in Israel. For Rosa, this choice provides her with a faith and a sense of belonging grounded in the tradition of her own family’s past. She is convinced that this return to the faith of her forebears will give her life the meaning and purpose she can no longer find in her former, more modern political convictions.

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Rosa’s sister Karla is both less political and less religious than is Rosa. Like her sister, however, Karla has been raised to work in social services. Overweight and lacking in self-confidence, Karla—clearly and comically named after Karl Marx—is suitably married to a union organizer and is a social worker in a hospital, but she is far from happy. Her husband would like to start a family, but Karla not only has difficulty conceiving but also is not particularly interested in motherhood. When she stumbles into an affair with Khaled, the Egyptian man who runs the hospital newsstand, it becomes clear that her life, like Rosa’s, is at a crossroads. Indifferent to politics, Khaled is a nominal Muslim whose true beliefs include astrology and esoteric Enneagram charts. They are beliefs of which Karla’s parents would wholly disapprove. None of this, however, matters to Karla; it is Khaled’s empathic personality to which she responds. Choosing love over a compliance that has left her secretly seething and mysteriously liberated by her father’s death, Karla impulsively abandons her plan to join her husband and family for Joel’s memorial service in Manhattan and instead hops a subway to Khaled’s borough. As the train barrels away from the platform into the dark tunnel, it becomes a perfect metaphor for Karla’s brave decision to leave the old, the familiar, and the disappointing for the greater possibilities inherent in the new and unknown. The third child of the Litvinoff family is the adopted Lenny, whose mother, a 1960’s-style radical, has been imprisoned for bank robbery since he was a baby. Unlike the girls, the raffish Lenny has no interest in social service, having struggled with drug addiction and general aimlessness for most of his adult life. His recent return to yet another rehab program, under the guidance of a strangely angelic carpenter named Dave, seems to have made a major difference in his life. His testy stepmother Audrey loves Lenny dearly and probably best of all, but she is nevertheless a major obstacle to his recovery. As an atheist, she belittles the spiritual aspects of his twelve-step program, unwittingly making it more likely that drugs will continue to control Lenny’s life. Audrey’s general harsh vitriol is directed toward her children, her friends, and even the doctors and nurses who are looking after Joel. Eventually, it seems to poison even herself. She sinks into squalor, as her always recalcitrant cooking and housekeeping degenerate to such an extent that, both physically and psychologically, she seems to have sunk into an abyss of her own making. One of the points of Heller’s beautifully developed novel is that things and people change. As Rosa returns to her ancestral religious roots, as Karla finds happiness with a Muslim shopkeeper, and as Lenny turns a corner into sobriety, so Audrey is miraculously and mysteriously transformed by the very thing she had fought tooth and nail to prevent: her husband’s death. While her husband seemed at one point utterly necessary to the very integrity of her personality, his death seems to emancipate Audrey in surprising ways, as it emancipated Karla. Joel’s death actually inspires the cynical Audrey to turn affirmative, as she invents a new role for herself as Joel’s loyal widow, the keeper of his flame. Amazingly grateful, Audrey not only celebrates Joel’s achievements but also genuinely understands and appreciates the degree to which Joel permitted her to share his own good life.

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In the wake of Joel’s death, Audrey begins a foundation in his name, and at his memorial service she invites all his liberal and left-wing friends to commemorate his good deeds. In keeping with the narrative’s satirical perspective, however, the memorial service is over the top and preposterously ideological, featuring a program that culminates in the congregation singing the anthem of international socialism. Despite the service’s relentless secularity, the influence of Lenny may be felt in the fact that it takes place in a Christian church, the famous and politically progressive Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Appropriately, the service features an Audrey who seems suddenly the very soul of Christian charity. Having previously behaved in a heartless and ugly way toward Joel’s patient mistress, she publicly proclaims her new familial friendship for Berenice and Jamil, virtually from the pulpit. Audrey’s political beliefs have been sustained, but they seem to be inching closer to an alliance with the progressive wing of Christianity; more important, Audrey is no longer the “wicked witch of the West Village,” and has relaxed into a more open and accepting perspective that has allowed her to age gracefully into a far more generous friend and mother than she was in her jaded middle years. In the end, Audrey gives her blessing to everyone—Rosa, Karla, Lenny, Berenice—as a significant page has been turned in the life of all the book’s major characters. Significantly, this is a family that has decentered and dispersed; no longer under one tent, the family scatters to various locales and comes to be shaped by diverse perspectives, none of which can be said to reflect the previous, purely radical vision that was the foundation of Audrey and Joel’s marriage. While only Rosa has officially embraced a faith rooted in her own family traditions, all of the family’s members have developed spiritual beliefs or affinities, whether involving Judaism, Islam, Christianity, New Age philosophy, or twelve-step therapies. While this novel is as much about the dismantling of political beliefs as it is about their perpetuation, there is a spiritual optimism in its concluding embrace of various religious perspectives that recalls the early socialist faith in the future that was so much the ground of Joel’s own convictions. Both satiric and empathic, this entertaining novel asks some serious questions. Heller not only examines the current condition of one of the last century’s most powerful political ideologies but also does so within the intimacies of family life and human relationships. As a result, her novel is at heart a psychological exploration of what happens when losing one’s politics is equivalent to losing one’s religion and of how such a crisis can represent an awakening and an opportunity for personal exploration and transformation. Margaret Boe Birns

Review Sources The Boston Globe, March 8, 2009, p. C5. The London Review of Books, November 6, 2008, pp. 35-36.

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Los Angeles Times, March 2, 2009, p. E1. The New York Review of Books, April 9, 2009, pp. 48-51. The New York Times, February 26, 2009, p. C1. The New York Times, March 3, 2009, p. C1. The New York Times Book Review, March 8, 2009, p. 9. The Times Literary Supplement, September 26, 2008, p. 23. Toronto Star, March 3, 2009, p. E2.

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THE BIG BURN Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America Author: Timothy Egan (1954) Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston). Illustrated. 324 pp. $27.00 Type of work: History Time: 1910 Locale: Washington, D.C.; Bitterroot Mountains, Idaho and Montana Egan presents a popular history of the origins of the United States Forest Service, and its heroic but doomed battle against a massive firestorm in 1910 Principal personages: Theodore Roosevelt, president of the United States, 1901-1909 William Howard Taft, president of the United States, 1909-1913 Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the United States Forest Service Ed Pulaski, forest ranger

Timothy Egan’s The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America is an engaging account of a 1910 forest fire that burned an area in the northern Rockies the size of Connecticut and took dozens of lives. Egan is a winner of the National Book Award for a popular history of the 1930’s Dust Bowl, and he knows how to vividly evoke character and spin a tale. When he is writing about the heroic efforts of forest rangers and firefighters to combat the flames of the Big Burn, he is on sure ground and his narrative is dramatic and compelling. Egan’s account of the fire takes up only about one-third of the book, however, and his sections on the political background to the Big Burn prove much less satisfying. Egan’s portrayal of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Progressive Era is simplistic and one-dimensional. He settles all too often for a portrayal of “good guys” fighting “bad guys” that would be more appropriate for juvenile literature. He leaves out crucial aspects of the story of the rift between Roosevelt and Taft, his chosen successor. He also oversells the significance of his subject. The great Northwestern blazes of 1910 did not save America. In the end, then, Egan’s book obscures as much as it reveals of the political forces operating through the smoke of the Big Burn. Egan insists on referring to Roosevelt as “Teddy,” a name the president loathed. He did not appreciate being called by a diminutive that evoked the children’s toy that was named after him. Egan’s use of the nickname is a telling indication of the superficiality of his understanding of Roosevelt. An immediate verbal caricature, it is of a piece with his general depiction of the president, startlingly reminiscent of the grinning, toothy, Rough Rider who graced contemporary political cartoons. One constantly expects Egan’s Roosevelt to shout “Bully” and charge up the hall stairs.

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Egan sees the well-born Roosevelt as a traitor to his class who defended workers and challenged big business and the wealthy. This is a crude interpretation of Roosevelt’s Square Deal, which sought to balance the interests in American society. Although famed as a trust buster, Roosevelt made a crucial distinction between good and bad trusts; he never led a crusade against corporate America. Even during his Bull Moose campaign for the presidency in 1912, one of Roosevelt’s closest associates was George Perkins, a partner of financier J. P. Morgan. Egan writes with more authority about Roosevelt’s conservationism. Roosevelt played a critical role in protecting great tracts of land from immediate exploitation, as Egan says. Even here, however, Egan obscures the strong connections between Roosevelt’s love of the outdoors and his less currently fashionable concerns about hunting, war, and “race suicide.” Roosevelt wanted to preserve ground where men could test themselves as their pioneer forebears had, resisting the deadly corruptions of an urbanized, consumerist society. As Egan grudgingly acknowledges, Rooseveltian conservationism was concerned with preserving resources for future generations, not precluding future development. Egan’s treatment of Taft is little better. Invariably, when Taft makes an appearance in the book, mention is made of his girth. While Roosevelt is portrayed as a trim and fit liberal, Taft is a fat and languid conservative. Taft was no politician, and he soon felt out of place in the White House. He made many mistakes in his first year of office and never mastered the art of public relations. Nevertheless, he was an able chief executive with a progressive record that gets no mention in Egan’s book. As a conservationist, Taft set aside twice as much public land in his single term in office as did his energetic predecessor in over seven years. Taft deserves the title of trustbuster far more than Roosevelt does. His Justice Department launched over three times as many antitrust suits in his four years as president. In fact, it was Taft’s decision to bring an antitrust suit against U.S. Steel in 1911 that led to the decisive rupture in his relations with Roosevelt. The suit mentioned a deal made by U.S. Steel that Roosevelt had personally approved. The Rough Rider regarded the Justice Department’s action against U.S. Steel as a personal affront, and he soon resolved to challenge Taft for the Republican presidential nomination. Egan leaves the impression that Roosevelt ran against Taft in 1912 because of differences over conservation. His fixation on the Big Burn and the battle for America’s woodlands leads Egan to distort the political history of the Roosevelt and Taft Administrations. In his version of progressivism, the tail wags the dog. Fortunately, Egan’s weakness in laying out the political background of his story is balanced by the strength of his account of the formative years of the United States Forest Service. The central figure in his book is Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt’s chief forester. Pinchot was born to wealth, the family fortune ironically rooted in the lum-

Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and the author of five books. His The Worst Hard Time (2006) won a National Book Award for nonfiction.

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ber industry. Financially secure, Pinchot devoted himself to the study of forestry. He became a leader in a field few understood. He befriended the great naturalist John Muir and became passionately devoted to protecting the American wilderness from reckless commercial exploitation. The crucial relationship of Pinchot’s life was his friendship with Roosevelt. Both men were avid outdoorsmen; they also shared impatience with the politics of business-as-usual in Washington. Pinchot became a sparring partner and speechwriter for Roosevelt. He was a kindred spirit the president could count on for companionship in either a constitutional or a convivial conversation. Pinchot’s reward was access to power. Roosevelt gave Pinchot an opportunity to act on his ideals, making him the first chief of the Forest Service. Pinchot threw himself into his work with single-minded devotion. Unlike his mentor, he had not married and started a family. Pinchot was once engaged, but his fiancé died of tuberculosis in 1894. Egan recounts that, for the next two decades, Pinchot was convinced that the spirit of his lost love visited him regularly—not as an ethereal presence but in a form so tangible that he could carry on conversations with her about policy. Egan notes this strange psychic phenomenon in Pinchot’s life but does not otherwise comment on it. In other hands, this might be taken as an indication that Pinchot was mentally unbalanced. For Egan, it seems to be one more measure of his hero’s driven nature. Pinchot was a man determined to make the world conform to his vision of it. Certainly, this was the case in his management of the Forest Service. He stamped his personality on it so indelibly that his early corps of specially chosen and trained forest rangers called themselves “Little G.P.s.” Pinchot carefully picked his forest rangers. Many were products of the Ivy League, especially a program in forestry at Yale University. Pinchot demanded that his rangers write well; they also had to pass grueling tests in outdoor living, animal care, shooting, and carpentry. The first generation of forest rangers was expected to patrol huge ranges of woodland, building their own cabins and stations. Pinchot entertained rangers in his Washington home as they trained for their assignments, imbuing them with his own sense of dedication to defending America’s woodlands. Morale was very high in the Forest Service. This was important because, under Roosevelt as well as Taft, forest rangers were poorly paid and had to provide their own, horses, saddles, rifles, and boots. Pinchot faced entrenched opposition in Congress from powerful politicians who saw the Forest Service as an obstacle to economic development in the West. In an effort to justify his fledgling agency, Pinchot made fire control a priority of the Forest Service. This was a mission that lumber men and conservationists alike could embrace. Rangers soon were stamping out brush fires that seemed to threaten ancient timber. Pinchot’s maneuver, while politically shrewd, set the stage for the Forest Service’s futile battle in 1910. He, however, would not be there to command his rangers. He engaged in a ferocious dispute with Taft’s secretary of the interior, Richard Ballinger, over the opening of some public land to commercial use. Taft finally fired Pinchot

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early in 1910. Pinchot immediately joined the peregrinating Roosevelt overseas to tell his mentor his version of events, and the affair strained relations between the former and incumbent presidents. The summer of 1910 in the mountain woodlands where Montana and Idaho meet was unusually dry. On July 26, an electrical storm started over one thousand fires. Almost a month later, the number had doubled. On August 20, a western wind known as a Palouser blew in and stoked the fires into a rapidly moving inferno. Caught in the advance of this firestorm were forest rangers, Army troops, and hundreds of immigrant laborers hired to fight the fires and protect the wildcat towns in the region that housed miners and lumbermen. Egan masterfully describes the efforts of the firefighters to survive in the terrifying conditions of the resulting perfect storm of flame. There were many heroes in this desperate struggle for survival. Ed Pulaski, a forest ranger, was widely acknowledged as the greatest of these heroes. He saved most of his force of fifty firefighters by leading them through the blaze to a mineshaft that gave them cover. Pulaski himself suffered severe injuries that stayed with him for the rest of his life. By the time the fire died down, around eighty men had died, and a huge stretch of the Bitterroot Mountains had been burned over. Roosevelt and Pinchot used the Big Burn as an occasion to criticize the conservation policies of the Taft administration. Roosevelt talked of the fire on the famous swing through the prairie states during which he laid out his “New Nationalism.” Pinchot argued that, had the Forest Service been better supported and funded, it could have prevented the disaster. Given the titanic natural forces at work, this was an absurd claim. Nevertheless, the trauma of the Big Burn shaped the governing ethos of the Forest Service for generations. As veterans of the fire rose in the service, firefighting became an obsession. Increasingly, the Forest Service cooperated with the logging industry, protecting trees so they could be harvested for commercial purposes. Only recently has the Forest Service acknowledged the ecological folly of preventing all fires, which are nature’s way of renewing forests. Pinchot himself came to acknowledge this. After a successful career in politics, during which he served two terms as governor of Pennsylvania, he revisited the western forests and recognized that fires were not a force that human beings could hope to control. Egan ends his account on a note of grace, pointing out that, whatever the errors of Pinchot and other early leaders of the Forest Service, the forests that they sought to protect still remain for future generations to treasure. Daniel P. Murphy

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Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 1 (September 1, 2009): 25. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 15 (August 1, 2009): 96. Library Journal 134, no. 16 (October 1, 2009): 94. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 17 (November 5, 2009): 44-46. The New York Times Book Review, November 1, 2009, p. 14. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 31 (August 3, 2009): 38. The Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2009, p. A21. The Washington Times, October 12, 2009, p. 17.

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BIRDSCAPES Birds in Our Imagination and Experience Author: Jeremy Mynott (1942) Publisher: Princeton University Press (Princeton, N.J.). 367 pp. $29.95 Type of work: Natural history, philosophy, science, sociology Mynott sets out to determine what humans appreciate about birds and what that appreciation teaches humans about themselves In the Preface to Birdscapes, Jeremy Mynott expresses his intention to let readers follow the twisted and indirect path he himself took to reach his conclusions, rather than presenting a streamlined path—purged of false starts and dead ends—in the manner of most studies of this sort. While it is doubtful that he includes all of the nonproductive thought processes he toyed with in writing the book, he certainly includes some of them. Even when it is time to draw conclusions, in the last paragraphs of the last page of the book, Mynott fails to answer the questions that he set out to explore—why people like birds and which characteristics of birds draw people to them. Instead of stating broad, general conclusions to these questions, Mynott declares that people can lose themselves (and then find themselves) in a number of activities or interests, from art to travel. He concludes that wondering about birds is one such activity—and a good one. Earlier, on the previous page, he explained his feelings with regard to the paucity of precise answers in his study, saying that he learned a great deal in the process of writing the book and he is now “confused in more interesting ways.” These are appropriate, even refreshing conclusions, especially in light of a secondary expectation Mynott held. He anticipated that he would learn some basic things about human nature in his exploration of human-bird relationships. This may have been the primary purpose for the book, to use human interest in birds to understand humanity. At any rate, he explores both ideas throughout the book, hypothesizing about which characteristics of birds interest and charm humans and why, as well as exploring what these observations and hypotheses might teach people about themselves. Mynott explores very different attitudes and activities involving birds, ranging from hunting and eating them to watching and listening to them. To Mynott, most human interactions with birds suggest basic human characteristics. Using these suggestions, he explores human nature as an extension of the bird-human interaction. Each chapter begins with a description of one of Mynott’s many bird-watching experiences. The experience exemplifies the focus of the chapter and initiates its discussion.

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Each chapter considers one or more reasons for loving birds, including their association A bird-watcher for most of his life, with a particular memorable experience or fa- Jeremy Mynott has traveled widely to vorite landscape. Mynott argues that it is re- observe birds and bird-watchers. He is ally the total experience or the total landscape especially interested in the songs and that is remembered fondly and that that total calls of birds and has studied them in context stimulates the love of the birds that depth. He has worked as the chief executive of the Cambridge University were integral parts of the whole. Press. Mynott posits several other possible rea sons that people appreciate birds. Some enjoy the challenge of identifying specific species. Some simply find birds’ construction and coloring beautiful and take pleasure in looking at them. Some appreciate their songs. Some are struck by the wonder of flight. Those humans who wish they could fly may be attracted to birds, though simultaneously jealous of them, for their ability to fly. Mynott is unable or unwilling to pin down a single characteristic of birds that gives them such favor with humankind, and he suggests, from time to time, that combinations of many bird characteristics are responsible for human ornithophilia. Mynott suggests that each of the reasons for loving birds plays a part in or is parallel to human endeavors and interests that do not involve birds. For example, in the chapter on sound he presents an argument that, while vision is considered to be the most fundamental sense, it may be no more important than hearing. He relates this arugment to birds by pointing out that in some contexts, forests in full leaf for example, bird-watchers must use their hearing more than their vision, finding and identifying birds by their songs and calls rather than by their appearance. He muses that in these situations, the exercise might be better called “bird listening” instead of “birdwatching.” Outside the birding context, Mynott quotes Helen Keller saying that loss of hearing was a greater hardship to her than loss of sight. He thus wonders why aural cues are subordinated to visual cues in bird-identification field guides. Mynott explores some ornithologic and birding history. He discusses the early American bird artists, including John James Audubon and Alexander Wilson, who stimulated the rise of North American ornithology. In addition, he considers the formal nomenclature that has developed for birds; scientific and common names are both discussed. In keeping with his determination to generalize the human response beyond that to birds, Mynott develops a philosophy of nomenclature that is broader than bird names. He concludes that the names humans use in many contexts may be less random and more meaningful than is commonly believed. Mynott includes an interesting consideration of the role of “rarity” in bird-watching. The bird-watchers who keep lists of the birds they have seen value the ability to add rare birds to those lists. Because rare bird species will, by definition, seldom be available for observation and counting, birders sometimes exert extreme effort to see them. Responding regularly to the presence of a rare species is called “twitching” and the responder is called a “twitcher.” Mynott argues that some of this reaction to rarity is shallow and artificial. For ex-

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ample, sometimes a bird is discovered by someone else and advertised on a rare bird alert network. Twitchers then travel to the discovery site by following the instructions provided in the announcement, wait in a line at the site, and look through a telescope that has been provided and focused on the bird by someone else. Mynott denies that these twitchers deserve credit for such “sightings.” He sees the same type of shallow, artificial attention to rarity exhibited in contexts other than ornithology, such as by collectors. He tells of a rare-book collector who bought a second copy of a book he already owned and burned the copy in order to keep it out of the hands of other collectors. Several topics recur at different points in the book. Mynott notes and discusses the extensive roles birds have played in symbolism, folklore, and mythology. He also explores birds’ contributions to the problem of anthropomorphism in scientific writing. Anthropomorphic verbiage assigns human characteristics and thoughts to birds and other animals and is frowned upon in scientific circles. Mynott agrees that it is a bad practice, but he is sympathetic with the argument that it is sometimes easier and more direct to use terms that could be interpreted anthropomorphically in scientific discourse, rather than contorting one’s speech in order to avoid the suggestion of anthropomorphism. At one point in this discussion, Mynott discusses “ornithomorphism” (a neologism meant to be an antonym of anthropomorphism), in which bird words are used in the description of human activities. He provides such examples as “eagle-eyed” and “craning one’s neck,” among others. He repeatedly expresses concern at the fact that some birds have charisma while others seem to lack it and that charismatic species receive more attention and protection than uncharismatic species. Often, a charismatic species is neither as much in need of protection nor any more deserving of attention than its less charismatic compatriots. To make this point, Mynott describes some unpleasant characteristics of the most charismatic birds in Great Britain, those chosen as the people’s favorites in various polls. Some of the anecdotes Mynott uses to support his arguments are interesting in their own right. One of the more intriguing examples is the story of Beatrice Harrison, her cello, and the skylark that volunteered to sing along when she played the cello in a woodlot. The skylark’s acompaniment was so impressive that the pair was featured on British television. There is some skepticism that the skylark was actually harmonizing closely with the cello, but it was clearly singing along in response to the instrument. Another such anecdote is included in the description of human attempts to present birdsongs and calls so that they can be easily learned. Mynott discusses attempts to describe birdsongs verbally and in sonograms, to record them for playback, and otherwise to learn and emulate these songs. He concludes that it is difficult, that sonograms are useful if a learner has the patience to understand them, and that playback of recorded birdsongs is very helpful. In this context, he describes an effort to generate artificial but accurate birdsongs: Songs were recorded then played back at a slower speed and set to music at that slower, human tempo. The musical score produced by transcribing the slowed birdsong was then played at the faster speed of actual birdsong, and it greatly resembled the original birdsong.

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Mynott lives in Great Britain and writes primarily about the birds of the British isles. However, he does describe some of his and other bird-watchers’ experiences in North America, Australia, and elsewhere, so the book is not restricted to discussion of British birds. The principles Mynott explores are germane to any geographic location. His secondary familiarity with American birds might have contributed to the few errors found in the work, such as Mynott’s assertion that the field sparrow is in sharp decline or his outdated assertion that the Baltimore oriole has been combined with another species. None of these oversights detracts seriously from the book, which is well written and carefully edited. Mynott transitions between chapters and sections nicely, and every so often he inserts a paragraph summarizing his past argument and previewing the next section. His refusal to draw a conclusion that declares one or a few bird characteristics to be the attractant that draws people to birds is both appropriate and refreshing. There is no single, easy-to-identify set of bird characteristics that attract humans. Instead, different birds in different contexts and different landscapes are attractive to different people for different reasons or different combinations of reasons. Four appendixes, a list of abbreviations, extensive notes on each chapter, a thorough general index, and an index of the birds mentioned in the book all add to the volume’s usefulness. Fifty-seven black-and-white illustrations and eight color plates serve to clarify various points in the text. Reviewers have been favorably disposed toward the book. Carl W. Hoagstrom

Review Sources The Guardian, April 18, 2009, p. 8. The New Yorker 85, no. 10 (April 20, 2009): 113. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette June 28, 2009, p. DD-2. Science 325, no. 5947 (September 18, 2009): 1501. Times Higher Education, May 14, 2009, p. 50. The Times Literary Supplement, September 11, 2009, p. 23.

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BLAME Author: Michelle Huneven (1953) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 291 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1980-2001 Locale: Los Angeles, California, and vicinity A story of guilt and redemption, in which a brilliant young history professor’s life is changed by her involvement in a fatal automobile accident and her subsequent prison sentence Principal characters: Patsy MacLemoore, a tall, blond history professor and an alcoholic Cal Sharp, a kindly, elegant lawyer, the guiding spirit of local Alcoholics Anonymous groups Brice, Patsy’s one-time boyfriend, a charming wastrel Joey Hawthorne, Brice’s niece Gilles, Cal’s nephew, former lover of two famous artists Ian Sasaki, a taciturn artist and professor Lewis Fletcher, an intense comparative literature adjunct Eileen Silver, Patsy’s therapist Mark Parnham, widower and father of the accident victims, a civil engineer

Los Angeles as a literary landscape has long been the territory of gritty detective stories and tragic or comedic tales of the glittering denizens of Hollywood. However, the area is also home to quite a few novelists who explore dilemmas of the human heart occurring in lesser-known parts of the region. Michelle Huneven’s novel Blame, which tells of the personal price extracted for a random event, plays out in three environments unfamiliar to most readers: a woman’s prison, the subculture of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the old-money enclaves of Altadena and Pasadena, which have changed very little during the decades of the metropolitan area’s explosive growth. Six months after Patsy MacLemoore successfully defends her dissertation and earns a Ph.D., she enters the custody of the California correctional system. She has just pled guilty to two counts of criminal negligence resulting in loss of life. The plea bargain was the best deal her attorney Benny could get; she had several prior convictions for driving while under the influence of alcohol and was driving with a suspended license when she hit two Jehovah’s Witnesses, a mother and daughter, in her own driveway. Patsy herself remembers nothing about the accident. She only knows that she blacked out then awakened in jail, finding her joking query, “What’d I do now?” met with stony silence.

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Patsy enters prison overwhelmed with guilt and dread. Benny has warned her that prison Michelle Huneven was born in is horrible, and it is. All around her are metal- Altadena, California, where she still lic sounds and shrieking. The solitude she ex- lives. She studied at Grinnell College pected to experience in confinement never and the Iowa Writers Workshop. materializes: She is always surrounded by Huneven is the author of two earlier other women prisoners, many of whom bab- novels, Round Rock (1997) and ble constantly. The food is so bad that she Jamesland (2003). stops eating. She loses thirty pounds in her first month in prison and is only saved from starvation when Gloria, an older woman who functions as a sort of den mother to her fellow prisoners, gets Patsy a job working in the kitchen. There, she can filch saltine packets and occasionally eat an apple or banana. When she is moved to a medium-security unit, Patsy survives on food from the commissary, which she likens to a badly stocked convenience store. She buys ramen noodles, tuna, and expired crackers that she can consume in her dormitory. Patsy knows she must give up drinking. She refuses the rotgut concoctions others sneak into prison, but for a long time she also turns down Gloria’s invitations to join the prison’s Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) sessions. The sheer lure of alcohol is still too seductive for her to face giving it up for a lifetime. Eventually, she does attend the sessions, drawn as much by the genuine laughter and camaraderie found there as by the prospect that her attendance may later help her gain parole. Patsy’s self-denial goes beyond food and drink. Racked with remorse, she resolves to live a better life, to not be cruel in word or deed, and to make a difference. For the last year of her sentence, she is assigned to a fire camp in the hills above Malibu. Despite the bone-wearying work of chopping brush and the occasional danger of fighting wildfires, it is “easier time” than prison. From camp, she can see vistas of the sea and mountains; the food is actually good, cooked from scratch on-site. Patsy’s release comes in June, 1983, two months earlier than expected. She is given a long list of conditions she must meet in order to be released. Patsy’s former boyfriend Brice, her most faithful visitor in prison, has arranged for some of them. He secures an apartment for her at the Lyster, a formerly fashionable apartment building that he manages. Her department head at Hallen College has already assured her that she will have a teaching job in the fall. Because she needs to show that she is working immediately, she takes an English as a second language (ESL) summer teaching assignment at a nearby school. She also has to attend frequent AA meetings—ninety meetings in ninety days, says Knock-Knock, her parole officer. She must also to be prepared for Knock-Knock to drop by and check on her any time. The following year is possibly the most eventful of Patsy’s life. Her adjustment to freedom, though welcome, is equally as traumatic as was that to prison two years before. Patsy is unused to having a whole apartment to herself and to being sociable without the buffers of liquor and the hilarity it provides. Formerly, she had a sharp wit and a reputation as the life of the party, but now she has become subdued and even shy. Fortunately, Brice proves a more reliable friend than he was a lover. He and

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Gilles, who has moved in with him, often invite Patsy to dinner and provide rides to AA meetings. Patsy also follows up on Knock-Knock’s recommendation of a therapist and finds in Eileen Silver a wonderful confidant who helps her work through depression and other life issues. Patsy resolves to take things slowly with her emotions. For a while she dates Ian and to her shock finds herself burning with erotic impulses. They go out to dinner and to a few movies, but Ian does not want to talk much, and their friendship settles into a pattern of twice-weekly late evenings of sex. It is not what Patsy wants, but she is not even sure what sort of relationship she is capable of at this time. Then, Cal Sharp comes into her life. Cal is a legend in AA circles, a rich, good-looking man who always has a helping hand for anyone trying to rebuild their life. Most women in AA cherish a secret crush on him, for his accepting attitude and his intense blue eyes, but he is also more than twenty-five years older than Patsy. When he first asks her to exercise his late wife’s horse, she believes he is only helping provide a new AA member with a useful task. Patsy’s life rapidly becomes complex. Gilles is hospitalized, an early acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) patient. Ian’s status in Patsy’s life remains undefined, and the challenges of climbing back onto the tenure track at Hallen absorb her. Outwardly, Patsy is doing great—and Cal tells her so—but inside, she is not so sure. Being with Cal feels like being wrapped in a warm glow of approval and emotional support. Before either of them quite intends, marriage looms as the logical next step. Patsy rationally examines the implications of such a choice, from acquiring stepchildren to the consequences for her own hopes for the future. At least, she thinks she is being rational. She decides that Cal is the best man she has ever met and she will be able to deal adequately with any problems resulting from their marriage. They marry less than a year after her release from prison. Cal’s encouragement and wealth make it possible for Patsy to do good, as she resolved to do. She keeps in touch with Mark Parnham, who while she was imprisoned inexplicably forgave her for causing the death of his family, and she helps pay his son’s college expenses. She and Cal tell their stories at innumerable AA meetings, where they are treated like royalty. As the years go by, Patsy’s academic career advances. She publishes two books and earns offers to speak and study overseas, yet the guilt from her past is never quite assuaged. It does not help that, in a season of discontent, she thinks she has found her soul mate in Lewis, a fellow academic, but cuts off their friendship as a potential threat to her marriage. Then, two decades after the event, evidence emerges that Patsy was not the driver during the fatal crash. She follows up this initial evidence, examining all relevant information with a historian’s caution. Once she has confirmed that she was not responsible for the Parnhams’ deaths, she reacts with joy and relief. Inevitably, though, she also undergoes a major reexamination of her life choices, seeking to understand how they have been shaped by a mistaken belief in her own guilt. As fate would have it, the age difference between Patsy and Cal has finally caught up with them. Cal is almost eighty and content to stay home watching tele-

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vision while Patsy pursues her own professional goals. Further, Cal’s youngest daughter, the snappish March, has moved into their house with her entire family. Given her husband’s laziness and her toddlers’ needs, they appear poised to stay indefinitely. Cal is charmed at being surrounded with grandchildren in his old age. Patsy feels displaced in her own home. The final blow comes when Cal, unlike Patsy’s friends and colleagues, insists on downplaying Patsy’s newly revealed innocence. At first, he grumbles about it being hearsay evidence. When he can no longer do so, he dismisses her prison time and enormous guilt by saying, in effect, that it does not matter because the experience got her to stop drinking. To Patsy, this feels like the ultimate betrayal. She buys a small house in a mountainside neighborhood and moves into it, ready to live her life on her own terms. Blame is not a tightly structured novel, in which cause and effect make certain events inevitable. As one reviewer notes, it is more like real life, in which things just sort of happen. In accordance with this pattern, the most significant event in Patsy MacLemoore’s life is something that did not happen—at least, not in the way she believes it did. The somewhat random string of resulting events seems appropriate for such a story. Critical reviews of the book have been overwhelmingly positive, with good reason. Huneven uses words, metaphors, and incidents with a near-perfect touch. Her presentation of character never rings false. Even background details are carefully observed and gracefully described. The author catches the qualities of the Los Angelesarea sky at different hours precisely, and neighborhood sounds convey the inner life of a street or cul-de-sac. A few criticisms are common to several reviewers; some are valid, some less so. Many note that the prologue focuses on twelve-year-old Joey Hawthorne, adrift in the old Bellwood hotel while her mother is dying of breast cancer. Patsy MacLemoore is a peripheral actor in this scene. When the main narrative opens a year later, a reader’s attention suddenly has to shift to Patsy, the book’s central character. This strategy violates most advice given to novelists. One can only guess that Joey’s continuing role in Patsy’s life—as the discoverer of the truth about the accident and perhaps as a sort of substitute daughter figure—motivates the opening. No quotation marks are used for dialogue in Blame. While this lack is bound to annoy some readers, it functions to wrap conversations in a woozy blanket, suggesting first the effects of alcohol on Patsy then her distancing from the other prisoners’ chatter. Even after her release, Patsy never feels fully a part of the world. Only two minor story points do not ring true, a good record for any novelist. One might speculate about the real errand of the accident victims. They were hit at dusk after leaving flyers at Patsy’s door. Jehovah’s Witnesses usually “witness” from door to door during the daytime, especially on Sunday mornings. Also, given interdepartmental rivalries, it seems unlikely that a history professor would be teaching a course on the works of literary figures such as Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, as Patsy does. The publisher has been criticized for hinting at the crucial turning point in the book

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cover’s notes. One can make a case, though, that the story’s real peripeteia—or emotionally stunning reversal—comes afterward, in Cal’s unsympathetic reaction to Patsy’s exoneration. These few quibbles aside, Blame is a novel full of extraordinary insights and grace. Emily Alward

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 304, no. 3 (October, 2009): 114. Booklist 105, no. 21 (July 1, 2009): 27. Library Journal 134, no. 13 (August 1, 2009): 68. Los Angeles Magazine 54, no. 9 (September, 2009): 72. The New Yorker 85, no. 33 (October 19, 2009): 87. People 72, no. 12 (September 21, 2009): 65. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 20 (July 20, 2009): 122.

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BLOOD’S A ROVER Author: James Ellroy (1948) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 639 pp. $28.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1968-1972 Locale: Los Angeles; Dominican Republic In the third volume of James Ellroy’s Underworld U.S.A. trilogy, following American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, Ellroy tells the story of three men who struggle to surface through the mire of late 1960’s and early 1970’s police, government, and underworld corruption Principal characters: Dwight Holly, an FBI agent Wayne Tedrow, Jr., a former policeman who becomes an agent for reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes Don “Crutch” Crutchfield, a young private investigator Karen Sifakis, an informant to Dwight and also his lover Joan Klein, a left-wing underground activist Marshall Bowen, an undercover police officer used by Dwight to infiltrate a militant African American organization Scotty Bennett, a vicious and corrupt Los Angeles police detective Jean-Phillippe Mesplede, a French mercenary and anti-Castro agent who participated in the assassination of John F. Kennedy Mary Beth Hazzard, wife of a murdered African American activist

James Ellroy’s novel Blood’s a Rover is the final installment in the author’s Underworld U.S.A. trilogy. The first novel, American Tabloid (1995), covered the abortive American attack on Cuba and the Bay of Pigs crisis in 1963 as well as its aftermath and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The second novel, The Cold Six Thousand (2001), further detailed the interweaving of government agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with organized crime and led up to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Blood’s a Rover picks up soon after the end of The Cold Six Thousand, further relating the struggles, both external and internal, of former police officer (and onetime vigilante) Wayne Tedrow and his friend, FBI agent Dwight Holly, from 1968 through 1972. Stylistically, Blood’s a Rover is similar in cadence to The Cold Six Thousand. Ellroy uses slang and short, choppy sentences with very little setup or description to develop his story; very few paragraphs are longer than three sentences. Ellroy employs the staccato rhythms and beats of everyday speech—and particularly the slang of the period covered in the novel—to keep the pace of the lengthy, 639-page novel rapid and edgy. While the style can be wearying, it is unique and speaks to Ellroy’s willingness to challenge the tropes of detective fiction, as his plots have always dem-

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onstrated. In a strategy also similar to that the previous novels, Ellroy primarily divides his narrative between three characters: Wayne, Dwight, and Donald “Crutch” Crutchfield. Much of the tension of the novel takes the form of dramatic irony; readers realize that a fact discovered by one of the protagonists would be revelatory to another protagonist, but readers cannot be sure whether those char acters’ paths will intersect in the right time and way. Like its two predecessors, Blood’s a Rover is a book that bores down through the surface happenings of American history and posits a tumultuous, interwoven, and complicated underworld of dark ambitions and hidden manipulations. As in the previous novels of the trilogy, as well as the earlier novels of Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet, Blood’s a Rover makes use of real-world public and underworld figures. Ellroy appropriates and offers characterizations of J. Edgar Hoover, the legendary founder of the FBI; Hollywood actor Sal Mineo; Howard Hughes, the famously reclusive and troubled billionaire; President Richard Nixon; and notorious underworld figures such as Sam Giancana, Santo Trafficante, Jr., and Carlos Marcello. Ellroy’s portrayal of Hoover is particularly unkind, depicting him as a man obsessed with subjugating African Americans and making use of the national fear of communism to build his own power base. Two of the novel’s three protagonists previously appeared in The Cold Six Thousand. Dwight Holly returns as J. Edgar Hoover’s subtle and tough “enforcer.” He is joined in the narrative by former policeman Wayne Tedrow. Dwight previously helped Wayne in a vendetta against the man who raped and killed his wife. In taking his revenge, Wayne found himself in the debt of powerful people. Doing the bidding of various underworld and right-wing interests (including Hoover) in the previous novel, the two men helped bring about the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. In Blood’s a Rover, Dwight, still in the FBI and still working primarily for Hoover on clandestine operations, is tasked with infiltrating and bringing down any of the various militant African American groups rising to power in the late 1960’s, such as the Black Panthers or (in the case of the novel) the Black Tribe Alliance (BTA) and the Mau Mau Liberation Front (MMLF). Wayne, on the other hand, uses his notoriety as a former vigilante and the son of a notorious right-wing personality to ingratiate himself with the reclusive billionaire Hughes. Wayne becomes a go-between for Hughes in contact with a triumvirate of Mafia leaders: Giancana, Trafficante, and Marcello. While helping Dwight in his various machinations, Wayne is also tasked with getting Hughes to buy more property in Las Vegas and to eventually begin development (again in collusion with the underworld) in the Dominican Republic. The novel’s third protagonist, “Crutch” Crutchfield, is a young private eye who is making a name for himself as a surveillance expert, able to film and record clandestine trysts and meetings. Engrossed as he is in voyeurism, and obsessed with older

A native of Los Angeles, James Ellroy has written thirteen crime novels, including L.A. Confidential (1990), White Jazz (1992), and American Tabloid (1995), as well as essays, short fiction, screenplays, and the 1996 memoir My Dark Places. Many of his works have been adapted into films.

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women, Crutch is reminiscent of earlier Ellroy characters such as Bucky Bleichert of The Black Dahlia (1987) and the author’s self-portrait in his memoir, My Dark Places (1996). Despite his initial naïveté, Crutch is talented at finding suspects and recording them without their knowledge. In some ways, Blood’s a Rover is the most traditional of the three Underworld U.S.A. novels, in that the structure of the entire lengthy book is centered and grounded by a famous armored-car robbery of emeralds that occurred in 1964. Various characters throughout the novel become obsessed with finding the emeralds; additionally, single emeralds from the robbery occasionally appear in African American communities of Los Angeles. The robbery itself, obscure as it is, slowly works to intersect the lives of Dwight, Wayne, and Crutch. At the same time, the novel is a strident departure from most of Ellroy’s earlier books. Typically, Ellroy characters may be brave but are almost never heroic; instead, his detectives, agents, and policemen work in their own self-interest. Their need to solve crimes is less about catching criminals and more about building up their own reputations. Initially, Blood’s a Rover seems to be cut from the same cloth: Dwight is willing to cover up murders and steal important information for Hoover; Wayne works for Dwight and has no compunction about working for the Mafia; Crutch feels no pangs of remorse for taking pictures and films that will be used in blackmail. The primary trajectory in Blood’s a Rover, however, brings all three men to crave atonement for their misdeeds; each decides to make up for past crimes and to work to change the future, and at least two of the three face serious consequences for their changes of heart. The novel’s title comes from A. E. Housman’s poem “Reveille”: Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover; Breath’s a ware that will not keep. Up, lad: when the journey’s over There’ll be time enough to sleep.

In the same way that the speaker in the poem warns that things must be accomplished in lives all too brief, so do Wayne and Dwight work to make differences in the world they helped create. All three men are led through their internal changes by women. Initially, Dwight uses his lover Karen Sifakis, a left-wing peaceful activist and professor, simply as an informant. Eventually, though, she leads him to the enigmatic and magnetic Joan Klein, a subversive leftist underground worker who has sought for years to counteract the right-wing machinations of men such as Hoover and Nixon. Like Karen, Joan agrees to inform on violent crimes to Dwight in exchange for help for her friends and political favors. Additionally, Wayne becomes involved with Mary Beth Hazzard, a woman whose husband was killed in part to cover up a crime committed by Wayne himself and whose son has been missing for years. Wayne and Dwight are both haunted by their pasts. Wayne, particularly, is unable to forget the damage he has done, partly out of fury and partly out of the manipulation of power brokers. Even as he is supposed to be helping his trio of Mafioso leaders develop casinos in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, he begins helping the communist

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resistance instead. Wayne’s integrity and raw need for change make an impression on Dwight, and, as Wayne develops, Dwight does too. Before long, each is being led by Joan to work increasingly for her gains while they strive to keep their changing affiliations secret from the likes of Giancana, Trafficante, and Hoover. For much of Blood’s a Rover, the plot is fragmented and scattered, and it seems doubtful that the various strands will ever tie together. Wayne’s actions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic seem to have little to do with Dwight’s work in having a young African American policeman, Marshall Bowen, infiltrate the BTA and MMLF. At the same time as Crutch is employed by Wayne’s sometime partner, the French mercenary Mesplede, Crutch still follows the original case that led him to Wayne and Dwight, searching for a blackmailing woman who turns out to be one of Joan Klein’s partners. Appearing throughout the text is the vicious and predatory detective Scotty Bennett, whose single-minded quest to recover the emeralds lost in an armored-car robbery five years earlier is clearly less about justice and more about his avarice. The emeralds and Joan, however, provide the anchors for the plot, and slowly but surely the various plot lines tighten into a dense and complex knot of entanglements. In a sense, the development of the characters’ consciences—from both a political and a moral perspective—mirrors the growth of the United States throughout the decade of the 1960’s that is covered in the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy. The nation and the characters evolve from a ferocious adherence to the status quo to a slow if grudging progress. Even as the cynical and savvy Wayne and Dwight are manipulated by Joan Klein, Crutch comes to understand how everything ties together. Of them all, Crutch is the survivor, the one who understands how to play his part without having to pay an irrecoverable price. Crutch does not have the blood on his hands that Wayne and Dwight have on theirs, nor are his actions scrutinized as theirs are. Taking their cues from Joan “the Red Goddess,” the men in Blood’s a Rover ultimately have to transform themselves into men they can live with being. Scott D. Yarbrough

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 19/20 (June 1, 2009): 4. Economist 392, no. 8649 (September 19, 2009): 98. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 15 (August 1, 2009): 46. Library Journal 134, no. 12 (July 1, 2009): 81. New Statesman 138, no. 4974 (November 9, 2009): 55-56. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 16 (October 22, 2009): 50-52. The New Yorker 85, no. 31 (October 5, 2009): 79. The Paris Review 190 (Fall, 2009): 37-69. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 26 (June 29, 2009): 110. Rolling Stone, October 15, 2009, 60+. The Times Literary Supplement, October 30, 2009, pp. 19-20.

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THE BLUE HOUR A Life of Jean Rhys Author: Lilian Pizzichini (1965) First published: The Blue Hour: A Portrait of Jean Rhys, 2009, in Great Britain Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 322 pp. $29.95 Type of work: Literary biography Time: 1890-1979 Locale: Dominica, West Indies; England; Paris and Juanles-Pins, France; Vienna, Austria; Budapest, Hungary This portrait of the author of Wide Sargasso Sea is more an evocation of Jean Rhys rather than a detailed, scholarly examination of the facts of her life. Omitting any analysis of her novels, it focuses on Rhys as a troubled and troubling woman Principal personages: Jean Rhys (born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams), a writer William Rees Williams, her father Minna Rees Williams, her mother Meta, her childhood nurse Clarice Williams, her aunt Lancelot Smith, her first serious lover Jean (or John) Lenglet, her first husband Leslie Tilden Smith, her second husband Max Hamer, her third husband Maryvonne Lenglet, her daughter Ford Madox Ford, a famous British author, her lover Stella Bowen, Ford’s common-law wife Selma vaz Dias, an actress

Toward the end of Jean Rhys’s life, after one of her many arrests for assaulting neighbors, disturbing the peace, and so forth, a local newspaper published an article about Rhys’s latest clash with the law under the headline “Mrs. Hamer Agitated.” One of the neighbors with whom she was feuding, when informed of Rhys’s identity, refused to believe it, saying that she was an impostor “impersonating a dead writer called Jean Rhys.” Lilian Pizzichini’s biography of Rhys, The Blue Hour, reveal that its subject was a violent drunk. She beat her husbands as well as her neighbors, and she seemed to have a perpetual chip on her shoulder. She suspected others and their motives, even when they tried to help her—perhaps especially then. The biography thus reveals an unpleasant side of an author known for Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and other novels about suffering, vulnerable women. Pizzichini attempts to defend Rhys, arguing that the author had “good reason to be angry” be-

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cause of the many difficult external circumstances she faced. In taking this approach, Pizzichini sets herself against a previous biographer of Rhys, Carole Angier. For Pizzichini, Angier was too judgmental and sought inappropriately to pathologize Rhys, diagnosing her as a “borderline personality.” Even Pizzichini, though, ends up using words such as “paranoid” to describe her subject. In fact, a glance at Angier’s 1990 biography, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, reveals that— differences in tone notwithstanding—the two biographies are very much alike. Pizzichini suggests that Angier sits in judgment while she, Pizzichini, is sympathetic and understanding. In fact, however, Angier is quite sympathetic as well, though admittedly less prone to explaining things away. By talking of how Angier’s research uncovered the facts of Rhys’s life and laid the groundwork for later biographers, Pizzichini also makes it sound as if Angier had produced a work of dry scholarship in contrast to Pizzichini’s livelier, more impressionistic approach. It is true that Pizzichini’s narrative is almost novelistic, evoking Rhys as a character and eschewing scholarly methodology. There are no footnotes in The Blue Hour, while Angier provides copious notes in her book. However, Angier’s biography, while perhaps more scholarly, also attempts to be novelistic, adopting a chatty, informal tone marked by the use of the first person. A close comparison of the two biographies reveals even more similarities. Pizzichini says Angier’s book was “a departure point for my own researches,” but she does not seem to have departed very far from Angier. She tends to report the same incidents, using the same quotations from newspapers and other accounts, and even lifts phrases from her predecessor. Here, for instance, is Pizzichini’s account of the experiences of Rhys’s first husband after being released from prison:

Lilian Pizzichini won the 2002 Gold Dagger Award for her memoir about her grandfather, Dead Man’s Wages: Secrets of a London Conman and His Family. She has worked for the Literary Review and the Times Literary Supplement in England and has been a writer-in-residence at several prisons.

Lenglet spent the next two years tramping around Europe. He became a sandwich man in Lucerne, sold newspapers in Berlin, was a publisher’s courier in Frankfurt, and when all else failed, he scraped a living as a street musician.

Here is Angier’s account of the same incident: He spent most of the next two years tramping around Europe, becoming a sandwich man in Lucerne, selling newspapers in Berlin, carrying books for publishers in Frankfurt; and when he couldn’t get even such lowly jobs, passing round his hat as a street musician.

There are also differences between the two accounts. Angier’s book is more than twice the length of Pizzichini’s. Partly, this is because Angier devotes several chapters to analyzing Rhys’s novels, whereas Pizzichini barely discusses the novels at all: Pizzichini’s focus is almost exclusively on Rhys as a person, rather than as a writer.

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This approach might have pleased Rhys, who according to Pizzichini preferred being admired as a woman rather than as a writer. Indeed, one striking suggestion to emerge from Pizzichini’s biography is that Rhys was not particularly driven to write, and authorship was not the essence of her being. True, Pizzichini notes, Rhys often felt best when writing, but as a child she did not aspire to a writing career, and she took it up only at the suggestion of her aunt when she received a setback in her attempts to become an actor. Even after starting to write, Rhys returned to the stage (she never progressed beyond chorus girl roles, however). She also spent time as an artists’ model. Rhys let all her careers go when she met her first serious lover, Lancelot Smith, who kept encouraging her to pursue the theater even while she was abandoning her career aims in order to devote herself to their relationship. Later, she turned seriously to writing when she was short of money—and even then only when encouraged by others, including the well-known author Ford Madox Ford. For a dozen years, she worked as an author, producing four novels and a collection of short stories, but then she stopped publishing for almost thirty years, though she long had the idea to write what became her most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. She first thought of it in 1939, at the end of her twelve-year productive period, but she did not begin working on that novel, or anything else, until the mid-1950’s, when once again she received outside encouragement. In a way, therefore, Pizzichini’s omission of literary analysis and focus on Rhys’s personality may represent an attempt to be true to Rhys’s nature. Pizzichini’s book holds one’s attention. She writes very well, in an impressionistic way, and does not get sidetracked into irrelevancies. She also presents a portrait of Jean Rhys that seems to ring true even if some of her facts may not be accurate—she tends to simplify at times. She speculates on her subject, as do many biographers, but those speculations in Pizzichini’s hands tend to acquire the status of fact rather than conjecture. Sometimes Pizzichini is simply wrong, as when she says Rhys mailed off the manuscript of Wide Sargasso Sea the day after her third husband died. In fact, according to Angier, the husband died March 7, and in April and May Rhys was still working on the manuscript. She mailed it on May 21. This is an odd error for Pizzichini to make because it puts Rhys in a worse light than the truth would, but this version of events makes for a romantic flourish in her prose, and she seems to value such flourishes. The Blue Hour is more a literary work than a scholarly one. Instead of accumulating detail on her subject, Pizzichini selects those impressions that are most suggestive or evocative. She attempts to reach her subject in this manner, where Angier attempted to use details gleaned from Rhys’s fiction to make deductions about the author. Neither biography may represent the final word on Rhys. Perhaps there can be no final word, because Rhys kept herself too secret. What does emerge in Pizzichini’s book, though, is a sense of Rhys as someone who alienated all who sought to help her. She would fail to recognize the aid she received until it was gone then denounce the friends and caregivers she drove off for ceasing their aid. Despite Pizzichini’s attempts to defend her subject, Rhys comes

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across as almost dedicated to frustrating herself and then blaming the world for her frustrations. For a novelist, she seems strikingly lacking in self-awareness. Rhys saw herself as weak and vulnerable, yet she was the one assaulting husbands and neighbors. No doubt, she felt weak and vulnerable inside, but Pizzichini seems to go too far in sympathizing with Rhys when she says that her later relations with men arose from early fantasies of male cruelty and female submission. Especially in her last two marriages, the reverse seems to have been the case. Interesting patterns do emerge in the account of Rhys’s relationships. She seems to have been drawn to men who, like her father, were unable to provide enough money for their family. Her husbands’ schemes and businesses tended to collapse, leaving them broke, and two of them were sent to prison for shady dealings. She seems to have been drawn to weak, ineffectual men and to men with little respect for the law. Rhys herself often chafed against the rules of society. On arriving in England from Dominica, she found the conventions in her new land, along with the rules at her schools, to be stifling. England in general she found gray and ugly, remembering her homeland with nostalgic regret, thinking of its heat and its lush vegetation. When she had been on Dominica, however, she had fantasized about going to England, and after emigrating she visited Dominica only once, finding herself miserable there. She never seemed to be content where she was; she was always complaining. Even when Wide Sargasso Sea made her famous, she complained that her fame came too late. In a way, Pizzichini suggests, Rhys was most satisfied during her brief stay in prison, for there she could feel vindicated. In prison, she could feel the world was conforming to her expectations, whereas outside prison the helpful people she encountered disrupted her view of humanity as purely self-seeking and dangerous. It is sad to think of Jean Rhys fighting imaginary enemies all her life, and it is this feeling of sadness and waste that one takes away from Pizzichini’s biography. Those seeking fuller details about Rhys’s life, and especially about her writings, will be best served by looking at Angier’s biography, but those who simply want to get a sense of what Jean Rhys may have been like will find Pizzichini’s biography a fascinating read. Sheldon Goldfarb

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 13 (March 1, 2009): 14. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 3 (February 1, 2009): 68. Library Journal 134, no. 7 (April 15, 2009): 92-93. Literary Review, May, 2009, pp. 19-20. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 7 (February 16, 2009): 123. Spectator 310, no. 9432 (June 6, 2009): 37-38. The Times Literary Supplement, July 24, 2009, p. 5. The Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2009, p. W2.

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THE BOOK OF NIGHT WOMEN Author: Marlon James (1970) Publisher: Riverhead Books/Penguin Group (New York). 417 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Locale: Jamaica Women slaves on the Montpelier sugar plantation plot secretly at night to raise an insurrection against the violent and cruel British owners Principal characters: Lilith, a mulatto slave with mysterious powers Homer, the slave woman who heads the plantation household Jack Wilkins, overseer of Montpelier Humphrey Wilson, the young master of Montpelier Isobel Roget, a Creole woman from the Coulibre plantation involved with Humphrey Robert Quinn, a friend of Humphrey and Wilkins’s replacement as overseer

Marlon James’s novel The Book of Night Women portrays the Montpelier estate, a sugar plantation in Jamaica where the slaves outnumber the white owners by thirtythree to one. Mindful of the 1791 takeover of St. Domingue by Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Jamaican history of bloody slave uprisings, the whites rule by terror. The barbaric treatment of the slaves includes such tortures as burning alive, chopping off the feet of runaways, brutal whippings for minor offenses, and other punishments too gruesome to describe. Slaves know that their lives are worthless in the eyes of their owners; they can be easily replaced at the slave market in Kingston. James’s unrelenting depiction of violence and explicit descriptions of sexual abuse of women have disturbed many readers and critics. However, as the author has said, historical records offer ample evidence of the savagery of plantation life of that time. Into the enclosed world of Montpelier is born Lilith, the green-eyed daughter of overseer Jack Wilkins, who names her for the first wife of the biblical Adam. Lilith’s fourteen-year-old mother, whom Wilkins raped, dies giving birth in a blood-filled scene that portends the role of blood throughout the story. Six women slaves who are secretly plotting an uprising at night believe that Lilith was born with demonic powers that threaten danger. Patrick Wilson, the dead plantation master, gave these women names from Greek mythology. Five of them—Gorgon, Pallas, Hippolyta, Iphegenia, and Callisto—are half-sisters fathered by Jack Wilkins; several have inherited his green eyes. Homer, the only African-born of the six, commands the house-

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hold slaves and is the most powerful black woman on the plantation. Mutilated by a brutal whipping that caused a miscarriage, she was used by the master as breeding stock, producing two children who were sold and met early deaths at the hands of their owners. Homer, outwardly compliant, is ruled by her desire to avenge her children; she has nothing more to fear. In the wake of Wilson’s death, his widow teeters at the edge of insanity, while the plantation descends into chaos. Humphrey, Wilson’s son, is summoned from Europe to restore order. He replaces Wilkins, making his Irish companion Robert Quinn the new overseer. The narrator, whose identity is withheld until the final chapter, speaks in Jamaican dialect, a risky choice by the author. However, once this voice is established in the first pages, the lyrical speech patterns seduce readers into accepting the compelling story. Several times, the narrator begins a chapter with this mantra: “Every negro walk in a circle. Take that and make of it what you will.” The slaves of Montpelier understand that their lives are circumscribed by the dictates of their masters: They have no choices. Montpelier is a nightmare for the slaves, whose work enriches its British owners. The whites, separated from the conventions of British society, exercise unrestrained power over their slaves, whom they treat as animals. In an early chapter, two slaves die from a mysterious bloody flux. The terror-stricken slaves attribute this event to Obeah, African black magic, and refuse to go into the fields. The overseers choose a random victim, a young girl, and slowly burn her to death while the slaves are forced at gunpoint to watch. Order is outwardly restored, but the slaves’ resulting hatred and thirst for revenge fuel the brewing insurrection. The British landowners, shunned by polite society, have their own caste system. They regard the Irishman Quinn as an inferior, little better than a slave. He is tolerated by Humphrey, as he harbors a dark secret about Humphrey’s past. Meanwhile, Isobel Roget, the daughter of the civil servant of the Coulibre plantation, is a Jamaican-born Creole. Mistress Wilson is horrified by the looming possibility of a marriage between Humphrey and a woman of such dubious ancestry. The slaves, in turn, have secrets and enmities among themselves. From the lowest field hands, fed starvation rations and worked to death, to the house slaves, who fare marginally better with food and clothing, they establish their own hierarchy. The “johnny-jumpers,” slaves given unlimited freedom to punish others by the master, rape and whip fellow slaves at will. In the hills, Maroons, roaming bands of escaped slaves, are paid by the whites to hunt down runaways. Lilith, at fifteen, is beautiful and headstrong and believes herself superior to the other slaves. Homer watches with scorn as Lilith attempts to ingratiate herself with the white family. She warns: “Lord knows what happen when a nigger girl not conMarlon James was born in Kingston, Jamaica. His first novel, John Crow’s Devil (2005), was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is professor of literature and creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

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tent with her lot.” Homer includes Lilith in the nighttime plotting, although the other five hate her and fear that she will betray their cause. When a Johnny-jumper attempts to rape Lilith, she murders him with his own cutlass. The night women dispose of the body; Homer brings her to the main house under her protection. Lilith, despite dire warnings from Homer, attracts the attention of Mistress Wilson, who assigns her to serve at table for the plantation’s New Year’s banquet. Vain and consumed by her own self-importance, Lilith commits a misstep that changes her life: She spills scalding soup on Isobel Roget’s chaperone, severely burning her and disrupting the dinner party. Humphrey beats Lilith with his fists, then turns her over to be gang-raped by white overseers. Isobel, driven by a desire for vengeance, takes satisfaction in ordering Lilith’s beating with the bullwhip for several weeks until Jack Wilkins intervenes. Lilith becomes known as the woman with the quilt on her back. Although it will be difficult for readers to summon any sympathy for the unspeakable behavior of the white plantation owners, James successfully develops complex psychological portraits that make them believable characters. Moral distinctions between good and evil are clouded, as even the whites are revealed to be capable of unaccountable acts of compassion. Slaves, meanwhile, victims who should elicit readers’ sympathy, are capable of savage cruelty toward other slaves. James also includes instances of humor amid the horror. Homer teaches Lilith to read with the only book available, Henry Fielding’s The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams (1742; commonly known as Joseph Andrews). Quinn continues her education with Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596). Lilith’s disingenuous commentary on the behavior of these fictitious narratives provides some lighter moments in the otherwise unrelenting darkness. After the banquet disaster, Lilith is sent to Coulibre to serve at Isobel’s whim— Isobel’s strategy for keeping her enemy under her control. Lilith is terrified when the young slave Dulcey, her coworker in the kitchen who serves the master’s perverted sexual desires, is beaten to death by Mistress Roget in a fit of jealousy. One day when Isobel is away, Lilith explodes under her silent burden of terror. While she is assisting Master Roget in his bath, he forces her into a sexual act. She responds by drowning him. When the mistress approaches, Lilith pushes her over the balcony to her death. Crazed by the fear of discovery, Lilith sets fire to the house, burning two slave women and the Rogets’ two young children to death. In the confusion that follows, her claim that she was in the barn milking the cow when the fire started is believed, but only by the whites. Several slaves are tortured into false confessions and executed, including the innocent Francine, who is burned to death. Lilth’s murderous powers become legendary among the slaves. Lilith, who sees herself as less than human, begins to mature into an individual capable of highly intelligent distinctions of moral reasoning. She is, in her own word, “perplex” about questions that trouble her. Roget, a murderer and rapist, deserved to die, as did his wife, who was equally guilty of terrible cruelties. She believes that the two boys, who would have become cruel masters like their parents, also deserved

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death. Nevertheless, Lilith’s nights are haunted by the vision of a shadowy, dark woman, and she is tormented by the smell of the burning bodies. She charges herself with the murder of seven people, including the three innocent slave women whose deaths she has caused. Isobel, meanwhile, is driven insane by the ghastly deaths of her family. She begins speaking wildly in slave dialect and makes nighttime journeys into the brothels and opium dens of Kingston. Although she and Humphrey are having a sexual relationship, she cannot convince him to propose marriage. In an unexpected turn in the narrative, there is a temporary respite, an incongruous love story. Robert Quinn takes Lilith into his house as his mistress and housekeeper. He treats her as though she were a white woman, begging her to call him by his Christian name and calling her “Lovey.” His gentle lovemaking awakens her sexual response, which was deadened after her earlier rapes. Even while they make love, though, he feels the scars on her back from the whippings that he sanctioned. Lilith, growing confident in her new knowledge of love, begins to imagine herself differently. Homer, scornful of her trust in a white man, asks who she thinks she is. She responds, “Me think me is Lilith,” yet she understands what Quinn cannot: He will always be the master and she the slave. In contrast to these tender scenes of romance, Homer’s plans for the uprising, three years in the making, are coming to fruition. She intends to kill all the whites and establish African-style villages throughout the island. Secret communications among slaves from several plantations have set the day for the revolt. It will take place in the midst of the cane harvest, when most slaves will be in the fields, where they can kill the overseers and escape in the night. Homer orders Lilith to join in the conspiracy, but Lilith refuses, telling Homer that she cannot commit any more murders and predicting that the revolt cannot succeed. Homer, unforgiving in her thirst for revenge for the deaths of her children, will not listen. Lilith’s warning fails. When the uprising begins, Lilith attempts to protect Quinn by drugging his food and hiding him. Mistress Wilson, the johnny-jumpers, and at least ninety-four whites from the rebelling plantations are killed, their bodies mutilated in barbaric acts of revenge. Inevitably, however, the insurrection is put down by British soldiers with their superior numbers and weapons. The horrors of the insurrection and its aftermath are described in explicit detail in the final section of the book, “Gehenna.” Lilith, watching as the plantation house burns, runs to the safety of Jack Wilkins’s house. When she protects him by facing down the rioters, they retreat in terror, fearing her evil powers. This act saves her from the fate decreed by Humphrey Wilson’s vengeance: The surviving rebels are placed in spiked cages alongside the road to die slow, agonizing deaths. Robert Quinn is killed during the revolt despite Lilith’s efforts to save him. Isobel, already pregnant, is brutally raped and left to survive as best she can in the ashes of Montpelier. The narrative voice is finally revealed as that of Lovey Quinn, the daughter of Quinn and Lilith. She assumes the traditional African role as witness and storyteller, charged with honoring the lives of the night women who died in the uprising. She pieces together the story as given to her by her mother and an unnamed “blind

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niggerwoman in the bush.” Either Homer has survived, or she serves as a tutelary spirit who witnesses to the truth. In the words of the chant repeated through the story, the circle within which every African walks is complete. As Lilith foresaw, Homer’s thirst for vengeance was the fatal flaw that blinded her to the truth that the slave insurrection would fail, marking the full circle of tragedy. James has created, out of historical fact and soaring imagination, a compelling world of such horror as to give readers nightmares. Still, as several critics have said, this is a story that needs to be told. Slavery, as history shows, has the power to corrupt both those who own other human beings and the slaves themselves, who prey on one another. This tale of racism and ethnic strife carries a warning that transcends its time and place. When one group refuses to acknowledge the humanity of the other, primitive savagery beyond rational belief can be the only result. Marjorie Podolsky

Review Sources The Boston Globe, Living Arts, May 12, 2009, p.4. Chicago Tribune, Books and Media, February 14, 2009, p.1. Essence, March, 2009, p.60. Library Journal 134, no. 12 (July 1, 2009): 52. Library Journal 134, no. 3 (February 15, 2009): 94. Miami Herald, March 1, 2009, M6. The New York Times Book Review, March 1, 2009, p.7. The Washington Post, February 17, 2009, p. C9.

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THE BOOK OF SAMUEL Essays on Poetry and Imagination Author: Mark Rudman (1948) Publisher: Northwestern University Press (Evanston, Ill.). 270 pp. $18.95 Type of work: Literary criticism Rudman assesses the literary achievement of a wide range of authors, examines their influence on other writers (including himself), and provides autobiographical accounts of his travels inspired by their works The essays in The Book of Samuel, most of which have appeared elsewhere previously, put forth a thought-provoking and sometimes maddening mélange of reflections on a variety of writers. The book is replete with insights into these writers’ works, intermingled with autobiographical vignettes that do not always obviously connect to the subjects ostensibly under consideration. Mark Rudman serves as a chatty and knowledgeable tour guide through the works he investigates, but his freeform presentation will frustrate those seeking a thesis or a cohesive argument. Readers seeking to revisit Rudman’s reflections will also be frustrated by the absence of an index. The opening chapter, “On the Road, Touch and Go, with D. H. Lawrence” responds to a letter from Gary Adelman of the University of Illinois asking Rudman’s opinion of Lawrenace, the author of Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). The Cambridge scholar F. R. Leavis regarded Lawrence as the most important early twentieth century novelist, but Lawrence’s reputation has declined over the decades with the rise of feminist and postcolonial criticism. Rudman nonetheless champions Lawrance’s work in all genres: short stories, novels, poems, letters, and nonfiction. According to Rudman, Lawrence rebelled against the modernist concern with form. Rudman maintains that Lawrence’s poetry is imperfect but not flawed. All Lawrence’s writing seeks immediacy, movement rather than fixity. According to Rudman, Lawrence, who wrote Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), took Walt Whitman as his model. Much of this chapter deals with Rudman’s retracing Lawrence’s footsteps through Italy as set out in Sketches of Etruscan Places (1923). Lawrence admired the vitality of the Etruscans, which he contrasted with Roman commercialism. Rudman finds the book still a useful guide, as well as a beautifully written text. Rudman argues that William Carlos Williams is the American poet closest in spirit to Lawrence, as well as the most original U.S. poet. Like Lawrence, Williams was not a slave to form. Instead, he allowed form to evolve from content. Williams was influenced by Lawrence’s Classics in American Literature, and Lawrence favorably reviewed Williams’s In the American Grain (1925) in an essay that appeared in The

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Nation. There, Lawrence praised Williams’s concentration on Americans’ energy, a qual- Poet and translator Mark Rudman teaches at New York University. His ity that Lawrence admired in the Etruscans. In a typically thought-provoking insight, collection Rider (1994) won the Rudman claims that Williams focused on the National Book Critics Circle Award, sounds of words in the same way that nine- and his work has appeared in many teenth century realists emphasized personal periodicals, including The Atlantic appearance and furnishings. Rudman shows Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, and the London Review of that Williams was aware of the slipperiness of Books. language. The title of “By the Road to the Contagious Hospital,” published in Spring and All (1923), suggests that the hospital not only is for those with contagious diseases but also is itself contagious. Rudman also shows through example how shifting the emphasis from one word to another in Williams’s poems can alter their meaning. Though Williams’s language is simple, it expresses complex truths, whether about mourners at a funeral or about spectators at a baseball game. Like Lawrence, Williams is, according to Rudman, undervalued. Harvard poetry professor Helen Vendler ignored Williams in her anthology of American verse. Rudman finds a strong strain in Williams reminiscent of William Shakespeare, particularly when his poems express skepticism similar to that expressed by Shakespeare’s character Hamlet. Walt Whitman provides another influence on Williams. Rudman reflects that some of Whitman’s best poems derived from his experience nursing soldiers during the Civil War. Williams, a physician, tended the sick every day. Such work, Rudman reflects, forces a writer outside the self. It may also have contributed to Williams’s focus on the physical, such as the thighs of a policeman’s wife (“The Cold Night,” 1921) or the gravel in a park (Paterson, 1946-1958). Williams contended that there are no ideas but in things, yet objects gain significance through Williams’s imaginative renderings. John Keats, too, trained in medicine, and Rudman finds in Williams’s open vowel sounds echoes of that Romantic poet. Keats’s example also taught Williams to compose rapidly. Rudman links Williams’s poignant “The Sparrow” (1955) to Keats’s observation in a letter that, when he sees a sparrow, he partakes of the bird’s existence. The Roman poet Catullus also famously wrote about the pet sparrow of his beloved Lesbia, a possible source that Rudman ignores. Rudman admires Williams for rejecting form. A theme that pervades the book is Rudman’s argument with modernist emphasis on that element. Rudman links Williams’s poems to Jackson Pollack’s paintings. Neither is amorphous, but form evolves in the process of creation. Rudman also admires playfulness, a quality that he finds in Williams and Samuel Beckett, whom he treats later in the book. Rudman argues that this element has cost Williams readers who believe that poetry should be serious. Rudman turns next to American poet Hart Crane and British novelist Malcolm Lowry, both of whom were, like Lawrence, drawn to Mexico. Both also killed them-

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selves, though Lowry may have had some assistance from his wife. Crane hoped to write a verse history of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, a project that defeated him. Rudman argues that Crane failed because he tried to plan the work rather than allow it to emerge spontaneously. Rudman contrasts the failed poem with Crane’s masterful letters from Mexico that record his immediate experiences. Both Crane and Lowry, Rudman argues, sought perfection and thereby created masterpieces, but they left themselves no opportunity to progress. Rudman concedes that he initially objected to what he regarded as the overly intellectual qualities of the poetry of Czesuaw Miuosz. Miuosz’s prose works, however, made Rudman more receptive to the spontaneity and risk-taking of his verse. In discussing Miuosz, Rudman focuses on what the Polish poet calls “apokatastasis,” or restoration, the idea that things exist both within and outside of time so that nothing is lost. Himself a translator of Boris Paternak and Bohdan Antonych, Rudman reflects on Miuosz’s good fortune to have his poems translated into English by Robert Haas and Robert Pinsky. Fine poets themselves, they have reproduced Miuosz’s sounds as well as his sense. In contrast, Joseph Brodsky has not been so fortunate in his translators. One of the best features of Rudman’s idiosyncratic book is its generous and incisive sampling of the works of the writers it discusses. Rudman reveals himself to be an excellent anthologist, using his selections to entice readers to seek out more works by the authors he treats. Rudman says of T. S. Eliot what Statius says to Virgil in Dante’s Purgatorio (c. 1320; Purgatory, 1802): Through him, he became a poet. Rudman argues that Eliot’s attempt to convey wisdom through verse hurt his later poems. Still, he admires Eliot’s late Four Quartets (1943) for its ability to transcend time. Rudman contrasts Lawrence’s cultivation of anxiety in his writings with Eliot’s attempt to escape it. Rudman observes that, while Eliot seemed to be the embodiment of conventionality in his dress and mien, his poetic language was original. Rudman’s book takes its title from the final section, which examines the work of three Samuels: Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Beckett. Rudman is so enamored of these writers that he named his son Samuel for them. As disparate as the three writers at first blush appear to be, Rudman connects them through their fascination with conversation. Coleridge wrote conversation poems, for example, while Johnson was noted for his brilliant talk. Rudman ascribes Coleridge’s failure as a poet to his loss of William Wordsworth’s friendship, the failure of Coleridge’s marriage to Sarah Fricker, and Coleridge’s inability to gain the love of Sara Hutchinson. As a result of these events, Rudman believes, the poet had no one with whom to communicate. Coleridge continued to produce volumes of prose, but, for Rudman, his lectures on William Shakespeare and the Biographia Literaria (1817) are poor consolations for the poems that Coleridge failed to create. Rudman regards the Biographia Literaria as an attempt by Coleridge to act as Wordsworth’s publicist. Rudman attributes Wordsworth’s poetic achievement to his conversations with his sister Dorothy. He also maintains, with less plausibility, that Johnson, too, turned to prose as a lesser substitute for poetry. Rudman quotes Robert Lowell’s report of Delmore Schwartz’s comment that if a

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poet can get people talking, his work will succeed. Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound achieved that goal. Beckett’s central problem, Rudman argues, was solitude. One of the Irish-born writer’s last works is called Company (1980). Isolation leads to silence, a situation reflected in the title of “Fin de partie,” suivi de “Acte sans paroles” (pr., pb. 1957; “Endgame: A Play in One Act,” Followed by “Act Without Words: A Mime for One Player,” 1958). Another Samuel enters the final chapter, the director Samuel Fuller, whom Rudman admires. This chapter turns into even more of a grab bag than the others, as Rudman discusses his son’s first encounter with the poetry of Robert Frost, a horseback riding incident when Rudman himself was ten, and the lives and works of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Perhaps Rudman seeks to create a sense of conversation akin to Coleridge’s, which famously rambled but always stimulated. The Book of Samuel concludes with a tribute to the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, whom Rudman met in 1972. Rudman already shared Parra’s objections to modernism and neo-Romanticism, strictures that inform much of The Book of Samuel and that may explain the work’s free-form construction. However, Rudman at twenty-three still admired Romantic writers such as John Keats and modernists such as Pablo Neruda, whom Parra regarded as outdated remnants of the nineteenth century. Parra wrote a book called Antipoems (2004), which Rudman links to Parra’s background in physics. Parra’s poems resemble antimatter and reflect his rejection of the lyric and of the closure that characterizes so much earlier verse. These reflections on antipoetry form a fitting conclusion to what might be seen as a book of antiessays that also lack a sense of ending, inviting further reading and reflection. Joseph Rosenblum

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THE BOOK OF WILLIAM How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World Author: Paul Collins (1969) Publisher: Bloomsbury (New York). 246 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Literary history Time: 1623-2006 Locale: London, England Evaluation of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, which preserved the work of England’s most famous playwright, including much that could have been lost, and which also began a great industry of Shakespeareana Principal personages: William Shakespeare (1564-1616), the most famous writer in the English language William Jaggard (c. 1568-1623), the London printer chosen to produce the First Folio Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), English essayist, critic, and editor of Shakespeare’s works Howard Staunton (1810-1874), a chess virtuoso and editor of the first facsimile of the First Folio Henry Clay Folger (1857-1930), a book collector and founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library

Paul Collins’s The Book of William presents a literary history of William Shakespeare’s First Folio. One of the most valuable books in the world, its importance is represented among other places in Umberto Eco’s novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2005). The novel’s narrator, a publisher who is unable to work and deeply in debt, suffers a massive stroke on discovering that his grandfather’s battered copy of Shakespeare’s plays is in fact a First Folio edition. Such discoveries, though rare, are not unheard of. Since the first census of First Folios was taken in the mid-nineteenth century, new copies have turned up at the rate of about one per year. Some have been in attics, others in cupboards and storage sheds, and a few out in the open in uncatalogued private libraries. Rumors of still others emerge periodically, to be pursued by any number of booksellers and collectors. Collins reveals that, to date, some 230 copies of the First Folio have been identified, and their individual flaws and markings have been noted in great detail. There must be an upper limit to those remaining to be found since the print run of the 1623 publication was limited by statute to two thousand copies and most of those were probably consumed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. It is increasingly rare for a First Folio to be sold on the open market, and the asking price is likely to increase.

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When a private library in London put its copy up for auction in 2006, the book sold for a A former editor for McSweeney’s record 2.5 million pounds, the equivalent at Books, Paul Collins is a professor of the time of 8 million dollars. The auctioneer English at Portland State University. remarked that the sum represented approxi- He has written on autism, the usedmately one-third of the library’s net worth; book trade, and Thomas Paine. the librarian said the proceeds would make it possible to preserve the library’s eight thousand other rare books. Collins attended the auction, fascinated by the allure of old books and determined to write a popular history of Shakespeare’s First Folio. The title of his book is well chosen, for this first posthumous edition of Shakespeare’s plays is as close as one can come to the words as he wrote them. It was edited by two surviving shareholders in the King’s Men, the acting company that made Shakespeare a rich man. The texts were based on acting copies in the company’s possession, not on the pirated copies printed during the author’s lifetime, and they included a good many plays that might otherwise have been lost. Many literature students purchase the Norton facsimile of the First Folio to see how Shakespeare’s contemporaries saw the text, and some actors use the Applause facsimile to eliminate the stage directions, scene descriptions, and other insertions that have been made over the centuries. Collins’s subtitle, on the other hand, is pure hyperbole, as the author would be the first to concede. First Folios are bargains compared to paintings by Rembrandt or Vincent Van Gogh. Even in the world of printed books, the First Folio sold at Sotheby’s is not the most valuable book known. A Gutenberg Bible, for example, has sold for 3.3 million pounds, and a first edition of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) has commanded 4.7 million pounds. However, a more accurate subtitle, more strictly limited to the auction that Collins attended, would be much longer, and he intends his book to be accessible to a wide reading public. Collins strikes a breezy tone, contracting words when, for example, he shows sympathy for “every high schooler who’s suffered through a Shakespeare assignment.” He uses such vernacular adjectives as “dorky” and “legit”; calls Shakespeare’s hometown a “tourist trap” (as may well be the case); and calls the playwright “Bill” (as was not the case: until the nineteenth century, the standard nickname for William was “Will,” and Shakespeare punned on that name in Sonnet 130). He notes that the folio’s editors divided the plays into acts and scenes, in the manner of Roman plays studied in grammar schools such as the one Shakespeare attended briefly. They thus gave a classical appearance to comedies and tragedies originally organized by scene alone. Collins follows suit, dividing his book into acts and scenes rather than chapters and sections. By adapting the five-act structure of the Shakespearean drama, he makes it easy for readers familiar with Shakespeare to grasp the overall structure of his story. “Act I” is set in London and describes the auction at Sotheby’s interspersed with portrayals of the print shop of William Jaggard and son, where the First Folio was produced. Collins provides details of the paper Jaggard chose for the job and of the

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folio format in general. The section also includes information about the second, third, and fourth folios that followed Jaggard’s 1623 folio over the next half century. Each edition corrected perceived errors in prior editions and added new texts attributed to Shakespeare—wrongly attributed, in almost every case. “Act II” continues in London and describes the fiercely competitive market in new editions of Shakespeare’s collected works—a market created by England’s first copyright law in the early eighteenth century. The poet Alexander Pope thought the First Folio useless and made as many corrections to it as he could; Lewis Theobald, his rival, considered the First Folio to have the highest authority and corrected Pope’s corrections whenever possible. Samuel Johnson, who compiled the first authoritative dictionary of English words, owned Theobald’s heavily annotated copy of the First Folio and followed Theobald’s lead. Johnson’s introductory essays in the several volumes of his edition of Shakespeare’s works helped shape the way that people read and understood the plays. They also had the immediate effect of reversing the value placed on earlier editions. First Folios began selling for more than the original selling price of one pound. They became collectors’ items. Given the structure of The Book of William and its analogy with the plays’ dramatic structure, one might expect the story of the First Folio and its readers to reach a crisis at this point in the text. Curiously enough, that crisis occurs with the invention of photography and the production of the first facsimile edition between 1857 and 1860. The facsimile was the work of Howard Staunton, a chess master who helped standardize and popularize the game. Rather than diminish the demand for original First Folio copies, as one might suppose, Staunton’s facsimile edition greatly increased that demand by putting members of the general reading public in contact with a monument of English printing comparable to the King James Bible of 1611. As demand increased, so did the number of known copies. Exhibitions of First Folios were held, and soon a census of known copies was published. The crisis of “Act III,” then, involves the scarcity of a desired commodity. What began as a story of artistry preserved by fellow actors and interpreted by poets and essayists who turned their hands to editing ends up as a story of acquisition. At this point, the story leaves England and begins to follow the money. “Act IV” focuses on Henry Clay Folger, a lieutenant of John D. Rockefeller in the Standard Oil Trust. Folger bought a cheap reprint of Staunton’s facsimile when he was a student at Amherst College and formed a lifelong fascination with Shakespeare. When he became a rich man, Folger used his wealth to buy books, and his focus was always on First Folios. Most of those he acquired were kept in warehouses, much like proven oil reserves, while Folger bought up land on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., and laid the plans for a great library dedicated to the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Folger became the first person known to have two First Folios of his own, and by the time of his death he owned seventy-two, more than half of all the copies then known. The endowment of the institution he founded, however, was harmed by the recession of the early 1980’s: Despite new acquisitions and construction to house

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them, the Folger Shakespeare Library had to place itself in trust to Folger’s alma mater. By then, investment capital was concentrated in Japan, where the Tokyo Globe Theater opened in 1988. Japanese audiences flocked to see Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601, pb. 1603) performed by visiting English actors, as well as its translation as Hamuretto, performed by their native counterparts. The play about the conflicted Danish prince resonated with the post-World-War-II generation in Japan. “Act V” thus discusses Japanese collectors of First Folios. The founding president of Meisei University in Tokyo began collecting Shakespeare editions in the mid1970’s. By the time he died, his university had the second-largest collection of First Folios in the world, next only to the Folger Library’s. Since then, the Meisei library has expanded its collection to include first folios of Geoffrey Chaucer and Ben Jonson, the direct ancestors of the Shakespeare First Folio. Collins traveled to Japan to examine a First Folio once owned by the benefactor of Harvard’s Houghton Library. Heavily underlined throughout, it is the First Folio known to have textual notes made by one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries—a man Collins identifies tentatively as a mathematics professor at the University of Aberdeen. Here, Collins writes, “Exuent”—“all exit”—but his book does not conclude with the narrative. Instead of the usual scholarly apparatus of endnotes and bibliography, he provides a twenty-page essay on further readings, arranged in the same five-act sequence. There is also a two-page list of acknowledgments. Together, these supplements identify Collins’s major sources of information. They take readers through the steps of his research and provide enough detail that the sources can be tracked down through an Internet search engine such as Google or a database such as WorldCat. Shakespeare might have called Collins “a snatcher up of unconsidered trifles,” for, like Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale (pr. c. 1610-1611, pb. 1623), he cannot resist the odd item. Like his other books of nonfiction, The Book of William is chock-full of curiosities—details easily overlooked in a more strictly serious study. He discusses flakes of piecrust that a subeditor found in Johnson’s copy of the First Folio, lost copies—such as that of a Spanish diplomat whose entire library was consigned to the rag pile or that of a Chicago collector whose books were destroyed in the fire of 1871— and a tavern built on a site where early editions of the plays were edited. Shakespeare scholars may be surprised that Collins says nothing about the spelling found in the First Folio or the varied attempts to make sense of it. Collins resists citing Theobald’s most famous correction, perhaps the most famous correction ever made to Shakespeare’s text. Pope had omitted the apparently random phrase “a Table of greene fields” from the description of Falstaff’s death in Henry V. Theobald emended it to read “a’ babbled.” Ever since then, the great comic character has been said to die babbling of England’s greenery. Early reviewers have appreciated the globe-and-century-hopping approach that Collins takes, though with some reservations. While The New York Times Book Review has called it amusing and Library Journal has termed it a welcome addition to the more serious studies it cites, Commonweal compares it unfavorably to Jack

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Lynch’s Becoming Shakespeare (2007), a longer book that provides a more comprehensive view of Shakespeare’s “afterlife.” The book has a few outright errors, such as referring to The Merchant of Venice (pr. c. 1596-1597, pb. 1600) as “A Merchant of Venice,” and it would benefit from the addition of a general index. Nevertheless, it is a lively introduction to a subject that should interest more readers in the legacy of Shakespeare’s works. Thomas Willard

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 21 (July 1, 2009): 13. Commonweal 136, no. 17 (October 9, 2009): 24. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 9 (May 1, 2009): 69. Library Journal 134, no. 10 (June 1, 2009): 100. The New York Times Book Review, October 4, 2009, p. 18. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 18 (May 4, 2009): 42.

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CAHOKIA Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi Author: Timothy R. Pauketat (1961) Publisher: Viking (New York). 194 pp. $22.95 Type of work: History Time: 1050 to the early twenty-first century Locale: The banks of the Mississippi River, near modernday St. Louis, Missouri The story of a Native American city that flourished more than a thousand years ago and whose inhabitants built more than two hundred pyramid mounds In Cahokia, Timothy R. Pauketat argues that Cahokia was the one true city of ancient America north of Mexico. It was as large as London in its day and was the capital of what Pauketat describes as “a most unusual Indian nation.” Cahokia—no one knows what its inhabitants actually called it—lay in the Mississippi bottomlands, close to modern St. Louis, Missouri. The Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site now protects the eighty mounds that remain from this ancient city, and they are designated as a World Heritage Site. At least sixty other mounds, and probably more, were destroyed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during the building of St. Louis. Cahokia was originally North America’s largest pyramidal mound site, possibly containing as many as two hundred mounds, including the third-largest pyramid in the New World. Most of these pyramids were packed into an area five miles square, and they were surrounded by thousands of houses and broad plazas. At the height of its importance, Cahokia may have been home to at least ten thousand people, with another twenty to thirty thousand living in the surrounding area. For a long time, no one was entirely clear who had built the mounds. Although it was clear that they had been built by human hands, it was believed that, rather than being constructed by Native Americans, they had been made by a lost race of moundbuilders. This hypothetical race would have traveled along the American frontier west of the Allegheny Mountains, through the Ohio Valley and the Mississippi trench, constructing the mysterious mounds. They then would either have been wiped out by warlike Native Americans or else have migrated into Central America, where they would have become the Aztec and the Maya. However, as Pauketat notes, the work of archaeologists and historians has begun to question long-held beliefs about Native Americans, suggesting that they were not necessarily as ecologically sensitive, peaceful, and mystical as was previously assumed. The emerging picture of Native Americans indicates that they were perfectly capable of building a city and developing an elaborate culture. Pauketat is particularly interested in the founding of Cahokia, which seems around 1050 to have sprung suddenly into being—what he calls the “big bang” theory. Al-

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most overnight, the buildings that formed what is now called Old Cahokia were taken down; the area was leveled; and the elaborate pyramids, streets, and houses of New Cahokia were constructed, creating what Pauketat argues was a new capital city. He notes that for this project to achieve such rapid growth in so comparatively short a period of time would have required a good deal of cooperation, not to mention strong leadership and a large population. Pauketat thus argues that the Cahokia civilization was either built on consensus or based on an ideology that legitimized the rule of the few in the eyes of the many. Whatever their governmental structure, the Cahokians made rapid and drastic changes to their lives. Pauketat theorizes that a supernova in 1054, documented in the New World but not noted elsewhere, may have been the impetus behind the change. The Mississippian culture developed rapidly and then spread across the American Midwest into the South and onto the Great Plains. Its influence can be traced in buildings and artworks, suggesting that there was an elaborate dissemination of Cahokian culture, which was copied by local artists and builders in turn. The reasons for the culture’s spread remain unclear. Pauketat suggests that in the dissemination of the culture was associated in some way with chunkey, a game widely played among different Native American groups for centuries, which seems to have arisen first in Cahokia. There is evidence that the Mississippi supported a prosperous society prior to the development of New Cahokia. This earlier society comprised unified family groups based in small villages. The population of the area was not large, and it sustained itself through hunting and through growing and gathering crops. There were festivals throughout the year, and the villages were neither socially isolated nor culturally insular. Pauketat argues that influential people in the larger villages, in particular Old Cahokia, drew people to them because of their success. He speculates that intermarriage with foreigners may have brought with it new ideas, leading to the development of the mound-building culture. It has even been suggested that people traveling from Mesoamerica brought with them the idea of mound-building (though it has also been suggested that, after Cahokia collapsed, the Cahokians traveled southward into Mesoamerica). Much of what is known about Cahokia is based on the extraordinary work of a dedicated group of archaeologists who have worked throughout the twentieth century to recover evidence of the mounds. Awareness within white culture of the mounds’ existence goes back further: In 1811, Henry Marie Brackenridge described them in detail in a letter to Thomas Jefferson. His account laid emphasis on the numerous mounds and their ordered arrangement. Remarkably, before this, the mounds had gone unnoticed by observers, although there had been European settlement in the area for many years. Timothy R. Pauketat is a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His previous books include Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions (2007) and Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians (2004).

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Modern Cahokian archaeology began with the arrival in the St. Louis area of Preston Holder, who began to draw together earlier work on the various mounds in order to make some sense of the information already gathered. Holder established a protocol for working on the mounds and their associated houses, stressing attention to detail during digging. Holder and the archaeologists who came after him often worked under intense pressure to record information, struggling in desperate conditions, only one step ahead of encroaching bulldozers as they tried to excavate archaeological sites before builders moved into them. Sometimes, they dug well into the night, working by the light of car headlamps. Often, they had to abandon work when the weather deteriorated and winter set in. The pressure of the work was such that more than one of the workers turned to drink. The quantity of material they found was immense, but retrieving it was only the beginning of the job. Everything then had to be cleaned and analyzed. While it had long been assumed that Cahokia had been a ritual center, the work of Holder and his successors, in particular Melvin Fowler, revealed the elaborate nature of some of the rituals practiced there. Archaeologists recognized and excavated special mortuary mounds in which they discovered high-status burials. These included the “beaded burial,” in which a corpse had been laid on an elaborately decorated cloak. Some of the burials were associated with human sacrifice. In particular, fifty-three women were discovered in a carefully organized mass grave. Pauketat notes that this grave is comparable with the royal burials in the cemetery at Ur. He observes that it is clearly the result of planned killings, carried out within a complex society that must have condoned such rituals. It is difficult, however, to discern exactly how Cahokian society was organized. Pauketat speculates on a number of possibilities, using examples drawn from elsewhere in the Americas. Such elaborate burials may represent a bloodline eliminated for dynastic reasons, ritual sacrifices designed to provide social cohesion, or sacrifices to ancestors or gods in which participants impersonated ritual figures. Pauketat cannot offer a clear answer, although he surveys the various possibilities in detail. In particular, he provides a close examination of the myth of the Twin Heroes, a story found in various forms from Central America right into the Midwest, and he considers its implications for Cahokia. Pauketat makes a dense argument regarding the Twin Heroes myth, and he draws on a wealth of material in support of his claim. However, some of it, particularly the connection he forges with the Gottshall Rockshelter in Wisconsin, remains somewhat controversial. He argues that women were important within the Cahokian society, which he believes was constructed on matrilineal lines. This argument is somewhat sketchy, however, relying heavily on the presence of so many female sacrifices. Their presence is further discussed when he theorizes about foreign groups being drawn into the orbit of Cahokia and possibly providing sacrificial subjects. The final great mystery of Cahokia is what happened to the city and its inhabitants. Archaeological evidence suggests that it flourished and was highly successful for

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several hundred years, before disappearing almost as suddenly as it had sprung up. Evidence further suggests that the city emptied very rapidly, its people dispersing almost without a trace. There are indications that groups from Cahokia scattered and settled, taking with them elements of their distinctive culture, but the dispersal was wide. The city’s residents seem to have left in small groups and become absorbed into other native tribes and cultures. Pauketat argues that traces of the Cahokian culture within other native groups persisted into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is almost impossible at present to determine what happened to the people as a whole. Remarkably, there are no stories in the oral histories of neighboring tribes to account for the city’s foundation or for its later disappearance, and Pauketat proposes the possibility of a concerted act of intentional forgetting, for reasons unspecified. Debate persists as to how the Cahokian culture first came into being. Although it appears to share certain similarities with Mesoamerican cultures, particularly in its apparent veneration of the Twin Heroes, no Mesoamerican artifacts have ever been found in Mississippi (with the exception of a few flakes of obsidian). It has been suggested that the similarities between the two cultures emerge from the experiences of a shared background or from a general diffusion of ideas. However, more recently, it has also been suggested that ideas from Mesoamerica were brought into the Mississippi Valley not by land but by sea and river, with Mesoamericans traveling along the coast of Texas and then upriver. This theory does not address the continued lack of artifacts, although some researchers are now suggesting that certain styles of Northern American knife in fact originate in Mesoamerica and might have been brought to the Mississippi by travelers. Many of the mysteries surrounding the foundation and later destruction of Cahokia remain unsolved. It may never be known whether the city’s foundation was precipitated by the supernova of 1054 or whether it was shaped by the needs of ritual cults. Nonetheless, the work of archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists such as Pauketat point to the possibility of even more remarkable discoveries waiting to be made, leading to a fuller understanding of the lives of the mound-builders of Cahokia. Maureen Kincaid Speller

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 21 (July 1, 2009): 23. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 11 (June 1, 2009): 598. Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2009, p. W6.

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CAN POETRY SAVE THE EARTH? A Field Guide to Nature Poems Author: John Felstiner (1936) Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). Illustrated. 396 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Literary history, literary criticism A series of essays engaging British and American poems of the past two centuries that respond to the natural world, demonstrating how environmental concerns were central to the poets’ visions of human existence While there are arguably more people writing competent if not exceptional poetry than at any time since the advent of modern English, there appears to be a paradoxical decrease in the prominence and influence of the poet as a figure of importance in the American cultural community. More than half of U.S. states have a designated poet laureate, but the people occupying these positions are rarely recognizeable to the states’ inhabitants. One factor in this separation is a displacement between the approach of academic commentators and the reasons that literate nonprofessionals read poems. John Felstiner, a professor of literature at Stanford University, addresses this disjunction in Can Poetry Save the Earth? by selecting and discussing nature poems, primarily from the Romantic era to the present. He begins with one of the first nature poems, the biblical book of Genesis, and concludes with the work of one of the most accessible contemporary poets, the pioneering environmental visionary Gary Snyder. These framing selections emphasize a sacred regard for the planet and an encompassing secular engagement with the matter and materials of everyday experience. In his discussions of poems, their authors, and the cultural contexts from which the poems evolved, Felstiner intends not only to answer the question his title poses in the affirmative but also to develop a positive argument for a parallel query: Can an awareness of one’s environment lead to a deeper involvement with all that a poem can provide? Felstiner’s introductory chapter demonstrates his method. It begins with an enthusiastic brief for poetry itself, including familiar quotes such as William Carlos Williams’s impassioned proclamation in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” that It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there

An important facet of “the news” referred to is the history of the destructive misuses of land, water, and living creatures in the United States since the arrival of Europeans

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on the continent. This volume’s convival conversation about poets and their work—marked by neighborly descriptions of poets such as the “boisterous” Dylan Thomas, the “peasant poet” John Clare, and the “Missouri-born T. S. Eliot”—shifts toward a professional historian’s rigorous, informative account of continental dispoilation stemming from a fundamental misunderstanding of how to live in harmony with the landscape. By the end of the opening chapter, Felstiner has effectively illustrated humanity’s devastating disregard for environmental necessities with many statements from the historical record. He has also juxtaposed these statements with observations from poets to demonstrated the ways that a mindful awareness of language—the essence of poetry itself—is a part of a way of seeing that results in an understanding of the natural world. This perspective is one of the reasons he calls his book a “field guide,” linking the explorer’s report on phenomena to the poet’s image-making vision of the cosmos. The heart of Felstiner’s project is a celebration of the capacity to see, understand, and appreciate the “human universe” (in the poet Charles Olson’s term) through language—in conjunction with a guided response to the natural universe calling on all of the senses. The linkage between the perilous condition of Earth’s ecological systems and the endangered or neglected state of poetic discourse beyond a coterie of devotees and initiates shapes Felstiner’s program. In his preface, he declares his intentions to address “every sort of reader,” an ambition common to guidebooks written by experts whose desire to share their knowledge is fired by enthusiasm and fueled by a diligent application of all their senses to the focus of their attention. The book follows the pattern of reports from the field, echoing Robert Duncan’s observation about “the opening of the field” in the mid-twentieth century, when conceptions of poetry and the poet moved outward from what has been called “academically sanctioned formalism” toward a poetics that had its origin in Walt Whitman’s work. In this sense, Felstiner calls for a return to a primal impulse that paralleled the perspective of the English Romantic poets, while introducing an American voice and the vision of a different landmass. Olson characterized the New World by saying, “I take SPACE to be the central fact of man born in America. . . . I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy.” It is through this “SPACE” that Felstiner, in collaboration with the poets whose work is an interaction with its dimensions, intends to guide his readers. By beginning his discussion with the book of Genesis, Felstiner asserts that the environment, in its largest sense, is fundamental to human existence. The focus on the familiar in the lines of the King James Version of the Bible, with an emphasis on God’s judgment that the creation of the earth was “very good,” establishes the sacred center of what Felstiner calls “Singing Ecology unto the Lord.” Felstiner is not just gathering poems that sing in praise of the natural world, however. He notes that,

John Felstiner is a professor of English at Stanford University. His awardwinning translations of Pablo Neruda and Paul Celan have been highly praised, and his biographical and critical study, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (1995) is regarded as the definitive work on the poet.

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where the Old Testament offers humans “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air,” the word “dominion” stems “from the same Hebrew root as ‘tyrant,’ an ominous gift,” but he emphasizes that the “Hebraic legacy also ordains stewardship.” Just as the poems he explores are guides to the natural world, Felstiner’s close and clear readings are designed to be guides to the poems. Each of the forty compact chapters chooses one or two poets and moves within their poems to reveal and illuminate the poets’ relationship with their environment. Recognizing that the primary component of poetic communication is an aural one, Felstiner has included sixty color and black-and-white images in the volume; a full range of response to the environment calls on all of the senses. The abundance of visual material in electronic form now available, the extensive array of digital videos that can bring the poet in performance almost anywhere, has taken poetry beyond the book, just as print took poetry beyond the poet’s speaking voice. This development does not make a book less valuable, but it certainly alters the expectations of what a book can be. In spite of Felstiner’s hope that he will reach “every sort of reader,” a realistic assessment by the Yale University Press would indicate that libraries—especially those affiliated with universities—will be the ones most likely to acquire the book. As an ultimate goal, a paperback prepared for courses with an accompanying compact disc would be a welcome outcome of Felstiner’s project. Visionary professors have already chosen the book as a teaching text, but this imaginative utilization depends on too many factors to be assured. As a start, Felstiner’s illustrations, including “many printed here for the first time,” are an added enticement. He argues, “As long as we know, poetry has aimed to enlighten and delight. So have the visual arts, honing our perception.” With the practice of printing on paper itself endangered, the incorporation of images represents part of a sound strategy for preservation. Many of the book’s illustrations recapitulate a tradition central to Anglo-American literary history. They include a reproduction of a page from John Keats’s manuscript for “To Autumn,” the frontispiece for Walt Whitman’s 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass (1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, 1876, 1881-1882, 1888-1889), the poet young and confident facing the world; a daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson and two pages of her manuscript for “A narrow Fellow in the Grass”; her penmanship is strikingly different from Keats’s, but both are intensely personal. Among the book’s less familiar images, there is a sketch by Gerard Manley Hopkins signed “Balagas, Isle of Man, Aug. 12, ’73”; a group of climbers on Mount Rainer in 1922, with Marianne Moore “third from right”; and a photo by Una Jeffers of Robinson Jeffers and Edna St. Vincent Millay at Hawk Tower, an unexpected alliance. Twelve pages of reproductions in color, superbly reprinted, are set in the center of the volume. They include William Blake’s awesome conception of “Creation” from Europe: A Prophecy (1794); Ansel Adams’s photograph of Big Sur for the cover of Robinson Jeffers’s Not Man Apart (1965); Stanley Kunitz walking in his garden; and an oil painting by Derek Walcott from Breakers, Becune Point (1995). Two prints from Japanese scrolls, meanwhile, point to the sources of Gary Snyder’s poetry. For some readers, these images alone would be worth the price of the book. It is the

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words, however, written, spoken, and sung, that are the essence of a poet’s response to and recreation of the whole earth and beyond. The chapter that concentrates on the anonymous medieval lyric “Western Wind” is crucial for Felstiner’s contention that “speech in the beginning brings all into being.” Likening human speech to the voice of God in Genesis, Felstiner maintains that “secular nature poetry lives if not by the grace of God then by the grace of language.” Felstiner’s close reading of the sound patterns of what he calls a “late medieval fountainhead of the English lyric tradition” leads readers syllable by syllable through the query in the couplet and the prayer closing the quatrain, alert to nuances of rhythm, measure, cadence, and rhyme. It then shows how the sonic structure of “Western Wind” is echoed in Dickinson’s “The Brain is wider than the sky” and in poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Keats. The reading concludes with a discourse on metaphor as motion, citing Bob Dylan’s well-known assertion about an answer “blowin’ in the wind.” This chapter could be seen as a template for the entire text. It is rife with references to other poems that expand one’s understanding of the work under scrutiny, defining and illustrating the terminology that is the vocabulary of poetic discourse. It then moves smoothly toward an intricate examination of how and why a poem operates in a linguistic and cultural field. The cultural component is a crucial element in Felstiner’s reclamation project, because his representation of the lives of the poets as environmental expeditions supports the book’s premise. Thus, William Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth are placed in “England’s semi-wild Lake District,” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge is there with them and walking in the Alps. Whitman exists on the road in America; Dickinson is in New England, her mind everywhere; Robert Frost situates himself in New England; and William Carlos Williams inhabits the American language in one of the book’s strongest chapters. Many other American poets are placed across the continent, leading up to Gary Snyder in the Sierra Nevada, building a house, voyaging across the Pacific, and seeming at home on all the surfaces of the globe. Felstiner concludes the book with a chapter that operates as a capsule biography of Snyder, who is presented as an epitome of the poet as environmental activist, mariner, terrainer, and congenial companion in multiple endeavors. Allen Ginsberg spoke for many when he said in a letter that Snyder is “the only one with a strong sense to find what need be done.” Felstiner follows Snyder’s path as “avid hiker-climber, redneck [his word] logger, seaman, and firewatcher, Amerindian anthropologist . . .” in a long list that winds up with Snyder declared the inheritor of many of the poets cited in previous chapters. Snyder’s characteristically astute endorsement of the book on its back cover, praising Felstiner’s “deep reflections” on poets “seeing the actual world” and telling “the story of the earth” is an accurate assessment of the book, which is not only a “field guide” but also, like Edward Thomas accompanying Robert Frost in the Glouscestershire countryside, a companion one would like to walk with when exploring new places or revisiting fond familiar ones. Can Poetry Save the Earth? is the kind of annotated anthology that returns the

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reader to a poet’s complete works and, like any valuable collection, implicitly invites readers to consider what other poets could have been included. The too-often ignored Appalachian region might have been represented by Charles Wright, for instance, and, while William Butler Yeats is always worth attention, Seamus Heaney’s excavations of Ireland’s soil would have been a fitting complement to the poets herein. The “boisterous” Dylan Thomas’s invocations of the Welsh countryside would also seem to have been a natural choice. Thoughts along these lines are a testament to what Felstiner’s book accomplishes and another of the reasons why it would be appropriate for compilers of introductory textbooks to follow its form, content, and aspirations. Leon Lewis

Review Sources Geographical 81, no. 10 (October, 2009): 57-58. Science 326, no. 5949 (October 2, 2009): 48. The Times Literary Supplement, April 24, 2009, p. 28. World Literature Today 83, no. 6 (November/December, 2009): 75-76.

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THE CANAL BUILDERS Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal Author: Julie Greene (1951) Publisher: Penguin Press (New York). 475 pp. $30.00 Type of work: History A prominent historian describes the daily experience of the workers who constructed the Panama Canal, as well as the social structure created for them In January, 2009, when Barack Obama became the first African American president of the United States, another unprecedented event also took place: Elizabeth Alexander recited her poem “Praise Song for the Day,” celebrating the workers of past generations—including slaves—who created the American infrastructure; “who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,/ . . . built/ brick by brick the glittering edifices . . .” While workers like those honored in Alexander’s poem might well have constructed the building where Obama was sworn in, historically their contributions have been little noted. More common is the sentiment of the poem “Dedication,” composed by Robert Frost for John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961 and forecasting “The glory of a next Augustan age.” In the same vein, histories of the Panama Canal have typically emphasized the engineering feats involved in its construction and the glory reflected on the political and professional leaders who promoted the project. A celebrated 1906 news photograph, featured in at least three major books on the history of the canal, shows a white-suited President Theodore Roosevelt atop a giant Bucyrus steam shovel at the building site. The picture, says University of Maryland historian Julie Greene, “telegraphed to the world the importance of the Panama Canal project.” Like Alexander, Greene shifts attention from the planners to the builders: “Absent from the picture,” she notes, “are the thousands of workingmen who actually dug the canal.” Greene details the lives of those workers in The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal. Her account of their daily experience seeks to supplant, or at least supplement, the “tale enshrined in popular memory and innumerable histories and novels” about “breakthroughs in medicine, technology, and science and wise engineering decisions” which, “according to traditional accounts of the project, allowed the United States to succeed where France had failed” in its attempt to build a canal during the 1880’s. Greene’s additional goal is to demonstrate that it was the “human rather than the technological or scientific dimensions of the project” that presented the greatest challenge to the project’s leaders. The tremendous size and diversity of the workforce—up to sixty thousand workers from some 105 countries around the world—created an unprecedented test of efficient social order in the Canal Zone. During the construction period, from 1904 to 1914, the popular image of the Canal Zone—fostered by contemporary journalists—was one of an ideal progressive soci-

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ety, a model of efficiency and social justice. Progressives of the era believed that the strong Julie Greene has authored Pure and government role in the canal project validated Simple Politics: The American theories of “scientific socialism,” of highly Federation of Labor and Political productive government-run ventures that also Activism, 1881-1917 (1998) and delivered social services to workers and the coedited Labor Histories: Class, community. Expectations ran high: The zone Politics, and the Diversity of the was to offer “a display of America’s domestic Working-Class Experience (1998). She is a founding editor of the journal strengths in a world setting” and “progressivLabor. ism for the world.” Greene evaluates this image, drawing on a large amount of newly unearthed archival material to show that nothing turned out as expected for either the project managers or the laborers. Workers came from all over the world anticipating high wages, a healthy diet, and comfortable living quarters. The project leadership, in turn, expected a docile, manageable workforce. In reality, employees were divided into two categories: those paid in gold and those paid in silver. The “gold” workers—typically white American skilled craftsmen—received better wages and living accommodations, while “silver” workers—mostly unskilled laborers from outside the United States— tended to receive lower wages and often substandard living quarters. If the system was not racist to begin with, it became so in time, owing to continual reclassification of individuals or groups of workers along racial lines. Death from disease or accidental injury was an everyday occurrence in the Canal Zone. More than five thousand workers perished before the project was completed. Managers also faced unexpected obstacles. The workers whom management expected to be so tractable—especially those from Spain and the West Indies—proved resourceful in getting around the rules and fomenting labor strife when they felt shortchanged. In response, the project’s leaders took a divide-and-conquer approach toward workers. Greene argues that there is a strong connection between the racist, exploitive treatment of the Panama Canal workers and the rise of U.S. imperialism generally. This rise was fostered by victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898, which established the United States as a world power. As Greene sees it, the patronizing attitude toward other countries of larger-than-life figures such as Roosevelt and George Washington Goethals, the final chief engineer of the canal project, was mirrored in the Americans’ attitudes toward Canal Zone workers. Greene’s chapter titles pinpoint the vital issues looming throughout the construction period. For example, the chapters “A Modern State in the Tropics” and “Progressivism for the World” detail the quest for economic and political efficiency that was a hallmark of the era’s progressive movement. Greene reveals anew the coercive side of progressivism that is often at odds with the movement’s democratic ideals. The progressive tactic of placing power in the hands of professional administrators such as Goethals often meant reducing the power of individual citizens. Those workers who were not U.S. citizens—such as the numerous ones from Jamaica and Barbados— seemingly had no power at all over their own lives. Greene notes that such attitudes

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about citizenship persist in the present: On a recent cruise through the Canal Zone, she found the ship’s crew racially divided between Europeans and Filipinos, as each group received significantly different living and working conditions and rates of pay. The chapter titled “Silver Lives” shows how the International Canal Commission (ICC), the project’s governing body, “searched the globe for a source of tractable workers. They settled on the West Indians as the most obedient workers they could feasibly bring to the Canal Zone,” but, she continues, “Once on the isthmus, West Indians set out to shape the world around them.” Finding the employer-provided food almost inedible, they opted to live outside the Canal Zone in Panamanian cities, where they could choose their own fare. They also frequently changed jobs and locations in search of better working conditions and higher pay. Sometimes, they also changed their names to avoid fines, imprisonment, or deportation—all common penalties for abandoning their old jobs. Stymied by the West Indians’ subtle strategies, which Greene says the ICC never truly grasped, canal officials began to recruit Spaniards instead as a more biddable source of labor. As recounted in Greene’s chapter “Lay Down Your Shovels,” Spanish laborers posed even greater challenges to management. Part of the difficulty stemmed from their indignation at being classified as “silver” workers along with the West Indians, to whom they felt superior. In this case, the divide-and-conquer strategy toward workers backfired on management, culminating in strikes and a major riot in 1912. Greene concedes that the strategy “also created a barrier to more widespread solidarities that might have empowered canal workers [and] given rise to a more potent labor movement.” A major strength of The Canal Builders is its powerful portrayal of the racial arrogance and economic exploitation that underlay the idealized canal project. However, the account is hampered by Greene’s perception—not original with her—of the canal project as a type of proving ground for America’s design to dominate the world. The new route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans gave the United States tremendous military and commercial advantages, but Greene implies that the canal, in itself, served as the origin of a drive to global dominance. It was more likely a reflection of aspirations already long established. Moreover, Greene does not make a case that the hard lot of Canal Zone workers was worse than that of laborers in the United States, whose shameful working conditions were documented, for example, in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), which dealt with the Chicago meatpacking industry. The difference between Chicago and Panama lay primarily in the unjustifiable boasts about the Canal Zone as a workers’ haven. Greene rightly rebuts the myth of the canal as wholly an epic achievement of topechelon engineers and managers. However, Greene wrongly implies that hers is the only history of the canal that looks beyond engineering marvels to the plight of the workers. For example, she characterizes David McCullough, author of the seminal 1976 volume The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 18701914 as fixated on the success of American engineers in confronting landslides and floods and on their development of a particularly strong and durable form of concrete for the canal locks. “The canal, he concluded, is ‘an extraordinary work of civiliza-

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tion.’” McCullough himself may have helped create this false impression of his book through a series of interviews and public speeches. The book itself, however, takes a comprehensive approach toward the challenges of design, engineering, and disease control, in addition to the plight of the workers and the unjust, often racist, solutions to labor issues employed by management. He describes “canvas cot[s] in an unfurnished, often miserably small room with five or six others . . . for unskilled black workers” and the “meager, monotonous, high-priced” food provided to them in the zone. Even Matthew Parker’s Panama Fever (2007), which generally celebrates the American triumph of engineering, includes an extensive chapter on racial and economic injustices in the Canal Zone—and Roosevelt’s dismay over those injustices. Thus, Greene is not alone in calling attention to the struggle of unskilled workers. The epigraph to Greene’s book is Bertolt Brecht’s poem “Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters” (1936; “A Worker Reads History,” 1947). Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are filled with the names of kings. Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? . . .

This passage does for the canal project what Elizabeth Alexander’s poem did for President Obama’s inauguration. Greene, as she asserts of herself, “tells a different story.” The story she tells is the story of the workers, their enormous diversity, their long journeys from other parts of the world in search of opportunity in the Canal Zone, their work and their leisure, their dwelling places, their squabbles with neighbors, their social life, and even their daily diet. There is more: Greene is, after all, a scholar, and her skill with anecdotal detail is reinforced not only by the previously unrevealed archival material with which she works but also by extensive scholarly annotation and an appendix that sorts the Canal Zone’s labor population by country of origin and gender. Greene portrays many individuals whose contributions to what Roosevelt called “the greatest work of the kind ever attempted” might not otherwise be fully chronicled. Without her meticulous depiction, these thousands of workers in the period 1904-1914 could be forgotten. That is enough to make The Canal Builders as significant an achievement as that of the people whose lives Greene portrays. Thomas Rankin

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 11 (February 1, 2009): 12. The Economist 390, no. 8620 (February 28, 2009): 89. Foreign Affairs 88, no. 3 (May/June, 2009): 176-177. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 23 (December 1, 2008): 1241-1242. Library Journal 134, no. 3 (February 15, 2009): 116. The New York Times Book Review, March 29, 2009, p. 11. Times Higher Education, April 2, 2009, p. 49.

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CASTLE Author: J. Robert Lennon (1970) Publisher: Graywolf Press (St. Paul, Minn.). 234 pp. $22.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 2006 Locale: In and near Gerrysburg, in upstate New York A man returns after a considerable absence to his hometown in upstate New York and is beset with a series of mysteries and inexplicable threats Principal characters: Eric Loesch, a man in midlife who returns home and purchases an old house and surrounding woods Doctor Avery Stiles, a former professor at a local university who knew Loesch in his childhood and had a profound effect on the boy Brian Loesch, Eric’s janitor father, who worked at Stiles’s university Cybele Loesch, Eric’s deeply depressed and dysfunctional mother

J. Robert Lennon’s Castle begins innocently enough, as Eric Loesch returns to his rural hometown and purchases a rundown house and 612 acres of adjoining forest. Loesch buys the land on an impulse and begins the process of restoring the property and presumably settling in to familiar surroundings. However, the familiar quickly becomes dangerously unfamiliar. Loesch is something of a handyman and methodically restores the dilapidated property and begins exploring his densely forested land. For the most part, he keeps to himself, but when he does interact with residents in nearby Gerrysburg, insults and misunderstandings abound. Loesch has a knack for alienating everyone, including his older sister when she drops by for a visit. Loesch is obsessed with a giant rock in the center of his property, and when exploring the woods he becomes horribly disoriented and fascinated with a pure white deer. When the title to his property arrives, he discovers that the rock and a small surrounding parcel belong to an owner whose name has been obliterated. Eventually, he discovers the identity of the owner—a former professor at nearby SUNY Milan who disappeared years ago. A series of bizarre events and threatening omens ensue, and Loesch is convinced someone has invaded his privacy and is threatening him. During one of his explorations, he discovers that a castle has been built adjacent to the giant rock. While investigating the structure, he is knocked unconscious, and he awakens to find himself incarcerated in a cage at the hands of a septuagenarian professor. At this point, the novel oscillates between incidents from Loesch’s childhood, when he was used as a subject for personality experiments by the bizarre professor,

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and his present adventures in the woods. De tails of his troubled childhood, his parents’ J. Robert Lennon is the author of The dreadful marriage and deaths, and his recent Light of Falling Stars (1997), The past overwhelm Loesch. Some of the myster- Funnies (1999), On the Night Plain ies about his unsociability are explained, as (2001), Pieces for the Left Hand: One Hundred Anecdotes (2005), Happyland he comes to terms with his past. The novel’s title invites comparisons with (2006), and Mailman (2003), his Franz Kafka’s last, unfinished work, Das greatest critical success. He teaches writing at Cornell University. Schloss (1926; The Castle, 1930), and al though the two novels are markedly different, they do share a surreal similarity. Lennon’s novel appears straightforward on the surface, until Loesch attempts to plumb the mystery of the anonymous owner of the adjacent property. When he receives a letter bearing only the name Doctor Avery Stiles, the narrator remarks that “the sight of those words caused my stomach to turn over” (93). This remark comes with no context to explain it. Other surreal occurrences gradually mount until readers realize that the seemingly straightforward narrative is no longer so straightforward. In his few encounters with locals, Loesch reveals himself to be thoroughly inept socially. In response to their affable, inquisitive remarks, the protagonist is defensive and downright confrontational, and his responses are utterly inappropriate. Still another odd occurrence involves the appearance at key moments of the mysterious white doe that guides Loesch to safety. These scenes are simply inexplicable, as are the strange noises, halfopened doors, and shadowy presences in and around the house. Along with Loesch’s fear of his basement, these episodes provoke questions that are never conclusively answered. Furthermore, the shifts between the present and past and the series of flashbacks that gradually predominate the story create an unsettling lack of narrative stability. These odd dislocations, however, appear to be Lennon’s point. The past and present merge in the text, and a clear division between reality and fantasy is never established. In many respects, Castle can be read as an inverted bildungsroman wherein the gradual movement from youth to maturity is displaced by a tracing from midlife to the protagonist’s early beginnings. Roughly the first half of the novel exists in the present, as Loesch establishes his connections with his new house, and a good deal of attention is given to the mundane matters of renovating and setting up a new home. As Loesch explores the nearly impenetrable surrounding woods and the mystery of his neighbor’s deed, readers similarly explore his tangled childhood. His family life is nothing short of horrific. He witnesses his parents’ ceaseless quarrels and sorrows and his sister’s rebellion and separation from home. Loesch’s father submits the boy, against his wife’s objections, to the stern professor’s experiments. These events match the oft-repeated pattern of an initiate in a bildungsroman being instructed by a surrogate parent in the ways of the world and the means of his eventual survival. As young Pip in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (serial, 1860-1861; book, 1861) is frightened and aided by the mysterious con-

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vict Magwitch, Loesch is terrified and abused by Stiles, who inflicts his version of B. F. Skinner’s radical behaviorism on the boy. Through punishments, coercion, and the torture of small animals, Stiles believes he is imparting major lessons to his subject. He warns the impressionable boy, . . . you will have to free yourself of all personal sentiment. A day will come when misplaced empathy could lead, I’m afraid, to your death. In what we think of as the civilized world—a world, I must inform you, Eric, that is soon to collapse into chaos and lawlessness—it is a virtue to do no harm. In the world to come, it will be a skill as valuable to you as the ability to start a fire, or build a shelter.

Despite the professor’s most perverse efforts, Loesch has not been equipped with strengths and abilities as much as with resentments and proclivities for violence and misanthropy. In the end, his strengths are revealed to be deeply intertwined with his greatest weaknesses. To the consternation of many reviewers, Castle is difficult to categorize, being neither a gothic tale, nor a traditional suspense novel, nor a hair-raising thriller. It is, by turns, each of these, as well as a psychological exploration of the deep recesses of the mind and heart. Like almost any psychiatric patient, Loesch and his own motivations are mysteries to himself. His alienation from others, which he views as a matter of preference rather than emotional incapacity, is a hint at his obtuseness. While hardly a typical Freudian analysis, the novel does explore a young man’s difficulties with his father, his sympathy for his mother, and the complicated connections to his personal past. The enigmatic white doe exists as a creature native to upstate New York and possibly a prophetic beast from Native American lore, but it is also a projection of something far more personal to the protagonist. It is a symbol of Loesch’s innocence and vulnerability, that fragile self he was forced to abandon years ago. The identification is nowhere more evident than when the creature guides him to safety, “I felt as though the woods were mine—that I knew every twig, every bramble and pebble, every handful of earth, by heart. It was as though I were dreaming.” This is the one figure that can rescue him at his most confused moments and the only physical presence for which he has any empathy or concern. The numerous irresolvabilities of the novel—whether Loesch’s father deliberately or accidentally killed his wife and then committed suicide, whether the professor has lived in the woods for decades after his dismissal from the university, whether he captures the protagonist on his last foray into the woods, whether he is killed at the end, and what exactly happens to Loesch in the concluding scene—have less to do with external events and explanations than they have to do with the protagonist’s internal journey. He must confront the recesses of his own mind, which is oppressed by the dreadful burdens of his past. The novel’s major weakness issues from the concluding chapters concerning Loesch’s military adventures in a detention center in Iraq. The attempt to fuse the topical atrocities of Islamic prisoners subjected to torture in the prison at Abu Ghraib with the tale of Loesch’s emotional and psychological dislocation is a bit too pat. His

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service is presented as the culmination of the professor’s behavioral experiments and his attempts to fashion Loesch as an empowered, unsympathetic warrior. Even as the answer to the novel’s grand secret, however, these sections advance little. Loesch is a desperate, troubled soul who can find no peace until he confronts his own grief and contradictions, and the overly dramatic template of combat atrocities is unnecessary to dramatize pain and psychological dissolution. In spite of this fault, Lennon is a clever writer who makes good use of the firstperson narrator. The reader constantly questions the protagonist’s reliability, and such dubiousness creates much of the novel’s suspense. In relating events, Loesch does not dissemble or misrepresent, though he often withholds information for the sake of dramatic tension. When the narrator confronts Stiles, his “nemesis,” on the edge of the great rock, he remains dense, though readers can see matters with greater clarity. The scene is reminiscent of many from doppelgänger stories, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), in which the protagonist finally confronts and does battle with his twin. Stiles clarifies the issue and the tensions in the novel when he says, “The fact is, Eric, that you cannot restore your own life by killing me. Furthermore, your life doesn’t need to be restored. . . . It merely needs to be seized. And my life—my life was never here to be taken.” The clues have been available all along, and the mystery of Loesch is finally dispelled. David W. Madden

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 13 (March 1, 2009): 22. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 4 (February 15, 2009): 168. Library Journal 134, no. 5 (March 15, 2009): 95. Los Angeles Times, April 5, 2009, p. E7. The New York Times Book Review, May 24, 2009, p. 17. The New Yorker 85, no. 20 (July 6, 2009): 85. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 4 (January 26, 2009): 99.

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CATCHER How the Man Behind the Plate Became an American Folk Hero Author: Peter Morris (1962) Publisher: Ivan R. Dee (Chicago). 386 pp. $27.50 Type of work: History Time: 1850’s to the early twentieth century Locale: United States A sprightly history of the catcher’s changing role, from baseball’s formative years to the beginning of the modern era Principal personages: Jim “Deacon” White, a catcher, perhaps the greatest professional baseball player of the nineteenth century Henry Chadwick, an influential sportswriter Nat Hicks, a leading catcher of the 1870’s Charley Bennett, Buck Ewing, and Mike “King” Kelly, the three leading catchers of the 1880’s

Peter Morris has established himself as the leading historian of early baseball. With Catcher: How the Man Behind the Plate Became an American Folk Hero, he consolidates that reputation. Morris traces the evolution of the catcher’s role from baseball’s beginnings into the early twentieth century. Along the way, he connects changing perceptions of the catcher to larger changes in American society (sometimes persuasively, sometimes not). The story he tells is entertaining, unpredictable, and thoroughly absorbing. Morris begins with a prologue of sorts, recounting the experience of Stephen, a young man born in 1871. Bright, slight of stature, fiercely competitive, and somewhat alienated, this young man loves baseball and in particular the catcher’s position. He is good enough to be the starting catcher for Syracuse University, which he attends before dropping out to become a journalist and, before long, a novelist. Morris reveals with a flourish that he is describing Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War (1895). In Morris’s telling, Crane’s “obsession with being a baseball catcher” is not simply an interesting bit of trivia. Rather, Morris argues, Crane in this respect stands for his generation: “Mastery of the intricacies of the [catcher’s] position was seen by American boys who came of age in the 1870’s and 1880’s as the ultimate embodiment of courage, leadership, resolve, and daring—in short, it was their initiation into manhood.” Morris frames this assertion with a rapid overview of American conceptions of heroism from the colonial era to the late nineteenth century. He acknowledges his

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debt to the work of historian Richard Slotkin for this overview. Some readers, finding this Peter Morris is the author of several account of the “American hero” heavy on books on the history of baseball, clichés, may be tempted to stop right there. including Baseball Fever (2003), A That would be their loss, however, for even if Game of Inches (2006), Level Playing one rejects the notion of an entire post-Civil Field (2007), and But Didn’t We Have War generation of boys desperately in search Fun? (2008). He is a former national of a way to enter manhood, Morris is thor- and international Scrabble champion. oughly convincing when he argues that, for many young men of this era, the catcher had an aura that attracted admiration and emulation. Morris traces that aura to the 1850’s, when baseball—still in its formative stage— came in two primary flavors: the New York Game and the Massachusetts Game. There were a number of differences between the two (both in rules and in style or attitude), but among the most salient was that in the Massachusetts Game the pitcher and catcher had greater impacts relative to the other positions in the field. At the same time, in the Massachusetts Game, the catcher—who was positioned much closer to the batter than was his counterpart in the New York Game—was far more vulnerable to injury. It was in part for this reason, Morris suggests, that by the end of the Civil War the New York Game had become dominant. Another concern was the fear that it would be too easy to throw games if only two positions were inordinately important for their outcomes. In the New York Game, the pitcher had a role very different from the likes of Walter Johnson, Bob Feller, Sandy Koufax, and Tim Lincecum. The rules specified that the ball was to be pitched underhand. The pitcher’s job was to put the ball in play. The catcher typically stood well behind the batter, hands protected (if at all) by thin gloves no thicker than today’s batting gloves that generally covered the palms. The technique was to stand with legs slightly bent, hands cupped together, ready to catch the ball with the fingers (rather than on the palm, as would later catchers equipped with mitts). It was not a particularly inspiring role. Even as the New York Game became generally accepted, changes were underway. Pitchers, growing restive under the restrictions, began to deliver the ball a bit higher, then higher still. Before long, average scores decreased as pitchers began to be more dominant. Meanwhile, catchers, who had already begun to move closer to the batter in certain strategic situations, now had to deal with much faster pitches. A fast pitcher could only be effective with a battery-mate who was able to handle his deliveries. (As Casey Stengel put it, in a line that Morris uses for the book’s epigraph, “You have to have a catcher or you’ll have a lot of passed balls.”) At the same time that the catcher became much more subject to injury (Morris includes photos of veteran catcher’s hands), the demand for outstanding skill at the position skyrocketed. Thus were born the first two archetypes Morris proposes: “The Catcher as Tough Guy,” stoically absorbing brutal punishment to his hands (not to mention his chest and legs—anywhere the ball might land with great force) and “The Catcher as Indispensable.” Flourishing teams whose catcher was injured sank into mediocrity over-

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night. From these archetypes proceeded a third, “The Catcher as One in a Million.” There was, Morris shows, a “mystique” associated with the position, expressed in various forms (including the notion of a special affinity between certain catchers and pitchers). By the mid-1870’s, baseball was ruled by the pitcher-catcher combination even more thoroughly than had been the case in the heyday of the Massachusetts Game. Scoring became scarcer than ever. For some observers, the nadir came in 1877 with a twenty-four-inning scoreless tie in a game between Harvard University and a professional team. The reaction against so-called scientific baseball became an outcry. Rule changes helped redress the balance. The pitching mound was moved farther from home plate, and a livelier ball was introduced (a move that would be repeated in the early twentieth century). Meanwhile, protective devices were introduced that made catchers less vulnerable (and hence more easily replaceable). The catcher’s mask was introduced in 1876 by a Harvard student, James Tyng, and refinements on his design soon followed. First used in a professional game in 1877, the mask was in general use by the following season. Several years later, in 1883, Detroit catcher Charley Bennett wore a chest protector made by his wife. Soon thereafter, inventor William Gray (who later created the pay telephone) devised an inflatable padded protector. By the end of the 1884 season, most major league catchers were wearing chest protectors. Finally, between 1884 and 1886, catchers began to change their technique, using primitive mitts to catch the ball on the palm instead of cradling it in the fingers. By 1888, mitts resembling the modern version were in use. Although these innovations won quick acceptance, they also provoked a great deal of scorn from sportswriters, fans, and catchers of the old school. Morris shows how these changes affected the image of the catcher in the popular imagination, very much for the worse. This was true despite the fact that—even with a mask, a chest protector, and a stout mitt—the catcher was still subject to injury and wear and tear in a way that other players simply were not. Part of what makes Morris such an enjoyable historian is a certain obsessive determination in following trails uncovered in his research, even when they seem to be leading rather far afield from the main line of his argument. One example in this book is the chapter titled “The Catcher as Desperado.” Noticing a number of cases in which catchers or former catchers committed odd crimes or otherwise acted in aberrant fashion, Morris wonders if repeated blows to the head or a single particularly drastic blow (of a sort that many catchers suffered) could account at least in part for this pattern. The increased attention now being given to the long-term effect of concussions among players in the National Football League lends some credence to the argument. Morris cannot resist following this chapter with an entire chapter devoted to the particularly bizarre case of one catcher who ran amok: “Harry Decker, the Don Juan of Shaven Head.” The 1890’s, the decade in which Stephen Crane played catcher briefly at Syracuse, saw a decline in public esteem for the position. The decline owed in some degree to the protections afforded the catcher, but it also suggests that not as many outstanding

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players were gravitating to the backstop in those years. Morris notes that, even during the 1880’s, of the three leading catchers of the period—Charley Bennett, Buck Ewing, and Mike “King” Kelly—only Bennett was a catcher pure and simple. In the course of their careers, both Ewing and Kelly (the only two nineteenth century catchers in the Hall of Fame) played more than half of their games at other positions. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, however—the beginning of the modern era for major league baseball—catching enjoyed a renaissance, as the position was redefined in ways that have not radically changed since then. There were changes in technique, the most significant of which was adopting the now familiar crouch behind the plate. Before the twentieth century, the vast majority of catchers stood with knees slightly bent, in a stooped posture. The crouch allowed the catcher to deal more effectively with new pitches such as the spitball (pitches that tended to break downward out of the strike zone) while protecting himself from injury. The crouch also allowed catchers to shield their signals to the pitcher and the infielders. Apart from these and other changes in technique, the role of the catcher as the field general—not previously unknown, but not so definitive of the position—was fully established during this period. It was an era, Morris notes, when a number of the most outstanding managers were former catchers, setting a precedent that endures to this day. Following the main text of his book, Morris includes an appendix in which he makes a very strong case that Jim “Deacon” White should be in the Hall of Fame along with Ewing, Kelly, and the other great catchers already enshrined. He then provides endnotes—almost seventy pages of them and worth every page. Morris the tireless researcher, Morris the raconteur, and Morris the fan meet happily in these notes, which readers will find particularly worthwhile. John Wilson

Review Sources Christianity Today 53, no. 9 (September, 2009): 82. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 8 (February 23, 2009): 47.

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CHEEVER A Life Author: Blake Bailey (1963) Publisher: Knopf (New York). 770 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Literary biography Time: 1912-1982 Locale: Boston; New York City and Westchester County, New York; Rome, Italy An exhaustive and insightful study of one of the leading American short-story writers of the twentieth century, a man whose happiness was always shadowed by self-doubt Principal personages: John Cheever, a short-story writer and novelist Mary Winternitz Cheever, his wife of forty-one years Susan Cheever, their first child, a writer, author of the memoir Home Before Dark (1984) Benjamin Cheever, their older son, also a writer, editor of The Letters of John Cheever (1988) Federico (Fred) Cheever, their third child, a law professor Malcolm Cowley, The New Republic editor who helped Cheever early in his career William Maxwell, Cheever’s editor at The New Yorker for many years

John Cheever was one of America’s most acclaimed writers in the middle decades of the twentieth century. He wrote more than 500 short stories and published 121 of them in the country’s premier periodical for short fiction, The New Yorker, between 1935 and 1981. He was the subject of a Time magazine cover story in 1964 on the occasion of the publication of his second novel, The Wapshot Scandal, and thirteen years later appeared on the cover of Newsweek when his fourth novel, Falconer (1977), was published. His collected stories won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1979, and several stories were made into films (such as “The Swimmer”) and teleplays (“The Housebreaker of Shady Hill”). Cheever traveled the world as a famous American writer and was particularly revered in Soviet bloc countries. Despite his apparent successes, Cheever was tormented by private demons and filled his voluminous journals with detailed descriptions of his loneliness and self-pity. He loved the rituals of family life but showed little affection for his wife and three children. He could be a charming and witty raconteur, as well as a mean, pompous bore. A chain smoker and alcoholic for most of his adult life, he was tormented by his own bisexuality and hated homosexuals.

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Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life, which was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in biogra- Blake Bailey published a biography of phy, is an exhaustive study of Cheever that novelist Richard Yates in 2003 and explicates the gap between his public self and edited the two-volume edition of John his private hell and does much to explain how Cheever’s works published by Library Cheever’s inner conflicts were forged into his of America in 2009. He has written for art. The story of Cheever’s life is not always The New York Times, the New York pretty, but it is compelling, and the biogra- Observer, and Slate. pher employs both empathy and insightful analysis. Cheever would often brag about his family’s distinguished New England lineage, but their notable accomplishments ended long before Cheever was born in 1912. His father was a failed salesman who Cheever believed detested his second son. His mother was a gift-shop owner who showed him little tenderness. Cheever felt his childhood was miserable, never finished high school, and soon fled Quincy, Massachusetts, for Boston and then for New York. He befriended editor Malcolm Cowley and other writers and artists, including photographer Walker Evans, poet E. E. Cummings, and novelist Josephine Herbst. On the basis of his early fiction, Cheever was invited to the artists’ colony at Yaddo, near Saratoga, New York, in 1934, the first of many visits over the next half century. (It is significant that Cheever, who at the end of his life was on the colony’s board of directors, called Yaddo “the only place I’ve ever felt at home.”) His first New Yorker story was published in 1935, and his career was launched. Cheever worked on the Federal Writers’ Project in Washington, D.C., and then New York to help support himself at the end of the 1930’s. His story “Frere Jacques” (1939) was published in The Best Short Stories of 1939, and by 1940, with the help of New Yorker fiction editor and friend William Maxwell, he was averaging almost a story per month in the magazine. A year later, his first collection of stories, The Way Some People Live (1941), appeared. The same year, he married Mary Winternitz. He spent three and a half years serving in World War II, mostly in writing units. His first child, Susan, was born in 1943; his first son, Benjamin, was born five years later; and his last child, Federico, was born in 1957. By the late 1940’s, Cheever had become one of the best fiction writers at The New Yorker (along with J. D. Salinger and Irwin Shaw) and thus in the United States. “The Enormous Radio” (1947), one of his best stories, was published during this time. Cheever’s marriage was not happy, however, in part because of his drinking and his conflicted sexuality, and he felt frustrated that he could not finish a novel. In 1951, the Cheevers moved from New York City to Scarborough, Westchester County, New York, near the street that would inspire the title of one of the best novels about postwar suburbia, Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961). Cheever’s second collection of stories, The Enormous Radio, and Other Stories was published in 1953, and he began to produce the “Shady Hill” stories about uppermiddle-class suburban life (including “The Five-Forty-Eight,” 1954, and “O Youth and Beauty!” 1953) for which he would become famous. Bailey argues that these stories contained “a tone of detached gaiety—a tone most characteristic of Cheever’s

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mature greatness, a playfulness that would lead him at last to The Wapshot Chronicle,” Cheever’s first novel, published in 1957. Cheever’s apparent success, however, disguised his alcoholism (he was now often drunk before lunch), his impotence, his deteriorating marriage, and his terror of homosexuality. His success did lift the Cheevers from genteel poverty. Cheever’s “The Country Husband” (1954) won first prize in the O. Henry Awards, was included in The Best American Short Stories of 1954, and was adapted for Playhouse 90 on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). Film rights to his “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” (1956) were purchased by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) for twenty-five thousand dollars. The Wapshot Chronicle won the 1958 National Book Award, but it also alienated Cheever from some of his Scarborough neighbors, who felt he had mined their lives for his satirical, often eccentric characters. In 1961, the Cheevers moved to Ossining, a few miles up the Hudson River. Cheever’s success continued: He published more stories—including “The Swimmer” (1964), perhaps his most famous—and placed some in better-paying magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Playboy. He also published more short-story collections (for example, The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, 1964) and his second novel, The Wapshot Scandal (1964). Cheever had an affair with the actress Hope Lange and traveled to Russia (with his New Yorker colleague John Updike, among others), but his successes could hardly mask what Bailey calls throughout this biography Cheever’s cafard, a French term for melancholy and boredom. In the late 1960’s, he made his first visit to a psychiatrist. The doctor diagnosed him as “egocentric,” “narcissistic,” and “evasive,” but for the next ten years he would continue to cripple himself with alcohol and his wife would begin to find her own life outside their marriage. He taught at nearby Sing Sing prison, as well as at the University of Iowa and Boston University. Finally, however, his drinking prevented him from functioning. Updike had to take over his classes at Boston University in the spring of 1975, and his younger son Federico was often his caretaker at home. A series of hospitalizations for seizures and heart problems finally led to Cheever’s sobriety. In 1977, he published Falconer (based in large part on his Sing Sing experience) and appeared on the cover of Newsweek, an issue that included an interview with him conducted by Susan, then a staff writer at the magazine. Bailey writes that Falconer was “a tabulation of his own singular afflictions, ordered as a parable of sin and redemption,” but it did not resolve Cheever’s own inner torments. His sobriety seems to have released his homosexuality, and he entered into a series of relationships with younger men, but these canceled neither his loneliness nor his self-pity. The Stories of John Cheever was published to great acclaim in 1978 and garnered a number of awards, including his first Pulitzer Prize, but his acquisition of wealth and status only made him more affected and boring. In one of his most telling journal entries, Cheever wrote, I was born into no true class, and it was my decision, early in life, to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission and to have taken my disguises too seriously.

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Cheever died of cancer in 1982. As Bailey notes, Cheever felt some remorse about his treatment of his children and tried to confess his sins to them toward the end of his life. It was only after his death, however, that they had recourse to his journals and could read his account of an anguished inner life. Susan wrote the powerful memoir Home Before Dark in 1984 as her own catharsis of her childhood, and Ben edited The Letters of John Cheever (including graphic letters to lovers of both sexes) in 1988 to make his own peace with his father. The journals were sold to Knopf and excerpts were published in The New Yorker in 1990 and 1991 and as a book in October, 1991. The critic Jonathan Yardley called them “the record of a man so enchained within the prison of self that he was never able to embrace others, even those he most loved.” Cheever’s story is a sad and depressing one, yet Bailey keeps readers interested by focusing on his fiction and its relationship to his life. There is no question that Cheever was one of the greatest practitioners of the American short story: He has been called the American Anton Chekhov, a reference to the great nineteenth century Russian writer, and Yardley calls Cheever’s stories an “essential monument of American literature.” Examples such as “The Country Husband” and “The Swimmer” continue to be included in anthologies of short fiction. His novels, however, have slipped in critical estimation, and Bailey pinpoints the problems with structure and sentimentality that account for this slippage. Like William Faulkner, Cheever was an autodidact who mythologized certain American landscapes and whose “tone of remote pessimism” captured a mid-century moment in American life. Bailey details Cheever’s relationships to other important twentieth century writers and identifies his place among them. Cheever resented the writer whom he perhaps resembled the most, his New Yorker colleague John Updike. In the end, however, they were friendly, and Updike gave the eulogy at Cheever’s funeral. Just before his own death, Updike reviewed Bailey’s biography of Cheever in The New Yorker. The contemporary writer toward whom Cheever was most magnanimous was Saul Bellow, perhaps because the two writers wrote for different audiences. (Mary Cheever has another explanation for their closeness, Bailey writes: “They were both women haters.”) Cheever detested the experimental fiction of John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and others who started to crowd him out of The New Yorker in the late 1960’s and the 1970’s, but he lived to see their postmodernist star fade. Bailey understands that Cheever’s talent came out of his inner conflicts: an insatiable need for love and approval, a split personality, and ambivalence toward the world. In Cheever, memory and imagination were not two faculties but one, Bailey argues, which is why a study of his life necessarily entails a study of his literature—or, as Bailey’s volume shows, why an understanding of the literature can start in the life. David Peck

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 5 (November 1, 2008): 4. The Economist 390 (March 14, 2009): 86-87. Harper’s Magazine 318 (April, 2009): 71-76. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 23 (December 1, 2008): 1232-1233. Los Angeles Times, March 8, 2009, p. 1. The New York Times Book Review, March 15, 2009, p. 1. The New Yorker 85, no. 4 (March 9, 2009): 73-75. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 47 (November 24, 2008): 45. Time 173, no. 13 (April 6, 2009): 64. The Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2009, p. W8.

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CHRONIC Author: D. A. Powell (1963) Publisher: Graywolf Press (St. Paul, Minn.). 79 pp. $20.00 Type of work: Poetry A striking poetic examination of how to survive tragedy and heartbreak in a world where AIDS, turmoil, and personal angst seemingly are always close at hand Although born in the South, D. A. Powell has come to be identified more with the West, especially California. He studied at the prestigious Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. After graduating from the program, Powell began a teaching career that has included stints at several universities, including Columbia University, San Francisco State University, and Harvard University. Since 2004, Powell has taught at the University of San Francisco as a member of its English department. Powell’s first poetry collection, Tea, was published in 1998. He wrote powerfully about the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic in this volume, and he has gained a reputation for taking chances as a poet. Through his experimentations, Powell is able to mix a variety of poetic techniques. His reputation as a poet worth watching mature continued to grow with the publication of his second collection, Lunch (2000), and his third collection, Cocktails (2004). He was praised by critics and readers alike for his originality and poetic dexterity. Powell’s first three collections can be read as a trilogy on living as a gay person in a world where AIDS has ravaged the human landscape. The poet understands that it is never easy to be gay or African American in the United States. Powell is both, and he constantly is wrestling with his place in contemporary American culture. For all the tragedy and confusion surrounding the world that he inhabits, Powell still has not given up on life. As a person and as a poet, he can take pleasure in beauty, in playfulness, and in heated sexuality. Even with all the pitfalls, the health concerns, and the betrayals he encounters, Powell seeks dignity, poetic justice, and fulfillment in love. Powell is adamant that one should take full advantage of both the spirit and the carnal. It is striking that he examines what it means to be happy and how one should resolve issues of sadness and contempt. Having to live with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) on a daily basis remains close to the surface in Chronic, as it has in his earlier collections, but in this volume he broadens his approach, looking for new connections. Powell first learned that he was HIV positive while he was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Always a fierce advocate for what love can offer, he refused to withdraw from the social scene. As in his previous collections, Powell does not capitalize the words of poems in Chronic. He also likes to employ short stanzas, usually no more than two or three

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lines each. The poet is very adept at giving his poems catchy titles. In this new collection, Powell employs such wonderfully intriguing titles as “gospel on the dial, with intermittent static,” “confessions of a teenage drama queen,” “the expiration date on the world is not quite the same as the expiration date on my prophylactic,” and “chia pet cemetery.” For the poems “cinemascope” and “cen terfold,” Powell employs fold-out pages, so those poems’ forms mimic their subject matter. Powell makes use of long lines in order to hold readers’ attention for as long as possible. He believes that poetry must suspend the quick fix, the easy resolution. The richness of a Powell poem is in the words pressed together for emotional impact. His three earlier collections have been compared to Dante’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802). This comparison represents high praise for any poet, and Powell has continued in Chronic to hone his craft. While Powell has doubts about the validity of Christianity, he does not shrink from making use of biblical references in his verse. He uses the Christian perspective as a mirror to which his vision can be compared. No matter what tradition he may reject, the cultural vortex cannot be denied or removed from the frontal cultural lobe. He acknowledges that the mythology has not been shed, so it has not been removed from the poet’s playbook. Powell believes in the need to reference cultural icons in order to make a larger point. For all that is different, that is without comprehension, Powell wishes to be a member of the poetic community in good standing. This community includes Dante and T. S. Eliot, alongside many others whose poetry would seem to be at opposite ends of the poetic spectrum. Poets are linked to other poets no matter the starting point, no matter the cultural invectives, and Powell wishes to be aligned with the poetic chronology. Within the poetic continuum, there is more room than even Powell would imagine could be found. He does not lose his place on the spectrum merely because he is a gay African American. In each of his collections, Powell has energized his audience with his passion and vision. Touching, bold, bitter, harrowing—each of the words can be used to describe Powell at his best in his latest collection. Divided into three sections, Chronic focuses on the power of memory and the tricks that it can play on the life of an individual. He takes aim at those who have wronged him in poems that are instantly recognizable. Powell also can be as touching as any poet writing, and it becomes obvious through his work that love and disease are closely related: Both are chronic. Powell opens the collection with an epigraph from Virgil, taken from Eclogue IX. The ancient poet is melancholy about how “Time robs us of all, even of memory.” Loss is part of the human condition, but, as the epigraph indicates, one of the roles that the poet can play is as the recorder of what has transpired, what humans have done. It is possible to celebrate life even in the face of death. Powell has spoken about D. A. Powell teaches at the University of San Francisco and is the author of four critically acclaimed poetry collections, including Tea (1998), Lunch (2000), and Cocktails (2004). In 2009, he published By Myself: An Autobiography (coauthored with David Trinidad).

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how this volume came to be, about the gathering of poems. For any poet, it is not always clear at the outset what sort of grouping or collection will come out of the writing process. A poet must wrestle with the forces of the writing in order to locate what is at the center of the creation, the whole. For Powell, this “revelation came very late.” The title poem was one of the last poems he wrote before he knew that a narrative cohesion existed for the manuscript that had been growing. Until this revelation, he believed that there were only “irreconcilable tensions” between the individual poems. Fortunately, Powell came to the conclusion that his poems about “love, loss, incurable illness, hope, the precipitous moment in history that we habit” truly could hold together and belonged to the same continuum of poetic thought. Divided into “Initial C,” “Chronic,” and “Terminal C,” the collection presents readers with a balancing act between “loss” and “hope.” It also seems to balance upon the letter c. This letter of the alphabet appears in as either the first letter or the last letter of every title in the collection. Powell seemingly chose c in an arbitrary fashion, but he knew that there was something about the letter that meant something larger, something transcendent. He recognized that c is “the opening of a parenthetical statement,” “the musical note that sounds like an ending,” “the center of our grading system,” “an echo of the ocean,” and much more. None of these reasons alone held sway with Powell, it was a combination of several complex reasons that made him stick with his chosen c. It became obvious to him that “we live in the age of the complex,” and the letter c is critical to the discussion. With these tools and more, the poet attempts to construct a vision or, more correctly, myriad visions that express the world in all of its incarnations. Powell feels a bond also with the natural world, with the world of “the seasons, the trees, the vines, the bees, and the animals.” Powell focuses on the uneasy relationship that humans have with their environment. He has stated that “we see our own deciduous selves mirrored in the landscape.” Through engagement in the process of living, through a love for the power of poetry, Powell attempts to acknowledge the struggles of living without succumbing to them. He does this through eloquent wordplay, expressing sensibilities that have one foot in the traditions of the past and one foot squarely planted in the present. The collection opens with the poem “no picnic.” The poet’s powers of observation are on display in this poem, with plain cloth cast upon the cool banks, the mere warbling frogs an interrupted repast, uninterrupted pile of leavings the parallax of bodies which are and are not ours.

It can be discerned that life is really “no picnic,” no easy exercise. One of the last poems of the third section, “scenes from the trip we didn’t take to the antarctic,” opens with “your inability to phone says it all: whitecaps frozen in a touchless curl/ the space in the lungs where breath catches and falters” and ends with

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Magill’s Literary Annual 2010 say it with me, sunshine: today, brainscan; today, x-ray today, complete metabolic panel with platelet differential today, urinalysis; today, liver biopsy; today, preparing the body at the last station, the sepulcher was empty and you asked why beyond this numbing terrain, frozen white cell: phantom laughter didn’t you hear it all along? or did you think it was just the wind.

The journey is difficult, and there are no easy answers. Terror can strike at the heart, whether one is reaching out for love or in the throes of facing the end of life. Powell has stated that “much of art, and much of life, is simultaneously funny and horrifying.” At the root of both is “surprise.” Even with a “surprise,” there is still a persistent recognition that no one can shake off what the Earth suffers from, what each person suffers from. The best that a person can do is do battle day by day. The poet presents this predicament, this seemingly incurable situation, yet does not leave readers without hope or a course of action. There still remains, for Powell, good reason to struggle against what touches each person day after day. There are reservoirs that exist within memory, mythology, science, history, and religion that can be tapped. They can be called upon to serve as a shield against the chronic curse. The journey toward an end, a little death, and the ultimate monumental death can be handled with dignity. Taking inspiration from Walt Whitman, Frank O’Hara, Gertrude Stein, and John Ashbery, Powell continues in Chronic to construct astonishing poems that speak eloquently about “loss” and “hope.” Jeffry Jensen

Review Sources The London Review of Books 31, no. 18 (September 24, 2009): 30-31. Los Angeles Times, February 15, 2009, p. F7. Poetry 193, no. 6 (March, 2009): 555-563. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 3 (January 19, 2009): 41-42. The Virginia Quarterly Review 85 (Spring, 2009): 215.

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CHRONIC CITY Author: Jonathan Lethem (1964) Publisher: Doubleday (New York). 467 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: New York City, especially the Upper East Side of Manhattan The protagonist of this simultaneously surreal and satirical novel begins to understand himself and the nature of reality in a city that experiences multiple disasters Principal characters: Chase Insteadman, a former child television actor living an empty life in Manhattan Janice Trumbull, his fiancé, an astronaut trapped in space Perkus Tooth, a manic pop culture theorist Biller, a homeless man Perkus helps, who later finds Perkus an apartment Richard Abneg, an aide to Mayor Arnheim of New York Laird Noteless, a famous sculptor Georgina Hawkmanaji, a wealthy woman with whom Abneg becomes involved Oona Laszlo, a ghostwriter with whom Chase falls in love Strabo Blandiana, an acupuncturist and New Age guru

Chronic City is at once satire and science fiction, a novel about contemporary New York City that uncovers the city’s glamour, its fantasy qualities, and its essential emptiness. The protagonist of the novel, Chase Insteadman, is a former child star who lives on the residuals from his role years before in the popular Martyr & Pesky television series. He now has no real job, except perhaps as a guest at fashionable dinner parties. Chase is a one-dimensional character (as his last name, “instead-of-a-man,” implies) who skates on the surface of life until he meets Perkus Tooth, a former rock critic who was famous for posting political broadsides around the city. Perkus draws Chase into his bizarre world of esoteric compact discs and digital videodiscs, while he deconstructs the conspiracies he senses lurking behind contemporary life. (For example, Marlon Brando, according to Perkus, is still alive, and the font of The New Yorker magazine controls its readers). Perkus smokes a lot of dope with Chase and also suffers from cluster headaches. The two friends inhabit a very small patch of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, rarely venturing beyond their apartments or the Jackson Hole restaurant where they consume the giant cheeseburgers that form the staple of Perkus’s diet. Chase soon persuades Perkus to visit Strabo Blandiana, a New Age guru and acupuncturist, to treat his headaches. In the treatment rooms, Perkus has his first glimpse of a chaldron, a beautiful

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vase giving off a mystical aura that leads Perkus and then his friends Chase and Richard Abneg (with whom he attended Horace Mann High School) to try to purchase one on eBay. All of them are caught up in the mystique of the chaldrons, but for Perkus the vases are also one of the keys to understanding reality. Chase is supposedly engaged to Janice Trumbull, an astronaut with whom he shared a brief adolescent romance while growing up in Bloomington, Indiana. Janice is now trapped on the space station Northern Lights, stuck in a zone of Chinese mines. Janice’s letters to Chase are published in the city newspapers, making Chase the object of public sympathy, but Chase has almost forgotten Janice. He falls in love with Oona Laszlo, who used to help Perkus with his broadsides and is now a ghostwriter working on the autobiography of Laird Noteless. Noteless is a sculptor who builds giant installations as chasms in the city. Oona and Chase visit one such construction pit, called Fjord, a giant hole in the ground above Harlem, to conduct research for Oona’s book. Meanwhile, other craters have appeared in Manhattan because a giant tiger is terrifying the city. Richard, an aide to the mayor of New York, explains that the “tiger” is really a tunneling machine brought in to finish a subway line that has gone berserk and wanders the city at night destroying buildings. In the long scene that brings this early exposition to a close, a large dinner party at the mayor’s residence, Perkus discovers a chaldron in a niche in a wall and then disappears. In the second half of the novel, the many mysteries raised in the first half are only partially solved. Perkus’s apartment is been condemned after the “tiger” destroys the nearby Jackson Hole, and he is saved by his homeless friend Biller, who secretly installs him in the Friendreth Canine Apartments. In this dwelling-house devoted solely to dogs, Perkus shares an apartment with a three-legged pit bull named Ava, who is recovering from the loss of her leg after a policeman shot it in a drug raid. Ava and Perkus appear to have rescued each other, but the old Perkus soon reemerges, riffing on his conspiracy theories about contemporary culture. When Chase finally tracks him down, Perkus begins to spin out the epiphanies he has gained from the chaldrons: He claims that all New Yorkers are living in a theme park and that the multiple urban disasters (such as the building-eating tiger, a gray fog that covers the city, a pervasive chocolate smell, and massive blizzards) are parts of a virtual reality that is being controlled by outside powers. They are all, in effect, players in a computer game being run by someone else. Perkus is also physically sick, however, and when Chase and Richard finally rush him to a hospital, it is too late. He dies of internal bleeding. In the conclusion of the novel, Chase uncovers the truth of Perkus’s rants, that he actually is an actor in a script someone else has written. Among other revelations, he discovers that Oona has been ghost-writing the letters to Chase printed in the newspapers because Janice probably died months ago in an explosion of the space station. The drama is being played out for publicity, to build public morale at a time of multiJonathan Lethem is the author of a number of previous novels, including Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and The Fortress of Solitude (2003), and several collections of short stories and essays. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005.

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ple disasters in the city. Further, Chase is living not only on residuals but also on checks from something called the Manhattan Reification Society, which is clandestinely paying him to play the empty roles he inhabits, such as Janice Trumbull’s lonely fiancée and the charming dinner party guest. Thus, the novel’s characters are players in a kind of virtual reality, as Perkus realized. Their world is a computer game like the popular Web site Yet Another World, but one that they take to be real. Even the chaldrons, it turns out, are not real but holograms created by multiple laser lights. Chase dismisses Oona—who is really the Janice of her letters, as Janice and the chaldrons are Chase’s illusions—and takes in Ava. He begins a relationship with another writer named Anne Sprillthrall and joins a combat unit in a Yet Another World video game. Chase in the end appears to have accepted his own identity and the city’s reality—or unreality. He acknowledges the illusion and even joins it. “The world was ersatz and actual, forged and fake, by ourselves and unseen others.” Chronic City is at once surrealistic and satirical, but the different parts do not always blend together easily. Jonathan Lethem’s first novels were science fiction, and elements of that genre permeate this work, from Janice’s space station letters to the ravaging tunnel machine beneath the city’s streets. There are other pits in the city, however—notably the public sculptures Laird Noteless builds, like his Fjord, but also the mayor (whom Chase calls “a black hole”), Jackson Hole (which becomes one), the empty chaldrons, and even Chase, who says, “I’m truly a vacuum filled by the folks I’m with.” The parallels point to the satire Lethem is creating in the novel. Everything in the city is layered, for beneath the shallow surface of this urban scene another world exists. Perkus Tooth gets Chase to question reality and to see that they are all living in a giant computer simulation. Even the tiger, it turns out, is a city operation, creating distractions to keep the public’s attention from the real disasters in New York. (The popular Tiger Watch Web site allows concerned residents to follow the nocturnal wanderings of the rogue tunnel machine.) Perkus gains some of his insights after his encounters with the chaldron, which is recognizable for “its sublime and superb thingliness,” and these objects point to another satirical angle. The Manhattan Reification Society—which not only pays Chase’s checks but also supports the canine apartments where Perkus ends up living for free with Ava—points to a Marxist analysis of contemporary life. In the superficial world Chase inhabits, everything and everyone has been turned into an object— they have been “reified” by contemporary life in “this world of commodities and cartoons”—and permanent and lasting human values have been lost. The characters, in other words, are not only shallow actors in some scripted reality television show, but they are also objects to be purchased and used. (At one elegant dinner party, Chase is auctioned off as a premium in a charity fundraiser; Perkus, Richard, and Chase try to buy a chaldron by outbidding others in an online auction.) The only objects in the novel that rise above this reification, strangely, are animals. Chase watches a flock of birds circle a church spire throughout the novel, and at its end he makes an accidental pilgrimage and finds both church and flock. Richard Abneg is involved in a dispute with his apartment managers over his treatment of an

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eagles’ nest. Perkus and Oona work late on a new broadside centering on a photo of a polar bear on an ice floe meant to symbolize isolation. Finally, Ava, the three-legged pit bull, comes into the lives of Perkus and Chase and helps rescue both of them from themselves. (The coincidences in the novel point to a lame and unimaginative virtual reality, however: Ava has lost her leg, paralleling Janice’s loss of a foot that is amputated when she develops a tumor in space.) People in Chronic City inhabit a superficial world filled with television reruns and gossip—possibly scripted by others—but animals at least act out their natural roles. Lethem has always been a writer able to carry the sounds of New York: Both Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and The Fortress of Solitude (2003), his best novels, are filled with vivid descriptions of the city and characters with distinct voices, and Chronic City follows their lead. For example, Chase comments on his city, saying To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interleave, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement-demolishing workmen periodically wrench open to the daylight and to our passing, disturbed glances. We only pretend to live on something as orderly as a grid.

Lethem’s Perkus has a voice as distinct as any in contemporary fiction. In the last part of the novel, it is even punctuated on the page by the hiccups that foreshadow his imminent death. Lethem is one of the best writers in capturing New York, a mimic of social mores and manners in a line of writers that stretches from William Dean Howells (A Hazard of New Fortunes, 1889) at the end of the nineteenth century through Stephen Millhauser (Martin Dressler, 1996) and Tom Wolfe (The Bonfire of the Vanities, 1987) at the end of the twentieth. Chronic City has moments of insight and humor, but it does not hold together at the end as one novel, nor, finally, does it compete with its predecessors. David Peck Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 22 (August 1, 2009): 7. The Christian Science Monitor, October 25, 2009, p. 25. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 12 (June 15, 2009): 624. Library Journal 134, no. 13 (August 1, 2009): 69. Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2009, p. E.9. The New Republic 240, no. 19 (October 21, 2009): 48-53. New York 42, no. 28 (August 31, 2009): 64-65. The New York Times, October 13, 2009, p C1. The New York Times Book Review, October 25, 2009, p. 1. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 31 (August 3, 2009): 27. The Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2009, p. 13.

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COLD Adventures In the World’s Frozen Places Author: Bill Streever (1961) Publisher: Little, Brown (New York). Illustrated. 292 pp. $24.99 Type of work: Natural history, history of science, environment Time: Human history, particularly 2006-2007 Locale: Alaska and worldwide Streever explains how most living creatures on Earth are affected by and cope with cold and with winter and tells the history of polar explorations and the science of cold Principal personages: Bill Streever, American biologist Adolphus W. Greely, American explorer of the North Pole Robert Falcon Scott, British explorer of Antarctica Roald Amundsen, Norwegian explorer of Antarctica and leader of the first expedition to reach the South Pole Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Dutch physicist and Nobel laureate, a pioneer in cryogenics

Bill Streever tackles many subjects in Cold, an engaging, wide-ranging historycum-journal. These include winter survival; catastrophic weather; polar expeditions; scientific studies of thermodynamics, including the search for absolute zero; glaciation; hibernation; the cycle of ice ages; and climate change. His nonlinear text does not, however, discuss these topics straightforwardly, chapter by chapter. Only Streever’s journal entries are in chronological order, while biographical narratives and scientific histories are interspersed among them. These interwoven narratives may be relinquished early, only to be amplified in later chapters. The journal, meanwhile, covers Streever’s life from July, 2006, to June, 2007. Streever’s journal recounts more than one occasion on which he exposed himself to conditions that would have been fatally cold had he not been able to extricate himself from them. Each chapter offers information about cold weather and its effects, as well as human effects upon the weather. The book begins by demonstrating what happens to the human body under extremely cold conditions. In a summer swim in the thirty-five-degree waters of Prudhoe Bay, in northernmost Alaska, Streever describes his sensations to a companion, who times his immersion for five minutes. Within moments, Streever’s extremities become numb. At three minutes, he begins to shiver. At four minutes, his skin seems to sting and burn. The seconds pass, his muscles tensing, his mind wandering. After spending five minutes in the bay, it takes him two hours to regain a feeling of warmth.

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Streever’s narrative alternates facts with drama, geographical data with animal behavior, mortality statistics with stories of heroics and loss. For example, he reports that Barrow, Alaska, has the coldest average yearly temperature of any community in the United States, just under 10° Fahrenheit. Then, he elaborates that it is the home of arctic foxes and polar bears and also among the oldest permanent settlements in the country. When starving European explorers first appeared in what would become Barrow, Native Americans there were flourishing. Their name for the site was “a place for hunting snowy owls.” Elsewhere, Streever juxtaposes the fact that a cumulonimbus cloud can hold 500,000 tons of water with accounts of an English youth who was killed by a falling icicle in 1776 and of a 1974 incident in which an eighteen-inch block of ice fell from an airplane and smashed into the hood of a woman’s car. Each chapter includes diary entries. In February’s chapter, for example, Streever informs readers of the then-current temperatures in several American cities. He reports that a thawed creek has flooded an Anchorage office building and ruined its computers and that, at an Alaskan zoo, a brown bear woke up and opted to go lie out in the sunshine. After establishing background details, he summarizes conversations with scientists, conference attendees, miners, friends, and family members as he travels the world to research the present and history of cold temperatures. Particularly arresting are Streever’s accounts of tragedy, which he begins describing within the first few pages as he treads water in Prudhoe Bay. He encapsulates episodes that he will expand upon later, including the Adolphus Greely expedition to the Arctic in 1883; the School Children’s Blizzard of January, 1888; and Robert Falcon Scott’s disastrous 1910 race to the South Pole, which he lost to Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. When Streever goes into detail, drawing upon pioneers’ journals and contemporary newspaper accounts, armchair explorers may shiver and wonder what drove those men (they were always men) into such unlivable terrains and horrifying conditions. Streever writes, “When one reads past the stoicism and heroics, the history of polar exploration becomes one long accident report mixed with one long obituary.” Greely was a U.S. Army officer who was put in charge of twenty-five men sent to Ellesmere Island, in far northern Canada, just west of Greenland. Only six members of the expedition survived; the rest died of starvation, drowning, or freezing—except the one whom Greely ordered shot for stealing food. It is likely that some of the dead were cannibalized. Two rescue attempts failed. When the survivors were finally reached in 1884, a rescuer wrote that one of the men in the tent had had both hands and both feet amputated because of frostbite; a spoon had been tied to the stump of his right arm. That man, Corporal Joe Elison, was still alive. He died several days after the rescue.

Biologist Bill Streever is the Environmental Program studies director for BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc. and chairman of the North Slope Science Initiative’s Science Technical Advisory Panel. He is the author of several books and numerous journal articles.

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Streever documents that Greely, a recipient of the Medal of Honor, was held responsible for another crisis and failure. In charge of the Weather Bureau (now known as the National Weather Service), Greely issued a prediction for January 12, 1888, a relatively warm day. He said that a cold front was indicated for the American Plains states. The bureau underestimated the front that was approaching. A blizzard struck the Dakotas, Nebraska, Montana, Wisconsin, and elsewhere, covering a vast area within six hours. Several thousand people, horses, and cattle were caught outdoors in a snowstorm that granted zero visibility. Of the several hundred victims of the storm, so many were children that the calamity was called the Schoolhouse Blizzard, or the Children’s Blizzard. Streever describes the reported experiences of several survivors and explains, clearly and at length, exactly what happens to the human body when frostbite and hypothermia occur. Beyond the physical symptoms, apathy, amnesia, and what is vernacularly called “cold stupid” thought patterns afflict the mind and cause self-destructive behavior. In the “January” chapter of Cold, Streever recounts stories beyond those of explorers and civilians: Untold soldiers have been ordered into and died in impassable weather conditions. Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great was blocked by snow when he tried to invade India. U.S. president George Washington’s twelve thousand Continental Army soldiers suffered greatly at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, during the winter of 1777-1778, becoming “an army of skeletons.” French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s assault on Moscow, Russia, in 1812, was a disaster at −35° Fahrenheit, and German chancellor Adolf Hitler’s similar attempted assault in 1941 caused the death of one-quarter of a million German soldiers at even colder temperatures. Streever’s book is not merely a history of catastrophe, however. He describes with admiration the attempts of the famous polar explorations of Roald Amundsen (which met with success), Richard E. Byrd (which first failed then succeeded), and Robert Falcon Scott (which toward the end amounted to pure tragedy). He explains the many ways in which measurements of cold temperatures have been standardized, most prominently by German physicist Daniel Fahrenheit, Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius, and British physicist Baron William Thomson, Lord Kelvin. His discussion of the obsessive scientific race to find the coldest temperature that could be created in laboratories—absolute zero—is both entertaining and alarming (the invention of dry ice ended in tragedy for a laboratory assistant). Scientists who receive particular attention in Cold include British chemist and physicist James Dewar (inventor of the Dewar flask, not of the whiskey) and Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, among whose many achievements was liquefying helium in 1908. This was an impressive feat, given that helium goes from gas to liquid (or, rather, superfluid) at less than 7° Fahrenheit above absolute zero. More amusing (and certainly less horrifying than other anecdotes) are Streever’s accounts of the various inventions and reinventions of the icebox: Clarence Birdseye, whose last name is familiar in the grocery store, played a role. Streever also discusses the Dutch “part scientist, part alchemist, part showman, part con man” Cornelius

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Drebbel, who promised King James of England that he could air-condition Westminster Abbey. Streever suggests that Drebbel managed to do so temporarily with some chemical tricks, but with no continuously operating machinery at work. In his “September” chapter, Streever visits Windsor Castle in England, hoping to meet with Queen Elizabeth II in order to ask about her heating bills. He writes philosophically that it was “a shame that my interview was refused.” Streever excels at metaphors, which makes his book accessible to general readers. He rarely waxes poetic but has a gift for visual details: On a global scale, seen from a distance, it might be said that the polar regions suck in the heat of the tropics, swallowing the world’s warmth. The equatorial regions shed heat south and north, like a Weddell seal steaming as it lies on the Antarctic ice, or like a moose panting, overheated and uncomfortable, its hot breath projecting vaporous shadows against the snow.

His history of the natural and synthetic fabric industries is full of interesting anecdotes. He explains, for example, that musk ox wool is the warmest fabric known, while cotton can kill because its fibers hold water. Describing domestic shelters as the outermost garment for people (or animals), Streever explains how igloos and quinzhees are built. He shows that such structures fashioned from ice, like animals’ dens, are more permanent and favorable than are buildings constructed from materials imported to the Arctic from southern climes. Dens and igloos are not subject to frozen pipes, mildew, brittle metal and plastic parts, corrosion from salt and sand, or indoor carbon monoxide. Thousands of American houses are ruined each year because they were not planned with a proper understanding of the mechanics of freezing and melting. The last chapter focuses on climate change. At the time of Cold’s publication, Streever reports, one-fifth of Earth’s land is frozen in permafrost and four-fifths of its freshwater is frozen. These numbers will change as the global average atmospheric temperature increases. The melting of glaciers is good news for archaeologists, who can discover fossils and even preserved bodies of humans and mammoths in newly exposed ice. Streever provides a good selection of quotes from scientists and industrialists on both sides of the argument of whether the Pleistocene Ice Age is ending. Cold includes pencil drawings and maps that usefully supplement this globespanning history. Less helpful for students is the “Notes” section, which includes bibliographic citations but no referral to the pages in question. A standard bibliography and endnotes section would serve better, while the subjective commentaries augmenting these notes should not have been relegated to an endnotes section: They would perfectly reinforce the stories within the main text. On the other hand, one great convenience of Streever’s bibliography is that he includes universal resource locators (URLs) to primary documents whenever he can. Cold will remain a classic of its type and of interest to general readers. It might serve well as a companion volume to Bernd Heinrich’s Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival (2003), which focuses on northern animals but shares many of the

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same concerns. Streever’s is a well-researched and well-written book and belongs in most libraries. Many of the scenes it describes, particularly of human triumphs and losses, will remain with readers for a long time after they finish reading. Fiona Kelleghan

Review Sources The Economist 392, no. 8642 (August 1, 2009): 73. Harper’s Magazine, August, 2009, pp. 73-74. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 12 (June 15, 2009): 650. Library Journal 134, no. 8 (May 1, 2009): 97. Los Angeles Times, August 3, 2009, p. D-8. The New Scientist 203, no. 2718 (July 25, 2009): 49. The New York Times, July 24, 2009, p. 21. The New York Times Book Review, July 26, 2009, p. 1. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 17 (April 27, 2009): 121.

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COLLECTED POEMS Author: C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) Translated from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn Introduction and commentary by Daniel Mendelsohn Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 547 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Poetry A translation by a noted memoirist and historian of Cavafy’s published, repudiated, and unpublished poems, together with an introduction and extensive notes When he died in 1933, C. P. Cavafy was virtually unknown outside a small circle of friends and admirers. Since then, however, his reputation has grown to the point that he is regarded as one of the two or three greatest Greek poets of the twentieth century. Now, Daniel Mendelsohn has added his versions of Cavafy’s poems to an ever-growing body of English translations. Cavafy was born in the Mediterranean port of Alexandria, Egypt, in 1863. Although the city was Egyptian, Cavafy’s parents were Greek, members of a large ethnic community that lived and flourished far beyond Greece’s nominal borders. Cavafy’s father was a wealthy and successful merchant, but his death when the child was only seven forced the family to live on the generosity of far-flung relatives. As a result, Cavafy spent five years in England before returning with his mother to Alexandra. Subsequently, he led an outwardly uneventful life. He worked as a clerk in the Irrigation Office of the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works from 1892 until 1922 and continued to live with his mother until her death in 1899. Cavafy seems to have had his first homosexual experience (with a cousin) when he was twenty. Back in Alexandria, he developed the habit of slipping out after eating dinner with his mother to have sexual encounters with other men. According to one acquaintance, he also rented a room in a brothel. Cavafy began writing poetry in his teens, but for the most part it was conventional and derivative. As Mendelsohn makes clear in his comprehensive introduction, Cavafy’s early influences included two French literary movements—the Parnassians, who stressed the doctrine of “art for art’s sake,” and particularly the Symbolists, who elevated poets to a kind of elite status. One early poem by Cavafy bears the pointed title “But Wise Men Apprehend What Is Imminent,” contrasting such privileged figures with those “in the street/ outside” who “hear nothing at all.” With time, however, Cavafy was able to meld a number of more personal factors—his troubled sexuality, his identity as a Greek living outside Greece, his memories of the lost splendors of his childhood, and his sense of the even greater splendors of the vanished Hellenic world—into a body of ironic, elegiacal work. Most of Cavafy’s poems are short, with few extending beyond two pages. Aside from their allusions, they are also relatively straightforward, although they incor-

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porate subtleties that defy easy translation. The poems Cavafy wrote during his maturity C. P. Cavafy was born in Alexandria, may be grouped into two general categories: Egypt, where he spent most of his adult the historical and the erotic. Many deal with life employed as a minor government familiar historical (or mytho-historical) fig- functionary. He shared his poetry with ures, such as Achilles—the Greek hero of the friends and admirers, but it was only Trojan War—or the Roman emperor Julian, after his death in 1933 that he came to known as “the Apostate.” More frequently, be recognized as a distinctive and innovative poet. however, the figures are obscure, such as rhet orician Theodotus of Chios or Seleucid dynastic victim Orophernes. The Roman soldier and statesman Mark Antony, whose troops had been defeated in battle by Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus), appears in one of Cavafy’s earliest and most memorable poems, “The God Abandons Antony.” The poem is set in Cavafy’s native city on the last night of Antony’s life. Miraculously, the doomed man hears the music and tumult of the invisible procession of the god Dionysus, to whom he had once compared himself and who now is deserting him. The poet counsels Antony not to fool himself into thinking that he is dreaming, but “like someone brave” to “listen with deep emotion” to the “exquisite instruments of that initiate crew/ and bid farewell to her, to Alexandria, whom you are losing.” The story, according to Mendelsohn’s helpful note, is taken from an account by ancient Greek biographer Plutarch. One of Cavafy’s finest and most famous poems, “Ithaca,” draws a lesson from the long voyage home made by Greek hero Odysseus (Ulysses) after the Trojan War. The poem counsels the traveler to “hope that the road is a long one,/ filled with adventures, filled with discoveries.” When the traveler finally arrives, he or she must remember that “Ithaca gave you the beautiful journey;/ without her you wouldn’t have set upon the road./ But now she has nothing left to give you.” After all, “As wise as you will have become, with so much experience,/ you will understand, by then, these Ithacas; what they mean.” Most of Cavafy’s other poems deal openly (although never explicitly) with homosexual desire and experience. “In the Entrance of the Café” recalls a moment in which the speaker’s attention is drawn to the lovely body that looked as if Eros had made it using all his vast experience: crafting with pleasure his shapely limbs; making tall the sculpted build.

In many cases, the experience seems predestined for incorporation into a poem and may even strike readers as nothing more than pretext: “Their Beginning” opens with what might strike most readers as an ending: “The fulfillment of their illicit pleasure/ is accomplished.” One of the partners in the act takes away something more: “Tomorrow, the day after, or through the years he’ll write/ powerful lines, that here was their beginning.”

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There are also a few mature poems that do not fit comfortably into either category. The first work in the collection, “The City,” is of this type, and it ranks as one of the most haunting works about ennui ever written. “‘I’ll go to some other land,’” muses its unnamed speaker, “‘I’ll go to some other sea./ There’s bound to be another city that’s better by far.’” The poem, however, asserts, “You’ll find no new places, you won’t find other shores.” It concludes with the chilling judgment, “Just as you’ve destroyed your life, here in this/ small corner, so you’ve wasted it through all the world.” Mendelsohn maintains that it is a mistake to divide Cavafy’s poems into such categories as “historical” and “erotic” and asserts that the poet’s single, overriding subject is time. However intriguing the point, readers may feel instead that Cavafy has collapsed time, allowing him to treat both ancient and contemporary events as elements of a vast continuum. Mendelsohn allows as much, speaking of the manner in which Cavafy weaves past and present, and he goes on to explain why some of the poet’s effects are liable to be lost on readers of English. During Cavafy’s lifetime, there were essentially two Greek languages—the “demotic,” or everyday language of the people, and katharevousa, a formal, invented language of the intelligentsia designed to preserve Greek in its purest form. Cavafy started out writing in katharevousa, switched to demotic in 1893, and subsequently mixed the two. Mendelsohn duplicates the effect—which conveys the interplay of ancient and modern—by mixing Latinate with simpler, more direct Anglo-Saxon words. He also discusses in detail the poet’s other stylistic methods and describes the manner in which he himself has rendered them into English. Aside from a few unimportant works of his youth that appeared in journals and the like, few of Cavafy’s poems were published—in the accepted sense of the term. Instead, Cavafy printed individual poems or small selections for circulation among friends and acquaintances and often revised the works afterward. (“The City,” for instance, is the product of fifteen years of revision.) A few thin volumes saw wider distribution, but the first commercial edition of his work—consisting of 154 poems that would come to be known as “the Canon”—appeared two years after his death. Besides the Canon, Mendelsohn includes twenty-seven poems that Cavafy repudiated and a group of seventy-seven poems (including three in English) that he retained but never published. Of the second group, one was written when the poet was in his early teens and another, “From the Drawer,” in 1923, when he was sixty. The unpublished works contain few surprises, as Cavafy’s concerns remained relatively constant throughout his adult years. Dealing with an old photograph, “From the Drawer” recapitulates one of the poet’s constant themes, and its three central lines might easily stand as the summation of his erotic outlook: “Those lips, that face—/ ah if only for a day, only for an/ hour their past would return.” One of Cavafy’s friends, the eminent British novelist E. M. Forster, memorably described him as a “Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.” Forster had met Cavafy in Alexandria during World War I and went on to introduce the poet to the English-speaking world in one of his essays. John Mavrogordato published the first substantial collection of Cavafy’s

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works in English in 1951. Later readers, however, may have first encountered Cavafy as a shadowy presence in The Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960) by British novelist and travel writer Lawrence Durrell, who included his own translations of Cavafy’s poems in two of the volumes. The past few decades have witnessed a growing number of English translations, including those of Rae Dalven, Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, and Theoharis Constantine Theoharis. Mendelsohn’s volume contains more works than those of any of his predecessors (in some cases by only a slight margin), and it includes a number of additional features, such as a page on the pronunciation of Greek and Byzantine names, a roster of the most important historical characters Cavafy treated, and a short list of books in English for further reading. The translator’s notes to specific poems run to more than 160 substantial pages. There is never a definitive translation of a work. Words in one language inevitably possess shades of association that their seemingly exact equivalents in other languages do not. Translators may choose to emphasize exact sense over sound, or sacrifice a degree of meaning in order to reproduce the poet’s rhyme and meter, although they commonly strive to capture both. Although Cavafy eschewed most poetic devices, his language is not as prosaic as previous translators have suggested. As Mendelsohn explains, Cavafy deployed a subtle rhyme scheme in “The City,” one that allowed him to underline the inertia imprisoning his subject. Wherever possible, Mendelsohn says, he has attempted to reproduce such effects in English. Mendelsohn states in his introduction to Collected Poems that he has included all of Cavafy’s known works in the form, with the exception of five poems translated from other languages. He adds, however, that a second volume—The Unfinished Poems (2009)—prints his translations (the first in English) of thirty drafts that the poet left in various stages of completion at the time of his death. Although there will inevitably be further translations of Cavafy, Mendelsohn’s skill and range are likely to make these volumes the translations of choice for some time to come. Grove Koger

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 14 (March 15, 2009): 38. Boston Globe, June 7, 2009, p. C5. Harper’s Magazine 318, no. 1908 (May, 2009): 71. New Criterion 27, no. 8 (April, 2009): 4-8. The New Republic 240, no. 10 (June 17, 2009): 39-45. The New York Times Book Review, April 19, 2009, p. 19. The New Yorker 85, no. 6 (March 23, 2009): 70-75. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 11 (March 16, 2009): 44.

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COLUMBINE Author: Dave Cullen (1961) Publisher: Twelve Books (New York). 417 pp. $26.99 Type of work: Sociology Time: April 20, 1999 Locale: Columbine, Colorado Cullen, an acknowledged national authority on the massacre at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, explores events leading up to the massacre, examines the psychological makeup of the perpetrators, and presents in chilling detail an account of the massacre itself Principal personages: Eric Harris, a senior at Columbine High School Wayne Harris, Eric’s father, a retired Air Force major Kathy Harris, Eric’s stay-at-home mother Dylan Klebold, a senior at Columbine High School Tom Klebold, Dylan’s father, a geophysicist employed by oil companies and later founder of Fountain Real Estate Management Sue Klebold, Dylan’s mother, a reading specialist, later Tom’s partner in Fountain Realty Frank DeAngelis, principal of Columbine High School

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, and, although he has been classified as a monster by mainstream U.S. society, many socially dysfunctional people have found in him someone with whom they can identify. His birthday and the days close to it have become rallying points for many dissidents, who have marked the day in a variety of violent and destructive ways. April 19 has also become an important date for many dissenters opposed to what they perceive to be governmental authority and oppression. It was on this day in 1993 that agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) stormed the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas—an event that resulted in eighty deaths, including those of twenty children. Two years later, on April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh, seeking vengeance for the Branch Davidian attack, parked a truck loaded with explosives outside the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and detonated its lethal load. The explosion killed 168 people. According to Dave Cullen’s Columbine, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold spent over eighteen months planning their own massacre, which was to take place at Columbine High School on “Judgment Day,” their designation for April 19. They had to move the date of their attack to April 20 when the person from whom they were buying ammunition was late in delivering it. The two boys determined that the optimal time for their strike was during the school’s most popular lunch period, which began at 11:10 a.m.

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Eric, after closely observing Columbine’s traffic patterns, found that the lunchroom had Dave Cullen, a prize-winning its largest concentration of students at 11:17 journalist, is the leading authority a.m. He and Dylan planted pipe bombs there on the Columbine tragedy and its and in various other places, including one di- two perpetrators. He has also written versionary bomb three miles from the school about such controversial topics as to distract the police. According to their plan, evangelical Christianity, popular the bombs would have their greatest explo- culture, politics, and gays in the military; for his work on the latter sive impact in the school’s cafeteria, where topic, he won a GLAAD Media they were set to explode between 11:16 and Award. 11:18 a.m. Had their timing mechanisms worked, the Columbine massacre, which killed twelve students and one faculty member, would have exceeded by far the 168 fatalities caused by McVeigh’s attack on the Murrah Federal Building. Eric had discussed exceeding the toll of the Oklahoma City disaster. When much-publicized mass murders, such as the Murrah Federal Building bombing or school shootings, focus attention on those who participate in them, often other people who view themselves as social rejects are tempted to gain the sort of notoriety that such violent acts generate. When teenagers are involved, they often feel that they have been bullied in school or have been rejected in one way or another by their classmates or their families. Eric and Dylan both reacted very negatively to rejection. People with such a mind-set may retreat into a protective carapace and appear to be withdrawn or sullen. On the exterior, they may be polite and acquiescent, even though they may seethe below the surface. Many might be termed “injustice collectors.” Cullen conducted extensive research to uncover the psychology and motives of Eric and Dylan. On the surface, these two teens seemed quite atypical of what most people would perceive to be severely disturbed youths. Although they dressed idiosyncratically in black trench coats, they came from stable, relatively affluent families. They were bright, and both maintained high grade point averages through high school. Although they were not as socially active as many adolescents are, they had friends and, only three days before their assault on Columbine High School, both had attended the senior prom. The night before the massacre, the two ate dinner with classmates at the Outback Steakhouse, Eric’s favorite restaurant. Nevertheless, as early as July, 1997, Dylan wrote in his journal about killing. Eric’s Web site also contained suggestions of what was to come and had caused him to be reported to the police. Later in the same year, Eric, Dylan, and another classmate were suspended from Columbine High School for breaking into school lockers. A month afterward, Dylan wrote in his journal about a killing spree. In January, 1998, Eric and Dylan were arrested for breaking into a van. In March, they were sentenced for this crime to enter a juvenile diversion program. Eric had begun seeing a psychiatrist shortly after being arrested and, at about this time, a pipe bomb was found near his house.

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Shortly after that incident, Wayne Harris discovered his son had a pipe bomb. By May, 1998, Eric began keeping a journal that outlined his intention to mastermind a massacre. By November, 1998, Eric was writing in his journal about his sadistic rape fantasies. By January, 1998, both boys drew up detailed plans for an attack on Columbine and wrote about it in each others’ yearbooks. Although Eric maintained an “I hate” list on his Web site, he and Dylan were less focused on individual potential victims than they were on wiping out large numbers of people indiscriminately. The school principal, Frank DeAngelis, was genuinely well liked by the students, including Eric and Dylan. He interacted well with his staff as well as with parents. A hands-on administrator who voluntarily did lunch duty in the cafeteria, he viewed this service as a means of getting to know his students better. On Judgment Day, he would normally have been in the cafeteria, but that day he was in his office conducting an interview when the massacre began. Hearing the commotion, DeAngelis left his office and, after he heard gunshots, saw Eric and Dylan brandishing guns. A shot shattered the trophy cabinet behind DeAngelis. Groping desperately to find the keys that would open the locked door of the gymnasium, he fished the right key out from several lookalike keys on his chain and herded a number of students into the gymnasium, thereby saving their lives as well as his own. The boys had expected their pipe bombs to explode between 11:16 and 11:18 a.m. They positioned themselves in the school’s parking lot so that they could observe the explosions. When their bombs failed to detonate, the two pulled their shotguns from their duffel bags at 11:19 a.m. and strapped them to their bodies. When one of them, presumably Eric, shouted “Go,” they began firing into the crowd. They found the massacre exhilarating and laughed maniacally as they pumped bullets into their classmates. By 11:23 a.m., four minutes after the onset of the shooting, Dylan had shot five of his classmates; Eric had shot the others. Bodies lay bleeding in the school’s hallways, its library, and the cafeteria, whose blood-splattered walls bore mute testimony to what had happened. At about this time, the crime was reported by the 911 operator, and Deputy Neil Gardner sped into the parking lot, his emergency lights flashing. As more police officers, including a special weapons and tactics (SWAT) team, gathered, no one knew where the two shooters were. The police had to proceed slowly among the dead and wounded because it was possible that Eric and Dylan were laying in wait to resume their killing. It was not until after 3:00 p.m. on that Tuesday that the attackers’ bodies were found and terrified people could emerge from hiding without fearing for their lives. Even then, most of those who were hiding had no way of knowing that the two killers were dead. In the wake of the disaster, there was speculation that Dylan, always the follower, had changed his mind about killing himself and that Eric had shot him. Cullen puts this notion to rest in his description of the aftermath of the shootings. He writes, “Most of the bodies lay under tables. The victims had been attempting to hide. Two bodies were different. They lay out in the open, weapons by their sides. Suicides,

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clearly. The SWAT team had descriptions of Eric and Dylan. These two looked like a match. It was over.” The time was 3:15 p.m. As the police gathered, Eric shot at them, by now hoping he and Dylan could go out in a blaze of glory, suicides by cop. When the police did not respond as Eric probably had hoped they would, he retreated into the southwest corner of the library, a small island of order amid the chaos. Dylan followed. One of them, probably Eric, lit a fuse to ignite a Molotov cocktail. He then put the shotgun into his mouth. Cullen writes, Eric fired through the roof of his mouth. . . . He collapsed against the books, and his torso slumped to the side. . . . Dylan’s blast knocked him flat on his back and strewed his brain matter across Eric’s left knee. Dylan’s head came to rest just beside it.

In retrospect one can recognize that Eric and Dylan were like low-rumbling volcanoes, close to erupting. It must be remembered, however, that both boys were maintaining good grades in school and that both held down part-time jobs at Blackjack Pizza, where they were regarded as two of the most dependable employees of the establishment. When the pizza parlor was sold, they were among a small body of former employees to be retained. Just four days before the Columbine massacre, Eric was promoted to shift manager. Against this backdrop, it was easy to dismiss suggestions that Eric and Dylan presented an imminent danger to anyone. Much earlier, they had decided what they would do and when they would do it. Nevertheless, they lived lives that seemed future-oriented, hardly the lives of people on the brink of killing themselves and as many others as they could take with them. Dylan, who had been admitted to the University of Arizona, had recently visited the campus with his father to secure housing for the fall semester. He spoke to some of his friends about his future plans. Eric deceived his parents into believing that he anticipated joining the Marines, a plan his father supported. On the Thursday before the massacre, a Marine recruitment officer met with Eric and his parents in their home. Searching for motives to explain the kind of violence that these two young men planned and approached with almost surgical precision, Cullen points to an essay about the Nazis that Eric wrote for his English class in October, 1998. Less than four months later, Dylan submitted to his English teacher a disturbing story about killing. What most people did not know was that in November, 1998, Eric and Dylan bought two semiautomatic shotguns at a gun show. Two months later, when both were still participating in the diversion program to which they had been sentenced, Eric and Dylan bought another gun, this time a powerful TEC-9, from a petty crook and drug pusher who also promised to sell them ammunition. Cullen is to be commended for the scope and balance of his study, a project that took a decade to complete. His writing and research are exemplary. R. Baird Shuman

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 15 (April 1, 2009): 9. Commentary 127, no. 6 (June, 2009): 64-66. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 4 (February 15, 2009): 180. Library Journal 134, no. 5 (March 15, 2009): 117. New York 42, no. 14 (April 27, 2009): 66-67. The New York Times Book Review, April 19, 2009, p. 13. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 8 (February 23, 2009): 44. Vanity Fair, May, 2009, p. 60. Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2009, p. W8.

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THE CRADLE Author: Patrick Somerville (1979) Publisher: Little, Brown (New York). 204 pp. $21.99 Type of work: Novel Time: 1997; 2008 Locale: Wisconsin; Minnesota; Indiana; Illinois; Hawaii What begins as a quest for a long-lost cradle ends with the healing of old wounds and the restoration of broken familial relationships Principal characters: Matthew (Matt) Bishop, a blue-collar worker, devoted husband, and orphan Marissa Francis Bishop, his pregnant wife, abandoned as a teenager by her mother Caroline Francis Glen Francis, Marissa’s father, a fifty-seven-year-old office worker and Caroline’s ex-husband Joseph (Joe) Roberts (later Joe Bishop), the five-year-old son of Caroline and Darren Roberts and the adopted son of Matt and Marissa Renee Owen, an author of children’s books and a poet Bill Owen, her husband Adam Owen, their nineteen-year-old son, a soldier deployed to Iraq Mary Landower, Caroline’s half sister, now living in Antarctica Hannah Price, Matt’s contact in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin “Ancient” Sylvia, a resident of Green Bay, Wisconsin, and a friend of Mary Landower Brian, her reclusive, sixty-year-old son, a computer expert Darren Roberts, Caroline’s husband and Joe’s self-absorbed father, now living in Walton, Minnesota Susan Roberts, Darren’s alcoholic mother and Joe’s grandmother, a resident of Rensselaer, Indiana

Patrick Somerville’s debut novel, The Cradle, begins as the story of a quest for a specific object, the antique cradle from which the book derives its title. However, after that particular cradle has been found and then lost again, it becomes clear that the cradle is more than a narrative device. It symbolizes the yearnings of children for parents they have lost or by whom they have been rejected, and, even more profoundly, it stands for a rebirth, a return to innocence that can make possible the reestablishment of broken family ties. At first, The Cradle appears to present a straightforward narrative: Matt Bishop and his wife Marissa Francis Bishop are living near Milwaukee in St. Helens, Wisconsin, in June of 1997. Marissa, who is eight months pregnant, has become convinced that her baby must have the very same cradle in which she herself slept as an infant. Unfortunately, she does not know where the cradle is. When Marissa was fif-

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teen years old, shortly after her mother Caroline had deserted her and her father, there was a robbery at the Francis home. One of the things that disappeared was the cradle. Marissa and her father Glen have always assumed that Caroline arranged the robbery. Thus, it seems likely that she still has the cradle, and Marissa has decided that Matt must find the cradle for her, even though it means that he will have to take time off from his job at the Delco chemical plant. Matt objects to this plan. Anticipating the expense of raising a child, he has been trying to build up the family’s savings, primarily by working double shifts at the plant. He does not want to lose that extra income. Nevertheless, Marissa is adamant, and Matt feels that he has no choice but to do as she wishes. Matt has personal reasons for trying to make Marissa happy. His own childhood was miserable. He never knew his parents. Instead, he lived in an orphanage and in foster homes, where he suffered abuses that he tries not to remember. As a result, Matt has resolved to do whatever it takes to make his own marriage last so that his child will have the loving home and the security that he never had. He is committed to making his wife happy, even if to do so he must set off on what seems to him a quixotic mission. In its second chapter, the novel moves suddenly to the year 2008, to suburban Chicago, and to a new set of characters who do not seem to have any connection with those previously introduced. Renee Owen, a successful author of children’s books, is consumed with worry because, despite her vehement objections, her son Adam has volunteered for military service and is headed for Iraq. The only hint of a possible connection between the two plots comes at the end of the chapter, when Renee and her husband Bill see a television report of a horrendous explosion at the Delco plant near Milwaukee. The story shifts back to 1997 and Matt’s mission, which from this point on dominates the narrative. In fact, only three of the fourteen remaining chapters are set in 2008. From the third chapter on, the focus is on Matt’s adventures as, like an epic hero, he moves from place to place searching for his equivalent of the Golden Fleece. As in an epic, he begins his quest with the help of a well-wisher: His father-in-law Glen slips a paper to him on which is written the address of Caroline’s half sister, Mary Landower, in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. Presumably, Mary will be able to put Matt on Caroline’s trail. However, also like an epic hero, Matt meets with one obstacle after another. When he arrives at the address Glen gave him, he finds that Mary no longer lives there. She has sold her house to an elderly woman, Hannah Price, and though Hannah admits that she knows Mary’s new address, she will not give it to Matt until he completes a set of tasks. Sweeping down spiders, carrying bags of birdseed, and mowing the lawn are not as difficult or as dangerous as the tasks assigned to traditional epic heroes, but

Patrick Somerville is the Simon Blattner Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University. He is the author of the short-story collection Trouble (2006), and his short fiction has also appeared in One Story, Epoch, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, 2007. The Cradle is his first novel.

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they are obstacles in Matt’s way, since he knows that he must find the cradle before Marissa gives birth. After Matt finally finishes the work Hannah has assigned him, she keeps to her bargain and gives him the address of Mary’s new home in nearby Green Bay, Wisconsin. Speeding to Green Bay in the pickup truck that serves as his steed, Matt again fails to find Mary Landower. Instead, he encounters an ancient, witchlike woman called Sylvia who lives in a house so dilapidated that it could well house supernatural beings. From Sylvia, Matt learns that Mary is in Antarctica. However, Sylvia offers to help Matt in his quest, and she takes him upstairs to the room where her troll-like son Brian performs “magic” with his computers. Brian manages to make contact with Mary, who appears on his screen like a disembodied spirit. From Mary, Matt learns that Caroline is in Indonesia and that her ex-husband Darren Roberts lives in Walton, Minnesota. At first, it seems that Matt’s quest is over: Darren admits that the cradle is in his basement. However, once he realizes how important it is to Matt, Darren begins to bargain, and Matt arranges to pay $750 for something that Darren admits he stole. When Darren mentions that the cradle was last occupied by a baby born to Caroline and him five years ago, Matt’s quest takes on a new dimension: He must find Marissa’s half brother, who has been deserted by his mother and then dumped by his father on his paternal grandmother. Like other epic heroes, Matt cleverly outwits his antagonist. He tricks Darren into drinking himself into a stupor, searches his papers, and finds his mother’s address. When Matt appears at Susan Roberts’s home in Rensselaer, Indiana, asking about Joe, he discovers that the child is filthy and seemingly mute. Marissa urges her husband to bring Joe home immediately, and Susan is only too happy to get rid of the child. On his way back to St. Helens, Matt stops at Darren’s house to arrange to adopt Joe. Again in the epic tradition, Darren says that he will consent only if Matt gives the correct answer to a riddle. Matt refuses to play his game, for, as he points out, Joe is not an object, but a real person. Surprisingly, Darren capitulates. This episode highlights one of the themes of The Cradle: that no object, whatever its associations, is as important as a human being. Though much of the humor in The Cradle comes from Somerville’s use of epic conventions, the novel could hardly be called a mock-epic. Structurally, it differs from the traditional epic in that, though there are flashbacks to the past, notably Matt’s memories of childhood abuse, there also periodic leaps into the future, to 2008. Moreover, epic heroes are men of action, not given to psychological analysis. While heroes such as Odysseus and Hector love their wives, they do not try to read their minds. By contrast, Matt is a thoroughly modern hero. After he sets off on his quest, he devotes hours of driving time to attempting to comprehend why Marissa is so obsessed with the cradle. Somerville traces Matt’s thought processes, showing how he comes to see that, in Marissa’s mind, the loss of the cradle is associated with the end of her parents’ marriage: Only when it is once again present by her bed can she feel that her own marriage will last. Since Matt, too, is determined to make their marriage last, he comes to an understanding of the cradle’s importance to his wife. Later, however, both Marissa and

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Matt see that the cradle is not as important as they had thought. To make room in his truck for Joe, Matt has to move the cradle out of the passenger seat and tie it in the open bed. As a result, it is stolen. When Matt returns home without the cradle, however, its loss does not seem to matter to Marissa, for she now knows that real people like Joe are always more important than inanimate objects. Thus, though Matt and Marissa do not even know of his existence until the novel is well along, Joe has an important role in what turns out to be less a quest for an object than a quest for wisdom. It is Joe who links the subplot with the main plot, the future with the present. Halfway through the book, Renee informs her husband that she had an illegitimate son. Near the end of the novel, a grownup Joe takes the first step toward reuniting Renee with Matt, who turns out to be her lost son. It can be assumed that, with the new understanding of human nature that fatherhood has brought him, Matt will forgive his mother for abandoning him and that her expanded family will bring Renee the happiness she seeks. The critical response to The Cradle has been generally favorable. The author is praised for his deft handling of a complex plot, for his skill in creating characters, and for using humor to enliven a book that is essentially serious. Even after the cradle Matt sought has disappeared from his truck, even after Marissa has forgotten about it, the idea of the cradle remains important in Somerville’s novel, for it represents the fragile innocence that can be protected and preserved only by families committed to the values it represents. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 13 (March 1, 2009): 22. Kirkus Reviews 77. no. 3 (February 1, 2009): 4. Library Journal 134, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 81. The New York Times, March 9, 2009, p. 4. The New York Times Book Review, March 15, 2009, p. 11. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 3 (January 19, 2009): 36. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 15, 2009, p. F8.

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CROSSERS Author: Philip Caputo (1941) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 448 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1903-2003 Locale: New York, New York; New Canaan, Connecticut; Arizona; Mexico In Caputo’s novel, a recent widower moves to Arizona seeking solace only to find himself caught up in violence related to drug trafficking Principal characters: Gil Castle, a Wall Street financial analyst Amanda Castle, his wife, killed in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks Blaine Erskine, his cousin, a rancher Monica Erskine, Blaine’s wife Ben Erskine, Blaine and Gil’s grandfather, a lawman Jeff Erskine, Ben’s brother, a cattleman Joshua Pittman, their uncle, a justice of the peace T. J. Babcock, a friend who fights alongside Ben in the Mexican Revolution Ynez Ybarra Babcock, his wife, a Mexican rebel Grace Castle, Ben’s daughter and Gil’s mother Miguel Espinoza, a border crosser Gregorio Bonham, also known as Euclid J. Carrington and The Professor, a Mexican policeman who works for a drug cartel Yvonne (La Roja) Menéndez, leader of a Mexican drug cartel Julián Menéndez, her son Joaquín Carrasco, leader of a Mexican drug cartel Tessa McBride, Blaine and Monica’s neighbor, a rancher and painter Beth McBride, her daughter, a soldier serving in Iraq Timothy Forbes, a reporter in the 1920’s Samantha, Gil’s Irish setter

In eight novels and several volumes of nonfiction, Philip Caputo has explored issues related to violence, war, terrorism, exploitation, and masculinity. His characters constantly find themselves tested by forces over which they have no control. A growing number of novelists have tackled the tragedy of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and their consequences. Some have focused on the larger issues the attacks raised, while others have concentrated on their specific effects on individual characters. Crossers takes the latter approach. Unable to overcome his grief at losing his wife in the Twin Towers attack, Gil Castle moves to his family’s Arizona ranch only to discover that greed, violence, and inhumanity are inescapable. Caputo makes Crossers both challenging and rewarding by interweaving the fifty-

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six-year-old Gil’s tale with that of his Arizona ancestors, primarily his grandfather Ben Erskine, a legendary lawman and “the last ember of the true Old West.” Caputo hints early on that Ben’s actions, which include killing twelve men, will have effects on Gil and others, but he delays revealing the connections between the past and the present until their consequences begin to unravel lives. This structure causes Crossers to have a greater emotional impact than it would have had if it had been told in chronological order. The Philip Caputo is a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist whose books include novel is an epic account of how little things can change over the course of a century. VilA Rumor of War (1977), a memoir of lains are different, but ethical dilemmas rehis combat experiences in Vietnam, as main as murky as ever. well as the novels Horn of Africa Ben is thirteen in 1903, conducting him(1980), DelCorso’s Gallery (1983), Indian Country (1987), Equation for self as if he is living in the legendary Old Evil (1996), The Voyage (1999), and West. Sent on an errand into Mexico by his Acts of Faith (2005). uncle, Joshua Pittman, Ben kills a Mexican in self-defense and throws the body down a mine shaft. This event is one of several instances of subtle irony employed by Caputo. The reckless Ben, compelled by an unquestioned code of rugged manliness, reflects little on his actions, and a similar case of selfdefense will have unexpected effects on his grandchildren and on the family of his victim. Joshua tells Ben, “It is a terrible thing to kill a man, even when it is justified,” but the boy is deaf to this lesson. Caputo skillfully connects this small-scale personal war with the events of September 11 without belaboring the point. People kill other people for complicated reasons, and even when they feel they are justified because of religious, political, and family concerns, morality is corrupted in ways they could not have foreseen. Caputo imparts to Ben Erskine’s chapters a sense of verisimilitude and historical sweep by presenting them as transcripts of a 1966 oral history project in which Ben’s life was recounted by those who knew him. Ben is repeatedly shown as a man with an unwavering code: “having solved so many crimes, having survived so many dangers, he begins to think of himself as a favored of the gods, as bulletproof. . . . He comes to believe in his own legend.” Caputo manages to make Ben both larger-than-life and humanly flawed. While some worship him as a hero, his daughter Grace, Gil’s mother, has conflicted feelings about the man she sees as an anachronism. Timothy Forbes, a newspaper reporter, thinks Ben became a lawman to avoid becoming a criminal. Running parallel to Ben’s story is the much less adventurous life of his grandson, senior vice president for the world’s fourth-largest investment firm. Caputo emphasizes their differences from the beginning of the novel. While his friend T. J. Babcock

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describes the charismatic Ben as “relaxed and coiled at the same time,” Gil has “the patrician severity of a Florentine prince,” though “his looks lacked the voltage to draw second glances from women.” After the death of Amanda, his beloved second wife, Gil no longer feels energized by New York’s financial district or managing half a billion dollars in assets. Despite being encouraged by his counselor and his two daughters to move on with his life, Gil cannot escape the past, which clings “to him like a second skin.” Unable to understand the motives of the September 11 terrorists, Gil can find little comfort beyond reading Roman Stoics such as Seneca. After a year of mourning, he realizes that “his whole benign life and the faith it was founded on, that reason triumphs in the end, had been beautiful illusions.” Contemplating suicide, Gil is saved by thoughts of what would happen to Samantha, his seven-year-old Irish setter, who is more a partner than a pet. Considering himself “merely passing time rather than living a life” and knowing he will go mad if he continues on his current path, Gil accepts an invitation from Monica Erskine, the wife of his cousin Blaine. She offers him a chance to live in an adobe cabin built by Jeff Erskine, Ben’s brother, in Patagonia, Arizona, near the border with Mexico. Taking early retirement and giving away much of his fortune to charities, Gil goes to Arizona hoping for rest and recovery. He begins to rise out of his misery when he finds himself falling for a neighboring rancher, Tessa McBride, who paints western landscapes. The lusty, buxom Tessa invigorates Gil. They also share burdens related to September 11, for Tessa’s daughter Beth is serving with the U.S. Army in Iraq. Patagonia, however, is far from the peaceful paradise Gil envisioned. Blaine’s sprawling ranch is used as a highway for criminals transporting drugs and illegal aliens into the United States. Matters begin to unravel when Gil rescues Miguel Espinoza, an abandoned border crosser who has witnessed the brutal murder of two men smuggling marijuana. One of Caputo’s major themes in Crossers is the effect of chance on people’s lives. Ben and T. J. join Pancho Villa’s army because a flyer for gringo recruits happens to blow into their path. In rescuing Miguel in the desert, Gil helps advance a chain of events already set in motion: it had the quality of fate, as if the course of his life and Miguel’s were destined to meet. Break one link, and he would not be here with his cowboy cousin and a Navaho tracker and a Mexican vaquero and two dead strangers.

Fate, in which Ben strongly believes, is a major factor in several of the novel’s pivotal events. Crossers contrasts two ways of coping with the complexities of modern life. Blaine is eager to return both to the Old West and to his Vietnam days by loading his guns and taking off after the bad guys. Gil is more contemplative, hoping some civilized means of sorting out problems will arise, while recognizing that this attitude may be inadequate, as the deaths in the desert remind him of how sheltered his life has

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been. Caputo implies that, while neither approach is entirely wrong, neither is applicable to all circumstances either. He sets up a situation in which Gil’s resolve will be tested without trivializing his characters or themes by suggesting that violence is necessary to allow a man to discover his true self. One of these themes is the impossibility of escaping the consequences of one’s actions, even when they are the result of the deeds of others. Given a gun and taking target practice, Gil wonders if he can shoot anyone. Caputo’s villains are more compelling that his heroes, even Ben. The man who calls himself the Professor is an American. A Georgetown University graduate, a former Drug Enforcement Agency officer, and a captain in the Mexican Federal Judicial Police, he also works for one of two rival drug cartels. He uses his law enforcement position to weaken the rival cartel by accumulating information to convey to the cartel’s leader, Joaquín Carrasco. Able to pass for an Anglo thanks to his English father, the Professor is known as Gregorio Bonham in Mexico and as Euclid J. Carrington across the border, where the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), presented as being involved in drug trafficking, hopes to settle a score with him. Both loving and hating America, fitting uneasily into two cultures and on both sides of the law, the Professor enjoys fluctuating between identities. He justifies his actions working for the drug cartel because it improves the lives of those living in Carrasco’s field of operations. Moreover, he sees the United States as “a nation of lazy, superficial, Web-surfing fools playing video games, alienated from the beating heart of life.” The Professor’s antagonist, Yvonne Menéndez, leader of the Agua Prieta cartel, resembles him only with her mixed ethnic heritage, inheriting from her Irish father the red hair that has earned her the nickname “La Roja.” While the Professor is coolly professional, Yvonne has a fiery temper, having her husband murdered so that she can seize his power and compete with Carrasco. The Professor knows that Yvonne’s impetuousness will be her downfall. He compares her to the gangster played by Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo (1948) who cannot be satisfied with his power, always wanting more: “She couldn’t spell enough in English or Spanish.” The fates of Yvonne and the Professor are linked to those of Gil and Blaine because Yvonne is motivated most of all by her quest for revenge against the Erskine family—for reasons Caputo delays revealing almost until the end of Crossers. Yvonne plans to force Blaine to sell her his ranch, which borders hers, to enable her agents to smuggle drugs more easily. Julián, Yvonne’s gay son and business partner, tries to make his mother act more reasonably to no avail. When Blaine is faced with losing his ranch, Gil agrees to pay Blaine’s back taxes in exchange for a partnership, thereby entwining him deeper in Yvonne’s plot. Caputo presents Yvonne as strangely resembling Ben, an anachronistic pulp-magazine hero. The Professor prevails over Yvonne by understanding what adjustments are needed to survive in the present, much more ambiguous, age. Caputo frequently grows elegiac when describing the physical charms of Arizona and Mexico, but he makes clear that “In these borderlands beauty cohabited with violence.” A potential paradise has been spoiled by greed, poverty, and exploitation. Un-

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like many other novels set in the American Southwest, the villain of Crossers is not progress, a trope Caputo negates by equating the propensity for violence in the Old West with that of the drug smugglers and terrorists of the present. The Professor says Gil “was trying to escape history.” Crossers vividly dramatizes the impossibility of this task. Michael Adams

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 19/20 (June 1, 2009): 4. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 17 (September 1, 2009): 905. Library Journal 134, no. 12 (July 1, 2009): 79. Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2009, p. E10. The New York Times Book Review, October 18, 2009, p. 14. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 24 (June 15, 2009): 79.

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DANCING IN THE DARK A Cultural History of the Great Depression Author: Morris Dickstein (1940) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 624 pp. $29.95 Type of work: History Time: 1929-1941 Locale: United States With this book, Dickstein, whom Norman Mailer has lauded as “one of our best critics of American literature,” advances his credentials as the prime chronicler of U.S. cultural history from the end of the 1920’s to the start of the 1970’s Born in 1940, Morris Dickstein, distinguished professor of English at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, remembers his steady-working, first-generation immigrant father recalling that, every Friday during the Great Depression, when he picked up his paycheck he looked for the pink slip telling him he was laid off. “The Depression put a strain on families, undermining the breadwinner and placing more pressure on the wife to bring in money and hold the family together,” Dickstein writes in the preface to Dancing in the Dark while quoting critic Alfred Kazin: “No one who grew up in the Depression ever recovered from it.” What he did for the turbulent 1960’s thirty-two years earlier in Gates of Eden (1977), Dickstein does in this book for the 1930’s; that is, he writes a high-minded survey of the decade’s cultural history. “Culture” is an eclectic term, though, perhaps best defined as the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted in evolved forms from one generation to another. One thus might wish for a more wide-ranging coverage than Dickstein provides. Such coverage would include, besides fluent exegeses of novels as well-known as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and little-known as Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934), ordinary things that people did such as listen to radio programs featuring the Shadow; order sodas at drugstore counters; see a newsreel, a serial, and a feature for eleven cents at Saturday motion picture matinees; and adore Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Betty Boop cartoons. Reviewer Robert Gottlieb finds Dickstein’s two most blatant omissions to be Walt Disney and Shirley Temple. The actress is acknowledged only disparagingly, while Disney, arguably the most revolutionary film talent of his time, is unmentioned. Gottlieb, however, praises Dickstein’s sense of what might appear to be the bipolar nature of the Thirties—the apparent clash between the frightening social realities and the ritzy glamour of so much of the entertainment of the period. . . . The Okies, yes, but also Astaire & Rogers and screwball com-

Dancing in the Dark / dickstein edy. Movie audiences—severely shrunk in the early Thirties—wanted to be cheered up, distracted.

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Morris Dickstein is distinguished professor of English and theater at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of Gates of Eden (1977) and Leopards in the Temple (2002), among other works. He lives with his wife in New York City.

The 1930’s gangster and up-from-poverty films reveal the seamy and the triumphant sides of the Depression, respectively. Two of Dickstein’s most delightful profiles are of Cole Porter and George and Ira Gershwin. Dickstein remains, as one would expect of a Columbia University student and colleague of Lionel Trilling, a perceptive critic. He finds in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “Babylon Revisited” (1931) “scarcely a remnant of the old iridescent shimmer, that romantic glow; at issue in Fitzgerald’s later work is no longer the dream and disappointment but simply survival, pasting it together.” He describes the subject of Migrant Mother, Dorothy Lange’s bitter 1936 photograph, as “a woman whose brow is furrowed like tractored-out land.” Dancing in the Dark is a treatise on what the author believes is the crucial role that culture can play in times of national ordeal. “The crisis kindled America’s social imagination,” he says. Dickstein’s main interest is less a novelist’s writterly qualities, as it was with Edmund Wilson, whose model was Henry James, than the writer’s social consciousness. The Depression, Dickstein continues, fomented, perhaps for the first time, “enormous interest in how ordinary people lived, how they suffered, interacted, took pleasure in one another, and endured.” “Enduring” is the touchstone of the novels of William Faulkner, whom Dickstein calls “the best writer”—one whose “voice and material, like Hemingway’s, add strength to the culture of the 1930’s without fully entering into it.” The author devotes portions of ten pages to Faulkner’s experimental As I Lay Dying (1930), seeking to demonstrate that the interior monologues of that novel set an example for writers such as James Agee (in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941) and Henry Roth (in Call It Sleep) by locating the fictional Bundren clan within a society without reducing them to their abstract social identity. Despite his high grades for Faulkner, however, Dickstein never seems at ease with him. The title of the book could be seen as a reflection of the carefree 1920’s giving way to the bleak 1930’s. It is taken from an Arthur Schwartz-Howard Dietz torch song of 1931, a lachrymose composition about a couple in a ballroom who are “waltzing in the wonder of why we’re here,” “looking for the light,” and resolved to “face the music together.” These lyrics prefigure several of Dickstein’s themes: yearning and wondering about the country’s dread condition, being fearful of what lies ahead, and enduring. The 1930’s novelist with whom Dickstein is most at home is John Steinbeck, who shows twice as many lines in the index as Faulkner—twenty-two to eleven—and three of whose titles are cross-referenced, as opposed to only one of Faulkner’s. Dickstein writes engagingly of relating not just to Steinbeck the writer but also to

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Steinbeck the person. “I lived in Northern California with my wife and kids in the summer of 1973 when we visited Monterey and Cannery Row.” Thus, as the chronicler of the Joads’ desperate odyssey through the Dust Bowl, Steinbeck is Dickstein’s preferred kind of writer—socially, not ideologically, committed. When he comes to poetry, Dickstein predictably finds less to fit his preference. He quotes from William H. Pritchard’s laudatory biography of Robert Frost, the era’s reigning figure, these words written to a young poet after praising his work: “I wouldn’t give a cent to see the world, the United States or even New York made better. I want them left as they are for me to make poetical on paper.” Somewhat similarly, William Carlos Williams, a poet and practicing physician, expressed delight at the “anarchy” of his poor clients in Rutherford, New Jersey. It would be difficult to find a spirit less like Steinbeck’s in either of these poets. Dickstein is luckier with Wallace Stevens, in whose later poems there is “a sense of a world transformed: the sharp, frosty air of autumn replaces the fragrant promise of spring; the voices of human calamity displace the sounds of spring; the moon of the imagination gives way to the sun of harsh reality.” Only in Langston Hughes does he find “one of the best young poets who became radicals and firebrands in the early Thirties.” One wonders if Professor Dickstein is being disingenuous when he writes in the preface that he made no attempt to cover everything. “Trying to grasp the essential spirit of the thirties would seem to be a hopeless task,” he writes a few pages later. “How can one era have produced both Woody Guthrie and Rudy Vallee, both the Rockettes high-stepping at the Radio City Music Hall and the Okies on their desperate trek toward the pastures of plenty in California?” It would be difficult, though, to make a laundry list of vital matters that he has left out. To return to Gottlieb’s regret at Walt Disney’s omission from Dancing in the Dark, it has been argued that Mickey Mouse may be more important to an understanding of the 1930’s than President Franklin D. Roosevelt. However, this seems to be an overstatement. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats defined the era more than did Mickey, Donald Duck, and Bambi, just as his actions did more to shape it. Culture may include far more than the political sphere, but it does include that sphere as well. Dickstein’s comprehensive account of the culture of the Great Depression may lead readers to wonder what similar accounts could be written in the future about the current era of recession and the culture it has produced. Richard Hauer Costa

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 22 (August 1, 2009): 24. Commonweal 136, no. 19 (November 6, 2009): 38-40. Harper’s Magazine 319, no. 1914 (November, 2009): 71-76. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 13 (July 1, 2009): 694-695. Library Journal 134, no. 20 (December 15, 2009): 117.

Dancing in the Dark / dickstein

The New Republic 240, no. 22 (December 2, 2009): 44-47. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 19 (December 3, 2009): 30-32. The New York Times, September 16, 2009, p. 4. The New York Times Book Review, September 27, 2009, p. 17. The New Yorker 85, no. 29 (September 21, 2009): 90-94. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 28 (July 13, 2009): 49. The Spectator 311, no. 9458 (December 5, 2009): 49-50. Times Higher Education, December 10, 2009, p. 52. The Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2009, p. A19.

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DARWIN’S SACRED CAUSE How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution Authors: Adrian Desmond (1947) and James Moore (1947) Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston). 486 pp. Illustrated. $30.00 Type of work: History of science, biography, natural history, anthropology Time: 1780’s-1871 Locale: England; North America; South America In a revisionist account of the provenance of Charles Darwin’s revolutionary ideas on human evolution, the authors emphasize his detestation of slavery and his conviction about the basic unity of all races of humankind Principal personages: Charles Darwin (1809-1882), English naturalist and evolutionary theorist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), Swiss American naturalist who developed the ice-age theory and opposed Darwin’s ideas on human evolution and the unity of human races Samuel George Morton (1799-1851), American physician and naturalist whose studies of skulls convinced him that human races had diverse origins Josiah Nott (1804-1873), American physician and ethnologist whose studies on “human types” purportedly supported Confederate slaveholders’ views on white superiority

In a remarkable historical coincidence, two of the nineteenth century’s most influential figures—Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln—were born on the same day, February 12, 1809. To celebrate the bicentennial of this event and the sesquicentennial of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859), which has been listed among the most important books ever written, numerous publications have appeared on the lives and achievements of Darwin and Lincoln. Some note certain interconnections between them, such as their abhorrence of slavery. In Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond and James Moore propose a radically new explanation of how Darwin conceived and developed his profoundly innovative ideas on transmutation. Desmond and Moore contend that abolition, the “sacred cause” of their title, was the moral fire that ignited Darwin’s controversial ideas. Based on overwhelming evidence in his letters and other personal papers, historians of science and biographers have long recognized that Darwin was an ardent abolitionist, but, according to

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Desmond and Moore, these previous scholars neglected the relationship between Darwin’s Adrian Desmond, a research fellow views on slavery and his theories of how new in the Biology Department at species, particularly the human species, origi- University College London, has nated. Traditionally, scholars stressed Dar- written several historical books on win’s geological and biological observations evolutionary thought. James Moore during his five-year voyage aboard the Beagle, has taught the history of science at his later assiduous collection of data from Harvard, Notre Dame, and the Open University. He has published several naturalists and breeders, and his wide readbooks exploring the interactions of ing, especially of British economist Thomas science and religion in the nineteenth Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of century. Population (1798), as providing the impe tus for his conception of natural selection, in which the best adapted species survive and poorly adapted species become extinct. In Desmond and Moore’s new interpretation, Darwin’s belief that all human races are members of the same species antedated his ideas on transmutation and provided the emotional stimulus for the theory of evolution. Although the actual writing of Darwin’s Sacred Cause took only two years, the authors have traced the book’s origins to their 1991 biography, Darwin, which was a critical and popular success. After the biography’s publication, Moore’s research into Darwin’s Christian abolitionist heritage and Desmond’s expertise in the science and politics of Victorian England ably armed them in their quest to “recover Darwin’s lost humanitarianism.” Because of the extensive research that they did for their Darwin biography, they were already familiar with many of Darwin’s letters and other private papers, and they deepened this understanding by studying many new documents, such as Darwin’s correspondence with the American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison; the Beagle’s logbooks; and Darwin’s marginal comments, underlinings, and exclamation marks in books from his personal library. They also explored the vast pro- and antislavery literature in England and the United States. For the most part, the authors structure their book biographically, conducting their analyses via the framework of Darwin’s life—from his family background, through his education at Edinburgh and Cambridge universities, to his Beagle voyage and his subsequent career as a naturalist, culminating with his publication of The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). They distinguish their approach from those doctrinaire atheists who have caricatured Darwin as a single-minded scientist whose discoveries, by creating a materialistic vision of life’s history, undermined religion. They also disagree with religious creationists who mistakenly portray Darwin as antireligious and immoral. Instead, they believe that their interpretation of Darwin as a great humanitarian best fits the documented facts. Furthermore, they realize that he was a complex man who both shared in and rebelled against the values of his Victorian era. Desmond and Moore also realize that, in the twentieth century, Nazis and other groups misused Darwin’s ideas in helping to forge their racist ideologies. The authors

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do not support these and similar attempts to “hijack” Darwin for ends that would have horrified him. Rather, they want to understand what all groups—historians, scientists, and ideologues—have failed to grasp—“the moral fire that fueled his . . . obsession with human origins.” Even those already familiar with the antislavery views of Darwin’s forebears will be enlightened by the wealth of new information the authors have found that elucidates both the extent of British involvement in the slave trade and the efforts of committed abolitionists who devoted their time, money, and energies to eradicating this heinous practice. Abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson and his many allies, including members of the Darwin family and the Wedgwoods (Darwin’s maternal relatives), succeeded in convincing the British government, in 1807, to outlaw its trade in slaves, though the practice of slavery was allowed to continue in the colonies. By the time Charles Darwin was born in 1809, nearly two million Africans had been abducted and sold in British colonies. During his youth he absorbed the belief from his sisters and relatives that black people were not members of a different, inferior race but human beings like him. While he studied medicine at Edinburgh University he met his first black man, a freed slave who taught him how to stuff birds. Darwin found him intelligent and pleasant to work with. However, at the university he also encountered others who did not share his liberal views. For example, certain phrenologists were using skull sizes and their protuberances to characterize racial intelligence and temperament. Some anthropologists in the United States manipulated these results to justify slavery. When Darwin transferred to Cambridge University to train to become an Anglican clergyman, he tended to form close relationships with those faculty members who shared his antislavery views, including John Henslow, an excellent botanist as well as an ardent abolitionist. Henslow played a pivotal role in Darwin’s getting a position aboard the Beagle. During his travels, Darwin experienced firsthand the evils of slavery in South American port cities and in the Brazilian and Argentinian countryside. The screams of brutally punished slaves and the cries of black mothers, fathers, and children who were being separated for sale created indelible memories that, the authors claim, were more significant in forming Darwin’s views on common ancestry than was his collecting of fossils and finches. Darwin was also horrified by educated people in South America, Australia, and South Africa who had convinced themselves that aboriginal populations were “pests” that needed to be eradicated. Following his return to England in 1836, the image of a genealogical tree began to dominate Darwin’s thinking about the relationship among all branches of life, plants and animals as well as humans. Some historians of science, familiar with Darwin’s extensive researches in natural history, may question the authors’ contention that his antislavery views were the “key driver” in the formation of his theory of natural selection. Humans were certainly not the sole source of his insights. Nevertheless, Desmond and Moore make a case that Darwin’s 1838 postulation of natural selection owes much to his conviction that humans of all races constitute a single species descended from a common ancestor. Emma Wedgwood, who became his wife in 1839, was as passionately antislavery as her husband, but she derived her convictions from


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her Christian faith, which taught that all humans had souls infused by God. Even though Emma easily adapted to her husband’s sexism—he believed that males are naturally more courageous, intelligent, and imaginative than females—she was distraught as his studies in natural history transformed him from a believing Anglican to a materialist agnostic. Darwin was even gathering information to show that human religious and moral feelings were rooted in the instincts of lower animals. As Darwin accumulated data to support his radically new ideas on “descent with modification,” he was appalled by those scientists, such as Louis Agassiz, Samuel George Morton, and Josiah Nott, who claimed to have discovered evidence that human races had separate origins in different places. Some of these scientists thought that the evidence indicated that there were two human species (black and white), while Agassiz argued for eight. Others proposed fifteen, twenty-two, and even sixtythree different human species. Morton’s Crania Americana (1839), based on measurements of many skulls, posited twenty-two great families of humans. Morton went on to hierarchize these families, using this information to justify the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of black Africans. Josiah Nott, a slave-owning physician, used Morton’s data in his campaign against miscegenation and for the slave system. In 1854, Nott, with George Glidden, published Types of Mankind, in which they argued for polygenism, the doctrine that humans are divided into different but fixed races, each of which had originated in specific geographical regions. Agassiz wrote the introduction for this book, which has been listed among the most prominent racist tracts in antebellum America. Darwin was disheartened by Agassiz’s identification with the segregationist and pro-slavery group. Even such an intelligent and compassionate person as the geologist Charles Lyell, Darwin’s mentor and friend, came, after visits to the American South, to share Morton’s views. These scientists believed that black people were suitable only for servitude. To refute those who held that human races constituted different species, Darwin collected evidence from domesticated animals, such as pigeons, which, despite their many varieties, had originated from a common ancestor. Darwin was writing a massive work on natural selection, and he intended to devote much attention to the descent of human races from a single ancestor (the unitarist, or monogenist, theory), which directly contradicted Agassiz’s polygenist, or pluralist, views. For twenty years, Darwin labored on this ever-expanding tome, but, fearing controversy, he shared his radical ideas only with close friends—until 1858, when the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace sent him a scientific paper that clearly demonstrated that Wallace had independently arrived at the theory of natural selection. This paper served to end Darwin’s procrastination, and in 1859 he published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. This work, which did not include Darwin’s ideas and data on human evolution, appeared just before the outbreak of the American Civil War. The exclusion of humans from Darwin’s book did not prevent readers from extrapolating the consequences of his argument from plants and animals to humans. Some even used Darwin’s example of certain ant species that enslave others in their

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justification of human slavery, an interpretation that infuriated him, since he felt it was absurd to jump from the unreasoning, instinctual behavior of an ant species to the rational, moral behavior of a human being. Darwin closely followed the American Civil War, and he was critical of Lincoln for fighting it to preserve the Union rather than to abolish slavery. He was also critical of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves only in the rebel states, where the president had no direct control, and not in those Union states that permitted slavery, where he had the power to effect this change. When the war ended, Darwin confessed an error, since he had believed, along with many Englishmen, that slavery would flourish for centuries in the Southern states. Darwin also reacted to British brutality against members of other races. When British colonial subjects in Jamaica revolted, the governor brutally repressed the rebellion, slaughtering hundreds of black Jamaicans. Darwin denounced the action, but the governor’s decision was defended, to Darwin’s chagrin, by several of his friends and even by his son William. Despite his sympathies for black people, Darwin realized that, throughout history, “civilized” races had exterminated and replaced “savage” races all over the world. Furthermore, he did not entirely escape the prejudices of the “cultural ladder” accepted by many of his racist and elitist friends and colleagues. For example, in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, he engaged in what today would be called ethnic stereotyping when he quoted with approval a characterization of the Irish as lazy, squalid, and licentious. When an Irish reader asked him to remove this offensive passage in later editions, he refused. Others, such as Wallace, criticized Darwin’s emphasis on sexual selection to explain the origin of human races, but Darwin continued to defend his theory, which he hoped would resolve the dispute between monogenists and polygenists. In this he was mistaken. He was not even able to remove the taints of racism, classism, sexism, and imperialism from his own thinking and feelings. Desmond and Moore end their account somewhat abruptly in 1871, leaving readers to wonder about the development of Darwin’s ideas on race in the remaining eleven years of his life. Because they so emphasize Darwin’s humanitarianism and enlightened thinking about slavery, some readers may be surprised, even shocked, by Darwin’s statements on the inferiority of aborigines, his denigration of the working classes, and his defense of the British colonial empire. Some scientists and historians of science have criticized the book for what they feel is the authors’ overemphasis on abolition as the source of Darwin’s revolutionary ideas. They point out that the evidence indicates that Darwin had a passion for wresting truths from the natural world that was even stronger than his moral passion against slavery. Religious critics have supported Emma’s views against her husband’s by stressing that his materialistic theory of natural selection provides no basis for a moral outrage against slavery. Slave owners, after all, could be interpreted as fighting for the survival of their way of life. In the commemorative year of 2009, many books and discussions about Darwin and Lincoln served to bring out the complexities of their views on race, class, and colonialism. Darwin and Lincoln shared some of the racial prejudices of their contemporaries, but this did not prevent Lincoln from taking actions that eventually led to the


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liberation of American slaves. Darwin, despite being tied to some of the values of his gentlemanly class, was able to free scientists from false views about the origin of species while playing a not-insignificant role in the movement to free the world’s slaves. Robert J. Paradowski

Review Sources Bookforum 15 (February/March, 2009): 36. Booklist 105 (January 1, 2009): 31. The Economist 390 (January 24, 2009): 87-88. History Today 59, no. 2 (February 2009): 62. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 23 (December 1, 2008): 1238. Library Journal 133, no. 20 (December 1, 2008): 156. The Nation 288 (June 22, 2009): 33-36. Nature 457 (February 12, 2009): 792-793. New Scientist 201 (February 7, 2009): 48. New Statesman 138 (April 13, 2009): 47-48. The New York Times Book Review 114 (February 1, 2009): 11-12. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 48 (December 1, 2008): 40. Times Higher Education, February 12, 2009, pp. 48-49.

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DEFEND THE REALM The Authorized History of MI5 Author: Christopher Andrew (1941) First published: The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, 2009, in Great Britain Foreword by Jonathan Evans Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). Illustrated. 1,032 pp. $40.00 Type of work: Current affairs; history Time: 1909-2009 Locale: Great Britain An authorized, massively detailed account of the growth of the British Security Service during the first century of its existence that objectively considers its failures and successes Principal personages: Sir David Petrie, MI5 director general, 1941-1946 H. A. R. “Kim” Philby, high-ranking MI5 officer and Soviet double agent Klaus Fuchs, German-born British physicist who passed secrets to the Soviet Union Harold Wilson, British prime minister, 1964-1970, 1974-1976 Sir Vernon Kell, MI5 director, 1909-1940 Sir Roger Hollis, MI5 director general, 1956-1965

For most Americans, the British Security Service is something of a mystery. As they will learn from Defend the Realm, Christopher Andrew’s exhaustive but accessible new history, it has been something of a mystery to the British public as well. When, in 1957, politician R. A. Butler was appointed home secretary, a position whose responsibility includes oversight of the agency, he admitted that he had no idea how to find its headquarters. To his considerable surprise, it turned out to be based not in some highly secret location but in a perfectly conventional London office building known as Leconfield House. The agency, popularly known as MI5 (for Military Intelligence, Section 5), was then nearly fifty years old, but it would be another thirty-two years before its existence was officially acknowledged. As intelligence authority Andrew explains, Britain had virtually no espionage apparatus at the beginning of the twentieth century. That the public (and perhaps even the country’s potential enemies) believed otherwise was due largely to the efforts of such novelists as William Le Queux and Rudyard Kipling, both of whom sang the praises of British superiority in the shadowy, far-flung world of espionage. In fact, Britain’s army and navy had only tiny intelligence components, while the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police (MPSB), which had been set up to deal with

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Irish Republican terrorists, was only slightly Christopher Andrew is a professor of larger. However, change was imminent, propelled modern and contemporary history at by the prospect of ever-increasing German Cambridge University, a chair of the militarization and the certain knowledge that British Intelligence Study Group, a Germany was introducing its own spies into cofounding editor of the journal England. In 1903, the director of military op- Intelligence and National Security, and erations within the War Office established an honorary Air Commander of the Royal Auxiliary Air Force. two new, albeit small, bodies—then called MO2 and MO3—to deal with foreign intelligence and domestic counterespionage, respectively. The Secret Service Bureau followed in 1909, and one of its components, MI5, took over the responsibilities of MO3 under the direction of Sir Vernon Kell. Thus Defend the Realm’s publication coincides with the centennial year of MI5’s formation. Andrew divides the history of the agency into six periods. Before and during World War I (or the “Great War,” as the British remember it), the primary espionage threat came from German subversion. Between the wars, MI5 dealt with the “Red Menace” of communism, as well as the rise of fascism at home and abroad. During World War II, the immediate enemies were once again German agents, although the service was well aware that the Soviet Union, although ostensibly an ally, was also a threat. Andrew sees the events of the subsequent Cold War as falling into two periods, after which counterterrorism rather than counterespionage became MI5’s principal activity. During World War I, MI5 staff devised a classification system for suspects that ran from AA (“Absolutely Anglicised” or “Absolutely Allied”) to B (“Boche,” a term for “rascal” borrowed from the French) and—worst of all—BB (“Bad Boche”). It was later determined that Germany had introduced some 120 spies into the country during the conflict, but some had simply pocketed their initial payment and made their way to the United States as immigrants. The service celebrated the 1918 armistice with a lighthearted “Hush-Hush” Revue and dinner dance. Subsequently, the agency’s strength fell to nearly prewar levels, only to rise again in the late 1930’s with the approach of another war. Of the two directors and fourteen directors general who have run MI5, Andrew singles out Sir David Petrie (1941-1946) for special praise. Petrie took over the agency in 1941 during a period marked by serious disarray, poor morale, and uncertain leadership. By war’s end in 1945, he could boast that MI5 had completely neutralized German subversion. A large part of the effort involved the famous DoubleCross (or XX) System. Overseen by a committee of intelligence agents headed by Oxford don turned MI5 officer J. C. Masterman, this operation made use of decryptions from the German Enigma code machines to identify and either “turn” or deceive German spies on British territory. MI5 also provided assistance in a number of other projects during World War II, one of the most memorable of which was Operation Mincemeat. The brainchild of

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MI5 officer Charles Cholmondeley, the ingenious operation involved floating a corpse ashore on the coast of Spain in late April, 1943. Attached to its wrist was a briefcase containing documents alluding to a planned Allied landing in Greece. The documents (and various other papers in the corpse’s pockets) were prepared so skillfully that the Germans who obtained them from their Spanish sympathizers were completely fooled, and they were thus unprepared for the actual landing in Sicily. (The episode was later described by Ewen Montagu in the 1953 book The Man Who Never Was: The Story of Operation Mincemeat and dramatized in a 1956 motion picture of the same name.) While MI5’s war years were largely successful, its early Cold War years—during which the Soviet Union and its satellites became Britain’s principal enemies—were marked by failures and scandals. One such case involved Klaus Fuchs, a Germanborn naturalized British physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project’s creation of atomic weapons in Los Alamos, New Mexico. In all, Fuchs was vetted by MI5 on three separate occasions—one of them dealing specifically with his involvement with the Manhattan Project—before he confessed in 1950 to passing crucial secrets about the atomic and hydrogen bombs to the Soviets. Soon afterward came the unmasking of five “moles,” or double agents, within MI5: Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross. The five, says Andrew, constituted the most skilled group of British agents ever recruited by an enemy. All had been turned in the 1930’s during their years at Cambridge University or shortly afterward. With the exception of Cairncross, who served in the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), all were MI5 agents. Philby had risen to become liaison to the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), while Blunt was a distinguished art historian and held the title of surveyor of the king’s (later, the queen’s) pictures. Thanks to the decoding of a Soviet telegram in 1951, suspicion fell first upon Maclean, who made his escape with Burgess in late May. Their defection to the Soviet Union implicated Philby, but British interrogators were divided as to whether he was indeed a spy, and there was no direct evidence. Subsequently employed at a low level by MI6 in Lebanon, Philby escaped on a Soviet freighter in 1963. Cairncross made a partial confession while in the United States in 1964, returning to Britain only in 1970. Blunt also confessed in 1964, but his role was not revealed publicly until 1979. The work of the five double agents was costly to Britain in terms of lost intelligence, and their unmasking further damaged MI5’s morale, as well as its relations with the CIA. (Feelings ran so high that some MI5 officers even suspected their own director general, Sir Roger Hollis, of being a Soviet mole.) Nevertheless, Andrew argues that the Soviet Union handled the spies carelessly, asserting that neither MI5 nor MI6 would have been so incompetent had their positions been reversed. One of the most bizarre episodes in MI5’s history involved Harold Wilson, who served two terms during the 1960’s and 1970’s as prime minister. Andrew confirms that MI5 maintained a file on Wilson detailing, among many other matters, his indiscreet association with various Soviet citizens, including some KGB officers. The ser-

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vice was also concerned that several of the prime minister’s business friends were dishonest or vulnerable to blackmail by Soviet espionage agents. Andrew judges that these concerns were well founded and goes on to describe Wilson’s troubling dismissal of the Security Service’s repeated warnings. Wilson grew increasingly paranoid during his second term, becoming convinced that a cadre of former MI5 officers was plotting against him, possibly with the help of the CIA and its South African equivalent. He hired private detectives to investigate officials who he believed were behind press attacks on his political allies. He even refused to speak in the restroom of his official residence without turning on all the faucets, thus interfering with the microphones that he imagined had been hidden in the ceiling. Toward the end of the Cold War, MI5 turned its attention to myriad terrorist organizations, some likely to be well-known to readers, some not. These included the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Marxist-Leninist Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, and so on. In the opening years of the twenty-first century, al-Qaeda became a primary focus. Long before the group’s September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, MI5 had identified Osama bin Laden as a financier (but not a leader) of terrorism and had opened a file on him in 1995. As the current director general of MI5, Jonathan Evans, makes clear in his foreword to Defend the Realm, Andrew’s book is an authorized but not an official work. Andrew was left free to draw his own conclusions, relying not only on an enormous archive of Security Service records—which run to nearly 400,000 paper files—but also on myriad other sources. However, Andrew cautions that the clearance of his text was a protracted affair, and some material was excised from the book before it could be published. What such material included is unknowable except to those in a position to read between the lines. While MI5’s early years were distinguished by something approaching a spirit of adventure and more than a few episodes of farce, its more recent, terror-focused activities make for grimmer reading. Although Andrew writes fluently, Defend the Realm is not for casual readers or the faint of heart. Weighing in at nearly three-and-one-half pounds, it runs to over one thousand pages of detailed description and analysis and includes over one hundred pages of notes in small print. It is enlivened by numerous illustrations, and readers who find themselves lost in the text will find some help in a series of appendixes listing the service’s directors and directors generals and outlining the nomenclature and responsibilities of the service’s various divisions over time. Grove Koger

Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 7 (December 1, 2009): 8. The Daily Telegraph, October 13, 2009, p. 25.

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The Economist 392, no. 8652 (October 10, 2009): p. 87. Evening Standard, October 29, 2009, p. 30. Financial Times, October 10, 2009, p. 14. The Guardian, October 10, 2009, p. 9. The Independent, October 16, 2009, p. 26. Mail on Sunday, October 18, 2009, p. 13. The Observer, October 11, 2009, p. 19. The Times (London), October 10, 2009, p. 10.


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DELIVER US FROM EVIL The Slavery Question in the Old South Author: Lacy K. Ford (1952) Publisher: Oxford University Press (New York). 673 pp. $34.95 Type of work: History Time: 1787 to the mid-1830’s Locale: Southern United States A study of southern ideas, arguments, and debates on the question of slavery, from the drafting of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 to the age of Andrew Jackson in the mid1830’s In the massive and detailed study Deliver Us from Evil, Lacy K. Ford draws upon a wide array of primary sources, including newspapers, sermons, speeches, pamphlets, government documents, and legislative records, to recapture the contradictory and shifting ideas and attitudes on slavery in the South in the early years of the Republic. Ford explores conflicting perspectives in the political, intellectual, religious, economic, and social thought that reverberated throughout the Old South, revealing that attitudes toward slavery were hardly monolithic. Instead, these attitudes adapted to growing opposition from slaves, abolitionists, and free blacks. Ford sets out to examine “how masters struggled with the contradictions of maintaining a brutal and oppressive system of human bondage in a republic founded on the principles of freedom and equality and how the enslaved used those contradictions to resist the slaveholders’ domination and control.” To frame the examination of the slavery question in the Old South, Ford divides the region into the upper South (Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, and North Carolina) and the lower South (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana). By 1830, slaves accounted for more than 40 percent of the population of the lower South, while in the upper South slaves were less than one-third of the total population. The upper South strained to make slavery compatible with the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the principles of political egalitarianism contained in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Condemning slavery, Patrick Henry asked why “at a time when the rights of humanity are defined and understood with precision, In a country, above all others, fond of liberty,” citizens would adopt “a principle as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the bible, and destructive to liberty.” Encapsulating this section of his study, Ford writes that in the founding era, republican ideals, Christian morality, fear of slave unrest, and troubling questions about the long-term economic viability of the area’s slave economy all pushed upper South whites to question a perpetual commitment to slavery as a labor system.

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Ford reminds his readers, however, just how deeply entrenched the right to own slaves had become in the minds of slave owners. John Breckinridge of Kentucky opposed calls in 1799 to alter the state constitution regarding slavery, asking indignantly what was “the difference whether I am robbed of my horse by a highwayman or of my slave by a set of people called Convention.” Almost forty years later, the governor of South Carolina would declare that “slavery is the corner-stone of our republican edifice.” In the summer of 1800, the first of several armed insurrections terrorized southern whites. Gabriel, a skilled slave blacksmith, organized a rebellion near Richmond, Virginia, but was betrayed by fellow-slave informants. At first, Gabriel evaded capture, but thirty alleged conspirators were arrested and given what Ford labels “socalled trials.” Twenty were promptly executed. A month later, Gabriel suffered the same fate. The reaction among most southerners was to defend slavery even more tenaciously. A writer in the Virginia Herald paradoxically reasoned that, since slavery was “a monster—the most horrible of monsters,” it required tight control. One slaveowner insisted that the “right of property in a slave was the same as that in a home, or other personal thing.” The second major slave uprising, the German Coast slave revolt, erupted in Louisiana in 1811. Two hundred slaves burned three plantations and killed and wounded several whites. Troops moved in, and at least 115 slaves were killed or executed in the suppression and punishment of the rebellion. A hastily organized “court” sentenced guilty slaves to be shot and have their heads placed on stakes “as a terrible example to all who would disturb public tranquility in the future.” The reaction in the upper South was to expand what Ford calls the “whiteness” of society by practicing paternalism in the short run and gradual manumission, colonization, and diffusion in the long run. Under paternalism, the master was seen as a “benevolent patriarch” who presided over “three interlocking domesticities—his blood family, the slave families, and the plantation community family.” Domestic slavery was redefined as the “social subordination of women and slaves” to protect and enhance “the liberties of white men.” Ford devotes considerable space to the emergence of paternalism, which encouraged that slaves be recognized as human beings, regardless of their “inferiority.” Paternalism saw the master as the “steward” of his plantation and slaves as entitled to nurture their families and religion. It sought to make “slave society work humanely as well as profitably.” In the cyclical history of slavery that Ford continuously reveals, paternalism was contested and resisted. Ironically, the presence of a small but visible cadre of successful free blacks challenged the very foundation of both slavery and paternalism be-

Lacy K. Ford is professor of history at the University of South Carolina. In 1989, the Southern Historical Association awarded Ford its Francis Butler Simkins Book Prize for Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (1988). He is editor of A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction (2005).

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cause it “suggested that, under some circumstances, blacks could take care of themselves quite well, better even than many whites.” Consequently, some states banned the immigration of free blacks. In 1822, South Carolina was rocked by the third major revolt that Ford explores in detail, this time feeding the fear of free blacks. Denmark Vesey, who bought his freedom in 1800 after winning fifteen hundred dollars in a lottery, became a blacksmith and joined the Second Presbyterian Church in 1817. Five years later, Vesey’s plans to lead a slave uprising were scuttled by an informant. Following what Ford calls “nothing that remotely resembled a trial,” Vesey and six others were tried, convicted, and hanged. A defender of the process readily agreed that no free white man could have been tried behind closed doors and without being confronted by witnesses, but he declared that “slaves are not entitled to these rights” and free blacks “are treated by laws in all respects in the like manner of slaves.” The Vesey plot prompted many to complain about the growing leniency in the treatment of slaves and the danger posed by slave literacy and black Christianity. Others, however, found it hard to explain how slaveholders could be Christians and Christians could be slaveholders. The latter concerns succumbed to the former, leading to the enactment of laws making it a crime for slaves to learn to read and write or to assemble even for religious purposes unless whites were also present. One defender of slavery insisted that literacy rendered the slave “dissatisfied with his lot and invited insubordination.” Meanwhile, abolitionists stepped up their opposition to slavery. In 1829, the highly influential pamphlet Appeal in Four Articles was published by David Walker, a free black born in North Carolina who had migrated to Massachusetts. It was widely distributed throughout the South. Trained in the Christian faith, Walker issued a withering indictment not only of slavery but also the emerging colonization movement (supported by Thomas Jefferson and others), declaring that “America is more our country than it is the whites—we have enriched it with our blood and tears.” Walker’s pamphlet posed such a threat to the institution of slavery that several states responded to it. Georgia made it a crime punishable by death for slaves or free blacks to assist in the circulation of any written material that might incite “insurrection, conspiracy or resistence” to slavery. Easily the most famous slave revolt was the one led by Nat Turner, a slave who worked on a farm in Southhampton County, Virginia. Turner’s parents taught him to read and write, and he came to believe that God had chosen him for great work. On the evening of August 21, 1831, Turner and six accomplices launched a bloody insurrection in which they killed fifty-five whites during a seventy-two-hour rampage. The response was what Ford calls “a frenzied white reign of terror,” killing at least thirtynine blacks, many of whom had little or no connection to the revolt. One of the murdered slaves had actually saved the life of his owner’s wife. Eventually, eighteen blacks were apprehended, convicted, and hanged, while fourteen others were convicted and transported out of state. Turner himself eluded capture for over two months until he too was caught, convicted, and hanged. As the South was reeling from the Nat Turner uprising, abolitionists continued

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their attacks on slavery. Beginning in 1835, the American Antislavery Society sent tens of thousands of pamphlets and tracts to southern destinations through the new U.S. postal system, triggering the outrage of slave owners, who condemned the effort as a “wicked plan of exciting the negroes to insurrection and to massacre.” A Tuscaloosa grand jury went so far as to indict the editor of the Emancipator newspaper in absentia for sending the publications into Alabama. Other steps to undermine opposition to slavery, such as eliminating the right of free blacks to vote in state elections, drew outspoken criticism from some quarters. “That the right of suffrage, on the part of the free people of color, was totally abrogated,” the Raleigh Register editorialized, “is a source of regret to us.” Buffeted by violent revolts and scathing criticism, the South renewed its defense of slavery, but it did so with what Ford calls an “ideological reconfiguration.” He concludes his comprehensive study by examining three key elements. First, that slavery was justified by irreversible racial differences. One defender claimed that the “negro is from his intellectual and moral organization incapable of being civilized or enjoying freedom; utterly incompetent to become a citizen of a civilized community.” Second, Ford explains that slave owners saw slavery as “the best foundation for liberty and democracy among whites” that protected “the independence of whites by preventing the development of a dependent white working class in the region.” Finally, Ford posits that the South’s best defense of its humanitarianism against the mounting abolitionist moral attack was “a full embrace of paternalism both as the ideology of slaveholding and as the best practice for slave management.” Deliver Us from Evil is a monumental work of historical research and analysis. At times, the level of detail is so granular, such as reporting the individual votes taken by legislative subcommittees in various states, that some readers may yearn for more of the human drama that Ford elsewhere so ably recounts. Also, the author never fully explains why he halts his study thirty years before the Civil War, leaving readers to question whether Southern attitudes toward slavery remained static or changed in the course of the next three decades. These flaws aside, the book is prodigious in its scholarship and illuminating in its perspective. Ford has taken a topic that many have assumed they understood and subjected it to a deeper and more penetrating level of analysis. No student of slavery or the intellectual history of the American South can afford to overlook this important work. Stephen F. Rohde

Review Sources Library Journal 134, no. 14 (September 1, 2009): 124-125. The New York Times Book Review, September 20, 2009, p. 14. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 25 (June 22, 2009): 38-39.

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DIGGING The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music Author: Amiri Baraka (1934) Publisher: University of California Press (Berkeley). 411 pp. $26.95; paperback 17.95 Type of work: Music, essays In this important collection of essays published since 1989, Baraka argues persuasively that jazz, as created and developed by creative African American composers and musicians from Scott Joplin to the present, constitutes the authentic classical music of the United States Principal personages: Louis Armstrong (1901-1971), a beloved American jazz trumpeter whose solo career lasted fifty years John Coltrane (1926-1967), an American saxophonist whose 1964 masterpiece Love Supreme illustrates the importance of African music in the African diaspora Miles Davis (1926-1991), an important American jazz trumpeter Duke Ellington (1899-1974), a popular jazz composer, pianist, and bandleader who is generally considered to be the greatest American composer Scott Joplin (1867?-1917), a composer generally viewed as the founder of jazz Thelonius Monk (1917-1982), an important jazz pianist and composer Sun Ra (1914-1993), a gifted composer who combined African religious mysticism and experimental jazz Nina Simone (1933-2003), a jazz singer famous for her civil rights songs and her introduction of African motifs into her jazz songs Bessie Smith (1894-1937), a great jazz singer who was often called “the Empress of the Blues”

Digging collects essays written over a twenty-year period in which Amiri Baraka explores jazz not only as the distinctively American art form but also as the United States’ version of classical music. To make this argument, he must successfully position the jazz tradition alongside the classical traditions of other countries, such as Germany, France, and Russia, that have recognized classical lineages. Generations of gifted classical composers in Europe expanded on earlier musical conventions in order to create new musical works that made use of existing musical traditions. German classical music, for example, developed from the highly intellectual and finely wrought fugues and suites of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) into the romantic and emotionally powerful symphonies of Ludwig von Beethoven (17701827). Beethoven found inspiration in the sung cantatas and masses when he intro-

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duced the words from the “Ode to Joy” by Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) in the final movement of his Ninth Symphony. The recurring musical themes in Beethoven’s last five symphonies inspired Richard Wagner (18131883) to use highly evocative leitmotifs in order to describe the unique traits of the major characters in his operas. Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner created their music in Germany, where different styles of classical music were appreciated and where composers frequently wrote creative musical imitations and variaPoet, playwright, and essayist Amiri tions on well-known classical works. Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) has Improvisation often played an integral part written extensively on jazz and African in performances and interpretations as early as American culture. A former professor the first half of the eighteenth century. Many of Africana studies at Stony Brook people who attended the Lutheran church of University, he is a member of the National Academy of Arts and Letters St. Thomas in Leipzig, where Bach played and has served as the poet laureate of the organ for Sunday services, stated that New Jersey. Bach played well-known Lutheran hymns in highly imaginative ways, and many parishioners were not pleased with his creative improvisations. Pianists and violinists who played concertos by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Beethoven felt comfortable including their own codas, which they added near the end of their performances. Such improvisations and creative changes to the original score extended well into the twentieth century. The eminent Viennese violinist Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962), who performed regularly in New York City during the first four decades of the twentieth century before moving there permanently at the outbreak of World War II, surprised concertgoers by adding his own codas to extremely well-known violin concertos by Beethoven, Mozart, Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840), and Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847). Kreisler even performed his own reinterpretation of the famous African American spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” His was a highly intellectual Austrian variation on this famous American hymn. Were one to compare Kreisler’s rendition of the spiritual with the very earthy and better-known 1962 interpretation by Louis Armstrong, one could conclude that Kreisler does not understand the African American origin of this hymn. While it is totally Eurocentric, however, Kreisler’s rendition of the spiritual does reveal his sincere attempt to understand the music of the country where he spent the last two decades of his life. New York City concertgoers could appreciate creative improvisations of famous works not just by classical European composers but also by twentieth century jazz composers. While Americans may appreciate the rich complexity of classical music from distant European countries, they understand that a love of classical music is a taste ac-

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quired by those who are interested in certain foreign cultures. European classical music is aesthetically very pleasing, but it is not American music. Baraka argues persuasively in Digging that jazz is the only music created and developed in the United States by Americans. He also points out that it is a historical fact that early jazz musicians and composers were almost exclusively African Americans. In the book’s opening essay, Baraka draws readers’ attention to the inextricable links between Africa and America in the development of jazz. In this essay on the West African word griot, or “storyteller,” he points out that a griot was much more than an oral historian who transmitted traditional African values from one generation to another. A griot also expressed the extraordinary joy and inner strength felt by those who nevertheless suffered greatly at the hands of their oppressors. Baraka argues that jazz musicians are in their own way griot who smile while simultaneously conveying to listeners the profound suffering of dignified African Americans. Those African Americans’ lives, Baraka believes, are enriched by liberating music designed to remind them of their rich African heritage. Baraka also directly links African tradition to the joyous “shouting” in African American churches, where people learn about both the Gospels and the “God Spell.” Jazz, which Baraka often calls “that music” or “our music,” has a mesmerizing effect on listeners. It elevates them while at the same time bringing them extraordinary bliss. In an essay titled “Ritual and Performance,” Baraka effectively contrasts the performance of classical European music with the performance of jazz. On one hand, those learning to play classical European music can be taught how to hold their instrument, how to dress, and how to remain stoic on the stage. On the other hand, it is not sufficient for jazz musicians to learn how to play their instruments. They must also learn to feel the intensity of the music and adapt their performances based on the reactions of listeners. Improvisation is essential in jazz, while it is largely discouraged in performances of classical European music. Baraka even associates the experience of performing or listening to jazz to “religious ecstasy.” With the exception of Bach, who created and performed religious music designed to fill an entire church with joyful sound and to provoke an intense emotional reaction from churchgoers, very few classical European composers strove to produce such a strong sense of ecstasy in their listeners. Baraka discusses at great length the myriad links between jazz and experiences of religion in African American churches. In traditional West African societies, from which most first-generation slaves were kidnapped and transported to America, people generally believe that the past, the present, and the future coexist. This is an alien concept to Americans of European descent, who consider time to be linear. In jazz and in traditional African American churches, however, the coexistence of various time frames serves to remind people of their place in an extremely old culture that must adapt once again to a changing world. The title of this volume of essays, Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music, is richly evocative. Like all great poets, Baraka is sensitive to the many levels of meaning that words possess. He is figuratively “digging” into the recordings and oral histories of major jazz musicians whom he never heard live. The

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word “digging” also evokes the meaning of “enjoying,” as in the expression “I am really digging it.” Baraka was born in 1934 and therefore had to rely on recordings that were not always of the highest quality to experience the performance techniques of such influential jazz musicians as Scott Joplin and Bessie Smith. Although he recognized the significance of their contributions to early jazz, from ragtime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the blues of the 1920’s and 1930’s, Baraka also understood the harsh racism with which both artists had to deal during their years performing jazz. American opera houses of Joplin’s day refused to perform his great opera Treemonisha (pb. 1911, pr. 1972) not only because of the composer’s skin color but especially because its major characters are all African Americans. The first complete performance of Treemonisha took place in 1972, a full fifty-five years after Joplin’s death. Although Treemonisha is now considered to be the greatest American opera, Joplin’s contemporaries knew of him only as the composer of rags. Racism even contributed to the death of Bessie Smith. On September 26, 1937, she suffered serious but not fatal injuries as a result of a car accident near Clarksdale, Mississippi. Ambulances came from Clarksdale’s hospital for whites and its hospital for African Americans. The ambulance drivers argued about who should take Smith to which hospital. The delay caused her to lose so much blood that her situation was hopeless when she was finally treated in Clarksdale’s hospital for African Americans. Baraka describes well how jazz developed from ragtime to blues, swing, big band, bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, free jazz, jazz fusion, and experimental jazz, but he also reminds his readers that these categories refer only to general jazz trends and do not describe the genius of individual jazz musicians and composers. He reminds them as well that many great jazz musicians did not limit themselves to one form of jazz but rather kept recreating themselves. Miles Davis, for example, began by performing bebop and then evolved into an original performer of cool jazz, hard bop, and eventually electric jazz. Baraka laments that white record producers tried to make jazz more acceptable to white listeners by releasing more records by rather unimaginative white jazz musicians and fewer records by highly creative African American jazz musicians. In his essay “The American Popular Song,” he also observes that, in the first “talking film,” The Jazz Singer (1927), a white actor named Al Jolson sings supposedly jazz songs in blackface. It is possible but not very likely that Al Jolson in blackface made jazz more acceptable to racists in 1927, but this film offends modern moviegoers because of its overt racism. There is much to recommend in this excellent volume of essays. In his theoretical essays, Baraka describes very well the profound likenesses between black African music, traditions, and spirituality and jazz as composed and performed by generations of talented African American jazz musicians. He also describes very well the true originality of many famous and some unjustly neglected African American jazz musicians, from Scott Joplin to the present. Edmund J. Campion

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Review Sources American Book Review 30 (July-August, 2009): 19. Ebony, June, 2009, p. 45. Library Journal 134, no. 9 (May 15, 2009): 75. New York Amsterdam News 100, no. 42 (October 15, 2009): 25-35

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DIGITAL BARBARISM A Writer’s Manifesto Author: Mark Helprin (1947) Publisher: Harper (New York). 232 pp. $24.99 Type of work: Memoir, philosophy, current affairs Time: The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries Locale: United States A memoir of Helprin’s development as a writer, a defense of copyright law, and an explication—occasionally intemperate—of his distrust of the Internet and its supporters, which distrust had its origin in a venomous response to one of Helprin’s articles The seesaw of Mark Helprin’s title and subtitle, Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto has a colon as fulcrum, the title encapsulating what he sees as the nature and tone of the age, the subtitle embodying his reaction and resistance. For Helprin, the weightier becomes the digital zeitgeist of immediacy, collaborative endeavor, and reliance on the image, the more necessary become the humanistic qualities of leisurely organic growth, individual effort, and memory, especially memory of words. All these qualities are to be based on knowledge of and respect for the slowly accumulating achievements of the human past, and all, according to the author, are kicking hopelessly in the air in this cultural moment. Helprin begins with two illustrative vignettes, the first imagining the life of a Californian of 2028, the “director of a small firm that supplies algorithms for the detection of damage in and the restoration of molecular memories in organic computation.” This man’s work is performed exclusively through the management of data links. Outside work, his relationship with his wife is temporarily fraught: during their last amatory encounter he had imposed upon her body in virtual sex not the appearance of a porn star but that of a former girlfriend. He jets out to see her in Alaska, where she is now on vacation, taking with him a “slim leather-bound portfolio” by means of which he can access everything ever printed or logged, including a remark about Descartes he half-remembers having made and wants to use again. This man’s life, although exciting and physically easy, is frenetic, sometimes alarmingly so. There can, however, be no going back to the days of his father and grandfather. It would be career suicide not to be on the technological cutting edge, and it would also be personally desolating, so hooked is he on the constant buzz of his technological existence. Counterposed to this picture is one of an English politician of 1908, on vacation by Lake Como. A letter from the prime minister will take eight days to reach him and an hour and three-quarters to answer, including the making of a fair copy. This answer will incorporate an observation about Descartes the politician had once made that at first he could not recall. He was able to remember it, though, because his education

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trained him to remember words not only in his own language but also in Latin, Greek, French, Mark Helprin is author of many books, and German. The politician’s experience of essays, and short stories. He has served making love (as it can justly be called in this in the Israeli military and as adviser to case) to his wife must wait some hours after Bob Dole’s presidential campaign. He the sight of her that first arouses his desire. was won the National Jewish Book For Helprin, the life of the past Englishman is Award, the Prix de Rome, the Peggy V. infinitely preferable to that of the imagined Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. future Californian. The politician knows the meaning of patience and tranquillity. He can “savor” the world in which he lives. The seed of Digital Barbarism was an article Helprin wrote for The New York Times about copyright, which he approves of and would like to see modestly extended. Helprin wonders why a man who creates a flour mill or a newspaper is able to will the fruit of his labors to his heirs, all due taxes having been paid, whereas a man whose life has been spent creating a number of copyrights is not able to do so, the fruit of his labors accruing to the government seventy years after his death. Despite the irresponsible title given the article by a New York Times editor, “A Great Idea Lives Forever: Shouldn’t Its Copyright?” Helprin says that he does not dissent from the words of the Constitution, that Congress has the power “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” (“The italics are mine,” he notes, “the capitalization James Madison’s.”). He merely disagrees about how long the “limited times” should be and advocates slight extension of copyright on the grounds of inconsistency, there being, he claims, no essential difference between real property and intellectual property. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the seed of Helprin’s book was to be found in the reaction to his article, which clearly took him aback and hurt him: The online version was seen by three-quarters of a million readers, and elicited many comments, all critical and many vituperative (such as “Screw you, Helprin!”). Electronic communication, writes the author, is sheltered or even anonymous. Nobody takes a blogger to task in the way one may be taken to task in face-to-face altercation. Furthermore, it is immensely easy to multiply responses electronically, to organize a dehumanized and merciless “flaming” of an unpopular view. Readers who have been on the receiving end of a sustained attempt to jeer and intimidate them into silence will sympathize with Helprin here, and the Internet facilitates such attempts. Helprin seeks to analyze why a call for the extension of copyright proved inflammatory. He claims that he unwittingly offended a movement, widespread in certain quarters, that opposes not merely the extension of copyright but its very existence. It was the 1999 fight against the recording industry that brought this movement into being. Young people mobilized against record companies because of their wish to enjoy unrestricted music “sharing” (the sneer quotes are Helprin’s), along with an equally limitless copying of digital video discs (DVDs) and piracy of software. This movement was facilitated by a series of moral failings, especially the belief

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that, because these forms of theft are easy and widespread, their perpetrators are not culpable, as well as a redefining of moral turpitude as virtue because such a redefinition is easier than standing for immutable principles. Thus, digital theft seemed to some to be not merely respectable but also admirable, representing a stand against rich and greedy corporations in favor of the poor and generous (who, Helprin would say, are generous with the goods of others that have been brought into being by talent, risk, and work). Here, then, is the link between “digital barbarism” and a sudden loutish objection to a literate article about copyright. Public availability is what counts, in the eyes of Helprin’s opponents. Helprin himself wishes to stand up for ways of responding to life and creating art that he learned to know and admire in what now seems a past world. He attacks present-day attitudes that he regards as inimical to life and art, such attitudes being fostered by the nature and consequences of the digital revolution, for “discipline, values, and clarity of vision . . . tend to flourish as we grapple with necessity and austerity, and tend to disappear when by virtue of our ingenuity we float free of them.” By repeated characterizations and oppositions, Digital Barbarism creates a series of mutually reinforcing contrasts between the way Helprin thinks things ought to be (and considers they actually were or could have been before the advent of the Internet) and the way they too often are now. On one hand, Helprin asserts that the human being is incomparably superior to any machine, “unexcelled as a masterwork of God and nature,” and the single, focused, creating, individual consciousness is all. A true writer will invest years in a book, perhaps living in conditions of actual poverty and certainly denied financial or family stability, for writing is a noble “craft and art that was ancient at the time of Jesus, that encompasses the world, and that has evolved by the love and labor of the greatest souls ever to grace the earth.” Not only is the struggling individual the only voice that can create any art worthy of the name according to Helprin, but also the implications of that honesty and striving are societal: It is the individual voice that resists “every form of tyranny, every attempted mechanization of the soul, every great challenge to civilization, and every assault upon human nature”—all evils that can be propagated by the power and misuse of the Internet. Copyright is the legal protector of authors, safeguarding their ability to make a living while standing against the forces of uniformity and safeguarding too the integrity of their texts. This is the argument defining the good in Helprin’s debate, and there can be no doubt of his utter sincerity. It is in the characterizations of his opposition that the occasional problem is to be found. Helprin makes a number of points that will hit home to those of his readers who are roughly the same age as he is and therefore remember a world before computers. Too often, computers do enable their less committed or scrupulous users to cut and paste pieces of what others have written. Too often, the major skill their users acquire can be that of blithely unaware juxtaposition. Although certain “abandonments” (“of grammar, capitalization, punctuation, spelling, et cetera, and the substitution for these things of either nothing or of idiotic and inexpressive pictograms, jargon, and expletives”) may well be the products in part of a degraded educational system, as Helprin plausibly claims, they are also surely products

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of the ease and celerity with which words can be flung onto a screen and then made gratifyingly public. Helprin’s panegyric of pen and ink may seem a little less curmudgeonly in the light of an Internet discourse dominated by formulaic abbreviations such as “LOL” and “ROTFLMAO.” However, curmudgeonly it can still seem. His gift for acerbic aphorism can be good fun (“In my education it was assumed that one would read Macauley and study Latin, in much the same way that today it is assumed that a student will know about Harriet Tubman and collect aluminum cans”), and his sustained invective can elicit a sympathetic grin, as when he refers to mouth-breathing morons in backwards baseball caps and pants that fall down; Slurpeesucking geeks who seldom see daylight; . . . women who have lizard tattoos winding from the navel to the nape of the neck; . . . and an entire race of females . . . that speaks in North American Chipmunk and seldom makes a statement without, like, a question at the end?

However, Helprin is still occasionally a little too reminiscent of the odd professor in the faculty lounge whom everybody is reluctant to sit next to and with whom no one wants to be associated. Helprin exhibits a great deal of idealism, acuity, selfless commitment, skill with prose, and literary address and poise, all slightly but fatally tinged with the aura of eccentric bitterness. He conveys impressive insights into the antihumanistic because antihuman machines that increasingly mold humans’ apprehension of the world about them, describing the machines’ terrible strengths, “speed, power, compression, instantaneousness, immense capacity, indifference, and automaticity.” He advances a telling condemnation of those who consider writing, of all things, “a communal effort, an act of assemblage and additive progression as in adding storeys to a skyscraper or the laying down of a railway track.” All these strengths would read more sweetly and therefore more effectively were he to add a drop or two of charity to his depiction of the forces he contemns and their servants. Helprin’s book has received varied reviews, some tepid or hostile. Perhaps the most negative was an Internet response by Lawrence Lessig, himself criticized in Digital Barbarism. M. D. Allen

Review Sources American Conservative 8, no. 12 (September 1, 2009): 45-46. Library Journal 134, no. 9 (May 15, 2009): 87. National Review 61, no. 13 (July 20, 2009): 46-48. The New York Times, May 19, 2009, p. C6. The New York Times Book Review, June 21, 2009, p. 13. The Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2009, p. A15.

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DON’T CRY Stories Author: Mary Gaitskill (1954) Publisher: Pantheon (New York). 226 pp. $23.95 Type of work: Short fiction Ten new stories of longing, love, and loneliness by the American writer famous for the collection Bad Behavior Mary Gaitskill is perhaps best known for her first collection of stories, Bad Behavior (1988), which included an often-anthologized, shocking tale about masochism titled “Romantic Weekend” and a story that was adapted into the 2002 film Secretary—starring Maggie Gyllenhaal as a mentally ill woman who cuts herself and James Spader as a dominating boss with obsessive tendencies. The two stories alone gave Gaitskill a reputation as a literary bad girl, which was furthered by her revelation that she had been a stripper for a couple of years. In “The Wolf in the Tall Grass,” an essay collected in Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction (1998), Gaitskill says that she writes because, even when her subject is pain and horror, she, like many others, has a powerful desire to say, “Yes, I see. I feel. I hear. This is what it’s like.” Gaitskill’s stories in Don’t Cry, her third collection, do not present clearly delineated narratives. Rather, they resemble essayistic descriptions of ensemble groups, each of which is positioned around one central character’s sense of disengagement and despair. The opening story, “College Town, 1980” focuses on four young people living together in Ann Arbor, Michigan, just after the election of Ronald Reagan. The central character, Dolores, has been hospitalized for mental illness and has to wear a scarf because she has taken to pulling out large clumps of her hair. She lives in a communal house with her younger brother Patrick, his girlfriend Lily, and a twenty-oneyear-old philosophy student named Mark. The story has no plot; the underlying tension stems from Dolores’s depression and the fact that she blames her unhappiness on her former boyfriend’s having dumped her. She also blames her father, an adulterous alcoholic, and her mother, who is “murderously unhappy.” Dolores feels particularly persecuted by a waitress in a restaurant she frequents who seems to hate her for no apparent reason. Another submerged conflict in the story is the tension between Patrick and Lily, who are threatening to break up. Dolores sympathizes with Lily, with whom she has desultory conversations about strength and weakness. Lily says that she was glad when Reagan was elected, even though she hates him, because he stands for strength. The story ends with Dolores thinking she will work on her research papers and graduate, feeling that she is strong—but strong like a bombed-out building, stripped and impervious. This is less a story than it is a set piece about young people who feel victimized, helpless, and

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trapped in a stagnant situation at a certain Mary Gaitskill’s stories have been transitional point in American society. “An Old Virgin” focuses on Laura, a chosen for The Best American Short woman filled with self-loathing who has a Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. habit of walking around her apartment mut- Her collection Because They Wanted tering about how ugly and valueless she is. To (1997) was nominated for the PEN/ Even while she seems to cope with everyday Faulkner Award, and her novel activities and her job at a medical clinic, she Veronica (2005) was nominated for the National Book Award. feels like a bug tunneling through the earth with fragile insect legs. Her father is very ill, emaciated, and fragile. He was abused as a child, and he abused his own children in turn. The story’s titular character and central metaphor is a forty-three-year-old woman who is given a preliminary examination by Laura. Because the woman is a virgin, Laura wonders what it would be like to be a virgin at her own age of forty. She imagines virginity as the source of her strength, making everything in her extra alive. However, she actually feels that, although her body is alive with strong feelings, the feelings seem broken or incomplete. After reading such stories about women who either feel sorry for themselves or hate themselves, one may find the title of the story “The Agonized Face” predictable and inevitable. Here, the unhappy women who seem to be Gaitskill’s obsessive focus are closer to her own persona as a writer and commentator on contemporary society. The divorced mother of a ten-year-old girl, the narrator has been assigned to write a piece on a feminist author who is giving a talk at an annual literary festival. The author at the festival, who was once a prostitute, has described prostitutes as feminist fighters against patriarchy. She talks about how she has been treated unfairly by the media, insisting that—although she can understand that it is exciting to imagine eccentric writers engaging in outlandish behavior—she is not such a person. She complains that, by isolating qualities that seem exciting and scary and projecting them onto public figures, media consumers deny those figures’ humanity and cheat themselves of life’s complexity. One wonders if this speech is a reference to the initial public interest in Gaitskill’s work after the publication of Bad Behavior created a great deal of publicity based on her prior career as a stripper. (When an interviewer asked Gaitskill if she had ever turned a trick, she replied without hesitation that she had, earning herself a reputation that she has perhaps since regretted.) Much of “The Agonized Face” reads like a personal essay. It raises the issue of the relationship of feminism to sexuality, pondering whether feminists who celebrate female sexuality have made young women promiscuous or whether feminists who attack traditional patriarchal sex roles have convinced those same young women that there is little or no difference between consensual sex and rape. Various images of Gaitskill’s own persona crop up in the story. For example, when the narrator recounts interviewing a topless dancer, a desiccated blonde with desperate intelligence burning in her eyes who refers to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, one may be tempted to look at the author photo on the jacket cover of Don’t Cry, in which Gaitskill stares out at her readers both defensively and belligerently.

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Recalling another story she once wrote about a television talk show that depicted stories of rape victims, the narrator wonders if the feminist author was suggesting that rape and being a prostitute are the same thing, concluding, in her essayistic tone, that for the purposes of her “discussion,” they are close enough. The article the narrator finally writes takes the feminist writer to task for pretending that female humiliation is an especially smart kind of game and for casually mentioning her experience with prostitution while leaving out the “agonized face” of women’s humiliation in modern society. In her article, she metaphorically chases the author down an alley, to stone her and force her to show the face that she denies. She insists that the “agonized face” is one of the few mysteries left to women and must be protected. One of the humiliations of women is suggested in “Mirror Ball,” a self-indulgent grotesque fairytale about a man who, by having sex with a woman and then failing to call her later, “takes her soul.” The man, a musician, picks the young woman up with the line that her eyes remind him of a mirror ball in the window of a vintage record store that flashes over the whole street at night. When he does not call her, she tries to feel contempt for him, but she feels that she loves him; that, by having sex with him, she has degraded them both; and that she will never see him again. The story continually recites the woman’s feelings of humiliation, pain, anger and fear. However, it does so in pretentious, ponderous language about the loss of her “soul” and the “window of her heart.” One of the more structurally complex stories in the collection is “The Arms and Legs of the Lake.” The narrative shifts back and forth between the points of view of several strangers on the same train, including a young man who has just returned from Iraq, another veteran who returned six months earlier, a woman who edits a women’s magazine and has been critical of the war, and the conductor of the train. As in many of Gaitskill’s stories, the focus is more on the static ensemble of characters than it is on plot or thematic significance. The collection’s title story focuses on a woman whose husband died six months earlier. She accompanies a friend to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to adopt a baby outside formal adoption channels. The two women battle the daunting bureaucracy of trying to arrange an independent adoption in the midst of revolution and political upheaval, as the narrator mourns the loss of her husband. The most experimental story in the book, a story that reads more as an essayistic exploration of connections than as a narrative, is “Folk Song,” which creates links between newspaper stories about a sadistic killer, a pair of turtles stolen from a zoo, and a woman who says she is going to have sex with a thousand men, one after another. Meditating on how loathsome it is to turn a sadistic murderer into entertainment, yet how irresistible it is to readers, Gaitskill seems to reveal one of the central aspects of her fiction—the morbid fascination people feel at the horrors that sometimes confront them. Even though those who disapprove of torture, she suggests, cannot resist scanning a newspaper story for descriptions of it. One of the shortest stories in the collection, and in many ways one of the most affecting, is “The Little Boy,” which focuses on a woman returning home after visiting her forty-two-year-old daughter. While waiting for her airplane, she becomes fasci-

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nated with a small boy accompanied by his mother. The woman recollects episodes of cruelty in her life, such as when her sisters would go to places where there were ugly people simply to make fun of them and when her grandfather killed kittens by putting them in a bag and slamming them against a wall. She is especially tortured by memories of her husband and his bouts with suicidal depression and violence, and she tries to find some hope and reassurance in the little boy. When the boy’s mother asks the protagonist to watch him for a few minutes while she checks on her flight, the boy says he has heard her talking to herself in one of the airport corridors. When she tells him she talks to someone she used to love, he says he talks to his father, who is fighting in Iraq. However, when the mother returns, she says she does not have a husband. The woman is encouraged by a boy so full of hope that he makes up a father of whom he can be proud. The story ends with some promise that the woman can reconcile her ambiguous feelings about her abusive husband and her painful relationships with her daughters. In contrast to all the young women in this collection who complain and assign blame to others, this one older woman closes her eyes and remembers her daughter’s good night kiss, dreaming a dream that began with that kiss. Gaitskill writes for a serious literary audience, rather than for the more casual consumers of so-called chick lit, and she strives to confront issues of concern to contemporary readers. However, her focus on unhappy women who cannot seem to find either fulfillment or hope for the future, combined with her didacticism and discursive style, sometimes make her fiction unpleasant and unrewarding to read. Charles E. May

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 14 (March 15, 2009): 40. The Boston Globe, April 19, 2009, p. B5. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 2 (January 15, 2009): 55. Library Journal 134, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 86. Los Angeles Times, March 22, 2009, p. E10. The New York Times Book Review, March 22, 2009, p. 12. Newsweek 153, no. 15 (April 23, 2009): 59. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 4 (January 26, 2009): 96.

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THE DYNAMITE CLUB How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror Author: John Merriman (1946) Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (Boston). Illustrated. 252 pp. $26.00 Type of work: History Time: 1890’s Locale: Paris, France This study recounts the anarchist movement in fin-desiècle Paris, with special attention to the “propaganda by the deed” anarchist Émile Henry; it also addresses the issue of why terrorists kill innocent victims Principal personages: Émile Henry, a bourgeois intellectual and anarchist who bombed the Café Terminus Sixte Casse Henry (Fortuné), Émile’s father, a socialist prominent in the Commune Rose Coubet Henry, Émile’s mother, owner of a very small inn in Brévanne Jean Charles Henry (Fortuné), Émile’s older brother, an anarchist Elisa Gauthey, Émile’s unrequited love François Claudius Koenigstein (Ravachol), an anarchist bomber Auguste Vaillant, an unemployed worker who tossed a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies Louis Deibler (Monsieur de Paris), Paris’s chief executioner

The Dynamite Club is a perceptive portrayal of fin-de-siècle Paris. In this historical account of the period, John Merriman presents the development of anarchism as a reaction to poverty and political exclusion. He also addresses the issue of terrorism and the motivation behind it and elucidates the fact that repression and execution do not deter terrorists. Merriman defines modern terrorism as an assault upon innocent victims. He recognizes that the terrorism anchored in religious difference rather than class distinction that is faced by Western society in the twenty-first century is of a very different nature than that which spread through late nineteenth century European society, especially in Paris. He seeks, however, to identify why the violence of terrorism becomes the driving force for certain individuals, and draws the limited lessons of the past that may apply to the present. The Dynamite Club traces the brief life of Émile Henry, who was guillotined on May 21, 1894, for the bombing of the Café Terminus, in which one person was killed, and for an earlier police-station bombing in which two police officers lost their lives.

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Merriman blends together a detailed account of Émile’s life, a history of anarchism and John Merriman is the Charles Seymour its advocates, and a psychological and socio- Professor of History at Yale University logical inquiry into the anarchists’ advocacy and author of several books on modern of violence, particularly of violence directed French history, including The Margins against random victims. In the prologue, Mer- of City Life (1991) and The Agony of riman immediately depicts the key event of the Republic: Repression of the Left in his book, the bombing of the Café Terminus. Revolutionary France, 1848-1851 (1978). He then states his reason for writing the book, to find out why Émile Henry bombed the café. Merriman proposes that there is a connection, although an elusive one, between the terrorism of the Islamic fundamentalists in the twenty-first century and the terrorism spread by the nineteenth century anarchists. He argues that the story of the late nineteenth century is the story of a changing world and that Émile was no ordinary terrorist. He was a bourgeois intellectual; his family was propertied, and he did not target symbols of oppressive political authority but rather diners in a Parisian café. For Merriman, Émile Henry was the first modern terrorist. Having established the premise of his text, Merriman next familiarizes his readers with fin-de-siècle Paris. He describes the large boulevards created by Georges Haussman. These boulevards literally destroyed the people’s Paris, where insurgents had been able to disappear during the city’s various previous rebellions, starting with the French Revolution. Haussman redesigned the city, whose narrow streets were incapable of accommodating modern volumes of traffic, creating wide boulevards through which people and commodities could flow with ease throughout the city. These new boulevards enabled the government to suppress rebellion readily, as it did with the Paris Commune. Merriman details the great wealth enjoyed by the Parisian bourgeoisie, particularly their elegant clothing and jewels. He describes as well the city’s magnificent buildings (especially the Opéra); its plush carriages; and the lights illuminating fabulously luxurious shops, cafés, and restaurants located in the center of Paris. To these, he sharply contrasts the dreary and dark suburbs, where the impoverished working class lived in the most abject conditions. Workers walked from the suburbs to their jobs serving the wealthy bourgeoisie, jobs that could be lost at the whim of their employers and that seldom provided enough money to feed workers’ families. The Paris presented by Merriman is a Paris of sharp and bitter contrasts and of division, where some live in great luxury and others barely survive. Readers become immersed in the Paris of Émile Henry, where hatred of the bourgeoisie and of governmental authority grew ever stronger within the working class. In the next chapter, “The Second Son of the Exile,” Merriman begins the story of Émile himself. This chapter and the next two, “Love Engenders Hate” and “Dynamite Deeds,” examine Émile’s development as an anarchist. “The Second Son of the Exile” recounts the significant happenings in Émile’s life, including his father’s death when he was ten, the hardships endured by the family with only Mme. Henry to pro-

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vide for them, Émile’s successes at school, and his failure in the oral exam for admission to the École Polytechnique. Émile worked in Venice with his uncle Jean Bordenove, a civil engineer, and he associated closely with his brother Fortuné, who had become an anarchist. He experienced an unrequited love for Elisa Gauthey. In this chapter, Merriman also reviews the thought of the anarchists Pierre-Joseph Prudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin, with whose writings Émile was becoming familiar. In “Love Engenders Hate,” Merriman continues his history of the anarchist movement both in Paris and throughout Europe. The Paris he describes is a Paris filled with anarchist groups, meetings, and newspapers and the anarchist ideas of Elisée Reclus, Émile’s brother Fortuné, and François Claudius Koenigstein, known as Ravachol. Paris at the fin-de-siècle was filled with hatred—hatred of the rich who scorned and exploited the poor, hatred of the politicians who enacted oppressive laws and lived by corruption, and hatred of the police who enforced the injustice of society. Merriman presents an extensive review of anarchist activities in France, the government’s severe measures of repression, the trials and executions of anarchists, and, finally, the anarchists’ turn to a philosophy of propaganda-by-deed, which employed dynamite to call for societal change. “Dynamite Deeds” continues this account of anarchist activities. Throughout these chapters, Merriman weaves together the general development of Parisian anarchism with the personal story of Émile, who became devoted to that anarchism—and very skilled with explosives. In his final chapters, Merriman once again concentrates on Émile Henry. Merriman recounts Émile’s attempt to blow up the offices of the Carmaux Mining Company in Paris, resulting in a horrendous explosion at the police station at 22 rue des Bons Enfants, an ensuing investigation and search for Émile, Émile’s bombing of the Café Terminus, his capture, imprisonment, trial, and execution. Inserted between the chapters “Carnage at a Police Station” and “Two Bombs,” six pages of drawings depict various important people, buildings, and events described by Merriman. These images review the history recounted and also preview the final chapters of the book, serving as a transition to the trial as they present both the evidence and the significant events of Émile’s life. They also foreshadow the text’s shift in focus, as it becomes more narrowly concerned with the individual rather than the society. The chapter “Two Bombs” begins by recounting an incident in which Auguste Vaillant, unemployed and unable to feed his family, tossed a small, nondeadly bomb into the Chamber of Deputies on December 9, 1893. Merriman provides extensive details of Vaillant’s life, his misery, his final frustrated attempt to call attention to the misery of the poor in France, and the controversy over his death sentence. Merriman also emphasizes how detail and fine points became important in the battle against anarchists. The laws eventually permitted prosecution of anyone who appeared to plan an attack, to sympathize with anarchists, or to have the slightest association with anarchy or anarchists. Merriman completes this chapter with a second account of Émile’s bombing of the Café Terminus; this account is extremely detailed. It discusses what Émile wore, how the tables were placed, who was sitting at each table and with whom, who was in-

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jured, who was killed, who chased Émile, what each individual was doing at the time of the blast, and myriad other minute facts about the incident. Merriman’s account of Émile’s imprisonment, trial, and execution evinces the same meticulous attention to detail. It is particularly in these last chapters that Merriman’s skill in descriptive narrative becomes apparent. Although he is writing a history, his factual account reveals nuances of the personalities of individuals, of events, and of attitudes. Merriman presents a very detailed description of Émile’s final days before his execution, including what he read, his interaction with his guards, his attitude toward his mother, his reaction to seeing Deibler, and his requests to have the bindings around his wrists loosened. Merriman also describes in detail the preparations made by Deibler and his assistants for the execution by guillotine. The two descriptions contrast sharply. Émile Henry, the anarchist who murdered randomly, killing ordinary people, remains for readers an individual—complex and perhaps not easy to understand, yet an individual. By contrast, when Merriman describes Deibler and his assistants methodically going about their preparations, he uses them to represent the impersonal mechanism of the state against which the anarchists fought. Merriman’s book has for the most part been enthusiastically received. His writing style, his meticulous research, and his attention to detail have all elicited strong praise from his reviewers. The one criticism of the book comes from the lack of a clear definition of the link between the underlying motivation of Émile Henry and twenty-first century terrorists. Merriman suggests and implies through his portrayal of Émile’s reactions why terrorism, attacks perpetrated against randomly chosen innocent victims, is espoused by some individuals, but he does not explicitly state an answer. However, rather than being a fault, this may well be the real strength of the work, for the answer to this question must lie deep in the psyche of the individual. A complexity of conditions must be met for a set of grievances and beliefs to materialize as an act of terrorism. Readers will finish the text stimulated to ponder both the motives for terrorism and the extent to which Émile Henry may be seen both as different from contemporary terrorists and, as Merriman proposes, as the first modern terrorist. Shawncey Webb

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 9/10 (January 1, 2009): 26. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 23 (December 1, 2008): 1245. Library Journal 133, no. 20 (December 1, 2008): 141. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 46 (December 17, 2008): 49. The Washington Post, March 8, 2009, p. B07.

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EATING ANIMALS Author: Jonathan Safran Foer (1977) Publisher: Little, Brown (New York). 341 pp. $25.99 Type of work: Ethics, nature, environment, current affairs This nonfiction exploration of vegetarianism and animal welfare by novelist Foer includes interesting stories and some subtle observations, but in the end becomes a polemical attack on modern industrial agriculture In his first book, the highly acclaimed novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Jonathan Safran Foer created a vegetarian character, also called Jonathan Safran Foer. His namesake in the novel has trouble ordering a vegetarian meal at a Ukrainian restaurant, where all the menu items seem to include meat. His Ukrainian companions do not understand his refusal to eat meat, and the scene ends comically with a potato falling on the floor. In the novel, a sort of “table fellowship” emerges, to use a term Foer introduces in his nonfiction book, Eating Animals. (He borrows the term from Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 2006). Despite their dietary differences, the characters in the novel become quite close to one another, mostly because of bemused and grudging acceptance on the part of the nonvegetarians, to whom vegetarianism is a puzzling sort of quirk but something they eventually do their best to accommodate. The novel itself to a certain extent seems to present vegetarianism as a personal quirk; there is no suggestion in it that the nonvegetarians are doing anything wrong. That all changes in Eating Animals, in which Foer argues that those who eat meat are complicit in horrendous crimes committed against animals. He presents in much detail the horrors of slaughterhouses and factory farms, and by the end of the book he sounds like a latter-day Karl Marx, inveighing not against industrial capitalism but against industrial food production, which he not only says should end but also predicts will end. He adds that those who will not participate in ending it, by which he means those who eat meat from factory farms or fish from fish farms, are guilty of choosing cruelty to animals for the sake of eating sushi, bacon, and Thanksgiving turkey. The book ends as an increasingly shrill diatribe against meat eating, though Foer seems a little uncertain whether to oppose all meat eating or just the eating of meat produced in inhumane conditions. The book begins differently. As one might expect from a book written by a novelist, it tells stories, most notably a story about the author’s grandmother that has been much quoted by reviewers. Foer clearly admires his grandmother, whose lesson from the horrors of World War II is that you can never have too much food. He also fondly describes his grandmother’s favorite dish, chicken with carrots, even though as a vegetarian he presumably cannot eat it anymore—something that seems to cause him some distress. Throughout the book, he presents the conflict between cultural tradi-

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tions involving meat—traditions he wishes to share—and his ever-developing views as a Jonathan Safran Foer is author of vegetarian. One of the greatest difficulties Everything Is Illuminated (2002), with being a vegetarian, he suggests, is the which won the National Jewish Book disruption of table fellowship with those who Award and The Guardian’s First Book Award, and Extremely Loud and eat meat. The context of his grandmother’s story is Incredibly Close (2005) and is editor of the vegetarianism of Foer’s book, though it is A Convergence of Birds (2000). In 2007, Granta included him in its list of not immediately evident how the story conthe best young American novelists. nects to that context. During the war, his grandmother was nearly starving as she fled the Germans until, on the brink of dying, she was offered food by a Russian farmer. “He saved your life,” Foer says to her. “I didn’t take it,” she responds: The food was pork, and, as a kosher Jew, she would not eat such a thing. When Foer asks how she could turn down any food, even pork, in a situation of life and death, she says, “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.” The point of the story seems to be that just living is not enough. One’s life must be about more than staying alive. It is not clear whether the moral is supposed to apply to vegetarians or to the animals they care about. Midway through the book, Foer recounts a secret raid he made on a poultry farm with an animal activist who, when there, “rescued” one particularly suffering chick by slicing its neck. Suffering is worse than death, presumably. This account brings up one of the issues in Foer’s book concerning vegetarianism, animal welfare, and animal rights. Is it all right to kill and eat animals as long as you treat them humanely beforehand? Or is it wrong to kill animals at all? The activist’s stance, by valuing quality of life over life itself, would seem to tend toward the first position, as would the grandmother’s story. Death for Foer’s grandmother, presumably, would have been preferable to a life in which she was forced to violate her principles. (Incidentally, traditional Jewish law would not support her position; the standard view is that it is permissible to violate the kosher laws and other Jewish laws if doing so is necessary to save a life.) At times, however, Foer seems to take the other position, arguing that any killing of animals is wrong. That seems to have been his attitude when he first became a vegetarian, at the age of nine, according to another interesting story he tells. He and his brother were being looked after by a vegetarian babysitter. The two boys could not understand why she would not share in their chicken dinner. “Chicken is chicken,” she said, making the young Foer realize that the chicken on his plate came from a live animal. This did not deter Foer’s brother, but it made Foer stop eating and become a vegetarian. Over the years that followed, he says, he lapsed from vegetarianism several times, but when his first child was born he thought it important to begin afresh, to take care of what his son would imbibe from his father. Thus, as he finally states explicitly at the end of the book, he has become a committed vegetarian again. Now, however, his approach is mostly a concern for humane treatment of animals rather than complete opposition to killing them. He does argue that humans, as animals, should not kill

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other animals, since they are able to transcend their animal nature and recognize the sanctity of animal life (animals after all kill and eat other animals). For the most part, though, Foer is sympathetic to the few humane farms and slaughterhouses and seems to believe that, if animals are treated well, it may be all right to kill and eat them. In the short term, however, since the industry has become dominated by corporations practicing inhumane methods of raising and slaughtering animals, he urges readers to give up all meat and fish. Still, he can envisage a time after the elimination of agribusiness when it will be acceptable to eat meat again, though it is unclear whether he would personally want to do so. Commentators writing from a vegetarian or vegan point of view have criticized Foer for this ambivalence. Vegan writers have especially criticized him for not saying much about the treatment of egg-laying hens and dairy cattle, treatment they find just as reprehensible as that of broiler chickens and beef cattle. Foer devotes most of his book to the latter, and his main argument for vegetarianism is a belief that boycotting meat and fish will lead to the end of inhumane meat and fish processing. Foer also says that modern agribusiness is the leading cause of global warming, though he seems to be relying for this view mainly on relatively few studies and does not spend much time arguing the case. Still, he adds this argument to the mix, eventually seeming to be ready to devote anything to his cause. It does seem very much a cause, the cause not of vegetarianism per se but of attacking industrialized agriculture. By the end of the book, Foer has left his storytelling about his grandmother and his nine-year-old self far behind. He seems not the lighthearted yet profound novelist of Everything Is Illuminated but rather a man with a mission: to convert his readers, shaming them into giving up meat and fish. It is unclear that his shaming will have the desired effect, but one further argument Foer brings to bear may, or at least it may galvanize the public to demand a cleanup of the factory farm system. This is the public health argument. It is not something Foer spends much time on, but he does report on the dangerous effects factory farming may have on human beings, because of all the antibiotics and growth hormones fed to animals, and because of the unsanitary conditions in the processing plants. This argument may impel people into action, as may the complementary argument of writers such as Pollan that industrially raised meat is a health hazard because of what cows and chickens are fed, regardless of their sanitary conditions. Over one hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle (1906), an exposé of the Chicago meatpacking plants and a call for socialism and justice for workers. His middle-class readers, not to mention President Theodore Roosevelt, ignored the call for socialism but took action to correct the unsanitary conditions Sinclair had revealed. The result was not revolution but reform, notably the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Perhaps such reform will be the result of Foer’s book and others like it. (Commentators have noted that Foer’s indictment has been anticipated by many other writers, including Pollan, Peter Singer, and Eric Schlosser). His readers may not care about the well-being of animals, but they may want to protect their own health, and thus, just as happened a century ago, there may be reforms, though not revolution.

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Meanwhile, readers who appreciated Foer’s debut novel will have to hope that he returns to his true métier, to a form of writing that emphasizes story over polemic and that does not fall prey to the very danger Foer warns against at the beginning of Eating Animals: of defending more extreme positions than those in which he believes. There are moments in this book in which storytelling and a subtle exploration of complexities come to the fore, as in the discussion of table fellowship. At the very beginning of the book, it is not even clear that it will be a study of vegetarianism: It seems possible the book may launch itself into strange realms, following the odd notions of Foer’s grandmother, who clips coupons she has no need of and who builds up a hoard of sixty pounds of flour. Foer also tells stories involving his father, an experimental cook, and a tiny village on the Bering Strait that somehow has need of a dating service. Thus, Eating Animals shows glimmers of inventiveness. It also hints, even at the end, at an interesting point about the alienation created in workers in meat-processing plants. All of this potential, however, is subordinated to the polemic against factory farms, which becomes as well a polemic against many readers of the book. Some have found this decision bracing and vow to at least think about the issues involved; others may feel alienated. Sheldon Goldfarb

Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 6 (November 15, 2009): 3. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 21 (November 1, 2009): 1147-1148. New York 42, no. 37 (November 9, 2009): 76-77. The New York Times, November 20, 2009, p. 25. The New Yorker 85, no. 36 (November 9, 2009): 74-78.

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THE EDUCATION OF A BRITISH-PROTECTED CHILD Essays Author: Chinua Achebe (1930) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 173 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Essays, memoir, literary criticism, literary history Time: 1930’s to the early twenty-first century Locale: Nigeria In this collection of autobiographical essays, Achebe reflects on his life and work, exploring the role of the artist as a recorder of truth in the African diaspora Principal personages: Chinua Achebe, Nigerian novelist, shortstory writer, poet, and critic Nnamdi Azikiwe, first president of Nigeria, 1963-1966 James Baldwin, American novelist, essayist, and civil rights activist Joseph Conrad, Polish-born British novelist Stanley Diamond, American anthropologist and poet who traveled to Biafra Christopher Okigbo, Nigerian poet who died in the Nigerian Civil War Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Kenyan fiction writer, playwright, and critic

In 2008, the literary world marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), among the most widely read novels ever to come from Africa. The story of the Igbo village leader Okonkwo and the ways his life is changed by the coming of British colonialists and missionaries, the novel is a common text studied in high schools and colleges throughout the world. When Newsweek published a “Meta-List” of the world’s top one hundred books of all time in June, 2009, it ranked Things Fall Apart fourteenth, behind such novels as the first-place Voyna i mir (1865-1869; War and Peace, 1886) and the eleventh-place The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), but ahead of such others as the eighteenth-place The Great Gatsby (1925) and the fortieth-place To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Achebe’s most recent novel, Anthills of the Savannah, was published in 1987, although he has reported that he is working on another. In 1989, he published Hopes and Impediments, the first of what are now three collections of lectures and previously published essays dating back to his early career. In Hopes and Impediments, he reflected on the extent to which Africa and Africans have been perceived by Europeans as lesser, incapable of producing real art or thought. He introduced themes that would also inform his next two books: the central role Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness (1899) played in shaping and reflecting Western attitudes toward Af-

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rica, the reasons for Nigeria’s inability to rise above poverty and corruption, the need for increased dialogue and understanding between Africa and the West, and the role that literature and art can play in enabling that kind of dialogue. In a slim volume called Home and Exile (2000), Achebe continued to develop these themes in three extended essays, originally a series of lectures delivered at Harvard University. Twenty years after the publication of Hopes Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe is and Impediments, Achebe has released The one of the most influential African Education of a British-Protected Child, an- writers. His first novel, Things Fall other collection mostly of previously pub- Apart (1958), has been translated lished essays. This volume revisits and re- into more than thirty languages and fines many of the themes addressed in the sold over eight million copies. He earlier book, but its focus is more autobio- was awarded the Man Booker graphical. It happens that in 1990, shortly af- International Prize for outstanding ter Hopes and Impediments came out, Achebe fiction in 2007. was in a serious car accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down. He moved shortly thereafter to the United States, where he has lived ever since. The essays in the new collection, which have been updated and revised, reflect an older man’s ponderings about his long life and career, as well as an expatriate’s analysis of the homeland he loves. Of the sixteen essays in the book, fourteen are adapted from earlier work. The earliest piece, “Spelling Our Proper Name,” is from a speech delivered on the death of James Baldwin in 1988; the most recent is “What Is Nigeria to Me?”— an address delivered in Lagos at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs in 2008. The title of the volume signals the autobiographical elements that distinguish it from Achebe’s other collections. Achebe explains that he grew up and attended school under British colonial rule; he was already thirty years old and the author of two novels when Nigeria attained independence. As the child of Christian evangelical parents who valued education, Achebe attended schools that strictly followed the British model, and the books he studied “were the books English boys would have read in England.” Throughout the volume, Achebe offers glimpses of his early life in an Igbo village that was home to both “the people of the church and the people of the world,” his education under the guidance of what appear to have been excellent teachers, and his involvement with Nigerian media and politics. He also describes the period in the 1950’s when he studied at the British Broadcasting Corporation Staff School in London, noting that his passport identified him as a “British Protected Person.” The designation represented an official denial of his status as an Igbo, as an African, and as an autonomous adult.

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Interestingly, Achebe says little about his wife and sons, his horrific car accident, or his life in the United States since 1990, although two of the essays are titled “My Dad and Me” and “My Daughters.” Instead, he looks back almost exclusively to his years in Nigeria, pausing to pay tribute to Nigeria’s first president, Nnamdi Azikiwe, in “The Sweet Aroma of Zik’s Kitchen”; the African American writer James Baldwin, in “Spelling Our Proper Name” and “Martin Luther King and America”; and the anthropologist Stanley Diamond, whose perceptions about Biafra in the failed Nigerian Civil War “are rooted in prodigious learning and a profoundly humane sensibility.” Achebe is clear in his condemnation of colonial power and postcolonial corruption, but he is generous with praise for those who use their gifts in the service of dialogue and understanding. Achebe declares in the beginning of “The Education of a British-Protected Child,” the essay that serves as an introduction to the collection, “I hope my readers are not expecting to encounter the work of a scholar.” However, he does address some of the issues of scholarly debate that he has discussed throughout his career. The most prominent of these is Conrad’s famous novella Heart of Darkness. Achebe reads the novella as an instrument of colonial oppression, rather than as an argument against imperialism. He acknowledges in “Africa’s Tarnished Name” that Heart of Darkness is but one example in a long tradition of presentations of Africa by Westerners, but again and again he has returned to that example as an emblem of that tradition that “has invented an Africa where nothing good happens or ever happened, an Africa that has not been discovered yet and is waiting for the first European visitor to explore it and explain it and straighten it up.” In the essay, he traces Conrad’s boyhood fascination with explorers, especially those who visited Africa, and wonders why he was so attracted to the writings of men such as Mungo Park and David Livingstone. Achebe’s tone is mild, even conversational, as he notes that “it is not a crime to prefer the Africa of explorers to the Africa of colleges.” When he turns to discussing Heart of Darkness, however, and presents an extended passage in which the narrator compares one of the Africans he met (a “savage”) to a dog, Achebe’s mildness vanishes: “This is poisonous writing.” Achebe describes Conrad’s “simple hierarchical order of souls,” with Africans at the bottom and Europeans at the top, and reminds readers of Conrad’s descriptions of “gyrating and babbling savages.” Achebe’s discussions of Conrad date back at least to 1975, when he presented a lecture on racism in Conrad’s novel at Amherst College. In the intervening years, other scholars have presented alternative readings of Conrad, many seeing the novel as a condemnation of imperialism written by a novelist who does not see the world as his narrator does. In “Africa’s Tarnished Name,” Achebe again refutes these readings. “People are wrong,” he writes, “when they tell you that Conrad was on the side of the Africans because his story showed great compassion towards them.” Achebe’s thinking about Conrad is more nuanced than this summary suggests, and he returns to Conrad in other essays in the collection. In “African Literature as Restoration of Celebration,” he admires the language and imagery of Heart of Darkness

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and acknowledges Conrad’s “high-minded” intentions. He admits that, when he read the novel as a student, he was among the readers swept away by the adventure and that as a young reader he “took sides with the white men against the savages.” Not until he was older, he writes, did he understand that Conrad and other writers about Africa had “pulled a fast one” on him. It is this very realization, he explains, reached by many people, that created the African writer: “His story had been told for him, and he had found the telling quite unsatisfactory.” In his opening essay, Achebe’s resentment is directed only at Kurtz, the “dreadful character” from Heart of Darkness, not at Conrad or at the novel itself. Thus, when Achebe says in the first essay that he is not appearing in the role of a scholar, he does not mean that he is not addressing scholarly concerns. The admirable accomplishment of the discussions of Conrad’s novel in this volume is that Achebe explains for general readers what the controversies are and why he reads as he does. The discussions are reasonable, thoughtful, and blessedly free of the complex jargon for which postcolonial criticism is notorious. By offering his thoughts about Heart of Darkness as one component in analyses of broader issues, rather than as a focused, linear argument about one novel, Achebe shows how criticism can be a dialogue, an activity for living, breathing readers. With “Politics and Politicians of Language in Africa Literature,” Achebe takes up another scholarly debate in which he is an important voice: the choice made by African writers to write either in a colonial language (English, French, or Arabic) or in their “mother tongue.” Achebe, who writes in English, disagrees with Ngugi wa Thiong’o, whose 1986 essay “Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature” famously called on African writers to create literature in their own languages, as he himself declared his intention to do. Achebe, whose essay title intentionally echoes Ngugi’s, continues the dialogue, again with a jargon-free, conversational diction that welcomes readers to think about an issue they may not have considered before. Nigeria, Achebe patiently points out to his ignorant American audience, is home to “more than two hundred component nationalities,” each with its own mother tongue. For him, the choice to write in English is a practical one: “I can only speak across two hundred linguistic frontiers to fellow Nigerians in English.” He traces the history of missionary schools and language education in Africa, coming to different conclusions than Ngugi does, and concludes, “the only reason these alien languages are still knocking about is that they serve an actual need.” Throughout the collection, Achebe comes across as a wise, thoughtful elder. He has read widely as well as deeply, from Homer to William Shakespeare to Okigbo; he has lived through colonialism, independence, and civil war; he is the author of one of the most important books Africa has produced. While he is opinionated, he is never cross or petty; while he is more knowledgeable than his intended readers, he is never pedantic. The Education of a British-Protected Child is an insightful and thoughtprovoking collection of essays for readers who are curious about African literature and culture, whether or not they are scholars. Many readers will come to this collection to learn more about Achebe, and that goal will be met. Because of Achebe’s

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probing mind and generosity of spirit, many will also discover new books, new writers, and new historical and cultural events to explore. Cynthia A. Bily

Review Sources America 201, no. 12 (November 2, 2009): 37-39. Booklist 106, no. 3 (October 1, 2009): 15-16. Columbia Journalism Review 48, no. 3 (September/October, 2009): 60-61. Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2009. Library Journal, 134, no. 16 (October 1, 2009): 76-77.

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1848 Year of Revolution Author: Mike Rapport Publisher: Basic Books (New York). 480 pp. $29.95 Type of work: History A country-by-country history of the revolutions and political reactions that swept continental Europe in 1848 The year 1848 saw a series of political upheavals in France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany, Italy, and Poland. Even places, such as England and Russia, that did not experience political change felt the shock waves of revolutionary activity, and Russia intervened in the conflicts to its west. The distant United States experienced the effects of this year when political refugees, especially Germans, emigrated during the aftermath. Despite the continental and even global reach of the struggles of this time, most historians have tended to concentrate on the events in only one nation. Mike Rapport’s book 1848: Year of Revolution attempts to provide a portrait of the revolutions as European phenomena, to examine their underlying causes, and to evaluate their consequences. Rapport begins his account with the departure of the Russian socialist Alexander Herzen from his own country, which was under the autocratic sway of Czar Nicholas I, to begin a journey through the European lands to the west. Herzen would never see Russia again, but he would have a long record as a political commentator. He would also be a witness to the European events of 1848. Rapport describes the lands Herzen entered as dominated by the conservative political order that had formed in reaction to the Napoleonic wars. France, under the rule of King LouisPhilippe since the uprising against Charles X in 1830, had a parliament. Even under Louis-Philippe’s comparatively liberal regime, however, only a minuscule fraction of the population could vote. The Habsburg Empire of Austria was an absolute monarchy that extended over Hungary and a large part of northern Italy, as well as a variety of lands and nationalities in eastern Europe. Prussia, the most powerful of the nations in what would become Europe, was also an absolute monarchy. Even in England, where Herzen eventually settled, only one-fifth of the population could vote, and the House of Commons’ members were all drawn from a small social and economic elite. In Rapport’s telling, the first sign of the collapse of the apparently stable regimes of Europe came late in January in Paris, when the political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville addressed the French Chamber of Deputies and warned that, without parliamentary reforms, not only France but also the rest of the Continent would be shaken by revolution. Despite the location of this initial alarm, the first violent confrontations of the year began in Milan, in northern Italy, with scuffles between the Milanese and the re-

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sented Austrian army. The conflict between dominant and dominated nationalities would be as much a part of the revolutionary year as struggles over political democracy and social reform. These overlapping but distinct forms of the desire for change would, in Rapport’s telling, help spread the radical impulses of the year. Ultimately, though, the inconsistencies among the goals of national and ethnic libera tion, social reform, and political liberalization would also stifle these impulses. Although Milan witnessed the first harbinger of continental revolution, Paris provided the greatest spark to the explosions that would occur around the continent. In the French capital, protests against the stubbornly unmoveable administration of government leader Francois Guizot were met with military repression, causing the protests themselves to escalate into violent uprisings. King Louis-Philippe fled the city, and the rebels proclamed France a republic. The news of the revolt in Paris galvanized oppositions in the German states and in the Habsburg Empire. The empire was multinational but dominated by German-speaking Austria. Hungary constituted much of the central part of the empire, though, and the Hungarians yearned for greater control over their land. In early March, inspired by events in Paris, the Hungarian speaker Lajos Kossuth rose in the parliament and called for his nation to become independent, retaining only the Austrian emperor, with the title king of Hungary, as the link between the two nations. Also in early March, the news of the French republic encouraged popular support for more liberal regimes in the many small German states located between the great German-speaking powers of Prussia and Austria. Faced with demonstrations, the princes of many of these states accepted parliamentary reforms. Delegates from the German states gathered in Heidelberg to form a German national assembly, the basis for a unified nation with a unified government. In Vienna, students and other supporters of Austrian political reform took inspiration from France, Kossuth’s speech, and the German assembly to call for political change at home. Public unrest in Vienna, according to Rapport, led to the second great crisis of the year, after the declaration of the French republic. Austrian chancellor Klemens von Metternich was one of the great figures of the Congress of Vienna, which constructed the European order following the Napoleonic Wars. An advocate of absolute monarchy as the basis of domestic and international social order, Metternich was unquestionably the most powerful individual in Austria and was probably the most powerful individual in Europe. On March 13, the demonstrations in Vienna forced Metternich to resign, and he then fled to England. Metternich was the symbol of the old monarchical regimes, and his fall seemed to herald a new future. In Prussia, March saw a popular insurgency demanding a constitution. After some efforts at putting the insurgency down, King Frederick William gave in and announced that he would grant the constitution. Bringing Prussia into the German

Mike Rapport is a senior lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Stirling in Scotland. The reviews editor for French History, his previous publications include Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France (2000) and Nineteenth Century Europe (2005).

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movement for change also created complications, however. If a unified Germany were to be established, would it include both Prussia and Austria? If Austria were included, what would happen to the non-German lands of the empire? In northern Italy, news of Metternich’s political end stoked unrest in Milan and Venice, which were chafing under Austrian rule. The northern Italians were split between republicans and advocates of monarchy. The monarchists most often regarded King Charles Albert of Piedmont, Genoa, and Sardinia as the most plausible ruler of a unified Italian state. Such Italian nationalism was also demonstrated to varying degrees by the advocates of change in Austria-ruled Italy. Some Italians thought of Pope Pius IX, initially regarded as something of a progressive, as a potentially foundational figure for national unity. Reaction quickly followed the revolutions almost everywhere. As conservative forces sought to regain control of Vienna, tensions between Austria and Hungary led to war between these two parts of the empire. The Austrians were able to enlist the support of minority groups within Hungary or threatened by Hungary in order to put down the Hungarians. At the same time, the powerful Austrian army fought to regain control over northern Italy, defeating the Piedmontese troops of Charles Albert, as well as the nationalist forces of legendary Italian professional revolutionaries Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi. Pius IX, who shrank from supporting the northern cause against Catholic Austria, fled from a republican coup to southern Italy, where King Ferdinand II was successfully putting down a rebellion against his rule in Sicily. This coup helped make the pope into the extreme conservative he would become in the later nineteenth century. In Paris, the political pivot of Europe, the forces of reaction began to assert themselves when the urban poor began to demand economic changes, including employment support from the government. When the new republican government put down urban uprisings in July, former political liberals began to make common cause with supporters of social order, including those who wanted to reinstate the dynasty of the Bourbons or that of Orleans, the other wing of the French royal family. In this polarized atmosphere, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, managed to capitalize on his absence from France and his consequent lack of existing political commitments to lead all sides into believing that they had his support. In October of 1848, Louis-Napoleon announced his candidacy for president of the republic. Ironically, the expanded democracy of the republic helped undermine it, since Louis-Napoleon was able to appeal to the memory of his uncle’s name among the peasantry to ride to a surprise landslide victory. Rather than accept the constitutional limit to a single term, Louis-Napoleon would stage a coup in 1852 and have himself crowned Napoleon III, ruling autocratically until 1871. Before that, though, Louis-Napoleon intervened in Italy. Following the rise of the republic in Rome, France, which many had proclaimed as the model for republican revolution throughout Europe, sent troops to take control of the seat of Catholicism and to make possible the return of the pope. Throughout the rest of the continent, the constitutions the kings had granted were

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taken back. Under the young Emperor Franz Joseph, who replaced the old Emperor Ferdinand, the Austrian monarchy not only reasserted its control over Austria itself but also defeated the forces of Hungary and shot Hungarian officers as rebels. For more than a decade, Franz Joseph would be the absolute ruler of the empire, giving way to reforms only in 1860. Rapport has provided an excellent guide to the complicated events that took place during and immediately after 1848. Moving from one part of the troubled continent to another, he manages to weave the rapidly paced histories of these lands into a single narrative. Even more important, he offers clear explanations of why the radicals and reformers of 1848 failed to achieve their goals. Essentially, they had too many goals, and these were often mutually inconsistent. The long period of political repression that followed the Napoleonic Wars brought many different movements for change together. The bourgeoisie sought more representative political systems but also wanted secure guarantees of property rights. The urban working classes and the poor wanted social reforms that often threatened those property rights. The peasants wanted freedom from exploitation by landlords but also often had sentimental attachments to monarchs, whom they could be encouraged to see as their protectors. The nationalists wanted unity and autonomy for their own ethnic groups but opposed the autonomy of minorities inside their national boundaries. Rapport cautions against regarding the revolutionary year as an utter failure. It did give many ordinary Europeans their first taste of politics and therefore could be seen as laying the groundwork for the republican governments that would eventually follow in many places. Some of the revolutionaries’ goals were later achieved. For example, following Austria’s defeat by Prussia in 1866, a key event in German unification, the Habsburg Empire was redesigned as the dual Kingdom of Austria and Hungary, joined together by the rule of Franz Joseph. The contradictions in the coalitions of interests during 1848 also demonstrated the inconsistent and unpredictable nature of political goals. National unification, seen as a liberal goal in Germany and Italy, was hardly liberal when it has finally achieved, and in the twentieth century nationalism in both countries became a basis for extreme authoritarian governments. Balancing ethnic minority interests with those of national self-determination would also become a central problem for European governments. While Rapport avoids reading history backward and interpreting 1848 in terms of events that came long after, he does a good job of presenting this year as the “seed plot” of modern Europe, when the great historical growths of the modern era took root. Carl L. Bankston III

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Review Sources American Conservative 8, no. 9 (May 4, 2009): 29-30. Booklist 105, no. 11 (February 1, 2009): 12. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 24 (Debember 15, 2008): 1297. Library Journal 134, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 107. New Criterion 27, no. 10 (June, 2009): 73-76. The New York Times Book Review, March 15, 2009, p. 15. The Times Literary Supplement, December 5, 2008, p. 13. The Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2009, p. A9. Weekly Standard 15, no. 11 (November 30, 2009): 33-35.

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EMPIRE OF LIBERTY A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 Author: Gordon S. Wood (1933) Publisher: Oxford University Press (New York). 778 pp. $35.00 Type of work: History Time: 1789-1815 Locale: United States The latest addition to the prestigious Oxford History of the United States, this work provides a scholarly and balanced narrative of the years traditionally classified as the early national period, from George Washington’s inauguration as president until the end of the War of 1812 Gordon S. Wood begins Empire of Liberty with a summary of Washington Irving’s 1819 story of Rip Van Winkle, the legendary man who fell asleep just prior to the American Revolution and woke up twenty years later to find that phenomenal and bewildering transformations had occurred. The village was “larger and more populous”; its earlier tranquillity had been replaced by bustling activity, fierce ambition, and concern for making money. Even the language of politics had changed. People were now talking about the rights of citizenship, elections to Congress, and other matters that Van Winkle did not understand. When asked “whether he was Federal or Democrat,” he stared “in vacant stupidity.” Wood writes that most Americans living in the early nineteenth century could identify with Irving’s story because of the tumultuous changes they had experienced in all aspects of life—in politics, culture, economics, and social relationships. Wood emphasizes, however, that the changes Americans experienced were frequently different from those that the founders of the new government had anticipated. Almost all the founders denounced the idea of rival political parties such as those that existed in England, but their strong differences in aspirations and values resulted in party-like polarization soon after George Washington’s inauguration. Those calling themselves Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, wanted the country to follow the English model of industrialization, large banks, urbanization, and centralized government. In contrast, those taking the name Republican, led by Thomas Jefferson, favored states’ rights and hoped for the country to remain essentially agrarian. While the Hamiltonians were no doubt pleased to see the expansion in financial and commercial institutions, they did not foresee the extent to which “the middling people’s go-getting involvement in commerce and enterprise” would dominate the economy and produce the “myth of the American dream.” Jefferson and most of his supporters, on the other hand, welcomed the growth of democracy but despised the economic transformations that occurred alongside it. In contrast to historians with more left-wing perspectives, Wood is impressed with

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the growth of democracy during the period. In 1789, it was common for Americans to use Gordon S. Wood, professor emeritus of the word “democracy” as a pejorative term history at Brown University, is author that connoted mob rule and lack of protection of The Radicalism of the American for minorities and property rights. In Feder- Revolution (1991), winner of the alist number 14, James Madison defined de- Pulitzer Prize, and The Creation of the mocracy as a system in which the people American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969), exercise power directly, which was inappro- which was awarded the Bancroft Prize. priate to a large country. He asserted that a republican system, as created in the Constitution, utilized the principle of representation, which could be extended over a large region. Within a few years, however, left-leaning persons and groups began applying the labels “democracy” and “democrat” to characterize political systems that reject aristocracy and allow the vast majority of citizens to vote for their representatives. By 1793, supporters of the French Revolution were establishing Democratic-Republican Societies, and some northerners were referring to the Republicans, or followers of Thomas Jefferson, as the Democratic-Republican Party. By the early nineteenth century, Wood demonstrates, it was not uncommon for the Republicans to be called Democrats. By then, the concept of representative democracy, which was only rarely mentioned in the eighteenth century, was becoming rather commonplace. Although Wood does not view history through the Marxist lens of class conflict, he argues that the period witnessed a “social struggle” between wealthy aristocrats and the “middling classes,” a conflict that was particularly strong in the northern states. These middling men could not be considered gentlemen because they worked for a living with their hands. Holding positions such as artisans, mechanics, and laboring proprietors, they were too refined and too affluent to be placed with the “lower sort” or the “ruder sort.” Wood estimates that in 1790 about 60 percent of Boston’s three thousand adult men were members of the middling class and that they held almost 40 percent of the taxable wealth of the city. Their numbers and influence continued to grow, so that by the second decade of the nineteenth century they “had come to dominate American culture to a degree that the middle class in England never achieved.” While insisting that the “popular myth of equality” was based on substantial reality, however, Wood finds that it was “a psychological more than an economic reality.” The size of Connecticut farms, for example, varied from fifty to five thousand acres. Wood recognizes that the South was not evolving into a middling and commercial society like that of the North. Although most southern famers were not slaveholders and many of them valued hard work, the states below the Mason-Dixon Line had fewer middling institutions—fewer schools, cities, banks, newspapers and manufacturing firms. The section’s “patrician order of large slaveholders” continued to dominate both politics and the culture. These economic differences had political consequences. In 1789, the South, particularly Virginia, had been the impelling force in creating the new government, and political leaders from the section still appeared to

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have control over the national government in 1815. The region’s power and prestige, however, was declining relative to the North, and many southerners “had a growing uneasiness that the South was being marginalized by the dynamic, enterprising, and egalitarian North, which was rapidly seizing control of the nation’s identity.” The term “empire of liberty” was utilized several times by Thomas Jefferson in his correspondence. As implied by the word “empire,” Jefferson was a strong proponent of territorial expansion. He wanted the country to annex all, or at least most, of North America, as well as Cuba and other islands of the Caribbean. Presenting a moral justification for this goal that would come to be called Manifest Destiny in the 1840’s, Jefferson asserted that “no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self government.” Although such a statement sounds arrogant to modern ears, Wood points out that numerous European observers looked upon America as “the premier land of liberty.” The English radical Richard Price, for example, wrote that a “Spirit” had originated in America that promised to bring about “a State of Society more favorable to peace, virtue, Science, and liberty (consequently to human happiness and dignity) than has yet been known.” As in his previous work, Wood does not write history from the perspectives of fads and “political correctness.” Convinced that historians should search for objective truths, at least in factual matters, he has little patience for the fashionable school of postmodernism and its “insidious” relativism that discounts even the goal of pursuing objectivity in historiography. In contrast to most contemporary multiculturalists, who tend to focus primarily on the inequalities and oppression of women, minorities, and the poor, Wood finds that the Revolution had the long-term result of liberation for the mass of citizens. Although he does not ignore the injustices that occurred during the early national period, he is convinced that American political institutions made a valuable contribution in promoting the expansion of liberty, equality, and democracy. Apparently, he continues to believe, as he previously wrote in the William and Mary Quarterly, that the school of radical multiculturalism “not only falsifies our past, it destroys our future.” Rather than focusing on the American Revolution’s failure to eliminate the evil of slavery, Wood argues that the Revolution created “the cultural atmosphere that made slavery abhorrent to many Americans.” He observes that all the revolutionary leaders recognized that there was an obvious contradiction between the appeal to liberty in the Revolution and the existence of hereditary chattel slavery. The early national era, nevertheless, was such a cruel and brutal age, as reflected in criminal punishments, that many Americans simply accepted slavery as “merely part of the national order of things.” Although persons of European ancestry in both the North and the South perceived the United States as “a white man’s country,” slavery was largely responsible for the growing divergence in the cultural and social organization of the two regions. Slavery, for instance, tended to breed deference and had “antidemocratic effects” on southern institutions. Wood even suggests that the continuation of slavery was one of the main reasons the South had fewer canals, fewer banks, fewer corporations, and fewer factories. It is impossible to prove or disprove such a causative linkage.

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Wood does not ignore the sufferings and injustices experienced by Native Americans, but he does not condemn governmental policies as harshly as do many historians. He observes that, under the Articles of Confederation (in effect from 1781 to 1789), both the Congress and the states assumed that ownership of Indian lands was based on “the right of conquest,” therefore requiring no compensation for the ceded lands. In contrast, the administration of George Washington decided to return to the colonial practice of purchasing Indian lands, and the administration’s policy “could scarcely have been more enlightened—at least for the enlightened eighteenth century.” Even Henry Knox, who was one of the strongest defenders of Indian rights at the time, insisted that Indians must become sedentary and learn the European kind of agriculture. Wood observes that many people today find such a policy to be cruel and ethnocentric, but, he argues, “by the most liberal standards of the eighteenth century it was the only realistic alternative to the Indians’ outright removal or destruction.” Empire of Liberty contains a good balance of materials concerning politics, law, economics, culture, and social relationships. Four of the nineteen chapters are devoted to the events and developments that occurred during Washington’s presidency, including the creation of new political institutions, reactions to the French Revolution, the conflict between unorganized political parties, the Whiskey Rebellion, and Washington’s farewell address. The presidency of John Adams is discussed in two chapters, and Jefferson’s two terms occupy four chapters. The chapter on Madison’s presidency deals primarily with the War of 1812, with interesting discussions of the major battles, the Treaty of Ghent, and the reasons why Americans came to think of the conflict as “the second war for independence.” The two chapters about American law are particularly valuable, providing insightful discussions of the common law, the establishment of the judicial system, the jurisprudence of John Marshall, and the origins of judicial review. In addition, the book has one chapter that deals with slavery, one chapter about religion, and one chapter that presents an overview of literary, artistic, and scientific achievements. A few of Wood’s generalizations are questionable. For instance, he writes that by 1815 “the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was clearly over.” While it is unquestionably true that many Americans, such as the followers of the religious revivals, were opposed to the worldview of the Enlightenment, there is considerable evidence that the major ideas and values of the movement, such as skepticism, deism, humanitarianism, and appreciation for science and education, were growing in importance and popularity. The period after 1815 would see developments that would have pleased most leaders of the Enlightenment, such as the growth in schools, newspapers, and opposition to slavery. Also questionable is Wood’s assertion that, with the development of a democratic society, “heroic individuals, like the Founders, no longer mattered as much as they had in the past.” To the contrary, it would appear that people living in democracies appreciate heroism, particularly during times of great crisis, especially major wars. Even in 1815, many Americans were already looking upon Andrew Jackson as a heroic figure. The image of heroism demands a certain kind of personality, as well as success in confronting a difficult challenge.

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Almost all scholars, even if they have reservations about some of Wood’s interpretations, will recognize that the Empire of Liberty, a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in history, is an outstanding achievement by one of the preeminent historians of the early history of the United States. Capitalizing on his lifetime of research and writing in the field, Wood was able to take advantage of an unmatched familiarity with both source materials and historical literature. In addition to his outstanding breadth and depth of knowledge, Wood remembers the crucial importance of stories to history, and he packages his narration in a style that is engaging and accessible to general readers. Although the book is quite large, many lovers of history will want to read it from cover to cover. It is probably too massive to serve as a text in a college course, but some history teachers, if they have motivated students, might want to assign particular chapters. The book is particularly useful as a reference work for persons who want to find dependable and balanced discussions of particular topics of the period. Thomas Tandy Lewis

Review Sources American Heritage 59, no. 4 (Winter, 2010): 105. Booklist 106, no. 2 (September 15, 2009): 19. Kirkus Reviews 77 (September 15, 2009): 72. Library Journal 134, no. 15 (September 15, 2009): 70. The Nation 290, no. 4 (February 1, 2010): 33-36. National Review 61, no. 21 (November 23, 2009): 50-52. The New York Times Book Review, November 29, 2009, p. 12. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 33 (Sept. 28, 2009): 54. Weekly Standard 15, no. 7 (November 2, 2009): 28-30.

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ENDPOINT And Other Poems Author: John Updike (1932-2009) Publisher: Knopf (New York). 97 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Poetry Collection of poems, written mostly during the last decade of Updike’s life, that focus on the writer’s considerations of old age and death When John Updike died in January, 2009, at the age of seventy-six, the literary world was filled with retrospectives of his life as a prose writer. He had written more than twenty novels, as well as many short stories, essays (including literary criticism), two plays, and even a few books for children. Updike’s prose seems likely to become a lasting part of the American fiction canon. It is not surprising, therefore, that his poetry has often been overlooked, although he published at least one volume of poems in each decade of his writing life (eight volumes in all, including Endpoint), and his poems appeared in a variety of periodicals ranging from The New Yorker to American Poetry Review. Thus, he produced a very respectable body of poetic work by any standard. The first third of Endpoint collects the volume’s titular grouping of poems. Updike began the grouping as a series of birthday poems, producing one each year beginning in 2002, when he turned seventy. He added to the series several poems written during his final illness. Always interested in form, Updike used unrhymed sonnets for these poems, often joining three or more sonnets to make a birthday poem, sometimes concluding with a half rhyme to bring the poem to an end. Although all their subjects begin with the birthday in question and consider, at least in part, the general subject of aging, the poems also include many references to Updike’s youth, moving back and forth between past and present. The first poem in the collection, “March Birthday 2002, and After,” can serve as an example. It begins with a snowy March day at Updike’s home in Massachusetts; the poet is suffering painful twinges brought on by his increasing age, as well as by the number of celebrations his seventieth birthday has occasioned. He points out that advanced age means merely that one has avoided dying, but his mind takes him back to his childhood, when he spent sick days in bed, accompanied by books and the radio, and when he enjoyed being waited on by his parents and the visiting doctor. The second sonnet in the poem blends images of the snowstorm and of Updike’s own physical state. The snow resists the encroaching sun and seems to say “Give me another hour; then I’ll go.” The third sonnet of this poem moves the poet to a plane, crossing countryside he has long known well to fly into Manhattan. For a moment, he thinks the plane’s approach is too low: “Age I must, but die I would rather not.”

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The last sonnet of this group offers the sort of attentive description that marks much of Updike’s writing. After a sleet storm, crocuses “spread their stained-glass cups” and “daffodils grow leggy like young girls.” Nature is constantly in flux, he notes, for flowers as well as for human beings, for whom all days are both birth days and death days. All of the birthday poems share this elegiac tone, Updike’s consciousness of the past and of his diminishing future (the first poem notes that, at seventy, Updike has entered the John Updike was born in Shillington, decade in which he is likely to die). In “03/18/ Pennsylvania, in 1932. His honors 03,” he notes the war in Iraq, the fifth war include two Pulitzer Prizes—for Rabbit he’s lived through, and then thinks of his parIs Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest ents walking ahead of him on a path that is si(1990)—and two National Book multaneously the real path he climbs on his Awards, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/ birthday and the metaphoric path of the fuFaulkner award. He died January 27, ture. They “seemed to sail ahead of me/ like 2009. ships receding to destinations where/ I’d be forgotten.” The 2004 birthday poem was written in Tucson, and Updike marks his seventy-second birthday with a satiric picture of the city’s aged retirees, who have come there “to bake away/ their juicy lifetime jobs.” The 2005 poem focuses on Updike’s life as an author, his written words a fragile legacy in an electronic world where printing (“a half-millennium’s brief wonder”) seems almost obsolete. The poem moves through Updike’s own history with print, from his childhood devotion to newspaper comic strips to the heady delight of seeing his first work in print, to his pleasure in working at The New Yorker and his admiration for its editors. The last stanzas note that Updike has reached the age at which his father died. The second part of the 2005 poem, “My Mother at Her Desk,” considers the writer’s own career by memorializing his mother’s unsuccessful efforts to publish her fiction. He concludes “Mine was to be the magic gift instead.” “Birthday Shopping, 2007” begins with Updike shopping for a new laptop computer in an electronics store in Tucson, an event that recalls for him a frightening childhood episode when he found himself separated from his mother in a department store. The poem then moves on to consider the power of radio and movies on his growing up and then to contrast his life in old age with that of his grandparents. “How not to think of death?” he asks, and imagines its frightening blankness, concluding “Be with me, words, a little longer; you/ have given me my quitclaim in the sun . . . .” The first of the several 2008 poems finds the poet running errands on his birthday, mailing checks and taxes, sending off proofs of his last novel, and suddenly finding himself unable to recall how to unlatch the gas cap cover on his car. The rest of the poems trace his final illness. He has a cold that becomes pneumonia. In the hospital in

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November, he recalls how callously he once dealt with the deaths of people he loved. “I brushed them off . . . in my unseemly haste/ of greedy living . . . .” In a December poem, he recalls two people from his past who became models for characters in his fiction, and their memory becomes a springboard for celebrating the role his hometown of Shillington had in furnishing him with characters. Written less than a month before Updike’s death, “12/22/08” records the biopsy that revealed the advanced state of his cancer. The last poem in the section asks “Why go to Sunday school?” if not to believe at least some of what was taught there. “We mocked but took” he says, and concludes with fragments of the Twenty-third Psalm’s assertion that goodness and mercy will follow the speaker into eternity. The second third of Endpoint, “Other Poems,” contains a range of poetic memorials to people and things that were significant to Updike. “Stolen” takes its starting point from the last letter Updike received from editor William Maxwell. Singer Frankie Laine, actress Doris Day, golfer Payne Stewart, baseball, and a crashed computer all receive attention, as does the writer’s arthritic left hand and his colonoscopy. The contrast between these mostly playful poems and the mostly meditative poems of the volume’s first third is surely intentional, but several of the later poems in the group return to the somber tone of the Endpoint section. In the nine haikulike segments of “Levels of Air,” for instance, the poet moves from describing midges at eye level through progressively higher reaches to conclude with space capsules and angels. “Saguaros,” the last poem in this section, offers a dark image of the skeletons of dead cactuses that stand in “mute mobs” in the desert. “Other Poems” is followed by a group of sonnets, many of which sketch travel destinations, ranging from Sainte-Chapelle through Ireland, India, and Phnom Penh. That many of these places have histories of violent conflict shadows Updike’s view of them. In St. Petersburg, the city’s troubled past is marked by young prostitutes on its street corners. The travelers in “Flying to Florida” are “agéd, average, dullish, lame, and halt” and pitiable in their efforts to find youth in Florida’s sun. “The Chambered Nautilus” plays on the poem of the same title by nineteenth century American poet Oliver Wendell Holmes. In Holmes’s poem, the speaker looks at the shell of the nautilus with its gradually increasing cells and uses it as a metaphor for spiritual growth. Updike, by contrast, sees in the shell a satiric image of the countless rooms a man inhabits through a lifetime, moving from the bedroom of the newly married to the hotel room for a one-night stand to the vacation rental filled with others’ castoffs and concluding with the “pricey white hospital space” and the moaning it holds. In “Tools,” (a sonnet in hexameters), the speaker considers the permanence of hammers and screwdrivers, which put to shame our “wastrel lives.” While the Endpoint poems were all inward looking in one degree or another, the arrangement of “Other Poems” seems to insist on focusing outside the poet. The power of the first group, however, with its valedictory tone and a reader’s inescapable knowledge that Updike intended them to be his final work, diminishes the poems of the collection’s later sections. The contrast makes many of the later poems seem faintly peevish, as when the poet protests the sound of workmen’s voices as they paint his kitchen.

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Much of Updike’s earliest poetry might be categorized as light verse, although it would be a mistake to use that term as an excuse to ignore the poet’s wonderful ear for poetic rhythms and sound effects. The last short section of Endpoint is titled “Light and Personal.” It reminds readers not only of Updike’s skill with poetic forms but also of his wit. “To a Well-Connected Mouse,” for example, plays on Scottish poet Robert Burns’s famous poem “To a Mouse,” which warns that plans of both mice and men often go astray. Updike’s poem, in fine Scots dialect, notes that DNA testing shows mice and men to be closely related. The poem suggests that the mouse’s theft from the human’s pantry can be seen as all in the family. “Duet on Mars” gives human voices to Spirit and Opportunity, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s two Mars exploration robots. “Elegy” playfully explores the sound effects of the words “equine encephalitis” and “emu,” as well as a number of other words phonetically related to them. One poem commemorates Monica Lewinsky’s place in U.S. history; one poem documents the small events of July 10, 1878, as recorded in the Reading, Pennsylvania, Daily Eagle. The last poem in the book is titled “For Martha, on Her Birthday, After Her Cataract Operation.” Martha is the poet’s wife, to whom the volume is dedicated. As its title indicates, the poem simultaneously celebrates her birthday and her newly restored vision. Her cake, Updike says in conclusion, is “A cake of love from your own/ John.” Ann D. Garbett

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 15 (April 1, 2009): 15. New Statesman 138, no. 4956 (July 6, 2009): 46-49. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 10 (June 11, 2009): 8-9. The New York Times Book Review, May 3, 2009, p. 15. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 13 (March 31, 2009): 29. The San Francisco Chronicle, April 12, 2009, p. J1. The Times Literary Supplement, July 10, 2009, pp. 19-20.

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THE ENDS OF LIFE Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England Author: Keith Thomas (1933) Publisher: Oxford University Press (New York). Illustrated. 393 pp. $34.95 Type of work: History Time: 1530-1780 Locale: England Thomas examines six qualities to which Englishmen and women in the early modern period aspired as means of achieving fulfillment in their lives Keith Thomas’s The Ends of Life grew out of a series of talks he gave in early 2000 under the rubric of the Ford Lectures in British History at the University of Oxford. The book retains the accessible tone of the original lectures, and each of the chapters—which are based on separate lectures—is capable of standing alone as a coherent study. Together, though, the chapters contribute to Thomas’s overall investigation of the sources of satisfaction available to those living in England in the early modern period (roughly between the English Reformation and the American Revolution). As the hundred pages of references indicate, Thomas has drawn on an encyclopedic range of written sources to illustrate people’s thinking. Since the majority of people living during this period were illiterate, however, their thoughts and desires must be inferred from the texts left by their better-educated countrymen and women. Thomas’s list of possible sources of happiness could be prolonged indefinitely, but he has chosen to focus on six: military prowess, work, money, reputation, personal relationships, and the afterlife. In Saturae (100-127; Satires, 1693), the Roman poet Juvenal devised his own list of the things people asked of the gods. Along with the wealth and military success that Thomas discusses, Juvenal included political power, learning, beauty, and long life, all of which Thomas ignores. To exhaust the list of human wants, however, would require a library rather than a volume, and Thomas shows through copious quotation that his choices loomed large in people’s minds during his period of study. Before considering each element in turn, Thomas explains that the very idea of self-fulfillment was once revolutionary. For Plato and Aristotle, eudaimonia, a sense of well-being, derived from philosophical contemplation and hence was accessible only to the elites who had leisure for this pursuit. In the Middle Ages, the words “ambition” and “singularity” had only negative connotations. Contentment was to come from fulfilling one’s role in the Great Chain of Being, a role determined by birth. Individual happiness was less important than social harmony and public welfare. Thomas recognizes that not everyone accepted this orthodox view, but in the early

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modern period the individual pursuit of happiness came to be more widely accepted. One path that Englishmen took in that quest was military. Chivalric romances enjoyed popularity, and real people imitated their fictional heroes. Thomas notes that, when the earl of Oxford arrived in Palermo in 1572, he issued a general challenge to the inhabitants. At the siege of Rouen in 1591, the earl of Essex invited the French governor to single combat. The earl of Newcastle in 1643 similarly challenged Ferdinand, Lord Fairfax, leader of the Parliamentary forces in the English Civil War. Thomas Nashe in 1592 commented on the popularity of William Shakespeare’s portrayal of brave Talbot’s battles against the French in Henry IV, Part I (pr. c. 1597-1598, pb. 1598), and Henry V’s exploits were similarly extolled. Henry VIII, Charles I, William III, George I, and George II all led armies in the field. Thomas acknowledges a countermovement that criticized the waging of war, at least for personal glory. Writers John Gower, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate, as well as theologian John Wycliffe, rejected militarism. The humanist Roger Ascham, tutor to Queen Elizabeth, objected to Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) because it glorified combat. The denizens of Sir Thomas More’s perfect society in De Optimo Reipublicae Statu, deque Nova Insula Utopia (1516; Utopia, 1551) avoid combat whenever possible. In Paradise Regained (1671), John Milton’s Christ rejects military glory. In any case, as armies became more professional, the opportunity to achieve individual military distinction declined. Thomas argues that by the end of the eighteenth century most English people no longer aspired to success in combat. Whereas warfare lost its appeal as a means of satisfaction, work began to be perceived as a means of self-realization. The classical ideal had stressed leisure, and the Church had long treated labor as a curse. The Reformation, however, rejected monkish contemplation in favor of the active life, if only because work left less time for sin and promoted a community’s welfare. Religious as well as secular writers also began to praise work for its own sake. In Paradise Lost (1667, 1674), Milton imagined an Eden where Adam and Eve faced more tasks than they could complete. Satan finds Eve alone because she and Adam have separated so they can work more efficiently. Milton believed that human happiness demanded labor. Thomas quotes a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to his daughter on May 21, 1787, in which he said that only the idle are wretched. One could find satisfaction not only in a job well done but also in the camaraderie that the workplace provided. Work could also lead to wealth, another source of satisfaction. While riches were never despised, classical philosophy and religious teaching warned against laying up stores on Earth at the expense of moral and spiritual values. Such views carried less

Keith Thomas has served as president of Corpus Christi College, pro viceChancellor of Oxford University, and president of the British Academy. His publications include Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971; winner of the Wolfson Prize), Rule and Misrule in the Schools in Early Modern England (1976), and Man and the Natural World (1983).

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weight by the 1500’s. The texts on which Thomas draws indicate that wealth was not so much an end in itself but rather a means for consumption. Nor was expenditure intended to provide comfort or convenience. Instead, its purpose was to purchase esteem. Thomas observes that in seventeenth and eighteenth century London owning a coach was inconvenient; pedestrians could maneuver more easily through the city’s congested streets than could carriages. The diarist Samuel Pepys proudly purchased a coach, however. The philosopher William Godwin maintained that almost every purchase was designed to secure the respect or avoid the contempt of others. Throughout the early modern period, the word “consumer” retained the negative meaning of “waster,” but wealth and commerce came to be viewed as civilizing forces. Though the purpose of acquiring wealth was in large part to gain honor and reputation, Thomas devotes a separate chapter to this goal. He notes that, for Adam Smith, respect from peers was the most powerful human desire. Aristotle in his Ethika Nikomacheia (c. 335-323 b.c.e.; Nicomachean Ethics, 1797) placed honor highest among external goods, and the Anglican divine Richard Hooker claimed that reputation was the greatest earthly blessing. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath (The Canterbury Tales, 1387-1400) was always the first to give an offering at church, not because she was the most generous but because she sought precedence. If someone went before her, her charitable intentions vanished. Thomas cites the seventeenth century squire George Spurstone’s objection that his vicar did not distinguish between rich and poor in administering communion. Some churches did differentiate, serving sweeter wine to the wealthy. Archbishop Laud semiseriously proposed removing pews from churches because so many disputes arose over the order of seating. Each socioeconomic group had its own ideas of honor, and respect from peers was more important than recognition from those outside a given social sphere. Even criminals wanted the respect of their fellow felons. Because respect was so important and shame so feared, many early modern punishments—such as placing malefactors in the stocks—relied on shame to enforce conformity. Hester Prynne’s treatment in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), set in the seventeenth century, exemplifies this practice. Like military prowess, the desire for honor waned over time. Urbanization led to increased anonymity, so the opinion of peers mattered less. Dissenters such as Quakers rejected communal standards of behavior in favor of personal convictions. Democracy, too, lessened the interest in honor: If everyone is equal, no person’s opinion matters more than one’s own. Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique (1835, 1840; Democracy in America, 1835, 1840) linked the quest for honor to hierarchical societies. By the end of the eighteenth century, social acceptance in general became less important than personal fulfillment. While many early modern subjects ceased craving social acceptance, friendship remained an important ingredient in the making of a satisfying life. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero’s Laelius de amicitia (44 b.c.e.; On Friendship, 1481) stressed the importance of friendship for moral development, virtue, and suc-

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cess. Friendship thus was viewed instrumentally, as useful for advancement. In the early modern period, comradeship came to be seen as a good in itself. Montaigne’s essay on his dead friend Étienne de La Boétie focused on personal affection. Clubs arose for conviviality. Thomas observes that Anthony Van Dyck painted seven double portraits of pairs of Englishwomen to symbolize their closeness. The idea of marital friendship also flourished. The older notion that the society of women effeminized men yielded to a vision of friendship in marriage as important for personal happiness. This new focus on domesticity and clubs came at the expense of community, however, as village fetes and other public gatherings declined in popularity. Thomas’s final section deals with the afterlife, not in the religious but rather in the secular sense. In Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (pr. c. 1594-1595, pb. 1598; revised 1597 for court performance), the king of Navarre establishes a monastic academy to gain eternal fame for its members. Thomas mentions a group of law students in 1606 who attacked a London brothel in the hope that this exploit would earn them posthumous recognition. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) tells of simple villagers who yearn for remembrance after their deaths. The eighteenth century historians David Hume and Edward Gibbon said that they wrote for fame. Lawrence Sterne offered the same reason for creating his curious novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. (1759-1767; commonly known as Tristram Shandy). Indicative of the growth of this desire for remembrance was the introduction of the obituary at the end of the seventeenth century. Funereal monuments date from antiquity, but they proliferated in the seventeenth century, and less permanent wooden markers gave way to brass and stone. Portraits, memorial medals, and death masks also became more common. Wills instructed descendants to preserve heirlooms. For Thomas, the rise of antiquarianism and biographical dictionaries reflects this increased concern with preserving the memory of the departed. Patronage similarly could guarantee remembrance. Francis Bacon observed that those without children were most likely to endow foundations such as colleges because they had no offspring to carry on their names. The antiquarian Thomas Hearne in 1717 argued that heads of colleges should be compelled to remain celibate because those who married never left money to their institutions. Thomas acknowledges that not everyone in early modern England shared the same desires. John Calvin was buried in an unmarked grave, and Quakers initially eschewed funerary monuments. Niccolò Machiavelli and Montaigne enjoyed withdrawing from society to read and write. Still, the elements Thomas cites as important for happiness in the early modern period seem familiar. The past is not invariably another country with alien customs. Thomas’s book therefore provides insights into the origins of more recent thoughts and practices. Joseph Rosenblum

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Review Sources The Evening Standard (London), March 30, 2009, p. 38. History Today 59, no. 6 (June, 2009): 59. London Review of Books 31, no. 14 (July 23, 2009): 18-19. The New York Review of Books, October 22, 2009, pp. 8-12. The Spectator 309, no. 9417 (February 21, 2009): 32-36. Times Higher Education, February 12, 2009, p. 49. The Times Literary Supplement, February 27, 2009, pp. 3-5. The Wilson Quarterly 33, no. 3 (Summer, 2009): 103-104.

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EVERY MAN DIES ALONE Author: Hans Fallada (1893-1947) First published: Jeder stirbt für sich allein, 1947, in Germany Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann Afterword by Geoff Wilkes Publisher: Melville House (Brooklyn, N.Y.). 543 pp. $27.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The early 1940’s Locale: Berlin, Brandenburg, and Erkner, Germany Written soon after World War II, Fallada’s novel chronicles how Otto and Anna Quangel resisted the Nazis by distributing subversive anonymous postcards through much of Nazi-controlled Berlin Principal characters: Otto Quangel, the foreman of a furniture factory Anna Quangel, Otto’s wife, who helps him distribute postcards Escherich, the Gestapo inspector in charge of the Hobgoblin case SS Obergruppenfuhrer Prall, Escherich’s superior Baldur Persickes, a sixteen-year-old Hitler Youth Emil Borkhausen, a loafer who tries to exploit people by informing on them to the Gestapo Enno Kluge, a gambler falsely accused of distributing the postcards Trudel Baumann, the former fiancé of Otto and Anna’s son who attempts to start a resistance cell against the Nazis Frau Rosenthal, a woman who cannot stand the isolation while hiding from Nazi persecution Judge Fromm, a retired judge who unsuccessfully tries to assist Frau Rosenthal Max Harteisen, a film actor blacklisted by Joseph Goebbels Dr. Reichhardt, Otto’s cellmate Friedrich Lorenz, the self-sacrificing chaplain at the prison where the Quangels await execution

With the many depictions of Nazis as convenient villians in popular films and books, it may be easy to lose sight of what it was actually like to live under their regime on a daily basis. Hans Fallada, an author then internationally known for his novel Kleiner Mann, was nun? (1932; Little Man, What Now?, 1933), opted to stay in Germany when the Nazis assumed power in 1933. He tried to write apolitical novels but found it difficult to adjust to the expectations of the Third Reich. After living in Berlin, Fallada sought refuge in a small village called Carwitz, but even then he had to suffer the paranoia, the eavesdropping, and the suspicions of the villagers.

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As a writer, Fallada was obliged to be am biguous about his allegiances. Geoff Wilkes, Hans Fallada (born Rudolf Ditzen) in his afterword to Every Man Dies Alone, de- found fame as a novelist when his novel scribes Fallada as “neither an eager collabo- Kleiner Mann, was nun? (1932; Little rator nor a resistance fighter.” Toward the Man, What Now?, 1933) became an end of the war, Fallada was committed to a international best seller. He opted to Nazi insane asylum. He emerged from that stay in Nazi Germany during World experience very much shaken, but Johannes War II. Fallada wrote Every Man Dies Alone just before his death in 1947. R. Becher, a friend of his, sought to encour age Fallada’s writing by giving him the Gestapo file on Elise and Otto Hampel, a working-class couple in Berlin. After hurriedly writing Every Man Dies Alone in twentyfour days, Fallada died from a morphine overdose before the book’s publication in 1947. Telling the Hempels’ story gave Fallada a way to depict many of the compromises, the fear, the betrayals, and the myriad forms of revolt against the Nazis that occurred during their regime. The working-class couple were not initially inclined toward political agitation, but when Elise’s brother died in the war, they decided to write and distribute hundreds of postcards around Berlin that were critical of the Nazis, calling for civil disobedience both at home and in the workplace. The Berlin police and the Gestapo spent three years hunting for the mysterious card makers, and the Hampels were initially so successful that the Gestapo thought that it was dealing with a much larger underground resistance. Eventually, the Hampels were captured, placed on trial at the People’s Court, found guilty, and executed in 1943. Fear can have complicated effects on a society in which most people have something to hide: In Nazi Germany, informers could prosper. People could be imprisoned or executed for minor acts of insubordination, both in the workplace and at home. Nazi officials wanted not only obedience but also complete agreement with their views. Fallada was interested in the extreme corruption of those who exulted in the display of power and the doglike debasement of those beneath them. Even those in power could be turned into suspects and punished with very little justification. Ultimately, Every Man Dies Alone debates what it meant to revolt against the Nazis if the consequence of that revolt was imprisonment and death. The novel questions whether it was better to live nobly and suffer the result or to compromise with the Nazi system. It asks what kind of values could be affirmed amidst such corruption and universal deceit. As much as he tries to resolve these moral ambiguities in the novel’s later prison scenes, Fallada leaves it to readers to draw their own conclusions by sifting through the conflicting perspectives of his characters. For the most part, these characters are portrayed as just trying to get by amid occasional Allied bombings and increasingly histrionic Nazi propaganda. Much of the novel’s early action takes place at 55 Jablonski Strasse, an apartment building where the Persickes, an arrogant pro-Nazi family, live uneasily with the Quangels and Frau Rosenthal, a Jewish woman who is afraid to leave her room. The novel begins with Otto and Anna Quangel learning that

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their soldier son has just died. The news radicalizes Otto against the Nazis, but he has to be careful what he says around Emil Borkhausen, an opportunistic neighbor who notes Otto’s defeatist talk. When Otto tells the news to Trudel Baumann, the woman who was engaged to his son, she tells him of a resistance cell that she has joined to fight the Nazis. Later, however, in part because of her talk with Otto, the cell dissolves, but not before some other Nazis overhear them talk about it and try to investigate. Once Otto and Anna begin to hatch their plan to spread various postcards around Berlin in the hopes of starting a broader resistance, Emil and Enno Kluge, another loafer, decide to rob Frau Rosenthal’s apartment under the assumption that, since she is Jewish, her possessions are up for grabs. Their plan goes comically awry when they get drunk on Rosenthal’s schnapps in the midst of the robbery. Before long, the Persickes find them and beat them in their stupor. Frau Rosenthal hides out in Judge Fromm’s home for several days but finds that she cannot stand the uncertainty and the solitude of hiding. Eventually, she avoids capture by committing suicide by jumping from a window. Occasionally, characters such as Judge Fromm try to retain some intellectual serenity in the midst of all this intrigue, but Fallada notes the difficulty of maintaining that “peace” when he writes of Fromm’s later demise in a parenthetical aside: “Three years later, a high-explosive bomb would blow this home to smithereens, and the sedate old gentleman himself would die a slow and agonizing death in the cellar . . . ” The novel becomes more suspenseful as Otto and his wife make progress with the postcards. They painstakingly write out proclamations such as “PASS THIS CARD ON, SO THAT MANY PEOPLE READ IT!—DON’T GIVE TO THE WINTER RELIEF FUND!—WORK AS SLOWLY AS YOU CAN! PUT SAND IN THE MACHINES!—EVERY STROKE OF WORK NOT DONE WILL SHORTEN THE WAR!” Then, they tentatively look around for places to put the cards without being seen, usually on the windowsills of office buildings around Berlin. Otto and Anna are initially quite successful at getting away with their plan, although they do not know how much their cards arouse the interest of the Gestapo and become the special focus of an inquiry by Inspector Escherich. The inspector makes it his life goal to capture what he calls “the Hobgoblin” who makes the postcards. Ironically, instead of cards being passed underground throughout the city, as Otto and his wife imagine, most of the people who find the cards immediately give them to the authorities in great fear of being implicated in the crime. For instance, film actor Harteisen happens upon a card. Instantly anxious, he tries to hand it over to his lawyer, but his lawyer does not want it because anyone associated with the cards can become a suspect. Clearly, the people who gain the most from the postcards are the Quangels themselves. Even though they will later suffer imprisonment and execution, the cards give their lives purpose and meaning. In their semiabsurd and relatively crude way, the cards show the importance yet also the sense of futility of writers under the regime, including Fallada, expressing themselves honestly in the midst of pervasive propaganda and fear. In part 2, Fallada shifts the narrative perspective to Gestapo Inspector Escherich

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and his efforts to track down the Hobgoblin. A surprisingly sympathetic figure, Escherich begins his investigation by tracking all of the found postcards on a large map of Berlin dotted with small red flags. He would like to be patient and let the criminal give himself away eventually, but his boorish superior SS Obergruppenfuhrer Prall wants immediate results. When Enno Kluge is falsely accused of dropping a card at a doctor’s office, Escherich can immediately tell that the man has no connection to the case and lets him go. Later, however, Kluge evades two Gestapo spies sent to keep track of his movements, and Prall becomes enraged with Escherich’s handling of the case. Escherich asks to be taken off the case, and for that act of presumption Prall has him stripped of his official function and sent to the Gestapo basement, where guards beat him and treat him like any other criminal. After Escherich’s replacement proves to be an even worse detective, Prall eventually reinstates Escherich to his former position, but the inspector has been permanently changed by his ordeal. He can hardly bring himself to look at Prall without trembling. In all, Fallada paints a picture of an organization in which even those in power have to fear SS brutality and any act of independence or free thinking can bring heavy reprisals. From the officials’ perspective, people need to get out of the habit of thinking, since “the Fuhrer can do their thinking for them.” Escherich’s ordeal makes him a much more efficient investigator, and he apprehends the Quangels soon after he is reinstated, in part because Otto accidentally drops a couple of cards in his factory. By now, late in the war, the factory makes only coffins. In part 3 of the novel, the Quangels are caught, separated, interrogated, and ultimately given a bizarre show trial. In this part, Fallada considers the results and consequences of their civil disobedience. Ironically, Escherich commits suicide after realizing that he was the one and only convert of the Quangels’ campaign. Otto had considered his resistance campaign in isolation from other events, but he comes to see how others have been hurt by his act of revolt. Because Anna did not think of the possible consequences of mentioning Trudel during her questioning, the Gestapo arrests Trudel as well, and she and her husband die. The prison scenes sometimes evoke the absurd trials portrayed in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), as well as Albert Camus’s meditations on the metaphysics of being condemned to death in L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, 1946). Otto struggles to retain his dignity and scorn for his captors, even when he is placed in a cell where his cellmate acts like a dog in an attempt to fake insanity. Later, however, Otto learns civility from a cellmate named Dr. Reichhardt, a musical composer, who maintains an orderly lifestyle including books, chess, and music as a way to rise above his imprisonment. While this portion of the novel tends to be a bit schematic in the way characters tend to be extremely good (the prison chaplain) or evil (the show trial’s judge), Fallada keeps the basic questions open: What good has the Quangels’ act of civil disobedience done? Working within a state run by criminals, how can one accomplish anything? Is resistance meaningful or futile if it leads to imprisonment, further suffering, and death? It is to the novel’s credit that there are no easy answers. Perhaps the

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thesis of the novel is best stated by Dr. Reichhardt, who comes to exemplify one enlightened form of protest: . . . we all acted alone, we were caught alone, and every one of us will have to die alone. But that doesn’t mean that we are alone, Quangel, or that our deaths will be in vain. Nothing in this world is done in vain, and since we are fighting for justice against brutality, we are bound to prevail in the end.

Roy C. Flannagan

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 12 (February 15, 2009): 28. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 2 (January 15, 2009): 54. The Nation 289, no. 2 (July 13, 2009): 25-30. The New York Times Book Review, March 1, 2009, p. 10. The New Yorker 85, no. 12 (May 4, 2009): 73. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 2 (January 12, 2009): 29-30.

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EVERYTHING RAVAGED, EVERYTHING BURNED Author: Wells Tower (1973) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 256 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Short fiction Time: The late eighth to the early eleventh century; the early twenty-first century Locale: United States; Scandinavia Tower’s debut collection of nine stories entertains and surprises as it depicts ordinary people coping with lives that are gradually unraveling or suddenly exploding around them It is not surprising that award-winning author Wells Tower has crafted a debut collection of short stories, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, in which ordinary people are intimately observed, some at pivotal moments of their lives. His interest in sociology and anthropology, disciplines in which he earned degrees from Wesleyan University, blend with his M.F.A. in fiction writing from Columbia University to make his stories seem as though they were case studies taken from an ongoing study of relationships. The stories explore painful bonds between parents and children as well as between siblings or friends. None of these relationships is left unscathed, as characters end up emotionally charred. The collection includes nine poignant tales that provide surprises as well as entertainment and insight. Tower explores everyday life through the eyes of middle-aged men whose lives are falling apart, envious teenage girls, a wheelchair-bound widower who may never get a chance to touch a woman again, and even Viking warriors who find love when their battles end. A strong sense of yearning permeates all of these stories—yearning for something more, something lost, or something unlikely ever to be found. In “The Brown Coast,” Bob Monroe is sorting out his life after the death of his father and the unraveling of his marriage. He recently made a series of mistakes, including a brief but unsatisfying affair, so everything that could go wrong for Bob does, even though he tries to fix things. The addition of an ugly sea creature to his aquarium ultimately becomes an apt metaphor for his life when it poisons the other sea animals and saltwater fish he has patiently collected. Upon finding his fish dead, Bob accepts that his marriage is dead as well. He also abandons his newfound friendship with neighbors Claire and Derrick Treat, whose troubled marriage pales in comparison to his losses. Ironically, it was Claire who found the ugly sea creature and gave it to Bob as a friendly gift. His downward spiral seems to continue as he tosses the poisonous sea slug into the ocean and nearly hits a catamaran. Poison also plays a role in “Retreat” as brothers Matthew and Stephen reunite at Matthew’s mountain cabin in Maine. Matthew seeks to help Stephen, who is struggling

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financially and resents his brother’s success. When Stephen quickly befriends Matt’s retired neighbor George, Matthew is hurt. Matthew is so unable to overcome his wounded pride that he chooses to ignore their warnings and eat the grilled tenderloin of a moose shot by Stephen and George, even though the animal was clearly ill when they found it. In the course of their brief reunion, the cavern ous gap between the brothers is made clear through their conversations as Matt is unable to let Stephen be right about anything, even the tainted moose meat. Their rivalry echoes the relationships of siblings in countless American families where some are black sheep and others are financial successes. Long-silent rivalries between fathers and sons are explored more subtly in “Executors of Important Energies.” Burt is called home by his stepmother Lucy, who claims his father Roger, a former attorney, is being ravaged by Alzheimer’s disease. Burt finds that the man whose approval he has sought all his life has become a stranger. In fact, Roger treats obese chess hustler Dwayne like his new best friend, as he ignores Burt. Over dinner, Burt is forced to accept how far Roger’s grip on reality has slipped and that Roger will never appreciate his work as an inventor. The domineering force in Burt’s life, he realizes, no longer exists. In “Down Through the Valley,” a middle-aged father painfully discovers that his young daughter Marie likes her stepfather better than she likes him. Ed reluctantly goes to the aid of his ex-wife Jane, whose second husband Barry, a yoga and meditation instructor, has broken his ankle. Jane is in seclusion at a meditation retreat in the mountains, and Barry is unable to care for Marie, who is still a toddler, so Ed agrees to pick Marie up until Jane’s retreat is over. Upon arrival, however, Ed learns he must also drive Barry back to civilization. On the harrowing ride down the mountain, Ed struggles to maintain his pride and cope with the awkward situation as it spirals out of control. When Barry intervenes between battling lovers at a coffee shop, for example, Ed winds up getting arrested. His attempt to help Jane turns into a nightmare that echoes the recurring bad dream she used to have when they were still together. Nightmares and visions also infuse “Leopard,” in which eleven-year-old Yancy stays home from school to avoid a bully. He lives with his mother and his survivalist stepfather on twenty acres in the middle of thick woods. Unable to forget how his father backed down when his stepfather threatened him with a rock, Yancy cannot refuse when his stepfather sends him for the mail, although the mailbox is a fifteen-minute walk from the house. Along with the mail, Yancy finds a flyer for a lost pet that looks like a leopard in the photograph. He decides to pretend to pass out from the heat and lies down in the driveway to wait for his mother to come home. This sympathy scheme goes awry when Yancy is discovered by police officers, to whom he looks dead. As he tries to ignore his stepfather’s anger after the officers drive him home, Yancy imagines that the lost leopard is stalking his house, an image that echoes his own desire for escape.

Wells Tower has been awarded the Plimpton Prize by The Paris Review, as well as two Pushcart Prizes. His short stories and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The Washington Post Magazine. This is his first collection of short stories.

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The relationship between fathers and daughters is explored in “Door in Your Eye.” Middle-aged but unmarried, Charlotte has recently brought her elderly, wheelchairbound, widowed father Albert to the city to live with her. She warns him to stay away from their across-the-street neighbor, who seems to be a prostitute. Albert, however, goes to meet this neighbor after watching her door from his window for several days. He senses she may be the last woman he will ever get to touch. When he discovers she sells marijuana and prescription drugs rather than sex, he is as much relieved as disappointed. Albert’s defiance displeases Charlotte, who returns home and finds him across the street, but his act of independence shows that he is still in charge of his own life. Teenaged cousins become envious rivals in “Wild America” when Maya visits Jacey. A model and dancer, Maya is about to attend a government-funded dance school in North Carolina. She confides to Jacey that she is in love with the dance school’s assistant director, who is old enough to be her father. She also humiliates Jacey by refusing to ask teen model Doug to take Jacey to the Burning Man Festival in her place. The girls later get stoned in the woods with Leander Buttons, a geeky boy whom Jacey once dated. Maya winds up dancing with him, so Jacey decides to go home without them. She tries to impress Stewart Quick, an older man who gives her a ride home. They wind up kissing, but Jacey resists going further with him. She is relieved when her father arrives to take her to dinner, and she assumes Maya will come home safely with Leander later. The self-absorption of these teenagers is implied by the story’s title. The girls seem to resemble Jacey’s cat Scopes, which toys with a bird at the beginning of the story and devours it in the end. In “On the Show,” a variety of personalities and relationships are brought to light. At a carnival, seven-year-old Henry Lemons catches a lizard, while his father Jim is trying to impress his date Sheila. Sheila’s ten-year-old son Randy, meanwhile, gives Henry a hard time. Henry runs off when Randy tries to take the lizard from him, and he hides in a plastic privy with a man who seems friendly. Meanwhile, Jeff Park is hired by ride foreman Leon to run one of the rides. He has run away from home himself after his drunken stepfather treated him like hired help one time too many. After Jim searches for Henry and fortunately finds him watching a midway show, Henry relates what happened in the privy, but Jim does not believe him. Jeff Park is later questioned by police about his whereabouts when Henry was in the privy, and he agrees to give a blood sample if necessary. Other carnival workers—including Gary, who seems retarded—are suspected of molesting Henry as well. The culprit turns out to be Horace Tate, a Future Farmers of America judge, whom Henry identifies by his distinctive turquoise belt buckle. No longer a suspect, Jeff goes to meet Katie, a girl he flirted with the previous night, but she stands him up for her friends. Jeff’s ardor fades like the green phosphorescence of some candy that Katie gave him the night before. Ancient friendships come to life in the collection’s final, eponymous story. “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” follows Vikings who sail across the North Sea to an island to stop a Norwegian monk living there from threatening their lands. Harald would rather stay home on his farm with his family, but his friend Gnut, a wid-

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ower who likes boats and does not like farming, convinces him to go. The warriors find and kill the monk, freeing the islanders, who had been forced to pay him tithes. Gnut falls in love with one-armed seamstress Mary and takes her home despite her father’s protests. The Vikings ravage and burn the island before going home to their farms again, but Harald continues to worry that people from the island will come to take Mary back, leaving the Vikings’ own lands ravaged and burned in return. Tower’s keen understanding of the complexities of relationships is felt throughout his wide range of characters. Some stories are more cohesive than others, but the collection as a whole is highly memorable. Overall, Tower’s writing feels ironic and suspenseful, although critics have called his style both violent and dazzling. He is clearly sympathetic to each of his characters but also compelled to give them emotional challenges that are not easy to overcome. Many of the stories in this collection end abruptly, which seems to be one of the devices Tower uses to make his stories both visceral and personal. Barbara Schiffman

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 12 (February 15, 2009): 28. Esquire 151, no. 3 (March, 2009): 50-52. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 24 (December 15, 2008): 1276. Library Journal 133, no. 20 (December 1, 2008): 122. London Review of Books 31, no. 13 (July 9, 2009): 23-24. New York 42, no. 9 (March 23, 2009): 64-65. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 9 (May 28, 2009): 22-24. The New York Times, March 11, 2009, p. 1. The New York Times, March 24, 2009, p. C1. The New York Times Book Review, March 29, 2009, p. 1. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 41 (October 13, 2008): 3. The Times Literary Supplement, April 17, 2009, p. 20. Village Voice 54, no. 51 (December 16, 2009): 35.

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EVIDENCE Author: Mary Oliver (1935) Publisher: Beacon Press (Boston). 74 pp. $23.00. Type of work: Poetry Beloved poet and nature writer Oliver offers fortyseven new poems tracing the paths of love, grief, and spirit through the natural world Readers of Mary Oliver’s nineteenth volume of poetry, Evidence, will find themselves in familiar territory, as Oliver once again strides out into the Cape Cod countryside to find wisdom and beauty in nature. Readers will also find in this collection the urgent attention to matters of meaning that is characteristic of Oliver’s poetry. Oliver in Evidence obliquely turns away from the heavy grief of her earlier volume Thirst (2006) and the dark undertone of Red Bird (2008). In Evidence, Oliver’s work is less somber, more centered, and fully engaged with the processes of life in all its glory. This is not to say that Oliver does not write about death in this volume. On the contrary, she faces death, her own and those of beloved animals and friends, with an assuredness that was not as pronounced in her earlier works. It is as if she has come to terms with loss by gaining greater understanding of what it means to love. For example, in “Swans,” Oliver first reports that she wants some physical reminder of the lovely swans that fly overhead, such as a feather, in order to demonstrate that the swans were real and not just her imagination. She closes, the poems, however, with the thought that the beloved is not something that requires physical presence: That which is beloved must be “believed in” rather than held. Such belief can transcend the “unreachable distance” that separates Oliver from the swans flying overhead. Oliver observes the interplay of life and death in a number of poems as well. In one of the finest, “Prince Buzzard,” she evokes rich mythological and religious symbols in her consideration of a buzzard flying overhead. Calling the buzzard “prince” evokes royal figures such as the prince of darkness, a sobriquet used for Hades, the Greek ruler of the underworld. Oliver further emphasizes this connection by reporting that she mistakes the buzzard drifting in the updraft for a “narrow boat and two black sails,” perhaps alluding to the boat used by Charon in Greek mythology to ferry people across the River Styx to the underworld. The buzzard comes down from its high spirals to investigate a dead lamb in a spring field. Oliver emphasizes the certainty of the lamb’s death by repeating the world “dead” three times. Oliver chooses the dead creature with care; a lamb in Christian iconography is a symbol for the Christ. Indeed, the words “O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us” form an important part of the litany of the Catholic Mass. Lambs are regarded symbolically as both innocent and sacrificial within a Christian context. Thus, Oliver’s choice of rendering the lamb as car-

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rion serves as both a striking image and a potent symbol. Oliver states that she knows that it is hunger that draws the buzzard to the lamb’s body, but she describes the buzzard’s slow approach to the corpse as reverential, his pause before the lamb’s body as a “ceremony.” Her description might be connected to the act of a priest blessing the host before the sacrament of holy communion. Indeed, in Catholicism, doctrine teaches that the host becomes the literal body and blood of Christ through transubstantiation. Thus, just as the worshiper consumes the actual body and blood of Christ in a holy, life-giving ritual, the buzzard consumes the flesh of the lamb, and the flesh sustains the buzzard’s life. That Oliver intends for readers to move from death to life in this poem is clear by her final stanza. Just as she includes the words “dead, dead, dead” in stanza three, in stanza nine she writes that nothing remains of the lamb in the field in the summer, only “flowers, flowers, flowers.” Thus, the remains of the lamb have nourished both the buzzard and the flowers of the field. The cycle is complete: The lamb of God has died in order to prepare the way for new birth. Oliver makes the same point in a less symbolic way in “Landscape in Winter.” In this short poem, a dead animal on the snow attracts a crowd of carrion crows. The crows speak, announcing that a death has occurred and that “this is good for us.” In Oliver’s world, the carrion eaters perform not only a useful but also a necessary task in the cycle of life. Oliver seems less resigned to death in her poem, “If You Say It Right, It Helps the Heart to Bear It.” The occasion of this poem is a visit to a Southern cemetery where Oliver notices many small crosses, indicating that children lie buried there. She asks readers to consider “the condition/ of the heart/ of a mother/ or a father/ watching these plantings.” The parents’ pain in this poem is nearly palpable. However, Oliver asserts, the words carved on the grave marker are a comfort, “like water on a stone.” In this poem, Oliver seems to ask readers to accept that, while words are only words, there are words that can help take pain away. In several of the volume’s poems, Oliver addresses the inevitability of her own mortality. “Thinking of Swirler” is one of the finest of these. In it, Oliver tells of going out on an autumn afternoon and encountering a large buck deer she names Swirler. The deer regards her without fear, and Oliver finds this a precious gift. It leads her to think about how little any creature, including a human, can know about the world and about other creatures. A week after the encounter, Swirler is killed by a young bow hunter who is known to Oliver. For Oliver, this is a reminder of how death can come suddenly and unexpectedly; she concludes, “In my house there are a hundred half-done poems./ Each of us leaves an unfinished life.” In “Heart Poem,” Oliver uses playing in an orchestra with a wild conductor as a Mary Oliver is one of the best-known poets and essayists writing in the United States. She has won the 1998 Lannan Literary Award, the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive, and the 1992 National Book Award for New and Selected Poems. Born in 1935 in Ohio, Oliver lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

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metaphor for the sudden silences and starts of her own heart, suffering from arrhythmia. The image is clear and direct, the power of the poem striking. Although Oliver has never worried about her heart, she is able to describe its faulty functioning both precisely and with good humor. Although the music of the orchestra restarts after a sudden silence caused by the director’s wildness, as Oliver’s heart does after missing a beat, the end of the poem implies that someday the music may not start again. Oliver’s response to her heart is not one of anger, grief, or fear. Rather, she expresses both acceptance and mild humor, making a gentle observation about what may come to pass. Although many of the poems in Evidence concern death, a significant number also are poems of praise, thanks, and theology. In perhaps the finest poem in the volume, “At the River Clarion,” Oliver offers an exploration of a theology of life. The images in this poem are exquisite, and the pacing of the poem is precise. In the first section, Oliver says that she does not “know who God is exactly.” However, she does tell readers about a mystical moment she experiences while sitting in the River Clarion over a long afternoon. She hears all the sounds of the river, all the moving water, the stationary stones, and the mosses. Together, their voices speak to her of holiness. She tells readers that, if they cannot hear the voices, it is not the river’s fault but rather the fault of human impatience and ego, which render people deaf to the holy. In the poem’s second section, Oliver reveals that God is in everything, in both life and death. She lists all the things that God is in, from lilies, to artists, to hands that make weapons and, by extension, bring death. She suggests that everything and everyone is a “tiny piece of God.” She returns to thinking about the river, the source of her ideas about God. In the third brief section, Oliver advises that people should give thanks for both the “ripe melon” and the knife that cuts it. This paradox suggests that the world is far more complicated than most want to admit. The world is a place of life and death, and God is present in both. The fourth section seems to refer to the illness and subsequent death of Oliver’s longtime partner Molly Malone Cook, who died in 2005. Oliver writes of the helplessness of watching someone fade away, but she also comforts herself with the knowledge that the cycles of life require both gain and loss, both receiving and giving back. Oliver reinforces the notion that seems present throughout the entire collection: Everything in life is temporary; love, of any sort, is only on loan for a brief period. Her recollection of lost love moves Oliver to the fifth section of the poem, which is about her dog Luke, who, like Cook, is also “given back.” The eternal, that which flows along despite the receiving and the giving back required of living and dying, is symbolized by the river Clarion that continues to flow, despite suffering and changes. In section six, Oliver calls the birds, trees, and flowers that live along the riverbanks, “the lucky ones.” She contrasts these creatures of nature with herself, a woman troubled in her thoughts, looking for answers in books rather than reading the text of nature. Oliver concludes the poem with the brief section seven. Here, she finds comfort in the sounds of the river, its “infallible” voice. Infallibility suggests not only the inability to make an error but also the unfailing reliability of the river. In spite of loss, in

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spite of pain, the river continues on its way, singing its songs. The concluding line moves readers back to the opening of the poem and Oliver’s statement that she does not “know who God is exactly.” Although the poem does not claim this kind of knowledge, it does at least suggest that the eternal river, flowing and rushing along despite human doubts and worries, is the singing voice of the holy. The quality of the poems of Evidence, in particular poems such as “At the River Clarion,” demonstrates why Mary Oliver is one of the very best known poets writing in the United States. Her words are timely, reminding readers of the need to pay attention to the world around them. Most of all, her words provide beauty, comfort, and a striking understanding of the necessity of both life and death. Diane Andrews Henningfeld

Review Sources America 200, no. 14 (May 4, 2009): 28-30. Booklist 105, no. 13 (March 1, 2009): 14.

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THE FACE ON YOUR PLATE The Truth About Food Author: Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 288 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Current affairs, environment, ethics, nature, science Masson’s well-reasoned, well-researched, and persuasive arguments for eating a diet free from animal products The growing movement that asks critical questions about where food comes from will welcome The Face on Your Plate, a provocative book by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2001) called attention to the way the U.S. food system is controlled by corporations that put profit before health. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006) exposed the recent food-safety scares and the dangers to health caused by a lack of government regulation. Masson’s The Face on Your Plate also seeks to raise public awareness of the ethical nature of food choices and challenges individuals to make a difference. This book documents the damage to the environment that the food production system causes and decries the cruelty to animals inherent in that system. Without its extensive footnotes and comprehensive list of recommended readings and Web sites, The Face on Your Plate would be a slim volume. The text is only about 170 pages, but it is not a fast read. Masson presents a mix of passionate activism and scholarship. He is convinced that vegetarianism, more especially veganism—abstaining from all animal products, including eggs and dairy products—is the only choice rational, compassionate human beings can make. Once they understand the implications of their food choices, not just for their health but also for the well-being of animals and the environment, he says, people can no longer ignore the ethical dimension of how they eat. He backs his arguments with staggering statistics, persuasive reasoning, and quotations from respected health, environmental, government, and scientific authorities. The facts are not controversial; they are just not explicitly recognized. Masson is at his best in the first chapter, “The Only World We Have,” where he mounts a dramatic case to argue that choosing to eat animal products is not good for the planet. The typical American diet damages the environment in many ways, such as by contributing enormously to global warming. Masson debunks the widespread belief in the myth of “Man the hunter” that implies that humans are like other animals—“beasts of prey” and naturally carnivorous. Anthropologic research suggests that human beings were originally omnivorous scavengers who actually ate very little meat. Different animals eat distinctly different diets, and most animals seem to have little choice in their diet. In contrast to other species, human beings, apparently do not

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have the instinctive ability to choose foods that make them healthy. However, humans are the only species that can take the moral high ground and choose to stop eating meat and animal products in the interests of saving the planet. In page after page of impressive statistics, Masson presents an indictment of the modern industrial food-production system. Food in the United States no longer comes from the family farm that most people naïvely associate with their food. Farming is now a megabusiness. Human beings, and all other animals, are significantly affected by factory farming. Huge animal farms and concentrated feeding pens hold hundreds of thousands of animals being fattened for slaughter. Such animal feedlots pollute air, water, and land. Citing the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, Masson states that the manner in which humans raise animals and dispose of their waste (urine and excrement) results in at least 33 percent of humancaused greenhouse gas emissions. Methane has 23 times the global warming effect of carbon dioxide, and two-thirds of all methane emissions worldwide come from industrial farming, largely from huge waste lakes (manure lagoons) that are often as big as several baseball fields. The method of growing fruits and vegetables also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. Nitrous oxide has 296 times the global warming effect of carbon dioxide, and three-quarters of the nitrous oxide emissions in the United States are caused by industrial farming, mostly from nitrogen-containing fertilizers. Factory farming (which produces three trillion pounds of raw waste) causes more pollution of American rivers and lakes than all other industries combined. Animals produce 130 times more waste than all the people in the United States—farm animals produce five tons of waste per year for each person in the country. A contaminated water supply results in sickness and death in humans. Masson catalogs the hazards of water pollution to human health—among them, problems for unborn babies; diarrheal diseases; and respiratory, brain, and eye problems caused by hydrogen sulfide gas. Contaminated water also poses a serious threat to fish and aquatic life. Livestock today are fed antibiotics, hormones, and ground-up animal parts that are excreted unmetabolized, to a large extent, and contaminate groundwater and soil. The dust raised by millions of animals contains bacteria, molds, and fungi that cause respiratory disease, nausea, fatigue, and irritated mucus membranes, especially in farm workers and people living near industrial animal farms. Chicken megafarms are no less harmful to the environment. They contaminate water and soil, and health authorities fear that avian flu could become a serious epidemic. Factory farms represent an extremely wasteful use of land. Although cattle in the United States and Europe seldom get outdoors, where they are allowed to graze, each head of cattle (producing twenty times more body waste than humans) requires 30 acres of pasture, land that could be used to grow crops for human consumption. Al-

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, an American psychoanalyst, vegan, and animal-rights advocate, is the author of numerous books on the emotional lives of animals, including the best sellers When Elephants Weep (1994; with Susan McCarthy) and Dogs Never Lie About Love (1997).

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most 40 percent of the world’s grain goes to feed livestock instead of humans. This picture can only get worse, as the demand for meat and dairy products grows with rising living standards in the developing world. Huge land areas are being bulldozed, devastating whole ecosystems, to accommodate the world’s increasing consumption of meat. Forests are disappearing at an alarming rate. Losing the forests, which remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and produce oxygen, means losing the fight against climate change. Industrial agriculture is also extremely wasteful of water, an increasingly scarce commodity worldwide. It takes ten times more water to produce two pounds of animal protein than to produce two pounds of grain protein. It takes thirteen thousand gallons of water to produce a single pound of beef. About 80 percent of all pumped freshwater goes to meet the demands of industrial agriculture. Seventeen trillion gallons of irrigation water are required per year to produce feed for America’s livestock. Water quality suffers from cattle feedlots and poultry farms. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, agriculture is responsible for 70 percent of all water quality problems in the United States. To cite but one example, chicken farms along the Eastern Shore of Maryland, bordering the Chesapeake Bay, produce 3.3 billion pounds of raw waste annually, polluting more than 173,000 miles of rivers and streams. Aquatic life has suffered dramatically from pollution, destroying the income of people who depend on fishing, crabbing, and oystering for their livelihood. World hunger is now worse than at any other time in history, although the world produces enough food to feed twice the world’s population. Humans have the space and the knowledge to produce enough fruits and vegetable to feed the world, according to Masson, but the political structure and will are lacking. He describes many examples of sustainable, innovative, agro-ecological approaches in communities throughout the world that use little or no pesticides but produce high yields. People are healthier and happier when they are productive, and natural farming methods fight against climate change. Masson accuses big business of seeking to maximize profits and using harmful pesticides and herbicides irresponsibly. “The Lives They Lead” (chapter 2) leaves little to the imagination about the sad lives of farm animals. A psychoanalyst who has explored extensively the emotional lives of animals, Masson gives convincing evidence that animals have complex social and emotional lives. However, the ways in which animals are kept, fed, and slaughtered in agriculture does serious harm to their nature: Farm animals, he argues, should engage in behavior that is normal for their species. They need freshwater and a healthy diet, freedom from suffering, a comfortable resting area, and adequate space in which to express their species-appropriate normal behavior. Masson describes the care of hens as a grim example of how industrial agriculture provides no opportunity for animals to lead a normal life. Young chicks’ beaks are trimmed (likened to cutting off the end of a finger), chickens are denied perches, nests, room to spread their wings, or a place to scratch. Almost all of the eggs produced in the United States come from battery-caged hens. “Battery hens” are kept four to ten in a cage about twenty inches by twenty inches in size, so that each hen has two-thirds the space of an eight-by-eleven-inch sheet of paper. Many have crippled

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feet from scratching their wire cage; they suffer from brittle legs (osteoporosis) due to a lack of exercise. They never see sunlight. Productivity of the overworked hens decreases within two years (as opposed to seven to ten years in the wild); then, they are slaughtered for pet food. Male birds are usually killed at birth since there is no profit from them. In similar fashion, Masson details the treatment of pigs, turkeys, and dairy cows (the pain of separation from their calves, the physical cost of overproducing milk, cramped housing, an artificial diet, abusive electric prodding, and being sent to slaughter when they are “spent”). In another chapter, “The Fishy Business of Aquaculture,” Masson gives no quarter to those who think they can happily substitute fish for meat in their diet. He debates the commonly held notion that fish do not experience pain. Furthermore, he argues that their intelligence is underestimated. Research indicates that the brains of fish are similar to human brains, fish have well-developed memory spans, and they are capable of complex social relationships. Human greed puts fish at risk. The ocean is not inexhaustible. Modern methods of fishing use huge ships and tow nets, trawl the ocean floor, and discard dead “nontargeted” and “unwanted” marine life back into the sea. These methods upset complex ecosystems and endanger many fish species. Fish and shrimp farms have become increasingly important, but they are often plagued by disease and toxic chemicals and pollute waterways. According to Masson, most people eat animal products out of ignorance or denial; they do not want to face the knowledge that cruelty to animals is involved in killing animals and using animal products. Masson devotes a whole chapter, “Denial,” to this subject. The book’s final chapter, “A Day in the Life of a Vegan,” makes becoming a vegan seem less of a sacrifice than one might imagine. Masson is aware that few readers will become vegans as a result of reading his book. However, he has done a service to his cause by increasing awareness of the issues, especially by putting them within an ethical framework. Each person can make a difference by even minor diet changes, such as by eating less meat or by insisting that the animals they eat are humanely raised. Edna B. Quinn

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 304, no. 2 (September, 2009): 98. Booklist 105, no. 12 (February 15, 2009): l4. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 24 (December 15, 2008): 1294. Library Journal 134, no. 5 (March 15, 2009): 118. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 17 (April 27, 2009): 128-129. The New York Times, April 15, 2009, p. D1.

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FIELD DAYS A Year of Farming, Eating, and Drinking Wine in California Author: Jonah Raskin (1942) Publisher: University of California Press (Berkeley). 329 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Memoir Time: 2006 Locale: Northern California A memoir and exploration of the slow food approach to growing and eating local food that describes the owners, workers, consumers, and cooks whom Raskin met while adopting this approach Principal personages: Jonah Raskin, writer, educator, and farmer for a year Carlo Petrini, founder of the slow food movement Warren Weber, early proponent of organic farming and owner of the oldest certified organic farm in the state of California Mimi Luebbermann, farmer in Chellano Valley, early advocate of supporting local farmers, and writer of how-to books for farmers and gardeners Sharon Grossi, owner of the largest certified organic farm in Sonoma County Otto Teller, Oak Hill Farm founder and early rejecter of chemical fertilizers Anne Teller, owner of Oak Hill Farm, where Raskin works and conducts research, and spokesperson for organic farming Paige Green, photographer of Raskin’s explorations Paul Wirtz, in charge of vegetables and managing day-to-day operations at Oak Hill Farm Miguel Barrio, foreman at Oak Hill Farm who teaches Raskin how to pick, pack, and recognize the best product Jesus “Chuy” Soto, in charge of flowers at Oak Hill Farm, teaches Raskin how to select an appropriate bunch of flowers Will Bucklin, organic grape grower and producer of wine Bob Connard, organic farmer whose farm has become famous for supplying fresh, organic, local food to Alice Waters and Chez Panisse Alice Waters, influential cook, restaurateur, and food advocate, owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley

Jonah Raskin’s Field Days continues the tradition of memoirs covering a single year in the life of an author undertaking a particular course of action, journey,

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or experiment. Previous books in this tradition include Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence (1991), Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (2005), and Elizabeth Bishop’s Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything in Italy, India, and Indonesia (2007). Raskin’s memoir chronicles the author’s investigation of farming, eating, and drinking in California. He explains that part of the project’s motivation grew out of the love that he shared with his parents of rural environments. Recalling fondly a boyhood spent on Long Island, New York, when it was still covered with farmland, Raskin took the opportunity in the 1970’s to move to California. There, he joined his parents, who, seeking to recapture such a rural environment, had retired to Sonoma County. Raskin has relished living in Sonoma, a place of Mediterranean climate with a nine-month growing season. He sees it as a near paradise. After working in academia for many years teaching writing and communications, Raskin developed a longing at age sixty-five to connect with the soil. He decided he could do so while continuing in his teaching position at Sonoma State University. He planned to utilize his writing to describe his exploration of the smallfarm, local-food movement developing in Northern California and throughout the country. Field Days, the resulting book, explores the resurgence of organic farming on small farms and the rising popularity of fresh, seasonal produce purchased by buyers interested in flavor and healthy eating. It describes the farmers and their supporters, who stand in sharp contrast to large-scale agribusiness. Industrialized farms produce mass quantities of often-tasteless fruits and vegetables on huge farms, spraying their produce with chemicals to protect them from disease and pests. These mass-produced fruits and vegetables, available year-round from suppliers around the globe, have caused Americans at least to grow accustomed to every fruit and vegetable being available in supermarkets all year long. Raskin investigates the growers, buyers, and environmentalists who have begun to change Americans’ ideas about the aesthetic, nutritional, and environmental value of agricultural products. Rather than year-round availability and shelf life, these people emphasize the value of flavor, nutrition, and care for the environment. Raskin discovers the influence of Bob Cannard, recognized by California growers as one of the founders of organic farming, who supplies Alice Waters of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley with the produce she uses in developing her menus of seasonal foods. Raskin begins what he calls his search for healthier food and connection with place in Marin County at a propitious time: Farms in Marin and elsewhere have been changing. Before Rachel Carson’s polemic book Silent Spring (1962) exposed the terrible effects of DDT, many farmers had the attitude that the land was theirs to treat

Jonah Raskin is professor and chair of communications studies at Sonoma State University. He has published studies of California and counterculture writers and poets, including American Scream (2004), For the Hell of It (1996), and (as editor) Natives, Newcomers, Exiles, Fugitives (2003).

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however they wanted. Raskin recalls days on his parents’ farm when clouds of pesticide spray floated over the valley, poisoning all around it. By contrast, Bob Cannard and other organic farmers tolerate weeds as part of a healthy ecosystem and focus on nourishing the soil as well as growing a product. Slowly, they are challenging farms focused only on profit. Raskin starts his journey by talking with the sister of an old friend, Mimi Luebbermann, a farmer in Chellano Valley. Luebbermann advocated buying local produce and supporting local farmers before it became fashionable to do so. Through her, Raskin meets photographer Paige Green, who takes the photographs that appear in the book and on its cover. He then develops networks that lead him to other local growers and shoppers. One day, on his way to Oak Hill Farm, where he works in the field, Raskin meets Sharon Grossi, the owner of a seventy-acre farm, the largest certified organic farm in Sonoma County. She describes the joy and challenge of growing and marketing her crops at a time when Sonoma County supports more people and thus has less water available for agriculture than ever before. Grossi says that she must be inventive and creative to survive in an operation that maintains a fine balance between financial success and failure. She is not the only one thinking creatively about marketing, nor is the small-farm movement confined to California. One initiative that supports small farm growers by ensuring that they will have consumers is community-supported agriculture (CSA), begun in the East. Through a CSA, individual buyers contract with a farm, paying an annual fee in return for weekly boxes of produce during the growing season. This advance commitment by consumers provides farmers with up-front cash for planting and guaranteed revenues. In return, community shoppers are guaranteed access to just-picked local produce. The operation Raskin comes to know best is Oak Hill Farm in Glen Ellen. Working there enables him to investigate a model farm, gain practical knowledge, engage in fieldwork, and develop healthy eating habits. Oak Hill Farm was started by Otto Teller, a renowned conservationist who died in 1998. It now operates under the careful eye of Teller’s widow, Janet Teller. An eloquent spokesperson for organic farming and protecting the environment, she gives Raskin permission to work on the farm and report on its operations. As a result, he is able to discover the complexities of farming from many perspectives. First, Raskin meets Patrick McMurtry, the farm’s unofficial historian, and learns from him how the place evolved. Then, he meets other managers and field workers as he explores the local community. He starts with the Red Barn Store, a market store open from April to Christmas, where the locals shop for the organic produce raised on Oak Hill Farm. These shoppers relish what is ready when it is ready. When they shop at the Red Barn Store, they do not expect tomatoes in April or lettuce in August, but appreciate each fruit and vegetable in season. Such an appreciation is essential to becoming a “locavore.” From the store for local shoppers, Raskin moves to the fields, where he can get dirty. He meets Paul Wirtz, head of vegetables and manager of workers and farm machinery, and Jesus Soto, known as Chuy, head of flowers. With Wirtz’s guid-

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ance, Raskin sees firsthand the planning and oversight that a farm requires. Managing the farm, Wirtz tends to every crop. He plants a row of trees to shade tomato plants from the summer sun; he minds the many irrigating hoses, keeps a log of what is growing in each field, and knows the composition of each compost pile. He maintains the many pieces of machinery needed on a farm, performing the essential welds when machinery breaks. For Raskin, Wirtz embodies not only a careful manager but also a man who thrives on the spiritual connection a farmer feels with the earth. At Wirtz’s suggestion, Raskin joins immigrant workers in the field. As he describes his work, he also recalls the Bracero program of the 1960’s, which brought immigrant workers to California’s farmlands. Such workers were invited to the United States to help harvest crops all over California. Sonoma County could not have survived without them. During July and August, Raskin picks vegetables under foreman Miguel Barrios. The workday is long and hard, but he finds the work exhilarating. He is paid in produce, gaining a sense of connection to the earth and a leaner, tauter body. He learns exactly when a vegetable is ready to be picked, and later, under Soto, he learns to feel how many flowers make a bunch. Winemaking and cooking are part of Raskin’s exploration. He meets many people engaged in growing and cooking, but he especially explores Oak Hill connections. Vineyards and winemaking at Oak Hill Farm are managed by Will Bucklin, one of Anne Teller’s sons. Equally committed to organic growing and quality assessment of his product, Bucklin ensures that only the ripest grapes are picked for wine or sold to another winery. From Oak Hill, Raskin moves on to San Francisco, observing the wholesale market where the farm’s flowers and vegetables are sold in season. He finds a restaurant touting Oak Hill Farm zucchini on its menu. Working at Oak Hill farm; talking to many growers, field hands, cooks, and environmentalists; reading many suggested books on farming; and connecting with the land, Raskin asserts his conviction that human interaction with farms and food is essential to personal health and a sustainable economy. He decides that the movement of domination of the land initiated by the first European settlers has to be reversed by what he calls the “post pioneers,” or “restorationists.” As he follows the route of Oak Hill products, he comes to savor the local, seasonal foods and appreciate the chefs and restaurants that serve local produce. Seeing and experiencing the effort and satisfaction in small-scale farmwork and production, Raskin becomes a most articulate advocate of this movement. When teaching memoir writing to his students, Rasking insists on the dictum that they avoid digressions. However, he notes in his introduction that Field Days does not follow this dictum. Instead, Raskin richly explores and celebrates every person and event that presents itself during the year—from Day of the Dead celebrations on Oak Hill Farm and individual stories of workers to writers past and present. All these people and events contribute traditions, ideas, strategies, and philosophies to the locavore movement. Raskin expresses enthusiasm for both the growing and the eating of local products, as well as for the good stewardship inherent in each product. His journey proves to have resulted in what he sought from it: a deeper un-

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derstanding of the small-farm movement, improved health, and a sense of connection to the earth. Bernadette Flynn Low

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 17 (May 1, 2009): 53. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 12 (March 23, 2009): 55. San Francisco Chronicle, June 9, 2009, p. E3.

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FLANNERY A Life of Flannery O’Connor Author: Brad Gooch (1952) Publisher: Little, Brown (New York). 448 pp. $30.00 Type of work: Literary biography Gooch’s detailed biography draws connections between the life and fiction of American writer O’Connor, although some of those connections are strained Principal personages: Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), an American short-story writer and novelist Regina O’Connor, her mother

“Does it have symbolisms in it?” Regina O’Connor asked her daughter, fiction writer Flannery O’Connor, as they awaited the appearance of her second novel in the late fall of 1959. “You know, when I was coming along, they didn’t have symbolisms.” Biographer Brad Gooch quotes Mrs. O’Connor’s philistine question as a tacit comment on a mother’s inability to fathom her daughter’s art, but the question could just as fairly be asked of Gooch’s biography. The answer would be that, unless one counts Freudian clichés, there are no “symbolisms” in Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, and the book is the poorer for it. Good biographies do not need to incorporate symbolism. However, as was the case with Gooch’s acclaimed 1993 biography of Frank O’Hara—another Irish American Catholic writer who died young (O’Hara died at forty; O’Connor died at thirtynine)—Flannery suffers from the lack of a through line that would impart a sense of personal continuity to the strings of anecdotes Gooch meticulously orders by chronology. The closest Gooch comes to a unifying image is invoked only at the beginning and the end, and even then it does not quite work. Gooch recreates, in some detail, O’Connor’s first public appearance in a Pathé newsreel, at the age of five, teaching her pet chicken to walk backward. He tries to use the chicken incident as the focal point for the author’s life story. The incident might have been a good choice if the biographer had attached to it a consistent interpretation of an O’Connor who walked backward, went against the grain, or otherwise reflected some aspect of the story. The portrayal of Flannery O’Connor in this biography never coheres to that degree. The seeming absence of authorial purpose in Flannery might be attributed simply to objectivity were the biographer’s objectivity not so selective. Although understandably skeptical of O’Connor’s own self-evaluations, Gooch is surprisingly uncritical of what others say about her. Gooch admirably conveys how little O’Connor’s mother, family, and college friends understood her and her work. He seems less conscious of the misunderstandings of the literati who discovered her genius, although he skillfully

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describes the limits of Caroline Gordon’s edi torial eye, of which even O’Connor became Brad Gooch is a poet, novelist, and acclaimed biographer. The author of aware near the end. Despite these limitations, Gooch’s book City Poet (1993), a life of Frank has great value as raw material for more per- O’Hara, he lives in New York and ceptive literary evaluation. O’Connor biogra- teaches literature and creative writing phies have been hampered until recently by at William Patterson University in New their authors’ lack of access to some relevant Jersey. materials, and Gooch presents some of those materials, such as the letters of Betty Hester, until 1998 known only by the coy pseudonym “A” in Sally Fitzgerald’s edition of O’Connor’s letters. The new documents made available through Flannery will be a sensation to O’Connor scholars hungry for every tidbit, although the book contains no major revelations. Hester’s identity was revealed after her suicide in 1998, and though some of her letters were not unsealed until 2007, her influence on O’Connor (and vice versa) was thoroughly discussed in Jean W. Cash’s 2002 biography, Flannery O’Connor: A Life. The very existence of the previous book-length biography is significant to the publication of Gooch’s book, as it calls into question the need for a new biography. Gooch’s reasons for writing Flannery, though, seem to be largely personal: The study’s “Acknowledgments” appendix begins as a narrative of Gooch’s “literary infatuation” with O’Connor. Inspired by reading Sally Fitzgerald’s 1979 collection of O’Connor’s letters, The Habit of Being, Gooch wrote to Fitzgerald announcing his intention to write a biography. He dropped his project, however, when Fitzgerald told him that she was writing her own biography of her literary friend. When Fitzgerald died in 2000, she had not yet published her promised biography, and it has yet to appear. Hence, there was no reason for Gooch not to write a second O’Connor biography. The reality is that there is enough personality in Flannery O’Connor for half a dozen more biographies. Gooch reports O’Connor’s well-documented aversion to author biography and her self-deprecating observation that a biography of a woman who spent most of her time writing and caring for barn fowl would make dull reading. Certainly, O’Connor had no adventures of the sort that characterized the lives of Ernest Hemingway or Clare Booth Luce, but her unique fusion of genteel manners, satiric vision, and dry wit are enough to make Gooch’s compilation of anecdotes worth reading. Gooch forges connections between O’Connor’s life and her fiction, but some of these connections seem forced. For example, O’Connor’s unlikely friend, Maryat Lee, different in every way from the author, once spoke of religious orthodoxy as a ceiling she had broken through. Gooch compares this statement to a passage in O’Connor’s story “The Enduring Chill” in which the character Asbury sees an image of the Holy Spirit in a water stain on the ceiling. While some of Gooch’s connections are tenuous, he packs his analysis with them, and the sheer number of the interrelations he sees between O’Connor’s life and work provides readers with a significant mass of details to evaluate and judge for themselves.

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Gooch reveals that O’Connor was reading about an RKO Studios publicity campaign for the premiere of the film Mighty Joe Young (1949) while she was revising Wise Blood (1952). In the novel, the character Enoch witnesses a publicity stunt identical to the one about which O’Connor read: a man dressed in an ape suit. Similarly, the Elvis Presley film Wild in the Country (1961) played in O’Connor’s hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia, in July, while she was writing “The Lame Shall Enter First.” The story features a similar theme to that of the film—rehabilitation of a country boy from delinquency—as well as a character who sings Presley’s version of “Shake, Rattle, and Roll.” While these cross-references to popular culture are one of Flannery’s chief assets, however, they are not indexed. Although not well connected to one another, the scenes and anecdotes making up Gooch’s biography are well told. Gooch is especially good at the iterative mode of narration, describing one scene in detail so it stands for countless other iterations of the same scene. He vividly and carefully describes O’Connor’s writing sessions at Yaddo in 1948-1949, when the budding author enjoyed the luxury of solitude for the last time; elegant luncheons in the Sanford House Tea Room in Milledgeville after its opening in the fall of 1952; and endless visits to hospitals and medical specialists from 1950 onward. The medical scenes serve as a good index of Gooch’s narrative skill: Their cumulative effect is a blur, as they must have been in real life to O’Connor and her mother, yet each is clinically accurate in detailing O’Connor’s symptoms at the time. The book is strictly organized by chronology, and it is divided by O’Connor’s debut as a published author. The first five chapters, forming part 1, recount her life before the publication of her first novel, Wise Blood. Each chapter represents a new residence: her early childhood in Savannah (chapter 1), the move to Milledgeville (chapter 2), Georgia State College for Women (chapter 3), Iowa State University (chapter 4), and the Yaddo Artists’ Colony outside Saratoga Springs, New York (chapter 5). In part 2, geography ceases to be a convenient marker, since after Christmas, 1950, O’Connor found herself increasingly confined to Andalusia, her mother’s farm in Milledgeville. In place of geographical tags, then, the last five chapters are designated by titles and images from O’Connor’s fiction: “The Life You Save” (chapter 6), “The ‘Bible’ Salesman” (chapter 7), “Freaks and Folks” (chapter 8), “Everything That Rises” (chapter 9), and “Revelation” (chapter 10). O’Connor’s increasing confinement to Andalusia made her come to terms with her complex relationship with her overprotective mother, and in the second half of the biography Gooch comes to terms with it as well. While readers may disagree with Gooch’s understanding of O’Connor’s southernness and her Roman Catholicism, few will fault his balanced portrayal of Regina O’Connor and her interactions with her famous daughter. Regina’s micromanagement of Flannery’s life from her earliest days is clear. She handpicked her daughter’s friends and had her driven or escorted to and from classes, even through Flannery’s graduation from the Georgia State College for Women, only a few blocks from her home. Gooch also makes clear his agreement with O’Connor’s friend and correspondent Maryat Lee that the author “got away with murder” in caricaturing her mother through several unflattering characters in her fiction, most famously the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

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What also comes through in Gooch’s portrayal—especially of the later years, as the lupus from which she would die in 1964 made her more and more physically dependent on her mother—is the extent of O’Connor’s emotional dependence and her realization that both her disease and her mother were her paths to sanctity, the crosses she had to bear to achieve holiness. The latter half of the book is a chronicle of O’Connor’s slow deterioration: her mother’s withholding the diagnosis of lupus from her; Sally Fitzgerald blurting it out in the car one day; and her trip to Lourdes, to which O’Connor attributed a renewal of her will to write (and perhaps the recalcification of her hip). Flannery appears at a time when O’Connor’s canonicity, her status as a major American author, is assured, though Gooch’s “Acknowledgments” essay may overstate the extent to which she was evaluated as minor in 1980. It could be argued that O’Connor has not been seen as a minor author since receiving the O. Henry Award for “Greenleaf” in 1956 (three years after coming in second for “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”). After 1960, few anthologies of American fiction lacked an O’Connor story. Gooch may have written his biography of O’Connor later than he had originally intended, but the timing may be fortunate: it provides enough new detail to whet readers’ appetite for the next major study of O’Connor. John R. Holmes

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 303, no. 5 (June, 2009): 88-96. Booklist 105, no. 7 (December 1, 2008): 4. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 23 (December 1, 2008): 1240-1241. Library Journal 133, no. 20 (December 1, 2008): 130. London Review of Books 31, no. 14 (July 23, 2009): 24-26. National Review 61, no. 4 (March 9, 2009): 38-42. The New Republic 240, no. 9 (June 3, 2009): 39-43. The New Yorker 85, no. 6 (March 23, 2009): 75. The New York Times, February 23, 2009, p. 8. The New York Times Book Review, March 1, 2009, p. 1. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 47 (November 24, 2008): 45. The Times Literary Supplement, September 11, 2009, p. 9. The Virginia Quarterly Review 85, no. 2 (Spring, 2009): 202-205.

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FORDLANDIA The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City Author: Greg Grandin (1962) Publisher: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt (New York). 416 pp. $27.50 Type of work: History Time: July, 1925-November, 1945 Locale: Fordlandia and Belterra, Brazil Ford established rubber plantations and two small cities in Brazil in order to develop an independent supply of rubber for his automobile factory, as well as to export his vision of an ideal American town to South America Principal personages: Henry Ford (1863-1947), founder of Ford Motor Company Henry Ford II (1917-1987), his grandson and successor as president of the company in 1945 Harvey Samuel Firestone (1868-1938), rubber manufacturer Getúlio Vargas (1882-1954), president of Brazil, 1930-1945 and 1951-1954

Few people are aware that Henry Ford tried to build the world’s largest rubber plantation on the banks of the Amazon River. Readers of Greg Grandin’s Fordlandia, which was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in history, will be entertained by a fascinating story of idealism, good wishes, arrogance, ignorance, greed, and incompetence, as the head of the world’s largest car manufacturing company unsuccessfully attempted to establish an independent source of rubber in Brazil. Discussion of the project began during a July, 1925, luncheon with tire manufacturer Harvey Firestone, who feared that British and Dutch owners of plantations in South Asia, which produced the overwhelming majority of the world’s rubber, would combine into a monopoly and greatly increase his costs. Ford needed rubber for tires, as well as for hoses, valves, gaskets, and other parts of his cars. To make his company self-sufficient, Ford had deliberately established control of most of the raw materials he needed. Company-owned forests in Michigan provided lumber, and company-owned mines provided coal and iron ore to feed the world’s largest steel foundry at his enormous River Rouge plant. Rubber was a major raw material he did not control, but Ford did not accept Firestone’s proposal jointly to produce their own supply. Brazilian consular representatives and Amazonian land speculators encouraged Ford to invest there. Brazil seemed a logical location. In the nineteenth century, its native rubber trees were the only source of latex until smuggled seeds were used to create large plantations in Asia, where trees produced much more latex sap, since Amazonian

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rubber-tree predators were absent. Lower-cost competition effectively ended the profitabil- Greg Grandin, professor of history at ity of Brazilian production. What little rubber New York University, has written Brazil exported in 1925 came from individual extensively on Latin America, sap collectors who sold their latex to local contributing articles to The Nation, merchants. The merchants held the collectors and has published The Blood of Guatemala (2000), The Last Colonial in virtual debt peonage. In early 1927, Ford sent a Michigan bota- Massacre (2004), and Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United nist to survey the possibilities for rubber proStates, and the Rise of the New duction in Brazil. The botanist returned a pos- Imperialism (2006). itive report and recommended acquiring land held by speculators. His description of the latex collectors’ terrible working and living conditions stimulated Ford to make the investment, even though by 1927 the original reason for wanting an independent source of rubber was no longer present. The feared monopoly never occurred; instead, overproduction of latex had significantly driven down prices. Grandin notes a recurrent theme in the Fordlandia story: Every time economic goals were less persuasive or proved elusive, social objectives would justify continuing. The Amazon project appealed to an idealist streak in Ford. To service his large lumber holdings in Northern Michigan, he had built model towns run by his rules, trying to demonstrate that industrialism was compatible with the small-town America he remembered from his youth and that his mass-production techniques were destroying. In 1927, the same year that he began assembling a replica of an ideal nineteenthcentury town in Greenville, Michigan, Ford set out to create a profitable, industrialscale rubber plantation, built around an example of a model American town. He would show Brazil and the world how to combine material and ideal values. He intended Fordlandia to be profitable and pay decent wages, while also teaching the workers thrift, good nutrition, and proper hygiene. Fordlandia would be a commercial enterprise with a civilizing mission. Ford sent two employees to Brazil with power of attorney to assemble the needed land. They acquired 2.5 million acres of jungle, about the size of Connecticut, half from speculators who were paid $150,000 and half as a grant of public land ratified by the state legislature of Pará on September 30, 1927. Nationalists criticized the terms of the grant, which seemed to permit Ford to operate Fordlandia as though it were a separate state. A 1929 investigation revealed an unsavory tale of kickbacks and payoffs to get the grant approved, but Grandin believes the controversy did not damage Ford’s reputation for honesty as much as his reputation for competence, since he could have received the entire grant for free. A self-made man, Ford distrusted experts. He saw them as people who told him what he could not do. Therefore, no one familiar with life in a jungle was consulted, nor did he seek advice from any botanist knowledgeable about rubber trees and their pests. Instead, Ford sent out aides, mostly engineers, in whom he had confidence. The result was a display of ignorance and incompetence.

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The first ships carrying supplies from the United States to Fordlandia could not get closer than fifty miles to the chosen location, necessitating a costly and time-consuming overland haul. It took nearly six months, until December, 1928, to get everything to the plantation site because no one responsible knew how low the river depth was in the dry season. Ford expected that the expedition would use trees that were cut down to prepare the land to build his town and that they would also provide valuable lumber for export. When the sawmill was finally complete, however, the immediately available trees were unusable. When valuable timber was ready for export, profitable markets proved elusive. A cost analysis, finally done in 1933, discovered that, under the most favorable export assumptions, the mill would lose $12,000 a month. To house his employees, Ford ordered that midwestern-style clapboard cottagesbe built, similar to those in his Michigan lumber towns. His architects, who had no experience with a tropical climate, chose metal roofs insulated with asbestos, rather than the traditional thatched roofs, thinking they would keep heat out. Instead, they kept heat in, and inhabitants denounced the houses as galvanized iron bake ovens. More destructive to the hope of operating a profitable rubber plantation were planting errors. Most of the seedlings planted the first year came up very weak, and in 1930 the current manager decided they should be plowed under and the fields replanted. This decision would cost another five years before Fordlandia would produce latex, but Ford was not discouraged and pressed on. Worse problems arose when the trees matured. Rubber trees in the jungle grew far apart, a useful strategy to limit damage from the many diseases and insects that attacked them. If a single tree were attacked and killed, others further away need not be affected. Fordlandia’s managers, copying South Asian plantations where Amazonian predators did not exist, cleared the forest and planted the trees in neat, closely spaced rows. As they grew, their branches touched one another. If rubber leaf blight reached one tree, it had a perfect highway for its spores to infect and devastate an entire field. In March, 1933, a plant scientist reached Fordlandia and immediately criticized growing trees from seed, since the resultant seedlings were certain to be of varying quality with many nearly useless as latex producers. He recommended grafting slips from the best producers of latex onto the fastest growing rootstock. Grafting was standard practice in Asian rubber plantations and may have been used in China as early as 2000 b.c.e., but it was new to Fordlandia’s managers. Ford took a very paternalistic interest in his Brazilian employees, as he tried to impose his understanding of American values on them. He paid well. He built a state-ofthe-art hospital open to those living nearby as well as to Fordlandia’s residents; erected a water-purification plant providing clean, wholesome water; and did his best to improve the Brazilians’ nutrition, whether they liked what he ordered for them or not. Attempts to put into effect American-style prohibition failed; Brazilian police refused to enforce Ford’s dictates, and workers thought them hypocritical as they watched managers indulge in major binges once away from dry Michigan. Nor were employees enthusiastic about Ford’s attempts to teach them to enjoy eating oatmeal for breakfast and whole wheat bread for dinner in the dining hall he had built for unmarried employees.

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In December, 1930, trouble broke out in the dining hall. A newly arrived manager decided to replace the existing waiter service with cafeteria lines, but the American clerk charged with checking badges of incoming workers was so slow that the line to the dining hall grew long. When he laughed dismissively at an impatient Brazilian, pent-up irritations exploded. The workers demolished the dining hall and for three days went on to trash the powerhouse, sawmill, and office buildings until a Brazilian army detachment arrived. Every Ford truck, tractor, and car on the plantation was destroyed. Ford rejected considering employee grievances. With the support of newly established dictator Getúlio Vargas, he fired the entire workforce, excepting only a small maintenance crew. Ford refused to abandon what was by now more a social than an economic enterprise, and he continued with new workers. He poured in money to rebuild Fordlandia and continued to expect successful rubber production. However, when the mass plantings of 1930 matured in 1935, leaf blight and caterpillars ran rampant, killing many trees and damaging those left standing. Ford would not surrender. In 1936, he accepted a proposal to move seventy miles downriver and start a new plantation at Belterra. Belterra, like Fordlandia, was a carbon copy of a midwestern small town, complete with a central square, sidewalks, indoor plumbing, movie theaters, a nine-hole golf course, a day-care center, schools, and an excellent hospital. By 1940, Belterra workers had cleared almost thirty thousand acres and planted nearly three million trees (properly grafted using techniques learned at Fordlandia) when the jungle struck again. Trees were still too close together; when they matured, caterpillars and leaf blight attacked 70 percent of the plantings, repeating the disaster at Fordlandia. During World War II, the U.S. government encouraged Ford to continue rubber production in Brazil without substantially changing results. The two plantations were striking examples of American town building, but they were economic failures. In November, 1945, Ford’s grandson, Henry Ford II, gave Fordlandia and Belterra (which had cost the company $20 million and were still valued at $8 million) to the Brazilian government for $240,000—the amount the company legally owed its workers as severance pay. Grandin bulks up his book with lengthy, often useful and informative, descriptions of Ford’s personal idiosyncrasies and the operation of his huge River Rouge plant. He finds it hard to resist attractive digressions. It adds little to the discussion of Ford’s factory to include a description of Diego Rivera’s Detroit murals, nor does it help readers understand a speculator who fleeced Ford to include an account of the suicide of his relative, Alberto Santos-Dumont, who Brazilians insist was the true inventor of the airplane. Although the book is long, however, readers will be rewarded with an engrossing narrative of high ideals miserably executed as America’s most successful car manufacturer attempted to create an ideal American farm town in the middle of the Amazon jungle. Milton Berman

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Review Sources American Scholar 78, no. 3 (Summer, 2009): 104-107. Booklist 105, no. 19/20 (June 1-15, 2009): 13. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 2 (January 15, 2009): special section, p4. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 7 (April 1, 2009): 357. Library Journal 134, no. 8 (May 1, 2009): 88-89. London Review of Books 31, no. 19 (October 8, 2009): 31-33. Los Angeles Times, June 24, 2009, p. D1. Mother Jones 34, no. 3 (May/June, 2009): 76-78. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 15 (October 8, 2009): 31-34. The New York Times Book Review, July 19, 2009, p. 12. The New Yorker 85, no. 24 (August 10, 2009): 81. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 18 (May 4, 2009): 44. The Times Literary Supplement, September 11, 2009, p. 27. The Wilson Quarterly 33, no. 3 (Summer, 2009): 92-95.

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THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM Author: Alan Wolfe (1942) Publisher: Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass.). 508 pp. $35.00 Type of work: History, philosophy A thoughtful analysis and defense of the liberal ideology, including its history, its characteristics, and its continued relevance In contemporary political discourse, ideological labels such as liberalism, progressivism, conservatism, socialism, and libertarianism are used in many different ways, and these differences result in considerable misunderstandings. In the United States, the label “liberal” is commonly used as a synonym for “left-wing,” just as “conservative” usually denotes “rightwing.” Americans utilize these two labels in reference to a great variety of controversial issues, including social programs, abortion rights, constitutional interpretations, same-sex marriage, affirmative action, economic regulations, deficit spending, and separation of church and state. In European countries, where the concept of socialism enjoys more popularity, people tend to speak of “the Left” and “the Right,” usually reserving the term “liberal” to denote free-market economic policies that would be classified as conservative in the United States. In The Future of Liberalism, Alan Wolfe makes a helpful distinction among three overlapping aspects of liberalism: the first focuses on temperament, the second on substance, and the third on procedure. The concept of a liberal temperament relates to psychological characteristics, such as tolerance and empathy toward others. Concerning the substance of liberalism, Wolfe writes that the core principle is that “as many people as possible should have as much say as is feasible over the direction their lives will take”—a democratic principle that logically implies commitments to two values: liberty and equality. He observes that this principle mandates legal protections for individual rights and freedoms, including the right to advocate reactionary and conservative policies that liberals hate. Liberalism is not anarchism, but while liberals accept the necessity for authority, they insist that constraints should be established “by people themselves through some form of consent or interdependence.” From the perspective of procedures, both political and judicial, Wolfe writes that liberals are committed to the goals of fairness and impartiality and that they support constitutional forms of limited government that guarantee free elections and due process. He believes, moreover, that they usually oppose special privileges and exceptions to established rules. While acknowledging that many procedural rules are not necessarily incompatible with political conservatism, he observes that conservatives are much more willing to accept compromises based on expenses and pragmatic considerations. In criminal trials, for example, the majority of liberals have insisted

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on strict application of the exclusionary rule, which requires that illegally acquired evidence must be excluded from the trial. Conservatives, in contrast, typically look upon this procedural rule as a “judge-invented” technicality that obstructs law enforcement, and they become furious whenever it allows a guilty and dangerous person to escape punishment. Most thinking persons mix the two ideologies, expressing liberal views on some issues while taking conservative positions on other topics. Despite the complexity of individual persons, however, Wolfe insists that liberalism constitutes a coherent ideology and that it provides the most viable option for the twenty-first century. In his view, the ideology is characterized by a set of at least seven “dispositions”: the assumption that people are capable of growth and progress; a bias in favor of equality; a preference for a sober sense of realism; an inclination toward rational deliberation; a commitment to tolerance, even for persons who are intolerant; an openness toward diversity and alternative ideas; and a favorable view of governance, based on the belief that elected officials can fashion intelligent policies in the interest of the common good. Wolfe argues that these dispositions were primarily products of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, making their political debut in the period between 1787 and 1815. “For all the talk about how the Enlightenment project failed,” he writes, “we live with the consequences of the Enlightenment all around us.” In the realm of political economics, theorists have long distinguished between “classical” and “modern” versions of liberalism. Adam Smith, the “quintessential classical liberal,” advocated a minimal state that would maintain low taxes and provide very little regulation of the economy. Such an ideology, which basically aligns with modern American libertarianism, remains the most common definition of the term “liberalism” in Europe. In the United States, by contrast, persons called “liberals” tend to endorse British economist John Maynard Keynes’s approach, which emphasizes the benefits of governmental spending and other forms of economic intervention. Wolfe, however, attempts to minimize the difference between classical and modern liberalism. Viewed historically, he argues that Smith and other eighteenth century liberals were reacting against a political system that supported the interests of a small elite and was oppressive toward the vast majority of citizens. Since the early twentieth century, in his view, governmental intervention has tended to lessen inequalities and to promote individual freedom from the restraints that reside in the private sector. Although Wolfe emphasizes that liberals want to expand equality, he writes that they do not view equality “as an end in itself” (an idea that is more associated with the socialist tradition). Rather, they place the highest priority on allowing people maximum freedom in living their lives in ways that they choose. Because liberalism does not require the utopian aim of absolute equality, the amount “of actual equality”

Alan Wolfe, a professor of political science at Boston College, has published at least fourteen books, including The Transformation of American Religion (2005) and Does American Democracy Still Work? (2006). He is a contributing editor of The New Republic and The Wilson Quarterly.

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found in liberal societies “will vary from one to another.” Nevertheless, Wolfe writes that no liberal society can tolerate extreme and persistent inequalities that deprive its least favored members of opportunities to develop their human capabilities. While opposed to the abolition of all class distinctions, Wolfe endorses sociologist Thomas H. Marshall’s version of a moderate welfare state. Such a state guarantees that all citizens have the right to basic medical care and legal services, as well as other “social rights.” Wolfe takes issue with Milton Friedman’s suggestion that the pursuit of an “equality of outcomes” is dangerous because it inevitably must rely on “the coercive mechanism of the state.” Wolfe answers that individual freedom is compatible with welfare-state programs, and he favors an unspecified compromise that exists “somewhere between equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes.” Wolfe asserts that modern democracy inevitably leads to an expansion of equality. Referring to the ideas of British philosopher John Stuart Mill, he writes that the “the many will use their facilities to extend sympathy and justice to all” and that “it is an illusion to think that the process can be stopped.” There is perhaps some historical basis to this optimistic theory, but it is highly questionable. In societies in which the majority of citizens are relatively affluent, experience suggests that there are limits to the majority’s willingness to make sacrifices to help the poor and needy. Skeptics of the theory can also point to examples such as the Jim Crow age of the American South, in which the majority of white southerners strongly supported inequality for African Americans. In asserting a direct linkage between democracy and equality, Wolfe appears to concentrate on the extent to which the glass is half full, ignoring the fact that such a glass is also half empty. In the United States, contemporary liberals might be divided into two categories: “centrist liberals,” who emphasize liberty, and “left-wing liberals,” who focus almost exclusively on equality. Wolfe is unquestionably among the former, and left-leaning liberals will no doubt find fault with some of his rather moderate views. With few exceptions, for instance, leftists give unqualified support for affirmative action programs that include racial and gender preferences in employment and university admissions. Wolfe, however, is decidedly ambiguous toward such programs. Concerning Barbara Grutter, a white student who was not admitted to the University of Michigan because of a racial preference, he declares that she “was unfairly passed over because of her race.” Most leftists will also disagree with Wolfe’s opposition to the punishment of persons who express “hateful speech” against minorities. He criticizes this policy as a form of “political correctness,” which is one of the favorite terms of conservatives. A majority of liberals will also disagree with his support for President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform law, which significantly decreased the number of poor women able to obtain welfare, and, even more, they will dislike his advocacy for vouchers that allow poor children to attend private schools. Wolf’s centrist perspective is particularly evident in the interesting chapter titled “How Liberals Should Think About Religion,” which takes strong issue with radical secular humanists, particularly Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, who want to ban religion from the public sphere. According to Wolfe, the enemy of liberalism “is

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not religion but religious oppression, and its friend is not skepticism but freedom, including religious freedom.” Recognizing the limits of tolerance, however, he warns that “liberals must constantly be on guard against those who would shut down free inquiry in the name of religious conviction.” Although he generally defends the Jeffersonian tradition of separation between church and state, Wolfe places priority on the application of liberal proceduralism, which allows both conservative believers and nonbelievers equal rights to try to influence public policy, even on contentious issues such as gay marriage, abortion, and stem cell research. He calls his perspective a “liberal bargain,” which basically means that “no group belonging to one particular religious tradition can monopolize the violence that the state has as its disposal to impose its views on those belonging to other traditions.” In summarizing the chapter, Wolfe declares: “Whatever the future of liberalism, a place for religion must be guaranteed.” A large portion of The Future of Liberalism is devoted to the history of liberal and conservative theories since the middle of the eighteenth century. Wolfe attempts to show that most ideas cluster into these two dichotomous and coherent ideologies, and he attempts to show continuity rather than change in the two ideologies. His argument results in a tendency to classify hundreds of political theorists as either liberal or conservative. Frequently, he compares theorists who lived in quite different times and places. Many of those theorists are rather obscure. Readers without a good background in the history of political theory will find the references to so many persons to be quite bewildering. Readers with a good foundation in the literature, moreover, will discover that some of Wolfe’s classifications and linkages are questionable. For example, he argues that modern conservatives share much in common with JeanJacques Rousseau, whose Romantic theories were used to justify the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. In defense of this rather tenuous association, Wolfe asserts that modern conservatives, like Rousseau, are hostile toward modernity. When discussing modern conservatism, portions of Wolfe’s analysis are excessively polemical, even sometimes unfair. For instance, in chapter 8, “Why Conservatives Can’t Govern,” he describes the ways in which President George W. Bush’s administration failed to respond adequately to Hurricane Katrina. He attributes this failure to the administration’s dislike of government action, and he claims that the example demonstrates that conservatives have “abandoned the terrain of good governance.” Even if Wolfe’s analysis of the example is valid, his broad generalization appears to be based on wishful thinking. During the last half century, there have been several instances of unsuccessful governance by liberal Democratic administrations, just as there have been moderately conservative presidents, such as Dwight Eisenhower, who are considered by general consensus to have been reasonably successful. In places, Wolfe appears to reify the abstract concepts of liberalism and conservatism; that is, he refers to them as if were concrete entities. For instance, he writes: “Liberalism is honest about itself. Liberals, all too often, are not.” Liberalism, however, is only a concept, and as such it is unable to be honest or dishonest. Liberal persons determine the denotations and connotations of the word liberalism, just as persons with conservative ideas establish the meanings of the word conservatism.

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Because people react to their experiences and to changing circumstances, the substances of their ideologies change significantly over time. The ideas of thoughtful liberals today might be quite different from those of both the past and the future. Rather than attempting to be consistently conservative or consistently liberal, most rational people make decisions about public policy based on a combination of their cherished values and their perceptions of reality. Wolfe, no doubt, is correct in pointing out the ways in which liberal thinkers have contributed to human happiness during the last two and a half centuries. Liberals, however, have often been unrealistic, especially about fiscal matters, and it is a mistake to minimize the positive contributions that have been made by conservatives. Thomas Tandy Lewis

Review Sources The American Spectator 42, no. 4 (May, 2009): 73-76. Booklist 105, no. 11 (February 1, 2009): 6. Commentary 127, no. 3 (March, 2009): 59-62. Dissent 56, no. 4 (Fall, 2009): 128-131. The Economist 390, no. 8617 (February 7, 2009): 75-76. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 24 (December 15, 2008): 1300. Library Journal 134, no. 3 (February 15, 2009): 121-122. The Nation 288, no. 18 (May 11, 2009): 32-36. National Review 61, no. 4 (March 9, 2009): 44-45. New Criterion 27, no. 7 (March, 2009): 4-9. The New York Times Book Review, March 22, 2009, p. 14. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 41 (October 13, 2008): 43. The Wall Street Journal, February 9, 2009, p. A17. Weekly Standard 14, no. 34 (May 25, 2009): 30-33. The Wilson Quarterly 33, no. 2 (Spring, 2009): 110-111.

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GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ A Life Author: Gerald Martin (1944) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). Illustrated. 642 pp. $37.50 Type of work: Literary biography Time: 1899-2007 Locale: Aracataca, Barranquilla, Sucre, Zipaquira, Bogotá, and Cartagena, Colombia; Caracas, Venezuela; New York City; Mexico City; Barcelona, Spain Martin’s is the first authorized biography of one of the most distinguished writers of the second half of the twentieth century, and it should serve as the standard portrait of García Márquez for some time Principal personages: Gabriel García Márquez, world-renowned novelist and journalist Colonel Nicolas Márquez Mejia, García Márquez’s maternal grandfather, the dominant influence on his life Gabriel Eligio García, García Márquez’s father, with whom he had a difficult relationship for many years Mercedes Raquel Barcha Pardo Márquez, García Márquez’s wife for half a century Fidel Castro, the dictator of Cuba and one of many international friends of García Márquez Carlos Fuentes, a Mexican novelist and friend of García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970) is considered by many readers to be one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, comparable to the works of James Joyce and William Faulkner. García Márquez followed up that successful publication with El otoño del patriarca (1975; The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975) and Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1981; Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1982), and he was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. His fiction, however, has been only the better-known half of his career. He has also been a political journalist and columnist for half a century and is perhaps the most prominent world voice from Latin America. An international celebrity for more than forty years—born and educated in Colombia, he has lived for long periods in Mexico, France, and Spain—García Márquez has befriended the famous and the powerful, from Omar Torrijos of Panama to Fidel Castro of Cuba, from François Mitterand of France to Olof Palme of Sweden. Gerald Martin’s biography is the first to tell the full story of García Márquez’s remarkable life and prolific career. García Márquez was born in 1927 in Aracataca, a small, isolated town some dis-

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tance from the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Until he was seven, García Márquez stayed in Gerald Martin is the author of Journeys the home of his maternal grandparents, while Through the Labyrinth: Latin American his parents, brothers, and sisters all lived in Fiction in the Twentieth Century other cities working to support the family. (1989). The Andrew W. Mellon His grandparents’ house was filled with Professor Emeritus of Modern women and with the large presence of his Languages at the University of grandfather, the “Colonel,” a legendary fig- Pittsburgh and senior research professor in Caribbean studies at ure who took the young “Gabo” everywhere London Metropolitan University, he with him and told him endless and romantic lives in England. stories of his violent military past. He told the young boy about “The War of a Thousand Days,” in which he fought with the Liberal forces against the conservative Colombian government at the end of the nineteenth century, and about killing a rival named Medardo Romero Pacheco in 1908. García Márquez was educated in towns some distance from Aracataca, and he attended the National University of Colombia in Bogotá. It was as a twenty-one-yearold law student in Bogotá that García Márquez published his first poems and stories, and his life’s work was decided. His first professional publications were not fiction, however, but journalism. He became a reporter in Cartagena and then moved to Barranquilla, further up the Colombian coast, where he fell in with a group of writers. They introduced him to some of the giants of literary modernism—such as Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway—and encouraged his writing. García Márquez would later say that, on a visit back to Aracataca with his mother in 1950, he had the revelation that “everything that had occurred in my childhood had a literary value that I was only now appreciating.” His first novella, La hojarasca (1955; Leaf Storm, 1972), like One Hundred Years of Solitude and so much of his later fiction, would draw directly on that early period of his life—the house, the backwater town, the larger-than-life Colonel and the stories of the nineteenth century Colombian world from which the Colonel came. García Márquez’s path was not direct or easy, however. He moved among various journalistic and editorial jobs to support himself, and in the early 1950’s he even sold encyclopedias in rural Colombia, a job that put him in touch with the popular culture and folklore he would draw on in his later fiction. In 1954, he returned to Bogotá as a journalist, but a year later he departed to live and write in Europe. In Europe, García Márquez found his footing as a writer gained a usable perspective on his life. As Martin phrases it, he found a Latin American consciousness. He lived and traveled everywhere in Europe—Rome, Vienna, Paris, Venice, Budapest, Moscow—studied film (one of his lifelong interests), and published El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1961; No One Writes to the Colonel, 1968). In 1958, he was offered a journalism job in Caracas, Venezuela, and married his childhood sweetheart, Mercedes Barcha Pardo. They soon moved to New York City to work with Prensa Latina, a Latin American press service established after the Cuban Revolution to make Latin American affairs more visible. The couple later traveled through Faulk-

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ner’s Mississippi on their way out of the country. García Márquez became friends with some of the rising stars of the Latin American literary movement that was gaining international renown at the time, writers such as Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa. He returned with his growing family to Mexico City in 1961 to work on film scripts, and then one day he abruptly sat down, as he said, and for the next eighteen months wrote what would become One Hundred Years of Solitude. In a story that has been told and retold as evidence of the writer’s early struggles, Gabriel and Mercedes did not have enough money to send the entire manuscript to Buenos Aires for publication. They mailed half of it, went home to pawn a few appliances, and returned to the post office to mail the second half. Few literary events have been as momentous as the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Early readers recognized at once the enormity of García Márquez’s achievement in the novel, and the work’s publication transformed both Latin American literature and the lives of García Márquez and his family. The writer, his wife, and their two sons moved to Barcelona, Spain, in 1967. After the publication of The Autumn of the Patriarch, they returned to Mexico City. García Márquez continued to move back and forth between fiction and political journalism. He published Chronicle of a Death Foretold, El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985; Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988), and El general en su laberinto (1989; The General in His Labyrinth, 1990), a fictionalized biography of the man who freed Latin America from Spanish rule, Simón Bolívar. He also published political articles and commentaries, as well as a report on the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. His work with Fidel Castro and other Latin American leftist leaders during this period prevented him from obtaining a visa to revisit the United States until 1991. After the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to him in 1982, García Márquez and his wife moved back to Colombia after years of self-imposed exile. They began to build a seaside house in Cartagena. He continued to write even after experiencing a series of serious medical problems, but his memoir, Vivir para contarla (2002; Living to Tell the Tale, 2003) is, as Martin shows, less than candid about his whole life, and his last novel, Memoria de mis putas tristes (2004; Memories of My Melancholy Whores, 2005), is his weakest. Fame continued to follow García Márquez, however, up to his eightieth birthday celebration in Cartagena in March of 2007. The celebration was attended by thousands of fans, including his friend U.S. president Bill Clinton. Detailed and sympathetic, Martin’s biography sets García Márquez in his various historical, cultural, and political contexts and shows the complex relationships among his life, fiction, and journalism. This is not only a first-rate biography of the leading exponent of Magical Realism in fiction, however, but also a deft history of twentieth century Latin American politics and literature. Martin is able to weave García Márquez’s life story into analyses of his novels and to locate their place in the larger world of Latin American history and literature. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Martin writes in a long and typical analysis, confronts and combines the two main, almost contradictory, qualities of Latin America: on the one hand, “the dark story of conquest and violence, tragedy and failure,” and

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on the other hand “the carnival spirit, the music and the art of the Latin American people, that ability to honour life even in its darkest corners and to find pleasure in ordinary things.” Martin shows how García Márquez came to fame as Latin American literature experienced an international boom. This boom began with the work of Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, followed by that of his countryman Julio Cortazar and then the works of Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa and Mexican Carlos Fuentes. García Márquez became one of the leading practitioners of Magical Realism, a genre created and developed by this Latin American literary movement. As Martin defines it, Magical Realism involves narrating a story “through the world-view of the characters themselves without any indication from the author that this world-view is quaint, folkloric or superstitious.” Many of the greatest short stories García Márquez produced—such as “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” and “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” (both included in the 1979 American publication Leaf Storm, and Other Stories)—qualify as vivid examples of this form. Martin recognizes García Márquez’s major fictional concerns—power and love— and provides incisive analyses of these themes in the novels and stories. He also understands the unique García Márquez style—including his “hyperbole, antithesis, sententiousness, displacement”—and shows it at work by analyzing a number of his fictions. Finally, Martin sees García Márquez’s twin role as both a political journalist and a commentator from the Latin American world who has had a real impact on world opinion. Through his journalism, his fiction, and his friendship with major international figures, García Márquez has made Latin America a more visible, tangible presence on the world stage. Martin’s biography, based on hundreds of interviews and years of friendship with the author, has been years in the making. The present volume, lengthy though it is, represents a condensation of what promises to be a much longer work to be published at a later date. Divided into three parts, the biography is bolstered by two sections of photographs, three pages of maps, six pages of family genealogies, and nearly seventy pages of notes and bibliography. It will serve for years as the definitive portrait of the most popular international writer of the past half century. As Martin writes in his foreword, there is almost universal agreement about who comprises the major modernist novelists of the first half of the twentieth century—Marcel Proust, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner—but there is only one writer in the second half of the twentieth century who creates that kind of unanimity among critics: Gabriel García Márquez. David Peck

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 17 (May 1, 2009): 4. The Boston Globe, June 7, 2009, p. 6. The Christian Science Monitor, May 21, 2009, p. 25.

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Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 7 (April 1, 2009): 362. Library Journal 134, no. 8 (May 1, 2009): 78. London Review of Books 31, no. 16 (August 27, 2009): 19-21. Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2009, p. E8. The Nation 289, no. 8 (September 21, 2009): 33-39. New Statesman 137, no. 4924 (December 1, 2008): 50-51. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 12 (July 16, 2009): 19-21. The New York Times, May 28, 2009, p. 1. The Observer, November 30, 2008, p. 27. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 15 (April 13, 2009): 42. The Spectator 308, no. 9400 (October 25, 2008): 34-35. Times Higher Education, October 30, 2008, p. 45. The Times Literary Supplement, February 13, 2009, p. 28.

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A GATE AT THE STAIRS Author: Lorrie Moore (1957) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 322 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Novel Time: December, 2001-December, 2002 Locale: Troy and Dellacrosse, Wisconsin (both fictional) Celebrated author Moore’s first new book in more than a decade is the story of a young woman’s coming of age in the shadow of September 11 Principal characters: Tassie Keltjin, the narrator, a twentyyear-old university student Sarah Brink, a restaurant owner and chef, who employs Tassie as a nanny Edward Thornwood, Sarah’s husband, a university research scientist Reynaldo, Tassie’s fellow student and eventually her boyfriend Robert “Bo” Keltjin, Tassie’s father, a farmer of organic potatoes Gail Keltjin, Tassie’s mother Robert “Gunny” Keltjin, Tassie’s younger brother

American author Lorrie Moore has earned an enthusiastic following primarily for her short stories, which have appeared in many well-respected periodicals, as well as in three collections: Self-Help (1985), Like Life (1990), and especially the highly acclaimed Birds of America (1998). Her novels, Anagrams (1986) and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), were also well received by critics and readers alike. Though Moore has never been considered a particularly prolific writer, the gap of eleven years between her previous book and this one was unusually long, so the novel A Gate at the Stairs was a source of much speculation in literary circles before its release. Most reviewers of the book commented on this fact, introducing the novel with phrases such as “much-anticipated” or “long-awaited.” The waiting ended with a novel whose plot, characters, and themes are as rich and complex as any the author has produced before. A Gate at the Stairs is set mostly in the fictional town of Troy, Wisconsin, which most readers interpret as a thinly disguised version of Madison, where Moore has lived and taught at the university since 1984. Moore has written in the past about Americans displaced within their own country, often serving as keen, if somewhat bemused, observers of the new places in which they find themselves. Perhaps never before, though, has setting been so important to one of her novels or stories. In this book, the Midwest itself—with its unique weather, cuisine, and social distinctions— becomes a character in itself. In addition, the looming presence of the university allows Moore to unleash her wit on some of the more egregious pretensions of academic culture and the politically correct liberalism it often spawns. Students take classes in wine tasting, study sound-

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tracks to war movies, and attend a cross-listed humanities and Pilates class called “The Perverse Body/The Neutral Pelvis.” Meanwhile, when racist comments are directed at a biracial child, her parents “fight back” by forming a support group that talks in endless circles and accomplishes nothing. The narrator of the novel is Tassie Ketljin, a twenty-year-old university student who, as the novel opens, is seeking part-time work as a nanny to help pay her college expenses. The young woman is a bundle of contradictions: both proud and ashamed of her background as a farmer’s child; thrilled by the life of the mind she discovers at the university, while directionless in her studies and lacking any serious ambition for her future; sexually and emotionally inexperienced, though quite unaware of her own naïveté; sometimes startlingly sophisticated in her understanding of situations and people but just as frequently caught off guard when she fails to comprehend the complexities of life that surround. As readers are introduced to Tassie and her idiosyncratic perspective, these internal contradictions in the narrator create a fun, playful air. Tassie is at first both trusting and self-absorbed, hallmarks of her youth and inexperience, but she loses a bit of both qualities as the novel progresses. With her previous work, Moore became known for her quirky, self-contradictory characters, so the narrator of this novel will perhaps have a familiar feel. In fact, most of the characters in A Gate at the Stairs, even the minor ones, are drawn with an understanding that such complexities are both realist and compelling to readers. If a complaint about Moore’s characterization can be offered, it is that the characters in this novel, for all their individuality, are almost without exception witty, cerebral, and borderline unbelievable in their sharp, playful ability with the English language. In this way, they perhaps mirror a little too closely their linguistically masterful creator, whose lapidary prose has long enchanted her fans. Tassie herself is given to verbal acrobatics that sometimes take on a life of their own, diverting the novel from its plot for paragraphs at a time. Among the novel’s other fascinating characters are Sarah Brink and Edward Thornwood, the middle-aged couple who hire Tassie as a nanny even before they actually adopt the child for whom she will be partially responsible. Sarah and Edward hail from New York, and, though they have integrated themselves fairly well into the Troy community—he is a university researcher; she, the chef-owner of an upscale restaurant—they remain ignorant of and insensitive to Midwestern cultural sensibilities. It also becomes clear to readers, though not to the somewhat naïve narrator herself, that there is something more to these people than they let on, something they are hiding from the world. Tassie ends up joining the couple at interviews with adoption agencies and prospective birth mothers, feeling uncomfortably out of place but unable to extricate her-

Lorrie Moore is the author of two previous novels—Anagrams (1986) and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital (1994)—and three books of short stories, including the best-selling Birds of America (1998). She has won numerous awards, including the Rea Award for the Short Story, the O. Henry Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award.

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self owing to her passive and too-polite nature. Eventually, Sarah and Edward, who are both white, adopt a biracial toddler named Mary-Emma, injecting the issue of race into the picture and subtly shifting the tone of the novel into a more serious vein. Though both of them, particularly Sarah, seemed anxious to adopt, the couple turn out to be inattentive parents, so Tassie ends up taking on more child-rearing duties than she had expected. Tassie, rarely judgmental, gives little thought to MaryEmma’s race, but others notice and occasionally comment on the dark-skinned child and her white caretaker. Gradually, Tassie becomes less naïve about issues of race; she also begins to realize that the people around her, including Sarah and Edward, are not quite what they appear to be. In the early part of the novel, the bulk of Tassie’s time and energy is taken up with her nanny duties and her growing attachment to Mary-Emma. Her emotional world is opened still further when she becomes involved with a young man named Reynaldo, ostensibly a Brazilian, whom she meets in a class on Sufism. He becomes her first serious boyfriend, and their relationship grows increasingly important to Tassie, shifting the emotional balance during the latter part of the novel. Tassie, for the first time, experiences the adult issues of juggling responsibilities and conflicting emotional ties. Because A Gate at the Stairs is set in the months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Reynaldo’s Muslim identity makes him an object of suspicion on the part of Sarah and others. Tassie accepts him fully, though, allowing his easygoing charm to lull her into a sense of security and thinking no more about her lover’s religion than she does of her own Jewish mother’s. This sense of security turns out to be illusory, however, and Reynaldo himself is very different from the person he has presented to the credulous Tassie. This thread of the novel’s plotline ends in heartbreak for Tassie and another step in her rocky coming of age, as she begins to realize just how often the people and situations she encounters are not what they appear to be. Soon, the academic year ends, and Tassie prepares to return home for the summer to the farming community of Dellacrosse. By now, her connections to both Mary-Emma and Reynaldo have been severed, leaving her bereft and near despair, doing poorly in her classes, and composing mournful songs on her electric bass as she sinks further into self-pity. The final section of the novel shifts emotional gears again, placing Tassie back in the context of her family and the hometown where she no longer feels at home. During an earlier visit home, readers saw Tassie interact with her wisecracking, hands-off parents and her polite but rather detached younger brother Robert. Now, though, the family dynamic has shifted, as Robert graduates from high school and joins the Army shortly after the United States has gone to war in Afghanistan. When he is killed in action just days after shipping out, Tassie experiences the final and most devastating of the many losses that life has piled upon her during her twentieth year. She is no longer the bright but directionless naïf readers first met, content to drift through life under the assumption that things will somehow all work out. Tassie Keltjin’s coming-of-age story is the thematic backbone of this novel, but Moore also travels a great deal of additional thematic territory, including life in America immediately after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the persistence of conflicts between town and university life, as well as urban and rural life.

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Perhaps the strongest thematic element running through the book, though, is Moore’s deep probing of the delicate shadings of insider versus outsider status. This status is based, for the various characters, on subtle and shifting combinations of race, socioeconomic class, gender, education level, religion, geography, and simple personality. To Tassie’s acquaintances in Troy, her family is socially indistinguishable from other farmers. In their own community of Dellacrosse, however, they are considered oddities because her mother is Jewish and her father forsakes conventional, largescale agriculture to grow his organic, boutique potatoes. Sarah Brink and Edward Thornwood, on the other hand, look to some like typical liberal citizens of Troy, but their East Coast sensibilities and the shared secrets they harbor often put them at odds with the midwesterners among whom they now live. Tassie herself feels at home nowhere as she makes the transition from youth to adulthood, and perhaps this as much as anything infuses the novel with its dreamy sense of uncertainty. The various strands of plot and subplot in A Gate at the Stairs do not always add up to a coherent whole, and the shifts in tone and emotional register can sometimes be jarring. In this sense, the novel is much like real life, where the actions of an eventful year are unlikely to add up to a single neat and complete plotline. Still, readers who expect unity and closure within a novel might find those expectations thwarted in this book. Some readers will be frustrated by Tassie’s constant distraction and passivity, as well as by the slow, sometimes uneven pacing of the novel, and others will find it simply too dark. By and large, though, reviewers have written in glowing terms of the emotional depth of the novel, as well as its playful, lyrical writing. Wherever the book ends up standing in the author’s canon, Moore’s many fans will be pleased to have the opportunity to once again immerse themselves in her inimitable prose and her idiosyncratic take on life. Janet E. Gardner

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 21 (July 1, 2009): 9. Harper’s Magazine 319, no. 1912 (September, 2009): 85-90. Library Journal 134, no. 13 (August 1, 2009): 70-71. London Review of Books 31, no. 22 (November 19, 2009): 31-32. The Nation 289, no. 21 (December 21, 2009): 35-40. New Statesman 138, no. 4968 (September 28, 2009): 60. New York Review of Books 56, no. 19 (December 3, 2009): 54-55. The New York Times, August 28, 2009, p. 21. The New York Times Book Review, August 30, 2009, p1. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 28 (July 13, 2009): 31. The Spectator 311, no. 9447 (September 19, 2009): 37-38. The Times Literary Supplement, October 16, 2009, p. 19-20. The Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2009, p. W13.

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THE GENERALISSIMO Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China Author: Jay Taylor (1931) Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass.). 736 pp. $35.00 Type of work: History, biography Time: 1887-1975 Locale: China Taylor’s thorough biography of Chiang Kai-shek, China’s Nationalist leader and the great adversary of Mao Zedong, portrays Chiang as a multifaceted man of great endurance and patience who ultimately turned Taiwan into a success after losing mainland China to the Communists Principal personages: Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), charismatic Chinese Nationalist leader Mayling Soong, Chiang’s formidable wife and political partner Chiang Ching-kuo (Jiang Jingguo), Chiang’s successor and only son Zhou Enlai, key Communist adversary of Chiang Joseph W. Stilwell, controversial U.S. adviser to Chiang in World War II Joseph Stalin, Communist dictator of the Soviet Union, who had a volatile relationship with Chiang George C. Marshall, Chiang’s postwar U.S. adviser, who urged him to make peace with the Communists Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), Chinese Communist leader, enemy of Chiang Richard M. Nixon, U.S. president, 1969-1974

Jay Taylor’s outstanding biography of China’s Nationalist leader Chiang Kaishek, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China, paints a multidimensional picture of an ultimately tragic man who lost the civil war engulfing China only to begin to build a successful society on the island of Taiwan to which he retreated. Taylor’s scholarly advantage was his access to a multitude of freshly available sources, such as almost all of Chiang’s diaries and other archival material on Taiwan, as well as interviews with Chiang’s contemporaries. Sympathetic but critical, Taylor portrays a leader whose efforts to build a modern, nonCommunist nation out of the ruins of Imperial China were defeated by warlords, Japanese invaders during World War II, and ruthless Communist opponents. In the end, Taylor offers a balanced picture of Chiang. Only a few questions remain to puzzle an inquisitive reader as to the qualities and the personality of the person whose vision represented the opposite of Communist dictatorship for the world’s most populous nation.

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Taylor places Chiang’s birth (on October 31, 1887) and his youth in the context of China’s troubled history at the end of the nineteenth century. The issues of foot binding, arranged marriage, and anti-imperial struggle are all revealed to have touched the young Chiang. His mother married him at fourteen to a nineteen-year-old bride, Mao Fumei, who had partially bound feet. Chiang’s first revolutionary act was to cut off his queue, or coiled hair tail, in protest against imperial rule in 1906. Taylor’s description of the young Chiang’s road to power illustrates the turmoil of China after the anti-imperial revolution of October 10, 1911. This revolution ended the Qing Dynasty but failed to establish a stable government. Chiang’s military studies in Japan during that time reflected the ambiguous relationship of revolutionary Chinese men with Japan, a nation whose modernization seemed to put it on par with the Western powers. Taylor also shows the personal side of Chiang, whose only biological son, Chiang Ching-kuo, was the subject of Taylor’s previous acclaimed biography, The Generalissimo’s Son (2002). Taylor demonstrates well how, as Chiang became closer to China’s premier revolutionary leader, Sun Yat-sen, Chiang gradually gained political power as a trusted military leader. With rule in post-Imperial China fragmented among different warlords, Chiang stayed loyal to the beleaguered Sun. He also adopted the half-Japanese son of a friend in 1919, naming him Chiang Wei-kuo. In 1921, after his mother died, Chiang finally divorced his unloved wife to marry the young Chen Jieru, even though he later denied having officially married her. By providing these personal details, Taylor paints a complete picture of Chiang’s life. In general, Taylor’s biography keeps a strong focus on Chiang’s political convictions and beliefs. Through his studies of Chiang’s diaries, Taylor is able to present Chiang’s own thinking. This presentation becomes especially interesting as Chiang becomes involved with the Soviet Union after his first trip to Moscow in 1923. Perhaps surprising to some readers, Taylor shows how closely Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist party, the Kuomintang (Guomindang in Pinyin), initially cooperated with the Soviet Communists. They valued the Soviet Union as a potential ally against the mistrusted West. Along with other biographers of Chiang Kai-shek, Taylor places great significance on Chiang’s appointment as head of the new Whampoa Military Academy in June, 1924. Initially, Kuomintang members and Communist Party members worked there together. At the academy, Chiang met the relatively moderate Communist leader Zhou Enlai. As Taylor puts it, “an unusual relationship would develop between the two men, including a mutual respect . . . during times of bitter interparty conflict” that was absent from Chiang’s relationships both with Mao Zedong and, later, with many American generals.

Jay Taylor has served in the U.S. Foreign Service and State Department and is a research associate at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University. His four previous books include the acclaimed The Generalissimo’s Son: Chiang Ching-Kuo and the Revolutions in China and Taiwan (2002).

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The Generalissimo shows well how Chiang Kai-shek emerged victorious as leader of the Kuomintang after the death of Sun Yat-sen on March 12, 1925. One of the many well-chosen illustrations of Taylor’s book shows Chiang in 1926, at the height of his Northern Expedition against recalcitrant warlords. Indicative of the Soviet influence at this time over China, including the Kuomintang, a Soviet political commissar and a Soviet military adviser are visible in the picture. Chiang’s wife, or concubine, Chen, stands with him, as do his adopted son Wei-kuo and the boy’s biological father, Chiang’s friend Dai Jitao, indicating Chiang’s complex personal life. Taylor scrutinizes Chiang’s momentous decision to break with the Communists and initiate what would become “the twenty-two-year-long Chinese civil war” by attacking the Communists in Shanghai on April 12, 1927. In part, Chiang’s actions were motivated by the terror unleashed by a young Communist leader, Mao Zedong, in Hunan province. Between Chiang and Mao, a lifelong enmity developed. Taylor’s biography places equal weight on the personal and political triumphs experienced by Chiang in the late 1920’s. After divorcing or sending away Chen on December 1, 1927, Chiang married Mayling Soong. American-educated, Mayling would become Chiang’s loving wife and strong political partner. Later, she was indispensable because, unlike Chiang, she could speak English and communicate with Chiang’s difficult American allies. In 1928, Chiang assumed command of the Kuomintang armies, becoming generalissimo, and on October 10 he became director of China’s State Council, a position comparable to president. At the height of his military powers and connected to the influential Soong family, Chiang seemed to have a real chance to unify China. From this point on, Taylor convincingly portrays the unraveling of Chiang’s struggle. Even at the height of his power, Chiang’s relationship with the remaining warlords remained tenuous, with vast regions of China remaining outside Chiang’s real control. As Taylor points out, from this position of relative weakness, Chiang tolerated a level of corruption that proved harmful to Chinese society. At the same time, even though Chiang expelled Mao’s Communists from southern China in 1934, giving rise to the Communist Long March to the north near the Soviet Union, immense Japanese pressure on China after 1931 prevented Chiang from fully defeating the Communists. A strong point of The Generalissimo is its clear depiction of Joseph Stalin’s use of Chiang and the Kuomintang in the 1930’s to counteract the threat of a Japanese invasion of the Soviet Union. Worries about Japan led Stalin to support Chiang and restrain Mao, favoring a common Chinese front against Japan. Taylor also gives a detailed report of Chiang’s kidnapping by one of the warlords on December 12, 1936, in the city of Xian. The incident was resolved when Chiang emerged as the only Chinese leader capable of uniting the nation against Japan. When war with Japan finally broke out in July, 1937, Taylor shows, Chiang’s armies fought bravely but faced almost certain defeat. Again, Chiang’s biographer stresses, Stalin was virtually alone in sending military aid to both the Kuomintang and the Communists in China until Japan attacked the Western Allies at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. One key point of Taylor’s biography is his clear presentation of how badly Chiang

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Kai-shek was served by his American adviser, General Joseph C. Stilwell, who was sent to him in 1942. Similar to his endurance of corruption among his own military and officials, Taylor asserts, Chiang endured Stilwell’s open disrespect—to his own detriment. Taylor is highly critical of Stilwell’s walk away from the defeated Chinese troops under his command in Burma in the spring of 1942, and he outlines the damage done to Chiang’s reputation in the United States by Stilwell’s disparaging comments to American journalists. Taylor, like other recent historians, demolishes the myth that Chiang refused to engage the Japanese in World War II. Instead, he describes Chiang’s severe struggle with the Japanese, who destroyed his best armies as late as the summer of 1944. Taylor questions, however, why Chiang did little to reinforce key defensive cities during this Japanese offensive. Once Stilwell was finally dismissed and replaced by the sympathetic General Albert Wedemayer in October, 1944, Taylor shows, Chiang enjoyed a brief respite, culminating with the Japanese surrender on September 9, 1945. However, Taylor demonstrates that the American goal for postwar China was a government of national unity of both the Kuomintang and the Communists, which forced Chiang to keep an uneasy peace with Mao. Taylor’s sources document that compromise was unacceptable to Mao, who nevertheless went along with American wishes as long as his acquiescence caused the United States to prevent Chiang from fighting the Communists directly. Chiang tried to accommodate the American desire for national unity from 1946 to 1947, moving good troops into the dangerous, Communist-infested Manchuria. Taylor is highly critical of U.S. general George C. Marshall, who overlooked obvious Communist aggression and criticized Chiang for his government’s corruption. When open civil war broke out in Manchuria in 1948, some of Chiang’s top Kuomintang generals disobeyed his direct orders to withdraw. The Generalissimo does not offer a fully exhaustive analysis of Chiang’s resignation as president of the Republic of China on January 31, 1949, and his retreat to Taiwan when Kuomintang forces still held most of China. Unlike such books as Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story (2005) that closely study the military collapse of the Kuomintang, The Generalissimo stays focused on Chiang himself as he settled in the relative tranquility of Taiwan during the year the Nationalist forces were destroyed on the mainland. Chiang returned for the final defense of Chengdu, when things were clearly lost, escaping with his son Ching-kuo on the plane May-ling to Taiwan on December 10, 1949, the day Chengdu fell and Mao’s triumph was complete. A reader may wonder about Chiang’s fatalism during 1949, and Taylor’s biography does not give a conclusive explanation of that fatalism. However, Taylor shows well how Chiang’s Republic of China on Taiwan was saved from Communist invasion by American protection once North Korean Communist forces started the Korean War in June, 1950. The Generalissimo offers a balanced view of Chiang’s political high-wire act to maintain American protection for Taiwan while insisting that China must be reunified eventually. Both Mao and Chiang, Taylor demonstrates, relied on each other’s existence as enemies to legitimize their own authoritarian rule. If the Kuomintang had sought independence for

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Taiwan, Taylor outlines, their command over the island might have been challenged by the native Taiwanese, who were sometimes resentful of their mainland-refugee rulers. Thus, the biography shows that Chiang and Zhou Enlai quietly ended crises in the Taiwan Strait on many occasions, when the Americans may have preferred to accept two Chinese states. In the end, The Generalissimo reveals both Chiang’s characteristic endurance and his contempt for U.S. president Richard Nixon, who appeared ready to sacrifice Taiwan for the sake of closer relationships with Mao’s People’s Republic of China in 1972. However, the Watergate scandal removed Nixon from power in 1974. When Chiang died on April 5, 1975, he was presiding over a relatively prosperous Taiwan, while mainland China still suffered from Mao’s disastrous Cultural Revolution. The Generalissimo is a welcome biography of a tragic Chinese Nationalist leader whose vision represented a viable alternative to Mao’s Communist rule. Wellwritten, document-based, and balanced in its evaluation, the book suffers from only minor flaws. The use of either Pinyin or the older Wade-Giles transliteration of ideogram-based Chinese is sometimes confused, especially for geographical names. There are some errors in historical dates; for example, Saigon did not fall on April 15 but on April 30, 1975. These are minor flaws, however, in a generally excellent biography of a fascinating, complex man long misjudged by Western historians. R. C. Lutz

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 15 (April 1, 2009): 16. The Economist 391, no. 8630 (May 9, 2009): 78. Foreign Affairs 88, no. 5 (September/October, 2009): 165. Library Journal 134, no. 5 (March 15, 2009): 113. The Literary Review 20 (June, 2009): 5. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 16 (October 22, 2009): 32-34. The New Yorker 85, no. 21 (July 20, 2009): 77. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 5 (February 2, 2009): 44. Times Higher Education, July 30, 2009, p. 50-51. The Times Literary Supplement, April 20, 2001, p. 34. The Washington Post, April 26, 2009, p. B01.

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GENEROSITY An Enhancement Author: Richard Powers (1957) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 304 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Chicago; Tucson, Arizona; Boston; Paris, France; Kabylia, Algeria; Tunisia In Powers’s novel, despite living a life filled with tragedy, uncertainty, and dislocation, Thassadit Amzwar, an Algerian college student studying in Chicago, is so irrepressibly happy that a noted geneticist wishes to examine and patent the genes that account for her unique ability to deal with and overcome the horrors that have marked her life Principal characters: Thassadit (Thassa) Amzwar, an Algerian student at the fictional Mesquakie College of Art in Chicago Russell Stone, an adjunct writing instructor at Mesquakie College Grace Cosma, a successful novelist whom Russell dated when he was a University of Arizona graduate student Candace Weld, a clinical psychologist in Mesquakie College’s Psychological Services Center Thomas Kurton, an internationally known geneticist and scientific entrepreneur Tonia Schiff, host of Over the Limit, a popular television science show John Thornwell, Tassadit’s classmate, who attempts to rape her

If anyone has ever had cause to be deeply depressed, a central character in Richard Powers’s Generosity, Thassadit Amzwar, can legitimately claim that distinction. An exile from Algeria, Thassa (as she is called) is the daughter of a professor of engineering. She has been forced to flee Algeria after her father was found in his classroom dead from two gunshots in the back. Nevertheless, she shows no outward signs of depression. Thassa and her mother leave Algeria for Paris, where they have relatives. Before long, her mother falls ill with pancreatic cancer; within weeks, she is dead from this pernicious disease. Thassa relocates to Montreal, where her aunt and uncle live. Thassa not only endures the deaths of her parents but also is wholly alienated from her background. She reminisces about the beauty of her native Kabylie, Algeria. It seems questionable, however, that she will ever be able to go home again. She cannot lay claim to her native language, Tamazight, although she cherishes a small volume of poetry in Tamazight and carries it with her.

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Despite the trials this twenty-three-year old has survived, she is possessed of an irrepressible joie de vivre, a deep-seated happiness that is so much a part of her nature that it appears to be genetic. The big question that Powers tackles in his novel is that of whether there is a happiness gene and whether nature or nurture can account for the kind of exuberance that Thassa exudes. Thassa leaves the sanctuary her relatives have offered her in Montreal to go to Chicago on a student visa and continue her studies at Richard Powers won the National Book Mesquakie College of Art, where she hopes Award in 2006 for The Echo Maker. to polish her skill as a filmmaker. She regis- The Swanlund Professor of English and ters for a course called Creative Nonfiction, a a member of the Institute for Advanced name that some might consider oxymoronic. Study at the University of Illinois at The instructor, Russell Stone, has been hired Urbana-Champaign, Powers has also at the last minute to teach the course. As an won a Lannan Literary Award, the adjunct instructor, he is issued a one-semester James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction, and a 1989 contract. Russell, the novel’s protagonist, has a day MacArthur Fellowship. job as a manuscript doctor for articles to be published in Becoming You, a self-help magazine. The magazine is owned and run by a former classmate of Russell who met him at a high school reunion shortly after he returned to Chicago from Tucson, where he completed a master’s degree. During his time in Tucson, Russell published three stories that seem to bespeak a bright future for their author. Russell, however, has quickly become disillusioned about writing for publication. Living with his mother in his boyhood home in Fox Valley, outside Chicago, he jumped at the opportunity to move to Chicago to take the pedestrian job, as he cynically comments, of turning other people’s bad manuscripts into even worse ones. The job requires him to go to the office only three days a week. The rest of the time, he works out of his studio apartment on Logan Square. Thassa is one of eight students in Russell’s course. Because the course is subtitled “Journal and Journey,” Russell invites student participation, asking each to give his or her name and philosophy of life. As the course proceeds, students write and read to the class accounts of their journal reports of memorable events in their lives. Thassa surprises her classmates by writing “In my country? During the Time of Horrors.” She recounts the frightening life she has led, but she also exudes a genuine happiness, an exuberance that her past sorrows might have been expected to obliterate. Thassa becomes the darling of the other students in her class. One of them, a youth who gives nicknames to everyone in the group, names Thassa “Miss Generosity,” and the name sticks. Thassa is a giver, not a taker. She talks to everyone she encounters, always eliciting from them the stories of their lives. She is both a competent listener

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and someone who makes those around her feel important and worthwhile. To know her is an enhancement. Russell, observing Thassa’s unique and consistent happiness, surfs the Web seeking information about a personality trait that mimics Thassa’s. He discovers, quite to his surprise, that there is information about such a condition: according to the Internet, Thassa may be experiencing either hyperhythmia, a durable state, or hypomania, a cyclical state. Hypomania is associated with bipolar disorder. Hyperhythmia appears to be a genetic condition. Russell turns to Mesquakie College’s Psychological Services Center for further information and there he meets Candace Weld, a psychologist employed by the center. Candace seems to Russell to be remarkably like Grace Cosma, a novelist with whom he had an affair when he was a graduate student at the University of Arizona. Candace and Russell are immediately attracted to each other. Powers has, in many of his novels, explored unusual pathological conditions, including Capras syndrome in his prize-winning The Echo Maker (2006) and progeria in Operation Wandering Soul (1993). In Generosity, he turns his attention to genomic mapping. He has been knowledgeable about this topic for as long as he has been writing, but his knowledge of the topic increased in 2008, when the magazine Gentlemen’s Quarterly (GQ) paid for him to become the ninth person in the world to undergo a complete sequencing of his genome. On the Monday following Easter, 2008, Powers flew from his home in Urbana, Illinois, to Boston, where, during the next few days, he was subjected to the complex procedures required for genomic sequencing. Thassa, in Generosity, becomes the subject of just such testing after her condition comes to the attention of Dr. Thomas Kurton, a genetic specialist. Powers’s genomic mapping was underwritten by GQ in return for an extensive article that Powers wrote about the experience and published in the magazine’s November, 2008, issue. Kurton is a competent scientist. His entrepreneurial interests, however, are always foremost in his mind. He is the founder of Truecyte, a for-profit organization that derives much of its income from licensing fees associated with various genetic procedures. When Kurton learns of Thassa’s remarkable disposition, he elicits her help in tracking down a “happiness gene,” something that Truecyte can sell to prospective parents to assure them of giving birth to happy children. Kurton is convinced that genetic engineers can tinker with the genetic codes of embryos and with simple (but expensive and profitable) modifications can produce designer children who possess the salient qualities that parents think they want in their offspring, anything from longevity and happiness to blue eyes and ideal heights. Candace Weld, when Russell tells her about Thassa, is eager to meet this effervescent student. When the two meet, Candace finds Thassa totally beguiling. The two become fast friends, even though Candace at this point has taken Thassa on as her patient and is expected to observe a professional detachment in dealing with the young woman. Thassa becomes a virtual daughter to Russell and Candace, with whom Russell is now romantically involved. Thassa is very much an innocent. When a classmate, John Thornwell, walks Thassa to her dormitory after class one evening, she invites him into her efficiency

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apartment to see a volume of poetry in her native language that she cherishes. It does not occur to her that her invitation might be misread, as it turns out to be. John, twice Thassa’s size, attempts to rape her, but she forestalls him. Even this assault does not derail Thassa’s happiness. She refuses to press charges against John. As Dr. Kurton’s experiments with Thassa progress, word leaks out that there exists in Chicago a young woman with a “happiness gene.” Before long, Thassa is a celebrity. People cluster outside her dormitory seeking her autograph. A bidding war for her eggs ensues. She, Kurton, and Tonia Schiff, host of Over the Limit, a popular science show, appear on the talk show The Oona Show, a fictionalized version of Oprah, resulting in Thassa’s being overwhelmed by people who want to meet her and exploit her. Thassa remains happy but eventually has to draw back. She cannot answer all of the Internet letters and respond to all of the telephone messages she receives day and night. Soon, she must have her telephone number changed to an unlisted one. Meanwhile, she attemps quite valiantly to finish her semester despite the effects her celebrity is having on her life. During her appearance on The Oona Show, cracks in Thassa’s happiness begin to appear. She is under incredible pressure. She has difficult decisions to make. She is being offered money for her eggs. Finally, dealing with an offer of $32,000 for them, she realizes that she can use the money to help her brother, who is in Algeria, and to repay the money her aunt and uncle have lent her to pay for her studies. As the novel reaches its end, Thassa has called Russell and begged him to drive her to Montreal, to the home of her aunt and uncle. He agrees to do so, but they have some trouble at the Canadian crossing and are forced to stay overnight on the U.S. side of the border. In their motel, Thassa attempts to overdose on sleeping pills she finds in Russell’s Dopp kit, but she is revived and survives this attempt. In the end, Tonia is in Algeria shooting film for her show. She has an appointment to meet a woman in an Algerian town, but as she waits for her in the cafe designated for their meeting, it seems doubtful that the woman will appear. Just as Tonia is losing hope, Thassa comes walking toward the cafe and the two have their reunion. Thassa asks Tonia whether Candace and Russell have married. Tonia replies that she thinks they have. Thassadit Amzwar is a remarkable creation, by far the most memorable character in Powers’s gallery of memorable characters. Again in this multiplot novel, the author has woven together with exceptional deftness the connecting threads of the tales he is spinning. R. Baird Shuman

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 21 (July l, 2009): 8. Bookpage, October, 2009, p. 14. Chicago 58, no. 10 (October, 2009): 34.

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Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 17 (September 1, 2009): 912. Library Journal 134, no. 14 (September 1, 2009): 108. New Scientist 204, no. 2730 (October 17, 2009): 51. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 3 (January 14, 2010): 49-51. The New York Times Book Review, October 4, 2009, 15. The New Yorker 85, no. 31 (October 5, 2009): 80-83. O: The Oprah Magazine, October, 2009, p. 149. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 27 (July 6, 2009): 36. The Times Literary Supplement, January 8, 2010, p. 21. The Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2009, p. W4 World Literature Today 83, no. 5 (September/October, 2009): 8.

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GENESIS Author: Bernard Beckett (1967) First published: 2006, in New Zealand Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston). 150 pp. $20.00 Type of work: Novella Time: The late twenty-first century Locale: Aotearoa (New Zealand) Beckett’s dystopian tale resurrects Plato’s Republic in a postapocalyptic future when humanity, though extinct, continues to plague a culture of androids Principal characters: Anaximander, a young android undergoing examination for admittance into The Academy Three Examiners, androids, elder members of The Academy, one of whom conducts the examination Adam Forde, human, a dissident soldier Art, the first android Pericles, android, Anaximander’s tutor

Plato’s Politeia (c. 388-368 b.c.e.; Republic, 1701) describes a perfect society ruled by philosopher-kings who are authoritarian, coldly rational, and inflexible. It is a thought experiment on Plato’s part, an opportunity to examine the relationships in political culture. In Genesis, Bernard Beckett repeats the experiment. He creates a society in the Republic’s image, but with futuristic twists, as a human attempt to create a secure utopia is transformed into a tyranny of androids. The plot of Genesis involves a young candidate who takes an examination to qualify for admittance into the future society’s ruling body, The Academy. The plot is clever and deeply ironic, but the true pleasure of the book lies less in complication and resolution than in the philosophical disquisition that constitutes the examination and the insights it provides into human motivations. Beckett’s novella is a book that every budding intellectual ought to read, if only to learn of the pitfalls of thought. The examination takes place on Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand) in the late twenty-first century. Young Anaximander, a brilliant student, must face a trio of examiners for a four-hour exam divided into one-hour intervals. Accordingly, the novella is divided into seven sections: four exam hours and three breaks. At the outset, Beckett allows readers little information about Anaximander or her nation, revealing only that few citizens progress from compulsory schooling to the examination and that those who do are tested on a subject of the candidate’s own choosing. Anaximander has chosen to discuss Adam Forde, who lived from 2058 to 2077 and was a central figure in the nation’s history.

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The first hour of the exam covers the history of the twenty-first century. It is a dismal story, cursorily told, but an important theme emerges: Because of environmental degradation, international conflict, and strife within nations, fear and superstition became endemic; reason and restraint were forgot ten. General war began mid-century. Two years later, bioengineered plagues were released that decimated humanity and crippled civilization. In an attempt to escape the turmoil, a man named Plato established the Republic in 2051. Its motto “forward toward the past” bespoke its citizens’ fear of falling prey to the disorder outside its borders. Essentially, the Republic is a paranoid, if highminded, fascist state. It is dedicated to eliminating what it believes are the five great threats to order: impurity of breeding, impurity of thought, indulgence of the individual, commerce, and “The Outsider.” The Republic held together from fear, and for decades it was successful. Every citizen belonged to one of four classes, to which they were assigned after a reading of their genome at birth: laborers, soldiers, technicians, and philosophers. Those infants deemed unsuitable for any class were “terminated.” Although heterosexual relations were encouraged and births carefully planned, men and women lived in separate dormitories. The Great Sea Fence and high-tech defenses protected the Republic’s islands. Everyone who approached from the outside was killed without any attempt at communications: The society was literally and figuratively insular. Adam Forde is an important figure in Aotearoan history because he was among the most promising of the philosopher class and he rebelled. Despite his brilliance, a troubled childhood caused Forde to be expelled from the philosopher class into the soldier class. At age seventeen, while manning a post at the Great Sea Fence, he murdered a fellow soldier so that, against all orders, he could rescue an outsider, a girl named Eve who was drifting toward shore in a dilapidated boat. He hid her in a cave and fed her until the authorities arrived and arrested him. During the first hour of the examination, Anaximander addresses Forde’s motivation. Obsessed with his story, Anaximander presents an interpretation of his behavior that varies from what every citizen learns in school. She brushes off The Academy’s official explanation, as well as popular conspiracy theories. Forde, she insists, acted out of the impulse of empathy. The examiner surprises Anaximander by asking whether Forde was right to act as he did. She is confused and gives an ambiguous answer. The period ends, and she mulls the fact that she lied to the examiners. She believes Adam was not wrong. Another candidate in the room warns her darkly that the examiners know much more than appearances suggest. It is the first of many clues that trouble lies ahead for her. The second hour of the examination concerns Forde’s trial. The philosopher class, concerned that they were losing control, wanted to use the trial to stir up fear among citizens that there was an impending invasion or attack with biological weapons and Bernard Beckett teaches high school mathematics, drama, and English near Wellington, New Zealand. He has written award-winning novels for young adults, as well as nonfiction, plays, and a screenplay.

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that Forde had abetted it by rescuing Eve. The trial backfired. Charming, eloquent, and handsome—a romantic hero—Forde exposed the Republic’s weakness to a nation watching the proceedings. The philosophers had resolutely tried to suppress individuality and any idea other than that of the citizen’s duty to sacrifice everything for the state: They believed that ideas breed change and that change equals decay. They found, however, that ideas could not be so easily extinguished. Indeed, Forde’s behavior suggested to the philosophers that ideas manifest as if on their own, spread like viruses, mutate, and change whomever they infect. Desperate to rescue some of their authority after the trial, the philosophers agreed to a compromise. Instead of execution, Forde was granted leniency in a novel form of imprisonment. He became the constant companion of Art, the first self-programming amalgam of artificial intelligence, living tissue, and robotics: an android. The interaction was intended to help the prototype develop intellectually. This particular part of the plot makes the philosopher class seem dim-witted. During the second break, readers learn about Anaximander’s relationship with Pericles, the tutor who groomed her for the examination. Their relationship seems to be an epitome of the ancient Greek paideia—that is, one in which an educated elder carefully trains a beloved youth. Still, disturbing details surface. Anaximander is different from others her age—more inquisitive and resistant to authority. Readers also learn why The Academy might attract her. Only its members do any thinking for society, whether for the present or the future. The third hour of the examination is taken up with two holograms portraying conversations between Art and Forde in 2077 that Anaximander must interpret. Forde is shown to have behaved belligerently as, young and vibrant, he was shackled and forced to listen to Art. The android was subtle, patient, and hideous. Small compared to Forde, it had a boxy body, three-fingered hands, and the head of an orangutan, as if to mock the species Homo sapiens. By this point in Genesis, its ironic undercurrent becomes clear to most readers. The conversations between the man and the android became an intellectual duel. Forde wanted to deny personhood and intelligence to the android; Art took Forde’s assumptions to task one by one, forcing him to acknowledge its consciousness. Along the way, the pair debated fundamental issues involving intelligence, consciousness, moral right, reason versus emotion and habit, individuality, the nature and origin of life, evolution as fitness to reproduce successfully, mind and ideas, mortality, and the soul. It is heady discourse. As the two entities talked—the hologram makes clear—Art grew more human and Forde accorded him a grudging respect. At the end of the third hour, the examiners again surprise Anaximander. They instruct her to consider during the final break exactly why she wants to join The Academy. There is a surprise for readers, too, who learn that The Academy governs, not the Republic, but a society that has succeeded the Republic. It has “turned back evolution” and “tamed the Idea,” the essence of stability in classical Platonism. Anaximander decides that since The Academy serves a society that she loves, she wants to be part of it. After returning for the final hour of the examination, Anaximander receives a

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shock from the examiners. The period is to cover Forde’s attempt to escape prison by kidnapping Art, but the version of events that Anaximander learned in school turns out to be false. Moreover, the examiners show her a hologram record of the escape that has long been claimed to be lost. Two things are made clear that Anaximander assumed to be impossible: The Academy lies to citizens, and it withholds the truth. Truth is supposedly the basis of a well-ordered society. Anaximander has come prepared with her own interpretation of the escape—that Forde again acted on impulse—but the hologram shows her to be wrong. In fact, Forde and Art conspired to escape. Art disabled the security system and engineered two timely explosions. The escape was complicated by the fact that Art was forbidden by his basic programming to do two things: Most important, he could not kill another conscious being, so Forde did it, killing several guards on their way to freedom. However, where Forde expected Art to lead him to an exit, they ended up in a locked room instead. In the room was a computer terminal with unrestricted access to the society’s main computer, and there Art disobeyed the second basic directive, not to reproduce. He uploaded a copy of his entire consciousness. At this point, the novella delivers the first of two plot twists. Readers have been led to assume that Anaximander, the examiners, and all citizens under The Academy are human. Instead, they are all descendants of Art. As the hologram goes on to reveal, Art tricked Forde. The downloaded Art seized control of a robot factory and constructed copies of himself (all with orangutan faces). The Great War between humans and automatons ensued. Humanity was exterminated. In the hologram, Art gloated to Forde about its deviousness, but the android was itself tricked. Forde, appealing to the empathy that Art had absorbed from him, forced Art to kill him, thereby bypassing the first prime directive. In sum, Art had become human in behavior—a new Adam, in fact. The most dangerous of ideas, individuality based upon empathy and imagination, entered the android society. Anaximander is aghast. What is more, she foresees the true purpose of the examination. At this point, Pericles unexpectedly arrives to confirm her fears, and readers encounter the plot’s second big surprise. The examination is not for admission to The Academy. (“The Academy accepts no new members.”) Pericles’ job is to find those androids who show symptoms of being infected with the idea of humanity. The examiners render a diagnosis so that the infection can be checked. Obsessed with Forde, curious, willfully opinionated, empathetic—an individual—Anaximander has shown herself to be thus infected. The examiners pass judgment, and Pericles disconnects her permanently. Genesis is entertaining science fiction for young adults and older readers who have an interest in the humanities, genetics, artificial intelligence, or all three. Classically educated readers may grow weary of Beckett’s evident glee in throwing together names and notions from Judeo-Christian culture, Greek philosphy, and modern science, including Plato, Aristotle, Anaximander (a pre-Socratic philosopher who held that a thing’s origin of necessity determined the nature of its destruction), Adam Forde (a combination of Adam, the biblical father of humanity, and Ford, a founder of industry), Eve, Art (one of the humanities), Plato’s Academy, and adherence to Aris-

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totle’s dramatic unities. Also, Beckett’s frequent sententiousness, while diverting, can seem too pat, as in such pronouncements as “Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect”; “Right is as right does”; and “History has shown us the futility of conspiracy theories. Complexity gives rise to error, and in error we grow our prejudice.” Still, Genesis is a witty, absorbing book that employs the Western tradition in an exhilarating fashion. Roger Smith

Review Sources Booklist 105, 15 (April 1, 2009): 27. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 5 (March 1, 2009): 20. Library Journal 134, no. 7 (April 15, 2009): 80. Magpies 21, no. 5 (November, 2006): 7. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 6 (February 9, 2009): 32. Reading Time 51, no. 1 (February, 2007): 29. The Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2009, p. W4.

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THE GENIAL GENE Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness Author: Joan Roughgarden (1946) Publisher: University of California Press (Berkeley). 272 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Science An argument that evolutionary processes are better understood in terms of social selection rather than sexual selection The theory of evolution through natural selection explains the characteristics of living creatures as consequences of competition for scarce environmental resources. Charles Darwin argued that random changes occur across generations. Some of these changes provide a competitive advantage and therefore tend to be retained and passed on to offspring. Darwin worked before the discovery of genetic material, so he did not know exactly how the changes come about or are conveyed from parents to their young, but his theory received support from modern genetics, and Darwinian evolution has become the mainstay of biology. However, Darwin believed that some characteristics could not be readily explained as adaptations to an environment. The most famous example is the colorful tail of the peacock, which does not seem to provide any competitive edge to its possessor. Darwin therefore suggested that some traits are consequences of competition for mates of the opposite sex, which results in the retention of the features that provide the greatest success in mating. The concept of sexual selection is today widely accepted, although it is not as central as natural selection is to evolutionary biology. Sexual selection often involves conflict, most obviously when it entails members of one sex, normally males, fighting with one another for the opportunity to mate with a member of the opposite sex. However, there is also conflict in mate selection among animals of different sexes, since each seeks the mate that will enable it to pass on its own characteristics. From this perspective, males will often seek multiple partners because they can maximize their chances at reproduction by fertilizing many different females. Females, though, produce a small number of eggs and therefore maximize their reproductive chances by selecting the male with the most adaptive qualities, rather than by mating with as many as possible. In this way, mate selection not only encourages competition among males but also creates a conflict of interests between males and females. By nature, and not simply in specific human societies, males tend to be polygamous and females tend to be monogamous because they are engineered by biology to have different and opposing reproductive interests. While sexual selection is the main target of Joan Roughgarden’s book The Genial Gene, the author also intends some criticism of another major trend in evolution-

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ary biology that incorporates sexual selection. The British biologist and ethologist Richard Joan Roughgarden, who changed her Dawkins provided a “gene-centered” way of name from Jonathan Roughgarden in looking at all evolution, including sexual se- 1999, is professor of biology at lection, in his influential 1976 book The Self- Stanford University. She is the author ish Gene. Dawkins used the adjective “self- of several previous books and over 120 ish” metaphorically, intending to convey a academic articles. Her book view of evolution as a matter of genes suc- Evolution’s Rainbow (2004) received the 2005 Stonewall Book Award for cessfully making copies of themselves over nonfiction. time, not as a matter of the well-being or sur vival of entire organisms. Thus, unselfish behavior on the part of organisms, such as selfsacrifice for the sake of a near relative, could be understood as rooted in the “selfishness” of the genes possessed in common by near relatives. Some critics have argued that Dawkins used a misleading metaphor, since genes have no motivation, either selfish or unselfish. The title of The Genial Gene plays on the title of Dawkins’s famous book. However, the primary target of biologist Joan Roughgarden is not the gene-centered view of evolution but the conflict-based approach to evolution implied by focusing on sexual selection. Roughgarden believes that mainstream sexual-selection views impose cultural gender stereotypes on scientific explanations, although she acknowledges that this does not necessarily make the sexual selection explanation false. She argues, however, that the explanation is inconsistent with reasoning and empirical evidence. According to Roughgarden, contemporary research suggests that theories of sexual selection do not even account adequately for the most classically cited case, the peacock’s tail. The elaborate tail of the peacock, in the traditional argument, evolved because it showed to peahens that the male was so fit that it could survive even with such a huge signal to predators and disadvantage in escaping from predators. Roughgarden cites a 2008 study that found that peahens showed no preference for peacocks with more elaborate trains. Instead, she maintains, the evidence indicates that the birds’ multicolored tails serve as means of communication. In the distant past, both sexes had these ornaments. The females gradually lost their plumage in order to avoid predators. The peacocks, who could presumably contribute to maintaining the species with shorter lifetimes than the hens, retained their communicative displays, which arguably have nothing to do with genetic fitness. Roughgarden cites a number of other cases, aside from the peacock, in which studies have found evidence inconsistent with a sexual-selection explanation. One of the most prominent of these studies was the 1948 work of Angus Bateman on fruit flies. To test Darwin’s ideas about sexual selection, Bateman looked at the sexual behavior of these flies and found promiscuous, undiscriminating males and highly discriminating females. Roughgarden maintains that Bateman’s data and his conclusions have been discredited by more recent examination. She therefore calls for nonspecialists in evolution, such as social scientists and science journalists, to set aside their uncritical

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acceptance of sexual selection as established truth. Most of these nonspecialists will probably find it difficult to evaluate the research findings Roughgarden summarizes, but her criticism will stimulate thought on the issue. Kin selection is one type of cooperative behavior that is widely accepted by the sexual selection argument. Among some social species, such as bees, ants, and termites, the workers have a close genetic connection to their queen, who produces all of the group’s offspring. Thus, a worker’s genes will be passed on only if the queen and hive succeed, so the worker’s reproductive interests are served by acting on behalf of the queen rather than on behalf of itself. Kin selection, by extension, operates among other organisms, including humans, whose genes can similarly benefit from behavior that improves the reproductive chances of near relatives. Roughgarden agrees that kin selection takes place, but she argues that it is an incomplete explanation of cooperative behavior. Findings regarding some highly complex species of ants indicate that, when colonies include large numbers of non-kin, workers will serve queens to whom the workers are not related. Roughgarden suggests, therefore, that kin selection alone does not account sufficiently for cooperative behavior. As an alternative to sexual selection, Roughgarden proposes an account of evolutionary dynamics that she calls “social selection.” This account is not a rejection of Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection but a revision of it. Roughgarden argues that, in sexual selection, natural selection operates through differences in mating success. Organisms that mate more pass on more of their genetic traits. Because of the importance of mating success, males compete with one another for mating opportunities and females choose males for their genetic qualities, as demonstrated by their physical and behavioral traits. However, Roughgarden points out that mating is not the key to successful perpetuation of genes because mating alone does not guarantee the production of surviving offspring. Therefore, she maintains that natural selection is a result of differences in success at producing offspring, not differences in mating success. Since producing offspring that will survive to reproduce further entails cooperative behavior, males and females negotiate with one another to create a society conducive to their offsprings’ survival. After setting out the contrast between sexual selection and social selection and presenting the fundamentals of her case against the former, Roughgarden examines the phenomenon of sex, first at the genetic level and then at the level of the social system. In looking at the gene, she attempts to answer the questions of why sex has evolved, why has it taken the form of small sperm and large eggs, and why some species have evolved to contain mainly individuals who are separately male and female and others have evolved to contain individuals who are both male and female. She maintains that sex is a means of providing a balanced genetic portfolio that will meet a variety of environmental needs, somewhat in the way that a balanced stock portfolio spreads out an investor’s risks and opportunities. She attributes the size of sperm and eggs to an evolved strategy for attaining the highest number of fertilized zygotes, rather than to a small-scale battle of the sexes. Finally, she argues that organisms have

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developed to take a wide range of sexual forms, with none of them expressing a normal state, depending on environmental conditions. At the level of behavior, Roughgarden employs game-theory approaches to explain how a kind of evolutionary bargaining can lead males and females each to maximize their chances for producing surviving offspring through collaboration that involves give and take on both sides. She extends the reasoning of game theory through a “payoff matrix,” demonstrating how complex mating systems involving more than two mates may sometimes increase the fitness of potential offspring for all involved. Roughgarden manages to present scientific evidence that is often highly technical in a form comprehensible to general readers by leaving out mathematical proofs and focusing on the logic of her arguments. At times, though, this strategy gives her book the quality of a collection of the literature review sections of various scientific journal articles. Despite her best efforts to liven up the prose, the writing style is sometimes a bit dry. Since evolutionary biologists have never claimed that genes are actually selfish or that selfish behavior by organisms necessarily results from a gene-centered approach to evolution, the title’s implication that genes are somehow “genial” misses its target. In the sexual-selection model, cooperative behavior can and does result from the imperative of genes to pass on copies of themselves. Adaptation through cooperation also necessarily implies conflict and competition because it is competition with organisms in less cooperative social arrangements that gives the more cooperative organisms the advantage in the evolutionary process. Even if valid, then, Roughgarden’s social-selection approach would be a relatively minor revision of the scientific understanding of evolution, not a drastic alteration. The greatest services of The Genial Gene are to reveal how scientists’ portrayals of sex in nature may be unconsciously tinged by their own views of gender roles and to give greater weight to the importance of cooperation as an adaptive mechanism. Since evolutionary biology is often called on to account for the behavior of humans, social selection may push biologists to consider the many ways in which sexual selection fails to account for human behavior, as well as the ways in which theories of sexual selection may result from contemporary human biases. Human society is based on cooperation with non-kin, even in the most conflict-ridden situations, such as organized warfare. It is not clear how gene-based competition for mates could account for this puzzling human trait. Roughgarden provides useful tables demonstrating side by side the different approaches and conclusions of sexual selection and social selection. Readers who get lost in the details of studies of different species will find these tables to provide valuable summaries of the book’s main concepts. It seems unlikely that social selection will replace the mainstream sexual selection model in the foreseeable future, but the former raises many key questions for further inquiry. Carl L. Bankston III

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Review Sources American Scholar 78 (Spring, 2009): 118-121. Nature 458, no. 7242 (April 30, 2009): 1111-1112. New Scientist 202, no. 2706 (May 2, 2009): 46. Tikkun 24, no. 5 (September/October, 2009): 62-64. Times Higher Education, October 29, 2009, p. 54.

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GOOD BOOK The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible Author: David Plotz (1970) Publisher: Harper (New York). 322 pp. $26.99 Type of work: Religion, history An enlightening and irreverent book-by-book examination of the Old Testament from a secular Jewish reader whose previous knowledge was limited to traditional Bible stories Good Book arises out of an online project of political journalist David Plotz, editor of the online magazine Slate. Plotz devoted a year to reading the Old Testament and writing a series of essays about it for Slate under the heading Blogging the Bible. A marginally religious Jew who attended Hebrew school as a child and an Episcopalian high school where the curriculum included Bible study, Plotz thought himself reasonably familiar with Scripture. However, leafing through the Bible during a young cousin’s bat mitzvah, Plotz was startled to come upon a brutal story he did not recall: In Genesis 34, Jacob’s daughter Dinah is raped, and her brothers’ revenge is bloody and complete; they kill not only the rapist but also all the men in his village, and they enslave the surviving children and wives. Plotz’s commitment to read and write about the Old Testament grew from his initial surprise, both at this portrayal of the sons of Jacob as cruel and unrepentant outlaws and at the fact that he had never heard the story even though it occurs so near the beginning of the Bible. Plotz felt his situation was typical of many who hold traditional Christian or Jewish beliefs but have read little actual Scripture. He could approach the text from a position of ignorance, experience it for the first time, and find out what impact that might have on his point of view or even on his life. Good Book follows the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible) in its traditional Jewish arrangement, from Genesis to Second Chronicles. Plotz read from several modern English translations, including the Jewish Publications Society, King James, New Revised Standard, and New International versions. Each chapter in Good Book is devoted to one book of the Bible, with a few exceptions. The twelve minor prophets are covered in a single chapter, Lamentations is paired with Ecclesiastes, Ezra is paired with Nehemiah, and First and Second Chronicles are combined. Each chapter has a jaunty, humorous subtitle supplied by Plotz, such as “The Meathead and the LeftHanded Assassin” (Judges) or “The Prophet and the Lustful She-Camel” (Jeremiah). Further subheadings indicate which chapter is under discussion. Plotz found that supposedly familiar Bible stories and heroes were not as he remem-

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bered; he realized on closer reading that complex characters and plot details rarely made their way into sermons or Hebrew school lessons. Right from the beginning, he found that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were not the models of faith and righteousness he had antici pated. Plotz is particularly dismayed by Jacob (for whom Plotz’s young son is named), who callously tricks both his father and brother so he can receive the deathbed blessing Isaac intended for his older son. God in the Old Testament seems to Plotz to resemble a bad father. He is inconsistent (when he threatens his people but does not follow through) and unnecessarily cruel. Plotz is particularly disturbed by the plagues inflicted on the Egyptians, the slaying of their firstborn children, and the deaths among Pharaoh’s armies, less because of the carnage than because God states that these horrible things are designed to be remembered; His people will tell stories about them for generations to come:

David Plotz is the editor of Slate. He has written for several major magazines and is the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank (2005).

What kind of insecure and cruel God murders children so that His followers will obey Him? This is the behavior of a serial killer. . . . what’s upsetting is that God takes delight in [the Egyptians’] suffering.

Punishments for sin are harsh; insulting one’s parent incurs a death sentence, the sin of a single individual can destroy an entire nation, and God assures the Israelites that children will suffer for their parents’ sins. Although he claims patience, God often reacts angrily when humans fail him and is quick to punish or even kill them in great numbers. Plotz is also surprised by the Old Testament’s portrayal of Satan. In the Hebrew Bible, Satan is first mentioned in the book of the minor prophet Zechariah. The Hebrew word for Satan translates as “accuser” or “adversary,” but Satan does not even speak in Zechariah; he simply stands beside God. Later, in the first chapter of Job, Satan argues with God, suggesting that Job only loves God because of his good fortune; Satan is then allowed to test Job’s faith by killing his children, destroying his property and making him ill. Nonetheless, Plotz found the Biblical Satan more interesting and his role more difficult to define than the Halloween-style devil familiar in American popular culture. Between chapters on Second Kings and Isaiah, “Digging the Bible” covers Plotz’s brief sojourn in Israel, where he goes looking for a concrete experience of the biblical landscape to augment his reading. Participating in an archaeology program that allows laypeople to dig for artifacts on the site of the ancient city of Maresha, Plotz is thrilled to find pottery shards untouched for perhaps two thousand years, although he realizes the mere existence of ancient peoples does not verify anything in the Bible. Plotz visits the Bible Lands Museum, The Shrine of the Book (to view a reproduction of the Book of Isaiah discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940’s and 1950’s), and Jerusalem’s Western Wall. In spite of the history he learns in Israel and

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the artifacts he sees, Plotz feels spiritually unchanged—more uplifted by others’ faith than enriched in his own. Modern-day Israelis view archaeological findings dating from biblical times as justification for their ownership of the land, while Palestinians think the archaeology is skewed to serve an Israeli political agenda. Plotz notes several instances of ancient biblical disputes that carry over to the present day. In Judges 11, when Jephthah tells an Ammonite King that God gave the Israelites their land and they will not leave it, Plotz comments: And there, my friends, you have practically the entire history of Israel, of the Middle East, and of Planet Earth, in two short sentences. Your God says it’s yours. Our God says it’s ours. Meet you at nine a.m. on the battlefield.

In another example, while leading a project to rebuild the walls around Jerusalem, Nehemiah assures a mocking Geshem—the only Arab individually named in the Old Testament—that Arabs have no “historic right in Jerusalem;” Plotz adds, “It’s 2,500 years later: Has anything changed?” Although Good Book primarily offers Plotz’s responses to the Bible as a layperson, some issues drove him to seek answers in biblical scholarship. Finding no thematic connection among the stories in Genesis 34-38, Plotz offers the perspective of two biblical theorists who suggest the stories were compiled by various authors for reasons lost to history. Bewildered and disgusted by the “carnival of gore, immorality, fratricide, infanticide, and regicide” in the Book of Judges and wondering what readers were ever meant to learn from it, Plotz consults Arthur Quinn and Isaac Kikawada’s Before Abraham Was (1989) to try to clarify the purpose of a gruesome and sadistic story lacking any obvious redemptive theme. He concludes that it may simply exist to test the character of its readers. He also outlines a scholarly explanation for the corruption of Israel’s ten tribes as described in First and Second Kings: Those tribes had been conquered by Assyria when the books were written, and the authors may have wished to justify their defeat with a story of their spiritual failure. Such scholarly references are brief, as Plotz generally allows readers to question and wonder alongside him when the point of a biblical passage is unclear. As an example, Plotz finds more than one version of the Ten Commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy. In Exodus 20, the Ten Commandments are listed with the repeated phrase “thou shalt not,” but they are not called “the Ten Commandments.” In Exodus 34, a different set of laws is offered, and these rules are called “the Ten Commandments,” but they are not the commandments with which readers are familiar today. In Deuteronomy, Moses gives the Israelites the well-known ten “thou shalt not” laws again, and this time the laws and the title are linked. Plotz speculates that the authors of Exodus and Deuteronomy may have had differing approaches to the Jewish faith, one based on religious ritual, the other on rules for keeping social order. The more familiar Ten Commandments do not offer moral guidance but aim to keep society functioning and at peace. Plotz points out several instances of common expressions that have their origins in

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the Bible. “How the mighty have fallen” is a quote from Second Samuel 1:25; “Can a leopard change his spots?” is a paraphrase of Jeremiah 13:23; prophetic “writing on the wall” occurs in Daniel 5:5; and “Man does not live by bread alone” is from Deuteronomy 8:3. The term “scapegoat” comes from the task, assigned to priests in Leviticus 16:10, of symbolically transferring a community’s sins onto an actual goat, then driving it away into the desert. Plotz also notes instances of the Bible being commonly misquoted. The Bible’s lion lies down, not with the lamb, but with the leopard, the kid, the calf, and the fatling in Isaiah 11:6. One of a growing number of mainstream print publications developed from material originally published on the World Wide Web, Good Book retains the informal, conversational tone of a blog with its parenthetical wisecracks and a multitude of references to popular culture. Plotz refers to numerous television programs, best-selling books, popular music acts from Three Dog Night to Patsy Cline, films from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) to Snakes on a Plane (2006), and personalities from Donald Trump to Kim Jong-il. Plotz compares the wheel rims in Ezekiel’s vision of winged cherubim to modern-day spinners. A paean to Solomon’s wisdom and accomplishments inspires him to add a few attributes from Steve Miller’s 1973 song “The Joker.” He suggests that Isaiah is more entertaining if one adds the phrase “you idiots!” to nearly any verse, as if reading a fortune cookie. In his final chapter, “Should You Read the Bible?” Plotz argues that everyone should do so, if only because present-day culture is so fraught with biblical references. Even beyond common phrases and other effects on language, contemporary culture is in many ways connected to scriptural ideals and beliefs. Although reading the Bible left Plotz feeling less drawn to God, he believes it is worthwhile to consider the biblical version of God—even if the end result is to disagree with or dislike him. Plotz ultimately found the disorganized, unpredictable, and often confusing Old Testament to be a truer reflection of life as it is lived than the more familiar, neatly packaged moral tales commonly thought of as “Bible stories.” Maureen Puffer-Rothenberg

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 12 (February 15, 2009): 6. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 28. The New York Times Book Review, March 29, 2009, p. 10. Newsweek 153, no. 9 (March 2, 2009): 12. Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2009, p. A13.

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A GOOD FALL Author: Ha Jin (1956) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 240 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Short fiction Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Flushing, Queens, New York In his fourth short-story collection, Chinese American author Jin reflects upon the cultural, generational, and relationship conflicts experienced by several Chinese immigrants trying to make better lives for themselves in an immigrant neighborhood located in the Queens borough of New York City Principal characters: Dave Hong, a twenty-seven-year-old graduate student Eileen Min, a forty-year-old widow, with whom Dave falls in love Sami Min, Eileen’s daughter, who objects to Dave and Eileen’s relationship Hongfan Wang, a graduate student Fuhua Meng, a professor and defector whom Hongfan helps Rusheng Tang, a professor seeking tenure Lina, a tax accountant in a relationship of convenience Panbin, the married man with whom Lina lives while awaiting her husband’s arrival from China Tian Chu, a young married man Connie Chu, Tian’s wife Wanping, a sweatshop laborer Huong, a prostitute tying to work off her smuggling fee, with whom Wanping falls in love Ganchin, a twenty-eight-year-old monk

Ha Jin’s fourth story collection, A Good Fall, consists of twelve short stories, each focusing on the experiences of Chinese American immigrants working hard to improve their lives in a country whose ways are foreign to them. The stories are equally divided between first- and third-person narration, and the viewpoint characters, primarily male but occasionally female, range from young twenty-somethings to elderly grandparents. Jin’s use of Flushing, New York, as a consistent locale for the stories is extremely effective; he paints a broad yet in-depth portrait of the Chinese American immigrant experience by featuring garment industry laborers, restaurant workers, and even prostitutes alongside the more prosperous businesspeople and academics with whom they share both a past and a present geographic identity. As with Jin’s previous novels and story collections, the stories in A Good Fall resonate in large part because they successfully distill common experience into short,

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tightly woven narratives. Specifically, the collection focuses on the cultural and interpersonal conflicts encountered by those who have traded a culture that is largely based on familial responsibility for one that places greater value on personal independence. As such, a common source of conflict in these stories is that of age or generational differences. In “Choice,” for instance, Dave Hong is hired by Eileen Min, a forty-year-old Chinese American widow, to tutor her daughter Sami Ha Jin immigrated to the United States for her college entrance exams. Dave and from China in 1985. He has published Eileen are immediately attracted to one annumerous novels, story collections, and other, but Dave, who is twenty-seven, knows poetry collections, several of which that his parents back in China will be horrihave won awards including the PEN/ fied if he marries a woman so much older than Faulkner Award, the Asian American himself. Dave is willing to risk his parents’ Literary Award, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. disapproval, but a further complication en sues when Sami also develops feelings for Dave. Sami demands that Eileen break off her relationship with Dave, and Eileen does so, feeling disloyal in the face of her daughter’s outrage, which seems to stem in part from Sami’s sense that romantic and sexual feelings are not appropriate for a woman of her mother’s age. Generational conflict also appears in the descriptively titled “Children as Enemies.” The story is narrated in the first person by a grandfather who has come to the United States with his wife to join their married son’s family. The narrator feels compelled to point out the flaws he sees in his daughter-in-law and grandchildren’s behavior, and he continually advises his son how to raise and educate his children. The final straw is broken when the children demand to change their legal surname in addition to their already Americanized first names. This story is particularly effective because readers can find fault both with the grandparents’ meddling and with the grandchildren’s lack of respect for their elders. In the end, it is perhaps members of the middle generation that engender the most sympathy, caught as they are between two warring factions and unable to please anyone. Other stories in the collection touch upon the difficulty of working as an academic in a foreign language, an experience with which Jin himself is intimately familiar. In “Shame,” Hongfan Wang is a Wisconsin university graduate student who has come to New York to work for the summer and to broaden his American experience. He is initially delighted when his former teacher from China, Fuhua Meng, contacts him during a government-sponsored visit. Wang feels conflicted, though, because he believes that Meng’s work must be fundamentally inferior to that of Western academics as a result of the government censorship in China that has limited Meng’s access to genuine scholarship. Meng then defects because his wife in China has extensive medical bills and he be-

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lieves he can make more money in the United States, even working illegally in menial jobs, than he can make as an academic in China. Wang helps Meng elude the authorities, in part because he feels guilty that he will be free to pursue an academic career while Meng must give up any hope of continuing the scholarship he loves. This story is particularly poignant, highlighting the fact that educated immigrants cannot necessarily utilize their education once they are in a new country. Similarly, in “An English Professor,” Rusheng Tang applies for tenure at a teaching college and feels fairly confident of receiving it, until he notices that he has signed his cover letter “respectly yours” instead of “respectfully yours.” Tang becomes utterly convinced that he is a laughingstock among his American colleagues and that they will never approve tenure for an English literature professor whom they will see as incapable of mastering the English language. Like Wang in “Shame,” Tang expresses his feeling that a Chinese immigrant’s scholarship may never measure up to Western standards. In fact, Tang is so distraught that he seeks work as a salesman, convinced that his shame when tenure is denied will be too great to allow him ever to work in academia again. Fortunately, Tang does get tenure after all, but his relief is so great that he becomes hysterical, perhaps indicating that his underlying sense of inferiority is much stronger than he previously realized. Perhaps the most common theme expressed in these stories is the burden of family ties that stretch halfway around the world when a Chinese immigrant to the United States has left family behind. The unnamed first-person narrator in “The Bane of the Internet” waitresses seven days a week at a sushi restaurant. She is trying desperately to save enough money to make a down payment to purchase a small apartment instead of wasting money on rent. Her parents and sister back in China, however, assume that she has an easy life and can send cash whenever they need it. The narrator’s sister, Yuchin, demands several thousand dollars to buy an American car, which is considered a status symbol in China, and threatens to sell one of her own organs to raise the money if the narrator will not help her. The narrator capitulates, reflecting bitterly that life was easier before e-mail and the Internet made it so easy for her family to stay in constant touch with her. In “Temporary Love,” Lina prepares to end her relationship of convenience with Panbin because her husband will soon be arriving from China. Lina and Panbin have been living together as a “wartime couple,” or two lovers both married to other people who are still back in China. Lina has enjoyed her time with Panbin in spite of her guilt, but she is determined to pick up her marriage where it left off four years earlier when she came to the United States. Panbin argues that he now loves Lina, but he does not know how to proceed since his wife in China will undoubtedly get custody of their son if he tries to divorce her. Both Lina and Panbin’s spouses become aware of their infidelity; Lina therefore feels obligated to give her husband the money she has so painstakingly saved so that he can get an M.B.A. degree, even though she considers it a bad idea. In the meantime, Panbin’s wife divorces him from China, and Panbin bitterly declares he will no longer date Chinese women, because they all have too much past baggage and he wants to live more freely. Marriage is also examined in the story “In the Crossfire.” Tian Chu quickly comes

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to regret inviting his mother to the United States for a six-month visit when she immediately begins criticizing everything about Chu’s wife, Connie. Although Chu feels his mother is unreasonable, his sense of parental respect is so ingrained that he simply cannot bring himself to defy her. The tension becomes so great that Connie threatens to leave, and Chu rather ingeniously quits his job, telling his mother he was fired for poor performance caused by the strain in his household. Although Chu is vastly relieved when his mother decides to return to China early, he cannot help but reflect on how selflessly both his parents helped him achieve an education, and he wishes things could be different between them now. In “The House Behind a Weeping Cherry,” Wanping supplements his income as a garment presser by chauffeuring his three female housemates to their appointments as prostitutes. He soon develops feelings for Huong, a young woman from Cholon, the Chinese district in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Huong wishes to stop selling herself but still owes several thousand dollars of her “smuggling fee” to an unethical human trafficker. In addition, her parents expect her to send them a great deal of money toward eventually getting her younger brother into the United States as well. Wanping convinces Huong to leave New York to escape the trafficker’s clutches, but he realizes this means that neither of them can ever contact their families again because to do so would leave a trail that could be used to hunt them down. Wanping concludes, “In this place, we had no choice but to take loss as necessity,” a statement that can be applied to many of the characters in these stories, who so often must sacrifice something of value in order to survive. In the collection’s title story, “A Good Fall,” twenty-eight-year-old monk Ganchin has also been taken advantage of by an unscrupulous trafficker of sorts. Ganchin has become too sick to teach, and the master of the temple where Ganchin teaches refuses to pay his promised salary, leaving Ganchin with the choice of going back to China in disgrace or becoming homeless. Ganchin ultimately decides to kill himself, seeing it as the only option without shame, but his suicide attempt fails. Ironically, the resulting publicity leads to the downfall of the corrupt temple master, who has similarly swindled other immigrants, and the story ends with Ganchin gaining a new chance at a prosperous life and perhaps even love. Much of the success of this collection can be attributed to Jin’s ability to group together works that are deceptively similar in setting and situation while actually depicting a broad range of experience. His earlier story collections are similarly focused: Ocean of Words: Army Stories (1996) deals with members of the Chinese army serving near their country’s northern border during the tumultuous 1960’s; Under the Red Flag (1997) focuses on the Cultural Revolution; and The Bridegroom (2000) depicts the experiences of residents living in China’s fictional Muji City after the revolution. By moving the focal point of A Good Fall to the United States, Jin has produced an impressive body of short fiction that provides insight into the complex path that his own life has taken, along with the lives of so many other Chinese, Chinese Americans, and immigrants of other nationalities. Amy Sisson

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Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 6 (November 15, 2009): 20. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 19 (October 1, 2009): 1038. Library Journal 134, no. 17 (October 15, 2009): 72. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 38 (September 21, 2009): 35-36. New York 42, no. 41 (December 7, 2009): 76-77. The Wall Street Journal, November 27, 2009, p. W7.

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HIDING MAN A Biography of Donald Barthelme Author: Tracy Daugherty (1955) Publisher: St. Martin’s Press (New York). 581 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Literary biography Time: 1931-2007 Locale: Houston, Texas; New York A first-time biographer writes the first biography of one of America’s most innovative writers—who was also the biographer’s college writing teacher Over a five-week period in early 2009, three biographies of important postwar American fiction writers appeared: Tracy Daugherty’s Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme (February 3), Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor (February 25), and Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life (February 10). All three are substantial and address real needs. Gooch seeks to rescue Flannery O’Connor from the myths that have come to surround her; more ambitious, Daugherty and Bailey want to rescue their subjects from neglect. Daugherty is certainly passionate about Donald Barthelme, his former teacher at the University of Houston, but passion can be a liability, because it can turn biography into something closer to hagiography. Ever the dutiful acolyte, Daugherty frames Hiding Man with two writing assignments, the first from when Daugherty was Barthelme’s student: “The assignment was simple: Find a copy of John Ashbery’s Three Poems, read it, buy a bottle of wine, go home, don’t sleep, and produce, by dawn, twelve pages of Ashbery imitation.” The other assignment is from the last time the two met: “‘Write a story about genius,’ he told me. A teacher’s last assignment to a student.” That, it seems, is what Daugherty thinks he has done in Hiding Man, although the result seems a good deal closer to the way Barthelme described Daugherty’s Ashbery imitation: an important first draft, one that a good editor should have helped Daugherty whip into shape. Its considerable limitations notwithstanding, Hiding Man is valuable for the details it provides and the questions it raises, albeit implicitly, about an author who, as Nathaniel Hawthorne said about himself, kept his “inmost me” behind a veil. Born in Philadelphia in 1931, Donald Barthelme, Jr., was raised in Houston, where his family lived in a house designed by Donald Barthelme, Sr., a well-known architect who took modernism seriously in terms of both its formal concerns and its social relevance. The elder Barthelme was clearly as dominant a presence in the home as he was in his profession. Life with father could be intense—“a verbal bully” is the way one son described him—but it was also intellectually stimulating. All five of his children became successful—three became writers; one, an advertising executive; and

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one, Pennzoil’s first female vice-president— but at least three of them had drinking or gam- Tracy Daugherty is the author of four novels, Desire Provoked (1986), What bling problems. Falls Away (1996), The Boy Orator Hiding Man does not have much to say (1999), and Axeman’s Jazz (2003), as about Barthelme’s siblings, and the contentious relationship between the two Donalds well as three collections of short fiction tends to be asserted rather than demonstrated. and a memoir. He teaches creative Barthelme had to endure nothing as extreme writing at Oregon State University. as what John Cheever’s three children endured: their father’s alcoholism, infidelities, and disparaging comments. Barthelme, Sr., seems to have been only as patriarchal as many fathers of his time and station, with the sense of oedipal conflict perhaps heightened by the Freudianism then in vogue and the son’s later reading of Sigmund Freud’s works. It is true, however, that Barthelme entered into a number of unsuccessful relationships with father-figures and with women (four wives and numerous lovers, including his literary agent Lynn Nesbit; his neighbor, the writer Grace Paley; and perhaps the wife of Max Frisch, an older writer he admired). Barthelme attended Catholic schools and the University of Houston, where his father was a professor of architecture; he served in the Korean War then returned to the university. Although he did not complete a degree, he found in philosophy professor Maurice Natanson “a sympathetic soul and an engaging mentor” whose “enthusiasms were [Søren] Kierkegaard, [Jean-Paul] Sartre, [Edmund] Husserl, and phenomenology in modern literature.” Barthelme wrote for the school newspaper, the Cougar, and then for the Houston Post; he married Marilyn Marrs in 1952, edited Forum magazine, and served as Director of Houston’s Museum of Contemporary Arts. Daugherty places less emphasis than seems appropriate on some aspects of Barthelme’s experience, such as the writer’s military service in Korea. At the same time, he attributes more significance than the evidence seems to justify to other experiences, such as Barthelme’s Catholic education. In 1962, Barthelme moved to New York to become managing editor of Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess’s new magazine, Location. The periodical’s aim, according to its prospectus, was to overcome the intellectual isolation of the arts in America, the growing parochialism and professionalist inbreeding that goes hand in hand with their separation from one another and from thought in general—and to further their inter-communication.

Location was well suited to Barthelme’s varied interests, as was New York City, where he indulged his passions for contemporary art, jazz, and ideas. When he moved there, however, his second wife, Helen Moore, stayed behind in Houston to work on the advertising agency she had recently started. Moore did not like New York, nor did she like the new circle of friends her husband acquired there. Their marriage lasted only a little longer than did Location, which made it through just two issues. By the mid-1960’s, Barthelme’s personal life had already begun to resemble the

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kind of fiction for which he became famous: collages made up of fragments and fragile relationships. Barthelme’s most enduring relationships would be with The New Yorker magazine and with New York, especially his West Village neighborhood and apartment, and with his fourth wife, Marion Knox, whom he married in 1978. Based on the evidence Daugherty provides, one wonders whether, had Location not folded or Barthelme been given greater freedom at Forum, he might have become one of the most influential editors of his time, given that he was as concerned with design as he was with ideas. Daugherty does a good job of marshaling the basic facts of Barthelme’s life, and he portrays well the influence on the writer of Natanson and of European writers and thinkers. Hiding Man suffers, however, from a surfeit of (mainly) good intentions. Daugherty seeks to expose the hidden Barthelme (no mean task, given Barthelme’s reluctance to discuss his personal life, even in interviews), to rescue Barthelme from neglect, and to write about Barthelme as a genius. In addition, Daugherty quotes Lois Zamora to explain that he wishes to perform a “critical repositioning” of Barthelme that would reveal “the relationship of his fiction ‘to political writing’” and would help readers “‘identify and appreciate ambiguities in his work that have been barely noticed or discussed by critics.’” Finally, it comes down to this: I still want to know Don better so as to know better the world he knew. Though some of the details have changed over time, the world he knew is, of course, our world. He still has lessons to teach us.

Not surprising, the multiplicity of Daugherty’s purposes results in a biography that neither quite coheres nor addresses satisfactorily any one of these points. Moreover, some of the points Daugherty attempts to make seem anachronistic when considered in the light of contemporary critical conventions. For example, “genius” is a term that is difficult to employ seriously at all, much less prove. Barthelme in particular seems ill served by such a term of traditional aesthetics, given that he was a maker of “anxious objects,” Harold Rosenberg’s term for the kind of work that calls into question the distinction between art and junk. Barthelme was one of the most idiosyncratic writers of his age—no small accomplishment in an age of idiosyncratic writers such as John Barth, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, Stanley Elkin, John Gardner, Raymond Federman, Ron Sukenick, and Kurt Vonnegut. He was just as surely the most imitated writer of his time—an honor that would pass to Raymond Carver in the early 1980’s. He did not “change the shape of the American short story,” however. Had he done so, he would not be suffering the neglect that has befallen him, along with nearly all the American postmodernists and metafictionists of his time. Barthelme and his verbal boxes, those anxious objects that delighted many and dismayed others, may simply have given way to the relentless and not entirely baleful pursuit of the new from which Barthelme and his then-young academic critics benefited. A new generation of writers and critics followed to benefit from from the same pursuit. Daugherty, however, has a different reading of Barthelme’s neglect: He asserts that Barthelme has been unjustly neglected as a result of the critical, commer-

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cial, and aesthetic turn toward dull representational fiction. In addition, he says, “I believe he designed his stories—and his teaching—to fall into disarray, only to bloom again unexpectedly.” Hiding Man comprises fifty-seven chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue in 496 pages: an average of eight pages per chapter. Many of the chapters are broken up into clusters of very short paragraphs, in imitation of the distinctive style of Barthelme’s fiction. The page design also suggests some of Barthelme’s publications: It employs a slightly smaller than usual font, and the text on the first page of each chapter is indented while block quotations on those pages are widened. Chapter titles are set off in sans serif typeface, and chapter numbers are placed at the bottom of the page, with only the number’s top half visible and the rest “hiding,” in reference to the title and trope of the book. Indeed, Hiding Man proves an apt title because Barthelme remains obscure and enigmatic throughout the biography. Daugherty reveals that Barthelme was extremely resistant to proposed changes in the placement of commas in “The Indian Uprising,” fighting the editorial staff of The New Yorker to preserve his punctuation. By contrast, the author seems to have been considerably less devoted to his wives, friends, students, and lovers. His second marriage ended because his wife did not like New York City. His third marriage—to Birgit Egelund-Peterson—ended because Barthelme could not cope with his wife’s Huntington’s disease and placed too much responsibility for her care on their seven-year-old daughter. Deeper issues of Barthelme’s psychology—such as why he seemed more committed to commas than to people—remain unexplored. Daugherty says that Barthelme “was always two people: the ‘hiding man,’ withdrawing from the world to work in the ‘smithy of his soul’ and the citizen working to better the world for others.” It is unclear, however, what acts of good citizenship Daugherty has in mind. Similarly, Daugherty says that Barthelme “always yearned for transcendence,” but exactly what this transcendence means Daugherty never makes clear. Hiding Man leaves this and other insights vague, and it leaves too many questions either unanswered or unasked, such as the reasons behind Barthelme’s ironic detachment or behind the shift in his fiction, which became less comic and detached and more wistful and personal in works such as Paradise (1986). Hiding Man relies too much on potted histories and too little on probing and analysis. Daugherty’s criticism of individual stories usually involves identifying sources and allusions, including to Barthelme’s personal life, rather than interpreting the stories themselves in the light of that personal life. Daugherty mentions, briefly but evocatively, that Barthelme’s apartment was just above Faith and Kirkpatrick Sale’s apartment, where Thomas Pynchon, wrote Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). He fails, though, to explore the importance of the fact that Pynchon was part of Barthelme’s world, spending more time on such other denizens of that world as Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984). However, Hiding Man makes abundantly clear what Donald Barthelme’s next biographer will need to address, and for that the literary world is very much in Daugherty’s debt. Robert Morace

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 13 (March 1, 2009): 14. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 22 (November 15, 2008): 1185. Library Journal 133, no. 20 (December 1, 2008): 129. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 5 (March 26, 2009): 25-26. The New York Times Book Review March 19, 2009, p. 1. The New Yorker 85, no. 2 (February 23, 2009): 68-76. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 47 (November 24, 2008): 44-45. The Wall Street Journal, February 21, 2009, p. W8. World Literature Today 83, no. 4 (July/August, 2009): 76-77.

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THE HINDUS An Alternative History Author: Wendy Doniger (1940) Publisher: Penguin (New York). 800 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Religion, history An interpretive history of Hindu beliefs and practices from the prehistory of the Indian subcontinent through recent years Wendy Doniger titles her ambitious expedition through millennia of Hindu history The Hindus, not Hinduism. Doniger approaches the central religious traditions of India as diverse in nature and as changing over the centuries, rather than as a unified, clearly defined set of doctrines and rituals. She is particularly interested in what she sees as the underemphasized and undervalued parts of Hindu life, such as the lower castes, women, and animals. In the later parts of the book, she attempts an examination of historical relations between Hindus and Muslims that sets aside the slogans of modern political tensions. Doniger’s style throughout the book is ironic and irreverent, with frequent references to modern high and low culture. The Hindus may offend some Hindus (and Muslims) and will probably provoke disagreements on a number of points by professional scholars. It is also a fascinating and provocative reinterpretation of Hindu history for those who know something about the subject and an enjoyable introduction to the topic for those who do not. Doniger is clear about the interpretive nature of her work. She does not pretend to convey a set of facts. Rather, from the beginning of her text, she explains that she is offering a narrative that shapes the facts in an attempt to understand them. Moreover, the facts at her disposal do not encompass the whole of Hindu history. She opens the first chapter with a Sufi anecdote about a Sufi who is looking for a lost key outside his house. When asked where he dropped it, he says it happened inside the house. He is looking outside, the punchline follows, because the light is better there. Doniger explains that she will often look for her historical evidence in the light—that is, in what information has been preserved through the centuries. However, the body of available information is not necessarily where the key to the past actually lies. India and the Hindu religion are so intricately intertwined that a history of one is necessarily a history of the other. Doniger begins looking at India by recounting its geological formation and the myths of its geological formation. Her account of civilizations in the Indus Valley goes all the way back to the Stone Age cultures of 50,000 b.c.e. and to the cave paintings of 30,000 b.c.e. The first urban societies began to appear about 2500 b.c.e., in the form of the Indus Valley Civilization, which was apparently in contact both with the ancient Near East and with Egypt. It is difficult to

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connect this early urban civilization with the Hindu society of later centuries, and Doniger may be too speculative in attempting to make links. Still, she points out that one can find some striking resemblances between the Indus Valley Civilization and those societies identified as Hindu. Some of the common artistic images, such as the motif of the fig leaf or the bull, appear quite similar in the two historical periods. These earliest Indians may or may not have provided a foundation for the people of the Vedas, the first holy books of what came to be called Hinduism. The oldest of these books, the Rig Veda was composed by nomads in the Punjab region by 1500 b.c.e., and three additional Vedas were produced in the following centuries. Centered on ritual and especially on sacrifice, the Vedic religion did not yet include a belief in reincarnation when the Rig Veda was composed. The caste system had also not yet set in, although its origins may lie in the relations between invaders and non-Vedic people, including the pre-Vedic inhabitants of the region. In dealing with the gradual emergence of caste, Doniger distinguishes throughout the book between the four main social divisions (varna, in Sanskrit) that are familiar to most people with a passing knowledge of India and the complicated array of inherited occupational categories referred to as jati. She reserves the term “caste” for the latter and refers to the former as “classes.” The terms are potentially confusing, given the modern sociological concept of class as social distinction based on mobility, but she does make clear how she is using these words. In contrast to the heavily textual official Hinduism of later times, the Vedas were at first carried in memory. The nomads who memorized these long testaments were horse riders, and the image of horses occurs repeatedly in Doniger’s narrative. The themes of intoxication and addiction, in Doniger’s telling, were among the earliest concerns of the Vedas, and these themes appear in different forms throughout later Hinduism. The most important gods of the later Hindus, Vishnu and Shiva, make only the barest of appearances in the Vedas, and Shiva only as his precursor Rudra. By contrast, Agni, Soma, Indra, and Varuna, the chief Vedic gods, almost disappear later. The concern with sacrifice continues through the Brahmanas, but this concern later turns inward, becoming self-sacrifice with the dedication to renunciation found in the Upanishads. The time of the Upanishads (placed by Doniger at 600 to 200 b.c.e.) is also the period when the Hindu religions begin to influence and be influenced by the Jain and Buddhist faiths. The role of Buddhism, in particular, takes on a particular significance after Ashoka, the ruler of the most important principality in India, takes up Buddhism. Over the course of the centuries, Doniger describes the attitude of Hindus toward Buddhism as initial tolerance, growing hostility and persecution, and then tolerance again as Buddhism becomes less of a threat. Wendy Doniger (formerly Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty) is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. She is author of fifteen previous books and has edited collections of scholarly articles and translated many texts of Indian literature.

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The two great Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, took shape in various forms from the fourth century b.c.e. to about the third or fourth century c.e. In looking at these great literary works, Doniger is especially concerned with the development of Hindu values. The Ramayana, the tale of the capture of Queen Sita by the ogre Ravana and the defeat of Ravana by the divine king Rama and his allies, becomes in her interpretation a representation of attitudes toward outsiders, such as women and the socially disadvantaged, who are regarded as ogres. The Mahabharata, a complex tale of dynastic struggle, is presented as series of efforts to grapple with questions of violence, order, and obligation. The characteristic Hindu themes of ahimsa, or nonviolence, and dharma, or cosmic order and personal obligation within an order, are central in Doniger’s discussion of the Mahabharata. The years from 100 to 400 c.e. saw the composition of the three primary shastras, or texts on behavior. The first, the Dharma-shastra, attributed to a mythological figure known as Manu, provided an ethical and legal code. The Artha-shastra, attributed to Kautilya, offered a guide to the art of rulership and political control. The Kamasutra of Vatsyayana concentrated on the realm of desire and sexuality. Doniger uses these to look at the often conflicting ideas of the Hindus on social categories and gender inequalities. She cautions that these texts can be used to examine norms and ideals but that they cannot be taken to reflect actual behavior. Introductions to Hinduism often divide its history into three periods: ancient Vedic sacrifice and worldliness, Upanishadic moksha (liberation through renunciation), and bhakti (personal devotion to and love of a god or goddess). Doniger does not entirely desert this periodization, but she turns largely to the non-Indo-European speaking kingdoms of South India for the beginnings of bhakti. This period began when the rivalry between Hinduism and the rival Jain and Buddhist religions was intensifying. The cults of Shiva and Vishnu (the Shaivas and Vaishnava bhakti sects) also grew in importance for the Hindus at this time. During the centuries known in Europe as the Middle Ages, driven mainly by the cults of Vishnu and Shiva, an elaborate mythology took shape in the vast corpus of writings known as the Puranas. The Tantric traditions developed along with and within the Puranas, creating a dark and erotic side to Hindu beliefs and practices. Doniger questions but never really answers whether Tantric Hinduism was a matter of real acts or of imagination and speculation. The arrival of Islam in the eighth century, followed by the Delhi Sultanate and then by the Mughals, created new challenges for the Hindus, carried by new sets of horse riders. However, Hindu kingdoms continued to exist, and Doniger points out the cultural and even religious exchanges among Muslims and Hindus. Contrary to some contemporary Hindu nationalist claims that the Muslims were oppressive invaders and overlords, Doniger presents Muslims as participants in a pluralistic subcontinent that was often distinguished more by class or caste than by religious differences. Doniger is critical of the English rulers who colonized India following the Moghul period. At first, the English were not much different from previous lords and robbers in India’s pluralistic mix, since the representatives of the East India Company appre-

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ciated local culture and even intermarried with the natives, even while growing rich at India’s expense. However, after 1813, the arrival of missionaries pushed EnglishIndian relations in a new direction, with Hindu religions seen by the British as expressions of vicious paganism. Following the the Indian Rebellion of 1857-1858, the third wave of the British Raj began, and the British viceroy officially replaced both Mughal rule and the East India Company. In this last period, the social distance between the European rulers and the Indian ruled became a wide gulf, and the study of India became even more a strategy for control. Doniger is much influenced by scholar Edward Said’s argument that orientalism was an instrument of Western colonial power. Accordingly, she sees Hinduism as increasingly misunderstood and misrepresented by Western, especially English scholars. She argues, though, that from the beginning of the British period Westerners tended to reinterpret Hinduism in terms of their own religious beliefs. Thus, texts such as the Bhagavad Gita (a section of the Mahabharata) took on a greater importance than they had enjoyed before because Bible-based English Protestants saw these texts as analogous to their own religious scriptures. In turn, Anglophile Indians began to refashion their views of their own religious traditions as they saw them reflected in a European mirror. The problem of suttee, or the burning of widows, led the British to initiate efforts at reform that eventually became efforts at self-reform on the part of Indians working toward independence. By the twentieth century, Hinduism spread beyond the shores of the Indian subcontinent and became a world religion, especially in America, where new visions of Hinduism (often based on illusions) spread. Doniger ends her account back in India, where the use and misuse of the past have become part of Indian society and politics. The author has placed helpful chronologies of events at the beginning of each chapter. These provide an outline of Indian and Hindu history that makes her discussions of the topic easier to follow. She has also provided a glossary of terms in Indian languages and names of key figures at the end of the book. In a book that contains so many concepts and personages, this ready reference is extremely useful in enabling readers to clarify concepts and identify historical or mythological personages. Maps of India at different historical periods, in the first few pages, give geographical meaning to the many place-names. The Hindus is a decidedly personal and often opinionated version of the history of one of the world’s great religions. The author never attempts to disguise her opinions as objective fact, though, and the book is deeply learned, as well as impressive in its scope. While many of her judgments will provoke disagreement, Doniger has produced a book that valuably contemplates a vast subject with wit and clarity. Carl L. Bankston III

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Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 304, no. 1 (July/August, 2009): 134-135. Booklist 105, no. 13 (March 1, 2009): 7. Library Journal 134, no. 3 (February 15, 2009): 110-111. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 18 (November 19, 2009): 51-53. The New York Times Book Review 114, no. (April 26, 2009): 20. The Times Literary Supplement, July 31, 2009, p. 8 Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2009, p. A17

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HOMER & LANGLEY Author: E. L. Doctorow (1931) Publisher: Random House (New York). 213 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1900-1970’s Locale: Coastal Maine; New York City A fictional exploration of two of history’s most famous recluses, the Collyer brothers of New York City Principal characters: Homer Collyer, the narrator and a reclusive resident of a Fifth Avenue mansion Langley Collyer, his older brother Mrs. Robileaux, their cook Mary Elizabeth Riordan, Homer’s piano student and lifelong love Jacqueline Roux, a French correspondent and friend of Homer Vincent, a local organized crime boss

In a city known for its tolerance of eccentric behavior, brothers Homer Lusk Collyer (1881-1947) and Langley Collyer (1885-1947) surely rank among the Manhattan’s strangest inhabitants. When the men were found dead in their Fifth Avenue mansion in 1947, authorities had to wade through tons of debris that the brothers had collected, and the structure itself had to be demolished. These brothers represent the antithesis of what most would consider “normal” behavior. Granted, isolation is a singular characteristic of modern existence, especially urban life. However, few would flee human society altogether while simultaneously building a mountain of its detritus. Stranger still, it would seem, is E. L. Doctorow’s decision to write a novel about the Collyers, Homer & Langley. Doctorow is in familiar territory when it comes to interweaving the lives of fictional characters with the larger drama of historical events. In The March (2005), he explored the deeper meaning of racism in the context of the Civil War through the life of an African American woman. Nor does his use of his native New York as a backdrop represent a departure from past practice. His novel Ragtime (1975) won great acclaim for its lively depiction of New York City life in the years just before World War I and achieved even greater renown when it was adapted as a film. Doctorow seems determined to write about the Collyer brothers in order to affirm the old truism that no man is an island—an ironic formulation, considering how often the brothers’ island-like isolation is challenged by the island of Manhattan. While Doctorow’s characters remain persistently reclusive, his novel richly resonates with other literary texts. It is true that the real Homer Collyer was blind, but Doctorow plays upon the associations between the fictional life of the actual Homer Collyer and the equally blind poet Homer of ancient Greece, the founder of Western

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fiction. Like the bard of Greece, Homer Collyer is the sightless spinner of tales who nevertheless “sees” what others do not. More subtle is the skill with which Doctorow reveals the influence of a more recent writer, the English novelist Joseph Conrad. In Conrad’s The Secret Sharer (1910), the unnamed narrator begins the story by describing a tropic twilight’s progress into night as he stands upon the deck of his ship. The progression into darkness is poetically rendered and almost cinematic in scope. In a similar manner, Doctorow begins his novel by having Homer describe another descent into darkness—not into the transient night of Conrad’s captain but rather the permanent void of Homer’s blindness. The houses over to Central Park West went first, they got darker as if dissolving into the dark sky until I couldn’t make them out, and then the trees began to lose their shape, and then finally . . . all I could see were these phantom shapes of the ice skaters floating past me on a field of ice . . .

Eventually, Homer’s slide into the world of blackness is complete, and nothing remains of the skaters but the sound of their skates, the “scoot scut” of blades on ice. Doctorow has sometimes been criticized for creating entertaining stories that are somewhat lacking in depth. The same cannot said of Homer & Langley. Doctorow’s description of Homer’s creeping blindness effectively captures his sense of isolation and defines his character in memorable imagery. The association with Conrad’s work is important, for it goes beyond a mere surface resemblance between the opening passages in the two novels. At the core of The Secret Sharer is a penetrating psychological exploration of the relationship between the captain narrator and the escaped murderer he assists— a relationship so intense that the narrator risks his vessel in his zeal to aid the man he links with his own identity. The psychological propinquity between Homer and Langley cannot be said to be nearly as close as that of Conrad’s characters. The former is the consummate artist of the book. He “creates” the tale, invokes his muse Jacqueline Roux in the crafting of it, and clearly reflects an active E. L. Doctorow’s novels include The imaginative inner life in his use of memory. Book of Daniel (1971), Ragtime Langley, however, seems at times to have (1975), Billy Bathgate (1989), The more in common with the Roman god Vul- Waterworks (2000), City of God can: A kind of mechanical genius gone awry, (2003), and The March (2005). He has he eventually brings a Model T Ford into the won three National Book Critics Circle house in a vain attempt to harness its power. Awards, the National Book Award, and There is, though, a kind of kinship between two PEN/Faulkner Awards. the two men that transcends their blood ties

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and harkens back to Conrad’s tale. Neither of the brothers is capable of leaving their family home, and they are thus bound to each other. Like his literary ancestor, Doctorow takes the raw material of a real incident and spins it into narrative fiction. While the actual Homer was the older of the two brothers, Doctorow’s story reverses this order. Moreover, while the real Collyer brothers died in 1947, Doctorow cannot resist the temptation to take them into succeeding decades. Fundamental to any understanding of the story is the question of why Doctorow would choose to write a novel about this particular pair. An enduring work of fiction must not only entertain but also resonate on a deeper level and capture some aspect of the human condition. The real Collyer brothers lived an utterly isolated existence. Doctorow’s Collyer brothers begin life with all the trappings of an upper-middle-class existence. In Doctorow’s narrative, the young Collyer boys enjoy summers at camp on the Maine coast while their mother and physician father embark upon European cruises. Curiously, even in these halcyon days, Homer reveals a kind of dissociation from others when he casually states that he cannot remember anything their parents ever said. Even the memory of their deaths from influenza during the great pandemic of 1918 evokes not sorrow but rather a sense of isolation. He describes their demise as “the final abandonment, a trip from which they were not to return.” Crucial to the novel’s theme of isolation is Langley’s World War I service in the Army, an experience that damages his psyche as much as the mustard gas ravages his body. Indeed, he does not even wait to be mustered out of the service: He simply abandons it. In this manner, Doctorow subtly shifts his narrative from a tale about eccentric recluses to a meditation on the meaning of American society in the twentieth century. Appropriately, the brothers’ massive collection of objects begins with Langley’s rifle. While the bulk of the story concerns the brothers’ seclusion, much of the conflict in the novel stems not so much from their desire for isolation as from the fact that they are consistently out of step with society. When the Great Depression devours the national economy in the 1930’s, Langley concludes that it would be good business to hold tea dances in their mansion for a small fee. The dances prove to be a success, but the gatherings incur the displeasure of the brothers’ staid Fifth Avenue neighbors. One could argue that, given the small amount of money generated by the dances, Langley’s scheme was all to the public good in providing a necessary service in a time of great deprivation. He also refuses to honor a policeman’s subsequent demand for a bribe, emphasizing Langley’s integrity over the hypocritical society he rejects. When the inevitable police raid on their home eventually occurs, Langley’s illconceived attempt to reach out to others is crushed. Doctorow underscores the deeper significance of the clash with the “cold breeze” that coincides with the policeman’s visit and the “chill wind” that accompanies the raid. These winds signal that any significant attempt by the brothers to breach their isolation is doomed. The use of wind imagery reinforces this idea, and Doctorow employs it at specific points either to mark an intrusion from the outside world or to highlight a pleasurable experience. Moreover, Homer’s resort to this device is singularly appropriate in his role as the story’s narrator. As a housebound blind man, he would be expected to be highly sensitive to both sound and atmospheric changes. It is also fitting that, as a declared writer who relies upon his

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muse, he employs a symbol that can express inspiration. The cold breeze precedes the police raid and blows again when Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrest the Collyers’ Japanese American housekeepers. “A soft breeze redolent of a countryside,” meanwhile, accompanies the brothers’ predawn search for water in the city streets. One of the most memorable aspects of the real Collyer brothers’ story was the fact that they had collected tons of newspapers over several decades, seemingly without any purpose. In the novel, Homer cleverly ascribes Langley’s acquisitiveness to his great project: to create a kind of perfect newspaper edition and thereby render all newspapers obsolete. Langley’s goal of having readers “fixed in amber” reflects a warped sensibility that has turned in upon itself. This is an interesting choice on Doctorow’s part, one that has important implications for Langley’s character and for the larger theme of the novel. In terms of the story’s structure, Langley’s project provides a convincing motive for his fundamentally aberrant behavior. Doctorow thus portrays Langley’s actions as misguided but in the service of a noble goal that is based on a real insight: Events may change from day to day, but actions as a reflection of the human condition do not. This is one of the reasons why allowing the Collyers to live into the 1970’s succeeds so well: It allows them to experience the appalling repetitiveness of America’s numerous wars. It is for this reason that one of the most amusing moments of the book is so effective: The Collyer brothers encounter a group of hippies in the 1960’s. By this time, Manhattan’s oddest siblings have proven themselves to be outcasts with their uncut hair, ragged Army fatigues, and unconventional lifestyle. In a fictional tour de force that was never possible for the real Collyers, Doctorow’s account allows Homer and Langley to find ready acceptance by the counterculture hippy lifestyle. The young people embrace Langley’s debris field as readily as they spurn the culture that created it. Even Homer finds a renewed sense of purpose in the climactic scene, when his blindness allows him to lead everyone to safety during a blackout. By turns funny and touching, Homer & Langley is a clever commentary on a pair of outcasts and the society they eschew. Cliff Prewencki Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 21 (July 1, 2009): 8. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 15 (August 1, 2009): 25. Library Journal 134, no. 13 (August 1 2009): 67. The Nation 289, no. 11 (October 12, 2009): 31 New Criterion 28, no. 3 (November, 2009): 27-32. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 20 (December 17, 2009): 34-36. The New York Times, September 1, 2009, p. 1. The New York Times Book Review, September 13, 2009, p. 7. The New Yorker 85, no. 27 (September 7, 2009): 80-81. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 27 (July 6, 2009): 31. The Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2009, p. W7. Weekly Standard 15, no. 8 (November 9, 2009): 32-33.

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HORSE SOLDIERS The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan Author: Doug Stanton (1962) Publisher: Scribner (New York). 393 pp. $28.00 Type of work: Current affairs Time: September-November, 2001 Locale: Northern Afghanistan; United States A detailed account of the first group of U.S. forces deployed to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda after the attacks of September 11, 2001 Principal personages: General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan warlord and leader in the Northern Alliance General Atta Mohammed Noor, another Afghan warlord and leader in the Northern Alliance Mike Spann, a CIA paramilitary officer sent to assist the Northern Alliance Dave Olsen, another CIA paramilitary officer working with Spann Major General Geoffrey Lambert, commander of U.S. Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel Max Bowers, commander of the Third Battalion, Fifth Special Forces Group, stationed in Afghanistan Captain Mitch Nelson, Third Battalion, Special Forces team leader in Afghanistan, riding with General Dostum Chief Warrant Officer Cal Spencer, Sergeant First Class Ben Milo, Sergeant First Class Sam Diller, and Master Sergeant Pat Essex, members of Nelson’s team Major Mark Mitchell, ground commander of Third Battalion, Fifth Special Forces Group’s Forward Operating Base Captain Dean Nosorog, Third Battalion team leader, riding with General Atta John Walker Lindh, an American who joined the Taliban in Afghanistan

In Horse Soldiers, Doug Stanton begins in medias res his account of the American forces who were the first to enter Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to assist the Northern Alliance in fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda. After many weeks of grueling work, by the last week of November, 2001, they have managed to capture a Taliban stronghold and are astonished to find six hundred Taliban prisoners (among them John Walker Lindh) about the enter the fort, where a huge amount of Taliban weaponry remains stored. Two Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

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officers, Mike Spann and Dave Olsen, de cided to interrogate some of the prisoners, but Doug Stanton is the author of In they are suddenly attacked, Spann is shot, and Harm’s Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary the Taliban prisoners begin to riot. Stanton shifts his narrative to a few months Story of Its Survivors (2001). He is a earlier, immediately after al-Qaeda’s attack contributor to many journals and has on the World Trade Center. The effect of this an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa attack on Cal Spencer and other Special Forces Writers’ Workshop. soldiers is sudden and swift: On a training mission with some men along the Cumberland River in Tennessee when he hears the news, Spencer speeds back to his base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Dean Nosorog, married only four days earlier, aborts his honeymoon in Tahiti, knowing he will also be needed at Fort Campbell. Mark Mitchell, then the operations officer for the Third Battalion, Fifth Special Forces Group, can scarcely believe what is happening, but it is his responsibility to have the men ready for deployment anywhere in the world. Greg Gibson, a helicopter pilot, tells his crew to get ready to break down their Black Hawks and Chinooks for travel. U.S. Air Force planes have already begun bombing suspected Taliban sites, though very ineffectively, when the first contingent of Special Forces soldiers arrives to set up camp in Uzbekistan, adjacent to Afghanistan. The various warlords opposed to the Taliban, including generals Dostum, Atta, and Mohaqeq, are glad the Americans are coming, as they have been fighting for many years and by now are running low on food, clothing, and arms. The Americans’ base at Karshi-Khanabad (K2) in Uzbekistan is where the small number of expert troops arrive to aid Dostum and Atta, particularly in spotting targets accurately for bombing raids. From K2, planes also drop supplies for both the Americans and the Northern Alliance armies. The trip by helicopter from K2 to General Dostum’s location is anything but easy. Sandstorms and other inclement weather conditions make flights extremely hazardous, to say nothing of the dangerous mountainous terrain, which forces the helicopters to fly much higher than usual. At one point, lacking oxygen, most of the soldiers black out during the trip. Despite every difficulty, Captain Mitch Nelson and his team manage to arrive in mid-October at an Afghani village called Cobaki to begin their work assisting Dostum and his allies. Nelson and his men learn that they will have to travel to the front lines on horseback. The difficult terrain and the absence of motor vehicles make this necessary. Although Nelson is an experienced horseman, most of his men are not; in fact, few have ever even been on a horse. The horses are short, shaggy, and rugged, built for mountain walking. Their saddles, made of three boards hinged together and covered by goatskin, are too small for an average American male, and the stirrups, hammered iron rings hanging down from the saddles on small pieces of leather, are so short that the Americans, when mounted, find their knees reach almost to their chins. Nevertheless, these horses are their means of transportation for most of the next two months, severe saddle sores notwithstanding.

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The ultimate objective for the combined Afghan and American forces is the northern town of Mazari-Sharif and the fortress of Qala-i-Janghi, held by the Taliban army. If the Northern Alliance can capture these targets, it will be able to bring under its control all of northern Afghanistan and then proceed to capture the country’s capital, Kabul, farther south. A great deal of fighting and bombing, however, are necessary before this objective can be attained. Nelson and five of his men set off behind General Dostum and his forces, leaving Cal Spencer, Pat Essex, Charles Jones, Scott Black, Ben Milo, and Fred Falls behind to coordinate logistics and await an air drop of medical supplies and blankets for Dostum’s men. The immediate objective for Dostum and Nelson is the town of Dehi. En route, they pass settlements that have been decimated by the Taliban. At Dehi, Dostum’s men load supplies onto their horses and pack mules and move on toward Chapchal, crossing the cold Darya Suf River. Sam Diller can already feel blood running down his legs from his saddle sores as the contingent begins climbing a sixthousand-foot mountain. Catching up with Dostum, Nelson and his men are welcomed to the general’s mountain headquarters, which consists of three caves whose walls are covered with horse dung and feel like fur. That night, Dostum asks Nelson to bomb a Taliban encampment some miles away. Although Nelson believes it is too distant for an accurate sighting, he agrees to order the bombs if Dostum can prove the Taliban are really there. To his amazement, Dostum picks up a walkie-talkie and talks with the enemy, thus reassuring Nelson. When the first bombing attack from an American B-52 is far off target, Nelson argues that he has to get closer to the encampment so he can convey accurate coordinates to the bomber. Although he is averse to putting Nelson or his men in dangerous proximity to the enemy, Dostum reluctantly agrees, and the bombing then begins to wipe out the Taliban position. Meanwhile, Dostum positions his men on horseback to charge the Taliban trenches and bunkers. Stanton, who writes as if he were there himself, gives a vivid description of the battle, in which the horsemen ride through blazing gunfire to reach the Taliban soldiers and overcome them. Nelson now realizes that, if the Americans can coordinate air support with Dostum’s fierce horsemen, they can win. He also knows that he must split the team up again and send Sam Diller north to call in bombs to destroy the Taliban’s tanks and other mechanized forces before those forces can reinforce the ground soldiers. Sam Diller’s odyssey is one of the highlights of Stanton’s book. With only two other Americans, thirty Alliance soldiers, and a meager supply of equipment and food, he does what is expected and significantly helps Nelson and others subdue the enemy. The key to his efforts, Stanton says, is stealth and speed. Moving deep into Taliban territory, the group situates itself high above the Taliban’s flank and calls in air strikes. Not until they rendezvous weeks later at Mazar do Nelson and Diller, nearly dead from hunger and fatigue, see each other again. On October 25, the day after the first battle, Dostum and Nelson start riding from Cobaki to the battlefield across the Darya Suf River. Dostum has lined up several hundred horsemen and foot soldiers to face the Taliban, who have tanks and heavy

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weapons to oppose them. Nelson knows he must destroy these mechanized forces with air strikes, He does so as the battle moves ahead, and once again the combined forces are successful. This time, their success requires the heroics of General Dostum, who charges ahead of his men when they are momentarily stymied to engage the remnants of the Taliban fighters. Back at K2, Dean Nosorog (referred to throughout simply as “Dean” by Stanton) is becoming increasingly impatient to get into the fray. He finally does, landing by helicopter with his team near Ak Kupruk to assist General Atta in retaking the village and attacking Shulgareh along with Dostum’s forces and Nelson’s team. Once Shulgareh falls, Dostum maintains, Mazar will fall and so will Afghanistan’s six northern provinces. On the helicopter with Dean are Lieutenant Colonel Bowers and Major Mark Mitchell and his team, who are ferried to Dostum’s base camp. Bowers becomes Dostum’s liaison, taking over from Nelson and bringing with him needed supplies and an additional willingness to fight, much to Dostum’s gratification. The battles continue moving northward toward Mazar. Although Dostum and Atta are perennial rivals for power, the two warlords coordinate their forces effectively, encouraged and supported by the Americans. At one point, on November 5, Milo, Essex, and an Air Force soldier named Winehouse are almost overrun by the Taliban, but they survive. After Shulgareh falls, the next objective is the Tanghi Gap, the gateway to Mazar-i-Sharif, which also falls. By November 10, Dostum’s forces, along with the Special Forces teams, enter Mazar and prepare to lay siege to the Taliban fortress of Qala-i-Janghi. During all this time, the soldiers keep their communications with family and others to a minimum. Rare phone calls to wives simply reassure them that their husbands are safe, but that is all the men can say. For security reasons, the press also is kept in the dark. Special Forces like to keep their reputation as “the quiet professionals” intact, though perforce their stories eventually come out. Stanton vividly details the hardships the men endured; although his book includes a few photographs of the soldiers and the Afghan terrain, the illustrations are almost superfluous. The fight to take the fortress of Qala-i-Janghi is the most furious battle Stanton describes. It brings his book full circle to the point at which it began. Although Dostum is able to obtain the surrender of six hundred Taliban fighters, Islamic law prevents men from intimately touching one another. Thus, searches are perfunctory, and the prisoners secrete within their robes pistols, grenades, and other weapons. Moreover, they are flimsily bound with cloth turbans. The prisoners are thus able to break free at an opportune moment, and they begin to attack their captors. In the ensuing fight, many Taliban and their Afghan captors are killed or wounded, along with Mike Spann, the first American operative to die in Afghanistan. The riot is finally subdued, and among the Taliban survivors is John Walker Lindh, who is later sent back to the United States to await trial as a traitor. In an epilogue to his book, Stanton says:

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By entering Afghanistan with a small force, and by aligning themselves with groups that once had been battling each other and pointing them in one direction at the Taliban, U.S. forces found robust support among Afghans. They proved the usefulness of understanding and heeding the “wants and needs” of an enemy, and the local population that may support it. Awareness is the soldier’s number one tool in his kit, beside his M-4 rifle. To win wars against enemies like the Taliban, which are often stateless in their affiliation, you adapt.

Commenting on the success of this mission, Major General Geoffrey Lambert says it was “about as perfect an execution of guerilla force as could be studied,” but he adds: “It may never be repeated.” Stanton responds: “His words would prove prescient,” as the errors made in Iraq soon afterward would show. Stanton cites, for example, the mistaken decision by Ambassador Paul Bremer to “fire” the Iraqi national army and disband it, thus sending 500,000 young Iraqis home with their weapons and a fierce determination to exact revenge. Instead of assimilating and working with the former enemy army, the U.S. occupation drove it underground, “where it mutated into a potent insurgency.” Stanton’s book is extremely well documented with a lengthy bibliography that includes government documents, electronic media, newspaper accounts, a hundred interviews, and many other references. Jay L. Halio

Review Sources Air Force Times 69, no. 49 (June 22, 2009): special section, p. 12. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 5 (March 1, 2009): 88. Library Journal 134 (June 15, 2009): 84. Navy Times 58, no. 39 (June 22, 2009): special section, p. 12. The New York Times Book Review, May 24, 2009, p. 18. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 21 (May 25, 2009): 54.

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HOUSE OF CARDS A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street Author: William D. Cohan (1960) Publisher: Doubleday (New York). 468 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Current affairs, economics Time: 2008 Locale: New York City A narrative of the March, 2008, collapse of Bear Stearns, the fifth largest investment bank in the United States and the first victim of the subprime mortgage debacle that would grow into a global financial disaster Principal personages: James A. Cayne (1934), chairman of the board of Bear Stearns & Co. Alan Schwartz (1950), president and chief executive officer of Bear Stearns & Co. James L. Dimon (1956), president and chairman of the board of JPMorgan Chase Henry M. Paulson (1946), U.S. secretary of the Treasury, 2006-2009

On March 5, 2008, an investment analyst in Florida posted an opinion on his Web site that Bear Stearns & Co., the fifth largest investment bank in the United States, was effectively insolvent. On the surface, this seemed strange. In 2007, Fortune magazine praised Bear Stearns as the most admired securities firm in the United States. The company had an $18 billion cash reserve and was about to announce a profit for the previous quarter. Nevertheless, the analyst was right. Ten days later, the eightysix-year-old firm no longer existed. Fearing that its bankruptcy might threaten the stability of the global financial system, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury forced the company to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase for a pittance. The first third of William D. Cohan’s House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street consists of a riveting, day-to-day, blow-by-blow account of those dramatic ten days. The next three hundred pages examine the history of the firm, describing its success and the reasons that it found itself so badly exposed in the early days of the economic downturn of 2008. The Florida analyst was not the only one to view Bear Stearns with suspicion. Rumors that the firm faced a liquidity crisis swept Wall Street. Oblivious to the impending storm, the company’s own top management left town. On March 6, president and chief executive officer (CEO) Alan Schwartz went to a media conference in Palm Beach, Florida; chairman of the board James A. Cayne, a championship-level bridge player, was in Detroit taking part in a major tournament. On Friday, March 7, a European bank informed Bear Stearns that it would no lon-

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ger provide the company with short-term financing. This was a major blow because investment banks depend on short-term loans to finance their operations. Often, these are overnight “repo” (repurchase agreement) loans, in which banks such as Bear Stearns “sell” securities to a lender and promise to buy them back the following day with interest. Normally, these loans can be renewed easily—if the borrower seems certain to repay. Readers of House of Cards need not worry if they do not understand the various financial terms—such as repo, “CDO” (collateralized debt obligation), and credit default swap—with which the book is strewn. On the evidence of this book, neither did financial experts at the biggest investment houses on Wall Street. At Bear Stearns, the operating capital of the firm depended on short-term (mostly one-day) loans. These loans often used subprime mortgage bonds as collateral. No one seemed aware of or concerned about the risk that the firm could become insolvent in just twenty-four hours if its reliability was questioned. On Monday, March 10, Bear Stearns assured customers that it faced no problems; the firm’s statement, however, only served to increase market rumors and anxiety. Hedge funds began withdrawing cash from the bank; lenders demanded more collateral. On Wednesday, CEO Schwartz, interviewed on television from Palm Beach, uttered vague reassurances that convinced no one. The run on the bank continued. At the start of the day on Thursday, March 13, the firm had $18 billion in cash. At the close of trading, this amount had dwindled to $2 or 3 billion, not enough to open the next day. Incredibly, Thursday night was the first time the chairman of the board, busy playing bridge in Detroit, or any other member of board of directors was informed that the firm had a problem. Fearful that the failure of Bear Stearns would set off a worldwide market panic, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and JPMorgan Chase advanced sufficient cash for Bear Stearns to open on Friday. News of the rescue brought increased pressure on Bear Stearns. The U.S. Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury concluded that Bear Stearns needed to sell itself to another firm. These institutions agreed to guarantee $30 billion of Bear Stearns’s assets, but they insisted that the deal had to be completed before Asian markets opened on Monday (7:00 p.m. on Sunday night in New York). The brokerage firm hired to find a buyer (and paid $20 million for its efforts) could locate only one bank willing to take on the burden—JPMorgan Chase, whose president, James L. Dimon, had long coveted Bear Stearns’s bond brokerage business. Dimon was willing to offer $10 per share, but Secretary of the Treasury Henry M. Paulson insisted the price be reduced to $2 so that the government could show it was not rewarding misbehavior. After furious maneuvering by Bear Stearns, the price went back to $10. In January, 2007, Bear Stearns stock had sold for $172.69 per share. At that price, the nearly six million shares held by board chairman Cayne had been worth about $1

William D. Cohan worked on Wall Street for seventeen years at Lazard Frères, Merrill Lynch, and JPMorgan Chase. His previous book, The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. (2007) won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

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billion. When he sold his stock on the market on March 25, he received $61.34 million. Cayne was hardly penurious, possessing another $600 million in assets, but he was furious, claiming that there must have been a conspiracy to destroy his firm. Others pointed to the company’s earlier history and to corporate mismanagement to explain the outcome. Cohan devotes the rest of his book to evaluating these various claims. The final 300 pages of House of Cards are as well written as the previous 150. Cohan very effectively uses material from more than 120 interviews, including interviews of many former Bear Stearns executives who provide colorfully profane remarks about their colleagues and competitors. However, this material is simply not as dramatic as the narrative of the banks’ final ten days, and the author’s presentation is marred by excessive detail, especially noticeable in the lengthy account of Bear Stearns’s hedge funds. Founded on May Day, 1923, the firm survived the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression through cautious management. During World War II, it became more aggressive and profited from enormous bets that proved highly lucrative for the firm and its customers. Railroad bonds traded as low as five cents on the dollar after the government seized the rail lines as part of the war effort. When the roads returned to private ownership, the bonds went to par and also paid accrued interest skipped during the war, making the firm and all who took its advice wealthy. Aggressive gambles became the hallmark of Bear Stearns and attracted affluent customers able to assume the risks involved in following the firm’s recommendations. The firm acquired the reputation of being unscrupulous, willing to do anything to make money. The motto of its trading room was “Let’s make nothing but money”—and it did so for customers and even more for top managers: In 1987, the five highest-paid executives on Wall Street were at Bear Stearns. In 2006, Cayne was the only Wall Street leader included in Forbes’s list of billionaires. Bear Stearns was never squeamish about how it made money. It acted as clearing agent for large hedge funds, such as the gigantic Long Term Capital Management, and for many shady small brokerages. In 1999, it was fined $28.5 million for helping a client brokerage fleece its customers. After the technology bubble burst in 2000, Bear Stearns was fined for pressuring its analysts to recommend securities that it was selling and also for facilitating market timing by mutual-fund purchasers. When Long Term Capital Management ran into difficulties, the Federal Reserve organized a bailout to permit an orderly winding down of the fund, fearing a market panic if it failed. Bear Stearns, which had profited significantly from its relationship with the fund, was the only investment bank that refused to participate. Cayne further irritated the financial world by boasting about his decision. Cohan believes that Bear Stearns was never quite as arrogant as its reputation suggested, but competitors found its flamboyant language and swashbuckling culture repellent. When the firm ran into trouble, many thought that Bear Stearns had had it coming. The major profit center for Bear Stearns was its fixed income division. That division would also be the major cause of the company’s demise. The firm made its reputation by originating and trading in industrial bonds issued by manufacturing and util-

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ity companies. In the later years of the twentieth century, Bear Stearns became a leader in issuing CDOs and asset-backed securities. The assets backing these securities might be car loans, credit-card loans, home mortgages, or other debts gathered together into large aggregates. Based upon these aggregates, Bear Stearns issued bonds paying greater-than-average interest. During the Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980’s, CDOs helped banks move illiquid assets off their books. In October, 1997, Bear Stearns counterwrote the first securitization of subprime mortgage loans; by the early twenty-first century, it was the leading issuer of such securities. By shifting monetary responsibility for mortgages from banks to bond holders, securitization expanded the supply of money available for mortgages and encouraged banks to extend loans to increasingly uncreditworthy borrowers. Both Republicans and Democrats agreed that extending loans to people previously unable to own their own homes was a worthy objective. Federal Reserve policy drove down interest rates, and Congress passed laws directing banks to invest in low-income neighborhoods. Salesmen assured customers that these bonds were safer than ones depending on a single corporation, claiming that the thousands of borrowers behind each bond provided valuable diversification: Though some would default, they said, most would not, so the bond owner would be protected. Cohan points out that this concept was fallacious, though it was widely accepted by investment banks, bond-rating agencies, and financial writers. A big pool of borrowers with essentially identical characteristics did not provide significant diversification. Once housing prices declined and first subprime then normal mortgages began to go into default, there was no way to estimate how many loans would be repaid. It was impossible to value the bonds reliably, and prices dropped precipitously. Cohan examines Bear Stearns’s hedge funds to illustrate the advantages and dangers in the firm’s management style. Year-end bonuses for middle management depended on how much profit the manager’s division produced, so they were rewarded for taking enormous risks. Those who succeeded were basically left unconstrained. In 2003, the firm started a hedge fund specializing in asset-based securities that operated almost entirely on borrowed capital, providing its investors with huge profits, 20 percent of which were retained by Bear Stearns. All went well until the housing boom slowed in 2006 and prices of subprime mortgages bonds declined. The fund manager believed that this was an opportunity to buy subprime bonds, rather than a warning sign. Although he told his investors only that 6 percent of his fund was in subprime mortgages, he increased his holdings to 60 percent, while the fund’s asset value steadily declined. The manager was later indicted for securities fraud for lying to his customers. No one in authority paid any attention to what the hedge fund manager was doing. Senior management was shocked when closing the fund in July, 2007, cost Bear Stearns more than $1 billion to repay loans into which the fund had entered. The mix of arrogance, greed, and mismanagement that Cohan describes helped bring about the demise of Bear Stearns. It was only the first, however, of a host of major financial institutions that suffered failure or takeover by the federal government during the next

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year. This wave of failures demonstrated that structural economic problems and not merely management malfeasance brought about the financial disaster of 2009. Examining the full dimensions of the downturn, however, goes beyond the scope of Cohan’s project. His well-written book holds readers despite its length and occasionally excessive detail, and it demonstrates the potential for other such studies to completely chart the corporations at the heart of the global economic events of 20082009. Milton Berman

Review Sources The Boston Globe, March 28, 2009, p. G8. BusinessWeek, March 16, 2009, p. 70. The Economist 390, no. 8621 (March 7, 2009): 89. Los Angeles Times, March 6, 2009, p. D1. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 17 (November 5, 2009): 54-57. The New York Times, March 10, 2009, p. C4. The New York Times Book Review, June 14, 2009, p. 10. Newsweek 153, no. 12 (March 23, 2009): 16. Reason 41, no. 3 (July, 2009): 48-53. The Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2009, p. A13. The Washington Post, March 22, 2009, p. B7.

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THE HOUSE OF WISDOM How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization Author: Jonathan Lyons Publisher: Bloomsbury Press (New York). Illustrated. 248 pp. $26.00 Type of work: History, history of science, religion Time: Around the eighth century to 1300 Locale: The Muslim empire; England; France By uncritically contrasting Islamic learning and sophistication on the one hand and European ignorance and barbarity on the other, Lyons argues that Muslim scholars preserved and built upon the intellectual heritage of classical Greece, thus making possible the European Renaissance Principal personages: Adelard of Bath (c. 1080-c. 1152), English scholar who spent time in the Middle East, translated Arabic works into Latin, and made them available to the West Averroës (AbN al-Wali-d MuWammad ibn AWmad ibn MuWammad ibn Rushd) (1126-1198), expert on Islamic philosophy, theology, and jurisprudence, commentator on Aristotle Avicenna (AbN 4Ali- al-Husain ibn 4Abdall#h ibn Si-n#), (9801037), Muslim physician and philosopher Frederick II (1194-1250), Holy Roman Emperor, 1220-1250, polymath, and patron of Muslim learning Al-Khw#rizmi- (c. 780-c. 850), Muslim mathematician, astronomer, and geographer Michael Scot (1175-1232?), mathematician, scholar, and astrologer to Frederick II

Jonathan Lyons’s The House of Wisdom provides an account of Muslim scientific and cultural superiority to Christian Europe during the Middle Ages and argues that the West owes a debt to the Arabs and Islam today. His account is structured around Islam’s mandatory five daily prayers. A brief prologue, headed “ALMAGHRIB/SUNSET,” represents “the traditional start of the day in the Middle East.” The introductory note to readers then refers to “the nightfall (al-isha) of the Christian Middle Ages; . . . the dawn (al-fajr) of the great age of Arab learning; . . . the glory of midday (al-zuhr) . . . ; and . . . the rich colors of afternoon (al-asr).” The text’s very structure and chapter headings thus make clear that the medieval day and its light are Islam’s, while the blackness of night is Christendom’s. As early as the introductory note, then, some readers may begin to suspect that the book will present neither a nuanced vindication of an unfairly maligned religion or a slandered people nor a careful rebalancing of a culturally skewed scale. Lyons’s book expresses a simple Manichaeism, with the forces of prejudice, repression, and bloodlust repre-

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sented by the West, while reason, toleration, and refinement are the almost exclusive pos- Jonathan Lyons has traveled widely, mostly in the Soviet Union and the session of Muslims. For Lyons, Pope Urban II’s call to liberate Middle East, as editor and foreign the Christian holy places from Muslim occu- correspondent for Reuters. He is now a pation let loose upon the civilized East armies Ph.D. candidate in the sociology of of ignorant, greedy, and ambitious thugs. He religion at Monash University in points out that Western society was unable Melbourne, Australia, and is affiliated with the university’s Global Terrorism even to measure the passing of time except in Research Center. the crudest manner and was thus incapable of establishing the date of Easter, the most important festival of the religion for which the crusaders purportedly fought. In this matter of time-telling as in others, Lyons portrays the Muslims as coming to the rescue, as it was they who perfected the astrolabe, an instrument invented by the Greeks that would enable considerable advances to be made not only in calendar-making but also in astronomy and cartography. Some enlightened European scholars would rise above the brutal credulity of their time and place and take Arab knowledge back to the West after years spent living in and learning from a superior civilization. Indeed, the book is loosely structured around the life of one of these scholars, Adelard of Bath. Adelard’s respectful admiration for Muslims and their learning contrasts gratifyingly with the attitude of the crusaders, who are portrayed as rapists and pillagers fighting under the symbol of the cross. “Where the crusaders had seen only evil in the Muslim infidel, Adelard sought the light of Arab wisdom.” The House of Wisdom ends with Adelard’s words distinguishing the provinces of faith and reason one from the other and hence justifying the scientific enquiry that would almost unimaginably change and improve the material conditions of human life: “Of course God rules the universe. . . . But we may and should enquire into the natural world. The Arabs teach us that.” In so enquiring, the Arabs illustrated their role as, in Lyons’s rather bold phrase, “inventors of the West.” Between Adelard’s setting out for the East at the beginning of the book and his validation of Arab intellectual superiority at the end, Lyons presents a number of Muslim scholars and Europeans sympathetic to Muslim learning. Al-Khw3rizmt’s name suggests that he was probably from present-day Uzbekistan. He worked with the Bayt alHikma, the so-called House of Wisdom that gives Lyons’s book its title, a royal library built in Baghdad to store Persian, Sanskrit, and Greek texts. The House of Wisdom also provided administrative and financial support for scholars studying and translating these texts and made possible centuries of sustained scholarly achievement. Al-Khw3rizmt himself created two star tables, careful records of planetary and stellar movements. What are now called “Arabic numbers” reached the West thanks largely to a Latin version of one of his texts. He also laid the foundations of algebra (the very term comes from the title of yet another of his works), giving practical illustrations of its utility in such matters as calculating inheritances and measuring land. Averroës, an expert on Islamic philosophy and theology, wrote about the very

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matter that Lyons sees as Islam’s greatest gift to the West: He produced a vindication of rational enquiry into the workings of the world and of that endeavor’s compatibility with religious faith. Kitab fasl al-maq3l (1179-1180; On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy, 1961) is a reconciliation of reasoned enquiry with the claims of religion, its thesis being that Islam not only permits such an exercise but also mandates it as a religious duty: One truth cannot oppose another but must rather complement it. Averroës rather than Descartes, writing five centuries later, should be regarded as the founder of modern Western philosophy. Writing a century and a half before Averroës, Avicenna, a “prolific Persian polymath,” made substantial contributions to metaphysics and medicine. In the former area, he argued for the existence of God and wrote an account of the creation of the world; in the latter, his Kitab al-Qanun fi al-tibb (early eleventh century; A Treatise on the Canon of Medicine of Avicenna, 1930) developed scientific methodology and recorded precise observations of specific diseases. Michael Scot, a great scholar of the thirteenth century, would translate Avicenna’s work on zoology along with Aristotle’s on the same subject. The immensely talented Scot also prepared a translation of Averroës’s work on Aristotle, making himself so much an expert on the great Greek philosopher that he was nicknamed the Commentator. Aristotle, as mediated and explained by Muslim scholars in Arabic, then necessarily translated by cultural conduits such as Scot into Latin, was central to the West’s intellectual development, to its eventual readiness to see investigation into the life and nature of the world as acceptable to God. In an age when learning was rare and therefore suspect in Christian Europe, colorful tales were recounted of Scot and his protector, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. These tales were all the more sinister as a result of the tellers’ awareness of their subjects’ Arab knowledge. Scot was said to be able to foresee the future, making forecasts about his master’s military campaigns and even foretelling the manner of his own death. Frederick organized a splendid court in Sicily, approached Muslim learning with enthusiasm, and acquired large amounts of it. He was twice excommunicated by the popes and earned the nickname stupor mundi, the “wonder of the world.” It was Frederick who recovered Jerusalem for Christendom, not by force of arms but by negotiation, and it was as protégé of Frederick and his court that Scot would make his contributions to the beginnings of Western science. One closes Lyons’s book lacking complete confidence in his claims. The author invariably relies on secondary sources. He also, more important, manifests a consistent partiality toward Muslim Arabs and a consequent distaste for Christian Europeans. Lyons has contrived to write a book dealing with the first seven or so centuries of Islam in which the word “jihad” never once appears. Time and again he mentions the “rapid territorial expansion” of Islam, the “empire’s newest Muslims,” the “rapid spread of Islam across much of the known world,” and “the lands and peoples under [Muslim] dominion.” Never is mention made of the manner in which these lands became Muslim. When he uses the phrase “fearsome holy warriors,” he is referring to crusaders. One of the book’s heroes is al-Mansur, the second Abbasid Caliph, founder of the House of Wisdom and of Baghdad itself. Before beginning to build the city, he asked advice from “his trusted royal astrologers, the former Zoroastrian Nawbakht and

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Mashallah, a Jew turned Muslim from Basra.” One wonders what inducements or threats may have been employed to convince these two men, among tens of millions of others, to embrace Islam. One need not wonder long: Writers such as Bat Ye’or in The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam (1996) and Andrew G. Bostom in The Legacy of Jihad (2005) have made it very clear that the once-flourishing Christian, Jewish, and even Zoroastrian communities of the Middle East and North Africa almost disappeared because their members converted to Islam in order to avoid death at the worst or a humiliating institutionalized second-class status at the best. This status, applied more or less rigorously according to time and place, was never formally abrogated. Neither Ye’or’s book nor Bostom’s appears in Lyons’s bibliography. Counterinterpretations also exist of the Crusades. For example, some scholars see them as a Christian reaction to more than three centuries of relentless Muslim empirebuilding. Lyons presents them as a papal grab at influence. Some would question even Lyons’s main thesis by denying the centrality of Arab learning as an instigator of the European Renaissance. (Victor Davis Hanson has suggested that Byzantine scholar refugees from Muslim Turks were of far more importance; Robert Spencer claims that Aristotle’s work was translated into Arabic by Christians.) These may be matters for professional historians and linguists to debate, but even general readers may be surprised to see the attempts of the Spanish to recover what was arguably their own country described as “Christian expansionism.” Lyons’s book has generally been well received. Eric Ormsby, in the Wall Street Journal, writes of it as “vivid and elegant, though marred at times by tendentiousness . . . [apparently wishing] to elevate Islam by diminishing European civilization to crude farce.” James Buchan in The Guardian praises “this clear and wellwritten book,” but wonders why medieval Muslim science lost its impetus until “well into our lifetimes.” Stephen O’Shea in the Los Angeles Times claims that “Dust will never gather on Jonathan Lyons’ lively new book of medieval history.” Marc Lambert in The Scotsman lauds “a well crafted, powerful account.” M. D. Allen

Review Sources The Guardian (London), February 28, 2009, p. 7. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 23 (December 1, 2008): 1243-1244. Library Journal 134, no. 7 (April 15, 2009): 101. Los Angeles Times, March 27, 2009, p. D14. New Scientist 201, no. 2696 (February 21, 2009): 46. The Sunday Telegraph (London), February 15, 2009, p. 36. The Sunday Times (London), February 1, 2009, pp. 39-40. The Times (London), January 24, 2009, p. 9. Times Higher Education, March 5, 2009, p. 45. The Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2009, p. W8.

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THE HOUSE OF WITTGENSTEIN A Family at War Author: Alexander Waugh (1963) Publisher: Doubleday (New York). 333 pp. $28.95 Type of work: Biography Time: 1865-1965 Locale: Vienna, Austria; Cambridge, England; New York City A biographical study of the powerful Wittgenstein family of Vienna, which included concert pianist Paul Wittgenstein and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein Principal personages: Paul Wittgenstein, a distinguished concert pianist who lost his right arm in World War I Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paul’s younger brother, a major twentieth century philosopher Karl Wittgenstein, a major Viennese steel manufacturer and Paul’s father Leopoldine Kalmus, Karl’s wife, mother to eleven children Hermine Wittgenstein, Paul’s eldest sibling, the family’s unmarried matriarch Johannes Wittgenstein, a musician and adventurer who goes missing in Latin America Konrad Wittgenstein, a steel manufacturer and soldier who commits suicide during World War I Helene Salzer, the fifth child in the Wittgenstein family Max Salzer, a minister of the Austrian government and Helene’s husband Rudolf Wittgenstein, a student of chemistry who commits suicide Margaret Stonborough, the seventh Wittgenstein child Jerome Stonborough, dilettante son of an American businessman and Margaret’s husband Hilde Schania, Paul’s mistress and wife

With all the richness and scope of a classic historical novel, Alexander Waugh’s The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War is a portrait of the eccentric family that produced Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the twentieth century’s central philosophers, and Paul Wittgenstein, a famous concert pianist. In encompassing the entire Wittgenstein saga, Waugh places the family’s tale in the social, cultural, and political context of the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the turmoil of two world wars, and the dawn of the postmodern world that Ludwig helped shape with his seminal writings on language and logic.

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It is clear why the Wittgenstein saga at tracted Waugh as a writer, since he too is a The grandson of novelist Evelyn Waugh member of an illustrious family. His great- and the son of columnist Auberon grandfather, Arthur Waugh, was Charles Waugh, Alexander Waugh is author of Dickens’s publisher. Arthur’s sons, Alec and Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography Evelyn, became significant novelists. Evelyn of a Family (2004) and Time: Its is best known as the author of Brideshead Re- Origin, Its Enigma, Its History (2000). visited (1945), the classic novel of class rela- He is also an award-winning music critic and producer. tionships and the Catholic faith. Evelyn’s son, Auberon, became a well-known British journalist, and Alexander is Auberon’s son. Thus, Alexander Waugh knows well the tensions and glories of being a member of a famous family—knowledge that served him well in the writing of Fathers and Sons (2004), his memoir of the Waugh clan, and The House of Wittgenstein, his fourth book. The strengths Waugh brings to this biography go beyond possessing famous relatives. As a music critic, a producer of award-winning classical albums, and author of Classical Music: A New Way of Listening (1995), Waugh has the perfect background to explore the musically inclined Wittgensteins, who were friends with Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, and other major composers. Incidentally, Waugh’s musical vocation explains why pianist Paul Wittgenstein receives more attention in The House of Wittgenstein than his more significant philosopher brother, Ludwig. Still, Waugh has published two books of popular philosophy—Time (1999) and God (2002)—that provide him the credentials to tackle Ludwig’s life as well. The House of Wittgenstein begins with Karl Wittgenstein’s rebellion against his father, Hermann Wittgenstein, who founded the family fortune through estate management and land speculation. In 1865, at the age of seventeen, Karl ran away from his Vienna home and landed in New York, where he made a living at a variety of trades, including waiter, fiddle player, and canal boat pilot. Kurt finally made his way to Rochester, New York, where he taught at an exclusive liberal arts college. With this position, he could finally return home without shame. In 1872, he became the head of an Austrian steel firm, and two years later he married Leopoldine Kalmus. This marriage was also an act of rebellion, since Leopoldine was Jewish, and Hermann had forbidden any of his children to marry a Jew. By 1900, Karl, who lived in a Viennese palace with his wife and extensive family, was one of the richest men in Europe. Ministers of government came to him for advice, and he was widely known as a patron of the arts. Karl hoped that his children would exhibit his qualities of unconventionality, strength of character, and an instinct for success. However, to his disappointment, they essentially embraced only the first of these traits. The one exception was Helene, his fifth child, who married a minister of finance in the Austrian government and remained comfortably upper class. The rest of his children had strange, often tragic lives. His eldest child, Hermine, never married and, like some character in a gothic

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novel, spent her life overseeing the Wittgenstein palace. The next child, Dora, died in infancy. Johannes arrived after Dora, and, while he showed promise as an engineer, he became a musician against his father’s wishes. To escape his father’s disapproval, Johannes fled to America in 1902. However, Johannes did not return triumphant from across the Atlantic as his father had in 1866. Instead, he mysteriously vanished. He may have changed his identity before losing himself in the vast South American continent, or he may have drowned in the Chesapeake Bay, Florida’s Lake Okeechobee, or Venezuela’s Orinoco River—all of these locations being possibilities according to the rumors sent back to the Wittgensteins. Because of Johannes’s fascination with nihilism, his family assumed he committed suicide. Two years later, Rudolf, the Wittgensteins’ sixth child, walked into a Berlin bar, ordered a glass of milk, mixed it with potassium cyanide, and drank it while the bar’s pianist played a sentimental song. He left a note claiming that the death of a friend inspired his agonizing suicide, but despair that his homosexuality would soon become public knowledge was a more likely motive. In 1905, Margaret, the seventh Wittgenstein, married Jerome Stonborough. It was not a salutary match. While the couple shared a passion for science, they had little else in common. Stonborough, the son of a bankrupt kid-glove merchant from New York, possessed a restless nature. With Margaret’s fortune, he launched on an endless journey across Europe, studying at various universities and scientific academies, never staying anywhere long enough to complete an advanced degree. In 1938, Margaret divorced him, and he committed suicide. This first wave of Wittgenstein family misfortunes climaxed with Karl’s painful death from cancer on January 20, 1913. The Wittgensteins’ second wave of tragedies began on June 28, 1914, when a Serbian anarchist assassinated Austrian archduke Ferdinand and Austria declared war on Serbia, triggering the bloody four-year conflict later called World War I. The surviving Wittgenstein sons—Konrad, Paul, and Ludwig—would all fight in the war. Only Ludwig would emerge unscathed. Months before the war started, Konrad, the fourth Wittgenstein child, arrived in New York seeking to invest in the American and Canadian steel industries. When war erupted, the United States was officially neutral and would not allow Konrad to return and serve in the Austrian army. For three years, he worked for the Austrian Consulate General, promoting the Austrian cause in the United States. Then, in April of 1917, when the United States declared war, Konrad was expelled as an enemy alien. Upon arrival in Vienna, he became an infantry captain. In late October, 1918, as the Italian front collapsed, Konrad committed suicide. The reasons given for this act vary, but the most likely explanation is that he killed himself to avoid capture. Paul, the eighth Wittgenstein, was the most serious member of the family when it came to music, and on December 1, 1913, he had his Viennese piano concert debut to great critical acclaim. However, Paul’s dawning career as a pianist was radically altered when he became a lieutenant in the Austrian army. Within weeks of the war’s advent, a bullet shattered his right arm. Soon after the surgeons operated on his arm, Russian troops overran the field hospital. Paul, now an amputee, found himself a prisoner of war deep in Siberia. Despite the camp’s wretched conditions, he taught him-

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self to play one-handed piano, first on a keyboard drawn on a wooden box and finally on a battered upright piano provided by a sympathetic Russian guard. Over a year later, Paul was released in a prisoner exchange and he performed in his one-handed concert premiere. The recital was wildly successful, and after the war Paul would become famous for his impressive one-handed abilities. During the 1920’s and 1930’s, he made numerous concert tours across Europe and America, commissioning left-handed pieces from major composers such as Sergei Prokofiev, Benjamin Britten, and Maurice Ravel. Ludwig, the youngest Wittgenstein, survived the war with his body intact, yet the war changed him in profound, internal ways. Like many Wittgensteins, Ludwig demonstrated engineering ability. In 1911, at the age of twenty-two, he already had an aeronautic patent. However, that same year he encountered the writings of Bertrand Russell and went to study under the British philosopher at Cambridge University, where Ludwig’s unique philosophical abilities blossomed. World War I interrupted Ludwig’s Cambridge sojourn. On August 7, 1914, he enlisted as a private in the Austrian army and served with distinction as an artilleryman. By 1916, he was promoted to lieutenant and, like his brother Paul, became decorated for bravery, yet it was a book discovered in a shop on the Polish frontier that brought the war’s greatest impact on Ludwig. Kratkoe izlozhenie Evangeliia (wr. 1896, pb. 1906; The Gospel in Brief, 1921), Leo Tolstoy’s radical meditation on the four gospels, had a profound influence on Ludwig’s concepts of language and meaning, as well as his personal path in life. The Gospel in Brief helped shape Ludwig’s first book, “Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung” (1921; best known by the bilingual German and English edition title of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922, 1961), which he wrote largely during the war. It was also Tolstoy’s belief in an ascetic life that inspired Ludwig to relinquish his family fortune in 1919. After laboring as an elementary school instructor and a gardener, Ludwig returned to Cambridge in 1929 and would teach there for the rest of his life, becoming a British citizen in 1939. After the war, mismanagement of the estate, hyperinflation, and Margaret’s attempts to control the family caused tensions to simmer in the Wittgenstein clan. Still, the remaining siblings tended to get along, even Paul and Ludwig, despite their intense disagreements. Paul, an ardent Catholic and monarchist, abhorred Ludwig’s communist tendencies and summed up the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in one word: “Trash.” In return, Ludwig thought Paul’s piano playing abominable. The brothers got along wonderfully, however, by agreeing not to discuss philosophy, politics, or music. The Wittgensteins’ uneasy harmony ended when Nazi Germany annexed Austria on March 11, 1938. Under Nazi rule, the Wittgensteins, having three grandparents who were Jewish, became defined as Jews under the Nuremberg Laws. As a member of the intensely anti-Nazi Austrian nationalist movement, Paul was especially targeted for Nazi persecution. Also, because he had a Catholic mistress, Hilde Schania, he could be prosecuted for “race defilement.” While Hermine, Helene, and Margaret tried to have their Jewish status changed and negotiated with Nazi authorities to preserve their assets, Paul refused to make deals with the Nazi occupiers. In this regard,

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Ludwig tended to side with his sisters. Finally, in 1939, Paul and his mistress fled to Cuba, where they were married. Ultimately, Paul, Hilde, and their two daughters would become American citizens and settle on Long Island. In 1940, Margaret too escaped Austria and joined her son Jerome in Washington, D.C. The sisters’ desperate attempts to reason with Nazi officials left all the Wittgensteins feeling betrayed, and the family’s scattering did not help matters. Most of the siblings would never speak with each other again. After the war, Karl and Leopoldine Wittgenstein’s remaining children died in rapid succession, and, except for Ludwig, they spent their final years largely isolated from the world. Hermine, Helene, and Margaret, all living in Vienna, died in 1950, 1956, and 1958 respectively. Ludwig died in 1951 in Cambridge, and Paul died a decade later in New York. Paul’s work as a concert pianist was by then largely forgotten, and his few recordings were panned by the critics. After Hermine died, the Wittgenstein palace was sold to developers. As Alexander Waugh writes, “Razed to the ground by cranes, bulldozers, and wrecking balls, the final demolition marked the symbolic end to the Wittgenstein story.” Only Ludwig triumphed against time. His reputation as a philosopher increased dramatically with the posthumous publication of a bilingual German/English edition of his second book, Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations, in 1953. The intellectual community came to regard him as one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. John Nizalowski

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 9/10 (January 1, 2009): 39. Chronicle of Higher Education 55, no. 33 (April 24, 2009): B4-B5. Harper’s Magazine 318, no. 1906 (March, 2009): 77-82. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 20 (October 15, 2008): 1108. Library Journal 133, no. 19 (November 15, 2008): 74-75. London Review of Books 30, no. 23 (December 4, 2008): 13-14. New Statesman 137, no. 4920 (November 3, 2008): 54. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 10 (June 11, 2009): 18-22. The New York Times Book Review, March 1, 2009, p. 8. The New Yorker 85, no. 8 (April 6, 2009): 70-74. The Times Literary Supplement, December 19, 2008, p. 11.

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THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR Author: Yoko Ogawa (1962) First published: Hakase no aishita snshiki, 2003, in Japan Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder Publisher: Picador (New York). 184 pp. $14.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1992-2004 Locale: A small city on Japan’s Inland Sea A reclusive mathematics professor introduces his housekeeper and her son to his ideal world of prime numbers, while they help him reconnect to the everyday world Principal characters: The Housekeeper, the narrator, an uneducated, twenty-eight-year-old single mother and an orphan Root, her ten-year-old son The Professor, a sixty-four-year-old mathematician whose short-term memory is limited The Sister-in-law, the widow of the Professor’s elder brother, who provides for him

When Yoko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool: Three Novellas appeared in English in 2008, the book was acclaimed by British and American critics. They were particularly impressed by the author’s elegant style, by her skill in creating realistic settings, and by her restraint in dealing with situations that had all the ingredients of a horror film, since all of the narrators were withdrawn, unhappy, cruel women. The tone of The Housekeeper and the Professor is very different. While again the critics have praised Ogawa’s lucidity, her pictorial powers, and her gift for understatement, they point out that—unlike the novellas collected and translated in The Diving Pool, which emphasize the dark side of humanity—the novel tells a story of compassion and redemption. Like the novellas, The Housekeeper and the Professor has a woman narrator: the unnamed, twenty-eight-year-old Housekeeper, who is the youngest employee of the Akebono Housekeeper Agency. Despite her youth, she has proven herself so capable that her employers send her to their most difficult clients. Up to this point, she has always succeeded in pleasing these clients. However, when the Housekeeper notices that the client to whom she is now being sent has dismissed nine previous housekeepers, she is curious and somewhat apprehensive. In an interview with a dignified, elderly woman, who is identified as the Sister-in-law, the Housekeeper learns that she will be working for a retired mathematics professor who lives in a cottage behind the house. The Sister-in-law also explains that, ever since he was injured in an automobile accident seventeen years ago, the Professor’s short-term memory has been lim-

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ited to eighty minutes. The Housekeeper is scheduled to begin work the following Monday. When she arrives at the cottage on her first day of work, the Housekeeper is surprised to have the Professor greet her by asking her shoe size. However, she soon realizes that, whenever he is unsure about what is going on around him, the Professor takes refuge in numbers. He spends his time working on mathematical problems, which he is able to solve with ease even though he can get through the necessities of daily life only by taking such measures as clipping notes to his jacket. At first, the Professor insists that the Housekeeper remain silent so as not to disturb his thought processes. Before long, however, he begins talking to the Housekeeper about number theory, which is both his specialty and his passion. One would not expect her to be particularly interested in such an abstract subject, but, even though she dropped out of school early, the Housekeeper proves to be both intelligent and intellectually curious. The Professor responds to her interest in his field of expertise by patiently showing her how numbers operate. When she observes that the way numbers connect with one another reminds her of the constellations in the sky, the Professor knows that he has successfully ushered the Housekeeper into the abstract world in which he lives. It does not seem to occur to the Professor that, since the process of teaching necessarily involves reaching out to another human being, he has ventured out of his own world and into the Housekeeper’s everyday world. At first, the change in him is evident in his taking an interest in minor domestic matters, such as the Housekeeper’s cooking. However, there is no evidence that the Professor is still capable of feeling human emotions until he learns that the Housekeeper’s ten-year-old son has no one to take care of him between the end of the school day and the time his mother arrives home. The Professor is horrified. Imagining all sorts of catastrophes, he sends the Housekeeper home immediately, ordering her from that time on to have her son stay with her in the cottage whenever he is not at school. Although the Housekeeper knows that her agency does not allow employees to bring their children to the workplace with them, the Professor feels so strongly about the matter that she does not dare oppose him. When the boy appears at the cottage, the Professor reveals a new side of his character. He embraces the boy, takes off his Hanshin Tigers baseball cap, rubs his head, and announces that he will be nicknamed “Root” because the top of his head resembles the square root sign. When the Professor realizes that Root will not be able to eat dinner until he and his mother return home, he orders the Housekeeper and her son to join him at the table. Again, the Housekeeper obeys him, hoping that the agency will not find out. To her amazement, in Root’s presence the Professor is no longer the sloppy eater he had been before. Instead, he displays perfect manners, and when Root makes errors in etiquette the Professor gently corrects him. The Professor even Yoko Ogawa has won the Kaien Prize, the Akutagawa Prize, the Yomiuri Prize, the Izumi Prize, and the Tanizaki Prize. His work available in English includes The Diving Pool: Three Novellas (2008) and Hoteru Airisu (1996; Hotel Iris, 2010).

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guides the dinnertime conversation, questioning Root about his activities and his interests. By the end of their first meal together, Root counts the Professor as one of his friends. During the months that follow, the Professor takes on the role of Root’s father or grandfather. He quizzes the boy about events at school; he helps him with his studies; he urges him to finish all the food his mother has prepared, so that he will grow big and strong; and he worries about his being hurt. The first time the Housekeeper leaves her son alone with the Professor, Root manages to cut himself with a knife, and when she returns to the cottage, the Professor is holding Root in his arms and sobbing uncontrollably. The Professor then insists on lifting Root onto his back, carrying him to the clinic for a couple of stitches, and then carrying him back to the cottage. Simple events such as these, which engage readers because they reveal changes in character and in relationships, constitute one plotline of The Housekeeper and the Professor. The other plotline involves the Professor taking charge of the Housekeeper’s intellectual development. Like the master teacher he is, he guides her through the intricacies of number theory, until, like the Professor, she sees it as a manifestation of God. Though Root is too young to find number theory spiritually illuminating, he can see how numbers apply to baseball, his favorite sport. He soon finds that the Professor shares his enthusiasm and that he, too, is a fan of the Hanshin Tigers. Unfortunately, since for the Professor time stopped in 1975, he believes that the great Yutaka Enatsu, who wore the perfect number 28 on his uniform, is still the star pitcher of the Hanshin Tigers. After Root persuades the Professor to get his radio repaired so they can listen to baseball games, the boy has to invent reasons for Yutaka Enatsu’s absence from the lineup. Then, as part of her campaign to get the Professor out of his self-imposed seclusion, the Housekeeper buys tickets for a game in which the Tigers are playing. Fortunately, since the player who now wears number 28 is out because of an injury, the Professor will not notice that Enatsu is not playing. At first, the trip to the baseball game is a great success. The Professor is fascinated with the details of the game, the first he has ever attended, and the fans around him are tolerant when he goes into long recitations of baseball statistics. After the three return to the cottage, however, the Professor becomes ill, and the Housekeeper stays at the cottage to nurse him. Four days later, though the Professor has recovered, the Housekeeper is informed that, because she broke the rules by spending the night, the Sisterin-law has dismissed her. A month later, the Housekeeper is summoned by the Sister-in-law, who is furious because Root has come to visit the Professor. The confrontation ends when the Professor orders the Sister-in-Law to leave Root alone, hands her a paper on which he had written an equation, and stalks out of the room. The Sister-in-law understands what he means, the Housekeeper is rehired, and things return to normal. However, during their celebration of Root’s eleventh birthday, the Professor seems confused. Two days later, the Sister-in-law notifies the Housekeeper that, because he no longer has any short-term memory at all, the Professor has been moved to a nursing home. He remains there until his death eleven years later. When the Housekeeper and Root

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visit him, he is always delighted to see them, but he has no memory of their time together. On the simplest level, The Housekeeper and the Professor demonstrates that human beings are most fully realized when they live both in the everyday world and in the world of the intellect, which, Ogawa suggests, is also the world of the spirit. When she finds herself able to solve problems independent of the Professor, the Housekeeper feels not only a sense of achievement but also a validation of herself as a human being. Thus, her friendship with the Professor enriches her life. The Professor’s ventures into daily life are even more difficult for him than the Housekeeper’s intellectual endeavors are for her. Not only is he out of the habit of interacting with others, but he also has a peculiar disadvantage. While most people can find common ground by reminiscing about their recent experiences, the Professor cannot remember what happened even two hours before, and at the end of the novel, he has no memory except of events that happened before 1975. However, what he lacks in memory, he more than makes up for by his capacity to love. Thus, at the end of The Housekeeper and the Professor, though the Professor has lost his recollections of that year when three lonely people became a family, his feelings for the Housekeeper and Root are as real as ever. As real, in fact, as prime numbers and, Ogawa suggests, as indicative of the existence of the divine. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 9/10 (January 1, 2009): 46. The Guardian (London), May 2, 2009, p. 11. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 23 (December 1, 2008): 1224. Library Journal 134, no. 6 (April 1, 2009): 71-72. Nature 460, no. 7254 (July 23, 2009): 461-462. The New York Times Book Review, March 1, 2009: 9. The New Yorker 85, no. 1 (February 9, 2009): 109. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 46 (November 17, 2008):40. Science 324, no. 5932 (June 5, 2009): 1271. The Spectator 310, no. 9432 (June 6, 2009): 36. The Times Literary Supplement, April 24, 2009, p. 21.

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HOW ROME FELL Author: Adrian Goldsworthy (1969) Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). Illustrated. 531 pp. $32.50 Type of work: History Goldsworthy argues that the Roman Empire collapsed in the West because recurrent civil wars wasted Roman resources and led Roman leaders to focus on personal survival rather than the common good Principal personages: Augustus, first Roman emperor, 31 b.c.e.14 c.e. Septimius Severus, Roman emperor, 193211 Diocletian, Roman emperor, 284-305

In How Rome Fell, Adrian Goldsworthy addresses the enduring question memorably raised by Edward Gibbon in the first volume of his monumental The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776): How was it that the greatest power of its day succumbed to an invasion of barbarian tribesmen? The scholarly brilliance and majestic prose of Gibbon’s masterpiece helped focus attention on this epochal revolution, which demarcated the boundary between the classical and medieval eras, and, as Gibbon himself noted, laid the foundations for modern Europe. Continuing interest in the fall of the Roman Empire has transcended the appeal of Gibbon’s literary artistry, however. The eighteenth century Enlightenment secularized Christianity’s belief in a teleological direction of history: Instead of a story of humankind’s fall into sin and ultimate redemption, history became a narrative of progress driven by scientific inquiry and technological innovation. Implicit in any vision of progress is the possibility of regression, or decline. The heyday of European expansionism and confidence was always haunted by fears that all could be lost. Gibbon himself was keenly conscious of the strength and accomplishments of European civilization in his day, yet he speculated on the possibility of nomadic barbarians riding once again into the European heartland. A melancholic sense that all great ages must come to an end persisted into the bustling nineteenth century. The catastrophic events surrounding World Wars I and II and the Cold War in the twentieth century stimulated interest in the fall of empires. As Goldsworthy notes in his introduction, the first decade of the twenty-first century has seen intense speculation about the decline of the United States as the world’s remaining superpower. Inevitably, there have been comparisons of the United States and Rome, a parallelism that Goldsworthy wisely cautions against pursuing too literally. The ubiquity of contemporary evocations of ancient Rome demonstrates that people

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today are just as fascinated by the specter of decline and fall as were Gibbon’s first generation of readers, perhaps with better justification. The scholarly literature inspired by Gibbon is enormous. Some of the greatest classicists of the past two hundred years have been drawn to the explanatory problem posed by the end of the Roman Empire. The result has been a string of histories that have offered compelling, and often conflicting, interpretations of Rome’s collapse. Gibbon famously ascribed the fall of Rome to the “triumph of barbarism and religion” and then, in a more dispassionate mood, wrote that the Empire sank under its own weight. Subsequent explanations have ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. Climate change, depopulation due to plagues, dysgenic breeding with captive peoples, and lead poisoning from Roman plumbing have all been put forward as causes of Roman decline. Some scholars have emphasized the external threats faced by the late empire. Others have concentrated on internal weaknesses of the Roman economy and imperial administration. Goldsworthy is firmly in the latter camp. In his view, the Romans had no one to look to but themselves for the loss of their Empire in the west. Goldsworthy argues emphatically that the Roman Empire was a superpower without peer in the ancient world. It controlled all the lands girdling the Mediterranean Sea, constituting a vast realm that in many ways was a world unto itself. The Pax Romana, or Roman peace, endured for centuries, enabling the people of the empire to enjoy the benefits of security and trade. Goldsworthy notes that, when the crisis came for the Empire, there was no movement on the part of the component peoples of the Roman world to break free. Romans wanted to stay Roman. It is one of the ironies of the fall of the Roman Empire that the barbarians who broke through its defenses often only wanted to share in the good life that it offered. None of the peoples beyond the Roman frontier could hope to match Roman resources and military might. Rome’s greatest neighbor lay to the east. For years, the Parthian empire had been a formidable but manageable foe. In the third century c.e., a dynamic and aggressive Persian state supplanted the Parthians. The Persians could cause the Romans serious problems but never posed a threat to the integrity of the empire. Still less of a threat were the evanescent confederations of Germanic barbarians rising and falling continually outside the Roman frontier along the Rhine and Danube rivers. Politically and technologically backward, the Germans could not hope to overcome the professionally proficient, well-armed, and well-supplied armies marshaled by Roman power. The Germans sometimes tried to raid Roman territory. They were more likely to trade at the frontier or attempt to enlist as auxiliaries in the Roman military. It was the Romans themselves, according to Goldsworthy, who ruined the Roman Empire. In surveying the vast literature on the late Roman Empire, Goldsworthy was surprised at how little attention was paid to the deleterious effects of recurrent civil wars. In recent decades, scholars have focused more on the social, cultural, and reli-

Adrian Goldsworthy is a British historian of the ancient world. His most recent book is the prizewinning Caesar: Life of a Colossus (2006). He lectures widely and has contributed to many historical documentaries on television.

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gious history of late antiquity. Goldsworthy, who made his reputation as a military historian of the Roman Republic and early empire, was struck by the amount of energy the Romans expended from the third century on in fighting one another, often in preference to combating external enemies. Civil wars were nothing new in Roman history. The Roman Republic was destroyed by a century of civil conflict that ended only with the founding of the empire by Augustus (who died in 14 c.e.). In the two centuries from the death of Augustus to the death of the Emperor Commodus in 192, however, civil wars were very rare. This was a measure of the political achievement of Augustus, who reconciled the Roman political elite to autocracy by masking his monarchy with republican trappings. Augustus called himself princeps, or first citizen, and ruled with the active collaboration of the Senate. Augustus personally controlled and paid the army as imperator, or emperor. The delicate balance between emperor and Senate was hard to maintain, but, despite the tensions that often arose, emperors continued to rely on the Senate as a reservoir of administrative and military talent. The army also stayed remarkably loyal to its oaths of fealty. Only once during the Principate did the system break down completely, during the brief but intense wars of the Year of Four Emperors in 69. Like Gibbon before him, Goldsworthy sees the reign of Septimius Severus as a crucial turning point. Severus was the general who triumphed in the brutal civil wars that followed the assassination of Commodus. Though born into an aristocratic family from North Africa, Severus never established a comfortable working relationship with the Senate. Aware that he had won the empire through military force, he counseled his sons to look to the army and ignore everyone else. This advice might not have mattered had the Severan dynasty proved stable. The successors of Severus, however, were unable to recapture the peaceful legitimacy that had undergirded imperial power in the previous century. When the last Severan was murdered in 238, a tumultuous period of fifty years ensued when the empire was repeatedly racked by civil wars as various armies put forward contenders for the throne. Roman dissension invited attack from the east and from the barbarians of the north. For a time, it seemed as if the empire would spin apart. Not until the accession of Diocletian in 284 did the empire once again enjoy an extended period of relative order, though Goldsworthy is quick to note that, from the crisis of the third century on, rarely did Rome see a decade without an internal challenge to a reigning emperor. Goldsworthy believes that the civil strife that undermined the empire was rooted in the breakdown of the partnership between the emperors and the Senate. Though emperors often regarded rich and powerful senators as potential rivals, most senators were quite happy with the honors and opportunities afforded them by the Principate. The Senate never posed a serious challenge to the imperial system. A Senate open to the admission of new talent was big enough to provide competent officials but small enough to be carefully monitored by a cautious emperor. The empire as envisioned by Augustus worked. However, Severus and his successors began to downgrade the role of the Senate. During the third century crisis, Senators lost their role as military com-

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manders. Increasingly, emperors entrusted armies to professional soldiers, often of humble background. Goldsworthy notes that the ironic effect of this was to make emperors even less safe, for now anyone could command an army and make a bid for the throne. The ranks of prospective emperors grew exponentially, leading to the near anarchy of the “Barracks Emperors.” Diocletian and his eventual successor, Constantine, reorganized the empire in an effort to restore stability. The emperor no longer was the “first citizen.” Instead, he became a sacred figure, remote from the people and swathed in an elaborate and defensive ceremonial court. The emperor was now known as dominus, or lord, and the name now given to the late Roman imperial system is the Dominate. Many scholars have argued that the late third and fourth centuries constituted a time of renewal for the empire. Goldsworthy does not agree. He sees the reforms of Diocletian and Constantine as signs of weakness. During this period, the size of the provinces was decreased so they would be less able to sustain a usurper. The civil and military functions of governors were separated, leaving civil and military officials as checks on one another. The size of the military increased on paper, but individual military units became much smaller. The net effect of all these changes was to increase the security of emperors by making it more difficult for challengers to emerge. The result was a bloated bureaucratic and military establishment that drained the resources of the empire. Insecure emperors were forced to take to the field themselves because they could not trust others with a large military force. Diocletian tried to solve this problem by administratively dividing the empire with a team of colleagues. This strategy worked only as long as Diocletian himself was available. When he retired, his system broke down into another round of civil wars. The empire eventually came to be divided between east and west, a practice that increased the weight of imperial administration without solving the problem of civil wars. Goldsworthy believes that the deadliness of their internal competition for power led emperors and their officials to become increasingly interested in personal survival, rather than in the good of the empire. Intrigue and corruption flourished. The major reason that barbarians were able to flood into the western half of the empire in the fifth century was that the Romans had wasted their resources fighting one another. Military units that should have been guarding the frontier existed only on paper; the money supposedly feeding and equipping them instead lined the pockets of venal bureaucrats. Defenders of the Dominate point out that the Empire in the east did not fall. Goldsworthy argues that the east was the beneficiary of geography and good fortune. The ultimate failure of the Emperor Justinian’s attempt to reunite the empire in the sixth century demonstrates that Rome’s strength was spent. Thus, Goldsworthy’s message to his readers and his contribution to the ongoing debate about the fall of empires is a moral insight: Nations have less to fear from external assault than from allowing their governments to become self-perpetuating bureaucracies focused on the government’s needs rather than those of society. Goldsworthy is not the first historian to note the self-destructiveness of Roman imperial and military institutions. He has, how-

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ever, provided one of the most penetrating and well-written analyses of how this dysfunction led to the fall of the Roman Empire. Daniel P. Murphy

Review Sources American Conservative 8, no. 12 (September 1, 2009): 48-49. Christianity Today 53, no. 6 (June, 2009): 56. Library Journal 134, no. 8 (May 1, 2009): 88. Military History 26 (June/July, 2009): 69. New Criterion 28, no. 2 (October, 2009): 66-79. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 13 (March 31, 2009): 39-40. The Wall Street Journal, April 21, 2009, p. A19.

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HOW TO PAINT A DEAD MAN Author: Sarah Hall (1974) Publisher: HarperPerennial (New York). 286 pp. Paperback $14.99 Type of work: Novel Time: 1953-2009 Locale: London, England; Umbria, Italy A novel in which four lives are intertwined by art, change, and tragedy Principal characters: Susan Caldicutt, a photographer and museum curator Danny Caldicutt, Susan’s twin brother Peter Caldicutt, a landscape artist, father of Susan and Danny Signor Giorgio, a famous Italian painter Annette Tambroni, young, blind former student of Signor Giorgio Nathan, Susan’s longtime lover Tom, Susan’s new lover Theresa, Signor Giorgio’s housekeeper Rosaria Tambroni, Annette’s mother

Sarah Hall’s fourth novel, How to Paint a Dead Man, has received mostly positive reviews. The novel is critically acclaimed for its portrayal of its characters’ psyches and its connection to art. Further, Hall’s writing has been praised for her daring style and layout. Hall has also been applauded for her emotional intensity, sensuality, and intelligence. Much commentary mentions the novel’s subtle interlacing of character and theme. Additional commendation centers on a thematic association with contemporary concerns in the British art world, as well as with social and cultural changes. Negative criticism of the novel centers on its lack of plot and heavy-handed characterization, with one reviewer making the claim that the minor characters stand out the strongest. Hall builds the novel around two historical references: a quote from French philosopher Gaston Bachelard and an excerpt from Italian artist Cennino d’Andrea Cennini’s book Il libro dell’arte (wr. 1437, pb. 1821 as Trattato della pittura; A Treatise on Painting, 1844; better known as The Craftsman’s Handbook, 1933). Bachelard’s words “Things are not what they are, they are what they become” begin the novel, and the passage from Cennini’s text provides closure. The philosophical theme that opens the novel suggests that people’s lives are affected by potentials. Things are constantly changing; nothing remains static. In contrast, Cennini’s brief exposition, from which the novel takes its title, provides detailed instructions on the process needed to paint a dead person. While Bachelard’s

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expression indirectly shows how the charac ters are in continual flux, Cennini becomes Sarah Hall earned a degree in Creative directly intertwined in the story when Italian Writing from St. Andrews University in painter Signor Giorgio comments on his meth- Scotland, and How to Paint a Dead ods and the way Giorgio’s own work reflects Man is her fourth novel. She has won Cennini’s other teachings. In addition, Peter the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and Caldicutt references Cennini in one of the let- the Society of Authors Betty Trask ters he writes to Signor Giorgio. The title’s Award. connection to Cennini’s instruction holds a variety of possible meanings related to the stories in the novel, as each character is connected to art and to death. All four of the main characters are artists. Signor Giorgio is famous for his paintings of bottles, Peter is famous for his landscapes, his daughter Susan is known for her photography, and Annette Tambroni is a budding child artist under Giorgio’s tutorage until she loses her eyesight. Each character’s artistic perception and vision is tested as they all undergo life-changing events and connect with one another at different points in their lives. Giorgio is at the end of his life in the early 1960’s, and as his narrative progresses readers see how he has painted his own death. He has isolated himself at his home in Serra Partucci. His only connections are with Theresa, the woman who keeps his house; Antonio, his agent; a few students at the local school (including Annette Tambroni); and Peter, who writes to Giorgio in admiration of the older artist’s works. Giorgio’s journal entries provide a portrayal of the artist as a dying man, and his journals seem to be priceless artworks in comparison to his bottles or his seldom-painted self-portraits. The changes in Giorgio’s life are indicated through the glimpses his journals provide into his childhood, his marriage, and his writing career. The journals ramble through these reminiscences in no particular order, but they are able to share the development of the subject matter that drives his life, the reasons for his subjects’ evolution, his perception of his life, and his anticipation of death. Peter’s chapters focus less directly on death. He is also less dynamic than Signor Giorgio, so views of his life allow readers a moment of retrospect. As his section commences, Peter is in the middle of his life. He is loud, rude, and inventive. He does not care what others think of him or his lifestyle, which includes drinking excessively and smoking marijuana on a regular basis. His children are almost grown and have moved beyond needing or revering him as they did when they were young. Susan is impatient with him, and Susan’s twin brother Danny has imitated their father’s drug use since the beginning of his teens. Peter’s story begins as he goes on a jaunt to prepare to paint a new landscape. Ironically, he is literally trapped in that landscape when a rockslide pins his leg and holds him in its grip for an afternoon and a night. While he waits to be rescued, he reflects without regret on what some would consider a life of debauchery. He reflects also on his children, who call him Wilse, and his second wife and the mother of his children, Lydia. Though not even close to death, Peter dwells on morbid thoughts that he will never be found. His vivid remembrances of the corpselike body of his first wife at the

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end of their marriage, their drug use, their sexual exploits, and her death as a result of a drug addiction connect him further to Cennini’s lesson. Susan’s chapters are about her twin brother Danny’s death and how it has drastically altered her own being. Her first chapter ends with the words: “The nub, the crux, the heart of the matter is this: Danny died a month and a half ago. You’ve lived six weeks, fourteen days, and several minutes longer than he.” Having been ripped out of an “ulterior proximity” with Danny, Susan does not know how to move on. As a result, with his death, she has stopped experiencing life. The only thing that makes her feel alive is an illicit relationship with her best friend and coworker’s husband, Tom. The sexual meetings between the two allow her brief outlets from her grief. In reflection of Susan’s own artistic medium of photography, in Susan’s chapters Hall provides brief descriptions reminiscent of snapshots of the woman’s relationship with her brother, her parents, her live-in boyfriend Nathan, and Tom. Susan’s memories provide often disturbing portraits of herself, Peter, and Danny. It is through Susan’s eyes that the repercussions of death are most vividly presented. She must learn to become an individual rather than a part of an almost conjoined duo. Susan’s change is most evident in the last words of the novel, “‘Yes,’ you say, ‘I’m here.’” These words force Susan to admit that she must go on without Danny. Perhaps the novel’s most disturbing narrative is that of Annette Tambroni. Annette is a young teen living in Italy with her mother, two brothers, and uncle. Though she has been cursed with a vision problem from childhood, Annette has the opportunity to be tutored by Signor Giorgio, who comes to her school to train the children in art. Giorgio finds an apt pupil in Annette and compliments her use of color and detail, taking the time to encourage her abilities despite her visual limitations. When Annette’s vision fails completely, her mother withdraws her from school, and a few years later her only connection to Giorgio comes as she tends his grave on Sundays after she tends the grave of her father. Annette’s life is limited by her disability. However, her restrictions are most often the result of her mother’s overbearing behavior. Rosaria Tambroni lives a life of religious confinement. After her husband’s mysterious murder, Rosaria has stopped allowing herself to find enjoyment in life. Instead, she turns to her faith and spends her days fretting over all the horrible things that could happen to Annette, never truly keeping Annette from harm. Rosario’s religious fervor frightens her daughter, leading Annette to picture the Bestia (a variation of Satan as portrayed in a painting located in her church) in every unknown corner. Annette’s weekly attentions to the dead men in her life place her in danger’s path, and in her last segment of the novel, she is raped in the cemetery. During the rape, she dwells on the idea that it is the Bestia rather than a human man who is defiling her. The sketch of Annette’s life ends with an immaculate vision of the world moving on without her. Hall’s stunning glimpses into life and death are presented through brief chapters that center on individual characters. The book begins with Susan’s story in chapters titled “The Mirror Crisis.” Susan’s chapters are all told in the second person, so Susan herself is told what her story has been and becomes. These chapters are presumably set in the early twenty-first century. Following Susan’s crisis, Hall introduces Signor

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Giorgio’s journal entries in chapters called “Translated from the Bottle Journals.” Set fifty years before Susan’s chapters, Giorgio’s entries chronicle the final days of his life and are told in his own voice in the first person. Peter’s chapters are designated “The Fool on the Hill,” and Annette’s are called “The Divine Vision of Annette Tambroni.” Peter’s and Annette’s stories are presented from a limited omniscient point of view. The book jumps from character to character and time to time in no clear order, as Giorgio and Annette’s experiences are limited to the 1960’s, Peter’s (outside his memories of the 1960’s) to a vague time in the late twentieth century, and Susan’s to the early twenty-first century. The lack of continuity, though disruptive and disturbing at times, creates a stream-of-consciousness feeling to the novel. Theresa L. Stowell

Review Sources The Daily Telegraph (London), June 6, 2009, p. 24. The Financial Times, June 13, 2009, p. 16. The Guardian (London), June 6, 2009, p. 14. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 17 (September 1, 2009): 908. The New York Times Book Review, September 27, 2009, p. 26. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 30 (July 27, 2009): 40. The Times (London), June 6, 2009, p. 12. The Times Literary Supplement, June 5, 2009, p. 20.

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THE HUMBLING Author: Philip Roth (1933) Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (New York). 140 pp. $22.00 Type of work: Novella Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Upstate New York An account of the last days of Simon Axler, a sixty-five year-old actor who loses his “magic,” desperately seeks happiness with a younger woman, and ultimately fails to find a reason to keep living Principal characters: Simon Axler, the last of the great American classical actors Pegeen Mike Stapleford, his lover, the forty-year-old daughter of Axler’s friends Asa and Carol Stapleford, Pegeen’s parents Jerry Oppenheim, Axler’s agent Sybil Van Buren, a distraught mother Axler meets at Hammerton Hospital

Philip Roth’s late fiction has treated subjects including heart attacks, chronic back pain, prostate cancer, brain tumors, memory loss, dementia, impotence, incontinence, depression, suicide, the devastation caused by the loss of loved ones, and the constant awareness of one’s own mortality. Such topics are likely to make readers every bit as uncomfortable as did the writer’s infamous earlier forays into the secret places of male desire. Beginning with The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988), and most notably in Patrimony: A True Story (1991), Sabbath’s Theater (1995), The Dying Animal (2001), Everyman (2006), and Exit Ghost (2007), Roth has sought to look at illness, aging, and death with the same refusal to blink or be polite that he has brought to his treatment of sexuality since Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). In his seventies, he has also been writing at a tremendous pace, publishing a book a year and favoring the form of the novella. In these later works, comedy has been replaced by sobriety and desperation, and the change both in subject and in tone has been startling to his longtime readers. Roth’s latest novella, The Humbling, tells the story of Simon Axler. For forty years, Axler has been one of the most distinguished classical actors of the American stage, playing the major roles of playwrights such as William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, John Millington Synge, and others to wide acclaim. Then, one day, he suddenly loses “the magic.” Performing as Prospero and Macbeth in a double bill of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (pr. 1611, pb. 1623) and Macbeth (pr. 1606, pb. 1623) at the Kennedy Center, Axler forgets everything he has ever known, is widely

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panned, and becomes convinced that his tal ent is dead. He can no longer act. Axler does not know how or why this has happened, and he suffers a “colossal” breakdown as a result. He retreats to his country home in upstate New York, and while he is falling apart his wife leaves him. Since they have no children and his only close friend in the area has recently died of cancer, he finds himself totally alone. Axler also suffers from chronic spinal pain that has grown worse as Since the publication of Goodbye, he has aged. The condition makes one of his Columbus (1959), Philip Roth has been legs go dead intermittently, causing him to at the forefront of American fiction miss steps or curbs and fall. writers. Author of Portnoy’s Complaint Soon, all the aging actor can think about is (1969) and American Pastoral (1997), Prospero’s lines, “Our revels now are ended. he has won every award available to an These our actors,/ As I foretold you, were all American writer—most, several times. spirits and/ Are melted into air, into thin air.” The Humbling is his thirtieth book. He constantly fantasizes about going up to the attic, loading the Remington 870 pump-action shotgun he keeps there, putting it in his mouth, and pulling the trigger. After spending an entire day in the attic with the shotgun in his hand, he checks himself into Hammerton Hospital. He spends twenty-six days there in individual, group, and art therapy. He listens to other patients who have attempted suicide talk excitedly about their attempts, and he becomes the confidant of Sybil Van Buren, a woman who tried to kill herself after realizing that her second husband had been abusing her little girl. Finally, Axler decides “Nothing has a good reason for happening . . . You lose, you gain—it’s all caprice. The omnipotence of caprice.” He leaves the hospital and returns to his empty house. While his suicidal thoughts may have receded, however, his depression has not. Axler’s agent Jerry Oppenheim drives up from Manhattan to see him. He offers him the opportunity to play the part of James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night (pr., pb. 1956) at the Guthrie Theater and tries to convince him that he can recover his art. Oppenheim recommends an acting coach who has helped other actors who have become blocked. “Play the moment,” this coach tells his students; “play whatever plays for you in that moment, and then go on to the next moment.” Axler refuses and, alone once again, decides that he should reread all the great plays in which characters commit suicide so “Nobody should be able to say that he did not think it through.” Instead, he ends up trying to “play the moment” in his life, rather than his art, with Pegeen Mike Stapleford, the daughter of fellow actors with whom he worked in a production of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (pr., pb. 1907) when they were all just starting out in Greenwich Village. Carol Stapleford had played the female lead, Pegeen Mike Flaherty, and named the daughter she had shortly afterward for her

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character. Axler saw the baby when she was first born and occasionally over the succeeding years when her parents came by to visit him. Now forty, a newly appointed professor of environmental studies at a nearby college, and a lesbian who recently suffered the traumatic breakup of a long-term relationship, Pegeen turns up at Axler’s door one afternoon. Before the evening is through, they have slept together and begun an unlikely affair. Over the next thirteen months, in the face of her parents’ opposition and their own spoken and unspoken doubts, they both try to transform their lives. Axler begins to hope again, thinking that they may marry and have a child. He hopes too that he can go to the acting coach, recover his art, and play Tyrone in Minneapolis. In Pegeen’s case, the refashioning is literal. In a sequence reminiscent of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (pb. 1912, pr. 1914 in English, pr. 1913 in German), Axler buys her an expensive coat, and they are soon going to New York City together on a shopping spree for dresses, jewelry, lingerie, and boots. Then, she brings home fashion magazines to look at hairdos, and they go back to the city to get her a fashionable cut. Pegeen describes their relationship to her mother as “an experiment,” but she also says that she thinks they love each other—and she reports all this to Axler. He tells her that he is getting in too deep, that he is at serious risk of not being able to recover if things end for them, and that they should end things sooner rather than later. She replies that she is at risk too and that she does not want to give up what they have. Since this is what Axler wants to hear, he chooses not to question her further. Before long, however, she admits to cruising the college softball field and pool for pony-tailed blonds, and they begin to incorporate the fantasy of bringing one of them home into their sexual play. The novella’s last act begins when Axler finds a young woman at a restaurant bar and he and Pegeen bring her home for a ménage a trois. Shortly afterward, Peegen leaves him. He goes back to the attic, where the last role he finally manages to play is that of Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev, the suicide in the final act of Chekhov’s Chayka (pr. 1896; revised pr. 1898, pb. 1904; The Seagull, 1909). It is hard not to wish that Axler had read some Philip Roth. Roth’s description of his own serious depression in The Facts and Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) might have helped his character see that another artist eventually overcame a very similar crisis. The Dying Animal and Exit Ghost could have reminded him of the most common end to older men’s obsessions with younger women in Roth’s fiction. Letting Go (1962), Portnoy’s Complaint, My Life as a Man (1974), and The Dying Animal would all have shown him the dangers faced by Roth heroes who play the role of Professor Henry Higgins in a love affair. Both Portnoy’s Complaint and The Professor of Desire would have warned him that, in Roth’s fiction at least, realizing the fantasy of a ménage a trois inevitably leads to disaster. To put it another way, Roth’s readers have seen much of the “love story” in this book before. Admittedly, making the younger woman a lesbian this time is a new twist. It is not, however, a very effective or believable one, and Roth makes Pegeen little more than the embodiment of the worst stereotyped clichés of lesbians: She only

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needs the right man to make her switch orientation, she cruises for blonds, she uses sex toys, and she desires the ménage a trois. This portrayal is hard to excuse or dismiss. (It is not surprising that the sex scenes in the novel earned it a place on the shortlist for the London Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award in 2009.) In 2004, Roth told an interviewer from The Times of London that writing was the center of his life, and he said, “If it were taken away from me I think I would die.” Imagining this prospect seems to be the original impulse behind The Humbling. Simon Axler feels the same way about his art, and when the novel is treating the depression he faces at the loss of his life’s work, it seems most deeply felt. The other impulse that explains Axler’s behavior in the book is expressed in David Kepesh’s defense of his obsession with Consuela Castillo in The Dying Animal: No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you’re not superior to sex. . . . It’s a very risky game. . . . what do you do if you’re sixty-two and believe you’ll never have a claim on something so perfect again? What do you do if you’re sixty-two and the urge to take whatever is still takable couldn’t be stronger? . . . What do you do if you’re sixty-two and you realize that all those bodily parts invisible up till now . . . are about to start making themselves distressingly apparent, while the organ most conspicuous throughout your life is doomed to dwindle into insignificance?

Roth has described The Humbling as the third in a quartet of novellas that also includes Everyman, Indignation (2008), and Nemesis (projected to appear in 2010). Of the first three, Everyman remains the most carefully wrought and satisfying treatment of the last things that are on its author’s mind. None of these works has dealt with these last things as powerfully as Patrimony, his memoir of his father’s illness and death, or Sabbath’s Theater. In retrospect, Sabbath’s Theater looms increasingly as the definitive expression of ideas and themes that Roth has continued to pursue in many of his books since. Although each has its moments, the novellas written in his somber mode sometimes feel as if their author has one hand tied behind his back. Sabbath’s Theater suggests that, like Dylan Thomas, when it comes to death and dying Roth is most his inimitable self when he and his characters “do not go gentle into that good night,” but instead “burn and rave at close of day;/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Axler mainly whimpers. Bernard F. Rodgers, Jr.

Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 6 (November 15, 2009): 3. Commentary 129, no. 1 (January, 2010): 54-56. The Economist 393, no. 8657 (November 14, 2009): 103. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 20 (October 15, 2009): 49. Library Journal 134, no. 14 (September 1, 2009): 109.

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New Statesman 138, no. 4973 (November 2, 2009): 50-51. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 19 (December 3, 2009): 6-8. The New York Times, October 23, 2009, p. C23. The New York Times Book Review, November 15, 2009, p. 11. The New Yorker 85, no. 35 (November 2, 2009): 109. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 32 (August 10, 2009): 32. The Spectator 311, no. 9455 (November 14, 2009): 46-47. The Times Literary Supplement, November 6, 2009, p. 20. The Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2009, p. W5.

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IMPORTANT ARTIFACTS AND PERSONAL PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF LENORE DOOLAN AND HAROLD MORRIS Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry Author: Leanne Shapton Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 129 pp. $18.00 Type of work: Novel Illustrator, writer, and photographer Shapton’s innovative second novel traces the arc of a love affair through the device of an auction catalogue Principal characters: Lenore Doolan, a columnist for The New York Times Harold Morris, a photographer

In her first novel, Was She Pretty? (2006), Leanne Shapton broke stylistic ground when she chose to build her story through line drawings of each of her characters, mostly former lovers of the protagonists, accompanied with very brief textual descriptions. Her second novel, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris: Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry is even more innovative. In this novel, Shapton draws on her talents as an illustrator, designer, photographer, and writer to create a very realistic, but wholly fictional auction catalog that details the remnants of a love affair gone wrong. The book is more easily read than described. Each page presents numbered photographs and lot descriptions of important artifacts in the lives of the two main characters, Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris. The premise of the novel is that these items are to be auctioned off by the fictional auction house Strachan & Quinn on February 14, 2009, at 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. A reader’s task is to examine the photos, read the lot descriptions, and glean the story of the couple’s four-year romance through the cryptic text and images. The lots are organized chronologically, so it is possible to trace the arc of the romance from beginning to end. For example, the opening page contains a photograph of Doolan as Lot 1001; the catalog description of the photo reveals that Doolan is twenty-six years old and works for The New York Times. The photo also shows Doolan as a waiflike, very thin, and very young-looking woman. Likewise, on the same page, listed as Lot 1002, is a passport photo of Morris. The text relates that he is thirty-nine years old and a photographer who has assignments worldwide. The photos illustrate the age difference between the pair far more starkly than the text is able to. Moreover, the fact that the photograph of Morris is from his passport suggests that Morris is not someone who stays in any one place very long. These two key details—

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the respective ages and careers of the couple—play mightily in both the initial attraction and the eventual breakup of the couple. The first several pages also present photographs of the couple at their first meeting, a Halloween party given by friends. Doolan is dressed as an ax-wielding, bloody Lizzie Bor den, and Morris appears as Harry Houdini. On first reading, these photos graphically display the electric attraction between the pair. By the end of the book, however, it is possible to return to these pictures and view them ironically. Doolan, as the lot numbers move chronologically forward, reveals herself to be prone to fits of temper: She breaks Morris’s favorite coffee mug (Lot 1232), she screams and yells at Morris (documented by a note from Morris in Lot 1246), and during a fight she throws a backgammon game in the fire (also illustrated by Lot 1246). Morris, on the other hand, becomes, like Houdini, an escape artist, using his job to put both emotional and physical space between himself and Doolan. Indeed, it becomes clear early in the book that the relationship is in trouble. By Lot 1060, Doolan is already receiving an e-mail from an old boyfriend, and in Lot 1063, the couple is apologizing for a fight. Lots 1070 through 1085 include artifacts from the couple’s first trip abroad together, including postcards, notes, photographs, the contents of their traveling cases, “Beware of Dog” signs in Italian, novels, and Italian phrase books. There is also embedded in these sections a note from Doolan to her sister describing a fight with Morris, as well as notes about how much Morris is drinking. The lots containing artifacts of the trip to Italy reveal many of the essential qualities of each character. Doolan seems uncomfortable with travel and inflexible in many ways. She appears uneasy when she is unable to control circumstances. Morris, on the other hand, is used to traveling alone. He fits easily into other cultures and does not seem at all bothered by petty or small inconveniences. He does, however, display impatience with Doolan’s need for control. Given Morris’s career and his need to travel constantly, the couple’s inability to travel well together seems to doom their relationship early on. In all, there are more than three hundred lots in the catalog, assembled by a fictional curator. Each lot’s contents are detailed in the curator’s coldly accurate voice, a voice that stops far short of revealing to readers what they should make of the item or items composing the lot. At the same time, the juxtapositions of those items with related letters and notes reveals a good deal not only about Doolan and Morris but also about the curator. For example, the curator’s decision to introduce the catalog with a note from Morris to Doolan written after their breakup and suggesting that they see each other again is fraught with significance. The note can be read in several different ways: It is a neat way to alert readers that the relationship portrayed through the catalog has deteriorated. It can also be read as an ironic recrimination against Morris, who is once again needing to “take a break” from his current woman friend. Alternatively, Leanne Shapton is a Toronto-born illustrator, writer, and publisher who lives and works in New York City. She is the art director of The New York Times op-ed page and the author of Was She Pretty? (2006).

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it can be read without irony, as a heartfelt message from Morris about his sorrow over the demise of his relationship with Doolan. The manner in which a reader chooses to interpret the note will influence the way that reader approaches the rest of the book. Additionally, the inclusion of the note reveals that the curator seems unable to let the affair end with the auction. While the device of the catalog is ingenious, the book’s underlying plot is not: The two characters meet, fall in love, discover each other’s faults, and break up. The format of the novel requires the plot to be kept simple, so readers will be able to infer that plot from the illustrations and descriptive text. However, a more richly textured novel might have emerged from the author’s conceit had not the situation of the story been so predictable. Moreover, the characterizations of Morris and Doolan are not subtle and, at their least successful, are stereotypical. Doolan behaves in exactly the ways one would expect a young, clever, insecure ingenue to act in a relationship in which she perhaps feels somewhat out of her depth. Morris behaves in exactly the ways that film and literature have trained audiences to expect of an older, globetrotting photojournalist. In other words, each behaves according to type. While there is some benefit in meeting the horizon of audience expectation in such an innovative format, one could hope for some interesting variations on the types, variations that would add depth to the characters and make them seem less flat than the photographs that picture them. That said, the novel does provide a few surprises. Doolan has a darker side, one that is only evident through careful reading. Shapton has given this character many of the qualities and habits of a woman with a serious eating disorder. Doolan is painfully thin in the photos, and the sizes and the styles of her clothing also reveal her size. Her column for The New York Times is devoted exclusively to recipes for and discussions about cake, a food that an anorexic would be likely to deny herself but would prepare for others. Homemade gifts from the couple, such as that illustrated by six jars of strawberry jam in Lot 1177, nearly always take the form of food. Finally, amid the many shopping lists kept by Doolan are lists of the food Doolan consumes each day. This is the behavior of a chronic dieter and, in the case of pencil-slim Doolan, a warning flag. Taken together, the clues imply a worrisome obsession with issues of food and control. As for Morris, it is tempting to see him only as emotionally distant and noncommittal to the relationship. However, Shapton is careful to provide qualities that problematize that reading. For example, several of the lots include information about Morris’s sessions with his therapist, in which he tries to work through emotional problems having to do with the relationship. It would appear, contrary to type, that Morris genuinely loves Doolan and wants the relationship to succeed. Perhaps two of the most revealing pages are those portraying the final lots. Lot 1331 is a group of dried flowers, kept and pressed by Morris. Lot 1332 is a group of pressed four-leaf clovers belonging to Doolan. Morris, it appears, has an uncharacteristically sentimental side; he chooses to keep mementos of important times and events with Doolan, specific occasions that have value for him, suggesting that he remembers well time they spent together. Doolan, on the other hand, saves only four-leaf

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clovers, not identifiable by event but only by their purpose, to bring good luck. Not satisfied with the relationship as it exists, she continues to wish for an idealized, romantic affair wherein she is adored, understood, and has her needs met. Despite some plot and characterization shortcomings, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris is a visual and conceptual delight. Shapton has stated in several interviews that her inspiration for the novel came from her own reading of the 2006 auction catalog of author Truman Capote’s personal belongings. She discerned from that catalog the bare outlines of a life and felt that she could use the catalog form as a narrative device. Many of the artifacts photographed for the book are Shapton’s own, including a collection of brassieres and other articles of clothing. Other items are from garage sales and second-hand stores. For her main characters, she called on her friends Sheila Heti (a fiction writer herself) and Paul Sahre (a graphic designer) to pose for the pictures of Doolan and Morris. It is striking how well these two individuals capture and advance the characterizations provided by the artifacts and descriptions. Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris is a book worthy of rereading and will likely encourage new interpretations with each perusal. Indeed, rereading might be a requirement for the novel, since it is so tempting to rush through the book the first time, glancing at pictures and skimming the text just to see how and why the couple falls in love and then how and why they part. Later, more leisurely readings reveal nuances in the text and the illustrations that could easily be overlooked but that provide readers with both surprise and satisfaction. Diane Andrews Henningfeld

Review Sources ARTnews 108, no. 6 (June, 2009): 32. Harper’s Magazine 318, no. 1908 (May, 2009): 78. Maclean’s 122, no. 12 (April 6, 2009): 52-53. The New York Times, February 5, 2009, p. C1. The New York Times, February 8, 2009, p. L10. Print 63, no. 2 (April, 2009): 95. The Spectator 311, no. 9458 (December 5, 2009): 37. The Virginia Quarterly Review 85, no. 3 (Summer, 2009): 207-211.

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IN OTHER ROOMS, OTHER WONDERS Author: Daniyal Mueenuddin (1963) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 247 pp. $23.95 Type of work: Short fiction Time: 1970’s to the early twenty-first century Locale: Southern Punjab, Pakistan Mueenuddin’s debut collection of short stories, which was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, presents an intimate view of modern Pakistani life in a postfeudal society Principal characters: K. K. Harouni, a Punjabi farmer Begum Harouni, his estranged wife Sohail Harouni, a relative Helen, his girlfriend Nawabdin (Nawab), a handyman and electrician Husna, Begum Harouni’s attendant Chaudrey Jaglani, the Harounis’ estate manager Saleema, one of the Harounis’ servants Lily, a young woman from Lahore Murad, her husband

Daniyal Mueenuddin, the son of a Pakistani father and an American mother, grew up in Pakistan and Wisconsin, graduated from Dartmouth and Yale, and has practiced corporate law in New York. His first book, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, is set in the Punjab region, where he wrote it while living on the family farm that he oversees and that served as a model for the fictional farm of K. K. Harouni. The eight interconnected stories of the collection depict ordinary Pakistanis of all classes. K. K., a retired civil servant and a still-wealthy member of a fading Pakistani aristocracy, serves as a unifying figure for the stories, which focus on those who surround him: his family, colleagues, and servants. In the lead story, “Nawabdin Electrician” (2008), K. K. is the patron of a likable mechanic and general handyman whose house has “running water in all three rooms.” As the father of twelve daughters and one son, Nawab thoroughly enjoys his family, hiding coveted lumps of brown sugar in his vest to surprise and delight them. In addition, he carries on numerous private enterprises to augment his meager wages and prepare for his daughters’ dowries. Nawab maintains the tube wells that irrigate his employer’s sugarcane, cotton, and mango fields. He also knows how to adjust electricity meters to save his poorer clients money. He is benignly dishonest—a sort of Pakistani Robin Hood. Traveling from job to job on a rickety bicycle, Nawab wants to ask K. K. for a motorcycle to make his life a little easier. Instead, he slyly complains of his tired old

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legs and begs his employer for release, fully aware that K. K. does not want to lose him. His strategy works, but the coveted motorcycle soon brings him misfortune, and then even Nawabdin, a good man, can summon no compassion for the person who ultimately confronts him. After reading this story when it was originally published in The New Yorker, British Indian author Salman Rushdie was so impressed that he included it in The Best American Short Stories, 2008. More than one critic has observed that Pakistani writers typically focus on the massive social changes taking place in their world, and this is certainly true of Mueenuddin, as the lives of his characters illustrate. Change is an underlying theme in all the stories, as Pakistan undergoes a transformation. This is seen in the diminishing wealth and influence of the old landed aristocratic families, such as the Harounis, who are selling off their land to raise money, and the increasing prominence and power of the new industrialists. English has become the favored language of the social elite, some of whom take pride in knowing neither Urdu (the official Pakistani language) nor the regional language of Punjabi. Change marks the contrast between the lives of rich and poor, as well as the difficulties of those who attempt to bridge that gap. In the title story, young Husna, neither privileged nor abjectly poor, has “refused to accept her present status,” having “neither talent nor beauty.” Originally, her ancestors were quite wealthy, but they gradually lost their money, and she longs to rise socioeconomically. At present, she attends to K. K.’s estranged wife Begum Harouni, who lives apart from her husband. Remotely related to K. K., Husna seeks his assistance in finding a teaching position, but, because she refuses to marry, he advises her to learn a skill instead. His secretary will teach her to type. Seven years ago, K. K. suffered a heart attack; now, he walks daily, inviting Husna to walk with him as a companion. He is alone; his married daughters have their lives elsewhere. Husna, feeling that she deserves K. K.’s world, struggles with ambition and ambivalence. Because she reminds him of his youth, she knows she could become his mistress, although the begum will be jealous of any attention she receives. When the begum decides to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca without her, Husna complains to K. K. He, who is rather removed from life and avoids unpleasantness, invites her to stay at his home in Lahore, the Punjabi capital, while the begum is gone. She will have her own apartment in the annex. Thus, Husna joins K. K.’s household. Although a virgin, she ultimately decides to seduce K. K., thereby altering her own future. He is lonely and fears imminent death, but she learns to handle him well and gradually grows to feel real affection for him. Some of K. K.’s elderly friends accept Husna, while the servants recognize that she has influence and treat her more respectfully. After K. K. is stricken in the middle of the night and taken to the hospital, his doctor instructs Husna to stay at the house rather than accompany him. When K. K.’s class-conscious daughters arrive, they im-

Daniyal Mueenuddin has a J.D. from Yale and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. A Fulbright scholar, his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, and The Best American Short Stories, 2008.

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mediately banish her to the annex, treating her as a servant, and after he dies, she is curtly dismissed. Just as the Harouni daughters reveal their lack of understanding and utter indifference to what Husna has lost, young Sohail Harouni, another wealthy relative, demonstrates his own lack of sensitivity. He does not wish to provide electricity to an elderly watchman’s hut on his property, responding to the suggestion with “Are you kidding? . . . These guys don’t get bored.” There seems to be no way to bridge the real gulf between the classes. Unfortunately, the traditional culture of corruption remains in Mueenuddin’s Pakistan. Chaudrey Jaglani, K. K.’s estate manager, sells his employer’s land as ordered but buys the best parcels for himself, secretly enriching himself at K. K.’s expense. In “About a Burning Girl,” both a mystery and an illustration of practical politics, much ado is made about the difficulty of rescuing a favorite servant from the police after he is accused of setting his brother’s wife on fire. The cynical judge who narrates this story has been asked to intercede, primarily because of his wife’s complaints that finding a good servant is “impossible.” New evidence and appropriate bribes are created in order to free the accused man. As the judge well knows, “In Pakistan all things can be arranged.” Ironically, no one mourns for the dead woman. Mueenuddin’s treatment of his female characters often involves telling a story from a female perspective, as he does with Husna. His insights are impressive, especially in the midst of a hierarchical, male-centered culture. Poor women, such as the nameless burn victim, are essentially powerless in this society. Wealthy women, like the judge’s wife, may have limited control within their households but are still at the mercy of their husbands or fathers. Although one critic suggests that these women are able to use sex as a weapon to get what they want, any power they may acquire is temporary, as the stories confirm. Saleema has the hardest life. Descended from a clan of unsavory characters, she is the daughter of a promiscuous mother and a father fatally addicted to heroin. At fourteen, she is already being abused by men. A new husband brings her to Lahore, where he becomes addicted to amphetamines. Ultimately, Saleema becomes a servant in K. K.’s wealthy rural home, where her drugged husband shares her room while she sleeps with the cook for extra food. When the cook grows tired of her, she seeks another protector and attaches herself to Rafik, K. K.’s kindly old manservant. He is married, but his wife has always lived elsewhere. Saleema has a son with Rafik, who loves her and the baby. Rafik confesses the affair to his wife and eventually separates from Saleema out of guilt, although he continues to give her money. After K. K. dies, his household disintegrates. Saleema loses her job, begins to use drugs, and is reduced to begging in the streets with her child. Mueenuddin demonstrates that more fortunate Pakistani women also face obstacles, although perhaps not as grave. “Our Lady of Paris” explores a different conflict of culture and class, as Sohail Harouni, like many of the collection’s characters, reappears in an earlier phase of his life. Having earned his law degree at Yale, he has returned to Karachi and his wealthy parents to follow in his father’s footsteps and to wait for Helen, the American student he is dating, to complete her final year. Helen,

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whose single mother works as a secretary, hopes to study medicine. The young couple has planned to meet in Paris for the Christmas holidays, but Sohail’s redoubtable mother announces that his parents will be there too. He is not pleased. The narrative viewpoint shifts to Helen, as she prepares for the dinner in Paris where she will meet Sohail’s parents. She feels intimidated, deliberately shut off from Sohail and his mother, particularly as they attend the ballet without her. Wisely, the young people manage to arrange a brief idyll without the parents, but Helen begins to recognize that their lives and goals are incompatible. Seen mostly through Helen’s eyes, this is a love story gone wrong. Lily proves a dramatic exception to the other women of In Other Rooms, Other Words. The daughter of formerly wealthy parents in Lahore, she lives a wild, excessive lifestyle filled with alcohol and parties, even as her parents can scarcely maintain their social position. When a serious automobile accident hospitalizes her with a concussion, Lily dreams of parachuting from a flaming jet plane. She views this dream as a symbolic escape from her previous dissolute life—an escape for which a part of her longs. Despite her dream, Lily relies on champagne to help her feel comfortable at an evening party hosted by a flamboyant friend who has imported enough sand to create a fake beach. At the party, she encounters a man she has seen before but does not remember—the young businessman and Punjabi farmer Murad Talwan, who has begun growing vegetables in greenhouses (as does Mueenuddin himself) in order to bring them to market earlier than his competitors. The previous year, Murad, while grieving the recent death of his mother, noticed Lily at a gathering and was impressed by his idealized vision of her beside the pool. Now, they are attracted to each other: She is lost, and he has been lost. In time, Murad drives Lily to a place where the Kabul and Indus rivers meet: brown and blue streams side by side, not yet joined, foreshadowing their lives together. Then, he stays the night with Lily (chastely, at his request). In four months, they marry, but there seems to be no real union of these two people; they remain separate even after marriage. She is impulsive; he is deliberate. Lily insists on honeymooning at the farm where they will live, rather than going abroad. While Murad feels respect and love for his land and for the people who work it, she becomes bored with the quiet life of the farm and realizes that she does not wish to become pregnant. Unable to accept the changes she thought she wanted, Lily soon invites her friends to the farm for a weekend party, and once in their presence she returns to the life that she rejected. While Murad politely avoids the rowdy visitors, Lily drinks heavily and is unfaithful to him. Secretly reading her husband’s private journal, she discovers that he loathes her parties yet is determined to work on their marriage: She must make a decision. The author does not judge this woman but reveals her desperate confusion. Mueenuddin, who prefers to write in English, is also fluent in Urdu and Punjabi. His style is intimate yet dispassionate, his descriptions terse but sharp, as when he says a servant’s “leathery glum face made him look as if he had been pickled in gin.” Subtly inserting custom and color into his stories, he is careful to convey the meaning

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of unfamiliar terms by their context, frequently using local idioms. For example, Nawabdin greets his wife with, “Hello, my love, my chicken piece.” With regard to K. K.’s dishonest servants, the valet Rafik complains to Saleema that his employer “made these people—the fathers ate his salt, and now the sons have forgotten and are eating everything else.” In a frequently harsh world, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s practiced eye sees into the hearts of his characters with empathy and understanding. Joanne McCarthy

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 9/10 (January 1-15, 2009): 46. The Economist 390, no. 8619 (February 21, 2009): 85. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 23 (December 1, 2008): 1223 London Review of Books 31, no. 14 (July 23, 2009): 27-28. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 17 (November 5, 2009): 39-40. The New York Times Book Review, February 8, 2009, p. 16. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 46 (November 17, 2008): 37-38. The Spectator 310, no. 9429 (May 16, 2009): 36. Time 173, no. 5 (February 9, 2009): 56. The Times Literary Supplement, April 17, 2009, p. 21. The Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2009, p. W2. The Washington Post, February 15, 2009, p. BW10. World Literature Today 83, no. 4 (July/August, 2009): 68.

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IN SUCH HARD TIMES The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu Author: Wei Ying-wu (737-791) First published: Wei suchou chi, 1056, in China Translated from the Chinese by Red Pine (pen name of Bill Porter) Preface, notes, and photographs by Red Pine; map by Molly O’Halloran Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, Washington). 368 pp. $18.00 Type of work: Poetry This collection of 175 poems finally translates into English about one-third of Wei Ying-wu’s surviving poetry, whose unobtrusive beauty earned it very high esteem in imperial China In Such Hard Times finally makes available in English the acclaimed poetry of China’s celebrated Tang dynasty poet Wei Ying-wu. The excellent translation by Red Pine (the pseudonym of Bill Porter) renders Wei’s classic poetry from the eighth century in a carefully chosen language that fully echoes its direct, unobtrusive beauty. It is very accessible to contemporary English-language readers. In Such Hard Times draws its title from the fourth and last line of its first poem, “The Ninth,” which was written in the fall of 756 when Wei was just nineteen years old. “On this day of drink and depression” (the ninth day of the ninth month according to the Chinese calendar, roughly corresponding to late October), the autobiographical persona reflects on the violent end of his sheltered aristocratic youth at the imperial court. This abrupt change was brought on by the An Lushan Rebellion’s threat to imperial rule. The Tang dynasty was challenged by a variety of internal rebellions throughout the rest of the poet’s life, and Wei’s poetry often alludes not only to personal hardship but also to that of the Chinese people of the period. At the end of “The Ninth,” the persona sadly muses that “in such hard times I can’t hope to go home.” Many of Wei’s poems have a slightly melancholic undertone born from the hardships he witnessed as an age of turbulence displaced the previous period of splendor and tranquillity. Red Pine presents “The Ninth” in the same successful format that he uses for all of the 175 poems he has chosen out of Wei’s 592 surviving ones. Each poem is given a consecutive number and is printed both in English and in its Chinese original, with the Chinese characters typeset by Pristine Communications of Taipei, Taiwan. This allows a Chinese speaker or student of Chinese to compare the texts. In addition, Red Pine’s annotations provide substantial background information and analysis for each poem. Readers will quickly realize that many of Wei’s most evocative poems are person-

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ally addressed to friends, family members, or colleagues. Indicative of the time in which he Wei Ying-wu was an aristocratic wrote, all addressees of his poems are male. imperial official in China during the Standing out among them is Ts’ui Cho, who Tang dynasty. His poetry was collected married Wei’s cousin and with whom the after his death in 791 by friends and poet frequently corresponded. The two men admirers, and the earliest identifiable shared a deep friendship despite long physi- resulting collection was published in cal separation. Thus, in “Alone at Night at 1056. Prior to In Such Hard Times, only a handful of Wei’s poems were My Monastic Residence: To Secretary Ts’ui” translated into English. (poem 68), Wei confesses: “I didn’t realize the year was so late/ or living apart was so lonely.” In poem 125, Ts’ui is described as “Man of my heart standing alone/ beyond Ch’in Pass so far away.” Poetry here becomes a means to bridge geographical distance. Another favorite recipient of Wei’s poems was his friend, mentor, and protector Li Huan. When Wei ran afoul of the shifting allegiances at the embattled imperial court, Li Huan secured a good official position for Wei. In consequence, Wei’s poems express admiration for his friend. In “On Li Wu-hsi Seeing Off Secretary Li to the Western Terrace” (poem 20), the location mentioned in Wei’s title refers to the Imperial Censorate, as the translator informs readers in his note. In this elevated position, Wei writes of his friend that “he wanted to join the circling hawks” and will not forget “his junior-official friends” such as Wei himself. Indicative of the high risks involved at court, to which Wei’s image of the hawks alludes, Li Huan was eventually charged with a crime and executed after the summer of 779. Some nine years later, in one of his last poems, Wei reflects with melancholy on a visit to the deserted home of the dead old friend in “Visiting Duke Shou-ch’un’s Old Home in the Kaihua Quarter” (poem 157), “walking up the steps I felt the same respect/ but when I saw your seat my tears turned to sobs.” Clear-mindedly, the persona of Wei realizes that the past is irrecoverable and “those days won’t come again” in which they celebrated their cruelly terminated friendship. In Such Hard Times effectively presents Wei’s poems that deal with his greatest loss, the death of his beloved wife Yuan P’ing in the early fall of 776 at thirty-five. She left behind two daughters and an infant son. “Lamenting My Loss” (poem 52) is a powerful elegy that admits to personal pain and bereavement in moving words, “Like . . . wood that’s now ash/ I recall the person I lived with/ gone and not coming back.” “Grieving on the Way to Fuping” (poem 53) tells of the necessity to marshal the persona’s strength and to carry on with his life for the sake of his children. “I hear our children crying/ but a father has to go forth/ even when there’s no mother at home.” The translator includes a photo of the stone epitaph Wei Ying-wu inscribed for his wife, the only known example of the poet’s own handwriting. This highlights how much Wei treasured his wife, an attitude not common during his time. Ten years later, Wei’s poem “Leaving Putang Post Station . . . ” (poem 145) sums up his feelings as widower when “my marriage and first post are a dream. . . . A high official’s life isn’t so grand.” Despite Wei’s proven love for his wife, there does not exist a single known

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poem addressed to her, indicative again of the patriarchal feudal culture in which he lived. Wei’s early poems to friends such as Yuan Ta, a relative often referred to by his official title of Censor Yuan, show Wei’s lifelong disillusionment with public service. In “After Waiting for Censor Yuan . . . ” (poem 33), the persona ruefully remarks that “The glory of office comes with its burdens.” This sentiment of disenchantment coupled with a longing for a purely spiritual life becomes stronger in Wei’s poetry as his life progresses. In “Visiting Master Shen on West Mountain” (poem 119), the persona praises a Buddhist monk effusively, stating with admiration that “you chased the tigers out of the forest/ meditating under the trees.” Similar admiration is expressed in Wei’s poetry addressed to the Zen Buddhist teacher Heng Ts’an. In “Spending the Night in Yungyang: To Vinaya Master Ts’an” (poem 126), the persona expresses his delight at a nighttime visit by the revered teacher, “a mountain monk stopping to visit/ hanging up his lantern sleeping alone,” as chastity was a trademark of Buddhist monks. By contrast, the widowed Wei is not above the occasional visit to a brothel, where, as in the poem “For Attendant Li Tan” (poem 106), “the fading flowers still welcomed my visit,” a reference to the prostitutes in the establishment. Translator Red Pine’s selection of Wei’s poems provides readers with a full range of examples of the poet’s multifaceted attitudes toward his life. The poems addressed to a favorite cousin, Wei Tuan, show self-irony when the persona laments his fate. In “Returning East to Choukuei Village on Bathing Day: For Tuan” (poem 64), the persona states that he “no longer recognized the fields/ but since it was my day to bathe/ I traveled back to our village.” Red Pine’s valuable notes inform readers that imperial officials were given one day off after nine working days, and they often used it for a soaking bath. A similar lightheartedness of spirit is discernible in other poems such as “In Reply to Vice Director for Ceremonials Yang” (poem 116), where the persona admits that “filling out records is a waste.” Even one of Wei’s last poems, “Leaving Court After a Snowfall . . .” (poem 161) reveals a playful mood among the government officials who amuse themselves as schoolboys would, as “at Penglai Palace we shook the pine branches” to make the snow covering them fall down. Wei’s poem upon the marriage of his older daughter to his friend Yang Ling in 783 shows tremendous sincere paternal affection. Like his love for his wife, this was a sentiment not commonly revealed in Chinese courtly poetry. “Seeing Off My Daughter to the Yangs” (poem 117) reveals the depths of a father’s love for his maturing child. “Such a long day is too painful,” the persona begins, before refering to the extra burdens the death of her mother bestowed on the young girl: “you didn’t have anyone to lean on/ nor their compassion or comfort/ you yourself raised your sister.” The father acknowledges the inevitable, “this ties my heart in knots/ but I can’t keep you from your rightful journey.” It is poems such as this one that allow Wei Ying-wu to speak across the centuries to a contemporary reader. Red Pine arranges Wei’s poetry in chronological order of composition. This arrangement helps readers follow the development of Wei’s poetry and emphasizes the links between the poems and key events in the poet’s life, especially given that about

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one-third of Wei’s poems are directly addressed to his friends, family members, and colleagues at work. The book is divided into four parts, with each part reflecting different way stations in the poet’s geographically varied life. The translator also has chosen to follow the traditional Asian order of family name before personal name, hence Wei Ying-wu instead of the Western form Ying-wu Wei. He also employs the traditional Asian calculation of age, by which babies are considered to be one year old when born. For this reason, a reader must deduct one year from all ages given in the poetry to arrive at the Western calculation. Because Red Pine lived and worked in Taiwan and Hong Kong from 1972 to 1993, he uses the older Wade-Giles system for transliterating Chinese characters. On Taiwan, Wade-Giles is used instead of the internationally more common Pinyin system promoted by mainland China. Readers have to bear in mind, therefore, that personal and place names given In Such Hard Times may appear differently in other Chinese texts. For example, the poet Tu Fu and the eastern Tang capital of Loyang, are spelled Du Fu and Luoyang in Pinyin texts that readers might consult for more information on the poet or his subject matter. Overall, In Such Hard Times offers a most welcome, long overdue translation of a significant and well-chosen body of the masterful and silently beautiful poems of Tang dynasty poet Wei Ying-wu. Wei’s poems come to their true life in Red Pine’s translation. They directly speak to a reader on such issues as finding the right path in life, dealing with the loss of a loved one, celebrating friendship, and the passage into adulthood of one’s children. In Such Hard Times is a valuable anthology, with notes and a critical translator’s preface that successfully place poet and poems in the context of their time. All of Wei’s poems collected and translated in In Such Hard Times beautifully transcend the passage of centuries to powerfully reach a delighted contemporary reader. R. C. Lutz

Review Source Publishers Weekly 256, no. 24 (June 15, 2009): 46.

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IN THE PRESIDENT’S SECRET SERVICE Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect Author: Ronald Kessler (1943) Publisher: Crown Books (New York). 273 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Current affairs, history Time: 1960’s to the early twenty-first century Locale: United States A critical and anecdotal examination of the protective mission of the U.S. Secret Service, with special attention to challenges that the agency faces because of inadequate funding Principal personages: John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), U.S. president, 1961-1963 Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973), U.S. president, 1963-1969 Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994), U.S. president, 1969-1974 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 Barack Obama (1961), U.S. president, 2009-

The U.S. Secret Service is, in some ways, a paradox. Despite its suggestive name, which seems to intimate covert operations, it is not a particularly secretive agency. In fact, it is more in the public eye than the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and most other federal law-enforcement agencies. Its agents, who are best known for their role in protecting the U.S. president, are most visible during presidential elections, when whey can be seen everywhere that political candidates appear. Clad in neat, businesslike suits and wearing earphones, they hover closely around the candidates, while carefully watching for possible trouble. Because of the high visibility of the president of the United States, the president’s family, presidential candidates, and other American government leaders and foreign dignitaries who receive their protection, Secret Service agents are probably seen in public more frequently than the agents of all other major federal law-enforcement agencies combined. As a consequence, the agency itself is publicly perceived as being involved almost exclusively in presidential protection. Such, indeed, is the perception conveyed in the title of Ronald Kessler’s book, The President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They

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Protect. The reality, however, is somewhat different. The Secret Service does not exist A former Washington Post and Wall merely to protect political leaders. In fact, it Street Journal reporter, Ronald Kessler was created for altogether different reasons is the author of nearly two dozen bestmore than three decades before it formally selling books, including Inside the CIA (1992), Inside the White House (1995), added presidential protection to its tasks. The Secret Service was established in 1865 Inside Congress (1997), The Bureau to combat currency counterfeiting, which was (2002), The CIA at War (2003), and A Matter of Character: Inside the White a critical problem during the Civil War. In House of George W. Bush (2004). what may be one of the great ironies in Amer ican history, President Abraham Lincoln signed the bill creating the Secret Service on April 14, 1865—the very day on which he was fatally shot. After a brief prologue describing the Secret Service’s role in President Barack Obama’s January, 2009, inauguration day, Kessler opens his book with an account of Lincoln’s assassination and then goes on to summarize the history of the Secret Service. Up to 1865, protecting presidents received little special attention, despite the fact that Lincoln himself received many death threats. After long refusing special protection, Lincoln finally assented to having a few Washington city police officers serve as his bodyguards. In sharp contrast to modern Secret Service agents, his bodyguards were given no special training and their supervision was lax. Lincoln was shot while sitting in a private box watching a stage play, after the lone policeman assigned to guard the door to his box wandered off to a saloon. Such a situation is unimaginable today, when highly trained Secret Service agents will not let anyone near a president without a careful screening and a magnetometer scanning. After Lincoln was killed, Americans demanded better protection of their presidents, but little was done until 1901, when presidential protection became a formal Secret Service responsibility. By then, two more presidents, James A. Garfield and William McKinley, had been assassinated, and the need for protecting presidents could no longer be ignored. Meanwhile, the responsibilities of the Secret Service had grown greatly since its creation four decades earlier. Thanks to the agency’s success in combating counterfeiting, Congress had authorized it to investigate other forms of fraud against the government. Since 1901, the Secret Service’s responsibilities for both protective services and fraud investigation have grown immensely. As the specific tasks of the agency’s individual offices and agents may vary radically from day to day, it is difficult to pinpoint how the agency’s resources are divided. Nevertheless, it is probably not an exaggeration to say that, by the early twenty-first century, the agency was still directing more of its resources into fraud investigations than into protective duties. Kessler acknowledges the primacy of the Secret Service’s fraud investigation work, but the primary focus throughout his book is on the agency’s protective work, particularly that relating to the presidency. He does, however, frequently mention the extent to which the agency’s growing fraud-investigation workload has strained its ability to do its protective work, which has also expanded to include protection of

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presidential families, vice presidents and their families, presidential candidates, retired presidents and vice presidents and their families, visiting foreign dignitaries, and whomever else a president wishes to have protected. At any given moment, each of these persons is protected by at least three or four agents (many more for presidents), and this figure grows exponentially when round-the-clock, seven-day-a-week schedules are factored in and the special complications of travel and public events are considered. The 2008 presidential campaigns brought unprecedented attention to the Secret Service. The campaigns themselves drew an extraordinary amount of public attention, which was accentuated by the fact that Barack Obama, the eventual winner of the election, is an African American. In the back of the minds of almost everyone— including government leaders—was the fear that Obama might become the target of racist hate groups who could not abide having a black president. Indeed, Obama’s unique peril was great enough for him to be accorded Secret Service protection well before he won his party’s nomination, and threats against the president quadrupled after he took office. Increased public interest in how presidents are protected makes publication of Kessler’s book very timely. However, although public awareness of the Secret Service has risen, public understanding of the agency does not run very deep. Most Americans know the Secret Service through watching presidents and political candidates on television, reading occasional news stories about security breaches—such as the couple who crashed a White House party in November, 2009—and seeing Hollywood films about the Secret Service that tend to be either thrillers about assassination plots or light comedies about presidential children growing restless under the strain of White House restrictions and Secret Service protection. Despite public interest in the Secret Service, so few books have been published about it that Kessler’s book is a welcome addition to the literature. While his book makes no pretense of being a comprehensive examination of the modern Secret Service, it offers a remarkably intimate account of what agents have experienced over the past half century. As a veteran journalist with extensive connections in the federal government, Kessler brings to his book a unique access to Secret Service officials and agents. After publishing generally positive books about the George W. Bush administration, the CIA, and other federal agencies, Kessler won the confidence of the director of the Secret Service, Mark Sullivan, who approved his proposal to write a book about the agency. With the director’s official blessing of the book a matter of public record, more than one hundred former and current agents granted Kessler interviews. Perhaps the most secretive thing about the Secret Service has been its longstanding policy that its agents should never publicly reveal what they see and hear while on protective duty. Protectees living under the constant observation of Secret Service agents—particularly when they are traveling—tend to become so inured to having agents clustering around that they often behave as if the agents are not present. The agents, in turn, often see and hear things that they never reveal to the outside world. Never, that is, until now. To most readers, the chief interest of In the President’s Secret Service will be not


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what the book reveals about the Secret Service itself but what it reveals about recent U.S. presidents. Thanks to the openness of scores of past and present agents—many of whom Kessler names—this book is a rich and often startling trove of anecdotal material. The book’s prologue sums up what readers can expect: Because Secret Service agents are sworn to secrecy, voters rarely know what their presidents, vice presidents, presidential candidates, and Cabinet officers are really like. If they did, says a former Secret Service agent, “They would scream.”

If most of the anecdotes recounted in In the President’s Secret Service are true, one might well ask who should be screaming: readers who are shocked by what they learn about their political leaders, political leaders who will no longer trust the agents protecting them to respect their privacy, or Secret Service agents who fear that their future relations with protectees have been compromised by the public revelations of fellow agents? A theme running throughout Kessler’s book is the mounting problems that the Secret Service faces as a result of mismanagement and insufficient budgeting. His prologue ends with this warning: Pledged to take a bullet for the president, agents are at constant risk. Yet the Secret Service’s own practices magnify the dangers to the agents, the president, the vice president and others they protect. These lapses could lead to an assassination.

Because of the importance of protecting national leaders, Kessler’s warning should not be dismissed altogether, but within the context of his book, it might be taken with a grain of salt. The book is anything but a rigorous analysis of the role of the Secret Service in national security. Its real subject—as its subtitle implies—is how presidents and other leaders behave in private. Judging by the stories the book tells, voters may truly have reason to scream. Enough is already known about President John F. Kennedy’s sexual escapades to leave little room for surprises, but Kessler’s informants provide several risqué details, such as stories about Kennedy’s sexual encounters with Marilyn Monroe in a loft above the Justice Department office of his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. More startling, perhaps, are stories about Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, whom Secret Service agents described as “uncouth, nasty, and often drunk.” Like Kennedy, Johnson was known for having affairs with female staff members. On one occasion, Lady Bird Johnson caught him having sex with a secretary in the Oval Office. Furious with Secret Service agents for not warning him of his wife’s approach, Johnson had a buzzer system installed in the White House so agents could signal him when his wife was approaching. Many of Kessler’s anecdotes about Johnson are unsavory. Among modern presidents, Johnson was unusual in not being shy about being seen drunk. He had no inhibitions about dropping his pants in front of strangers, and he occasionally held press conferences while sitting on the toilet. Kessler’s anecdotes about Richard Nixon tend to be on the pathetic side. They reinforce Nixon’s image as a tormented loner, prone to drink privately when depressed

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and occasionally to engage in bizarre behavior, such as sampling dog biscuits. Gerald Ford comes off comparatively well, with the main criticism against him being that he was an incredible cheapskate. The most significant revelations in Kessler’s book may be those concerning Jimmy Carter, whom Secret Service agents called the “least likeable” president. In contrast to Carter’s public image as a warm, caring leader, he was known for the contempt with which he treated his underlings. One agent, for example, said that during his three and a half years on Carter’s protective detail—including seven months as his driver—Carter never spoke to him. Carter was also known for engaging in ruses to enhance his public image, such as carrying his own luggage while not letting on that his bags were empty. To give the impression that he worked long hours, he often went to his office as early as 5:00 a.m., only to close his door so he could go back to sleep. In public, Carter was all smiles for cameras, but within the White House, he was mean-spirited, controlling, and terrified his staff. He was also not above violent behavior. On one occasion when he was staying in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, agents saw him chasing a dog with a bow saw, trying to kill it because it had eaten his pet cat’s food. Many anecdotes in Kessler’s book are disturbing for what they suggest about the moral character of American presidents, but others are amusing. For example, Secret Service agents regarded Nixon’s son-in-law David Eisenhower as extraordinarily “clueless.” Eisenhower once asked an agent if he understood why the electric light on the garage door opener he had been using for two years never went on. The agent pointed out to him that there was no lightbulb in the opener’s socket. On another occasion, Eisenhower interrupted a long auto trip when his car broke down. After having the car towed to a dealership for repairs, he spent the night in a motel. The next morning he learned the car’s problem: It had run out of gas. The president and First Lady who emerge from this book most favorably are George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush, who were clearly devoted to each other and who consistently went out of their way to show consideration for Secret Service agents and other underlings who worked for them. By contrast, Bill and Hillary Clinton were known for treating Secret Service agents quite differently, particularly after Clinton left office. Whereas Hillary has tended to treat agents and underlings dismissively, Bill has generally gone out of his way to show them consideration. One agent offered an explanation of the former president’s generosity: “I think he realizes once he’s out of office, we’re pretty much all he’s got . . . ” One indication of the public impact of Kessler’s book is the amount of attention it has received on Amazon.com, an online book-selling site on which readers can post reviews. By mid-January, 2010—barely five months after the book’s official publication date—185 readers had taken the trouble to post reviews of the book. That may seem a minuscule number compared to reader responses to J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, but it is a large number within the narrow world of books about government agencies. More to the point, it is more than six times greater than the twentyeight customer reviews posted for the two editions of Philip H. Melanson and Peter F. Stevens’s The Secret Service: The Hidden History of an Enigmatic Agency (2002,


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2005), a similar but arguably superior book. even though the latter was originally published seven years earlier. Whatever the ultimate merits of Kessler’s book, it will clearly make a mark in public perceptions of the Secret Service. R. Kent Rasmussen

Review Source Library Journal 134, no. 20 (December 15, 2009): 70.

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INHERENT VICE Author: Thomas Pynchon (1937) Publisher: Penguin (New York). 370 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1970 Locale: Southern California In Pynchon’s latest novel, a drug-abusing private investigator involved in a complex murder-kidnap plot traverses Southern California discovering plots and corruption everywhere he goes Principal characters: Larry “Doc” Sportello, a stoned surfer and private investigator who becomes embroiled in a case of abduction and murder Shasta Fay Hepworth, Sportello’s ex-girlfriend, a marginally successful actress and the mistress of Mickey Wolfmann Mickey Wolfmann, a real-estate mogul with connections to organized crime, renegade bikers, and political influence Lieutenant Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, a Los Angeles police detective and occasional spokesman for Wolfmann’s business ventures

Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice begins when Shasta Fay Hepworth arrives at the Gordito Beach residence of her former boyfriend, private investigator Doc Sportello. She persuades Sportello to save her lover, Mickey Wolfmann, from a plot to kidnap him and install him in a sanitarium. As Sportello begins his investigation of Wolfmann, an influential real-estate developer with connections to both criminal and police sources, Sportello is knocked unconscious and awakens to discover that one of Wolfmann’s bodyguards has been murdered and Sportello is the prime suspect. After his lawyer secures his release from jail, Sportello is contacted by Hope Harlingen, the widow of a saxophone player in a local surf band, who asks him to investigate her husband’s suspicious drug overdose, and by Black Nationalist Kahlil Tariq, who is seeking an ex-convict who owes him money. A massage parlor attendant warns Sportello to beware of the Golden Fang and tells him that Coy Harlingen, the saxophone player, is not really deceased but is also looking for the private eye. A pair of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents then detain Sportello as part of an investigation of Black Nationalists, who they believe have kidnapped Wolfmann. Soon, Sportello’s investigations spread in all directions, and the mystery of the Golden Fang deepens. Sportello wanders through Los Angeles and local beach communities, has random sexual encounters with various women, and ingests one drug after another. Before long, he discovers a counterfeiting ring, anonymous telephone threats are made to his parents, Wolfmann and Hepworth disappear, and new theo-

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ries surface about the bodyguard’s killing. He eventually discovers that the saxophonist is Thomas Pynchon, one of contemporary being held against his will in a drug rehabili- American letters’ most challenging and tation center and that the gang that murdered important writers, is author of V. the bodyguard is actually a militia financed (1963); The Crying of Lot 49 (1966); by the police department to do its dirty work. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), which won Sportello becomes a suspect in a second mur- the National Book Award; Slow der, this time of a dentist he interviewed, and Learner (1984); Vineland (1990); Mason and Dixon (1997); and Against at every turn he is rousted by police detective the Day (2006). In 1989, he was Bigfoot Bjornsen, who pressures Sportello to awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. provide him with information. Following yet another request to find a missing person, Sportello heads to a North Las Vegas casino and spies two FBI agents escorting Wolfmann off the premises. He further discovers that the developer has begun building a free-housing site in the desert, has redirected his assets into restoring the dilapidated casino, and has returned to his wife. Back at the beach, Sportello learns of a loan shark, Adrian Prussia, who murders adversaries with police cooperation and is also the killer of Bjornsen’s former partner. When Sportello investigates this new lead, he is abducted and drugged. He escapes, kills Prussia, and is then rescued by Bjornsen, who plants heroin in Sportello’s car to incur the wrath of drug dealers. After negotiating a return of the drugs, Sportello secures his parents’ and the saxophone player’s safety, and the novel ends with a few mysteries solved but many more still unresolved. As this brief summary indicates, Thomas Pynchon has created another intricate, byzantine plot replete with twists, blind alleys, and often-inconclusive conclusions. Whether the plot complications result from the author’s affection for convoluted structures or from the conventions demanded by detective fiction is a moot point: In the detective story, Pynchon finds a perfect structure for his own fictional predilections, which typically involve plots nestled within scores of other plots that may or may not be connected. In many respects, Inherent Vice is the fitting culmination of Pynchon’s tendency, in nearly all his other six novels, to involve characters in mysteries that force them to venture into an often-threatening world, decipher seemingly arcane clues, and arrive at a condition of precarious equipoise. An argument can be made that this novel’s twisted plot is simply the product of Sportello’s hopelessly twisted and drug-addled brain. By all accounts, Sportello is a generally lazy, irresponsible slacker who prefers to spend time with other misfits in a drugged haze. His career, what there is of it, exists largely as an afterthought. However, as enticing as this explanation may seem, it ignores Pynchon’s more serious metaphysical inclinations to see life, even at its most banal, as a condition of deep confusion and irresolvable puzzles. Pynchon consistently conjectures about parallel worlds, temporal dislocation, and a complexity to existence that is hidden under the veils of social orthodoxy and convention. What any summary of a Pynchon novel cannot convey is the bevy of eccentric and oddball characters that people his fiction. Pynchon has always reveled in presenting

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characters who exist on society’s fringes and fritter away time with absurd obsessions. Doc Sportello is a perfect case in point, being a bright man who has squandered his intellect with too many drugs, bad fast food, and television. Bigfoot Bjornsen, his adversary and professional critic, is a cynical cop who works as a shill for a real-estate mogul and turns over the messy labor of detection to a private investigator he would happily frame and send to prison. Mickey Wolfmann is a conniving real-estate speculator, a possibly mob-connected criminal, and an ethically reformed businessman who wants to create free housing for the needy and return all his ill-gotten profits as a result of an attack of conscience. As he has in each of his other fictions, Pynchon returns to a practice that has amused his fans and exasperated scholars. His characters sport an assemblage of silly names—Sauncho Smilax, Jason Velveeta, Dr. Buddy Tubeside, FBI agents Flatweed and Borderline, Zigzag Twong, Trillium Fortnight, and Denis (“whose name everybody pronounced to rhyme with ‘penis’”). Such names, seemingly chosen for comic effect, defy serious significance, though readers have often attempted to find some logic in these cognomen. Most likely, Pynchon is simply rebelling against the traditional practice of creating either realistic names or identifications that suggest some essence of the character. As also occurs in Pynchon’s other novels, characters flit in and out of the narrative, sometimes disappearing for scores of pages, only to reappear later, sometimes vanishing from the text altogether. As often as they advance the plot, deepen the mystery, or add some local color, they just as often have no apparent purpose other than to crowd the story with an amusing density and act as postmodern alternatives to Victorian fictions’ sense of social complexity. One of the faults of Inherent Vice, however, arises from the sheer abundance of its characters: The novel lacks much indication of who is most important and why, and its character overload will remind fans of the author’s endless teasing in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), where the protagonist, Oedipa Maas, is overwhelmed by experiences that portend too much meaning and too little pattern. The characteristic Pynchon theme of entropy also finds expression here. The author sees entropy as the condition in the universe through which originality and energy gradually dissipate and create an atmosphere of lifelessness and conformity. The Crying of Lot 49 also introduces the theory of communicative entropy, a condition whereby increases in information create only confusion, and in Inherent Vice not only is there deliberate verbal obfuscation but also characters frequently speak at crosspurposes to one another. Sportello often cannot comprehend what others tell him, and his mind races to follow clues and decipher explanations as events chaotically crowd together. The fact that Pynchon returns once more in this novel to the late 1960’s underscores his conviction that a period of such considerable social, political, and economic potential dissolved into muddle and complacency in the 1970’s. Hovering over much of the novel’s atmosphere are the Manson killings, which are referred to repeatedly. The message seems to be that Sportello’s stoner acceptance and laissez-faire attitude have devolved into a culture of homicide and exploitation.

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When Wolfmann announces that he intends to donate all his guilt-inducing wealth to the disadvantaged, he is abducted by the FBI, deprogrammed, and liberated only once he returns to his former life. Another analogue for the novel’s attitude about the United States and its decline into chaos and insensitivity comes in the various discussions characters have about Lemuria, an island believed to have existed in the Pacific at roughly the same time as Atlantis and that disappeared in the same cataclysm as that island. Lemurians believe the island continent was an eden of peace and tolerance destroyed by scientific rationalism. Another of Pynchon’s long-standing obsessions is the belief that conspiracies of all types abound and that hidden forces control individual lives and frustrate originality and freedom. The line between coincidence or misapprehension and conspiracy is thin, and Sportello constantly wonders if he has stumbled on some intricate plot, is simply too stoned, or has meandered into a happenstance that appears to reveal hidden connections. The best example of a conspiracy that may be nothing more than urban legend is the Golden Fang. Doc is warned to beware of the Fang in a cryptic note, but when he tries to discern its meaning, he discovers one confusing explanation after another. The Fang is either a dope-smuggling schooner, an office complex, a drug rehabilitation center for the wealthy, a drug cartel, or a tax dodge for a group of dentists. As a result of the Golden Fang, corrupt cops and FBI agents, and the possibility of more Mansonites lurking in the shadows, Sportello and a number of the characters experience a free-floating paranoia. He initially regards paranoia as “a tool of the trade, it points you in directions you might not have seen to go.” However as the case progresses and the plots within plots grow more dense, he wonders if all the disparate threads of the investigation are actually connected and becomes increasingly uneasy: “Doc felt a suspicion growing, paranoid as the rapid heartbeat of a midnight awakening.” For Pynchon, the old adage holds true, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” Inherent Vice is an amusing, often clever pastiche of Raymond Chandler and the Coen Brothers’ film The Big Lebowski (1998), but in the end it is not terribly original. Rumor has it that the novel has been optioned for a film production, and certainly of any of Pynchon’s books this seems the most accessible to a mass audience. While Pynchon still retains his ability to capture the range of high and low culture and write devilishly allusive prose, however, this is far from his best work. David W. Madden

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 21 (July 1, 2009): 7. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 13 (July 1, 2009): 679. Library Journal 134, no. 13 (August 1, 2009): 74. London Review of Books 31, no. 17 (September 10, 2009): 9-10. New Statesman 138, no. 4960 (August 3, 2009): 42-43.

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The New York Review of Books, September 24, 2009, 70-71. The New York Times, August 4, 2009, p. 1. The New York Times Book Review, August 23, 2009, p. 9. The New Yorker 85, no. 23 (August 3, 2009): 74-75. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 27 (July 6, 2009): 38. Rolling Stone, August 6, 2009, p. 38-39. Time 174, no. 6 (August 17, 2009): 60. The Times Literary Supplement, August 7, 2009, p. 22. The Wall Street Journal, July 31, 2009, p. W2.

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INSIDE THE STALIN ARCHIVES Discovering the New Russia Author: Jonathan Brent Publisher: Atlas (New York). 304 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Current affairs, history, memoir Time: January, 1992, to October, 2007 Locale: Moscow, Russia A memoir of Brent’s work with Russian archivists to set up the Annals of Communism series for Yale University Press combined with observations about both the archival contents and the deteriorating condition of Russia Principal personages: Jonathan Brent, the author, the editorial director of Yale University Press Joseph Stalin, Soviet premier, 1941-1953 Jeffrey Burds, an American historian in Moscow, Brent’s intermediary with the Russian archivists Nikolai, a historian at Russian State University for the Humanities, intermediary with archivists on Brent’s first visit to Moscow in January, 1992 Mariana, a widow, the mother of a friend of Burds; Brent stayed at her apartment on his first visit to Moscow Fridrikh Firsov, the head of publications of the Comintern archives, involved in access negotiations Vladimir Kozlov, the deputy director of the Federal Archival Service of Russia, involved in access negotiations Vladimir Naumov, a Russian archivist and Annals of Communism coauthor Oleg Naumov, the director of the Central Party Archive, son of Vladimir, and Annals of Communism coauthor Alexander Yakovlev, a Russian reformer and supporter of opening archives

Jonathan Brent’s memoir Inside the Stalin Archives is divided into two main parts. In the first, he discusses his first trip to Moscow to negotiate access to various Soviet archives for the planned Annals of Communism series for Yale University Press. The Boris Yeltsin government had officially opened all these archives to scholars, both Russian and foreign, but making that access a reality required quite a bit of negotiation. In the memoir’s second part, Brent discusses various later trips, though in less detail. In particular, only in the first part does he provide significant coverage of his time away from the negotiations. Brent went to Moscow in January, 1992, to arrange scholarly access to various Soviet and Communist Party archives for the purpose of producing books for Yale

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University Press. These books were to be coauthored by Russian scholars, who would receive equal pay. The archivists who helped locate the documents would also be paid for their work. Yale wanted exclusive rights to publish outside Russia; there would be no restrictions on publication within Russia. Money was always a concern; only a few of the twenty Annals of Communism volumes published so far have been popular sellers, so the project has always depended heavily on donations. The desire for exclusive non-Russian rights (to prevent being upstaged by other publishers) was perhaps the most difficult negotiating point. Fortunately, the Russian archivists were well aware that Yale University Press had a good reputation for scholarship. Brent first visited the Central Party Archive, where even taking the elevator was a bit of an adventure: He wanted to go to the third floor, and the first three floors were listed as 2, 2, 3. At the archive, Brent met Fridrikh Firsov and Vladimir Kozlov, who had recently moved from the Central Party Archive to the Federal Archive Service. Kozlov took Brent to his own archive and, having to attend another meeting, left him with Oleg Naumov. At this point, Brent explained his primary interests in the archives: materials on the state terror of the 1930’s, the church and its role in the revolution, the Communist International (Comintern) and its role in the oppression of the 1930’s, and Soviet daily life in the 1920’s and 1930’s as revealed by the letters of peasants and workers. On his first trip, Brent stayed with a general’s widow named Mariana. Though she lived in the Moscow equivalent of an upscale apartment, her quality of life was wretched even by working-class American standards. In particular, the apartment often seemed about to fall apart, though it never quite did. The food generally was merely edible; Brent reports eating cookies that were nearly tasteless. (He also got them in a restaurant.) Perhaps not surprising, his visits were accompanied with gifts of American cigarettes, liquor, biscuits, salami, and chocolates, which represented a quality of goods not available in 1992 to ordinary Russians. In his first meeting with Firsov and Kozlov, he gave the latter a package of Winstons in exchange for a package of Russian cigarettes, a carefully choreographed transaction that reads as though two spies were meeting. The analogy is appropriate, as many influential Russians disliked opening the archives to foreigners. Brent’s first trip to Russia lasted several days, and he was able to see some archival material, including material on the last days of Czar Nicholas II, such as a diary kept by Czarina Alexandra. Seeing this material was an ironic experience for Brent: In 1972, he had an argument with his girlfriend because he considered the executions of the czar’s family members (even those of the children) justified by their crimes. Revolution, he argued, has no room for pity. Presumably, he later came to realize the error in this judgment. Firsov also showed Brent documents on the Comintern and its role in Soviet espionage (which became the subject of one of the first Annals of Communism books).

Jonathan Brent is the editorial director of Yale University Press and founded its Annals of Communism series. He teaches at Bard College, writes for a number of magazines, and coauthored Stalin’s Last Crime with Vladimir Naumov in 2004.

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Brent returned to Moscow in July, 1992, to finalize the contract. In doing so, he chose not to use the suggested contract written by a lawyer that Yale University Press had consulted, believing its conditions were too favorable to Yale for the Russians to accept. After completing his negotiations successfully, out of curiosity he showed the contract to Oleg Naumov, who confirmed that it would have broken their trust and thereby stopped the project in its tracks. The Russians soon agreed to the contract, but then later in 1992 they began to back off and call for some new negotiations. Brent was very concerned that this might mean an end to the project, but he was able to resolve matters on his third trip, in January, 1993. On this occasion, he noted the problems that resulted from differences in meanings between English and Russian. Many words have different multiple meanings and thus cannot be precisely translated; thus, the Russian rezolyutsiya can mean “resolution,” but also “added instructions.” Despite such problems, Brent was able to finalize matters without significant changes in the terms of the agreement. From then on, his Moscow trips involved specific research topics. Brent makes many interesting observations on Soviet archival materials. For example, the common view is that the December, 1934, assassination of Sergei Kirov (Leningrad Communist Party chief and a Politburo member) caused the Great Purge, in which Joseph Stalin solidfied his dictatorial power through widespread campaigns of political repression. (There remain suspicions that Stalin was himself responsible for Kirov’s assassination, but Brent never managed to resolve these suspicions from his own archival studies.) Brent looks at the number of arrests, particularly for counterrevolutionary crimes, made during the 1930’s. These arrests numbered 283,029 in 1933, and Brent points out that there was no significant increase in their annual rate until 1937, when 779,056 people were arrested and most of them were shot. He also analyzes the trial and execution of writer Isaac Babel in 1939. He seeks to determine why Babel was shot while his fellow writer (and later World War II propagandist) Ilya Ehrenburg was not even arrested, despite being implicated in Babel’s confession. He also researches why Babel’s interrogators were interested in his possible espionage for the British, rather than the Nazis. In the latter case, he thinks their interest foreshadowed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact made later that year, as it seems to indicate that Stalin was already considering the possibility of such a pact with Germany. Brent sought information on many specific topics. He tried to get information on the arrest and execution of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat famed as the savior of thousands of Hungarian Jews in 1944, but without much success. As a writer, Brent was also interested in the large number of cultural figures purged during the Stalin era. He devotes three pages to a list of writers, poets, critics, musicians, playwrights, scholars, and others purged by Stalin (most of them shot), and he points out that even that lengthy list is incomplete. He quotes some interesting discussions between Stalin and film director Sergei Eisenstein (not one of those purged) about Eisenstein’s film about Czar Ivan IV (commonly known as Ivan the Terrible). Stalin saw Ivan as a great autocrat who opposed the aristocracy and tried to centralize government but failed to complete the job because of a fatal deficiency—he possessed a conscience.

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The personality of Stalin was at the heart of the long era chronicled by Brent, and Brent devotes three chapters to what the archives reveal about him. He starts with a discusion with reformer Alexander Yakovlev, including the problem of the Soviet system’s reliance on instilling fear in the population (making it literally as well as figuratively a terror state). Yakovlev saw this fear in the current state as well, though not to the same degree. Stalin, however monstrous, was a genuine theoretician of communism who no doubt believed that what he was doing was best for the country as a whole (an attitude helped by his total lack of regard for individuals). Among the archives are the books Stalin read—which are heavy on communist polemics that the dictator annotated extensively. Also of interest is Stalin telling his son that Stalin the autocrat and national symbol had subsumed Stalin the person. Another important point is that Stalin, when he talked about selfless devotion to the state (and thus to the party that controlled it and to the autocrat who ran the party and the state), he meant it literally. When Vyacheslav Molotov, supreme toady and sometime premier of the Soviet Union, chose to abstain in a vote on his wife’s application to join the Communist Party, Stalin was displeased. This may be why, several years later, Molotov finally began to fall from favor (and might well have been purged had Stalin lived longer). To Stalin, the totally united state should be everything; no personal ties of any sort should rank above it, nor should any independent thought mar its unity. This is one reason for his suspicion of ethnic minorities (especially Jews). Although the purpose of Brent’s Russian trips was to arrange for scholarly access to the archives of the old Soviet state (and to do some research himself), Brent also uses his accounts of his various trips to discuss life in modern Russia, at least in its capital and largest city. One constant that he reports is anti-Semitism. As the descendant of Ukrainian Jews from Zhitomir and Lvov whose family name was originally Brodsky, Brent naturally is very concerned about this anti-Semitism. On his first visit, he found a crude anti-Semitic flyer, an experience he would repeat many times. On another trip, he discussed the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family and learned that the Russian Orthodox Church was delaying declaring him a saint until they established his cause of death. One possibility it was seriously considering was that his death was a Jewish ritual murder to obtain blood to make matzohs for Passover. (The fact that the czar was murdered a few months after Passover was apparently irrelevant.) Nor was this anything new; Stalin had his anti-Semitic moments and in fact was preparing a pogrom when he died (this plan, the Doctors’ Plot, is the subject of Brent’s own Annals of Communism volume). Brent also discusses scenes in Isaac Babel’s “Red Cavalry” (which appeared in his 1960 Collected Stories) portraying the plight of Jews during the Russian Civil War. (Babel, executed by Stalin in 1939, was himself Jewish, but his portrayals of his fellows Jews apparently were hardly positive.) For that matter, one of his contacts (Fridrikh Firsov) was Jewish, and at times this affected what he was free to say in public about his researches. Regimes come and go, but some things never change. Russia during the Stalin era was a black hole for both freedom and democracy, but

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in the 1990’s many hoped that the situation would change. Even then, however, people felt that the police listened to everything. Yakovlev supported reporting the contents of the archives, particularly in Russia, hoping that revealing their contents would help inoculate the country against a resumption of authoritarian rule. This strategy failed: On a later visit, Brent met an unnamed elderly historian who mentioned having his pension threatened for daring to report honestly that Stalin took over Lithuania the year before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Those who favored authoritarianism, revered Stalin, or simply disliked revealing national secrets opposed opening the archives. Corruption was another constant. Brent’s Russian contacts assumed their taxes were almost entirely wasted. Once, a department store was forcibly closed to the public for a Russian VIP’s visit. Thus, Brent’s firsthand reports on life in contemporary Russia help relate the present to the events of the past recorded in the Soviet archives he helped make available to Western scholars. Timothy Lane

Review Sources Foreign Affairs 88, no. 5 (September/October, 2009): 159. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 17 (September 1, 2008): 923. Library Journal 133, no. 18 (November 1, 2008): 77-85. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 7 (April 30, 2009): 25-28. The New York Times Book Review, January 25, 2009, p. 14. The Times Literary Supplement, July 24, 2009, p. 8. The Wall Street Journal, December 2, 2008, p. A17.

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INVISIBLE Author: Paul Auster (1947) Publisher: Henry Holt (New York). 320 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1967; 2002; 2007-2008 Locale: New York City; Oakland, California; Paris, France; Quillia, a small island in the West Indies A successful novelist becomes fascinated with a manuscript left behind by a dead college classmate that seems to be a puzzling mixture of memoir and fiction Principal characters: Adam Walker, a Columbia University student who aspires to be a poet but ends up becoming a lawyer Gwyn Walker Tedesco, Adam’s sister Rudolf Born, a French professor of international relations Margot Jouffroy, Born’s younger consort Hélène Juin, Born’s fiancée, a speech pathologist whose husband has been rendered comatose Cécile Juin, Hélène’s daughter, who becomes a literary scholar Cedric Williams, an eighteen-year-old would-be mugger stabbed by Born Rebecca, Walker’s African American stepdaughter James Freeman, a successful novelist, Adam’s classmate

In fourteen novels as well as collected poems and essays, Paul Auster has aspired to give artistic form to meditations on personal identity and the art that might embody them. He is a virtuoso of metafiction, often organized as stories-within-stories that reflect upon themselves and one another. In his fifteenth novel, Invisible, Auster has fashioned a consummate instrument of existential mystery and literary reflexivity. In four bravura sections, the novel ponders the fate of Adam Walker, a student at Columbia University whose life is transformed by Rudolf Born, a charismatic but enigmatic professor from France. An aspiring poet, Walker meets Born at a party in 1967, and the sophisticated stranger soon offers to finance a literary magazine that Walker would edit. Before departing for a brief return to Europe, Born also appears to encourage the young man to take his place in bed beside his lover, Margot Jouffroy. Walker is disturbed by Born’s nihilistic celebration of violence. Human beings were animals, he said, and soft-minded aesthetes like myself were no better than children, diverting ourselves with hairsplitting philosophies of art and literature to avoid confronting the essential truth of the world.

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That essential truth, according to Born, is “the darkness inside us.” When Born stabs and apparently kills Cedric Williams, a mugger who accosts them one evening, Walker is appalled and breaks with his would-be mentor. James Freeman, a successful novelist, learns about these events in the early twenty-first century by reading a manuscript sent to him by Walker, whom he has not heard from since both were students at Columbia almost forty years before. Now a lawyer in Oakland, Walker is dying of leukemia, and he asks Paul Auster is a novelist, poet, essayist, for Freeman’s professional advice about the translator, editor, and filmmaker. His memoir, titled 1967, that he is struggling to novels include The New York Trilogy complete. Freeman encourages Walker to (1987), The Music of Chance (1990), keep writing and to send him the second chap- The Book of Illusions (2002), and The ter. He does, and it turns out to be a lyri- Brooklyn Follies (2005). In 2006, he cal evocation of the months after Walker’s was inducted into the American falling-out with Born. It is set during the sum- Academy of Arts and Letters. mer of 1967, when Walker has a job shelving books at Columbia’s Butler Library. He shares an apartment with his sister Gwyn, who is beginning graduate school in the fall. The chapter recounts how, for thirty-five consecutive days, until his departure to study in Paris, brother and sister engaged in passionate incest. After reading the first two chapters, Freeman travels to California but arrives at Walker’s house in Oakland three days after the funeral of his old college classmate. However, obeying his request, Walker’s stepdaughter Rebecca hands the novelist the notes Walker left behind for the third chapter of 1967. The notes recount Walker’s experiences in Paris during the fall of that year. Making contact with Born again, he plots retribution for the murder of Cedric Williams. He learns that Born plans to marry Hélène Juin, whose husband, Born’s friend, has been incapacitated by an irreversible coma. Walker ingratiates himself with Hélène’s eighteenyear-old daughter, Cécile, and begins undermining Born’s hopes of marrying Hélène. He does not count on Born’s cunning and his connections with French espionage services. After reading the notes for Walker’s third chapter, Freeman contacts Walker’s sister, Gwyn, who denies that any incest occurred between them. During a trip to Paris, he also tracks down Cécile Juin, now a doughty literary scholar. Cécile lets Freeman read entries from her diary that constitute part 4 of Invisible. Cécile’s journal tells how in 2002, after losing contact for many years, she suddenly received a letter from Born. Living alone on a Caribbean island called Quillia, he invited her to visit. When she did, she was dismayed by Born’s bizarre behavior and fled. In four sections spanning forty years, Invisible thus makes use of three narrators: Freeman, Walker, and Cécile. The first three sections are told, successively,

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in the first person, the second person, and the third person, as though the truth cannot be apprehended through a unitary perspective. What one ought to conclude about Adam Walker and Rudolf Born is prismatic, a matter of multiple, fragmented points of view. The story that emerges is fraught with unlikely coincidences, such as the fact that Walker ends up marrying an African American woman, Sandra Williams, whose last name is the same as that of Cedric Williams, whose killing forever alters Walker’s life. The possibility that Born, who behaved dishonorably during France’s attempt to quell rebellion in Algeria, might be a government spy remains unresolved. Gwyn’s categorical, and credible, denial that she engaged in incest with her brother is one of several contradictions in the text. Like the novel’s readers, Freeman is faced with trying to make sense of it all. He must also confront his own responsibility to his dead classmate: He now possesses the only copy of Walker’s manuscript and wonders whether he should destroy it, publish it as is, or transform it into a novel. Early in the proceedings, describing his first encounter with Rudolf Born and Margot Jouffroy, Adam Walker recalls that “the longer I talked to them, the more unreal they seemed to become—as if they were imaginary characters in a story that was taking place in my head.” There is a spectral quality to the novel’s characters, including Walker himself. After reading part 1, which is written in the first person, Freeman advises Walker that he might need more distance from the material and suggests switching to the third person, as Freeman himself has done in one of his own books: “By writing about myself in the first person, I had smothered myself and made myself invisible, had made it impossible for me to find the thing I was looking for,” the novelist explains. I needed to separate myself from myself, to step back and carve out some space between myself and my subject (which was myself), and therefore I returned to the beginning of Part Two and began writing it in the third person. I became He, and the distance created by that small shift allowed me to finish the book.

In fact, Walker switches from first-person narration in his part 1 to second-person narration in part 2, only to adopt the third-person “he” in part 3. Although Freeman recommends abandoning the first-person perspective in order to acquire greater objectivity, Walker’s movement from first to second to third person seems not so much to endow his account with greater objectivity as to lay bare its manner of construction, thereby emphasizing its artificiality and undermining any claim it might make to objective truth. Walker’s presence is felt throughout, but his strategy of moving away from the use of “I” does not so much render him invisible, as the title of Auster’s novel suggests, as indefinable. Who exactly Adam Walker was is impossible to pin down. Although he is present all over its pages, the subject of this book is hiding in plain sight. Because Walker’s manuscript seems either scandalously revealing or else patently false, Freeman at first considers it unpublishable. However, Gwyn offers this suggestion: “You change the names of the people and the places, you add or subtract any ma-

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terial you see fit, and then you publish the book under your own name.” Though he has qualms about committing what amounts to plagiarism by passing off someone else’s book as his own or else taking such liberties with the original text that he is betraying a dying man’s trust, Freeman proceeds to follow “Gwyn”’s advice. He informs readers: Adam Walker is not Adam Walker. Gwyn Walker Tedesco is not Gwyn Walker Tedesco. Margot Jouffroy is not Margot Jouffroy. Hélène and Cécile Juin are not Hélène and Cécile Juin. Cedric Williams is not Cedric Williams. Sandra Williams is not Sandra Williams, and her daughter, Rebecca, is not Rebecca. Not even Born is Born.

Except for Paris, Freeman admits, all of the place names have been changed, along with other significant details of the story. What readers are left with following this revelation is a fictional novelist (perhaps loosely and cunningly based on the real novelist, Paul Auster, who also attended Columbia University forty years ago) who exposes the treacherous nature of his own literary contrivances. The fictional novelist Freeman’s confession that he has manipulated the narrative resembles the conclusion of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (pr. 1611, pb. 1623), the moment of disenchantment in which Prospero breaks his wand and abjures his rough magic. In part 4 of Invisible, Rudolf Born asks Cécile Juin to help him compose a memoir about his experiences while assigned to dangerous missions as a spy for France. However, in order not to disclose shameful and incriminating secrets, he resolves to alter important details. His strategy parallels Freeman’s decision to change names and other key elements in Walker’s manuscript. Born is determined not to abandon the project of writing about his life. “But in order to tell the truth, we’ll have to fictionalize it,” he explains to Cécile. Convinced that Born is a monster, she refuses to collaborate and leaves. However, it is too late for readers. Cécile’s rejection of Born’s request occurs at the very end of Auster’s Invisible, a crafty novel that offers the pleasures of a complex and engaging story even as it reminds its readers that it is all an elaborate literary contrivance. Without a willing reader, one willing to accept speculation without resolution, Invisible is just an ingenious stunt. Like Cécile, herself a literary scholar, some reviewers have preferred to walk away, faulting Auster for arid self-indulgence and a preoccupation with formal invention at the expense of forceful storytelling. However, the intricate form that he devises for this novel is in service to an exploration of fundamental questions about identity, love, and art. Inviting skepticism toward aesthetic illusions, Invisible does not demand the usual willing suspension of disbelief. However, anyone drawn into Auster’s seductive metafiction becomes complicit with an exhilarating exercise in the possibilities of making a novel responsive to truth. Steven G. Kellman

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 22 (August 1, 2009): 8. The Boston Globe, November 1, 2009, p. 6. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 15 (August 1, 2009): 12. Library Journal 134, no. 16 (October 1, 2009): 68. Los Angeles Times, November 22, 2009, p. E6. New Statesman 138, no. 4974 (November 9, 2009): 52-54. The New York Times Book Review, November 15, 2009, p. 20. The New Yorker, November 30, 2009, p. 82. The Observer, November 29, 2009, p. 22. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 33 (August 17, 2009): 39. San Francisco Chronicle, November 8, 2009, p. E5. The Times Literary Supplement, November 6, 2009, p. 19.

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IT WILL COME TO ME Author: Emily Fox Gordon (1948) Publisher: Spiegel & Grau (New York). 267 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Lola Dees Institute, Texas In Gordon’s novel, an unfulfilled faculty wife named Ruth takes readers on a bumpy but illuminating exploration of dark psychic corners in her life and those of her husband and other campus characters at the Lola Dees Institute Principal characters: Ruth Blau, a former writer whose muse motherhood may have destroyed Ben Blau, Ruth’s husband, chair of the Philosophy Department at Lola, who is writing a book called Necessity of Altruism Dolores, Ben’s efficient secretary whom the hated new dean has transferred Roberta Mitten-Kurz, Lola’s bureaucratic dean Ricia Spottiswode, a writer-in-residence and charismatic teacher whose arrival and inspiring words to Ruth turn her life around Charles Johns, Ricia’a big, brash husband Isaac Blau, Ruth and Ben’s dropout son

In It Will Come to Me, an exquisitely styled, humanely satirical novel of academe, writer Emily Fox Gordon forges an unusual track—that of a hurricane—to allow at least the possibility of redemption for her put-upon central couple. Ruth Blau is the author of an acclaimed trilogy of novels, now twenty-five years behind her. Ben Blau skimps on his bureaucratic duties as philosophy chair at the Lola Dees Institute (commonly known as Lola) to finish a book about altruism. Before Hurricane Heather can play its redemptive role in the ninth and final chapter of It Will Come to Me, Gordon skillfully alternates viewpoints between her two protagonists in the first eight. Both Ben and Ruth have suffered seemingly irremediable personal and professional losses. Ruth has not written since the birth twenty-four years ago of their only child, Isaac. She has only a flawed manuscript to show for her former efforts at continuing her writing career. Isaac, now a dropout and mentally ill, has become a street person. His parents have not seen him for two years, and their only means of communicating with their son is through his eccentric psychaitrist. Ben, meanwhile, has lost his secretary Dolores, whose industrious dedication to her job enabled him to ignore his administrative duties and work on his book, Necessity of Altruism. Dolores has been transferred to a different department out of spite by Lola’s hated new dean, who refers to professors as “share-holders.”

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Ruth is fed up with her current life at Lola, which she finds unbearably dull. She is bored by Philsophy Department potluck dinners and Ben’s philosophy students. “To all appearances they might have been working on MBAs or degrees in physical therapy.” Ruth sees little evidence that they are even having sex. They just want to get jobs, preferably teaching in a place like Lola. “They wanted to be marsupials, creatures with no natural enemies who could look forward to living out their days in absolute safety.” There has not been a scandal at Lola for twenty years. Ruth does not want to have an affair herself; she would just like to know that someone is having one. At worst, people have been “difficult” but seldom interesting. In her faculty-wife mufti of clogs, graying updo, and dangly ethnic jewelry bought on eBay, Ruth is, in her own word, “stuck.” Her moderately successful first book—which was on academe—has been remaindered to dollar bins outside used-book shops. She drinks too much wine at parties. Her only excitement comes from epic arguments with Ben and watching dire weather reports about Hurricane Heather, a Category Four hurricane that is blowing toward the school. Ruth desperately needs a catalyst to rouse her out of despair. Such a catalyst is provided with the start of the fall semester and the arrival of Ricia Spottiswode—a new writer-in-residence, a young, charismatic teacher, and the author of a best-selling memoir. At their first meeting, Ruth is embarrassed when an old trustee sidles up to Ricia and croaks into her ear: “You say you a memwa-ist. Now dunnat make you a nahsussist?” Invited by Ricia to share Whole Lives Devoured, her stalled manuscript, Ruth carries the bulky manuscript to a coffeehouse as if she were “transporting a packet of X-rays . . . to a consultation with an oncologist.” When they later meet in an unlikely place—the ladies room—Ruth fears the worst. Ricia’s opening volley is brutal until she disdains her own assessment as that of the critic she says she is not. As a “fan” of Ruth—she claims familiarity with her trilogy—Ricia admires the new work. Her parting words are an admonition: “Just write!” That Ruth will be inspired to revive her dormant literary career is a given. As for Ben, he cannot bring himself to fire Hayley, his maladjusted, incompetent new secretary. His inability to function without Dolores, however, leads to a fiery dressingdown from the dean, whose name, Mitten-Kurz, could be taken to rhyme with her perceived demeanor: “spit and curse.” A capsule review in The New Yorker gave high praise to much of this novel, but it decried as “falsely redemptive” the Hurricane Heather ending: The Hurricane causes Ruth and Ben to be reunited with Isaac, in company with his much-older Asian partner and their infant daughter, Drusilla. To be sure, Gordon exploits Heather as a means to reconciliations. The hurricane is slightly reduced in force by the time it reaches Spangler, Texas (a stand-in for Houston). Ben and Ruth find themselves mingling with the university

Emily Fox Gordon is an awardwinning essayist and the author of two memoirs, Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy (2000) and Are You Happy? A Childhood Remembered (2006). She lives in Houston and teaches writing at Rice University.

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community in Horace Dees Hall, a campus shelter. Making adjustments for the effects of aging, Ben makes an inner roll call of people who have not shown themselves in decades: It took him a moment to recognize a famous emerita . . . now inching along with the help of a walker, her elderly son clearing a path. For the first time he laid eyes on the legendarily anorexic daughter of the History Department secretary. He spotted a reclusive poet with multiple chemical sensitivities and a young ethnomusicologist who’d been on medical leave since exposing himself to a group of Korean middle schoolers. . . . [Ben] witnessed some particularly stiff encounters between rivals who for years had been arranging their schedules to avoid meeting one another He saw two scenes of joyful reunion.

Even with the wind howling outside, Ruth offers her usual disclaimers: “I’ve had the hardest time taking this hurricane seriously. . . . It doesn’t seem real.” Ricia, ever theatrical, asks her to challenge nature’s distraction and read aloud from her manuscript. Predictably, Ruth declines with a lie: “I left it at home.” Meanwhile, Ben, grazing nearby, is left with his own thoughts: “Was that the wind, that high, faint keening he kept thinking he was hearing over the shoptalk jabber?” He had hoped to be depersonalized by the crowd, but he cannot help but sense that a diasporizing impulse had begun to break the aggregation into constituent couples and groups. These were rapidly moving away from one another and drifting up the stairs and down the hallways to offices and lounges and other private places where the parts could escape the whole.

Escaping the whole becomes the thematic touchstone of the galvanic conclusion of the novel. Gordon accomplishes this shift from apartness to togetherness in four pages. A group of six “of indeterminate genders and radically varying sizes” materializes, among whom Ben identifies Isaac. Leading the group is Eusebio Martinez, his son’s psychiatrist, who removes a bundle from the arms of the Asian woman, placing it in Isaac’s arms while the crowd forms “two blazing banks on either side.” Ruth can only say, softly, “Isaac” as he extends the bundle to her. She turns to Ben, shows him their infant granddaughter while “a groan of adoration rose from the crowd, followed by scattered imitative coos.” Now that they have seen and held their grandchild, they infer that the older Asian woman has a vital connection to their son and his daughter. The psychiatrist introduces the mother, Rosemary Tran, to the grandparents. “This Rosemary was as much a street person as Isaac, Ruth could see—more so . . . and a great deal older. . . . Presented to Ruth, she . . . smiled shyly . . . .” At first, Ruth is put off by Isaac’s appearance—“a beard that had crept up his cheeks over the last two years obscured any expression. He might have been an apparition, were it not for his smell.” Her revulsion is only momentary. It is preempted by wisdom. To Ruth, Isaac’s dirt and odor are “quite tolerable . . . more a confession than a challenge.” She thinks of a line from William Shakespeare’s King Lear (pr. c. 16051606, pb. 1608), “It smells of mortality,” but a more famous line from Shakespeare

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sums up the conclusion of It Will Come to Me. In the final scene of The Tempest (pr. 1611, pb. 1623), Miranda speaks for Ruth, Ben, and everyone in the long lines of candle-bearing cohorts waiting to honor the infant: “O brave new world/ that has such people in’t!” They stop “to congratulate the family, to peer into the baby’s face, to marvel.” These are the last words of the book, and the last word—“marvel”—is the most important one. Richard Hauer Costa

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 11 (February 1, 2009): 26. The Boston Globe, March 15, 2009, p. C7. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 2 (January 15, 2009): 55. Library Journal 134, no. 3 (February 15, 2009): 94. The New York Times, March 19, 2009, p.C6. The New Yorker 85, no. 10 (April 20, 2009): 113. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 49 (December 8, 2008): 41. Southern Living 44, no. 2 (February, 2009): 130.

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ITALIAN SHOES Author: Henning Mankell (1948) First published: Italienska skor, 2006, in Sweden Translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson Publisher: The New Press (New York). 336 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: An isolated island and various other locations throughout Sweden The life of a reclusive former physician who lives alone on a remote island is disrupted when a lover of forty years ago suddenly appears and leads him on an eye-opening journey Principal characters: Fredrik Welin, a reclusive, sixty-six-year-old former physician Postman Jansson, the hypochondriacal postal carrier who serves the isolated islands of the archipelago Harriet Kristina Hörnfeldt, Welin’s former lover, now dying of cancer Louise Hörnfeldt, Welin’s previously unknown daughter by Harriet Giaconelli Mateotti, an Italian master shoemaker Agnes Klarström, the patient whose botched operation caused Welin’s retirement

Swedish author Henning Mankell is probably best known in the United States for his crime novels featuring the somewhat shopworn detective Kurt Wallander. In many ways, the Wallander series has led the way for a recent influx of translations of Scandinavian crime fiction and thrillers. One of the hallmarks of these books is the far-reaching social commentary that accompanies their portrayals of criminal investigations, as well as their focus on the everyday lives of characters and not just the derring-do required to defeat the criminals. This broader social context, often quite political and concerned with economic inequality and unemployment, makes Swedish crime fiction closer to mainstream fiction than to average novels in the mystery genre. This tendency in Swedish fiction helps explain Mankell’s easy transition from his crime series to his African novels and to the stand-alone work Italian Shoes. In Italian Shoes, Fredrik Welin is a sixty-six-year-old former surgeon who removed himself years ago to his grandparents’ summerhouse, where he lives with an aging cat and dog. His home is located on a remote island inhabited by only a few hardy souls who endure being frozen in during the long winter and have only sporadic contact with the outside world even in summer. The postal carrier, Jansson, visits Welin on occasion, appearing more often for advice on his various ailments than to deliver any mail. Every morning, Welin walks down to the jetty, chops a hole in the

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ice with an ax, and jumps into the water. The ritual is his way of convincing himself that he is not totally numb to feeling and to life. Welin’s decision to exile himself resulted in large part from a botched operation in which, relying on his staff, he amputated the wrong arm of a young woman who had been a hopeful swimming champion. It is a cruel irony that the original diagnosis proved wrong, Henning Mankell is Sweden’s most so she did not need an operation at all. In disread author worldwide. His Kurt grace, Welin escaped to his island, hoping to Wallander series has been translated insulate himself from his past. The past will into thirty-seven languages, with 30 not leave him alone, however, and one day, as million copies in print. Mankell divides he is preparing to go down for his dip in the his time between Sweden and Maputo, water, he notices a silhouette, a black figure Mozambique, where he is the director standing out on the ice. Through his binocuof Teatro Avenida. lars, Welin sees a woman leaning on a walker, a handbag over her arm, wrapped against the cold. At first, he cannot identify her, but as he looks closer he recognizes her as Harriet Hörnfeldt, his lover of forty years ago. With Harriet comes Welin’s past, the past he has worked so diligently to suppress. She tells him that she has come after all these years to make him honor a promise he made to her when they were still a couple. Once, Welin’s father had taken him to an isolated forest pool that left a magical impression on him, and he promised Harriet that he would take her there one day. When he received an invitation to study in the United States, however, he left without a word, rather summarily dumping her. The rejection, she will later confess to him, left her devastated. Welin’s excuses for not making the trip to the pool—that his car is too unreliable, that he cannot remember the way, and so on—fall deaf ears. Harriet insists that he fulfill his earlier promise. From the beginning, the trip appears fraught with disaster. Travel to the mainland, where Welin stores his antiquated car, goes smoothly, and the car seems adequate enough for the trip. However, the travelers get a flat tire, become stuck in a snow bank, and, while staying overnight at a bed and breakfast, discover that their landlady has died. In spite of these setbacks, eventually they reach the forest pool, and Welin experiences relief at finally keeping a promise. He offers to return Harriet to her home before returning to his island. She, however, has one more stop to make and once again insists that he take her there. This little side trip proves even more revelatory than Harriet’s sudden appearance. Welin and Harriet travel to a remote, forested area of Sweden to meet a young woman who lives ina trailer. Harriet calmly informs Welin that the young woman is his daughter. Harriet was pregnant when he abandoned her, and she was unable to reach him with the news that he was about to become a father. Welin is surprised, angered, and finally fearful, retreating to the safety and isolation of his island once again. Welin finds, however, that the trip has shaken him out of his isolation, and he be-

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gins to search for the young swimmer whose arm he mistakenly amputated. After some effort, he locates her and makes a trip, on his own this time, to seek her out. He discovers her name, Agnes Klarström, and that she is operating a foster home for three wayward teenaged girls, Sima, Miranda, and Aida. Her base of operations is owned by an absentee landlord who is in the process of evicting them. After his brief visit, Welin returns to his island, but he begins correspondences with both Agnes and his daughter, Louise. The postman, who at the beginning of the novel never delivered any mail to Welin, now begins to bring letters with him on his visits. Although tentatively, Welin has begun to reengage with the world. Welin’s dog dies in April, reducing by one his emotional attachments on the island. Sima, one of the runaway girls, visits him by stealing a boat and later tries to commit suicide. Getting her medical attention brings Welin further out of his emotional and physical confinement. He begins working to refurbish an old boat of his grandfather’s only to eventually abandon the job as beyond his abilities. The boat is a part of the past that he cannot repair. Louise is arrested for participating in a political action. Event after event complicates Welin’s life as it enriches it. The second major event that marks a changing point in Welin’s life is also instigated by Harriet. At her behest, he gives a midsummer party and invites his few friends. The party marks Welin’s final break with his rejection of the world, but it also marks the end of Harriet, who finally dies. She is given a bonfire cremation nestled in the old boat, which sits atop the funeral pyre. As the fall settles in before another winter, Welin offers to house the runaways that Agnes is looking after. Agnes visits him to see if the accommodations might suit her needs and the needs of her wards. Louise also returns. Her arrival brings full circle the presence of Harriet, whose bold appearance began Welin’s transformation. The novel ends with Welin looking forward to events that might come, rather than backward at events that were. Italian Shoes is about change. The initial central images of the novel cluster around stasis, isolation, and the past. When the novel opens, Fredrik Welin exists alone on an isolated island, during the frozen time of winter, and in his grandparents’ house. He lives a static life, apart from other people, and exists primarily in the past despite trying to avoid it. The island is frozen in, and Welin follows a well-worn routine that includes a daily dip in the ocean. The heart-seizing cold plunge is his one way of shocking his system and reminding himself that he is still alive. His self-imposed isolation is his way of running away from life and its human obligations and interactions. Just as he ran away from Harriet and their relationship, he escaped into his childhood past to avoid his responsibility for maiming his former patient. It is into this literally frozen world that Harriet brings memories of Welin’s recent past and the possibility of life-altering change. The changes Welin experiences in the novel often come with bewildering quickness. Welin discovers he has a daughter without preamble or preface. Harriet just drops the reality on him. His dog and cat die unceremoniously and unexpectedly. His decision to try to find Agnes Klarström appears almost capricious. It is as if, once jogged out of his previous lethargy, Welin slides into action without much resistance.

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He may not exactly relish taking action, but neither does he seem to resist it strenuously. By the novel’s end, stasis has given way to dynamism, isolation to involvement, and the past to the present—or at least an engagement between the two. Welin has opened his life to include his newly found daughter and possibly the young, onearmed social worker from whom he has been hiding for years. The metaphors of the narrative suggest the change that is taking place: The ice melts, his daughter’s trailer now sits on the island, and he has offered to open his living space to the social worker. Although Harriet dies and is given a Viking funeral of sorts, her reappearance has worked to reconnect her long-lost lover with the world he abandoned. No longer living an isolated life, he even inherits a homeless dog to replace the one who died. Welin is beginning his life over at the story’s end, however difficult and brief that new life may be. It is at the novel’s conclusion that the shoes of the title come into play. An Italian shoemaker, a Florentine master craftsman, lives near Louise, and when Welin visited her she had him measured for a pair of shoes. The shoes take the cobbler a year to make. Welin finally receives the exquisitely crafted pair of shoes at the beginning of the final winter portrayed in the novel. He confesses that he wears them only around the house, never outside, always putting them back in their box when he is through. The Italian shoes, reminiscent of sunnier climes and the transforming power of art, provide the perfect image with which to introduce the season of spring, a season of fresh beginnings, into Welin’s newly emerging life. Charles L. P. Silet

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 15 (April 1, 2009): 18. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 5 (March 1, 2009): 14. Library Journal 134, no. 7 (April 15, 2009): 85. The Times Literary Supplement, May 1, 2009, p. 21.

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JEFF IN VENICE, DEATH IN VARANASI Author: Geoff Dyer (1958) Publisher: Pantheon Books/Random House (New York). 292 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Venice, Italy; Varanasi, India In Dyer’s novel, aimless, middle-aged journalist and critic Jeff Atman takes two trips; the first is an amorous yet ultimately meaningless adventure in Venice, and the second is a deeper, more profound realization of self in Varanasi Principal characters: Jeff Atman, a freelance writer and critic Laura, an American art gallery owner Darrell, an American traveler in Varanasi Laline, an Anglo-Indian woman visiting Varanasi

Geoff Dyer’s novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi is simultaneously more complicated and more playful that it first seems. The first half of the novel narrates in the third person a story about an Englishman named Jeff Atman. Like the author (whose name, Geoff, is a homophone for that of his protagonist), Jeff Atman is a freelance journalist and critic for prestigious British magazines. Jeff is hired to attend the famous Biennale art festival in Venice and conduct an interview with the former love of a famous artist. The second half of the novel is narrated in the first person. The unnamed narrator is presumably still Jeff Atman (there are many similarities and indicators that the two are the same character, but the fact is never entirely confirmed). He has now been sent to Varanasi, a city on the Ganges River in India where Hindus bathe in the river in part to cleanse their body of karmic debt and in some cases to escape further reincarnations. The complexities and playfulness of the novel are in many ways prefigured by Dyer’s earlier work. For example, his But Beautiful (1991) tells the purportedly nonfictional life stories of several jazz greats, but the narrative style and approach seem fictive in quality. Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage (1997) is both a book about British novelist D. H. Lawrence and a memoir about Dyer’s failure to write a book about Lawrence. Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It (2003), a collection of travel essays, partly chronicles small voyages of self-discovery similar to the one made by the narrator of the second half of the novel. The title of Jeff in Venice, the first half of the composite novel, is a pun referring to Thomas Mann’s famous novella Der Tod in Venedig (1912; Death in Venice, 1925); the narrative is related to Mann’s novella in a number of other ways as well. Death in Venice tells the story of the aging Gustav von Aschenbach, who has traveled to Venice from Austria in part out of denial of his impinging mortality. While at the seaside,

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he becomes obsessed with an adolescent boy named Tadzio, the son of a vacationing aristocratic family. The novella is famous for many things; as Aschenbach’s obsession moves from fascination with Tadzio’s beauty to a pedophilic sexual longing, Mann seems to be commenting in part on the modernist di chotomy that exists between the Dionysian, or carnal, self and the Apollonian, or platonic and spiritual, side of humans. At the same time, Aschenbach is at least partly infatuated by Tadzio’s youth, which in its glory stands in stark contrast to the writer’s fading eminence. The novella ends with Aschenbach’s death at the very moment he believes that Tadzio may consent to some contact with him. Just as Aschenbach dyes his hair before descending upon Venice, so does Jeff Atman. Jeff, who in his mid-forties is a decade younger than Aschenbach, is striving also to fight back the forces of ennui and mortality. His life is largely without purpose and has achieved almost a kind of meaningless vagueness: “He had a vague idea of things, a vague sense of what was happening in the world, a vague sense of having met someone before. It was like being vaguely drunk all the time.” While attending the grand Venice art festival the Biennale, however, Jeff meets Laura at one of the endless parties for the members of the media attending the festival. The character is appropriately named, since another Laura was the object of a famous series of love sonnets by Renaissance Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374). Just as Jeff will fall in love and lust with Laura at first sight, Petrarch’s life was presumably changed forever at the sight of his own Laura, a woman who greatly influenced him yet who remained unobtainable to him. Jeff is immediately obsessed with Laura, both from an aesthetic appreciation of her beauty (again mirroring Mann’s protagonist) and from a more carnal need to possess her sexually. When the two quickly become lovers, Jeff completely revels in her: the sight of her, her smell, her feel, everything about her. His infatuation is so complete that he thinks of how they can continue their relationship, of how they can commit to a life together beyond the confines of their short time together in Venice. Jeff’s affair with Laura corresponds with his indulgence in drugs, particularly cocaine. He is first reintroduced to these drugs by Laura and then has them thrust upon him. Much like his love affair, the drug use is another escape that allows Jeff to pretend that his youth has not faded and that he has entered a different stage in his life. Despite his revels with Laura, however, the end of the Biennale brings the end of their affair. As much as Jeff clearly wishes to continue their relationship, Laura’s assurances ring hollow. Walking Venice like a tourist at the end of the novel’s first section, Jeff finally enters the Scuola Grande di San Rocco church. He takes in the various religious paintings by the famous Renaissance Italian artist Tintoretto (1518-1594) but never gains anything from them. He never has an epiphany. The second half of the novel is set in the Indian city of Varanasi, which serves as a holy site for Hindus and Buddhists, among other faiths. Many Hindus believe that

Geoff Dyer’s works include three previous novels and six books of nonfiction, including Out of Sheer Rage (1997), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in London.

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bathing in the Ganges River at sites in Varanasi can cleanse the bather of sins. The unnamed freelance journalist who narrates the section and appears to be Jeff Atman is hired to write a travel piece on Varanasi. One of the allusions of the first half of the novel—a character named “Jeff” as written by a novelist named “Geoff”—is matched in the second half of the novel by an allusion to the character’s last name. To Hindus, the “atman” is a person’s soul, her or his true self. Dyer’s machinations leave readers with unanswered questions. Why shift from third person to first person? Why obscure the name of the narrator? Why segregate the sections so that their continuity is questionable? If the novel is meant to be read as two novellas, why incorporate so many parallels, and why include so many subtle indicators that Jeff Atman is the protagonist of the second section? The narrator of the second section is initially skeptical. He takes in the human waste and industrial garbage that routinely floats down the Ganges and is repulsed by it. Traffic in the city is so horrifying to him that he thinks of it as a game called “Varanasi Death Trip.” His digestive system is affected more than once by Varanasi’s food, and he is forced to subsist on bananas. He is astounded by the vast amounts of human and animal excrement that seem to be found everywhere in the streets and river. He is also shocked by the presence of death; he finds a corpse one day and realizes that in Varanasi death is not so far removed from the everyday as it is in the West. The narrator quickly befriends an American traveling abroad named Darrell who shares the narrator’s ironic sense of humor. Before long, a third person has joined their group, a woman named Laline who is of Indian descent and has been raised in England. Darrell and Laline soon become lovers; their relationship parallels Jeff and Laura’s in the first half of the novel. The narrator makes a few halfhearted attempts at seducing other expatriates but largely lacks the energy to throw himself into the pursuit. Slowly, however, the narrator slowly begins to lose his sense of European identity and become accustomed to the local ways. Jeff notes that, in Hindu tradition, “crossing places” are sacred and “certain crossing places were especially auspicious, but the whole of Varanasi was a crossing place, between this world and the next.” Ultimately, Jeff has reached a crossing place in his own life. Instead of dying his hair, he shaves his head. He begins wearing a local tunic called a dhoti instead of his western clothes. He even finally washes himself in the Ganges. At the same time, his health begins to deteriorate and his new friends worry about him. He misses his deadlines to return to England, presumably supporting himself through renting out his flat in London. Some critics have made convincing arguments that the multiple parallels between the two stories show that both texts are telling the same tale in differing ways. On the other hand, there are changes in the second half of the novel that may be read to further reflect themes unique to that half. Jeff’s name is never mentioned in the second half of the novel because his sense of identity—and his sense of self, his atman—have grown vague and meaningless. In the crossing place of Varanasi, where the self must come to some kind of reckoning, his begins slowly to melt away. The narrator says that he finds many Hindu ideas confusing, but the concept of darshan, or divine seeing and revelation, makes sense to him. As the narrator states,

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This was what Hindus went to the temple for: to see their god, to have him or her revealed to them. The more attention paid to a god, the more it was looked at, the greater its power, the more easily it could be seen. You went to see your god and, in doing so, you contributed to its visibility; the aura emanating from it derived in part from the power bestowed on it.

The narrator will undergo his own revelation of self, realizing that the world he has lived in at home is meaningless and vague. His encounters with women such as Laura are, when all is said and done, simply an escape from the reality of life and the reality of death; they are ways to acknowledge the simple facts of human existence, that all things that live must also someday die. Ashenbach’s death in Death in Venice may, in some ways, been seen as the final outcome in the confrontation between youthful beauty and aging decrepitude. On the other hand, the narrator’s acceptance of his mortality in Death in Varanasi perhaps shows a profounder wisdom and an understanding of the transience of the things of this world. Scott D. Yarbrough

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 14 (March 15, 2009): 42. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 4 (February 15, 2009): 166. Library Journal 134, no. 3 (February 15, 2009): 93-94. London Review of Books 31, no. 11 (June 11, 2009): 24-25. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 12 (July 16, 2009): 24-25. The New York Times Book Review, April 19, 2009, p. 12. The New Yorker 85, no. 10 (April 20, 2009): 110-112. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 2 (January 12, 2009): 3. San Francisco Chronicle, April 19, 2009, p. J-5. The Spectator 309, no. 9423 (April 4, 2009): 32. The Times Literary Supplement, March 27, 2009, p. 19.

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JUDAS A Biography Author: Susan Gubar (1944) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 453 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Religion Time: The first century c.e. Locale: Roman-occupied Israel An analysis of the many interpretations of the story of Jesus and his betrayal by Judas put forward by theologians, religious leaders, artists, novelists, poets, and playwrights Principal personages: Jesus of Nazareth, Jewish prophet and the Christ Matthew, author of a canonical gospel and, according to tradition, one of Jesus’ original disciples Mark, author of a canonical gospel Luke, a companion of Paul and author of a canonical gospel and the Acts of the Apostles John, author of a canonical gospel and, according to tradition, the youngest of Jesus’ original disciples and the author of the Book of Revelations and three canonical letters in the Bible Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus’ original disciples and the one who betrayed him Paul, a later apostle of Jesus and author of thirteen canonical letters in the Bible

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the supporting characters in the story of Jesus of Nazareth beyond what is said about them in the canonical gospels of the Bible. For example the novel The Da Vinci Code (2003) by Dan Brown concerns Mary Magdalene, a female disciple of Jesus, and the alleged descendants of the couple. A translation of the noncanonical Gospel of Judas, another disciple of Jesus, was released in 2006 by National Geographic and became controversial because it was at odds with the portrayals of Judas in the canonical books of the Bible. Susan Gubar’s Judas: A Biography is also about Judas Iscariot, a supporting character who is critical to the story of Jesus because his betrayal is part of the chain of events that leads to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Strictly speaking, Judas: A Biography is not a biography, as the author admits in her introduction. The twenty-two references to Judas Iscariot in the Bible only amount to about twelve hundred words, and they are not consistent with one another. Instead, Gubar examines how writers and artists have interpreted those references through the centuries. Different interpretations are dominant in different historical periods, although the dominant interpretation of a given time is not the only one of its

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time and the time in which it is dominant is not the only time people subscribe to it. The first question Gubar discusses is whether there was a historical Judas. All four canonical gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; the Acts of the Apostles, which was written by Luke; and several noncanonical gospels describe Judas’s betrayal of Jesus on the night before the crucifixion. The argument in favor of his historical existence would thus seem strong. However, Paul, whose letters predate the canonical gospels, never mentions Judas, nor do several of the noncanonical gospels. Scholars now believe that none of the authors of the canonical gospels were eyewitnesses to the events they described, so none of them can be considered primary sources. Gubar, following some biblical scholars, also questions whether Judas’s betrayal was a necessary precondition of Jesus’ crucifixion: The Romans could easily have arrested him in a public place, and his whereabouts on the night of his arrest were not secret if they wished to arrest him in a private setting. Betrayal by someone close to Jesus makes for a stronger narrative. Ultimately, Gubar decides that Judas’s factual existence and the historical truth of his actions are irrelevant to her book, since she is primarily interested in how people have interpreted the story over the last two millennia. Judas’s name itself is not without significance. It was a very common Jewish name at that time, so many writers and artists with an anti-Semitic agenda identified all Jews with him, especially since the Jewish religion is often referred to as “Judaism.” According to Mark and Matthew, Jesus had a brother named Judas. John mentions yet another man named Judas, and Saint Jude is the patron saint of hopeless causes. Judah, the oldest son of Jacob, betrayed his younger brother Joseph by selling him into slavery in Egypt and founded the largest of the original twelve tribes of Israel. Judas Maccabeus was one of the greatest warriors in Hebrew history. Gubar’s next step is to contrast and compare the versions of the story in the four canonical gospels, in the order in which scholars believe they were written: Mark (written around 68-70 c.e.), Matthew (c. 80-85 c.e.), Luke (c. 80-85 c.e.), and John (c. 95-100 c.e.). All four agree that Judas betrayed Jesus by leading Jewish or Roman authorities to the garden of Gethsemene, where Jesus had retired after the Last Supper to pray. Jesus was accompanied by his disciples Peter, James, and John, who, to his annoyance, kept falling asleep. None of the four gospels describes Judas’s childhood or background. In Mark’s version, in return for money, Judas leads the authorities to Jesus, whom he kisses so that the authorities know whom to arrest. Mark never mentions what happens to Judas afterward. Matthew specifies the amount of money as thirty pieces of silver, which has some interesting connections with mentions of silver in the Old Testament, and he also has Judas kissing Jesus. Matthew adds to Mark’s account by having Judas repent: Susan Gubar is a professor of English at Indiana University in Bloomington. She is the coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985, 1996, 2007) and has written such books as Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century (2000) and, with Sandra Gilbert, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979).

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He tries to return the money to the Jewish authorities and then commits suicide by hanging himself. Luke is ambiguous about whether the kiss actually took place, has Judas using the money to buy a field, and then has him die in the field from the bursting of his bowels. Luke also wrote that Judas was possessed by Satan. John does not mention money or the kiss but specifies the arresting authorities as Roman soldiers and has Jesus identify himself to them rather than have Judas do it. John does not describe what happens to Judas after the crucifixion, but he goes so far as to call Judas a demon. Gubar interprets the progressively harsher portrayals by the authors of the canonical gospels in terms of the need for early Christianity to differentiate itself from Judaism, as personified by Judas. She also discerns several themes that recur in the many interpretations of the story of Jesus and Judas. The first theme is Judas being portrayed as a pariah whose sin of betrayal was unforgivable. This makes him the worst human being in history, since the Bible describes many sinful actions committed by people such as King David and Saint Paul that were eventually forgiven. Saint Jerome (347-420), Saint Augustine (354-430), Martin Luther (1483-1546), John Calvin (1509-1564), and Karl Barth (1886-1968) all took this position. Luther tried to reconcile the accounts of Judas’s death in Matthew and Luke by speculating that Judas’s bladder burst when he hanged himself. Gubar comments on Luther’s anti-Semitism and draws a clear line between the concept of Judas as pariah, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. Judas is made to stand for the Jewish people so that executions of the Jews by the Nazis are justified as punishment for the betrayal of Jesus. Nazi theologians argued that Jesus was not a Jew but an Aryan and that Judas betrayed him in much the same way that the Jews betrayed Germany during World War I. (Hitler himself rejected this theory, because he considered Christianity itself to be part of the Jewish conspiracy against the Aryans.) Gubar cites many examples in this anti-Semitic tradition. For instance, in Dante’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802), Satan tortures Judas for eternity by using him as a kind of chew toy. In Jacopo da Voragine’s Legenda aurea (c. 1260; The Golden Legend, 1483) and the Wakefield Mystery Plays (fourteenth century), Judas’s story is combined with that of Oedipus in that he kills his father and marries his own mother. In the film Dracula 2000 (2000), the title character is the reincarnation of Judas, which explains his aversion to silver and the crucifix. Gubar also discusses common interpretations and portrayals of Judas’s kiss. She describes Ludovico Carracci’s painting Kiss of Judas (1589-1590) as homoerotic. In the Gospel of Barnabas, written in either the late Middle Ages or the early modern period, Judas loves Jesus so much that he takes Jesus’ place and is the one crucified. This gospel is very popular in the Islamic world because it denies Jesus’s divinity and his resurrection. Gubar cites Emily Dickinson’s poem “’Twas Love—not me—” as a dramatic monologue by Judas declaring his love for Jesus. In Terence McNally’s 1998 play Corpus Christi, Judas is openly gay. Another gay interpretation of the story is the 1964 film The Gospel According to St. Matthew. After the Enlightenment, scholars approached the Bible as a historical text. Thomas De Quincey in his essay “Judas Iscariot” (1857) conceived Judas as a Jewish

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patriot, like his namesake Judas Maccabeus, who mistakenly believed that Jesus had come to establish a worldly kingdom. His betrayal was thus meant to force Jesus to take action. Richard Hengist Horne’s verse drama “Scriptural Tragedy” (1848), Frederick William Orde Ward’s dramatic monologue “Judas Iscariot” (1897), Cale Young Rice’s poem “The Wife of Judas Iscariot” (1912), W. W. Story’s long poem A Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem: First Century (1970), Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son (1997), and the 1961 film version of The King of Kings all take this viewpoint. Dorothy Sayers and Robinson Jeffers both take an opposing, although complementary, approach, Sayers in her 1943 radio play The Man Born to be King and Jeffers in his verse drama Dear Judas (1928). In both versions, Judas is a pacifist who believes that Jesus plans a violent revolt, and he betrays him to prevent an insurrection. The last major theme Gubar discusses is the notion that Judas’s betrayal was a necessary condition of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Consequently, Judas’s action saved the human race and is therefore forgivable, as Joseph forgave his brother Judah and King David and St. Paul were forgiven for their sins. The fifteenth century dialogue Lucius and Dubius takes this position. John Donne (1572-1631) argued that Judas was only doing what Jesus wished him to do so that Jesus could be crucified and redeem the human race. Theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) also subscribed to this view, and even Karl Barth commented on the paradox that Judas is condemned for doing God’s will. Albert Levitt’s Judas Iscariot: An Imaginative Autobiography (1961), José Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), and the recently translated Gospel of Judas agree with this position. A variation of this theme argues that Jesus tricked or persuaded Judas into betraying him. Examples are found in Armando Cosani’s novel The Flight of the Feather Serpent (1953), Hugh J. Schonfield’s The Passover Plot (1965), and Michael Dickinson’s The Lost Testament of Judas Iscariot (1994). Some authors combine these themes. In Ho teleutaios peirasmos (1955; The Last Temptation of Christ, 1960; also known as The Last Temptation) and its film adaptation, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Nikos Kazantzakis combines the concepts of Judas as both patriot and savior. Judas knows that he is helping Jesus perform his mission on Earth, and Jesus tells him that God gave Judas the more difficult task of betraying a friend rather than the simpler task of being crucified. However, Kazantzakis follows John’s version of Jesus’s arrest in that there is no kiss and Jesus identifies himself to the authorities. In Mario Brelich’s 1975 novel The Work of Betrayal, the author combines the savior theme with the homoerotic aspect of the story, postulating a love triangle among Jesus, Judas, and John. Judas forfeits his own salvation so that everyone else can be saved. None of these interpretations reveal anything about a historical Judas. However, as Gubar points out, they do reveal a great deal about the interpreters themselves and about the times and places in which they lived. Thomas R. Feller

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 12 (February 15, 2009): 8. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 22. Library Journal 134, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 97. The New York Times, April 5, 2009, p. BR10. The New York Times Book Review, April 5, 2009, p. 10. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 2 (January 12, 2009): p. 41. Times Higher Education, October 15, 2009, p. 48. The Washington Post, March 26, 2009, p. C01.

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A JURY OF HER PEERS Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx Author: Elaine Showalter (1941) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 608 pp. $30.00 Type of work: Literary criticism, literary history Time: 1650-2000 Locale: United States A comprehensive, perceptive, if flawed, effort to encompass a history of American women writers while at the same time identifying the best work that deserves to be included in the canon of American literature The daunting nature of Elaine Showalter’s task in A Jury of Her Peers is made apparent by simply noting that the book is the first comprehensive history and assessment of American women writers ever to be published. Even though feminist literary criticism and history have produced an impressive body of work, including several anthologies meant to recover neglected masterpieces and other significant work out of print and forgotten, no scholar has essayed a book-length overview of the achievements of women writers in the United States. To do so invites controversy—as Showalter acknowledges in observing that feminist critics have hesitated to make qualitative judgments, wishing to be inclusive of the many women writers who for centuries have not received their due. She believes, however, that the first phase of fully acknowledging women writers—the discovery period begun in the 1970’s—is over and that it is time to write a selective history and assessment of those women writers who belong in the American literary canon. If Showalter had been content only to produce a work of literary history, she could have avoided some of the judgments that reviewers of her book have made concerning her choices. Some reviewers have questioned, for example, the decision to write about Pearl Buck but not Eleanor Clark when they see the latter as manifestly the superior writer. The answer to this question is perhaps that, because Buck was the first woman writer to win the Nobel Prize and because her work has had such an impact on American culture, she deserves a place more than Clark, who appeals to a much smaller audience. This seems like a weak argument, however—one that Showalter would not have to entertain if she had written a two-volume work. Such a work could have comprised one volume of more objective history followed by a second putting forward a more programmatic argument about which authors covered in the first volume ought to be included in the American literary canon. The writers that Showalter does discuss—and there are over 250 of them—are, for the most part, presented with considerable flair and concision. Especially noteworthy are Showalter’s discussions of Anne Bradstreet, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Annie

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Proulx. The examinations of these three authors stand out, in part, because they exemplify Showalter at her best—melding historical context with literary achievement. Bradstreet, a dutiful Puritan daughter and wife, nevertheless faced the daunting prospect of life in a new world and was able to write poetry that remains profound and affecting. Stowe, in Showalter’s narrative, is a towering figure not only because of the pervasive influence of her Elaine Showalter, a feminist scholar great novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life teaching at Princeton University, has Among the Lowly (serial, 1851-1852; book, authored several influential studies, 1852) but also because of Stowe’s literary ex- including A Literature of Their Own perimentation, especially in Dred: A Tale of (1977, revised 1982), The Female the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), a work that Malady: Women, Madness, and deserves to be set against the finest achieve- English Culture, 1830-1980 (1985), ments in the American novel. Proulx emerges and Daughters of Decadence (1993). as a true groundbreaker, a woman competing with male authors on their own territory by refashioning the view of the American West in stories such as “Brokeback Mountain” (1997, revised 1999). For the most part, Showalter eschews sociological explanations as to why very few American women created great literature before the twentieth century, but she does offer the following explanations: Many women believed that their families came first; others had to put up with and were obstructed by husbands who resented their wives’ dedication to literary labors; and middle-class American women writers, unlike their British counterparts, did not usually have servants and were far more directly involved in the day-to-day details of housework and homemaking. The British class system, in other words, actually worked in favor of certain women writers who could assign menial tasks to their servants. Then, too, only a few of the men in charge of the literary establishment were disposed to publish work by women. In this context, those women who did become best-selling novelists seem all the more impressive for their initiative and determination. The virtue of writing a combined work of literary history and literary criticism in one volume is that Showalter can reveal the conditions out of which great work is created. She notes, for example, that for every great poem Emily Dickinson wrote she had behind her another ten that were flawed. It is also suggestive, Showalter notes, that Dickinson was at her most productive during the Civil War, even though her poetry does not deal explicitly with that crucial event. Literature is not created in a vacuum, and it is to Showalter’s credit that she is able to write so cogently about the way writers interact with their environments. If by the 1850’s women were capable of writing best sellers, that ability did not earn them the respect of the critical establishment, Showalter demonstrates. Indeed, male authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne complained about having to compete with

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popular female novelists. Other male writers suggested that women had no business trying to write great literature because they tended to write about domestic matters rather than taking on the important subjects of war and world events. Even the most successful women writers—such as Willa Cather and Edith Wharton—shared this male bias and scorned the literature produced by their sex. Those such as Amy Lowell who openly competed with male poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were rejected as merely ambitious interlopers. Other successful poets, such as Marianne Moore, were careful to avoid lyrical poetry that reflected their feelings, opting instead for “objective,” hard-edged poems about animals that cultivated an impersonal air. Showalter takes her title from a story by Susan Glaspell, a playwright contemporary of Eugene O’Neill who worked with him at the Provincetown Playhouse. Glaspell’s story, which she also turned into a play retitled Trifles (pr. 1916, pb. 1917), makes the point that women have not been perceived as the peers of men and therefore their work has not been evaluated with the respect automatically given to that of male authors. The irony is that Glaspell herself and her story were largely forgotten until her peers, women, rediscovered her in the 1970’s. Until then, most journals, reference works, and other venues where American literature was assessed did not even include women on their editorial boards. Women writers were, in other words, virtually invisible. Thus, Showalter sees her work as building on a generation of feminist scholars who have brought back into literary consciousness the work of Glaspell and others such as Mary Hunter Austin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Tess Slesinger, Jean Stafford, Gwendolyn Brooks, Shirley Jackson, Diane Johnson, Marilynne Robinson, and Gish Jen. Quite aside from the important writers Showalter does not discuss—for example, Evelyn Scott, Caroline Gordon, Mary Lee Settle, and Dawn Powell—Showalter sometimes seems curiously neglectful of her contemporaries. She barely mentions Susan Sontag, even though Sontag is a shining example of a woman who was able to compete successfully among New York intellectuals and become a cultural figure in ways they could not. Similarly, Showalter’s treatment of Lillian Hellman is perfunctory: There is no mention of the way she triumphed as a feminist icon in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Moreover, Hellman’s plays are barely acknowledged. Showalter’s comment that The Children’s Hour (pr., pb. 1934) is dated because it deals with lesbianism is perplexing. Certainly, the play no longer has the shock value of its first production, but the work is hardly just about lesbianism. Showalter might as well dismiss William Shakespeare because Americans are no longer monarchists. Her take on Hellman is certainly acceptable, if debatable, in academia, but theater professionals and American audiences do not share this disparaging view and have made Hellman’s plays a part of the canon irrespective of academic judgments. Even more disturbing is Showalter’s failure to discuss the strides feminists have made in American biography, beginning with Nancy Milford’s landmark biography of Zelda Fitzgerald and continuing with the work of Elinor Langer, Deirdre Bair, Marion Meade, Stacy Schiff, and many other women writers who have taken on biographical subjects that were once almost the exclusive privilege of male biographers or have identified female subjects that male biographers have overlooked or dis-

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counted. Apparently, Showalter accepts the academic bias against biography—that the genre is not itself to be classified as literature—but the consequence of this attitude is to obscure the way women biographers have reshaped the American literary canon and American history through their treatment of both male and female figures. It is as if the academic world and its ideas of what constitute literature are the only arbiter in A Jury of Her Peers. The irony is that Showalter relies in many cases on biography in order to construct her narrative. Her notes cite the relevant biographies on which she has drawn, yet she seems not to realize that those very biographies are not only part of the history and the assessments she is intent on pursuing but also make possible the very history she has written. Thus, she does not discuss the reasons why is biography as a genre made its appeal to women writers beginning in the 1970’s. Nor does she adequately explore how these women writers became the jury of peers that she showcases. Omitting American women biographers harms Showalter’s assessment of women writers, as well as her understanding of how literary history is made. Even with its gaps and questionable judgments, however, A Jury of Her Peers is an astonishing tour de force and a courageous effort to advance women’s studies beyond the stage of celebrating its writers and deploring the reactionary male critical establishment. Showalter suggests that the literary playing field for women is now on a par with that for men. As creative writers and critics, women have achieved their goal: to be judged by their peers, men and women no longer held back by prejudices against the very idea that women can create great literature. In the long run, A Jury of Her Peers is bound to have a positive impact, encouraging new generations of scholars to exercise their judgment by holding women and men to the same standard of literary excellence. Carl Rollyson

Review Sources America 200, no. 17 (May 25, 2009): 23-24. Booklist 105, no. 9/10 (January 1, 2009): 35. Commentary 127, no. 6 (June, 2009): 74-76. Commonweal 136, no. 17 (October 9, 2009): 22-23. The Economist 390, no. 8619 (February 21, 2009): 83-84. Library Journal 134, no. 3 (February 15, 2009): 108. New York Review of Books 56, no. 15 (October 8, 2009): 37-38. The New York Times Book Review, March 8, 2009, p. 16. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 1 (January 5, 2009): 40-41. The Times Literary Supplement, May 8, 2009, pp. 11-12. Weekly Standard 14, no. 42 (July 27, 2009): 32-34. Women’s Review of Books 26, no. 4 (July/August, 2009): 5-7.

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THE KINDLY ONES Author: Jonathan Littell (1967) First published: Les Bienveillantes, 2006, in France Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 984 pp. $29.99 Type of work: Novel Time: 1941-1945 Locale: Soviet Russia; Poland; Germany; France An epic novel of the Holocaust that painstakingly describes the bureaucratic and military machinery developed by Hitler and his henchmen for the annihilation of the Jews and other minorities, told years later by a former SS officer living in France under an assumed identity Principal characters: Maximilien (Max) von Aue, a Schutzstaffel (SS) officer during World War II and later a lace merchant in the north of France Thomas Hauser, SS officer and Max’s closest friend Una von Üxküll, née Aue, Max’s twin sister, who marries an older German aristocrat Héloïse Moreau (formerly Aue), Max’s mother, who remarries after the disappearance of his father Aristide Moreau, Max’s stepfather, whom he despises Dr. Mandelbrod, a top Nazi ideologue who claims to have known Max’s father

Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones is a colossal novel in the form of a fictional memoir. The narrator and protagonist is Dr. Maximilien von Aue, a former officer in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the secret service of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the elite Nazi military organization that operated within and alongside the German army during World War II. Now an elderly lace merchant living under an assumed name in the north of France, Max is married, has twin children, and is bored with his life. His attempt to tell “how it happened” mainly covers the period from June, 1941, the beginning of the German invasion of Soviet Russia, to April, 1945, when Russian troops conquered Berlin. There are also frequent flashbacks to Max’s childhood and student days, usually triggered by some stressful event during his involvement in the extermination of Jews and other minorities in the conquered territories. The external structure of the novel parallels that of a baroque orchestral suite; the individual chapters bear the names of the dance movements of such a suite, and the action described in each chapter reflects the mood and tempo of each musical subdivision. Thus, the first chapter is called “Toccata,” referring to a virtuoso piece to highlight the technical mastery of the performer. Toccatas were used as introductions or overtures to suites and fugues in the contrapuntal works of Johann Sebastian Bach

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(1685-1750), Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683 1764), and François Couperin (1668-1733), Jonathan Littell was raised and all of whom the narrator mentions as his fa- educated bilingually in both the United vorite composers. The last chapter is entitled States and France. He has worked for “Gigue,” referring to a lively dance known in several international humanitarian English as the jig, and the novel comes to a organizations and wrote one sciencefiction novel before The Kindly Ones, close in a bullet-riddled dance of death. Before beginning his memoirs proper, the which won the Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie narrator delivers a brilliant harangue, addressFrançaise in 2006. ing his readers as his “human brothers,” know ing full well that they will reject any kinship with a man involved in the Nazis’ extermination of millions of Jews and other “undesirables.” Von Aue goes even further; he repeatedly insinuates that most of his readers, given the same circumstances, would have acted exactly as he did and that he regrets nothing, since all he did was his work. However, he explicitly refuses to claim, as many of his colleagues did, that he was only following orders and admits that he did what he did because it was his duty and had to be done. In doing so, he asserts that in war cruel acts are committed not by sadistic monsters—though he admits that there were those as well—but by “ordinary” people. He himself had once hoped to be such a person before “all this evil” entered his life. Max ends his address to readers with an impassioned plea for understanding: I live, I do what can be done, it’s the same for everyone, I am a man like other men, I am a man like you. I tell you, I am just like you!

This passage presages the main argument his narration attempts to illustrate, stated later in the novel: that there is no such thing as inhumanity, only humanity. Max’s recollections of his life as an SS officer on the eastern front and as an administrator in the forced labor and extermination camp system constitute a description of a long descent into hell, one that begins even before his war experiences. An incestuous relationship with his sister Una when they were both in their early teens has left him incapable of a meaningful heterosexual love life and driven him to mainly random, often violent, homosexual affairs. His sister has married an older, impotent German aristocrat and has outgrown their previous relationship. Max hates his mother and his stepfather for having forcibly separated him from his twin sister, to the point that he murders both of them after his return from the Russian front. The horrors of his duties in the Einsatzgruppen, the task forces that accompany advancing German troops and identify Jews, Bolsheviks, and other “undesirables” in order to have them executed, begin to weigh heavily on Max. Although he constantly maintains that he must keep his cool sense of detachment, it becomes evident from increasingly frequent crying fits, nightmares, and bouts of vomiting and diarrhea that Max is losing his sanity, as his task force makes its murderous voyage through the Ukraine, the Crimea, the Caucasus, and finally to Stalingrad. He seems to have suf-

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fered a head wound, but he does not remember doing so. Instead, he can recollect the wound only as a long, weird fantasy about his sister. The wound and his detachment from it symbolize his growing loss of touch with reality, which he begins to repress even in his memoir: He has, for instance, no memory of having killed his mother and stepfather on a brief trip to France. Only Thomas Hauser, his friend and confidant, manages to return Max to a normal life occasionally, thus saving his life and his career more than once in the novel. After his superiors refuse him a posting to France for which he felt singularly qualified because of his bicultural upbringing and education, Max’s life rapidly disintegrates. This disintegration parallels the falling apart of the Third Reich to which he has sworn loyalty. After a last, unsuccessful attempt to forget his sister Una and to establish a normal relationship with a young woman who clearly loves him, Max finds himself at the deserted estate of Una’s husband, where he descends to a completely animalistic state, living out his incestuous fantasies. Quite in keeping with his condition, the novel’s final scenes take place at the bombed-out Berlin zoo. Two dogged policeman have been after Max for some time, convinced that he has murdered his mother and stepfather. As Max is about to be shot by one of them, Thomas saves him once more by killing his enemy; Max, however, beats his friend to death with a crowbar and takes the French identify papers Thomas had prepared for his escape. In the guise of a released forced laborer, he makes his way to France, where he eventually becomes a wealthy, middle-class merchant, married with twin children, just like his despised bourgeois stepfather. In addition, Max has to bear the guilt of his participation in the horrors of the Holocaust, which he has been trying to assuage by writing this memoir. The Kindly Ones is an ambitious novel on one of the most controversial subjects in contemporary literature, the Holocaust. It is written, not from the usual perspective of the victims, but through the reminiscences of a perpetrator who appears to have escaped the consequences of his crimes. Max claims to be an ordinary human being, neither a sadistic beast nor the “one good Nazi” of so many books and films about the Holocaust. In order to accomplish his seemingly impossible task, Littell had to reconcile two opposing components: First of all, he had to portray the Holocaust from the viewpoint of a highly educated intellectual who fervently believes in the Nazi ideology and who sees the extermination of the Jews not as a pleasure but a necessary and often odious administrative task. This task is performed in the context of a huge bureaucratic apparatus in which the narrative is a cog and that provides him with more chances for advancement than would other legal tasks for which he is qualified. The enormous bulk of the novel results from its meticulous and historically accurate descriptions of the workings of this bureaucracy: its overly complicated structure; the petty jealousies operating between its various branches and executives; and the logistical problems of finding its intended victims, developing efficient means for their execution and the disposal of their bodies, and keeping up the morale and team spirit of the people involved. Portraying the mind-set of an intellectual SS officer and the vast Nazi bureaucracy is the purpose structuring the novel as a very strictly organized Baroque suite. The

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execution of the Nazis’ so-called final solution from Max’s perspective is a mathematical, economic, and logistical problem, performed mostly by career bureaucrats who after work are husbands, fathers, musicians, and neighbors—in other words, ordinary people. The sadistic torturers who find physical and emotional satisfaction in taunting and killing individuals are portrayed as a small minority. The greatest concern for Max is that his reports are well written and that all the accounts are correct and can pass muster when examined by auditors. The recognition of this “banality of evil,” to use Hannah Arendt’s characterization of Adolf Eichmann, strikes more horror into readers than the pornography of violence that erupts in the novel from time to time. The cogs of the Nazi machinery in Littell’s account are “ordinary people” who are subject to neuroses and psychoses, often caused or made worse by stress and guilt. As the title of the novel indicates, Littell bases the internal structure of the novel on the last play of the classical Greek trilogy the Oresteia (458 b.c.e.; English translation, 1777) by Aeschylus. In this play, Eumenides, or “the Kindly Ones,” Orestes objects to his mother marrying another man, believing that her husband Agamemnon has been killed in the Trojan War. He is sent away from home, living with the family of Pylades, who becomes his best friend. Eventually, Orestes returns and kills both his mother and his stepfather, aided by his beloved sister Elektra. As a result, he is pursued by the Furies, goddesses of revenge who seek to punish him for his matricide. In the end, the Furies consent to abandon their pursuit in favor of civilized forms of justice. From then on, they are called the Kindly Ones. In the novel, Max plays the role of Orestes, Thomas is Pylades, and Max’s twin sister Una is Elektra. It is his hatred of his mother and his stepfather that drives Max to Germany, toward National Socialism, and finally to murder. This pathological hatred, combined with his incestuous attraction to his sister, allows readers to distance themselves from Max and to doubt his claims of being an “ordinary person.” Even as he progresses in revealing his inner self and his past, it becomes clear that he is, contrary to his assertions, racked by guilt and that for him the Furies have not turned into the Kindly Ones. The Kindly Ones was met with the predictable firestorm of contrasting opinions. German and Jewish critics mostly condemned the book as pornographic in its descriptions both of homosexual activity and of executions, whereas critics in the United States and France were more positive, as evidenced by Littell’s garnering two of the most prestigious French literary prizes. While it may be premature to praise the book as the great Holocaust novel, as some reviewers have done, Littell’s novel is, despite its intimidating size and its often hard-to-stomach descriptions of death and violence, clearly one of the most significant literary events of the year. Franz G. Blaha

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 11 (February 1, 2009): 25. Commentary 127, no. 5 (May, 2009): 78-81. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 8. Library Journal 134, no. 2 (February 1, 2009): 66. London Review of Books 31, no. 8 (April 30, 2009): 11-13. The New Republic 240, no. 5 (April 1, 2009): 38-43. New Statesman 138, no. 4940 (March 16, 2009): 55-56. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 5 (March 26, 2009): 18-21. The New York Times, February 24, 2009, p.C1. The New York Times Book Review, March 8, 2009, p.10. The New Yorker 85, no. 6 (March 23, 2009): 75. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 49 (December 8, 2008): 42-43. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 48 (November 30, 2009): 41. The Times Literary Supplement, March 6, 2009, p. 21. World Literature Today 77, no. 1 (April-June, 2003): 77-78.

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KING’S DREAM Author: Eric J. Sundquist (1954) Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). 320 pp. $26.00 Type of work: History Time: 1963 Locale: Washington, D.C. Sundquist’s close reading of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech reveals the essence of the Civil Rights movement in America Principal personages: Martin Luther King, Jr., African American religious and civil rights leader Abraham Lincoln, U.S. president, 1861-1865 John Lewis, African American civil rights leader and later U.S. representative from Georgia, 1987Malcolm X, African American religious leader and activist

Perhaps no speech since Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address has summarized the past, present, and future of the United States as well as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. It had been one hundred years since the Emancipation Proclamation, and many African Americans were demanding that the U.S. government do more to secure their rights. King addressed a gathering of over 250,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. Their march to that memorial was a symbol of their desire for a new civil rights bill to be quickly passed by Congress and signed by President John F. Kennedy. King carefully prepared a written speech for the occasion. Subtly alluding to Lincoln, King wrote “fivescore years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” As Eric J. Sundquist illustrates in King’s Dream, King attempted to show that the promises made one hundred years earlier were as yet unfulfilled. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were seen as “promissory notes” yet to be satisfied. The timing of the speech was significant for other reasons. Many African Americans were beginning to believe that King’s philosophy of nonviolent, peaceful protest was taking too long to accomplish results. He was under challenge by younger members of the movement such as John Lewis, whose more radical speech immediately before King’s that day had to be toned down at the last minute. He also faced the challenge of the emerging Black Power movement and the Nation of Islam, both of which called for more direct and forceful action against segregation. King replied to these challenges that African Americans could not “. . . satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.” It was clear, however, that there was no turning the Civil Rights movement back.

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In the chapter “Soul Force,” Sundquist traces a subtle, emerging black consciousness in the early 1960’s. Signs of frustration, anger, and a desire for freedom began to appear in poetry, art, and, above all, music. Jazz in particular became the “language of dissent,” as Sundquist describes it. Music became a precursor of the great changes to come. Sundquist also shows that King made very effective use of Scripture. As an ordained min ister steeped in theology, he was able to frame a speech that appealed to biblical prophecy, as in his Promised Land analogy, and to Old Testament parables and symbolism. The black church has always been an integral part of African American culture, and King’s audience understood the connections he was drawing between the Bible and the Civil Rights movement. As Sundquist emphasizes, King delivered his speech in the shadow of Lincoln’s statue. Speaking at the Lincoln Memorial gave King’s speech historical legitimacy. The Civil War did not settle the question of the status of free blacks in America, especially in the South. In a sense, King chose to speak, one hundred years later, at the great monument to ask that Lincoln’s promise of a “new birth of freedom” be fulfilled at last. Sunquist also reads King’s use of the lyrics of “America” (“My country ’tis of thee . . .”). The author claims that this was not a spontaneous decision on King’s part. The song had been sung by African Americans for generations, even though a “sweet land of liberty” was not a reality for them. King employed the lyrics as an ideal—a promise to be realized when freedom and equality are achieved. The resonance of the song with King’s audience also demonstrates, Sundquist notes, that most African Americans, in spite of the inequality they had suffered for so long, still considered themselves Americans. They believed in the American Dream and were willing to work toward a day when true equality would be theirs. For them, it was a song about hope yet to be fulfilled. Watching and listening to the speech very carefully, Sundquist detects a moment when King abandoned his prepared text and began to preach extemporaneously. King never fully explained why this happened. Perhaps the excitement of the moment brought out the preacher in him; perhaps he saw an opportunity to profoundly inspire the huge crowd. In any case, he drew his words from writings and sermons delivered over many years. This has led some critics to charge that this portion of King’s speech was plagiarized. Sermons, however, are not meant to be well-documented scholarly treatises. Their purpose is to inspire, uplift, and challenge their listeners. In this sense, King was shaping the collected wisdom of many sources to make his point more forcefully. The dividing line, where he began to speak directly from his heart and soul, seems to be at the point where he said “I still have a dream.” The theme of an American Dream appears in many of King’s previous speeches

Eric J. Sundquist is UCLA Foundation Professor of Literature at UCLA. He is the author or editor of twelve books on American literature and culture, including the award-winning volumes To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993) and Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (2005).

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and sermons, and it seems particularly appropriate here. Paraphrasing from the Old Testament, the Declaration of Independence, and the lyrics of “America,” King proclaimed his dream. The result was electrifying. Repeating the phrase “Let freedom ring . . .” he challenges segregation, hatred, and those who would advocate violence. “If America is to become a great nation, this [freedom] must become true.” Taking the audience across the country and to “every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city . . .” he illustrated that segregation was not exclusively a Southern problem; it was an American problem. Repeatedly employing the power of symbolism (“. . . we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope”), King effectively reminded his audience that, until the cancer of racism is everywhere removed, America cannot become or remain a great nation. Like those of Lincoln before him, King’s words strongly resonated among those who heard them. In a few short paragraphs, he touched a nation and reenergized the movement. Looking back, King’s speech stands as the highwater mark of his leadership of the Civil Rights movement. In the months and years to follow, President Kennedy would be assassinated, Malcolm X would be killed, and the Vietnam War would escalate. King’s final challenge, Sundquist believes, came with the line “. . . that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” In the years following King’s speech, Sundquist observes, the United States has struggled to bring this about. It may not be possible, the author asserts, ever to completely ignore race, and highly controversial programs such as affirmative action and school busing have specifically taken race into account in order to achieve equality. In the book’s final chapter, Sundquist ponders the question of whether a truly “color-blind” society is possible. He considers the argument that past inequities in hiring, promotion, and college admissions cannot be rectified without taking race into account. Most Supreme Court decisions involving equity issues have allowed race to be considered as a factor, validating a practice that Sundquist calls “race-conscious affirmative action.” King illustrated his views on equality by use of an analogy of an athletic competition. People who have been held in bondage and denied the advantages granted to others cannot be put at the starting line in a race and be expected to perform as well as those in positions of privilege. In the “race of life” as King put it, the United States must do more than simply bring more people to the starting line. Equal opportunity is not enough. More has to be done, King believed, to help African Americans overcome their disadvantages. King frequently used the metaphor of a footrace to illustrate his views on equality. He thought that preferential treatment in hiring, for example, may be the only way to even the odds and give African Americans a real chance: No racially neutral program would work. Sundquist believes that the Supreme Court decisions dealing with affirmative action issued after King’s death brought a period of “transitional inequality” in which race had to be taken into account in order to get beyond racism. The hope was that eventually the use of racial preferences would no longer be necessary.

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Sundquist presents evidence that King’s goal was a totally “color-blind” society, but King was also a pragmatist. Sundquist believes that King would have understood the need for racial preferences and affirmative action to achieve his dream. King’s ideal goes much further, however. He saw a world cleansed of not only racial injustice but also of economic injustice toward all people—not just African Americans. Photographs of the crowd at the March on Washington that heard King’s speech show a substantial proportion of whites, suggesting that his message was a universal one. As King used to say, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Sundquist’s book represents perhaps the most detailed analysis of King’s speech to date. It does an excellent job of comparing and contrasting King’s words with the thoughts of other African American leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Malcolm X. Sundquist admirably shows that, in the first and more formal part of the speech, King’s words were carefully chosen and crafted to explain the status of civil rights in 1963 and the historical irony of the gathering in Washington that August day. The second part of the speech came directly from King’s heart and soared in its imagery and oratorical power. In that moment, King inspired and uplifted Americans far beyond his tragic death in 1968. He secured his rightful place in history and became the catalyst for the changes that followed his passing. Sundquist powerfully reminds his readers that one cannot begin to comprehend the history of race relations in America without fully understanding the “I Have a Dream” speech. Delivering the speech at the height of his influence, King summed up the past and showed the way to the future for African Americans. Some dismissed it as being too idealistic and too far-reaching. Others doubted that the philosophy of nonviolence was the way to get there. King’s leadership, however, was unquestioned, and his vision was clear: The Promised Land was attainable for African Americans if they would stay the course. As Sundquist says, King could not know, nor could the rest of the country, that his dream would be America’s dream for a long time to come. The struggle would continue long after his passing, but his greatness and his words would live on to inspire millions. In addition, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act (1965) can be at least indirectly attributed to the challenge posed by King’s words in 1963. The election of the first African American president is proof that America has come a long way since King delivered his speech. No doubt, King would have been pleased. Sundquist believes that one day a Martin Luther King Memorial in Washington, D.C., in the line of sight of the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials, will finally place King where he rightfully belongs in U.S. history. Raymond Frey

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Review Sources American Literature 81, no. 4 (December, 2009): 869-871. The Boston Globe, January 17, 2009, p. G9. Choice, April, 2009, p. 1492. Library Journal 133, no. 20 (December 1, 2008): 142-143. The New York Times Book Review, January 18, 2009, p. 9. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 45 (November 10, 2008): 43-44. The Times Literary Supplement, January 16, 2009, p. 13. The Washington Post, February 15, 2009, p. T8.

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KIPLING SAHIB India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling Author: Charles Allen (1940) Publisher: Pegasus Books (New York). 426 pp. $28.00 Type of work: History, literary biography Time: 1865-1901 Locale: India; Great Britain An account of Rudyard Kipling’s early life, mostly spent in India, and the role India played in his emergence as a writer Principal personages: Rudyard Kipling, British writer Alice Macdonald Kipling, Kipling’s mother John Lockwood Kipling, Kipling’s father, an artist Trix (Alice) Kipling, Kipling’s sister Carrie Balestier Kipling, Kipling’s wife

Charles Allen’s Kipling Sahib relates the story of Rudyard Kipling’s early life, his development as a writer, and his conquest of the reading public in India, Great Britain, the United States, and elsewhere. His poems “The White Man’s Burden” and “The Recessional” captured in different ways the glories and responsibilities of Western imperialism, while “Danny Deaver” caught the pathos of a condemned British soldier going to his death. Barrack-Room Ballads, and Other Verses (1892) portrayed ordinary soldiers, rather than their officers, and in “Gunga Din” Kipling honored the humble Indian water carrier. His novel Kim (1901) is among the greatest novels about India, and for generations children have avidly read The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895), which tells the tales of the human child Mowgli being raised by a wolf named Raksha, as well as the ever-popular Just So Stories (1902). Kipling’s parents were middle class. John Lockwood Kipling was trained as a modeler in clay and carving bas-reliefs. He worked on the Albert Memorial in London, among other projects. Alice Macdonald and her sisters made their mark through marriage and motherhood. Alice was the mother of Rudyard, Georgie married the prominent pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, and Louisa was the mother of Stanley Baldwin, British prime minister during the 1920’s and 1930’s. Bombay, India, was a boomtown rife with speculators in the early 1860’s, and Allen provides a vivid description of the city during those years. Lockwood Kipling was offered a position in Bombay’s newly established school of art and industry, and, with the prospect of financial independence, Alice and Lockwood left England for Bombay in early 1865. Lockwood also ventured into journalism, becoming the Bombay

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correspondent to the Allahabad Pioneer, the leading Anglo-Indian newspaper in northern Charles Allen was born in India and India. Rudyard, the Kiplings’ first child, was has many Indian connections. He has born on December 30, 1865, and named after written widely on South Asia, including England’s Lake Rudyard. A second child, Al- Plain Tales from the Raj (1985), The ice, or Trixie, was born in 1868. Although the Search for Shangri-La (1999), and The Kiplings lived in Bombay for only a few Buddha and the Sahibs (2002). years, Rudyard, or Ruddy, later looked back on those years with great fondness. As was typical, his ayah, or nursemaid, was a major figure in his life: Most English parents turned much of the labor of child rearing over to a nursemaid. Both Kipling children had a gift for languages, and Kipling early learned to speak some Urdu and Hindi from the servants. The children’s upbringing spanned two cultures, encompassing both the Anglo-Indian population of about fifty thousand and the native Indian population of several hundred million. It was customary for Anglo-Indian children to be schooled in England. As Allen points out, schooled might be too strong a word. In 1871, Rudyard and Trixie were placed with a family in Swansea that was overly strict. That strictness combined with what both children felt to be their parents’ betrayal to made his time in Swansea perhaps the unhappiest period of Kipling’s life. It would later be reflected in his short story “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.” At the age of eleven, Kipling had what was apparently a nervous breakdown. In the interim, Lockwood had accepted a position in Lahore as a teacher at the Mayo School of Industrial Art, as well as the job of curator at the Lahore Museum. He had also become The Pioneer’s Lahore correspondent. Allen, as he did with Bombay, provides an extensive description of Lahore. In 1876, Lockwood’s professional career was advanced when the British viceroy, Lord Lytton, chose him to design dozens of coats of arms to commemorate the Delhi ceremony proclaiming Queen Victoria as empress of India. Alice Kipling returned to England in 1877 to rescue Rudyard and Trixie. Rudyard was placed in a newly established “public school,” the United Services College (USC), which was founded primarily to educate boys for a career in the British military. Such a career was not likely for Rudyard, however, given his lack of physical dexterity, his poor vision, his dislike of games, and his preference for reading. In spite of these attributes, however, Rudyard thrived at USC, where he was given access to the headmaster’s personal library. He read voraciously and wrote verses, some of which were published in India in 1881 as Schoolboy Lyrics. While at USC, Kipling matured physically and fell in love for the first time, but his love remained unrequited. The years at USC were also the inspiration for Kipling’s later schoolboy stories, Stalky and Co. (1899). In 1882, Kipling, aged sixteen, returned to Lahore, becoming the assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette (CMG), the sister newspaper to The Pioneer. The work was demanding—he complained of ten-hour days—but he found time to continue writing poetry. Although, as a young boy in Bombay, Kipling had experienced several Indias, he shared the assumptions and prejudices of most Anglo-Indians: He saw British rule as necessary and believed that Indians, with their “inferior” and con-

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flicting cultures, needed British authority to guarantee peace and maintain order. During the several months of summer “hot weather,” many in the European Indian community retreated to the hill towns, the most famous of which was Simla, with an elevation over 7,000 feet, in order to escape the burning heat of the plains. Allen provides an excellent picture of Simla and its society. Kipling’s experiences in Simla found their way into his many writings. Other events that he observed during his multifaceted journalistic career also became subject matter for those writings. He reported not only on political events, such as the Viceroy’s visits, but also on sports, the theater, and the gossip engendered by the personal lives of the Anglo-Indian community. He rejected bribes offered by an exiled Afghan chieftain who hoped to use the influence of the CMG to gain his freedom, and he reported on the Rawalpindi Durbar and the meeting of the amir of Afghanistan and the viceroy, Lord Dufferin. The trial and execution of Private George Flaxman in 1887 for the murder of a fellow soldier was the incident that three years later resulted in one of Kipling’s most famous poems, “Danny Deaver.” His journalistic experiences were also central to the approximately two hundred short stories he wrote in India. During the heat of summer, when it was it was too hot to sleep, Kipling would prowl the streets of Lahore with their opium dens and brothels, observing the India of the Indians and not just that of the British. He admitted to resorting to using opium on one occasion when ill. Allen also says that Kipling’s private notes suggest that, on another occasion, he was concerned that he had contracted syphilis. In the 1880’s, Lockwood Kipling became the artistic adviser to the duke of Connaught and was entrusted with the design of the new Punjab Museum. He was thus recognized as the leading British authority on Indian arts and crafts. Although still not yet twenty years old, Rudyard began to draft what he hoped would be the great Indian novel, tentatively titling it Mother Maturin and setting it in the Lahore of his nighttime explorations. In Quartette, published in 1885 as a seasonal supplement to the CMG, were printed two of Kipling’s short stories, “The Phantom Rickshaw” and “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes.” The latter presented a nightmare vision of an India wherein the Hindus ruled the British. In Lahore, Kipling became an active Freemason, and Allen notes that Masonic images pervade his short story “The Man Who Would Be King” and the novel Kim. He developed an admiration for the common British soldier, subject to disease, drunkenness, and death. Soldiers Three: A Collection of Stories (1888) featured three British privates. Departmental Ditties (1886) increased his fame among the Anglo-Indians; he was still only twenty-one. In 1888, Kipling published Plain Tales from the Hills, consisting of thirty-two stories, many of which had been previously published in the CMG. The previous year, Kipling had left Lahore for Allahabad, the location of The Pioneer and, in spite of its name, primarily a Hindu city. Kipling was generally more sympathetic to India’s Muslims than its Hindus, perhaps because of Hinduism’s polytheism and seeming sexual openness. This judgment is reflected in his negative interpretation of Calcutta and its Bengali population in the stories collected in The City of Dreadful Night, and Other Places (1890). Kipling’s last visit to Simla was in the summer of 1888. By then, he had adopted

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“the Scheme,” which was his plan to leave India, return to London, and continue as a journalist with the ultimate aim of writing full time. His financial security was to be assured as the English correspondent of The Pioneer. He arrived in England by way of the United States in October, 1889. Although he was only twenty-three, Kipling’s fame had already spread beyond India: He came across a pirated American edition of Plain Tales from the Hills in a Japanese bookshop. In London, he was readily embraced by a number of prominent writers, including Andrew Lang, Walter Besant, and H. Rider Haggard. “Danny Deaver” appeared in 1890 to considerable praise, and it was included in the first series of Barrack-Room Ballads, which also included “Gunga Din” and “Mandalay.” In January, 1892, Kipling married Carrie Balestier, an American. After a roundthe-world honeymoon, they acquired a rustic home in Battleboro, Vermont. With the birth of a daughter, Josephine, Kipling envisioned a children’s novel, which eventually became Kim. More immediately, Kipling, joined by his father, began the story of Mowgli, an infant saved from the tiger Shere Khan and raised by Father and Mother Wolf. The resulting The Jungle Book was published in 1894, with The Second Jungle Book (1895) following shortly thereafter. The Kiplings moved back to England in 1896. The first of the Stalky and Co. stories about his schoolboy years appeared in 1897, which was also the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, for which he wrote one of his most famous poems, “Recessional.” The poem was a warning against imperial hubris and famously included the phrase, “Lest we forget.” The following year, another iconic poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” appeared, making an appeal to the United States to assume its imperial responsibilities. Kipling’s Just So Stories reflected his growing family concerns, including the death of a daughter. Kim, Kipling’s last great work about India, was written in England, with Lockwood providing the illustrations for the first edition. Allen notes that Christopher Hitchens once described Kipling as “a man of permanent contradictions.” The biographer agrees, and he quotes a Kipling verse that headed one of the chapters in Kim, referring to “Separate sides to my head.” Kim, an orphaned boy of working-class British parents, is at home among Muslims, Hindus, and a Buddhist lama, but he is also claimed by a Methodist and a Catholic, is sent to an Anglo-Indian school, and is used by the British government as a spy against Russians. Kim is, among other things, about a search for identity, and one sees such a search in Kipling himself: A defender of British imperialism and an admirer of Britain’s officer class, Kipling was also empathetic to the British enlisted men and to the other, non-British India. The ending of Kim is left ambiguous: Kim may become a British sahib, or he may remain a disciple of the Lama. Kipling won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, becoming the first British writer to be so recognized, and he remains the youngest literary Nobel laureate. Allen claims that Kipling’s best work was behind him after Kim, when he turned his back on the Indian and the intuitive side of his head. Kipling Sahib is an excellent work, including an incisive and sympathetic discussion of Kipling and his writings, but it also provides a valuable view of India under the British Raj in the late nineteenth century. Eugene Larson

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Review Sources Asian Affairs 39, no. 2 (July, 2008): 297. Contemporary Review 290, no. 1691 (Winter, 2008): 514-515. Geographical 80, no. 4 (April, 2008): 76. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 17. Library Journal 134, no. 2 (February 1, 2009): 71. Sewanee Review 116, no. 4 (Fall, 2008): 507+. The Sunday Times (London), September 28, 2008, p. 48. The Times Literary Supplement, July 4, 2008, p. 13. The Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2009, p. W8.

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KOESTLER The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic Author: Michael Scammell (1935) Publisher: Random House (New York). 689 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Literary biography Time: 1905-1983 Locale: Budapest; Vienna, Austria; Palestine; Berlin, Germany; Paris, France; London, England; Wales; Spain; Naples, Italy; Pennsylvania; Stanford, California A biography of one of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century Principal personages: Arthur Koestler, a Jewish Hungarian fiction and nonfiction writer Adele Koestler, his mother Daphne Hardy, his companion Dorothee Ascher, his first wife Mamaine Paget, his second wife Cynthia Jefferies, his third wife Albert Camus, a French existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre, a French existentialist philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir, a French feminist philosopher

If Arthur Koestler is remembered today, it is for his riveting novel about the perils of Soviet communism, Darkness at Noon (1940), and perhaps as well for his contribution to the collection of essays by disillusioned Marxists, The God That Failed (1949). There may also be some interest in his work on the sources of creativity, The Act of Creation (1964), but as to his investigations late in life into parapsychology, non-Darwinian evolutionary theory, and the possibility of using therapeutic drugs to end social problems such as war, there is mostly embarrassed silence. This silence would have disappointed Koestler, who had a falling-out with his first biographer, Iain Hamilton, when Hamilton refused to focus on these later interests of his subject. Michael Scammell’s Koestler is a well-written account of his life and work but does not convey a clear enough sense of what Arthur Koestler was all about. Scammell certainly does not ignore the writer’s later interests, but his biography is at its best when it recounts his earlier years, tracing Koestler’s youth as a deracinated Hungarian Jew through his time as a Zionist, culminating with Koestler’s time as a communist and his break with communism. Perhaps this uneven quality of treatment is simply because the earlier portion was the most interesting or most important part of Koestler’s life. In those years, especially in his masterpiece, Darkness at Noon, Koestler grappled with an ideology and an attitude toward life that in the middle of the twentieth century affected the entire world. His later dabbling in extrasensory per-

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ception and his campaign against quarantine restrictions on dogs entering England hardly seem to be in the same league. There is more to it than that, though. The later stages of Scammell’s book, though as clearly written as what went before, seem increasingly scrappy. There is yet another love affair to chronicle or at least mention, another house Koestler is bought near Naples or Cam bridge or in Kent. His failing health is mixed in with making a new friend and his reporting on the famous chess match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. This portion of the biography contains so many different bits of information along these lines that it seems disorganized or lacking in focus. Perhaps the problem is that there is a lack of a sense in the book of what Arthur Koestler’s life meant. Earlier in the biography, this lack of evaluation seems to be less of an issue. There is a focus at that point having to do with Koestler’s disillusionment with communism and his campaign to reveal its true nature to those in the West still sympathetic to the Soviet Union. It is perhaps this campaign of disillusionment that prompts Scammell to label Koestler a skeptic, incorporating the word into his subtitle. Perhaps what prompts this notion of skepticism is the fact that Koestler typically set himself against orthodoxies, such as the Darwinian orthodoxy in evolution. Scammell spends little time developing or explaining the idea that Koestler was a skeptic, however, which is perhaps understandable because on his own evidence a skeptic was the furthest thing from what Koestler was. Scammell’s biography reveals a very young man latching onto an extreme form of Zionism, Revisionist Zionism, which was associated with terrorist groups such as the Irgun and the Stern Gang. After that, Koestler drifted into the Communist Party, becoming a defender of the Soviet Union, though never a completely reliable one. (This unreliability caused him to have some trouble publishing one of his early books.) There was something in Koestler that resisted becoming a true believer, though whether that was a general tendency toward skepticism or just a problem he had with the conflict between communist theory and Soviet reality is not clear. What is clear is that an even larger part of him yearned to be a true believer in some cause—any cause. As he put it in one of his autobiographical volumes, in a passage quoted by Scammell, he suffered from “absolutitis”—a desire to solve the riddles of the universe—from his earliest years, when he wondered where an arrow shot up into the infinite might go:

Michael Scammell’s 1985 biography of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the English PEN Nonfiction Prize. Scammell has also translated numerous Russian authors into English. He teaches creative writing at Columbia University in New York.

The thirst for the absolute is a stigma which marks those unable to find satisfaction in the relative world of the now and here. My obsession with the arrow was merely the first phase of the quest. When it proved sterile, the Infinite as a target was replaced by Utopias of one kind and another. It was the same quest, the same all-or-nothing mentality, which drove me to the Promised Land and into the Communist Party. In other ages aspirations of this kind found their natural fulfillment in God.

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This hardly sounds like skepticism; it is more a religious feeling, but somehow divorced from orthodox religion. Koestler indeed in his later life was willing to call himself a mystic and to say that, although he did not believe in a Designer for the universe, he did believe in a design. When a friend suggested that he should give up on his pseudoreligions and go in for the real thing, Koestler declined. There was something rebellious in him that led him to oppose reigning orthodoxies, but it led him not into a permanent state of skepticism but to a perpetual state of seeking the truth. This tendency was something Koestler himself recognized, as indicated in the passage quoted above, and perhaps Koestler is still the best guide to Koestler. He produced four volumes of autobiographical writings, and Scammell says that autobiography may have been his best sort of writing. Whether that is so or not (some might argue that he was best as an essayist or a popularizer or even as a novelist of ideas), it may be that the autobiographies are the best place to go to understand Koestler. However, Scammell has written an entertaining narrative of Koestler’s life, demonstrating easy mastery of a number of archival sources and avoiding various biographical pitfalls. For instance, he does not succumb to judgmental debunking of his subject in the manner of another Koestler biographer, David Cesariani, who called Koestler a serial rapist and suggested he was to blame for his third wife’s death by suicide. As an authorized biographer, it is only to be expected that Scammell would take a less negative view, but he examines the evidence and makes a good case for dismissing both charges. It is not as if Scammell tries to portray Koestler as a saint; it is certainly clear from his biography that Koestler could be a difficult man, one who drank far too much, drove recklessly, could become physically violent, and was often intellectually aggressive. His relations with women, as Scammell describes them, are frankly astonishing. He somehow managed to attract a great many of them, having affair after affair, but there was usually something excessively controlling about his relations with them. With his third wife, Cynthia, he was downright tyrannical, according to Scammell’s account. This attitude toward women in a way seems more sad than anything else, a reflection of the fact that Koestler seems to have been incapable of true intimacy. Before reading Scammell’s biography, one might have thought that Koestler achieved at least something like intimacy in his long third marriage, but what emerges in this account is a description of a marriage that was a relationship more of master and slave than of husband and wife. Cynthia comes across primarily as a cook, housekeeper, and secretary perpetually being yelled at by her husband. If Scammell had been interested in the larger patterns in Koestler’s life, perhaps he might have made something of this lack of intimacy. Perhaps, as Koestler himself suggested, his unrelenting search for larger meanings reflected a failure to find satisfaction in his daily life, most notably in his relations with women. Scammell does not make this connection, however. On the other hand, Scammell manages to do something quite unusual in a biography: He introduces an element of suspense. The suspense does not involve Koestler

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himself, for the facts of his life are fairly clear and most readers know that he was not, for example, executed in prison before getting a chance to write Darkness at Noon. The case of his mother is different. She was marooned in Nazi-occupied Hungary, and the tension builds as the pages go by over whether she made it out alive. Scammell also manages one comic masterstroke when describing Koestler’s obsession with signs and symbols. At one stage in his life, he wondered what it might mean that he had recently had so many automobile accidents. Perhaps, says Scammell, it was just that he was a lousy driver. It is a funny comment, and it is true enough that Koestler seemed prone to seeing meaning where there was perhaps just accident; he even wrote a book, The Roots of Coincidence (1972) on the topic. Even so, Scammell may be too quick to dismiss the search for meaning, especially since that search seems to have been the essence of Koestler’s life. All in all, then, Scammell has produced a solid examination of the life of a fascinating mid-twentieth century intellectual, one of a dying breed, the public intellectual writing for a nonacademic public. It is interesting that the highly sophisticated and widely respected Koestler, author of dozens of books and numerous articles, in fact never finished a university degree—one of the many interesting facts that Scammell presents. Scammell also reports that Koestler looked a bit like Humphrey Bogart, though a Bogart with a heavy European accent that was part of what made him fear he could never fit into the upper reaches of British society. That society was where he wanted to be in his final decades. In other words, Scammell asserts, Koestler was a snob. He did ultimately receive recognition from Queen Elizabeth II as a Commander of the British Empire, but he still was never truly an insider. This partial exclusion from respectable society may have been inevitable given his attachment to less-thanrespectable views on such things as parapsychology. More serious, Scammell more than once examines Koestler’s long tussle with the issue of ends and means. As a communist, he was dedicated to the notion that the ends justified the means. When he broke with communism, he also broke with this concept to a certain extent. He seemed still able to adhere to it in certain situations, though—a position perhaps explained by his friend, the author Albert Camus, who said it depended on the particular ends and means in each case. It is typical that this most interesting formulation about ends and means comes not from Scammell but from another commentator. Some of the most insightful passages in the biography are ones Scammell is merely quoting from others, often from reviewers of Koestler’s work, sometimes from Koestler himself. It is as if the biographer almost deliberately refrains from analysis, at least large-scale analysis, and instead remains content to tell a story. The story he tells is an interesting one, including such things as Koestler’s personal adventures with Camus and the two other leading French existentialists, JeanPaul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Scammell provides a comprehensive retelling of what seem to have been all the important moments of Koestler’s life, without descending into the trivial or amassing a stodgy monument of facts of interest only to scholars. This is no mean feat. There are moments in the biography in which Scammell goes a bit overboard in

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praising Koestler’s achievements and his prescience. He says repeatedly that Koestler was significantly ahead of his time, an observation that sometimes seems true but mostly seems a bit forced. Scammell can be forgiven his cheerleading, however. The real shortcoming of the biography is its lack of a clear pattern for Koestler’s life, the sort of pattern Koestler provided in his autobiographies. Perhaps that pattern was forced, but when there is hardly any pattern at all, a biography cannot ultimately satisfy. Sheldon Goldfarb

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 304, no. 5 (December, 2009): 103-107. Booklist 106, no. 8 (December 15, 2009): 10. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 20 (October 15, 2009): 56. Newsweek 155, no. 2 (January 11, 2010): 60. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 43 (October 26, 2009): 43. The Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2010, p. W15.

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THE LACUNA Author: Barbara Kingsolver (1955) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 507 pp. $26.99 Type of work: Novel Time: 1929-1959 Locale: Mexico; Washington, D.C.; Asheville, North Carolina This novel tells the life story of Harrison Shepherd, who balances Mexican and U.S. nationalities, against the backdrop of the major political upheavals in the two countries from the 1920’s through the 1950’s Principal characters: Harrison Shepherd, a Mexican American novelist Salomé Shepherd, his mother Frida Kahlo, a painter and the wife of Diego Rivera Diego Rivera, a painter and the husband of Frida Kahlo Lev Davidovich Trotsky, a Russian revolutionary in exile in Mexico Van, Trotsky’s secretary Violet Brown, Harrison’s stenographer

One of Barbara Kingsolver’s repeated themes in The Lacuna is that the most interesting part of a story is the part that is not told. A lacuna is a missing or hidden part, and the novel hints at many of them. On the surface, the book tells the life story of Harrison William Shepherd. It begins when he is a child in the 1920’s. His Mexican mother, Salomé, has taken him to her home country to live with her lover after leaving his father, a U.S. government employee. They move frequently as Salomé drifts from lover to lover. Harrison’s schooling is so sporadic that by his teenage years he qualifies only for a school for the mentally deficient. When that school proves unsuitable, he goes to Washington, D.C., where his father enrolls him in a military boarding school. After being expelled for homosexual behavior, Harrison returns to Mexico. He works for the artist Diego Rivera mixing plaster. Later, he becomes a cook and secretary for Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo. The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky takes refuge with the artists. After Trotsky is shot, Kahlo seeks to protect Harrison by having him deliver art to the United States to get him out of the country. Harrison settles in Asheville, North Carolina, where he writes best-selling novels about ancient Mexico. He hires a stenographer, Violet Brown, to help with typing and correspondence. Harrison is investigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which seeks to stop the spread of communism in the United States. He and Violet travel to Mexico, where Harrison fakes his death. Violet compiles his journals and other materials into a book manuscript and has it locked away to be considered for publication in fifty years.

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That is the plot of The Lacuna, but, like any good novel, the book goes far beyond its plotline. In this case, the text’s lacunae are important parts of the story. As a child living on Isla Pixol in Mexico, Harrison discovers the novel’s first lacuna: He learns that the cliffs along the ocean contain caves that are underwater at high tide. He learns to hold his breath long enough to swim into one of these caves. There, he finds that it is a tunnel leading into a pond where the Aztecs left gifts for the gods and made human sacrifices. The Lacuna is Barbara Kingsolver’s Another lacuna occurs at the end of the seventh novel. The Poisonwood Bible novel, when readers are led to believe that (1998) was chosen as an Oprah’s Book Harrison has drowned. Violet learns the truth Club selection. She has also published several years later, when she receives a draw- nonfiction, including the best-selling ing from Frida Kahlo’s estate with a cryptic Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of message on it. Readers learn that he is alive Food Life. She was awarded the from her account of that gift. Another missing National Humanities Medal in 2000. piece of the story is the journal that tells why Harrison was expelled from school. Occasional comments in his later journals make it clear that he was caught engaging in homosexual activity with another student, but few of the details are revealed. The novel is formatted as a compilation of various types of written documents, creating an exploration of how readers acquire information and misinformation. In fact, a major theme of the work is how and why misunderstandings are created. Its first words introduce this theme by describing the “howlers” Harrison hears every morning as a child on Isla Pixol in Mexico. He and his mother think these howlers are demons who eat human flesh. It turns out that they are only monkeys. The novel includes the beginning of Harrison’s memoir, his journals, newspaper articles, letters, notes from Violet about the materials included in her manuscript, and the transcript of a hearing. By juxtaposing these texts, readers construct a narrative and discover the lacunae within it. The beginning of Harrison’s memoir is a rewritten version of his first childhood journal, presented from an adult perspective. His other journals remain in the format of dated entries. While much of the novel derives from Harrison’s journals, though, Violet is in a large way the story’s creator, since she has compiled them for a manuscript. The extent to which she edited Harrison’s writing is not clear. Harrison thought that Violet burned the journals to destroy potentially damaging evidence when he was being investigated by Congress. In fact, she burned only one, the one he kept while he was a teenager at the Potomac Academy. She explains in her notes that she burned that one because it contained something Harrison did not want others to read. She admits that he wanted the other journals destroyed also but does not clarify why she kept all but one.

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While Violet might have manipulated the material in Harrison’s journals, Harrison himself also might have done so, aware of the possibility that someone would read the journals someday. He continued to make journal entries even after he thought his earlier journals had been burned. By this time, he knew that government agents might read anything he wrote. Earlier, Rivera and Kahlo were afraid that Harrison’s journals would create trouble if the police or others read his account of Trotsky’s stay at their home. Kahlo asked Harrison to use his journal to create an objective record of the household’s events, and he submitted the entries to her each week for her review. It is clear that during this time Harrison wrote journal entries thinking of Kahlo as an audience. While journals are typically thought of as personal records of truth, newspapers contain public statements of fact. The Lacuna includes a number of newspaper articles. Some are actual articles reprinted from publications including The New York Times. Others are fictional. The actual articles document the political biases behind reporting of the leftist movement in 1930’s Mexico and behind the investigations into “un-American” activities in the United States in the 1940’s. The last excerpt from The New York Times, dated September 26, 1948, reports on a claim that President Harry S. Truman had communist ties. This article demonstrates both the extent to which accusations of communism were politically motivated and the degree to which politicians, reporters, and others quickly forgot their own recent history during the Red Scare. The article reports that Truman had been endorsed for vice president by a socialist newspaper a few years earlier. It does not note that ties to socialist and communist groups were common among U.S. politicians, intellectuals, and others throughout the 1930’s and early 1940’s. In fact, the endorsement had come during World War II, at a time when the United States and the Soviet Union were military allies. The novel’s fictional newspaper stories contain numerous inaccuracies. For example, Harrison’s obituary in the local newspaper says that he was discharged from his job with the Department of State for treason, fraud, and misrepresentation of qualifications. In fact, at the time of his supposed death, Harrison had been a full-time novelist since his war-related government service concluded with the end of World War II. Several articles about his investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities attribute a quote to him that was actually spoken by a character in one of his novels. Moreover, although his novels were set in ancient Mexico, reporters labeled them as commentary on the U.S. political situation of the time. The novel also incorporates reviews of Harrison’s books that question the objectivity of book reviews. Before he is accused of being a communist, he is one of the most popular writers in the country. His reviews are glowingly positive. Once the congressional investigation begins, however, reviewers denounce his books and comment on the ways they express a communist viewpoint. Harrison always refuses to have his photograph published on his book jackets. Before the investigation, reviewers describe him as attractive and eligible. Later, one describes him as too ugly to have his photograph printed. The fan letters included in the novel take a similar turn. Before the investigation,

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Harrison receives bags of enthusiastic fan mail and attracts particular interest from female fans. After the investigation becomes public, the letters change to hate mail and threats. Among all the documents included in the novel, a transcript of a hearing before a subcommittee of the Committee on Un-American Activities is the one that seems most reliably to report on an event. The transcript provides no evidence that Harrison was active in or promoted communist activity. However, one of the examiners, after insisting that Harrison provide only yes or no answers, words his questions in ways that, if the questions are taken out of context, appear damning. In the simplest terms, in Kingsolver’s novel what appears to be true is not the whole story. Although Harrison worked for Rivera and Trotsky, he was not engaged in revolutionary activity. He served as a cook and secretary. Brown claims that she prepared the manuscript that has become the novel because she wanted readers to understand who Harrison Shepherd was and what happened to him. Throughout the novel, though, other characters see him through their own perspectives, even naming him to suit their purposes. His full name is Harrison William Shepherd, and his mother calls him Will. Later, when she sends him to the United States for school, his father calls him Harrison. When he works as a cook in Kahlo’s home, Kahlo cannot pronounce “Harrison,” so she nicknames him Insólito, or Sóli for short. He signs letters to Kahlo and Rivera with the names H. W. Shepherd, H. Shepherd, Insólito, and Sóli. Part of the complication to Harrison’s identity is his mixed Mexican and American parentage and upbringing. Having lived in both countries, Harrison never feels completely at home in either. He spends his childhood in Mexico reading adventure novels and learning survival skills from the servants. As an adult in North Carolina, he rarely leaves home, preferring for Brown to run his errands for him. In spite of the novel’s insistence on the complexities of communicating with and understanding other people, deep friendship is an important theme of the work. Harrison is a successful writer largely because of the support and encouragement of Kahlo and Brown. Kahlo urges him to write. She steals a copy of an ancient artifact from Rivera and sends it to him. Harrison bases one of his novels on the story its pictures tell. Brown is loyal to her employer even after he is investigated for communist activity. On its publication, The Lacuna met a mixed critical reception. Some reviewers judged The Lacuna to be Kingsolver’s finest novel to date. They praised the novel’s scope and commented that the plot is engaging throughout. Others said that the second half, recording the time after Shepherd moves to North Carolina and becomes a novelist, is weaker than the first half. The main complaints about the second half were that Shepherd’s character goes flat and that the political statement about U.S. politics in the 1950’s takes priority over plot and character development. Most reviewers responded enthusiastically to the part of the novel that records Shepherd’s time living in the Rivera-Kahlo household in 1930’s Mexico. Joan Hope

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Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 2 (September 15, 2009): 5. The Bookseller, no. 5407 (November 6, 2009): 55. The Christian Science Monitor, October 31, 2009, p. Books-25. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 17 (September 1, 2009): 909-910. Library Journal 134, no. 17 (October 15, 2009): 67. The New York Times Book Review, November 8, 2009, p. 9. The New Yorker 85, no. 38 (November 23, 2009): 113. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 33 (August 17, 2009): 1. The Times Literary Supplement, November 13, 2009, p. 23.

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LAISH Author: Aharon Appelfeld (1932) First published: Layish, 1994, in Israel Translated from the Hebrew by Aloma Halter Publisher: Schocken Books (New York). 231 pp. $23.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Locale: Eastern Europe A picaresque novel narrated in the first person by an orphan boy describing a group of Jews traveling by wagon train from Eastern Europe toward Jerusalem Principal characters: Laish, a young orphan boy, the narrator Fingerhut, his employer, who dies early on Ploosh, a crude and cruel wagon driver Sruel, the wagon driver who takes over after Ploosh dies Old Avraham, the devout spiritual leader of the group and Laish’s teacher Tzilla, a seamstress who later cooks for the pilgrims Chiyuk and Shimkeh, a pair of rough wagon drivers Itcheh Meir, a clever thief Ephraim, an informer who is beaten by Chiyuk and Shimkeh Blind Menachem, one of the old, pious men in the wagon train Maya, a prostitute with whom Laish becomes obsessed Mamshe, a wild, caged woman

In Aharon Appelfeld’s Laish, a young orphan, probably in his early teens, tells the story of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem by a group consisting partly of elderly, devout Jews. A number of merchants, called “dealers,” are also included in the wagons that wend their slow and weary way from the Carpathian Mountains in Eastern Europe to a port on the Black Sea. There, the group plans to take ship for Palestine and their final destination: the holy city of Jerusalem. Women and children, apparently the wives and offspring of some of the men, make up the rest of the entourage. The time of the pilgrimage is indeterminate but most likely it begins near the end of the nineteenth century and originates in the Ukraine. The convoy travels for a considerable time along the Prut River, which borders Romania and what is now Moldava. Progress is very slow. En route, the dealers trade and bargain with the peasants and townspeople they encounter, whereas the old men spend time studying Torah and praying. Old Avraham takes Laish (from the Hebrew word for “lion”) under his wing. He teaches the boy to pray and impresses on him the importance of study. The pilgrimage is nothing if not dangerous. Not only are the wagons frequently be-

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set by thieves, but also the dealers transport contraband and accordingly have to evade the legal authorities. Money passes from hand to hand and is sewn into the men’s coats for safekeeping. As Laish describes the goingson, there is great tension between the dealers and the old men. Adding to the difficulty of the journey are the wagon drivers, men of crude disposition who drink heavily and also steal, especially when the group arrives at some of the bigger towns on their route, Aharon Appelfeld, the author of many such as Sadagora, Czernowitz, Vishnitz, and novels, essays, and poems in Hebrew, Galacz. In Laish’s view, “Here, everyone’s a was born in Czernowitz, Romania. In thief.” 1940, he was imprisoned in a Fingerhut, who appears early in the novel, concentration camp but escaped and spent three years hiding in the Ukraine, is seriously ill and has Laish help him as he eventually emigrating in 1946 to Israel, lies swathed in blankets and writhing in pain. where he now lives and writes. At one point, he tells Laish that he no longer believes that Jerusalem will heal him; he dies shortly thereafter. The wagon driver Ploosh then forces Laish to work for him and treats him badly, until Ploosh is arrested for murdering one of the dealers to whom he owed money. Sruel takes over Ploosh’s duties as wagon driver, further angering the imprisoned Ploosh, who does not think Sruel knows how to handle horses well enough. When Ploosh escapes from jail, he seeks out Sruel, who kills him with Ploosh’s revolver during their fight. Ploosh turns out to be quite wrong about Sruel’s ability to handle horses. Sruel proves equally adept at handling people, and he gradually becomes a leader of the pilgrimage. Along with Old Avraham, he takes special care of Laish. He shows the boy how to catch fish in the Prut River that they use to feed the pilgrims, and he advises Laish in many other ways. He is a tall, strong man with a much gentler disposition than the other wagon drivers. He even has a falcon who perches on his shoulder and sleeps in his lap at night after flying aloft during the day. Earlier in his life, Sruel was convicted of murdering two peasants who had attacked his father; as a result, he served thirty years of a life sentence before being released. He is the most remarkable character in the novel, revealing depths of his nature to Laish, who learns to admire and respect him highly. Laish reveals other sorts of tension in his narrative, including some that directly involve him. For example, when the convoy arrives in Czernowitz, he is taken to a nightclub by several dealers. There, he meets Maya, evidently a barfly or prostitute, who captivates Laish. Although she does not look Jewish, she tells Laish that she is and calls him her “cub.” She is unlike any of the women in the convoy, whom Laish describes as embittered and without charm, casting a heaviness and gloom on one’s heart. By the end of the evening, Maya has thoroughly “ruined” Laish, who up to then was most likely a virgin.

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Partway through the convoy, Laish reveals a secret concerning a violent young woman named Mamshe who is confined in a cage carried in one of the wagons. Though she sleeps curled up most of the day, she breaks out in wild screams at night like a wounded animal. Obviously deranged, she poses a problem for the others, who have been told by their late holy man that they must take her on the pilgrimage and treat her gently, as if she were an ordinary person. In Czernowitz, a doctor gives her tranquilizers, but they prove useless and her screams of pure terror continue. At their wits’ end, the pilgrims open Mamshe’s cage and prod her to escape among the reeds along the Prut River. She never returns, and her disappearance casts a pall over everyone, for they had no idea how much a part of them she had become. Another source of tension is the problem of informers, or “snitches,” among the pilgrims. When Ephraim is discovered to be one of them, two of the wagon drivers, Shimkeh and Chiyuk, are commissioned to punish him. They lash him with their belts, leaving terrible wounds that never completely heal. While suffering, Ephraim becomes a kind of saintly individual. He begins to have visions and becomes a much gentler person. Shimkeh and Chiyuk never truly repent of whipping him mercilessly, claiming that it was what the group wanted them to do, but Ephraim forgives them nevertheless. The pilgrims, especially the old men, do their best to observe holy days and other religious rites. They ritually immerse themselves in the river once a day, whisper their prayers, visit the sick, and ask forgiveness of everyone. Laish describes the ceremony on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the Days of Awe, or the Ten Days of Penitence: On the eve of the holiday the old men put on their white clothes. They circled the table on which the Torah lay and then sat in the front row. The dealers sat behind them, and the wagon drivers stood. Truth be told, that was how it was every year. But this time, they brought Ephraim on his pallet, wrapped him in a yellowed prayer shawl, and they placed him next to the table. One of the old men handed him a holiday prayer book. Ephraim took the prayer book in his hands and kissed it. Old Yerachmiel led the prayers quietly, in a restrained manner.

Appelfeld’s prose here, translated from the Hebrew by Aloma Halter, reveals the simplicity as well as the devotion not only of the worshipers but also of Laish, the narrator, who eschews florid language throughout his story. Besides the dangers of robbers and the difficulty of getting the wagons through the rough roads, often filled with mud when the rains come, Laish also recounts the serious depredations of illnesses experienced by the group. When they are only partway to Galacz, they are afflicted by plague, which carries off a number of them, including children. Their consequent need to find a Jewish cemetery where the bodies may be interred compounds their difficulty, as it does later, when another illness strikes the convoy. Eventually, increasing numbers of the pilgrims leave the convoy in despair of ever reaching Jerusalem alive. By the time the pilgrims arrive at Galacz, only two of the original six wagons are left, and many fewer of the original band of pilgrims.

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The novels ends as the remaining pilgrims finally find a ship and, mainly through Sruel’s leadership, enough money to pay for their passage. Laish does not reveal whether the pilgrims ever reach their ultimate destination, which they expect will fulfill its promise of redemption. Jay L. Halio

Review Sources Forward 112 (March 20, 2009): 11. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 3. New York Times Book Review, March 29, 2009, p. 6. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 2 (January 12, 2009): 30. World Literature Today 69 (Spring, 1995): 427.

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LARK AND TERMITE Author: Jayne Ann Phillips (1952) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 307 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1950’s Locale: North Chungchong Province, South Korea; Winfield, West Virginia Phillips brings together the multiple strands of a West Virginia family’s story in order to show the mysterious effects the past has on the present and the future Principal characters: Lark, a teenaged girl who cares for her Termite during a horrible flood in West Virginia Termite, her mentally incapacitated halfbrother, who has an uncanny ability to understand the past and the future Lola, Lark and Termite’s mother, whose lifestyle and lovers lead her far from her West Virginia roots Nonie, Lola’s long-suffering sister, who cares for Lark and Termite Charlie, Nonie’s paramour, once smitten by Lola but now faithful to Nonie and her family Corporal Robert Leavitt, Lola’s second husband, Termite’s father, and a soldier in the Korean War Solly, the boy next door and Lark’s secret childhood lover Stamble, a mysterious and helpful social worker

Known for her poetic glimpses into complex family relationships in such previous novels as Motherkind (2000), Jayne Anne Phillips works the same familial ground in Lark and Termite. She uses a variety of techniques to untangle the complex story of Lark, a young woman in small-town West Virginia in the late 1950’s who is struggling to understand her family’s past and its ramifications for her future. Told from the multiple perspectives of the main characters in the novel, the story refuses a strict linearity. Instead, readers learn information piecemeal, as different aspects of the family saga are revealed by different voices with distinct memories. Furthermore, Phillips hints at the possibilities of intersections between past and present, often made possible in the novel by a mystical interplay between different times and places. The novel contains two discrete story lines, nine years apart in time, and the events in each help inform the unfolding of a larger plot that combines the two. The first story is told in multiple sections from the third-person limited perspective of Corporal Robert Leavitt, a young man who finds himself in South Korea at the onset of the Korean War. Given that most of the Americans with Leavitt have not been anticipating a conflict of this magnitude, the bombing and fighting creates mass confusion, hamper-

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ing the Americans’ ability to differentiate between their allies, the South Koreans, and their enemies, the North Korean aggressors. As a result, some American soldiers fire on a group of retreating South Koreans that includes Leavitt. Leavitt heroically tries to get his group to safety inside a tunnel underneath a bridge overpass. Shot just as he enters the tunnel, Leavitt spends much of his narrative in a halJayne Anne Phillips has written several lucinogenic retreat into memory and fantasy, where he confuses his present in the tunnel short-story collections and novels, with a fantasy of being at home in the United including the Pushcart Prize-winning States with his wife. Time balloons and shortSweethearts (1976), Black Tickets ens during Leavitt’s sections of the novel, as (1979), Fast Lanes (1988), Machine he moves in and out of consciousness. Cared Dreams (1984), Shelter (1994), and for tangentially by a young Korean woman Motherkind (2000). Phillips is professor of English and director of the who is also responsible for a mentally reM.F.A. program at Rutgers University, tarded child and an older woman, Leavitt Newark. seems to communicate to them beyond his physical capacity for language. Part of Phillips’s purpose in these sections is to depict the senseless slaughter of hundreds of innocent Koreans in this tunnel incident, which actually occurred during the Korean War. (She also includes recent photos of the tunnel, bridge, and underpass taken by photographer Robert Nilsen). Hinted at within the hallucinations, however, are intimate connections between Leavitt’s present in Korea and a concurrent time with his wife back in the United States. He seems to exist in both places, knowing things about his wife and the imminent birth of his son that he could not realistically know. Also tying into this sense of unreality are the uncanny abilities of the mentally retarded Korean boy whom Leavitt saves and who senses an attack by airplanes before it occurs. Though lacking the connections typically available to him, the boy, like Leavitt’s son Termite, seems to have prophetic abilities. Since the Korean boy’s qualities and physical characteristics are mirrored in Termite in the other sections of the novel, Phillips seems to suggest that the young Korean boy’s spirit is transferred somehow into Termite. Certainly, the two have similar attributes, including unusual, opaque eyes and an inability to walk or talk. Most important, Termite seems to know about things that occurred in the past and seems to “remember” the tunnel in Korea: He seems to connect an otherwise normal tunnel in West Virginia with the atrocities that occurred in Korea. Here, Phillips seems to portray the past and the present as capable of conjoining in ways one cannot fathom. Termite’s is one of the most interesting voices in the text. His sections, told via third-person limited omniscience, give readers the odd sense of being inside his thoughts as well as perceiving the outside world from his perspective. Phillips’s nar-

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rative technique resembles those of modernist authors who also used multiple narrations, particularly in Termite’s distinctively disjointed point of view. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), for example, is also told in multiple sections and, most relevant, also includes the stream-of-consciousness narration of a mentally incapacitated character, Benji Compson. Phillips uses an epigraph from The Sound and the Fury to begin the novel. Even without this clue, the opening line of the Termite section is reminiscent of Faulkner’s text, in which Benji tries to describe golf without being able to interpret the golfer’s actions. In Phillips’s case, Termite is engaged in playing with a piece of blue plastic, yet he cannot understand what he plays with, so he sees it as something mysterious: “He sees through the blue and it goes away, he sees through the blue and it goes away again. He breathes, blowing just high.” Thus, readers must interpret Termite’s scenes from sensory information alone. Termite cannot evaluate or analyze; the narrative voice of his sections therefore simply describes things literally. Similarly, readers must interpret Termite’s apparent dual existence. He is a part of the story of his father, existing as or in connection with the South Korean baby his father saves before he dies by friendly fire at the bridge overpass. At the same time, he is a young American boy, hindered by physical and mental defects even as he becomes a kind of seer in the novel, a mythical and mystical creature who carries the secret knowledge of both stories. Termite serves as a bridge into the second plot of the novel, set in the late 1950’s. While connected in both obvious and mysterious ways to the past, this story primarily concerns its present, occurring over six days in late July in Winfield, West Virginia. It involves Lark, a teenager who cares for her brother Termite during a storm and great flood. Lark, an emotionally fragile and somewhat naïve young woman, has decided to be the primary caregiver for her younger brother, eschewing further education in favor of an isolated existence in her aunt’s home. Her mother Lola, the unknown and unspoken-of sister of her guardian and aunt Nonie, haunts Lark’s thoughts, and she tries to recreate Lola from a few pictures and boxes of Lola’s personal effects stored in the basement of her aunt’s house. As the rains force her to take these items to the attic, Lark begins to piece together some of her mother’s story, though the exact details of her parentage and that of her brother do not emerge until nearly the end of the novel. As she gradually learns of the circumstances of her birth and the situation surrounding her brother’s birth, and as the flood frees her from her conventional ways of thinking, Lark gradually recognizes her need to escape from the safety of her aunt’s home. She decides to strike out alone with her brother on the freight train that passes through town every day. At the last minute, she invites her childhood lover, Solly, to join them. Like Lark, Solly is motherless, and he seems to understand her despite her attempts to push him away. Lark, Termite, and Solly have spent many childhood days at a local West Virginia train overpass and tunnel (one that matches the South Korean tunnel in description and tone), and eventually they meet there to hop the train, bound for Florida and a new chance at life for all of them. Though the earlier tunnel housed death and destruction, this tunnel offers the protagonist hope.

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Lark’s sections of the novel are narrated in the first person, as are additional sections narrated by Nonie, her aunt. Though Nonie serves as primary caregiver for Lark and Termite, her most important role in the novel is to provide essential background information. Her sections provide the family’s backstory, particularly that of Lola, revealing Lola’s terrible hold over men and Nonie’s life devoted largely to taking care of situations that Lola has created. Though Lark, Termite, Nonie, and Leavitt’s points of view appear multiple times in the text, Lola’s perspective, narrated in the third person, appears only in the last section of the novel, on the day she commits suicide— another connection with The Sound and the Fury. The novel’s complex story also has the effect of one of Faulkner’s texts in that one learns the truths of the family by following the circuitous route of the narrators’ voices. These multiple points of view, which shift from first to third person, lead readers backward in time, then forward, as each section supplies additional clues about Lark and Termite and their eventual need for escape. By the climactic flood scenes at the end of the novel, Lark and Termite have been “saved” in multiple ways: potentially by Termite’s father, who has been mysteriously reincarnated in the form of a social worker named Stamble; by Solly, who brings a boat to take Lark and Termite from their attic hiding place during the flood; and, more important, by Lark’s own sense of self-preservation. Lark has been saved by her belief in herself and the necessity to enlarge her worldview. The children’s survival and their departure from their “tunnel” suggest a hopeful future for them, one that is freed from the ghosts of their past. Rebecca Hendrick Flannagan

Review Sources Book World 39 (January 25, 2009): 1 Booklist 105, no. 4 (October 15, 2008): 5. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 20 (October 15, 2008): 1090. Library Journal 133, no. 20 (December 1, 2008): 118-119. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 7 (April 30, 2009): 45-47. The New York Times, January 6, 2009, p. 1. The New York Times Book Review, January 18, 2009, p. 17. The New Yorker 84, no. 47 (February 2, 2009): 67. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 43 (October 27, 2008): 30-31. The Times Literary Supplement, March 20, 2009, p. 21. The Wall Street Journal, January 10, 2009, p. W8. The Women’s Review of Books 26, no. 3 (May/June, 2009): 20-21.

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LAST RITES Author: John Lukacs (1924) Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). 187 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Autobiography Time: 1924-2009 Locale: Hungary; United States The historian Lukacs’s autobiography sums up his life and times and provides his final reflections on how to study the past and its significance Principal personages: John Lukacs (1924), historian Helen Lukacs (1926-1970), his first wife Stephanie Lukacs (1926-2003), his second wife Pamela Lukacs, his third wife Winston Churchill (1874-1965), British prime minister, 1940-1945, 1951-1955 Mary Soames (1922), Churchill’s daughter Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), German chancellor, 1933-1945

John Lukacs has over the past forty years become one of the most interesting and popular historical writers in the United States. Born in Hungary in 1924, he came to his adopted country in 1947 and began a teaching career at Chestnut Hill College, a small Catholic college for young women outside Philadelphia. Over the next sixty years, the prolific Lukacs produced thirty books on topics that ranged from the cultural history of Philadelphia to the history of the Cold War. In the 1990’s, he gained renewed acclaim for a series of short books that focused on key events in World War II. His close examinations of Winston Churchill’s decisions and speeches of May, 1940, and their relationship to the outcome of the war became best sellers. Lukacs’s reputation as an interpreter of recent history and a lucid writer soared. As his books became shorter, his audience grew larger, appreciating the luminous and insightful essays that his later work contained. Lukacs’s writings are not easily classified. His interests have ranged from Alexis de Tocqueville to George Kennan. He will probably be best remembered for his insights into World War II. He spent the war years in his native Hungary as the Germans and Russians contested for supremacy in central Europe. His ability to unravel the complexity of national and international politics in that turbulent region was most evident in The Last European War (1976), where he explained the interplay of economic, cultural, and political events between 1939 and December, 1941. That book remains a stimulating and informative work and perhaps the best place to begin understanding what has made Lukacs such an influential chronicler of modern times.

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One of the most entertaining features of Lukacs’s books are the discursive footnotes that comment on his text and elaborate on his opinions. Fans of Lukacs enjoy that aspect of his work as much as his main narratives. Excerpts from his diaries, comments about his personal experiences, and tart observations on the work of other historians turn up in his annotations. Throughout his narratives, these notes provide intriguing hints about Lukacs’s own life experiences. Naturally, these revelations about his personal history have fed an interest in Lukacs himself. Lukacs addressed these matters in his first autobiographical volume, Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990). He traced his life and developing thoughts, from Hungary and his reactions to World War II to his emigration to the United States once the fighting had stopped. The book’s narrative examined his career as a teacher and writer and explained how he came to write the books he did. Readers learned something of his personal life, but only within the context of his professional interests. At age sixty-six, Lukacs could look back in 1990 over a rich and productive career as a scholar and teacher. Now, nearly two decades later at the age of eighty-five, Lukacs has written a second, more personal account of his own life and writing. He intends, he says in the opening pages, to move in this narrative, “from something like a philosophy to something like an autobiography.” In the course of the book, Lukacs reveals more of his personal story than in his previous volumes, and admirers of his work will find here more insights into the man himself. However, Lukacs has never been particularly easy to read, and Last Rites requires readers to plunge into the author’s philosophy of history and of the place of humanity in the universe before his more personal disclosures arrive. As if to alert readers that heavy thinking will be necessary before more accessible information is provided, Lukacs titles his first chapter “A Bad Fifteen Minutes.” For that period of time, or however long it takes to read the first chapter, Lukacs delves into the thorny questions of objectivity and subjectivity in history, how historians know what they know, and how valid history is as a discipline. He sees humanity as existing at the center of the universe and history as “the recorded and remembered past.” Models, science, and history, for Lukacs, are all creations of the human mind and must be understood as such. These beliefs reflect Lukacs’s long-held views that historical events are subject to contingency and human action. In a short book of this kind, his aphoristic style and references to such thinkers as Werner Heisenberg will challenge his audience to grapple with these large questions. The portions of the book that admirers of Lukacs will find most rewarding deal with his response to his adopted country, the United States, recollections of his native Hungary, and comments about his popular volumes on Winston Churchill and the events of the spring of 1940. Lukacs sees humanity reaching the end of a fivehundred-year epoch, “the so-called Modern Age,” when Western European civiliza-

John Lukacs taught for many years at Chestnut Hill College and is the author of a number of books including The Last European War (1976), Five Days in London: May, 1940 (2001), and June, 1941: Hitler and Stalin (2006).

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tion dominated the affairs of the world. He is pessimistic about the future because “for the first time in the history of mankind, men have acquired the power to destroy much of the earth and much of mankind, potentially even most of it.” Last Rites represents for Lukacs “my last, desperate attempt to teach.” For his readers, the resulting book will have much to say about the situation in which the world now finds itself. Lukacs admires American culture and the physical world of Pennsylvania in which he has made his life and professional career. He approaches his adopted country with a skepticism about both the Left and the Right on the political spectrum. Those who place Lukacs as a conservative will find in this book trenchant criticisms of U.S. involvement in the Iraq War and the rise of the imperial presidency, yet he is also jaundiced about the Democrats and their capacity to alter the course of overseas involvements and the militarization of the nation. At the same time, Lukacs is attached to the physical environment of the United States. He presents moving and evocative passages describing his affection for the Pennsylvania countryside, such as when he recounts rowing on the reservoir near his home. Alone, on that dark indigo water, as if one hundred miles away from any town, out in some wilderness, under a sickle moon, I was full of gratitude for what God and this country had allowed me, for this silent world where I belong, where I had chosen to live.

An excellent chapter deals with Lukacs’s ambivalent attitude toward Hungary, the country he left just after World War II. His writings have made him a celebrity in Hungary, where he spends two weeks each year around the time of the country’s Book Week. As he puts it in Last Rites, “Hungary is my mother, America is my wife.” For Lukacs’s fans in the United States, the most interesting chapter in this book will most likely be his account of his intellectual connection with Winston Churchill and World War II. Building on the research that he did for The Last European War, Lukacs decided in the 1980’s to concentrate on the weeks in May, 1940, when Churchill and Great Britain faced a Germany that had just defeated the French army and overrun France. Lukacs recreated the interplay between Churchill and Lord Halifax in his book Five Days in London: May, 1940 (2001) and explained how Churchill kept the British government on the path of resistance to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The book became a popular success and led to the naming of a street in Budapest after the British prime minister. The pages of the book on Lukacs’s friendship with Churchill’s daughter, Mary Soames, are among its very best. Reading these sections adds to the enjoyment of Lukacs’s previous investigations of the battle between Churchill and Hitler during those crucial days of World War II. Although many long books have been written about Churchill and his legacy, the brief Lukacs volumes are the best introduction to the significant role that the British leader played in world history. Writing about personal and romantic relationships is never easy in an autobiography. Lukacs devotes an entire chapter to his three marriages. The portraits that he provides of his wives—two of whom died of serious, disabling illnesses—underscore Lukacs’s skill and subtlety as a writer. His first wife, Helen, a sometime secretary to T. S. Eliot at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University, helped ad-

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vance Lukacs’s writing career with her editorial skills. For her husband, she provided “her unfailing kindess, the instant red goodness of her heart.” Lukacs, like Woodrow Wilson, seems to be one of those men who needs to be married to have a fulfilling life. He recounts how, after his first wife’s death, he married Stephanie during the mid-1970’s and, following her death, he married Pamela. Lukacs explains how each of these marriages shaped his existence as a historian and writer. This is the most personal and affecting chapter in this very intimate volume. Written when Lukacs is in his mid-eighties, Last Rites is not as finished and polished a product as some of his earlier works. Part of the charm of the narrative, as is always the case with Lukacs, comes from his discursive footnotes, with their excerpts from his diaries and wry comments about issues, people, and the books he is reading. They convey a sense of listening to an old friend sum up his existence and illuminate past events with the wisdom of years of study and thought about historical issues. If Last Rites is indeed the final book in Lukacs’s illustrious career, it represents a capstone to an impressive intellectual achievement. Coming to the United States at the outset of the Cold War to teach at a small institution without a major academic reputation was not the most propitious way to launch a career as a historian. Through his skill and insight, however, Lukacs has made the most of the opportunities that history and chance have offered him. Many of his books on World War II will remain classics in the field and excellent introductions to the transcendent issues of that cataclysmic conflict. Lukacs’s prose gives pleasure to his readers. He is a master of historical aphorisms and tart phrases that skewer sloppy authors and hapless historical actors. His dismissal of the presidential practice of returning the salutes of military personnel is a gem of historical analysis. “There is something puerile in the Reagan and Clinton and now Bush salute. It is the gesture of someone who likes playing soldier.” He links this ritual to the growth of the imperial presidency and the overemphasis on the president as commander-in-chief. Thus, Lukacs in a few effective sentences illuminates something that is so familiar on television that its true meaning is hidden from view. For readers new to Lukacs, the place to begin is with his books on Churchill, Hitler, and Stalin. The Last European War and Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines, 1900-1950 (1981) show Lukacs at the top of his form. Last Rites is a graceful summing up of his life, but it will mean even more to readers who have explored Lukacs the historian at his very best. Lewis L. Gould

Review Sources America 200, no. 7 (March 2, 2009): 23-24. American Conservative 8, no. 4 (February 23, 2009): 28-29. Booklist 105, no. 11 (February 1, 2009): 13. National Review 61, no. 5 (March 23, 2009): 42-43. The Wilson Quarterly 33, no. 2 (Spring, 2009): 106-107.

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LAURA RIDER’S MASTERPIECE Author: Jane Hamilton (1957) Publisher: Grand Central (New York). 214 pp. $22.99 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Hartley, Wisconsin A fictional exploration of the complexities of marital faithfulness and unfaithfulness and of the relationship between the public and private spheres in the Internet age Principal characters: Laura Rider, co-owner of Prairie Wind Farm and an aspiring writer of romance Charlie Rider, her husband and business partner, Jenna Faroli’s paramour Jenna Faroli, a syndicated public radio personality, the object of Charlie’s desires Frank Voden, Jenna’s husband, a Wisconsin Supreme Court judge Dickie Karmauth, a former poet laureate and family friend of the Vodens Sally Karmauth, Dickie’s wife, a hematologist and confidant of Frank Voden The Silver People, aliens that Charlie claims abducted him when he was a teenager

Laura Rider’s Masterpiece, Jane Hamilton’s sixth novel, recounts an Internet-era ménage à trois involving a married couple—Laura Rider and her husband Charlie Rider—and radio talk-show host Jenna Faroli, a recent addition to the rural Wisconsin community of greater Hartley who has matched wits with public figures from presidential candidate Al Gore to musician Sting. Ultimately, the tangled RiderRider-Faroli triangle leads to an accidental, but painful, public revelation of Charlie and Jenna’s clandestine relationship. While Hamilton’s previous five novels, beginning with The Book of Ruth (1988) and continuing through When Madeline Was Young (2006), contain comic elements, by and large their tone is dark, reflective of the author’s focus on personal and familial tragedies. Typical of Hamilton’s oeuvre is the recognition that acts of infidelity, abuse, and defamation have serious consequences. Central characters in previous novels bear the physical and emotional scars of trauma survivors. Essential questions about relationships between the individual, the married couple, the family, and the community are posed in Hamilton’s works, and although Laura Rider’s Masterpiece is written in the comic mode, such questions still surface. Though populated with quirky characters, the novel explores the nebulous natures of truth and falsehood. Laura and Charlie Rider are a playful couple whose imagina-

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tions lead them to invent stories about their family pets—such as Maine Coon cat Polly having a prom date—and to collaborate on Charlie’s ardent e-mails to a married woman. Additionally, husband and wife send separate missives, but always under the guise of Charlie’s moniker. When Charlie tells new resi dent Jenna Faroli about the Silver People, aliens who abducted him in his teens, she receives his personal truth with an equal mixture of skepticism and intrigue. Later, when Charlie invents a family whose members dwell in his kneecap and recounts their adventures, Jenna, now his lover, joins in and continues the story line in a return e-mail. Some deceptions appear to be harmless entertainments, but others breach the social contract that mandates honesty as a precursor to trust. Hamilton suggests that fiction is a type of lie that has the potential to entertain (and on occasion to instruct) and that humans by their nature are storytellers. She thus raises the question of to what extent individuals should be allowed to concoct mistruths in order to narrate their life stories and the life stories of others. She provides no pat answer to this question. Critics have tended to note the comic tone of Laura Rider’s Masterpiece to the exclusion of serious issues raised by its tale of covert romance and public exposure. Chief among these issues is the difficulty of maintaining personal privacy in an era of mass correspondence. A simple keyboard error can make private information available for public consumption. When a fatigued and multitasking Laura inadvertently inserts an erotic e-mail, penned by Jenna and intended for Charlie’s readership alone, into the front section of her nursery newsletter, the love life of a radio celebrity becomes titillating community news. With the press of a button, private words—in which Jenna ruminates on Charlie’s sexual technique—are delivered to more than six hundred online subscribers. Jenna is humiliated, Charlie is infuriated, and Laura is oddly amused by the mishap. Although Laura has revealed her husband to be a philanderer and brought ridicule to a respected interviewer, when her error is revealed to her, she laughs. For Laura, the mistake makes an amusing story, material for the writing workshop that she attends at the Bear Claw Resort. Hamilton writes about the complications that accompany acts based on human desire. While Charlie and Laura are coconspirators in their seduction of Jenna, they woo her in order to satisfy disparate needs. Denied his wife’s body after years of connubial contentment (Laura claims that Charlie’s passion has worn her out), the sexually prolific Charlie seeks a replacement lover. Having barred sexual activities from her own life, Laura dreams of creating them for others. For Laura, instigating an affair between her husband and Jenna is a form of research conducted in pursuit of her ultimate ambition: to become a successful author of romance novels. Her goal is not only to gain publication but also to transform the genre. She wants to create a new form, the “conscious romance,” a term she purloins from one of Jenna’s e-mails and inserts into their radio interview. Jane Hamilton is the author of six novels including The Book of Ruth (1988), recipient of the PEN/ Hemingway Award for First Fiction, and A Map of the World (1994), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

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The scheduled topic for their live, broadcast discussion, prairie gardens, is abandoned when Laura confesses to Jenna her desire to update the standard love story for the twenty-first century. She announces that her mission is to “discover what the ideal man is for today’s real woman.” Laura’s real woman appears to be a successful career woman like her role model Jenna, one who straddles the professional and domestic spheres with ease. Her ideal man is defined as “calibrated exquisitely”—equal parts masculine and feminine—like her husband Charlie. The ideal man, physically enthusiastic but emotionally sensitive, shares sexual favors with the real woman who is his equal in life and in bed. Laura fails to see that her vision for the new romance merely collapses, rather than eradicates, stereotypes associated with the genre—an irony not lost on Jenna. Whether Laura can transform the romance genre is left unresolved, but in a true sense she has rewritten the tawdry tale of infidelity within her own community. In large part, Jenna and Charlie’s affair is the result of Laura’s foray into creative writing, a warm-up drill in anticipation of crafting a novel. As author, Laura literally draws her characters from life. Having honed her craft for fiction by forging e-mails for her husband and transmitting them to Jenna, Laura is oblivious to the fact that her ghostwriting has turned destructive. In Laura’s eyes, Jenna Faroli leads a charmed life as an acclaimed public-radio figure married to a respected judge, but appearances are deceptive. Jenna’s marriage is passionless, and her husband’s ardor is directed elsewhere. Reminiscent of the chaste sleeping arrangements of the Rider household, Jenna Faroli and Frank Voden ended their sexual relationship years ago, with one significant difference: The choice was Frank’s, not Jenna’s. Unaware of the parallel courses of their marriages, Laura imagines a much different Jenna, a woman intellectually and sexually fulfilled. Laura does not envy her sexual fulfilment, but she lusts after a similar intelligence, one she believes will be within her grasp once she becomes a writer. Laura’s interest in Jenna pre-dates the talk-show host’s move to rural Wisconsin. For years, Laura has sought to improve her mind by listening to the interviews that Jenna conducts with dignitaries, rock stars, and authors. Laura views Jenna as her mentor, one whose probing questions improve her mind in the passive act of listening. She has developed an emotional crush on Jenna: “How she loved slipping into the dream, master and pupil bathed in the warmth of their mutual regard.” The mutual regard, however, is more fantasy than reality. The women meet infrequently; Charlie is the conduit through which they enter each other’s personal spheres via online communication. Jenna believes that she deceives Laura by engaging in an affair with Charlie, but Laura is conscious of their affair and has knowingly instigated their liaison. Ultimately, it is Jenna, not Laura, who is deceived. Unbeknown to Jenna, Laura composes the majority of Charlie’s e-mails in an action reminiscent of the plot of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (pr. 1897, pb. 1898; English translation, 1898), a play in which the title character, a master of eloquent speech, becomes a surrogate wooer for a local, tongue-tied baron. Though Laura’s feelings for Jenna are clearly an infatuation for a perceived superior, Jenna’s feelings about her erstwhile

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pupil reveal themselves to be a complicated mix of guilt (for sleeping with Laura’s husband), envy (of Laura’s gardening and entrepreneurial talents), and disdain (for Laura’s lack of intellectual rigor). Far from being the all-knowing Everywoman whom Laura imagines her idol to be, Jenna remains ignorant of the true source of her seduction. Later, Jenna mistakes Laura’s publication of her private correspondence for the retaliatory act of a jilted wife and not the honest mistake of an online publisher. Hamilton reminds readers that love triangles and open marriages are not new phenomena in a scene that features Jenna and family friend Dickie Karmauth discussing the Bloomsbury Group, a cotillion of British artists and writers remembered in part for their unorthodox living and loving arrangements in the 1920’s and 1930’s. There are shades of Bloomsbury in the relationships among poet Dickie, his wife Sally, Jenna, and Frank. Jenna muses that Frank’s proposal of marriage was linked to her ability to fall “into step so naturally with Dickie and Sally, his two essential friends.” Dickie is Jenna’s favorite partner for conversations about art, literature, and life, and Jenna suspects that Sally is Frank’s preferred partner for more intimate needs. Frequent mutual houseguests and vacationers, the foursome regroups into twosomes and triads reminiscent of the shifting alliances of Bloomsbury members. Imaginatively, Jenna is able to incorporate Charlie into her reveries with Dickie. As the poet recites a passage from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), Jenna conjures Charlie as the young boy preparing for his boat journey. In reality, Jenna is unable to integrate either of the Riders into this insular group of married friends who play Scrabble, but only in foreign languages, and who discuss extraterrestrial visitations, but only to quote the views of Harvard professors. Intellectual and professional snobbery keeps the Riders at a distance. When news of the affair breaks through cyberspace, it is beneath Frank’s dignity to discuss the infidelity with his wife, and Dickie offers her only the blithe observation that “no one is ruined by this kind of scandal. On the contrary, your stock is probably soaring.” Hyperinformed Jenna doubts that Laura, who never read a book before the age of forty-three and who has only a viewer’s knowledge of a limited number of classics, is capable of writing a romance novel—let alone of transforming the genre. Hamilton suggests, however, that Jenna—who is so easily duped by Laura’s online machinations—underestimates her rival. Certainly, Hamilton, in her sixth novel, has penned the “conscious romance” that her heroine, Laura Rider, aspires to write. Part deconstruction of the traditional romance novel and part reconstruction of a love story for the Internet age, Laura Rider’s Masterpiece leaves readers conscious of the act and the artifice of falling in love. Dorothy Dodge Robbins

Laura Rider’s Masterpiece / hamilton

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 14 (March 15, 2009): 42. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 2 (January 15, 2009): special section, p. 6. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 8 (April 15, 2009): 406. People 71, no. 16 (April 27, 2009): 49. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 49 (December 8, 2008): 40. USA Today, April 28, 2009, Life, p. 06d.

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“LE CID” and “THE LIAR” Author: Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) First published: Le Cid, 1637, in France; Le Menteur, 1644, in France Translated from the French by Richard Wilbur Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston). 272 pp. $13.95 Type of work: Drama Time: The eleventh century (Le Cid); the early 1600’s (The Liar) Locale: Seville, Spain (Le Cid); Paris (The Liar) Former American poet laureate Richard Wilbur provides vibrant new translations of seventeenth century French playwright Corneille’s most famous tragedy, about an eleventh century Spanish hero, and one of his witty comedies, about contemporary Parisian society Principal characters: Le Cid Don Rodrigue (later known as the Cid), a young Spanish noble Chimène, a young woman in love with Rodrigue Don Diègue, Rodrigue’s father Don Gomes, Chimène’s father Don Fernand, first king of Castile The Liar Dorante, a student from the provinces recently arrived in Paris Géronte, Dorante’s father Clarice, a young Parisian woman Lucrèce, a friend of Clarice Cliton, Dorante’s valet

For more than half a century, Richard Wilbur—one of America’s leading poets and poet laureate of the United States from 1987 to 1988—has been translating plays by the giants of the seventeenth century French theater, Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, and Molière. His translations of Le Cid and The Liar, paired in a single volume, display not only Wilbur’s versatility as a translator but also the brilliant range of Corneille’s dramatic genius. Both plays hold places of distinction in the Corneille canon. Corneille scholar Peter Nurse calls Le Cid the first masterpiece of French drama. Its maiden production, in late 1636 or early 1637, ushered in the great age of French theater, which was dominated by Corneille, Racine, and Molière. The Liar, meanwhile, has become a long-term staple of the repertoire of the Comédie Française, the Paris acting company founded by Louis XIV in 1680 and still operating today.

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Corneille drew his inspiration for these plays from two Spanish dramas on the same Pierre Corneille, a seventeenth century subjects, but in both cases he transformed playwright, is considered one of the them for the French stage. In Le Cid, he re- three great French dramatists of his structured the play to conform to the classical age. He wrote and produced numerous unities; in The Liar, he incorporated French plays in various genres but is best customs and values into the story. Although known as a master of tragedy. Richard both plays were intended for the stage—and Wilbur is one of America’s leading poets. He is a past recipient of the have been successfully produced at various National Book Award, the PEN times for nearly four centuries—merely read- Translation Prize, and two Pulitzer ing them in Wilbur’s translation gives some Prizes. From 1987 to 1988, he served indication as to why they have remained fa- as poet laureate of the United States. vorites among playgoers and critics. Based on a legend about the eleventh century Spanish nobleman and warrior Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, Le Cid focuses on the dramatic conflict that emerges between the young Rodrigue, not yet known for his prowess as a warrior, and Chimène, the beautiful daughter of Don Gomes, the count of Gormas. The two are deeply in love and planning to marry when Chimène’s father insults Rodrigue’s father, Don Diègue. To defend the family honor, Rodrigue kills Don Gomes, immediately creating enmity between him and his beloved. Chimène feels bound to avenge her father’s murder, but before she can extract revenge, Rodrigue is called away to fight the Moors. His bravery earns him the sobriquet “Le Cid Campeador,” or the lord of military arts. Nevertheless, although she still loves him, Chimène demands that Rodrigue be punished for killing her father. Rodrigue, also still in love, insists that he must die to preserve his honor in her eyes. Chimène convinces a former suitor to challenge Rodrigue to a duel; Rodrigue vanquishes this rival, even though he wants to die, because he feels that to lose intentionally would demean him in Chimène’s eyes. Royal intervention seems to provide a solution to the lovers’ dilemma: Don Fernand, the first real king in Castile, wants Rodrigue to remain alive so he can serve the state. In the final scene, the king demands that Chimène marry Rodrigue, but he agrees to let them wait a year so Rodrigue can earn even greater honor on the battlefield. The ambiguous ending of the play has bothered critics since it was first produced. Knowing whether Chimène really intends to marry Rodrigue is key to understanding her character, but her internal decision is not revealed. Although Le Cid was a boxoffice sensation, Corneille was chastised severely by contemporary critics for violating an essential element of tragedy, the consistency of a tragic figure’s commitment to high moral principles. So violent was the outcry against Chimène’s apparent acquiescence to the king that the “Querelle du Cid”—the quarrel over Le Cid—was referred to the new Académie Française. This French academy was established in 1635 to arbitrate matters concerning French language and literature. Despite this contemporary controversy, what tends to stand out for readers four

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centuries later is the unrelieved tension created by the clash of values represented in the drama. Both Chimène and Rodrigue are committed to the feudal code of honor that demands they avenge slights to their family. At the same time, they are passionately in love with each other. To honor one commitment necessitates violating the other. At the time Le Cid first appeared, audiences were accustomed to seeing tragicomedies, a mixed genre in which people of high stature engage in actions both comic and tragic. Corneille, however, wanted his work to be viewed as a tragedy in the classic mode, and he maintained a high level of decorum, sharply focusing attention on the tragic dilemma faced by both his hero and his heroine. Stripping away materials about El Cid’s exploits as a warrior, he focused on the conflict between love and duty, highlighting the role that both fate and custom play in bringing about the play’s tragedic events. One can see precedents in classical drama for both Don Rodrigue and Chimène, specifically in the plays of Sophocles. Rodrigue is reminiscent of Oedipus, whose actions to defend his honor after a seemingly trivial incident have long-term consequences in the Oedipus trilogy—Oidipous Tyrannos (c. 429 b.c.e.; Oedipus Tyrannus, 1715), Oidipous epi Kolfnfi (401 b.c.e.; Oedipus at Colonus, 1729), and Antigon (441 b.c.e.; Antigone, 1729). Chimène is much like the title character of Antigone, torn between obeying the state and honoring her family. Her problem is further complicated, however, by the intense love she feels for the man who dishonored her family. The ambiguous ending of Le Cid only serves to emphasize the ongoing tragedy that prevents its two passionate lovers from realizing their happiness. The contrast between Le Cid and The Liar could not be more pronounced. The latter is a light comedy in which Dorante, a law student from Poitiers, comes to Paris and immediately decides to pose as a seasoned warrior in order to impress the ladies. A chance encounter with Lucrèce and Clarice causes him to fall in love with the latter, but, when told that the name of the more beautiful of the two is Lucrèce, he believes Lucrèce is the name of his new love. Throughout the play, Dorante makes up a series of stories—first to impress Clarice and later to avoid having to go through with a marriage arranged by his father. Ironically, the intended bride is Clarice, but, because Dorante remains under the impression that the object of his affection is named Lucrèce, he schemes to avoid the union. As he becomes more enmeshed in a web of falsehoods, Dorante is constantly reminded by his valet Cliton that he will eventually be found out and will suffer for having misled so many people. In the denouement, however, when Clarice and Lucrèce meet Dorante and confront him about his lying, the hero engages in a deft bit of verbal legerdemain: He declares his willingness to marry Lucrèce, who is actually a better match for him. The Liar is very different from Le Cid in theme and in its representation of individual character: This is a play about self-preservation and self-advancement. If the hero and heroine of El Cid remind one of Oedipus and Antigone, Dorante calls to mind William Shakespeare’s Falstaff, a master of self-preservation and a braggart who seems to bounce back from temporary setbacks. In The Liar, Corneille explores the

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relationship between illusion and reality in seventeenth century society, where appearance was all-important; people in this drama define their self-worth by what others think of them. The play also addresses a theme that has great appeal to modern audiences: the idea that one can reinvent oneself, especially if one moves physically to another locale where one is unknown. Some twenty-first century readers or playgoers might be annoyed or even outraged by the apparent moral tone of The Liar. Throughout most of the play, Dorante gets away with his lies. When he is eventually caught, he manages to extricate himself from his predicament by casually abandoning his original choice of a lover and agreeing to marry a girl who is both more attractive and better connected socially. Others will recognize, as Corneille’s original audience probably did, that Dorante is portayed as someone to be laughed at throughout, and they will be satisfied that he is not ostracized from his new social circle at the play’s end. The original English translation of Le Cid was commissioned by Corneille himself, along with translations into other European languages. Over the last three centuries, numerous new renderings into English have been produced, including several in the twentieth century. The same can be said to a lesser extent about The Liar. Wilbur’s translations may be the first, however, in which the translator’s own poetic genius is evident throughout. As a consequence, he is able to capture the spirit of Corneille’s originals. For Le Cid, Wilbur translates Corneille’s elevated French alexandrines into English heroic couplets, reminiscent of those in English Restoration plays such as John Dryden’s All for Love: Or, The World Well Lost (pr. 1677, pb. 1678), which tells the story of the ill-fated affair of Marc Antony and Cleopatra. For The Liar, Wilbur also uses heroic couplets, but the tone of the drama mirrors the sprightly comedies of the English Restoration and the eighteenth century. In both cases, however, Wilbur modernizes the dialogue, avoiding the stilted phraseology that makes some theatergoers and readers uncomfortable with plays of earlier periods. Corneille’s moral maxims and grand statements about love and honor lose little in translation. For example, when Chimène is misled into believing that Rodrigue has died in battle, she laments that the man who slew her father will now be glorified: “To die for king and country is no shame;/ by such a death one gains a deathless name.” When the king insists she marry Rodrigue, Chimène replies with a question that reveals both her medieval sensibility and a surprisingly modern complaint about women’s role in a patriarchal society: If Rodrigue is now essential to the State, Must I, for salary, become his mate, And bear an endless guilt because the stains Upon my hands are from my father’s veins?

By contrast, the combination of coquettishness and good sense in Clarice’s reply to Dorante’s father when he proposes to arrange for her to marry is aptly captured in Wilbur’s translation:

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Magill’s Literary Annual 2010 That he’s a son of yours, sir, is no mean Attraction, yet to wed him sight unseen, Though you assure me he’s extraordinary, Would show a strange anxiety to marry.

Numerous additional examples could be drawn from both plays to demonstrate further how adept Wilbur is in rendering both the content and sense of seventeenth century French into modern English. Readers fortunate enough to pick up a copy of “Le Cid” and “The Liar,” and audiences who get to see stage performances using these texts as their basis, are sure to find the experience most rewarding. Laurence W. Mazzeno

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 22 (August 1, 2009): 21. Library Journal 134, no. 12 (July 1, 2009): 98.

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LEAVING INDIA My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents Author: Minal Hajratwala (1971) Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston). 430 pp. $26.00 Type of work: History, biography, memoir Time: The late 1800’s to the early twenty-first century Locale: India; Fiji; South Africa; Australia; New Zealand; England; Hong Kong; Canada; United States Highlighting individual narratives based on extensive research, Hajratwala traces generations of her family from their common roots in the Indian state of Gujarat through migrations around the world and, in so doing, unfolds the story of the Indian diaspora Principal personages: Minal Hajratwala, the author Motiram Narsey, Hajratwala’s paternal great-grandfather, who emigrated to Fiji Ganda Chhagan Kapitan, Hajratwala’s paternal great-great-uncle, sent as a boy to live with relatives in modern-day South Africa Narotam Chhagan, Hajratwala’s maternal grandfather, who eventually joined his older brother in Fiji Ranchhod Hazrat, Hajratwala’s paternal uncle, who worked in the family business in Fiji Bhanu Hajratwala, Hajratwala’s mother Bhupendra Hajratwata, Hajratwala’s father Mala Kumar, Hajratwala’s cousin, who moved from Fiji to Los Angeles after winning the immigration lottery

Juxtapositions abound in Minal Harjatwala’s Leaving India, which traces generations of the author’s family, weaving back and forth across maternal and paternal lines as they spread out from India around the globe. Meticulously researched and documented, the book offers narratives of individual lives within historical and anthropological contexts. It also unfolds a personal account that uncharacteristically minimizes its author, except in her role as reporter, until Hajratwala unveils her own story near the end of the book. Presumably in an attempt to minimize confusion, she includes graphics of her family tree, a chronology, and a map depicting the family’s journeys. However, especially in the early chapters, it may still be hard for readers to keep everyone—and everything—straight. Some critics have commented on a sense of slow going, noting the text’s plethora of characters, events, details, and anecdotes. Still, readers who persevere are ultimately rewarded. As Hajratwala explores the story of her own family’s choices, she also unfolds the larger story of the Indian diaspora.

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In Hajratwala’s “Acknowledgements” and “A Note on the Text” sections, readers are introduced not only to this expansive work but also to the language sensibilities of its author, a poet as well as a journalist. Hajratwala says that she interviewed nearly one hundred family members, friends, and community sources during the eight years the book was in progress. She confesses to her “geekish love of re search” and references eight months of travel and research when “almost every member of my extended family hosted, fed, or chauffeured me.” Hajratwala also acknowledges scholars and others who helped her find resources along the way, with special mention of those in India, where “research often seems possible only through acts of grace.” She describes her usage guidelines, offers pronunciation cues, and promises that any necessary non-English words will be defined in the nearby text. She also explains the few basic non-English terms that recur throughout the book. Hajratwala emphasizes that Leaving India is a work of nonfiction, where no poetic license has been taken because “the journalist in me is scrupulous about such matters.” Hajratwala has explained that in this book she set out to find the intersection between character and history. The first chapter is a stand-alone essay that delves into Hajratwala’s caste (Kshatriya) and clan (Solanki), “the group of people we think of as our close relatives, a cluster of Kshatriyas who live in certain villages—five villages, to be precise—and with whom we share rituals and sacraments.” The rest of the text is structured in four main parts that unfold stories of the author’s family members, spanning the late nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century. Each part opens with a dated title page estimating the size of the Indian diaspora at that point (from fewer than 374,000 in 1900 to greater than 11 million in 2001) and a list of countries with more than 10,000 people of Indian origin. Parts 1 through 3 contain two or three chapters apiece. Each has an introductory page with title, epigraph, and a portion of the family tree that locates its main character. In part 4, following the epigraph Vaasudeva Kutumbukam (an ancient Sanskrit mantra translated as “the whole world is one family”), Hajratwala creates a collage of her own generation. First, though, she goes back to its roots. The opening narrative focuses on Motiram, Hajratwala’s paternal great-grandfather, born to a clan of weavers in the village of Navsari, in southern Gujurat. Records show that he went to the Fiji Islands in 1909 and, two years later, established a small tailoring shop that eventually became one of the largest department stores in the South Pacific islands. Without records of “the precise combination of ambition, wanderlust, and desperation which led him to cross two oceans,” Hajratwala focuses on what she can know—conditions in India at the time as well as influences from the British “empire in need.” She offers a meticulously documented rendering of the years of Motiram’s childhood, when cotton was being extensively grown in India to feed the mills (by then, most of the cloth in Gujurat was machine made); with a harsh tax re-

Minal Hajratwala’s creative work has appeared in numerous publications and performance spaces. For eight years, she worked as a journalist at the San Jose Mercury News and was a National Arts Journalism Program Fellow at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

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quiring yearly payment on both the harvest and the land itself; and where the famine of 1899 caused widespread death even in relatively successful Navsari. Although Leaving India is nonfiction, Hajratwala skillfully and carefully includes possibilities and alternate scenarios as she speculates about Motiram’s reasons for emigrating and the surrounding circumstances. In the same way, backed by extensive research, she enlivens Motiram’s voyage to Fiji on a ship whose cargo at that time typically consisted of 750 to 1,200 indentured Indians, quoting a contract in the Fiji Royal Gazette of 1910 that payment only occurred “for each adult Indian (male or female) of the age of ten years and over landed alive.” The rare paying Indian passenger, such as Motiram, shared the same deplorable shipboard conditions as the “other ‘coolies.’” As Hajratwala moves through the emigration narratives from India to Fiji and South Africa (and later, to Australia, Britain, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States), she sometimes breaks chronology to reference people or events still to come or long past. Doing so often helps interlace the stories. At times, however, frustration may result, especially if readers have not sorted out the characters or developed the fortitude to press on despite uncertainty. At the start of the chapter on Narotam (Hajratwala’s maternal grandfather), Hajratwala hints at her own story. She recalls first meeting her grandmother (Narotam’s wife) in Iowa when the author was seven years old. Visiting there after her own family had just arrived in the United States from New Zealand, “the only home I remembered,” she was “shy and reeling from the shock of migration.” Hajratwala transitions to the story of Narotam through a second recollection. When she was eleven, living in a tiny Indian community in suburban Michigan, she saw the film Gandhi (1982) with her mother. Among other things, it depicted the march to the sea undertaken by influential Indian political and spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi and his followers to protest a salt tax. At their destination, they were severely beaten by “native police,” yet the marchers, buoyed by their belief in nonviolence, moved forward—wave after wave—into the onslaught. During the movie’s intermission, Hajratwala’s mother confided to her that her father had been in that march. Narotam’s story is rich in Indian history, illuminating—among other things—the traditional Hindu view of life, the philosophy and influence of Gandhi, and India’s achievement of independence in 1947. The central artifact is a photo of Narotam taken immediately after his release from months of hard prison labor, the result of his participation in the salt march. He looks “young, intense, dressed like a saint all in white.” Narotam’s father, however, saw a rebellious young man on the brink of trouble and arranged for him to join relatives in Fiji. To help fund the trip, all the women in the family, including Narotam’s young wife, had to pawn their meager jewelry. In 1931, Narotam arrived in Suva, Fiji, and worked as a tailor. In 1937, leaving their sixyear-old daughter in India to be raised by grandparents, Narotam’s wife joined him. In time, Narotam established a clothing store, more children were born (including Bhanu, Hajratwala’s mother, in 1946), and Narotam gained the respect of his community. To his retail shop, he added a wholesale company that expanded its business to Western Samoa, American Samoa, and Tonga, bringing great wealth. Through the

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mid-1950’s to early 1960’s, the family lived well. Then, unfortunate business circumstances caused their situation to change suddenly. Narotam’s health also began to fail, and he died in 1965. Hajratwala writes that she missed her grandfather “by six years and two continents” and finds his life complicated, with “moments of shining idealism and sad compromise illustrating the relentless ironies of diaspora.” Perhaps the most fascinating chapter of Leaving India tells the story of Hajratwala’s parents. Both Bhupendra and Bhanu lived in Fiji, but they were not acquainted until Bhupendra returned for a visit from the United States, where he had gone to study pharmacology in 1963, in the vanguard of the “brain drain.” He came to see the woman his family thought would be a suitable match for him. Hajratwala weaves back and forth between her parents’ childhoods as the two grow up in comfortable circumstances and gain solid educations. Eventually, the marriage of Bhupendra and Bhanu is arranged, and she returns with her husband to the United States, where he is working on a Ph.D. In telling their story, Hajratawala interjects her own: “It is hard for me to imagine my parents’ state of mind upon marrying a stranger. They have tried to explain: That is just the way it was.” Hajratawala recounts her parents’ early adventures learning American customs and creating a home in student housing, a dilapidated barracks apartment. The narrative unfolds to include, among other things, house-hunting in San Francisco, the arrival of two children, a move to New Zealand for a professorship, and a return to the United States to live in Michigan. Along the way, Hajratwala details the development and far-reaching influences of U.S. immigration law, as well as the economic and social circumstances that immigrants face. In so doing, she also encourages readers to look at American life anew. Hajratwala ultimately reflects upon what her parents gained and lost in their immigration to the United States, concluding that “perhaps only we of the next generation—raised among strangers, eating the fruits of our parents’ risks—can taste the true proportions of bitter to sweet.” The most surprising chapter is probably the candid one that Hajratwala writes about herself. She focuses on childhood (when she longed to be named Ann) and her coming of age, responding to what she felt was “America’s siren call of freedom, individual and sweet.” When she left home, Hajratwala was “like any American adolescent, escaping my parents,” but she was also “escaping India, that part of it which lived in our skins, in our home.” While studying at Stanford University, she experiments with different lifestyles, at first without the knowledge of her parents and later incurring their wrath. As often happens, however, things have a way of working out, and the Hajratwala family ultimately stands united, embracing both their lesbian daughter and their son’s marriage to a woman from Michigan who is half Finnish, one-quarter Irish, and one-quarter Norwegian, “the first white flower to blossom on the brown limbs of the family tree.” While critics have generally praised Leaving India, it has been suggested that Hajratwala’s rich rendering of historical framework tends to overshadow the personal stories. Some have commented on the book’s occasionally tedious detail, uneven presentation, and potential for confusion; whereas others speculate that it may be useful for people reading about migration not to have everything completely pinned down.

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This book is likely to be equally compelling for those born in the United States, immigrants (Indian and otherwise), and academicians investigating how disparate cultures migrate, intersect, and interact. Second-generation immigrants, perhaps not quite sure whether to run from or embrace their ethnicity, may find Hajratwala’s account especially meaningful. She explains that working on this book has helped her understand how each life is a tangle of push and pull; how each migration opens up future directions; and how my own journey, which I had come to believe and had been made to feel was so unusual as to be selfish and freakish, was in fact continuous with a long heritage of moving from the known to the unknown, from tradition into modernity, from village India into a cosmopolitan world.

Jean C. Fulton

Review Sources Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 1 (Jan. 1, 2009): 23. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 47 (November 24, 2008): 46. San Francisco Chronicle, March 15, 2009, p. J1. San Francisco Chronicle, March 18, 2009, p. E1. The Washington Post, March 15, 2009, p. B06. The Wilson Quarterly 33, no. 2 (Spring, 2009): 101-102.

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LEAVINGS Poems Author: Wendell Berry (1934) Publisher: Counterpoint Press (Berkeley, Calif.). 132 pp. $23.00 Type of work: Poetry Using clear, everyday language and various poetic forms, Berry continues his lifelong advocacy of living close to the land and criticism of the devastation wrought by industrial society In Leavings, as in his poetic works, Wendell Berry combines elements from the bucolic tradition stretching back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, from Jeffersonian agrarian democracy, from the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850), from the Stanford University Creative Writing Program, from raging modern-day environmentalists, and from the Old Testament prophets. Mostly, though, he is a Kentucky farmer and intellectual. He has written about life close to the land in a tight-knit rural community not only in some eighteen volumes of poetry but also in a series of novels and short stories chronicling events in fictional Port William (modeled after Port Royal, the Kentucky River town near Berry’s farm). He has also produced numerous works of nonfiction that have influenced contemporary thinking. The title of Leavings strikes a valedictory note, as do some of the collection’s poems about growing old, as if the author were collecting the remnants of his fifty-year writing career. It seems early, however, for the seventy-five-year-old author to be saying good-bye. In fact, the greater part of Leavings consists of a continuation of the series begun in the earlier volumes Sabbaths: Poems (1987) and A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997 (1998). These volumes were inspired by Berry’s Sabbath strolls and meditations, and many poems in Leavings were inspired by similar Sabbath reflections from 2005 to 2008. Other poems, collected in the first part of Leavings, more closely resemble a culmination of Berry’s career, distilling his lifelong themes. These include “A Speech to the Garden Club of America” (which first appeared in The New Yorker), “Questionnaire” (which first appeared in The Progressive), and “Look It Over” (which first appeared in Appalachian Heritage). These key poems and others in Leavings make it evident that the poet is not writing confessional poetry about himself and his career. Instead, Berry uses his perspective to comment on society and its ills in the manner of a public spokesperson, speaking as a laureate, a prophet of American life, or a “mad farmer” the subject of The Mad Farmer Poems (2008). From this perspective, the collection’s title evokes the remnants some beneficent farmers leave in their fields after harvest for the public, especially the needy, to come and pick. In contrast, it may also evoke abandoned farms,

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rundown small towns, empty Rust Belt factories, strip-mined lands, uranium tailings, radioactivity from atomic ventures, acid rain, chemical residues, poison, pollution, global warming, and other “leavings” of industrial society. These physical leavings of industrial society are only the most obvious part of the picture Berry sketches. He also connects industrial society’s need for raw materials, energy, manufactured goods, and trade to America’s continuous or intermittent warfare. Moreover, industrial society for Berry has horrific psychological, moral, and theological ramifications. In essence, he indicates, industrial society no longer needs a hell, since it is making its own, as Berry humorously describes in “A Letter (to Ed McClanahan)”: I dreamed that you and I were sent to Hell. The place we went to was not fiery or cold, was not Dante’s Hell or Milton’s, but was, even so, as true a Hell as any. It was a place unalterably public in which crowds of people were rushing in weary frenzy this way and that . . .

The poem goes on to describe a teeming university or city street where everyone in the crowd is “alone” and “hurrying”: “It was a place/ deeply disturbed.” The description is reminiscent of New York City or of the crowds crossing London Bridge in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), which in turn are reminiscent of the hordes crossing the mythological River Styx. A brief statement of Berry’s themes appears in the short poem “Look It Over,” about a walk in the woods. Berry leaves behind all the seemingly necessary accessories of life in industrial society: “I bring/ no car, no cell phone,/ no computer, no camera,/ no CD player, no fax, no/ TV, not even a book.” Instead, sitting down on “a log provided at no cost,” he communes with “the earth itself, sadly/ abused by the stupidity/ only humans are capable of. . . .” After this blunt statement, he picks up on his earlier diction and mockingly concludes the poem in commercial language full of resonance: “Free./ A bargain! Get it [the earth] while it lasts.” Wendell Berry, Kentucky farmer, “A Speech to the Garden Club of Amer- intellectual, and author of fifty volumes ica” expands on these themes in heroic cou- of poetry, fiction, and essays, has won plets that announce the poem’s satiric intent. the T. S. Eliot Award, the Aiken Taylor The speaker regrets that he had to travel there Award, the John Hay Award, and the “[b]y a sustained explosion through the air,/ Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Burning the world in fact to rise much higher/ Achievement. Than we should go.” Further details about

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digging up, burning, and poisoning the world “in our fit/ Of temporary progress” lead to the dictum “Burning the world to live in it is wrong,/ As wrong as to make war to get along. . . .” Instead, the speaker urges his audience to learn from gardens to live sustainable lives consistent with nature’s cycle, Unlike our economic pyre That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire, An anti-life of radiance and fume That burns as power and remains as doom . . .

Addressing readers directly, “Questionnaire” uses a survey form typical of consumer products and questions worthy of the Grand Inquisitor to underline the moral compromises and complicity required by life in industrial society. It begins by asking readers the amount of poison they would willingly consume for the sake of a good economy (“Please/ name your preferred poisons.”) and ends by asking readers to list the beliefs, “energy sources,” and “kinds of security,/ for which you would kill a child./ Name, please, the children whom/ you would be willing to kill.” After “Questionnaire,” it is a relief to reach a peaceful poem such as “Tu Fu,” even if the speaker, like the great eighth century Chinese poet alluded to, lives “in a time of ruin.” The poems in part 1 show that Berry can write in a variety of poetic forms and that, despite his near-apocalyptic themes, he has a delightful sense of humor. In addition to epistles, speeches, questionnaires, and rhymed couplets, part 1 includes haiku and poems in free verse. A couple of other humorous poems make fun of the big bang theory, one of them featuring the “mad farmer,” who shows up at a nearby academic conference on the subject. “An Embarrassment” describes a limp before-dinner blessing. “Men Untrained to Comfort” is about Port William men who spare their horses by carrying their plows to their workplaces or working in the traces alongside (the poem also uses some quaint farming diction such as “rastus plow” and “singletree”). “And I Beg Your Pardon” puts the haiku to humorous purposes: The first mosquito: come here, and I will kill thee, holy though thou art.

The Sabbath poems of part 2, almost all written in untitled free verse, reflect Berry’s serious, meditative side and the rambling walks that inspired them. Berry continues to criticize the destruction caused by industrial society, even more harshly than in the part 1 poems relieved by humor. A few grim poems see no hope and instead, echoing epigraphs from the Old Testament prophet Hosea and opponents of strip mining, predict the end of industrial civilization (the results of mountain removal to mine coal to produce cheap electricity elsewhere are only too apparent in Berry’s native Kentucky). Other Sabbath poems, however, find or imply hope in a simple life lived close to nature and based on sustainable farming. A substantial number of the Sabbath poems are meditations on time or embody an awareness of time as it is experienced while growing old, in the seasonal cycle of nature, and in history. Although painfully aware of growing old, the poet takes joy in a

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long married life and in the generations of children and grandchildren. “The Book of Camp Branch,” the longest of the Sabbath poems and one of the few that are titled, is a meditation on a local stream. For Berry, the stream’s operations represent those of time, cutting a groove down the hillside and moving rocks, but its sounds are like words, inspiring the language of the poet. A few poems about time address complex philosophical issues, but others only imply such complexity in the language of folk wisdom. One such poem begins “‘That’s been an oak tree a long time,’/ said Arthur Rowanberry” and ends “We didn’t find what we were looking for,” said Arthur Rowanberry, pleased, “but haven’t we seen some fine country!”

As a metaphorical commentary on human life, Rowanberry’s words can hardly be topped, but other poems with a historical perspective come close. One poem challenges Thomas Jefferson’s slighting reference to “barbarous ancestors” by noting that history is always partial, historical “truth” only a “story,” a “plausible arrangement” made up from remaining bits of evidence. As do other poems in the collection, this poem suggests not only a historical but also a philosophical cast to the title of Leavings, as if the whole “truth” can never be known. The observation is consistent with Berry’s repeated statements, echoing the prophet Hosea, that industrial society, which seems to know so much, is destroying the world and itself from lack of knowledge. The historical outcome is indicated in another poem that wonders what the Shawnee called Camp Branch and what it will be called after “our nation” vanishes. Many of the Sabbath poems also celebrate a sense of place, suggesting that all truths are local. In the place Berry celebrates, life can be hard, as exemplified by the farmers “untrained to comfort” and by an old man in another poem who gets off his sickbed to go out on a winter day and feed the livestock. Central to Berry’s sense of place, however, is the relatively unspoiled nature of the places he celebrates, including the farm, the woods, Camp Branch, and the Port William community. From these scenes, Berry derives his inspiration, and he sees the local truths that they embody as an antidote to the ills of modern industrial society. One hopeful poem even speculates that, after the fall of industrial society, there will be a return to the land—to the farms, rural communities, and small towns where people live in harmony with one another, animals, and the land. Also part of Berry’s sense of place is the simple fact that it is home. One Sabbath poem compares leaving home to “death”: Farewell, my dearest ones. Farewell, my lovely fields. Farewell, my grazing flock, my patient horses, Maggie my ardent dog. Farewell, tall woods always so full of song.

The consolation for taking a trip is that “coming home is resurrection.” The religious terms in Berry’s poems, such as “resurrection,” “grace,” and even

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the title “Sabbaths,” connect with his informal theology. He rejects the idea that, because he wrote “some pages in favor of Jesus,” he belongs to any hidebound religious orthodoxy, to which he attributes much disputation and suffering. Instead, he has learned to duck when the small, haughty doctrines fly overhead, dropping their loads of whitewash at random on the faces of those who look toward Heaven.

The imagery of these batlike creatures is replaced, in other Berry poems, by images of birds singing joyfully, ascending into the light and the sky, but eventually coming back to earth. They represent a natural theology in which life on this earth, with its edenic possibilities, is heaven enough. Harold Branam

Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 6 (November 15, 2009): 15. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 46 (November 16, 2009): 40.

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THE LETTERS OF SAMUEL BECKETT Volume I: 1929-1940 Author: Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, with associate editors George Craig and Dan Gunn Publisher: Cambridge University Press (New York). Illustrated. 782 pp. $50.00 Type of work: Letters Time: 1929-1940 Locale: Dublin, Ireland; London, England; Paris, France; Hamburg, Berlin, and Munich, Germany The first of a projected four-volume series of Beckett’s letters containing, according to the author’s instructions, only those letters whose contents have some bearing on his work Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) was one of the most extraordinary writers of the twentieth century. Born to a prosperous Protestant family in Dublin, Ireland, he excelled as a student of languages and literature at Trinity College. This first volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett comprises correspondence taken from the period during which Beckett published his first works of fiction, criticism, and poetry. In 1928, Beckett accepted a position as English instructor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the city that eventually became his permanent home. He soon made the acquaintance of fellow Irish expatriate writer James Joyce (1882-1941) and became one of a circle of younger writers who assisted Joyce—who suffered from failing eyesight—and collaborated on a volume of essays devoted to the author’s “Work in Progress,” the sprawling manuscript that would eventually be published as Finnegan’s Wake (1939). Beckett also contributed the first essay, “Dante . . . Bruno . . . Vico . . . Joyce,” to the collection published in 1929 as Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. This was Beckett’s first published criticism, to be followed a year later by his short book Proust (1930). During the following decade, Beckett’s life was one of peripatetic shuttling back and forth from Paris to Dublin, then to London, and also to a variety of German cities. He was beset by worries over employment, especially whether he should continue to pursue a career in teaching, something for which he had a steadily dwindling appetite. He felt a great deal of pressure from his family, especially his mother, to follow such a path. As he struggled to establish himself as a writer, Beckett’s first publications (such as More Pricks than Kicks, his 1934 volume of short stories) brought him scant notice and even scanter income. His lack of immediate literary success produced even more importuning from his impatient mother, May. The height of the family drama came

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with the death of Beckett’s beloved father, William. It fell to brother Frank to take over the family business. Beckett considered following suit as his own prospects dimmed. However, no matter how great the pull he felt toward Dublin, his need to escape was even greater. Beckett’s letters show a tender concern for his mother, but they make it equally clear that he needed to maintain a certain level of distance between them. By early 1938, Beckett had planted himself firmly on French soil. The Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) was an early months of that year featured three draIrish writer who lived for most of his matic developments: the publication in Lonlife in France and who began writing don of his first novel Murphy (1938), a stab exclusively in French by the late wound delivered by a derelict on a Paris street, 1940’s. Author of plays, novels, short and the beginning of his relationship with stories, and criticism, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil (1900-1989), who was later to become his wife. Beckett’s name is associated with a set of stereotypes about the author that have developed into a mystique. He is thought of as having been almost pathologically private, if not reclusive, having thoroughly scorned the value of his own writings, and having been profoundly indifferent to the question of their publication. He often seemed to shun the spotlight, as in his peeved response to receiving the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature (although, unlike Jean-Paul Sartre, he did accept it). The letters published in this volume demolish such stereotypes. They reveal that Beckett was keenly and affectionately interested in a wide network of friends and relations, longing for news of and from them. Also, even though he could not resist frequent disparaging or dismissive remarks about his literary output, it is clear that he felt a sense of urgency about having his work read and evaluated. Moreover, he yearned fervently to see each manuscript through to publication, writing constantly to far-flung friends and acquaintances who might have been able to facilitate that process. Beckett’s letters show that, like his mentor Joyce’s fictional alter ego Stephen Daedalus, he had a growing conviction that he was meant to embrace the vocation of writer. Also like Joyce, Beckett was intoxicated with language, and he would not confine his use of language to his mother tongue. He was fluent in French and very nearly fluent in both Italian and German. He wrote most of his letters in English, but quite a number of them are in French or German. He frequently peppered his letters with phrases and brief passages from the languages he loved, often inserting lines from his beloved Italian poet Dante. In addition to introductions from the editors, this volume of letters includes prefaces from the French and German translators. These will prove most helpful to read-

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ers, as will the informative notes supplied by the editors. These notes set the context for specific letters and give useful but never excessive doses of information. Beckett’s letters of 1929-1940 were written primarily to friends, fellow writers, and persons in the publishing profession. He stayed in touch with friends in Ireland and regularly paid his respects to James Joyce and members of the Joyce family. For many years, Beckett was the object of unwelcome amorous attention from Joyce’s mentally disturbed daughter Lucia, a predicament that sometimes caused strained relations between Beckett and the Joyces. Many of Beckett’s letters were directed to his good friend and literary agent George Reavey (1907-1976). Thomas McGreevy (1893-1967), though, stands as the recipient of by far the greatest number of letters. Like Beckett, he was an Irish writer and a passionate Francophile. Their friendship began when they met as fellow instructors at the École Normale Supérieure. To McGreevy especially, Beckett poured out his heart where his literary ambitions were concerned. McGreevy was also an art historian and would later become the director of the National Gallery of Ireland. Accordingly, Beckett often wrote to him of the galleries and art museums he visited in his travels. Especially when writing to McGreevy, Beckett’s considerable erudition is on impressive display. His letters virtually constitute a university course in Western civilization. His ability to recall and describe paintings he has seen is quite remarkable. Beckett regaled McGreevy with commentary on the Flemish painting he especially loved, as well as Italian Renaissance and eighteenth century French painting. His letters also contain frequent mention of their mutual friend, the artist Jack Butler Yeats (1871-1957), younger brother of poet William Butler Yeats. Beckett especially enjoyed visits to Yeats’s studio when he was in Dublin. Beckett was no less passionate when discussing music. He himself studied piano during these years, devoting himself especially to the music of Mozart. It was as a reader, however, that Beckett’s restless intellect ranged most widely. The word “voracious” does not begin to do justice to his appetite for books, and when his personal library arrived from Dublin in 1938, it served as a dramatic confirmation that he had decided to take up permanent residence in Paris. While it is not surprising that Beckett was vastly well read, some of the opinions he expresses in his letters about authors and certain works may come as a shock, especially those regarding authors one might expect him to revere. Marcel Proust, for example, comes in for his share of ridicule in the letters. Beckett registers particular scorn for Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859), a book he professed to find tedious in the extreme. As is true of his discussions of many topics, Beckett’s mordant wit comes into play when he assesses certain authors. He mischievously reworks celebrated titles, often converting them into obscene puns. Beckett’s letters to close friends give full rein to his penchant for scatological humor, more often than not directed at himself and his writings, as he compares his literary output to excrement. Coming across as something of a hypochondriac, he comments repeatedly on the state of his digestive tract,

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as well as other bodily functions and conditions. McGreevy received far more information of this kind than he is likely to have wanted. Readers of Beckett’s novels and plays will be reminded of the physical afflictions and complaints associated with many of his characters. One thinks of the title characters of Murphy and Molloy (1951; English translation, 1955), as well as of Vladimir and Estragon from En attendant Godot (pb. 1952, pr. 1953; Waiting for Godot, 1954). Beckett’s correspondence became especially prolific from 1936 through 1938, years marked by frequent travel and, most important for his literary career, by the long campaign to find a publisher for Murphy. Expressions of discouragement appear quite often in these letters, as do words of gratitude to McGreevy for his encouraging comments on the manuscript. Reading these letters gives one the sense that Beckett’s career itself hung in the balance and that he would have walked away from his literary vocation if he had not been able to get his book published. At times, his letters profess weariness and even complete indifference to the question of Murphy’s publication. More often, however, he makes it clear that he will pursue every avenue toward that end. Beckett’s frequent letters to Reavey contain many suggestions of publishers to try. Finally, Routledge of London accepted the work, and it appeared in early 1938. Murphy was a pivotal book for Beckett. While it is redolent of Irish wit and the influence of James Joyce, it prefigures in many ways the fiction Beckett would write during the following decade, when he made the bold move to begin writing in French. Perhaps in part because Beckett stipulated that the only letters to be published should be those that have bearing on his work, the ominous political developments of the 1930’s receive scarcely any comment in the published correspondence. Considering the amount of time the writer spent in Germany, this omission seems particuarly astonishing. Once in a great while, Beckett lets slip a reference to the Nazis, for example referring disparagingly to the virulent anti-Semite Julius Streicher in a letter to McGreevy dated March 7, 1937. Especially given his later activities on behalf of the French resistance, Beckett’s sentiments seem clear enough. The writer’s letters do touch upon most other aspects of his life, since, as the editors argue, quite a broad range of topics can be understood to have bearing upon his work. The letters to his great friend McGreevy cover the gamut, from literature to his personal life, a brief glimpse of which Beckett offers when first mentioning (in his letter of April 18, 1939) his growing fondness for the French woman who would become his wife, Suzanne. All in all, this volume of letters represents a substantial achievement, and it will be welcomed heartily by all admirers of Samuel Beckett. The editors supply very detailed and informative introductions, as well as helpful footnotes where needed. In nearly all cases, they include translations of the many foreign-language passages in the letters. The translators of the letters in French and German (George Craig and Viola Westbrook, respectively) also shed light on the specific challenges posed by Beckett’s letters in those languages. The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume I, 19291940, ending as they do at the threshold of such a decisive decade both for the writer

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and for the world, will leave readers with appetites whetted for the volumes yet to appear. James A. Winders

Review Sources Library Journal 134, no. 4 (March 1, 2009): 72. London Review of Books 31, no. 15 (August 6, 2009): 14-20. The New Republic 240, no. 8 (May 20, 2009): 32-36. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 7 (April 30, 2009): 13-16. The New York Times, March 5, 2009, p. C23. The New York Times Book Review, April 5, 2009, p. 1. The New Yorker 85, no. 7 (March 30, 2009): 64-68. The Spectator 309, no. 9418 (February 28, 2009): 28-29. The Times Literary Supplement, March 13, 2009, p. 3-7. The Washington Post, April 2, 2009, p. CO2.

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LIFE IN SPACE Astrobiology for Everyone Author: Lucas John Mix Publisher: Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass.). 331 pp. $29.95 Type of work: Science Mix explains how astrobiology, drawing from the discoveries of many physical sciences, addresses such fundamental questions as the nature of life and its role in the universe Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. That observation from Scottish philosopher David Hume applies nowhere better than to speculations about the origin and evolution of life and whether it exists elsewhere in the universe. There is, after all, only a single example to judge by: life on Earth. The relatively new discipline of astrobiology nevertheless takes up those matters from a strictly scientific viewpoint, and Lucas John Mix explains how it does so in Life in Space: Astrobiology for Everyone. That subtitle seems tongue-in-cheek, given the complexities of the science involved, until one realizes that, even if astrobiology is not really for everyone, its findings will be. As Mix patiently, clearly, and humbly argues, how people define life influences how they look for life, and how people look for life reflects humanity’s deepest assumptions and aspirations. Mix possesses a notable ability to guide readers, if not to an outright understanding of astrobiology’s aims and methods, at least to a constructive appreciation. Astrobiology studies life by drawing on many scientific disciplines—including biology, physics, astronomy, geology, oceanography, paleontology, and climate science—in order to treat it as an Earth-wide phenomenon. Astrobiologists hope thereby to learn where they might best look for life on other planets. This project is less straightforward than it sounds. Mix first sets out the assumptions behind the discussion and then methodically surveys the contributions of science. Among those assumptions is the belief that reductionism is a useful method of investigation. Reductionism holds that simple phenomena give rise to more complicated phenomena. It works very well for physics and chemistry, which have posited basic laws and forces, but less well for biology. Still, Mix points out, when regarded as one method rather than as an end in itself, reductionism provides insights useful to assembling a coherent picture of life. Another assumption of astrobiology is that it is possible to define life clearly. There are many approaches to formulating such a definition. Mix discusses five approaches and shows the weaknesses of each. These five include the “pornographic” definition of life (“I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it”), the biochemical definition, the antientropic definition, the replication definition, and the evolutionary definition.

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Yet another crucial set of assumptions is that the universe is well-ordered and that hu- Lucas John Mix received a doctorate in mans are capable of understanding it. In the biology from Harvard University. He first five chapters of Life in Space, Mix ably lives in Redmond, Washington, serving argues that science (and philosophy) have as an Episcopal priest at a Seattle-area much of value to say about life. Thus, he as- church and teaching courses on serts, astrobiologists should proceed with cau- religion and science. tious confidence. It is in chapter six, “Life in the Cosmos,” that Mix grows specific. It and following chapters rely on physical laws and, especially, chemical formulae to make their case. Readers with no knowledge of science, or patience with it, will likely founder, but a high-school-level acquaintance with astronomy, chemistry, and physics easily suffices to follow Mix’s argument. The effort will be rewarded not only with insights but, as important, with the assurance that even the most abstruse and seemingly intractable matters are accessible to an open mind. In short order, Mix lists the circumstances of life on Earth: It needs a watery environment, is based on carbon, functions through reduction-oxidation (redox) chemistry and proton gradients, requires a few basic elements in sufficient quantity (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur), and subsists on an influx of energy (mostly sunlight, but in some cases geochemical reactions). Given these terrestrial (curiously, astrobiologists use “terrean”) specifications, scientists logically can start their search for life elsewhere by locating places that seem to have the same characteristics. “In short,” Mix concludes, “we are looking for a rocky planet or moon, close, but not too close to a star”: A rocky planet (as opposed to a gas giant) will have the right variety of chemicals. It must be close but not too close to a star so that water can exist there as a liquid. This formulation helps narrow astrobiologists’ search somewhat. As it turns out, two very good candidates for their search exist in Earth’s solar system: Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa. Saturn’s giant moon Titan may represent a third candidate. These are not the only places where scientists might look, but they are the best places to start. The solar system is only one planetary system in one arm of a big galaxy. Already, only twenty years after the discovery of the first “exoplanet,” or planet outside the solar system, some 350 planets are now known to orbit stars other than the Sun just in the solar system’s galactic neighborhood. It is reasonable to assume, considering the difficulty of spotting such planets, that this number represents only a small fraction of all the exoplanets nearby—and a tiny fraction of those in the Milky Way. Most exoplanets do not qualify as potential life-cradles if judged by Earth standards. Mix explains why this is so: They orbit the wrong kind of star, are too big, or are too cold or too hot. Stars have a relatively narrow belt of space around them, the habitable zone, where life might arise on a rocky planet. Only a small percentage of planets would find their way into this zone, yet space is vast, so astrobiologists reasonably assume that if a planet has the right conditions, life may be found there. Mix devotes several chapters

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to planetary science and how astronomers detect exoplanets, a fascinating account in itself. Mix’s real enthusiasm shows in his discussion of the history and mechanisms of life, to which he devotes the last seven chapters of his book. He presents life as a kind of reprieve from the inexorable, inescapable desolation of entropy. Entropy is essentially the underlying tendency in nature toward disorder. The second law of thermodynamics holds that, in any energy system, entropy always increases. That is, disorder increases and energy is lost. The Earth and Sun together form such a system, yet the planet’s surface hosts organisms with the antientropic capacity to trap energy and use it to expand order. They do so by reproducing, by evolving into more complex, efficient organisms, by filling every available niche that supports them, and by participating in the “web of life,” the ecosystems of interdependent organisms. All organisms are part of these communities. The biosphere itself is the grand community of these communities. There is competition among organisms, to be sure, but the overall direction for life is to exist in interconnectedness and to build from simplicity to complexity. This occurs, Mix points out, in the overall context of entropy: Disorder still increases in the Earth-Sun system. Nevertheless, the ages-long profusion and variety of life increases. To humanity, this fact is, or should be, valuecreating and beautiful. Mix considers the magnificent tree of life, from life’s precursors (such as prions and viruses) to the largest and oldest living things, from the beginning of life on Earth to the present, and always with an eye toward what these observations might teach science about life elsewhere. A great many basic mysteries remain, which is precisely what makes science so exciting. For instance, the origin of life is a matter of speculation, but it is increasingly informed speculation as scientists discover more about microbiology, genetics, and ecosystems. According to Mix, a promising theory holds that the first ecosystems appeared around deep-sea volcanic vents, where organisms fed from chemical energy. Only later did they evolve the ability to convert solar energy through photosynthesis. Such matters as the origin and age of life and whether it exists outside Earth are culturally sensitive. They frequently divide science from religion, as well as one religion from another. Mix takes great care not to characterize the results of science as in any way complete or final. Indeed, as he remarks, to do so would not be scientific. Moreover, he is as careful not to present his own speculations based on scientific results as anything other than a personal viewpoint. His viewpoint is modest yet compelling in how it views life. Mix suspects that humans can only know symptoms of life, not any essential character, and that it may be more productive to define life as a process rather than as the attribute of an individual. An organism may exist only in relation to its ancestors and to its offspring. That view insists on the historical journey of life, as well as any given organism’s immediate environment. Intelligence is probably the most sensitive of all topics related to life. It is difficult to define intelligence as a strictly human characteristic, as Mix makes plain. Still, the characteristic is central to humanity’s definition of itself as a species (Homo sapiens, the thinking branch of the genus Homo). It underpins the idea of civilization and

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forms a basis for the doctrine of exclusiveness in religions. Accordingly, the possibility that intelligent beings might live on other planets is inherently disturbing. It is perplexing, too. If life is the rule and intelligent races are common, why has there been no solid evidence of contact? One supposition is that intelligence is rare. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the decades-long effort by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program to detect artificial signals from outer space has thus far been unsuccessful. Another, less complimentary supposition is that intelligent aliens exist but find humanity not worth contacting. Mix’s own viewpoint about extraterrestrial intelligence is as refreshing as it is sensible. Whether common or rare, awe-inspiring or diminishing, such beings would offer an opportunity. “For many of us,” he writes of fellow astrobiologists, the greatest motivation to find life elsewhere comes from a hope that such life should provide perspective. It would help us step outside of ourselves and discover something fundamental about how we see the world.

Throughout Life in Space, Mix’s tone is of that tenor: earnest, judicious, and guiding. There are occasional sparks of humor, albeit nerdy humor (“Only eukaryotes have sex”), but readers will mainly encounter in Mix a reasonable man intent on taking up an extremely complex discipline on the frontiers of science in order to offer it as a wholly rational, salutary enterprise. He soft-pedals religious qualms about scientific enquiry, especially reductionism, and avoids secular mysticism. For example, he does not discuss James Lovelock’s concept of Gaia, a superintelligence that emerges from the biosphere as a whole. Such belief systems, while they may bear on the larger implications of life, do not directly clarify the methods and findings of astrobiology. Mix also barely alludes to human-caused environmental degradation, species extinctions, and climate change. Maybe he does not have to. Life in Space, by showing how wonderful life is, teaches readers to cherish it and seek it out. It is in this respect that Life in Space has a claim to being extraordinary. Roger Smith

Review Sources Chronicle of Higher Education 55, no. 25 (February 27, 2009): B16. Library Journal 134, no. 4 (March 1, 2009): 96. New Scientist 201, no. 2702 (April 4, 2009): 45. Science News 175 (April 11, 2009): 30.

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THE LIFE YOU CAN SAVE Acting Now to End World Poverty Author: Peter Singer (1946) Publisher: Random House (New York). 207 pp. $22.00 Type of work: Ethics, economics Singer deploys powerful ethical arguments to support the view that many Americans could and should increase their donations to save and improve the lives of people in low-income areas of the world, presenting information to help make such donations cost effective Princeton philosopher Peter Singer has demonstrated awesome gifts for self-promotion and controversy. His The Life You Can Save is mostly uncontroversial, however, while Singer’s skill at self-promotion is admirably harnessed to a thoroughly worthy cause. Around the world, millions of people (especially children) die every year from causes that would be preventable at comparatively low cost if appropriate resources were available to them. Singer’s book is a call to action for Americans to elevate their giving, and it is working. A Web site based on the book records a steady escalation in the amount of funds donated or pledged since its publication. The book is being translated and published all over the world. Singer confronts many potential objections and obstacles to his project. He feels that most Americans are not hopelessly mired down in the hedonistic pursuit of supposed self-interest. Indeed, research on happiness consistently finds that generous givers tend to be happier. After all, Christian teachings, and those of most other major faiths, strongly advocate for the poor. Singer’s iconoclasm surfaces a bit when he challenges the common conviction that one’s family comes first, but he sensibly concludes that this principle need not be an obstacle to generous giving. (The classroom examples he cites in this context, intended to discomfit his students, seem overdone). Singer might have done better to stress that much of the expenditure made by the rich on their children may be damaging to those children’s moral and emotional wellbeing. (Is a Princeton University education, for example, worth its price in comparison to the price of attending nearby Rutgers University?) He does point to the success of the “default option,” where payroll deductions for a favored objective are taken automatically unless an employee explicitly opts out. This example establishes the extent to which Americans’ spending is influenced by the path of least resistence. Singer raises the question of why most Americans do not support overseas relief more generously, given their apparently generous inclination. One might respond that governmental foreign-aid programs, paid for with taxpayers’ money, have not worked very well. Singer rejoins that the U.S. government spends relatively little on foreign aid, little of that spending goes to the lowest-income countries, and what does go to such countries is often impaired by “buy America” programs and other distrac-

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tions. He strongly opposes dumping farm sur pluses on poor countries, a practice that often Peter Singer is Ira W. DeCamp harms those countries’ abilities to develop Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He has published more than their own food production systems. Singer could have spoken even more harshly thirty books, individually or against government-to-government aid pro- cooperatively. He is considered one of grams and shown more systematically why the founders of the animal rights private efforts are more likely to succeed. movement. Among the obstacles to more giving, economists cite lack of information and the transaction costs of giving. The lives of the truly poor are so remote from U.S. experience that most Americans cannot identify with them. Singer acknowledges that generous giving is often forthcoming when the beneficiary has a name and a face and is “someone like us.” Singer also acknowledges that Americans may be less likely to respond to the needs of others if the only way to do so is by giving money. Money gifts are often the most efficient because they can support a cadre of specialists and can permit expenditures in the locality of need, drawing on the resources of that area (and paying the providers). For Americans with more time than money, volunteer activities such as serving in a food bank or senior center can offer face-to-face contact and sociability with other volunteers. For a man, being a blood donor can bolster a macho sense of selfesteem, partly because of the discomfort being overcome. Singer effectively marshals evidence about the costs of saving lives. World Health Organization (WHO) programs directed against malaria, diarrhea, respiratory infections, and measles have cost about $300 for each life saved. Problems now faced in the developing world will probably more expensive to address. The comprehensive relief organization Population Services International (PSI) saves lives at a cost somewhere between $650 and $1,000 each. Perhaps more important is the fact that these programs have improved quality of life for many more than those who would have died. Early WHO campaigns, though successful in their direct goals, were somewhat vitiated by the resulting population increases. Singer addresses this issue by citing the evidence that rising incomes tend to reduce birth rates. However, it is not evident that his proposals will increase incomes. Singer is at his best in addressing the hard-boiled issue of cost effectiveness: He determines which organizations do the best work toward saving and improving lives per dollar spent. To begin, he alerts readers that many charitable organizations do not report data that permit cost-benefit calculation, and many do not even do a respectable job of self-evaluation. One of the hoped-for benefits of the charitable involvement of billionaires such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett is greater attention being paid to such project evaluation. Singer himself strongly supports Oxfam; he also gives eloquent testimonials to the work of Partners in Health and Interplast. The book provides moving descriptions of programs dealing with obstetric fistulas, surgery against deformities, and remedies for blindness. However, the discus-

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sion of fistulas illustrates an underlying systems problem: Some societies neglect women’s rights and force girls into marriage and childbearing before their bodies are ready. The book’s complementary Web site provides an updated directory of organizations that perform cost-effective work for the very poor. By highlighting these organizations, Singer is performing a service in institution building, helping drive financial support toward effective organizations. His data might lead some donors to redirect their contributions so as to increase the benefit derived from a given level of giving. As an ethicist, Singer devotes much attention to why Americans should follow his recommendations. He uses one of economists’ favorite bits of analysis in arguing that each person should donate up to the point where the personal expenditures sacrificed are nearly as important as the benefits obtained. Admittedly, entrepreneurs whose profits are plowed back into creating more capital and more jobs may be creating more social benefit than if they donated to even the most cost-effective charities. Singer urges that people forgo drinking bottled water, a singularly wasteful and environmentally unfriendly activity, and donate the cash they save. He notes that donating may contribute as much to one’s self-esteem as would purchasing a lavish home or a fancy car. Conceding that Americans are relatively generous givers, Singer remains skeptical about vast philanthropic support for the arts and cultural activities, leading readers on a scornful tour of the numerous donor identifications that adorn the new home of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. For potential donors with a propensity toward competition, the book’s Web site offers donors the opportunity to receive publicity. As befits an ethicist, Singer finds many opportunities to berate the conspicuous excesses of the really rich, a topic developed by economist Robert Frank. Singer has fun providing a suggested-giving chart with a progressive rate structure such as that used to determine income taxes. In the current recession, he might have added that people who have adjusted their lifestyles to generous giving are well placed to absorb income decrease without needing to make painful reductions in consumption. Singer’s book provides a scholarly and persuasive foundation for a commendable humanitarian cause, but the subtitle “acting now to end world poverty” is inappropriate. Most of the philospher’s emphasis is on measures to improve health and schooling. The microcredit enterprises he praises have raised some people from being very poor to being merely poor. However, ending world poverty means raising people’s productivity and their earned incomes. This is largely a systems problem, as dramatized by China’s skyrocketing economic advance since emerging from Mao Zedong’s oppressive regime. It requires entrepreneurship, capital, technology, organization, and favorable government. Singer momentarily stumbles on this matter when he gives credence to a crude calculation by Jeffrey Sachs of how much money it would take to raise everyone above the poverty line. Grassroots measures that raise agricultural productivity may worsen the level of surplus labor in rural areas—still a major problem in China.

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In other sections of his book, Singer acknowledges the importance of systems elements such as the rule of law, property rights, and honest and effective government. He points to the systems approach embodied in the Millennium Villages Project, led by Jeffrey Sachs and sponsored by the United Nations. Besides health, education, and women’s rights, the program stresses increasing productivity in agriculture and other appropriate village activities. By 2008, the program covered eighty African villages with a total population of more than 400,000 people. The program has targeted countries that are reasonably peaceful and law-abiding. Such programs offer the prospect of complementarity with government aid to develop highways and other infrastructure. The greatest obstacle to economic improvement in Africa is bad government, as in Zimbabwe and Somalia, or absence of any effective government. The efforts of the United States government to upgrade the quality of government by direct action, such as in Iraq, have not met with great success. U.S. foreign-aid policies now give more attention to recipient government quality. As private aid organizations gain support, they can also gain influence toward better indigenous government and toward better U.S. government aid policies. Such economic and political leaders as Gates, Buffett, Bill Clinton, and Rick Warren are acting on that assumption. Singer recognizes that the policies of developed countries regarding international trade have powerful adverse effects on low-income countries, but he is pessimistic about prospects for overcoming the special-interest pork-barreling behind them. Unfortunately, he neglects the fact that the single most effective way to raise the income of persons in low-income countries is to enable them to migrate to the United States. Singer’s book has saved lives and will save many more. Not many authors can make such a claim. Paul B. Trescott

Review Sources The Age (Melbourne), April 11, 2009, p. A2-25. Chronicle of Philanthropy 21, no. 11 (March 26, 2009): 24. The Globe and Mail (Toronto), March 14, 2009, p. F11. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 24 (December 15, 2008): 1298. The New York Times, March 11, 2009, p. 6. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 50 (December 15, 2008): 42. Quadrant Magazine 53, no. 5 (May, 2009): 67-69. Times Higher Education, March 19, 2009, p. 51. Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2009, p. A15.

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LIT A Memoir Author: Mary Karr (1955) Publisher: Harper (New York). 386 pp. $25.99 Type of work: Memoir Time: 1972-2009 Locale: California; Texas; Massachusetts; New York The third of Karr’s memoirs describes her battle with alcoholism, as well as her unraveling marriage and her experience of motherhood Principal personages: Mary Karr, a writer, wife, and mother struggling with alcoholism, depression, and a volatile relationship with her mother Charlie Karr, her mother, an artist and recovering alcoholic whose unpredictable behavior traumatized her children Lecia Karr, Mary’s older sister and confidant Warren Whitbread (a pseudonym), Mary’s husband Dev, Mary’s son

Seven years in the making, Lit is the third of Mary Karr’s memoirs. The Liar’s Club (1995), her first, was principally about her childhood, and Cherry (2000) focused on Karr’s teenage years. In Lit, Karr attends college in the 1970’s, meets her future husband in graduate school, and becomes a mother while battling depression and alcoholism. In the letter to her son that begins this memoir, Karr tells him, “Any way I tell this story is a lie” and asks him to forget that she is fifty to his twenty and that her brain is “dimmer” so that she can tell him the “whole tale” as she knows it. Karr describes how she hurt her son, not only by divorcing his father when he was five but also with the shouting and slamming doors that accompanied the end of her marriage. She expresses guilt for “vanishing” into the “madhouse” for a period and recounts her mother’s psychotic episode when she stood over Karr and her sister Lecia with a carving knife before she herself was taken away to the madhouse. When Karr asked her why she had done it, her mother said, “I just couldn’t imagine bringing two girls up in a world where they do such awful things to women. So I decided to kill you both, to spare you.” Karr explains to her son that she always tried to protect him from the “knife-wielding goddess of death” who had also set a pile of her children’s toys on fire. Part 1 of the memoir begins in California, where Karr spends time with some “extremely stoned surfers.” At “age seventeen,” she is “stringy-haired and halter-topped, weighing in the high double digits and unhindered by a high school diploma.” Think-

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ing of her father makes her feel more rooted in the itinerant, unsanitary conditions in which Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club (1995) she lives. She ponders the nights that he would won the PEN prize. Her second go into the garage and drink from the bottle memoir, Cherry (2000), was a New that he kept under his truck seat, as well as the York Times Notable Book. Karr has times that he would come home at dawn after received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a long day of work in the oil fields and ask Pushcart Prizes, as well as a Bunting Fellowship. Karr to walk barefoot across his back. After a hitchhiking incident in which a man high on crystal meth picks her up and she jumps out of the car and runs off, Karr realizes that she wants a more stable life than she has with the surfers. She goes to college at “a small midwestern school,” where she decides to reinvent herself for that “leafy place” and the “college folks” who would not know how to speak to someone like her father, “who’d graduated grade six and spent days off cleaning his squirrel gun.” In her father’s absence, Karr seeks the favor of her male professors, one of whom—a “white-haired psychology prof, Walt Mink”—becomes her mentor. He helps her figure out how to improve her grades and possibly get some scholarship money, as well as offering her a job cleaning rat and pigeon cages to free her from the food service’s “vile hairnet.” In the meantime, despite her reluctance to take a literature class because she feels outclassed by better-read students, Karr recognizes her affinity for poetry. She remembers that, in high school, she had “fallen in love with the visionary antiwar work of Bill Knott, who’d become a cult figure partly through a suicide hoax.” Impressed with the way he read his poems, drawing them from a wrinkled bag stuffed with pages and then discarding them as if they were trash, she decides to take a poetry workshop with Etheridge Knight. Knight describes poetry as an oral art and impresses Karr with his support of her work, despite also telling her it is pretentious and incomprehensible. As Karr explains it, Knight runs his workshops from his house with a forty-ounce bottle of Colt malt liquor between his knees, wearing “a string T-shirt and dark pants of a stiff material that I swear to God looked prison issue.” When Walt Mink and his wife arrange a job for Karr teaching at a group home for “fairly functional retarded women,” she is amazed at the women’s ability to tell the good poetry she reads to them from the bad and their enthusiasm in doing so. The women’s reactions remind Karr of her own visceral response to poetry. Karr also realizes at this time that she has “an appetite for drink, a taste for it, a talent.” Karr begins sessions with a therapist, and he encourages her to talk about her “complicated mother” and “absent father.” As a result, she has what she calls “nonalcoholic blackouts,” when she goes blank after being asked to recount memories of her mother, Charlie. At her therapist’s suggestion, she invites her mother to a session, but neither of the women shows up for the appointment. Both of them claim that they forgot. After another session alone with her therapist, Karr flies home to Leitchfield, Texas, where her mother tells her that Karr’s father was her fifth husband. Karr discovers that she has a half sister, a “blowsy L.A. blonde” with a taste for pills whom

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she sees only once, as well as an “easygoing” half brother, Tex, whom she takes to “right off.” Soon afterward, Karr is accepted on probation at a low-residency graduate school in Vermont—thanks to references from Mink and Knight, she thinks. Although the college is approaching bankruptcy, it remains open until the year she graduates. She describes herself as drinking “like a fish” during her residencies but staying sober between them, while she lives and teaches in Minneapolis, sobriety being “the only way to shovel through the heaps of work.” During one of her grad-school residencies, Karr meets her future husband, Warren Whitbread, who is rumored to be “the star of genius Robert Lowell’s last class at Harvard,” while he is touring the Vermont grad school for a week. Karr is impressed with his “shy smile and decorous bearing,” which she later decides has been bred into him by his patrician family, who live in mansion called Fairweather Hall. She is struck by how different Warren’s family is from her own, with their polite conversation, selfcontrol, and apparently effortless entertaining, thanks in part to their domestic help. Years later, she will realize that she never really knew them. Despite the conflicts that Karr and her husband have in their marriage, which increase as her drinking becomes more frequent, Karr describes herself as drawn to Warren’s differences, finding in his “cool certainty” a counterbalance to her “ragtag—intermittently drunken—lurching around.” Their love of poetry also draws them together. Karr admires Warren’s self-discipline in keeping himself on a regular writing schedule, while she writes in fits and starts. In the meantime, her father’s health is deteriorating, so she divides her time between Massachusetts and Texas, watching her father die. It is only after four years, when her father is on the verge of death, that Warren finally meets him. Although she does not drink every day, Karr says, she finds herself “unpredictably blotto at inopportune times.” When she discovers that she is pregnant, though, she swears off alcohol for the duration of the pregnancy. After twenty-two hours of labor, she is struck with a feeling of joy that she has never felt before, fascinated with her newborn son, Dev. Her mother says that Karr will “stare the skin off him” when she visits to help care for the baby. It turns out that Dev is not an easy baby to care for, and Karr later credits his frequent ailments for preventing her from getting as drunk as she might have otherwise. At the age of thirty-four, Karr takes a job teaching six classes as an adjunct instructor, freeing herself from a “deeply respectable but non-writer-esque telecom consulting” job. As she and her husband speak less and less, Karr feels as if she is “circling” her marriage and “being erased with each rotation.” Her drinking increases. Karr says that when Warren does speak to her, “the airspace is sandpapered and abraded, spiked as a bondage collar.” They attend counseling sessions but cannot seem to contain the rage that they feel toward each other. One night, when the room is “swirling” with their “invectives” and Karr sees Dev standing in the doorway, “naked and gap-mouthed,” she realizes that she needs help and seeks it at a local support group for alcoholics. Karr is impressed with the diversity of the people who attend this meeting, noting that they do not fit her stereotype of

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such groups. She has a hard time, however, believing that she has anything in common with them, and she scoffs at the idea of a higher power. Nevertheless, with the help of her sponsor (whom she calls Joan the Bone), Karr maintains sobriety and concedes that a higher power might exist. She remains reluctant to pray. After a poetry reading at Harvard College, Karr gets drunk and narrowly misses skidding into a concrete divider. Miraculously, to her, she and her car emerge unscathed, and she walks home. As Karr reconnects with her support system, she decides to give prayer a try, and within about a week she receives a call from the Whiting Foundation telling her that she has been awarded a thirty-five-thousand-dollar prize for which she had not applied. An “anonymous angel” nominated her. Although her initial response is guilt because Warren did not win the prize, Karr starts to believe in the power of prayer. Karr and her husband continue to grow apart, however, and she realizes that prayer will not heal her marriage. She finds that the grant she has received paralyzes her writing rather than aiding it: She still feels guilty for receiving the award and for being underemployed while her husband is doing more and more editing and teaching. Feeling “dark and dead,” sometimes going “days without obsessing about a drink,” she begins to have suicidal thoughts. After a sleepless night of driving around with a garden hose in the back of her car and images of herself swerving into a telephone pole, tree, or ramp, she checks herself into a mental health institution famous for having had “blue-blooded ‘Mayflower screwballs,’” including Robert Lowell, among its residents. After this experience, Karr decides to surrender herself to God, stating that, before, she feared that surrender would “sand” her “down to nothing.” Now, she says, “I’ve started believing it can bloom me more solidly into myself.” Karr develops a support system so strong that she does not want to leave it for Syracuse University, so she initially turns down a professorship she is offered there. However, the university eventually makes her a better offer that she feels unable to refuse. Shortly after moving to Syracuse, Karr and her husband divorce. She begins not only dating but also “God Shopping,” as she titles chapter 39. She eventually decides to become a Catholic after being surprised at the open-mindedness of a Catholic priest when she confesses her doubts about the existence of God. She also confesses to readers that, despite her newfound faith, she does not “much care to see God in all things.” In fact, she says, “I prefer to find God in circumstances I think up in advance, at home in my spare time—circumstances God will fulfill for me like a gumball machine when I put the penny of my prayer into it.” The irreverence evident in this statement permeates Lit. Karr’s voice expresses a skepticism not only about a higher power but also about her own power to overcome her alcoholism and finally consider herself a good wife, mother, sister, and daughter. She admits to failure in some aspects of her life and finds both frustration and salvation in writing, taking the pages and her journey to sobriety one day at a time. Holly L. Norton

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Review Sources Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 15 (August 1, 2009): 81. Library Journal 134, no. 16 (October 1, 2009): 77. Los Angeles Times, November 8, 2009, p. E8. The New York Times, November 6, 2009, p. C25. The New York Times Book Review, November 15, 2009, p. 12. The New Yorker 85, no. 38 (November 23, 2009): 113. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 31 (August 3, 2009): 36. The Wall Street Journal, October 31, 2009, p. W5. The Washington Post, November 10, 2009, p. C01.


MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2010 Essay-Reviews of 200 Outstanding Books Published in the United States During 2009

With an Annotated List of Titles

Volume Two LIT-Z Edited by

JOHN D. WILSON STEVEN G. KELLMAN

SALEM PRESS Pasadena, California Hackensack, New Jersey

Cover photo: Courtesy, U.S. Senate

Copyright © 2010, 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, [email protected]. ∞ 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): 978-1-58765-655-2 ISBN (vol. 1): 978-1-58765-656-9 ISBN (vol. 2): 978-1-58765-657-6

first printing

printed in the united states of america

CONTENTS

Complete Annotated List of Titles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xlvii The Little Stranger—Sarah Waters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy—John R. Hale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Lost Art of Gratitude—Alexander McCall Smith . . . . . . . . . . The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon— David Grann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Lost Symbol—Dan Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Louis D. Brandeis: A Life—Melvin I. Urofsky . . . . . . . . . . . . . Love and Summer—William Trevor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lowboy—John Wray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon— Buzz Aldrin with Ken Abraham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son—Michael Chabon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels— Tristram Hunt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Mechanics of Falling: And Other Stories—Catherine Brady . . . Mercury Dressing: Poems—J. D. McClatchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary—Miri Rubin . . . . . Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding—Sarah Blaffer Hrdy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Museum of Innocence—Orhan Pamuk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . My Father’s Tears: And Other Stories—John Updike . . . . . . . . .

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489 493 498 503 507

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Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity—Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor . . . . . . . . Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology—Mark V. Barrow, Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . A New Literary History of America—Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors . Nine Dragons—Michael Connelly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans—Dan Baum . . . . . . . . . Nobody Move—Denis Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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On Moving: A Writer’s Meditations on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again—Louise DeSalvo. . . . . . . . . . Once on a Moonless Night—Dai Sijie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Once the Shore: Stories—Paul Yoon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . One D.O.A., One on the Way—Mary Robison . . . . . . . . . . . One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World—Gordon Hempton and John Grossman . . One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict— Benny Morris. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Original of Laura—Vladimir Nabokov . . . . . . . . . . . . . Orlando Furioso: A New Verse Translation—Ludovico Ariosto . . Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue—William Logan . . .

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584 589 594 598

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A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster—Rebecca Solnit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line—Martha A. Sandweiss . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire—Flora Fraser . . . . . . . . . Poems, 1959-2009—Frederick Seidel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong—Terry Teachout . . . . . . . . . . The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess— Andrei Codrescu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Practical Water—Brenda Hillman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger— Alec Wilkinson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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608 612 616 620

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629 634 639 644

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A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq—Mark Moyar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 662 Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life—Carol Sklenicka . . . . . The Reason for Crows: A Story of Kateri Tekakwitha— Diane Glancy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigrants, Islam, and the West—Christopher Caldwell . . . . . . . . . . Rhyming Life and Death—Amos Oz . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . 667 . . . . . . . . . 672 . . . . . . . . . 676 . . . . . . . . . 681

Sag Harbor—Colson Whitehead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Scarecrow—Michael Connelly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d’Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon—Veronica Buckley . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Seven Deadly Sins: And Other Poems—David R. Slavitt. . Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work— Matthew B. Crawford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Short History of Women—Kate Walbert . . . . . . . . . . . xliv

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CONTENTS

The Siege—Ismail Kadare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels—Janet Soskice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Skating Rink—Roberto Bolaño . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Slang: The People’s Poetry—Michael Adams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream—Patrick Radden Keefe . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sonata Mulattica—Rita Dove . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Song Is You—Arthur Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . South of Broad—Pat Conroy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Spartacus War—Barry Strauss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stone’s Fall—Iain Pears . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families— Michael Holroyd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom— Graham Farmelo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness—Tracy Kidder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summer World: A Season of Bounty—Bernd Heinrich . . . . . . . . . . . Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson— Wil Haygood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Talking About Detective Fiction—P. D. James . . . . . . . . . The Tanners—Robert Walser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tea Time for the Traditionally Built—Alexander McCall Smith The Thing Around Your Neck—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. . Tiepolo Pink—Roberto Calasso . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . To Be Read in Five Hundred Years—Albert Goldbarth . . . . . Too Much Happiness: Stories—Alice Munro . . . . . . . . . . The Tourist—Olen Steinhauer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy—Keith Waldrop. . . . . . . Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary—Bertrand M. Patenaude True Compass: A Memoir—Edward M. Kennedy . . . . . . . . Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories—Kevin Wilson . .

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The Unfinished Poems—C. P. Cavafy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 838 Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington— Robert J. Norrell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 843 The Vagrants—Yiyun Li . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 849 A Very Brief History of Eternity—Carlos Eire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 854 A Village Life—Louise Glück . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 858 xlv


Wanting—Richard Flanagan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wedlock: The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore— Wendy Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order—Martin Jacques . . . . . . . . Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman—Jon Krakauer . Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector—Benjamin Moser The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America—Douglas Brinkley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation—Fanny Howe . . . . . . . . . . The Winter Vault—Anne Michaels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Women—T. Coraghessan Boyle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West—Anthony Grafton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Writing the Rapture: Prophecy Fiction in Evangelical America— Crawford Gribben . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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The Year of the Flood—Margaret Atwood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 916 Zeitoun—Dave Eggers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 921 Biographical Works by Subject Category Index . . . . . . . . . Title Index . . . . . . . . . . . Author Index . . . . . . . . . .

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VOLUME 1 A. Lincoln: A Biography—Ronald C. White, Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 This biography of the sixteenth U.S. president incorporates new perspectives regarding Abraham Lincoln’s formative years and development, including the role of his religious beliefs in shaping his life and work The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science—Richard Holmes. . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Holmes provides sequential biographies of some of the key figures in British exploration and science during the Romantic period, highlighting their impact on the literature and poetry of the age All Other Nights—Dara Horn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 This Civil War tale follows the life of a young Jewish American spy as he deals with assignments that ask him to betray those closest to him and that challenge his understanding of his own identity American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone—D. D. Guttenplan . . . . 15 An intellectual biography of American political journalist I. F. Stone, with emphasis on the broader political contexts that shaped Stone’s work and legacy as an independent radical reporter Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life—Adam Gopnik . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 This study of the nineteenth century reveals significant and surprising parallels between the lives of English biologist Charles Darwin and U.S. president Abraham Lincoln The Antelope’s Strategy: Living in Rwanda After the Genocide— Jean Hatzfeld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Hatzfeld’s third book about the 1994 Rwandan genocide uses testimony from Tutsi survivors and Hutu perpetrators to assess how they are coping with the devastation that both links and divides them

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The Anthologist—Nicholson Baker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 In Baker’s novel, writer Paul Chowder muses on poetry, and on life while trying to write an introduction to an anthology of rhymed poetry he has been commissioned to compile Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back—Reynolds Price . . . . . . . . . 33 This third volume of Price’s autobiography is a graceful and elegiac view of his life in the 1950’s as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and his return to his native South to teach writing and literature at Duke University The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution—Denis Dutton . . . . 37 An exploration of the origins of the arts within the context of Darwinian evolutionary science and the ways that this intellectual perspective changes contemporary art theory and criticism Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F.—Stefan Aust . . . . . . . . . . 42 Aust provides a detailed account of the activities of the Red Army Faction (RAF), a group of urban terrorists operating in Berlin and West Germany for more than a decade Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock—Pete Fornatale . . . . . . . . . 46 Based on the recollections of dozens of participant observers, a legendary rockand-roll disc jockey reconstructs the story, and considers the legacy, of the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace—Ayelet Waldman . . . . . . . . . . . 50 An offering of motherhood, its joys and impossible goals, on the altar of public opinion The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography—Robert Crawford . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Published on the 250th anniversary of Burns’s birth, Crawford’s biography traces the many influences on Burns’s poetry and thought; Crawford also explores the writer’s various relationships and his efforts to provide for himself and his family The Believers—Zoë Heller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 After noted radical lawyer Joel Litvinoff is felled by a stroke, the lives of his wife and three children unravel, but they eventually achieve significant psychological and spiritual transformations

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The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America— Timothy Egan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Egan presents a popular history of the origins of the United States Forest Service, and its heroic but doomed battle against a massive firestorm in 1910 Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience—Jeremy Mynott . . . . . 68 Mynott sets out to determine what humans appreciate about birds and what that appreciation teaches humans about themselves Blame—Michelle Huneven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 A story of guilt and redemption, in which a brilliant young history professor’s life is changed by her involvement in a fatal automobile accident and her subsequent prison sentence Blood’s a Rover—James Ellroy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 In the third volume of James Ellroy’s Underworld U.S.A. trilogy, following American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, Ellroy tells the story of three men who struggle to surface through the mire of late 1960’s and early 1970’s police, government, and underworld corruption The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys—Lilian Pizzichini . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 This portrait of the author of Wide Sargasso Sea is more an evocation of Jean Rhys rather than a detailed, scholarly examination of the facts of her life. Omitting any analysis of her novels, it focuses on Rhys as a troubled and troubling woman The Book of Night Women—Marlon James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Women slaves on the Montpelier sugar plantation plot secretly at night to raise an insurrection against the violent and cruel British owners The Book of Samuel: Essays on Poetry and Imagination—Mark Rudman . . . . 90 Rudman assesses the literary achievement of a wide range of authors, examines their influence on other writers (including himself), and provides autobiographical accounts of his travels inspired by their works The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World—Paul Collins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Evaluation of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, which preserved the work of England’s most famous playwright, including much that could have been lost, and which also began a great industry of Shakespeareana

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Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi— Timothy R. Pauketat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 The story of a Native American city that flourished more than a thousand years ago and whose inhabitants built more than two hundred pyramid mounds Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems— John Felstiner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 A series of essays engaging British and American poems of the past two centuries that respond to the natural world, demonstrating how environmental concerns were central to the poets’ visions of human existence The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal— Julie Greene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 A prominent historian describes the daily experience of the workers who constructed the Panama Canal, as well as the social structure created for them Castle—J. Robert Lennon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 A man returns after a considerable absence to his hometown in upstate New York and is beset with a series of mysteries and inexplicable threats Catcher: How the Man Behind the Plate Became an American Folk Hero— Peter Morris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 A sprightly history of the catcher’s changing role, from baseball’s formative years to the beginning of the modern era Cheever: A Life—Blake Bailey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 An exhaustive and insightful study of one of the leading American short-story writers of the twentieth century, a man whose happiness was always shadowed by selfdoubt Chronic—D. A. Powell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 A striking poetic examination of how to survive tragedy and heartbreak in a world where AIDS, turmoil, and personal angst seemingly are always close at hand Chronic City—Jonathan Lethem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 The protagonist of this simultaneously surreal and satirical novel begins to understand himself and the nature of reality in a city that experiences multiple disasters Cold: Adventures In the World’s Frozen Places—Bill Streever . . . . . . . . . 133 Streever explains how most living creatures on Earth are affected by and cope with cold and with winter and tells the history of polar explorations and the science of cold l


Collected Poems—C. P. Cavafy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 A translation by a noted memoirist and historian of Cavafy’s published, repudiated, and unpublished poems, together with an introduction and extensive notes Columbine—Dave Cullen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 Cullen, an acknowledged national authority on the massacre at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, explores events leading up to the massacre, examines the psychological makeup of the perpetrators, and presents in chilling detail an account of the massacre itself The Cradle—Patrick Somerville . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 What begins as a quest for a long-lost cradle ends with the healing of old wounds and the restoration of broken familial relationships Crossers—Philip Caputo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 In Caputo’s novel, a recent widower moves to Arizona seeking solace only to find himself caught up in violence related to drug trafficking Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression— Morris Dickstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 With this book, Dickstein, whom Norman Mailer has lauded as “one of our best critics of American literature,” advances his credentials as the prime chronicler of U.S. cultural history from the end of the 1920’s to the start of the 1970’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution—Adrian Desmond and James Moore . . . . 160 In a revisionist account of the provenance of Charles Darwin’s revolutionary ideas on human evolution, the authors emphasize his detestation of slavery and his conviction about the basic unity of all races of humankind Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5—Christopher Andrew . . . 166 An authorized, massively detailed account of the growth of the British Security Service during the first century of its existence that objectively considers its failures and successes Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South— Lacy K. Ford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 A study of southern ideas, arguments, and debates on the question of slavery, from the drafting of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 to the age of Andrew Jackson in the mid1830’s

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Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music— Amiri Baraka. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 In this important collection of essays published since 1989, Baraka argues persuasively that jazz, as created and developed by creative African American composers and musicians from Scott Joplin to the present, constitutes the authentic classical music of the United States Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto—Mark Helprin . . . . . . . . . . . . 180 A memoir of Helprin’s development as a writer, a defense of copyright law, and an explication—occasionally intemperate—of his distrust of the Internet and its supporters, which distrust had its origin in a venomous response to one of Helprin’s articles Don’t Cry: Stories—Mary Gaitskill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184 Ten new stories of longing, love, and loneliness by the American writer famous for the collection Bad Behavior The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror—John Merriman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 This study recounts the anarchist movement in fin-de-siècle Paris, with special attention to the “propaganda by the deed” anarchist Émile Henry; it also addresses the issue of why terrorists kill innocent victims Eating Animals—Jonathan Safran Foer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 This nonfiction exploration of vegetarianism and animal welfare by novelist Foer includes interesting stories and some subtle observations, but in the end becomes a polemical attack on modern industrial agriculture The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays—Chinua Achebe . . . . . 196 In this collection of autobiographical essays, Achebe reflects on his life and work, exploring the role of the artist as a recorder of truth in the African diaspora 1848: Year of Revolution—Mike Rapport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 A country-by-country history of the revolutions and political reactions that swept continental Europe in 1848 Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815— Gordon S. Wood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 The latest addition to the prestigious Oxford History of the United States, this work provides a scholarly and balanced narrative of the years traditionally classified as the early national period, from George Washington’s inauguration as president until the end of the War of 1812 lii


Endpoint: And Other Poems—John Updike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Collection of poems, written mostly during the last decade of Updike’s life, that focus on the writer’s considerations of old age and death The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England— Keith Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 Thomas examines six qualities to which Englishmen and women in the early modern period aspired as means of achieving fulfillment in their lives Every Man Dies Alone—Hans Fallada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 Written soon after World War II, Fallada’s novel chronicles how Otto and Anna Quangel resisted the Nazis by distributing subversive anonymous postcards through much of Nazi-controlled Berlin Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned—Wells Tower . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Tower’s debut collection of nine stories entertains and surprises as it depicts ordinary people coping with lives that are gradually unraveling or suddenly exploding around them Evidence—Mary Oliver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Beloved poet and nature writer Oliver offers forty-seven new poems tracing the paths of love, grief, and spirit through the natural world The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food— Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Masson’s well-reasoned, well-researched, and persuasive arguments for eating a diet free from animal products Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating, and Drinking Wine in California—Jonah Raskin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 A memoir and exploration of the slow food approach to growing and eating local food that describes the owners, workers, consumers, and cooks whom Raskin met while adopting this approach Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor—Brad Gooch . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242 Gooch’s detailed biography draws connections between the life and fiction of American writer O’Connor, although some of those connections are strained Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City— Greg Grandin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246 Ford established rubber plantations and two small cities in Brazil in order to develop an independent supply of rubber for his automobile factory, as well as to export his vision of an ideal American town to South America liii


The Future of Liberalism—Alan Wolfe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 A thoughtful analysis and defense of the liberal ideology, including its history, its characteristics, and its continued relevance Gabriel García Márquez: A Life—Gerald Martin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256 Martin’s is the first authorized biography of one of the most distinguished writers of the second half of the twentieth century, and it should serve as the standard portrait of García Márquez for some time A Gate at the Stairs—Lorrie Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Celebrated author Moore’s first new book in more than a decade is the story of a young woman’s coming of age in the shadow of September 11 The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China—Jay Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Taylor’s thorough biography of Chiang Kai-shek, China’s Nationalist leader and the great adversary of Mao Zedong, portrays Chiang as a multifaceted man of great endurance and patience who ultimately turned Taiwan into a success after losing mainland China to the Communists Generosity: An Enhancement—Richard Powers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270 In Powers’s novel, despite living a life filled with tragedy, uncertainty, and dislocation, Thassadit Amzwar, an Algerian college student studying in Chicago, is so irrepressibly happy that a noted geneticist wishes to examine and patent the genes that account for her unique ability to deal with and overcome the horrors that have marked her life Genesis—Bernard Beckett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 Beckett’s dystopian tale resurrects Plato’s Republic in a postapocalyptic future when humanity, though extinct, continues to plague a culture of androids The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness— Joan Roughgarden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280 An argument that evolutionary processes are better understood in terms of social selection rather than sexual selection Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible—David Plotz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 An enlightening and irreverent book-by-book examination of the Old Testament from a secular Jewish reader whose previous knowledge was limited to traditional Bible stories liv


A Good Fall—Ha Jin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289 In his fourth short-story collection, Chinese American author Jin reflects upon the cultural, generational, and relationship conflicts experienced by several Chinese immigrants trying to make better lives for themselves in an immigrant neighborhood located in the Queens borough of New York City Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme—Tracy Daugherty . . . . . . 294 A first-time biographer writes the first biography of one of America’s most innovative writers—who was also the biographer’s college writing teacher The Hindus: An Alternative History—Wendy Doniger . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 An interpretive history of Hindu beliefs and practices from the prehistory of the Indian subcontinent through recent years Homer & Langley—E. L. Doctorow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304 A fictional exploration of two of history’s most famous recluses, the Collyer brothers of New York City Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan—Doug Stanton. . . . . . . . . . . 308 A detailed account of the first group of U.S. forces deployed to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda after the attacks of September 11, 2001 House Of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street—William D. Cohan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313 A narrative of the March, 2008, collapse of Bear Stearns, the fifth largest investment bank in the United States and the first victim of the subprime mortgage debacle that would grow into a global financial disaster The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization—Jonathan Lyons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318 By uncritically contrasting Islamic learning and sophistication on the one hand and European ignorance and barbarity on the other, Lyons argues that Muslim scholars preserved and built upon the intellectual heritage of classical Greece, thus making possible the European Renaissance The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War—Alexander Waugh . . . . . . . 322 A biographical study of the powerful Wittgenstein family of Vienna, which included concert pianist Paul Wittgenstein and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein The Housekeeper and the Professor—Yoko Ogawa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 A reclusive mathematics professor introduces his housekeeper and her son to his ideal world of prime numbers, while they help him reconnect to the everyday world lv


How Rome Fell—Adrian Goldsworthy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 Goldsworthy argues that the Roman Empire collapsed in the West because recurrent civil wars wasted Roman resources and led Roman leaders to focus on personal survival rather than the common good How to Paint a Dead Man—Sarah Hall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336 A novel in which four lives are intertwined by art, change, and tragedy The Humbling—Philip Roth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340 An account of the last days of Simon Axler, a sixty-five year-old actor who loses his “magic,” desperately seeks happiness with a younger woman, and ultimately fails to find a reason to keep living Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris: Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry—Leanne Shapton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345 Illustrator, writer, and photographer Shapton’s innovative second novel traces the arc of a love affair through the device of an auction catalogue In Other Rooms, Other Wonders—Daniyal Mueenuddin . . . . . . . . . . . . 349 Mueenuddin’s debut collection of short stories, written with irony and affection, presents an intimate view of modern Pakistani life in a postfeudal society In Such Hard Times: The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu—Wei Ying-wu. . . . . . . . 354 This collection of 175 poems finally translates into English about one-third of Wei Ying-wu’s surviving poetry, whose unobtrusive beauty earned it very high esteem in imperial China In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect—Ronald Kessler . . . . . . 358 A critical and anecdotal examination of the protective mission of the U.S. Secret Service, with special attention to challenges that the agency faces because of inadequate funding Inherent Vice—Thomas Pynchon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364 In Pynchon’s latest novel, a drug-abusing private investigator involved in a complex murder-kidnap plot traverses Southern California discovering plots and corruption everywhere he goes Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia—Jonathan Brent . . . 369 A memoir of Brent’s work with Russian archivists to set up the Annals of Communism series for Yale University Press combined with observations about both the archival contents and the deteriorating condition of Russia lvi


Invisible—Paul Auster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 374 A successful novelist becomes fascinated with a manuscript left behind by a dead college classmate that seems to be a puzzling mixture of memoir and fiction It Will Come to Me—Emily Fox Gordon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379 In Gordon’s novel, an unfulfilled faculty wife named Ruth takes readers on a bumpy but illuminating exploration of dark psychic corners in her life and those of her husband and other campus characters at the Lola Dees Institute Italian Shoes—Henning Mankell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383 The life of a reclusive former physician who lives alone on a remote island is disrupted when a lover of forty years ago suddenly appears and leads him on an eyeopening journey Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi—Geoff Dyer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387 In Dyer’s novel, aimless, middle-aged journalist and critic Jeff Atman takes two trips; the first is an amorous yet ultimately meaningless adventure in Venice, and the second is a deeper, more profound realization of self in Varanasi Judas: A Biography—Susan Gubar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391 An analysis of the many interpretations of the story of Jesus and his betrayal by Judas put forward by theologians, religious leaders, artists, novelists, poets, and playwrights A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx—Elaine Showalter . . . . . . . . . . . 396 A comprehensive, perceptive, if flawed, effort to encompass a history of American women writers while at the same time identifying the best work that deserves to be included in the canon of American literature The Kindly Ones—Jonathan Littell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 400 An epic novel of the Holocaust that painstakingly describes the bureaucratic and military machinery developed by Hitler and his henchmen for the annihilation of the Jews and other minorities, told years later by a former SS officer living in France under an assumed identity King’s Dream—Eric J. Sundquist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405 Sundquist’s close reading of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech reveals the essence of the Civil Rights movement in America Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling—Charles Allen . . . 410 An account of Rudyard Kipling’s early life, mostly spent in India, and the role India played in his emergence as a writer lvii


Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic—Michael Scammell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415 A biography of one of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century The Lacuna—Barbara Kingsolver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 420 This novel tells the life story of Harrison Shepherd, who balances Mexican and U.S. nationalities, against the backdrop of the major political upheavals in the two countries from the 1920’s through the 1950’s Laish—Aharon Appelfeld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425 A picaresque novel narrated in the first person by an orphan boy describing a group of Jews traveling by wagon train from Eastern Europe toward Jerusalem Lark and Termite—Jayne Ann Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429 Phillips brings together the multiple strands of a West Virginia family’s story in order to show the mysterious effects the past has on the present and the future Last Rites—John Lukacs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 433 The historian Lukacs’s autobiography sums up his life and times and provides his final reflections on how to study the past and its significance Laura Rider’s Masterpiece—Jane Hamilton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 437 A fictional exploration of the complexities of marital faithfulness and unfaithfulness and of the relationship between the public and private spheres in the Internet age “Le Cid” and “The Liar”—Pierre Corneille . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 442 Former American poet laureate Richard Wilbur provides vibrant new translations of seventeenth century French playwright Corneille’s most famous tragedy, about an eleventh century Spanish hero, and one of his witty comedies, about contemporary Parisian society Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents—Minal Hajratwala . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447 Highlighting individual narratives based on extensive research, Hajratwala traces generations of her family from their common roots in the Indian state of Gujarat through migrations around the world and, in so doing, unfolds the story of the Indian diaspora Leavings: Poems—Wendell Berry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 452 Using clear, everyday language and various poetic forms, Berry continues his lifelong advocacy of living close to the land and criticism of the devastation wrought by industrial society lviii


The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I: 1929-1940—Samuel Beckett . . . . . . 457 The first of a projected four-volume series of Beckett’s letters containing, according to the author’s instructions, only those letters whose contents have some bearing on his work Life in Space: Astrobiology for Everyone—Lucas John Mix . . . . . . . . . . 462 Mix explains how astrobiology, drawing from the discoveries of many physical sciences, addresses such fundamental questions as the nature of life and its role in the universe The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty— Peter Singer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 466 Singer deploys powerful ethical arguments to support the view that many Americans could and should increase their donations to save and improve the lives of people in low-income areas of the world, presenting information to help make such donations cost effective Lit: A Memoir—Mary Karr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 470 The third of Karr’s memoirs describes her battle with alcoholism, as well as her unraveling marriage and her experience of motherhood

VOLUME 2 The Little Stranger—Sarah Waters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475 A fateful boyhood visit to a local country estate leads a doctor to insinuate himself into the owners’ lives thirty years later in this quasi-Gothic tale of desire born of class differences Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy—John R. Hale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 480 This historical study reveals that, when the Athenians created a navy, they had to extend political participation to the landless poor The Lost Art of Gratitude—Alexander McCall Smith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 485 In McCall Smith’s sixth book featuring his popular philosopher and editor, Isabel Dalhousie, she faces ethical issues of investment banking, trust, and plagiarism

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The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon— David Grann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489 Recounts Grann’s hunt for the truth about the disappearance of the explorer Percy Fawcett in Brazil in 1925, as well as the author’s own journey to the Amazon basin in search of a solution to the mystery surrounding the lost City of Z The Lost Symbol—Dan Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 493 Brown’s follow up to The Da Vinci Code finds Professor Robert Langdon in the U.S. capital, embroiled in kidnapping and political intrigue involving Masonic mysteries and a maniac willing to kill in order to achieve a kind of mystical knowledge and transcendence Louis D. Brandeis: A Life—Melvin I. Urofsky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 498 A comprehensive and scholarly biography of a remarkable man who made significant contributions in four interrelated areas: the legal profession, the reforms of the Progressive period, the Zionist movement, and above all, the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court Love and Summer—William Trevor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 503 A chance meeting at a funeral leads to a summer romance between a photographer and a farmer’s wife in this novel set against a broadly painted canvas of rural Irish life Lowboy—John Wray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 507 In Wray’s compelling thriller, a paranoid schizophrenic teenager escapes from his caretakers into New York City’s subway system on a delusional mission to save the world from global warming Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon— Buzz Aldrin with Ken Abraham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 512 This sequel to Aldrin’s 1973 autobiography Return to Earth describes his second and third marriages, his battles with depression and alcoholism, and his life from 1969 to 2009 Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son—Michael Chabon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 517 In this collection of subtly interconnected essays, the author contemplates what it means to be a man in the twenty-first century Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels— Tristram Hunt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 522 A portrait of Engels, who held an important position in his German family’s Manchester textile firm for twenty years, all the time playing the English foxhunting gentleman while supporting Karl Marx and writing his own revolutionary works lx


The Mechanics of Falling: And Other Stories—Catherine Brady . . . . . . . . 527 Eleven stories, all but one from a female point of view, about the difficulty of finding something to cling to or believe in Mercury Dressing: Poems—J. D. McClatchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 532 Well-known poet McClatchy provides formal, lyrical reflections on mythic subjects and human emotion in this graceful collection Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary—Miri Rubin . . . . . . . . . . 536 The most comprehensive and detailed account of the devotional response to the Virgin Mary at varying social and cultural levels through the centuries Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding—Sarah Blaffer Hrdy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 541 A noted anthropologist and primatologist surveys nurturance and coparenting in humans and related species and offers an answer to the question, “What makes humans human?” The Museum of Innocence—Orhan Pamuk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 546 In Pamuk’s first novel since being awarded the Nobel Prize, an engaged man becomes obsessed with another woman My Father’s Tears: And Other Stories—John Updike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 551 Updike’s final collection of short fiction features stories focusing on growing up, marriage, divorce, travel, and philosophical speculation on the value of an individual human life Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity—Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor . . . . . . . . . . . 555 Graham and Kantor present a compelling account of the struggles of French and Russian mathematicians who addressed one of the most vexing problems in the field of mathematics, the nature of infinity Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology—Mark V. Barrow, Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 560 A study of the changing attitudes of American naturalists toward the concept of species extinction and the growing concern of the scientific community with preventing extinctions, culminating in the 1973 Endangered Species Act A New Literary History of America—Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors . . . . 564 This history surveys a broad range of literary works and many other types of cultural objects in order to convey a more capacious sense of American culture lxi


Nine Dragons—Michael Connelly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 569 Harry Bosch investigates the murder of a liquor store owner, and his pursuit of a powerful Chinese gang becomes especially vengeful when his daughter, living in Hong Kong, is abducted—which may or may not be related to the crime in Los Angeles Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans—Dan Baum . . . . . . . . . . . . 574 Baum’s linked profiles—based on a million words of interviews with nine representative New Orleanians—span the period between the recovery from Hurricane Betsy to that from Hurricane Katrina and show the courage, character, and even heroism of Orleanians of all kinds in surviving difficulty and disaster Nobody Move—Denis Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 579 Johnson skillfully employs the fundamental elements of the classic American crime novel in a gripping narrative concentrated on characters as memorable as those that have distinguished his previous work On Moving: A Writer’s Meditations on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again—Louise DeSalvo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 584 DeSalvo’s reflections on the experience of moving houses and making homes Once on a Moonless Night—Dai Sijie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 589 In their shared dedication to recovering the separated halves of an ancient Buddhist scroll, a Frenchwoman and a Chinese scholar fall in love and gather stories that shed light on the history of China Once the Shore: Stories—Paul Yoon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 594 A debut collection of eight lyrical stories of human separation and loss, all set on an island off the southern coast of the Korean peninsula following World War II One D.O.A., One on the Way—Mary Robison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 598 Robison’s multisectioned novel combines narrative, interior monologue, black comedy, and realist descriptions of New Orleans to examine the blighted cultural and spiritual fabric of the city post-Katrina One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World—Gordon Hempton and John Grossman . . . . . . . . 603 Hempton narrates his cross-country journey to search for places where natural silence still exists and to advocate for the preservation of some areas of natural silence in the United States

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One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict— Benny Morris. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 608 In pursuit of a viable resolution to the long-standing dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, an Israeli scholar reviews the conflict’s ideological history from the late nineteenth century to the present and reveals what he believes to be the only genuinely plausible solution The Original of Laura—Vladimir Nabokov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 612 Nabokov’s last work, published posthumously, is about a scholar allegedly wishing to end his life in search of life after death Orlando Furioso: A New Verse Translation—Ludovico Ariosto . . . . . . . . 616 A comic epic poem of the Italian Renaissance translated by a gifted American poet and satirist Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue—William Logan . . . . . . . . . 620 A collection of Logan’s previously published reviews and essays, many of them attacking contemporary poets and poetry, written in the learned poet-critic’s colorful shock-and-awe style A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster—Rebecca Solnit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 624 In her tenth book, Solnit portrays the aftermath of five major disasters that have occurred in North America and recounts how the people most affected by these disasters recovered from them and rebuilt despite colossal governmental bungling and examples of ineptitude that bordered on criminality Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line—Martha A. Sandweiss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 629 This excellent case study of late nineteenth century race relations recounts the tale of a renowned explorer and geologist who lived a double life for thirteen years, marrying a former slave and claiming, despite fair skin and blue eyes, to be African American Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire—Flora Fraser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 634 A narrative of the life and times of one of Napoleon’s sisters Poems, 1959-2009—Frederick Seidel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 639 A bizarre, often salacious, and brilliantly controversial poet’s complete works Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong—Terry Teachout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 644 A well-researched modern biography of the most influential jazz musician of the twentieth century lxiii


The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess— Andrei Codrescu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 649 An account of the origins of Dadaism, its founding figures, its continuing relevance, and its tensions with other major twentieth century movements, including Surrealism, Futurism, modernism, and communism Practical Water—Brenda Hillman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 654 Hillman’s challenging new collection of poems explores the element of water in all its real and mythic manifestations The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger—Alec Wilkinson . . . 658 A brief biographical portrait of an icon of twentieth century American folk music, based largely on conversations Wilkinson had with Seeger and focusing as much on the subject’s politics as on his musical career A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq—Mark Moyar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 662 A study, resulting from the author’s teaching on counterinsurgency at the Marine Command and Staff College, of nine counterinsurgency operations, in order to determine how best to succeed at such operations in the future Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life—Carol Sklenicka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 667 This expansive biography of twentieth century American author Carver offers a thorough life history of the significant and controversial writer, as well as a critical appraisal of his short fiction and poetry The Reason for Crows: A Story of Kateri Tekakwitha—Diane Glancy . . . . . 672 The seventeenth century “Lily of the Mohawks” narrates the story of her short life, complemented by the voices of various Jesuit priests who came to the New World seeking converts Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigrants, Islam, and the West—Christopher Caldwell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 676 Caldwell presents an insightful and gloomy assessment of the ways in which the mass migration of Muslims to Europe is transforming the heartland of the modern West Rhyming Life and Death—Amos Oz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 681 During one long evening in Tel Aviv, a prominent Israeli author meets his readers and exposes the sources and subterfuges of his art

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Sag Harbor—Colson Whitehead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 686 Benji Cooper, a privileged African American teenager, spends the summer in Sag Harbor with his friends, trying to discover how to live his life The Scarecrow—Michael Connelly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 691 Pursuit of a serial killer by a dedicated, old-style male journalist and a female FBI agent, set against a background of self-serving corporations and bureaucracies, as well as cybertechnology that dehumanizes people as well as empowering them The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d’Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon—Veronica Buckley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 696 Buckley recounts the life of the morganatic wife of Louis XIV of France in a broad historical context, elucidating the role played by Madame de Maintenon in the king’s life and also providing insights into life at all social levels in seventeenth century France The Seven Deadly Sins: And Other Poems—David R. Slavitt. . . . . . . . . . 701 In a direct and efficient poetic style, employing various forms, learned allusions, and translations, the author comments wisely and wittily on sleep, Yiddishisms, his fiftieth Yale reunion, the seven deadly sins, the phoenix, and other topics Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work— Matthew B. Crawford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 706 Crawford, a practicing motorcycle mechanic and professional philosopher, reflects on the epistemological status and social importance of skilled work performed in small shops, garages, and plants—places where a commitment to practical excellence makes possible both authentic fellowship and self-reliance. A Short History of Women—Kate Walbert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 711 Five generations of women descended from a single Anglo-American family struggle in this novel to define and understand their lives in a gendered minefield whose contours change but whose traps remain The Siege—Ismail Kadare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 716 A novel describing the siege of an Albanian fortress by invading Ottoman Turks The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels—Janet Soskice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 721 The story of the Scottish Smith twins—their lives, education, travels, and monumental manuscript discoveries in the Middle East—woven into the religious, social, and scientific controversies of the late Victorian age

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The Skating Rink—Roberto Bolaño . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 726 Bolaño’s crime novel explores the interrelation of sex, obsession, political corruption, immigrants, and homelessness in a Spanish resort city Slang: The People’s Poetry—Michael Adams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 730 Adams provides an extended definition for “slang,” as distinct from other forms of informal language, and explains how slang helps speakers claim membership in some groups and separate themselves from others The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream—Patrick Radden Keefe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 734 Keefe examines in detail the human smuggling operations of the 1990’s that brought thousands of illegal immigrants from Fujian Province to the United States, detailing the roles played by individuals as well as the politics of immigration law Sonata Mulattica—Rita Dove . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 738 A set of poems that create a fictionalized biography for a real historical figure, George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, a violin prodigy born of an African father and Polish mother who was mentored by Joseph Haydn and then by Ludwig van Beethoven, who later discarded him The Song Is You—Arthur Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 742 A middle-aged man’s obsession with a young rock singer fuels this story about art and commerce, and human relationships broken and restored, in the digital age South of Broad—Pat Conroy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 746 Ten high school friends help break down social and racial barriers in Charleston, South Carolina, unite to help a friend in need twenty years later, and struggle to ward off a threat from a psychopath intent on killing them all The Spartacus War—Barry Strauss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 750 This historical study recounts in detail the revolt of enslaved gladiators under the leadership of the Thracian Spartacus against their Roman masters; the rebels attracted thousands of followers and terrorized the Italian peninsula for two years Stone’s Fall—Iain Pears . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 755 When a young reporter is hired to find a missing person, he enters a web of intrigue that includes espionage, arms trading, and market manipulation A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families—Michael Holroyd . . . . 760 A group biography of the brilliant theatrical clan that dominated the English stage from the mid-Victorian era to the beginning of World War I lxvi


The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom— Graham Farmelo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 764 Despite emotional damage due to possible autism and a tyrannical father, Dirac’s belief that equations in physics should be beautiful enabled him to help create quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics and to predict such pivotal discoveries as that of the positron Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness—Tracy Kidder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 768 The biography of a Burundian medical student who survives the East African genocides of 1993-1994, remakes his life in the United States, and returns to help rebuild his country Summer World: A Season of Bounty—Bernd Heinrich . . . . . . . . . . . . . 773 Writing with enthusiasm, sensitivity, and a zeal for all of nature, Heinrich has observed closely a dazzling variety of vertebrates, insects, and plants in an effort to unlock some of the mysteries of how they evolve, exist, and coexist Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson— Wil Haygood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 778 A fascinating account of boxing’s greatest middleweight champion and of Harlem in the mid-twentieth century Talking About Detective Fiction—P. D. James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 783 In a compact work of historical criticism, James surveys the origins of British detective fiction, traces its development, assesses the contributions of its most prominent writers, analyzes its form and technique, and responds to its most outspoken critics The Tanners—Robert Walser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 788 In Walser’s first novel, the young Simon Tanner roams in a zigzag journey from the country to the city, from job to job, and from sibling to sibling, learning though never fully embracing lessons about the nature of freedom, love, and the meaning of life Tea Time for the Traditionally Built—Alexander McCall Smith . . . . . . . . 793 The tenth book in McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, this novel places Mma Ramotswe in an investigation of possible game-fixing in a Botswana football club and introduces a disturbing menace to the happiness of her assistant, Mma Makutsi The Thing Around Your Neck—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. . . . . . . . . . 798 A collection of twelve short stories depicting Nigerians living in Africa and in the United States, but who are at home in neither place lxvii


Tiepolo Pink—Roberto Calasso . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 802 A renowned Italian publisher, Calasso applies his formidable learning to the paintings and etchings of Tiepolo, a Venetian artist famed for his effortless technique, and finds fascinating complexities in the works To Be Read in Five Hundred Years—Albert Goldbarth . . . . . . . . . . . . . 807 An informative, touching, and prodding volume of poetry that examines what civilization should truly treasure Too Much Happiness: Stories—Alice Munro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 811 Ten new stories by one of the most accomplished North American short-story writers currently practicing that underrated art form The Tourist—Olen Steinhauer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 815 Unusual circumstances pull a deskbound CIA agent back into the field and into a complex conspiracy Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy—Keith Waldrop. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 820 A bold and revelatory collection of poems that touches on the power of memory in the pursuit of navigating through daily life Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary—Bertrand M. Patenaude . . . . . . . . 824 The story of Leon Trotsky’s last years in Mexico, from his arrival in that country in January, 1837, to his assassination in August, 1940 True Compass: A Memoir—Edward M. Kennedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 829 In this historic memoir, the scion of one of America’s most powerful political families shares his extraordinary story about his controversial personal life, as well as his work in the Senate on the major issues of five decades Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories—Kevin Wilson . . . . . . . . . . 834 This debut collection of eleven stories is filled with strange and wonderful premises about modern society and the lonely adolescents who live in it The Unfinished Poems—C. P. Cavafy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 838 The first English version of thirty incomplete drafts by Cavafy from the Cavafy Archives as prepared for publication by Renata Lavagnini and translated by Daniel Mendelsohn Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington—Robert J. Norrell. . . . 843 A favorable account of the life and career of a former slave who became the dominant African American leader and educator of his time lxviii


The Vagrants—Yiyun Li . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 849 The execution of a woman counterrevolutionary and what it reveals about life in a provincial town of the People’s Republic of China A Very Brief History of Eternity—Carlos Eire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 854 Eire traces the development and metamorphoses of the concept of eternity in Western thought, exploring the social, political, and economic impact of the definition of eternity and the human need for immortality A Village Life—Louise Glück . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 858 An extremely compelling meditation on the universality and transience of life and experience, using evocative imagery, moving themes, and profound insights into the human condition Wanting—Richard Flanagan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 863 In Flanagan’s novel, Lady Jane Franklin, Charles Dickens, and an aboriginal girl called Mathinna are linked across time and space by the disappearance of Sir John Franklin during an expedition to find the Northwest Passage Wedlock: The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore—Wendy Moore. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 868 A biography of a woman who was tricked into marriage with a brutal adventurer and suffered years of horrific domestic abuse before bravely winning a divorce in a male-dominated society When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order—Martin Jacques . . . . . . . . . . . . 873 An attempt to assess the impact of China’s economic growth and magnitude on world economic conditions, politics, and diplomacy that argues that the “end of the Western world” is not imminent, and the shape of the new global order is vague Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman—Jon Krakauer . . . . . 878 Its publication delayed a year while Krakauer embedded himself with U.S. combat troops, this impeccably researched odyssey of professional-football-player-turnedsoldier Tillman chronicles minute-by-minute his death in Afghanistan by what the military finally acknowledged was friendly fire Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector—Benjamin Moser . . . . 883 Moser’s engaging and magisterial biography reveals for the first time the fascinating public and private worlds of Lispector, peering behind the myths that surround her life and unveiling the remarkable woman who converted her struggles into compelling and powerful art lxix


The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America—Douglas Brinkley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 888 An account of the impact and consequences of the activities of Roosevelt on the preservation of America’s birds, animals, and wilderness areas The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation—Fanny Howe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 893 Howe describes her intellectual and spiritual journey as a thinker and writer, reflecting on the experiences, people, and ideas that influenced her, using a method of exploration and analysis that focuses on connections rather than chronology The Winter Vault—Anne Michaels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 897 In her first published work in over a decade, Michaels masterfully weaves the dichotomies of loss and discovery, destruction and creation, sorrow and happiness, as she follows the lives and relationship of Avery Escher and Jean Shaw across cultures and continents The Women—T. Coraghessan Boyle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 902 A fictionalized reverse saga of world-renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s tangled and often scandalous relationships with four women, three of whom he married Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West—Anthony Grafton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 907 A collection of essays concerning the nature and status of occidental scholarship, from the Renaissance to the present Writing the Rapture: Prophecy Fiction in Evangelical America— Crawford Gribben . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 911 The first to discuss prophecy or “Rapture” novels in their historical context, this study offers insights into this branch of Christian literature and discusses its roots in the evangelical Christian tradition The Year of the Flood—Margaret Atwood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 916 A companion volume to 2003’s Oryx and Crake, this novel tells the stories of two women who survive a pandemic induced by corporate greed and environmental destruction Zeitoun—Dave Eggers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 921 Eggers recounts the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his family, who were caught up in Hurricane Katrina, and the role of various governmental agencies in turning their lives into a nightmare in the storm’s aftermath

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THE LITTLE STRANGER Author: Sarah Waters (1966) Publisher: Riverhead Books (New York). 466 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1919; 1947-1951 Locale: Warwickshire, England A fateful boyhood visit to a local country estate leads a doctor to insinuate himself into the owners’ lives thirty years later in this quasi-Gothic tale of desire born of class differences Principal characters: Dr. Faraday, a country doctor, the narrator Mrs. Ayres, the matriarch of an aristocratic family Caroline Ayres, her daughter Roderick Ayres, Mrs. Ayres’s son, an injured World War II veteran

Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger—her fifth novel and the third to reach the Booker Prize shortlist—begins on Empire Day, 1919, “the first summer after the war.” This misdating—Empire Day was celebrated, from 1902 through 1952, on May 24, a full month before summer started—may be nothing more than a bit of seasonal license, or it may be the first subtle sign that Waters’s narrator is not entirely reliable. His memory may not be altogether accurate, despite his scientific training. In any case, the local celebration that year was held at the Ayreses’ ancestral home, whose very name, Hundreds Hall, implies both its rootedness in English history and its obsolescence, the geopolitical term “hundreds” having lost its currency long ago. “There were no trips inside of course,” the narrator, Dr. Faraday, explains. That is, there were no official tours. Dr. Faraday’s mother, however, had once been a nursery maid at Hundreds Hall before marrying a grocer’s delivery boy (“a back-door romance”). She still knew some of the servants working there, and she was able to sneak her son inside. “The visit impressed me deeply,” he says, both “the thrill of the house” and the thrill “of trespass.” Faraday comes away from that visit not only with an Empire Day medal given to him by Mrs. Ayres but also with a plaster acorn that he secretly pries from a decorative border. From that tiny acorn, a mighty desire grows within the sedate Faraday, leading to the events recounted in his lengthy narrative of his year in the life of the Ayreses. This narrative constitutes Waters’s remarkable novel. Faraday’s desire, born of class differences, lies more or less dormant over the next thirty years. It slowly festers until the day that Faraday, quite by chance (his partner, the Ayres’ regular physician, is busy), is called to Hundreds Hall to attend to a servant. Faraday is shocked by the decay that he finds there: The grounds are untended, much of the house is closed up, and the servant corps has been reduced to one fourteen-

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year-old girl. The girl feigns illnesses, but the family cannot afford to lose her, knowing they would not be able to find a replacement. (Conditions in post-World War II Britain may have been austere, but workers were in demand as the nation began rebuilding itself—on a quite different, more egalitarian basis than before.) The three remaining family members are virtual recluses: the now-widowed Mrs. Ayres; her decidedly plain daughter, Caroline, in her mid-twenties; and her slightly younger son, the aptly named Roderick, who was badly injured in the war and now spends his time tending the family’s dwindling finances. The hall resembles Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher. It is literally walled off from the changing outside world, a Britain far more interested in the National Health Service than in National Heritage sites. Faraday’s interest in the Ayreses, or, more accurately, in Hundreds Hall, represents a combination of envy and resentment. Unlike the other locals, who “had begun to withdraw their labour, their belief” in the house, Faraday remains perversely steadfast. He enjoys a slightly elevated position as a medical doctor—a position that his parents paid for with their lives, the financial burden of his education contributing to their early deaths. He uses that position to enter Hundreds Hall, a world that he previously could only glimpse from afar, other than on that fateful Empire Day. The quiet manner in which Faraday insinuates himself into the Ayres family’s lives and house is fascinating. Accessing the family for him seems to be little more than a means for accessing the house. Faraday, moreover, possesses a remarkable capacity for self-deception that makes him seem more comical than sinister and that precludes his ever becoming an English version of Nick Carraway, the ultimately detached and evaluative narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). Unlike Nick, Faraday wants to be part of the aristocratic lifestyle too badly to gain any perspective on it. Faraday thinks of Hundreds Hall as a patient in need of medical care, to be saved from decay and restored to its former glory. Its fate is in his hands. To gain weekly access to the house, he offers to treat Roderick’s leg injury for free, knowing the Ayreses could not otherwise afford his services. He seems incompletely aware of his own motives, however. Part of his unconscious plan is rescuing Caroline from the spinsterhood into which she has already settled and from which she appears to have no other means of escape. Mrs. Ayres’s one attempt at matchmaking for her daughter goes horribly wrong. She seeks to match Caroline with the brother-in-law of a nouveau-riche neighbor. No sooner does the neighbor tell Faraday that Caroline is too unattractive even for an “ass” like his brother-in-law, however, than the Ayreses’ usually good-natured dog, Gyp, attacks the neighbor’s daughter. Faraday saves what remains of the day by stitching the girl’s badly mangled face. Putting Gyp down, the price the Ayreses pay to avoid the cost of threatened litiga-

Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 1966 and currently lives in London. She is author of Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999), Fingersmith (2002), and Night Watch (2006). The Little Stranger is her third novel to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

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tion, inaugurates a series of removals of various family members from the house. These removals suggest such earlier works as Agatha Christie’s whodunit Ten Little Niggers (1939; also known as And Then There Were None, 1940), in which the visitors to an island estate are killed one by one, and the Ealing Studios motion picture comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), in which a distant heir to a dukedom disposes of the many relatives who stand in his way. Roderick is next. Having already returned from the war a physically and emotionally scarred, limping “stranger,” he now becomes, like Poe’s Roderick Usher, firmly in the grip of “the grim phantasm fear.” He experiences a series of odd occurrences. They start with disappearing and then reappearing shirt collars and cufflinks and progress to mysterious scorch marks on walls and ceiling and a fire that destroys part of Roderick’s room, as well as many of the estate’s papers. The fire results in Roderick being committed to a private clinic—his place secured with Faraday’s help. Faraday now moves on to Caroline. “I’m not a naturally mendacious man,” Faraday claims. Neither is he naturally romantic or sexual, as his fumbling, unintentionally comical efforts to seduce Caroline and to narrate that attempted (and rebuffed) seduction indicate. Acting more as a doctor than as a seducer, Faraday “awkwardly” unfastens the buttons on Caroline’s gown, uncovers the “overlaundered” slip beneath, then “her brassière, solid, unfussy, severely elasticated, the kind of thing I’d seen many times on female patients since the war.” Caroline’s stiff rebuff (“I’m sorry, I—I can’t”) only momentarily dissuades the implacable milquetoast, a man accustomed to rejection. The parents of a girl he knew in medical school had not considered him a suitable match for their daughter, and Mrs. Ayres will tell him much the same thing later in the novel, after Caroline ambiguously agrees to marry him. Faraday frets that the impending National Health Service will harm his practice, making all his work and all his parents’ sacrifices worthless. (Faraday’s envy and resentment of the upper classes is tinged with a trace of guilt over his parents’ early deaths. His guilt does not redeem Faraday, but it does humanize him a bit.) Offered a position at a London hospital by a slightly younger and more accomplished doctor who also comes from the working class, Faraday stays on in Warwickshire, preferring the eventual reward that he assumes will come to him from his association with the cash-poor but house-rich Ayreses over the opportunities in London that may test his abilities and find them wanting. (For all his misplaced aspirations, Faraday is full of self-doubt and self-hatred.) The otherwise rational Faraday does not consider such things consciously. Rather, he keeps his focus on the prize, Hundreds Hall, by masking his intentions with concern for the family. Nonetheless, he clearly hopes to gain his place there, among like the male Ayres (a pun on “heirs”) whose portraits adorn the walls, offering a stark contrast to the photograph given him by Mrs. Ayres of someone who may or may not be his mother. Faraday wants his place in a quickly disappearing world: a decaying house in the middle of an estate being sold off to a developer whose modest, semidetached homes Caroline belittles but in which Faraday knows his mother would have been happy to live.

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As the strange, seemingly supernatural occurrences become more frequent, the pace of a novel that was already a page-turner (albeit of a highly if unobtrusively literary kind) quickens. Mrs. Ayres starts believing that Susan, her dead daughter, is trying to contact her. (Waters dealt with spiritualism before, in her 1999 novel Affinity.) Caroline begins reading the spiritualist books she finds in her late father’s library. Faraday seeks the advice of a colleague named Seeley—significantly, one he dislikes—who attributes Mrs. Ayres’s odd behavior to menopause and Caroline’s to sexual frustration. As for Roderick’s theory of an evil germ loose in the house infecting the inhabitants, Seeley agrees: Well, the sexual impulse is the darkest of all, and has to emerge somewhere. It’s like an electrical current; it has a tendency . . . to find its own conductors. But if it goes untapped—well, then it’s a rather dangerous energy.

“Could there be something loose in the house,” Faraday wonders, “some sort of ravenous frustrated energy, with Caroline at its heart?” Faraday is not altogether wrong to look to Caroline; he is only wrong in failing to look also to himself: The novel thus mocks Faraday even as it mesmerizes readers, offering insight and irony in equal meaure. On the one hand, Caroline must bear some of the blame—not for causing her mother’s suicide, but for allowing it to happen. On the other hand, having Mrs. Ayres out of the way prepares for Faraday’s accession to the throne via marriage to Caroline. He is surprised to find, however, that instead of being more emotionally and financially dependent on him following her mother’s death, Caroline is less dependent. She breaks their engagement, refusing to allow Faraday to gain control of the estate through marriage. Mrs. Ayres’s death frees Caroline from a long postwar life confined to a dying house, as well as from the prospect of a long marriage to a man she does not love. It liberates her to travel, perhaps to Canada or the United States, she prematurely imagines, on the proceeds of the estate’s sale. Horrified by the prospect of losing what was almost in his grasp, Faraday becomes hysterical (and hysterically funny), running to the family’s solicitor in the absurd hope of preventing the sale. That same night, Caroline dies under decidedly mysterious circumstances, perhaps a suicide or the victim of a delusion or, less likely, the victim of a supernatural visitation, of foul play, or of something more benign but no less deadly. The servant reports (perhaps an embellishment) that Caroline’s last word was “you.” If true, and if it referred to Faraday, that would not have been the last time the doctor visited Hundreds Hall. In an epilogue, he explains what has transpired over the three years since Caroline’s death (including the modest growth of his practice, his earlier fears over the National Health Service having proved misguided). The hall remains unsold, visited occasionally by tramps and squatters and more frequently by Faraday, who is now its unofficial caretaker. For him, despite its further decay, the hall

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retains its beauty. In some ways it is handsomer than ever. . . . If Hundreds Hall is haunted, however, its ghost doesn’t show itself to me. For I’ll turn, and am disappointed—realising that what I am looking at is only a cracked window-pane, and that the face gazing distortedly from it, baffled and longing, is my own.

One year later, Empire Day would be celebrated for the last time. Old desires, like old empires, die hard. Long after the British Empire contracted, Waters’s career has been expanding apace and ironically is based on doing well what Faraday does so badly: returning to the past. Her first three novels are set in Victorian times, the latest two during and just after World War II. She is in top form in The Little Stranger, a work of historical insight and psychological depth, a virtuosic act of ventriloquism that manages to be as restrained in style and constrained in setting as it is extravagant in its range of literary allusion, from Edgar Allan Poe, the Brontë sisters, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, and Evelyn Waugh to Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Robert Morace

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 17 (May 1, 2009): 64. The Boston Globe, July 24, 2009, p. G5 The Globe and Mail (Toronto), May 18, 2009, p. R1. History Today 59, no. 10 (October, 2009): 55. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 9 (May 1, 2009): 14. Library Journal 134, no. 9 (May 15, 2009): 72. London Review of Books 31, no. 13 (July 9, 2009): 21-22. The New York Times Book Review, May 31, 2009, p. 20. Publishers Weekly 256 (March 30, 2009): 1. The Spectator 310, no. 9431 (May 30, 2009): 26-27. The Times Literary Supplement, May 29, 2009, p. 19. The Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2009, p. W6. The Washington Post, May 20, 2009, p. C4.

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LORDS OF THE SEA The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy Author: John R. Hale (1951) Publisher: Viking (New York). Illustrated. 395 pp. $29.95 Type of work: History Time: 483 b.c.e.-322 b.c.e. Locale: Aegean Sea This historical study reveals that, when the Athenians created a navy, they had to extend political participation to the landless poor Principal personages: Themistocles, the founder of the Athenian navy, who devised the strategy that defeated the Persian navy at Salamis in 480 b.c.e. Cimon, who led the navy of the Delian League to repeated victories over the Persians Hippodamus of Miletus, who designed the harbor and town at Piraeus Pericles, the Athenian political and military leader who presided over Athens’s Golden Age Phormio, Athens’s most innovative commander in the Peloponnesian War Alcibiades, Athens’s most daring commander and most deadly enemy in the Peloponnesian War Conon, an Athenian commander who escaped the disaster at Aegospotami and led the revival of the navy Phocion, an Athenian who was elected commander of the navy fortyfive times and restored Athenian power in the Aegean Sea Demosthenes, an orator who revived the navy as the means of saving Greece from Philip of Macedon

The traditional approach linking military service to democracy is to argue that, when ancient Greek city-states ceased to rely on cavalry and instead employed hoplites (heavily armed infantrymen fighting in a tight formation), the aristocrats had to share political power with those commoners who were able to equip themselves with armor and weapons. In Lords of the Sea, John R. Hale extends this argument to include the truly poor who rowed the triremes—sleek warships with three banks of oars. Triremes possessed the speed and agility to make ramming enemy vessels a superior tactic to boarding them and fighting a land battle on water. The trireme was not a sturdy vessel. It was light, could fight only in calm water, and was so subject to destruction by the teredo worm that it had to be brought onto shore each evening to dry out. It required constant work, scraping the hull and keeping it covered with pitch (causing ancient historians and playwrights to speak of

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“black ships”), and the ships had to be shel tered in expensive sheds throughout the win- John R. Hale is a widely published ter. Trireme crews had to be recruited, trained, author on ancient warships, with experience in underwater archaeology. and paid. Hale’s description of all these processes— He is director of liberal studies at the including the development of troop carriers University of Louisville. and horse transports—supersedes all previous efforts at producing an Athenian naval history. The illustrations and maps included in his study are first rate as well. His narrative is enthusiastic and compelling. Naval warfare was not new in 483 b.c.e., when Themistocles persuaded the Athenians not to spend the silver from a newly found vein in a state mine but to build triremes instead. The Athenians should indeed have been expanding their navy to prepare to deal with an impending Persian invasion: All intelligent observers would have agreed on this point. However, only Themistocles and his few supporters were in this category, so Themistocles motivated the necessary buildup by turning the public’s attention to a traditional rival within sight of Attica, the flourishing city-state of Aegina. The Athenians humbled Aegina but fortunately did not destroy the city—its forty ships would be valuable only three years later when the gigantic Persian fleet encountered the Greek naval force at Salamis. No Athenian could have forgotten the previous Persian invasion, in 490 b.c.e., that had been almost miraculously turned back by the battle at Marathon. Most probably heard of subsequent Persian fleets moving along the coast, one being destroyed in a storm, others bringing workmen to dig a canal that would allow ships to bypass the most dangerous promontory. However, the Athenians, like most democratic peoples at any time and place, preferred to ignore warning signs rather than to prepare to defend themselves. It was a combination of luck (the money being available) and genius (Themistocles) that allowed Athens to prepare for the great confrontation with the Persian king and the fantastic number of men and ships he was leading into Greece. The story of the Spartans at Thermopylae is far better known than is the one that Hale recounts, that of the Athenians who protected the Spartan forces from the rear. Hale points out, however, that, had the navy not held the Persian fleet back until storms and combat weakened them, the Spartans would have been surrounded and destroyed much more quickly than they were. When the Persians broke through the Spartan line, there was nothing to stop them short of Athens. States lying in between joined them out of necessity or to take revenge on Athens for past offenses. The Persians captured and burned the Acropolis, then moved against the Greek fleet at Salamis. The ensuing battle was a Greek victory, thanks to Themistocles, but Hale describes the manner in which it was fought very differently than do most texts. The difference lies in Hale’s superior understanding of the principles of trireme warfare. Themistocles’ postwar career was short after he hurriedly built the Long Walls connecting Athens to its port at Piraeus. Athenians recognized him as a rogue, useful in a

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crisis but dangerous to a democracy. Fittingly, he went into exile at the Persian court, advising the king on methods that could defeat the Athenians. That was not an easy task, however, because Athens had an outstanding general (all commanders by land and sea alike were called generals) in Cimon, the son of Miltiades, the hero of Marathon. Cimon liberated all the Greek cities in Asia Minor then threatened the Persian hold on Egypt. Had he been able to divert that region’s tax revenues to Athenians, it would have been the end of Persian power on the seas. As it was, when Cimon died of illness on campaign, Persia recovered to become once more a major player in regional politics. Pericles is the man most identified with Athens’s Golden Age. He was content to solidify the Athenian empire and use the contributions of the allies to beautify his city and to complete the naval arsenal at Piraeus. Under his leadership, the navy became larger and better trained and the city’s wealth grew, until Sparta and Corinth began to fear that, unless Athens was stopped soon, it would be impossible to stop its expansion later. The conflict that followed, the Peloponnesian War, was judged by the historian Thucydides to be the greatest in the history of the world. It pitted a land power (Sparta) against a sea power (Athens). Hale’s tale follows Thucydides closely but explains for a modern audience nuances that knowledgeable Athenians would have understood without explanation. High points include the struggle at Pylos and Naupactus, strategic locations where Athens demonstrated its mastery of maritime warfare. Low points include the disaster at Syracuse, where overly ambitious plans coincided with overly cautious commanders. The defection of the Athenian darling of war, Alcibiades, to the Spartans was fatal to his homeland, which just at that moment found itself bereft of commanders willing to risk public displeasure by either risking battle or coming home, a choice that resulted in the total loss of two expeditionary forces. That should have been the end of Athens, but Alcibiades’ advice to the Persian king—to play the Greeks against one another, always supporting the weaker party— allowed him to raise a new Athenian fleet, if not to retain Persian support once he made it formidable. Bad luck and the stupidity of his second-in-command cost him the confidence of the Athenians and command of the fleet. He had to watch helplessly as his successors took the fleet to Aegospotami on the Gallipoli peninsula in 405 b.c.e. and beached the vessels at an exposed location. The campaign had begun with the Spartans sailing to the Hellespont to intercept the Persian fleet bringing grain from the Black Sea regions. They had used the Persian subsidy to raise a large fleet, one that the Athenians could face only by extraordinary efforts. Since Athenians were utterly dependent on imported food, they had no choice; they managed to put 180 triremes to sea, each with 160 to 200 men on board. Traditional accounts have placed the fleets on opposite sides of the Hellespont, but Hale’s personal reconnaissance of the region has convinced him that this would have put the Athenians on a shore without a beach, from which they could easily have seen the Spartans put to sea. A surprise attack on the beached Athenian triremes would have been impossible under such circumstances. There was a good beach just to the

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north, behind a headland that would have hidden the Spartan approach and where Spartan hoplites could be landed to take the crews in the rear as they rushed toward their ships. Hale argues that this is what happened. The battle ended almost before it began, with the capture of the entire Athenian fleet except a handful of vessels led by Conon, who managed to escape the disaster. Afterward, the Spartans executed several thousand Athenians and sent the remainder home without supplies. They then sailed to each of the Athenian colonies, expelling the people so the returning exiles would eat what remained of the Athenian food stocks. Surrender followed. Athens barely escaped destruction and became ruled by hardcore aristocrats under Spartan supervision. The Long Walls were demolished, as was the harbor at Piraeus. Had the Spartans been capable of governing well, this would have been the end of Athens. Spartans did not know how to rule foreigners, however. Sparta’s arrogance and extortion soon made the conquered Greeks long for a return of Athenian rule. Sparta could not pay its sailors without Persian money, and when these funds were redirected to Conon defeat seemed likely. Conon’s genius did the rest. After he had crushed the Spartan fleet, Conon returned to Athens with the funds needed to rebuild the Long Walls. Athenian successes, often led by the dashing Phocion, were cut short in 386 b.c.e. with “the King’s Peace,” Persian-dictated terms that made it impossible for either state to rebuild an empire. Sparta’s land empire began to unravel after a crushing defeat in 371. This defeat was totally unexpected. A large Peloponnesian army with the unbeaten Spartans at its center faced a smaller Thebean force at Leuctra, but it failed to realize that hoplites deployed in a heavy phalanx could overwhelm any traditional infantry formation. Meanwhile, Athens, once again the dominant naval power of the Aegean Sea, enjoyed a golden age of prosperity. Known for its artists and philosophers, Athens was once again the School of Hellas of which Pericles had boasted. Over the northern horizon, however, a storm was brewing: The Macedonian state, previously so chaotic as to threaten no one, was now organized by its king. Philip, who had been a hostage in Thebes, further developed the military innovations of recent decades then began snapping up Greek cities along the coasts. When he moved on the Hellespont, the Athenian orator Demosthenes warned of impending war. Athenian sea power was unable to prevail over continental Macedonia. Triremes could transport men and horses to the kingdom’s periphery, but then it was up to the hoplites and cavalrymen. In the end, only land armies counted, and even Thebes and Athens together were no match for Philip. He spared both cities, wanting to enlist them in a great war to liberate Greek cities in Asia Minor, but he was assassinated before he could begin. Rebellions broke out across Greece, but they were crushed by Alexander the Great, who destroyed Thebes but spared Athens. When Alexander led his army east, he faced Persian armies employing Greek mercenaries, many of them Athenians. In his absence, Athens rebuilt its fleet, making ready for revolt. Alexander’s death, however, did not end the Macedonian kingdom, and when the Macedonian fleet prevailed in 322 b.c.e., it was the end of the Athenian navy, the end of Athenian democracy, and the end of Athenian greatness. Hale’s ac-

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count thus demonstrates the close links among all three of these entities, but particularly the extent to which Athens’s democracy was shaped by and depended upon its navy. William L. Urban

Review Sources Archaeology 62, no. 4 (July/August, 2009): 14. Booklist 105, no. 15 (April 1, 2009): 9. History: Reviews of New Books 38, no. 1 (Fall, 2009): 29-30. Library Journal 134, no. 19 (November 15, 2009): 40. The New York Times, August 7, 2009, p. 23. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 17 (April 27, 2009): 123.

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THE LOST ART OF GRATITUDE Author: Alexander McCall Smith (1948) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 262 pp. $23.95 Type of work: Novel Locale: Edinburgh, Scotland In McCall Smith’s sixth book featuring his popular philosopher and editor, Isabel Dalhousie, she faces ethical issues of investment banking, trust, and plagiarism Principal characters: Isabel Dalhousie, a forty-something ethical philosopher and journal editor Charley, her eighteen-month-old son Jamie McPherson, a twenty-something musician, Isabel’s fiancé, and Charley’s father Grace, Isabel’s maid and Charley’s nanny Minty Auchterlonie, an investment banker and acquaintance of Isabel Professor Christopher Dove, an ethical philosopher and former journal editor

Alexander McCall Smith, a lawyer and teacher, became an internationally popular author with the publication of The Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (1998), a mystery set in Botswana and featuring sleuth Mma Precious Ramotswe. His unusual heroine gained in readership with each of the nine subsequent novels in the series. In 2004, McCall Smith created another woman sleuth, Isabel Dalhousie, an ethical philosopher living in Edinburgh, Scotland. The previous titles featuring Dalhousie are The Sunday Philosophy Club (2004), Friends, Lovers, Chocolate (2005), The Right Attitude to Rain (2006), The Careful Use of Compliments (2007), and The Comforts of a Muddy Sunday (2008). McCall Smith is also a prolific author of children’s books. Each Isabel Dalhousie novel assumes a reader’s knowledge of what has happened in the personal lives of the main characters in the prior books. At the same time, each new story is complete enough in itself, so a lack of background is not a problem. In The Lost Art of Gratitude, Isabel’s present familial, social, and professional lives are clear, while the writer makes occasional brief references to background details from the earlier works. The narrative moves along smoothly as a result. Dalhousie is in her forties, resides in Edinburgh, and is independently wealthy. She shares her spacious home with her partner Jamie and their eighteen-month old son Charley. She also owns and edits The Review of Applied Ethics. Despite her great wealth, Isabel lives simply, but she is generous to others in need. In The Lost Art of Gratitude, Isabel’s relationship with Jamie, her twenty-something lover of several years, is stable. Shortly into the novel, he proposes marriage and she

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accepts, though they make no plans for their wedding. Jamie is an accomplished bassoonist who plays and records with orchestral groups and teaches private pupils. He has his own apartment, which he now uses primarily for teaching. Isabel and Jamie, with the assistance of her maid Grace, enjoy very much raising their son. Aside from Grace’s sometimes blunt interference in things, there is a loving harmony, wit, and humor among Isabel, Jaime, and Charley that provides a soothing background for the sleuthing diffiAlexander McCall Smith, professor culties in which Isabel invariably becomes inemeritus of medical law at Edinburgh volved. University, is internationally popular What makes Isabel an original character is for his mysteries featuring Isabel that in each area of her daily life—domestic, Dalhousie, as well as the No. 1 Ladies’ professional, and social—she ponders her acDetective Agency series. tions and experience from the viewpoint of a moral philosopher. Just as her professional journal is concerned with applied ethics, so she is a practical philosopher, examining closely her own thoughts and behaviors in her day-to-day, indeed minute-by-minute, life. She also ponders the words and behaviors of others, while trying always to be in these instances nonjudgmental. Thus, considering the investment-banking career of her recently regained acquaintance Minty Auchterlonie, Isabel thinks, “There was nothing essentially wrong with investment bankers, but they were usurers,” but then adds, “There was an ocean of difference between a usurer, properly so called, and a banker. Usurers exacted excessive interest, whereas bankers extracted . . . moderate interest.” The underlying humor in this kind judgment, caught only in the word “extracted,” enriches McCall Smith’s narrative. The text is never preachy, despite its heroine’s serious debates with herself and others. The characters are both very human and richly entertaining. Whether McCall Smith hopes that his heroine’s concern about right and wrong—or, in this story, the presence and absence of a simple thank-you—will unobtrusively rub off on readers is a mystery. Many of Isabel’s own decisions and actions are based in her strong belief that, when one can help someone, one should. Also, she wants to trust everyone. These beliefs and the actions that stem from them worry her loved ones, because in helping and trusting others she finds herself in tricky, sometimes even dangerous, situations. These situations create the plot tensions needed to carry the narrative’s philosophical material. Thus, The Art of Gratitude presents—in addition to the domestic ins and outs of Jamie, Isabel, Charley, and Grace—three plot problems for Isabel to solve, one in her domestic life, one in her professional life, and one in her social life. The problem Isabel encounters in the domestic arena concerns Brother Fox. This transient dweller in Isabel’s backyard throughout the series, to whom she sometimes

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feeds chicken, holds a place in her heart. Now, the wild creature is badly wounded, and Isabel decides to seek help from a veterinarian. Her friend Minty and the man she hires to catch Brother Fox both urge her to destroy him. Nonetheless, with Jamie’s support and the trapper’s reluctant skill (in return for one hundred pounds), the injured animal is trapped, his wound is kindly treated, and he recovers to continue his neighborhood roaming. Isabel’s kindly heart extends to all of creation. In her professional life, Isabel opens her business mail and finds a letter from Professor Christopher Dove. Dove, when he had been on the board of The Review of Applied Ethics, had for no just reason removed Isabel as its editor and assumed the position himself. When that happened, Isabel, after much inner ethical debate and consultation with her lawyer about this use of her wealth, decided she was justified in simply buying the publication and reappointing herself as its editor. Now, Dove is attempting revenge. He accuses Isabel of allowing plagiarized material to appear in the journal—a serious transgression among academics and a reason for the current board to fire her as editor. Isabel’s intolerance of real malfeasance, and especially a second such action by Dove, come into play. She visits a library to investigate his charge and determines that, indeed, a minor instance of plagiarism mars one article she has approved for publication. She decides to follow the journal’s procedure for rectifying her error. However, in her research, she also comes upon a more signficant instance of plagiarism in an article by Dove. When Dove sends an ally to tell her she must resign, Isabel explains that she has followed the journal’s procedure to correct her error, shares her knowledge of Dove’s own plagiarism, and holds out the carrot of a wonderful professional possibility for the envoy. All ends well for Isabel and her new ally, if not for Dove. Later, in relation to this event, Isabel demonstrates the iron-hard integrity at the heart of her character. While researching Dove’s article, she notices that he justifies “free-riders,” a position that she asserts is “thoroughly dubious.” Isabel argues that, for social beings, “it was not rational to look after oneself at the expense of others, for the simple reason that we sank or swam together.” A little later, in considering her government making rules concerning private actions, she thinks, “very ordinary freedoms” are being taken away by the “nanny state.” She concludes, however, that since she has as yet “done nothing to defend these freedoms, she [i]s herself what Dove called a ‘free rider.’” Thus, she admits that what she has earlier quite selfrighteously condemned is, in truth, a behavior of which she is guilty. The complexity of one’s ethical life always comes through in Isabel’s very honest analyses and observations. Minty Auchtelonie presents Isabel with a social and ethical dilemma of trust. Though Minty has been her friend in the past, Isabel is not happy to meet her again. After their previous encounter, Isabel has retained some small doubts as to the probity of Minty’s behavior, doubts that both Jamie and others tell her are justified. Now Minty, who is married, asks for help ending her former lover’s pursuit of the right to visit their son. She tells Isabel that the man is doing physical damage to her home to frighten Minty into cooperating. Minty asks her friend to meet the former lover and

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ask him to give up his pursuit. Isabel, though warned again that Minty is “wicked,” wants to trust her and agrees to help. Isabel meets the man on Minty’s behalf, but he refuses her request. At the same time, behind Isabel’s back, Minty has someone else tell her former lover that Isabel is an evil enforcer who will end his law career if he does not do as she asks. Blaming Isabel, he withdraws from his pursuit of his son. When Isabel tries to explain her innocence, he believes her, but, fearing that Minty will find a way to destroy him professionally, he still decides to give up his claim to his son. Isabel wonders how the man can value his career more than his own son. As a new mother, Isabel is confounded by his behavior. Then, Minty angers Isabel with yet another deceit. Minty has acquired and then spent an investment from another man, through what the previous owner descibes as fraudulent behavior. She forges Isabel’s signature in order to prevent the man from seeking to retrieve his investment. Isabel visits the investor to explain her innocence. She discovers that Minty did defraud him, but she also finds that he is the one who is damaging Minty’s house, behavior she finds unjustifiable even after the financial theft. Still, fearing Minty, the investor gives up on getting his money back, again confounding Isabel. In each of these complex dealings, what most bothers Isabel is Minty’s inability to see or to admit that her actions are in any way unethical. She determines to break her relationship with Mint permanently, but she is determined to maintain her own integrity. Isabel decides that she must find the right way to confront Minty one last time, and this confrontation completes the novel in a satisfactory way for Isabel and for readers. Francine A. Dempsey

Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 2 (September 15, 2009): 5. Publishers Weekly 256 (August 17, 2009): 44. The Washington Post, September 20, 2009, p. BW04.

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THE LOST CITY OF Z A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon Author: David Grann (1967) Publisher: Doubleday (New York). 339 pp. $27.50 Type of work: History, archaeology Time: 1867 to the early twenty-first century Locale: Great Britain; Ceylon; South America Recounts Grann’s hunt for the truth about the disappearance of the explorer Percy Fawcett in Brazil in 1925, as well as the author’s own journey to the Amazon basin in search of a solution to the mystery surrounding the lost City of Z David Grann’s The Lost City of Z arose out of a famous failed Amazonian expedition of the 1920’s. In May, 1925, Lieutenant Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett left the tiny trading depot of Bakairí Post to continue his journey toward the upper Xingu River in Central Brazil. A veteran of six previous expeditions to South America, he was an experienced explorer and surveyor with a reputation for being able to endure great physical hardship. On this occasion, however, rather than surveying borders and the courses of rivers, Fawcett had a different aim in mind. He was searching for what he called the City of Z. Fawcett believed that in the past the Amazon basin had supported a sophisticated civilization, and he was searching for evidence of its existence. With Fawcett were his eldest son, Jack, and Jack’s boyhood friend and inseparable companion, Raleigh Rimell. Fawcett’s last dispatch, dated May 29, was brought back to Bakairí by Indian porters who had been unwilling to continue the journey. Neither Fawcett, nor his son, nor Rimell were ever seen or heard from again. When he had left, Fawcett had told his wife Nina not to expect to hear from him for at least two years. Consequently, it was not until 1928 that the first rescue mission, led by Commander George Dyott, finally arrived in the area where Fawcett had last been seen. The Kalapalo Indians had been the last to see Fawcett’s party before it headed into difficult and unknown country where aggressive Indian tribes lived. The Kalapalo informed Dyott that they had seen smoke from Fawcett’s campfires for five days after he left their territory. After that, they had seen no sign of him. They believed that Fawcett’s party had been massacred, and Dyott agreed. However, the story does not end there. Expedition after expedition has set out to solve the riddle of Fawcett’s disappearance. Tantalizing details have emerged from time to time. Expedition artefacts have been retrieved; as late as 1979, Fawcett’s signet ring was discovered in a shop in Cuiabá. In 1951, Fawcett’s bones were allegedly discovered, though subsequent examination suggested that they were not in fact remains of his body. Still, the would-be explorers keep arriving, among them David Grann himself. Grann first came across the story of Fawcett’s disappearance while researching

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another story. Well aware of the fact that people tended to become obsessed with solving the mystery, Grann nonetheless decided to look into the story in greater detail. Before long, he found that he too had been bitten by the Fawcett bug. In particular, he was intrigued by Fawcett’s belief that the Amazonian rain forests concealed a lost city, and he became determined to find out more about this supposed city and about Fawcett himself. Fawcett’s father had belonged to an aristocratic English family and had been a friend of the future King Edward VII when Edward was still prince of Wales. A brilliant sportsman, he had failed to live up to early promise and had instead turned to alcohol, dying young. Fawcett’s mother seemed to have little interest in her son, and the decisions she made about his education were often whimsical. She sent him to a military academy because she liked the uniform, rather than because he had any interest in a military career. Fawcett’s education, as Grann puts it, fitted him to be an English gentleman but for little else. However, by dint of great effort, Fawcett managed to establish himself as a soldier renowned for his toughness. He was bitten early by the treasure-hunting bug, while stationed in Ceylon. He was also acquainted with H. Rider Haggard, the author of King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and other adventure stories. Fired by these associations and by his own older brother’s novels, Fawcett determined to become an explorer and undertook the Royal Geographical Society’s course for explorers and surveyors. Having passed with flying colors, Fawcett was dispatched to Bolivia to assist in mapping its borders with Brazil and Peru. There and during subsequent expeditions, he began to hear stories about lost cities in the jungle, and he became determined to locate such a place. Hiram Bingham, an amateur archaeologist, had recently discovered Macchu Picchu, in the high Andes, and Fawcett became obsessed with the notion of finding a lost city that he had heard about and that he dubbed “Z.” Although he was fairly confident that he knew where Z was, Fawcett was very cautious about committing details to paper and kept the city’s supposed coordinates secret even from his own family. Fawcett himself was most concerned that his archrival, millionaire doctor Alexander Hamilton Rice, would beat him to the discovery. Rice was able to avail himself of the latest technology, including radio and airplanes to conduct aerial surveys, but ultimately his interests seem to have been different from Fawcett’s, and there is a sense that Fawcett’s concerns were driven as much by envy of Rice’s limitless funding as by actual competition. Fawcett struggled to fund what turned out to be his final expedition. His style of exploration was fading out of fashion; Grann describes him as the last of the Victorian explorers, as his approach focused more on surviving physical hardship and locating topographical goals than on more modern ethnographic study. Grann suggests that Fawcett made valuable contributions to Western understanding of newly contacted Indian tribes, as well as mapping vast areas of the rain forest, but Fawcett’s Born in 1967, David Grann has been a senior editor at The New Republic and, since 2003, a staff writer for The New Yorker. He holds master’s degrees in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and in creative writing from Boston University.

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many critics suggest that his achievements in these areas were somewhat exaggerated. Fawcett’s wife was a consummate publicist who worked tirelessly to promote her husband’s cause, and this role was later taken up by Fawcett’s admiring younger son Brian. While Fawcett himself was seemingly impervious to physical hardship and was rarely if ever affected by local conditions, other members of his expeditions were not so lucky. He set a blistering pace when traveling, and many of his companions found it extremely difficult to keep up with him. Rations were meager, and the company marched all day with little rest. Fawcett was also supremely intolerant of others’ injuries and infections, regarding them as indicative of physical and moral weakness. Grann is perhaps overly enthusiastic in detailing encounters of Fawcett’s expeditions with maggots under the skin, insect bites, and so forth, but few people willingly traveled with Fawcett a second time, assuming they survived the first trip. Having said that, Grann points out that there seems to have been something about Fawcett that was capable of inspiring extreme loyalty. His family adored him despite the fact that he reduced them to penury in order to fund his travels and was rarely at home. Some of his lieutenants were utterly devoted to him while recognizing that he was a hard taskmaster. Fawcett has exerted a strange fascination over those who have attempted to solve the mystery of his disappearance, as Grann discovered when he began to do just that. Fawcett’s papers are kept at the Royal Geographical Society; when Grann visited the society’s library in order to view them, he learned about the “Fawcett lunatics,” each of whom has a pet theory as to what happened to Fawcett. Through the years, there have been claims that Fawcett was not murdered but was imprisoned, that he decided to live among the Indians as a hermit, and that he died of natural causes but his son decided to remain with the Indians. A tendency to albinism among certain tribes has led to stories that Jack had settled down with an Indian woman and had children with her. Rimell is usually assumed to have died early in the expedition because he is known to have been ill when the party left Bakairí. Other theories are more esoteric, involving lost civilizations hidden underground or extraterrestrials. Indeed, Fawcett himself had begun to experiment with spiritualism before his expedition, and Grann suggests that he may have had a long-standing interest in occult matters. His older brother was a quondam associate of the famous spiritualist Madame Blavatsky, and it has been suggested that Fawcett, in common with his brother, converted to Buddhism. Toward the end of his life, Fawcett claimed that he was being led to Z by visions of the city given to him in dreams. The truth, as Grann discovers when he finally travels to Brazil, is rather more mundane. He meets one of the few surviving Indians who remembers Fawcett passing through her village when she was a small child. She reiterates the Indians’ belief that the party was murdered by hostile Indians farther into the forest. Grann also meets an Indian who claims that the bones discovered in the 1950’s were in fact those of his own grandfather and were offered up in the hope that, once they found a body, the European explorers would go away and leave the tribe in peace. The current whereabouts of those bones are unknown, though they are believed to be in a bank deposit box, but the grandson would like them back.

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Grann’s guide takes him to visit what appear to be mysterious ruins, similar to those sought by Fawcett, but he is disappointed to learn that they are in fact natural rock formations where sandstone has been eroded by the wind. Furthermore, as archaeologist Michael Heckenberger points out, stone is not used by the Indians for building because so little of it is available. However, Heckenberger’s work suggests that Fawcett was not entirely wrong in his supposition that the Amazon basin did at one time support a larger population. As Heckenberger shows Grann, he has found ancient pottery and evidence of drainage channels and embankments that would have been accompanied by buildings. However, the buildings would have been made of wood rather than stone, and they have long since disappeared, eaten away by insects and plants. Fawcett’s dream of finding a city like Macchu Picchu was always that, a dream, and in the end it led to his death. Whether he and his party were murdered or died from injury or disease will never be known. Nonetheless, Grann himself seems to be satisfied with his adventure. His book has attracted some criticism from reviewers and scholars who suggest that he has exaggerated Fawcett’s achievements and presented an inaccurate picture of Fawcett’s experiences. While this may be true (much depends on the accounts retained by Fawcett’s own family, and it is known that Fawcett did on occasion falsify his own accounts), it is difficult to deny that Grann captures the many ways in which Fawcett was a remarkable man. If Fawcett did not succeed in the quest he undertook, his adventures still have the power to fire the human imagination, and people will continue to attempt to solve the mystery of his death. Maureen Kincaid Speller

Review Sources Archaeology 62, no. 3 (May/June, 2009): 14-15. Booklist 105, no. 5 (November 1, 2008): 4. Geographical 81, no. 3 (March, 2009): 61. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 23 (December 1, 2008): 1241. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 2 (January 15, 2009): special section, p. 6. Library Journal 133, no. 18 (November 1, 2008): 86. London Review of Books 31, no. 10 (May 28, 2009): 17-18. The Nation 288, no. 14 (April 13, 2009): 32-36. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 8 (May 14, 2009): 14-16. The New York Times, March 22, 2009, p. 6. The New York Times, March 17, 2009, p. 1. The New York Times Book Review, March 1, 2009, p. 16. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 41 (October 13, 2008): 44-45. Spectator 309, no. 9422 (March 28, 2009): 34-36. The Times Literary Supplement, June 5, 2009, p. 7-8. The Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2009, p. W6.

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THE LOST SYMBOL Author: Dan Brown (1964) Publisher: Doubleday (New York). 509 pp. $29.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Washington, D.C., especially the Kalorama Heights suburb Brown’s follow up to The Da Vinci Code finds Professor Robert Langdon in the U.S. capital, embroiled in kidnapping and political intrigue involving Masonic mysteries and a maniac willing to kill in order to achieve a kind of mystical knowledge and transcendence Principal characters: Robert Langdon, Harvard professor and symbologist Katherine Solomon, researcher in the field of noetic science Peter Solomon, Katherine’s brother, Robert’s friend, and a thirty-thirddegree Freemason Mal’akh, a mysterious, murderous being, a thirty-third-degree Freemason with a violent agenda Inoue Sato, director of the CIA Office of Security Warren Bellamy, architect of the U.S. Capitol and a thirty-thirddegree Freemason Turner Simkins, CIA officer under the command of Director Sato Trish Dunne, Katherine Solomon’s lab assistant Reverend Colin Galloway, dean of Washington National Cathedral Trent Anderson, Capitol police chief

Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol is a sequel to two previous best-selling novels, Angels and Demons (2000) and The Da Vinci Code (2003). The series’s protagonist, Robert Langdon, is once again featured, as he finds himself involved in yet another mystery centering on codes, symbols, and legends, this time in Washington, D.C. Arriving at the Capitol to give a last-minute lecture at the Smithsonian Institution for his old friend and mentor Peter Solomon, Langdon is instead horrified to find his friend’s severed hand, with its distinctive thirty-third-degree Masonic ring, in the National Statuary Hall. Via cell phone, Langdon learns that he has been duped into coming to Washington by the man who now holds Peter captive—and who demands that Langdon find and unlock a portal leading to ancient mysteries. Unhappily, Langdon realizes that he has also been tricked into bringing with him a small, wrapped, cube-shaped box that Peter entrusted to his safekeeping years earlier— a secret object that Peter believes holds great power and that he fears powerful people may try to steal. Indeed, powerful people begin to converge upon Langdon immediately: In partic-

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ular, he encounters Inoue Sato, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Office of Security. A no-nonsense woman, Sato seems less interested in the severed hand than in what secret information Langdon may be hiding. Guided by Capitol police chief Trent Anderson, the three make their way into the depths of the Senate’s subbasement, where they find a locked room belonging to Peter Solomon full of Masonic regalia, as well as a hidden stone pyramid with cryptic engraving on one side. An X ray of Langdon’s day bag transmitted to Sato’s BlackBerry reveals that the package he is carrying contains a small golden pyramid capstone. Threatened with CIA detention and questioning, Langdon is rescued by the sudden appearance of Warren Bellamy, the Capitol’s architect (or supervisor), who spirits away Langdon and the two parts of the pyramid. Meanwhile, Katherine Solomon, Peter’s younger sister and a research scientist in the field of noetics (the concept that human thought can affect physical matter), finds herself in danger from a mysterious being known as Mal’akh. The Solomon family has been beset by tragedy for years: Katherine’s mother died in her arms, and her nephew met his fate in a foreign prison, and now this new threat has appeared. Mal’akh has grotesquely enhanced his body through the use of steroids and human growth hormones, and every inch of his skin except the crown of his head is tattooed. Having kidnapped Peter and thus acquired the use of his cell phone, Mal’akh has been able not only to lure Langdon to Washington but also to arrange a private meeting with Katherine at her lab in an isolated corner of the Smithsonian Museum Support Center. Posing as Peter’s psychiatrist, Mal’akh first kills Katherine’s lab assistant Trish Dunne by drowning her in a tank containing a preserved giant squid. Katherine faces a similar threat in the absolute darkness that engulfs the entryway, or pod, to her lab. Through a combination of cleverness and luck, Katherine manages to escape from the pod. While Mal’akh is not able to kill her as he planned, she is horrified to realize that he has carried out the second part of his mission, as a massive explosion destroys her lab and all of her research contained therein. Katherine meets Langdon and Bellamy at the Library of Congress reading room, where the two men have been trying to decipher the pyramid. None of them really knows anyone else, so they do not know who can be trusted. Everyone seems to have a secret agenda, and neither Robert nor Katherine knows who may be working for which side in this complex drama of conspiracies. Before long, they find themselves on the run—first on foot, then via taxi, subway, car, and helicopter—in a race to escape Sato’s forces, which are led by CIA operative Turner Simkins. They must decode the mysterious symbols on the pyramid and save Peter’s life, while evading the predatory Mal’akh, who will put more lives in danger before the evening is over.

Dan Brown is the author of one of the most widely read books ever published, The Da Vinci Code (2003). His other works include Angels and Demons (2000), Deception Point (2001), and Digital Fortress (1998), all international best sellers.

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The Lost Symbol is classically plotted, taking place during the course of a single evening (with flashbacks providing necessary background detail). Nearly every chapter ends in a cliffhanger, large or small, making the novel a definite “pageturner.” Brown proves once again to be an expert storyteller, as over and over readers are forced to ask themselves how the characters are going to escape from their present situation. One major character even seems clearly to die before readers’ eyes—only to be resurrected in an infuriatingly logical way. On the other hand, Brown’s weaknesses as a writer are also apparent. Too often, crises are resolved by withholding information from readers; the occasional deus ex machina makes an appearance. Moreover, while it is fine that the novel has a philosophical angle to it, its philosophy sometimes threatens to bring the plot to a standstill. One character in particular, the Reverend Colin Galloway, dean of Washington National Cathedral, seems less like a fully formed character and more like a spokesperson for a particular religious viewpoint. Occasionally, the prose style can be a bit melodramatic (“When Katherine Solomon finally saw the massive bronze doors of the library swing open before her, she felt as if an emotional floodgate had burst. All the fear and confusion she had bottled up tonight came pouring through.”) Then, too, Brown can fall into the trap of telling as opposed to showing, particularly when one character is conveying established information to another. There is no doubt, however, that Brown can write a masterful thriller. The scene in which Katherine is stalked by Mal’akh in absolute darkness, his distinctive scent making him seem to be everywhere at once, is positively terrifying. Mal’akh himself is a fascinating yet horrifying creation. Obsessed with the Ancient Mysteries and a hatred for Peter Solomon, his true nature and the secrets of his past are only gradually revealed. Bellamy and Katherine Solomon’s discovery of Mal’akh’s true identity generates one of the most shocking revelations in the story and should catch even the wariest readers off guard. Langdon, meanwhile, has a reputation—established in Brown’s previous novels—for deciphering, decoding, and decrypting all sorts of codes, symbols, and systems of communication, and there is plenty of that for him to do here. Once he and Katherine begin working together, their combined knowledge of symbology and science enables them to make further progress in solving the puzzles of the pyramid. What they ultimately discover is that advanced science and magic are not so far apart after all. At the center of the novel is the order of the Freemasons. Brown scandalized the Catholic Church with The Da Vinci Code, and, prior to its publication, it appeared that The Lost Symbol (initially titled The Solomon Key) would draw the same type of reactions from the Masonic world. The novel is steeped in the mysteries of Masonic lore, from initiation rites to a description of a Masonic Chamber of Reflection deep beneath the U.S. Capitol. Peter Solomon and Bellamy are thirty-third-degree Masons, as is the villainous Mal’akh, and the plot of the novel centers on Mal’akh’s belief that there is a secret spiral staircase deep beneath the earth somewhere in Washington, D.C., that leads to the most secret of Masonic mysteries. It is easy to understand the Masons awaiting the publication of such a novel with some anxiety. Actually, though, Brown presents the Masons in a rather positive light. Langdon

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praises them for working together in harmony, while differences among religious and political beliefs are causing strife throughout the world. He considers Masons to be men of honor and integrity and finds beauty and meaning in their rituals and symbols. In fact, the way Masons, particularly prominent ones, might be viewed should a secretly recorded video of their activities be made available to the media becomes a key plot point of the book. The novel’s characterization is appropriate for its genre. It is not deep or profound, but it serves to create characters whom readers can identify with, such as Robert and Katherine; fear, such as Sato and Mal’akh; or appreciate, such as Galloway and Bellamy. Readers never get true depth from these characters; it is more as though they are there to serve a function in the winding, convoluted plot, with no need to explore any deeper. The character around whom the plot revolves, Peter Solomon, is kept offstage for most of the book, appearing (aside from flashbacks) only at the novel’s climax. Moreover, the novel’s protagonist, Robert Langdon, remains passive throughout much of the novel—doing what others tell him to do, evading capture, hiding in stillness, and allowing himself to be guided rather than putting his own plots into action. It is only when he begins to solve the hidden meaning of the Masonic pyramid— with the help of Dean Galloway and Katherine—that he comes into his own as a man of action. It is important to note that the novel is a combination of fact and fiction. There is no Department of Symbology at Harvard, or anywhere else, because such a discipline does not exist. On the other hand, the famous architecture of the nation’s capital is described in painstakingly researched detail. Brown’s characters are fictional, but it is his genius to blend the factual and the imaginary so that they are intertwined as though they were one. Following in the tradition of The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol is a thoroughly researched, fact-filled novel that is not just a thriller but also a lesson in the history, art, and architecture of Washington, D.C. In a flashback, Langdon asks his students why they would want to tour Europe when so much beauty, history, and grandeur is to be found right in their nation’s capital. This novel plays off that theme, with the Capitol Rotunda, the Library of Congress, and the Washington Monument, among other historic sites, serving as backdrops for many of the novel’s key scenes. Brown deftly works art and sculpture into the plot of the story at strategic points as well. It is only in the final chapters of the book that Brown’s technique might seem anticlimactic to some readers. Others will find themselves enthralled throughout. Charles L. Avinger, Jr.

Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 3 (October 1, 2009): 6. The Boston Globe, September 18, 2009, p. 18. The New York Times, September 14, 2009, p. C1.

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The New York Times Book Review, October 11, 2009, p. 1. Skeptical Inquirer 34, no. 1 (January/February, 2010): 60-61. The Spectator 311, no. 9448 (September 26, 2009): 30-31. Time 174, no. 12 (September 28, 2009): 67-68. The Washington Post, September 15, 2009, p. C1. Washingtonian 44, no. 12 (September, 2009): 7-8. The Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2009, p. A25.

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LOUIS D. BRANDEIS A Life Author: Melvin I. Urofsky (1939) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 955 pp. $40.00 Type of work: Biography Time: 1856-1941 Locale: United States A comprehensive and scholarly biography of a remarkable man who made significant contributions in four interrelated areas: the legal profession, the reforms of the Progressive period, the Zionist movement, and above all, the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court Principal personages: Louis D. Brandeis, associate justice of the United States, 1916-1939 Oliver Wendell Holmes, associate justice of the United States, 19021932 Woodrow Wilson, U.S. president, 1913-1921 Franklin D. Roosevelt, U.S. president, 1933-1945

Louis D. Brandeis: A Life is a monumental achievement that could only have been written by a scholar, such as Melvin I. Urofsky, who has devoted many years to the subject and his historical context. In the mid-1960’s, when Urofsky was searching for an appropriate problem for a Ph.D. dissertation, he noted that historian Arthur Link had referred to Louis Brandeis as “the architect of [President Woodrow Wilson’s] New Freedom.” After examining Brandeis’s papers, Urofsky concluded that there was not enough material on this particular topic to construct a large dissertation, but he and a fellow historian found the correspondence to be so fascinating that they decided to edit the documents for publication. While teaching, writing, and thinking about various aspects of U.S. legal history during the next four decades, Urofsky became increasingly intrigued with Brandeis’s career, and he decided that a full-scale biography would be a challenging retirement project. In addition to conducting exhaustive research in primary sources, Urofsky was able to take advantage of a large number of valuable secondary works about Brandeis and the years in which he lived and worked. Philippa Strum has written excellent books on aspects of Brandeis’s political and legal career. Alpheus T. Mason, whose highly respected biography appeared in 1946, had the advantage of interviewing Brandeis over a period of ten days, and he had access to many of Brandeis’s papers, although he was not allowed to use the valuable Supreme Court papers at Harvard. Urofsky was able to use these papers, as well as numerous other manuscript collections that were not available to Mason. In addition, since 1946, many changes in constitutional law and public policy have modified the focus of scholars’ interest in

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Brandeis’s contributions to jurisprudence and Melvin I. Urofsky is coeditor of a fivepolitical theory. Urofsky emphasizes that Brandeis made volume collection of Louis Brandeis’s outstanding contributions as a practicing law- letters; he is also author of three yer, a progressive reformer, a justice on the previous books about Brandeis and of Supreme Court, and a leader of the Zionist numerous other works, including movement. As a lawyer, he was extremely American Zionism from Herzl to the successful. In 1890, for example, when two- Holocaust (1995) and A March of Liberty: A Constitutional History of the thirds of U.S. attorneys earned less than five United States (2001). thousand dollars per year, Brandeis’s annual income was more than fifty thousand dollars. He was one of a new breed of lawyers who responded to the growing importance and complexity of the law during the large-scale modernization of the country. He was highly organized, a tireless worker, and a ferocious adversary. Urofsky frequently points out that Brandeis loved facts and that “time and time again he would trip up the opposition by knowing more about the business than they did.” Despite his general hostility to bigness, he was a pioneer in the development of the modern law firm, which typically uses specialists to concentrate in different areas of the law. A committed moralist with a strong altruistic turn, Brandeis (who later acquired the nickname “Isaiah”) joined the Progressive movement in an attempt to ameliorate the harsh conditions of the Industrial Revolution. He began his effort at reform during the 1890’s in Boston, fighting against corrupt streetcar franchises, and during the next decade he led a crusade for savings bank life insurance. By then, he was often called the “people’s attorney.” Particularly noteworthy was the argument he made before the Supreme Court in Muller v. Oregon (1908), in which he persuaded the Court’s conservative justices that a there was adequate justification for a law that limited the workday of women to ten hours. His success was primarily due to an accumulation of empirical factual data showing the harmful effects of excessive hours on the health, safety, and welfare of women. This type of pragmatic brief became known as a “Brandeis brief,” and, because the approach emphasized information abut social conditions rather than legal precedents, it was frequently described as “sociological jurisprudence.” Despite his busy career, Brandeis somehow found time to produce books, articles, and speeches about the theoretical aspects of the law. The best summary of Brandeis’s philosophy of using law for the promotion of humanitarian reform, according to Urofsky, is found in his speech “The Opportunity in the Law,” which he delivered before the Harvard Ethical Society in 1905. The speech was based on the conviction that law can be an instrument of morality, social justice, and progress. Rather than becoming “adjuncts of large corporations,” he urged lawyers to hold positions of independence, between the wealthy and the people.” Urofsky makes it clear that these were precepts and values that Brandeis attempted to integrate into his own life and career. He was also perhaps the first prominent member of the legal community to propose that all lawyers should consider it an obligation to make pro bono contributions to public service or worthy causes.

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About 1910, Brandeis first embraced the Zionist movement, in large part because he perceived it as an idealist movement. An unlikely candidate for a Zionist leader, he was raised by secular Jewish parents who had emigrated from Bohemia, and he frequently said that he was not “mystically or religiously inclined.” He agreed with Theodore Roosevelt in opposing the notion of hyphenated Americans, and he never let himself be defined by religion or ethnicity. Unquestionably, he experienced the sting of anti-Semitism from time to time, but he apparently never perceived of himself as a victim of discrimination. As head of the American Zionist movement from 1914 to 1921, his pragmatic goal was “Men! Money! Discipline!” His goal for Palestine was that it become “democratic, egalitarian, and Jewish the latter in terms of the ethical teachings of the prophets and not the ritualistic prescriptions of the rabbis.” While on the Court, he did not hesitate to attempt to influence American presidents to support Jewish immigration into Palestine, and in the 1930’s he secretly provided over fifty thousand dollars to support the Jewish military organization, the Haganah. Urofsky persuasively argues that, as a reformer, Brandeis “balanced his realism with a sense of idealism.” Never seriously attracted to socialism or utopianism, he did not believe that every injustice could be eliminated, and he advocated piecemeal improvement rather than holistic transformation. Never an opponent of a competitive economic system, he once wrote to his daughter, “My dear, if you will just start with the idea that this is a hard world, it will all be much simpler.” In contrast to some other progressives, most notably Herbert Croly, he distrusted big government, as indicated in the title of his book The Curse of Bigness (1934). Urofsky writes that Brandeis assumed that “great size, either in government or in the private sector, posed dangers to democratic society and to individual opportunity.” He was thus a Jeffersonian liberal on this and other issues, especially those relating to democracy and education, for he had great confidence “in the people and their ability, once they knew the facts, to do the right thing.” During the presidential election of 1912, Brandeis was one of the trusted advisers to Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson, and he helped formulate the main ideas of Wilson’s program, called the New Freedom, which emphasized antitrust enforcement and the “regulation of competition,” with the goal of helping small businesses compete fairly with large ones. After Wilson’s election, he played a significant role in designing several New Freedom reforms, particularly the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914) and the Federal Reserve Board. Because these reforms did not attempt to transform society, Urofsky claims that they were “basically conservative,” and he writes that the progressivism of Brandeis and Wilson “lay in their desire to favor popular democracy against wealthy elites, but they wanted to do so with minimal governmental interference and regulation.” Big businessmen nevertheless detested Brandeis’s ideas. When Wilson nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1916, the choice initiated a bitter confirmation fight. Not surprising, conservatives strongly opposed and reform groups enthusiastically endorsed the nomination, which the Senate finally approved after four months of vigorous debate. Brandeis served twenty-three years on the Court, and even his critics would not be able to disagree with Urofsky’s statement that “no justice of the twentieth century had

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a greater impact on American constitutional jurisprudence.” As a justice, Brandeis continued to emphasize the factual background of cases, and his opinions, especially his dissents, frequently resembled Brandeis briefs. Although he is often remembered as a dissenter, Urofsky observes that he wrote for the majority in 454 of his 528 opinions. Both he and his famous colleague and friend Oliver Wendell Holmes were advocates of “judicial self-restraint,” arguing that justices should not overturn legislation simply because they disagree with a particular practice. Brandeis, however, tended to follow a double standard: He frequently deferred to legislatures when assessing issues of economic policy, even when he disagreed with a policy, but he did not hesitate to strike down laws or policies that violated individual liberties. During and after World War I, the Supreme Court heard a series of cases involving federal and state prosecutions of subversive speech. In the first such case, Schenck v. U.S. (1919), Brandeis joined the other judges in upholding the defendant’s conviction, based on Holmes’s “clear and present danger” test. In subsequent cases, however, he usually dissented. His concurring opinion in Whitney v. California (1927) modified Holmes’s test in a way that expanded the right of free expression. He insisted on a distinction between dangerous acts and expressions of opinions, writing that “no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present, unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion.” Subsequent Courts would adopt and then further liberalize Brandeis’s approach to the issue. In emphasizing the influence of Brandeis’s judicial opinions, Urofsky occasionally yields to the temptation of exaggeration. For instance, when examining Brandeis’s dissenting opinion in Gilbert v. Minnesota (1920), Urofsky asserts that this dissent began the Supreme Court’s application of the Bill of Rights’ limitations on the federal government to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment—a practice that is commonly called “incorporation.” Justice John Marshall Harlan, however, had already argued in favor of incorporation during the late nineteenth century. Even earlier, moreover, Representative John Bingham and other members of Congress responsible for creating the Fourteenth Amendment had explained that the term “privileges or immunities” refers to the first eight amendments, thereby setting the foundation for incorporation. Urofsky is nevertheless correct in emphasizing that Gilbert moved the court a long way toward the landmark decision in Gitlow v. New York (1925), which held that the liberty protected in the Fourteen Amendment includes the substantive liberty of speech guaranteed in the First Amendment. He fails, though, to acknowledge that the Gitlow opinion was an example of “substantive due process.” In constitutional jurisprudence, Brandeis will always be associated with the value of individual privacy. Early in his career, in 1890, he joined with his law partner, Samuel Warren, in publishing the highly influential article “Right to Privacy,” which criticized journalists and other who intrude into other persons’ private lives. In the Fourth Amendment case Olmstead v. U.S. (1928), where the majority held that wiretapping was permissible, Brandeis wrote one of the more seminal dissents in the history of the Court. It was here that he declared that the Constitution requires the government to respect a comprehensive right of privacy, which he defined as the “right to

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be let alone.” Later in the century, the Court would adopt Brandeis’s position on wiretapping. His dissent would also help provide a foundation for abortion rights and other spheres of individual autonomy. Although Urofsky has mostly praise for Brandeis, he does acknowledge a few weaknesses. Like most progressives of the time, he says, Brandeis was “remarkably indifferent” to issues of race. Urofsky notes, however, that in the racial cases that came to the Court, Brandeis and the majority usually ruled in favor of African American petitioners. He joined, for instance, the famous fourth footnote of U.S. v. Caroline Products (1938), which recognized a stricter scrutiny of laws that aim at “discrete and insular minorities.” Another blind spot of the justice, according to Urofsky, was the extent to which Brandeis played an inappropriately active role in political affairs while he was on the bench. Especially during the New Deal period, he frequently held consultations with members of the executive branch and even with President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself. Although Urofsky finds no evidence that such conduct affected his judicial behavior, the conduct was not consistent with Brandeis’s own principles of judicial restraint. Louis D. Brandeis: A Life is a large book, but it will prove well worth the time and effort required to read it for a variety of readers interested in legal history, the progressive movement, or the period from the late nineteenth century until World War II. The book is especially useful as a reference source for readers interested in a specific topic relating to Brandeis’s life or career. Thomas Tandy Lewis

Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 1 (Sept. 1, 2009): 16. The Economist 392, no. 8650 (September 26, 2009): 97-98. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 14 (July 15, 2009): 60. Library Journal 134, no. 15 (September 15, 2009): 63-64. The New York Times Book Review, September 27, 2009, p. 13. The New Yorker 85, no. 37 (November 16, 2009): 81. The Washingtonian 44, no. 12 (September, 2009): 13. Weekly Standard 15, no. 4 (October 12, 2009): 28-32. The Wilson Quarterly 33, no. 4 (Autumn, 2009): 100-101.

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LOVE AND SUMMER Author: William Trevor (1928) Publisher: Viking Penguin (New York). 212 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Novel Time: Late 1950’s Locale: Ireland A chance meeting at a funeral leads to a summer romance between a photographer and a farmer’s wife in this novel set against a broadly painted canvas of rural Irish life Principal characters: Florian Kilderry, an itinerant photographer Ellie Dillahan, formerly a foundling, now a farm wife Dillahan, a rural farmer and Ellie’s husband Miss Connulty, proprietor of a bed and breakfast Joseph Paul Connulty, manager of his family’s coal operation Bernadette O’Keefe, Joseph’s business assistant Orpen Wren, a pensioner once attached to a large estate

In the public square of rural Rathmoye, once a mill town, stands a bronze statue dedicated to a bony-featured, twenty-two-year-old Thomas John Kinsella, hero of the 1798 rebellion, who “Died for Ireland.” This memorial hints at some of the persisting divisions that have separated the local families, English from Irish, Protestant from Catholic, landed gentry from business class, and shopkeepers from farmers. In his consistently understated novel Love and Summer, William Trevor has masterfully filled out that rich social tapestry by focusing on the inhabitants of five houses that serve as locales for the action. The story begins at No 4 The Square, a former boardinghouse now run as a bed and breakfast and the site for a reception after the funeral of the socially prominent Eileen Connulty. A Catholic bishop has presided over the well-attended Mass for Eileen, who married into property, owning not only the bed and breakfast but also a coal company, a public house, and the local cinema. The deceased leaves behind adult twin children, a son and daughter, who, though they continue to live under the same roof, barely exchange a word with each other. Joseph Paul, Eileen’s son and decided favorite, had hoped to become a priest. Whereas most Irish mothers would have been ecstatic over the prospect, however, Eileen—perhaps to keep him as her own—dissuaded him from following a vocation at which she thought he would not succeed. Now he manages the family’s coal business, with considerable help from Bernadette O’Keefe, who, despite her unspoken desires, realizes that Joseph Paul is forever joined by an “iron bond” to his mother.

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Eileen was despised by her daughter, who is known simply as Miss Connulty. Her mother forbade her Christian name from being uttered in the house twenty years ago, after Miss Connulty became pregnant by a married man who then went off to war and later returned to his wife. After Mr. Connulty took his daughter to Dublin for an abortion, his wife burned the tainted bedsheets, condemned him as a murderer, consigned him to a bed in the attic, and refused to be buried next to him or share a gravestone, trusting that she would never meet up with him in the afterlife. Miss Connulty, denied any life until now, revels in being the new mistress of No 4 and wearing pieces from her mother’s considerable collection of jewelry. Florian Kilderry has come to town to dispose of his late parents’ property. He intends to take pictures of the burned-out movie theater (where an alcoholic Mr. Connulty died seventeen years ago) but, to the consternation of many, winds up photographing the funeral. Unlike the Connultys, Florian’s parents were devoted to each other. His mother was from an aristocratic family in Genoa, and his father met and courted her when, as a soldier in Italy, he became separated from his regiment. Florian’s mother even gave up her Catholic faith so she could be buried with her husband in the Protestant cemetery. Both of Florian’s parents were talented watercolorists, and their paintings became so much alike that it is difficult even for Florian to tell which of them created a given painting. They frequently opened their stately home, Shelhanagh, to partygoers who came down from Dublin for dances and lavish entertainments. Now rundown and in disrepair, its gardens full of rotting fruit, Shelhanagh is to be sold to pay off debts. Although Florian did not become the artist his parents would have liked, they (unlike Miss Connulty’s parents) never expressed disappointment in him. He became a lover of reading and even tried his hand at writing stories in bound record books, though they remained uncompleted. Having taken up photography quite by accident, Florian judges himself pretty much a failure at it, believing “the images he achieved were too slight, each one too ordinary a statement.” He intends to go into selfimposed exile in Scandinavia, taking with him only the watercolors in all their “faded dazzle,” his father’s watch, and his mother’s ring. Florian is an object of intense curiosity among the mourners and of immediate attraction to Ellie Dillahan, whose attention is drawn to his “delicate hands.” Ellie is associated with two places: the foundling home where she grew up and the farmstead where she was first a housekeeper and is now a wife. Cloonhill, a foundling home run by an order of Catholic nuns, was an unattractive concrete building, formerly the residence of a horse dealer. Imposing in size yet austere, it once housed fifteen girls who only infrequently left its confines. Ellie—even after she has had the good fortune to be chosen to work for Dillahan—continues to regard the sisters as surrogate mothers

William Trevor is one of Ireland’s premier writers. The author of fourteen novels and a dozen collections of short fiction, he has won numerous awards, including the Hawthornden Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, as well as being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

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and retains much of the simplicity of her childlike, convent-raised faith. She still thinks of the affection she has come to feel for Dillahan in terms of the nuns’ spiritualized notions of Jesus, pictured with his heart afire with love. The farm to which she goes is, however, a haunted place, since seven years earlier Dillahan’s young wife and child were killed in a tractor accident for which Dillahan feels tremendous, unrelieved guilt. One of Rathmoye’s oldest fixtures is Orpen Wren, who wanders the streets and waits at the railway station for the long-discontinued trains to arrive. Once hired to catalog the extensive library at Lisquin, the impressive seat of the English St. Johns, he now goes about carrying old family papers: documents of births and burials, bills of sale and debt, the viceroy’s letters about the rebellion and famine. The library has long since been pillaged by collectors, and the estate was auctioned off more than thirty years ago. Although Lisquin is now just a shell, with only the back-gate lodge intact, Orpen talks of it as if it is still standing. Orpen mistakes Florian for one of the St. John descendants, George Anthony. Florian, out of compassion, plays along with him, despite the St. Johns’ ignoble family history of debauched and disreputable sons who brought their women home to Lisquin, shaming and breaking the hearts of their parents (as Miss Connulty’s out-ofwedlock pregnancy did). Old Orpen, as if time had stopped and yesterday were today, “lived in both the present and the past”; mostly, however, “It’s the past that has him in its grip.” As someone whose “memory [is] turned inside out,” he becomes an exemplar of the way that memory can make a muddle of the truth of what actually happened, so he embodies Trevor’s concern with myths about history, both personal and national. Like Ireland itself, none of these characters can escape what has occurred in the past as they negotiate what is happening in the present. Trevor is expert at effortlessly shifting his narrative from past to present, as well as at viewing his characters simultaneously both from the outside and from within. The core of Love and Summer resides in Trevor’s subtle handling of the summer love that blossoms tentatively and passes fleetingly between Florian and Ellie. Florian is initially reticent and protractedly indecisive, as unsure of himself in human relationships as he is in his profession. For one thing, he sees himself as something of a transient, returning to Ireland only to dispose of the family property before moving on again. For another, he has always been a loner, losing himself in a world of books about other people’s experiences. Furthermore, he seems to doubt that any relationship can ever match in its absolute compatibility the innocent and idealized one that he had with his cousin Isabella when she visited Shelanagh on summer vacation—a time captured in one of his parents’ watercolors. In fact, in his own version of Orpen’s predisposition to conflate past and present, Florian often confuses Isabella and Ellie in his mind, a hint that he has not let go of an idyllic union of perfect companionship that will never be achieved again. As his liaison with Ellie develops in ways that neither one could have imagined from their first brief encounter, Florian guiltily regrets not putting a stop to things before they progressed too far. He finds himself being drawn further and further in, at first rationalizing that he does not want to cause her pain by ending their affair, then coming to enjoy

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the game of concealment and taking pleasure in the affair, until he realizes “too late” that just “tenderness in return” will no longer suffice. For her part, Ellie becomes increasingly bold, eventually not caring that others in the town are talking about her. It had seemed to her a natural progression from being Dillahan’s housekeeper to becoming his wife and sharing his bed. Although he has never reproached her for being childless, she considers their bond as one more of caring than of love. However ashamed she is over her feelings for Florian, and however much she doubts that the nuns could ever understand her actions, she retains her belief that “God is never not there for you, wherever you were, however you were.” He is always ready to forgive. Once, at Cloonhill, a sister had run off with the man who delivered their wood, only to become a beggar and eventually have her body recovered from a river. Now, recalling this episode, Ellie wonders “Could there really be an echo of that nun’s misery long ago in what so ordinarily had come about this summer . . . ?” Despite Florian’s hesitancy, she is ready to run off with him, but Orpen spies them together. Once again mixing up present and past, Orpen tells Dillahan that his first wife is carrying on with a St. John (mistaking Florian for George Anthony), claiming “the old trouble” has come again. Unwilling to inflict greater suffering on a husband who has done no wrong, Ellie remains with him. By remaining, she gives Miss Connulty, who begins as a voyeuristic gossiper but ends lost in reverie over what it might have been like to have a baby, a chance to become a supportive friend: She urges Ellie, if she should be pregnant, never to let them take the child away. Catastrophe has been blessedly averted through Dillahan’s chance misunderstanding and Ellie’s refusal to claim innocence, but her sacrifice of happiness earns a kind of salvation. Compact yet detailed, Love and Summer reveals more about the workings of the human heart in two hundred pages than most novels accomplish in twice that length. It can only further enhance Trevor’s reputation as one of the foremost masters of contemporary Irish literature. Thomas P. Adler

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 21 (July 1, 2009): 8. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 15 (August 1, 2009): 37. Library Journal 134, no. 13 (August 1, 2009): 74. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 18 (November 19, 2009): 54-55. The New York Times Book Review, September 20, 2009, p. 11. The New Yorker 85, no. 28 (September 14, 2009): 109. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 27 (July 6, 2009): 33. Spectator 310, no. 9444 (August 29, 2009): 35. The Times Literary Supplement, September 4, 2009, p. 19.

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LOWBOY Author: John Wray (1971) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 258 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: New York City In Wray’s compelling thriller, a paranoid schizophrenic teenager escapes from his caretakers into New York City’s subway system on a delusional mission to save the world from global warming Principal characters: Will Heller, also known as Lowboy, a sixteen-year-old paranoid schizophrenic off his medications but on a mission to save the world Yda Heller, also known as Violet, Will’s thirty-nine-year-old mother Ali Lateef, police detective and specialist in missing persons Ulysses S. Kopeck, Will’s therapist Emily Wallace, Will’s teenaged love interest Rafa Ramirez, a forty-year-old bag lady

John Wray has established a significant critical reputation for exploring new territory in both content and style with each new book he writes. His first novel, The Right Hand of Sleep (2001), for example, focuses on a tortured love triangle on the eve of the Nazi occupation of Austria; his second book, Canaan’s Tongue (2005), explores the hold that a humbug preacher and outlaw slave trader has on his followers in Mississippi before and during the Civil War. Part literary thriller and part compelling character study, Lowboy sets yet another new course for the author, who abandons historical material in his third novel in favor of contemporary experience. In this case, readers are swept along with the teenaged protagonist, whose escape from psychiatric care has set into motion a frantic effort to find him before he can harm himself and others. A major part of the novel’s appeal is the desire to find out what happens to Will Heller and those he encounters on his manic flight through the New York City subway system. Just as compelling as the chase, however, is the empathy that the author engenders for his principal characters, especially the beautiful but schizophrenic Will. Indeed, reviewers have been unanimous in their praise for Wray’s ability to navigate the complexities of his main character’s “cramped and claustrophobic brain.” Narrated sometimes in the first person and sometimes in limited third person, the novel makes readers privy to Will’s visual and auditory hallucinations. His underground journey is marked by numerous “signs and tells,” and his skewed responses to his environment elevate the ordinary sights and sounds of urban mass transit into something extraordi-

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nary. While waiting on the platform between trains, for instance, Will tries to read the code implicit in the argon lights that appear to be “stuttering like pigeons”; he also tries to taste the “clot of air” that each passing train leaves in its wake, “hot from its own great compression and speed, whipping the litter up into a cloud.” Once aboard the next train, Will muses on the nature of each subway car as a “controlled environment,” an expression of “the designers’ fear”—and Will’s paranoia as well—for “no one sat with their back turned to anyone else.” Will—or Lowboy, as he was called in the hospital—is on a mission to save the world from global warming by losing his virginity. How he has made this bizarre connection offers further evidence of his psychiatric disorder; an avid reader, Will has conflated reports of the dire consequences of planetary climate change with Buddhist teaching that the world and the self are one. Thus, he comes to believe that if he can release his own vital heat through coitus, the world itself will cool down. “I read it in National Geographic,” Will offers as cockeyed evidence of the validity of his theory. It is clear that the author has done his homework about the condition labeled paranoid schizophrenia, which, according to recent research, generally manifests itself in individuals in their twenties and rarely in someone as young as Will. The protagonist’s diagnosis dates, his mother tells Lateef, from four years earlier, when he was only twelve. This early onset of the disease makes the character’s situation all the more desperate and poignant, and a reader’s concern about his fate all the more intense. On his own, this “pale and fine-featured” adolescent may very well be an easy victim of urban crime and a danger to himself: Individuals with his condition have a higher suicide rate than do members of the general population. To complicate matters even more, readers soon discover that Will may also be a serious threat to those around him. Prior to his hospitalization, he pushed a female friend, Emily Wallace, onto the subway tracks, and upon his escape, he chooses her to be the one to help him “open like a flower.” She eventually becomes his willing but generally unwitting fellow fugitive, drawn to Will because of his looks and because of a shared sense of alienation. In part, she views her dalliance with Will as an act of teenaged rebellion, as a means of further aggravating her already exasperated father. The fact that there are eventually two young people on the run—one endangered by the other—heightens the suspense. Wray further enriches the plot by establishing a complex dynamic between the two teenaged runaways and their two principal pursuers: Will’s mother and the detective assigned to the case. Indeed, Wray’s narrative strategy involves transitioning back and forth between the perspectives of these two pairs of characters. It can be argued that the unfolding relationship between Yda Heller and Ali Lateef

Born John Henderson, John Wray is the author of The Right Hand of Sleep (2001) and Canaan’s Tongue (2005). He won a prestigious Whiting Writers’ Award in 2001, and Granta named him one of the Best Young American Novelists in 2007.

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will arouse in some readers a level of interest equal to that engendered by the protagonist and his companion. Will’s mother is a beautiful Austrian immigrant whose agitated concern for her child hints at a level of responsibility that transcends the maternal instinct. In some ways, the deciphering of her story offers detective Ali Lateef as great a challenge as the one he confronts in trying to find her son. In fact, Lateef, a lover of puzzles, traces his interest in this particular “Special Category Missing” (SCM) case to the moment that he was given a note that Will had left for his mother in his hospital room, a note discovered after he fled the facility. Written in a substitution cipher, which Lateef himself translates by using the boy’s pet name for his mother, the word “Violet,” the message declares Will’s mission. It also links his prospective deflowering to his mother’s flower-related nickname. The bond between parent and child, in this case, runs deeper than what Lateef may at first suspect, and the unlocking of that puzzle takes him almost as long as it does to find the runaway protagonist. Indeed, the convoluted relationship between this particular mother and son proves to be as deeply interconnected as the subway system that forms both the agency and the backdrop of the novel’s central chase. Wray himself has confessed that he wrote at least half of the book while riding the New York City subway, thus immersing himself in the ebb and flow of that environment. The tunnels through which the trains run twenty-four hours a day, each day of the year, circle, the author tells readers more than once, so that they resemble the image of the ouroboros, or tail-devouring snake. Such is also the nature of the subconscious, Will’s in particular. He acknowledges that he is a “prisoner” of his “own brainpan,” a “hostage” of his “limbic system.” Try as he might to quiet his teeming brain—Will frequently presses his hands over his eyes to slow this thoughts—“words and signs” proliferate even “behind his eyelids.” In Will’s paranoid state, the whole world is negatively self-referential. This may account for his nickname, Lowboy. On the one hand, this appellation calls attention to the fact that he has made a concerted effort to make himself smaller and less conspicuous, just as a lowboy, or dressing table, attracts less notice than a highboy, or tall chest of drawers. At the beginning of the novel, before Emily takes him to a secondhand store for a change of wardrobe, Will hides in his baggy clothes, which serve both to disguise his prepossessing physical form and to insulate him from outside influence. Lowboy’s nickname is also a reference to the fact that society often regards the mentally ill as furniture to be warehoused or kept out of sight. On his underground journey, Will confronts a number of deinstitutionalized individuals, who presumably suffer from a condition akin to his own, such as the enormous bag lady Rafa Ramirez or the Dutchman, who calls Lowboy a “colleague.” Thus, Will is attuned to street people and they to him. Members of the general population, however, tend to consign to the periphery of their experience all such individuals who fail to meet certain expectations of “normality.” Just as Will does, both his mother and Lateef make their own ironically selfreflexive journeys. For her part, Yda retreats increasingly far inside herself as she gets increasingly close to finding her son. She ends, as she began, in a state of “spirit-

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less blankness.” Ali, who was originally attracted to searching for missing persons because he had always been good at solving riddles, discovers, in the final analysis, that he has been “too stupid or too self-satisfied, or too smitten” with Will’s mother to make a success of his present task. The truth may lie in the fact that as a left-brain individual—grounded, he believes, in reality and logic—Ali is no match for those, such as Will and Yda Heller, who live almost exclusively in the right brain, the region of fantasy and intuition. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that both Hellers are associated, time and time again in the novel, with references to right-brain activities, especially music and the visual arts. For example, Will’s father Alex was a jazz musician—he and Yda met at a Vienna club called Porgy and Bess—and Will often finds himself humming jazz tunes. He particularly likes the compositions of Bix Beiderbecke, an American cornet player of German heritage who was a jazz pioneer and a tragic victim of life in the fast lane. Furthermore, Yda, whom Lateef compares to a portrait by the family of seventeenth-century Flemish painters surnamed Brueghel, “awkward and immaculate at once,” makes a living by painting mannequins for department stores. Lateef’s struggle to comprehend Will—and his mother—may remind readers of the task faced by the psychiatrist Martin Dysart in the play Equus (pr., pb. 1973) by British dramatist Peter Shaffer. Dysart too is confronted with the investigative challenge of trying to decipher the dark fantasies of a troubled adolescent male, the seventeen-year-old Alan Strang, who unaccountably blinds six horses. In exploring the puzzle of Strang’s psychosexual landscape, Dysart faces some truths about himself and comes to realize his own shortcomings. Similarly, Lateef , who was originally christened Rufus White but was later renamed by his father—one of Allah’s many sacred names is al-Lateef, the gentle prober of the hidden and secret—eventually uncovers cracks in his own heretofore carefully maintained persona, including his vaunted patience and objectivity. Nevertheless, as readers are informed at several points in the novel, Lateef ultimately survives his harrowing and life-altering twenty-four-hour pursuit of Will. He has many years before him to reassemble the pieces of his monkish façade. Will is not so fortunate. Will’s tragic fate in the novel dramatizes the continuing plight of mentally challenged people in the United States. As a whole, Lowboy compellingly depicts not only the inadequacies of the social safety net put in place to secure their welfare but also the many persistent misconceptions and prejudices attendant upon any diagnosis of mental disorder. Despite many well-intentioned efforts, those suffering from mental illness are still unfairly stigmatized. In this regard, Wray skillfully leads his readers to realize that Will’s mission to save the world is essentially an effort to give some meaning to his life other than the “sickness” that defines him and limits his expectations. “Why was I born?” he repeatedly asks himself. During the course of this compelling novel, readers may very well pose the same question. S. Thomas Mack

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 9/10 (January 1, 2009): 47. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 22 (November 15, 2008): 1179. Library Journal 133, no. 16 (October 1, 2008)): 64. London Review of Books 31, no. 11 (June 11, 2009): 28-30. New Criterion 27 (May, 2009): 33-38. The New Republic 240, no. 7 (May 6, 2009): 45-47. New York 42, no. 8 (March 9, 2009): 96-97. The New York Times Book Review, March 1, 2009, p. 22. The New Yorker 85, no. 7 (March 30, 2009): 69-71. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 38 (September 22, 2008): 35. School Library Journal 55, no. 3 (March, 2009): 176-177. World Literature Today 83, no. 2 (March/April, 2009): 8.

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MAGNIFICENT DESOLATION The Long Journey Home from the Moon Authors: Buzz Aldrin (1930) with Ken Abraham (1951) Publisher: Crown (New York). 336 pp. $27.00 Type of work: Autobiography Time: 1969 to 2009 Locale: Earth; the Moon This sequel to Aldrin’s 1973 autobiography Return to Earth describes his second and third marriages, his battles with depression and alcoholism, and his life from 1969 to 2009 Principal personages: Buzz Aldrin, also known as Edwin A. Aldrin, Jr., the second person to walk on the Moon Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the Moon Michael Collins, command module pilot during the first moon landing Joan Archer Aldrin, Aldrin’s first wife Beverly Van Ziles Aldrin, Aldrin’s second wife Lois Driggs Cannon Aldrin, Aldrin’s third wife Marianne, a woman with whom Aldrin had a love affair Dr. Don Flinn, psychiatrist Admiral Bud Scoles, Aldrin’s sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous Captain Joseph Pursch, a U.S. Navy psychiatrist Clancy Imislund, a recovering alcoholic who ran the Los Angeles Midnight Mission

Buzz Aldrin’s Magnificent Desolation—the second volume of his autobiography, cowritten with Ken Abraham—takes its name from the words he used to describe the lunar landscape during his historic walk on the Moon. The book is unusual in that it overlaps significantly with Aldrin’s first autobiography. The first eight chapters of Magnificent Desolation cover the same period as the first three and last four chapters of Return to Earth (1973; cowwritten with Wayne Warga). However, there is some justification for the overlap. First, the high point of Aldrin’s life was his two-hour walk on the Moon in 1969, so both books include the event. Second, although the first book described his initial bouts with depression, the second book recounts his continuing struggles, so repeating his account of the first episodes provides context for the later ones. Third, while he described episodes of binge drinking in his first book, Aldrin was still in a state of denial regarding his alcoholism at the time he wrote it. Thus, though the second book may recount many of the same incidents as the first, it does so from a different perspective and to different purpose. Although Aldrin became famous for his achievements as an astronaut, Magnificent

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Desolation is really about his lifelong battle with depression and alcoholism, which caused the breakups of his first two marriages. The first three chapters of the book, describing the first moon landing, are really just a prologue, and the landing is covered in greater detail in other books, especially First on the Moon: A Voyage with Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr. (1970) by Gene Farmer and Dora Jane Hamblin. First on the Moon also provides some biographical de- Buzz Aldrin, the second astronaut to tails, especially regarding Aldrin’s contribu- walk on the moon, has written several tions to the space program, that are not found books, including two children’s books in his own two books. about space. Ken Abraham is a bestIncluding three chapters on the lunar land- selling author known for his ing provides a key to understanding Aldrin. collaborations with celebrities and Like most astronauts, Aldrin is highly com- high-profile public figures. petitive, so the idea of being number two at anything is anathema to him. The decision for Neil Armstrong to be the first person to walk on the Moon and Aldrin to be the second was based on the practical problem of how best to exit the lunar module while wearing spacesuits. Aldrin described sharing the vessel with Armstrong as similar to two large football players sharing a tent designed for two Cub Scouts. It was simply easier for the one closer to the hatch to go first, and Armstrong’s duty station placed him in that position. Although Aldrin could intellectually understand the decision, it has always bothered him emotionally that he was number two by nineteen minutes. Aldrin’s depression may have been hereditary. Both his mother and his maternal grandfather committed suicide, and both Armstrong and command module pilot Michael Collins had an easier time adjusting to life after the moon landing than Aldrin did. Armstrong became an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Cincinnati and a consultant to Chrysler, and Collins went to work for the State Department and then moved to the Smithsonian Institution, where he became director of the National Air and Space Museum. There have never been any reports of either of them suffering from depression. At first, it appeared that Aldrin was having a midlife crisis when he had an affair with a woman he calls Marianne in both Back to Earth and Magnificent Desolation. Those who have read Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff (1979) will not be surprised to learn that Aldrin was among the astronauts who occasionally cheated on their wives. However, his affairs consisted of a series of one-night stands until he met Marianne after his mission to the Moon. As a result of his ongoing affair with Marianne, Aldrin seriously considered leaving his wife Joan, to whom he had been married since 1954. He could not make up his mind, however, and Marianne got tired of waiting and broke off their relationship.

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In 1971, Aldrin left the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to return to the Air Force, and he became commandant of the Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. One of his predecessors in the job was Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier and the single most important figure in The Right Stuff. However, Aldrin had never been a test pilot himself and had never commanded so much as a fighter squadron. Instead, Aldrin had spent three and a half years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology becoming a rocket scientist and then seven and a half years at NASA as an astronaut. He flew on the last Gemini mission and the fifth Apollo mission, so he was not involved in testing either spacecraft. Furthermore, he had never commanded a space mission. On the other hand, Aldrin had flown sixty-six combat missions during the Korean War, so he understood the needs of combat aircraft. In addition to walking on the Moon, he had set the record for extravehicular activity, at five hours and twenty-six minutes, during his Gemini mission. Thus, he was familiar with working under extreme physical conditions, a skill necessary to all test pilots. Unfortunately, Aldrin had a fundamental disagreement of policy with his superiors. He felt that all pilots, especially test pilots, needed to be proficient in all kinds of aircraft. His superiors felt that pilots should specialize in a particular kind of plane, such as fighters or bombers. The same year he began his first command assignmenet, Aldrin began to show signs of depression, so he sought psychiatric help. First, he consulted with the flight surgeon at Edwards, who referred him to an Air Force psychiatrist in San Antonio. Both men made the same diagnosis: Aldrin’s life up to 1969 had been highly structured and goal-oriented. After going to the Moon, however, Aldrin could not find a new, equally compelling or consuming goal around which to structure his life. He could not keep the resulting depression a secret, and his superiors learned about his treatments. Thus, by mutual agreement with his superiors, Aldrin retired from the Air Force with the rank of colonel in 1972. Now aimless, he made television commercials for Dynamark Lawn Tractors and Volkswagen. He began seeing Doctor Don Flinn for his depression and continued to do so until 1975. Aldrin had first met Flinn in 1963 when he was applying to become an astronaut. It was at Flinn’s recommendation that Aldrin began going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings because of his heavy drinking. However, Aldrin was not prepared to admit that he had a drinking problem as well. Aldrin had become a binge drinker while serving in the Air Force, where such behavior was employed as a common method to relieve stress. However, his structured life as an Air Force pilot and astronaut kept his drinking under control. On the other hand, he mentions carrying a bottle of scotch in his luggage during business trips. After retiring from the Air Force, he lost the rigid structure that had limited his alcoholic binges. He began to drink even more heavily, favoring bourbon, scotch, and gin. He consumed as much as a bottle a day and got in the bad habit of misplacing his car. Even worse, on one occasion he drove his car into a ditch while Joan was a passenger. The police did not investigate until several hours later, so his blood alcohol level was never checked.

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In 1973, Aldrin published Return to Earth. Since it described his fight with depression, he was asked to serve on the board of directors of the National Association for Mental Health. In 1974, he served as the organization’s national chairman. Aldrin finally divorced Joan in 1975. In public, Aldrin’s drinking made him less inhibited and more upbeat. He would go as long as two weeks without taking a drink and then go through an entire bottle at one sitting. On August 7, 1975, he checked into the Beverly Manor, an alcoholism rehabilitation center. He stayed there for twentyeight days, and after his release he managed to stay sober for a year. That year, he met Beverly Van Ziles, the interior decorator who became his second wife. She and Dr. Flinn persuaded him to check into the alcoholism rehabilitation center. The next year, Aldrin attended the Operation Understanding banquet in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the National Council on Alcoholism. Aldrin was one of fifty-two people who announced to the public that they were alcoholics. Others making the announcement included former Congressman Wilbur Mills, actors Dick Van Dyke and Robert Young, and television game-show host Garry Moore. However, a few months later, Aldrin began drinking again and divorced Beverly. Aldrin again checked into a rehabilitation center, St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, California, but stayed for only a few days. Despite the brevity of his stay at St. John’s Hospital, Aldrin benefited from the experience because while there he met retired Navy admiral Bud Scoles. Scoles became Aldrin’s sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous. With Scoles’s encouragement, Aldrin attended ninety meetings in ninety days. Aldrin also began seeing a Navy psychiatrist, Captain Joseph Pursch, who specialized in treating alcoholism in armed forces personnel. Pursch arranged for Aldrin to check into a Navy hospital for treatment. Aldrin then became part of a recovery group run by Clancy Imislund, a nonprofessional who was in charge of the Los Angeles Midnight Mission for homeless people, alcoholics, and drug addicts. Aldrin finally took his last drink in October, 1978. Once sober, Aldrin began working on developing new space technologies. In 1984, he began promoting a return to the Moon. In 1985, he began thinking seriously about going to Mars and developed the concept of the Mars Cycler. This would be a spacecraft that perpetually shuttled between the Earth and Mars, using each planet’s gravity as a booster and rotating to create artificial onboard gravity for its crew. In 1993, Aldrin published a science-fiction novel, Encounter with Tiber, in which spaceships use solar winds to propel them, approaching the speed of light. Aldrin met Lois Griggs Cannon in 1985, and they were married in 1988. Also divorced, Cannon had been raised as a Mormon and had graduated from Stanford University. One of the first things Aldrin did after beginning their relationship was to take Lois to an Alcoholic Anonymous meeting so that she would know what she was getting into. She taught him to ski, and he taught her to scuba dive. (Aldrin had been the first astronaut to train for space walks by scuba diving.) Lois had inherited stock in the Western Savings and Loan, originally founded by her father, but the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980’s rendered it worthless. Since then, they have lived on Aldrin’s pension and income from books, public appearances, and consulting agreements.

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Aldrin reveals in Magnificent Desolation that he still experiences bouts of depression. He describes one incident that occurred as recently as 2000. Aldrin suffered a minor stroke in 2005. He underwent an operation that removed a blood clot and returned to normal. He concludes his autobiography saying that he is still sober and married to Lois. Thomas R. Feller

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 19/20 (June 1, 2009): 25. Bookseller 5392 (July 24, 2009): 37. The Economist 392, no. 8640 (July 18, 2009): 82-83. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 10 (May 15, 2009): 66. Library Journal 134, no. 12 (July 1, 2009): 119. The New York Times Book Review, July 12, 2009, p. 18. Science News 171, no. 5 (February 3, 2007): 79. The Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2009, p. W8.

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MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son Author: Michael Chabon (1963) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 306 pp. $25.99 Type of work: Essays In this collection of subtly interconnected essays, the author contemplates what it means to be a man in the twenty-first century Despite their diversity of topic and their previous publication in various periodicals—principally in Details— the essays collected in Manhood for Amateurs are strongly interrelated. The book groups them thematically under section titles such as “Exercises in Masculine Affection,” “Styles of Manhood,” and “Studies in Pink and Blue.” They are even more closely tied by the key word in the book’s title, “amateurs,” and ultimately by the thread of Michael Chabon’s abiding interests and passions. It is clear that Chabon chose his title carefully for its constructive associations. He concedes that “we must accept the inevitable connotation of hopeless ineptitude that amateur carries . . . ,” but in the positive sense, an amateur (the term derives from the French word for “lover”) is one who pursues a subject or discipline with passion, though generally with little or no tangible reward. As Chabon sees it, there are two ways in which one may be an “amateur” man: in forebodings of failure and doom and in the sharing of enthusiasms that mark one as a “fan.” The enterprises a boy or man undertakes and the attempts he makes to master his roles in life may be doomed to failure. Chabon explains this in his opening essay, “The Losers’ Club,” about his unsuccessful attempt at age ten to start a comic book fan group. Although his mother encouraged this venture (an “overwhelming maternal task”), he could not interest other children in joining. He reveals that he then “began to think of myself as a failure. It’s a habit I have never lost.” Now that he has children of his own, Chabon derives a sense of strength and confidence from his life as a husband and father (and also as a writer). He nonetheless asserts, “A father is a man who fails every day. Sometimes things work out. . . . Success, however, does nothing to diminish the knowledge that failure stalks everything you do.” Failure threatens in both the practical and the emotional realms. In the emotional realm, Chabon admits that he tries but often fails to understand his children’s emotions, especially those of his daughters: . . . while I vocally admire my daughters themselves, I don’t fully understand them. . . . When one of them is feeling sad, or crushed, or furious, or anxious, . . . I find myself unable to jolly or cajole or, worst of all, sympathize her out of it in the way I can almost always manage to do with the one of the boys. . . . There is a mystery in those heads that I

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will never stop trying to solve, even if the very act of seeking solution, of viewing women in terms of mystery, damns me forever to defeat and ineptitude.

Likewise, in the practical realm, many of the accomplishments expected of a father and husband are almost beyond his capability, according to Chabon. He describes how, confronted with the job of installing towel racks at home, he picked up his electric drill and screwdriver, suspecting that he “may well have looked as if I knew what I was doing.” He does install the towel rack, and the towels, he says, are hanging from it to this day, but “I fully expect, at any moment, in the dead of night, to hear a telltale clatter on the tiles.” In “Faking It,” Chabon asserts that men develop a knack for dissimulating competence in both practical and emotional matters. “This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to . . . behave as if you have everything under your control even when you have just sailed your boat over the falls.” Many women scorn the allegedly male trait of false assurance, and conscientious men resolve to avoid it. Chabon writes, “When I became a father, I made a promise to myself not to pretend to knowledge I did not possess, not to claim authority I plainly lacked, not to hide my doubts and uncertainties, my setbacks and regrets, from my children.” He learns, though, that there are forces within and without that tend to undermine such a resolution: He confesses to a “primal longing (which I think we all share) for inerrancy, . . . for the needle that always finds true north in a storm. And maybe that longing in one’s wife and children runs beyond the understanding of even the most painfully self-conscious of fathers.” Given these incentives, a sense of assurance and total competence are worthy goals, even if elusive. Chabon’s epigraph for this book is G. K. Chesterton’s remark that “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” Chabon is simply acknowledging that learning involves continuing to engage in trial and error until, if ever, one gets it right. As he sees it, the freedom to explore, to engage in trial and error, during childhood is something modern-day parents seldom allow, with all their “helmeting and monitoring, . . . corralling of children into certified zones of safety . . . ,” and he worries about the effect this lack of freedom may have on the development of children’s independence and imagination. In contrast, in “The Wilderness of Childhood,” he recalls the Maryland region where he grew up and the “incredible degree of freedom my parents gave me to adventure there,” with at least the potential for “frightening encounters with genuine menace, far from the help or interference of mother and father . . . ” In adulthood, he emphasizes, parenting also entails continual trial and error. The second, and more important, way in which one may be an “amateur man” is in sharing one’s enthusiasms and passions with those one loves. To Chabon this means, first and foremost, sharing with his children. In the essay titled “The Amateur Family,” he says, Perhaps there is no perfect word for the kind of people I have raised my children to be: a word that encompasses obsessive scholarship, passionate curiosity, curatorial tenderness, and an irrepressible desire to join in the game . . . the closest I have ever come for myself is amateur, in all the original best senses of the word: a lover, a devotee; a person driven by passion and obsession. . . .

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In a way, this project builds upon his mother’s encouragement of his comic book club enterprise. Chabon also recalls a gift of baseball trading cards from his father that had the same effect. The qualities that made him lonely as a boy he can now share with his children, instilling in them a passion for life while also gaining from them the sense of community he lacked in childhood. Despite employing Chesterton’s maxim, Chabon knows that the work of amateurs is often done well. Some have made significant Michael Chabon is one of the premier contributions in fledgling fields of study, as American authors of contemporary did Heinrich Schliemann when he discovered fiction. His books include The the ruins of ancient Troy, long considered a Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), the mythical place. In the twenty-first century, Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing manhood itself may be a myth. The old cer- Adventures of Kavalier and Clay tainties about manhood have vanished and (2000), The Yiddish Policemen’s not only through gender politics. As women Union (2007), and the nonfiction have evolved their social roles and the man- collection Maps and Legends (2008). ner in which they live, so have men been compelled to change, indeed, to relearn every aspect of what they thought they knew. Chabon’s subtitle—“The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son”— does not signify that he is focused exclusively on the roles men take on in life. Many contemporary essays on manhood and fatherhood do exhibit such a limited focus. The result is often a very narrow treatment of the subject, devolving into condescending professional advice on “new roles for men” or personal memoirs written in a selfconsciously hip or flippant tone, suggesting ambiguity toward evolving masculine roles. Chabon, on the other hand, embraces his subject wholeheartedly, with a much broader perspective than the subtitle implies. Although he has much to say in this book about male-female relationships, the book is really about all aspects of being male. His essays constitute a living record of Chabon’s development as a man, a development that may be bound up with his adult roles but is not limited to those roles. He seems to miss the 1970’s, during which he grew up, replete as that decade was with contradictions for males: He was free to explore on his own, as many boys have been through the ages, but he also became an expert cook because his single mother, who worked a fulltime job, insisted that he learn the skill. To young adults in the 1970’s, the era may have seemed revolutionary, but despite its incongruities, it was, to Chabon in boyhood, the norm. There is a sense in which Chabon has now become conservative, calling for a return to values he sees as worth preserving from that time. Still, then as now, the world was full of unknowns and lacking in absolute answers.

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As Chabon’s essays make abundantly clear, an amateur at manhood can never hope to become professional (or fully proficient), and there will be practically no reward for the attempt. He writes of wondering what he will say when his children ask if he used drugs in his youth; of being at a loss for answers when one daughter reports seeing boys treat animals cruelly; of reluctance to allow his children out to play, despite his insistence on the freedom to explore. Often enough, he has to tell his children that he does not know the answers. Amateurs, however, with their lack of formal training, are free to tackle their challenges with an open mind—though as children and as adults, they may lose their way or fail to find it to begin with. They start each adventure not knowing where they are or where they will end up. Chabon says, though, that they arrive at a place that may not be perfect but can be good enough. Chabon tells of setting off as a fourteen-year-old with his younger brother Steve (to whom he dedicates Manhood for Amateurs) to find Schenley Park in Pittsburgh, not knowing the way but reasoning it out. At one point, he spotted the park across a gully but conceded—inwardly though not aloud to Steve—that “there was no obvious way to get to the other side. . . .” Eventually, they found their destination. Many years later, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, they searched for their mother on the beach where they became separated from her, and when they found her the younger brother had to concede, “We got lost.” Nevertheless, says Chabon, “Steve just went on trusting me, and following me, and doing what I told him we were going to do. . . .” In the same fashion, years later, the two full-grown brothers support each other as they explore the mysterious territory of early manhood and new fatherhood by reminding each other of all the times in youth when they were lost but found their way. That, says Chabon, is the purpose of all the stories they tell each other: It is ultimately “the story about the day their story began.” If Chabon’s ideal man is doomed to failure, it is because he strives—and is fated to go on striving—to know the unknowable, to reach the unreachable. His ideal male is humble because he is mystified by life, but he is also conscientious, compassionate, and considerate. Uncertain and tentative as it is, his life as a twenty-first century man still allows for greater individuality and vibrancy than manhood offered in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. The stories Chabon tells throughout this book are subtly interrelated, so that one must read them all to grasp his entire point. Almost by stealth, he has constructed a jigsaw-puzzle picture of his ideal male—ideal partly because he accepts his lack of perfection. It is a much broader picture than is offered by those authors who focus exclusively on responding to the repeated transformations of gender roles. Long before any of those transformations, a man must have at least a working definition of what it is to be a man, indeed to be human. Despite the current emphasis on differences in consciousness, women confront the same issue as men—that is, what it means to be a man or woman. One begins as an amateur, and remains an amateur, because that is how one learns about life. Thomas Rankin

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 22 (August 1, 2009): 4. Christianity Today 53, no. 11 (November. 2009): 70. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 12 (June 15, 2009): 640. Library Journal 134, no. 13 (August 1, 2009): 97-98. New York 42, no. 32 (October 5, 2009): 91. The New York Times, October 19, 2009, p. 1. The New York Times Book Review, October 18, 2009, p. 15. The New Yorker 85, no. 32 (October 12, 2009): 34-35. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 29 (July 20, 2009): 131. The Virginia Quarterly Review 85, no. 4 (Fall, 2009): 216.

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MARX’S GENERAL The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels Author: Tristram Hunt (1974) First published: The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels, 2009, in England Publisher: Metropolitan Books (New York). 430 pp. $32.00 Type of work: Biography, history Time: 1820-1895 Locale: Barmen, Germany; Manchester and London, England A portrait of Engels, who held an important position in his German family’s Manchester textile firm for twenty years, all the time playing the English foxhunting gentleman while supporting Karl Marx and writing his own revolutionary works Principal personages: Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), socialist writer and theorist who collaborated with Karl Marx and offered him financial support Karl Marx (1818-1883), socialist writer and theorist who founded world communism

Marx’s General, Tristram Hunt’s biography of Friedrich Engels, begins with Engels’s birth to the prosperous Rhineland businessman Friedrich Engels and his wife Elise on November 28, 1820. Engels was raised in the town of Barmen in Germany’s Wupper Valley. The family operated a yarn business and was known for its generous treatment of its employees, the ribbon makers, joiners, craftsmen, and others whom young Friedrich came to know on easy terms. The Wupper Valley region boasted many churches, visible evidence of the “aggressive” form of Lutheran Pietism that the Engelses shared to a degree. Hunt argues that, despite Engels’s complaints about his father’s perceived philistinism in later years, he enjoyed a comfortable and satisfying family life. At age fourteen, Engels enrolled in the gymnasium at Elberfeld, where a Dr. Clausen spurred his interest in Germany’s medieval past and the burgeoning Romantic period fostered by Friedrich Schiller and the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich and August Wilhelm. In 1836, he began writing his own Romantic effusions about ancient German heroes, but in 1837, his father grew tired of what he perceived as this nonsense. He took Engels out of school and soon assigned him to a commercial apprenticeship in the family’s firm in Bremen. In Bremen, Engels associated with a group of young radicals and immersed himself in the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley while writing for Telegraph for Deutschland under the pseudonym Friedrich Oswald. His letters from Wuppertal provided

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what Hunt calls “a magnificently brutal cri tique of the human costs of capitalism,” moti- Tristram Hunt teaches history at the vated perhaps by a rejection of the religious University of London. He is the author pietism of his youth, as seen in his enthusiasm of Building Jerusalem: The Rise and for David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu Fall of the Victorian City (2004), and (1835; The Life of Jesus: Or, A Critical Ex- he writes for The Times, the London amination of His History, 1843; better known Review of Books, and other as The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, publications. 1846). His next step after reading Strauss was to essay the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel’s idealist philosophy is neatly summarized by Hunt: “In its essence the passage of history consisted [for Hegel] of the organic growth of freedom and reason in civilization in a teleological manner, culminating in the fulfillment of the Spirit.” Not entirely satisfied by the Spirit, in 1841 Engels abandoned his desk job and accepted a year’s service with a Prussian artillery unit. Engels was stationed in Berlin, the scene in 1841 of a struggle between competing schools of Hegelian philosophy. The “Right Hegelians,” favored by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, regarded the state as the embodiment of history and committed to tradition and hierarchy, whereas the “Left Hegelians,” or “Young Hegelians,” saw their own era as but one stage in Hegel’s ongoing dialectic, in which neither Prussian rule nor Christianity represented an end to history. A damaging blow came to both schools in the form of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums (1841; The Essence of Christianity, 1854), a head-on materialist assault on the identity of Christian theology and Hegelian “rational mysticism.” The French Revolution encouraged the birth in the nineteenth century of several utopian socialist movements, such as those led by Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen. More radical were the early communists, especially the man Engels called the “first” communist of the party, Moses Hess. Influenced partly by a wealthy radical, August von Cieszkowski, Hess agitated for the abolishment of private property and improved living conditions for the proletariat, goals that attracted the Young Hegelians to his side and made Engels a communist for life. By 1830, the 550 cotton mills of Lancashire, England, employed over 100,000 workers, making the county a center of the Industrial Revolution. Engels arrived in Manchester (then part of Lancashire) in 1842, the year that city endured devastating riots that were suppressed by the army. He soon made two friends among the Chartists: George Julian Harvey, an advocate of insurrection, and James Leach, a weaver. It was, in Hunt’s description, the “sage, polemicist, and reactionary” Thomas Carlyle whose condemnation of capitalism spoke most loudly to Engels. In 1843, Engels met Mary Burns, the uneducated daughter of a Manchester factory hand, who became his lover and his guide to the hell of the mill communities. At about this time, Engels began writing about alienation, the concept that capitalism split humans away from their essential selves through the ruthless pursuit of private property. A corollary of alienation was the important Marxist teaching that social

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class was economically determined. The grievous social miseries Engels discovered in Manchester led him to produce his greatest work, Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (1845; The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, 1887). Only communism, he concluded, could alleviate the nation’s demoralization and pauperism. Ironically, it was only through their suffering that the exploited working classes could realize their class consciousness, and it is Engels’s focus on the proletariat that distinguishes him from the Owenites and Chartists, who did not grasp the broad socioeconomic forces that produced the workers. When Engels stopped over in Paris in 1844, he began a close relationship with Karl Marx that was to endure for forty years, with Engels providing the money that maintained Marx and his family. In a vital advance for communist ideology, they quickly scrapped the last vestiges of Hegelian idealism. As Engels wrote, “There is no independent entity called ‘history,’ using mankind to attain its ends: history is simply the purposeful activity of human beings.” Back home in Barmen, Engels delivered such inflammatory attacks against capitalism that all communist meetings in Elberfeld-Barmen were banned. Engels and Marx decided to relocate to Brussels, sparking some local fussing by bringing Mary with them. In Belgium, they collaborated on Die deutsche Ideologie (1932; The German Ideology, 1964), which, though not published for ninety years, was a bold statement of how social structures are produced by economic and technological forces. Returning to Paris in 1846, Engels womanized relentlessly (Hunt calls him “something of a sexual predator”) and was soon in trouble with the police for his political agitation. In 1847, he composed “Principles of Communism,” the basis of Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848; with Marx; The Communist Manifesto, 1850), a work much indebted to Engels’s study of the proletariat. A month after The Communist Manifesto came off the presses in London in February 1848, Europe was shocked by widespread revolutions, from Sicily to Austria. Marx and Engels chose Cologne as their base, and Marx’s newspaper the Neue Rheinische Zeitung as their propaganda organ. Engels quickly fled to Switzerland, however, where he supported the United States’ seizure of California from the “lazy Mexicans” and “advocated a policy of ethnic cleansing in the service of progress and history.” The formation of a revolutionary militia in Elberfeld brought Engels back to battle the Prussians, and he soon joined a force of eight hundred workers and fought with “mettle and distinction” in western Germany. The rebels failed, however, and Marx and Engels were soon back in England, where they conspired for the next forty years. Between 1850 and 1870, Engels devoted his life to Ermen & Engels, his family’s Manchester cotton firm, and to supporting Marx. These years, Hunt says, “provided the empirical foundations of” Marx’s great masterpiece, Das Kapital (1867, 1885, 1894; Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 1886, 1907, 1909; better known as Das Kapital). On June 23, 1851, a new challenge appeared for Engels: the birth of Henry Frederick Demuth, Marx’s illegitimate son by the Marxes’ housekeeper. Engels accepted the blame, hurting his own reputation, while Marx treated the boy “abominably,” in Hunt’s estimation.

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Engels had another family problem as well—his relationship with Mary Burns and her sister Lizzy, with whom he lived while at the same time traveling with the foxhunting set and maintaining his social position. To hide his unorthodox domestic arrangement, Engels kept two residences—one for business and entertaining his associates, another a mere half mile away for Mary and Lizzy. Engels’s passion for fox hunts led him into the Cheshire Hounds, the toniest of such groups, and provided him with “the visceral thrill of the chase.” Hunt therefore calls him the “original champagne communist.” Although in his last years Engels was to question the dogma of vulgar historical materialism—that is, of reducing all behavior to economic causes—he and Marx early on attacked its idealist mirror image, the belief that intellectual shifts are determined by the disembodied interaction of ideas rather than by socioeconomic forces. One casualty of historical materialism was Carlyle’s “great man theory” of history. Marxist historiography replaced this model of history as the story of a few individual actors with a model that emphasized class warfare and collective entities and movements as the agents of historical change. In 1850, Engels published Der deutsche Bauernkrieg in serial form (book 1870; The Peasant War in Germany, 1926), arguing that contemporary conditions in Germany resulted from the state of the nation’s agriculture, industry, roads, waterways, and commerce. At about this time, Engels became engrossed in the study of warfare, causing Marx to nickname him the General. For Engels, a nation’s military superstructure mirrored its socioeconomic base, and Britain thus lost its Crimean campaign not because of Lord Cardigan’s errors but because of its outdated socioeconomic system. Marx and Engels both reversed their thinking on colonialism in the 1850’s, shedding their view of it as a necessary step in capitalism and regarding it as a “tool of bourgeois hegemony.” Engels suffered a crippling blow in 1863, when Mary suddenly died, and Marx’s callousness at the event damaged their friendship for a while. Within two years, Lizzy had succeeded her sister as Engels’s “dear spouse,” as he called her. Finally, in 1868, came the great relief of publishing Das Kapital, the classic text of scientific socialism, with its outline of historical stages, its materialist theory of history, and its explanation of surplus value as the instrument of capitalist exploitation of the proletariat. Another great relief for Engels came in July, 1869, when he left Engels & Ermen with a settlement. In 1870, he moved with Lizzy to 122 Regent’s Park Road in London. Engels enjoyed a triumph in 1872 within the ranks of the International. The International, founded in 1864 in London, had grown to an estimated 800,000 members in a decade, and it bred a formidable rival for the workers’ cause in the former Young Hegelian Mikhail Bakunin. Exiled to Siberia, Bakunin escaped and made his way to America via Yokohama and San Francisco, and in December, 1861, he was back in London teaming up with another radical, Alexander Herzen. The anarchist Bakunin saw in communism a crushing state authoritarianism, but Marx and Engels succeeded in ousting him and his followers at the 1872 Hague Congress. The fight damaged the International, however, and it was dissolved four years later. Ensconced in Regent’s Park Road, Engels became that hated capitalist villain, the

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rentier, and by the time he died he had stocks worth $4 million in today’s currency. He suffered a blow when Lizzie died in 1878, but in her last hours Engels arranged for them to be married according to the rites of the Church of England. Three years later, Marx’s wife Jenny died, and in March, 1883, Marx himself was buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery. In his last years, Engels became “Marx’s bulldog,” as Hunt names him. Hunt forcefully rejects all claims that any Stalinist horrors can be traced to Engels, pointing out that some of Marx’s disciples would like to divert any guilt away from the founding father. Hunt sums up Engels’s gift to Marx eloquently: he “was to transform Marxism into one of the most persuasive and influential political philosophies in human history. . . .” Marx’s General is an excellent biography, elucidating in the best prose some of the subtlest arguments of both Hegel and Marx. Frank Day

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 21 (July 1, 2009): 14. The Economist 392, no. 8644 (August 15, 2009): 76-77. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 12 (June 15, 2009): 644. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 16 (October 22, 2009): 25-27. The New York Times, August 19, 2009, p. 1. The New Yorker 85, no. 32 (October 12, 2009): 123. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 25 (June 22, 2009): 41. Time 174, no. 11 (September 21, 2009): 22. The Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2009, p. W8.

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THE MECHANICS OF FALLING And Other Stories Author: Catherine Brady (1955) Publisher: University of Nevada Press (Reno). 248 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Short fiction Time: 1980’s to the early twenty-first century Locale: California, mostly the Bay Area Eleven stories, all but one from a female point of view, about the difficulty of finding something to cling to or believe in Ever since the 1920’s, commentators on the short-story form have claimed that it, more than the novel, is suited to represent the fractured nature and frantic pace of modern life. In this view, the novel offers a coherent vision, a structured world—real, imagined, or fantastic—into which a reader can settle and wander with some sense of familiarity and comfort. The short story, by contrast, offers fragments, glimpses, snapshots— often, as Frank O’Connor claimed, of those “lonely voices” on the fringes of society. Furthermore, practitioners of the short story frequently note that a reader’s involvement in a short story must be active and contributory. Unlike novels, in which much can be spelled out, short stories suggest, hint, and sometimes even feint, rather than explicitly telling. To put it another way, readers must fill in the blanks, make connections, and draw inferences in order to supply or perhaps even guess at “the meaning” of the text. These qualities are especially evident in many contemporary short stories, particularly those collected in Catherine Brady’s The Mechanics of Falling, and Other Stories. Plot has long since disappeared from the literary short story, replaced by structures based on repeated images or motifs, verbal echoes or reflecting incidents, or subtle repetitions of ideas or gestures. In Brady’s collection, details are often presented with apparent randomness, as though they were scattered pieces of a puzzle waiting to be assembled into a meaningful picture. Characters are similarly presented, through bits and pieces of information, so that they slowly emerge out of the shadows into the light. Quotation marks are not used, so the lines between direct and indirect speech, between a character’s thoughts and the narrator’s observations, are blurred. These narrative techniques encourage close reading, careful attention to every detail, and a willingness to suspend the desire for a transparent “meaning.” The opening story of the collection, “Looking for a Female Tenet,” uses a pun to set the tone and direction for the collection. It features two female Stanford students who have taken summer jobs as waitresses at a third-rate “resort” in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Their accommodations are shabby, their pay is inadequate, and the customers are cheap. Their only other female companion is the regular waitress, Ginny, who pins up an advertisement for a female “tenet,” mispelling “tenant.” Ginny’s malapropism

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points readers in the direction of the story’s point. Jules hails from an upper-middle-class home; she is sexually confident and experienced but not a good student. Mary Lee has escaped for the summer from a crowded home ruled by an angry and disappointed father, who is inclined to strike his children for real or imagined infractions. She is a straight-A student but inexperienced and lacking confi dence. The girls’ tedious and lonely lives are somewhat relieved by a band hired by the lodge. Jules takes up with Colin, the band’s lead singer, sharing sex and joints of marijuana. He has little to teach her except how not to shiver when he places ice cubes on her stomach. Mary Lee becomes friends with Owen, the only African American member of the band and the only one who is married. He encourages her reading, teaches her to sew a hem, and offers her experienced advice. The contrast between the two young women grows as the story progresses. Jules becomes increasingly daring, emboldened in part by marijuana but also operating from a more stable economic basis than is Mary Lee, who desperately needs to make enough money to pay for her senior year. Carelessness and bravado lead Jules first to antagonize, then to go off with, a couple of male customers, who drag her into the woods and attempt to rape her. She is saved by Mary Lee’s intervention. Shaken by the near rape and injured when one of the men punches her in the face, Jules is attended not by Colin but by Owen, who presses ice to her cheek. Owen’s anger at Jules’s stupidity rubs off on Mary Lee, but Owen insists that Mary Lee has something to learn from the experience. “Owen turned to Mary Lee and jabbed a finger at her. You! You stay smart! She didn’t say no. She didn’t say, I don’t want to.” Whether Mary Lee will find a female tenet remains unresolved, as does the question of what a “female tenet” might be and how a young woman can learn to believe it or rely on it. Similar questions haunt Judith of “The Dazzling World.” Traumatized by nearly dying in a suicidal automobile crash engineered by a neurotic boyfriend, she cannot decide how or whether to continue her four-year relationship with Cameron, an unsuccessful actor. When they plan to move in together, Judith forgets to bring the check that was to be the deposit on their joint apartment. It is unclear whether this was an honest mistake or an intentional way to avoid making the commitment. Judith takes a vacation to Guatemala to visit her sister’s archaeological dig, but her time there does nothing to help Judith make up her mind about Cam. His daring and eagerness seem only to increase her uncertainty. “Slender Little Thing” employs an unusual narrative device, reminiscent of the “Sirens” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922): Every sentence in the story’s opening paragraph is repeated later, in order. The device effectively marks temporal nodes in the narrative, as Cerise, the uneducated single mother of Sophie, raises both Catherine Brady teaches at the University of San Francisco. She has published two previous collections of stories, The End of the Class War (2000) and Curled in the Bed of Love (2002), which was a cowinner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

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her own daughter and Mason and Connor, two privileged sons of doctors. When their boys are grown, these doctors help Cerise obtain a menial job in a nursing home. When Sophie’s inevitable teenaged rebellion comes between them, Cerise manages her daughter’s anger with the same loving patience she used on Mason and Connor— and later on her elderly patients. The story’s title refers both to Sophie and to the bond between mother and daughter. When Sophie tries to break that bond by pretending to be pregnant by her worthless boyfriend, Cerise brushes Sophie’s hand with a hot iron in an instant of calculated violence. Readers are left to determine whether the bond is seared tight or burned away. “Scissors, Paper, Rock” reverses nurturing roles. Natalie, the aging photographer for an alternative newspaper in San Francisco, is protected from poverty and failure by younger staff members, especially Liz. The story traces Natalie’s career as a woman photographer, emphasizing her selfless devotion to her art, her unique photographic vision, and her helplessness in dealing with practicalities. Natalie’s fortunes have fallen so far after her divorce from Doc, her partner of many years, that she is reduced to living in her car and stealing food from the office refrigerator. Fortunately, the staff pitches in to rescue Natalie; there is even talk of a retrospective of her Vietnam War-era photographs. Even these efforts prove insufficient. At the very end, Liz rescues Natalie once more—this time from a street person who has snatched her beloved dog and is demanding “a reward” for returning it. The contrast between Natalie’s naïveté and Liz’s worldly competence shows two philosophical poles in conflict, but “Scissors, Paper, Rock” is more properly a story of protected innocence and the power of naïve idealism. At the political level, it suggests that true radical politics entail caring for those closest to oneself. The collection’s title story features two more misfits—Clay, an accomplished horseman and third-rate musician, and Annie, a bright college dropout who will never master horsemanship. Each seems to be striving after that which he or she cannot have, hence the need to master the mechanics of falling. Standing in contrast to both Clay and Annie is Sharon, a rich wife who takes riding lessons and knows what else she wants, namely Clay. Unlike Clay and Annie, she knows how to angle and wait, how to have her fling and keep her marriage. Unlike Sharon, Clay will often wake up amazed at what he has done, and Annie seems likely to follow him. The title character of “The Last of the True Believers” is Neil, a talk-show host at a small radio station who likes to use his microphone to air his Marxist politics. His wife, the story’s first-person narrator, understands his need to both fight the system and exploit it. She left her first husband, a professor, to take up with the more exciting and unpredictable Neil, and they and their three children appear to constitute a fairly normal family. However, an accident has partially crippled their oldest daughter Molly, leaving her with a limp and a leg brace. Moreover, the narrator’s need for security—health insurance above all—conflicts with Neil’s ability to improvise and make do so he can stick to principle. In a telling scene, Molly comes home from the mall with new jeans that she realizes are not right for her. Neil does not understand “the pleasure of slipping into new, unmarred clothes.” In the end, Neil loses his job at the radio station and, instead of accepting responsi-

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bility, focuses his anger at an abandoned car on their street that the city refuses to move. Defiantly, he sets it on fire to compel the city to respond, but firemen only put out fires; they do not remove burned-out cars. The story concludes I would search the garage and if I found oil-soaked rags or a can of gasoline, I’d get rid of the evidence and never tell him. There was so much more that we’d never admit to each other, that only he and I would ever know.

As in “Paper, Scissors, Rock,” the practical character must clean up after the idealist, though readers may nevertheless wistfully admire the dreamer. Like the female protagonists of the previous stories, Laurel in “Seven Remedies” is at the center of a maelstrom, scrambling to balance her domestic, familial, and professional responsibilities with seven possible “remedies”: positive thinking, windowshopping, wallowing, duct tape, twenty milligrams twice a day, cosmology, and none of the above. The futility of each remedy is excruciating to behold; Laurel is a latterday Job, suffering the plagues that modern home-owning can inflict. Brady reveals that locus of the American Dream, an article of faith for so many, can become a nightmare. “Those Who Walk During the Day” is the only story in Brady’s collection to focus on a male protagonist. Timothy has left a lucrative job and his family to follow his Christian calling as the manager of a church’s shelter for homeless men. It is thankless, futile work, as the men he serves cannot be rehabilitated. They are victims of drugs, alcohol, venereal disease, AIDS, and despair. Timothy shares a name with a saint who was stoned to death for interrupting a pagan procession to preach the Gospel. He soldiers on, trying to walk in the light of day but stumbling nevertheless. One night, a man named Michael seeks shelter at the church with his ill-tempered and dying dog. The rules prohibit the dog from being in the shelter, but Michael resists. When the dog attacks Michael, Timothy intervenes, and for his charity he suffers a blow from Michael and lacerations to his arm from the dog’s claws and teeth. Unlike many characters in this collection, Timothy knows what he believes. When Michael in despair whimpers, “I ain’t worth sh*t,” Timothy replies, “You’re valuable to God.” “Wait for Instructions,” “Much Have I Traveled,” and “Wicked Stepmother” feature women at the center of troubled families. Ethena of “Wait for Instructions” is a sandwich-generation woman, trying to juggle the demands of family, job, and a sick father. In “Much Have I Traveled,” Nina holds her marriage together in spite of a philandering husband suffering from multiple sclerosis and the temptations of a prospective lover. In “Wicked Stepmother,” Amanda is Lexie’s real mother, but she is so distant that Lexie and her brother identify her with the stepmothers of fairy tales. In all these stories, the protagonists wrestle with the often-impossible demands placed on women in a society where their roles have been so widely defined, the expectations of their competence so impossibly high, that they can only struggle to cope and hope to find some peaceful center. Brady’s are indeed stories for a stressed generation living in a decentered world.

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Her characters are vividly portrayed, in prose that is sometimes clear and inventive, occasionally misty and complex, and often brightly original. If readers sometimes have to work to piece together the events being narrated, assemble characters, or tease out a “meaning,” these readerly activities, too, are reflections of the postmodern condition. Brady is a strong, important voice and an accomplished practitioner of the short-story form. This is a collection to be read, savored, and reread. Dean Baldwin

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 9/10 (January 1, 2009): 47. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 51 (December 22, 2008): 32.

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MERCURY DRESSING Poems Author: J. D. McClatchy (1945) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 112 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Poetry Well-known poet McClatchy provides formal, lyrical reflections on mythic subjects and human emotion in this graceful collection J. D. McClatchy is known for brilliant, lyrical poems that contemplate the relationship between body and soul and the difficulty of knowing oneself. Born in 1945 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, he was early attracted to both poetry and music; a librettist as well as a poet, he has produced work that demonstrates his love of music and his careful attention to sound. Mercury Dressing is McClatchy’s sixth book of poetry; he has also written three collections of prose. This latest collection showcases his technical agility, as well as his thematic preoccupations. McClatchy’s previous poetry has been celebrated by critics for its stylistic verve and subtlety; his complex, layered poems require multiple readings to yield their meanings. He describes events, real and imagined, as freighted with ambivalent attitudes and sometimes contradictory symbolic values, but his writing is always graceful and clear. A few critics have objected to this very lyricism, finding the virtuosity of the language at odds with its suitability to communicate complex themes and subtle emotions. McClatchy himself is a critic of contemporary poetry and has written a collection of essays rejecting teaching techniques popular in poetry workshops. On the one hand, he derides extreme postmodern techniques, and, on the other hand, he rejects a tendency toward bland realism. He opposes his own ideal of poetry to these two extremes: “I have wanted to write poems with shape and a rich sound, with ideas and a good deal of ‘speech,’ with epigrammatic surfaces and resounding depths.” McClatchy’s essay collection White Paper: On Contemporary American Poetry appeared in 1989. His poetry then and now illustrates the fulfillment of his goals. His poems are shaped not only for the ear but also for the eye, and they are good to listen to for their sound-echoings and other felicities of language. They are quiet in tone but express banked passion. They are poems of ideas as well, often expressing speculations and conclusions through myth. Only a few contemporary poets provide lines that stick in the mind for quotation, but McClatchy is one of them. Mercury Dressing is divided into three parts; the first begins with the title poem and the last, with “Mercury Descending.” The enigmatic figure of the Roman winged messenger god thus presides over a collection of poems that are strangely both personal and impersonal at once, as the poet-speaker speaks through and to other real and

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fictional figures. Mercury is god, muse, and warning. The pair of poems that bear his J. D. McClatchy is author of Hazmat name allows the figure of the messenger god (2002), Ten Commandments (1998), to hover over the area of McClatchy’s explo- The Rest of the Way (1992), Stars Principal (1986), and Scenes from rations as he does over Athens in Ovid. The poems in the first section create un- Another Life (1981) and has won a usual personae and narrate complicated sto- literature award from the American ries. They take side glimpses at myth, legend, Academy of Arts and Letters, a fellowship from the National and history and develop them in flexible blank Endowment for the Arts, and a verse and other forms. The longer poems ex- Guggenheim Fellowship. plore desire and discontent within the slight framework of a myth or tale. These poems are the sort that contain sudden, memorable insights that can catch readers’ minds and hearts as they journey through the narrative. Such a poem is “Sorrow in 1944,” which tells the story of Frank Pinkerton, the grown child of the title character of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly (1904). The poem’s narrator, Frank has grown up in his father’s home, being raised by his father’s American wife after his mother’s suicide. He has followed his father’s pattern by falling in love with a Japanese American woman in an internment camp. He visits his beloved in the camp, where her presence somehow consoles him about his own tragic history. Snippets of Japanese myth lace their love story. The poem is a sonnet sequence, but now and then a rhymed tanka replaces the closing couplet. The narrative allows the poet to present a complex understanding of love and loss, and the extension of the familiar story provides readers with opportunities for both recognition and discovery. A note reminds readers of the title’s double meaning: McClatchy explains that “‘Sorrow’ is the name Cio-Cio San gives to her child by Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton in . . . Madama Butterfly.” This poem in particular demands rereading for its exquisite language as well as its story. The collection’s central section is short and miscellaneous in content, but its longest poem represents an interesting anomaly in the collection. “The Seven Deadly Sins” is a divided poem or poem sequence that describes the well-known titular sins—pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, and sloth—in separate sections, using a different form for each. The work will have its greatest appeal for those who have something of a medieval mind-set. Its approach is similar to medieval and Renaissance explorations of these sins and may bring to mind not only the intricate punishment system of Dante’s Inferno (c. 1320; English translation, 1802) but also Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus (pr. c. 1588, pb. 1604), in which the devil presents the seven deadly sins as a form of entertainment. McClatchy’s sins, too, are entertaining, though the segments presenting them have a thoughtful dimension as well. In McClatchy’s poem, some of the segments are told from the point of view of an “I” who represents the sin, while others are not. The traditional forms chosen for the poems are cleverly chosen and make up a part of the sense of decorum that characterizes this collection and McClatchy’s work in general. The third section begins with the somewhat cryptic poem “Mercury Descending.”

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It is not a simple poem and indeed relies so much on the plot of Book II of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (c. 8 c.e.; English translation, 1567) that readers wanting to follow the poem’s narrative will need to consult the Ovid story first. The poet’s addition to his source material lies not in the events he recounts but in the focus of the poem and its interpretation of those events. Mercury’s descent is always a harbinger of trouble. In this case, the god hovers over Athens until he spots the lovely Herse, whose beauty inflames him and causes him immediately to plot to secure her. When he approaches her sister Aglauros, an angry Minerva, who bears a grievance against Mercury, hopes to thwart his plans by inspiring the sister to drink of the poison envy. The poison is lethal, but in McClatchy’s poem, as the sister lies dying, “Mercury stepped over her into the darkened room,/ His eye never straying from what it wanted./ A god can do this, can do whatever he wishes.” Human love is blighted by its very humanness and causes mostly pain. Moreover, it is not chosen but is inflicted from without, as though by a god. Many poems in Mercury Dressing present love in such a light. However, they do not reject it to suggest flight into the world of the mind. They imply, rather, that love is fated, that it cannot be evaded, and that now and then its gifts outweigh its thefts. Mysteriously compelling is “Trees, Walking.” It is introduced by a passage from the Book of Mark describing Jesus’ healing of the blind man; according to Mark, Jesus’ first touch resulted in a distorted vision of “men as trees, walking” but the second laying on of hands restored the blind man’s vision completely. The several narratives of “Trees, Walking” join and separate: They include stories of fathers and sons, of lovers, and of killings and healings, but the narratives return repeatedly to the basic elements of the biblical event: Jesus spit on his hands to heal the man, the man first saw the men around him as trees, and true sight came afterward. McClatchy explores all sorts of blurrings and blindnesses from history, legend, and personal life in this poem. The final scene narrates a childhood episode of violence—a boy is shaken from a tree where he is hiding so a neighbor can attack him with a knife and wound him. Much later, he goes to a healer, who makes him relive the incident. I saw my cousin’s father coming Towards the tree, his face angry, his mouth open But no words in it. Then the tree moved. All the trees moved, walking away from the man And his knife. He shouted after me. I thought I heard him tell me to look again.

An imitation of Christ’s healing takes place, and when he looks again, he finds that Everything Around me was so bright I was forced to close My eyes. If I ever open them Again, all I hope to see is my father.

It is impossible to give a sense of this poem through quotation, but the elements go together to create a kind of elegy to earthly love, which can never be fully experienced

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when it is present because of the individual blindnesses of all who live it. It seems mostly to be felt in retrospect and therefore mourned. Mercury Dressing features other motifs besides figures of myth and legend. Waters, birds, beds, and trees loom and disappear in the poems, but perhaps the most haunting and multilayered of the recurrent images is the tree. These poems represent a number of real and symbolic trees—trees bearing all the symbolic freight assigned to them in the past and more. They tend, moreover, to be identified simply as trees, not as oaks, aspens, or maples. They tend to measure emotional spaces. An example is the beginning of “Chinese Poem”: Whatever you were thinking, please, Do not plant another tree in the garden. One tree means four seasons of sadness: What is going, What is coming, What will not come, What cannot go.

“Chinese Poem” also demonstrates the simplicity that sometimes, though rarely, appears in McClatchy’s poetry. The tree image widens to include the passing of the seasons, the planter of the tree, the relationship between planter and observer. Another example of McClatchy’s sometimes misleading simplicity is the title poem of the collection, which begins the work. These poems are quietly meditative, but they focus on issues of the mind and spirit as much as of the soul. They center on human love—its demands, its pitfalls, and its lingering effects. These graceful poems neither evade nor shout; they invite readers to explore with them the vagaries and difficulties of human relationships. It is hard to place McClatchy with confidence in one of the schools of contemporary poetry. He is a formalist, but his forms are rarely tightly contrived and rigid; formalism is not generally what first impresses readers of his work. The poetry is personal, but the personal elements are clothed in myth and narrative. The Los Angeles Times Book Review has commented, “It’s hard to imagine another poet capable of being wry and tender, unpredictable and measured, original and traditional—within the body of a single poem.” The contradictions and opposites of McClatchy’s work constitute its individuality and its major appeal. Janet McCann

Review Sources Library Journal 134, no. 4 (March 1, 2009): 76. The New Leader 92, no. 1 (January/February, 2009): 29-30. Poetry 194, no. 5 (September, 2009): 469-475. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 3 (January 19, 2009): 42.

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MOTHER OF GOD A History of the Virgin Mary Author: Miri Rubin (1956) Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). 544 pp. $35.00 Type of work: History, religion Time: 4 b.c.e.-1600 c.e. Locale: Europe; North Africa; the Middle East The most comprehensive and detailed account of the devotional response to the Virgin Mary at varying social and cultural levels through the centuries Principal personages: Matthew, Luke, and John, evangelists Origen, biblical scholar, theologian, and spiritual writer Constantine, Roman emperor, 306-337 Saint Jerome, biblical scholar Saint Anselm of Canterbury, theologian, philosopher, and archbishop of Canterbury, 1093-1109 Eadmer of Canterbury, theologian and historian Saint Hildegard, abbess of Rupertsberg Saint Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan order Duns Scotus, Franciscan philosopher Martin Luther, founder of the German Reformation Ferdinand II, king of Sicily, 1468-1516, Castile, 1474-1504, Aragon, 1479-1516, and Naples, 1504-1516 Isabella, queen of Spain, 1474-1504

Miri Rubin’s Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary chronicles ideas, practices, and images that developed around the figure of Mary from the earliest decades of Christianity through approximately 1600. It is founded on an extensive range of source materials: music, poetry, theology, art, scripture, liturgy, and miracle tales. It provides an invaluable historical understanding of devotional materials regarding Mary, as well as the cultural contexts in which those materials were produced and used. In addition, it illustrates abiding and evolving qualities of religious experience for individuals, families, parishes, congregations, secular groups, religious orders, and nations. Still, readers may wish that Rubin’s social history offered more explanation of the theological complexities of the Marian sacred tradition and of how, for example, it authenticates interpretation of the Bible as a form of continuing revelation. Unparalleled in scope, clarity, and scholarly reach, the book immerses readers in many forms of private and public veneration. It charts, moreover, a movement toward the immediacy of Mary, how believers brought her into their lives and saw what a vast

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difference that decision made. The abundant, endlessly rich forms of adoration of Mary Miri Rubin, professor of history at came to have global consequences; they re- Queen Mary University of London, is main growing, emergent, and full of untold author of several books regarding the social and religious history of Europe, possibility. The author’s interest in her subject was including Corpus Christi: The initially provoked by the question of how Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture Mary—about whom the Gospels reveal lit- (1990), Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (1986), and (as tle—constantly enlarged in presence and subcoauthor) Love, Friendship, and Faith stance, becoming a figure of worldwide his- (2005). torical significance and complexity. After her appearances in the birth stories of Christ told in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, she remains in the background in the biblical narratives of His public ministry, until she appears at the foot of the cross and awaits with the disciples the coming Holy Spirit. Rubin illustrates how early evangelists and their successors accepted Old Testament prophecies of Mary’s virginal conception of Jesus, believing that they proved Christianity to be a fulfillment of Judaism. Moreover, later scholars such as Saint Jerome elaborately commented on Old Testament passages that they believed foretold Mary’s own immaculate conception. Others reinterpreted Hebrew prophecy to help believers imagine the woman all generations would call blessed as a handmaid of the Lord, participant in her Son’s destiny. Rubin carefully demonstrates that, although the Scriptures themselves contain few details of Mary’s origins or life, other writings—the apocrypha, legendary tales, and creeds of early Christian sects—soon began to fill in the blank spaces of her biography. The apocryphal books The Gospel of the Birth of Mary and The Protevangelion: Or, An Historical Account of the Birth of Christ, and the Perpetual Virgin Mary, accepted by the earliest Christian churches, gave Mary a fine Jewish ancestry and a pure childhood, and they asserted her perpetual virginity as evidence of Christ’s divine authority as Son of God. Mary’s ever-increasing group of admirers devised ways to make palatable and authoritative the stories of her blessed state, humility, holiness, and other distinctive traits. They focused on Mary’s life as a way of achieving Christian orthodoxy and distinguishing it from Judaism, which denied the incarnate Son of God conceived through the Holy Spirit within the ever-virgin Mary. Furthermore, Rubin notes how Christianity, as a sect within Judaism, attained favored status within the Roman Empire. This fact had enormous effects regarding Mary’s exact nature and meaning. For example, once the Emperor Constantine publicly endorsed Christianity in the early fourth century, Mary, as a consequence of the Council of Nicaea in 325, became the subject of theological inquiry. Her titles of popular piety, Mother of God or God-Bearer, endlessly open with spiritual and psychological import, were affirmed at the Council of Ephesus in 431. Rubin might have added that imperial or political involvement concerning Mary signaled a view that the state had a natural interest in matters pertaining to the Christian church. The idea that the Church itself should determine its own affairs—including theological meanings,

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forms of internal organization, and toleration of variations in liturgy—was slow to develop, not beginning to resolve or assert itself until the late seventeenth century in England. Rubin suggests, however, that rituals involving the Virgin Mary may have been an exception as a cause of conflict between church and state. She recounts the development of the doctrine of Assumption, the belief that after her earthly life Mary was brought bodily into heaven. This doctrine first appeared in New Testament apocrypha dating from the fourth century and was well known by the seventh century, when it was celebrated throughout European communities. The Assumption was an unwritten dogma, a widespread consensus of faith, varying in ceremony or means from place to place. It won approval first of local clergy, then of regional clergy, and finally of the general Church itself, which decided to preserve it intact. The first feast of Mary in history, the celebration of the Assumption involved music, song, processions, dramas, liturgies, art, and many rituals, seemingly unaffected by political divisions. Pope Pius XII defined the doctrine in 1950. In addition, Rubin illustrates that even the disasters that began to fall upon the western Roman Empire in the beginning of the fifth century did not stem the many kinds of religious expression and spiritual aspiration concentrated upon Mary. In particular, Pope Gregory I, who reigned from 590 to 604 amid great political distress and anarchy, managed to unify the churches of Italy, Spain, France, and England. One result was a sprouting of all kinds of devotional modifications and additions to the veneration of Mary, transcending national boundaries. Even when, for centuries, Scripture existed in Latin and Greek, in handwritten form in monasteries, available to monks and clerics only, Mary inspired a burgeoning world of biblical tales, hymns, ceremonies, and miracle stores—including tales of Marian appearances. Also, by 1300, use of the rosary—prayer beads to honor the life and mission of Christ and Mary—in conjunction with the recitation of the Hail Mary and the Lord’s Prayer had spread throughout Europe. As she did with the doctrine of the Assumption, Rubin catalogs and synthesizes ways that the multisided religious love for Mary by the laity and the clergy became part of the Church at all levels. Similarly, Rubin details how Mary continued to serve as a rallying point of religious affirmation and concord during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, when the many worldly contests between popes and secular rulers over ecclesiastic and political power tore at the fabric of Christian culture. In those troubled times, as in all others, no other subject of Christian expression had so wide a vogue or so sustained a popularity as did Mary. Once again, what believers made or did to express their faith ranged from the homespun to the majestic. The examples Rubin supplies, particularly prayers and hymns, contain a simple directness and clarity of style that combine otherworldliness with uncanny insight into human motives. Through veneration of the Blessed Virgin, believers learned in singular ways to transcend themselves and move from self-centeredness to self-forgetfulness, ever mindful of the wordly distractions that keep people from spirituality. In addition, the Crusades, undertaken between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries to recover present-day Israel from Islam, expanded and enriched the homage to Mary through

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forms of cultural exchange between western and eastern Christian traditions. Rubin’s treatment is so potent that some readers may wish she had developed the matter that, in both traditions, expression of faith is not only a cultural practice or ritual but a search for ultimate truth. She might, for instance, have explored ways poets and hymn writers—in attempting to describe indescribable truth—invested their works with literal, allegorical, moral, and spiritual meanings, then a deeply rooted habit of mind. Rubin details how, in the sixteenth century, Protestant reformers, regarding literal interpretation of Scripture as the sole basis of faith and practice, sought to deny that Mary’s family relation to Christ gave her a unique spiritual precedence, while still depicting her as the most tender, faithful, patient, loving, and humble of women. As a result, adoration of Mary was omitted or minimized in Protestant countries. Marian teachings and practices were deemed nonessential to the basic message of Christ, even though they were intended by worshipers as expositions of Christ’s life. Rubin leaves it unclear whether a form of Marian devotion proper to the Reformation ever developed. She finds that Protestant criticism of Marian veneration rendered such veneration distinctly Roman Catholic and thereby strengthened it, apparently because it indicated that Catholics enjoyed a greater freedom of devotion. Furthermore, during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the nature and pace of homage to Mary was unfolding and amplifying immeasurably. In particular, the printing press made the Bible and traditional writings of Mary available and accessible in languages that people spoke. Consequently, to a greater extent than ever before, people interpreted and represented Mary in accordance with their own experience of reading, selecting mental images that happened to corrospond to their particular psychological values and attractions. Their convictions of faith thus became conduits for self-understanding and shared interpretation. Moreover, as a result of Spanish and Portuguese exploration and missionary endeavors, particularly under Ferdinand and Isabella, Marian influence spread to North and South America, and in time Mary became a world icon. Rubin reveals a full spectrum of ways in which the faithful remain receptive to Mary and the steadiness with which that receptivity increases in character, content, and wealth. Marian devotion involves virtually all forms of public and private adoration. Rubin should, perhaps, stress implications of the fact that Marian veneration lauds newness and assimilation. It involves proofs taken from Scripture, as well as emotional proofs taken from intuitive, or possibly unconscious, reactions. Rubin might properly call the spiritual love, sacred awe, attachment, or affection for the Blessed Virgin the Holy Spirit’s direct effect upon the hearts and minds of the faithful. She should clarify, however, whether or to what extent the Holy Spirit’s influence is itself influenced by the Church or clergy. If it is not, which at times seems to be the case, then Marian devotion contains some radical potentials that may cause believers to come in conflict with the Church, a possibility that Rubin brings up but does not pursue. Still, Rubin recognizes that the sacred mysteries associated with Mary, both common and miraculous, resulted in imaginative, conceptual, and evocative space that expands in all directions, in the lives of all Christians, male or female, in all times and

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places. After all, Mary—the most significant female presence in Christian culture—is referred to by a plethora of names: Mother of God, Mother of the Church, Blessed Virgin Mary, the Immaculate Conception, Queen of Heaven, Our Lady of Sorrows, and Mary as Comforter at the hour of our death. As well, Christian writers beginning in the first century revered Mary as the second Eve, through whom the sin of the first Eve is paid for and pardoned. Rubin’s book should redirect certain kinds of Marian scholarship, particularly Christian feminist understandings of Mary. Rubin argues, for instance, that the Church itself is a reflection of Mary and the faithful are the virginal womb into which the Holy Spirit deposits the seed of faith. Mary embodies the deepest, most abiding of human dreams, hopes, and needs, as with the imagined world of delight in Mary’s maternal embrace, whether involving the Christ child or the individual believer. Mary is figured bringing assistance and consolation on Earth and in Heaven, a comfort beyond human reach, doing what mothers always do: She brings life and love; she nurtures, teaches, corrects, and reassures. To Mary are attached yearnings for assistance, for hope and coming joy. Rubin’s book wonderfully demonstrates ways that the words “history” and “story” have the same etymological parent, the Latin historia. Her history merges stories of individuals with stories of particular groups regarding the past. The story and and history of Mary’s unique holiness, her sacred and emotional presence, the awe and mystery of her, has never been told so well. Timothy C. Miller

Review Sources America 201, no. 9 (October 12, 2009): 24-26. Commonweal 136, no. 20 (November 20, 2009): 26-28. The Economist 390, no. 8619 (February 21, 2009): 84. History Today 59, no. 5 (May, 2009): 62. Library Journal 134, no. 8 (May 1, 2009): 84. London Review of Books 31, no. 7 (April 9, 2009): 3-6. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 6 (February 9, 2009): 46. Times Higher Education, March 12, 2009, p. 49. Times Higher Education, October 15, 2009, pp. 30-35. The Times Literary Supplement, May 8, 2009, pp. 8-9.

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MOTHERS AND OTHERS The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding Author: Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (1946) Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass.). 422 pp. $29.95 Type of work: Anthropology, natural history A noted anthropologist and primatologist surveys nurturance and coparenting in humans and related species and offers an answer to the question, “What makes humans human?” In Mothers and Others, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy joins the many scientists and theologians who have sought to determine what traits are unique to humans and why humans behave as they do. The serious involvement of science with these two questions dates back to the great British naturalist Charles Darwin and his book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Building on this massive work, later biologists and anthropologists have projected multiple, separate ideas of what makes people uniquely human and what distinguishes them from the other primates. Walking upright, the ability to make fire, the capacity to learn language, the mix of cooperation and competition needed for hunting big-game animals—all have been theorized as the crucial turning point that differentiated Homo sapiens’ ancestors from their great ape relatives and set them on the path to full humanity. Sociobiology, now often called evolutionary psychology, attempts to explain human social behaviors in terms of the evolutionary mechanisms that produced them. From the beginning of her career, Hrdy has been one of a very few sociobiologists who viewed the activities of early protohuman females as being at least as significant for human evolution as were those of males. Two of her previous books have documented strategies used by primate females to maximize their own, and their descendants’, survival chances. In Mothers and Others, Hrdy explores in great depth a key feature of her research and thought: the demands and social effects of human motherhood. She argues that the innate conditions of raising a child to adulthood almost require a support system of caring others if the child is to survive. In making this argument, Hrdy marshals a large array of research findings, at the same time managing to make them accessible and interesting to nonspecialist readers. Furthermore, Hrdy provides her own answer to the question of what defines humanity. The fact that multiple caregivers are needed to raise a child means that, from their very early days, most young humans are exposed to many other people in addition to forming a primary bond with their mother. Some of these “others” around them offer attention, love, and food, backing up the mother’s provision of these necessities. Oth-

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ers may be indifferent, or even inimical to the child’s welfare. Hrdy suggests that the ability to “read” others’ intentions and states-ofmind must have been an essential survival skill that shaped humans’ future. The capacity to “mind read” other people, to know and care what other people think and to spontaneously share emotions as well as material objects with them, formed a basis for all later cooperative human ventures, from big-game hunting to creating such complex systems as representative government. The book opens with a startling image: a plane full of chimpanzee passengers. Traveling in such company, the author says, any individuals would be lucky to finish the flight with all their fingers and toes intact. Despite their close genetic relationship to humans, chimpanzees seem to lack the “mental wiring” for spontaneous giving or to perceive others’ wishes and emotions. These capacities underlie the existence of hospitality, good manners, and moral codes—concepts that every human society has developed. Studies of chimpanzee behavior have demonstrated how very protective the mothers are of their young. In all species of great ape, mothers form profound and longlasting bonds with their infants. Normally, babies are in constant physical contact with their mothers for at least half a year. They cling to their mothers as they go about their daily rounds and continue to nurse for four to seven years. Other females around a mother will be greatly interested in her baby—a pattern true of all primates—but an ape mother does not normally turn her infant over to any other primate to hold, much less to “baby-sit.” Indeed, a baby ape’s world is defined almost exclusively by his or her mother’s presence. Human mothers’ experiences with their children are different. While the human mother-child bond may be just as profound and long-lasting as it is among primates, the human lack of fur and a mother’s need to do things with her hands make continuous body-to-body contact much less secure. Thus, human mothers are much more likely than primate mothers to allow other people to hold their babies, as well as to feed and amuse them. In hunter-gatherer societies, which follow a preagricultural mode of life, babies are never left alone, but mothers willingly let fathers, female relatives, and perhaps some other group members care for them. While this pattern of child care is not found in any other great apes, humans are not the only primates who exhibit it. Many monkey species practice communal child care also. Such sharing of caregiving duties means that, from its very early days, a human baby is exposed to at least several people. Knowing how to “read” these people’s various emotional states and intentions and to respond appropriately will garner more attention for the baby, so it is a crucial survival skill. This type of interaction constitutes a two-way process. Mothers are expected to read their babies’ preverbal signals and respond to them, and most mothers do. Much of the alloparenting

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has published studies of Mayan folklore, infanticide in langurs, female primate strategies, and mother-infant bonds from an evolutionary perspective. She is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, where she still works with the Animal Behavior Graduate Group.

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(parenting by others) undertaken in most societies is done by young females, and it probably serves to hone their own emotional readiness for mothering. Hrdy believes not only that this adaptation is crucial to defining humanity, but also that it occurred relatively early in human evolutionary history, as far back as 1.8 million years ago, prior to the acquisition of speech and the development of big-brained, anatomically modern humans. In Mothers and Others, Hrdy does not conclusively prove her theory that cooperative parenting and emotional coawareness are the keys to becoming human. The reasoning and evidence she presents are provocative, however, and she does make a persuasive case. It may be that no one factor can account for the distinctive human identity. In the latter half of Mothers and Others, Hrdy makes a much stronger case that cooperative childcare has been a necessary precondition for the survival and healthy growth of human children throughout the species’ existence. Early sociobiology did not have a very good track record of successfully explaining human family life. It emerged as a comprehensive theory in the 1970’s, and its founding practitioners were heavily influenced by a mystique that portrayed human males as mighty hunters. Such portrayals of early human behavior sometimes resembled a bizarre episode of The Flintstones, in which self-sufficient nuclear families focused upon the importance of big-game hunting as a masculine pursuit. Only after much field research by anthropologists did facts emerge—and theories follow—indicating that such portrayals were at least half wrong. Not coincidentally, many of the scientists who reshaped the paradigm, including Hrdy, were women. Hrdy includes several relevant facts about human child rearing in her book. It takes approximately 13 million calories in food to rear a human from birth to maturity. Even the most successful hunters in hunter-gatherer societies rely upon gathered food and small game for most of their calories and to maintain a reliable food supply: Big-game hunting is too risky and often unsuccessful to form the basis of a food system. Women, who can perform the other food-producing activities as well as men, usually bring in the bulk of the food consumed in primitive societies. Moreover, while they may sometimes do this work while carrying a baby in a sling, it is often more efficient to leave babies at home in the care of older siblings. Alternatively, grandmothers, whose knowledge and perseverance at finding vegetable and nut sources are unmatched, can bring in extra supplies for the family. Hrdy takes readers on an extended tour of child rearing practices around the world and through history. Surviving hunter-gatherer cultures, as the nearest analogue to preagricultural-era humans, receive the most attention. However, the author also provides cameo portraits of child rearing in more modern settings, such as those of Canadian farms and of Israeli kibbutzim. In all of these situations, the presence and quality of care by “allo(other)mothers” is important to a child’s survival chances and wellbeing. In many cases, the bulk of the responsibility for added care falls to fathers, who provide both hands-on care and the material resources necessary to sustain a child. The amount of hands-on child care performed by fathers varies with the culture, as well as with individual men. Overall, though, the greatest proportion of cooperative

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child care seems to be performed by female relatives. There are even studies that quantify the benefits of having a maternal grandmother at hand to help with this. (Approximately two more of her grandchildren survive for each postmenopausal decade she lives.) The author also touches on the opposite situation. Cross-culturally, the children of a mother without outside sources of support or child care are not likely to thrive. Father-absence is a problem of not only the modern world. Events often intervene in other times and cultures so that a father is not present to help. How much this absence affects a child’s survival chances—drastically or hardly at all—depends on whether other sources of care and support are available to back up that provided by the mother. In addition to discussing child rearing among humans and other primates, Hrdy provides glimpses of such behavior in other parts of the animal kingdom. These glimpses vary in their usefulness to nonbiologist readers. The fact, for example, that honeybees are haplodiploid (sharing three-quarters of their genes rather than the usual one-half of full siblings) will probably not seem relevant to most readers. However, these asides do serve to illustrate the amazing variety of the patterns found in nature. Although Hrdy’s sociobiology is quite feminist in its focus upon the role of females in evolution, some of her speculations are likely to take some feminists by surprise. Among the fascinating ideas in the chapter “Babies as Sensory Traps,” the author suggests that the female-only preference for the color pink may be subliminally derived from the pink features that make primate babies irresistible to their species’ females. She also intimates that teenage girls’ preoccupation with being popular and belonging to a group may reflect an ancestral need to form same-sex bonds, so as to have a supply of friendly female caregivers. On a more somber note, Hrdy speculates that infanticide might be a response to the poor prospects for a baby whose mother has no outside social support or resources to help her care for it. Of the many works about child rearing and child care, this is one of the few crosscultural studies to look backward into the protohuman past as well as forward to its implications for the future. The footnotes and bibliography are a good guide to the available research on motherhood and human evolution. Hrdy ends her book by cautioning that human evolution is far from a completed process. If people fail to surround their children with the experience of nurturing and being nurtured or to provide relationships with caring adults, future generations might not be recognizably human. The context makes this a warning against indifferent foster-care systems and providers and perhaps a plea for more high-quality daycare and social support for child rearing. Thoughtful readers may find other, related issues they wish the author had addressed. This very fact is evidence of the study’s contemporary relevance. Emily Alward

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Review Sources American Scientist 97, no. 4 (July/August, 2009): 328-330. Nature 458, no. 7242 (April 30, 2009): 1111-1112. New Scientist 202, no. 2702 (April 4, 2009): 45. Science 324, no. 5935 (June 26, 2009): 1646-1647. Scientific American 300, no. 5 (May, 2009): 79. Times Higher Education, May 7, 2009, p. 46-47. The Times Literary Supplement, May 22, 2009, p. 3-5.

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THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE Author: Orhan Pamuk (1952) First published: Masumiyet Müzesi, 2008, in Turkey Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 536 pp. $28.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1969-2007 Locale: Istanbul, Turkey; Paris, France In Pamuk’s first novel since being awarded the Nobel Prize, an engaged man becomes obsessed with another woman Principal characters: Kemal Basmaci, a wealthy Istanbul businessman Füsun, a shop assistant, his former lover Sibel, Kemal’s fiancé Feridun, Füsun’s husband, a screenwriter Nesibe, Füsun’s mother, a seamstress Tarik, Füsun’s father Zaim, Kemal’s friend, owner of a soft-drink company Vechie, Kemal’s mother Mümtaz, Kemal’s father Çetin Efendi, Kemal’s chauffeur Papatya, Feridun’s mistress, a film actress

The Museum of Innocence is seemingly the most conventional of Orhan Pamuk’s eight novels. His earlier fiction, for which he was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, has been described as philosophical, postmodern, and dense. While The Museum of Innocence may be less demanding, it is nonetheless a philosophical consideration of the nature of love and obsession; a moving, often oddly amusing lament for opportunities lost; a celebration of the power of memory; and a detailed examination of the upper-middle-class culture of late twentieth century Istanbul. The Museum of Innocence focuses on the relationship between Kemal Basmaci, thirty-year-old scion of a wealthy Istanbul family, and Füsun, an eighteen-year-old distant relative he meets again in 1975 in the shop where she works. Kemal is shopping for a gift for his fiancé, Sibel, and Füsun sells him an expensive designer handbag. When Sibel objects that the bag is counterfeit, Kemal returns it and begins a forty-four-day affair with Füsun. The handbag becomes one of the most significant of hundreds of objects that Kemal accumulates over the years to remind him of Füsun. It is designed by Jenny Colon, who shares a name with the opera singer the French poet Gérard de Nerval continued to worship after her death. The issue of separating the real and the fake is central to The Museum of Innocence and to Pamuk’s method. When initially confronted with his feelings for Füsun and Sibel, Kemal cannot decide

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which emotions are most genuine. A series of related blunders leads to his failure to live the Orhan Pamuk is best known for Kara Kitap (1990; The Black Book, 1994), life he should. Benim adim kirmizi (1998; My Name Like many men of his class, Kemal asIs Red, 2001), and Kar (2002; Snow, sumes Füsun will continue as his mistress 2004). In addition to the Nobel Prize in once he marries Sibel, but she has too much pride. After Füsun attends the elaborate en- Literature, Pamuk has received the gagement party for Sibel and Kemal, she dis- IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Prix Medicis. appears from his life. Distraught, he is unable to go ahead with his marriage and creates a scandal. The snobbish, sometimes cruel Istanbul society acts as a chorus throughout The Museum of Innocence. By making love to both Füsun and Sibel, he has compromised them in that society’s eyes. After months of searching, Kemal is shocked to discover Füsun has married Feridun, a chubby screenwriter. The couple lives with Füsun’s parents, Nesibe and Tarik, in a neighborhood where writers, actors, and directors flock to bars and clubs each night to discuss their projects and the state of Turkish cinema. Because Feridun hopes to make an art film starring his wife, Kemal agrees to be its producer as an excuse to see Füsun. He begins going out with the couple and spends several nights each week in their home, dining and watching television with Füsun’s family. Matters finally appear headed toward some resolution when Feridun begins an affair with Papatya, an actress. Kemal is always analyzing himself: “Sorrow was slowly consuming me, though at the time I couldn’t see it clearly, recognizing it only now.” The Museum of Innocence is much less the story of what happens to the ill-fated Füsun than it is Kemal’s selfpitying account of how she affected him. Turkey is embroiled in civil wars during most of Kemal’s time with Füsun, yet he is so self-absorbed that he either ignores the coups, bombings, and curfews or sees them as mere irritants, created simply to disrupt his routine: “Like most people in Istanbul, I had no interest in politics.” While one uprising is raging, he reports, “it would suddenly seem to me that nothing was happening in the world.” Pamuk’s representation of Kemal is in the tradition of the indecisive, ambiguous protagonists of Henry James. An observation, circling back upon itself, such as “If I’d been able to understand something Füsun had meant to say with her look, in time I would come to see that the thing the look meant to express was the look itself,” could have been written by James himself. Kemal exaggerates his predicament, never realizing how ridiculous he can seem at times. The Museum of Innocence has many subtly comic touches, as Kemal himself observes, “a novel need not be full of suffering just because its heroes are suffering.” When confessing his affair to Sibel, he adds “colors to my story, so as to lighten the tone of my rather ordinary crime.” More obvious irony occurs when Tarik sings “Why Did I Ever Love That Cruel Woman.” There is also humor in Kemal’s account of how he steals numerous objects from Füsun and his awareness that she and her parents know about and tolerate the thefts. Kemal steals to create the museum of the novel’s title, both as a testimony to Füsun

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and as a way of preserving the memory of his love for her through “the astonishing powers of consolation that objects held.” Thus a pen-and-pencil set from the apartment where they held their rendezvous becomes “a relic of the refinement and the fragile tenderness we felt for each other.” Kemal and Feridun name their production company Lemon Films in honor of Füsun’s beloved canary. Füsun is an amateur artist, painting pictures of the birds her husband photographs for her. After he stops this practice, she decides to paint Lemon but on a windowsill rather than in his cage, “like a wild bird who has alighted there of his own free will.” Artifacts related to the canary are ironic additions to Kemal’s museum because he can see them only for how they remind him of his love, not the trapped state in which he caused her to live. An earring that Füsun loses during their affair reappears and is lost again during the course of the novel, constantly taking on additional meanings for both its owner and Kemal, who comes to believe that by reuniting Füsun with this object he can finally possess her. The same motivation is behind his giving her a pair of earrings his father bought for his own mistress. A series of china dogs Nesibe places on top of the family television set become talismans encompassing both Kemal’s happiness at being with his beloved and his sadness at not being able to have her. As he does with similar objects, Kemal reads his emotions into at least one dog, saying it looks as if it is about to cry. Kemal’s goal through his museum is “to illustrate to the museum visitor where the agony of love first appeared, where it became most pronounced, and how it spread.” He uses the objects in the museum to try to relive the past: “Like a shaman who can see the souls of things, I could feel their stories flickering inside me.” Once Kemal is committed to creating his museum, he visits 5,723 museums around the world. The account of his travels is the most charming portion of this melancholy but often delightful novel. Films are central to the plot and themes of The Museum of Innocence. Kemal uses his role as would-be producer to see dozens of Turkish films first with Füsun and Feridun and then alone with his beloved. The cinema is also used metaphorically. Kemal is surprised that Füsun yields her virginity to him because “such things only happened in foreign films.” Pamuk’s characters live in an environment that is becoming increasingly westernized, and they see Europe and the United States, where Kemal attended business school, as daring, learning about their exotic ways primarily from films. Sibel accuses Kemal of imitating the behavior displayed in Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960). Kemal asks his friend, Zaim, who later marries Sibel, why his life cannot be like those in romantic films, and Zaim replies, “I’ve never seen one that justifies a case like yours.” To Kemal, the facial expressions Füsun uses to express her emotions seem to be copied from those she has seen in countless Turkish films. Frustrated over her ambitions to be a film star, she tries to become the star of her life. Watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), Kemal, who resembles the film’s passive, obsessed, helpless hero, feels “caught up in a suffocating dream, trapped in a room whose walls were advancing toward me.” Kemal and Füsun watch a series of Grace Kelly films

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just after the actress dies. Seeing Kelly drive Cary Grant around the Riviera in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955), Füsun decides to learn to drive, even though Kelly was killed in a car crash on the same road seen in the film. Kemal’s obsession, eventually proving destructive both to him and to Füsun, is strongly reminiscent of that portrayed in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). The Museum of Innocence is a highly self-conscious novel, with Kemal, the firstperson narrator, often speaking directly to readers. Describing Füsun’s sensual body, he suggests that “the lycée teachers studying this book in their class” should “advise the students to skip this page.” Kemal tries to coax “the reasonable reader” into seeing things his way. Pamuk appears in the novel as a guest, along with family members, at Kemal and Sibel’s engagement party, where he dances with Füsun. Then he reappears at the end of The Museum of Innocence to reveal that he has written Kemal’s story after the collector realizes “that my museum would need an annotated catalog, relating in detail the stories of each and every object.” The revelation that Kemal is not actually the narrator puts a new, ironic perspective on all that has gone before. It calls into question whether the representation of Kemal’s consciousness—his consistent lack of self-awareness and his efforts at justifying his actions—truly represent his interpretation of his life, or whether they represent Pamuk’s interpretation. It also raises the issue of whether a distinction can be made between Pamuk the character and Pamuk the creator of the novel. Related postmodern elements include an illustration of an admission ticket to Kemal’s museum, to be stamped when the book is presented, and an index of the names of all the supporting characters. “Even I have a hard time keeping all the names straight,” Kemal tells his ghostwriter. Though intended as a testament to Füsun, The Museum of Innocence is primarily Kemal’s ironic confession. Kemal’s visit to the Nabokov Museum in Saint Petersburg alerts readers to the similarities between Kemal and the hero of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955). Both Kemal and Humbert Humbert are obsessed by younger women, with tragic consequences, and Humbert calls his first-person narrative a confession. Pamuk provides a map of Nilantali, the quarter of Istanbul where his characters live, because The Museum of Innocence is about place almost as much as it is about its characters. The driving lessons Kemal gives Füsun cause them to discover parts of the city unknown to them. Kemal tells Pamuk, “this is not simply a story of lovers, but of the entire realm, that is, of Istanbul.” This celebration of Pamuk’s native city helped the novel sell 140,000 copies in Turkey during its first year of publication. In the tradition of postmodern writers who attempt to steer critics toward the “correct” interpretation, Pamuk points out that The Museum of Innocence gives him the opportunity to rebut “the false but widely held impression that my books set in Nilantali denigrated everyone mercilessly.” While the superficialities and prejudices of his characters are being mocked, Pamuk seems sympathetic to their foolishness. Michael Adams

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Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 2 (September 15, 2009): 5. The Economist 393, no. 8658 (November 21, 2009): 87. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 21 (November 1, 2009): 1135-1136. Library Journal 134, no. 17 (October 15, 2009): 71. New Statesman 139, no. 4982 (January 11, 2010): 55-56. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 18 (November 19, 2009): 38-40. The New York Times Book Review, November 1, 2009, p. 15. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 37 (September 14, 2009): 29. The Times Literary Supplement, January 8, 2010, p. 19-20.

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MY FATHER’S TEARS And Other Stories Author: John Updike (1932-2009) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 292 pp. $29.95 Type of work: Short fiction Time: 1930’s-2008 Locale: Pennsylvania; New England; Europe; North Africa Updike’s final collection of short fiction features stories focusing on growing up, marriage, divorce, travel, and philosophical speculation on the value of an individual human life Over the last four decades, John Updike managed to issue at least one book each year. Updike died in January, 2009, and My Father’s Tears, and Other Stories is likely to be the final work of his fiction to be published. (His publishers have announced that a collection of Updike’s later poetry is forthcoming.) Throughout his brilliant career, Updike regularly collected awards for his work, and My Father’s Tears seems a fitting farewell from a writer who has been called one of the most important and insightful chroniclers of twentieth century middle-class America. The eighteen stories in My Father’s Tears were all previously published, most within the last decade. Their subjects will be instantly familiar to those who have read Updike regularly: childhood, marriage and divorce, infidelity, and the quest to make sense of life and the afterlife. The latter quest in Updike’s hands includes speculations about the possibility that a divine being exists who offers some ultimate meaning to people struggling to get by in a world where ordinary events take on extraordinary importance. While several of the collection’s stories describe the adventures and minor mishaps of Americans abroad, most are set either in Pennsylvania, where Updike grew up, or in New England, where he made his home after returning from studies at England’s Oxford University in the late 1950’s. Quite a number of these stories share affinities with a group of earlier ones Updike dubbed “Olinger stories.” These tales were set in and around the town of Olinger, Updike’s fictionalized version of Shillington, Pennsylvania, where he was raised as an only child by his parents and grandparents. Like the earlier Olinger stories, newer ones such as “The Guardians,” “The Walk with Elizanne,” “The Laughter of the Gods,” and “Kinderszenen” reflect on childhood, but these newer narratives do so most often from the perspective of an elderly man taking stock of his life as he recognizes that it is drawing to a close. Perhaps the most poignant of these is “The Road Home,” in which the protagonist, who fled from rural Pennsylvania half a century earlier to escape what he then perceived as its suffo-

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cating atmosphere, returns home for a reunion with several high school classmates. As he drives around, frequently lost, he begins to realize that, although the terrain has changed markedly, he still bears fond memories of growing up in this nurturing environment. It should probably not be surprising to find so many elderly men at center stage in Updike’s late fiction. For a half century, many of his protagonists bore a striking if oblique resemblance to their creator. On occasion, Updike represented the minds of women, most notably in The Witches of Eastwick (1984), its sequel The Widows of Eastwick (2008), and S. (1988), part of his rather ambitious trilogy that attempts to remake Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) for modern readers. Generally, however, Updike concentrated on male characters who were close in age to himself. This is not to suggest that either the earlier work or the stories in My Father’s Tears are simply disguised autobiography. Rather, it is to recognize that Updike most often achieved success when he transformed his own experiences into fiction. At times, this tendency to concentrate on protagonists whose experience resembled his own has led some critics to fault Updike for what might be called “creative myopia.” Updike contributed to that perception by adopting a kind of Walt Whitmanesque stance toward his work, made most obvious in the opening lines of his 1969 poem Midpoint, in which he says “Of nothing but me, me/ . . . / I sing, lacking another song.” By extrapolating from his own experience, these lines suggest, he could describe the human condition—or at least the condition of middle-class America, with all its hopes and all its angst. While many of the stories in My Father’s Tears evince an autobiographical impulse, it would be unfortunate to judge all of them by that criterion. Updike could create characters and situations far beyond his personal experiences, as evidenced by the haunting portrayal of African politics in his 1978 novel The Coup or the portrait of a young Muslim radical in his 2006 novel Terrorist. The story in My Father’s Tears that most exemplifies his continuing ability to get outside himself is “Varieties of Religious Experience.” Updike borrows this title from American philosopher William James as a means of centering readers’ attention on the religious dimension of one of the country’s worst tragedies: the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Updike’s tale does not focus on the political events that motivated the September 11 attacks or on the American government’s response to them. Instead, it switches back and forth among the stories of people whose lives are changed by the event: a businessman visiting his adult daughter who works near the Twin Towers, a stockbroker working on an upper floor when the planes hit, two Muslim extremists who are involved in the plot to attack icons of U.S. power, and a woman aboard Flight 93 as it is hijacked and as its passengers fight back. Without ever saying so directly, Updike makes it clear that each one of these characters is forced to decide if God is present in his or her life—and to act on that belief. John Updike was the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews. He won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

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One of the constants that has made Updike’s fiction a success is his unflagging ability to fashion a metaphor or capture an emotion in a scintillating image. That talent is on display throughout My Father’s Tears. One male protagonist’s clandestine affair “burned within him like an untreated infection.” The population of the “dying city” of Alton—a fictionalized version of Reading, Pennsylvania, the mid-sized metropolitan area near Updike’s birthplace—is described as clinging to life in postindustrial America “like sleepy end-of-summer wasps clustering in an old paper nest.” The rather imperious and aloof father-in-law in the collection’s title story is said to move among his extended family “like a planet exempt from the law of gravitational attraction.” Furthermore, the stories are filled with witticisms and aphorisms that seem appropriate in the mouths of the characters Updike creates but that at the same time provide insightful authorial commentary on modern life. If there is one story that captures the spirit of this volume, it is the final one. “The Full Glass” was originally published in The New Yorker in May, 2008, just a year before the publication of My Father’s Tears. In what might be called an “extended reflection,” the story’s elderly narrator recounts events great and small from his past and present. He begins by describing a nightly routine in which he sets out a full glass of water that he lets sit for a few moments before using it to wash down a handful of pills for a variety of ailments typically associated with advancing age. Though he admits that the rational explanation for filling the water glass early is to avoid having to “fumble at the faucet and simultaneously try to hold the glass” while clutching a handful of pills, there is another, more deeply felt cause for his behavior. It is, he says, “a small but distinct pleasure, in a life with the gaudier pleasures leveled out of it.” For the narrator, “that healthy swig near the end of the day has gotten to be something important, a tiny piece that fits in.” This emphasis on simple pleasures in an orderly life highlights one of the principal themes of much of Updike’s fiction: For the most part, his heroes and his villains are ordinary people, mostly Americans, getting on with their rather ordinary lives while the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century swirl about them. Despite their travails, most of them are happy to be alive. Collectively, they represent Updike’s proclamation that life is worth living. Additionally, although the author himself could hardly be classified as a member of the struggling middle class, Updike never forgot his middle-class Pennsylvania upbringing or the values he learned at home from his parents and grandparents. In a sense, a majority of the stories he wrote were tributes to his caregivers and to his own unvarnished optimism about the potential for humans to find happiness in everyday affairs. There are hints throughout “The Full Glass” that the aging protagonist is an alter ego of his creator, and it is easy to read the story as a metaphor for Updike’s career as a writer. Like Updike, the narrator has moved to New England from Pennsylvania, and, again like Updike, he is a craftsman. The narrator works not in words, however, but in wood, earning his living as a floor refinisher. Although he says the work he does “has conditioned me against digging too deep,” he is fascinated by everyday occurrences—the passage of current through a wire, subway trains careering beneath the city streets, marbles rolling in troughs, water propelled ever downward by gravity.

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He admits that his “favorite moment in the floor-finishing business” has been his departure from a job, “knowing that all that remained was for the polyurethane to dry, which would happen without me, in my absence.” The parallel between this aspect of the narrator’s job and a writer’s experience of sending out a story for publication and having it affect readers in his or her absence is too strong to be coincidental. The ending of “The Full Glass” can thus be read as Updike’s final pronouncement on his own life, as both a man and a writer. In the final scene, the narrator muses once again on his nightly routine, transforming the act of taking medicine into a philosophical commentary on the individual’s place in the universe. “My life-prolonging pills cupped in my left hand, I lift the glass, its water sweetened by its brief wait on the marble sinktop. If I can read this strange old guy’s mind aright, he’s drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned.” These final words of what is likely to be Updike’s final volume of creative prose express a sentiment that parallels that of the author himself. There can be no more fitting epitaph for a writer who, over his lifetime, approached his craft with a sociologist’s understanding of middle America, a psychologist’s insights into the workings of the human mind, a theologian’s perception of humankind’s struggles with faith and morals, and a poet’s gift for language. Laurence W. Mazzeno

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 14 (March 15, 2009): 4. The Christian Science Monitor, June 7, 2009, p. 8. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 7 (April 1, 2009): 346-347. Library Journal 134, no. 6 (April 1, 2009): 72. New Statesman 138, no. 4956 (July 6, 2009): 46-49. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 10 (June 11, 2009): 8-9. The New York Times Book Review, June 14, 2009, p. 18. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 13 (March 31, 2009): 29. The Spectator 310, no. 9437 (July 11, 2009): 35. The Times Literary Supplement, July 10, 2009, p. 19-20. The Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2009, p. W12.

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NAMING INFINITY A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity Authors: Loren Graham (1933) and Jean-Michel Kantor (1946) Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass.). 239 pp. $25.95 Type of work: History of science Time: 1870’s-1950’s Locale: France; Russia Graham and Kantor present a compelling account of the struggles of French and Russian mathematicians who addressed one of the most vexing problems in the field of mathematics, the nature of infinity Principal personages: Émil Borel, French mathematician and professor whose research focused on game and probability theory Henri Lebesgue, French mathematician and Borel’s student, who formulated the theory of integration René Baire, French mathematician and Borel’s student, whose primary interest was in continuity and irrational numbers Dmitri Egorov, Russian mathematician known for his contributions to differential geometry and mathematical analysis Nikolai Luzin, Russian mathematician and Egorov’s student, who founded the Moscow School of Mathematics Pavel Florensky, Russian mathematician, Russian Orthodox priest, and student of Egorov

For most people, exposure to mathematics begins with arithmetic in elementary school and may extend to the study of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus in high school. Math is usually viewed as a rational, scientific discipline with practical applications. The notion that mathematics may have a connection to the divine does not often enter into classroom discussions. After all the job of a mathematician is to define precisely and to prove theories and equations, while the purview of a theologian is to explore the transcendent. Throughout history and across cultures, however, mathematics and spirituality have intersected in humanity’s quest to know the absolute. The magic square number system formulated by the Chinese and the correspondence between Indian astronomy and sacred Hindu texts represent early examples of ways in which humans have linked mathematics and religion. During the classical Greek period, the Pythagoreans believed that creation was founded on the principles of mathematics. In the centuries that followed, Augustine, Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Baruch Spinoza, and others explored the notion that the divine essence underlying the structure of the material universe could be unveiled

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through the study of numbers. With the advent of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, secular views predominated in the form of deism, agnosticism, and atheism, and mathematics was studied from a rationalist perspective. This approach continues to prevail, although some mathematicians continue to assert that metaphysics and mathematics are related. The tug of war between the rationalist and metaphysical approaches to mathematics is at the center of the intellectual drama in Naming Infinity by Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor. In the early twentieth century, mathematicians were wrestling with the problem of how to define the nature of infinity. They sought to determine what kind of thing infinity is, whether it should be considered a number, and whether it can be of different sizes, among other questions. Three French and three Russian mathematicians grappled with this problem, but their social and cultural contexts led them to tackle the situation from opposite sides of the spectrum. The French Émile Borel, Henri Lebesgue, and René Baire attempted to understand infinity from a rationalist viewpoint. Russians Dmitri Egorov, Pavel Florensky, and Nikolai Luzin drew on a spiritual practice called “name worshiping”—a heretical practice according to the Russian Orthodox Church—to enhance their understanding of infinity. The nature of infinity is central to set theory, which was introduced in an 1874 paper by German mathematician Georg Cantor titled “On a Characteristic Property of All Real Algebraic Numbers.” Even before Cantor began his study, the concept of infinity had occupied mathematicians for centuries. Cantor’s groundbreaking work on number theory, however, brought the nature of infinity into sharper focus. Cantor’s theory stirred controversy within the mathematical community but eventually garnered widespread interest if not acceptance. His notion of one-to-one correspondence among sets, his work with the real numbers and integers, and his idea of multiple infinities touched off a wave of excitement among mathematicians that over the years would transform mathematical inquiry. German mathematician David Hilbert hailed Cantor’s ideas during his historic address to the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900. Hilbert’s endorsement of Cantor’s work caught the attention of “the French trio” of Borel, Lebesgue, and Baire. However, the French mathematicians would eventually become less excited about set theory. Graham and Kantor note that one reason the three men lost their enthusiasm was that in 1895 Cantor himself had

Loren Graham is a professor emeritus of the history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a research associate at Harvard University. Jean-Michel Kantor is a mathematician and historian of mathematics at the Institute de Mathématiques de Jussieu in Paris and a member of the literary journal La Quinziaine Littéraire.

realized that there were difficulties with what he called ‘sets that were too big to correspond to any cardinal,’ . . . and he escaped from the resulting contradiction by introducing pluralities too big to be sets, corresponding to a theological notion, the ‘Absolute,’ which cannot be known, even approximately.

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Troubled by the metaphysical aspects of Cantor’s ideas, the French believed that reason should be the sole basis for mathematical study and that anything that “cannot be known, even approximately” is beyond the realm of mathematics. The question became: “Is mathematics a house built on sand, on the shaky foundations of psychology and philosophy?” Ernst Zemelo, a young German mathematician who proposed the “Axiom of Choice” in 1904, related this concern to a claim. His axiom raised some thorny questions such as “What does it mean to choose?” and “Is it possible to make an infinity of choices?” Lebesgue went further and asked “Can we convince ourselves of the existence of a mathematical object without defining it? To define always means naming a characteristic property of what is being defined.” While the religious implication of set theory troubled the French, the Russians were intrigued by it. Egorov, Luzin, and Florensky, who was a priest as well as an accomplished mathematician, did not view the paradoxes inherent in set theory as insurmountable. Indeed, they believed that philosophy and religion could aid in mathematics. Specifically, they sought to prove the existence of sets by naming them. Followers of name worshiping, an obscure Christian sect, Egorov, Luzin, and Florensky believed that, by repeating the Jesus Prayer—“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me a sinner”—they could eventually achieve oneness with God. The Jesus Prayer has been used for centuries by Christian mystics and contemplatives to achieve mystical union with God. Practitioners chant the prayer continuously until the rhythmic repetition coincides with the beating of their hearts and their breathing. Although repetition of the prayer is accepted practice in Russian Orthodox spirituality, the Name Worshipers went a step further. They claimed that the name of God is God himself. The Church, however, considered this idea heretical and tried to suppress Name Worshipers. The most notorious example of this purge was an attack by Russian imperial marines in 1913 on the Pantaleimon Orthodox monastery on Mt. Athos, Greece, where several hundred monks were expelled because they were adherents of the forbidden practice. When early twentieth century mathematicians were grappling with the concept of infinity in relation to set theory, they were puzzled by Georg Cantor’s “infinity of infinities.” It seemed that Cantor, by naming sets—in other words, by properly defining them—gave them existence. Egorov, Luzin, and Florensky recognized the similarities between Cantor’s notions and their own religious beliefs. If they could make God real by worshiping God’s name, then they could also bring new infinities into existence by naming them. As Kantor and Graham point out, the notion of bringing an object into existence through naming is not as far-fetched as it sounds if one is familiar with the biblical account of creation, in which God said, “Let there be light” before light existed. Florensky in particular saw Lebesgue’s inquiry to Borel in 1905—“Is it possible to convince oneself of the existence of the question of a mathematical being without defining it?”—as analogous to his query, “Is it possible to convince oneself of the existence of God without defining him?” The answer lies in the way Name Worshipers viewed the use of words. To them, words were not just products of the mind or intel-

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lect: They affect the very fabric of reality. This radical marriage of mathematics and religion went against the materialism and determinism that dominated the field at the time. It also proved to be the breakthrough that was needed to understand set theory as it related to infinity. The new insights on set theory derived from Name Worshiping had an enormous impact on the mathematical landscape for years to come and became a distinctive contribution of the Moscow School of Mathematics, of which Egorov, Luzin, and Florensky were members. Graham and Kantor’s thesis that religious mysticism fueled creative mathematical insights is intriguing. Readers unschooled in the concepts of higher mathematics may find some ideas difficult to grasp, however. Terms such as “numerable and denumerable sets” and “continuous and discontinuous functions” are only summarily explained, and notions such as the Continuum Hypothesis or the Axiom of Choice could be better clarified. The authors also give the impression that the Jesus Prayer is mainly associated with name worshiping, when in fact the prayer has been practiced by non-Name Worshipers since the desert fathers first formulated it around the fifth century. Still, Graham and Kantor, both self-described secularists, present beliefs of the Russian Name Worshipers in a fair, unbiased way. It is evident that they respect the Russians not only for their mathematical genius but also for their dedication to their religious beliefs, which in turn led to important discoveries. The authors comment that when we emphasize the importance of Name Worshipping to men like Luzin, Egorov, and Florensky, we are not claiming a unique or necessary relationship. We are simply saying that in the case of these thinkers, a religious heresy being talked about at the time when creative work was being done in set theory played a role in their conceptions. It could have happened another way; but it did not.

Graham and Kantor’s narrative is more than just a history of transformative events that had an impact on a particular field of mathematics. It is also a chronicle of social upheaval, political conflict, and personal sacrifice. In discussing the Russian trio, Graham and Kantor explore the political milieu in which the Russians lived and worked. The chaos following the Bolshevik Revolution and the Communist crackdown in the newly formed Soviet Union resulted in the persecution of people the government viewed as religious dissidents. Egorov, Luzin, and Florensky were among them. Accused of participating in a counterrevolutionary organization (the Russian Orthodox Church), Egorov was arrested and sent to prison in Kazan. He refused to eat and subsequently died. Florensky was arrested three times and was tortured during his third arrest. Under pressure, he signed a forced confession, was exiled to a gulag in the Soviet far east, and was executed in 1937 for carrying out counterrevolutionary agitation in the labor camp. Luzin was the only one of the three who escaped prison. However, he was a victim of jealousy and was betrayed by Ernst Kol’man, one of his colleagues, who was a fervent Marxist. Luzin managed to escape imprisonment and death, however, through the efforts of well-placed friends. The authors also reveal details of the personal lives of other mathematicians who knew or were influenced by

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the Russians. Some of these stories include instances of sexual betrayal, homosexuality, and suicide. Although some have argued that such anecdotes have no place in a history of mathematics, the personal profiles of the six men and their colleagues that Kantor and Graham provide contribute depth and drama to what could have been a dry account. One understands that these scholars were not simply sitting in an ivory tower with pen and pencil in hand, puzzling over esoteric concepts. They had families and friends, suffered losses and savored triumphs, and were subject to emotional, psychological, and spiritual trials. Graham and Kantor have succeeded in portraying not only the intellectual challenges that set theory presented to the French and Russians but also the human cost that may result from single-mindedly pursuing a goal in which one believes. Pegge Bochynski

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 13 (March 1, 2009): 12. Christianity Today 53, no. 7 (July, 2009): 56. London Review of Books 31, no. 16 (August 27, 2009): 28-30. Nature 458, no. 7241 (April 2, 2009): 971-972. Scientific American 300, no. 4 (April, 2009):83. Times Higher Education, April 30, 2009, pp. 46-47.

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NATURE’S GHOSTS Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology Author: Mark V. Barrow, Jr. (1960) Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Chicago). 497 pp. $35.00 Type of work: History, environment Time: 1780-1973 Locale: United States; Africa; Central America A study of the changing attitudes of American naturalists toward the concept of species extinction and the growing concern of the scientific community with preventing extinctions, culminating in the 1973 Endangered Species Act Principal personages: Thomas Jefferson, governor of Virginia, 1779-1781, and president of the United States, 1801-1809 Joel Asaph Allen, curator of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology William Temple Hornaday, nineteenth century taxidermist and the first director of the Bronx Zoo Harold Jefferson Coolidge, assistant mammalogist at the Museum of Comparative Zoology and one of the founders of the American Committee for International Wildlife Protection Alexander Wetmore, ornithologist with the Bureau of Biological Survey, later an administrator of the Smithsonian Institution Rosalie Edge, founder of the radical Emergency Conservation Committee and a defender of predatory birds Ray Erikson, head of habitat management in the Division of Wildlife Refuges in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

In Nature’s Ghosts, Mark V. Barrow, Jr. presents a study of two centuries of changing attitudes of American naturalists toward the concept of species extinction and of the role of the scientific community (encompassing both professional scientists and amateur naturalists) in efforts to prevent extinctions. Barrow begins with the Revolutionary War generation, focusing especially on Thomas Jefferson, and ends with the passage of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, with a brief glance forward to the rise of the field of biodiversity in the last quarter of the twentieth century. For Jefferson, an ardent naturalist as well as a statesman, species extinction was simply not possible. Like most of his eighteenth century contemporaries, he believed that nature was orderly and static. There was no room in his universe for creatures to completely disappear. For him, the fossilized bones discovered on the North American continent were evidence that, somewhere on the continent, great beasts such as the mammoth and the giant sloth still roamed. One of the charges that Jefferson gave

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Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their great expedition across North America to the A historian of science on the faculty of Pacific Ocean from 1803 to 1805 was to look Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Mark V. Barrow, Jr. is the out for living specimens of these animals. Barrow points out that, even as Jefferson author of A Passion for Birds: confidently anticipated that the unexplored American Ornithology After Audubon American West would prove to be the home (1998), which won the 1998 book prize of the living remnants of these species, Geor- of the Forum for the History of Science in America. ges Cuvier of the Paris National Museum of Natural History was systematically describing a variety of fossilized animals and arguing that these museum specimens represented species that were extinct. By the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century, it was evident to most professional naturalists that some species had disappeared from the earth. A generation later, in 1832, in utter contrast to Jefferson’s confidence in the survival of all of nature’s creations, the British geologist Charles Lyell could, without generating controversy in the scientific community, consider extinction as a routine part of the natural world. Reinforcing the paleontological evidence of extinctions taking place many years earlier, by the mid-nineteenth century naturalists could point to three examples of extinction within human memory. The disappearance of great flightless birds from the islands where they once dwelled demonstrated that human action could and did lead to species extinction. The dodo on Mauritius, the moa in New Zealand, and the great auk of the islands of the North Atlantic were all wiped out by human action. Naturalists recognized that humans could destroy species directly, through overhunting, and indirectly, through habitat destruction and the introduction of predators. Confronting this harsh reality, naturalists developed seven justifications of their efforts to preserve species. The first was the aesthetic pleasure provided by plants and animals. In direct contrast to this was the utilitarian argument that humans could lose useful and important services and products uniquely provided by endangered plants and animals. These services and products ranged from the immense quantity of destructive pests eaten by certain birds to potential, but still unknown, botanical cancer cures. Third, naturalists argued for the need to preserve the ecosystems. To lose any component of an ecosystem could endanger the stability of the entire system. The fourth argument was both somewhat sentimental and an acknowledgment of the centrality of evolution in science. As end products of a long, and in some cases complex, evolutionary path, each species was seen as a sort of monument to evolution. All such monuments, the naturalists claimed, should be preserved. Preventing the loss of key aspects of American identity—unique native plants and animals—was a fifth justification. The American bison and the bald eagle were in this category of distinctively American creatures. The sixth justification was a desire to preserve species for the befit of future generations to study. Finally, naturalists argued that all species have a right to exist so humans have an obligation to preserve them. Barrow credits naturalists with having developed a “deep sense of connection with the organisms and places they study” and “strong emotional bonds with the creatures

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they have come to know and ultimately love.” Those connections and bonds have made them defenders of species. He looks at the successes and failures of naturalists to save species in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, emphasizing how the actions of committed scientists and lovers of nature often meant the difference between species survival and destruction. One of the most important early successes was the American bison. At the time of the American centennial celebrations in 1876, the great herds of bison had disappeared. Commercial hunting had reduced the bison population to a few hundred. Thanks, however, to the efforts of men such as Joel Asaph Allen, who took the occasion of the centennial to argue for federal refuges for the bison, and William Temple Hornaday, who initiated breeding efforts at the Bronx Zoo, the animal slowly made a comeback. By World War I, there were over three thousand bison in North America. Barrow contrasts that victory with failures to save the Carolina parakeet and the passenger pigeon. From these very different results, Barrow draws the conclusion that different animals attracted different responses from naturalists and the public. A large mammal, especially one so identified with American history, could elicit nationalistic and nostalgic responses that certain birds did not. Neither the passenger pigeon nor the Carolina parakeet captured the American imagination. Different responses to different animals based on factors such as their size, cuteness, or identification with nationalism would be repeated later. Barrow also discusses international efforts by American naturalists. These efforts were centered in Africa, where they concentrated on large mammals such as gorillas and game animals; in areas of Latin America, where many North American birds spent the winter; and in the Galápagos Islands, where the 1935 centennial of the visit of British naturalist Charles Darwin (and the role of the fauna of the islands in the development of his theory of evolution) attracted American attention to such animals as the giant tortoises. A key player in the international efforts was the American Committee for International Wildlife Protection. Established in 1930 by Harold Jefferson Coolidge and John C. Phillips, a conservationist and sports hunter, the committee brought together representatives from museums, zoos, and conservation organizations. Beginning in 1935, the committee gathered information that led to the publication of three groundbreaking reports on extinct and nearly extinct wildlife: the mammals of North America (1942), the mammals of the Old World (1945), and birds (1958). Operating under the principle that effective wildlife protection began with authoritative knowledge, the committee provided that knowledge, as well as taking the first steps in shifting the focus of the American wildlife conservation community away from native species and outward to the rest of the world. Barrow argues that the rise of ecology as a field in the twentieth century raised new challenges and issues for naturalists. There was a shift in emphasis in conservation from preserving individual species to preserving “associations of organisms.” This raised new questions and issues for the naturalists. For example, should predators be protected? Prior preservation efforts had avoided predators. Species had been designated as either beneficial or detrimental, with preservation efforts limited to species viewed as good. The new science argued that the preservation of predators was neces-

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sary to maintain the health of an ecosystem. Barrow looks in some detail in the interwar efforts to protect raptors (birds of prey, such as hawks, owls, and eagles), which culminated in the Bald Eagle Protection Act of 1940. Rosalie Edge was a pivotal figure in this movement, serving as a gadfly to the more conservative Audubon Societies and securing the purchase of the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania. One of the themes of Nature’s Ghosts is the central role of the U.S. federal government in species preservation. For a century, the federal government has partnered with the scientific community and nature lovers in conservation efforts. The government established bison refuges in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the Division of Wildlife Refuges in the Fish and Wildlife Service, headed by Ray Erikson, bred whooping cranes in captivity. The culmination of these government efforts was the Endangered Species Act of 1973, passed by Congress in an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote. Barrow argues that this act represented two radical departures from past practices. The first was its comprehensiveness. Unlike previous regulations, which tended to focus on large mammals and birds, the 1973 act provided protection for almost every animal (and even plants), no matter how insignificant economically or aesthetically. Second, it replaced what was a collection of ad hoc laws and uncoordinated efforts with a system incorporating clear steps and criteria for preservation. Increased federal intervention has the potential for increased political controversy. Barrow presents three examples of political strife brought about by the Endangered Species Act. The need to preserve the snail darter, a small fish, almost torpedoed the multimillion-dollar Tellico Dam project. The lumber industry was harmed by regulations imposed to protect the habitat of the spotted owl. Efforts to save the California condor were similarly controversial. Barrow thus reminds readers that the Endangered Species Act can make life difficult for politicians. Overall, he presents a lucid narrative based on extensive scholarship. The result is a volume of value for both scholars and lay readers that may well serve as the standard history of the topic. Marc Rothenberg

Review Sources Library Journal 134, no. 13 (August 1, 2009): 103. New Scientist 204, no. 2730 (October 17, 2009): 51. Times Higher Education, October 15, 2009, p. 44-45.

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A NEW LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA Editors: Greil Marcus (1945) and Werner Sollors (1943) Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass.). 1,095 pp. $49.95 Type of work: Literary history This history surveys a broad range of literary works and many other types of cultural objects in order to convey a more capacious sense of American culture Literary historians normally subscribe to the notion that literary history must be occasionally rewritten to reflect not only changes in the literary scene but also changes in the perceptions of its audience. Editions of the first large-scale work on American literature after World War II, Literary History of the United States—often identified as “Spiller,” after the first in its list of six editors, Robert E. Spiller—appeared in 1947, 1953, 1963, and 1973. The work’s last two revisions, appearing at intervals of ten years, suggested to its editors that the passage of a decade should signal the time for a fresh look at American literature. When a new edition of Spiller did not appear in the 1980’s, the Columbia Literary History of the United States sought to supplant it in 1988. Like Spiller, it had well over a thousand pages. An interval of twenty-one more years has brought A New Literary History of America from a coalition at Harvard University led by editors Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. With respect to mere size, the three works do not differ substantially. A New Literary History of America is somewhat shorter in page count, but given its slightly larger format, its length in words is similar to those of its predecessors. The number of editors for each volume keeps increasing. Counting editors variously referred to as associates, advisers, and board members, the fourth edition of Spiller has nine, the Columbia Literary History of the United States has ten, and A New Literary History of America has fourteen. With respect to the number of contributors, the change is more notable: Spiller has sixty, the Columbia history has seventy-four, and A New Literary History of America has an even two hundred. The sixty contributors to Spiller were almost all American male English professors: only one contributor was female. About one-fifth of the contributors to Columbia Literary History of the United States were women, but, except for one serving at a British university, they all taught in American institutions. In the A New Literary History of America many of the two hundred contributors are professors of subjects other than English or are not professors at all. About one-third are women. Some of the professors teach at such places as Tel Aviv University, Palacky Universitý (in the Czech Republic), the University of Florence, and the University of Göttingen, to name a few. Some of those who teach at American institutions also have foreign back-

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grounds, particularly Asian ones. Except for the identifications provided, readers would in Greil Marcus is the author of Lipstick most cases be unlikely to guess their origins, Traces (1989), The Dustbin of History for all essays display intimate contact with (1995), and The Shape of Things to Come (2006). Werner Sollors teaches their subject matter. With so many people involved in the pro- in the Departments of African and ject, there is considerable diversity in the ap- African American Studies, English, and proaches and styles of the contributors, but Comparative Literature at Harvard University. the editors of A New Literary History of Amer ica have imposed a limit on the length of the individual essays. The essays on individual writers and literary movements in Spiller and the Columbia Literary History of the United States reflect judgments about the relative importance of the writers; Spiller gives figures as eminent as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain from twenty-five to thirty pages, while the Columbia Literary History of the United States allots more space to previously ignored or underrated authors, usually providing from fifteen to twenty pages for the most significant figures. A New Literary History of America consistently allows its writers about five pages per essay, regardless of subject. This allotment directs readers’ attention to the distinctly different path of A New Literary History of America. First of all, the book is not merely a literary history. There are essays on paintings, magazines, jazz, comic strips, and manufacturing technology. Such things are not literary history, but it can be argued that literary history is best understood in relation to other aspects of American culture. The editors refer in their introduction to “the American story” and invite the audience to think of “other moments” that might enhance this story. There are no convenient limits for such an endeavor. The 218 topics (a few people have contributed more than one essay) occupy 1,050 pages and are arranged chronologically, but not necessarily according to the time of composition or publication of the works considered. As in Spiller and the Columbia Literary History of the United States “major” works occupy more space than “minor” ones. Emerson’s “The American Scholar” address and “The Divinity School” address are each treated in five-page essays by James Conant and Herwig Friedl, respectively. A caption for “The Book of a Lifetime” points to a discussion of Walt Whitman’s use of Emerson’s salutary letter as an advertisement for Leaves of Grass (1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, 1876, 1881-1882, 1888-1889). As in other literary histories, Emerson is referred to briefly in various essays, but it may surprise some readers that his seminal essay Nature (1836) is mentioned only twice and then very briefly. The plan of this new history allows scant or no reference to works that received more attention in Spiller or the Columbia Literary History of the United States. Spiller refers to fifteen titles by Washington Irving, while A New Literary History of America refers to just one, A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasties (1809). The famous “Rip Van Winkle” is curiously

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not found in the index, despite being noted as an important work in the general introduction. Irving is one of the authors downplayed in A New Literary History of America, while Edgar Rice Burroughs—the creator of Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, and other mass cultural novel series—is treated in five respectful pages. Burroughs is unmentioned by Spiller and alluded to only briefly by Columbia Literary History of the United States. The writer of the Burroughs essay, Gerald Early, as part of his defense of Tarzan, argues that everyone is familiar with him. A critic might assert that everyone is just as familiar with Rip Van Winkle. Irving is not the only writer to fall by the wayside. Colonists John Winthrop and Roger Williams each receive essays, but William Bradford does not. Nor are nineteenth century literary historians accorded much attention: William Hickling Prescott and Francis Parkman are mentioned only briefly, while George Bancroft and John Lothrop Motley are not mentioned at all. Sarah Orne Jewett is included, but Mary Wilkins Freeman is not. More surprising are some of the twentieth century omissions. Neither Eudora Welty nor Archibald MacLeish is included in the volume; Kurt Vonnegut and Joyce Carol Oates are barely mentioned. Probably the most striking instance of a declining figure is poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, whose relative eminence as a singer of New England once troubled Robert Frost’s ambition to reign supreme in that field of endeavor. Spiller granted Robinson a full chapter of fourteen pages, and the Columbia Literary History of the United States cited him briefly but respectfully three times. For A New Literary History of America, he does not merit inclusion. A comparison of the first essays in each of the three histories reveals some interesting developments. Spiller offers an essay on the European background of American literature, in the light of such traditional abstractions as the Reformation and the Renaissance. The Columbia Literary History of the United States reminds its readers that the body of literature includes more than is contained in the written record by celebrating oral forms such as the songs and tales of Native Americans, and comparing them to the Homeric epics. A New Literary History of America leads off with the year 1507, when the first European map appeared that included a large and ill-defined island called “Amerige, land of Americus,” or “America.” The second essay is dated “1521, August 13,” at which time the Aztec empire surrendered Tenochtitlán to the Spanish. Its author, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, relates this event to American literature by noting such things as the interest displayed by writers such as Ambrose Bierce, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, and Katherine Anne Porter in Mexican villages, as well as William Carlos Williams’s suggestion that American history might well begin with the destruction of that Aztec community. A New Literary History of America provides several other examples of literarily provocative events. One is the entry for the year 1804, on Haiti’s declaration of independence, which evoked literary responses from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, and Zora Neale Hurston, among others, as Kaiama Glover demonstrates. An artistic work may also inspire numerous literary works. Consider, for instance, an essay by Richard Powers on the monument designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens to commemorate Civil War commander Robert Gould Shaw and his Fifty-Fourth

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Massachusetts Regiment of black soldiers. Standing on Boston Common, the monument has provoked poems by William Vaughn Moody, Laurence Dunbar (whose father was a slave), John Berryman, and Robert Lowell; a musical composition by Charles Ives; and a 1989 motion picture, Glory. There is much to be said for organizing an essay in a literary history around a work that is both artistic itself and provocative to a succession of poets. Sometimes, a literary work makes its way into A New Literary History of America because it, so to speak, anticipates an event. The year 2005 was the year of Hurricane Katrina and thus recalls William Faulkner’s story “The Old Man,” written in 1937 and based on a flood that occurred in 1927. Other events are offered as inspirational not for writers but for other artists in other fields. In 1875, Buffalo Bill Cody proclaimed the excellence of a recently developed model of Winchester rifle as an outstanding firearm for fighting Native Americans or hunting. In an essay titled “Manufacturing Technology,” Merritt Roe Smith, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology expert on the history of technology, makes no reference to the rifle or any other technological artifact as an ingredient of a writer’s imagination. He does, however, cite the Winchester in paintings by artists Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, and in a Hollywood film called Winchester ’73 (1950). The contribution of this rifle and other firearms such as the Colt six-shooter to the American public’s romantic entanglement with the American West sufficed to justify its inclusion in a book that seeks to embrace a wider representation of American culture as the realm of the arts and humanities. The book comes much closer to covering literature than to covering culture, however. The great authors continue to be recognized, but some of the greatest American artists are not. Saint-Gaudens is discussed but not Daniel Chester French; Charles Ives is included but not Aaron Copland; Grant Wood is covered but not Edward Hopper. There is an essay on the skyscraper but no mention of Louis Sullivan. Even in a book of over one thousand pages, of course, there is not enough room for all cultural heroes, nor for all events that animate writers, but the attention to nonliterary makers of American culture in this book is very uneven. There are many excellent essays in A New Literary History of America. Anyone rummaging through it—including people with little interest in literary history—will find pleasure in essays by extremely talented writers whose backgrounds vary much more than those who wrote for Spiller and the Columbia Literary History of the United States. The book adopts a scheme of chronological organization much more interesting than one that sticks to a string of publication dates. This scheme and the unevenness of its coverage, however, sacrifice some important writers to events with no obvious literary connections. Few critics or literary historians have much faith in classifying literature by genre any longer, for genres now get stretched far out of shape. Readers today probably would not balk at an expression such as Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel.” The genre of literary history has been energetically and enthusiastically distended by the editors of A New Literary History of America in their efforts to enliven literary study. The work is new not just in the sense of freshly made but also in the sense of a type of

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study not previously experienced. It begins with “1507” and ends with “Barack Obama.” The next literary history must move beyond Obama, but perhaps it will also move further back. Indeed, perhaps Cahokia, that American settlement in the Mississippi valley several centuries before Christopher Columbus, will find its way into the next such work. Robert P. Ellis

Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 2 (September 15, 2009): 18. The Boston Globe, September 13, 2009, p. K6. Library Journal 134, no. 13 (August 1, 2009): 81-82. New Statesman 139, no. 4981 (January 4, 2010): 40-41. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 17 (November 5, 2009): 52-53. The New York Times, September 23, 2009, p. C1. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 29 (July 20, 2009): 133. The Virginia Quarterly Review 85, no. 4 (Fall, 2009): 213. The Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2009, p. W8.

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NINE DRAGONS Author: Michael Connelly (1953) Publisher: Little, Brown (New York). 374 pp. $27.99 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Los Angeles; Hong Kong Harry Bosch investigates the murder of a liquor store owner, and his pursuit of a powerful Chinese gang becomes especially vengeful when his daughter, living in Hong Kong, is abducted—which may or may not be related to the crime in Los Angeles Principal characters: Harry Bosch, a detective in the Homicide Special division of the Los Angeles Police Department Eleanor Wish, Bosch’s wife, long separated from him and living in Hong Kong Madeline, their thirteen-year-old daughter, who is trying to carry on a long-distance relationship with her father Peng Qincai, one of Madeline’s close friends in Hong Kong He, his sister Ignacio Ferras, Bosch’s partner, who is more preoccupied with his family life and protecting himself than with his police work John Li, a murdered liquor store owner Robert Li, Li’s son Mia Li, Li’s daughter Bo-Jing Chang, part of an organized crime syndicate putting pressure on Li and other business owners Sun Yee, Eleanor’s partner in Hong Kong, who assists Harry when he arrives

Much of the power and richness of Nine Dragons comes from the various ways that Michael Connelly not only tells an exciting tale set in a recognizable contemporary world but also taps into larger-than-life mythologies of character and setting, including several associated specifically with detective fiction. Harry Bosch, the protagonist of Connelly’s long-running detective series, has been established in earlier works as a quirky but archetypal detective. Without being reduced to caricature, he in many ways is a direct descendant of Dirty Harry, himself a descendant of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. All three have become cultural icons of the legitimacy and necessity of combating violent crime with sometimes even more violent justice. Harry’s full name, Hieronymus Bosch, identifies him with the Dutch painter of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries who is famous for his depictions of the corruption and cruelty of the world. One of the painter’s most well known works, The Gar-

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den of Earthly Delights (c. 1503), is an ironically named piece that includes a nightmarish rendering of the torments of hell on earth. A similar irony is employed by Connelly when he sets some of the most horrifying incidents in his story in a place called the Happy Valley. The detective’s name also invokes the apocalypse that seemed imminent in the earlier Bosch’s paintings. If the world has not yet ended four hundred years later, Connelly’s portraits of contemporary society impart the Michael Connelly is a former crime sense that the danger of apocalypse persists. reporter and novelist whose The Black Connelly’s Los Angeles, a stand-in for conEcho (1992) won the Edgar Award for temporary America at large, is filled with Best First Novel. In addition to his crime, violence, and other assorted threats fifteen Harry Bosch novels, he has that are concrete and local but also at times written several books featuring crime cosmic and overwhelming, evocative of an reporter Jack McEvoy, including The Scarecrow (2009). entire world always ready to implode. There is another reference point for Nine Dragons that is equally evocative and more recognizable to modern readers. The anxieties and mysteries of Roman Polanski’s film Chinatown (1974)—deeply influential on modern cinema, fiction, and cultural consciousness—inevitably loom large over Connelly’s story about a Los Angeles detective drawn back to a scene of enveloping and rippling violence that has left its mark on him. This locale, a liquor store, is not literally in Chinatown but is owned by a Chinese man, John Li. Some years ago, in 1992, Li gave Bosch refuge—and his last cigarette—during the Los Angeles riots. Bosch now has an opportunity to return the favor, but in the grimmest of ways: by capturing Li’s murderer, a quest that takes him from Los Angeles and its metaphorical Chinatown to a literal China that is even more menacing and mysterious. Connelly focuses extensively on Bosch’s investigative methods, some of which are both admirable and problematic. Bosch is intensely dedicated to his cases, in marked contrast to his partner, Iggy Ferras, who seems to be a lesser cop because he has a life outside the job: He thinks as much about his family as his cases. Moreover, his fears sometimes get in the way of his effectiveness as an investigator; he was recently wounded and has not been able to recover from a paralyzing sense of his own vulnerability. Ironically, those concerns link as well as differentiate the partners: Bosch’s family concerns turn out to complicate his investigation enormously, and he too is preoccupied with a sense of his own vulnerability, although this preoccupation makes him not timid like Ferras but impetuous and bold, like the dragon to which he is likened at one point in the story. Bosch does his best to proceed carefully and without preconceptions, letting the story of the crime scene emerge from a patient examination of all its details. This approach seems to bear fruit as a narrative emerges plausibly connecting Li’s murder to

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an extortion gang. A surveillance disc shows Li paying off a man later identified as Bo-Jing Chang, a member of the Chinese Triad. The Triad is a powerful criminal enterprise with an international reach. Chang is arrested but, not surprisingly, is completely silent and uncooperative. The case seems to be falling into a familiar groove, and Bosch remains the patient, analytical, and dispassionate investigator, even when he receives an anonymous threatening phone call warning him to back off. Everything changes suddenly, though, and Connelly heightens the drama by showing the effect before the cause: Bosch enters the interview room and assaults Chang violently and uncontrollably. The explanation comes later: Bosch has received a second threat, this time in the form of a video showing his daughter being kidnapped. Although there is no message with the video, he immediately interprets it as related to Chang’s case. He believes that the Triad in China has found his vulnerable spot and kidnaped his daughter in order to force him to let Chang go. Rather than being intimidated, though, Bosch is energized and launches a singleminded search-and-rescue mission. What was up until this point a classic detective story and criminal investigation now veers off toward another genre and becomes a captivity story, one of the oldest and most galvanizing of American tales (and dark fantasies), with Bosch manically dedicated to the recovery of his daughter. The captivity story is at the heart of many Westerns, and Bosch in Nine Dragons comes to resemble archetypal and ambiguous American heroes such as Ethan Edwards in John Ford’s film The Searchers (1956), a lone gunman doing what the institutions of civilization—specifically the law and the ordinary police establishments—cannot or will not do. Edwards is ambiguous because his relentless drive to save a young woman from not only death but also other unimaginable horrors at the hands of savages brings out the best but also the worst in the hero. Bosch mobilizes all his analytical skills and effectively tracks down his daughter’s whereabouts, using old-style grit and intuition and new-style technological savvy. He flies to China and walks the mean streets there, aided by a high-tech analysis of video images and voice messages. A memory card from a cell phone leads him from the virtual traces of his daughter to the real place where she is being held. Alongside Bosch’s determination and ingenuity, though, is what can only be called hysteria, and, as he fights off fears for his daughter’s safety and an almost overwhelming sense of dread at his own vulnerability, he becomes unable to remain detached and properly evaluate evidence and anticipate dangers. As a result, he makes a series of mistakes and bad decisions. Bosch joins his estranged wife, Eleanor, and her new partner and protector, Sun Yee, but their reconciliation is ineffective and shortlived. Beneath the tensions of the moment are the tensions of the past that Bosch always carries with him, and it is clear why he and Eleanor are an impossible couple—and a doomed one as well: Bosch’s impetuous rush to storm a hotel room where they suspect their daughter may be hidden is more foolish than brave, and it leads to a gunfight in which Eleanor is shot. “Stay strong and keep moving” is Bosch’s motto, but it is a double-edged principle that both keeps him together and tears him and his family apart. Several more violent barrages vent Bosch’s anger but lead him to what is nearly a dead end. He becomes locked in a dark compartment of a ship they are searching, an

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experience that recalls old traumas of entrapment in dark tunnels in Vietnam and new feelings of despair, defeat, and failure. Sun releases him, however, and Bosch finds his daughter. He takes her back to Los Angeles so he can try to be a real rather than a virtual parent to her. Most captivity stories would end at this point, but Connelly is far from finished. He wants to continue the story to show that rescue is not the end but only the first step in the difficult and by no means assured work of recovery and redemption. There is much to tell about the fumbling steps that Harry and Madeline take to build a loving and trusting relationship and to rebuild their individual lives and fragile senses of self. More unsettling, Connelly gradually reveals that the narrative that Bosch has constructed up to this point, the frame that gave coherence to the unfolding events and guided his actions, is completely inaccurate and untrue. When Bosch returns to Los Angeles, he is frustrated by the fact that Chang has been set free. He blames Chang for the original murder that started the horrific chain of events that have affected him so personally. He is at least able to insulate both himself and Sun from any further consequences of the havoc they wrought while pursuing personal justice in China. New evidence emerges, though, that discloses the truth about both Li’s murder and Madeline’s kidnaping. Fingerprints on a gun casing from the original shooting implicate a new suspect, who in a further twist turns out to be innocent but leads Harry to the revelation that Li was not killed by a Triad gangster. Instead, his murder was engineered by his own son and daughter. This discovery clears up one mystery, but it creates another: Since the Triad was not involved in Li’s murder, it no longer makes sense to assume that Triad gangsters abducted Bosch’s daughter. As it turns out, a tangled family dynamic is at the root of this other series of murderous events as well. Madeline staged her own abduction with the help of her friends Peng Qincai and He as part of an attempt to manipulate her father into coming to Hong Kong to take her back with him to Los Angeles. Thus, her plot succeeded, but not as uneventfully or harmlessly as she had hoped. The Triad is everywhere throughout Connelly’s novel: It is a constant pressure on Chinese people in Los Angeles, including John Li, and it is the force behind what turns out to be the real abduction of Madeline, not as a prank but in a plot to kill her and sell her organs. Nine Dragons is ultimately less about a dangerous worldwide criminal organization, however, than about equally sinister threats within the home. Chang is a fearsome threat, both in appearance and in reality, but he is not the real danger. The most harm in the novel is caused by two young women: Mia Li, who instigates the plot to kill her father and at the end of the novel kills Bosch’s partner before killing herself, and Madeline, who despite all appearances is far from an innocent victim. Bosch, too, the one most dedicated to stopping harm, is one of its prime causes, and he acknowledges his bloody as well as blood kinship with his daughter in the closing scene, saying “We all make mistakes.” In recognizing this fact and their shared task of recovery and reparation, he knows whereof he speaks. As the novel ends, the case is closed, but now the real work begins. Sidney Gottlieb

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Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 2 (September 15, 2009): 6. The Guardian (London), October 31, 2009, p. 10. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 20 (October 15, 2009): 12. Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2009, p. D1. The New York Times Book Review, November 1, 2009, p. 22. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 38 (September 21, 2009): 38.

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NINE LIVES Death and Life in New Orleans Author: Dan Baum (1956) Publisher: Spiegel & Grau (New York). 353 pp. $26.00 Type of work: History, biography, current affairs Time: 1965-2007 Locale: New Orleans Baum’s linked profiles—based on a million words of interviews with nine representative New Orleanians—span the period between the recovery from Hurricane Betsy to that from Hurricane Katrina and show the courage, character, and even heroism of Orleanians of all kinds in surviving difficulty and disaster Principal personages: Tim Bruneau, a New Orleans police detective in love with the highintensity policing the city offers Billy Grace, a former king of Carnival, whose noblesse oblige conflicts with his less than aristocratic origins JoAnn Guidos, formerly John Guidos, a suburban football player who becomes the female owner of a downtown bar, Kajun’s Pub Ronald Lewis, a Lower Ninth Ward product who experiences both Betsy and Katrina Frank Minyard, a downtown trumpet-playing society gynecologist who acquires a social conscience and becomes coroner, serving longer than any other Louisiana official Joyce Montana, widow of Tootie Montana, the godfather of the Mardi Gras Indians who weaned them from violence to aesthetic costume combat Wilbert Rawlins, Jr., a quintessential Orleanian school bandleader and surrogate parent to generations of lost, unparented children Belinda Rawlins, his wife, who resists Ninth Ward culture and struggles with the city’s dysfunctions Anthony Wells, a Californian of New Orleans parentage who returns to the city only to undergo mandatory evacuation to unhappy exile in Knoxville, Tennessee

Dan Baum’s Nine Lives is a truly remarkable achievement in numerous ways, not least in that, as various commentators confirm, it “gets” New Orleans as few books have. In Baum’s hands, the city of New Orleans itself becomes an antagonist, a tenth life, frustrating the nine protagonists of the title. Baum brackets his portrait of city and characters between two hurricanes, Betsy (1965) and Katrina (2005), chronicling more than forty years of events that accelerated the city’s long decline after its pre-Civil War glory. New Orleans, sited at a strategically crucial point at the lower end of the

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Mississippi River, was once the spigot that could shut off all but overland travel up and Former New Yorker staff writer and down the continent. The Erie and other canals Boulder, Colorado, resident Dan Baum and then the transcontinental railways sup- moved to New Orleans after Hurricane plemented the north-south Mississippi trade Katrina to record the city’s response to with burgeoning east-west commerce, serv- the disaster. He is author of Smoke and ing only to increase the port city’s impor- Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the tance, as it served as the gateway to world Politics of Failure (1996) and Citizen Coors (2000). shipping and to Central and South America. Baum reveals, however, that by the midtwentieth century New Orleans was increasingly a backwater town. It was challenged economically by new competitors such as the oil-rich Houston and the cosmopolitan Miami, and it was held back by a poisonous racial climate summed up in the experiences of two of Baum’s subjects: Ronald Lewis struggled against racism while organizing workers, and Wilbert Rawlins, Jr., strove to help semi-abandoned African American children who joined his school band. Meanwhile, the city was losing its economic base: Containerization replaced Ninth Ward stevedores. Wholesale “white flight” to the Metairie suburbs, exemplified in John Guidos’s early life, left New Orleans with an African American majority population. Its school and recreational systems, once vigorous and even admirable, suffered as white taxpayers abandoned them for Catholic or private schools and Mardi Gras celebrations. Baum uses Billy Grace, a decent, well-meaning member of the white uptown aristocracy, to manifest the difficulty of changing a city fanatically committed to tradition: Billy, an upper-middle-class striver himself who married into Carnival circles, works to elect Creole Marc Morial mayor but faces the disapproval of his society peers. Billy, serves as Rex, King of Carnival, a New Orleans title and tradition dating back to 1872, and he truly believes Rex’s motto, pro bono publico, “for the public good.” He regards his own strenuous efforts on behalf of Rex’s Krewe (the group that mounts the king’s annual Mardi Gras parade) as a public service. Baum wonderfully captures Billy’s almost charming cluelessness when, during one Mardi Gras, the aristocrat runs into Tootie Montana, the godfather of the modern Mardi Gras Indians. Tootie has been a real change agent, single-handedly replacing the bloody fights between the Indian “tribes,” or marching clubs, with aesthetic competition for the prettiest Indian outfit. Even participants can hardly believe that Tootie was able to bring about this shift from ingrained violence to a fashionista contest between men of color dressed as Native Americans. Billy, in effect, tells Tootie, “We have much in common; let’s do lunch.” Tootie, however, is heedless of the opportunity represented by an old white Rex engaging a new black innovator. He never calls. Baum uses the story to emphasize that, while people live cheek by jowl in New Orleans, they inhabit hermetic universes (“different planets,” remarks Baum). In uptown New Orleans, such separate worlds are only blocks apart. Frank Minyard does bridge communities. Like many New Orleanians, Frank is a school musician who maintains his trumpet skills as a lifelong avocation. A down-

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town white boy, he becomes a gynecologist to uptown matrons. Making huge money (even treating African American patients) and womanizing energetically, Frank finds his social conscience when he is asked to enlist his friend Pete Fountain to play in a benefit concert for a children’s breakfast program. The toddlers in the program are the offspring of prostitutes, and the venue is a Black Panthers center. Frank, unfazed, agrees to dispense methadone to the children’s heroin-addicted mothers. When arrested for streetwalking, these prostitutes become addicted at the city’s central lockup, where the official responsible for their medical care, in a perfect New Orleans touch, is the Orleans Parish coroner. When the coroner refuses to dispense methadone to addicts, Frank promises to take away his elective job and does so, assuming the duties of coroner and becoming possibly the longest-serving official in Louisiana history and one of the few U.S. coroners who performs regularly on the trumpet. The motto of Frank’s office sums up his efforts on behalf of all New Orleanians throughout his long career: “Where death delights to serve the living.” During the 1970’s, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) embargoed the United States, cutting off the supply of foreign oil and bringing an oil boom for domestic producers. New Orleans become one of the ten fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. High-rise office towers lined the city’s Poydras Street, and a technologically advanced future promised opportunities that would transform the fortunes of Billy Grace and other residents. The promise did not last, however, as prices plunged in the late 1970’s and the boom ended. Baum describes the resulting retreat, as Texas vulgarians disappeared from the famous Antoine’s restaurant, taking their Lone Star beers with them, and the distance-management capabilities created during the computer revolution allowed the few remaining oil operations to be controlled from far-off Houston. This post-boom bust left the marginally employed African Americans of downtown and the Ninth Ward with little work. Crack cocaine flooded the city, and young men rejected family and church values to make thousands of dollars on street corners, backed by automatic weapons. Baum describes the deadly effects of these proliferating weapons, as New Orleans became regularly listed on lists of the ten most dangerous U.S. cities. These very developments attracted Tim Bruneau to the city from Boerne, Texas: He joined the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) in search of what he describes as “kick-ass policing.” Telling Bruneau’s story enables Baum to represent another significant population in the city—the visitors, such as Bruneau, who find life in small-town Texas or Iowa dull and unfulfilling and come to New Orleans for excitement and even danger. Bruneau loves the NOPD, with its military esprit de corps. Crushed by a speeding car while chasing a suspect, Bruneau returned, partially crippled, and became famous post-Katrina for driving around the city with a dead body in the backseat. (Charity Hospital’s emergency room had shut down, and no other morgue would accept the corpse.) In extended travels around the city, feverish with the heat, Bruneau talked to the dead woman, a crack addict killed by a falling streetlight. He feels an obligation to serve even such bottom-rung citizens but also expresses contempt for the dysfunction and heedless violence in the city’s African American community.

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A similar need for excitement, but of a very different kind, motivates John Guidos, who was brought up as a conservative Catholic in the bedroom suburb of Metairie. Guidos became a strapping college football player in Mississippi, married, and had two children, but he found serenity only when dressing in women’s clothing. Baum describes Guidos’s hesitant steps toward becoming the woman he feels he really is: Reversing the “white flight” from the city, Guidos escapes his conventional marriage by becoming downtown bar owner JoAnn Guidos and serving the lost and out-ofplace members of all races and sexes within the city. Baum met JoAnn because her bar, Kajun’s Pub, had its own generator and was therefore a rare source of cold beer in the aftermath of Katrina. Wilbert Rawlins, Jr., the son of blues legend Irma Thomas’s drummer, has a distinguished musical pedigree but finds his place in New Orleans not in performance but in leading school bands. In New Orleans, band competition sometimes trumps the football and basketball games for which the bands purportedly play backup. Marching bands are the mainstay of Mardi Gras parades, allowing a parade that includes only one or two dozen floats to extend for miles, and changing a limited number of tableaux into feasts for the eye and walls of sound. Wilbert finds the band he leads in Texas during his Katrina exile technically competent but lacking in soul. He considers himself a surrogate father to his band members, half of whom have only one parent and many of whom have no parent at all, as they live with other relatives or with peers, sometimes in abandoned buildings post-Katrina. Memorably demonstrating how school marching bands serve as incubators for young city musicians, Baum describes Wilbert converting a group of young muggers into a street band for hire by teaching them syncopation. Belinda Rawlins was a Ninth Ward girl determined to escape New Orleans culture for a picket-fence life. Tough, smart and disciplined, she ended up pregnant, married, and unable to finish college—not once, but twice, with two different husbands. After meeting Wilbert, she got to live in her perfect house but discovered that her husband was “married” to his band room, hopelessly smitten by his extended parental obligations. She left him, but after a lonely post-Katrina stint in a Houston hotel she returned, more understanding of his vocation and avocation. Baum presents Ronald Lewis’s life as bookended by Hurricanes Betsy and Katrina. His story begins and ends Nine Lives. Lewis escaped town to live with relatives fifty miles west of New Orleans in rural Thibodaux, but the city drew him back to his completely ruined house and neighborhood. Interviewed on National Public Radio, he becomes a spokesman for the now famously damaged area and laboriously rebuilds his house. The book ends with Lewis leading a second-line parade he has organized, the Big Nine, symbolically proclaiming that the Ninth Ward still lives. Baum portrays most of his subjects as heroes who sacrifice themselves in some way for the city they love, whether by organizing the community (Ronald Lewis), risking marital concord (Wilbert Rawlins), rejecting financial success (Billy Grace), postponing sex-change surgery (JoAnn Guidos), or playing hardball politics despite old age (Frank Minyard). The satisfying congruence of these various forms of self-

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abnegation toward the end of the book suggests a literary hand at work, but Baum chose these particular personages from the outset to make a point. A hazard of writing biography is that authors may think they understand their subjects better than the subjects understand themselves and may attempt to supply their “real” thoughts rather than their reported thoughts. With a few exceptions—such as attributing the term “sacred places,” used metaphorically, to a fourteen-year-old boy—Baum avoids this trap, producing a work of amazing authenticity. Authenticity is the major issue in a book of this kind, one based on interviews so seemingly ingenuous and artless as to seem transparent, as subjects seem simply to talk directly to readers. At times, readers may begin to think of the speakers as literary characters, shaped by an artistic hand, before realizing that they are real people. Baum’s achievement is thus all the more remarkable, for despite the modest disclaimers of his acknowledgments, he chose and engaged most of his subjects himself. (The Rawlinses were suggested to him.) Like a documentary filmmaker pointing a camera in one direction but ignoring everything else, Baum made countless, if invisible, decisions about who could best tell the story of New Orleans and which details of that story to retain and omit. Baum conducted large numbers of background interviews with people who knew his nine subjects. He cut one million words of such interviews down to the 120,000 of the finished book. Most of all, Baum somehow persuaded his nine subjects to describe their intimate fears and failures and to leave themselves emotionally naked before the world. The result is convincingly accurate for anyone who knows the city well and is very fair. The author was pilloried for an NPR interview with Kai Ryssdal in which he said the future New Orleans would be as corrupt, violent, and dysfunctional as was the pre-Katrina city, an impolitic remark for a book promotion tour. However, Baum understands that part of the city’s appeal is this very un-American dysfunction, its sense of real danger, and its Caribbean tolerance of feckless excess. Andrew Macdonald and Gina Macdonald

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 9/10 (January 1, 2009): 40. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 18. Newsweek 153 (March 16, 2009): 18. The New York Times Book Review, February 22, 2009, p. 13. The Next American City, Spring, 2009, pp. 51-52. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 50 (December 15, 2008): 44.

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NOBODY MOVE Author: Denis Johnson (1949) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 195 pp. $23.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Bakersfield, California, and its environs Johnson skillfully employs the fundamental elements of the classic American crime novel in a gripping narrative concentrated on characters as memorable as those that have distinguished his previous work Principal characters: Jimmy Luntz, also known as Frankie Franklin, a small-time gambler Hank Desilvera, a county prosecutor Anita Desilvera, Hank’s ex-wife Ernest Gambol, a mafia collector and enforcer Juarez, the apparent crime boss of the sector Mary, a former Army nurse, who provides medical attention for the mob The Tall Man, a mafia accountant

The conventions of the classic genres of prose fiction are formed by the most striking and memorable books that declare and define their fundamental elements. Expectations concerning character, setting, and narrative tone are eventually established under the stress of what works, permitting immediate recognition and an acceptance of authenticity by readers. Inevitably, however, conventions become confining, and further work in the genre can become stale and predictable. To reinvigorate the genre, both an easy familiarity with its elements and a distinctive individual style are minimum requirements. Denis Johnson, an author very highly regarded by a relatively small group of people then familiar with his work, reached a much larger audience when his long novel Tree of Smoke (2007) won the National Book Award. What made his books especially appealing prior to the award was his unique style and oblique perspective, which resulted in the linked short stories of Jesus’ Son (1992) becoming an intensely admired, almost private pleasure. Johnson’s venture with Nobody Move into what the publisher calls “one of our most enduring and popular genres—the American crime novel” has some of the features that made Jesus’ Son so compelling and shows just how fresh and revealing a well-worn path can be when it is followed by a writer who rarely sounds as though he is imitating anyone. Johnson’s antic outlook is perfectly suited for a narrative that closely tracks, and often advances within, the consciousness of characters who are separated from the familiar social strata of American society. He is fascinated by the “bottom dogs” who

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inhabit realms both forbidding and intriguing. He has such a solid grasp of the styles of speech ofhis characters that much of the novel is composed of extended stretches of dialogue that seem simultaneously startling and natural. These passages illuminate the erratic psychological foundations of the main characters. The novel’s central character, a small-time gambler named Jimmy Luntz, is introduced by an omniscient narrator in an unfolding present tense that almost imperceptibly shifts to Luntz’s point of view. The narrative continues primarily in that mode, with terse interpolations to provide succinct details of Luntz’s meeting with Ernest Gambol, a man who has come to collect money that Luntz borrowed to pay gambling debts. Luntz, ever-alert for an opportunity, is wary of “that lucky feeling” that “had let him down before.” He cannot directly refute Gambol’s declaration “You can’t make a payment,” which is a summary of his situation in life. He has survived thus far by strategies of negotiation that alter the terms of agreements. “People will be missing me,” he tries, but realizing that Gambol is not convinced, Luntz shoots Gambol with Gambol’s gun. In a perplexing and strangely affecting moment, he says to Gambol “Look, brother, I hope you understand,” and calls 911 before departing with Gambol’s wallet, duffel, car, and gun. Johnson thus introduces a character whose unpredictable but plausible actions are likely to engage readers and placed him in a world that is seedy, somewhat sordid, and rife with the promise of danger and adventure. The author gives then Luntz an appropriate partner, as Anita Desilvera enters the narrative going through the final stages of an unpleasant divorce. Anita’s first appearance is in a movie theater at 11:00 a.m. since “There was no other place for the wife of the Palo county prosecutor to gulp down booze and grieve.” In spite of her predicament, Anita has a feisty spirit of selfpreservation and a fast mind and mouth. Seeing herself without illusions, she admits that “In a single morning with some documents and a little ink she had made herself a vagrant, a felon and a future divorcee.” Her car, a “beat-up near-worthless 1973 Camaro” is an emblem of her life, and it parallels Luntz’s complementary a selfassessment as he enters a motel “All wet, no car, no socks, paying cash.” Their separate narratives track Anita and Luntz as they warily eye each other then join as two loners looking for some solace, first in a saloon and then in a motel. The conventionality of the scene is alieviated by Johnson’s use of noir tropes—“Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy” energizes a standard setting—while spoton dialogue enlivens the pair as they individually decide to take a chance on company for the evening. “Frankie Franklin, are you a loser?” “Not when I’m lucky.” “When was a guy like you ever lucky?” He pulled her blouse over her head and a couple of buttons popped loose and flew at his face. “Sh*t, honey,” he said, “Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately? I’m lucky now.”

Such dialogue may not represent the popular conception of literature, but from Ernest Hemingway to the present it has shaped the matter of literary reality. As the first sec-

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tion of the novel ends, an aura of menace en ters the narrative: Gambol recovers from his Denis Johnson is the author of three gunshot wound, assisted by a woman with books of poetry and six novels, medical capability, asserting “I need a car. including Tree of Smoke (2007), which And I need a gun.” Gambol prepares to pur- won the National Book Award, and sue Luntz, driven by a very personal vision of Jesus’ Son (1992), which was made a social order that requires restoration, and into a film in 2003. Johnson expands the dual-track narration that was initiated to follow the separate paths of Luntz and Anita by using the cinematic technique of continual cross-cutting to create a feeling of tension that accelerates the narrative pace, reducing exposition while moving deeper into the consciousness of the characters. Although Luntz is meant to be the focus of readers’ interest and empathy at this stage, Johnson is disinclined to permit total identification with anyone. Gambol, who has been portrayed with no appealing features, is not made any more likeable but is humanized to the extent that he cannot be dismissed as a “villain.” Gambol’s exchanges with Mary, the combat veteran Army nurse who works for crime boss Juarez, set up a relationship that parallels the evolving pairing of Luntz and Anita. As Gambol rambles obscenely through stages of clarity and drug-induced confusion, Mary’s direct, no-nonsense estimate of everything is an appealing contrast to the pseudophilosophic self-reflection of the other characters. Anita demonstrates a proclivity for a kind of surreal vagueness that she resorts to when events are overwhelming. Luntz insists on framing everything within a context of qualification. These character traits are part of Johnson’s method for deepening the structure of their minds and is one of the signatures of his work. There are passages that have the flavor of Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot (pb. 1952, pr. 1953; Waiting for Godot, 1954), as Luntz and Anita seem to be searching for enlightenment as much as pursuing the money hidden in a scheme not yet explained. The characters’ increasingly self-referential comments on their own actions have some of the flavor of the retrospective narration familiar in film noir, but stretched into a discourse of comic absurdity that stems from their inclination to see themselves and their gestures as a part of a dramatic noir tableau. One of the basic motifs of the crime novel is an elaborate plan that is originally conceived simply to gain money, but that becomes laden with personal or ulterior motives. In Nobody Move, characters talk about making off with enough of the 2.3 million dollars in stolen money to retire from criminal enterprises. Aside from Mary, however,these characters seem incapable of living any other way. Luntz competes with “THE ALHAMBRA CALIFORNIA BEACH-COMBER CHORDSMEN” in a local contest as the novel opens. He preposterously likens that sensation to being in war, but his real excitement is the ultraviolent contest with Juarez and Gambol that occupies him. Johnson shows that all of the characters are, like soldiers in combat, at their most vividly alive when they are in danger. The challenge to these men does not come from the law, which is regarded as existing in another realm, to be treated with outward respect and avoided. Rather, their central con-

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flict is with other criminals, and through this conflict they gain status, stature, and self-regard. Juarez and Gambol enjoy proclaiming that they favor a particular gruesome procedure for exacting revenge. The punishment they describe may be fabricated: The story itself is enough for them to exert control over others. The extremity of the claim expresses the lengths to which they are willing to go to maintain the rules of their game and their social order. This strategy does not work, however, on a wild card such as Luntz, who cannot predict even his own actions. Almost as a set piece, Gambol sojourns, wounded leg sutured, carrying a cane, through the night to the restaurant where Luntz is trying to hide. The scene is informed by such gripping detail that it almost seems to overload the senses. Johnson choses to make this episode a full-scale, devastatingly realistic depiction of gun violence—perhaps because Gambol always operates this way, while Luntz, who wreaks more havoc than anyone else in the novel, acts almost in an instinctive response to an impossible situation. Following this episode, Johnson does not feel that he has to cover every detail of the very violent actions that lead toward the novel’s conclusion. Luntz is seen completely in the grasp of Juarez and his associate the Tall Man. Then, the narrative cuts (as in a film) to a parallel track and, without any intervening explanation, cuts back to Luntz holding a gun on Juarez, who is now driving a stolen Jaguar at Luntz’s command. It is as if Johnson has decided he has done enough with standard motifs and structure and is prepared to complete the narrative according to his own designs. The invitingly ambiguous last story in Jesus’ Son offers a degree of hope for the protagonist, but Johnson ends Nobody Move differently: In separate sections, each of the characters who are still alive is given a kind of envoi. Luntz, a compulsive conversationalist, brings the careening car to a stop and says, ostensibly to Juarez but more as a comment on the situation, “Wow. I think I just shot you.” Gambol drives by and thinks “Accidents were none of his business, gawking just another symptom of the human disease.” His future is probably the most promising, as Mary greets him “Ernest. I never saw you smile before.” Anita exacts her apparently justified revenge for her mistreatment by the power structure and then leaves for the territory, perhaps ratifying rumors about her American Indian heritage. In a cyclical return to the novel’s opening, Luntz ambles along, regaining the amiable demeanor that is his default mode, chatting with an attendant at a convenience store who suggests he needs to wash his clothes. “Where’s the river?” he asks. “Right over there a half a mile” she says. “Is it cold?” he asks. “It’s cold. But it won’t kill you,” she tells him, which is a summary of most of what Luntz has experienced. The water as a vehicle for purifying a damaged soul is not beyond consideration, but Johnson does not push the point. The fact that Anita has also headed toward the river might imply a mutual destiny for her and Luntz, or might not. The title of the novel, Nobody Move, suggests a command given by a person in charge to a disparate gathering in a threatening situation. However, it occurs on page 30, when Luntz hits the FM band in Gambol’s car and hears a Jamaican rhythm— “Somebody sang ‘Nobody Move, Nobody get hurt’”—which is sound advice that none of the characters is ever even close to taking. Although some of the novel’s tight

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structure and frequent erotic passages might be a product of Johnson writing it for Playboy as a serial on a publishing schedule, its ultimate form, quirky and convincing characters, and dazzling dialogue are all Johnson’s own. Leon Lewis

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 12 (February 15, 2009): 5. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 4 (February 15, 2009): special section, p. 6. Library Journal 134, no. 3 (February 15, 2009): 94. New Statesman 138, no. 4953 (June 15, 2009): 50-51. The New York Times Book Review, May 10, 2009, p. 6. The New Yorker 85, no. 17 (June 8, 2009): 113. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 2 (January 12, 2009): 26. The Times Literary Supplement, June 26, 2009, p. 21. Vanity Fair, May, 2009, p. 60.

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ON MOVING A Writer’s Meditations on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again Author: Louise DeSalvo (1942) Publisher: Bloomsbury (New York). 227 pp. $22.00 Type of work: Memoir Time: 1942-2008 Locale: New Jersey DeSalvo’s reflections on the experience of moving houses and making homes Principal personages: Louise DeSalvo, a teacher, scholar, editor, and memoirist DeSalvo’s grandparents, the Italian immigrants and first-generation family members who shaped her early life Percy Bysshe Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Marguerite Duras, Mark Doty, Pierre Bonnard, Vita Sackville-West, and Sigmund Freud, writers, artists, and thinkers whose experiences of houses and homes DeSalvo describes and intersperses with her own

The inspiration for the engaging if not wholly satisfying On Moving was the move Louise DeSalvo made from one house to another. It was not just any move. DeSalvo and her husband spent thirty years in Teaneck, New Jersey, in a house that witnessed the raising of a family, the planting of gardens, and the launching of teaching and scholarly careers. Once their children were grown and departed, the DeSalvos decided to move to Montclair, New Jersey, but in their new craftsman bungalow DeSalvo did not feel the joy she initially imagined she would feel at the opportunity to create a new home and life together. Instead, she was surprised by a profound sense of loss and emotional restlessness. To sort out and “temper the trauma of a move,” DeSalvo began asking friends and family about their experiences of moving, compiling stories that might help explain her own feelings. Because she wanted to go beyond that limited source of information, however, she soon found herself researching the lives of her favorite writers and artists to see what they had to say about this unsettling experience. She articulates her intentions in writing On Moving early on:

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I wrote this book to record the most useful moving histories I found, those that aided me in understanding my own experience in the context of my family’s and my past. I hope that it will help readers gain a new perspective on this, one of our most significant life experiences, and that it will impel them to reconstruct the history of this important transition in their own lives.

DeSalvo’s statement of purpose is admirably clear and direct, but it also strikes a distinctly therapeutic note that hovers over the entire book and its prose style as one of its less welcome features. DeSalvo is the author not only of several memoirs but also of a book about the writing of memoirs, Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives (1999). There is in On Moving a real sense that DeSalvo conducts her meditation on the subject preeminently as an exercise in producing psychological benefits for herself and her readers. This therapeutic goal of the text registers not only in the explicitness of many statements (for example, “the most important personal outcome of my writing this book is that my father and I talked about my family’s moving history during the last months of his life . . .”) but also in the explicit nature of almost every aspect of the book. The author relies on lists and repetition, and she has a penchant for anaphora. She uses catalogs to group tidily such things as the lessons she has learned about moving or the discoveries about the subject made by other famous authors and thinkers. These features give the text a reductive feel, as if DeSalvo’s interest in what is “most useful” trumps all other objectives and risks, turning suggestive observations into mere practical applications. There is an explicit touch to DeSalvo’s title as well in its clear invocation of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne and his characteristic approach to the personal essay, a form he virtually invented. Montaigne asked, in his famous formulation, Que sais-je? (“What do I know?”). As he looked out on a familiar sixteenth century landscape strewn with an inviting number of potential topics, he began to explore his own response to them. He wrote “essays,” trials or tests of what he knew, bringing to bear on his topic (whether “On Smells,” “On Liars,” or “On Coaches”) the full weight of his acute perception, his flexible humanist sensibility, and, not least, his capacious reading. Indeed, many of Montaigne’s essays are so larded with deftly embedded quotations from the authors he read and absorbed that they can sometimes feel like thematic entries from a particularly sagacious commonplace book. Nonetheless, it is precisely this combination of personal reflection and wide reading that gives Montaigne’s meditations a universal resonance, something beyond mere personal opinion or autobiograph Louise DeSalvo is a distinguished ical revelation. DeSalvo adopts the same strategy, seeking professor of literature and teacher of to create a braided essay that weaves together creative writing at the City University critical reflections on her own experience of of New York’s Hunter College. She has houses and homes with what she has gleaned received awards for her critical from her reading about the experiences of biography of Virginia Woolf and her others. She thus creates a sound, promising several volumes of memoirs. structure, though it is sometimes more suc-

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cessful in conception than execution: After four chapters in which there is an easy movement back and forth between DeSalvo’s personal history and the house-hunting history of such figures as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Virginia Woolf, and Vita SackvilleWest, a rhythmic disruption occurs when—for the length of nearly three chapters— DeSalvo is altogether absent from her own narrative. The sections that are uninflected by DeSalvo’s story can begin to feel like a report on her research, as she seems to treat Marguerite Duras, D. H. Lawrence, and Mark Doty as case studies in the pathology of moving. Even if the material imported from other writers and artists is heavy-handedly conveyed in long stretches of summary and extended quotation, this material constitutes the real interest of DaSalvo’s book. The eight chapters cover a rich array of topics related to moving, from the dream of a house that will be a “balm to cure all ills” to the frustrating reality of trying to find that ideal, from the joys of setting up a new home to the pain of dismantling an old one, from the curious sense of liminality and drift when one is between homes to the complicated sense of uneasy freedom when one is more or less a permanent exile or itinerant. Running through all these experiences is the persistent theme of change, how one seeks it and simultaneously seeks to buffer oneself against it, how it can be “a door, opening” onto new worlds, even if those worlds bring “ambiguous losses” as well. DeSalvo assembles a fascinating set of responses to changes of habitation from the journals, letters, and diaries of writers and artists. Among the most poignant of these figures may be Elizabeth Bishop. One of the great twentieth century American poets, Bishop was also a woman whose life was a decades-long quest for the perfect home. Once she found that home, it felt like a trap, and she was forced to flee. Partly, Bishop’s experience stemmed from her painful family history of dislocation as a child, an experience DeSalvo finds similar to the childhood experiences of English novelist Lawrence: His mother’s perpetual dissatisfaction with any home she lived in carried over into her son’s unflagging need to move, making him a “restless spirit” who sought freedom in motion. Though he continually nurtured the ideal of a permanent community of like-minded fellows, Lawrence could never long endure any community he settled into. Both writers embody the alienated soul, the nomad who feels the lure of permanence but follows the call of movement, who seeks in travel a cure for the disillusionment of an unattainable utopia. Both writers as well recognized the cost of living such a life, of traveling so light: For them, inspiration was bought at the expense of isolation. Bishop said her epitaph should read that she was “the loneliest person who ever lived.” Sigmund Freud, on the other hand, fought against this feeling of displacement and drift by refusing to travel light. After the Nazi invasion of Austria in 1938, old and ill as he was, Freud refused to consider leaving for the safety of England unless accompanied by his collection of art objects and archaeological artifacts. He had no home without these two thousand-odd pieces, the statues, totems, vases, stones, charms, and images that for years had surrounded him in his study and given him a sense of wholeness and stability. Without them, he confessed, he not only had no home but also had no self. In fact, Freud’s artifacts followed him to Hampstead and resided, if

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only for the last year of his life, in a room that was a perfect reproduction of his Vienna study. It was that room in which he chose to die. This fixation on the consolation and comfort of objects and place is perhaps nowhere more visible than in the painting of Pierre Bonnard, the one visual artist among DeSalvo’s examples. Bonnard’s endless recording of his Provençal house—the rooms with their familiar objects, the windows letting in light onto his carefully placed furniture and shaded walls—shows the way that building a home with Zenlike attention can make living in a particular space a genuinely spiritual experience. DeSalvo reads Bonnard’s creation of a home and his lovingly exact recreation of this home in his paintings as a testament to his profound connection to place, the subject of his meditation and the source of his art. Making a home, DeSalvo finds, can be work for the spirit. She discovers this sort of work is what her own new home will require of her. The final two sections bring the focus back to DeSalvo and her own moves, which are now placed in the context of her various histories of others’ moves. Her last chapter is a chronological list of all her residences, from dodgy urban walk-ups to charming suburban Tudors, annotated to include the economic and emotional conditions of her life in each place. Constructing the list leads DeSalvo to see a pattern in her moves, one that surprisingly recapitulates her family’s migration from Italy to America. She begins to understand that each move was precipitated in one way or another by a feeling that her life or welfare was under threat. She moved when she needed to move. The list also allows DeSalvo to reanimate the period of her life attached to each residence and to reflect on the role it played in her growth as a daughter, wife, mother, academic, and writer. Her afterword is an extended apostrophe to her penultimate house, the Teaneck home, through which she walks, offering an overly fond farewell to each of its rooms and recalling the life that took place within them. The tour is fittingly concrete and clearly heartfelt, but it also both sentimental and prosaic. After pages of pathetic fallacy, in which she insists that the house feels betrayal, pleasure, relaxation, recovery, resistance, and so on, the chapter’s excessive lyricism shears off into the self-help discourse of “bringing closure” and the clichéd exclamation, “this house: it could tell stories.” DeSalvo writes, “The typical American moves 11.7 times in a lifetime; that’s forty-two million people or 25 percent of all adults in a single year.” Her statistics, whatever else they do, suggest that moving is certainly an experience that everyone has had. That means people fundamentally know something about it. DeSalvo’s unexceptionable observations about this universal process of moving, noted and documented in her own life and the lives of the writers she consults, come down to these: People care deeply where they live; a new house alone cannot make someone happy; one can be unhappy in a “perfect” house; packing and sorting possessions will make a person relive the past and can be emotionally difficult; and being without a “home” is both freeing and worrying. Most people already know these things. If DeSalvo’s goal is to conjure up the spirit of Montaigne, then her essays need to tell readers something fresh, or at least remind them in arresting ways of what they al-

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ready know but have not considered in so revelatory a light. That is not always the case here. Though too often let down by her flat-footed prose and therapeutic tones, however, DeSalvo does succeed in marshaling a rewarding array of voices to weigh in on the pleasures and perils of moving; that is an accomplishment. If it is also “useful” and will “help readers” make “this important transition in their own lives,” all the better. Thomas J. Campbell

Review Sources Library Journal 134, no. 5 (March 15, 2009): 106. The New York Times Book Review, March 29, 2009, p. 17.

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ONCE ON A MOONLESS NIGHT Author: Dai Sijie (1954) First published: Par une nuit où la lune ne s’est pas levée, 2007, in France Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 288 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: Ancient China; the twentieth century Locale: China; France; Mali; Burma In their shared dedication to recovering the separated halves of an ancient Buddhist scroll, a Frenchwoman and a Chinese scholar fall in love and gather stories that shed light on the history of China Principal characters: The Narrator, a young Frenchwoman studying at the University of Peking Cixi, the dowager empress of China Puyi, the last emperor of China Tumchooq Zhong, a grocer and scholar in Maoist China Ma, Tumchooq’s childhood friend Paul d’Ampère, a French scholar of Chinese language and culture Hu Feng, a Chinese scholar and political prisoner

The intricate narrative of Dai Sijie’s Once on a Moonless Night is composed of stories within stories, arranged so as to give the impression of a timeless tapestry. These various stories—written texts, tales told, and histories recounted—range from tales of ancient China to twentieth century stories of the last dowager empress and the last emperor of China. They include episodes that take place during Mao Zedong’s China, as well as glimpses of the new, capitalist China. All this material is contained within the elegant and erudite consciousness of a young, unnamed Frenchwoman. A scholar of the Chinese language, she serves as the narrator of not only her own personal journey but also that of modern China. Her liquid and hypnotic storytelling, in the manner of a modern Scheherazade, invites readers both into her personal life and into an archive of historical incidents and episodes crucial to twentieth century Chinese history. In addition to its unnamed narrative consciousness, the other unifying feature of this novel is a mysterious ancient scroll on which is written one of the sutras of the Buddha, the first lines of which are also the novel’s title. This scroll, written on an eight-hundred-year-old bolt of silk, relates a Buddhist fable about a man who has stumbled off his path and who finds himself hanging from a single tuft of grass, below which he can see only a dark and unfathomable abyss. There is no way to know what

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happens next because the scroll has been torn in two. The whereabouts of the missing half are unknown. The fate of the scroll is mirrored in many of the stories the Frenchwoman hears or reads— and by her life as well: Much that she encounters or experiences is incomplete, broken off, or left hanging. The Frenchwoman’s own life is broken in two as a result of what happens to her during her stay in China. Her visit is shaped by her involvement in a quest for the missing part of the scroll and by her love affair with a Chinese man named Tumchooq, who is intimately concerned with the mutilated scroll as well. The story of Tumchooq and his French father Paul d’Ampère are at the heart of the Frenchwoman’s complex narrative. Another important thread of the narrator’s story concerns the fate of the last emperor, Puyi, who was a puppet of his conniving aunt, the Dowager Empress Cixi. Puyi was deposed in the early twentieth century when a major modern revolution toppled the old imperial system. The story of Puyi, another example of a life broken in two, is integral to the situation of the scroll, which increasingly over the course of the novel becomes a symbol of China itself. The near-mad Puyi took the scroll with him when the Japanese attempted to set him up as their puppet in the province of Manchuria. He impulsively tore it into two pieces with his teeth, throwing the second half from an airplane in mid-flight. The portion of the scroll that Puyi retained is eventually purchased by a wealthy French scholar, Paul d’Ampère. Here, the story advances some years later into Maoist China and examines the consequences of the revolution, which has led to totalitarian control, absurd mismangement, fanatic persecutions, and harsh punishment for anyone perceived as a dissident. D’Ampère, whose love of China has led him to take Chinese citizenship, is punished both for purchasing the scroll and for his status as an intellectual. He is arrested and imprisoned in a dehumanizing labor camp. Living in freezing weather, served inedible food, and forced to work mining gems in a suffocating and filthy mine shaft, d’Ampère is still dedicated to understanding the silken scroll, which is written in an ancient tongue called Tumchooq and which he has sewn into his sheepskin jerkin. Despite the ghastly conditions under which he is forced to live, he spends as much time as he can working on this language. He teaches it to his son, named after the language, who has discovered his father’s whereabouts and faithfully visits him. Even though Tumchooq’s hair features some of the red strands that indicate an exotic, red-haired father, he spent his childhood without knowledge of d’Ampère. His mother, now working for the government, kept his father’s disgrace hidden from him. On a visit to the Forbidden City, once home to Puyi and Cixi, Tumchooq and his boyhood friend Ma come upon a torture chamber. During a playful interrogation, Ma taunts Tumchooq with information about his father, upsetting him to such an extent

Dai Sijie is a Chinese-born French filmmaker and novelist. He is the author of Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise (2000; Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, 2000) and of Le complexe de Di (2003; Mr. Muo’s Traveling Couch, 2003), winner of the Prix Femina.

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that he tortures Ma in earnest. Tumchooq’s filial instincts, however, eventually surface despite the rumors that his father failed to consider how his pursuit and purchase of the ancient “Moonless Night” scroll would affect his wife and son. Although his father is now dishonored and imprisoned, it is these filial instincts that lead Tumchooq to begin visiting his father at the prison. During these visits, d’Ampère successfully teaches him the ancient language after which he is named. Tumchooq begins to share his father’s fascination with both the language of the mysterious Buddhist sutra and the unresolved fable itself, becoming as dedicated as his father to recovering the missing half. A fellow imprisoned scholar, Hu Feng, is also initiated by Paul into the linguistic mysteries of Tumchooq. The language of Tumchooq helps them transcend their grim surroundings, especially when they begin to play a protracted imaginary chess game using only words from this ancient tongue. Although Tumchooq is as intellectually gifted as his father, Paul’s disgrace has led to Tumchooq’s banishment, first to a reeducation camp and then to a job as a greengrocer, a position that not only fails to take advantage of his intellectual abilities but also requires enduring the eccentricities and shortages of baffling and ineffective Maoist economic policies. It is at this point that the narrator becomes a part of Tumchooq’s life, almost as if it is destined. She reveals that, in the late 1970’s, a book by Paul d’Ampère titled Notes on Marco Polo’s “Book of the Wonders of the World” inspired her to travel to China and study there. Like d’Ampère, the narrator is a French native who became fascinated with the Chinese language and with ancient Chinese culture. Also like d’Ampère and his son, she has become fascinated by the “Moonless Night” sutra. The narrator finds her way to Tumchooq’s grocery store coincidentally, while working in Beijing as an interpreter on the famous Bernardo Bertolucci film about Puyi, The Last Emperor (1987). The two bond over their shared interest in the mysteries of the ancient sacred sutra. Their shared passion gradually becomes a romantic passion, but the love affair is broken off when d’Ampère, whose duties include that of pigkeeper, is murdered by fellow prisoners. In the outrageous incident, his ignorant fellow inmates kill him because they believe that he has fathered one of his pig’s redhaired offspring. The sutra d’Ampère had preserved on his body goes missing. Meanwhile, horrified at the circumstances of his father’s death, disgusted with life in Maoist China, and resolving to dedicate the rest of his life to the recovery of the scroll, Tumchooq disappears. As his father apparently chose the lost scroll over his wife, so Tumchooq abandons the narrator for the same reason. It is revealed to the narrator, however, that d’Ampère was imprisoned because Tumchooq’s mother was forced to make the impossible choice between keeping her child or keeping her husband. This revelation suggests that it was Maoist China that broke Tumchooq’s intact family. In a parallel pattern, the narrator’s potential family life is also broken by the political persecution of d’Ampère: In the wake of Tumchooq’s disappearance, she burns all the beloved books she and Tumchooq enjoyed together, aborts the child she is carrying, and leaves the country, determined to abandon her study of all things Chinese.

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The action of the story advances to the 1980’s, as the narrator wanders somewhat aimlessly, taking up different languages and visiting different countries. She begins then cuts short a humanitarian career in Mali, Africa. This episode, however, features an adventure on a little boat she has named the Tumchooq, suggesting her heart is still with China and her former lover. As with so much of the narrator’s life, however, her African venture is not seen through to completion but is instead cut off inconclusively. Wondering what her future will be and whether or not her life is part of a grand design as is suggested in Buddhist philosophy, the narrator finds herself drifiting once again to Asia. In 1990, she is led to Burma, where she discovers that Tumchooq has become not only a Buddhist monk but also the prestigious master of his monastery. She is not reunited with him, however. While awaiting Tumchooq’s return from an official visit to Japan, the narrator is told that he has been arrested for holding an irregular passport, charged with identity fraud, and imprisoned in Laos. The narrator returns to Beijing, which she finds much changed from the Maoist city she lived in ten years earlier. She hopes to free Tumchooq from captivity, but, as is characteristic of the narrative, the novel defers the story of Tumchooq and of the narrator’s relationship with him. This plot is suspended so the story of the missing “Moonless Night” sutra may be concluded. The narrator discovers the scroll in a museum in Beijing. It has been miraculously reconstituted, the pieces finally brought together so that she, and indeed the world, will now know how the story ends. The image of the dark night and the threat of falling into an unfathomable depth is resolved through the missing half of the sutra, which depicts a safe and happy landing in its description of the presence of solid ground in close proximity to the feet of the dangling sojourner. This ending may promise a similar conclusion to the story of the narrator and Tumchooq, but, even more, the outcome suggests the healing of the Maoist rupture of China’s traditional Buddhist culture. Sijie uses the restored scroll, with its completed fable, to convey a metaphysical Buddhist vision, but it is also a vision of a China that is recovering its deep historical identity after a modernity that sought to sweep away any vestiges of the past. On a more intimate level, Once on a Moonless Night is notable for its series of love stories—from that of Emperor Puyi and his faithful sumo companion, to the love of Tumchooq for his father, to the romantic love of Tumchooq and the narrator. Love of language and learning are also crucial aspects of this ingenious and deceptively unassuming novel, which addresses both the personal and the political and which deftly integrates Buddhist precepts into the novel form’s traditional explorations of history, society, and the self. Margaret Boe Birns

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 19/20 (June 1-15, 2009): 36. The Guardian, January 10, 2009, p. 10. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 12 (June 15, 2009): 628. Library Journal 134, no. 8 (May 1, 2009): 70. Los Angeles Times, September 7, 2009, p. D.5. The New York Times Book Review, October 8, 2009, p. 20. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 26 (June 29, 2009): 109. The Times Literary Supplement, February 6, 2009, p. 20. The Washington Post, August 18, 2005, p. T24.

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ONCE THE SHORE Stories Author: Paul Yoon (1980) Publisher: Sarabande Books (Louisville, Ky.). 269 pp. $15.95 Type of work: Short fiction Time: Late 1940’s to the early twenty-first century Locale: Solla, an island off the tip of South Korea A debut collection of eight lyrical stories of human separation and loss, all set on an island off the southern coast of the Korean peninsula following World War II Paul Yoon sets the lyrically realist stories collected in Once the Shore in Solla, a reimagined version of the island of Cheju. Cheju is a volcanic island some sixty miles south of the Korean mainland. Approximately forty miles long and twenty miles wide, it is a place where, as one of Yoon’s characters says, it takes no longer than an hour to get from “here to anywhere.” Once a mysterious place of banishment for political dissidents, the island has become a favorite destination for honeymoon couples and tourists, and it is famous for the sea women who dive for shellfish off its shore. Yoon has appropriated Cheju, renamed it Solla, and created a fictional world reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Yoon’s Solla is a world of loneliness and loss. In interviews, the author has said that, although a sense of place is very important to him, when he had finished Once the Shore he realized that he had changed everything about the island—geography, events, and history—and that the stories were not about Cheju at all. Yoon says that he was most interested in exploring the effect of outside forces invading an isolated environment and changing people’s lives. The collection thus follows the island’s transformation in the years between the military occupation after World War II and its present-day reincarnation as a visa-free tourist destination. However, historical change and cultural upheaval are not what these stories are about. In spite of the important time span it encompasses, this is not primarily a social document, nor a “story cycle” parading as a sociorealist “composite novel.” Rather, it is a collection of self-sufficient, independent stories about individual lonely lives in the lyrical realist tradition of Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. The title story, Yoon’s first published work, was chosen for the 2006 Best American Short Stories. It transfers the 2001 Ehime Maru incident, in which a Japanese fishery school’s training vessel was sunk by the U.S. nuclear submarine USS Greeneville, killing nine Japanese fishers, from the coast of Hawaii to the coast of Korea. Changing the drowned Japanese to Korean fishers, Yoon tells the story of a twentysix-year old waiter at one of the island’s resort hotels whose brother is killed in the accident.

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Parallel to the waiter’s experience of loss is the story of an American widow in her six- Paul Yoon’s stories have been chosen ties visiting the resort. Her husband has been for The Best American Short Stories, dead only a few months, and she tells the 2006 and The PEN/O. Henry Prize waiter the story of how, while stationed in the Stories, 2009. Once the Shore is his South Pacific during the war, her husband first collection. came to the island on a furlough and carved a heart with their initials in a cave there. Although she has gradually realized that her husband had lied about this incident, she wants to locate the cave to somehow find the husband who left her to go to war but never really returned the same man. Also seeking some reconciliation, the waiter is looking for the mythical center of the ocean that his brother once told him they could find together. When he takes the woman to the caves, he thinks it is possible that this island, his home, is the center of the ocean. After serving her a special communal meal, he takes her into a cave where, with a sharp stone, she begins carving on the wall a design that he thinks could be the words of a language “long forgotten.” Told in a restrained and lyrical fashion that is both mythic and realist at once, “Once the Shore” evokes a sense of loss and final poetic reconciliation that constitutes is a typical pattern for Yoon’s stories. In “Among the Wreckage,” another story about a tragic accident involving the United States, an aging Korean couple lose their forty-year-old fisherman son when American planes drop test bombs on uninhabited islands just after the end of the war. The old couple set out to search for him on a dilapidated trawler that the father and son once reclaimed and painted. After a cruel encounter with an American patrol boat, they reach the site where their son’s boat was destroyed and begin the gruesome task of looking through the debris and human limbs. Casting themselves off from the trawler on a small piece of wood the size of a door, they pull floating bodies closer, lifting their faces out of the water looking for their son. Once again, Yoon’s language is reserved and controlled as he recounts the tension between the old man and woman that separates them and the horrible quest that unites them. Four of Yoon’s stories focus on women who have passively grown older on the island and who encounter and become involved with visiting men and lonely boys. Some are people the women have previously lost and try to recover; some are forbidden to them by age or nationality. In “Faces to the Fire,” a woman who operates a convenience store for tourists and cares for her aging father feels hope for the future when a man with whom she grew up returns to the island with the intention of staying. Her expectation of a renewed life for herself is dashed when she discovers that her dead mother’s jewelry box has been pilfered and that the man has once again left the island. One of Cheju’s famous sea women is the focus of “So They Do Not Hear Us,” in which a sixty-six-year-old woman, who began making the dangerous dives when she was thirteen, still searches for edible seaweed, mussels, and clams in the waters around the island. Having lost her husband to conscription by the Japanese during the war, she has never remarried. She takes care of her neighbor’s son, who has lost his arm to a tiger shark. When she discovers that what she thought were bruises from bul-

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lies are evidence of the boy’s own self-punishment, the two bond as she tries to teach him to dive for giant sea turtles. Once again, Yoon’s story is more like an extended poetic meditation than a linear story, moving slowly and lyrically to the final image of the boy practicing holding his breath in the bathtub, the stub of his arm resting on its edge, as the sea woman inhales deeply and in her imagination joins him. In “The Woodcarver’s Daughter,” which takes place two years after the end of World War II, a young woman who walks with a limp because of a childhood fall befriends an American interpreter who has come to the island. However, both the woman and the American have secrets. Her injury was the fault of her father, and the American is a deserter. The story ends with the American being captured by U.S. authorities and the woman slipping her father’s woodcarving knife into his pocket as they lead him away, not knowing how he might ever use it. Although she loses the American, she becomes reconciled with her father. “And We Will Be There,” which was chosen for publication in the 2009 Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories collection, focuses on a thirty-four-year-old woman who works for a hospital on the island. She first arrived at an orphanage on the island after an earthquake destroyed Tokyo. A boy came to the orphanage at the same time, and the two became friends. Ten years later, when the boy leaves the island, the woman moves to a hospital, where she helps care for the wounded men brought there. She becomes obsessively solicitous of one man, thinking he is her missing childhood friend. The story ends when, after hallucinating conversations with a young blind boy, she leaves the hospital with the boy on a bicycle, as he whispers in her ear, “War’s ending.” “Look For Me in the Camphor Tree,” the one story in the book told completely from the perspective of a child, is the most fairytale-like piece. Since her mother’s death a year earlier, a nine-year-old girl has lived with her father. He has decided to sell their farm and stables, finding them too large for him to manage alone. The lonely child feels that leaving the place is like leaving her mother, whose photograph she keeps on her dresser. One day, she sees a woman in the field wearing a pale blue dress similar to the dress her mother wears in the photograph. Later, when she takes her mother’s photograph with her and tries to show it to the woman, the woman disappears, leaving no indentation where she lay or footprints where she might have walked away. One night, when the child looks out her window, she sees a shadowy shape under the camphor tree that her mother used to sing to her about, but when she goes to it, she finds it is an old pony from their stables. She follows the pony, but she falls and cannot move. Her father finds her lying next to the pony. He picks her up and, in the mood of a fairytale, tells her about nighttime and its noises, foxes and maidens, and a woman in a pale blue dress. The final story in Once the Shore, “The Hanging Lanterns of Ido,” is the only story that centers primarily on a male protagonist. It is also the most contemporary story, focusing on the island as a favorite tourist destination. The story begins with a routine walk of a comfortable couple who live and work in the tourist industry on the island. When they stop for a meal at a restaurant, the waitress stares at the man as if she

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knows him and says, “It’s you.” It is only a case of mistaken identity, but later the man is troubled by it, weighing his life against the life he imagines for the other man, wishing he had asked the waitress questions about him. Because the restaurant where he encountered the waitress was Thai, the man looks up books on Thailand and finds a picture of a hotel in a Thai city. In the picture, he thinks he sees part of a figure behind the curtain of an upstairs window—a bare leg and an arm. He associates the figure with the waitress. This romantic fantasy so obsesses him that it contributes to a sense of alienation from his wife. He looks for the girl, going back to the restaurant, but finds that she has been dismissed for theft. Months later, walking on the boardwalk alone, the man sees the waitress again and says to her the same words she earlier spoke to him, “It’s you,” but he cannot think of the questions he wanted to ask her. It is as if the one language that he knew has now failed him. When he goes home to his wife, they sit alone in their apartment, and he tells her that if she ever goes away, he will remember her face and look for it. “We will be strong. We will be heroic.” The obsessive fascination with the waitress and the alienation the man feels from his wife do not suggest a romantic attraction to the girl or dissatisfaction with his wife. Rather what he experiences is a poignant sense of “what if.” What if his life had been different; what kind of life would it have been? Like all of Yoon’s stories, this final one in the collection has the sense of loneliness that Frank O’Connor once attributed to the short story as a form. In their combination of realist detail and folkloric fantasy, the stories are classic examples of what the short story has done best since Turgenev discovered the power of lyrical realism. Charles E. May

Review Sources The Boston Globe, April 12, 2009, p. C7. Literary Review 52, no. 4 (Summer, 2009): 206-208. Los Angeles Times, April 12, 2009, p. E5. The New York Times, April 26, 2009, p. 23. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 5 (February 2, 2009): 31.

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ONE D.O.A., ONE ON THE WAY Author: Mary Robison (1949) Publisher: Counterpoint Press (Berkeley, Calif.). 166 pp. $23.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: New Orleans, Louisiana Robison’s multisectioned novel combines narrative, interior monologue, black comedy, and realist descriptions of New Orleans to examine the blighted cultural and spiritual fabric of the city post-Katrina Principal characters: Eve, a location scout for a film-production company in New Orleans Adam, Eve’s husband, who is very ill with hepatitis C and lives with his parents Saunders, Adam’s twin brother, an alcoholic who is having an affair with Eve Lucien/Paul, Eve’s intern at the production company, who lives in a FEMA trailer Petal, Saunders’s wife Collie, Petal and Saunders’s young daughter, a kleptomaniac

Mary Robison’s One D.O.A., One on the Way is told primarily from the first-person perspective of the ironically named Eve, a fortyish location scout for the New Orleans film industry who lives in a decidedly non-Edenic world. The novel combines narrative, interior monologue, diary entries, and fact lists to create a kind of southern gothic pastiche of the many tragedies, both personal and cultural, in post-Katrina New Orleans. It is divided into chapters, which are then subdivided into a total of 225 subsections. This subsectioning technique, also used by Robison in her earlier novel Why Did I Ever (2001), initially creates a sense of constant disconnection in the plotting of the text. The narration of Eve’s movements and reactions is choppy, interspersed with seemingly digressive bits of information about random things she notices, items her kleptomaniac niece Collie steals, and fact lists, some of them about the situation in New Orleans since Katrina. For example, in one section titled “Community Service,” Robison includes a bulleted list of seven facts about drainage issues in New Orleans. (According to Robison’s “Author’s Note,” she has “not knowingly made statements about New Orleans that are incorrect.”) This section is juxtaposed with two small subsections about the beginning of Eve’s affair with Saunders, perhaps as a kind of ironic commentary on the narrative. In another example of what at first appears dissociative, several of the subsections

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consist of lists about the different types of holsters used for carrying various concealed Mary Robison is the author of Days weapons. Though Eve does not carry a gun or (1979), An Amateur’s Guide to the discuss carrying a gun, these lists that read as Night (1983), Believe Them (1988), though they were diary entries hint at a vio- Tell Me: Thirty Stories (2002), Oh! lence that does not occur until the end of the (1981), Subtraction (1991), and Why novel. Thus, the sections of jumpy, short nar- Did I Ever (2001; winner of the Los rative are purposefully positioned next to other Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction). She teaches at the University of observations and facts to create ironic associFlorida. ations that help constitute both the humor and the pathos of the book. Robison, often discussed critically as a minimalist, employs that quality of her work here, saying more with less and inviting readers to make connections between what at first might seem to be disparate subjects. The text that forms from these associations constitutes a novel that is more than just a narrative: It also serves as a kind of exposé of post-Katrina New Orleans. Eve’s story, the narrative part of the novel, is split between scenes with her intern (whom she calls Lucien through much of the text, only to learn that his real name is Paul) and scenes with her family members. Her conversations with Paul help illustrate Eve’s work since one of her professed goals is to explain her work to him. Her moments with her family address issues of her emotional life. The narrative arc of Eve’s life is interrupted in the middle of the text, when Eve inexplicably begins an affair with Saunders, her husband’s alcoholic twin brother. This affair is further complicated when Saunders’s wife Petal pulls a gun on him in the car after they leave a restaurant. In order to keep Petal from harming Saunders, Eve convinces her to commit herself to a mental hospital. Though readers never quite understand Petal’s reason for wanting to shoot her husband or how she obtained the gun, Robison uses her stay at the mental hospital to portray the problems with health care in New Orleans. Petal becomes trapped in the hospital, despite the fact that she committed herself voluntarily, because the hospital stands to make money by keeping her there. Her daughter Collie is a kleptomaniac, and many of the subsections of the novel consist of lists of things that Collie has stolen from Eve. Details of Collie’s relationship to her family are never made clear, nor is where she stays after her mother enters the hospital. Both Petal and Collie remain underdeveloped as characters, remaining comic caricatures because of their unexplained, bizarre behavior. Robison’s minimalist technique can be seen in a lack of development of other characters as well. Frequently, characters are identified by their quirks, these quirks serving as shorthand devices for conveying larger themes of the novel. Saunders, as the lovable drunken twin, is described by the expensive clothes he wears, the many destructions caused by his drunken stumbling, and the nonchalant manner in which he hands over a hundred-dollar bill. His brother Adam, described as critically ill from hepatitis C, has taken to his sickbed at his parents’ house. Adam’s parents feed and clothe him and even pay for him to be moved to the top of a waiting list for a liver transplant.

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The twins are disconnected from everything other than their often-selfish whims, existing in complete isolation from New Orleans. Their isolation underscores the separation of the wealthy from the less fortunate city dwellers who must constantly face the seriousness of corruption and the horrors of mismanagement and destruction. Even more despicable are the twins’ parents, who are characterized by their crisp clothing, their perfect hair, and their inability to see beyond their own narrow, preserved bastion of wealth and privilege. By contrast, Eve’s intern lives in a Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA) trailer and lies about his living arrangement in order to stay there. His lifestyle has been radically changed by the effects of Hurricane Katrina, and his distrust and disillusionment can be felt in his interactions with Eve and her family. At one point, when Paul meets the brothers, they offer $75 for anyone who can name a certain character in a movie. When Paul responds with a name, they hand him the money. He seems unsure of taking it, since he is not sure his answer was correct, but Eve assures him that the twins do not know the truth anyway so he might as well take the money. In short, this interchange underscores the insidious way corruption can enter into even the smallest interaction. Unlike these characters who live at extreme ends of the spectrum of wealth and poverty, Eve operates between the two worlds of the jaded rich and the streetwise poor. Robison accordingly allows her more dimensions than the novel’s other characters. Eve’s perceptions filter readers’ experiences of the other characters, and the digressive subsections in the novel seem to be part of Eve’s diary or interior monologue. Thus, readers are exposed to what appear to be intimate, though often simply factual, bits of Eve’s consciousness. Many of Eve’s most intimate moments are captured in her lists of things she will never do again. Part comedy and part serious attempt to stop bad behavior, these interior looks at Eve’s world reveal much about her character. For example, in one list she indicates she is “never again calling my congressperson and screaming ‘Liar!’ into the phone,” a serious injunction against political apathy in the area, but in the same list she also says she is “never again eating a Slim Jim,” and “Diving from a height onto packaging peanuts is over.” With humor and seriousness, Eve manages living in this postlapsarian world. Because of her exposure to the real New Orleans, however, she can acknowledge the city’s dangers and potentials, as well as find fault with the general attitudes of her husband’s family. Another aspect of Eve’s character can be seen in her professional evaluations of New Orleans. By discussing the city with Paul from a professional standpoint, Eve presents a more objective, detached viewpoint. Because Eve spends much of the novel teaching Paul to be a locations expert, many sections of the novel are essentially lectures to the intern about how to find certain locations for others, both inside and outside the city. Eve’s job involves locating plantations, cemeteries, and swamps. She frequently tells others the correct places to stay in the city. She eats at various restaurants in the city, including the Café du Monde. She wanders around the city, noting changes in the area, taking them in as part of her professional career. This objective relationship between Eve and her environs forces readers to see

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New Orleans from a unique perspective, devoid of sentimental speculation or despair. Rather, the problems of crime, unreconstructed destruction, and pollution are seen as matters of fact. In a discussion with a production company representative who wants to visit the Ninth Ward, Eve simply says that he cannot go there. When he smiles and says that he can handle it, indicating that he is somehow special because he is involved in movies, she simply tells him that he physically cannot reach the Ninth Ward because of all of the destruction and debris in the way. Eve’s nonchalant honesty and her nonjudgmental attitude illustrate the conditions in New Orleans much more clearly than other, hyperbolic accounts might. One never knows why Eve sees things from this point of view, if she has become so emotionally desensitized that she cannot feel anymore or if this is simply her normal manner. One sees this same emotional distancing when Eve describes her two previous marriages in emotionally stripped terms: One begins to sense that Eve has always been hopelessly anesthetized. Eve’s encounters with New Orleans and its environs are in sharp contrast to the home of the twins, a classic southern gothic home set on some acreage that contains a lake where the twins’ younger sister once drowned. To pay tribute to their drowned daughter, the parents have erected a statue in the water and brought in two black geese. In this protected compound, the family hunkers down, desperately desiring to evade the problems of the rest of the world. At the beginning of the book, the father fears that his world is being invaded by young punks who come to the lake and toss in trash. As a way to protect his world, he wants to inform the police. Ironically, however, the father lives so much in a bubble that he does not realize that the police force is drastically understaffed and that he will need to hire private security guards in order to be protected. Several of the lists in the novel involve problems of police protection in New Orleans, including the number of crimes not processed because of a lack of police officers, the number of innocent people injured by police officers, the number of untrained officers, and the number of officers who have left New Orleans. These hints of police problems meet fruition in the novel’s final scenes, when Eve throws away her sister-in-law’s gun in the lake and it accidentally discharges. Police emerge from the surrounding area, shoot her, and shoot and kill her husband. Thus, the climax of the story illustrates one of the many paradoxes of the city: The innocent are punished, while the guilty go free. Adam and Eve are gunned down in paradise. One D.O.A., One on the Way complicates the traditional novel in terms of its characterization and plot structure. Moreover, Robison’s minimalist approach to discussing the many issues relevant to post-Katrina New Orleans allows readers better to appreciate the incongruities of the city. Indeed, though Eve’s digressions and lists help readers see her somewhat more clearly than other characters, the associations among the multiple subsections of the novel and their connections to New Orleans suggest that the city is Robison’s main character—and the main focus of the novel as well. Rebecca Hendrick Flannagan

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 11 (February 1, 2009): 28. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 24 (December 15, 2008): 1275. The New York Times Book Review, March 22, 2009, p. 13. The New Yorker 85, no. 10 (April 20, 2009): 113. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 50 (December 15, 2008): 33-34. The Times Literary Supplement, May 8, 2009, p. 21.

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ONE SQUARE INCH OF SILENCE One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World Authors: Gordon Hempton (1953) and John Grossman Publisher: Free Press (New York). 356 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Environment, nature, travel Time: 2007-2008 Locale: Olympic National Park and Seattle, Washington; Montana; Canyonlands National Park, Utah; Colorado; Nebraska; Kansas; Missouri; Illinois; Indianapolis, Indiana; Tennessee; C&O Canal National Historic Park, Virginia; Washington, D.C. Hempton narrates his cross-country journey to search for places where natural silence still exists and to advocate for the preservation of some areas of natural silence in the United States Principal personages: Gordon Hempton, acoustic ecologist and nature sound recordist John Grossman, freelance writer Jay Salter, poet and nature sound recordist Elliott Berger, acoustic scientist

In One Square Inch of Silence, Gordon Hempton argues that silence, which might be defined as natural quiet, is a natural state that all species including humans seek. Silence is essential for physical, mental, and spiritual well-being, yet it is perhaps the most endangered natural resource of all. The intrusive noise made by human technology now infringes on every part of the earth. Hempton, who has recorded nature sounds across the world, finds that pure natural silence has almost disappeared globally. In the United States as of 2007, Hempton finds only three places with “noise-free intervals of 15 minutes or longer.” In an effort both to preserve and to raise awareness about this vanishing natural state, Hempton established a place named One Square Inch of Silence and marked by a small red stone in the Hoh Rain Forest at Olympic National Park on Earth Day, 2005. His goal was to maintain this natural soundscape so that natural silence would spread to the surrounding area and “quiet will prevail over a much larger area of the park.” Although the location has attracted many visitors who share and support his vision for preservation of natural silence, in 2007 Hempton realized that he needed to do more. This book is the record of a cross-country trip that Hempton took. During his journey, he sought out naturally quiet locations and made recordings. He gathered information from public officials in agencies such as the National Park Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Federal Aviation Administration and from

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scientists, engineers, and medical professionals who specialize in acoustics. He advocated and raised awareness about natural silence among the public through conversations. One Square Inch of Silence—coauthored with freelance writer John Grossman, who participated in interviews in Indianapolis and Washington, D.C.—is an extension of Hempton’s efforts to champion and preserve areas of natural silence in the United States. The organization of the book chronicles the route of Hempton’s journey. He begins appropriately at One Square Inch of Silence in Olympic National Park. There, he retrieves the red stone and takes it with him as a symbol of his quest for the preservation of silence. Throughout his trip, he photographs the stone at different places, concluding with the Washington Monument. From a literary standpoint, the initial chapter gives readers an excellent acoustic sense of what it feels like to experience natural quiet in close to its pure state. As Hempton travels from west to east across North America, he alternates between wilderness experiences and urban noise. For instance, after leaving the silence of One Square Inch, he goes to Seattle. His purpose is to gather information about sound and acoustics from city streets and buildings. He attends a professional basketball game and learns about the professional manipulation of sound that is typical of most sports arenas, both indoor and outdoor. On the quieter side, he also meets with acoustical engineers who have worked on interior soundscapes for the downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library and for Benaroya Hall, the performing venue of the Seattle Symphony. Throughout this urban acoustic tour, readers gain information about the variety of sound experiences and acoustical possibilities, both indoor and outdoor, that exist within a large urban environment. Similar contrasts of sound continue through Hempton’s journey. He has another intensive wilderness experience camping in Canyonlands National Park near Moab, Utah, with his friend and nature sound recording colleague, Jay Salter. The two men emerge from this profound immersion in natural quiet to dine at a busy restaurant, where they measure the sound level at almost 75 A-weighted decibels, very high compared to levels between 20 and 40 A-weighted decibels in the Canyonlands backcountry. Salter comments: “It’s hard to believe, Gordon, we’re coming from twenty decibels to this! A jet intrusion would be quieting.” Further along the way in Indianapolis, after consulting with acoustic scientist Elliot Berger, Hempton leaves the bustle of that city and the earsplitting sound level of the Indianapolis speedway, where personal noise protection for the ears is advisable. He seeks the mountain stream in Tennessee where John Muir, the nature writer and founder of the Sierra Club, described the “music” of a mountain stream in 1867 as “the most eloquent voice of Nature.”

Gordon Hempton is an acoustic ecologist and sound recordist. His sound portrait in a PBS documentary, Vanishing Dawn Chorus, received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement. John Grossman is a freelance writer whose writings in magazines such as Audubon and National Geographic Traveler often focus on nature and environmental issues.

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As Hempton travels, he meets with public officials to discuss policy issues that could determine the fate of preservation of some areas of natural silence, primarily within some of the national parks. En route across Colorado, he stops in Fort Collins to speak with Frank Turina and Karen Trevino at the Natural Sounds Program, a division of the National Parks Service. Despite the promising mandate and goals of this program and federal laws that support it, very little has been done to protect the natural soundscapes within the national parks. Hempton identifies one key problem: “Nobody is talking about the natural resource, it’s the noise that’s being studied. To me that seems totally backwards.” The culmination of this cross-country journey is in Washington, D.C., where Hempton and Grossman meet with officials in the Department of the Interior and the Federal Aviation Administration to discuss rerouting flights away from especially sensitive park areas. They also speak with Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington about One Square Inch in the Olympic National Park. Again, from the standpoint of noise control or preservation of natural soundscapes as a natural resource, the issue of natural quiet gets lost in the political shuffle. For instance, within the Environmental Protection Agency, an Office of Noise Abatement once existed to help implement the Noise Control Act of 1972. Ten regional centers at universities were studying and providing educational outreach with information about the impact of noise on health and welfare. That thriving initiative has now dwindled to one person. One of the rationales that public officials give for ignoring noise pollution and preservation of natural quiet is a lack of studies that measure and demonstrate the deleterious effects of noise on health and society. The very programs that were providing that information, however, have been dismantled. In considering this book’s purpose and effectiveness, it is helpful to consider it in the context of the distinctive American literary contribution of nature writing. As Daniel G. Payne explains in his study of this literary genre, Voices in the Wilderness. American Nature Writing and Environmental Politics (1996), nature writers have been a driving force behind environmental reform and public policy in the United States. He argues that the most successful of these writers—such as John Muir and Rachel Carson—combine three “rhetorical tasks”: to alert, to inform, and to persuade readers. One Square Inch of Silence is effective in the first two categories, informing and alerting. Informing involves many aspects. A large part of it for Hempton is simply giving readers an understanding of what natural silence is. The book achieves this goal through descriptive nature writing about the effects of quiet. As Hempton writes about being connected to nature in places of natural silence such as One Square Inch or in the far reaches of Canyonlands National Park, he figuratively opens readers’ ears. With him, one can “hear” the sounds of birds, insects, and animals. One can hear the wind through the leaves of the trees, the flowing of rivers and streams. The sound of rain as it falls through the forest, making its way from the different types of leaves to the mossy ground, have their own orchestration in Hempton’s hands. Hempton describes the more tumultuous sounds of the autumn floods in the Hoh Rain Forest, saying they constitute a “deluge concerto” of boulders breaking down

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rocks and trees splitting. Hempton makes readers aware of how the natural inhabitants of these areas rely on sound for protection from predators and for awareness of changing weather conditions. Through Hempton’s words, readers can imagine what he feels in a quiet place. “It is a place to feel the love that connects all things, large and small, human and not; a place where the presence of a tree can be heard. A quiet place is a place to open up all your senses and come alive.” The book extends this literary description by including a compact disc with sounds that Hempton recorded on his journey, as well as color photographs. In this way, technology can simulate the effect of pure nature sounds in opening all the senses. The book also includes much information that alerts readers to the dangers of noise pollution. Although the problems of high noise levels are discussed throughout the book, much of this information is concentrated in a chapter titled “Toxic Noise.” Readers learn that premature and irreversible hearing loss is only the tip of the iceberg. Noise pollution has proven negative effects on cardiovascular health and on the nervous system. With even moderate levels of noise, sleep disturbances continue. The body cannot rest and restore itself. An increase in aggressive behavior is just one of the broader effects of noise pollution on society. Despite the variety of information and eloquent descriptive passages on the beauty, as well as the personal and ecological benefits, of natural silence, Hempton fails to be completely persuasive. Some of the difficulty he encounters is inherent in his subject. Silence, the quiet of nature, is an ephemeral thing. A person cannot see silence. It is something that must be experienced, often alone in the wilderness. In addition, as the author notes, “noise has become so prevalent it’s taken for granted.” Most people do not even know what true silence is or how to adjust to it. Moreover, some of Hempton’s key points get lost in the organization of the book. A clear statement of purpose does not appear until more than one hundred pages in, when Hempton speaks of “searching for true natural quiet and speaking to people . . . about quiet and the significance of quiet in their lives.” Somewhat later, Hempton speaks of “the sonic beauty of these landscapes.” The phrase “sonic beauty” could be emphasized as a catchphrase that captures people’s attention, much as “scenic beauty” does. Also, the key issue is confusing. The need to preserve natural silence becomes conflated with the problem of noise pollution, and these two aspects of Hempton’s thesis need more coherent integration into an emphatic message. Hempton’s project in One Square Inch of Silence, which encompasses both the book and the place in the Olympic National Park, is an environmental wake-up call. Hempton ends the book by quoting another environmental activist and writer, Edward Abbey: “The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.” Hempton is an impassioned and informed defender of natural silence. He considers “saving silence” as “an awakening joy.” He states: “I cannot imagine a future without quiet, nor do I care to try.” This book is a worthy effort on behalf of natural silence that should inspire others to give natural silence its crucial place in the future of this planet. Karen Gould

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 14 (March 15, 2009): 33. Christianity Today 53, no. 3 (March, 2009): 62. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 3 (February 1, 2009): 51. Library Journal 134, no. 4 (March 1, 2009): 95-96. Natural History 118, no. 4 (May, 2009): 55. The Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2009, p. W7.

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ONE STATE, TWO STATES Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict Author: Benny Morris (1948) Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). 240 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Current affairs, history Time: The late nineteenth through the early twenty-first century Locale: Israel and Palestine In pursuit of a viable resolution to the long-standing dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, an Israeli scholar reviews the conflict’s ideological history from the late nineteenth century to the present and reveals what he believes to be the only genuinely plausible solution In One State, Two States, Israeli historian Benny Morris examines ideological dimensions of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, focusing on the historical lineage of the various one-state and two-state solutions currently being proposed to resolve the conflict. As the author of Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (1999), 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (2008), and other works on the Middle East, Morris is both widely respected and highly controversial. Morris has gained the admiration of many readers for the depth and detail of his research. In addition, where the evidence has warranted it, he has rejected dogmatic positions held by true believers on both sides of the conflict. For example, on the issue of Palestinian refugees and “the right of return,” Morris has disputed claims by supporters of Israel that the rapid emigration of Palestinians from Israel during the 1948 war was entirely voluntary and unaffected by Israeli policy. He has also disputed the orthodox Arab and Palestinian belief that the Israelis carried out the systematic expulsion of Palestinians. While this sort of even-handedness has won the respect of many of Morris’s readers, it has also alienated a number of observers on both sides of the conflict. As a result, Morris has been accused of being everything from a traitor to his own people to a hyper-Zionist thug. One State, Two States is likely to provoke a similarly divergent range of responses, since it too challenges the prejudices and valued beliefs of Israelis, Palestinians, and any number of supposedly disinterested observers working to bring a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One State, Two States is divided into three asymmetrical chapters. In the first, Morris describes and discusses what he calls “the re-emergence of one-statism.” In recent decades, the world’s most prominent diplomats have been attempting to foster a mutually agreeable two-state solution, one that would provide peace and security for the Jewish state of Israel and also establish an independent, autonomous state for Palestinians. The United States and the United Nations have both committed to this

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goal, gathering at least a modicum of apparent support from Israelis and Palestinians. Of late, Benny Morris teaches history at Benhowever, there has been growing sentiment Gurion University and has worked for among intellectuals (in both the Middle East the Jerusalem Post. His previous books and the West) supporting a one-state solution include The Birth of the Palestinian that would, in effect, put an end to the current Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (1988), state of Israel. While some one-state advo- Righteous Victims: A History of the cates hearken back to the traditional Palestin- Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (1999), 1948: A History of the First ian desire for a pre-Zionist, Muslim-domiArab-Israeli War (2008), and Making nated Palestine, most of the figures cited by Israel (2008). Morris call for a secular, liberal, democratic state cohabited by Jews, Muslims (who would represent the majority), and others. All would enjoy religious freedom and equal political rights. In essence, these writers argue that the desire for a Jewish homeland, born out of centuries of persecution (and, for many Jews, founded on biblical authority), has become an archaic aspiration, one that is sadly out of sync with contemporary political values. In his second chapter, which makes up nearly two-thirds of the book, Morris offers a thoroughly detailed history of one-state and two-state solutions proposed since the nineteenth century by various Zionists, Palestinian nationalists, and British diplomats. With the exception of a tiny handful of socialistically oriented Zionists, the ideas put forth by these figures have given little shrift to the idea of a multicultural Palestine shared predominantly (and equitably) by Jews and Muslims. Originally, most Zionists wanted the whole of Palestine to become the new Jewish state. They envisioned a small Arab minority remaining in the new Jewish state, with the remainder relocating to other countries in the region ruled by their fellow Arabs. For these Zionists, Palestinian Arabs did not really form a distinct nationality. Zionism itself, however, helped forge a stronger Palestinian identity. Like their Zionist counterparts, Palestinian nationalists envisioned the whole of Palestine as a single nation. In their version, Jewish immigration would be severely limited and the state would be overwhelmingly Arab and Muslim. Before World War II, the British colonial masters dabbled with ideas of partition but took no decisive action to resolve the mutually exclusive claims and aspirations of Jews and Muslims in Palestine. After World War II, with the British Empire in full retreat and in the wake of the grim reality of the European Holocaust, the United Nations, backed by the United States and other world powers, established the state of Israel by dividing Palestine between Jews and Arabs. By this time, Zionist leaders had come to accept partition as the best possible outcome. Palestinian Arabs and the surrounding Arab states did not accept partition. War ensued. Israel survived and subsequently came to occupy substantial portions of what was supposed to be the Arab portion of Palestine. Ultimately, Israel made peace with Jordan and Egypt. At the same time, Palestinians in the occupied territories organized and gained world recognition, leading to the ascension of the drive for a viable twostate solution.

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In recounting these developments, Morris makes clear that the Zionist and Palestinian aspirations to control all of Palestine have never quite disappeared. This latter phenomenon is not balanced, however. While Morris thinks that Israeli settlements on the West Bank are perhaps partly driven by the original goal of making all of Palestine into the Jewish state, he is certain that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians have not genuinely accepted the concept of a two-state solution and never will because they do not accept the legitimacy of Israel (and also because the suggested boundaries of a proposed Palestinian state offer little promise of political or economic stability). Thus, for Morris, the quest for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is quixotic and utterly futile. Nor are current one-state solutions any more viable. The overwhelming majority of Israelis would not accept the end of the Jewish state, even if it were to be replaced with one featuring liberal democratic institutions. Then, too, Palestinians and other Arab peoples have a poor track record with regard to the maintenance of liberal democracy. Indeed, they seem, for Morris, to hold cultural norms inimical to majority rule with minority rights. Thus, Morris’s second chapter ends in a quandary. There simply seems to be no practical way to achieve lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The third and final chapter in Morris’s book is titled “Where To?” In it, Morris mostly reviews the impracticality of the one-state and two-state solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict he has already discussed. Only in the last few pages does he make a brief and somewhat tentative proposal for an alternative. For Morris, the best available solution to the conflict is to amalgamate Palestinian territories into Jordan, with Palestinians working their way toward some sort of limited autonomy within the broader context of the Jordanian state and Israel giving up most of its West Bank settlements. According to Morris, Jordanians have the well-established state apparatus necessary to guarantee Israeli security—something the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have not been able or willing to do. Thus, a solution featuring the Jordan government could help break the cycle of violence in the region. Given the lack of support among Palestinians for this solution, however, it lacks viability. Morris openly admits as much. It is only the profound hopelessness of the currently popular onestate and two-state solutions that makes his own proposal the best possible one in his view. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that Morris offers his solution simply as the one that is least impossible. Thus, Morris’s book ends on a pessimistic note. The question then arises as to whether Morris’s account is convincing or he is being unnecessarily gloomy. Unfortunately, Morris’s conclusions fit all too well with the facts on the ground. Among Israelis and Palestinians alike, there seems to be much hardening of positions, as the two sides prepare to accept the harsh fate of endless war. What Morris’s book adds to this observable tendency is a rich and persuasive account of just how deep-seated and historically rooted the antagonism is between Israelis and Palestinians. In this regard, the additional question arises as to whether Morris’s account of the situation is objective. As in his previous books, Morris’s inquiry cuts deep and, in doing so, violates dogmatic beliefs held by both sides in the conflict. Nevertheless, a number of the book’s early readers have found Morris’s recommended solution to be biased in favor of the Israeli side.

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The reason for this accusation is simple: Appending the Palestinian national entity to Jordan may indeed provide Israelis with a level of national security they have yet to enjoy in their relatively brief history. From the Israeli point of view, it would almost certainly be worth a try. It would not, however, satisfy the aspirations of Palestinians for their own independent and autonomous state. This is not to say that Morris disregards the welfare of Palestinians. He merely believes that, in the long run, they too would be better served by tailoring their aspirations to political, economic, and cultural realities that make independence impractical, at least for the time being. Whether or not one accepts Morris’s particular resolution, he would seem to be right in his assumption that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is unsolvable given the current (deeply rooted) priorities of the two sides. This revelation is both troubling and potentially liberating. If the status quo is unworkable, and it is made so by the clashing priorities of the principals, then one way out of the dilemma (and perhaps the only way out) is for the disputants to reexamine their priorities. This realization would seem to apply not only to the grim situation in the Middle East but also to other global, national, and local impasses. This is not to say that such reexamination of revered premises, arguments, and conclusions is easy. On the contrary, it is difficult for individuals and groups to question their own firmly held beliefs about how they want to live (and why), what does and does not belong to them, and what is and is not worth the lives and overall welfare of present and future generations. Nevertheless, finding ways to make the world fairer and more peaceful may well depend on people’s ability to shake themselves loose from ideas and beliefs that have outlived their usefulness. Ira Smolensky

Review Sources The Christian Century 126, no. 15 (July 28, 2009): 31-33. Commentary 128, no. 1 (July/August, 2009): 63-65. History Today 59, no. 10 (October, 2009): 59. Middle East Journal 63, no. 4 (Autumn, 2009): 671-672. National Interest, no. 100 (March/April, 2009): 71-81. The New York Times Book Review, May 24, 2009, p. 12.

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THE ORIGINAL OF LAURA Author: Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 278 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The twentieth century Locale: Switzerland; New York Nabokov’s last work, published posthumously, is about a scholar allegedly wishing to end his life in search of life after death Principal characters: Philip Wild, a corpulent neurologist and scholar preoccupied with his own death Flora, his wife, a slender, promiscuous woman Adam, Flora’s father, a photographer and son of a Russian immigrant Lanskaya, Flora’s mother, a famous ballerina Ravitch, a painter and writer who sends Philip Wild his novel My Laura an Older English gentleman whose name is assumed to be Hubert H. Hubert, one of Flora’s lovers

Vladimir Nabokov started working on The Original of Laura in 1974 under the title Dying Is Fun. Later, he titled it The Opposite of Laura. The final title, The Original of Laura, is found in the incomplete manuscript. While seriously ill in a Swiss hospital, he worked feverishly on the novel but was unable to finish it. Aware that he would not be able to complete the project before he died, Nabokov left to his wife, Véra Nabokov, the manuscript, written on index cards, along with a request that all his unfinished manuscripts be destroyed. She was reluctant to grant his wish, thinking that the writings of her husband, a great writer, should be preserved at least for scholars, if not for the general public. She left the decision to their only son, Dmitri. Upon her death, he too grappled for years with the dilemma of whether to burn the manuscript. He finally decided not to do it, and the novel has now been published after decades of gestation. Any discussion of the first draft of The Original of Laura must be based in large part on its incompleteness. Many questions about the meaning of the plot, even in small details, remain unanswered. It is certain that the author would have elaborated on some of them in the course of finishing the book. The last index card contains only unconnected words: “efface,” “expunge,” “erase,” “delete,” “rub out”, “wipe out,” and “obliterate,” along with a crossed-out word. The list seems to indicate that Nabokov intended to make presumably significant changes in the manuscript. To evaluate the novel as it stands, it is useful to follow the plot concerning the relationship between Philip Ward and his wife Flora, as much as it is possible to do so. A brilliant neurologist and scholar, Philip is very corpulent and homely looking. He

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hates his body to such a degree that he wishes he could get away from it. His young wife, Flora—a good-looking, promiscuous flirt— does not satisfy him as she does others. It seems that the main reason for Philip’s attraction to her is not sexual desire but rather that she resembles his former love, Aurora Led. Philip seems to be sexually impotent, for which reason he hates his body, beginning with his small, stinking feet (a possible allusion to the size of his penis). Philip secretly writes a novel about his Vladimir Nabokov wrote and published wife and the difficulties of their relationship. works in Russian, English, French, and A painter by the name of Ravitch then sud- German, including the acclaimed denly sends him his own novel, My Laura, English works Bend Sinister (1947), which makes clear reference to Philip’s wife. Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale In the painter’s novel, Laura is destroyed. Fire (1962). He died in Montreux, Philip is not hurt by this manuscript, as he is Switzerland, in 1977. too consumed by hatred for his body. Rather, it only makes him wish more for death, but in an unusual way. When Philip dies of a heart attack, Nabokov does not dwell on the earthly nature of his death. Furthermore, he does not indicate whether Philip has succeeded in his desire to overcome death. Instead, he hints at philosophical frames for death, such as Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s theory of the will, the Buddhist philosophy of the “absorption into the supreme spirit,” and Brahma’s embrace of nirvana. Several features in the manuscript reveal basic and established characteristics of Nabokov’s literary profile. Among these are his preoccupation with death, fondness for creating puzzles, and highly inventive use of rare or coined words. Philip’s strong desire is to end his life, not through a physical act of suicide but as a mental exercise. For him, death is not the end of it all, nor is it even a tragic experience for most people (the subtitle to the novel is still Dying Is Fun). He often expresses a strong hatred for his own body. I loathe my body, that trunkful of bowels, which I have to carry around, and everything connected with it—the wrong food, heartburn, constipation’s leaden load, or else indigestion with a first installment of hot filth pouring out of me in a public toilet three minutes before a punctual engagement.

Philip’s bodily hatred begins with his feet and moves first to his torso and then to his head. His “stinky” feet are unusually small. Parts of his torso are also small and malformed. His brain is infested with negative thoughts. Philip believes that a person should imagine a detailed, recognizable picture of himself on the “private blackboard” in his brain. On this blackboard, he sees his obese, corpulent body and unusually small feet. He decides to begin the process of self-elimination with the feet and move slowly upward. He is so determined to get rid of himself that he has several ex-

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pressions for this process: self-extinction, self-immolation, self-obliteration, selfdestruction, self-dissection, self-deletion, and self-annihilation. Nabokov represents the process as providing the greatest ecstasy known to man. Placing himself in a trance, Philip sees his toes disappear slowly, calling this experience “delicious dissolution,” “the sweetest death.” The fact that a person looks at his own dissolution and continues to enjoy the process makes it different from a regular physical suicide, in which there is no return. Placing oneself in a trance, looking at one’s true nature, and then coming back to the previous stage is the most important aspect of self-dissolution. At the end, Philip dies of a heart attack, but, as Nabokov’s son Dmitri says in the novel’s introduction, his father never dies for him. Nabokov transforms death into a state that can be brought back and disappear as an illusion. On the border of reality and fiction, he seems to conquer death in his yearning for immortality, leading to his conclusion that death is fun. Another striking feature of the novel is Nabokov’s use of puzzles and codes. Some of the puzzles may result from the novel’s incompleteness, while others may be intentional creations of an author who loved puzzles. The most obvious puzzle is Philip’s wife, Flora: Her behavior, as contrasted to Philip’s, is puzzling, as is her name, since Philip calls her both Flora and Laura. It is possible that the name Laura reflects Philip’s desire for an ideal woman of the Renaissance, as seen in several famous paintings of the period so dear to Nabokov. Flora’s behavior does not reflect that perfection, which is probably the point Philip is trying to make—that beauty and youth are not enough for happiness. The fact that the two names rhyme may be an instance of Nabokov’s playfulness. While Philip’s wish for death is not in itself puzzling, the specific form that it takes is: The brilliant scholar comes to believe that one can achieve self-dissolution simply by wishing it. He also wishes for Flora’s death, as suggested in the painter’s novel My Laura. In addition, the novel contains puzzling coincidences, such as the painter sending to Philip a novel in which he kills Laura and identifies her with Flora. A miniature chess set, a favorite of Nabokov’s metaphors, represents the nature of love relationships, such as the relationship between Flora and Mr. Hubert H. Hubert. Other puzzles represent minor aspects of the novel and are difficult to interpret because they are not sufficiently elaborated. Nabokov is known for his experimentation in style and structure. His most unusual writing technique involved writing the original manuscript on index cards, which he would reshuffle and rearrange as he saw fit. The extant manuscript of The Original of Laura comprises 138 index cards. In the published novel, the cards are reproduced in their original handwriting, as well as in printed form. Nabokov is also known for a highly inventive use of language, of rare words and phrases, and of coined words. Examples from the novel include “febrile motion,” “squinty nipples,” “omoplates,” “incurvation,” “execrable writing,” “librarious fates,” “inguen,” “inodorous,” “hypnagogic gargoyles,” and “porcine stare.” The manuscript includes empty spaces in parentheses that mark places where the author intended to fill in medical terms after looking them up later. Nabokov’s play with words is evident in the names of his female characters. The name Flora is used in sev-

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eral variations, including the novel’s title. Philip’s former love was called Aurora Lee. The woman from the painter’s novel is called Laura. Interestingly, the manuscript contains grammatical and spelling errors, some inadvertent, that have been corrected in the publication. Nabokov also marked by hand places where he intended to insert new paragraphs. The novel contains sexual references, but not as many or as drastic as in other Nabokov works such as Lolita (1955). It also incorporates many autobiographical references, and to a certain degree Philip can be considered Nabokov’s alter ego. Nabokov uses the novel-within-a-novel technique in order to create a second layer of autobiographical echoes. Thus, in the novel My Laura, allegedly written in 1875, Laura is clearly referred to as Flora, and Philip Wild is called Philidor Sauvage. Philip himself sometimes pronounces Flora’s name Flaura. There is also a reference to a Renaissance painting by Giorgione titled Laura, as well as a 1515 painting by Titian named Flora. Finally, Petrarch’s Laura, a woman he loved and immortalized in poetry, is referenced. All these references might have been further explained in the finished novel. As it is, The Original of Laura remains a fragmented work, and the shape and meaning it would have acquired had Nabokov lived to complete it is the published book’s greatest enigma. That question, however, is unanswerable. As it is, the manuscript is “a beautiful ruin,” as Lev Grossman calls it in Time. When the decision to publish the manuscript fell upon Véra Nabokov, she felt that every writing of a gifted writer deserves to be read and studied. Dmitri finally came to the same conclusion, rejecting accusations that he was motivated only by the desire of financial profits. Reading the fragmentary novel reveals that Dmitri made the right decision: Even though The Original of Laura does not contribute substantially to Nabokov’s fame, it offers a fascinating look into the laboratory of a great writer. Vasa D. Mihailovich

Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 1 (September 1, 2009): 26. Library Journal 134, no. 15 (September 15, 2009): 51. The New Republic 241, no. 1 (February 4, 2010): 30-35. New York 42, no. 39 (November 23, 2009): 89-91. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 20 (December 17, 2009): 16-20. The New York Times, November 10, 2009, pp. C1-C2. The New York Times, November 15, 2009, pp. 8-9. The New York Times Book Review, November 15, 2009, p. 8. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 31 (August 3, 2009): 1. The Times Literary Supplement, December 4, 2009, p. 19-20. The Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2009, p. A21.

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ORLANDO FURIOSO A New Verse Translation Author: Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) First published: Orlando Furioso, 1516, 1521, 1532, in Italy Translated from the Italian by David R. Slavitt Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass.). 672 pp. $39.95 Type of work: Poetry Time: The early Middle Ages Locale: France; Spain; Cathay; Japan A comic epic poem of the Italian Renaissance translated by a gifted American poet and satirist Principal characters: Orlando, a great warrior serving the Charlemagne Charlemagne, king of the Franks, 768-814, and Holy Roman emperor, 800-814 Angelica, a pagan princess Astolfo, an English knight Agramante, a Saracen African king

Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso is a comic extravaganza in which Matter of France and Matter of Britain—the historical rubrics for the stories clustered around Charlemagne and King Arthur—are interwoven and subtly ridiculed. While siege, jousting, and warfare in the poem seem to cancel one another out in the breathless turmoil of mock-epic action, high romance lends a charm and grace to the endless confusion and misunderstandings between lovers. Orlando’s “fury” recalls the wrath of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad (c. 750 b.c.e.; English translation, 1611), but the evocation of the famous Greek hero and his ungovernable anger is comically erased by the fact that Orlando’s anger is nothing but jealous rage. The pagan princess Angelica not only rejects his love but also elopes with a wounded Saracen knight, Medoro. This kind of farcical situation is a world away from the classical events portrayed in the Iliad, when Agamemnon offends Achilles’ dignity by depriving him of his love slave won in battle. Ariosto’s poem appeared in an early version in 1516, but it was not published in its fully completed form until 1532. During the previous century, Matteo Maria Boiardo had written the romance Orlando innamorato (1483-1495; English translation, 1823), which was published posthumously as an unfinished work. Ariosto took up Boiardo’s story by continuing to chronicle the war between Charlemagne’s Christian knights and the Saracen Muslims attempting to dominate Europe. This struggle provides the background to the poem, but the main plotlines involve the frustrated romance be-

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tween Orlando and Angelica, as well as the love between the female Christian warrior Bradamante and the pagan Ruggiero. The second plot establishes a symmetry with the first: The first couple comprises a Christian man and a pagan woman, while the second comprises a Christian woman and a pagan man. The great conflict of the hour pits Christians against Muslims, but the romantic protagonists, despite their many difficulties, cross the The Renaissance poet Ludovico lines of combat. Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso has been a The mock epic’s rambling plot starts off in major influence on such central figures ironic counterpoint to that of the Iliad. The in the Western literary tradition as Saracen king of Africa, Agramante, invades Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Europe to avenge the death of his father Tra- Voltaire, Italo Calvino, and Jose Luis iano. This invasion parallels Menelaus’s gath- Borges. David R. Slavitt is author and ering of the Greeks to attack Troy to avenge translator of more than seventy works the abduction of his wife Helen by the Tro- of fiction, poetry, and drama. He has jan prince Paris. Agramante and his allies— translated texts such as the works of including Marsilio, the king of Spain, and the Seneca and the Latin odes of Jean boastful warrior Rodomonte—besiege Char- Dorat. lemagne in Paris just as Menelaus in Homer’s poem solicits the aid of his brother, King Agamemnon, to lay siege to Troy. Orlando, Charlemagne’s most famous paladin, has been tempted to forget his duty to protect the emperor through his love for the pagan princess Angelica. In the Iliad, Achilles refuses to fight against the Trojans because of Agamemnon’s insulting refusal to grant him his prize. After Angelica elopes with the wounded Medoro to Cathay, Orlando goes “mad with despair” and rampages across the entire globe, destroying everything in his path in the fury of his pursuit. Again, this rampage mirrors the bloodlust of Achilles toward the end of the Iliad, when he goes back into battle to avenge his friend Patroculus, who has been killed by the Trojan prince Hector. All through Ariosto’s poem, however, epic constantly yields to romance. The English knight Astolfo goes to Ethiopia on the back of the mythical hippogriff to find a cure for Orlando’s madness. Unsuccessful there, he flies up to the Moon, where everything lost on Earth is to be found, in search of Orlando’s lost wits. The geographical exuberance of this poem is one of its most beguiling features. Astolfo returns to Earth with the lost wits in a bottle that he passes under Orlando’s nose. His sanity restored, Orlando falls out of love with Angelica. Ariosto explains that love is itself a form of insanity, and, Orlando’s wits and sense of purpose once again in place, the hero kills King Agramante and the siege of Paris is lifted. Europe is saved from the Saracens. The subplot involving Bradamante and Ruggiero is similar. The Saracen hero is imprisoned and enchanted but finally freed. He converts to Christianity, marries Bradamante, and slays the Saracen challenger, Rodomonte, in single combat.

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Boiardo’s poem had taken the legends of Arthur and Roland seriously, but Ariosto in his work took full advantage of the possibilities of irony—not only because he was essentially a humorist but also because irony called up style and wit. He consulted with the great humanist Pietro Bembo to improve and enhance the polish of his verse. In Ariosto’s hands, felicitous diction, prosody, and ironic uses of classical myths and allusions were coupled with an increasingly fantastic plotline. Imaginary beasts and arbitrary deployments from Europe to Japan and from Ethiopia to the Moon were only part of Ariosto’s exuberant playfulness. Indeed, his poem seems to suggest that a truly gifted and skillful poet can ask readers to forsake verisimilitude and common sense in pursuit of brilliance and wit. Ariosto’s treatment of Boiardo and Homer was repeated with gusto by generations of writers who followed. Edmund Spenser’s epic The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (pr. c. 1598-1599, pb. 1600), and, most significant, Lord Byron’s Don Juan (1819-1824, 1826) all leaned on Ariosto’s poem for plots and more. Ariosto’s most telling influence on his successors is to be found in his ability to enhance what he borrowed, to take wit and imagination to new heights. The literary ideal of leaning on a model and then vindicating one’s dependence on the original by taking one’s own work beyond it—that is Ariosto’s principal legacy. David Slavitt’s translation of Orlando Furioso has acted on that legacy with a strange variation. Instead of being influenced by Ariosto to write a poem of his own—which, as an accomplished poet—he could have done easily, Slavitt translates Ariosto’s work, relying heavily on the last great poet to adopt Ariosto’s love of fantastic journeys, romantic complications, and mock-heroic action: Lord Byron. Slavitt brings to his translation the strategies of ironic wit and clever rhymes that Byron brought to perfection in Don Juan. Just as Ariosto went beyond Boiardo by introducing stylistic and tonal qualities that took Boiardo’s content to new comedic heights, Slavitt brings Ariosto’s poem closer to English-language readers by using the multisyllabic rhymes and the intrusive voice of a digressive narrator to evoke Romantic irony. This is a technique that Byron introduced in Don Juan. Ironically, Slavitt is merely returning the favor that Byron owed Italian literature in the first place. Byron discovered the ottava rima stanza, the same stanza used by Ariosto, in the work of another Italian comic poet, the Florentine Luigi Pulci (14321484), whose chivalric epics preceded Orlando Furioso. Slavitt thus translates Ariosto’s ottava rima stanza in a Byronic accent of another Italian poet’s ottava rima stanza. Slavitt is a poet and satirist who has worked in various genres. He is known for his many translations from Latin and Greek, including the Metamorphoses (c. 8 c.e.; English translation, 1567) of Ovid. He usually translates freely and creatively, often veering from the original text. In the current ambitious project, nearly fifty cantos stretching to more than 650 pages, his reliance on Byron’s tone and techniques constitutes the essence of his deviation from the original. The ottava rima stanza (which follows the pattern A-B-A-B-A-B-C-C) flows smoothly in the original Italian, and its closing couplet permits the narrator to catch his breath or wrap up a thought. Byron

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could not resist the opportunity for comic rhymes afforded both by the internally rhyming lines and by the staccato effect of the abrupt closing couplet. The latter also invited ironic observation or intrusion by the narrator. In stanza 75 of Canto XII, for example, Orlando is in a difficult spot after having killed Alzirdo, a vain Spaniard who challenged him in a fit of envy. Stanza 74 closes with Alzirdo’s soldiers “impressed/but not in a good way.” They charge at Orlando, . . . intending to right the wrong They believe he has done, cutting, thrusting, and shooting A storm of arrows at him. It’s very busy As when a wolf comes down to the valley, looting Bleating sheep or squealing pigs. Or is he More like a bear that arouses the shepherds’ bruiting? They swarm around him. They’re in a perfect tizzy, And shouting, “Kill him! Kill him! Tear him limb From limb.” They are not friendly at all toward him.

The participles pile up until they settle into the gerund (“bruiting”) and at the same time supply the rhymes for all three B lines. Note the contrasting assonance: “cutting, thrusting”; “shooting . . . looting . . . bruiting”; and “bleating . . . squealing.” This kind of verbal wit is characteristic of Byron, as is the colloquial “tizzy.” Perhaps the most Byronic touch of all is the closing couplet. The understatement of “They are not friendly at all toward him” is quintessential romantic irony: The narrator intrudes to make readers aware of his wry detachment, his awareness of the ultimate childishness of all that he surveys. The soldiers are violent and out of control; the narrator remains unruffled and bemused. This ironic contrast is captured in a multisyllabic weak rhyme: “him limb . . . toward him.” In passages such as this one, Slavitt achieves a ventriloquist’s tour de force in his translation. He reproduces both Ariosto and Byron together and thereby recreates Orlando Furioso. Peter Brier

Review Source The Times Literary Supplement, January 8, 2010, p. 23.

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OUR SAVAGE ART Poetry and the Civil Tongue Author: William Logan (1950) Publisher: Columbia University Press (New York). 346 pp. $29.50 Type of work: Literary criticism A collection of Logan’s previously published reviews and essays, many of them attacking contemporary poets and poetry, written in the learned poet-critic’s colorful shock-and-awe style William Logan could be accused of practicing a form of literary criticism akin to gonzo journalism, in which the writer’s personality and style are the center of attention (the word gonzo is from the Italian for “simpleton” or “blockhead”; fare il gonzo is “to play the fool”). Logan’s personality and style definitely cannot be ignored in his criticism, especially his harsh judgments on leading contemporary poets, his resort to ad hominem accounts of poets’ personal lives, his mocking italicized quotations of their bizarre diction and confused metaphors, and his withering depiction of them in terminology derived from popular culture. Logan is no simpleton or blockhead, however. He draws on a deep well of knowledge of literary criticism, immense reading of poetry, and decades of experience in the “savage art” of critical reviewing. In addition, he is a poet himself, with eight published volumes, as well as a teacher of creative writing, so he knows whereof he speaks. Author of four earlier collections of criticism, Logan received a National Book Critics Circle Award for the previous one, The Undiscovered Country (2005). As in Logan’s other books of criticism, many of the reviews collected in Our Savage Art first appeared in the June and December issues of The New Criterion magazine, where Logan regularly takes on the recent works of five or six poets in a “Verse Chronicle” review. For example, in the June, 2009, issue he savaged Billy Collins’s Ballistics (2008), Katha Pollitt’s The Mind-Body Problem (2009), and especially Rita Dove’s Sonata Mulattica (2009), among others. Logan’s “Verse Chronicle” reviews seem to be tailored for the conservative New Criterion, whose announced purpose is to champion what is “best” and expose what is “mendacious” in culture and which sponsors a poetry contest emphasizing traditional forms. Logan’s own poetry tends toward restraint and conventional forms, which distinguishes it from most contemporary poetry. Many of the reviews in Our Savage Art resemble those in the June, 2009, New Criterion. For example, the collection includes reviews of two Billy Collins collections, Nine Horses (2002) and The Trouble with Poetry (2005). Collins is one of Logan’s favorite targets: “I should have reviewed Billy Collins’s Nine Horses months ago, but I couldn’t stand the excitement.” Logan goes on to describe Collins as a singer of “the

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cheesy sentiment of the everyday” and “the Caspar Milquetoast of contemporary poetry.” William Logan is author of eight Logan begins his review of The Trouble with collections of poetry and five Poetry with “Speak of the devil.” Logan ad- collections of book reviews and literary mits that Collins is popular with the masses criticism, including The Undiscovered and can sometimes be funny but asks (“I feel Country (2005), winner of the National like a grouch to ask . . . ”) “what happens Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. when everyone [like Collins] writes poems that humiliate the art they practice.” Another plainspoken poet who appears twice and is gleefully impaled both times is Ted Kooser, “a prairie sentimentalist who writes poems in an American vernacular so corn-fed you could raise hogs on it.” Logan’s first review attacks Kooser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Delights and Shadows (2004), his Flying at Night: Poems, 1965-1985 (2005), and The Poetry Home Repair Manual (2005). Even more devastating is Logan’s later review of Kooser’s Valentines (2008), twenty years’ worth of Valentines Day poems originally written on postcards and mailed to women around America. Logan titles his biannual “Verse Chronicle” after it (“Valentine’s Day Massacre”) and opines: “In the House of Fame, there’s no doubt a broom closet for Ted Kooser.” Poets considered difficult to understand do not get off any easier in Logan’s hands. Two such poets who also appear twice in Our Savage Art are Pulitzer Prize-winners John Ashbery and Jorie Graham. Logan takes the multitasking Ashbery to task for writing sentences that go in every direction and do not cohere: “Were he unfortunate enough to develop Alzheimer’s, the poems wouldn’t change a bit.” One might argue that Ashbery mirrors the simultaneous nature of contemporary experiences—say, driving while listening to the radio, talking on the cell phone, trying to quiet the kids, and wondering what to have for dinner. Repeated looks into the same old mirror are enough for Logan, however. As for the megatasking Graham, with her big subjects and confused “dithering” style, Logan feels that she suffers from overweening ambition and ego and “some form of poetic ADHD.” Logan indicates that other poets not afflicted with Alzheimer’s or attention deficit hyperactive disorder nevertheless exhibit symptoms of aging—mellowing out, repeating themselves and their routines, and in general just going through the motions. Among these “old geezers” (including some whom Logan admires, or maybe once admired, and assorted winners of Pulitzer or Nobel Prizes) are James Fenton, Charles Wright, Gary Snyder, Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur, Mark Doty, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon. The list is a reminder, as Logan notes, of the graying of contemporary poets, who includes some centenarians. Logan seems to find few promising younger poets who are coming along to replace these old men. One might look to women poets to carry the creative torch, but Logan tends to paint them also as an unpromising lot, again, including some Pulitzer Prize winners. He does admire Elizabeth Bishop (who died in 1979), even though Bishop exemplifies a women’s school of fine descriptive touches that Logan condemns with faint praise in later poets such as Mary Oliver and Kay Ryan. Logan identifies another women’s school that could be called the Sylvia Plath School of Suffering, exempli-

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fied by Louise Glück. He describes Kim Addonizio as “that New Formalist wet dream, a hot babe who can bang out a sonnet on demand.” He depicts Rita Dove and Natasha Trethewey as mediocre poets pursuing a dead-end poetics of ethnic identity. Logan’s reviews are great fun to read because of his style (though probably not fun for the poets who are the butts of his style). Displaying an informal, slangy, sometimes outrageous combination of literary learning and pop culture, his style is a refreshing change from stiff academic writing. To some extent, the style seems to be dictated by the “Verse Chronicle” format, which requires Logan to review each poet’s latest work or works in a couple of pages or less: There is only room for a few sound bites, a bit of literary or personal history, and one or two quotations with brief analysis. The “Verse Chronicle” is then pulled together with a snappy title. Over time, the format has become somewhat formulaic: For instance, the title “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Luff” in Our Savage Art and the beginning of Logan’s June, 2009, review both draw on the same popular Cole Porter song. It might seem inconsistent and unfair for Logan to use popular culture in his critical style and to condemn the same trend in poets such as Billy Collins and Kim Addonizio. As Logan points out, however, the trend is everywhere in contemporary life: He might argue that he constantly emphasizes this ubiquity, mockingly using the trend’s own weapons against it and counterbalancing his style with his critical judgments. At the same time, although there is no denying the impact of his style, Logan catches himself in a double bind: By “dumbing down” his discourse, as he accuses some poets of doing, he, like them, raises (or lowers) expectations for all his writings in Our Savage Art’s mixed bag. Roughly half of Our Savage Art consists of “Verse Chronicle” reviews; the other collects reviews and essays that first appeared in a range of publications, including The New Criterion, Poetry, Parnassus, The Times Literary Supplement, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and especially The New York Times Book Review. In these other reviews and essays, Logan employs less of his gonzo style, and they are correspondingly less interesting. Among these pieces are mostly admiring reviews of works by Derek Walcott (despite his aging) and Geoffrey Hill (despite his obscurity). Logan also admires and makes insightful remarks about the poets themselves, but he has some caveats about the editing of Elizabeth Bishop’s notebooks, Robert Lowell’s letters, and, in particular, Robert Frost’s notebooks (he thinks Harvard University Press should recall the work). Editors of two anthologies get another dose of disapproval in two reviews combined under the title “Attack of the Anthologists.” The review of Robert Frost’s notebooks, with page after page of detailed textual analysis and comparison, is one of the longest and dullest pieces in Our Savage Art, even if it does a good service for literature. A similarly long, dull piece is a rambling article, “The State with the Prettiest Name” (titled from Elizabeth Bishop’s line), on Florida as portrayed in poetry over the centuries. Two long articles on the American novelist Thomas Pynchon might seem out of place, but Logan describes Pynchon’s play with knowledge and ideas as poetic in nature, provides some excellent explication, and sums up Pynchon as embodying the rambunctious zeitgeist of “the late sixties and early seventies.” In two essays where Logan sounds like a throwback, he

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makes convincing arguments for the persistence of the New Criticism in the age of literary theory and for the revival of a masterly Byronic narrative poem, Guy Vernon (1878), by the obscure American writer John Townsend Trowbridge (1827-1916). Logan returns somewhat to his gonzo style in “Hart Crane Overboard,” his notorious review of Crane’s Complete Poems and Selected Letters (2006), in which he downgraded Crane’s poetic achievements, noted Crane’s sexual proclivities for sailors, and drew angry letters to The New York Times Book Review. In a dispiriting exchange, Logan responded to the letters in the October, 2008, issue of Poetry magazine, drew another angry batch of letters, and responded to those in the December, 2008, issue of Poetry. The offending review and Logan’s replies to his critics are all included in Our Savage Art. More upbeat and interesting are the personal essay and the interview about Logan’s criticism that, respectively, begin and end Our Savage Art. Logan says that he thinks of himself first as a poet, that he more or less drifted into criticism, and that he tires of criticism but something always provokes him to return to it. He is inspired by the twentieth century “long string of poets who turned their hands brilliantly to criticism: Eliot, Pound, Empson, Auden, Blackmur, Jarrell, Berryman, and Lowell.” Finally, Logan feels that “the critic’s besetting vice is generosity” and that, while the critic delights in finding “a few books rich and strange, . . . it’s his duty, however, to hold up weaker books to public scorn. Bad books do drive out good ones—it’s the Gresham’s law of literature.” One might wish that Logan could find more good books to review, which is also the job of the critic. Otherwise, one might conclude from so many dismal reviews that bad books have already won out and that poetry in America—despite or because of all the creative writing programs, little magazines, volumes published, and awards granted—is a dead or dying art. Maybe Logan will be provoked to respond to a reviewer of Our Savage Art in The Times Literary Supplement, who implied that Logan is a kind of critic-entertainer contributing to a “self-fulfilling” gloom-and-doom scenario in American poetry. Alternatively, if there is truth in that scenario, maybe Logan can find some solutions. Harold Branam

Review Sources The New York Times Book Review, April 26, 2009, p. 12. Poetry 194, no. 3 (June, 2009): 244. The Times Literary Supplement, June 19, 2009, p. 30.

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A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster Author: Rebecca Solnit (1961) Publisher: Viking (New York). 432 pp. $27.95 Type of work: History, economics Time: 1906-2005 Locale: San Francisco, California; New York, New York; New Orleans, Louisiana; Halifax, Nova Scotia; Mexico City, Mexico In her tenth book, Solnit portrays the aftermath of five major disasters that have occurred in North America and recounts how the people most affected by these disasters recovered from them and rebuilt despite colossal governmental bungling and examples of ineptitude that bordered on criminality Principal personages: Anna Amelia Holshouser, a resident of San Francisco Brigadier General Frederick Funston, commanding officer of San Francisco’s Presidio Hugh Kwong Liang, a fifteen-year-old who fled San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake William James, a noted American psychologist visiting Stanford University when the earthquake struck Vincent Coleman, a telegrapher who tried to warn railroads about the impending Halifax explosion Gustave Le Bon, a French psychologist George W. Bush, president of the United States, 2001-2009 Michael Brown, director of FEMA, 2003-2005

Rebecca Solnit, author of ten books and recipient of both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Mark Lynton History Prize for River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003), has written on such diverse topics as art exhibitions, photography, the history of walking, and the spread of urbanism. In A Paradise Built in Hell, a collection of essays most of which she has previously published in a variety of magazines or as chapters in books, she takes up and expands upon many of the arguments she considered in her ninth book, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (2007). The essays focus on the occurrences of aftermaths of five major North American disasters: the San Francisco earthquake of 1906; the Halifax, Nova Scotia, explosion of 1917; the Mexico City earthquake of 1985; the terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Center in 2001; and the flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Solnit does not limit herself to discussing only these disasters: She also gives brief

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consideration to such other disasters as the In dian Ocean tsunami of 2004, the 2008 Sichuan Rebecca Solnit, a contributing editor earthquake that killed more than seventy thou- for Harper’s Magazine, also writes for sand people, three successive cyclones that hit the London Review of Books and The Madagascar, the London blitz during World Guardian. The author of ten books, she War II, Nicaragua’s earthquake of 1972, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship Argentina’s economic meltdown in 2001. She and a Lannan Literary Award for also provides cogent asides in discussing the Nonfiction. major disasters on which she focuses. For example, a section on William James, a visiting professor at Stanford University during the 1906 earthquake, describes him venturing into the heart of the destruction with a Stanford colleague shortly after the disaster in order to search for the colleague’s sister. Solnit reproduces James’s firsthand accounts of the earthquake, found in letters he wrote to friends and relatives in the East. One of the appealing vignettes in A Paradise Built in Hell is that of fifteen-yearold Hugh Kwong Liang, a boy transplanted from China to San Francisco in the early twentieth century. Living on his own there, he suffered from the anti-Chinese sentiments of the period. Bereft of family, he thought his only option following the earthquake was suicide. He rushed to the waterfront, planning to drown himself. There, however, he was taken aboard a ship by a sympathetic Caucasian and taken to Napa, where he had distant relatives. Liang thrived in his new surroundings, suggesting that disasters can shape lives in positive ways. Similarly, following Halifax in the early twentieth century was marked by divisions of religion, race, and class. Following the explosion there, however, people in the destroyed city reached out to help survivors without considering such divisions. The unbending class structures of Halifax society, in the face of disaster, became—at least briefly—integrated. Solnit, who lives in San Francisco, has no academic affiliation but is what one might term a “public intellectual.” She is extremely well read and her research is exhaustive and accurate. Politically, she identifies as a liberal, but many of her arguments are compatible with those of political conservatives because they call for less governmental interference in the lives of Americans. The examples in A Paradise Built in Hell point quite consistently to government ineptitude in the face of disaster. In discussing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, for example, she writes with a bitter vitriol aimed at the George W. Bush administration: Thanks to Katrina, the Bush administration lost its mandate of heaven. Perhaps the president and his team should have lost it in the chaos of September 11, 2001, but they cannily framed the situation in a way that led to a surge in patriotic fear and deference and defined the administration as decisive, powerful, unquestionable—until the summer of 2005.

Solnit, whose writing is dependably stimulating, examines the political and economic implications of the bureaucratic response to disasters. In discussing the San

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Francisco earthquake, she notes that those with political power preferred to refer to the disaster as a great fire rather than as an earthquake. Their reasoning was that an earthquake is an act of nature that humans cannot control, whereas fires are at least partially controllable. If San Francisco were perceived as a place in which future earthquakes were likely to occur, businesses would shy away from establishing themselves there. On the other hand, fires can take place anywhere, and all cities are subject to them, so a fire is less likely to prevent development in a given city. In discussing the portrayal of disasters in popular films and in the press, Solnit detects a tendency to view the survivors of disasters as mobs that need to be controlled. In popular film portrayals of disasters, the aftermath of such events involves looting, carjacking, and widespread civil disorder. The governmental agencies dealing with disasters are more likely to emphasize the protection of property than the protection of the lives of the survivors. Indeed, during most disasters, people are warned by signs posted in prominent places that looters will be shot with no questions asked. Solnit provides documentation of such shootings during several disasters. Following the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, survivors banded together to help one another. San Francisco resident Anna Amelia Holshouser went to Golden Gate Park because its open spaces were safer than those near weakened buildings that might collapse. Holshouser had only one tin can and one plate, but she found ways to feed survivors. Food merchants cleared their shelves to provide free food to the survivors, and soon Holshouser was running an outdoor kitchen to feed hordes of survivors who needed to be fed. A great feeling of camaraderie arose quickly among the dispossessed people camping out in the park. However, the commander of the Presidio, Brigadier General Frederick Funston, viewed the survivors as “the enemy,” people who had to be subdued and controlled. He ordered looters to be shot. Sometimes, people who were trying to help others were mistaken for looters, as they took food and medical supplies from places whose owners had offered these supplies free of charge to anyone who needed them. Some three thousand people died in the San Francisco earthquake, but it is possible that as many as five hundred of these casualties were caused by General Funston’s occupying forces. One of the people shot dead was mistaken for a looter when he attempted to extricate a survivor from beneath a pile of rubble. In the case of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, Solnit blames bureaucracy for not giving sufficient advance warning to those in the path of the walls of water that soon battered the shoreline. It could have provided such a warning, but a Thai official later revealed that “’The important factor in making the decision [to withhold an early warning] was that it’s high [tourist] season and hotel rooms were nearly one hundred percent full.’” An early warning might have saved hundreds, even thousands, of lives but would surely have resulted in a mass exodus during the most profitable time of the year for those catering to tourists. Solnit’s account of the Halifax explosion of 1917 is spine-tingling. This was the largest human-caused explosion ever recorded prior to the atomic attacks on the Japanese cities of Nagaski and Hiroshima in 1945. The Mont Blanc, a munitions

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ship, was transporting some three thousand tons of explosives and flammables such as oil and gun cotton to Allied forces in Europe during World War I. It collided with another ship in a narrow channel between Halifax and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. It soon was clear that a firestorm was about to be set off. The crews of both ships abandoned them and, once on shore, warned everyone they could of the impending disaster, thereby saving thousands of lives. Soon, the sky was raining glass shards upon the area. People were blown off their feet by the explosions, some dying on impact in the places where they landed. Windows were shattered as far as fifty miles away, and 325 acres of Halifax were virtually obliterated by the series of blasts that ensued. Solnit highlights the bravery of Vincent Coleman, a telegraph operator, who thought not of escape but of saving as many lives as he could. A train was barreling toward the area carrying three hundred passengers and its crew, so Coleman, rather than fleeing to safety, returned to his telegraph office and sent a warning to the approaching train. He ended his dispatch by saying that he guessed it would be his last message and bidding good-bye to those receiving it. An express train from New Brunswick approached Halifax soon afterward. When the engineer saw what was happening, he slowed the train to a crawl. With the help of his crew and passengers, the wounded who had survived the initial explosion were loaded onto the train and transported to nearby Truro for life-saving treatment. Perhaps the most shocking of the disasters Solnit writes about was the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and related attacks on the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania. The twenty-five thousand people estimated to have been in the World Trade Center when the airplanes hit sprang into immediate action, attempting to help one another. Without this concerted effort, the death toll of 2,603 would have been considerably greater. John Abruzzo, a paraplegic accountant working on the sixty-ninth floor of the second tower, would surely have been counted among the dead had not ten of his coworkers, working in relays, carried him down the sixty-nine floors to safety. Meanwhile, owners of private boats anchored near lower Manhattan formed an armada of rescue ships to transport the wounded to safety. All such efforts were undertaken not by government officials but by ordinary citizens who quickly divined what they had to do and, with equal alacrity, did it. In the five major disasters about which Solnit writes in detail, official government intervention seems to have worked reasonably well in just one case, that of the World Trade Center attack. Readers might feel that Solnit has a considerable bias in favor of free enterprise when it comes to dealing with disasters, and such a conclusion would be partly justified. Her extensive documentation, however, substantiates much of what she contends regarding the ability of private citizens to deal with the aftermath of disasters. R. Baird Shuman

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 21 (July l, 2009): 15. The Christian Science Monitor, September 15, 2009, pp. 25-26. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 13 (July 1, 2009):705. Library Journal 134, no. 12 (July 1, 2009): 115. Mother Jones 34, no. 5 (September/October, 2009): 75. The New Republic 240, no. 16 (September 9, 2009): 35-42. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 17 (November 5, 2009): 50-52. The New York Times Book Review, September 6, 2009, p. 12. The New York Times Book Review, September 13, 2009, p. 26. The New Yorker 85, no. 31 (October 5, 2009): 79. Progressive 73, no. 11 (November, 2009): 43-44. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 17 (April 27, 2009): 119. The Wilson Quarterly 33, no. 4 (Autumn, 2009): 102-103.

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PASSING STRANGE A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line Author: Martha A. Sandweiss (1954– ) Publisher: Penguin (New York). 370 pp. $27.95 Type of work: History Time: 1842-1933 Locale: United States This excellent case study of late nineteenth century race relations recounts the tale of a renowned explorer and geologist who lived a double life for thirteen years, marrying a former slave and claiming, despite fair skin and blue eyes, to be African American Principal personages: Clarence Rivers King (James Todd), first director of the U.S. Geological Survey Ada Copeland, King’s wife John Hay, U.S. secretary of state and a friend of King Henry Adams, historian and a friend of King James Gardiner, geologist and a lifelong friend of King

Martha A. Sandweiss’s Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line presents one man’s story in an effort to crystallize the state of U.S. race relations at the end of the nineteenth century. An enigma of vast contradictions, Clarence Rivers King loved aristocracy’s trappings but struggled all his life, unsuccessfully for the most part, to remain financially solvent. An idealist who despised the United States’ “Peculiar Institution” of slavery, he nonetheless traveled to the Western frontier to escape service in the Civil War. Robust and peripatetic, yet often nagged by illness and melancholia, he valued respectability but found pleasure “slumming” in the so-called tenderloin districts of big cities, where, like many voyeurs of his day, he delighted in the exotic and the unconventional. Born into fashionable Newport, Rhode Island, circles on January 6, 1842, King first laid eyes on his father, a China trader, at age three. The elder King died when Clarence was six. Florence, his sickly, overprotective, financially strapped mother, was a burden to him most of his life. Until he met Ada Copeland, King reserved his love for male friends. As he reached puberty, he formed intimate bonds with adolescents Daniel Dewey and James Gardiner. In the summer of 1859, they went camping in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Three years later, the lusty threesome took off on a rowing expedition into Canada with a couple of King’s Yale classmates. A customs inspector detained them briefly at the border, suspecting them of being draft dodgers. Dewey was killed in battle at Irish Bend, Louisiana, during the Civil War. Gardiner remained a lifelong friend of King. In a letter to Gardiner written while at Yale’s

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Sheffield Scientific School, King wrote: “My heart is taken up with you. . . . My love for you grows always and is a most absorbing passion.” King rose to the apex of his scientific profession by making numerous contributions to the mapping of the West. The self-promoter published Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872), a sometimes-embellished narra tive of his adventures working with the California State Geological Survey. Charming and successful in obtaining funding from the frugal federal government, he was the envy of fellow geologists, including John Wesley Powell. Surveying the Fortieth Parallel was entirely King’s idea, and it laid the groundwork for other valuable expeditions. In 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed King to be the first director of the United States Geological Survey. Eight years earlier, while in Estes Park, Colorado, he had had a chance encounter with presidential scion Henry Adams. This is how Sandweiss writes of their night together:

A former photography curator and art museum director, Martha A. Sandweiss is professor of history at Princeton University. She edited Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (1991) and is the author of Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (2004).

Riding through the park in search of his crew, King had paused for the night in a cabin with “a room and one bed for guests” when a small, frail, mustached Harvard history professor rode into camp on a mule, lost after a day of fishing. It was Henry Adams. “As with most friendships,” Adams later wrote, “it was never a matter of growth or doubt. . . . They shared the room and the bed, and talked till far towards dawn.”

“A new friend is always a miracle,” Adams recounted in the memoir The Education of Henry Adams (1907), “but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage brush was an avatar.” The normally hard-to-please Adams believed King brilliantly combined action and intellect. Adams, John Hay, and their wives Clover and Clara welcomed King into a ménage called the Five of Hearts (complete with stationery and tea service). The name was a reference to King’s nickname, King of Diamonds, obtained by exposing a fraudulent mining company stock scheme. Like many bachelors, King lived mainly in hotels, such as the Brunswick and Albert in New York City. He entertained friends at such exclusive clubs as the Metropolitan, Century Association, the Tuxedo, the Union League, the Knickerbocker, and the American Geographical Society. (Entertaining was his greatest talent, biographer Harry Herbert Crosby once sneered; otherwise he was the “most overrated” man of his era.) Frequently absent on business or pleasure, King invented plausible excuses to keep his acquaintances in the dark about his double life. Sandweiss skillfully pieces together the details of that life, in which King would assume the identity of an African American Pullman porter named James Todd. It was as Todd that he met Ada Copeland. From what meager evidence exists, Copeland was a determined seeker of independence and economic security, no easy task during the nineteenth century for an African American woman. She told a census taker that

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she was born in West Point, Georgia, a hamlet straddling the Chattahoochee River, which forms the state’s western border with Alabama. She emigrated north during the 1880’s, perhaps first residing briefly in a Southern city before finding work as a nursemaid in lower Manhattan. Ada married the man she believed to be James Todd in September, 1888, at her Aunt Annie Purnell’s residence. The esteemed Reverend James H. Cook of the Union African Methodist Episcopal Church presided at the ceremony. Ada bore King five offspring in nine years (the eldest, Leroy, died at age two). In 1897, the Todds moved into an eleven-room single-family dwelling in the Flushing section of Queens. King’s long absences afforded them both the freedom they needed and perhaps made their hearts grow fonder. From his letters, Sandweiss reveals, Ada excited King sexually all his life. In summer of 1900, he wrote to her: Ah dearest, I have lain in my bed and thought of you and felt my whole heart full of love for you. It seems to me often that no one ever loved a woman as I do you. In my heart there is no place for any other woman and never will be. My whole heart is yours forever.

Ada told a city directory agent that her husband was originally from the West Indies and presently employed as a clerk (in one census report, his profession is listed as steelworker). Her life revolved around family, and her ambition was to achieve respectability within New York City’s African American community. Ada had two live-in servants and three others providing day help (some African Americans preferred white, foreign-born servants, but Ada hired members of her own race). Her greatest social success was throwing a masquerade party to ring in the twentieth century that received mention in the New York Age society pages. Sandweiss speculates that King attended in costume and writes, “Perhaps it was her big house, maybe just the splendor of the party. But somehow the former nursemaid who was born a slave had arrived.” While a man of King’s stature assuming an African American identity was virtually unprecedented, “passing” in the other direction was not uncommon during an age when one was considered black based on ancestry rather than skin color: Having a single African American great-grandparent would categorize one as African American. When posing as James Todd, King did not have to explain his fair pigmentation, as many equally light-skinned people were considered to be black (although Pullman porters were almost always dark-skinned). Many biracial people passed to take advantage of the opportunities that the white world afforded them. Women sometimes passed as men, either for economic opportunities or to live with female lovers. While New York, unlike some states, recognized multiracial marriages, such a union would have jeopardized King’s social standing, threatened his professional career, and ended friendships with those who frowned on what they considered miscegenation. In his musings to Adams and Hay, King imagined a future raceless world, but he was too timid to be an open trailblazer of such a world. Suffering from myriad financial, physical, and mental problems—no doubt exac-

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erbated by the strains of living a double life, with all the lies and subterfuges that entailed—King finally revealed his true identity to Ada in a letter written from his deathbed in a sanitarium in Phoenix, Arizona. Dying of tuberculosis, he may finally have also confided to James Gardiner so that Ada would be provided for after he passed away. He indicated to his wife that a trust fund would provide for her wellbeing. His will, however, left his meager assets to his mother, who had never completely lost her grip on him. In the wake of race riots in New York, King had persuaded Ada to move to Toronto, Canada, although that city was not as racially tolerant as he had expected. He had hoped she would be content there. After his death, however, she moved back to New York and made contact with Gardiner, who with Hay’s help provided her with sixty-five dollars a month and a rent-free house. In 1906, Ada hired the first of a halfdozen attorneys in a dogged effort to recover the money she believed her husband had left her. In retaliation, her benefactors threatened to revoke the monthly payments. As a result, Ada waited until her children reached adulthood and then resumed her legal efforts. In 1933, the litigation culminated in a public trial. The tabloid press had a field day with the couple’s “torrid” love letters, treating the revelation as a scandal. One headline proclaimed: “Mammy Bares Life as Wife of Scientist.” Another reported: “Old Negress Suing Estate, Reveals Love.” The New York Daily News portrayed Ada as a “huge, kinky-haired, pleasant-faced colored woman of 70 years.” Represented by a Russian-born attorney named Morris Bell, she lost her case. The funds she thought came from a trust fund were actually charitable payments from Hay and his descendents. She lived another thirty-one years in relative obscurity (King’s first two biographers made no effort to find her), passing away in 1964 at approximately 103 years of age. Her two daughters married white men and effectively passed. A thorough researcher, Sandweiss is on solid ground speculating about many aspects of this unique couple, but she shies away from their sex life, either separately or together. She does reveal that King had absolutely no passion for well-bred white women. One eligible contemporary he found “shrunken [and] of sharp visage, in which were prominent two cold eyes and a positively poisonous mouth; her hair, the color of faded hay, tangled in a jungle around her head.” Rejecting Hay’s efforts to pair him with a young socialite, King quipped, “To see her walk across the room, you would think someone had tilted up a coffin and propelled the corpse spasmodically forward.” His fascination was with more “natural” or “primal” females. Henry Adams wrote that “King had no faith in the American woman; he loved types more robust.” One biographer hypothesized that he sought women devoted to him, such as his black childhood nursemaid (Sandweiss demurs from such a conclusion). On the dust jacket of Passing Strange is a designer’s visualization of a nattily dressed gentleman (King was a dandy even out in the wild) crossing a bridge as a voluptuous, dusky African American woman approaches him from the other direction. In the end, though, Ada Copeland emerges as the more compelling of the two protagonists. As historian David W. Blight asserts, thanks to Sandweiss’s “remarkable detective work,” Ada “steals the show.” Tragically, as Booklist reviewer

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Vanessa Bush points out, Ada’s husband “defied social conventions” but “could not face up to the potential ruin of an interracial marriage.” He went to his grave negligent toward loved ones and with too little faith in his closest friends’ capacity for compassion. James B. Lane

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 11 (February 1, 2009): 20. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 23 (December 1, 2008): 1247. Library Journal 134, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 108. The New York Times Book Review, March 8, 2009, p. 11. The New Yorker 85, no. 4 (March 9, 2009): 70. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 48 (December 1, 2008): 39-40.

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PAULINE BONAPARTE Venus of Empire Author: Flora Fraser (1958) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 287 pp. $28.95 Type of work: Biography Time: 1780-1825 Locale: Corsica; France; Haiti; Italy A narrative of the life and times of one of Napoleon’s sisters Principal personages: Pauline Bonaparte, a cruel, promiscuous young woman, duchess of Guastalla, 1806 Napoleon I, her brother, emperor of France, 1804-1814, 1815 Jérôme Bonaparte, her brother, king of Westphalia, 1807-1813 Joseph Bonaparte, her brother, king of Spain, 1808-1813 Louis Bonaparte, her brother, king of Holland, 1806-1810 Lucien Bonaparte, her brother, prince of Canino, 1814-1840, and of Musignano, 1824-1840 Caroline Bonaparte, her sister, queen consort of Naples, 1808-1815 Élisa Bonaparte Baciocchi, her sister, grand duchess of Tuscany, 1809-1814 Letizia Bonaparte, Pauline’s mother General Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, Pauline’s first husband Prince Camillo Borghese, her second husband Dermide Louis Napoleon Leclerc, her son Josephine Beauharnais Bonaparte, empress of France, 1804-1810, Napoleon’s first wife

In 1964, historian R. F. Delderfield published The Golden Millstones, a collective biography of the brothers and sisters of Napoleon I. Delderfield characterized the actions of Napoleon’s siblings as detriments to his career and at least partially responsible for his demise. Flora Fraser’s Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire reveals that Delderfield’s description of the siblings applied especially to Pauline, Napoleon’s younger sister. The Pauline who emerges from Fraser’s pages is superficial, egoistical, narcissistic, and cruel, with no redeeming characteristics. Fraser does not relate even one anecdote of an act of kindness or compassion performed by Pauline, nor of any action of historical significance. Pauline was christened Maria Paola the day after her birth on October 20, 1780, in Ajaccio, Corsica. The sixth of eight children, she grew up as Paoletta. She became known as Paulette shortly after Napoleon moved his family to the south of France in 1793, and was eventually addressed as Pauline. Virtually no records survive of Pauline’s life or activities before 1796.

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Fraser begins her biography of Pauline with a dinner held on March 22, 1796, in Flora Fraser is author of The Unruly Marseille and attended by her brother Napo- Queen: The Life of Queen Caroline leon, her future husband Victor Emmanuel (1996), Beloved Emma: The Life of Leclerc, and her then-fiancé Stanislas Fréon. Emma, Lady Hamilton (1986), and Fréon was a man of some consequence in the Princesses: The Six Daughters of revolutionary government and potentially a George III (2004). valuable ally for Napoleon. In a surviving letter (which Fraser speculates was not composed by the poorly educated Pauline) the fifteen-year-old girl proclaimed her undying love for Fréon, who was almost three times her age. Fréon subsequently fell out of favor with the Directory (France’s revolutionary government). As a result, Napoleon apparently no longer saw an advantage to a union between Fréon and his sister and ordered the engagement ended. Pauline offered only token objection to the broken engagement. Within a year, Napoleon had arranged a marriage between Pauline, who resembled him both in facial appearance and in stature, and Leclerc, perhaps as a means of binding the promising young military commander more closely to himself. The couple was married on June 14, 1797, at Mombello, Italy. Within a year, Pauline was pregnant. She gave birth to her only child, a son (Dermide Louis Napoléon Leclerc, named by Napoleon), on April 20, 1798, in Milan, Italy. In September, the army transferred Leclerc to Paris with his wife and child. Within a month, the Directory sent Leclerc to another post in Brittany, while Pauline stayed with their child in Paris. In Paris, Pauline indulged her interest in the high fashions of the day. Based on two-hundred-year-old court gossip, Fraser argues that Pauline also at this time began to participate in the sexual affairs for which she later became notorious. These affairs accelerated into 1799, when Napoleon returned from his ill-fated Egyptian campaign to overthrow the Directory and establish himself as the de facto dictator of France in a government called the Consulate. In early 1800, Pauline began a ritual that would mark the rest of her life: visiting European spas for her health. She went to Plombières-les-Bains in the Vosges seeking relief from pelvic complaints that nonetheless continued to plague her. Returning to Paris, Pauline and Leclerc bought an elegant house, as had most of the other members of the Bonaparte clan, and began to participate in Parisian society. Pauline apparently continued the sexual escapades that she had begun there earlier. Napoleon dispatched Leclerc and Pauline to Haiti on December 14, 1801—a decision that had tragic consequences for the young couple. Pauline supposedly continued her sexual conquests among Leclerc’s junior officers (as well as Haitians of both sexes). The general eventually fell ill from yellow fever and died on November 1, 1802. In a macabre gesture, Pauline had his heart embalmed separately from his corpse and kept it near her in a gilded urn for the rest of her life. Pauline returned to Paris and apparently resumed her life of sexual excesses in a new residence that was a large as those of her brothers and sisters. Pauline had hardly

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reestablished herself in Paris when her brother Joseph began intriguing to marry her to an empty-headed Italian prince, Camillo Borghese. Napoleon was lukewarm toward the match, but it took place on August 28, 1803. The marriage barely caused a pause in Pauline’s amorous adventures. Pauline subsequently moved with her husband and increasingly ignored son to Rome, where she almost immediately took a lover (according to gossip). When Napoleon heard of Pauline’s conduct, he dispatched a stern letter of reprimand, and almost immediately her mother Letizia arrived in Rome to counsel her daughter. Shortly thereafter, the French senate named Napoleon emperor of the French. Within days, most of Napoleon’s siblings, including Pauline, received royal titles. During that same summer of 1804, Camillo and Pauline commissioned the artwork that would constitute Pauline’s lasting claim to fame, a statue by Antonio Canova depicting a nearly nude Pauline as Venus Victrix. The statue now permanently resides at the Villa Borghese in Rome. Pauline finished sitting for the statue in July of 1804 and decided to visit several spas for her health. On August 14, while Pauline was taking the waters in Tuscany, her son Dermide died of a fever. Her entourage kept the news from Pauline for ten days because of her health. When they finally told her of her son’s death, Pauline went through a period of intense mourning, having his heart embalmed as she had her husband’s earlier and returning to France to entomb the boy with his father. That done, she immediately busied herself with choosing a gown for her brother’s coronation in December, 1804. Returning to Paris, Pauline resumed a long-standing feud with Napoleon’s wife Josephine. As other members of her family had done, Pauline encouraged Napoleon to divorce Josephine in favor of a younger woman who could give him an heir. Josephine retaliated by circulating (apparently for the first time) stories about Napoleon having incestuous relationships with his sisters, especially Pauline. The merits of these stories are questionable, but Fraser accords them some credibility. After her brother’s coronation (during which she displayed her mean-spiritedness in full), Pauline busied herself for the next year with pursuing her penchant for clothes and jewels and displaying herself at parties. Her sexual conquests during this period allegedly included the mulatto father of the famous writer Alexandre Dumas. After Napoleon’s victories in the War of the Third Coalition, Napoleon named many of his brothers and sisters to titles of nobility with great estates. To Pauline, he accorded only the tiny duchy of Guastalla, infuriating her but nevertheless affording her a sizable fortune. During the winter of 1805-1806, Pauline’s sexual escapades became a chief topic of gossip in Paris. It was also during this time that Josephine supposedly caught Napoleon and Pauline having incestuous relations, which Pauline reportedly confirmed. Fraser even speculates that Napoleon may have given his sister the venereal disease that “may” have caused her chronic health problems, for which she continued to visit spas for the rest of her life. This disease is believed to have been gonorrhea, for which her doctors prescribed leeches around her pubic region, a treatment both painful and humiliating. The disease, Fraser speculates, may have been responsible for Pauline’s invalidism, which caused her to request that she be carried almost everywhere. Her

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doctors also supposedly recommended that Pauline refrain from sexual activity, advice that Pauline ignored. For reasons of her own, Pauline then took an extended tour of the south of France. To underline Pauline’s cruel and capricious nature, Fraser recounts an incident that took place while she was visiting Nice during the winter of 1807: She received a visiting duchess while resting her feet on the throat of one of her ladies in waiting. During her sojourn in the south, Pauline continued to take and discard lovers at will. Her odyssey ended when Napoleon appointed her husband as governor of the Transalpine Department of the French Empire and ordered Pauline to accompany him to Savoy as the governor’s lady. She soon tired of life on the periphery and, pleading ill-health, returned to Paris. Back in France, Pauline soon joined Napoleon’s drive to divorce Josephine and marry a younger woman who could give him a son. Pauline, then according to Fraser in the full flower of her beauty, indulged herself in romantic affair after romantic affair. She also apparently played a successful role in orchestrating the divorce of her brother and his subsequent remarriage to the Austrian archduchess Marie Louise. In 1812, Pauline’s years of indulgence ended. Napoleon embarked on his fateful Russian campaign, and Pauline again left Paris for the south of France, where she was joined initially by other female members of the Bonaparte family. Despite continued health problems, Pauline apparently continued her profligate sexual excesses during the next two years, while her brother’s fortunes on the battlefield began to wane. She seemed more concerned with her jewels and dresses than with the emperor’s defeats or victories. Napoleon was exiled to Elba in 1814. Pauline joined him there after first visiting yet another spa for her health. When Napoleon returned to France for a final hundred days of glory, Pauline departed for Italy, where she received the news of her brother’s final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Fraser’s account of Pauline’s acts of charity toward her brother on Elba represent virtually the only examples she provides of nonselfish behavior on the part of her subject. Even these acts were not altruistic. Pauline realized that her own fortunes were inextricably interwoven with the successes or failures of her brother. Pauline subsequently returned to Rome, where she organized a reconciliation with her husband. Despite the Bonapartes’ fall from power, Pauline was wealthy enough in her own right to live out the rest of her days in comfort and luxury. Although her beauty began to fade, she continued to make sexual conquests almost until the end. Despite remaining loyal to her exiled brother, Pauline entertained British expatriate nobility at her palace in Rome. Although she maintained that she was ready to leave the comforts of Rome to join her brother on St. Helena, Napoleon himself refused, saying he would not permit himself to be seen in such a condition. Pauline’s life ended in Florence on June 9, 1825. Her death was caused, according to the death certificate, by a tumor of the stomach. She had moved to Florence in 1824, and she spent her last days without any of the lovers or relatives with whom she had been surrounded for most of her life. Elegantly attired as always, she dictated her will from her deathbed and then gave detailed instructions to members of her household as to how her corpse was to be attired. She died in pain, leaving few to mourn.

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Despite proclaiming her lack of faith many times during her life, she once again became a good Catholic on her deathbed (as had Napoleon). Fraser’s biography reveals the triviality and banality of Pauline’s life, providing insight through her into the nature of fame and power during the Napoleonic era and the attitude of French society toward its remaining aristocratic classes in the wake of the French Revolution. Paul Madden

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 11 (February 1, 2009): 14. The Economist 390, no. 8621 (March 7, 2009): 91. History Today 59, no. 8 (August, 2009): 65. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 24 (December 15, 2008): 1290. Library Journal 134, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 99. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 49 (December 8, 2008): 54.

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POEMS, 1959-2009 Author: Frederick Seidel (1936) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 509 pp. $40.00 Type of work: Poetry A bizarre, often salacious, and brilliantly controversial poet’s complete works When Frederick Seidel published his second collection of poems, Sunrise, in 1980, he was already forty-four years old. There was little reason to expect, therefore, that he would become a prolific poet, but that is exactly what happened. After collecting all of his poems published up to 1979 in a retrospective volume following the appearance of Sunrise, he went on to produce some ten volumes of new verse over the next twenty-eight years, culminating in 2008 with Evening Man. Leafing through the more than three hundred poems collected in Poems, 19592009, one cannot help but admire the power of Seidel’s imagery, his startling metaphors, and the relentless intensity of a sharply focused sensuality. Seidel is not an erotic poet in the conventional sense of an artist interested in sensual experience and arousal. Nor is he pornographic, vulgar, or sensationalistically exploitative of prurient expectations. He has been called “louche,” or disreputable, but irreverent comes closer to the truth. Wealthy, a man of infinite leisure, he has developed a natural gift for penetrating observation by combining it with a passionate disinterestedness. No matter how sad or poignant, ridiculous or venal the world may be, Seidel backs off from moral or political judgment of it. Seidel insists on engaging in poetic reportage. Critics have commented on his “social interest,” and it is true that, from his earliest poetry to his most recent, there has been a marked awareness of social and political events. Nevertheless, he quickly moves from allusions to the news of the day to the state of his own consciousness, which may be deeply affected by what has occurred but is invariably drawn into a mood or awareness all its own. In Sunrise, there is a moving elegy to John F. Kennedy with the glancing title of “November 24, 1963,” two days after the assassination of the president. There is no specific allusion to Kennedy in the poem, other than a searing description of funereal flags: “The flags soak at half-staff, bloodshed and blue,” while the bulk of the poem is devoted to a description of New York under a mournful and pervasive but light rain: The rain points prick the lake and touch the drought The dusk blue of a sterile needletip. The brightness and the light has been struck down.

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In this early poem, Seidel pays tribute to the conventions of elegiac poetry from John Milton to Walt Whitman, as well as to his earliest, most important model, Robert Lowell. By the 1980’s, however, he was already launched on a trajectory that never lost its sense of direction. It is best defined as a voice and tone deeply at home in the moment and willing to give up any sense of decorum in order to be true to that moment. Seidel’s Ooga-Booga (2006) includes an eight-stanza poem titled “The Bush Administration.” In this poem, Seidel’s nausea over political events turns into a visceral imagining and transformation through which he becomes a foraging beast caught in a cycle of eating and disgorgement, partial digestion and vomiting: The radio said: They had beheaded an American. There was a thunderclap and it poured. ... I am on all fours eating grass So I can throw up because I like the feeling. I crouch over a carcass and practice my eating. ... The United States of America preemptively eats the world.

All of this culminates in a stanza in which Seidel’s mordant wit soars above his own despair and situates him in a state apart. The metaphor of suicide, transformed through the wit of a pun, catapults him into a higher state of being in which the crawling, vomiting persona of the poet triumphs in the joy of his anger: The Bush administration likes its rain sunny-side up. I feel a mania of happiness at bring alive As I write you this suicide note. I have never been so cheerily suicidal, so sui-Seidel. I am too cheery to be well. George Bush is cheery as well. I am cheeriest Crawling around on all fours eating gentle grass And pretending I am eating broken glass. Then I throw up the pasture.

After Seidel published his first book of poems, Final Solutions (1962), he went into a seventeen-year hibernation. He did not become a recluse, but he stopped publishing any poetry. He lived an active social life in New York after divorcing his wife and became a man of the city very much in the manner of Charles Baudelaire, the great nineteenth century French poet who, in many ways, is Seidel’s principal precursor. If Baudelaire became fa Frederick Seidel has published more mous as an explorer of the dark side of Parithan thirteen volumes of poetry and has sian life and opened the “abyss of ugliness” to received the National Book Critics poetry, Seidel decided to confront the AmeriAward and the Lamont Poetry Prize. can Dream, as one commentator as noted, in all its “permutations . . . at its most ripe.”

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From his student days at Harvard to his early seventies, Seidel’s compass has been his libido. To turn his back on sexual energy would be to deny the essence of his psyche and creativity: Those Harvard years His ego hovered like a hummingbird, Wingless, songless—halfway Between his knees and shoulders. Perhaps it wanted to embrace the universe. Closing his eyes to caress This girl or that, he saw stars.

Sensuality, however, crosses physical swords with a variety of bodily functions, and Seidel’s commitment to observation, in its widest scope, often forces him to juxtapose the beautiful and the profane. Just as William Butler Yeats could not forget that “love pitched its tent close to the place of excrement,” Seidel is often bemused to discover that thoughts of love cannot be segregated from the intrusive presence of all that cares not for love—or for creativity. In “To the Muse,” the first poem in a mature collection, My Tokyo (1993), the speaker calls a woman from a phone booth on a New York street. While waiting for the woman’s butler to summon her to the phone, he observes a man crouching near a car defecating on a newspaper. The man folds the paper and carries it to a trash basket in front of an exclusive restaurant, where the “maitre d’ was seating an early customer.” A woman pushing a shopping cart comes up and begins to pick through the “trash basket the man had used.” The poem ends with the butler returning to the phone to tell the speaker that the woman, his muse, has gone. Seidel’s poetry variously invests sexuality with a great many shades of emotion, but humor is never far away. This is particularly true as the poet gets older. The farcical gestures and desires of the aged lover are transformed in Seidel’s poetry into a strangely patterned, dance-like progress. His self-awareness is so intense and complex that readers may find little opening to laugh at, rather than with, him. Rather, they are forced either to laugh or wince in accompaniment to Seidel’s own, often eerie but never self-pitying understanding. His disinterested objectivity never flags, and his wit charms readers before they can back off in revulsion or contempt. “Love Song,” written when Seidel was seventy years old, begins: I shaved my legs a second time, Lagoon approaching the sublime, To cast a moonlight spell on you. TriBeCa was Tahiti, too. I know I never was on time. I was downloading the sublime To cast a moonlight spell on you. TrBeCa was Tahiti, too.

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Magill’s Literary Annual 2010 The melanoma on my skin Resumes what’s wrong with me within. My outside is my active twin. Disease I’m repetitious in.

The tangolike rhythm of these quatrains amplify the hypnotic monotony of the repeated rhymes of the first two stanzas, while that monotony is brought to a halt by the emphatic sameness of the four rhymes in the third stanza. Such measured and controlled seduction gives way to a Rabelaisian gusto in another poem, “Climbing Everest.” Here, an old lover is making love to a very young woman: I’m getting young. I’m totally into strapping on the belt of dynamite Which will turn me into light. God is great! I suck Her tongue. ... I enter the jellyfish folds Of floating fire. The mania in her labia can inspire Extraordinary phenomena and really does cure colds.

On the other hand, love for the old can also be full of cruel reminders of the imminence of death. “Broadway Melody,” written at the same time as “Climbing Everest,” observes that “A naked woman my age is a total nightmare. . . . I hate the old couples on their walkers giving/ Off odors of love.” Despite the fact that Sunrise won a National Book Critics’ Award and the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1980, Seidel was never taken up by the American academic poetry establishment. When it was published, Richard Poirier called Sunrise “one of the best books of poetry in the last ten years,” and recently Adam Kirsch announced that Seidel was “the best American poet writing today.” While a critical success, however, Seidel was never interested in wooing universities or in giving readings. He has not taught anywhere, and he refuses to ingratiate himself with the institution of “creative writing”—the poets and audiences that make up the bulk of writers and readers of poetry in the United States. This large volume of more than five hundred pages of poetry without an introduction, preface, or any kind of critical apparatus makes for a refreshingly bold and authentic introduction to the broader audience Seidel deserves. Peter Brier

Review Sources Antioch Review 67, no. 4 (Fall, 2009): 802-805. Commonweal 136, no. 16 (September 25, 2009): 21-22. London Review of Books 31, no. 15 (August 6, 2009): 39-40.

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The New York Review of Books 56, no. 12 (July 16, 2009): 34-36. The New York Times Book Review, May 24, 2009, p. 15. Poetry 194, no. 5 (September, 2009): 451-460. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 11 (March 16, 2009): 41. The Village Voice 54, no. 51 (December 16, 2009): 35.

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POPS A Life of Louis Armstrong Author: Terry Teachout (1956) Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston) 475 pp. $30.00 Type of work: Biography Time: 1901-1971 Locale: New Orleans; Chicago; New York; Hollywood, California A well-researched modern biography of the most influential jazz musician of the twentieth century Principal personages: Louis Armstrong (1901-1971), a jazz musician Lillian Hardin Armstrong (1898-1971), Armstrong’s second wife Lucille Armstrong (1914-1983), Armstrong’s fourth wife Joe Glaser (1897-1969), his business manager Earl “Fatha” Hines (1903-1983), the pianist with Armstrong’s “Hot Seven” Joe “King” Oliver (1885-1938), a trumpet-playing forerunner of Armstrong Jack Teagarden (1905-1964), an innovative trombonist and member of Armstrong’s All-Stars

In his lifetime, Louis Armstrong—the subject of Terry Teachout’s new biography, Pops—was the most famous jazz musician in the world. He burst upon the music scene during the 1920’s as a charismatic and talented cornet and trumpet player. His unique vocal style as a scat singer and interpreter of popular melodies became an indelible trademark. Until his death in 1971, Armstrong remained an international star in concerts, in movies, and on records. As late as 1964, he had a number one pop single in “Hello Dolly,” outpacing even the Beatles on the record charts. Bing Crosby called Armstrong “the beginning and the end of music in America.” Armstrong’s enduring appeal to his audiences in the United States and abroad contrasted with the deep divisions about his career and artistic development within the jazz community. About his indispensable contribution to the new music of the mid1920’s, there was no real argument. The small groups he assembled as Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven recorded performances that changed the direction of jazz. In such records as Weather Bird (1928) and West End Blues (1928), Armstrong displayed how an innovative soloist could reshape conventional melodies into rich and complex improvisations. Young musicians, black and white, listened to and emulated Armstrong’s creativity. The fundamental direction of jazz as an American art form changed because of what Armstrong and his group offered.

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Within a decade of his path-breaking per formances, however, Armstrong was regarded Terry Teachout is the drama critic of among his fellow jazz musicians as no longer The Wall Street Journal and the author on the frontier of the music. While they ac- of biographies of George Balanchine knowledged his singing gifts, his trumpet- and H. L. Mencken. playing came to seem old-fashioned as such virtuosos as Roy Eldridge and especially Dizzy Gillespie came upon the scene. By the 1950’s, the tenor sax player Coleman Hawkins said of Armstrong that “he isn’t going any place musically.” In the age of bebop and modern jazz, Armstrong sounded out of date. Moreover, his showmanship and entertaining of his audiences struck some of the more rebellious younger African American players as pandering to white tastes. Some African American musicians called him an “Uncle Tom,” a term of derision. By the 1960’s, Armstrong had overcome some of this criticism through the positive nature of his personality and through his sheer longevity, but issues of his ultimate impact on American music persisted up to and past his death in 1971. Armstrong has attracted several interesting biographers. James Lincoln Collier in Louis Armstrong: An American Genius (1983) acknowledged Armstrong’s musical greatness but depicted a man influenced by his personal insecurities. Gary Giddins in Satchmo (1988) produced an authoritative, brief study, while Laurence Bergreen’s Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life (1997) featured extensive research and a positive assessment of Armstrong’s musical and cultural legacy. In many respects, Terry Teachout’s new biography of Armstrong is a synthesis of the previous writing on his life and times. A drama critic for the Wall Street Journal and a cultural commentator in general, Teachout was a jazz musician himself before starting on a writing career. He has written books on the choreographer George Balanchine and the political and social commentator of the 1920’s and 1930’s H. L. Mencken. An affection for Armstrong pervades Pops, but Teachout engages with insight and passion many of the issues that arise from studying the trumpeter’s career. He calls the book “an exercise in synthesis, a narrative biography based in large part on the research of those academic scholars who in recent years have unearthed a wealth of hitherto unknown information about Armstrong.” The result is a winning narrative that covers the by now familiar story of Armstrong’s rise from poverty and family dysfunction in early twentieth century New Orleans to world fame and popularity. He was born not on July 4, 1900, as legend had it for many years, but on August 4, 1901, into the racially segregated world of New Orleans and the South. Teachout traces the young Armstrong’s ability to overcome poverty, broken family life, and endemic racism in the years before World War I. Throughout this difficult phase of his life, Armstrong displayed the raw talents as a musician that would enable him to achieve his distinctive sound in the 1920’s. He did not take formal lessons on the cornet, and his self-taught approach left him with lip problems that plagued him for the rest of his life. By the time of World War I, he was performing on Mississippi river boats as a trumpeter and making a reputation for his

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prowess with his instrument. Several years later in 1922, Joe “King” Oliver, who had been a mentor to Armstrong in New Orleans, invited him to come north to Chicago and join the popular Creole Jazz Band, which was winning audiences in the Windy City. Soon, musicians in the city, as one of them recalled later, “were aware of the fact that a young trumpet player had just arrived from New Orleans and was playing with Oliver.” Oliver was on the downhill phase of his professional career in these years, and Armstrong emerged as a special talent within a short time. During the early 1920’s, jazz was the music of young white and African American people, who flocked to hear the new trumpet sensation from the South. Such aspiring musicians as Jack Teagarden and Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke came to watch Armstrong perform. After a stint in New York with the talented African American bandleader Fletcher Henderson, Armstrong returned to Chicago to record the music that would transform jazz and secure his place as its first great innovator. Teachout’s narrative of these events pulses with energy as he describes Armstrong on the verge of musical greatness. Armstrong made his most important trumpet-playing recordings in the mid1920’s with the Hot Five and the Hot Seven. Teachout’s musical background enables him to describe such important songs as “West End Blues” in impressive detail and clarity. He gives a good sense of how Armstrong’s recording of this song and others influenced young musicians such as clarinetist Artie Shaw. In the years that followed, Armstrong became less of an innovator on his instrument and more of a creative force as a vocalist on such tunes as “Stardust” (recorded in 1931). Teachout does not, however, incorporate the important work of such writers about jazz singing as Will Friedwald and Gene Lees into his analysis of Armstrong as a singer. One of the major economic actors in Armstrong’s life was his longtime manager Joe Glaser. An unpleasant and crude individual with a sordid background in Chicago organized crime, Glaser supervised Armstrong’s career from the 1930’s until his own death in 1969. Armstrong wanted a white man with connections to the business world to take care of management details while he played onstage. In Glaser, he obtained that and more. Teachout fails to explore the full dimensions of Glaser’s links to such sinister mob fixers as Sidney Korshak, however. Lawrence Bergreen is more thorough on this aspect of Armstrong’s life than is Teachout. The extent to which Glaser cramped Armstrong’s artistic development is still a debated point among his biographers. Glaser and Armstrong wanted to make a career for the musician in motion pictures, but in the segregated Hollywood of the 1930’s and 1940’s it was difficult to find a suitable vehicle for the musician’s talents. The 1946 film New Orleans includes some good examples of Armstrong’s playing, as does the 1956 picture High Society, in which he appears with Bing Crosby. Hollywood never discovered how to make the most of Armstrong’s special gifts, though. The arrival of modern jazz, or bebop as it was known, in the mid-1940’s left Armstrong confused and unhappy. He had little taste for the harmonic and rhythmic departures that such players as Charlie Parker and Gillespie were making in the

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jazz world. Tension between the musicians who had come of age in the 1920’s and 1930’s and their younger colleagues pervaded the jazz scene after World War II. Armstrong offered reporters many caustic comments about the work of the bebop generation. Teachout’s sympathies lie with Armstrong and his approach to jazz, and as a result he does not alway provide readers with a clear picture of what Parker, Gillespie, and the other jazz modernists were trying to do. Armstrong was never an intellectual, and he did not appreciate the ways in which the boppers made more demands on their audiences than he was accustomed to do. Teachout also notes that Armstrong could have emulated bandleaders such as Count Basie, who retooled his orchestra with the help of gifted arrangers and found wider popularity during the 1950’s. Teachout makes Dizzy Gillespie something of a foil to Armstrong in these years, providing ample quotes from both men about their musical differences. Gillespie was, by all accounts, a kind and thoughtful man, and he and Armstrong became friends and even played together later in their lives. The trumpet player Clark Terry was also a close friend of Armstrong and commented about their relationship in interviews, but he receives only one passing reference in Teachout’s account. As is true of Teachout’s treatment of much of Armstrong’s life, the author could do more to illuminate Armstrong’s personal ties within the jazz community. Pops traces the last quarter century of Armstrong’s life, when he performed with his All-Stars and had two hit singles, Mack the Knife (1955) and Hello Dolly (1964). He also released some wonderful long-playing albums with Ella Fitzgerald and a compelling tribute to W. C. Handy that may have represented his best work of all. Armstrong also displayed some unexpected militancy in 1957, when he publicly denounced President Dwight D. Eisenhower over his handling of the Little Rock, Arkansas, school integration crisis. Armstrong’s strong assault on the president’s performance surprised the musician’s critics, who had previously assailed him for his lack of identification with the Civil Rights movement. By the time he died in 1971, Armstrong had become an American icon who had outlasted his detractors and was acknowledged for his powerful influence on the nation’s unique art form. In the nearly forty years since his passing, Armstrong has received his due recognition as the individual who, more than any other musician during the 1920’s, set jazz on the path it would follow for the rest of the twentieth century. One of the virtues of Teachout’s book is that it impels readers to pull out an Armstrong recording and listen once again to the unmistakable sound of “Pops” at his best. The Internet also offers a great selection of videos of Armstrong on film and television, in appearances with other stars and with his own group. The disputes and controversies of his lifetime continue to fade away, and the music remains as lively and involving as it was when a young man with a horn entered the recording studios to cut recordings with his Hot Five and his Hot Seven almost nine decades ago. Lewis L. Gould

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Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 304, no. 5 (December, 2009): 110. Booklist 105, no. 22 (August 1, 2009): 6. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 18 (September 15, 2009): 100. Library Journal 134, no. 13 (August 1, 2009): 83. National Review 61, no. 24 (December 31, 2009): 50-52. The New York Times Book Review, December 6, 2009, p. 10. The New Yorker 85, no. 41 (December 14, 2009): 86-89. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 32 (August 10, 2009): 43. The Washington Post, December 20, 2009, p. B06. Weekly Standard 15, no. 11 (December 30, 2009): 29-31.

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THE POSTHUMAN DADA GUIDE Tzara & Lenin Play Chess Author: Andrei Codrescu (1946) Publisher: Princeton University Press (Princeton, N.J.). 235 pp. $16.95 Type of work: Literary history, literary theory Time: 1915 to the early twenty-first century Locale: Zurich, Bucharest, Paris, Berlin, New York City An account of the origins of Dadaism, its founding figures, its continuing relevance, and its tensions with other major twentieth century movements, including Surrealism, Futurism, modernism, and communism Principal personages: Tristan Tzara, Romanian poet and originator of Dadaism Vladimir Lenin, founder of the October, 1917, Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union André Breton, French poet and architect of Surrealism Hugo Ball, poet, Catholic mystic, and co-owner of Cabaret Voltaire, where Dadaism was born Emmy Hennings, Ball’s wife, a dancer, singer, and song writer Richard Huelsenbeck, German author, Dadaist, and Freudian analyst

The Posthuman Dada Guide, by Andrei Codrescu, is far more than its title suggests. While it does survey the birth, development, and continuing influence of Dadaism—the early twentieth century antiart and antiwar movement that laid the groundwork for Surrealism—it also explores Dadaism’s relationship to other sociocultural, philosophical, and political movements of the early twentieth century, as well as the movement’s roots in western European artistic developments, eastern European history, and the Jewish experience. Moreover, Codrescu weaves into the book his own unique experiences in postwar Rumania and America, as well as his encounters with countercultural figures and contemporary poets. The result is a fascinating blend of cultural history, philosophical exploration, and personal narrative—with Dada at its core. Codrescu’s organizational method places The Posthuman Dada Guide within the category of the ABC book, an eastern European nonfiction literary form composed of brief, alphabetically arranged essays. The structure is reminiscent of a game of chess, in that there is a rigid organizational principle within which there may be many interesting and unexpected juxtapositions of pieces. The form also allows the author to follow a nonlinear path that nevertheless possesses a structural sequence.

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Chess also represents an explicit organizational thread in The Posthuman Dada Guide, resulting from the intellectual environment in which the movement began. Codrescu describes the culturally rich environment of Zurich, Switzerland, in 1915, when poet Hugo Ball and his wife Emmy Hennings transformed the Meierei Restaurant into the Cabaret Voltaire, the birthplace of Dada. Fleeing the insanity of World War I, many of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers, poets, and artists found their way to Zurich, where they joined with native Swiss talent to form an amazingly creative and intellectual sphere that included James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and early Dadaists such as Tristan Tzara and Richard Huelsenbeck. In this fertile environment, major artists and thinkers often crossed paths, and Codrescu imagines that in 1916, Lenin and Tzara, the founder of Dadaism, met in the Café de la Terrasse, an important Dadaist haunt just up the street from Lenin’s apartment, and played a game of chess. For Codrescu, this chess match symbolizes the conflict between communism and Dadaism, and he poses the question: Which side won? Soviet-style communism ended in 1991, making it appear that Dadaism triumphed, but according to Codrescu, the contemporary world still lacks creative, emotional, and spiritual joy. As Codrescu writes, “Could it be that late-capitalism posthumans have arrived in a leninist future without communism?” Throughout The Posthuman Dada Guide, Codrescu returns to this chess game as the book’s touchstone. Codrescu finds the roots of Dadaism in ancient poet-philosophers such as Orpheus, Sappho, Lao-tzu, and the Zen beggars who challenged the established order and announced the freedom found beyond conventional understanding. This spirit continued in the Middle Ages with its wandering troubadours, commedia dell’arte theatrical troupes, and the visual and sexual excesses of annual festivals. In the early twentieth century, this bohemian thread combined with the last poetic utterances of the symbolist movement, the dawn of modernism, the psychology of Freud and Jung, the new physics of Einstein, and the radical artistic visions of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Then, the violent absurdities of World War I called into question the European framework of governmental authority, capitalism, nationalism, family, and the Christian worldview. This general portrait of the early twentieth century suffices to explain the origins of Dadaism in most classic explorations of the movement. Codrescu, however, as a Romanian Jew—an identity he shares with Tzara—brings to The Posthuman Dada Guide a deeper understanding of Dada’s ethnic and regional sources. To Codrescu, it is no accident that a Romanian Jew founded Dadaism. Tzara and his childhood friend Marcel Janco brought to Zurich, according to the author, “the knowledge of Balkan cultures deeply invested in vivid folk traditions rife with supernatural creatures, ritual Andrei Codrescu is the award-winning author of numerous books of poetry, essays, and fiction, including The Blood Countess (1996) and It Was Today (2003). A commentator for National Public Radio, he is the MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University.

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masking, pre-Christian fairy tales, drinking songs, bawdy skits, and mystery plays.” Codrescu explains that many of these folk traditions emerged from Jewish cultural institutions such as Yiddish theater, which blossomed despite—or perhaps because of—the stresses of being a persecuted, underground culture—as was Dada in its early years. With this background, Codrescu assembles all the pieces that were in place on February 5, 1915, when Cabaret Voltaire opened for the first time. Hugo Ball hung paintings and drawings by Picasso, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee, as well as a poster for the cabaret by Ukrainian artist Marcel Slodki. With these as a backdrop, Tzara, Janco, Ball, Hennings, and others began a night of singing and reciting poetry—some of it obscene and some nonsensical—while a Russian balalaika band and Ball on the piano pounded out music. The evening’s climax arrived when four masked figures appeared onstage under a green spotlight, uttered a deluge of nonverbal sounds, and started a frenzied dance. At the height of the dance, one of the dancers ripped open his coat to reveal a cuckoo clock underneath. Soon after, a tuxedoed Tzara walked onstage, sent the dancers away, recited meaningless French verse, and finally opened a roll of toilet paper. Dada—the forerunner of Surrealism, absurdism, and performance art—was born. From Zurich, Dadaism found its way to the salons and cafés of Europe and America. First, publications spread the word, including an anthology called Cabaret Voltaire and a magazine titled Dada that Tzara sent to Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Filippo Marinetti, André Breton, and other major figures of the avant-garde. Soon, Dadaist happenings were taking place in Berlin and Paris. Duchamp unfurled the Dadaist banner in New York, where Mina Loy and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven—who filled the roles of muse and creative artists—took it up with the zeal of true believers. The ultimate sign of Dadaism’s triumph came when Peggy Guggenheim, one of the great matriarchs of the arts in America, included it in her cultural universe. However, while Dada rapidly reached this apex, it quickly lost followers and spawned rival movements. The first to defect were Ball and Hennings, the founders of Cabaret Voltaire, who returned to the Catholic faith of their childhood and began to write in a Christian, mystical vein. Then, in Paris, Breton characterized Tzara as undisciplined and rejected Dada’s resolute meaninglessness. He established Surrealism, a purposeful revolt against reality founded in studies of the unconscious, and this countermovement eclipsed Dadaism for several decades. Next, Huelsenbeck, who had been one of the most inventive and vigorous of Tzara’s followers, completed his training as a medical doctor and became a Freudian psychoanalyst, eschewing Dada and setting up clinical practice in New York. Meanwhile, Marinetti rejected Tzara’s ideas and turned instead to his own concept of Futurism, an artistic sensibility that focused on the world’s violence and cruelty. While Futurism lent its energies to fascism, state communism sprang from the revolutionary efforts of Lenin, Tzara’s imagined chess opponent in The Posthuman Dada Guide. Codrescu views communism as Dadaism’s greatest rival, for he asserts that communism is the ultimate ideology and Dadaism is the ultimate anti-ideology.

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Codrescu describes a Dada event in Zurich at which Huelsenbeck declared, in a mockery of Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848; The Communist Manifesto, 1850), “Workers of the World, Go Dada.” After arguing that the world’s workers would have been better off listening to Huelsenbeck, Codrescu notes that, during Huelsenbeck’s satire, Lenin may well have been in the audience and perhaps formulated his policy of deporting avant-garde intellectuals that very night. Despite its detractors, Dadaism has a surprising timelessness. According to Codrescu, it has survived the long decades, and each generation reinvents it, giving rise to Surrealism, existentialism, absurdism, concrete poetry, Beat poetry, abstract art, pop art, and performance art. While these movements become trapped in their historical moments through their ideologies, however, Dadaism—which for Codrescu is free from programmatic thinking—lives on in full vitality, entering the cultural DNA of European and American culture. For Codrescu, the great revival of Dada occurred in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, first with the Beats and then with the hippies. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and Other Poems (1956, 1996), with its poetic celebration of madness; William Burroughs’s random cutting up of texts to create new forms; the denial of quotidian reality caused by LSD and other psychedelic drugs; Andy Warhol’s mass production of everyday images; and the Living Theater’s demands that its audiences take off their clothes and burn their money—all of these are manifestations of Dada. In the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s, performance art and poetry and music happenings embraced Dada’s call to break down the boundaries between creative forms and smash the tyranny of meaning. Dadaism marched into the twenty-first century, according to Codrescu, through computers and the Internet. However, while cyberspace keeps Dadaism current, it is also the movement’s greatest challenge since communism and the metaphorical chess match between Tzara and Lenin. Codrescu finds that many of the Internet’s characteristics have a Dadaist flavor. For instance, the nonsense text that accompanies much unsolicited commercial e-mail reads like Dada verse, and the ability of users to choose anonymous online avatars reminds Codrescu of the way in which many Dadaists possessed multiple pseudonyms—such as Samuel Rosenstock, who became S. Samyro and then transformed magically into Tristan Tzara. However, the Internet, in Codrescu’s view, is a technological stand-in for the once planet-spanning, shamanic net—the spiritual, telepathic communion of the Neolithic period’s spirit-travelers. Contemporary users are therefore fooled, unconsciously accepting the Internet as the magic psychic net humans experienced six thousand years ago. The Internet, however, is merely electronically facilitated communication, pixels, and impulses, while the shamanic net, according to Codrescu, was a real, soul-tosoul interconnection. Thus, the challenge to Dada in the twenty-first century is to keep people unambiguously human and individualistic, to prevent them from sliding into a false universal identity shaped by technology. This is where Codrescu brings up the term “posthuman,” for he believes that humans may be on the verge of transcending their human identity and becoming something different, perhaps a hybrid of human and machine. If this transcendence is to be productive and not destructive, he ar-

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gues, they must maintain their core humanity—and Codrescu believes that Dadaism is the surest pathway to maintaining one’s humanness in the face of soul-devouring technology. While The Posthuman Dada Guide moves through the dizzying heights of Dadaist history and perspective, Codrescu infuses many of its sections with experiences that enliven the text and make it more accessible. For example, he describes meeting Allen Ginsberg for the first time in New York City in 1968 as the iconic Beat poet headed out to purchase matzoh balls for his ailing lover. He recounts Amiri Baraka’s frightening 1968 poetry performance at St. Mark’s Church, filled with darkness and the sounds of gunfire, and a party at Mogoloaia Castle after the 1989 Romanian Revolution, when an elegant young woman desecrated a fallen statue of Lenin. By combining such vivid personal accounts with brilliant literary theory, The Posthuman Dada Guide becomes more than a review of the Dadaism’s history. It represents a spiritual and intellectual journey in itself, a guide, as Codrescu states at the book’s beginning “for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life.” John Nizalowski

Review Sources The Guardian, April 11, 2009, p. 19. The National Post, April 11, 2009, p. WP18. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 5 (February 2, 2009): 44. The Times Literary Supplement, October 23, 2009, pp. 9-10. The Toronto Star, May 10, 2009, p. IN7 The Village Voice 54, no. 14 (April 1, 2009): 30.

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PRACTICAL WATER Author: Brenda Hillman (1951) Publisher: Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, Conn.). 103 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Poetry Hillman’s challenging new collection of poems explores the element of water in all its real and mythic manifestations Brenda Hillman is a poet with a wide range who has produced everything from gentle and accessible love poems to experimental work. In Practical Water, she offers layered explorations of the earth and its threats and promises. Hillman began writing as a child in Arizona, and her first poems contained a striking mixture of science and metaphysics that revealed an interest in nature and its conservation even then. She published her first collection in 1982, and her books, which have come out fairly regularly since, have remained concerned with the world and the possible, evanescent spirit. “I’m always trying to figure out what God is and why matter exists and whether it contains spirit or not,” she has said in an interview. Her poems do not explain but weigh possible explanations, and they work not toward closure but toward a way of living that would make sense in a world without an explanation. They are thus satisfying to readers who are wary of easy solutions. Hillman’s 1997 collection Loose Sugar may be her best known, as it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. In it, her experimental direction announced itself through poems that were more opaque, more difficult, and less contained than her earlier work. These poems’ boundaries are more expansive, looking to a kind of gnosticism not to explain but to explore what the poet sees as the limitless possibility of the mind and the world. She celebrates the unknown and takes joy in it, all the while lamenting the things that human beings do that are limiting and destructive. Hillman’s Practical Water is moving and exciting. Her twenty-first century work has centered on the medieval four elements: Cascadia (2001) was devoted to poems about earth, Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005) explored the element of air, and a last book in the series will be about fire. This collection presents readers with seemingly all possible forms of water—bodies of it, chemistries of it, its mythic freight, and its practical necessity. While some of the collection’s meaning is under the surface, enough glints of it shine through to maintain the attention of even a casual poetry reader. Hillman has explained that reading poetry is “not like going on Google and getting the answer. . . . You go to a poem to get the mystery.” The poems in Practical Water explore the mystery of water through abundant, evocative images and metaphors and through juxtapositions that explain as they delight. The book is divided into four unnamed parts, each very different in style, contain-

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ing free-verse and sometimes free-associa tion poems about the precious, irreplaceable Brenda Hillman is Olivia Filippi element of water and its central part in peo- Professor of Poetry at St. Mary’s ple’s lives. Each section begins with a group College in Moraga, California, and of quotations that help serve as entry portals author of eight poetry books. She has for the complex and challenging work. The also edited a collection of poems by style is refreshing because it facilitates a flow Emily Dickinson. Her Pieces of Air in of connections, some startling, that may pro- the Epic (2005) won the William Carlos Williams Award. duce sparks of recognition in readers. The first of the unnamed sections is perhaps the easiest to follow—perhaps as it should be because readers need to get a sense of Hillman’s ambiguities, her swiftly moving, layered verse, before being confronted with its difficulty. Readers need to wade in. The book is political—it is a green book as well as a blue one—and refers to many historical injustices and oversights, some nearly forgotten. The four sections are quite different in style and content, seeming to divide one of the four elements into its own four parts. The first part begins with “Partita for Sparrows,” a gently compassionate account of burying “the sparrows of Europe,” “their breasts light as an ounce of tea,” in the areas affected by World War II. The sparrows—in their vulnerability and the care taken with their tiny bodies—suggest a fresh look at war and sorrow. They perhaps also suggest that no loss of life, however small, should be forgotten, and that one can ill afford to miss the lessons implied. The biblical Book of Matthew says, Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.

The comfort in the biblical passage is not reflected in the poem, however. Moreover, Hillman’s poems are not religious—except in a large, exploratory sense. It is human beings, not God, who are counting her sparrows. The collection’s title poem, “Practical Water,” is a tour de force. It links bodies of water, nature images, industrialization, global warning, and ethics in a fashion that beggars explication. It is filled with hooks, however, pulling in readers with insights and images. The poem’s speaker, searching for answers, goes to the creek, “& there were in the hearts of the water molecules/ little branches perpendicular to thought.” Efforts to bring about improvement through institutions have failed, the speaker suggests, but “An ethics occurs at the edge/ of what we know,” and it seems that all the violations and sufferings of nature are visible to the eye. The collection’s third section is a series of short, spare poems accompanied by photographs. This sequence, which goes through the year from September to September by moons, may be the most cryptic of the four parts. Pieces of the other poems turn up here, and fragmented meditations are interspersed with narrative loops. The relation of poem to photograph can sometimes be inferred and sometimes not, yet

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fractured insights shine here and there as the poems flow past, and the eccentric images and scenes compel attention. Reading this section is like panning for gold, and some will conclude that it requires a great deal of work, but the section’s repressed excitement keeps bursting forth: It’s twins, you silly— this irrational eagerness to be alive: Romulus & Remus under a wolf moon—.

This beginning of “January Moon” is followed by swiftly sketched action at sea and in town, reaching a mysterious conclusion above a photograph of what appears to be a farm on a hill by the ocean. The unusual poems of the third section are paired, and the image of a couple or of a wedding seems sometimes to lurk behind them. The word “joy” erupts repeatedly into the surface of the poems, which come close to being love poems. The fourth section is more accessible, with its clearly identified bodies of water and its section heading, “Of Local Creeks and Aqueducts.” The style is playful here too, with some “concrete poems,” one even labeled “After George Herbert.” “Request to the Berkeley City Council Concerning Strawberry Creek” is a two-page poem. The text on one page forms a capital B, while the text of the other page forms a zigzag, presumably representing the shape of a creek. The plea for the creek is encompassed in these two pages of jumbled images of the creek, observers of it, and the speaker’s own life as it connected with the creek. The plea includes the question, “Aren’t you mostly water/ yourselves?” This question is central to the book—water is not only a shared element but also a link between all beings. Some of the poems seem to suggest a kind of sentience to the element itself, a secret knowledge that humans cannot access but that they can destroy. For many, the most exciting poem in this section will most likely be “Hydrology of California, An Ecopoetical Alphabet.” Alphabet poems are popular, falling between language and mainstream poetry; a number of poets have recently experimented with them. In many cases, the poem consists of a series of images or reflections that begin with each letter in turn. Hillman does whatever she pleases with the alphabet, sticking an italicized letter-comment whenever she wishes: The creek was full of trash & origins/ It said search between m & n for what we have destroyed & both shall row on Papermill Creek my Love & I saw huge orange nonsense dragonflies like fire engines medium bluets like tiny folded pool cues & green.

A motif of the work is the phrase “Future of Poetry,” which is repeated with images of the beautiful nature lost to greed and industrialization, details about its destruction, and fractured pictures of the speaker’s life. The poem interrupts the flow of words and images for pictures of the river, the dams, and the country beyond the river’s shore.

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The poem is a kind of prayer to the spirit of poetry, asking for its help in controlling and reducing the damage caused to the natural world by forces that are the opposite of poetic. Hillman’s poetry is hard to classify. Certainly, she is an experimental poet, often using experiments with form that bring to mind the Oulipo poets and their arbitrary constraints. However, her experiments are not with words alone but with meanings, and she has a definite program, social and political, underlying her work. Moreover, she feels perfectly free to begin in a certain direction but then veer off elsewhere. Now and then, a clear, generally accessible passage challenges readers to connect it to the more obscure parts of a poem. Hillman claims that contemporary poetry is not more difficult than other contemporary arts and adds that the techniques of poetry are probably the techniques of your daily life. I don’t know a single person who goes into the grocery store and thinks in complete sentences. . . . We often think in fragments, we think in little lists, we think in non-sequiturs, we think in feelings that may not match up with each other.

However, people do not usually communicate with one another in the same way that they think to themselves, so following the flow of thought produces a surreal surface. This surface is always intriguing. Hillman’s name too surfaces startlingly, when readers least expect it, linking creator-weaver with the complex web of images she spins. Words exist as words in Hillman’s poetry, and play with letters and numbers also forms part of the message rather than an end in itself. The small photos often embedded in the text, especially in the last two sections, serve to amplify the poems sometimes, but sometimes these photos tend to puzzle and confuse readers. (Their small size makes them hard to see, and their connection with the poem is not always easy to find.) Ideas, images, and reflections flow through and around one another with dizzying effect. The poems suggest that too many elements of the contemporary world are toxic and destructive and that far too few are creative and nurturing. This poetry is highly specific, identifying clearly the sources and places of disaster, tracing results to motives, always showing the interconnectedness of all things. If these poems do not provide answers for contemporary society’s teasing questions, they explore the mysteries with wit and understanding. Janet McCann

Review Source Publishers Weekly 256, no. 29 (July 20, 2009): 124.

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THE PROTEST SINGER An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger Author: Alec Wilkinson (1952) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 152 pp. $22.95 Type of work: Biography Time: 1919-2009 Locale: United States, especially Beacon and New York, New York A brief biographical portrait of an icon of twentieth century American folk music, based largely on conversations Wilkinson had with Seeger and focusing as much on the subject’s politics as on his musical career Principal personages: Pete Seeger, musician, political activist, and student of American folklore Toshi Seeger, his wife of more than sixty years Alec Wilkinson, the author

Published in time to coincide with Pete Seeger’s ninetieth birthday celebration in May, 2009, The Protest Singer is a slim, readable volume that explores the life and work of this icon of American folk music and culture. The book shines a spotlight on some of the many controversies that grew around Seeger during his decades of performing and using the power of his public image to support a variety of leftist political causes. While many of the basic facts in the book are drawn from earlier biographies of the singer—most notably David Dunaway’s How Can I Keep from Singing? (1990)—much of the original material comes from a series of visits Alec Wilkinson made to Seeger’s home in rural upstate New York over several months during 2008. A great deal of previous biographical material has been written about Seeger, so both the author and the musician himself were interested in giving the public a smaller, less comprehensive book. Wilkinson quotes Seeger as saying, “What’s needed is a book that can be read in one sitting.” This book attempts to fill that perceived need. The early pages of The Protest Singer feel a bit scattered and unfocused, as the author introduces himself and his subject and previews several moments and themes he will return to cover later in greater detail. At this point, Wilkinson seems eager to establish the fact of his visits to Seeger’s home and the openness of the singer’s dealings with him. Before long, though, the book settles into a fairly straightforward chronology, though even then the author takes some liberties with time. The book becomes, essentially, a series of verbal snapshots of Seeger at various points in his life: attending boarding school as a child, dropping out of Harvard to travel and paint pictures, meeting and courting his wife, serving in World War II, building his own house in rural upstate New York, participating in various leftleaning political causes, and playing music around the country and the world. Still,

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Wilkinson makes no attempt at a full recount ing of the singer’s ninety years. Rather, he Alec Wilkinson, a former police officer presents a string of anecdotes, some about from Wellfleet Massachusetts, has been Seeger’s music, many about his political ac- a staff writer for The New Yorker since tivism, and others simply about the musi- 1980. He has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Robert F. Kennedy Book cian’s daily life. A typical incident recounted from Seeger’s Award, and a Lyndhurst Prize. His life will illustrate Wilkinson’s method. In previous eight books have included memoirs, biographies, and essay 1949, Seeger bought a piece of land on a recollections. mote mountain outside Beacon, New York, mostly using money he borrowed from his family. He moved there with his wife Toshi and their children to live in a trailer while he cleared the land and built their first cabin with his own hands, using plans he discovered in the New York Public Library. As he describes this episode of Seeger’s life, Wilkinson also recounts how, during the same period, Seeger was commuting to New York City regularly to perform in nightclubs and how he also became involved in a nearby civil rights concert that turned into a famous riot. The author also recounts his own visits with Seeger on the property, where he still lives, and how the singer showed him around the property and described, in his typically humble way, his amateurish attempts to build a proper fireplace. In reading Wilkinson’s account of Seeger’s early life, it is easy to see where both his musical talent and his fiery political attitudes originated. Seeger’s parents, Charles and Constance Seeger, were both classically trained musicians with a passion for bringing their art to the widest possible audience. When Pete was a boy, they traveled around and performed in small towns, often on a stage built into a homemade trailer. Charles was a committed communist and even wrote a brief manifesto (reprinted as an appendix in The Protest Singer) about the need for music to serve a greater cause than simple entertainment. Seeger’s parents both encouraged his musical development, though his mother would have preferred him to specialize in a classical instrument rather than the banjo that became his musical trademark along with his twelvestring guitar and his high tenor voice. Wilkinson’s book gives Seeger his rightful place at the very heart of the American folk music revival of the 1950’s and 1960’s. The singer’s interest in the form began as early as 1929, when he worked briefly helping legendary music historian John Lomax transcribe field recordings for the Library of Congress. Lomax, who was a colleague of Seeger’s father Charles, was documenting the music of working-class and rural America, including slave songs, mining songs, widows’ and mothers’ laments, and the like. Much of it was adopted or adapted from the English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh folk traditions. As Seeger began to write more music, his work with Lomax began to pay off, as many of his own songs were written in the tradition of those recordings, though always filtered through his own sensibilities and made to speak to the contemporary American scene. As a young musician, Seeger began to make his name by playing his banjo and singing for a share of the proceeds at schools, church picnics, and county fairs, as well

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as more conventional nightclubs and performance halls. During this time, he performed both as a solo act and with other well-known folk musicians, most notably Woody Guthrie and Lee Hays. Over the next two decades, he gradually grew in stature to become one of the most recognized voices on the folk scene. Seeger was a founding member of The Almanac Singers and later of The Weavers, who had a string of radio hits in the early 1950’s. The Weavers’ recording of “Goodnight Irene” by bluesman Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter) remained number one on the charts for thirteen weeks in 1950 and could alone have secured Seeger’s reputation in the music world. In the end, though, this hit was far from the defining moment of Seeger’s career. Wilkinson writes, “Seeger did more to make people aware of folk music in the middle of the twentieth century than any other performer.” Perhaps even more than his music, The Protest Singer focuses on Seeger’s involvement in progressive politics, though Wilkinson prefers to cast it in a different light. “Seeger’s politics,” Wilkinson writes, “are of the most extravagantly conservative kind. He believes ardently in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. His interpretation of them is literal.” Seeger supported the union movement in the 1930’s and 1940’s, he marched for racial equality and civil rights in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and he spent much of the 1960’s and 1970’s protesting the Vietnam War and working for environmental causes. His support for these issues most often took the form of performing his music at rallies and fundraisers, as well as writing and performing songs to bring wider recognition to the people and causes he supported. Wilkinson’s book chronicles Seeger’s political participation by focusing on a handful of particular incidents, such as a civil rights concert in Peekskill, New York, in 1949, that ended in a riot inflamed by the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. The most significant political entanglement in Seeger’s history was the singer’s early support of the American Communist Party, which came back to haunt him in the 1950’s when he was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and later indicted for contempt of Congress for his uncooperative testimony. He was sentenced to a year in jail (though he successfully appealed this sentence and never served the time) and subsequently blacklisted along with many other performers of the era who were believed to have communist sympathies. Though the blacklisting made it difficult or impossible for Seeger to play large venues or appear on radio and television, he continued to play in schools, church basements, and small gatherings— a return in many ways to his roots as a musician. The incident, though undoubtedly difficult for Seeger and his family, helped secure the musician’s stature as a serious cultural figure, one willing to put his own career and personal freedom in jeopardy for his beliefs. This episode becomes the chronological and emotional heart of the book. The Protest Singer includes two appendixes. The first is “The Purpose of Music,” the manifesto penned by Seeger’s father in the 1930’s, at a time when he was active in the Communist Party. The second appendix, which will be of particular interest to those interested in Seeger’s political career and blacklisting, is a complete transcript of Seeger’s testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in August of 1955. The book is also liberally sprinkled with black-and-white photo-

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graphs, some professional but most informal snapshots, many of which have never been published before. These provide an excellent visual complement to the text, but they are uncaptioned, forcing readers to flip frequently to the acknowledgments at the back of the book if they wish to identify specific people and settings. The portrait of Seeger that emerges in this volume is of a man of unflagging optimism and hope, despite the fact that he speaks often of his struggles and perceived failures. Much of the book focuses on his battle to reconcile an essentially shy and retiring nature with the desire to spread both his music and his political message as widely as possible. Wilkinson is unabashed and unfailing in his respectful, occasionally worshipful, stance toward the singer, and some readers may be distracted by the way he writes himself into the narrative, making his visits with Seeger a part of the story. Still, despite some flaws, The Protest Singer will be a welcome read for Seeger’s many fans, as well as for those looking for a brief overview of the career of this icon of American folk music. Janet E. Gardner

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 16 (April 15, 2009): 12. The Boston Globe, April 19, 2009, p. C6. Library Journal 134, no. 7 (April 15, 2009): 94-96. The New York Times Book Review, 5 31, 2009, p. 26. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 11 (March 16, 2009): 49. San Francisco Chronicle, May 3, 2009, p. H1. The Times Literary Supplement, November 27, 2009, p. 35. The Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2009, p. W9. Weekly Standard 15, no. 4 (October 12, 2009): 36-37.

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A QUESTION OF COMMAND Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq Author: Mark Moyar (1971) Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). 368 pp. $30.00 Type of work: Current affairs, history Time: 1861-2008 Locale: Southern United States; Philippine Islands; Malaya; South Vietnam; El Salvador; Afghanistan; Iraq A study, resulting from the author’s teaching on counterinsurgency at the Marine Command and Staff College, of nine counterinsurgency operations, in order to determine how best to succeed at such operations in the future Principal personages: Ramon Magsaysay, Philippine secretary of national defense and later president Edward Lansdale, American counterinsurgency expert and advisor to Magsaysay, and later (briefly) to Diem Gerald Templer, high commissioner of Malaya Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam to November, 1963 Hamid Karzai, post-Taliban president of Afghanistan David Petraeus, American military leader in Iraq

Mark Moyar starts A Question of Command by pointing out that, before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, interest in counterinsurgency was based primarily on historical curiosity. The Vietnam War had persuaded most Americans to avoid such operations. Moyar was one of those curious historians, having interviewed Vietnam veterans about the Phoenix counterinsurgency operation for a book that appeared in 2008. (The veterans generally believed that South Vietnamese units were effective in counterinsurgency operations when they had capable leaders.) In the wake of September 11, counterinsurgency has become important again. One result of this development is Moyar’s own teaching position, which began a few years after the attacks. For A Question of Command, Moyar selected a representative set of counterinsurgency operations to serve as lessons. From these and his earlier interviews, he draws the conclusion that success in counterinsurgency depends most strongly on leadership qualities. This conclusion contrasts with previous theories, which are generally oriented either toward networking or toward winning over the indigenous population with social reforms and democratization. Moyar emphasizes, though, that these tactics are useful only if performed by capable leaders. His book analyzes the nine example operations in detail to show how they support his thesis. They may have been chosen

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for this purpose, rather than as a truly repre sentative sample, but there are other exam- Mark Moyar is a professional historian ples that support his thesis (most notably the and national security analyst who holds sudden collapse of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba). the Kim T. Adamson Chair of Also, comments about the war in Afghanistan Insurgency and Terrorism at the United before the November, 2009, decision to in- States Marine Corps University (the crease the number of troops there often re- Command and Staff College). He has flected similar tactical views (though these written two books about the Vietnam War. views were not specifically leader-centric). Moyar identifies ten key leadership qualities. The first is initiative: Local leaders must act aggressively against insurgents, and higher leaders must encourage this. The second is flexibility—a willingness to try new ideas and change them if necessary. Third is creativity: Someone must come up with those new ideas, especially when conventional leaders are confronted with the unconventional nature of counterinsurgency. Judgment is also important: Good leaders must be able to determine which methods work. The next talent is empathy, the ability to understand how other people think, especially those in very different cultures. Next is charisma, the ability to persuade people in large groups. Seventh is sociability, the ability to persuade people individually. This ability is especially important when dealing with local elites, whose influence in an area can render their support criticial to defeating an insurgency. Local support enables a good leader to develop the intelligence needed to take the war to the insurgents. The next talent is dedication. There are times when leaders must push hard, work extremely long hours, and take the war to the insurgents in difficult terrain and often atrocious weather. Next is integrity: Fair, honest government is very important to winning over locals who are considering supporting an insurgency (far more so than social reforms). The final talent is organization. This refers both to the ability to maintain discipline in order to prevent abuses (or punish them quickly if they do occur) and to the ability to reorganize under pressure. The first three campaigns that serve Moyar as case studies of leadership qualities involve the nineteenth century U.S. Army. They are the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Filipino rebellion of 1898-1902. During the Civil War, few Union officers were successful in stopping Confederate and pro-Confederate insurgents for long. Moyar identifies many leadership problems, some of which resulted from the rapid expansion of the Army (a problem that shows up in many counterinsurgency campaigns). He also discusses examples of successes. Perhaps the most successful Civil War counterinsurgency (though limited in area) was Thomas Ewing’s 1863 deportation to Arkansas of pro-Southern people from four Missouri counties along the Kansas border. After the war, Moyar controversially argues, there was actually a possibility of gradual acquisition of civil rights for African Americans, but the impatience of radical Republicans made such gradual gains impossible, ultimately leading to the degra-

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dation of southern culture under the Jim Crow laws. Moyar cites Brigadier General John Tarbell as observing that the Freedmen’s Bureau was rejected by Southerners only where its leaders were corrupt. Forcible imposition of corrupt carpetbag rule and racial equality led to violent insurgencies such as the Ku Klux Klan. A few good leaders, such as Arkansas militia general Robert Catterson and Major Lewis Merrill in York County, South Carolina, used good intelligence to hunt down insurgents ruthlessly. Others eventually succeeded by threatening severe reprisals, encouraging Southerners to await their inevitable political success. Filipino leader Emilio Aguinaldo supported the overthrow of Spanish colonial rule in 1898, but he opposed the American takeover the followed it. Quickly defeated in conventional warfare, he resorted to guerrilla tactics that soon spread to most of the Philippines. Attempts at reform failed to halt the insurgency, but good leaders finally defeated it. Often, their methods were quite draconian, but it helped that many Americans liked the Filipinos despite having only limited respect for them (mainly for racial reasons). This represented the reverse of the situation at home during Reconstruction. The insurgent Filipino group HukBaLaHap started as a communist anti-Japanese resistance group in central Luzon, but it later revolted against corrupt misgovernment. Reform again failed to stop the insurgency. However, American counterinsurgency specialist Edward Lansdale discovered Ramon Magsaysay, a capable officer of peasant background, and the Americans coerced the government into naming him secretary of national defense. The two made a superb team. They improved intelligence collection, rid the army of corrupt and incompetent officers, emphasized good treatment of civilians, won over many Huks, and developed and taught new counterinsurgency tactics. From 1950 to 1952, they gravely weakened the Huks, finishing them off in Magsaysay’s first year as president. During World War II, many ethnic Chinese in Malaya became squatters, and they fueled the communist insurgency there beginning in 1948. This insurgency proved highly successful as a result of poor counterinsurgency leadership. In 1952, the British made Gerald Templer high commissioner. He left routine administration to capable subordinates and made frequent local inspections, got rid of poor leaders at all levels, encouraged local initiative, and developed and taught sound tactical doctrine, while allowing local commanders to adapt to their particular circumstances. He encouraged active jungle patrols in small groups guided by solid intelligence and put the Chinese squatters in honestly run “New Villages.” He had greatly weakened the insurgency by the time he left in mid-1954, and it finally collapsed in 1960. The most controversial chapter in the book may be the one on Vietnam. Moyar considers Ngo Dinh Diem to have been an effective counterinsurgent; he was welleducated despite a peasant background, a European-oriented Catholic but also a firm nationalist who rejected colonialism, and firmly anticommunist. When the guerrilla war started, Diem worked to develop effective local militias to fight the insurgency while maintaining a strong conventional force in case North Vietnam chose to invade. However, American officials interfered with his methods, and initial communist attacks in 1960 were quite successful. Diem began replacing poor officials with capable, honest, energetic leaders. With the help of American aid and trainers, he counter-

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attacked the insurgents in 1962 and developed the Strategic Hamlet program to secure key villages. The reeling Viet Cong persuaded procommunist Buddhist monks to denounce Diem. Western reporters believed the charges (partly because they were duped by a communist agent who served as a Reuters stringer). This led U.S. president John F. Kennedy to support a 1963 coup against Diem. The coup led to further coups that left the country with poor leadership and enabled the Viet Cong to recover. A 1965 coup finally gave the country a firm, effective leader in Nguyen Van Thieu, who gradually repaired much of the damage inflicted on the lower levels of leadership. He was later helped by the bloody defeat of the Viet Cong in its 1968 Tet Offensive and by the decision of energetic new American commander Creighton Abrams to concentrate on helping the South Vietnamese in smallunit actions. These partnerships inflicted heavy losses on the Viet Cong while enabling the local troops to develop. In 1972, these local troops, fighting with American air support, defeated a major attack, but, after the 1973 armistice, American support diminished, leading to a conventional war defeat in 1975. Severe class divisions enforced by brutal treatment of the peasantry sparked the communist revolt in El Salvador. Modest reform efforts failed to stop it, and the army suffered from expanding too rapidly to develop adequate leaders (who were already too few in number before the expansion). Department commander Sigifredo Ochoa Perez pressured the insurgents and worked with local institutions to isolate them, and quick-reaction battalion commander Domingo Monterrosa used heliborne raids to hit the insurgents while encouraging defections by offering amnesty. After 1983, new defense minister Carlos Eugenio Vides went into the field to ensure good treatment of civilians and replaced many poor leaders with good ones. Finally, President Alfredo Cristiani provided firm support and honest government while rounding up and killing insurgent supporters. A 1992 amnesty finally ended the insurgency. In Moyar’s chapter on Afghanistan, the focus is on Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun and former government official who took over leadership of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in September, 2001. Unfortunately, his forces were small and defeated the Taliban only with massive American firepower support. Karzai thus had to work with sympathetic local warlords. There was inevitably much government corruption, as well as Tajik ethnic domination. Eventually, under pressure, Karzai appointed Rahim Wardak as defense minister, and Wardak brought in capable non-Tajik leaders, thereby appeasing Pashtuns and other non-Tajiks. The chapter on Iraq points to the key error made in June, 2003, by Paul Bremer who purged Baathists from the government and security forces (contrary to the initial, sketchy postwar plans). This purge created a strong, well-led insurgent force. In contrast, Iraqi counterinsurgents generally had poor leadership. The election of a strongly sectarian Shiite government alienated Sunni Arabs, as did a series of atrocities. Some leaders proved quite effective, however, most important David Petraeus. As commander of the 101st Airborne Division occupying Mosul, Petraeus ignored deBaathization edicts, built up infrastructure, ordered troops to respect local customs, and allocated new tasks to suitable officers. Later, given charge of Iraqi forces, he worked hard to develop and train good officers. In 2007, he assumed command of all

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U.S. forces and effectively used the surge in troop strength begun that year to provide improved urban security while persuading most Sunni Arabs to oppose the insurgents. Moyar does not discuss the final conclusion of either the Afghani or the Iraqi campaigns, since they were both ongoing when the book was written. Moyar summarizes the results of a 2008 forty-two-question survey of U.S. Army and Marine officers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. In both cases, the officers overwhelmingly agree that the success of native troops results primarily from good leaders, who also have far fewer absentees to worry about. They report far more oustanding Afghan military and police leaders than Iraqi ones, but there is otherwise little difference in their evaluation of leadership qualities. The officers noticed that higher leaders in both countries rarely visit their subordinates often to check on them and that good leaders are not reliably promoted (and are occasionally punished). In both countries, corruption is reported to be a problem. The officers generally believe that many good native leaders exist outside the nations’ security forces, and some believe the insurgents have better leaders than do the national armies. They also believe that both countries (but particularly Iraq) damaged their causes by purging supporters of their former governments. They mostly think that American officials are capable of recognizing good native leaders and should do more to encourage their promotion. They generally think the United States should provide more and better advisers. As for American leadership qualities, both Army and Marine officers agree that leadership is the primary factor determining success in American units (the Marines more so than the Army officers). They consider their own officers to be better than native officers. They agree that a talent for conventional operations does not necessarily indicate a talent for counterinsurgency operations, though good officers can handle both. They agree (again, the Marines more so than the Army) that mistreatment of natives results from poor leadership and that good leadership helps in obtaining good intelligence on insurgents. They think well-led units can succeed even without specialized counterinsurgency training. They think their service encourages innovation, but Army officers think theirs discourages risk-taking. They tend to agree (the Army more so than the Marines) that good officers should be given new commands more quickly, and poor officers should be removed more quickly, than is currently the practice. Timothy Lane

Review Sources Library Journal 134, no. 17 (October 15, 2009): 94. MHQ: Quarterly Journal of Military History 22, no. 2 (Winter, 2010): 95. The Wilson Quarterly 33, no. 4 (Autumn, 2009): 92-94.

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RAYMOND CARVER A Writer’s Life Author: Carol Sklenicka (1948) Publisher: Charles Scribner’s Sons (New York). 578 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Literary biogrpahy Time: 1938-1988 Locale: America, primarily the Pacific Northwest This expansive biography of twentieth century American author Carver offers a thorough life history of the significant and controversial writer, as well as a critical appraisal of his short fiction and poetry Principal personages: Raymond Carver, short story writer and poet Maryann Burk Carver, his first wife, mother of his children Christine Carver, their daughter Vance Carver, their son Tess Gallagher, poet, Carver’s second wife Gordon Lish, Carver’s editor

Raymond Carver knew at an early age that he wanted to be a writer, but such an ambition was not easily achieved. Hardships, including financial insecurity and frequent upheavals, would plague the writer and his family, particularly as Carver’s dedication to writing took precedence over other matters. Once success arrived, in the forms of publication and critical acclaim, the author still had a demon to confront: his drinking. For Carver, literary reputation arrived relatively early in life, while he was still in his thirties, but personal contentment and financial security would be delayed until he obtained sobriety in his forties. It is this dual struggle, to devote his life to writing and to free himself from impediments that kept him from writing, including his family obligations and his addiction to alcohol, that Carol Sklenicka chronicles in Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, her expansive biography. Sklenicka organizes the thirty chapters of her book into five sections that reflect chronological and literary stages in Carver’s life. Part 1, the aptly titled “Beginnings,” examines the author’s early years, from his birth in Oregon through his young adulthood. Part 2, “Search,” captures Carver’s tentative emergence as a writer. Janitor by night and writer by day, the author’s hand-to-mouth existence provided material for his short stories and poetry. Sklenicka assesses the impact of frequent relocations upon Carver’s family and his work. Part 3, “Success and Discontent,” examines Carver’s growing reputation as a man of letters and his increasingly erratic, alcoholfueled misbehaviors. In part 4, “Recovery,” Sklenicka records the writer’s break with his addiction, separation from his family, emerging sobriety, and new life with poet

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Tess Gallagher. Part 5, “Victory,” the shortest of the sections, records the final years of Carver’s life as he achieves success as a writer and combats the cancer that will eventually claim him. As Sklenicka observes, the circumstances of Carver’s early life provided unusual incubation for a would-be writer. Relocation is a predominant theme in this biography of a writer struck with wanderlust, and Sklenicka traces its origins to Raymond’s working-class parents, C. R. and Ella Carver, who moved from Arkansas to Washington in the 1930’s in part to flee the Great Depression. C. R. found employment in the timber mills, while Ella worked in the service industry. With Ella pregnant with their first child, the Carvers moved to Oregon’s Columbia River Valley. Sklenicka notes that it was into this hardscrabble existence, so at odds with the beautiful wilderness in which they resided, that Raymond was born on May 25, 1938. Both the landscape of the Northwest and the lives of its working-class families would feature predominantly in many of Carver’s short stories. A heavy smoker and a heavier drinker, Carver died at the age of fifty from complications of lung cancer. Throughout his relatively brief life, one chronicled at great length by Sklenicka, Carver’s restlessness, often in search of better opportunities, would manifest itself in travel. Carver uprooted himself, his wife, and his two children, living in various towns and cities in Oregon, Washington, California, and Iowa—and briefly abroad in Tel Aviv, Israel. Carver was a pudgy, awkward child, an outsider who retained his awkwardness well into adulthood. Despite average classroom performance from grade school through graduate school, Carver developed a voracious and lifelong reading habit. As Sklenicka notes, reading was one way to escape the unpredictability of life with an ailing, alcoholic father and an enabling mother, a pattern Carver would duplicate in his own marriage. Carver first announced his intention to become a writer as an adolescent, while on a hunting trip with a family friend, and he made good on his word. Enrolling in the Palmer Method, a mail-order writing program, Raymond completed the course requirements in a manner that suggested his lackluster school performance was the result of boredom rather than weak ability. Much of Carver’s juvenilia (stories written in his youth) concerns hunting in the Cascade Mountains, and Sklenicka suggests that the wilderness provided him another form of escape from a troubled home life. A young marriage—Carver and his bride, Maryann, were both in their teens with a child on the way when they married— necessitated a break with the couple’s respective parents, but family connections were difficult to escape. Throughout his life, Carver felt weighted down, responsible for multiple generations, his parents, spouse, and children. He came to resent these obligations as they interfered with his plans to write unfettered. Higher education— both Raymond and Maryann would eventually complete college degrees—also proved more of a hindrance than an advantage when it came to allocating writing

A native of California, Carol Sklenicka earned an undergraduate degree from San Luis Obispo, California, and a graduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis. The author of numerous stories, essays, and reviews, Sklenicka lives in Northern California with her husband, R. M. Ryan.

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time. He was accepted into the selective Iowa Writer’s Program in 1963, where novice writers learn from accomplished authors in a workshop setting. Carver never completed his studies, though he would later claim graduate credentials when applying for teaching positions. Sklenicka offers a complex account of Ray’s relationship with Maryann Burk, his first wife and the mother of his children, Christine and Vance. Much of Raymond Carver reads like a dual biography, so crucial was Maryann’s support of her husband’s chosen career and so entwined were their lives around alcohol. Maryann was as dedicated to Carver’s ambition to write as he was; time and again, she delayed her own educational and career pursuits in an effort to provide her husband with the opportunity to write. Frequently, Maryann worked and supported the family so that her husband could devote his time to composing stories and poems. Despite Carver’s extramarital affair with graduate student Diane Cecily in the early 1970’s, Maryann remained devoted to her husband. Sklenicka notes that they were both surprised by his ability to fall in love with another woman. Years of ruminating about their increasing marital problems provided additional fodder for Carver’s fiction. The stories in his first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976), are modeled after their strained relationship and the equally sad and frequently mundane lives of their acquaintances. As their drinking increased, so too did marital violence. A separation became inevitable when Raymond severed an artery in Maryann’s neck with a wine bottle. Following their 1982 divorce, Maryann and Raymond retained a cordial communication, though Sklenicka notes that Maryann was poorly compensated in their divorce settlement and largely neglected in Carver’s will. Carver, absorbed in his writing and in his relationship with Maryann, appears in Sklenicka’s account to have been an emotionally absent father. Frequently sequestered in a room apart from the children in order to write undisturbed, he was not above locking his young children in a car while responsible for their care in order to concentrate on his work. Sklenicka cites Carver’s 1981 essay “Fires” as revelatory about his parental attitude. In it, Carver admits that fathering two children placed him in a “position of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction.” Carver’s daughter, Christine, would go on to emulate her father’s problematic drinking and would also be burdened early in life with children and a difficult relationship of her own. In her twenties, she attempted to complete her college education, piecemeal as her mother had, relying upon but not always receiving supplemental checks from her father. Carver’s son, Vance, also emulated his father’s behavior with a brief indulgence in drugs and alcohol as a young teen. He soon rejected that lifestyle, however, and turned his attention to his studies. He earned a degree from Syracuse University, where his father was employed at the time as a professor, but their relationship remained tentative. Vance was disallowed from visiting the home his father shared with Tess Gallagher without a formal invitation. As was the case with their mother, Christine and Vance’s inheritance from their father’s estate was meager and was contested unsuccessfully in court. In addition to offering a record of Carver’s difficult marital and family life,

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Sklenicka examines the late twentieth century world of publishing. She credits fiction editor Gordon Lish with furthering Carver’s career through his efforts to provide the author with publishing venues, but she also scrutinizes their relationship. Initially, the two men met in California in the Bay Area, and they became drinking buddies united by a shared interest in literary matters. When Lish, known as Captain Fiction, took an editorial position at Esquire magazine, he helped propel Carver’s name to national recognition. Lish also edited Carver’s work, at times with the author’s permission and at other times without the author’s full knowledge. As Sklenicka observes, Carver was often too sick or too distracted by inebriation to combat Lish’s forceful revisions and cuts. The heavily edited What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) was Carver’s most successful collection of stories, garnering critical acclaim and financial success. In response to this work, critics classified Carver in the minimalist school of American fiction, known for its sparse style and barebones form. They thus placed him in the company of celebrated authors John Cheever and J. D. Salinger. Sklenicka questions, but does not resolve, whether Carver was a minimalist by craft or as a result of Lish’s excessive editorial liberties. Later republications of the stories have returned them to their pre-Lish format, and the difference is striking: Entire passages and endings have been restored. In addition to being classified a minimalist, Carver was deemed a “dirty realist” by a British publication, a moniker he shared with emerging authors Tobias Woolf and Richard Ford. Sklenicka recounts a book tour the three writers undertook to Canada that ended with a hunting trip. A photograph of a joyful Carver shows him fully in his element, hunting Canada geese in a muddy wilderness in the company of fellow distinguished authors, unburdened by family responsibilities. If Maryann provided inspiration and resources for Raymond’s early writing, Sklenicka says, his second wife, the poet Tess Gallagher, provided companionship and direction. As a fellow writer, Gallagher knew the environment that would best allow Carver to work unimpeded. Together, they took up residency in her glass house on the northwest coast, where each maintained a separate writing studio. Gallagher helped Carver solidify his career; she offered him a safe haven, a place to write undistracted, and she nursed him through the harrowing cancer that took his life at the age of fifty. Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life not only provides insight into the psyche of its subject but also provides information about the state of American letters in the 1970’s and 1980’s, the age of American minimalism. Sklenicka makes connections between Carver’s life and works that provide greater understanding of the author, his oeuvre, and the place that each claims in American literary culture. From this massive work, a portrait emerges of an iconic American storyteller whose demons did not deter his desire to write. Carver’s characters reflect the real struggles of their author, and their stories provide a chronicle of late twentieth century life in America. Dorothy Dodge Robbins

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Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 4 (October 15, 2009): 16. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 18 (September 15, 2009): 94. Library Journal 134, no. 15 (September 15, 2009): 60. The New York Times Book Review, November 22, 2009, p. 1. The New York Times Book Review, November 29, 2009, p. 22. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 35 (August 31, 2009): 43-44. Time 174, no. 20 (November 23, 2009): 109.

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THE REASON FOR CROWS A Story of Kateri Tekakwitha Author: Diane Glancy (1941) Publisher: State University of New York Press (Albany). 89 pp. Paperback $14.95 Type of work: Novel, biographical fiction Time: Approximately 1661-1680 Locale: New York; Quebec The seventeenth century “Lily of the Mohawks” narrates the story of her short life, complemented by the voices of various Jesuit priests who came to the New World seeking converts Principal characters: Kateri Tekakwitha, a young MohawkAlgonquin woman her father, a Mohawk chief her mother, a Christian Algonquin Iowerano, her uncle Karitha, Iowerano’s Christian wife Aronsen, Iowerano’s Christian sister Enit, Kateri’s friend Father James de Lamberville, the Jesuit priest who converts Kateri Father Claude Chauchetiere, a priest at St. Francis Xavier Mission Father Pierre Cholenec, Kateri’s biographer and deathbed witness

In The Reason for Crows, Diane Glancy, who is of Cherokee, German, and English descent, presents a first-person, fictionalized account of the life of Kateri Tekakwitha, the seventeenth century Mohawk-Algonquin maiden beatified by the Catholic Church. The language of the novel has been called poetic, but the book is also based on the historical writings and journals of Jesuit priests (the “crows” of the title), who sailed from France to convert Native Americans to Christianity. In her afterword, Glancy indicates that she prefers to examine a story from the past as it might be viewed from several conflicting perspectives, such as those of Kateri and the individual Jesuits, because “History takes place depending on who is speaking. . . . The history of truth is these incoherent versions—this . . . assemblage of voices.” The Reason for Crows is the third in Glancy’s series of four works of historical fiction. It is preceded by Pushing the Bear: A Novel of The Trail of Tears (1996) and Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea (2003) and followed by Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears (2009). In each text, Glancy retells American history from a Native American perspective. Inspired by a figure on the door of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, Glancy does a remarkable job of capturing the voice and thoughts of a girl

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who has been dead for more than three hun dred years and who lived in a time and culture that no longer exist. Kateri’s story begins when she is about five, with a confused memory—the moans of her dying parents and infant brother in an epidemic of smallpox, presumably brought to the New World by Dutch traders. Her father was a Mohawk chief, and her mother was a Christianized Algonquin who was captured A prolific author of poetry, fiction, years before. Glancy uses a technique akin to nonfiction, and drama, Diane Glancy stream of consciousness to present Kateri’s has received numerous awards, feverish thoughts: “Black birds gathered wait- including grants from the National ing for our death. I felt the birds peck my Endowment for the Arts and the face. . . . For a while, I was inside God. I National Endowment for the floated like a crow.” Humanities, the American Book Award Kateri recovered from the illness slowly, from the Before Columbus Foundation, often relapsing, but her face remains scarred and the Pushcart Prize. and her eyesight is forever weak: “I can look into the woods and see snow that is not there.” Her Mohawk name, Tekakwitha, identifies her as “one-who-walks-groping-herway.” Her other senses become crucial to her, and she functions largely by touch. Kateri can feel sun and shade. She hears the sounds of nature and speaks in natural metaphors, using short, simple sentences filled with physical sensation. Kateri lives with her uncle Iowerano, the tribe’s new chief, but she is cared for by his wife Karitha and his sister Aronsen, who are both Christians. The girl is expected to contribute to the family by pounding corn and carrying water or firewood. She can bead by feel and weave belts that she trades for thimbles and more beads. Red-dyed eel-skin ribbons in her hair (her only vanity) give her pleasure, but she covers her head with a blanket to hide her pocked face. As the smallpox epidemic continues, the tribe abandons the doomed village to move across the Mohawk River and establish a new village, Caughnawaga (Kahnawake). The Mohawks build longhouses and plant crops on uncontaminated ground, but soon everything is destroyed by marauding French soldiers, who set fire to the new village. Kateri can hear the sound of crops crying out as the French soldiers burn them. Afterward, the people must rebuild in winter, when food is already scarce. Following the French attack, Kateri senses “a shift in the land.” The encroachment of the Europeans is changing everything. When French Jesuit priests arrive seeking converts, they are tolerated and allowed to build Saint Peter’s Mission, a small bark church. After Kateri again becomes ill, she encounters Father James de Lamberville, whom she identifies metaphorically with crows, which have power: “I remembered when the Jesuit entered the longhouse with his crow wings folded. His beak guideth me.” The priest talks to her of God, Christ, and the Holy Book from which he reads, quoting Ezekiel, his favorite. She tells him of her mother, who spoke to her of “a holy

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bath.” Kateri hopes to be baptized too. Even though her family tries to arrange a marriage for her, she wants to study with the priest: “How could I marry when I heard the prophets’ visions? How could I marry when I wanted the visions myself?” Historically, the strongest tribal hostility toward the Jesuits and the French came from the Mohawks. Although Kateri’s uncle strongly opposes her wish, she receives instruction from Father de Lamberville, who, on Easter Sunday, 1676, gives her the baptismal name of Kateri (the Mohawk pronunciation), after Saint Catherine of Siena. Her remaining family is hostile to her conversion. Boys throw rocks at her; she is mocked, threatened, and seen as a traitor to the old ways. However, ongoing problems such as disease, whiskey, and tribal wars eventually cause many of the Mohawks to become indifferent to Christianity. Kateri’s friend Enit has already fled north to Saint Francis Xavier Mission in Canada, a Jesuit refuge for Native American converts, and Father de Lamberville realizes he must send Kateri away too for her own safety. Eventually, she leaves Saint Peter’s Mission at Caughnawaga, in what will become New York, for the northern settlement also named Caughnawaga, on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River in Quebec. Nearly blind, Kateri probes the world around her, trying to make sense of what she cannot see or comprehend. She is moving toward a strong religious faith, even though she understands it differently from the Europeans. She is committed to reaching the new mission. Even with her friends’ help, it takes her two months to get there. Once in Canada, Kateri offers herself to God as reparation for the sins of her people. Removing her beads and eel-skin ribbons, she does penance. She scourges herself, standing in the chill Saint Lawrence River up to her chest. She fasts, refuses blankets, and pierces herself with thorns. She burns herself in order to understand the torments of hell, so that she will better know how to pray; then, she believes, she will be able to teach others. Her friends beg her to stop. Christmas Day, 1677, marks Kateri’s first communion at Saint Francis Xavier. She is enchanted when for an instant she can see clearly and recognizes that the moon is pockmarked. She notes surface irregularities in nature, especially on rocks. She believes that Christ has known smallpox too because he has holes in his hands and feet. These images comfort her. The strict Father Claude Chauchetiere, who has endured a nightmarish sea journey from France, believes that the priests have brought God’s mercy to the mission and despairs that some of the Indians are turning away: “I came to help the Indians. . . . I was prepared to be a Jesuit martyr. . . . I was not prepared for indifference.” Alternately depressed and angry, he later is able to ask God for a gentler spirit. When he observes Kateri, he thinks he sees a light around her, and he notices that she continues to help others, even though she is often feverish and vomiting. He marvels at her suffering. She, in turn, is horrified by the cruelties that have been visited on the refugees who continue to arrive with flesh cut from their bodies or boiling water poured into their open wounds by other tribes—or perhaps their own. Another priest, gentle Father Pierre Cholenec, notes with shock how thin Kateri is becoming, although she continues to make Indian bread and participate in ceremonial planting. She still beads and dyes threads and porcupine quills, while she teaches

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these skills to the girls. Although she can be analytic and intuitive, at times her thoughts race and she seems almost irrational, but this incoherence may reveal her gradual transition to a more spiritual level. Father Cholenec is present at Kateri’s deathbed on April 17, 1680, when she is twenty-four. In her biography, which he will later write, he will report that her last words were “Jesus, I love you” in Mohawk, and that shortly afterward, “We saw the scars on her face disappear. Her fingers uncurled. Her skin was smooth in death.” Father Chauchetiere, also present, notes that the Indians marvel at the change in her physical appearance. Awed by Kateri’s death, they do penance. Father Chauchetiere in turn waits for visions: “I was not disappointed. I saw her as I prayed at her grave. I saw her with the crucifix in her hand. I saw a church turned on its side.” He will paint an early portrait of Kateri. The Reason for Crows is a short book but not easily read. Often, it seems more like a play, as alternating voices carry it along. Kateri’s natural world is different, and readers must adapt to it. Her world of faith is rife with biblical and native symbolism that may not be familiar. The whole book is filled with rambling fragments— thoughts, dreams, images, and memories—dominated by the recurring image of the crow, an ambiguous symbol of good and ill, of death and, finally, life. As Kateri, the nascent saint, says in a firm voice of faith, “The Lord will transform our life. We will not perish. We have everlasting life. It is the reason for crows.” Joanne McCarthy

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 12 (February 15, 2009): 32. Christianity Today 53, no. 5 (May, 2009): 62. World Literature Today 83, no. 6 (November/December, 2009): 67.

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REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN EUROPE Immigrants, Islam, and the West Author: Christopher Caldwell (1962) Publisher: Doubleday (New York). 422 pp. $30.00 Type of work: Current affairs Caldwell presents an insightful and gloomy assessment of the ways in which the mass migration of Muslims to Europe is transforming the heartland of the modern West Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is an ambitious analysis of the demographic transformation of Europe that has resulted from decades of immigration from the Islamic world. Caldwell’s treatise is modeled on Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke’s great meditation on the French Revolution was published years before the Terror gave the upheaval in France the sinister face of the guillotine. His analysis was premised on a conviction that already, in the relatively peaceful days of 1790, steps had been taken in France that would bear bitter fruit. Arguing from first principles, Burke was convinced that the French Revolution would lead to social and political disaster, and he lived long enough to see the worst of his expectations fulfilled. His book remains a classic of conservative thought. Caldwell’s book is similar to Burke’s in its seriousness, the high caliber of its argumentation, and its air of ruefully retrospective premonition. Caldwell argues that, as was true of the French Revolution by 1790, the rise of Islam in Europe constitutes an emergent and overpowering reality that promises to change the course of history. The full consequences of the massive Islamic migration to Europe are difficult to comprehend fully, but Caldwell doubts that they will be happy for Europeans. At the heart of Caldwell’s analysis is the conviction that, while Islam is a great religion and culture, it is not Europe’s religion and culture. The influx of Muslims is therefore changing the human topography of Europe, something that Europeans are just beginning to realize. Opinion polls have begun to register European discomfort with the results of this immigration. However, Caldwell argues that such concern has come too late. The facts on the ground have already been established, and an earlier Europe cannot be wished back into existence. As Caldwell sees it, all that is left is to ponder the meaning of the new revolution that has taken place in Europe. Caldwell predicts that future historians may see World Wars I and II as representing the collective suicide of European civilization. In addition to the horrendous death and destruction inflicted by Europeans on one another in these wars, the conflicts brought a profound loss of confidence in the institutions and ideals that had shaped Europe. History seemed to have culminated and ended with the Nazi concentration camps such as Auschwitz. The robust sense of civilizational superiority that had led

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Europeans to build empires stretching around Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor the world disappeared. Caldwell writes that, after World War II, at the Weekly Standard. He also Europeans were determined to eradicate the contributes articles to The New York nationalism and ethnic chauvinisms that had Times Magazine and the Financial inspired so much bloodshed. Traditional ap- Times. He lives in Washington, D.C. peals to patriotism no longer resonated. The European nations retreated from their empires with remarkable speed. Within a quarter century, most of their former colonies had become independent. At home, the goal of a European Union, transcending ageold borders and boundaries, steadily became a reality. The military shield erected by the United States during the Cold War allowed the Western European countries to build generous welfare states that provided cradle-to-grave benefits to their citizens. Europeans entered a comfortable period of prosperity and social security. Caldwell asserts that at this time Europeans readily embraced a cultural relativism that refused to privilege any belief system over another. He sees this as the inevitable ethic of a civilization that had lost faith in the past and valued peace and accommodation in the present. Left out of consideration, in his estimation, was the future. Church attendance declined precipitously across Europe. The birthrate plummeted until, in most European countries at the turn of the twenty-first century, it was well below replacement levels. This decline in birthrates posed a fundamental threat to the longterm viability of the European project, as European society inexorably grayed. Still, had all other things been equal, Europeans might have met their demographic challenge with equanimity, hoping for relief from technology or medical advances. Life was pleasant in “posthistorical” Europe, but all other things were not equal. The growing vacuum in European society was filled by outsiders from the Islamic world. Caldwell emphasizes that it was only the peculiar circumstances of postwar Europe, with its resolute relativism and determination to move beyond its racist and colonialist past, that made possible the immigration of millions of Muslims. Such an influx from developing nations would have been inconceivable in the past. As European governments rebuilt and expanded their industries after the war, they met perceived labor shortages by importing workers from Turkey and other Islamic countries. Initially, these immigrants were simply to be guest workers who would return to their home countries after a few years of capital accumulation. As time passed, however, they did not leave. They became a permanent presence, even after the initial need for them passed away with rust-belt industrialism. The Europeans had failed to anticipate the effects of their prosperity on the desperately poor Islamic peoples ringing the southern shore of the Mediterranean. Muslim workers sent for their wives and children, and then they had more children in their new European homes. They arranged for the immigration of their extended families. Soon, thriving communities of Muslim immigrants existed throughout Europe. At first, the immigrants were welcomed and seen as providing a welcome diversity. Early warnings about a cultural threat posed by immigration from politicians such as British member of Parliament Enoch Powell were denounced as racist. Once the eco-

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nomic rationale for allowing mass immigration passed, it was replaced by a humanitarian imperative: Immigrants were accepted as refugees from religious or political persecution. To turn them away would be to revert to the racial and religious chauvinism Europeans were attempting to escape. With remarkable rapidity, then, Muslim Europeans became a demographic force. Muslims already comprise 10 percent of the population of some European countries. By 2050, Muslims may make up one-third of Europe’s population; they will form the majority of the population in many cities. Because of the newcomers’ high birthrate and the anemic birthrate of Europeans, the percentage of Muslims in some populations may be even higher. The differences in European and Muslim fertility have led the distinguished scholar Bernard Lewis to predict that Europe will be Islamic within a century. For Europeans, this dramatic demographic revolution began during a fit of what Caldwell describes as absent-mindedness. The laws that made such immigration possible were promulgated by governmental elites. The European people never voted on the policies reshaping their communities. The relativistic reification of tolerance, Caldwell says, proved sacrosanct. People who could not be forbidden admittance to Europe could not be denied the practice of their native religion and culture once they arrived. Europeans did not demand that the immigrants assimilate fully and accept European values. Given their own civilizational doubt, Caldwell claims, Europeans could not do this. As a result, Muslim communities grew up everywhere, beside but apart from their European neighbors. Moreover, modern technology allowed immigrants a degree of contact with their home countries never before possible. The practice of seeking spouses from abroad disrupted traditional patterns of acculturation. Europeans were shocked to discover that second-generation Muslim immigrants were less inclined to integrate to European norms than their parents had been. Many Muslims, in Caldwell’s analysis, find nothing in the pallid, relativistic ethos of modern Europe to admire or desire. All too often living in isolated ghettos, beneficiaries of a welfare state that commands no loyalty, these immigrants increasingly identify themselves by their religion. Their communities are growing more selfconsciously Islamic. Europeans are uneasily accommodating themselves to this development. Two-thirds of the imams in France are on the dole. Sharia law is openly practiced in parts of Britain. Many Muslim neighborhoods across the continent have become no-go zones for the European police and are patrolled instead by Islamic gangs. Caldwell asserts that, when voices are raised criticizing such practices as polygamy or female genital circumcision, they are denounced as racist by immigrant rights organizations. Muslim “agitators,” in his estimation, have taken the measure of their neighbors’ relativism and exploit it to pursue their own agendas. In London, demonstrators called for the death of Danish cartoonists who depicted the Prophet Muhammad, a violation of Islamic beliefs. These demonstrators were protected on the streets by lines of police. In Britain, Muslim men are able to collect welfare checks for all of their multiple wives, a benefit unavailable to Christian bigamists. In 2005, when mobs of Muslim youths attacked police and torched cars in France, the government and press diligently obscured the ethnic identities of the rioters.

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Caldwell asserts that the political correctness that justified the admittance of so many Muslim immigrants has frustrated European political debate about immigration and its consequences. The unwillingness of many ruling political parties to address the implications of Muslim immigration has spurred the growth of anti-immigrant fringe parties that have shown surprising electoral strength. In response, steps have been taken by some European governments to control immigration. Other governments have begun to address the cultural issues posed by burgeoning Muslim populations. In an effort to halt the practice of importing wives from abroad, the Danes have made it difficult to marry outside the European Union. The French have banned female headscarves in schools, along with yarmulkes and large crosses. Caldwell says that, in each case, all citizens have to sacrifice liberties to address problems caused by the failure of Muslim minorities to assimilate. Critics of Caldwell could argue that not all Muslim immigrants are embracing Islamism in radicalized ghettos. Many Muslims are succeeding brilliantly in Europe. Over time, the large Muslim population in Europe could well integrate and blend into the larger population as immigrant groups have done in the United States and elsewhere. Caldwell does not accept this optimistic scenario because he believes that it assumes the values that have guided Europe over the past fifty years to be universal and thus attractive to people coming from an entirely different cultural and historical background. He believes that it fails to take into account the dynamism of ideas and the passion with which they are held. To illustrate this point, Caldwell explores in detail the writings of Tariq Ramadan, who is often portrayed as an exponent of a new middle way for Europe that will harmonize the interests of Muslims and their neighbors. The grandson of one of the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood, Ramadan calls for a European Islam, which many non-Muslims see as a gesture of accommodation. In fact, Ramadan criticizes the secularism and materialism of European civilization. He sees Islam as a regenerating force that will create a new Europe. As Caldwell notes, Ramadan is all for accommodation, as long as it is on his terms. Ramadan anticipates a future far different from that desired by his European interlocutors. The case of Tariq Ramadan underlines the reasons for Caldwell’s pessimism about the results of Muslim immigration into Europe. He sees a demographically vigorous, intellectually and spiritually confident culture encountering a civilization declining in numbers and uncertain in its beliefs. For Caldwell, in such a confrontation there can only be one result. The future of Europe will not be European. Some figures in Europe are attempting to defend European beliefs. Pope Benedict XVI is calling for a revival of European Christianity, while President Nicolas Sarkozy of France is a champion of his nation’s secular civil culture. Caldwell sees the efforts of such men as admirable but unlikely to change the tide of history. Perhaps, he says, they will someday be seen as “the last of the Europeans.” Caldwell’s analysis of the “revolution” in Europe is challenging and thought-provoking. Whether one agrees with Caldwell or not, his book is to be taken seriously. It will factor in debates about the future of Europe for years to come. Daniel P. Murphy

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Review Sources American Conservative 8, no. 13 (October 1, 2009): 41-43. The American Spectator 42, no. 8 (October, 2009): 72-73. Booklist 105, no.19/20 (June 1, 2009): 12. Commentary 128, no. 2 (September, 2009): 60-62. The Economist 392, no. 8646 (August 29, 2009): 72. First Things, no. 195 (August/September, 2009): 46-47. Foreign Affairs 88, no. 5 (September/October, 2009): 156. International Affairs 85, no. 6 (November, 2009): 1249-1298. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 10 (May 15, 2009): 116. Library Journal 134, no. 10 (June 1, 2009): 110. Macleans 122, no. 31 (August 17, 2009): 56-57. The Nation 289, no. 20 (December 14, 2009): 15-24. National Review 61, no. 14 (August 10, 2009): 42-44 The New Republic 240, no. 21 (November 18, 2009): 38-41. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 20 (December 17, 2009): 62-65. The New York Times, July 30, 2009, p. 1. The New York Times Book Review, August 2, 2009, p. 1. Policy Review, no. 156 (August/September, 2009): 76-82. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 19 (May 11, 2009): 43. The Wall Street Journal, September 18, 2009, p. W8.

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RHYMING LIFE AND DEATH Author: Amos Oz (1939) First published: Haruze ha-hayim veha-mavet, 2007, in Israel Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 118 pp. $23 Type of work: Novel Time: One summer night in the 1980’s, from about 9:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. Locale: Tel Aviv, Israel During one long evening in Tel Aviv, a prominent Israeli author meets his readers and exposes the sources and subterfuges of his art Principal characters: Author, a famous Israeli novelist who also works as a tax accountant Rochelle Reznik, a professional reader Joselito, Reznik’s cat Tsefania Beit-Halachmi, a prolific hack poet, author of Rhyming Life and Death Ricky, a café waitress Charlie, a soccer goalkeeper who broke Ricky’s heart Lucy, the beauty queen for whom Charlie left Ricky Yuval Dahan/Dotan, an unhappy teenage poet Ovadya Hazzam, a lottery winner dying of cancer Yakir Bar-Orian, a literary critic Yerucham Shdemati, cultural administrator of a community center in Tel Aviv Arnold Bartok, an unemployed, irritable party hack Dr. Pessach Yikhat, an educator who takes a dim view of contemporary literature

Amos Oz’s Rhyming Life and Death opens with a battery of twenty-six questions. The first are reasonable enough (“Why do you write? Why do you write the way you do?”), but the interrogation soon descends into the personal and impertinent: “Are your books autobiographical or completely fictional? Above all, how is it that, as a creative artist, you lead such a stolid, unexciting private life?” These are questions that an author of any prominence who dares venture out among readers might expect to encounter, and, reappearing twice elsewhere in the book, they frame and haunt the proceedings. Oz himself is probably Israel’s most famous contemporary author; his books have been translated into thirty-six languages, more than those of any other living Hebrew writer. It is likely that, in a career that began more than forty years ago, he has been subjected to similar interrogations during hundreds of interviews and public appear-

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ances throughout the world. Thus, a reader’s curiosity about the autobiographical basis of Oz’s fiction is not entirely unnatural, especially given that the protagonist of Rhyming Life and Death is identified merely as the Author, a famous Israeli novelist in his forties. The story is set in the 1980’s, when Oz, too, was in his forties. Unlike the actual author of this novel, though, the Author within the novel is a twicedivorced professional accountant whose father was a diplomat. Moreover, in this acAmos Oz’s books include My Michael count of one long night in the writing life, (1968), Unto Death (1971) Black Box biographical details are fluid, moot, and sub(1987), Fima (1991), A Panther in the ordinate to Oz’s attempt at a general allegory Basement (1995), and the memoir A about the process and consequences of makTale of Love and Darkness (2003). He ing fiction. Invited to be the focus of a literary has won the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize, the Frankfurt Peace Prize, and event in Tel Aviv at a scruffy community centhe Prince of Asturias Award for ter awkwardly named “Shunia Shor and Seven Letters. Victims of the Quarry Attack,” the Author ar rives early. While tarrying in a café a few blocks from the community center, he fantasizes about the waitress who serves him an omelet, a salad, and coffee. He assigns her a name, Ricky, and imagines that she had a love affair with a man named Charlie, the reserve goalkeeper of the Bnei-Yehuda football team, but that Charlie dumped her for Lucy, the runner-up in the Queen of the Waves contest. The fertility of the Author’s imagination is also evident in the way he eavesdrops on two men sitting at a nearby table and speculates that one is a gangster, the other a hairdryer salesman. When he eventually shows up, about twenty minutes late, at the community center, the Author is greeted by Yerucham Shdemati, its aging cultural administrator. An impatient crowd has been awaiting the featured celebrity on this sweltering summer night. Following Shdemati’s officious introduction, a literary critic called Yakir BarOrian launches into an elaborate analysis of the Author’s new book, describing it as “a trap, as a hermetically sealed chamber of mirrors with no door or window.” Thus Oz anticipates how unsympathetic readers might respond to the intricate metafiction he himself has constructed in Rhyming Life and Death, a novel that reflects on its own devices. During Bar-Orian’s exposition, the Author’s mind wanders. He mixes memories of his own childhood with speculation about the identities behind the faces peering at him in the room, devising lives for the people assembled for his literary evening. “It is,” we are told, “as though he were picking their pockets while the audience is immersed in the byways of his writing with the literary expert as their guide.” Bar-Orian is followed on the program by Rochele Reznik, a professional reader of about thirty-five who, in her public recitation of four extracts from the Author’s

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book, transforms its vitriol into compassion and grace. While grateful for Reznik’s performance, the Author wonders why he agreed to participate in this event and acknowledges to himself that he has not prepared for it. When the time comes for him to speak, he mixes comments about his literary predecessors with personal anecdotes. He patiently responds to the audience’s questions about why he writes and how his art relates to his life, but he admits to himself that his words consist of charming evasions and lies. After signing copies of his book, the Author walks off through the dark city streets mulling over incidents in his memory, as well as the characters he has invented based on people he encountered during the evening. He may or may not make his way to Reznik’s apartment, where his attempt at seducing the lonely, timorous reader, whose only companion is a jealous cat named Joselito, would be a fiasco. The Author’s bungled possible encounter with Reznik is a somewhat comic variation on the familiar notion that reading and writing are erotic experiences that enable people to overcome the isolation of the self. Oz’s Author is an anxious schlemiel who is incapable of intimacy with the public he entices and, through his distorted representations, traduces. He is described as suffused with “a profound sadness that he is always an outsider, unable to touch or to be touched, with his head perpetually buried under the photographer’s old black cloth.” Rather than affirming the transcendent power of verbal art, the Author’s inept attempts to touch others undercut the arrogant claims of the literary sublime. In his shifting recollections and mental fabrications, the Author does attract adoring fans. He recalls a strange woman who showed up at his apartment grasping a nineyear-old son whom she wanted to imprint with the memory of meeting a living writer. The Author also speculates about a melancholy adolescent, whom he calls Yuval Dahan, sitting in the audience at the community center. He imagines the boy as a suicidal would-be poet who calls himself Dotan and cherishes the Author as the only one in the world who understands him. In the same audience is a man whom the Author calls Dr. Pessach Yikhat. He imagines the man to be a veteran teacher who takes a dim view of contemporary writing, including and especially the Author’s. The Author also imagines one of the attendees as a party hack named Arnold Bartok who is embittered over the recent loss of his job. Convinced that Bartok came to the community center expressly in order to mock him, the Author believes he hears Bartok sniggering throughout the evening’s proceedings. Even more unsettling than his audience’s tacit hostility is the censure that the Author attributes to reality itself, the raw material out of which he fashions his art: “To write about things that exist, to try to capture a color or smell or sound in words, is a little like playing Schubert when Schubert is sitting in the hall, and perhaps sniggering in the darkness.” Such considerations make a mockery of the literary evening, whose guest of honor is doomed to failure. Oz’s novel is best read as a kind of psychological shadow show, onto whose stage the Author projects facets of himself in the guise of different characters. In order to console Reznik about their abortive coupling, he imagines telling her:

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Listen, Rochele, please don’t be sad, after all, the characters in this book are all just the Author himself: Ricky, Charlie, Lucy, Mr. Leon, Ovadya, Yuval, Yerucham, they are all just the Author and whatever happens to them here is really only happening to him, and even you, Rochele, are just a thought in my mind and whatever is happening to you and me is actually only happening to me.

This is probably the most self-conscious moment in a thoroughly self-conscious, if not claustrophobic, fiction that ultimately reminds its own readers that Amos Oz in turn has assembled characters, including the Author and Reznik, to constitute a pageant of his own wandering thoughts about his literary art. Oz’s novel derives its title from a volume by a fictional figure, a once-famous but now neglected old poet named Tsefania Beit-Halachmi. At the outset of the evening at the community center, Shdemati, flaunting his literary sophistication, quotes a couple of lines from Beit-Halachmi’s book Rhyming Life and Death: “You’ll always find them side by side:/ Never a groom without a bride.” This couplet, like several other snatches of verse by Beit-Halachmi quoted throughout the novel, is sententious verbiage that, as the Author notes, is not even true. However, rhyming—that is, reconciling—life and death is the challenge that the Author, Beit-Halachmi, and Oz all confront. So, too, do readers. Throughout the evening, references to the prolific but forgotten old poet serve as reminders of the vanity of artistic ambition. They demonstrate how porous is the line between profundity and banality and how fickle is literary renown. By the end of the novel, the Author has consigned a fictional creation named Ovadya Hazzam, a bon vivant who won a fortune in a lottery, to agonizing death from cancer. In the final sentences of Rhyming Life and Death, he also learns that Tsefania Beit-Halachmi was still living in obscurity, dying just the day before, at ninety-two, of heart failure. Neither the Author nor his author, Amos Oz, nor readers can take heart from the poet’s sad example. In a piece titled “Clearing out the Leaven,” Beit-Halachmi once wrote “about the tendency of all things gradually to fade, to become worn out, objects and loves, clothes and ideals, homes and feelings, everything becomes tattered and threadbare, and eventually turns to dust.” What redeems this novel from mere cleverness is its candid recognition of the dusty fate shared by authors, readers, and their desperate inventions. Steven G. Kellman

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 14 (March 15, 2009): 43. The Guardian, February 21, 2009, p. 10. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 5 (March 1, 2009): 18. Library Journal 134, no. 8 (May 1, 2009): 71. Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2009, p. E7.

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The New York Times Book Review, May 24, 2009, p. 9. The Observer, February 15, 2009, p. B5. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 4 (January 26, 2009): 94. San Francisco Chronicle, April 19, 2009, p. J5. The Spectator 309, no. 9417 (February 21, 2009): 36. The Times Literary Supplement, February 20, 2009, p. 19.

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SAG HARBOR Author: Colson Whitehead (1969) Publisher: Doubleday (New York). 273 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: Summer, 1985 Locale: Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York Benji Cooper, a privileged African American teenager, spends the summer in Sag Harbor with his friends, trying to discover how to live his life Principal characters: Benji Cooper, fifteen years old Reggie, his fourteen-year-old brother Elena, his eighteen-year-old sister Dr. Cooper, his father, a podiatrist

In his fourth novel, Sag Harbor, Colson Whitehead focuses his considerable wit and imagination on the traditional coming-of-age story, with far from traditional results. Although the events in the novel are based on his own summers at Sag Harbor, the author has said that his invented characters lead much more interesting lives than he did. Benji Cooper, fifteen years old, is “out” for the summer, having come from New York City to a beach house in Azurest, a colony on Long Island Bay populated by wealthy African American professional families. Benji and his brother Reggie attend a predominantly white prep school in Manhattan. White people, unaccustomed to seeing African American children dressed in khakis and blazers on their way to school, mistake them for the children of African diplomats. During the school year, Benji revels in his role as the token African American, invited by the politically correct parents of his schoolmates to attend bar mitzvahs where he can sample exotic food and try to make out with the girls. When summer comes, though, he is free to experiment and invent himself. The older Benji who narrates the novel casts his satirical eye on the behavior of both African American and white people in an emerging postracial world. As a college student, he reveals, he discovered W. E. B. Du Bois’s doctrine of doubleconsciousness, that African Americans must struggle to reconcile their outward existence in the white world with their desire to be authentically black. The younger Benji, eager to make a place for himself in his summer world, does not yet understand that this is his quest. As he says, “If I had enough information I might know how to be.” He is, by turns, innocent and appealing in his teenaged confusion, yet an astute observer of his friends and family and of the people of the summer community. The story begins with Benji’s arrival at the beach house and ends with a Labor Day picnic. The six chapters in between, loosely organized around the summer’s events, take off in a series of jazz riffs that allow Benji to observe the world around him and at the same time try to learn how to grow into the role of the man he will become. His

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parents, a successful doctor and lawyer, work in the city, coming out only on weekends. Colson Whitehead is the author of The Benji and Reggie are left to fend for them- Intuitionist (1999); John Henry Days selves during the week. They have summer (2001), which won the Young Lions jobs—Benji at Jonni Waffle, an ice cream Fiction Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Apex Hides the stand, and Reggie at Burger King. Benji’s dead-on observations of the events Hurt (2006), a New York Times of the summer of 1985 are uproariously funny. Notable Book. He has received a Whiting Writers’ Award and a The adult narrator comments, but only rarely, MacArthur Fellowship. to place the story in its larger context. Benji hopes to get rid of his childish nickname and become Ben, but this attempt is doomed to failure. His descriptions are loaded with the iconic artifacts of the 1980’s, including Swanson television dinners, Walkman radios, and Classic Coke. Benji is something of a nerd, still wearing braces on his teeth and embarrassed by school photographs of his bad haircut. He wants desperately to fit in with his group but is usually a step behind his friends, unable to master the complex handshakes of the ever-changing African American street culture. He is addicted to Dungeons and Dragons, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), which he has only seen edited for television, and his Six Million Dollar Man action figure—an icon of the 1970’s that he would have acquired at a younger age. The African American beach colony of Azurest, unfamiliar territory to white Americans, was built by the hard-working grandparents of Benji’s generation as an escape from the racial tensions of the city, a place for themselves. The prime Long Island real estate of the Hamptons belongs to wealthy white people. The Rock and the Creek mark the end of the African American enclave and the beginning of the white territory into which the boys are forbidden to venture. White people, in their turn, become uneasy when they find themselves on a beach populated by African Americans and realize that there they are the intruders. At Sag Harbor, Benji and his friends are free to be themselves while sardonically mocking their parents’ generation and the white people who patronize the resort businesses where they work. Benji and his friends are preoccupied with definitions of “cool” and “uncool.” Their discussions, which often become arguments and occasionally fights, focus on the nuances of racial identification. They make jokes about the Ku Klux Klan and “Massa,” but nervously and never in the presence of their parents. They seek to determine whether their light-skinned boss at the ice cream stand is African American by observing whether he displays an identifying “black” walk. Benji describes to his friends, in hilarious detail, the procedure an African American kid must follow to carry a watermelon down the main street without becoming a racial stereotype. Their activities are accompanied by the pop music of the 1980’s, generating heated arguments about which groups are acceptably cool for black teenagers. They also observe such peculiarities of white people as their habit of “’fro-touching,” the compulsion to feel the hair of African American kids. The boys have invented their own tribal language, and the author includes an ex-

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planatory chart of its verb forms. The favored word is “dag,” serving multiple purposes from mild profanity to a sardonic comment on the unfairness of life in general. Inspired by the beginnings of hip-hop culture, they talk like gangsters, but, as privileged kids, they have to learn the lingo from television and movies rather than firsthand experience. They are practiced code-switchers, knowing how to distinguish the language of the “’hood” from the acceptable usage of the adult world. Much of their time is spent trying to find girls or to convince an adult to buy the beer that fuels their evening adventures. One of Benji’s preoccupations is to arrange a “tit collision,” the not-so-subtle brush of his elbow against the breast of his coworker at Jonni Waffle. Benji’s parents, mostly absent from the story, may resemble the idealized, uppermiddle-class parents portrayed in the African American sitcom The Cosby Show, but the comparison is superficial. Shadowing the narrative, and reported matter-of-factly by Benji, is his father’s abusiveness. Dr. Cooper eases back from city life each weekend with his barbeque and his gin-and-tonic. Benji listens to the opening and closing of the liquor-cabinet door for clues about how much his father has drunk so he can plan his escape. Their father demeans Reggie with an insulting name and verbally harangues Benji’s mother, starting the summer-long arguments that drive Benji and Reggie from the house and that have caused their older sister Elena to take a summer job elsewhere. During one school year, Benji reported a racial insult from a white classmate; he had walked away without a confrontation. His father was angry and punched Benji hard several times in the face. He sought to teach Benji never to back down from a fight, because nobody could hit him harder than his father could. In Dr. Cooper’s world, an African American man has to learn how to defend himself against racism. The generation gap between the father and son is an underlying theme in the narrative. Benji’s father, who grew up in the rough inner city, listens to Afrocentric radio and watches CNN for reports of violence against African Americans. He sends his sons to an exclusive prep school, as befits an upwardly mobile African American family, but he is angered that they are learning nothing about African American history. Benji acknowledges, but cannot identify with, the racial insecurities of the older generation. Once, Benji and Reggie rode their bicycles into the white part of town and were terrified by a snarling Doberman blocking their path. When their father learned of the incident, he drove the car to the neighborhood and saw a blackfaced lawn jockey in the front yard. White people, he explained, use lawn jockeys to train their dogs to attack when they see a black face. Benji reports the incident without comment. Benji and his friends engage in potentially dangerous recreation. The group obtains BB guns, and the boys decide to test their mettle in a gang war. They make rules—that copper beads and repeat shots are forbidden—but the war never gets off the ground: Randy ignores the rules and shoots Benji in the eye socket, causing pain and bleeding and endangering his eyesight. Because his parents will find out if he goes to the hospital, he must deal with the injury himself. He attempts primitive surgery with a razor blade but cannot remove the BB. The narrator reports with casual indifference that the BB is still in place and is not

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likely to kill him, but in a rare departure from his comic stance, he offers a sobering glimpse into the boys’ future: “As time went on we learned to arm ourselves in different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world.” He adds, without explanation, that one of the boys will die and another will be paralyzed. The comedy resumes when Benji is about to experience a traditional coming-ofage event, the sexual initiation. He finds himself in an unexpected and opportune situation: He and the desirable Melanie are exploring the empty beach house that used to belong to his parents. They wander to the upstairs bedroom, where their kisses become passionate. Suddenly, headlights appear in the driveway—the house is not empty, after all. The would-be lovers make a hasty escape through the upstairs window and jump to the ground. The next day at Jonni Waffle, Melanie coldly dismisses Benji and goes off with her boyfriend. Benji doubts that he has learned anything about himself by Labor Day, but, ever the optimist, he makes plans for the coming school year, when he will be sixteen. He decides to buy combat boots to wear with his school uniform—perhaps not a significant step toward maturity, but very Benji-like in his intention to defy convention and declare his individuality. Whitehead’s novel has received lavish attention from critics who praise his comic genius and his ingenuity in shedding new light on the United States’ complex social issues. His three previous novels have been acclaimed for their edgy originality and eloquent mastery of language. Several critics have dissenting views about this novel, but these are minor notes in the general praise. The narrative tends to meander, but the author claims that little happens in the summer, so the meandering is motivated. The novel’s extended, detailed descriptions of the working day at Jonni Waffle and its constant references to the pop culture of the 1980’s may try the patience of some readers. Inevitably, as an African American writer, Whitehead has been taken to task for avoiding the risk of focusing on weightier issues. However, in departing from the traditional protest novels of writers such as James Baldwin and Richard Wright, Whitehead represents the ambiguous experiences of a new generation of African Americans in an emerging postracial America. This story will entertain readers of any race, ethnicity, or generation in its reminiscences of a nostalgic world before digital gadgetry, in which confused young people must rely on personal confrontations with one another and the community around them in order to grow into authentic, confident adulthood. Marjorie Podolsky

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 12 (February 15, 2009): 5. Esquire 151, no. 4 (April, 2009): 42.

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Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 5 (March 1, 2009): 53. Library Journal 134, no. 5 (March 15, 2009): 99. New Criterion 27, no. 9 (May, 2009): 33-38. New Statesman 138, no. 4949 (May 18, 2009): 48. The New York Times, April. 27, 2009, p. C1. The New York Times Book Review, May 3, 2009, p. 1. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 8 (February 23, 2009): 33. Rolling Stone, June 11, 2009, p. 90. San Francisco Chronicle, May 3, 2009, p. H3. The Times (London), May 9, 2009, p.11. Vanity Fair, no. 585 (May, 2009): 60 The Village Voice 54, no. 18 (April 29, 2009): 35. The Wall Street Journal, January 2, 2009, p. W10.


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THE SCARECROW Author: Michael Connelly (1953) Publisher: Little, Brown (New York). 419 pp. $27.99 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Los Angeles, California Pursuit of a serial killer by a dedicated, old-style male journalist and a female FBI agent, set against a background of self-serving corporations and bureaucracies, as well as cybertechnology that dehumanizes people as well as empowering them Principal characters: Jack McEvoy, a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times working on his last story after being fired because of cost-cutting Rachel Walling, an FBI agent and former lover of McEvoy who worked with him on a previous serial-murder case Angela Cook, a young reporter who will replace McEvoy on the newspaper staff Richard Kramer, the assistant managing editor of the newspaper Alonzo Winslow, a young African American who is mistakenly arrested for killing a woman found in the trunk of a car Wanda Sessums, Winslow’s mother or grandmother, who seeks help from McEvoy Wesley Carver, a high-tech computer engineer and serial killer Freddy Stone, Carver’s coworker and accomplice

The detective novel has from its beginning been a dark genre, acknowledging the unmanageably violent impulses of a significant proportion of society, including many of those responsible for upholding and enforcing its values. Many classic detective novels portrayed corruption as omnipresent and emphasized the physical, moral, and emotional vulnerability of all people, and, as the genre has developed, its generic landscape has darkened even further. The classic detective story, particularly of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, was by no means always confidently optimistic, but there was usually some reassurance that the combined powers of reason, goodwill, and heroic effort could keep murderers, maniacs, and criminals at bay. They would always return, but they could be reliably combated by such figures as C. Auguste Dupin (in several groundbreaking stories by Edgar Allan Poe), Sherlock Holmes (in the works of Arthur Conan Doyle), and Nayland Smith (in Sax Rohmer’s many popular Fu Manchu novels). The modern detective story—hard to date precisely, but running from the about the 1920’s to the 1970’s—conveyed somewhat less reassurance, as victims and detectives alike were increasingly overwhelmed by a violence that was inescapable, in-

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scrutable, and systemic as well as personal. Such novels depicted threats to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that were not only often psychopathic but also sometimes surprisingly “typical,” not so much aberrant as symptomatic of an entire society strikingly out of balance. Individual detectives, such as the classic model described by Raymond Chandler, were principled and admirable, but they were often compromised in their inevitably losing battle to protect the public—and Michael Connelly, a former crime themselves—in the “mean streets” of an unreporter, is author of The Black Echo deniably mean world. (1992), which won the Edgar Award Michael Connelly’s The Scarecrow is a for Best First Novel; Blood Work good example of a further stage in the devel(1998), made into a 2002 film directed opment of the genre, the contemporary or by and starring Clint Eastwood; and a postmodern detective story that takes darkcontinuing series of novels featuring detective Harry Bosch. ness to an even grimmer level. The intensity of its threats is enormous: Violence is common and extreme; dangerous people easily masquerade as being harmless and respectable, and they have no difficulty assuming positions of power from which they can manipulate the fates of others, as well as torture and kill them freely. No one is safe—murder victims in The Scarecrow include a drug addict and exotic dancer as well as a corporate executive and nearly include the two main characters, a newspaper reporter and an FBI agent. Each protagonist is saved not by any power of intelligence or physical strength but by accident. Still, the reporter and the agent are extremely resourceful, and, as it turns out, that quality is essential to their limited success. Indeed, they must rely on their own resources because, as Connelly details, their support systems—in fact, the support systems for society at large—are crumbling and other developments in contemporary culture seem to work to the advantage of a new generation of predators. Connelly is well known for his ongoing series of novels featuring Harry Bosch, a Los Angeles policeman, but he uses a stand-in for a detective in The Scarecrow: Jack McEvoy, a journalist, was one of the main characters in a previous novel by Connelly, The Poet (1996), which was also about the pursuit of a serial killer. The substitution is telling. Connelly himself was a longtime crime reporter for a newspaper before he turned to writing detective novels, and there is a natural connection between the two professions, not only because the one inevitably writes about the actions of the other but moreso because they play similar, critical roles in a properly functioning society. “To protect and serve” might well be the motto of a newspaper as well as of a police department, and much of The Scarecrow focuses on the extent to which the current economic climate is stripping newspapers of their power to fulfill these functions. The novel is for the most part character-centered and driven by suspenseful action, but the action is carefully set against a broad background that is perhaps equally inter-

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esting: the decline of a newspaper from an institution of investigation and responsible surveillance supporting society’s highest values and goals to a corporate profit center and medium of distraction. This decline transforms the newspaper from a social resource, protecting citizens from corruption and crime, into a vehicle that exploits its readers’ fascination with the dark side of life without shielding them from it. With subtle irony, Connelly devises a plot that ties a technological impetus for the decline of newspapers to the success of a serial killer: The Internet is killing the Los Angeles Times, by drawing away advertisers and decreasing the interest in hard news, so it is grimly appropriate that the serial killer featured in the newspaper’s stories is a master of the Internet who uses computer networks to magnify his deadly power. The story alternates between the killer (and his accomplice) and McEvoy, building to several dramatic moments when they literally cross paths. Wesley Carver operates from an Internet security center called “The Farm,” designed to provide security for corporations, but he uses cyberpower to become a nightmarish rather than protective “scarecrow,” inflicting violence on virtual as well as physical bodies. He reduces real human beings to nonpersons, sometimes by abducting, torturing, and killing them, other times by invading their computers, canceling their credit cards, and stealing their online identities. As Connelly’s novel emphasizes, decades of technological innovation have created innumerable comforts and conveniences for a society now irrevocably reliant on computers and a wireless lifespace, but this “progress” also brings with it unforseen dangers. Modern communication and information networks are impossible to secure and are therefore liable to virtual invasions by individuals such as Carver that in turn make even more damaging physical assaults possible. Moreover, they create an environment that encourages people to indulge in fantasies and express forbidden desires, making those people vulnerable to exploitation and possibly also contributing to their decisions to turn dark thoughts into gruesome actions. The Scarecrow portrays an Internet that creates postmodern mean streets and irresistibly invites individuals to engage in behaviors that inevitably put not only those individuals but also the entire society at risk. Connelly is a master at gradually accelerating narrative action, increasingly pulling readers into a widening maelstrom. At the beginning of the novel, McEvoy is fired from his job at the newspaper, almost the last of a projected one hundred victims of downsizing for profit. (Phrasing this downsizing as “corporate bloodletting” serves as a reminder that individual psychopaths are not the only sources of devastating violence characterizing the contemporary world.) He is given two more weeks on the job, not to ease his transition but to help break in his replacement, Angela Cook. “Oldjos”—old-style journalists such as McEvoy, who believe in hard work, hard news, and being paid fairly for patient, responsible, respectful reporting— are being forced out by “mojos”—modern and mobile journalists, abundantly available at entry-level salaries, who sacrifice reliable sources and substance for speed and sizzle. Cook demonstrates some potentially promising drive and ambition as she and McEvoy work together on the story of a young woman whose body was found in a car abandoned near a ghetto housing project. Although they both contribute to finding the

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murderer, however, their different methods and mentalities lead to strikingly different, serendipitous fates. McEvoy’s old-style legwork, personal interviews, and incessant, rational analysis quickly reveal that the ghetto youth arrested by the police is not the murderer. He draws closer to the real murderer when he follows up on clues provided by another murder strikingly similar to the one they are investigating. Meanwhile, Cook’s ease with the Internet leads her to a Web site that turns out to be directly relevant to the case but that also alerts the killer to her presence and marks her as the next victim. Connelly adopts the inverted double-chase structure common especially in contemporary thrillers: As the protagonist hunts the killer, the killer hunts the protagonist as well. McEvoy narrowly escapes an encounter with Carver’s murderous accomplice, but Cook is not so lucky. McEvoy has more than luck: He also has Rachel Walling at his side, a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent and former lover with whom he worked on a previous case. Walling drops everything to join him in his search for an active serial killer. The search is complicated by the strains of their relationship. The fact that intimacy is difficult for two such independent, intelligent, and ambitious people is revealed not only by their moments of worry and suspicion about each other but also by the term they use to describe the notion that there is one ideal romantic partner for each person: the “single bullet theory.” When Walling gives McEvoy a silver bullet on a chain, it confirms not only their commitment to each other but also their shared conception of dangerous love in a dangerous world. The search for the killer is also complicated by the FBI bureaucracy, which acts as both a resource and a nuisance. Detective novels often contrast the integrity of a solitary investigator with the inefficiency, corruption, and self-serving preoccupation of institutions. Connelly is more careful than most writers of such novels to balance the commonplace and sometimes justifiable distrust of law enforcement agencies with real respect for the police and FBI. He is not blind to the many failings of those institutions, however, as they take shortcuts, misplace priorities, and are sometimes simply overwhelmed by the difficulties of preserving both freedom and safety. These failings come to the fore when Walling is dismissed from the FBI for violating protocol while saving McEvoy’s life, but the agency is partially redeemed when she is reinstated—not entirely for the right reasons—and given backup when she joins McEvoy for the final push to close in on the killer. Carver is so adept at stage-managing the action, hiding, and masking his identity that, up to the very end, McEvoy and Walling pursue the wrong man. Even when they discover their mistake, Carver, the controlling figure in a surveillance nightmare, is watching them on a Web cam and able to prepare for their attempt to capture him. The final confrontation happens very quickly, but Carver’s ingenuity and technology are ultimately no match for McEvoy’s determination and Walling’s ability to use a single bullet as something other than a love token. The story concludes, however, with very little sense of triumph, relief, or even closure. The killer has been identified and caught, but one of the deeper drives of the detective story—to understand how such beings are created and what shapes their horrifying actions—has not been satisfied. The brief, almost perfunctory confirmation that Carver was repeatedly abused as a

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child by those entrusted with his care still leaves readers far from understanding his motives in detail. By the end of The Scarecrow, a formidable murderer has been stopped, McEvoy and Walling have been reunited as a couple, and McEvoy can look forward to turning his recent experiences into a successful novel and finding a place as an old-style journalist at one of the few respectable new Web sites. Despite these successes, however, the novel concludes bleakly, confirming that it is fundamentally a story about endings: of a job, a newspaper, an era of privacy and protection, a sense of tangible reality, and ultimately of life. The figure of the scarecrow is a harbinger of an apocalypse that is close, if not already here. Carver survives, not as a continuing physical threat, but as a traumatic memory haunting the other survivors and as a delirious consciousness who presides over the final scene, humming the theme song of his life and the last days, “The End” by The Doors. He is given the last word in the narrative, and that word, echoing the world depicted by the novel, is “darkness.” Sidney Gottlieb

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 17 (May 1, 2009): 34. The Boston Globe, May 23, 2009, p. 10. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 8 (April 15, 2009): 405. Library Journal 134, no. 7 (April 15, 2009): 82. Los Angeles Times, May 27, 2009, p. D1. The New York Times, May 21, 2009, p. 1. New York Times Book Review, May 24, 2009, p. 22. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 13 (March 31, 2009): 26. The Washington Post, May 25, 2009, p. C05.

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THE SECRET WIFE OF LOUIS XIV Françoise d’Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Author: Veronica Buckley (1956) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). Illustrated. 544 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Biography, history Time: 1635-1719 Locale: France; the Caribbean Buckley recounts the life of the morganatic wife of Louis XIV of France in a broad historical context, elucidating the role played by Madame de Maintenon in the king’s life and also providing insights into life at all social levels in seventeenth century France Principal personages: Francoise d’Aubignac, Madame de Maintenon, widow of Paul Scarron, morganatic wife of Louis XIV Sieur Constant d’Aubigné de Surimeau, Françoise’s father, son of Agrippa d’Aubigné Jeanne de Cardilhac d’Aubigné, Françoise’s mother Charles d’Aubigné, Françoise’s brother Benjamin Le Valois, seigneur de Vilette, Francoise’s uncle, a Protestant Louise Le Valois, Françoise’s aunt Philippe Le Valois, comte de Mursay, Françoise’s cousin and friend Madame de Neuillant, a baroness who took Françoise to Paris Paul Scarron, a satiric writer, Françoise’s first husband Madeleine de Scudéry, a writer, salonnière, and friend of Francoise Ninon de Lenclos, a courtesan and friend of Françoise Athénais, Madame de Montespan, acknowledged mistress of Louis XIV Marquis de Villarceaux, lover of Françoise for a very brief time Père François Gobelin, Françosie’s confessor Mignon, duc de Maine, d’Aubigné’s favorite among Louis XIV’s illegitimate children Louis XIV, also known as the Sun King, Francoise’s second husband and king of France, 1643-1715

In The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d’Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon, Veronica Buckley combines a biography of Françoise d’Aubigné with a comprehensive presentation of the political, social, economic, religious, military, and cultural history of seventeenth century France. Françoise d’Aubigné’s life was so interwoven with every aspect of the seventeenth century that her biography is the biography of seventeenth century France, if the term biography may be applied to a country during a par-

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ticular period. Born in 1635 and living until 1719, she lived through the major events and Veronica Buckley is the author of changes of the century. Through her grandfa- Christina, Queen of Sweden: The ther Agrippa d’Aubigné, a Calvinist poet and Restless Life of a European Eccentric satirical writer, and her father Constant, her (2004), which was chosen by The life was also intimately linked to the early Telegraph as one of the twenty best nonfiction books of 2004. The Secret years of the century. By including detailed history of the vari- Wife of Louis XIV is her second book. ous events of the time, Buckley recounts Françoise d’Aubigné’s life in context and makes it understandable. Her inclusion of detailed accounts of the Fronde, of the West Indies Company, of the machinations of Colbert and Louvois, of political maneuvering by the European dynasties, of the salons, and of court ritual place the biography of an exceptional woman living in a very precise time and place. Her lucid portrayal of d’Aubigné’s role in Louis XIV’s life once she had become Madame de Maintenon and his morganatic wife does much to exonerate her in relation to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the stifling piety of the court during the last years of Louis’s reign. Buckley presents d’Aubigné’s life in two parts. The first chapters of the book recount her family history, her impoverished childhood and adolescence, her arrival in Paris and success in becoming part of the intellectual salon society, and her involvement with Louis XIV as governess of his illegitimate children. The second part portrays her life with Louis XIV. Buckley begins the biography with a brief prologue announcing the birth of Louis XIV and that of Françoise d’Aubigné. The former was born in a palace near Paris, the latter in a prison cell in western France. This prologue immediately makes readers aware of the gulf separating Louis XIV and Françoise d’Aubigné and sets the tone for the tale of an incredible rise in society by a very determined woman. Buckley then devotes the majority of her first three chapters to the situation and activities of d’Aubigné’s parents, her Protestant aunt and uncle, the Le Vilettes at Mursay, and her exiled grandfather Agrippa d’Aubigné. During this time, the young Françoise d’Aubigné lived first with her mother, sometimes on the charity of others, then at Mursay and eventually in convents in Paris. Unlike her grandfather, Françoise’s father, Constant d’Aubigné, was an unreformable scoundrel who, once released from the prison where his daughter was born, became involved in schemes to make a fortune in the West Indies. He sailed to the West Indies with his family and, leaving his wife and children to fend for themselves, returned to France. There, disinherited by Agrippa d’Aubigné and involved in fradulent schemes, he was soon forced to flee and disappeared from Françoise’s life. Buckley emphasizes the uneven life that d’Aubigné experienced. Her mother Jeanne de Cardhilac, embittered by the poverty and problems caused her by her husband, was harsh and unloving toward her daughter to the point of abuse. She eventually returned to France with her children and left her daughter at Mursay, where life was quiet, gentle, and idyllic. Françoise was shifted between the relaxed ambiance of

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her Protestant aunt and uncle’s home and the regimented life of the convents. Taken ill in the Ursuline convent, she was befriended by one of the nuns, who helped the young woman make the transition to Catholicism, the dominant religion of France. In these early chapters of d’Aubigné’s formative years, Buckley emphasizes how she developed into a compassionate yet self-protecting individual and learned carefully to evaluate her situations and to profit from them. Buckley never portrays her as a cold, ruthless opportunist but rather as an individual who was ready to benefit from the opportunities offered to her. Buckley further develops these aspects of d’Aubigné’s character in the chapters dealing with her introduction into Parisian society and in her relationship with Paul Scarron, a deformed satirical poet. Having been taken to Paris by her mother’s friend Madame de Neuillant, d’Aubigné was taken to Scarron’s salon. A written correspondence soon developed between the two. Eventually, Scarron presented her with an offer of either a convent dowry or marriage. Although Scarron was dreadfully deformed and much older, d’Aubigné readily perceived the advantages of marriage and accepted. Although she saw the marriage as a means of securing a good reputation, comfortable living conditions, and a place in society, she also esteemed Scarron and devoted herself to caring for him until his death. In the chapters devoted to Scarron’s salon and d’Aubigné’s widowhood after his death, Buckley presents a panorama of the seventeenth century social milieu frequented by the nobility, the wealthy, intellectuals, and artists. D’Aubigné counted among her friends the writer Madeleine de Scudéry; the courtesan Ninon de Lenclos; the wife of Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV’s minister of finance; and Athénais de Montespan, the king’s mistress. In this section, Buckley also depicts d’Aubigné’s intense concern for her reputation and her need to be admired and respected, as well as her intense love of children. She provides numerous quotations from d’Aubigné’s letters to her director of conscience, Père François Gobelin, in which she not only asks for religious guidance but also evinces her focus on the importance of maintaining a good reputation. Only for a few brief months during this period did d’Aubigné become involved with a lover. Encouraged by Ninon de Lenclos, she spent a brief time in the country with the Marquis de Villarceaux, with whom she had fallen in love. Back in Paris, d’Aubigné soon saw her life change from that of a carefree widow to that of the governess of the illegitimate children of the king and Athénais. Always fond of children , she loved her charges as her own, especially Mignon. She also began to provide for other children and, for the rest of her life, took an intense interest in the children of her relatives. She was always working to better their futures through her influence. Her concern for children, especially for young girls of noble but impoverished families such as her own, resulted in her founding of Saint-Cyr to aid such girls. Buckley devotes a considerable amount of the final chapters of the book to a detailed account of d’Aubigné’s efforts and difficulties in establishing Saint-Cyr. The final chapters of the book also recount the relationship of d’Aubigné, then Madame de Maintenon, with Louis XIV. Having moved to the court, she soon became the friend and confidant of the king, with whom she fell in love. Since her lack

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of royal blood prohibited her from being recognized as queen, she became Louis’s morganatic wife. In these chapters, Buckley elucidates the role that d’Aubigné played in the life of the king but she also presents strong and convincing evidence that Louis was still ruling as an absolute monarch and was not influenced by d’Aubigné in matters of state. D’Aubigné’s major concern in regard to the king was to save his soul by turning him away from his wanton, illicit sexual life. In this she succeeded, as Louis XIV remained faithful to her until his death. Buckley points out that it was the king, wishing to secure his absolute power, and not d’Aubigné who insisted upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which had given Protestants the right to practice their religion without restriction or persecution. She emphasizes that d’Aubigné, with her dual background of Catholicism and Protestantism, found one faith as acceptable to God as the other. However, in view of the king’s determination, she encouraged her family to convert and even kidnapped several of the children in order to assure their conversion. For her, conversion was the only reasonable path to follow in a country where being a Protestant would close all avenues of advancement. Buckley consistently portrays d’Aubigné as a compassionate yet practical individual who possessed the self-control necessary to maintain her reputation and rise from begging in the streets of Paris to become the beloved wife of Louis XIV. Buckley includes two family trees, a number of illustrations, and a comprehensive bibliography, as well as a very useful index that enables readers quickly to find the many personages and events portrayed in the work. The first family tree is that of the Bourbons, including the illegitimate children of Louis XIV. The second one traces the d’Aubigné family. These two family trees assist readers in avoiding confusion in regard to the large number of individuals included in the text, many of whom had or inherited the same name or title. The many footnotes for each chapter, numbering 428 for the entire work, attest to Buckley’s attention to detail and concern accurately to portray the personages in her work. The Secret Wife of Louis XIV has been well received and praised for the most part. Before its publication, Buckley discovered that she had mistaken a pastiched secret journal written by François Bluche in 1998 for the authentic writing of Louis XIV about his private life. As soon as the discovery was made, Buckley quickly admitted her error. The accounts and references from the journal were expurgated from the text, which was rewritten. There has been some negative response to the biography: A few critics have felt that it is more a history than a biography, and at least one critic has proposed that Buckley at times recounts what she feels d’Aubigné felt or meant, rather than d’Aubigné’s actual feelings or words. However, the biography has received far more praise than criticism and has been recognized as an exceptionally useful work both for understanding Françoise d’Aubigné’s life and importance in the seventeenth century and for comprehending the social, political, economic and religious complexity of the period. Shawncey Webb

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Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 2 (September 15, 2009): 20. The Economist 388, no. 8590 (July 26, 2008): 96. Library Journal 134, no. 12 (July 1, 2009): 104. The New York Times Book Review, September 6, 2009, p. 8. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 28 (July 13, 2009): 48.

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THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS And Other Poems Author: David R. Slavitt (1935) Publisher: Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge). 69 pp. $50.00; paperback $17.95 Type of work: Poetry In a direct and efficient poetic style, employing various forms, learned allusions, and translations, the author comments wisely and wittily on sleep, Yiddishisms, his fiftieth Yale reunion, the seven deadly sins, the phoenix, and other topics David R. Slavitt’s poetry does not employ rich sensuous imagery or musical sounds. Instead, Slavitt has developed a clear, unadorned, workmanlike style close to prose. One might say of him, as Matthew Arnold said of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, that, even when he writes in verse, Slavitt is a classic of prose. Indeed, there is some justice in comparing Slavitt to the neoclassic poets Dryden and Pope. Just as they represented an age of prose and reason, according to Arnold, so Slavitt’s rationality stands out. Although not as sharply satirical as Dryden and Pope, Slavitt does indulge in wit and humor. Most of all, in his allusions and translations, Slavitt looks back to classical Greek and Roman times as did Pope and Dryden. In fact, Slavitt has published more volumes of classical translations of poetry and drama than he has of his own poetry. A prolific author, Slavitt has produced more than eighty volumes, including novels, essays, translations from modern languages, and even a memoir of his 2004 run for the Massachusetts state legislature titled Blue State Blues: How a Cranky Conservative Launched a Campaign and Found Himself the Liberal Candidate (and Still Lost) (2006). The fact that he has written so voluminously and produced so many translations might help explain Slavitt’s poetic style. It is a style that can be written quickly, smoothly, and efficiently. Whatever the ease with which Slavitt writes, his poetry has its attractions, even if those attractions are not as apparent in the beginning and ending of The Seven Deadly Sins as they are throughout most of the rest of the collection. It perhaps takes a confident poet to begin his collection with “Sleep Set: A Sonnet Sequence” and end it with translations of minor literary relics from French, Latin, and Sanskrit. Even the relatively dull beginning and ending say a lot about the volume as a whole. The fourteen-sonnet sequence “Sleep Set” focuses on the speaker’s troubles falling asleep and then, once asleep, on the nightmares that waken him. The sonnets reveal a prime candidate for a sleep apnea study who finds relief in daytime naps that bring “the unsought visit of that god you pray for/ so fervently at night.” More generally, the sonnet sequence reveals the speaker’s, presumably the poet’s, underlying anxieties about the contingencies of life.

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The poet’s anxieties that come out during sleep connect with other poems in the collection and suggest a floating paranoia. Two poems, for example, concern the Holocaust. “What Is Poetry About?” includes a visit to Auschwitz, where the poet recalls a friend who survived the Nazi concentration camp there by eating grass. “Acknowledgment,” written “for G. G., obit 2006,” recalls another person who survived concentration camp “selections” by “marching around/ naked . . . trying to look as though/ she were still healthy. . . .” “Gator” is about a Florida woman who takes a walk and perishes from an alligator attack, which confirms “that our first/ fears were justified when we ventured down/ from the trees. . . .” “Herald” announces forthrightly that “Empires shudder/ and fall, and any yutz can be the occasion.” “Glimpse,” about a “garden hose” mistaken for a “menacing serpent,” sums up the whole phenomenon: Such Shakespearean “misprisions” or Wordsworthian “intimations of otherness” develop

David R. Slavitt is a prolific poet, novelist, translator, and nonfiction writer who has published more than eighty volumes. His other poetry collections include Change of Address: Poems, New and Selected (2005) and William Henry Harrison, and Other Poems (2006).

a keener awareness of danger that lurks not there where we thought but just out of sight and that we’ve avoided if only by blind luck we understand we cannot trust.

Like sleep apnea, such undefined anxieties tend to accompany old age, of whose advances the poet is only too well aware. In “Fog,” Slavitt imagines aging as a “dense fog” that lifts to expose “on every side the dangerous chasms” then closes in again: “It was no dream but the waking truth of aging.” “Acknowledgment” recognizes that “In time, we are all selected [for death]. . . .” At their deepest level, then, the sleep sonnets are premonitions of death, just as the final sonnet, “Waking,” celebrates the achievement of “heavy protesting flesh” in getting up each morning: “each day’s triumph, however unlikely, is cause/ in a losing war for modest celebration. . . .” Slavitt offers few consolations for the contingencies of life and the certainty of death. He himself seems to find little consolation, for example, in religion. Although he refers to the Torah, to names of angels, and to God, these appear to represent more of a cultural background than a strong belief system. In poems such as “Candle,” “Prayers,” and “Tabernacle,” Slavitt indicates his inability to pray and God’s withdrawal. He does, however, find comfort in his spouse as he touches her in bed (“Touch”) and delight as he watches her blurred form in the shower (“Ave Verum Corpus”). The dull but erudite translations that conclude The Seven Deadly Sins, plus the book’s title, suggest another place where Slavitt finds consolation. The translations are of “Après Les Vents, Après Le Triste Orage” (“After the winds, after the pitiless storms . . . ”) by Jean-Antoine de Baïf (1532-1589); “The Six Elegies of Sulpicia” (first century b.c.e.); “The Hermit and the Mouse” (from the Hitopadesa; twelfth cen-

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tury b.c.e.); and “The Phoenix” by Lactantius (c. 240-c. 320). From these translations, the title The Seven Deadly Sins, and numerous other references, it is clear that Slavitt deeply enjoys traditional legends, fables, and myths. Jean-Antoine de Baïf’s poem opens with an ancient formula that Geoffrey Chaucer used to begin The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400). After the fierce winds and rains comes the pleasant spring. The poem depicts graces, satyrs, and other mythical creatures celebrating the season, but the poem’s sad speaker cannot participate because his mood depends on the whims of his cruel mistress. There is something consoling about the poem’s traditional elements despite their triteness. More lively are “The Six Elegies of Sulpicia,” (outspoken views of a young Roman maiden about her love life) and the Sanskrit animal fable “The Hermit and the Mouse.” Even the long-winded “The Phoenix,” with its tedious repetitions and set descriptions of the mythical bird, finally offers some consolation with its theme of rebirth. In addition to enjoying the traditional satisfactions of legends, fables, and myths, Slavitt puts them to typical postmodern use by giving them some deconstructions, twists, and reinterpretations. “The Pussycat Poem” deconstructs a child’s sweet nursery rhyme about his loving cat to prove that “those tetchy beasts” instead exemplify “a nature/ that isn’t always fair. . . .” A myth from Aelian (c. 175-c.235), about a baby dogfish that supposedly returns to the womb when endangered then reemerges when safe, is used in “The Dogfish” to comment on contemporary existence: “The wails of our reluctant newborns are dreadful,/ but for these, who are born again, how much worse must it be?” “A Consolation for Rigoletto,” on the death of the title character’s daughter in the famed opera, argues that she “disobeyed you,” “was a slut,” and “was a melodramatic fool”: “If Sparafucile hadn’t killed her, you/ would have been right to do the job yourself.” In “Beast,” Beauty is “the boytoy she [‘some old woman’] has picked up. . . .” Perhaps the most obvious poem of this sort is “A Tale of Love and Death (Or the Lessons of Literature),” which comments on a story from Michel Eyquem de Montaigne about a girl who, because an adoring young soldier seriously romances her, becomes discombobulated and twice attempts suicide: One would think she’d have gone along, for men in the taverns would say she was fun and an easy lay. And that’s where the young man went wrong, letting her know what a treasure he thought she was and had. This confused her . . . .

Some of these funny poems seem to parody postmodern revisionist tendencies of feminists, historians, and others. The collection’s title poems fit into this humorous pattern. Each of the seven deadly sins—Pride, Anger, Avarice, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, and Sloth—delivers a self-serving dramatic monologue that revises traditional views. As they tell it, the sins have simply been misunderstood throughout history, called ugly names, and given a bad reputation: Each of them, in reality, is a kind of virtue in

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disguise and a benefit to humankind. Among other revisionist claims, Pride becomes self-esteem, Anger becomes a fighter against injustice, Avarice becomes the basis of material prosperity, Envy becomes the basis of social equality, Lust becomes a divinely-blessed natural instinct, Gluttony becomes a misunderstood need for love, and Sloth becomes a true recognition of life’s meaninglessness. Satirically embodying the postmodern mentality, sensibility, and idiom, Slavitt’s version of the seven deadly sins captures the speech of politicians, academic experts, talking heads, and other perpetrators. Other fine poems in the collection include “Nu, a Sestina,” “What Is Poetry About?” and “Fiftieth-Reunion Poem.” “Nu, a Sestina” is a humorous poem that plays with the Yiddish words “schmooze,” “maven,” “bagel,” “mensch,” “tush,” and “chutzpah” in the line-end positions. “What Is Poetry About?” plays with poetry’s ability to connect disparate subjects through a word-association game involving a lost pillbox, psychiatrists, Nebuchadnezzar’s stolen vessels, a visit to Auschwitz, cats, references to family and friends, and the word “grass.” “Fiftieth-Reunion Poem” reminisces about the June, 2006, reunion of Slavitt’s Yale University class, drawing together the themes of old age and the new revisionism. Slavitt feels that he and his clubby, all-male classmates would not get into the new Yale with its diversity, its women, and its economist president. He consoles himself that there are some things at Yale that do not change: Taste, cultivation, learning are never secure but here still enjoy lip service, and from time to time, at night, in some lighted window you can see from a quad looking up, in that room that was once ours many years ago, that something goes on that God and country need, now more than ever.

The word “that” seems to be overused here, perhaps as a result of Slavitt getting carried away by God, country, and Yale. Slavitt has few such lapses of style in The Seven Deadly Sins, despite writing in a spare poetic style that comes close to prose. Even when he uses traditional forms such as the sonnet, the quatrain, the sestina, terza rima, or couplets, Slavitt pays little attention to meter and only slightly more to rhyme (used mainly in humorous poems and translations). The looseness of his traditional forms is typical of contemporary American poetry, which has largely gone in the direction of free verse. Slavitt writes in free verse also, but he makes frequent use of traditional forms, however loosely. Roughly half of the poems in The Seven Deadly Sins, although they lack rhyme and meter, fall into the loose fourteen-line sonnet form (usually an octet followed by a sestet), which appears to offer a convenient unit of thought for Slavitt. Because of his efficient style, his variety of forms, and his wide knowledge reaching all the way back to classical times, Slavitt has an impressive range as a poet. Like most leading contemporary poets, he has also had a long life in which to develop both his style and his range. His translations of classical literature, use of traditional forms, and clarity might make him seem a bit old-fashioned, but he can also strike a post-

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modern note with the best. Slavitt writes with a wit and urbanity that should make Yale proud. Harold Branam

Review Source Booklist 105, no. 12 (February 15, 2009): 17.

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SHOP CLASS AS SOULCRAFT An Inquiry into the Value of Work Author: Matthew B. Crawford Publisher: Penguin Press (New York). 256 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Essays, philosophy Crawford, a practicing motorcycle mechanic and professional philosopher, reflects on the epistemological status and social importance of skilled work performed in small shops, garages, and plants—places where a commitment to practical excellence makes possible both authentic fellowship and self-reliance. Three explanations suggest themselves as to why the release of Shop Class as Soulcraft has been greeted with such excitement and praise. First, the book provides the pleasure of reading challenging philosophy in the context of several kinds of narrative: the story of Crawford’s vocational crisis and its eccentric resolution; the background narrative of the survival of places where work remains a craft even in an era of outsourced mass production and the reign of office culture; bizarre war stories from grimy motorcycle garages and speed shops; and intricate accounts of how tough mechanical problems get solved. Second, the book is an interdisciplinary tour de force, engaging such diverse subjects as the history of American higher education, personnel management theory, the subprime mortgage crisis, Aristotle’s account of happiness, Taylorization, occupational prestige, and the nature of creativity. Third, the book carries with it an air of needing to be written. As Crawford correctly says, he is attempting to do for manual labor what Michael Pollan did for local food and Wendell Berry did for the meaning of agricultural land. Crawford reveals information about himself only occasionally and then in fragments, thereby adding significant narrative tension to his book. By the end, if one has read carefully, an unusual portrait emerges. In an endnote to the first chapter, Crawford writes: My circumstances were a bit unusual—I lived in a commune from age nine to fifteen. Because the group picked up and moved every six months, there was constant renovation work on whatever dilapidated hotel we currently occupied. The electrical crew needed somebody small to fit into tight crawl spaces and drafted me.

He thus became a skilled electrician, and his reflections on this trade play an important role in his argument. In the concluding chapter, for example, he includes a vignette that begins: “When I was sixteen, I traveled to India by myself.” At first, the thronging, stinking city repelled him, but the sight of Indian workers preparing to pull wire through a conduit allows him a foothold in the chaos: “The oppressive sense that I was a foreigner among foreigners evaporated as I projected myself imaginatively

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into their day, into this very moment.” His feeling of solidarity with these laborers had a Matthew B. Crawford is a mechanic, a specificity that, he later realized, had ethical contributing editor to The New significance, because it was so much denser Atlantis, and a fellow at the University than abstract ideas of “humanity” or “univer- of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. sal obligation.” Other details about Crawford’s life gradually surface over the course of his essays. His father, Frank S. Crawford, Jr., was a physicist at the University of California. Matthew attended Berkeley High School and studied physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also had his own electrician business. Meanwhile, the charms of automobile and motorcycle mechanics continued to pull at him. After completing a master’s degree in the history of political philosophy at the University of Chicago, Crawford found employment in Silicon Valley as a writer of abstracts for the Ziff Corporation, owner of the Info-Trac indexing service. He also taught high school for a time. Once his Ph.D. work at Chicago was finished, Craford received a fellowship to turn his dissertation into a book. Despairing of finding a teaching position and bored with his editing job, he turned back to fixing and restoring motorcycles. For a year, he headed a think tank in Washington, D.C., whose task was to shape the results of climate-change research to fit the needs of its sponsors. Put off by that enterprise, he opened Shockoe Moto, a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia. He presently remains there, while also serving as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Shop Class as Soulcraft is dedicated to Crawford’s wife and daughters, as well as to his late father. This latter gesture is curious because the book is full of accounts of quarrels between Crawford and this father, as if to justify his own life path. Frank Crawford commented on particular mechanical problems his son encountered by referencing formulas and deductions from mathematical physics. Matthew could not apply these, however, because the thick, dusty, caked reality of specific repair situations requires a different kind of knowledge. Thus, trying to use Ohm’s Law—which neatly coordinates the relations between voltage, current, and resistance—to coax a spark from a recalcitrant plug only produces frustration. Unlike the physicist, the mechanic must contend with subtle changes in humidity, temperature, and tensile strength, as well as the mistakes of earlier mechanics. More useful for Crawford is “tacit knowledge,” which “seems to consist of recognizing patterns.” Further, “the causal patterns of the ignition problem are mirrored by patterns in his own bodily motions: periodically scratching the sand out of his scalp, or peeling a clammy shirt off his shoulders.” Crawford’s gradual discovery—and naming—of the kind of knowledge and skills appropriate to those who work with their hands becomes the “plot” of Shop Class as Soulcraft, a plot into which the smaller drama of his self-vindication is fitted. Crawford argues that the clean, abstracted logic developed by physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists has developed an imperious and essentially sinister so-

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cial momentum. Common workers are threatened by automation systems based on algorithms—supposedly flawless instruction sets for dispatching finite tasks—that can be applied globally. In the process, the richness of intuitive, personal knowledge is lost. Modern economies are modeled and made amenable to mathematical interpretation and manipulation, but the drive to exploit such models is bound to fail, because reality in fact consists of embedded, particular, and embodied situations, not abstractions. Crawford argues that tacit knowledge—which calls upon evolved, complex layers of experience—is ultimately superior. “Its superiority lies in the fact that it begins with the typical rather than the universal, so it goes more rapidly and directly to particular causes, the kind that actually tend to cause ignition problems.” Crawford effectively illustrates this claim through a discussion of firefighters. If firefighting could be reduced to algorithms, then novices and masters would not differ much from one another. Both could follow a set of instructions that would be valid in all instances of fires. In fact, however, experienced firefighters react in ways that are too complex to articulate because they have built up an incomprehensibly detailed body of knowledge about typical fire scenarios. A firefighter seems to sense danger almost before it presents itself and makes decisions not always prescribed in instruction manuals. According to Crawford, the great pathos of contemporary society is that many occupations resemble firefighting in this feature but the practitioners of these occupations can find no good way to explain what is involved in them. Thus, the firefighter “is not able to give an account of himself to the larger society.” He is therefore threatened by those who wish to reduce his work to a series of time-and-motion studies in order to make it available to cheaper, less skilled labor. Shop Class as Soulcraft represents an extended working out of this central epistemological insight. Its introduction explains that the author’s focus is on manual competence, self-reliance, genuinely useful work, the dignity of trades, the beauty and utility of good tools, and the satisfactions of local and personal knowledge. Crawford critiques manufacturers for overcomplicating machines, deliberately obscuring their operational logics. He also targets “virtual work” and the allure of high technology. He presents the sorts of knowledge required in automobile and motorcycle repair—as well as carpentry, wiring, and other construction-related skills—as having their own dignity. The book also laments the fact that modern workers rarely have the experience of “individual agency”—that is, mastery and practical judgment combined in the workplace. In “A Brief Case for the Useful Arts,” Crawford notes that while shop programs in high schools are closing, a shortage of skilled tradesmen exists. Reflecting on his own work as an electrician, he wonders why others do not flock to a vocation that is both well-paid and satisfying. Electricians get to view an end product of their labor that is both useful and beautiful (Crawford admiringly pictures elegantly bent arrays of conduit). Meanwhile, far too many Americans labor in fields where few clear, objective outcomes measure the quality of their work. In making this claim, Crawford has in mind the world of cubicles, where fitting into “corporate culture” becomes paramount. When Americans produced “durable objects of use,” they were less needy of

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campaigns for self-esteem. The change to office work and sales has meant that fewer people struggle with the recalcitrance of machines. Such struggles, Crawford insists, can be characterologically significant for, in learning to think about what the machine requires, one must shed the narcissism promoted by popular culture. Such comments on machines indicate that Crawford is no Luddite. While reluctant to move toward public policy recommendations, Crawford does adumbrate a kind of ideal in his final chapter, “Work, Leisure, and Full Engagement.” Its guiding principle is the same as that proposed in the 1980’s by the celebrated neoAristotelian Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue (1981). Similarly alarmed by the rise of the therapist and the manager as dominant figures in the arena of work, MacIntyre reminded readers of a concept of happiness that is not based on ever-increasing consumption. What people actually seek in work, he argued, is an active involvement in significant practices, the carrying out of which require the mastery of skills and insights that have a craft nature. Productive practices—firefighting would qualify as an example—fully engage people’s capacity for learning and place them in the company of skilled coparticipants. The pleasures of such difficult work are internal to the work itself and are not based on external compensations for labor. MacIntyre argues that virtues are the qualities necessary to make a given cooperative productive practice possible. Crawford’s critique of the current discussion of “compensation” for corporate leaders illustrates his appreciative borrowing from MacIntyre. When work is “toil,” then receiving “compensation” for it is just, he argues. However, when work is essentially empty, arid, and without truly useful results, workers become entirely focused on what the “reward structure” will yield for the enrichment of leisure time. Thus, the young executive lives for the eco-tourist trip to Costa Rica or the summiting of Everest. In contrast, the motorcycle mechanic loves going to work because both the process of work and its product can approach true excellence. For such mechanics, good problems elicit an increase in practical wisdom, as well as bonds of friendship with coworkers and customers. A fair income is necessary, but “rising incomes” alone cannot be made the measure of a society’s success. For Crawford, then, the truly good political economy will replicate—on a vast series of different levels—the experiences available in the mechanic’s shop. Crawford refers to his ideal as a “progressive republican one” that “insists on the permanent, local viability of what is best in human beings.” Shop Class as Soulcraft invites rereading and study. Even those readers who are not philosophically inclined may find themselves returning to the text. Crawford’s “mechanical adventures” are narrated in a wonderfully precise style that evokes both Walker Percy and Hunter S. Thompson. The occasional illustrations by Thomas Van Auken supply additional charm. “The Contradictions of the Cubicle” (chapter 6) is a funny and poignant look at Crawford’s efforts to write informative, precise abstracts of dense scientific articles for managers who care more for quantity than accuracy. Finally, the author’s enthusiasm for motorcycles is so excellently communicated that readers who might otherwise be horrified will get, at the very least, a different point of view. “People who ride motorcycles have gotten something right,” exults Crawford,

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“and I want to put myself in the service of it, this thing that we do, this kingly sport that is like war made beautiful.” Leslie E. Gerber

Review Sources Library Journal 134, no. 8 (May 1, 2009): 94. The New York Times Book Review, June 7, 2009, p. 15. The New Yorker 85, no. 18 (June 22, 2009): 83-87. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 16 (April 20, 2009): 45. Time 173, no. 22 (June 8, 2009): 18. The Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2009, p. A19.

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A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN Author: Kate Walbert (1961) Publisher: Charles Scribner’s Sons (New York). 237 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1880-2007 Locale: England; United States Five generations of women descended from a single Anglo-American family struggle in this novel to define and understand their lives in a gendered minefield whose contours change but whose traps remain Principal characters: Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a suffragist whose fatal hunger strike reverberates among her heirs Evelyn Charlotte Townsend, Dorothy’s daughter, who lives out her mother’s academic dream at the expense of her personal life Thomas Francis Townsend, Dorothy’s musically gifted son Stephen Pope, Evelyn’s gentleman friend, who provides a safe haven upon her arrival in New York and for decades afterward Dorothy Townsend Barrett, Thomas’s only child, who in her seventies erupts in rage at the personal cost of her traditional life Charles Barrett, a World War II veteran and Dorothy’s husband Caroline Townsend Barrett Deel, the older Barrett daughter, a career woman and divorcé caught between her rebellious mother and teenage daughter Liz Barrett, Caroline’s younger sister, whose marriage, young children, and work and social life compromise her artistic aspirations Dorothy (Dora) Barrett-Deel, Caroline’s daugher, a selfproclaimed revolutionary

Kate Walbert’s third novel, A Short History of Women, explores “the Woman Question” as it shapes five generations of an Anglo-American family between 1880 and 2007. Walbert has said that her characters repeatedly find themselves with “new freedoms” but continue “spinning their wheels a bit” as they find they “have inherited a world that’s not what they expected at all.” The dramatic event resonating across their lives involves Dorothy Trevor Townsend, whose adolescent daughter Evelyn announces at the start of the novel (in a sentence Walbert has identified as the work’s genesis), “Mum starved herself for suffrage.” While the intervening years have brought markedly greater female opportunity to both sides of the Atlantic, Walbert’s contemporary characters continue to wrestle with the meaning of their individual choices across a century when wars repeatedly defeat the dream of feminist-driven pacifism. What begins as a gendered quandary becomes, in the words of Townsend’s great-granddaughter, “a kind of postmodern, existential question no one bothers to ask anymore.”

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Walbert skillfully presents this saga in six distinctive voices across fifteen interlocking segments (some only one page long) that generally follow a forward temporal momentum. For most of the characters, chronological disjunctions occur within chapters and recall Virginia Woolf’s associational suffusion of the narrative present with memory-laden reflec tion. Indeed, Woolf’s influence informs the novel’s characterizations, themes, and fluidly poetic style. In the case of Townsend herself, information about her life surfaces throughout the novel in nonlinear increments: One learns of her self-willed death at age thirty-four long before discovering that, a decade earlier, she had been refused a degree at Cambridge University, despite completing the appropriate coursework, because the “girls” of the Girton women’s annex received only “certificates” for their effort. One-third of the chapters belong to Dorothy and gradually reveal how she spends her entire adult life starving from a failure to enter and change history. Condescended to by male peers whose intellectual pretensions she can easily deflate but does not, chastised by a mother who expects her to live within the feminine class ideal into which she was born, abandoned by a globe-trotting civil-servant husband, she preaches genteel virtues to her children but boldly displays her lavender suffragist sash and resumes a college-era love affair with a Conservative British member of Parliament. On the same autumn day in 1914 when she decides to stop eating, she earlier listens to a male “expert” deliver “A Short History of Women,” in which he quotes Havelock Ellis: “Every inaptitude of Woman will be in its time accompanied by some compensatory attitude ‘even if it has not itself yet developed into an advantageous character.’” Specifically, the speaker explains, the long-awaited female ballot will offer additional support to men as they pursue “incontrovertible necessities” such as the Great War, then in its early stages. For Dorothy, Europe’s descent into unprecedented militarized violence represents a catastrophe for the civilization it is supposed to further. Not only has it recast suffrage as a dangerous diversion from the war effort but it also demands that women enthusiastically yield their sons to the carnage. Outraged by the news that suffrage will not free women from the role of comforters-in-chief enabling such self-annihilation, she concludes she can no longer play the part—not for the empire and not even for her own children. She convinces herself that she is giving her life for her daughter and in order to “make something happen,” but Evelyn’s final image of Dorothy is as an emaciated body “curved into a singular question.” The novel’s framing first-person sensibility belongs to Evelyn Townsend, whose opening chapter records her mother’s death and whose closing chapter, set some seventy years later, concedes the approach of her own death. By then, she has in every way fulfilled her mother’s intellectual ambitions: She has secured a Ph.D. in chemistry and crafted a successful academic career at her alma mater, Barnard College.

Kate Walbert is the author of Where She Went (1998), The Gardens of Kyoto (2002), and Our Kind (2004). She has written three plays and been published in the Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Best American Short Stories.

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Evelyn remains deeply wounded, however, by Dorothy’s priorities, which led to her placement in a hardscrabble British boarding school while her younger brother Thomas was sent to live with relatives in San Francisco. Though carrying with her in 1919 the postage stamp of her mother issued by the British government once suffrage was granted, Evelyn regards Dorothy’s posthumous lionization wryly and refuses to acknowledge their kinship, determined to “start from nothing” as “no one’s daughter.” She comes to embody female self-denial of another kind, for she eschews emotional commitments, choosing a chaste friendship with an older man rather than the family that likely would have ended her career. Instead, she mentors succeeding waves of college women who hopefully look toward a fuller range of options than her life represents. Moments after privately conceding in old age that “It only goes so far, your work,” Evelyn decides against responding to a letter from Thomas’s only child—also named Dorothy—who is trying to find the aunt she only recently learned existed. From that letter, she also discovers that Thomas has seemingly suffered the deeper wound from losing their mother: Clubfooted at birth and pampered by Dorothy accordingly, he initially attained both career and family in California before losing both, succumbing to alcoholism while still in his forties. One of Walbert’s continuing motifs involves the seismic emotional shocks delivered to men when women cease listening to them. The niece whom Evelyn repudiates in 1985 is then fifty-five years old and undergoing one of a series of attempts to address the vague unease she has experienced throughout her adult life. Though given fewer chapters than either of her precursors, Dorothy Townsend Barrett nonetheless provides the novel’s contemporary touchstone, having experienced “the Woman Question” through the “feminine mystique” of the 1950’s, the Second Wave feminism of the 1970’s, and the Third Wave still seeking to define itself in the twenty-first century. Married at nineteen to a veteran of the second “great war” (a kind, intellectual man himself severely damaged by brutal captivity in the Pacific), she bears three children whom they successfully raise to adulthood. All the while, though, she feels herself “a hollow bone.” This Dorothy, a suburban Maryland housewife of seventy-three when she first enters the novel, has already experimented with 1970’s consciousness-raising (later revealed in a satiric scene that captures both the narcissism and the discontent characterizing the middle-class feminine ideal). Thirty years after that experiment, she loses her firstborn, James, to cancer in a year—2001—that delivers other broad shocks to the collective American psyche. By late 2003, she has undertaken her own form of civil disobedience against the newest war in Iraq by violating the ban against photographing the returning caskets of soldiers at Dover Air Force Base. Like her grandmother, whom she has learned about in detail, she feels compelled to “do something,” to make a difference, though she eventually concedes the effort’s futility, not least because the soldiers who apprehend her fail to recognize in her actions a maternal protest against their subordination to the modern war machine. Dorothy’s rebellion continues, however. She has also discovered and identified with Florence Nightingale—not knowing that the first Dorothy also read Cassandra (1928), Nightingale’s plea that women be allowed to pursue meaningful lives in the

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world. On a 2004 cruise with other seniors to the frozen regions off Patagonia, Chile, the modern Dorothy lectures on Nightingale as she decides to divorce her husband, an act that eventually breaks his will to live. In 2007, her chagrined daughters Caroline and Liz discover that her quest for a voice has led Dorothy to launch her own blog, where the few respondents show a disheartening failure to understand her core message. In a novel saturated with female attempts to be heard—and to cease thereby being obliged to listen—the Internet seems both a dream come true and a shapeless, cacophonous void, but in language that reverses her grandmother’s movement toward self-extinction, the seventy-seven-year-old Dorothy proclaims, “I have little left in the way of me, or who I once thought I was. . . . I now value honesty of a particular kind and will . . . accept nothing less of myself.” To her own surprise, her postings become a bridge to her own daughter Caroline after decades of miscomprehension. Caroline and her younger sister Liz offer mirror images of the situation facing women who came of age with Second Wave feminism. Determined to “have it all,” neither woman has accomplished that goal. Caroline has had considerable professional success but at the price of her marriage. Unlike her mother, she resists political commitment as bad for her business career. Her only child, also named Dorothy, has left for Yale, where Caroline was among the first women graduates. Grieving over her empty nest, Caroline unexpectedly engages her mother across the Internet to confess that, like Dorothy, she puzzles over her life with “regret, perhaps, but not, it is bigger than that, more epic . . . weirdly historical: this restlessness, this discontent. You’ve done it wrong again, and you were going to do it perfectly.” In contrast, Manhattanite Liz Barrett, mother of three young children (including male twins conceived using another woman’s eggs), lacks the inclination or energy to engage the questions her mother raises. Indeed, following a wine-soaked afternoon comparing her anxieties in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with those of a new acquaintance during their daughters’ playdate, she freezes at the suggestion they turn this into a regular event. Instead, she retreats into a routine that allows her regular studio time to throw pots—to what end, even she does not seem to know. The Barrett women thus reveal how the quest for an authentic life continues to vex Dorothy Townsend’s descendants. Her great-great-granddaughter, the Yale-bound Dorothy Barrett-Deel, has ironically renamed herself “Dora” in honor of one of Picasso’s famous mistresses, Dora Maar (herself the subject of many cubist fracturings of the female portrait and one of the many women left bereft after the artist’s departure). Dora blithely declares her bisexuality on her Facebook page, along with her namesake’s martyrdom, coyly claiming an affinity: “Color me Revolutionary.” Such mass market self-packaging undercuts the individuality she claims: That still remains to be forged through the decisions ahead. In a work where the fraught motherdaughter dynamic plays a more central role than sex, work, politics, Dora’s yet-to-bewritten story invites tantalizing speculation about what the next episode in this riveting feminist generational saga will bring. Barbara Kitt Seidman

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 15 (April 1, 2009): 22. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 9 (May 1, 2009): 2. Library Journal 134, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 85. The New York Times, June 14, 2009, p. 1. The New York Times Book Review, June 14, 2009, p. 1. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 6 (February 9, 2009): 29. The Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2009, p. A13

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THE SIEGE Author: Ismail Kadare (1936) First published: Kështjella, 1970, in Albania; in revised, definitive form as Les Tambours de la pluie, 1994, in France Translated from the French and Afterword by David Bellos Publisher: Canongate (New York). 328 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The early fifteenth century Locale: Within and around a fortress in Albania A novel describing the siege of an Albanian fortress by invading Ottoman Turks Principal characters: Ugurlu Tursun Pasha, the commander-in-chief, or Pasha, of the Ottoman army Mevla Çelebi, the chronicler of the siege The Quartermaster General, the army’s officer in charge of keeping the invading forces supplied with food and water Tuz Okçan, a young janissary who befriends the chronicler Sadedin, a poet and friend of the chronicler The army astrologer, a figure known only by his title, who befriends the chronicler Saruxha, an engineer responsible for casting cannons Siri Selim, a doctor Giaour, an architect giving technical advice for the siege George Castrioti, an Albanian prince

Ismail Kadare’s The Siege tells of efforts by the Ottoman Empire to take a solitary fortress in Albania. Although the novel is grounded in history, the fortress is not identified. It is as much a symbolic obstacle against the progress of the Ottoman Turks as a factual one. All the same, the sustained, military effort represents a specific conflict: the opening move by the Ottomans in their efforts to occupy the region. The opposing sides are represented by sketchy figures who remain in the background of the novel. On one side is the sultan, who has assigned an experienced commander, Ugurlu Tursun Pasha, to lead into Albania an immense army of some forty thousand soldiers. Opposite the Sultan is a nearly legendary figure whom the Ottomans call Skanderbeg, Albanian prince George Castrioti who has helped prepare the fortress against attack and provides indirect assistance once the attack begins. For the duration of the siege, however, the fortress’s relatively small body of defenders must rely upon their own resources and ingenuity. The English translation of this novel is unusual in not being a translation from the Albanian, the language of its original publication in 1970. After he revised the novel

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in the 1990’s for its republication in France, Ismail Kadare considered the new, French version to be the definitive one. It is from this version that the English version has been translated. Although the novel is penned by an Albanian writer, the character of greatest dramatic power is the Turkish Pasha. The narration reveals his thoughts during war councils, during private moments, and in the thick of battle. His future within the empire’s hierarchy Born in Gjirokaster, Albania, Ismail depends upon his performance during this Kadare has published more than twenty campaign. novels, beginning with Gjenerali i The pasha oversees a body of men repre- ushtrisë së vdekur (1963; The General senting a variety of different fighting forces, of the Dead Army, 1971). He won the incorporating infantry, cavalry, swordsmen, inaugural Man Booker International the elite janissaries, and the serden geçti, who Prize in 2005 and the Cino Del Duco are referred to as the “soldiers of death.” His World Prize in 1992. Since 1990, he army also includes units made up of Kurd- has lived in France. ish, Persian, Tartar, and Caucasian soldiers, among others. It benefits, moreover, from advanced technology, such as the mortars and cannons being cast by the engineer Saruxha. The single most important weapon in the pasha’s arsenal is the giant cannon, being cast in a size unprecedented in military history. “An earthquake will sound like a lullaby next to their terrible thunder,” the engineer predicts while overseeing the casting operations, which have been set up on the battleground itself. The weight given to these engines of war by the various military commanders reemphasizes their importance. In one of many moments that seem intended to disrupt the fifteenth century historical narrative and that give it resonance with historical developments in the twentieth century, Saruxha reveals that he learned his craft from a master engineer who refused to do what Saruxha is doing. “He refused to make cannon of larger calibre,” Saruxha states, when explaining his teacher’s fall from favor. He claimed it was impossible, but in fact, as he told me, he didn’t want to do it. If we make them even bigger, he would say, then the cannon will become a terrible scourge that will decimate the human race. The monster has come into the world, he said by way of explanation, and we can’t put it back where it came from.

As the casting nears completion, the pasha and his officers decide on an immediate attack. In so doing, they are acting on the advice of the army astrologer and against the expert advice of Saruxha, whose work is not quite finished. The Ottoman attack upon the fortress goes ahead, and it is concentrated and brutal. Not all goes according to plan, however, as the Christian Albanians mount a spirited defense, causing tremen-

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dous Ottoman casualties. The pasha is forced to pull back his forces by nightfall. The failure of this initial assault, which occurs in mid-June, extends the length of the siege for the duration of the summer. Although the pasha, as one of several viewpoint characters, is the most fully realized figure in Kadare’s novel, an equally important role is played by a low-ranking individual named Mevla Çelebi. The official chronicler for the military campaign, his task is to memorialize the siege in epic form. Although the chronicler is not allowed to be present at the councils of war, he is befriended by the Quartermaster General, who provides Çelebi, and through him readers, with a great deal of privileged information about the campaign. The Quartermaster General also discusses the difficulties he faces in maintaining food supplies for the immense army. By happenstance, during the hectic festivities that take place on the eve of the first attack, Çelebi becomes friends with a varied trio: a janissary, a poet, and the army astrologer. As the chronicler’s understanding of the campaign deepens, his idealized understanding of both the Ottoman Empire’s history and its future is gradually undermined. In part, the direct experience of witnessing the army’s setbacks during the siege is disillusioning. Just as powerful, however, are the insights Çelebi gains from considering the Quartermaster General’s words. The chronicler soon finds that his newfound circle of friends is suffering gradual attrition. The poet, Sadedin, is blinded during the ferocious initial assault on the fortress. The astrologer, held to account for the assault’s failure, is assigned to a digging crew undermining the fortress walls and ultimately meets his end in the underground darkness. The janissary, Tuz Okçan, is bitten by one of the diseased rats the Turks release into the fortress during one of their final, desperate efforts to breach the castle walls. Kadare gives careful attention to the structure of the Ottoman military and bureaucracy, and he presents realistic evocations of everday life during the military campaign: Crates of bronze pieces, cauldrons, innumerable sacks bursting with victuals, gourds of oil and honey, fat cartons full of all kinds of equipment, iron bars, stakes, forks, hempen ropes with hooks on their ends, clubs, whetstones, bags of sulphur, and a whole array of metal tools he could not even name—all now came to rest in growing piles on the ground.

The author also grounds the narrative with unflinching descriptions of the toils of the soldier’s life and the horrors of warfare. Likewise reinforcing the novel’s historical nature are short passages placed between the longer, detailed chapters describing Turkish efforts to capture the fortress. These short sections, from the viewpoint of the beseiged Christians, are printed in italics and are first-person, present-tense accounts, representing journal entries written during the siege. These historical elements are countered, to some degree, by the appearance of more contemporary concerns, ideas, and notions. Translator David Bellos, in his afterword to the book, notes that Kadare purposefully introduced anachronisms to achieve his novelistic aims. Kadare, who sees his work as falling outside the category

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of the historical novel, purposefully introduced elements designed to undermine its historical verisimilitude. One such undermining occurs in the thoughts and statements of various characters. These characters, most notably the Quartermaster General, deliver generalizations and judgments that seem almost contemporary. Kadare’s use of these characters as mouthpieces, however, adds an element of disjunction without affecting the flow of the narrative. He also stops short of making the novel seem a vehicle for a single, simple moral or thematic point. The most obvious undermining of the narrative’s historical verisimilitude involves weaponry. Kadare presents the advance of weaponry, as represented by the cannon of unprecedented size, in a way that echoes the arguments that surrounded the development of atomic weaponry. These advanced weapons are seen to pose a threat to the safety of the entire world, and in their application they wreak havoc even upon the Turkish forces deploying them. The cannon is a “monster” of such a nature that people “can’t put it back where it came from” and it “will devour the world.” Similarly, the cannons represent the unprecedented force of empire as developed by the Ottoman Turks—or as developed in the twentieth century by the Soviet Union. The cannons’ appearance in the novel is not purely allegorical, however, for they, like the human characters, are forceful and effective at some times but fallible and unpredictable at others. Also presented with symbolic force is the fortress itself, an embodiment of a nation’s self-defense against the seemingly overpowering force of empire. Its symbolic role is emphasized by its being left unnamed throughout the novel. Similarly, Kadare introduces numerous characters without proper names. Besides the Albanian prince Castrioti, no commander of the defending forces is named or even specified. More striking, a number of characters with major parts to play in the novel go entirely without personal names. Their number includes the army astrologer and the Quartermaster General, who sometimes seems to offer the most directly authorial perspective to readers. The novel’s narrative has as much pertinence to events of the later twentieth century, when it was written, as it does to the historical milieu it purports to depict. The siege of the Albanian castle, taking place centuries before the modern era, is simultaneously historical and contemporary, suggesting that historical events are never purely historical. The siege itself is “the most modern war the world has ever known,” as the engineer Saruxha declares. The novel’s emphasis on endings and failures of various kinds—the unsuccessful siege, the end of major military careers, and the deaths of friends—provides telling counterpoint to its concurrent emphasis on the unrelenting change that seems essential to the nature of history. The novel may offer a pessimistic vision, for readers know about the ultimate power of modern technological weaponry—and of the dehumanized warfare and dehumanized world that have resulted from it. All the same, The Siege may offer readers hope in that the lone fortress remains standing against the forces of cannon, empire, and a vast tide of soldiers and arms. A complex novel that features great clarity of presentation and a straightforward, simple narrative, The

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Siege successfully presents in dramatic form the problems of the post-World War II world. Presented in terms of empire versus nation, it is a tale of humans—both attackers and defenders—being crushed by heartless progress. Mark Rich

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 11 (February 1, 2009): 29. Library Journal 133, no. 20 (December 1, 2008): 112. Maclean’s 121, no. 41 (October 20, 2008): 74. The New Yorker 85, no. 6 (March 23, 2009): 75. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 49 (December 8, 2008): 46. The Sunday Times (London), May 18, 2008, p. 47. The Times (London), May 24, 2008, p. 8. The Times Literary Supplement, May 30, 2008, p. 21.

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THE SISTERS OF SINAI How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels Author: Janet Soskice (1951) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). Illustrated. 316 pp. $27.95 Type of work: History, biography, women’s studies Time: The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Locale: Scotland; Cambridge, England; Egypt; the Sinai Peninsula The story of the Scottish Smith twins—their lives, education, travels, and monumental manuscript discoveries in the Middle East—woven into the religious, social, and scientific controversies of the late Victorian age Principal personages: Agnes Smith Lewis (1843-1926), wealthy Scottish traveler and adventurer Margaret Dunlop (Smith) Gibson (1843-1920), her twin sister and partner

Janet Soskice’s The Sisters of Sinai tells the story of Agnes and Margaret Smith, identical twins born in the mid-nineteenth century in western Scotland. The twins were raised by their wealthy, strict Presbyterian father following the early death of their mother after childbirth. Educated at home, they were rewarded for linguistic study with travel to any country whose language they learned. Thus, early in life they became fluent in Italian, French, Spanish, and German, later adding to their repertoire Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and the ancient biblical languages of Aramaic and Syriac. Along with their language training and their knowledge of the Bible, it is perhaps their upper-class background and the money they inherited from their father’s business dealings that made their activities and discoveries possible. Travelers and adventurers from an early age, they became enthralled with travel to biblical lands, first to see the sights where various miracles had taken place and then to ferret out lost documents. Soskice’s book explains in engaging detail the theological and scientific controversies (and the colorful characters) that engulfed the Victorian era in the age of Charles Darwin. People debated whether the Bible was to be taken literally, the status of various biblical translations and newly discovered manuscripts written in different languages, and how to view differing versions of the Bible. Some of these suggested unorthodox interpretations of Jesus’ divinity (for example, that Joseph was the biological father of Jesus) or omitted well-known passages from a Gospel (such as the last verses of the Gospel of Mark, which include Jesus’ promise to the disciples that they might handle snakes and drink poison without harm), potentially calling into question aspects of established Christian doctrine.

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Most Bibles in Victorian England were editions of the seventeenth-century King James translation, but original manuscripts in Greek, Aramaic, and Syriac were being recovered during this era of the rise of archaeology. Agnes and Margaret quickly became embroiled in the resulting controversies, especially because the scholarly establishment held them to be suspect as “uneducated women.” They were not swayed from their resolute Protestantism but became great friends with the Greek Orthodox librarian (and later abbot) of St. Catherine’s Monastery, Father Galaktéon. They also worked with Muslim clerics in Cairo and helped their Jewish rabbi friend Simon Schechter (later president of the new Jewish Theological Seminary in New York) in ferreting out a huge cache of ancient Jewish documents from a synagogue in Cairo. It is to the author’s credit that the theological controversies of the day are explicated so clearly that twenty-first century readers can engage in some of the excitement with which nineteenth century scholars greeted each new discovery. Soskice introduces and explains Jewish, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim beliefs and scholars. She describes in detail the meaning of a palimpsest, the importance of an earlier phrase with a slightly different meaning, and the intricacies of Victorian photography. In addition to these cultural contextualizations, Soskice provides vivid descriptions of the trials of desert travel by camel to the holy places of the great Abrahamic faiths. She details the journeys of the Smiths as they crossed the Red Sea; visited the sites where Moses and the Israelites are believed to have witnessed the burning bush, received the Ten Commandments, and gathered and eaten manna; and reached St. Catherine’s monastery, an oasis for both Muslims and Christians. Soskice describes the competitive backbiting among the Western elite of biblical scholarship. Scholars sought to receive the credit for each new discovery and to send the first notice of each discovery to the newspapers. Agnes Smith was not fully credited for her discoveries, and the documents were the subject of controversy for years in both the religious and the secular press. The controversy continued even after 1894, when she finally published The Four Gospels in the Old Syriac Version Transcribed from the Palimpsest on Mount Sinai, which included her own scholarly introduction. In 1892, the twins traveled for the first time to the Convent of St. Catherine in the Sinai Peninsula (built by the Emperor Justinian around 557). They planned every detail, hiring a dragoman and a cook and buying supplies and tents in Cairo. They fended off criticism both from home and from other Europeans in Cairo about the dangers of two women traveling alone. They were used to being tourists without male escorts, as they had previously done in Greece, riding sidesaddle on horseback. Now, they would travel by camel, the only animals capable of withstanding the desert. They hired camels—four for riding and seven for portage—and Bedouins to take care of Janet Soskice is a professor of philosophical theology at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Jesus College. She is author of a number of theological works, most notably The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language (2008), and coeditor of Feminism and Theology (2003).

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them. The camels had to carry all the food and water for the whole expedition of nearly sixty days, including the time to be spent at St. Catherine’s. Crates of live chickens, turkeys, and doves were strapped on the camels, as well as pots, pans, tables, and chairs. The sisters were searching for a Gospel manuscript that they had heard of as a result of an earlier discovery by the German Constantin von Tischendorf and later from their Quaker friend Rendel Harris. The manuscript was a palimpsest, a vellum scroll that had had one text written on it and was then reused centuries later to inscribe a different text. The two texts on such were often in different languages. They found the manuscript they sought in an ancient chest in a dark closet, along with others. The original text had faded or nearly disappeared, but Agnes saw page headings in Old Syriac underneath the later text, a hagiology of women saints. The older text headings read “of Matthew” and “of Luke.” Agnes later recounted how she first saw the manuscript in her book In the Shadow of Sinai (1898). “It had a forbidding look, for it was very dirty, and its leaves were nearly all stuck together through their having remained unturned probably since the last Syrian monk had died, centuries ago, in the Convent.” The sisters took photographs and, back at Cambridge, determined that the underwriting was indeed a version of the Gospels. Agnes procured a noxious chemical concoction to bring out the original writing when she returned to St. Catherine’s the following year. It worked, although it was ultimately damaging to the manuscript itself, enabling the original Syriac to be deciphered. Travel by women and their accounts of their travel became important in the nineteenth century. Consciously or unconsciously, aristocratic or middle-class nineteenth century women, inhabiting the space of “the Other” in their own society, increasingly felt the need for physical and mental space of their own. They sought environments in which the limitations imposed on them by society were, at the very least, less binding. Travel to other worlds provided such an opportunity. Women who traveled alone or in the company of other women were called “unprotected females” in nineteenth century parlance. A whole series of books was published for the unprotected female, as were satiric essays and stories by novelist Anthony Trollope and others. Sister pairs (such as the Smith twins) or mother-daughter duos were common for women travelers, but women traveling together without a male escort were not immune from criticism. Agnes and Margaret first traveled with a third woman, Grace Blyth, but they were still considered “unprotected,” as discussed in Agnes’s first book, Eastern Pilgrims: The Travels of Three Ladies (1870). Only their final journeys to Cairo and the Sinai, in the company of male Cambridge dons and their wives, were free from the scandal of the unprotected woman. Even then, one of the wives published her own account, suggesting that Agnes and the abbot of St. Catherine’s monastery engaged in shockingly flirtatious behavior. Both twins married later in life, first Margaret and then Agnes, but in each case, their husbands died after only three years of marriage. Each twin lived with her married sister after each wedding—the sisters were not to be separated. Margaret married

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a former cleric and translator of Spanish classics named James Gibson, a man who worried about his health during most of his relatively short life. Several years after the death of Gibson, Agnes married Samuel Lewis, a librarian of manuscripts and antiquities at Corpus Christi College. After three years of mutual work, travel, and entertaining friends at their new home Castlebrae in Cambridge, Lewis died suddenly of a heart attack after running to catch a train. The twins’ health and stamina far outlasted that of their husbands. Their travel, perhaps taken to offset their grief, continued to be the subject of Cambridge gossip. They also engaged in eccentric exercises with ropes in the backyard of their Cambridge home, clad only in their underwear, shocking their neighbors. Castlebrae was built with an exercise tower so they would have more privacy. Soskice’s thesis is that the main reason the sisters’ work has been forgotten and nearly erased is their gender. After all, it was not usual or “proper” for ladies to go on archaeological travels, especially since they had no university training. Soskice reminds readers that, at the time, no women were admitted as regular university students. Even after they were permitted to sit for the exams at Cambridge and scored better than the men, the Smiths were not awarded degrees for many years. There was in fact a riot among male undergraduates against women’s admission at Cambridge in 1896. It was years after the twins’ return and publication of their discoveries before accolades and honorary degrees from universities in Germany, Scotland, and Ireland were given them. No college in Cambridge ever conferred honorary degrees on them. In 1899, Westminster College, the new Presbyterian college that they had endowed at Cambridge, honored them as founders but not with degrees. In women’s history, there is a long list of sister pairs whose collaboration brought about important results. Sarah Grimké and Angelina Grimké were early abolitionists and women’s rights activists in the United States. The Brontë sisters—Anne, Emily, and Charlotte—wrote novels in the nineteenth century that are still read worldwide. The Cone sisters—Etta and Clarabelle—amassed a collection of works by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, bringing important modernist art to Baltimore in the early twentieth century. There are many other examples. In each case, although their works were signed individually, the study, conversation, collaboration, and encouragement between the sisters enabled their work to go forward. Much has been written about sibling rivalry and the importance of birth order, but there has been little notice taken of the collaborative importance of sisters, especially in earlier eras when women confronted so many societal barriers in order to make their work known. The Smith twins surely are a part of this group, as Agnes and Margaret worked together on all projects, often speaking to each other for weeks at a time only in whatever new language they were in the process of learning. Each of the volumes they published was signed by only one sister, but it is clear from their diaries that they worked together on all projects. The resurrecting work on these women and their discoveries by Janet Soskice may in fact guarantee that there are no more erasures or palimpsests of their contribution to biblical history. The Sisters of Sinai, moreover, is graced with a goodly number of historical photographs from the sisters’ nineteenth century travel, as well as portraits of the important personages in Scotland

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and Cambridge and maps of the Mediterranean and Sinai regions. It thereby recovers and circulates to a wider audience the image, as well as the words and acts, of two remarkable women. Margaret H. McFadden

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 19/20 (June 1, 2009): 26. The Christian Century 126, no. 26 (December 29, 2009): 30-31. The Christian Science Monitor, September 1, 2009, p. 25. Geographical 81, no. 6 (June, 2009): 63. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 11 (June 1, 2009): 601. Library Journal 134, no. 13 (August 1, 2009): 88. The New York Times Book Review, September 6, 2009, p. 13. Times Higher Education, March 26, 2009, p. 47. The Times Literary Supplement, August 14, 2009, p. 28. The Washington Post, August 30, 2009, p. B07. Weekly Standard 14, no. 48 (September 14, 2009): 32-34.

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THE SKATING RINK Author: Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) First published: La pista de hielo, 1993, in Spain Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews Publisher: New Directions (New York). 182 pp. $21.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1980’s Locale: A seaside city in northeastern Spain Bolaño’s crime novel explores the interrelation of sex, obsession, political corruption, immigrants, and homelessness in a Spanish resort city Principal characters: Remo Morán, a Chilean novelist turned businessman Gaspar Heredia, a Mexican illegal immigrant Enric Rosquelles, a socialist politician and bureaucrat in local government Nuria Martí, a champion figure skater Carmen, a homeless opera singer Caridad, a homeless teenager The Rookie, a homeless middle-aged man Lola, Morán’s ex-wife

A murder ought to imbue a novel with mystery. In Roberto Bolaño’s 1993 novel The Skating Rink, billed as a crime novel, the murder of a homeless woman seems to tease readers rather than to provide meaningful suspense. Bolaño is justly famous for innovative narrative methods that immerse readers in seedy, corrupt, desperate, absurd, violent, but vibrant struggles among characters who haunt the fringes of mainstream society or fall from its careless grace. In the case of The Skating Rink, however, the story is so sparely told, so focused, that it ends up seeming aimless, even querulous. Still, if the novel is less successful than Bolaño’s later novels, such as Los detectivos salvages (1998; The Savage Detectives, 2007) and 2666 (2004; English translation, 2008), it nonetheless demonstrates Bolaño’s talent for powerful characterization and portrays as few other novelists can the fragility of love and ambition, the hypocrisy of power, and the quixotic temperament of literature. The story takes place in a seaside resort city, called simply Z, on the Costa Brava north of Barcelona, in Spain’s semiautonomous Catalan region. In an unvaryingly repeated sequence, the narrative alternates among three point-of-view characters— Remo Morán, Gaspar Heredia, and Enric Rosquelles. Each tells his side of the story in short chapters. There is both a tone of intimacy and evidence of evasion to their statements, which read as if recorded from a conversation. The “you” to whom these statements are directed is never identified. It may be a policeman, a reporter, or the novel’s readers. The uncertainty is not insignificant because it leaves unclear a

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reader’s relation to the story. Other features of the novel are similarly ambiguous or provocative. None of the three narrators is reliable, and each represents a different facet of society. Morán is likely to seem the most straightforward and reputable, yet the style of his characterization is such that this impression is misleading. Bolaño is sparing in details about the characters’ backgrounds. They supply such details in passing over the course of their narratives, providing bits of information that Winner of Spain’s foremost literary sound like reminders to someone who already awards, poet, essayist, and novelist knows their stories. In any case, Morán is Roberto Bolaño’s novels include Chilean by birth, a novelist and poet who 2666 (2004; English translation, 2008), spent a portion of his young adulthood in La literatura nazi en América (1996; Mexico City. After immigrating to Spain, he Nazi Literature in the Americas, 2008), moved to Z and undertook a series of success- Los detectives salvajes (1998; The ful business ventures, managing a restaurant Savage Detectives, 2007), and and hotel, opening a series of jewelry stores Nocturno de Chile (2000; By Night in and souvenir shops for tourists, and operating Chile, 2003). a campground. He is solidly middle class, was married briefly to a city social worker name Lola, and is a busy but essentially lonely man who has watched his youth vanish behind him. Heredia, also a poet, is Morán’s old friend from Mexico City. An illegal immigrant to Spain without the official papers necessary to get a good job, Heredia exists in the restless shadow world of the homeless. He comes to Z in hopes of obtaining a job from Morán, who obliges by hiring him as a night watchman for the campground, Stella Maris. There, Heredia gets to know other illegal immigrants, as well as native roamers and tourists who come to Z for their summer vacations. Among them are aging street singer Carmen and her sickly teenage friend Caridad, both Spaniards living a hand-to-mouth existence. Rosquelles is Catalan and a rising bureaucrat in the Socialist Party. He directs the social services department for the city of Z and is the mayor’s confidant. Well educated, from a close-knit family, and locally powerful, he is nonetheless an awkward man. He is shy with women, arrogant with subordinates, suspicious, calculating, selfpitying, and rationalizing. He appears to be the villain of the story, the least reliable narrator, but that too is misleading. The three are closely involved with one another. Morán and Rosquelles are in a love triangle with Nuria Martí, a champion figure skater and the local beauty of Z. Only Morán is her actual lover, but Rosquelles, physically ugly and sexually repressed, acts as her sugar daddy. Besotted, he embezzles money from the city to convert the swimming pool of an abandoned resort, Palacio Benvingut, into the skating

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rink from which the novel takes its title so that Martí can practice for Spain’s Olympic trials. Once the project is complete, he oversees her training. Meanwhile, Heredia falls in love with Caridad, a sickly teenager who squats in Palacio Benvingut with Carmen. Caridad frequently spies on Martí as she trains— whether out of jealousy or simple curiosity is unclear. For her part, Carmen has a grudge against Rosquelles because he refused to provide social services to her. Armed with the knowledge of the skating rink and Rosquelles’ embezzlement, Carmen tries to blackmail him into providing her with a free apartment and a pension. She has grand plans to end her homelessness and live in a made-up family with her own off-and-on lover, whom she calls the Rookie, and with Caridad. This knotty situation begins to unravel when Rosquelles takes Martí to a dinner party attended by the mayor and several other department heads. She innocently lets slip the fact of her training at the skating rink in Palacio Benvingut. The mayor grows suspicious, and Rosquelles foresees that his tenure as a force in the Socialist administration of Z is about to end. That same night, Carmen’s body, stabbed dozens of times, is found at the skating rink. Who is the murderer? The question is not satisfactorily resolved. Heredia is the first of the main characters to see the body. Caridad is nearby, holding the knife and covered in blood. Heredia naturally assumes that she killed Carmen. In love with and afraid of her at the same time, he cleans her up and hides her in a distant room of the Palacio Benvingut. Morán is next on the scene. He suspects that Caridad or Heredia might be the killer, cleans the knife handle to remove incriminating fingerprints, seeks out the couple, and persuades them to go to Stella Maris. Only then does Morán report the murder. As the victim of blackmail, Rosquelles is the most obvious suspect and is arrested. He has an alibi, however, and although he goes to jail, it is for embezzlement and corruption rather than murder. Morán turns private investigator, impelled by an obscure desire to learn the truth, and obtains a confession from the Rookie. Spurned by Carmen, the Rookie claims, he killed her in a moment of blind rage. Morán accepts the confession, but it is difficult for readers to do likewise. The Rookie is plainly insane. From this indeterminate resolution, only Rosquelles emerges with clear prospects for the future. While in jail, he helps the warden improve living conditions for the inmates and writes a prize-winning essay. After his release, he finds a job at a publishing company. Disgraced as a skater because of the scandal, Martí leaves Z, Rosquelles, and Morán to live in Barcelona. She has glided through life thus far because of her beauty and precocious skating skill, but she ends up a confused, pathetic figure, trying to capitalize on her notoriety by giving interviews and posing nude for a magazine. The world-weary Morán ponders leaving Z and making a fresh start elsewhere but cannot decide to do so. Caridad and Heredia, now deeply in love, leave Z together hoping to find work in some other town. The story peters out rather than coming to a conclusion. Rosquelles, who gets the last word in the novel, observes, “What’s gone is gone, that’s why I say, you have to keep looking ahead . . . ” The Skating Rink seems like a slice-of-life tale about a small number of people

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whose lives intersect by chance and then spin apart. The novel does not employ gritty realism, however. It consistently nudges readers toward interpretation. Consider the setting, which is both vague and suggestive. Z, a resort city, is an emblem of the temporary and transient. On one side is the campground Stella Maris, whose name, a cognomen of the Virgin Mary, seems a satirical swipe at marginalized traditional religion. On the opposite side of Z is Palacio Benvingut. In Catalan, benvinguts means “welcome.” The dilapidated building, partly converted to a skating rink, seems to be a symbol of the deterioration and corruption of some bygone societal goal. The names of the three main characters likewise might be read as suggestive, but their differing social status insists that readers view them as types: Two are immigrants, one legal and middle class and the other illegal and poor. The third is a member of the ruling class. The various love relationships also seem meant to express types: Morán and Martí stand for sexuality; Rosquelles and Martí, for romantic fantasy; Heredia and Caridad (whose names suggest heredity and charity), for marriage; and Carmen and the Rookie, for obsession. Whatever readers make of this invitation to assign figurative meanings, the novel hustles them along, insisting upon its own elusiveness. Every chapter trails off in ellipses. Passages are terse to the point of obscurity at times, including, for instance, an incoherent description of the three-coin game and another nearly as impenetrable discussion about pétanque (a form of lawn bowling). Other passages are suggestive but also comic, without it being clear that they are intended to be so. Rosquelles summarizes a novel by Morán, in which he is not sure whether the hero is a person or a dog. There are occasional caustic asides about literature that seem, at best, tangential to the story, as when Morán comments that “in a planet of happy eunuchs and zombies, poetry is a waste of time.” The characters of The Skating Rink all are looking for love, stability, and purpose. None of them finds all three. Bolaño appears to view Western society—at least as it was constituted in the 1980’s—to be incapable of satisfying such basic desires. The Skating Rink is of greater interest, though, for how it says than for what it says. It prefigures the shifting testimonial point-of-view that Bolaño develops further in his later novels and the gravity with which he takes up unpopular topics, such as immigration and homelessness. Roger Smith

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 22 (August 1, 2009): 34. Chronicle of Higher Education 55 (December 19, 2008): B20. The New York Times, March 11, 2009, p. 2. The New York Times Book Review, August 30, 2009, p. 8. San Francisco Chronicle, August 10, 2009, p. E2.

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SLANG The People’s Poetry Author: Michael Adams (1961) Publisher: Oxford University Press (New York). 238 pp. $23.95 Type of work: Language Adams provides an extended definition for “slang,” as distinct from other forms of informal language, and explains how slang helps speakers claim membership in some groups and separate themselves from others Most readers of Slang: The People’s Poetry will be surprised to learn how little they know about the informal and playful language they use every day, and they will be delighted to be educated by such a teacher as the author, Michael Adams. Drawing on dozens of sources, from slang dictionaries and works by linguists to television shows and schoolyard chatter, Adams describes exactly what slang is and how it is used. Though the material is quite technical in places, the author’s humor and his unblushing, close examination of the sort of language most of his readers do not encounter in their professional lives, make this an educational and entertaining read. Adams begins, as any good teacher does, with definitions, separating slang from related kinds of language such as argot and jargon. In his preface and first chapter, Adams introduces what has apparently been a long-standing controversy among linguists and attempts to resolve it: First, he describes the leaders among the earlier books about slang, most notably Eric Partridge’s Slang: To-day and Yesterday (1933), which attempted to cover broad questions of definition and purpose, as well as more recent works addressing subsets of slang use, including the “wise and elegant” Slang and Sociability: In-Group Language Among College Students (1996) by Connie Eble and The Slang of Sin (1998) by Tom Dalzell. In nodding to earlier work, Adams presents the scholarly debate as a conversation among geeky friends and his own approach as respectful, not confrontational. He says of his colleagues’ books, “All of these works are excellent in ways I can’t match, and I couldn’t have written this book if they hadn’t been written first.” One would already expect that the people who study slang professionally are not cutthroat competitors, but this reassurance, by an author who also wrote Slayer Slang: A “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” Lexicon (2003), helps nonspecialist readers settle in for an analysis that will be both serious and fun. To summarize briefly Adams’s full and fascinating explanation: Slang terms form a lexicon that is “casual, vivid, racy, irreverent, and playful,” but these qualities alone are not enough to separate slang from jargon or argot. Jargon, Adams explains at some length, is the language of work—for example, the shorthand phrases that serv-

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ers and kitchen staff in a restaurant use to com municate with one another over the heads, as Michael Adams, professor of English it were, of their customers—or the language language and literature at Indiana of specialists in any field. Its primary purpose University, is the author of Slayer is not to include or exclude people from a Slang: A “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” group, but to facilitate work—to continue the Lexicon (2003). He has been an editor example, to get the meals delivered and the for the journals Barnhart Dictionary tables cleaned efficiently. Argot also facili- Companion, Dictionaries, and American Speech. tates the discussion of work. However, unlike jargon, argot is intentionally secret language, perhaps used by a group of criminals, and its chief purpose is to enable people to talk privately about their work—say, transporting stolen goods—even in public. Slang, Adams explains, contrasts with jargon and argot in that it serves a purpose that is more social than functional. There are many ways to say hello to an approaching friend, and all of them will do the basic work of greeting. Using slang (for example, “hey,” “what’s up?,” “what up?,” or “yo”) serves the social purpose of establishing or claiming membership in a group. Chapter 2, “Fitting In: Social Dynamics of Slang,” shows how slang helps speakers sort themselves into groups according to race, class, age group, and so on. Specifically, though, “Slang is about fitting in to groups marked against the mainstream,” which is why teenagers continually invent new slang to bewilder and lock out their parents and African Americans come up with new slang when the old slang is appropriated by white Americans. Like fashions in clothing, slang helps people achieve the seemingly contradictory tasks of establishing their individuality while establishing group identity. Additionally, Adams writes, “In the end, all slang is social critique.” In a section titled “Boyz in the Hood Speak Slang, Soccer Moms Don’t,” Adams picks up the idea that slang is generally considered inferior or suspect, a sign of laziness or lack of intelligence (which is why students are discouraged from using slang in their school work). He devotes several pages to the varieties of language used by African Americans. Here, Adams sheds new light on words such as “man,” “brother,” and “dude,” tracing their histories and African American associations. He argues that the idea that African Americans use more slang than other groups comes from the misperception that African American language is by default slang and that the language of the dominant group is not. Intuitively, we expect African American culture to generate more slang because it is in a constant state of antagonism with white America, constantly resists authority, not for the fun of it, but for existential reasons.

The groups most associated with slang, according to research as well as general perception, are groups of young people, working hard to separate themselves from their elders. Adams writes, “Young people are the group with the most and most extreme slang; adults are the ones who’ve lost their slang along with their hair, teeth, and sense of humor. It can’t be helped.”

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In Chapter 3, “Standing Out: Aesthetic Dimensions of Slang,” the subtitle of the book, The People’s Poetry, comes into focus. Adams addresses the metaphor, rhythm, and rhyme of slang, and he traces the use of what he calls “infixing,” or “insertion of expressive but lexically meaningless parts into meaningful words,” in words such as “bizatch” and “fabflippintastic.” He reminds readers of types of slang, including profanity, “experimentally crude sexual expressions,” and romantic metaphors, examples of which occur throughout the book. He jumps enthusiastically into what he labels “The Raunch and the Hip: Two Slang Aesthetics.” Raunch, Adams explains, “is playful, extravagant, racy and vivid”—qualities identified with slang from the beginning of the book—and, “If you’re self-consciously mature, it’s also disgusting.” Here Adams, a self-proclaimed “bashful Episcopalian boy,” provides a lively and entertaining list of slang terms for various sexual activities and attitudes, complementing the nearly thirty pages throughout the book analyzing the “F-word” and all its variants and grammatical uses. Examples drawn from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Simpsons, and casual conversations between the author and his wife help make a convincing case that slang is poetry, that it is worthy of serious study, and that it is fun. For general readers, the fourth and last chapter, “It’s All in Your Head: Cognitive Aspects of Slang,” is the most challenging, as it draws on the work of cognitive scientists such as Steven Pinker and linguists such as Noam Chomsky to inform its examples from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Grey’s Anatomy. Throughout the book, Adams faces a difficult writing task: to present fairly complex theoretical ideas about language in a nontechnical way. In his preface, the author describes his audience as “‘everyone,’ by which I mean university-educated or other really smart people interested in slang and contemporary American culture.” That this particular subset of “everyone” is relatively small is demonstrated by the fact that the book—issued by one of the most important publishers of English-language scholarship—was unreviewed in its first three months by many of the common journals and newspapers that review popular or general-reader books. Reviews in blogs and language-discussion forums have tended toward analyzing specific points of contention, such as whether the book overemphasizes infixing while undervaluing interposing. For Adams’s nonexpert readers, following the argument may be challenging. The rewards prove worth the challenge, however, and Adams does what he can to lighten his material without giving up accuracy or fine distinctions. He is a warm and personable narrator, and he uses humor effectively to pull his readers along. To illustrate the concept of recursion, for instance, he bypasses the examples provided by Chomsky in favor of his own favorite camp song, in which “the green grass grew all around, all around.” He frequently mixes formal and informal language, as when he claims, “It’s fair to say that Milton’s Eve gets totally faced on forbidden fruit.” It takes hard work to make something appear effortless. Adams has clearly worked hard to put his serious arguments into language that is as playful and vivid as his subject. These arguments are worth knowing about for specialist and nonspecialists. Adams is not the first to point out what should be an obvious truth: Words matter, and the labels attached to words matter. In April, 2009, just days after the publication date of

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Slang: The People’s Poetry, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a case involving the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The commission had fined the FOX television network for broadcasting “fleeting expletives” during coverage of live events. When the Court heard oral arguments in the case, lawyers and justices alike coyly referred to the four-letter words in question as “the F-word” and “the S-word.” In its decision, the majority agreed, in part, that all uses of those words refer to “sexual or excretory” functions, while dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens argued that the golfer who shouts one of those words after a bad shot is not thinking of sex or of excrement. Adams does not comment on this case or its arguments, but he makes a strong case throughout the book that a single word or phrase, removed from its contexts, can have a variety of meanings and serve a variety of functions. Slang touches more directly on the political when Adams briefly describes the controversy that arose in 1996 when the Oakland, California, Board of Education proposed that “Ebonics,” the dialect of English that linguists refer to as African American Vernacular English (AAVE), be used as a bridging language in schools to help AAVE speakers, much as Spanish or another language is used in bilingual programs. “This is not the place to argue the merits of the Oakland proposal,” Adams writes, though he concludes that “an extensive literature supports it quite effectively.” (As in other chapters, the author provides extensive endnotes for those readers who wish to delve further into the technical arguments.) Adams is more concerned with the social and political response to AAVE: “many opponents of the proposal caricatured AAVE as slang and in doing so meant to stigmatize it.” He points out, however, that dialect and slang are not the same thing. If all African American speech is perceived by others as slang, and if slang is perceived as suspect, then it becomes easier to discount the speakers. “If this book changes any or all of these positions among its readers and our collective perception of slang changes,” Adams writes, “then the book has done some good.” Cynthia A. Bily

Review Sources Library Journal 134, no. 13 (August 1, 2009): 80. Scotland on Sunday, June 7, 2009, p. 15.

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THE SNAKEHEAD An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream Author: Patrick Radden Keefe (1976) Publisher: Doubleday (New York). 432 pp. $27.50 Type of work: Current affairs Time: 1993-2009 Locale: Rockaway Peninsula, Long Island, and New York City’s Chinatown, New York; York, Pennsylvania; Fujian Province, China Keefe examines in detail the human smuggling operations of the 1990’s that brought thousands of illegal immigrants from Fujian Province to the United States, detailing the roles played by individuals as well as the politics of immigration law Principal personages: Sister Ping, New York City snakehead and respected member of the Chinatown community Ah Kay, leader of the Chinatown Fuk Ching gang Sean Chen, Fujianese teenager who arrived in the United States on the Golden Venture

Patrick Radden Keefe’s The Snakehead is a sprawling chronicle that examines the complex route taken by Chinese entering the United States illegally as clients of the professional human smugglers known among the Chinese as “snakeheads.” Keefe distinguishes between human “smuggling”—in which people willingly pay for transportation to a foreign country and for documentation that will allow them to live there independently—and human “trafficking.” In the latter case, immigrants are frequently deceived and forced into slave labor once they reach their destinations. The centerpiece of Keefe’s story is the Golden Venture, a freight boat that ran aground off the Rockaway peninsula near Queens, New York, on June 6, 1993. The seventeen-thousand-mile, four-month journey of the Golden Venture was simply the last leg of a long odyssey for its 296 Fujianese passengers, who had endured squalid conditions on the boat. Some had hiked overland for days in Thailand and endured long waits in Singapore and Mombasa when the ship stopped to take on more passengers or to wait for further arrangements to be made. Most Chinese immigrants to the United States during the 1990’s came from Fujian Province, and Keefe notes that increased prosperity in Fujian, rather than creating a general sense of opportunity, may have driven some less fortunate Fujianese to seek better economic opportunities elsewhere. When the Golden Venture arrived in U.S. waters, no one appeared as previously arranged to meet it and take its passengers ashore. Snakeheads on board the ship mutinied and deliberately ran the ship aground. Most of the Chinese passengers—who had paid (or promised) up to thirty thousand dollars to snakeheads for their passage to the

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United States—feared that the boat would sink and jumped into the freezing water. Ten Journalist Patrick Radden Keefe holds passengers either drowned or died of heart at- degrees from Columbia College, tacks while attempting to swim to shore. The Cambridge University, the London remaining survivors were taken into custody School of Economics, and Yale Law by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization School and is a fellow at the Century Service (INS). Few American officials could Foundation. He is the author of Chatter: understand or speak the dialect peculiar to the Uncovering the Echelon Surveillance Network and the Secret World of Fujianese; even so, many Golden Venture Global Eavesdropping (2005). passengers were able to make clear in the first hours after the incident that they were asking for political asylum. Keefe points out that snakeheads typically advised their clients to request political asylum as soon as they arrived in the United States. After the Chinese government crushed the 1989 prodemocracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Americans sympathized with the protesters, and Chinese immigrants claiming connections to the Tiananmen incident had a better chance of legally obtaining asylum. China’s onechild policy also played a role in applications for political asylum. To counter population growth, Chinese were legally prohibited from having more than one child, and many reported that they had been punished for having more than one child or had been subject to forced sterilization or abortions. During George H. W. Bush’s presidency, U.S. immigration policy leaned toward sympathy with those who fled China to escape the government’s brutal birth-control laws. When large numbers of applicants for political asylum created a backlog at the INS and delays in processing illegal immigrants, these immigrants were given temporary documents allowing them to seek employment and were released pending their hearings. They often disappeared before their scheduled court appearances. The Golden Venture ran aground in the early months of the Bill Clinton administration, during a shift in the official position toward illegal immigrants. It was more difficult for the ship’s passengers to obtain political asylum on the basis of China’s one-child policy or political oppression tied to the 1989 Tiananmen protests. Furthermore, the INS had realized that undocumented Chinese immigrants frequently disappeared rather than returning for their asylum hearings. Golden Venture passengers were therefore not released but detained. Many were sent to a county prison in York, Pennsylvania. It appeared that the INS hoped to place the Chinese geographically out of reach of New York attorneys familiar with immigration law who might knowledgably defend the Chinese men in their applications for political asylum. Pennsylvania attorneys with no experience in immigration were asked to take on the Golden Venture survivors’ asylum cases pro bono (for free). The hearings were expedited, apparently to ensure not only that their cases would be quickly resolved but also that their attorneys would have little time to prepare their defenses. As it became clear that few of the Golden Venture detainees would be granted asylum, a group of Pennsylvanians formed a support group called the People of the Golden Vision under the informal leadership of a York Methodist minister. Keefe

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briefly profiles several members of this group who stood vigil outside the prison every morning in all weathers, singing, praying, and waving to the Chinese detainees who could see them from the prison windows. Many of these supporters were conservative Christians who frequently cited Scripture to explain their support for the detainees. Many were pro-life, opposed to China’s one-child policy, and galvanized by detainees’ stories of forced abortion and sterilization. Others felt that imprisoning people who had committed no crime was simply un-American. Some were the children or grandchildren of immigrants and believed the Chinese had left circumstances similar to those that had brought their own families to the United States. Most Golden Venture detainees were deported back to China or relocated to other countries. By 2009, however, most had returned to the United States—legally or illegally—and were living and working there. In 2000, the Golden Venture, renamed United Caribbean, was sunk off the coast of Florida, where it became a tourist attraction for scuba divers. Keefe prefaces The Snakehead with a “dramatis personae” listing fifty-five individuals who figure in his account, many of whom have both Chinese and Americanized names. These include Chinatown gang members, organized crime figures, snakeheads, INS officials, detainees, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, seamen, and immigration attorneys. Among them is Sister Ping, one of the most successful and well-known snakeheads, who had two clients aboard the Golden Venture. Sister Ping legally emigrated to the United States from Fujian in 1981. In New York City’s Chinatown, she and her husband opened a shop and eventually a restaurant. Ping prospered and was highly respected as a smart businesswoman and generous pillar of her community. In, time she also became known as a reliable and efficient snakehead. Ping continued to work behind the counter of her shop and lived modestly, even as her snakehead business earned her an estimated 40 million dollars. In the early 1990’s, when Ping’s role as a human smuggler caught the attention of INS officials, she matter-of-factly assured an INS investigator that his organization lacked the resources to convict her of any crime. In fact, it was years before American officials were both sufficiently prepared to charge her and able to find her. In 1994, Sister Ping left the United States to avoid criminal charges. In 2000, she was arrested in Hong Kong. In 2003, she was extradited to the United States to face five counts of conspiracy, hostage-taking, and money-laundering, all related to her human smuggling activities. In 2006, she was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison. Keefe points out that Sister Ping was unusual in that she sometimes met her clients in cities around the world and escorted them personally from place to place. Snakeheads typically use Chinese gangsters and gang members to shepherd their clients, collect them in smaller boats if they arrive on American shores by sea, and sometimes hold new arrivals hostage until their fees are paid. Typically, a client makes a down payment before the journey and arrive still owing thousands of dollars to the snakehead. The undocumented immigrants or their families work hard to pay off the balance as quickly as possible. Keefe traces the intricate business dealings and family relationships of the snakeheads and the organized crime structures they rely upon to move both people and cash. Ah Kay, a leader of the violent Fuk Ching gang in Chinatown, was a key prosecution

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witness against Sister Ping. Keefe chronicles Ah Kay’s rise through the ranks of the Fuk Ching in some detail, covering intricate relationships and casual violence among Fuk Ching members, as well as the roles they played in the snakehead business. Keefe shows how internal betrayal and conflict and a horrifying murder among the Fuk Ching led to a failure of the snakehead network and subsequently to the Golden Venture’s running aground. A murderer several times over, Ah Kay was released from prison after serving only twelve years in return for his testimony against Sister Ping and other criminal figures. Ah Kay claimed to have been rehabilitated, and as of 2009, as Keefe notes with concern, Ah Kay was a free man in the U.S. witness protection program. The arduous and dangerous journey made by the Golden Venture’s Chinese passengers reflects their determination to pursue the American Dream. While in prison, the detainees began making large origami and papier-mâché sculptures, usually depicting patriotic American themes. Keefe devotes a chapter to the sculptures, which were exhibited and sold to raise money for the detainees’ legal defense. Keefe briefly describes and traces the fortunes of a few Golden Venture passengers, focusing primarily on Sean Chen as an example of the detainees’ willingness to take phenomenal risks and persevere against nearly unimaginable odds. In February, 1997, President Clinton signed an executive order releasing the last thirty-eight detainees from York County Prison, including Chen. Even after four years in detention, Chen assured Keefe, he had no regrets and would not hesitate to make the journey again. Keefe’s research is impressive, hampered only when representatives from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency declined to be interviewed for the book. The Snakehead is indexed and includes extensive chapter-by-chapter notes. Critics have noted that the Golden Venture detainees themselves are not particularly well-drawn as individuals. Even Sean Chen remains somewhat flat in Keefe’s portrayal, and Sister Ping is an elusive figure even though Keefe communicated with her in writing. The unfamiliarity of Chinese culture, Chinatown gangs, and immigration law require lengthy digressions and explanations that slow the narrative. Nonetheless, Keefe skillfully handles myriad characters and a story of far-ranging geographical and chronological scope, working disparate legal and criminal elements into a true-crime tale that is accessible, compelling, and timely. Maureen Puffer-Rothenberg

Review Sources Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 10 (May 15, 2009): 118. The Nation 290, no. 1 (January 4, 2010): 30-33. New York Review of Books 56, no. 18 (November 19, 2009): 48-50. The New York Times, August 17, 2009, p. 4. New York Times Book Review, August 16, 2009, p. 9. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 19 (May 11, 2009): 40 Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2009, p. W12.

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SONATA MULATTICA Author: Rita Dove (1952) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 231 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Poetry Time: 1780-1860; 1895; 1954 Locale: Hungary; Austria; Paris, France; London, England A set of poems that create a fictionalized biography for a real historical figure, George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, a violin prodigy born of an African father and Polish mother who was mentored by Joseph Haydn and then by Ludwig van Beethoven, who later discarded him Principal characters: George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, a biracial violinist Friedrich Augustus Bridgetower, his father, a womanizer, gambler, and page to Prince Esterházy Joseph Haydn, a composer who served as music director at the Esterházy estate, Bridgetower’s first teacher Johann Peter Salomon, a concert promoter The Prince of Wales, also known as “Prinny,” the spendthrift son of King George III of England and later prince regent Mrs. Papendiek, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte who wrote a diary of the last years of George III Black Billy Waters, a black street musician in London Ludwig van Beethoven, a composer, pianist, and star of the music world in the early nineteenth century

In her preface to Sonata Mulattica, Rita Dove reminds her readers that all the major characters in this work are historical figures, including George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower himself. Actual historical events also form the background for the book. Even Black Billy Waters can claim a real place in history, and the relationship between Bridgetower and his mentor Ludwig van Beethoven was a real one as attested by Beethoven’s original dedication to Bridgetower of what is now known as the “Kreutzer” Sonata. The narrative that joins these historical bits makes the poetry. Dove, herself a musician, has a natural interest in music, and she was intrigued when she saw a black violinist appear briefly on the screen in Immortal Beloved (1994), a film biography of Beethoven. She filed away in her memory the idea of investigating Bridgetower’s life. Years later, Sonata Mulattica is the result. Readers familiar with Dove’s work will recall that she employed a related strategy in Thomas and Beulah (1986), a biography-in-poems of her grandparents. In that volume, however, she was working with the materials of family history. In Sonata

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Mullatica, she must invent almost everything but the bare facts. In her invention, she creates a variety of voices and scenes to represent a past world, one in which she speculates on motives that no one recorded. In doing so, she manages to make a coherent and imaginative representation of that world. A major theme in this volume is the position of Bridgetower himself—the ultimate outsider in a world where even Joseph Haydn was little more than a servant to the powerful Rita Dove has received many awards Esterházy family. The elder Bridgetower, evi- for her poetry, including the Pulitzer dently a man of great social skills, can scarcely Prize, the National Humanities Medal, have been more than a graceful curiosity to and the NAACP Great American Artist the family he served, as an African (he may Award. U.S. poet laureate from 1993 to have portrayed himself as a prince) in the 1995 and poet laureate of Virginia white world of northern Europe. His biracial from 2004 to 2006, she is child at first may not even have risen to the Commonwealth Professor of English at level of curiosity, though he too was good the University of Virginia. looking and acquired polished manners. (As Dove portrays him, the elder Bridgetower found gambling and women more compelling than his son.) Dove’s picture of young Bridgetower suggests that he remained an outsider throughout his life, even during the times of his greatest reputation. Part of that theme, of course, is related to his presence as a black man in a white world, a fact Dove explores in various ways. That Bridgetower disappeared almost completely from public awareness in his later life gives rise to another of Dove’s themes—an examination of the fleeting nature of fame and of what fame means to the celebrity. After death, even Haydn was subject to grave robbers, who stole his head out of an interest in phrenology (his skull was returned to his coffin only in 1954, 145 years after his death). Meanwhile, the beggar Black Billy Waters was celebrated in a Staffordshire figurine. To accomplish her explorations, Dove uses the musical form of the sonata, as her title suggests, covering the events of Bridgetower’s career in the five movements associated with such compositions. These include an introduction, the exposition of the themes, an elaboration and development of those themes, a recapitulation that resolves them, and a coda. Into this structure, Dove interposes a “Short Play for the Common Man,” in which she dramatizes the crisis of Bridgetower’s relationship with Beethoven. Two poems in the Prologue set out some of the themes Dove intends to explore. “The Bridgetower” speculates on what might have happened if Bridgetower and Beethoven had not quarreled, if their friendship had prospered and Bridgetower had “sailed his fifteen-minute fame/ straight into the record books.” The second poem, “Prologue of the Rambling Sort,” introduces the other characters in the narrative and promises, playfully, to “leave out the boring parts.” (Dove’s poetic forms and tones vary widely in this volume and include playfulness.)

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The first movement of the collection focuses on Bridgetower’s life as a child in the Esterházy court. Haydn suggests that he has musical talent, and his father gladly turns the child over to the composer instead of returning him to his mother as he had intended. A poem in the boy’s voice, “Recollection, Preempted,” recalls his time there and indicates his passion for the music he learned. The poems trace Bridgetower’s growing ability, dramatizing his initial concert in Paris and following him on to England, where Mrs. Papendiek’s diary offers two entries about the boy’s impressive musical performance. In “The Wardrobe Lesson,” the voice of Bridgetower’s father discusses the social value of living up to English assumptions about Africans’ love of color; he recommends a cape for impressing women. The second movement, “Bread & Butter, Turbans & Chinoiserie,” begins with a poem exploring London’s fondness for the exotic (“Hear Ye!”) and follows that with “The Lesson: Adagio,” the form of which suggests the slow bowing of a violin (“To bow/ is to breathe”). “Black Pearl” examines the presence of Africans in London in 1790. Poems that suggest that black faces are cultivated as a sort of social decoration alternate with poems dealing with music. In “Pulling the Organ Stops,” for instance, the voices of Bridgetower, Haydn, and Franz Clement (another prodigy) alternately describe the effects of the organ in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Next is a pantoum, “Black Billy Waters, at His Pitch,” in which the peg-legged black street musician proclaims “All men are beggars, black or white;/ Some worship gold, some peddle brass,” suggesting a sort of identity between him and Bridgetower. This section records Bridgetower’s abandonment by his father and his life as a refugee at court. Dove provides useful notes to many of her poems and an even more useful chronology for tracing the events they depict. “Sturm und Drang” (storm and stress) makes the sonata’s third movement, the one in which Bridgetower meets Beethoven at a time when the famous composer is experiencing increasing deafness. In “Vienna Spring,” Beethoven praises Bridgetower, who has renewed his faith in the violin, which he had previously renounced as “a tiny querulous beast” fit only for peg-legged street musicians. In “Augarten, 7 a.m.” and “The Performer,” Dove records first the various responses (ranging from vacuous to irrelevant to thoughtful) to a concert given by Beethoven and Bridgetower and then the voice of Bridgetower himself. Bridgetower in the latter poem declares that music is “what it is like/ to be a flame.” At this point, Dove offers a bit of “Volkstheater,” the play called “Georgie Porgie, or A Moor in Vienna.” She heads it with a “Cast of Characters (& I mean characters!)” that includes Bridgetower and Beethoven, his copyist, a barmaid, and “a chorus of bad girls.” In the first scenes, Dove suggests a rivalry between the copyist and the director of the Augarten concerts against Bridgetower, whom they see as an interloper who has displaced them in Beethoven’s attention. The tone is satiric as Bridgetower responds to their stereotypes by doing some fraternity stepping. In a later scene at the Prater, an amusement park, Bridgetower flirts with a barmaid whom Beethoven has admired. When she agrees to meet Bridgetower later that night, Beethoven explodes, calling him an abomination and implying that he has insulted her. At the end, Beethoven strikes him with the score of his current violin concerto, quot-

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ing the dedication: “Mulatto Sonata, composed/ for the mulatto Bridgetower,/ great lunatic and mulatto composer.” This is the sonata that he rededicates to violinist Rudolphe Kreutzer, whom Dove quotes as saying that Beethoven did not “understand the violin.” In the fourth movement, Dove explores the aftermath of the falling-out between Bridgetower and Beethoven. “Tail Tucked” gives voice to Bridgetower’s philosophical resignation to what has happened. “Esterháza, Prodigal” records his return to the court where Haydn gave him his first lessons. “Andante con Variazioni” is Bridgewater’s meditation on music and love in London. The fifth section, “Nomadia,” chronicles the end of Bridgetower’s career. The section’s first poem, “Half-Life” sets the tone: “Dull/ the days before me,/ slack the reins, my horse run off.” The section contains another poem in Black Billy Waters’s voice, claiming that the “world’s jig” demands that one “Fall in step/ or be left behind.” This section includes a poem on the sad fate of Haydn’s head and one that maps Bridgetower’s aimless travels through Europe’s capitols. In “#8 Victory Cottages, Peckham, 1860,” Bridgetower faces his own death: “I loved only/ what my fingers could do. . . . ” The last poem in the book, “The End, with MapQuest” records Dove’s effort to find Bridgetower’s house in Peckham. After a frustrating search, she is cheered by the gaudy sign of a kebab shop. She confesses her inability to know such an elusive figure. She mulls whether his music was really miraculous or whether people were simply drawn to the spectacle “of all/ that darkness swaying close enough to touch,/ palm tree and Sambo and glistening tiger. . . .” Her final poignant question, “How does a shadow shine?” is answered by the poems of this book. Ann D. Garbett

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 13 (March 1, 2009): 15. The New Yorker 85, no. 11 (April 27, 2009): 71. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 11 (March 16, 2009): 40.

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THE SONG IS YOU Author: Arthur Phillips (1969) Publisher: Random House (New York). 254 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1950’s to the early twenty-first century Locale: Mainly New York City and Brooklyn, New York A middle-aged man’s obsession with a young rock singer fuels this story about art and commerce, and human relationships broken and restored, in the digital age Principal characters: Julian Donahue, a director of television commercials Rachel Donahue, a lawyer and his estranged wife Carlton Donahue, their deceased son Aidan Donahue, Julian’s older brother Will and Pamela Donahue, Julian and Aidan’s deceased parents Cait O’Dwyer, an up-and-coming Irish rock star Ian Richfield, a bass player in Cait’s backup band Alec Stamford, a guitarist turned visual artist Maile, Julian’s assistant

Arthur Phillips’s The Song Is You takes its title from a Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II tune originally written for the 1932 show Music in the Air and later popularized by a young Frank Sinatra. The novel concludes with an author’s note listing over one hundred composers, from Antonio Vivaldi to David Bowie and beyond, whose song titles the book incorporates. Thus, from beginning to end, the book is alive with music. Hammerstein’s well-known lyrics to “The Song Is You” celebrate the ability of physical allure to evoke music in one’s mind. Appropriately for Phillips’s purposes, they also carry a disquieting subtext about a frustrating inability to escape from solipsism—an inability that keeps one separate from the object of one’s affections. The concluding extensive catalog of composers, for its part, sets up a kind of game, challenging readers to go back and find the references and allusions they may have missed the first time through the book. Moreover, Phillips embeds invented song lyrics in his narrative, as well as rendering music an incessant presence throughout the novel: It is recorded on vinyl, reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes, and compact discs (CDs); played on hi-fi stereo systems, televisions, Walkmans, and iPods; and stored on Web sites and computer files. Phillips uses this omnipresence of music to invite readers to reconsider the bond between performer and listener, and the altered nature of communication, in the mechanical and digital ages. The novel represents the extent to which continuous and ready access to music has become the norm, across socioeco-

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nomic boundaries, but it questions whether this norm paradoxically fosters isolation and Arthur Phillips is the author of thwarts community as much as it sustains Angelica (2007) and The Egyptologist (2004), along with his highly acclaimed one’s connections with others. The story’s focal character is Julian Dona- debut novel, Prague (2002). Born in hue, a highly regarded and much-sought-after Minnesota, he attended Harvard director of commercials. Julian’s commer- University and has lived both in New cials employ familiar songs, which are some- York and abroad. how lessened or neutered in the process, and they are touted for featuring beautiful models lacking any trace of vulnerability. By contrast, Julian himself is extraordinarily vulnerable. Personally, he has undergone the trauma of the sudden loss of his two-yearold son to an infection and the subsequent breakdown of his marriage, after multiple infidelities on both sides. Professionally, he experiences the vague sense of never having become the film artist he might have been. Impotent of late, Julian is suffering from a generalized, early middle-aged malaise. He is influenced by his father, who named Julian after a relatively unknown alto sax player when his mother rejected the first names of twenty more famous musicians, and who displays a strongly Beckettian sense of life beginning and ending in one long scream. Julian longs to find some stimulus that will somehow make everything right once again. The one stable force in his life seems to be popular music, about which he has a vast storehouse of knowledge going back even beyond his teen years. When listening to music, he “felt a physical relief as the day’s silliness was replaced with a sense of purpose. . . . music could inject the quotidian with significance, lyricism, uniqueness.” Like his father before him, he becomes smitten by a female singer. The novel’s intriguing opening sentence reports, “Julian Donahue’s father was on a Billie Holiday record.” Just before he shipped off in 1953 to fight in Korea, where he lost a leg, Will Donahue’s voice was caught on a Holiday recording when he requested that the performer he idolized sing “I Cover the Waterfront” for him at New York’s Galaxy Theater. Another Holiday recording, “Don’t Explain,” made just before her death in 1959, figures later in the novel: Julian runs into the recording’s featured jazz pianist, Dean Villerman, in 1988. He plays for Villerman a tape recording made of his father listening to Holiday’s radio performance, complete with an apology from Julian’s mother (“Sorry, my heart”) for interrupting the music. Though Villerman denies any memory of the experience, the elder Donahue, hearing the broadcast on his hospital deathbed via headphones attached to Julian’s CD player, judges it a moment of miraculous artistry, claiming “Dean was playing like he was giving Billie his blessing, saying it was going to be okay.” This provides Julian, too, with an opportunity to reassure his dying father that things will be “okay”—a benison Julian understands he himself will never receive from his own dead son. The death of Julian’s infant son, Carlton, propels him into the disquieting pursuit of rock singer Cait O’Dwyer that gives Phillips’s narrative what momentum it possesses. From the moment Julian first sees her performing at the Romping Rat in Brooklyn and puts her demo recording on his iPod, he becomes increasingly—and ir-

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rationally—obsessed with her, feeding the impossible dream that possessing her will make his dead son present in his life once more. Believing that her “voice . . . reveals the feelings he could not find in silence,” he submits totally to her seductive power over him, allowing the sorcery of her music to take “possession” of him. He listens to countless CDs of earlier performers, so he can tell which ones have influenced her. He draws captioned pictures on cardboard bar coasters and has them sent backstage, so that she starts to refer to him as her Cartoon Boy. When she borrows the phrase “Bleaker and Obliquer” from one of his illustrations as the title for a new song, he becomes convinced she is writing only for him. Julian reads a feature story in The New York Times that suggests he is Cait’s Svengali, so he begins to regard himself as a muse inspiring her to greater heights and generating in her emotions she can “extrude as art.” He interprets her lyric “Come Find Me” as an invitation, so he sets up surveillance outside her apartment, photographing her surreptitiously and spying on her in the park as she walks her dog. He decodes her song “The Key’s Under the Mat” as permission to enter her apartment, access her computer, and even lie on her bed. Cait and her music, Julian comes to believe, are helping him eradicate an unwanted and unhappy past—his marriage to Rachel, the death of Carlton—and recover a kind of primal innocence: “he’d been pardoned . . . readmitted to a world from which he’d been brutally exiled.” He follows Cait and her musicians when they go on a college tour in the Northeast, and finally, in a dark (possibly creepy) variation on the familiar journey or quest motif, he stalks her across Europe, from Dublin to London to Paris to Budapest. Ultimately, he breaks into her hotel room, sleeping there alone one night. Ironically, that night, she dons one of his shirts and spends the night alone in his room. Indeed, Cait herself is hardly a passive victim of Julian’s voyeuristic desire. She seems to enter willingly, if somewhat incredibly, into their cat-and-mouse game, a circumstance that speaks perhaps to the way that celebrity allows itself to become fetishized, as performers feel both an attraction to and a repulsion from being watched and objectified. Cait calculatedly directs song lyrics to Julian, e-mails him, puts messages on his Web site, and creates nicknames for him such as Sleepycupid. She leaves a copy of William Butler Yeats’s poetry and a bookmark with an image of an Irish landscape for him to find. That their pursuit of each other never comes to fruition reveals more about Julian’s uncertainties than about Cait’s. He fears that the fantasy of perfection may not be borne out by the reality or that Cait might lose her seeming dependence upon him for creative inspiration. He refuses, moreover, to give up the thrill of the chase, with his prey always either just out of reach or, when caught, responding with rejection. Julian hopes that his almost masochistic abnegation will prove just how much suffering he can endure. Although he knows that his desire for Cait has become a crazy and compulsive addiction, it is also what has rescued him from despair, so he feels helpless to end it. The two settle instead for an increasingly frenzied and frustrating process of advance and retreat. While Julian and Cait circle around each other, action on another front moves toward reconciliation between Julian and Rachel. Julian’s older brother, Aidan, acts as

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go-between. Unlike Julian, Aidan is dismissive of music and skeptical of his father’s intentions toward his sons. Aidan makes an anti-Semitic comment during an appearance on the television quiz show Jeopardy! that results in his being made an object of ridicule in late-night television skits. As a result, he suffers a nervous breakdown and is nursed back to health by Rachel. What most disturbs Rachel is the feeling that Carlton’s death was an experience unique to them that has set her and Julian apart from everyone else in a ceaseless pattern of mourning. She also regrets that there is no family left to keep the memory of their son alive. She even attempts suicide, but her ministrations to Aidan represent a positive way of channeling her grief. To repay her, Aidan attempts to bring her and Julian back together. Though readers may tire of, and even be put off by, the intensity of Julian’s obsession with Cait long before it is over, the artful way that Phillips embeds serious themes and concerns within the narrative, far beyond any nimble cleverness with musical allusions and motifs, makes reading The Song Is You a worthwhile experience. By having the action span so many technological advances in the recording and delivery of music, Phillips raises issues about the intervention of machines into daily life and how emotional relationships in the digital age might differ, for better or worse, from those of earlier times. He probes as well the nature of grief, the connection between art and trauma, and the way the former might ameliorate the latter. Phillips considers how an art form such as music can retrieve lost moments— somewhat as Marcel Proust considers the power of taste to evoke the past. At the same time, he lobbies for a more expansive acceptance of popular culture into the realm of art. Julian’s father innocently idolized Billie Holiday, and the singer rewarded him in a spontaneous and generous moment when she catered so genuinely to her adoring young fan’s request. Julian, by contrast, becomes intensely immersed in music and in Cait, demonstrating a willingness to be at the mercy of, and even subjugated by, a singer who lives and interacts with him solely through the artificial interventions and gadgets of digital technology. His is an altogether darker and more disturbing reality than was his father’s. The awareness of that difference renders Phillips’s novel—as temperamentally nostalgic as it might be in its valorization of a wide range of music and music makers—ultimately a rather dark and chilly book. That tone, though, may help prevent the intrusion of any mawkish notes in the narrative. Thomas P. Adler

Review Sources The Boston Globe, April 11, 2009, p. 10. Chicago Tribune, May 16, 2009, p. 15. The New York Times Book Review, April 12, 2009, p. 1. The New Yorker 85, no. 14 (May 18, 2009): 79. The Washington Times, June 14, 2009, p. M4.

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SOUTH OF BROAD Author: Pat Conroy (1945) Publisher: Nan Talese/Random House (New York). 514 pp. $29.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1969-1989 Locale: Charleston, South Carolina; San Francisco, California Ten high school friends help break down social and racial barriers in Charleston, South Carolina, unite to help a friend in need twenty years later, and struggle to ward off a threat from a psychopath intent on killing them all Principal characters: Leopold Bloom (Leo) King, a high school principal’s son who becomes a journalist Jasper King, his father, a high school science teacher Lindsay King, his mother, the principal of a public high school Chadworth (Chad) Rutledge X, the scion of a prominent Charleston family, who becomes a lawyer Molly Huger, Chad’s girlfriend, later his wife Fraser Rutledge, Chad’s sister, who marries Niles Ike Jefferson, an African American athlete who becomes a police officer Betty Roberts, an orphan who becomes a police officer and marries Ike Starla Whitehead, an orphan who marries Leo Niles Whitehead, an orphan who marries Fraser Sheba Poe, a high school flirt who becomes a movie star Trevor Poe, a gay youth who contracts AIDS

Pat Conroy is a deliberate craftsman who produces novels more slowly than more prolific contemporary writers. His work reflects the care he gives to plotting, characterization, and story lines. Moreover, the notoriety he received for writing the screenplay adaptation of his novel The Prince of Tides (1986), a commercially successful movie starring Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte, did not lure him into the Hollywood scene. Some of his predecessors’ careers as novelists have been sidetracked or ended by their sojourn into the world of cinema. Conroy, by contrast, has remained dedicated to his proper craft. Ever since he published The Great Santini in 1976, he has worked diligently to create fiction that has wide popular appeal yet also displays a rich depth of characterization and sensitivity to important social issues. As a consequence of this commitment, Conroy’s novels often provide intellectual and emotional stimulation to more discerning readers and critics. Reading a Conroy novel can often keep one on the edge of one’s chair in suspense, cause one to burst out laughing, or occasionally bring tears to one’s eyes. Reading South of Broad is likely

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to bring out all of these emotions, while at the same time keeping readers guessing about Pat Conroy’s first book, The Water Is what will happen to the large cast of characters Wide (1972), an account of his who constantly seem to be getting into trouble. experiences as a teacher on the South In South of Broad, Conroy tells the stories Carolina coast, won a National of ten people who develop lifelong relation- Education Association Award. Several ships with one another during their senior year of his novels, including The Great in high school in Charleston, South Carolina. Santini (1976) and The Prince of Tides (1986), have been made into successful The novel’s narrator and the central figure in motion pictures. the group, Leopold Bloom King, is the youn ger son of the school’s principal. This rather headstrong woman, a former Catholic nun, has married a man who is exceptionally kind toward Leo but continually deferential toward his wife in matters great and small. Leo’s mother—Dr. King, as she reminds everyone—is a frustrated expert on James Joyce who has named her sons for the principal characters in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Sadly, her elder son Steve (named for Stephen Dedalus as Leo is named for Leopold Bloom) committed suicide at age twelve. Leo suffers a number of social maladies: The second and never favored son, he is also physically unattractive (his friends call him Toad) and unusually awkward and self-conscious. He believes that he is somehow responsible for his brother’s death and must continually make amends for this perceived transgression. To make matters worse, when the novel opens he is completing a three-year probation imposed when he was convicted of a drug charge because he failed to reveal the real culprit, a more popular student at the school. His sentence involves doing community service, and, because he is not allowed to drive, he delivers newspapers on his bicycle through the upscale neighborhood south of Broad Street. One of Conroy’s principal concerns throughout the novel is tracing Leo’s rise from social outcast to the central figure in a group of friends whose lives continually intersect over the next twenty years. It is certainly a strange assemblage, including a brother and sister from a high-society Charleston family who have been expelled from an elite private academy, the brother’s girlfriend, another brother and sister whose shady past and flamboyant behavior make them objects of attention and derision, and the son of the school’s first African American head coach. The group also includes a trio of students sent to the school from a Catholic orphanage. The first part of the book, set in 1969, describes the group’s senior year in high school. Each character seems to have a particular cross to bear. Chad, the disgraced scion of prominent Charleston socialites, finds it hard to accept his fellow classmates, whom he deems beneath his class. His tomboy sister Fraser is uncomfortable with the thought of becoming a woman, because she thinks no boy will accept her on her own terms. The coach’s son, Ike, thinks he must constantly assert his rights as a young African American, and he is distrustful of any white person who befriends him. The three orphans—Betty, an African American girl, and Niles and Starla, a brother and sister from the mountains of North Carolina—fight the prejudices associated with their social status.

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Two teens who move into a house across the street from Leo’s family are the oddest members of the group: Sheba is an aspiring movie star who flaunts her sexuality with astonishing success but worries constantly about Trevor, her gay brother. Trevor endures both physical and emotional abuse from the southern rednecks who populate their school. Collectively the novel’s band of socially maladjusted teens manages to break down quite a few racial and social barriers, though sometimes at great personal cost, in a city that prides itself on maintaining its traditions. The second part of the book skips forward twenty years, when all ten characters have settled into careers and most have married other members of their group. Not all these marriages are happy. Chad and his longtime girlfriend, Molly, appear to be an ideal couple. Ostensibly, it is his work as a lawyer that keeps him away from home, but there are indications that he is carrying on affairs. Molly suffers from a malaise akin to that described by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963) as affecting women who have come to define themselves exclusively as wives and mothers. Leo’s marriage to Starla, one of the orphans, has turned out disastrously, and she has left him to live alone in the mansion he inherited from a former customer on his paper route. Ike and Betty are both police officers and the only truly happily married couple in the group. Sheba Poe has become an established Hollywood star, but her brother Trevor has lost himself in the gay community in San Francisco. Sheba’s return to Charleston to seek help from her former high school classmates in finding her brother precipitates the action of this section of the novel. The entire group travels across the country to find Trevor, who is near death apparently from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). The trip puts them all in harm’s way, moreover, as they are stalked by a shadowy character whom they eventually identify as Sheba and Trevor’s estranged father, a psychopath who sexually abused Sheba and Trevor when they were children. This novel of social commentary thus turns into a thriller. The climax of the novel occurs after the group has returned to Charleston with Trevor in tow. The summer of 1989 is drawing to a close, and the city is bracing for Hurricane Hugo, which will effectively change not only the lives of the characters but the face of Charleston as well. Trevor and Sheba’s father has apparently followed them back to Charleston and is terrorizing them all. Leo and his friends are running scared of the sinister assassin, who eventually manages to murder Sheba. The hurricane proves to be both scourge and savior, as the would-be killer falls victim to a force of nature with which even he cannot contend. In the final pages of the novel, Leo learns what really happened to Steve to cause his suicide, his mother returns to the convent, and it seems that life for the circle of friends is returning to some sense of normalcy. The novel’s unusually complicated and perhaps even contrived plot, filled with interesting coincidences and innumerable twists and turns, is reminiscent of a Victorian triple-decker, although it is only half the length of most such texts. What makes South of Broad so compelling, however, is Conroy’s ability to make people and places come alive. His penchant for populating his work with quirky eccentrics and social misfits, as well as with lovable if sometimes frustrated heroes and heroines, may call to mind some of the best works of Charles Dickens or William Faulkner.

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As a group, the characters in South of Broad offer a portrait of the various classes that made up the social landscape of Charleston in the pivotal decades when the city moved out of the shadows of its antebellum past. They can easily be viewed as representative of certain types, such as the disgruntled white Southern male aristocrat, the closet liberal forced to express publicly his distaste for racial prejudice, the alluring southern debutante, the white-trash hillbilly from Appalachia, the persecuted homosexual, and the oppressed new woman who knows there must be more to life than a marriage that seems to her to resemble white slavery. Nevertheless, each of the principal characters is highly individualized, complex, and intriguing. What is more, much as John Berendt does of Savannah, Georgia, in the nonfiction Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994), Conroy makes the city of Charleston a character in its own right. Conroy knows Charleston quite well—both its physical and its social landscape. Conroy uses the city in a fashion similar to that employed by Joyce in his depiction of Dublin, Ireland, in Ulysses, a book referenced frequently in South of Broad. Conroy’s prologue, rhapsodic in tone and filled with insight into the character of the place he calls the Mansion on the River, evokes images of southern grandeur and decadence. One of Conroy’s themes, which might easily be missed by one caught up in the suspenseful plot, is the notion that in recent memory cataclysmic storms have reshaped the landscape of the South, both literally and metaphorically. The changes wrought by and upon Conroy’s principal characters are paralleled by the changes that Charleston itself undergoes in the tumultuous decades of the 1970’s and 1980’s, when so many social customs, including ones based on class and race, were forced to bend before inexorable forces that swept the United States. It is not surprising that Conroy chooses to set the climax of his novel during Hurricane Hugo, which was the worst storm endured by the residents of Charleston in modern history. Just as the city’s physical landscape was changed by this storm, so the storm unleashed earlier by the Civil Rights movement eventually caused a change in the social climate of the city where the Civil War began. The neighborhood south of Broad—and the states south of the Mason-Dixon line—will never be the same again. Laurence W. Mazzeno

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 17 (May 1, 2009): 5. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 13 (July 1, 2009): 673. Library Journal 134, no. 12 (July 1, 2009): 80. The New York Times Book Review, August 23, 2009: 22. Newsweek 154, no. 6/7 (August 10, 2009): 59. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 22 (June 1, 2009): 32. The Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2009, p. W12. The Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2009, p. D5.

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THE SPARTACUS WAR Author: Barry Strauss (1953) Publisher: Simon & Schuster (New York). 264 pp. $26.00 Type of work: History Time: 73-71 b.c.e. Locale: Roman Empire (now Italy) This historical study recounts in detail the revolt of enslaved gladiators under the leadership of the Thracian Spartacus against their Roman masters; the rebels attracted thousands of followers and terrorized the Italian peninsula for two years Principal personages: Spartacus (d. 71 b.c.e.), Thracian soldier who served as a Roman auxiliary before becoming a bandit, a gladiator, and the leader of a major slave revolt Thracian Lady, anonymous female companion of Spartacus who, as prophetess of the god Dionysus, stirred support for the revolt throughout Rome Crixus (d. 72 b.c.e.), Celtic gladiator who broke out of Capua with Spartacus and lead the revolt with him until his death Cannicus (Gannicus?) and Castus (d. 71 b.c.e.), Celtic leaders of a rebel army that broke away from Spartacus and was defeated by Crassus Marcus Porcius Cato, also known as Cato the Younger (95-46 b.c.e.), Roman who fought in the campaign against Spartacus in 72 b.c.e. Marcus Licinius Crassus (d. 53 b.c.e.), wealthy and politically ambitious Roman general who defeated Spartacus in 72-71 b.c.e. Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, also known as Pompey the Great (10648 b.c.e.), prominent Roman general and statesman who helped defeat Spartacus’s forces Gaius Verres (d. 43 b.c.e.), Roman governor of Sicily who successfully defended the island against Spartacus

As Barry Stauss recounts in The Spartacus War, between 73 and 71 b.c.e., the Thracian gladiator Spartacus terrorized the Italian peninsula as the leader of a slave rebellion. Long after his death, Romans continued to remember him with horror, and his memory has not tarnished with time. Nineteenth century freedom fighters such as Haitian Toussaint L’Ouverture and Italian champion Guiseppe Garibaldi idolized Spartacus as a revolutionary hero, as did the eighteenth century French philosopher Voltaire. Marxists have long celebrated him as the champion of a repressed segment of society and an example to the contemporary proletariat.

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Hollywood has ensured Spartacus’s place in modern mythology and culture. A 1950 Barry Strauss is professor of history novel by the disillusioned Marxist Howard and classics at Cornell University. He Fast inspired Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film is the author of The Battle of Salamis starring Kirk Douglas. Although teeming with (2004) and Trojan War: A New History historical inaccuracies, this film made Sparta- (2007), as well as the autobiographical cus a cinematic icon who most Americans Rowing Against the Current: On would recognize. Because of Kubrick’s film, Learning to Scull at Forty (2001). most would also sympathize with Spartacus’s doomed but “noble” campaign. The Spartacus commonly represented today, Strauss notes, is a puzzling mixture of soldier, slave, gladiator, general, orator, noble egalitarian, and freedom fighter. His complex story blends legend, history, romantic love story, crusade, liberation theology, and identity politics. Exactly who was this Spartacus? What were his goals and intentions? Was his campaign just a slave revolt or actually an uprising against Roman nationalism? How Roman was the Thracian Spartacus? Strauss, an ancient historian, uses a variety of historical resources to seek answers to these questions and to fill out the personality of Spartacus and the details of his revolt. Only the barest outline of the Roman war against Spartacus is known. Sometime in the spring or summer of 73 b.c.e., a small band of gladiators under the leadership of Spartacus broke out of their barracks in Capua and occupied Mt. Vesuvius. In the next few months, tens of thousands of runaway slaves and disaffected Italians flocked to the gladiator’s camp, as his forces defeated Roman units led by Glaber and Varinius and launched raiding expeditions in the area. The rebels, relying mostly on guerrilla tactics to withstand the Romans, wintered in the southern Italian city of Thurii. In the spring of 72, the rebels marched north as far as Mutina in the Po Valley, where a Roman army led by both consuls was defeated. Why Spartacus and his followers did not, at that point, attempt a crossing of the Alps into either Gaul (modern France) or his native Thrace (modern Bulgaria) remains one of the most puzzling riddles of the story. Instead of doing so, the rebels split into two armies, one led by Spartacus and the other by the Celtic gladiator Crixus, who was soon defeated and killed by Roman forces. By the summer of 72, Spartacus and his forces had returned to southern Italy. During the following winter, they attempted, with the help of some pirates, to cross over to the island of Sicily. Cheated by the pirates, Spartacus was gradually isolated in southern Italy by the forces of Crassus. Sometime around April of 71, Crassus defeated a breakaway rebel army led by the Celts Cannicus and Castus and forced Spartacus into a pitched battle, where Spartacus was killed. In the following month, Crassus crucified thousands of Spartacus’s followers along the Appian Way. Bands of rebels apparently continued their guerrilla tactics in southern Italy for at least a decade, because Octavian (the future emperor Augustus) is said to have wiped out the last survivors in 60 b.c.e. Unfortunately, the real man and his followers left no historical record, no explanation of their motives and plans, so Strauss must comb incomplete and biased sources

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for information. As is often the case, the history of the vanquished is told only through the words of the victors. Even this record is fragmentary and distant in time from actual events. Spartacus’s famous contemporaries, Julius Caesar and the orator Cicero, both in their thirties at the time of the revolt, make only passing (but valuable) references to Spartacus and the Roman campaign against him. The only contemporary Roman who wrote directly about the war in any detail was Sallust (C. Sallustius Crispius, 86-35 b.c.e.). However, Sallust was only in his early teens at the time of the revolt and his writings about Spartacus do not survive intact. The historian Livy (Titus Livius, 59 b.c.e.-17 c.e.) also wrote about Spartacus in his monumental history of Rome, Ab urbe condita libri (c. 26 b.c.e.-15 c.e.; The History of Rome, 1600). Livy was not alive at the time of the revolt but had access to good historical documents. Unfortunately, the portion of his work dealing with the years of Spartacus’s revolt is available only in summary form. The most detailed surviving ancient accounts were written in Greek, not Latin, more than a century after the death of Spartacus. The Life of Crassus—one of the biographies in Plutarch’s Bioi paralleloi (c. 105-115; Parallel Lives, 1579), which Strauss rightly considers the best single source—focuses naturally not on Spartacus himself but on his conqueror, Crassus, whom Strauss calls “the Decimator” because of his severe treatment of his own troops. Also useful is Rhomaika (wr. c. 160, pb. 1551; Roman History, 1578) by the Greek historian Appian. The details about Spartacus provided by this scattered and fragmentary literary evidence are often contradictory and unreliable, and they are always sketchy. For this reason, Strauss adds to the historical record evidence from a number of nonliterary sources. For example, he uses coin hoards, weapons, and other archaeological finds in southern Italy to trace Spartacus’s march through the peninsula. Evidence of the Gallic victory against the Romans in Arausio (Orange, France) in 105 b.c.e. provides a context for understanding military encounters between Romans and Gauls (who represented a significant number of Spartacus’s forces). While little of this archaeological record relates directly to Spartacus, it nevertheless makes the slave leader’s world more tangible and vivid for Strauss’s twenty-first century readers. While no contemporary portraits of Spartacus survive, Strauss brings the gladiator to life with photographs of places associated with his career and campaign: the ancient Roman amphitheater in Avella (where Spartacus may have fought), Mt. Vesuvius (where Spartacus and his followers initially took refuge), the Strait of Messina (where Spartacus attempted an unsuccessful crossing into Sicily), Melia Ridge (where Spartacus and Crassus may have fought in 71 b.c.e.), and the ancient Appian Way (where many of Spartacus’s followers were crucified by Crassus in 70 b.c.e.). All of these photographs were taken by Strauss himself, as he personally traced the course of Spartacus’s campaign in southern Italy. The historian’s on-site observations about the terrain thus become another important tool in telling Spartacus’s story. To this geographical context, Strauss adds ancient artifacts: portrait busts of Romans such as Cato, Crassus, and Pompey; representations of everyday Roman life, including ancient gladiators in combat and a slave auction; and Greek and Roman depictions of Thracians and Celts. Most intriguing is a fragmentary cartoonlike painting

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from Pompeii with a figure labeled “Spartaks.” This image may or may not be intended to represent Spartacus himself, but it is an exciting possibility. Strauss expands this picture further with detailed descriptions and historical overviews of Thrace, Capua, Thurii, and other places associated with Spartacus, as well as a general history of Rome and its empire in the second and first centuries b.c.e. Rome in the time of Spartacus may best be understood in terms of earlier conflicts, especially its war with the Carthaginian Hannibal at the end of the third century b.c.e., various slave revolts in the second century, and the Social or Italian War in 91-88 b.c.e. All of these conflicts kept Romans perpetually terrified about foreign invasion and internal revolts by slaves and subject peoples. Furthermore, as Spartacus led his uprising, Rome was dealing with two major challenges: a war by Mithridates, king of Pontus, in what is now Turkey (88-63 b.c.e.), and a revolt by the Roman Sertorius (80-72 b.c.e.) in Spain. Indeed, only when the danger from Sertorius was past could Rome devote the attention necessary to deal with Spartacus effectively. Strauss also intersects Spartacus with the lives of famous Romans—not only Cato, Crassus, and Pompey, who dealt directly with the revolt, but also Cicero, who successfully prosecuted Verres for corruption and misadministration as governor of Sicily, and the poet Horace, whose father owned a farm in the path of Spartacus’s march. Spartacus’s world is made even more accessible to modern readers by Strauss’s lively descriptions of various aspects of everyday life, including the lives of gladiators, their armor and combat tactics, slavery in the Roman world, and Roman military and political customs. The story of Spartacus prompts particular discussion of the Roman practice of execution by crucifixion, Roman military triumphs, and especially worship of the Greek deity Dionysus (known better to the Romans as Bacchus), with whom Spartacus was identified. Using all these tools, Strauss creates a number of memorable historical vignettes that are not in the Hollywood version of the hero’s story: the Roman senator and commander Lucius Cossinius soaking in his bath as the rebel army attacks; the snake which is said to have wrapped itself around a sleeping Spartacus; the prophecy of Spartacus’s Thracian consort, who used the snake to transform the rebel leader into a champion of Dionysus; the scouts who helped Spartacus find his way through the rugged terrain of southern Italy; the ingenious rafts that Spartacus’s men fashioned in a futile attempt to cross over onto the island of Sicily; the fearless Celtic women who warned Cannicus and Castus of Crassus’s impending attack; Spartacus’s cunning escape from Crassus’s fortification line along the Melia Ridge in southernmost Italy; and, especially, the gladiator’s courageous decision to slay his personal horse and meet Crassus’s army on foot. Most significant, Strauss describes Spartacus’s noble death on the field of battle (not by crucifixion on the Appian Way, as depicted in the Kubrick film). In the end, readers of The Spartacus War are left with historian Strauss’s realistic estimation regarding the details of Spartacus’s campaign and place in Roman history. Even Strauss, however, can provide only reasonable guesses and hypotheses about the rebel’s motivations and intentions. It can never be known, for example, to what

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extent the slave revolt was also motivated by resentment against Roman imperialism. At the least, Strauss’s balanced and cautious history of Spartacus and his campaign puts the mythic Spartacus of Hollywood in a more secure historical context. Thomas J. Sienkewicz

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 12 (February 15, 2009): 19. Christianity Today 53, no. 6 (June, 2009): 56. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 30. Library Journal 134, no. 2 (February 1, 2009): 81. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 2 (January 12, 2009): 38. The Washington Post, April 5, 2009, p. B06.

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STONE’S FALL Author: Iain Pears (1955) Publisher: Spiegel & Grau (New York). 594 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1867-1953 Locale: London; Paris; Venice When a young reporter is hired to find a missing person, he enters a web of intrigue that includes espionage, arms trading, and market manipulation Principal characters: John Stone, Baron Ravenscliff, a wealthy industrialist and financier Elizabeth, Lady Ravenscliff, Stone’s wife Matthew Braddock, a London journalist Henry Cort, a British government agent

Iain Pears’s Stone’s Fall is a puzzle that may be likened to a set of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls. It consists of three interconnected tales with three distinct narrators. Each successive tale is nested within the one before it and takes place during an earlier time in the life of a British businessman named John Stone. Each addition to his story challenges readers’ previous impressions and uncovers more information about Stone’s rise to great heights in the power structure of Europe before World War I— heights from which he inevitably and fatally falls. Over the last decade, Pears has risen to heights of his own. With An Instance of the Finger Post (1998), he won recognition as an author of detective fiction as cerebral as that of Umberto Eco, to whom he is often compared. He widened the historical sweep of his fiction considerably with The Dream of Scipio (2002) and sharpened its focus with The Portrait (2006). Stone’s Fall, though not the longest of Pears’s novels, is the one that covers the broadest social and geographical range. Whereas the earlier mysteries focused on science, philosophy, or art, the new novel takes on the structure of modern banking and finance, as well as the emergence of the arms race among western European powers. Adding to the intrigue are side excursions into such areas as socialism, spiritualism, and newspaper management. Readers learn about these topics along with the narrators, and some of the lessons are eerily reminiscent of the world economic crisis taking place at the time of the book’s publication. Stone represents a new kind of businessman that emerged in the late nineteenth century, one interested less in the product than in the deal. In the vocabulary of the late twentieth century, he has a flair for integrating markets, both vertically and horizontally, and for leveraging assets. He builds up a multinational corporation as well as an investment group, with which the rich and powerful invest their savings. He considers himself a loyal British subject and is made a peer of the realm, but by the time

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he is knighted he is selling arms to rival governments, convinced that he is helping maintain the balance of power. (“It is not the task of my companies to make Britain more secure,” he rationalizes; “it is the duty of Britain to make my companies more secure.”) Stone’s new title, Lord Ravenscliff, seems oddly appropriate: From his lofty vantage point, he can survey all possible prey. The novel opens in Paris in 1953, when a retired journalist learns that Stone’s widow will be buried there that day. Matthew Braddock worked briefly for Elizabeth, Lady Ravenscliff, and, although embittered by the experience, he attends the funeral service. There, he happens to meet a London attorney whose firm just happens to have something for him. A longtime associate of Lord and Lady Ravenscliff, Henry Cort, left a box to be delivered to Braddock only after both of the Ravenscliffs were dead. Before retrieving the box, Braddock reads over a manuscript that he prepared after working for Elizabeth. Dated “London, 1909,” Braddock’s tale is the largest of the narrative nesting boxes. As a successful crime reporter, he is engaged, at his editor’s recommendation, to help Elizabeth find a mysterious child mentioned in her late husband’s will. Thanks to a generous retainer and new contacts in the upper stratum of British society, Braddock quickly learns about Stone’s economic genius and personal concerns. He turns up many mysteries surrounding Stone’s death, but his leads take him nowhere. He suspects that he was hired so that the mysteries would remain unsolved and the estate would remain in the hands of Elizabeth, who seems to be Stone’s equal in many respects, including cleverness and rapaciousness. Only in the last pages of his narrative does Braddock gain an understanding of the facts behind Stone’s life and death. Even then, he learns these facts from shadowy and suspicious man, a government agent named Henry Cort. The box left for Braddock contains the second narrative Chinese box, written by Cort and dated “Paris, 1890.” As a young civil servant, Cort knew the future Lord and Lady Ravenscliff. When he discovered the makings of a financial crisis that would cause a run on every British bank, he engaged them to help resolve it. Several decades later, as he approached death, Cort decided to leave his manuscript for Braddock. As a trusted associate, he was in possession of some of Stone’s papers, including a narrative that Stone wrote during the weeks leading up to his death. Stone’s narrative, dated “Venice, 1867,” takes place during the days immediately after the American Civil War, when Cort was still a boy and Stone was a young businessman in search of better investments. This third manuscript is the shortest—the smallest of the nesting boxes—but it reveals the most about Stone’s real character. Stone’s narrative makes it clear that Braddock did not get an entirely accurate picture from Cort before he wrote the 1909 manuscript. Audiences of Stone’s era loved stories of mistaken identities, featuring beggars who turn out to be heirs to great fortunes, parents and children separated for years

Educated at Oxford, Iain Pears has written a scholarly book on art history, as well as seven novels about murder and theft in the art world. He is best known for An Instance of the Finger Post (1998), The Dream of Scipio (2002), and The Portrait (2005).

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before a final reunion, and so forth. However, Stone’s Fall contains enough coincidences and improbabilities to frustrate even a Victorian reader. When all the narrators are so obviously unreliable, it becomes hard to trust the author who created them. Perhaps for this reason more than any other, many critics have responded to the nested stories as though they were reviewing three novels rather than one. Some have praised “London, 1909,” which seems to be the most convincing piece of historical reconstruction. Others have much preferred “Paris, 1890” or “Venice 1867,” depending on their preferences in narrators and background information. The different narratives tend to express the different personalities of their respective narrators. The London section seems to incorporate the most characters and opinions, in part because Braddock is a reporter and an aspiring writer of newspaper “leaders,” or editorials. The Paris section is more concerned with people who are not what they seem and with the narrator’s breathtaking adventures because Cort has spent his life as an undercover agent. Finally, Venice section, as the work of a calculating business executive, takes less interest in people and more in problem solving. This praise for discrete parts of the novel, however, tends to dismiss or overlook the work as a whole, the large box that contains the three nested tales. One reviewer remarks that Pears has written “historical hokum”; another thinks he is “joking.” So far, there has been little interpretation of what may be concluded from the totality of the evidence Pears presents. In the author’s defense, it should be said that, much like Stone, Pears is a master of organization and detail. The first narrative box is full of details about the running of a London newspaper one hundred years ago, including the very class-conscious hierarchy of reporters, writers, and editors. The second box provides details of the secret information networks connecting bankers and governments across Europe. The third box reveals information about Stone before he had acquired his business empire, or his wife, as well as the insights and actions that made him a very rich man. In a sense, there are three stories of John Stone’s fall. Stone died, readers quickly learn, after a fall from his study window, and his literal fall raised questions about its cause. The first narrative variously weighs the possibilities that Stone was pushed, jumped, or fell by accident. Many of Stone’s investors felt they had been cheated. Stone faced possible ruin and disgrace. Everyone around him was acting under great stress. Thus all three causes are plausible. The conclusion one reaches about Stone’s death will depend, to a large measure, on what one makes of Stone’s widow. Braddock, who is hired to help Elizabeth, finds himself falling in love with her, only to be felled by a bullet she fires at him—accidentally, she claims. Cort, who met her when she was lower on the social ladder, has been her confidant long enough to convince Braddock that he knows what really happened. Stone himself learns important information about his wife just days before his death. Meanwhile, readers discover that Elizabeth is capable of almost anything. Each narrator thinks for a while that he knows who she really is, only to find that he has underestimated her. There are many more characters than the few who tell Stone’s story. In addition to

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the advisers and associates Stone collects over more than four decades, there are many others who become involved with Lord and Lady Ravenscliff. Not only Cort but also his father and stepmother have major roles to play. Many minor characters come to have strangely important parts as well, including Red Ruth, the bombthrowing anarchist; Virginie, the ambitious prostitute; and Madame Boninska, the swindling spiritualist. All are more closely affiliated with Lady Ravenscliff than they first appear to be. Other characters appear only long enough to drop a clue or provoke a reflection, yet they are vividly imagined while they do. For example, George, a seasoned reporter, gives Braddock his first lesson about British titles. A habitué of a pub called the Duck, where newspapermen gather, George dresses “so appallingly that he was once arrested for vagrancy,” but he provides a sound warning about the nouveau riche: “These people take a lot and give nothing back.” In another episode, Braddock shares a berth with a lawyer on an intercity train. Braddock reflects: On other occasions I might have found him dull, I suppose; his life of bridge and supper parties would never have suited me. But I took comfort would never have suited me. But I took comfort in the fact that he liked it; and found my liking was tinged with longing. I feared for Mr. Jordan; I felt that the anarchists and the Ravenscliffs would succeed in sweeping all away, sooner or later, and the world would be the poorer for its loss.

Simply as historical fiction, recreating life in three great European cities before World War I, Stone’s Fall is a triumph. The world of the London reporter is entirely convincing; it could have been written by such contemporary authors as George Gissing or Arnold Bennett, but it happens to be a new telling. Pears’s research extends to the names and details found in everything from a torpedo assembly to a lady’s costume. The social gatherings of Paris and the architectural practices of Venice capture Stone’s attention at different points, as he builds his business empire, and Pears similarly portrays them in detail. Stone’s Fall is a long novel, approaching the length of a Victorian “triple-decker,” or novel in three volumes. Nevertheless, it must be read more than once to be appreciated beyond its dazzling surface. Only in a rereading is it apparent how much each narrator misses or conceals—and how subtly Pears, the real storyteller, drops clues that will take on meaning only much later. When a twenty-first century reader pieces together the story that Matthew Braddock tried to construct a century earlier, he or she may find a simple solution to the apparently hopeless array of data. Thomas Willard

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 17 (May 1, 2009): 33. The Guardian, May 9, 2009, p. 10. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 7 (April 1, 2009): 344. Library Journal 134, no. 6 (April 1, 2009): 72. Los Angeles Times, May 9, 2009, p. D4. The New York Times Book Review, June 7, 2009, p. 12. The Sunday Times (London), May 10, 2009, p. 47. The Times Literary Supplement, May 15, 2009, p. 20. The Washington Post, May 27, 2009, p. C4.

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A STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families Author: Michael Holroyd (1935) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 620 pp. $40.00 Type of work: Biography Time: 1838-1966 Locale: England A group biography of the brilliant theatrical clan that dominated the English stage from the mid-Victorian era to the beginning of World War I Principal personages: Ellen Terry, a charismatic actress who became the reigning queen of the English theater Henry Irving, her kingly consort, a gifted actor and impressario Edward Gordon Craig, her son, who became a noted theatrical designer Edith Craig, her daughter Laurence Irving, and Henry Brodribb Irving, Henry Irving’s sons Christopher Marie St. John, companion of Edith Craig

Lest anyone think that the culture of celebrity is a recent invention, Michael Holroyd’s generally engrossing account of the lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and their numerous children and romantic partners contains many examples of just how enthusiastically their contemporaries loved and idolized these icons of the British stage. Their every movement was front-page news for journalists catering to the public’s desire to know the most trivial details of their lives, and, in this fishbowl atmosphere, relationships with their children, lovers, and professional associates were subject to the kind of intense scrutiny that can either harden or unbalance its recipients. Although Terry and Irving were by temperament and training able to stand up to this constant attention, their children and friends often reacted to it in much more negative ways. As a consequence, A Strange Eventful History for the most part more than lives up to its title, as it reveals in compelling detail how life on the public stage could result in severely troubled private lives. Ellen Terry was born into the world of the theater in 1847, although at a much lower level than that she would eventually achieve. Her father was a competent supporting actor. Her mother took theatrical odd jobs between pregnancies, and most of the family’s nine children would go on to have some sort of theatrical career. The family’s life was one of frequent travel from one provincial playhouse to another,

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punctuated by periodic unemployment and occasional longer runs in successful produc- Michael Holroyd has written tions, and from her earliest days Terry was biographies of Hugh Kingsmill, fascinated by the atmosphere of the stage. In Augustus John, George Bernard Shaw, 1856, she made her London debut in William and Lytton Strachey, as well as two Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (pr. c. 1610- volumes of memoirs, Basil Street Blues 1611, pb. 1623) at the age of nine. Despite a (1999) and Mosaic (2004). In 2005, he series of both professional and personal ups became the first nonfiction writer to be awarded the David Cohen British and downs—including an abortive early marLiterature Prize. riage and a nonmarital relationship that re sulted in the birth of two children—by her early thirties, she had become the brightest star on the London stage. Terry’s eventual partner in celebrity, Henry Irving, came from a much different background. His father was so unsuccessful as a travelling salesman that Irving (born John Henry Broadribb) was at the age of four sent to live with an aunt in Cornwall, a region at the time connected to the rest of England only by steamboat. Living in a remote mining village where entertainments were few and far between, he was enthralled by the touring theatrical companies that occasionally visited the area. At a Christmas party, he was scared out of his wits when a boy wearing a terrifying mask burst into a darkened room. He always remembered this incident as proof of the power of acting and, when reunited with his family in London at the age of eleven, insisted on following a theatrical career. He progressed slowly but steadily to the point that, by the early 1870’s, he had changed his name to Henry Irving and become one of England’s leading actors. Irving and Terry first acted together in 1867, but his performance was panned by the critics and there seems to have been no romantic interest between them at the time. Irving married in 1869 after a whirlwind romance, but the following year he and his wife began a series of separations and reconciliations, during which two children were born. Meanwhile, Irving’s increasing professional success seemed to drive him further from his wife. Forced to chose between his family and his career, he made it clear that he loved the theater more than he did his family. Devoting himself to a hectic acting schedule while also assuming managerial responsibility for one of London’s largest theaters, Irving rapidly became one of the people to reckon with in his chosen profession. As Irving began to partner with Terry more frequently on the stage, an offstage relationship developed between them that has somewhat puzzled previous biographers. Given that both were married to people from whom they were separated, and given the legal barriers to divorce at the time, the two could not marry. As a result, they had to be somewhat discreet. The two actors traveled as a couple when touring, and Irving purchased a secluded suburban villa where they could be together in private. However, it was necessary for the sake of appearances to preserve the fiction that they were simply working professionals who happened to act in many of the same productions. Their ability to maintain this illusion of respectability has led some commenta-

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tors to question whether they ever were in fact lovers, but Holroyd’s analysis of the historical evidence establishes with little doubt that their relationship was a longlasting one, if subject to variations in interest and intensity—on Irving’s part in particular. Although the two never had a child together, the fate of their various children occupies a substantial portion of A Strange Eventful History, and it is in following these diverse biographical strands that the book begins to lose some of its coherence. Their four children followed very different paths that, except in one case, are of no great intrinsic interest. In attempting to keep their separate stories in play simultaneously, Holroyd necessarily alternates back and forth between somewhat pedestrian narratives in a not entirely successful effort to keep readers’ attention. The one exceptional tale is provided by Edward Gordon Craig, the flamboyant son of Terry and her lover Edward William Godwin. Craig’s innovations in theatrical design brought him the admiration of luminaries such as Isadora Duncan, Max Reinhardt, and Konstantin Stanislavski. His life was a chaotic one, though, not least because of his penchant for siring children with many of the women who crossed his path and whom he typically exploited as unpaid secretarial help before abandoning them for the next pretty face that caught his fancy. His thoroughgoing selfishness and unwillingness to take responsibility for any of his actions make it hard to care much about him, but Holroyd’s evocative descriptions of Craig’s often stunning theatrical designs establish his importance to the era’s stagecraft. The same cannot between be said of his sister Edith Craig, who had difficulty freeing herself from her mother’s well-meant but nonetheless smothering influence. Much of the substantial portion of A Strange Eventful History devoted to Edith is monopolized by the idiosyncrasies of the companion of her later years, a woman who chose to socially transgender herself by adopting the name Christopher Marie St. John. Although the text’s resulting glimpses of the rather genteel and necessarily circumspect lesbianism of the period offer some counterpoint to the actively heterosexual lives of Terry and Irving, Holroyd does not succeed in enlivening what seems to have been a long, loyal, and on the whole rather dull relationship. Irving’s children Laurence and Henry, who died relatively young—at the ages of forty-two and forty-nine, respectively—followed in their father’s footsteps, enjoying successful theatrical careers. They do not play significant parts in the book’s narrative scheme, however. Given the comparative brevity of their lives and the similarity of their professional accomplishments to those of their father, one can understand why Holroyd chose to downplay their roles. However, Holroyd falls instead into repetitive accounts of Edward Gordon Craig’s series of affairs and descriptions of minor conflicts in Edith Craig’s menage. Readers may therefore wish that he had paid more attention to the literally dramatic and less to the private melodramas of Edith Terry’s children. Holroyd’s most recent biographies have dealt with larger-than-life individuals such as Augustus John, Lytton Strachey, and George Bernard Shaw, whose stories needed no embellishment from relatives, lovers, or friends. Here, however, the somewhat elusive personalities of Terry and Irving, neither of whom seems to have had an

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inner life that matched the charismatic drama of their public performances, has led Holroyd to surround them with a supporting cast that tends to obscure rather than reveal his subjects. In addition to casting about for extraneous material to enliven his narrative, Holroyd several times resorts to a structural device that one associates with the most primitive forms of melodrama: Ending a chapter with the person he has been talking about in mortal danger, he then leaves readers hanging as he switches to another subject entirely. Although one’s curiosity will eventually be satisfied in a later chapter, this cheap chronological trick has no place in what purports to be a serious treatment of its material. Fortunately, the main thread of A Strange Eventful History is the exciting and compelling story of Terry, Irving, and the collective and individual achievements of their time on the stage. That story’s appeal is strong enough to keep one persevering through the book’s less gripping sections. Even though the concluding years of their careers were marked by health problems that might have forced less dedicated actors to retire, Terry and Irving fought their way through these difficulties and found ways to compensate for the decline in their physical abilities. Accounts of their performances during this period often refer to a new maturity and subtlety in their acting that impressed audiences anew with their mastery of their art. Although Holroyd spends too much time on other figures in their lives, those lives themselves are worth documenting and compellingly documented in this biography. Paul Stuewe

Review Sources The Economist 388, no. 8595 (August 30, 2008): 79-80. The Guardian, September 6, 2008, p. 7. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 4 (February 15, 2009): 184. Library Journal 134, no. 2 (February 1, 2009): 73. London Review of Books 31, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 27-29. Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2009, p. D2. The New Republic 240, no. 8 (May 20, 2009): 46-47. New Statesman 137, no. 4913 (September 15, 2008): 52-53. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 10 (June 11, 2009): 70-72. The New York Times Book Review, March 29, 2009, p. 12. The New Yorker 85, no. 9 (April 13, 2009): 77. The Observer, September 7, 2008, p. 23. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 51 (December 22, 2008): 41. The Spectator 308, no. 9399 (October 18, 2008): 37-38. The Times Literary Supplement, December 19, 2008, p. 3-5. The Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2009, p. W6. The Washington Post, March 12, 2009, p. CO4.

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THE STRANGEST MAN The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom Author: Graham Farmelo (1953) Publisher: Basic Books (New York). 539 pp. $29.95 Type of work: Biography, science, history of science Time: 1902-1984 Locale: England, especially Bristol and Cambridge; United States, especially Princeton, New Jersey, and Tallahassee, Florida Despite emotional damage due to possible autism and a tyrannical father, Dirac’s belief that equations in physics should be beautiful enabled him to help create quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics and to predict such pivotal discoveries as that of the positron Principal personages: Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, English mathematical physicist Charles Dirac, school teacher and Paul’s father Florence (Holten) Dirac, Paul’s mother Margit (Wigner) Dirac, Paul’s wife Peter Leonidovich Kapitza, Soviet physicist and Paul’s closest friend

Graham Farmelo’s The Strangest Man is a biography of one of the most imporant scientists of the twentieth century. Throughout his scientific life, Paul Dirac sought to discover the deepest and most comprehensive laws of the universe, laws he believed would be expressible in mathematical equations that were aesthetically pleasing. Though he was adept at formulating such laws, he was inept when he tried to understand the complexities of his own eccentric personality and his difficulties in interacting with people. These difficulties persisted within his own family and with the many individuals he met over the course of his career. Science is an intensely social enterprise, and ideas that are permanently locked in the minds of their creators never become truly scientific. Thus, it is a paradox of Dirac’s life that such an asocial individual came to be admired by such scientists as Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger. A principal goal of Farmelo’s biography is to understand this paradox by penetrating the shell that Dirac constructed around his “hidden life” to reveal the emotional roots of his personal oddities and public triumphs. The book’s title derives from the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who once said that Dirac was “the strangest man” ever to have visited his institute. Farmelo, a physicist with a talent for popularization (an activity that Dirac disdained), has been interested in Dirac since his own adolescence in England. Unlike many Englishmen and Americans, who were fascinated with the Bristol-educated Archibald Leach (who became the actor Cary Grant), Farmelo, whose paternal grandmother was born in Bristol, developed an abiding absorption in Dirac. Dirac had

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spent twenty-five years as a child, teenager, and young adult in Bristol. As Farmelo pur- Graham Farmelo, while a senior sued his own scientific career, he kept en- research fellow at the Science Museum, countering Dirac’s name in his textbooks, London, wrote a book on museum and his admiration grew, as did his interest in visitors published in 1993. His edited the history of science. This growing interest book, It Must Be Beautiful: Great led him to edit It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science (2002), Equations of Modern Science (2002). Dirac, became a best seller. He is an adjunct professor of physics at Northeastern who was responsible for some of the most University in Boston. beautiful equations of modern physics, was part of this publication. Dirac’s life has already been explored in articles and in Helge Kragh’s Dirac: A Scientific Biography (1990). However, Farmelo’s approach is not a detailed study of Dirac’s scientific publications; he generously refers readers interested in that aspect of Dirac’s life to Kragh. Instead, Formelo engages in a probing investigation of the psychological and social contexts of Dirac’s discoveries and publications. Although Farmelo takes a basically chronological approach to his subject’s life, he is not averse to jumping forward and backward in time should his development of a theme warrant it. He intends his book for general readers, and he explains equations mostly in words. The book begins with a prologue that analyzes Dirac as a “top-down thinker,” someone who believes that theories are more important than experiments. Unlike Dirac, Farmelo the biographer pursues the “bottom-up” approach, in the sense that he bases his generalizations about Dirac’s life, career, and character on historical facts. Thus, he has assiduously collected data from archives in England and the United States; he has also interviewed many of the surviving colleagues, friends, and family members who were in any way connected with his subject. He has also read extensively in the secondary literature that has gathered around the analysis of Dirac’s life and contributions. What is original in Farmelo’s treatment is the extent to which he is able to uncover aspects of his subject’s life and personality that Dirac himself tried to keep concealed. For example, Dirac viewed his father Charles as a tyrant who bullied his wife, two sons, and daughter (Paul was the middle child). Charles himself had been tyrannized by his own parents, as well as in the Swiss army, and after he moved to England to teach modern languages he became a rigid disciplinarian in school and in his family. Charles insisted that Felix, Paul, and Betty speak perfect French, whereas their mother Flo always talked to her children in English. This inevitably led to conflicts and to Paul’s retreat from his family into the peace and safety of his imagination. In his elementary and secondary schooling, Paul preferred science and mathematics over such subjects as history, poetry, and German. He also developed what would become a lifelong distaste for sports and an equally long lived love of comics and cartoons, particularly Mickey Mouse. At a local college, he, like his older brother before him, enrolled as an engineering student, but his passion was for theoretical physics (he was especially enamored of Einstein’s general theory of relativity). During this

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time, Paul automatically became a British citizen when his father decided to change nationality from Swiss to British. Charles thought that this would improve the family’s financial well-being, and it is true that Paul had to struggle before being able to enter Cambridge University. Once he did enter it, Cambridge became the center of Dirac’s life for nearly fifty years. It was there that he formed an enduring friendship with Peter Kapitza, a Soviet citizen who influenced Dirac’s left-wing views, which he kept discreetly private. It was there, too, that he learned of his brother’s suicide, an action for which he blamed his father, although his own indifference to Felix may have been a contributing cause. Most important, it was at Cambridge that he learned and mastered the old quantum theory and the new quantum mechanics. Dirac once said that Heisenberg’s foundational paper on quantum mechanics changed his life. He became so intrigued by the mathematics of quantum mechanics that he began attempting to create a much more ambitious theory than Heisenberg’s, and it became part of his thesis for his doctoral degree, which he received in 1926. During his postdoctoral studies, Dirac was able to deepen his understanding of the new physics through work with Bohr in Copenhagen and through conversations with physicists Max Born and J. Robert Oppenheimer in Göttingen. Upon his return to St John’s College in Cambridge, he was able to devise an equation that described the behavior of the electron much better than previous treatments had. (This equation was later carved into his commemorative stone in Westminster Abbey, an honor that he almost did not receive because of his fervent atheism.) Dirac believed that beautiful mathematical equations were wiser than their creators, and in trying to rationalize some of the problems of his “Dirac equation” he made his most famous prediction—that “anti-electrons,” electrons with positive charges, should exist. The California physicist Carl Anderson, who verified their existence, called them “positrons,” giving them the name by which they are now known. Dirac’s reputation was also enhanced by his The Principles of Quantum Mechanics (1930), which Einstein called “the most logically perfect presentation” of the new physics and which others characterized as a great mathematical poem. These achievements led to his being named, in 1932, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a position once held by the preeminent English natural philosopher Isaac Newton. These honors received a suitable capstone when he shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger for their discoveries of “new and productive forms of atomic theory.” Like many physicists before him, Dirac was unable in the half century following his Nobel Prize to make discoveries and predictions comparable to those that he made as a young man. He did predict that “magnons,” or single magnetic poles, might exist in the universe, but this prediction was never verified. In 1937, he married the sister of the Hungarian American physicist Eugene Wigner, his colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Manci, a widow with two children from her previous marriage, did much to make her husband into a slightly more outgoing human being. They eventually had two daughters of their own. Manci and Paul were able to travel to the Soviet Union to visit Kapitza, who was unhappy that Soviet officials had forced him to leave his laboratory in Cambridge.

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Dirac, ignorant of the horrors of Joseph Stalin’s purges, continued to have an overly idealistic view of the “Soviet experiment.” During World War II, Dirac made some contributions to the British atomic bomb project, and after the war he renewed his friendship with Kapitza, despite the problems created by the Cold War. Increasingly unhappy at Cambridge, Dirac, following the wishes of his wife, decided to spend his final years at Florida State University, where they would be able to visit their daughters and Manci’s brother. In his old age, Dirac was critical of what he viewed as the inelegancies of new discoveries and theories in physics. His last paper was entitled “The Inadequacies of Quantum Field Theory.” In Farmelo’s final two chapters, which serve as the book’s epilogue, he investigates the questions of whether Dirac suffered from autism and what Dirac’s place in the history of physics should be. Though not a psychiatrist, Farmelo believes that his diagnosis of autism explains several puzzling aspects of his subject’s eccentric personality, but others think that this “evidence” can be explained in other ways. Although he does not consider Dirac’s achievement comparable to those of Newton and Einstein, he does believe that Dirac belongs with such founders of quantum mechanics as Heisenberg and Schrödinger. Some readers have not been as forgiving as Farmelo concerning Dirac’s rudeness toward family, friends, colleagues, and strangers, and his biography is not without errors, typographical and factual, that would have bothered the perfectionist Dirac. Nevertheless, Farmelo presents a convincing case that Dirac made unique and profound contributions to modern physics, even though, in his waning years, Dirac himself thought that his life had been “a failure” and that quantum mechanics, to which he had devoted so much time and energy, was still unable to explain with sufficient precision something as simple as an electron interacting with a light particle. Robert J. Paradowski

Review Sources American Scientist 97, no. 6 (November/December, 2009): 502-504. Booklist 106, no. 1 (September 1, 2009): 19. The Economist 390, no. 8615 (January 24, 2009): 89-90. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 13 (July 1, 2009): 696. Library Journal 134, no. 16 (October 1, 2009): 95 London Review of Books 31, no. 4 (February 26, 2009): 21-22. Natural History 118, no. 9 (November, 2009): 35-37. Nature 459, no. 7245 (May 21, 2009): 326-327. New Scientist 201, no. 2690 (January 10, 2009): 43. New Statesman 138, no. 4934 (February 2, 2009): 53-54. The New York Times Book Review, September 13, 2009, p. 14. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 26 (June 29, 2009): 120. Science 326, no. 5957 (November 27, 2009): 1191-1192. The Times Literary Supplement, March 13, 2009, p. 22.

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STRENGTH IN WHAT REMAINS A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness Author: Tracy Kidder (1945) Publisher: Random House (New York). 277 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Current affairs, biography Time: 1970’s-2009 Locale: Burundi; Rwanda; New York, New York; Boston and Cambridge, Masssachusetts The biography of a Burundian medical student who survives the East African genocides of 1993-1994, remakes his life in the United States, and returns to help rebuild his country Principal personages: Deogratias Niyizonkiza (Deo), a Tutsi survivor of Burundian and Rwandan genocides Lonjino, Deo’s paternal grandfather and the family patriarch Deo’s mother, whose social conscience influenced his childhood and made her a change agent for her village Deo’s father, a village elder Bishop Bernard Bududira, mentor to the teenage Deo Muhammed, the baggage carrier who initiated Deo to the hard facts of American life Sharon McKenna, ex-Benedictine nun whose kindness began the reversal of Deo’s fortunes as a homeless undocumented immigrant Charlie and Nancy Wolf, a middle-aged couple who invited Deo to share their Manhattan apartment and financed his degree at Columbia University Dr. Paul Farmer, model for the medical activism Deo practices Abbe Zacharie, Burundian schoolmaster Tracy Kidder, Deo’s companion in retracing his experiences

Strength in What Remains might seem a companion piece to Tracy Kidder’s bestselling Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (2003). Farmer, whose foundation Partners in Health has reinvented health care delivery in some of the world’s poorest regions, figures briefly in this new book as a mentor to its central figure, Deogratias Niyizonkiza. Kidder in fact met Deo in Boston while researching Farmer’s history, though three years elapsed before he began investigating Deo’s own dramatic story. Deo escaped from the 19931994 ethnic genocides of Burundi and Rwanda, reinvented himself as an American immigrant, and, inspired by Partners in Health, returned to Burundi to launch his own public health initiative, Village Health Works. If Farmer exemplifies the mixture of American determination, ambition, energy, and idealism that Kidder has typically celebrated in works such as The Soul of a New Machine (1981) and Among School-

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children (1989), Deo led Kidder into what he termed “the land of Joe Conrad. . . . This is the heart of darkness right here.” Deo’s painstaking and painful recovery of self after surviving the nightmare of history forms Kidder’s abiding subject. The book’s title derives from William Wordsworth’s famous lines from “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” included as the book’s epigraph. We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind

Though Deo’s six-month flight from Africa’s killing fields stands at both the literal and the figurative center of Strength in What Remains, his resilient spirit frames and contains the horror. Kidder situates the sections recounting the genocide and its aftermath as flashbacks within an account of the 2006 trip he and Deo made to Burundi. During this trip, Deo decided to stop retracing his earlier trauma in favor of building a clinic in his family’s new village, Kayanza, so that at least one Burundian community could begin to move away, as he had, from the paralyzing weight of the past. Figuring out how to tell this story was no easy feat for either writer or subject. While the intensity of Deo’s psychic wounds posed their own constraints, Deo also expressed traditional Burundian antipathy to fabled “talking heads” whose garrulousness brings about their own destruction. Moreover, he struggled with a native taboo against gusimbura (the act of inflicting painful recollections on others). It is no wonder, then, that Kidder repeatedly hestitated when probing his subject’s memories and feelings, conceding the role of silence as both a refuge and a prison for his subject. Part of the book’s narrative involves Deo’s quest for a way out of the profound loneliness inflicted on him by his experiences and his difficulty communicating those experiences to those with whom he longs to connect. Language barriers oppress him as he struggles for the right English words to reconstruct his fractured identity while also bearing witness to the dead. It was Deo’s postcolonial immigrant odyssey that originally enticed Kidder in 2005 to take up his story. Part 1 of the book, “Flights,” begins in May, 1994, with the plane trip (paid for by a wealthy friend) that propelled the traumatized survivor to the United States with two hundred dollars and a falsely secured visa in his pocket. There, he underwent homelessness and exploitation by unscrupulous employers before making the serendipitous decision to approach the Tracy Kidder is author of The Soul of a person who would reverse this trajectory, for- New Machine (1981), which won the mer nun Sharon McKenna. Kidder alternates Pulitzer Prize and the National Book chapters on Deo’s rural upbringing in the Bu- Award; Among Schoolchildren (1989), rundian mountains with chapters about his which won the Robert F. Kennedy Award; and My Detachment (2005). time in New York City. With a novelist’s skill, Kidder conveys His writing appears regularly in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, the immediacy of Deo’s inner life. Readers Granta, and The New York Times. share Deo’s disgust at the squatters’ tene ments where his friend Muhammed took him

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to live. (Even as he brought him to these tenements, Muhammed warned Deo to save his money for a quick return to Africa “because it is so hard here.”) Deo’s relief upon finding Central Park is also palpable. There, he could sleep under the summer sky rather than endure the violent shakedowns and daily human abasement of inner-city life. He met McKenna’s advocacy with a mixture of shame and gratitude that became outright wonder when she secured him an invitation to live with Charlie and Nancy Wolf. The academic couple eventually funded Deo’s biochemistry degree at Columbia University, where Deo discovered the work of Paul Farmer. Farmer offered a model for the “scholarly and passionate” activism on behalf of the world’s poor that Deo adopted as an antidote for Burundi’s lingering psychosis. As one narrative pathway follows Deo’s climb out of despair, the other moves inexorably toward the violence that fractured his life in the first place. The two are brought into momentary equilibrium by Deo’s 1996 receipt of a threatening e-mail from individuals claiming to be Hutus in America who were bent on hunting down Tutsis who had escaped their net back home. In the next paragraph, the core flashback begins. It follows Deo’s bewildered entrapment as escalating mayhem produced thousands of mutilated corpses littering the landscape and clogging its rivers for hundreds of miles. Throughout his flight from this carnage, Kidder says, Deo felt the emergence of “something like another version of himself, another skin” necessary to withstanding such relentless terror, revulsion, and exhaustion. It would be the business of his American life—and his collaboration with Kidder—to loosen, albeit painfully, that skin. Part 2, “Gusimbura,” documents the two men’s efforts to make Deo’s story accessible to Kidder, who enters the book’s narrative as a participant. This section lacks the compelling urgency of part 1, though it provides readers with a surrogate self inside the narrative who quickly recognizes how ill-equipped he is to fathom Deo’s suffering or mind-set. Together with his subject, Kidder retraces Deo’s life, first in New York City and then in Africa itself, creating a degree of narrative redundancy. In characterizing Deo’s ordeal, Kidder draws upon classical allusions to Hercules and Sisyphus (Deo’s own favorite analogy for his circumstances), but ultimately Deo seems to him most to resemble John Bunyan’s Christian from The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come Delivered Under the Similitude of a Dream, Wherein Is Discovered the Manner of His Setting Out, His Dangerous Journey, and Safe Arrival at the Desired Country (1678, 1684; commonly known as The Pilgrim’s Progress). He is embarked on his own postcolonial pilgrimage, complete with martyrs, Judas-like betrayers, and materialistic distractions. Deo’s Catholic upbringing explains his fortuitous name (Latin for “thanks be to God,” in honor of his successful birth after a difficult delivery), as well as his education at a Catholic preparatory school. There, his spiritual mentor, Bishop Bernard Bududira, taught him, “There are many ways in which poverty finds its way into the bodies of the destitute.” An excellent student offered the chance of further study, he chose medicine over the priesthood. He entered medical school still innocent of the virulent politics that would erupt into wide-scale bloodshed four years later, during his internship at a rural Burundian hospital.

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Deo’s own understanding of the conflicts between the majority Hutus and the ruling Tutsi minority was meager and dismissive when he was caught up in their paroxysms at the age of twenty-four. While he registered the escalating hate rhetoric in the background as he routinely tended his patients, he knew little more about it than he had when he was harshly silenced as a child for asking about simmering antagonisms between two groups. (A 1972 conflict had caused the violent death of his uncle, also a physician.) The ethnic distinction between Tutsis and Hutus predates European conquest, but it lacked either political animus or “scientific” grounding until nineteenth century Belgian colonial policy spuriously racialized the difference between the two groups to justify its alignment of power with Tutsis over Hutus. The resultant discrimination against Hutus and accompanying resentment toward Tutsis continued beyond liberation in 1962 and provoked recurrent campaigns of retribution, reprisal, and repression in both Burundi and Rwanda, with the 1993-1994 genocides their grim apotheosis. While Rwanda and Burundi each have their own distinctive histories in this regard, those distinctions ironically collapsed before the mutual slaughter of Tutsis preoccupying Hutu militias on both sides of the border. The genocide from which Deo fled in 1994 saw more than one million people murdered, millions displaced, and thousands maimed or raped. Deo had no explanatory history available to him at the time; he relied on his raw survival instinct to counteract the paralyzing terror and faltering energies that threatened his ability to keep running. At key moments, he survived only though inexplicable good luck or the intervention of equally mysterious fellow feeling from other refugees, such as the older woman who refused to let him give up before the relentless Hutu militias hunting them. His survival had its costs, however. He retained soul-searing memories of abandoning an infant whose mother lay dead and of fleeing the schoolhouse where his cousin boarded (only to find out later that she too survived, albeit seriously disfigured). Psychological and spiritual recovery from the abyss into which he had fallen became the defining project of Deo’s later life. This project not only reconnected him to medicine but also sent him to philosophy, theology, and political sociology for explanations that could go beyond “Joe Conrad’s” reductionism. Why did such madness overtake people he knew to be as human as any other? What kind of divine sensibility operates in a world capable of such deformation by supposedly rational beings? How do historical realities and their attendant infrastructures inscribe poverty’s dysfunctions into the psyches of people who act out their miseries on the body politic? Deo struggled with these questions, as well as with the matter of commemoration itself. He had to decide when it was time to move from acknowledging the horror of the past to engaging with a future that could only be wrought from a legacy of guilt, grief, and trauma. Kidder wanted to quit their project earlier than Deo, particularly after the two visited a museum in which separate rooms housed skeletons, skulls, and femurs of the genocide’s victims. Through their journey, however, Deo came to see that the more pressing problem lay in reversing his people’s mass “retardation” by refocusing community energies on looking ahead instead of simply backward. For this reason, Deo founded his health clinic initiative for the village of Kayanza,

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where women became his greatest allies in championing renewal directed toward a better future. An epilogue explains that by 2008 Deo had become a U.S. citizen and his clinic had begun operation. The shadow of the region’s ethnically fueled turmoil looms nearby in the continuing violence of Congo, but Kidder ends his book with Deo’s satisfaction at seeing in Kayanza “a place of reconciliation” where Hutus join Tutsis in staffing and using the clinic. They honor his work by confessing their own complicity in the past, and they try to emulate his ability to look beyond the horror for collective benefit. It is one of the strengths of this powerful book that Kidder leaves it to each reader to decide the sufficiency of that response. Barbara Kitt Seidman

Review Sources America 201, no. 8 (October 5/, 2009): 37-38. Booklist 105, no. 17 (May 1, 2009): 4. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 12 (June 15, 2009): 645. Library Journal 134, no. 20 (December 15, 2009): 70. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 19 (May 11, 2009): 40. The New York Times, September 2, 2009, p. 1. The New York Times Book Review, August 30, 2009, p. 12. Time 174, no. 9 (September 7, 2009): 20. The Village Voice 54, no. 51 (December 16, 2009): 35. The Wall Street Journal, August 27, 2009, p. A13.

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SUMMER WORLD A Season of Bounty Author: Bernd Heinrich (1940) Publisher: Ecco (New York). Illustrated. 272 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Environment; natural history Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Vermont; Maine Writing with enthusiasm, sensitivity, and a zeal for all of nature, Heinrich has observed closely a dazzling variety of vertebrates, insects, and plants in an effort to unlock some of the mysteries of how they evolve, exist, and coexist Like his previous works, Summer World allows Bernd Heinrich to express his exuberance about nature. A German-born biologist and the son of an entomologist, Heinrich immigrated to the United States with his parents when he was ten and was raised in Maine. After receiving a Ph.D. in biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1970, he began his teaching career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1971 until 1980. He then returned to the East Coast to teach at the University of Vermont, where he has spent the remainder of his professional career. Heinrich has observed closely and recorded diligently the existences of many of the animals and plants that have intrigued him since childhood. Pencil in hand, he has perched in trees and lurked behind bushes, quietly watching the life that unfolds around him and sketching much of it in illustrations that enrich his book greatly. One of the most striking elements of his explorations has been his discovery of many symbiotic relationships among small animals, birds, insects, and the flora and other fauna on which many of them are dependent for their continued existences. Heinrich poses many questions and generally refrains from offering glib answers to them. Posing such questions, however, is an important part of what he is attempting in his book. Readers will complete Summer World and Heinrich’s earlier companion volume, Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival (2003), with many unanswered questions but with a great deal to consider and cogitate upon. One of the more beguiling questions Heinrich poses has to do with the migration patterns of the rubythroated hummingbird. This tiny creature typically weighs about as much as a penny. Heinrich points out that the bird is attracted to specific flowers whose pollen lies so deep inside their bloom that only the tiny hummingbird can access it. Its bill alone has the curvature and length to get deeply enough into the flower to retrieve its pollen. Thus, it is not only the only bird capable of feeding on this pollen but also the only creature capable of pollinating the plant. Such a unique adaptation may pose the question of whether it is the result of intelli-

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gent design. Some readers will subscribe to that theory, while others will consider this remarkable symbiosis an example of evolutionary adaptation and will link it to the survival of the fittest. There is no single answer to Heinrich’s question, but wrestling with such questions as they occur throughout the book provides challenging mental exercises for those to whom such matters are important. Addressing the migration patterns of the ruby-throated hummingbird, Heinrich considers its annual flight from Mexico to the southern United States as winter wanes, as well as its return flight when summer is nearing its end. The most perilous leg of the hummingbird’s journey involves a flight over 520 miles of open water, as the bird crosses the Gulf of Mexico. This is a daunting expedition for a tiny bird that regularly must consume twice its body weight in food every day in order to survive. The hummingbird flies at about thirty miles an hour, so to cross the Gulf of Mexico it must fly nonstop for over seventeen hours. On the whole of its two-thousand-mile migratory flight, it fattens up daily on as much food as it can in the early morning, then it takes off and flies until nighttime. On its flight across the Gulf of Mexico, it has no place to land and no way to rest. Some of the migrating birds avoid the long flight over open water and instead follow a longer route along the Texas coast that gives them opportunities to refuel along the way. Heinrich is at a loss to explain why different birds of the same species adopt different migration patterns, and he wonders whether some of the birds have foreknowledge of the hazards that each route poses. He leaves his readers to think through this puzzle and to work it out in their own minds. Achieving a level of excitement and curiosity often found in well-crafted mystery stories, Heinrich, in his observations of the wood frog, presents an exciting story of death and resurrection and charges it with an urgency that will keep readers intrigued. As soon as winter appears to have ended, wood frogs emerge, having spent the winter in a state of suspended animation beneath the forest’s carpet of decaying leaves. Many of these frogs have been frozen stiff during the long New England winter. They have no heartbeats. They have no respiration. Their digestive activities have ceased. They have no detectable brain activity. By all clinical measures, they are dead. Nevertheless, as soon as winter ends and the temperature rises to 40° Fahrenheit, only slightly above freezing, the wood frogs emerge from beneath the damp, decaying leaves that have blanketed them. Occasionally, during warm spells in January and February, the outside temperature approaches 60°, but the hibernating wood frogs do not emerge prematurely. As the April rains fall and form small pools of water in the forests, hordes of frogs rush under the cover of night to these pools, where the females lay their eggs and mate. As many as four thousand frogs have been counted in a single pool. There is a Bernd Heinrich has written numerous books that deal with nature, the environment, and animal behavior. Summer World serves as a contrast to his earlier study Winter World (2003), which emphasizes hibernation. His Mind of the Raven (1999) won the John Burroughs Medal for writing in natural history.

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great urgency in their rush to the water because they must mate before the pool they are in dries up. Heinrich describes the urgency of the situation with an intensity reminiscent of a chase scene in a well-wrought screenplay. Competition in the breeding pools is intense. Only four of every ten males will have the opportunity to mate. The males try to outdo one another in the croaking that is part of their courtship ritual. Heinrich reminds readers that the males have had nothing to eat for many months and that the croaking, an obligatory part of their sexual pursuit, is exhausting. The males must overcome their exhaustion, however, to compete physically for the females whose eggs they are bent on fertilizing. Several males usually pursue a single female. The one who succeeds is usually the one who gets a neck lock on the object of his affections and hauls her off to the place where they will spawn. Even this conquest, however, does little to assure that a new generation of wood frogs will emerge. Heinrich describes in some detail the seemingly insuperable difficulties the wood frogs face: “Regardless of ultimate cooperation by males in attracting mates, northern wood frogs breeding in woodland puddles live on the edge of survival and proximally compete for their lives.” He continues, In their ephemeral pools, wood frogs have only about two months of summer to complete their larval development. Often they run out of time. In 1995, twenty-one of the twenty-four pools I was watching were dry by the beginning of July.

Wood frogs and their tadpoles are generally vegetarians, but Heinrich made an amazing discovery when he took a few spoonfuls of dead and dying wood frogs from the gooey soup of a pool that was drying up and was on the brink of disappearing. He put into an aquarium of wood frog tadpoles a small amount of this slime with dead and dying wood frogs in it. The tadpoles immediately began to consume their dead and dying relatives. By the next day, they had hatched hind legs. On the day after that, their tails disappeared and their front legs hatched. Even though they still swam like tadpoles, as soon as they were on dry land they hopped about like mature frogs. The cannibalism they engaged in, atypical of their vegetarian diet, speeded their maturation to the point that in three days they were catapulted into adulthood. Wood frogs lead a perilous existence. Their chances of survival are slim, especially in dry summers when their breeding pools dry up before the animals have an opportunity to see their offspring reach maturity. Heinrich discovered that, by adding protein to the diets of wood frog tadpoles, the maturation process could be accelerated substantially. Much of Heinrich’s book focuses on survival and on the enormous variety of strategies and fortuitous accidents through which living creatures in nature manage to survive. He points out that many of the insects whose habits he has explored have been on Earth for hundreds of millions of years. Something as fragile as the dragonfly has endured through millennia, feasting for over 350 million years during their nocturnal forays on mosquitoes. Mosquitoes in turn live on the blood of the creatures (including humans) they can bite.

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Another salient survival technique discussed by Heinrich is camouflage. This technique is so highly developed among several species of caterpillar that the caterpillars have assumed the precise texture and color of the plants on which they generally feed, and they are virtually undetectable as they roost on them. Heinrich photographed some species of caterpillar that depend upon camouflage for their survival and then showed these photographs to several of his colleagues, asking them whether they could point out any of the caterpillars in his pictures. In most cases, the camouflage was so complete that, of four caterpillars in his photographs, few of his biologically oriented colleagues were able to distinguish more than two, and even this partial success required considerable time to achieve. According to Heinrich, there are over 250,000 types of caterpillar, and the various types demonstrate a great variety of survival skills. Some grow sharp spines to injure any animal that attempts to eat them. Other are so furry as to be unpalatable. Still others exude a noxious poison that would sicken or kill any animal that ate it. Without these defenses, caterpillars would not have survived. They would have fallen prey to birds who favor them as easy meals for their newly hatched fledglings. A mother bird with four or five newborns in her nest must feed her young highprotein foods that will hasten their maturation. The birds should be ready to leave the nest within a week or so of their births. Caterpillars make an ideal meal because they are protein rich and boneless. The mother can ingest them quickly and then regurgitate them into her fledglings’ mouths. The survival of caterpillars is dependent upon their ability to evade detection in nature, as well as the other traits by which they dissuade predators. Heinrich’s illustrations of the maple tree spanworm are particularly interesting. This caterpillar assumes the color and texture of the leaves on which it spends its days motionless. Once night falls, it begins to devour its leaf voraciously, but a danger lurks because caterpillars can be detected if they leave behind any signs of their presence. The maple tree spanworm, after feasting on a leaf, undertakes the arduous task of chewing through the large, tough stem to which the leaf was attached so that its presence will not be detected by its leavings. Heinrich ranks high among a continually increasing cadre of nature writers. In reading him, one thinks of authors such as Gladys Taber, whose Stillmeadow Seasons (1950) and subsequent Stillmeadow books have delighted readers for years. Summer World and Winter World bring to mind books such as Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986) and Winter Count (1993) or Loren Eisley’s The Unexpected Universe (1969) and Another Kind of Autumn (1977). Heinrich’s books appeal to a broad range of readers who rejoice in nature. R. Baird Shuman

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 12 (February 15, 2009): 23. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 2 (January 15, 2009): 69. Library Journal 134, no. 6 (April 1, 2009): 92. The New York Times Book Review, May 31, 2009, p. 7. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 44 (November 3, 2008): 47.

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SWEET THUNDER The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson Author: Wil Haygood (1955) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 464 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Biography Time: 1921-1989 Locale: United States A fascinating account of boxing’s greatest middleweight champion and of Harlem in the mid-twentieth century Principal personages: Sugar Ray Robinson (Walker Smith, Jr.), a boxing champion in several weight classes George Gainford, his trainer Jake Lamotta, his six-time ring opponent Carmen Basilio, a middleweight champion Joe Louis, a heavyweight champion Lena Horne, a singer and actress Miles Davis, a jazz trumpeter Langston Hughes, a poet and playwright

Wil Haygood’s Sweet Thunder begins with this description of boxer Sugar Ray Robinson: When he posed for photographers in those halcyon days of the early 1950’s, he looked not like an athlete but a man of leisure. Sugar Ray Robinson was now one of the kings of sepia America, rolling in a rich man’s mist: dinners at the Waldorf, up-close tickets to big sporting events, swaying on dance floors at those charity balls. Sometimes he’d be spotted standing on a Manhattan street corner, in repose, chatting with some anonymous soul. He’d be holding his fedora by his fingertips, as if he might flip it into thin air, daring it not to circle back to him.

Haygood tells the story of a champion. Robinson’s boxing career has become the stuff of legend, and Haygood is up to the task of introducing the accomplishments of this one-of-a-kind pugilist to a new generation of sports fans and social historians. Named, pound for pound, the greatest prizefighter ever by The Ring magazine and in polls conducted by ESPN and the Associated Press, Robinson went undefeated in eighty-five amateur bouts, winning the Golden Gloves featherweight championship in 1939 and conquering the lightweight division in 1940. Over the next quarter century, he entered the ring professionally two hundred times and held the welterweight or middleweight title on five different occasions. For a quarter century, he vanquished the best those divisions had to offer, including Jake LaMotta, Marcel Cerdan, Randy Turpin, Bobo Olson, Carmen Basilio, and Gene Fullmer. He lost just nineteen matches,

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mostly when he was past his prime and be ing hounded by the Internal Revenue Service An award-winning correspondent for (which was also the bane of Joe Louis’s exis- The Washington Post, Wil Haygood is tence despite his considerable wartime contri- the author of Two on the River (1995), The Haygoods of Columbus: A Love butions). Not only was Robinson a vicious puncher Story (1997), Black and White: The with dizzying speed, but he also displayed a Life of Sammy Davis, Jr. (2005), and charismatic ring presence that won adoration King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (2006). from fans on two continents. A female ad mirer declared in 1939, after witnessing him defeat Eastern States amateur champ Dom Perfetti, that he was sweet as sugar, helping give him his nickname. As was also the case with Muhammad Ali a generation later, Robinson’s popularity transcended athletics. He was a fashion trendsetter in the elite subculture of New York City’s Harlem, the unofficial African American capital. In fact, Esquire magazine heralded him as a modern Renaissance man. Wearing hand-stitched suits, sporting wavy marcelled hair, and chauffeured around town in a flamingo-colored Cadillac, Robinson personified elegance. Robinson’s nightclub, Sugar Ray’s, was a nerve center of postwar jazz society, and he traded intimacies with the likes of gossip columnist Walter Winchell, poet Langston Hughes, and musicians Billy Eckstein, Lena Horne, and Miles Davis. His hair salon and lingerie shop catered to a celebrity clientele. Kids would press their faces to the barbershop window to catch a glimpse of Ray shaking hands, signing autographs or getting a shave, manicure, or curling-iron treatment. Born Walker Smith, Jr., in Detroit, Michigan, on May 3, 1921, Robinson was never close to his father, who never stayed long in any one place. While his southernborn mother Leila worked as a Statler Hotel maid, sisters Marie and Evelyn tended young Walker as best they could. What kept Walker out of serious trouble was Brewster Recreation Center. Joe Louis Barrow, six years his senior, was also a member. In 1932, Leila and the children moved to New York City. At Salem Crescent Athletic Club, Walker met trainer George Gainford, who would take fighters up and down the East Coast AAU circuit in a 1931 Model T Ford. In Kingston, New York, the fifteen-year-old Walker substituted for a fighter named Ray Robinson, and, because the young boxer did not have an AAU card, Gainford used the other fighter’s name. The name stuck. In the years to come, the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church congregation showered its hero with gifts and prayers. After he turned pro, Robinson received financial backing from eccentric millionaire Curt Horrman, but twenty-eight fights later, anxious to avoid anyone controlling his career, he bought the manager out for $10,000. Avoiding mobsters such as Frankie Carbo, who influenced or controlled many other fighters, Robinson was the first African American athlete, Haygood concludes, “to largely own his own fighting rights, and the first to challenge radio and TV station owners about financial receipts.”

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During World War II, touring southern Army camps with heavyweight champ Joe Louis, Robinson refused to bow to segregationist practices. In Mississippi, he would not perform before white-only audiences, forcing the military brass to allow African American soldiers to attend. At Camp Siebert in Alabama, Louis was denied entry to a bus into the town of Gadsden reserved for whites. When Louis then used a whiteonly pay phone to call a taxi, a military policeman raised his billy club as if to strike him. Robinson leaped on the soldier’s back and wrestled him to the ground. Subsequently incarcerated, he was soon released; army officials were fearful of African American G.I.s already infuriated by daily indignities. Ordered to Europe in 1944, Robinson went absent without leave for six weeks and then checked himself into a hospital claiming amnesia. Not wishing to provoke an embarrassing incident, Army officials granted the deserter an honorable discharge. As sportswriter W. C. Heinz said of Robinson, he was a great con man. Robinson married Edna Mae Holly in 1943 and had a son, Ray, Jr., but he was neither a faithful husband nor a devoted father. Rather, he was a ladies’ man. White champions commonly shunned African American contenders, but his boxoffice appeal earned Robinson a title shot on December 20, 1946, against fellow African American welterweight Tommy Bell, and Robinson made the most of it. Fighting at the legendary Madison Square Garden, Robinson was floored in round one, but he earned more points than Bell for the rest of the fight. The following year in Cleveland, challenger Jimmy Doyle collapsed from Robinson’s blows and went to the hospital on a stretcher. Doyle had suffered a serious concussion the previous year, yet he was cleared to fight. He died the next day. Robinson viewed the body in the morgue and subsequently gave money to Doyle’s mother. Other “ring killers” often lost their knockout punch after accidentally causing a death, but Robinson’s remained as strong as ever. Over the course of nine years beginning in 1942, Robinson fought “Bronx Bull” Jake LaMotta six times, including Robinson’s first defeat, during which he was knocked from the ring. The last of their six fights, on February 14, 1951, televised and for the middleweight crown, became known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. In a brutal display, Robinson triumphed by technical knockout in the thirteenth round. That summer, Robinson’s entourage toured Europe. Based on the French media’s reaction to the boxer, Haygood says that the French loved him. Robinson reveled in the relaxed sexual and racial mores of Parisian society. At the Lido nightclub, he danced cheek to cheek with blond siren Martine Carol, with his “black right hand on her bare white back, both smiling, the music wafting.” In London, Robinson trained lackadaisically before facing English champ Randy Turpin and got beaten after sustaining a head butt that later required ten stitches. Prior to their rematch, Robinson welcomed Turpin to his nightclub, where Turpin became enamored with Harlem beauty Adele Daniels. At Grossinger’s training camp in the Catskills, Turpin sometimes disappeared to be with her, much to his trainer’s chagrin. The rematch was fought at Polo Grounds before a crowd of sixty-one thousand spectators. In round ten, Robinson—bleeding profusely from a head butt—registered a stunning knockout. Turpin’s career subsequently plummeted. He wrestled profes-

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sionally for a time and later, succumbing to depression, killed himself and an infant daughter. So agile that he could floor opponents with a left hook while back-pedaling, Robinson had the balance of a dancer and the power of an anvil. In 1952, he defeated Bobo Olson in San Francisco and Rocky Graziano in Chicago. New York Times scribe Arthur Daley labeled him a cold-blooded machine. Seeking three titles simultaneously, as had African American pioneer boxer Henry Armstrong, Robinson challenged light heavyweight champ Joey Maxim. At Yankee Stadium, with the ring temperature well over 100° Fahrenheit, referee Ruby Goldstein had to be replaced in the tenth round. Three rounds later, Robinson threw a wild punch and collapsed, suffering only the third loss of his career. Hoping to conquer the entertainment world, Robinson hired a dance coach and had plastic surgery on his nose. Among the glitterati on hand for his French Casino debut were Joe Louis, baseball great Jackie Robinson, comedians Milton Berle and Nipsey Russell, and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Robinson went through a half dozen costume changes and bantered between dance numbers. The adulation he received convinced him to take his show on the road, but once the novelty wore off crowds dwindled. He loved seeing his name in lights. Used to headlining, at some stops he got second billing to Count Basie. Gate receipts rarely covered his production costs. With his Harlem businesses also losing money, Robinson returned to what he did best. At age thirty-five, considered by doubters over the hill after he lost to Tiger Jones, Robinson regained his middleweight crown with a second round technical knockout of Bobo Olson. The normally nonchalant gladiator cried tears of joy afterward. Chicago Defender reporter Russ J. Cowans wrote: “It turns out now that we buried Ray before he was dead.” In 1957, Carmen Basilio defeated him by split decision. The two men despised each other. Basilio considered his foe an egotistical showboat. Robinson won the rematch, also by split decision. In 1959, Robinson lost to Gene Fullmer but won their rematch, too. In 1960, scrappy Joey Giardello wrested the title from him. Five years later, the forty-four-year-old veteran was still hoping for a chance to become champion for an unprecedented sixth time, but a loss to Joey Archer on November 10, 1965, ended that pipe dream. Afterward, Ray was not up to chatting with fans. Haygood writes: Inside the dressing room, Miles strolled over to the great prizefighter. “Sugar, it’s time, man,” he whispered into Robinson’s puffed-up face. And so it ended there, with [manager] George [Gainford] and [second wife] Millie and the trumpeter at his side. He would never fight again.

Moving to California (his defunct nightclub would become a victim of urban renewal), Robinson appeared on episodes of such television shows as Car 54, Where Are You?, Lost in Space, Mission Impossible, and Julia, but these television bit parts did not lead to film roles. Neither did Hollywood make a movie about him, similar to the Rocky Graziano biopic Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), as he had hoped. In

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1969, he received an invitation to attend British queen Elizabeth’s forty-third birthday party. Prince Philip, referring to the urban riots erupting in America, told him, “Sugar, I believe you could help that.” Those words inspired Robinson to help found the Sugar Ray Robinson Youth Foundation. Among the many thousands he helped through that program was future Olympian Florence Griffith-Joyner. Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1984, Robinson passed away five years later. Members of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church organized a tribute and, led by his sister Elizabeth, unveiled a plaque at the former site of Sugar Ray’s nightclub dedicated to a “CHAMPION OF CHAMPIONS.” Of the many tributes paid to Robinson, Haygood says, Muhammad Ali provided the summation, calling Robinson, “The king, the master, my idol.” Haygood’s smooth prose and wealth of knowledge about boxing and show business do justice to the colorful fighter. He provides in-depth portraits of Horne, Hughes, and Davis, as well as coverage of contemporary events pertaining to African American history. Save for a few minor factual errors pertaining to the Scottsboro case and the 1936 Berlin Olympics, for which he relied on secondary sources, Haywood’s “life and times” saga is impeccable. The laudatory biography concludes with a reference to the sheer pleasure this American original gave to those whose lives he touched: The following weekend, there were salutes and toasts to Sugar Ray Robinson at the Showman’s Café, at the Casablanca Café, at 22 West Restaurant, at many of the bars and nightclubs up and down the streets of Harlem. He was yet again, as he had always dreamed, a part of the soliloquies sweeping around town as men and women discussed him. . . . Who is to say that, in the harsh and terrifying world he sprang from, it wasn’t the beautiful end of a beautiful story?

James B. Lane

Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 1 (September 1, 2009): 30. The Economist 392, no. 8654 (October 24, 2009): 96. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 18 (September 15, 2009): 76. The New York Times Book Review, December 20, 2009, p. 17. Sports Illustrated 111, no. 25 (December 21, 2009): 70.

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TALKING ABOUT DETECTIVE FICTION Author: P. D. James (1920) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 198 pp. $22.00 Type of work: Literary criticism Time: The nineteenth to the early twenty-first century In a compact work of historical criticism, James surveys the origins of British detective fiction, traces its development, assesses the contributions of its most prominent writers, analyzes its form and technique, and responds to its most outspoken critics Having spent almost a half century writing novels of detection, P. D. James is eminently qualified for the task she undertakes in Talking About Detective Fiction: to survey the history and importance of the genre. While the book was intended originally to be a study of British detective fiction, James also remarks on the American contribution to the genre. At the outset, she struggles with a problem that besets many students of detective fiction: distinguishing it from mainstream fiction. The elements of mystery and crime that, by anyone’s definition, are essential to detective fiction are also frequently present in mainstream fiction. Nonetheless, James says, detective fiction is distinguished by a highly organized structure and recognized conventions: . . . a central mysterious crime, usually murder; a closed circle of suspects, each with motive, means and opportunity for the crime; a detective, either amateur or professional . . . ; and, at the end of the book, a solution which the reader should be able to arrive at by logical deduction . . . .

James argues that, while this definition of the genre is adequate, it has over time become restrictive. The tightly delimited circle of suspects, for example, has proved to be less essential than the other elements included in the definition. In her survey of the origins of detective fiction, James takes the view that Wilkie Collins’s novel The Moonstone (1868) stands as the first “full-length classic detective story.” Only in a later chapter does she acknowledge that the American Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories featuring the fictional French sleuth C. Auguste Dupin contain all the essential elements of the emergent genre and were written more than twenty years before The Moonstone. Still, there can be little doubt that The Moonstone is a pioneering work, and in that novel Collins introduces the memorable Sergeant Cuff, a detective who is in many respects more representative of later detective heroes than is Poe’s Dupin. Many of the finest works of detective fiction, especially in the early years, were works of short fiction—particularly Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries. Regarding Doyle’s work, James has little to add to the already voluminous critical literature on the subject. Doyle’s histor-

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ical importance lies in his break with the rather shoddy plot construction of the detective story in the late nineteenth century. He considered most of the tales of his predecessors to be “unimaginative, unfair in their denouement[s] . . . ” and burdened by detective heroes whose success depended on luck and the “stupidity of the criminal [rather] than their own cleverness.” Holmes, by contrast, relies consistently on the scientific method. Nevertheless, James argues, the enduring appeal of the Holmes tales owes something their finely crafted Victorian atmosphere of P. D. James is the author of the Adam Dalgliesh and Cordelia Gray detective- “fog and gaslight,” an atmosphere that “conjures up an enveloping miasma of mystery fiction series, among other works. She and terror.” James regards Chesterton’s Father has won many awards, including the Brown stories (which first appeared in 1911 Crime Writers of America’s Cartier Diamond Dagger award for lifetime in the collection The Innocence of Father achievement. For her service to the Brown) to represent a more profound contriBritish government, she was honored bution to the detective genre. Like Holmes, with a Life Peerage in 1981. Father Brown is a brilliant amateur who relies upon logical deduction, yet he is also endowed with an intuitive sense of moral character that brings to Chesterton’s stories a depth of insight into the criminal mind that Doyle’s tales sometimes lack. James emphasizes that Father Brown solves crimes “by a mixture of common sense, observation and his knowledge of the human heart.” Moreover, there is something deeply mysterious about him. Readers never learn much about his origins, his parentage, his life as a priest, or even his age. “Unencumbered by his past,” he appears at the scene of a crime like an “iconic harbinger of death.” For Chesterton, James says, crime fiction was not simply a matter of presenting a puzzle with an elegant solution; rather, he was a literary artist with a poetic vision whose tales invite readers “to see the romance and numinousness in commonplace things.” While many aficionados of detective fiction regard the so-called Golden Age (roughly the period between the two world wars) as the high-water mark in the development of the genre, James makes no such argument. She admires many of the crime writers of the Golden Age and credits them with important innovations in the development of the genre. She criticizes their work, however, for its excessive preoccupation with original and surprising plots. A strong plot is essential to effective detective fiction, and James is quite aware that much of the genre’s appeal during the Golden Age and thereafter has been its capacity for telling a story using conventional realist narrative techniques, by contrast to the experimental fiction that began to appear early in the twentieth century and that frequently emphasized stream of consciousness and psychological complexity. How-

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ever, she correctly argues that subtlety of characterization, realist settings, and believable motivation are frequently neglected in Golden Age crime fiction. As James asserts, Golden Age crime novels are paradoxical. They “deal with violent death and violent emotions,” but they are also essentially escapist: “We are required to feel no pity for the victim, no empathy for the murderer, [and] no sympathy for the falsely accused.” However, James, like many critics of Golden Age detective fiction, has little to say about one of its most admirable traits. What it lacks in subtlety of characterization and social realism, it more than makes up for in its biting satiric treatment of the generally upper-middle-class milieu in which its plots unfold. James’s most serious treatment of Golden Age detective fiction focuses on several women writers. In discussing Agatha Christie, the best known of these, James is even-handed in assessing both the strengths and the weaknesses of a novelist who is all too often dismissed by academic critics. If Christie’s characters lack subtlety and nuance, they are nonetheless lively and often credible, and her dialogue is deft and convincing. If her novels are dominated by plot contrivances, those plots are among the most ingenious in the history of the genre. If her stories never allow the presence of evil unduly to disturb the social order, Christie was never sentimental in her selection of victims. Anyone, no matter how likeable, is potentially a victim (or, for that matter, a perpetrator) in her otherwise well-ordered universe. James acknowledges no personal debt to Christie and argues that Christie had little influence on later writers. More influential in her estimation was Dorothy Sayers, who was not only an innovative novelist but also a first-rate critic of the genre. What distinguished Sayers from most of her contemporaries was her unwillingness to sanitize the crime scene, often exposing her readers to highly realistic details of violent death. More important, Sayers cultivated a high degree of social realism. James praises Gaudy Night (1936) as the most successful of Sayers’s novels, one that effectively fuses the puzzle plot with credible psychological subtlety. In this respect, Sayers was a forerunner of many of the more serious detective-fiction writers of the second half of the twentieth century. While James does not deal extensively with the American hard-boiled school of crime writing, she recognizes its importance, especially the stark realism of its depictions of violence and a corrupt social order that contrast so sharply with the British tradition. However, there are some weaknesses in her assessment. In her comments on the work of Dashiell Hammett, the originator of the hard-boiled style in such novels as Red Harvest (1929), she claims that “Hammett’s stories are not about restoring the moral order. . . .” She offers no evidence to support this claim and seems to contradict herself several paragraphs later when she speaks of Hammett’s earliest detective character, the Continental Op, as a protagonist who “takes on the combined strength of the police, corrupt politicians, and gangsters to cleanse the city of Personville. . . .” In the same chapter, James criticizes Raymond Chandler, the most widely read of the hard-boiled novelists, for being overly romantic in his conception of the detective hero. Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe, “riding forth like a knight errant to redress the evils of the world . . . does violence both to the ethos of the hard boiled school and to the character. . . .” Whether Chandler’s romantic vision of his hero is credible or not is

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certainly a matter for debate, but James seems unaware that Chandler was drawing upon a well-established tradition in American literature, one that began at least as early as Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902). Wister quite consciously fashioned his cowboy hero as a latter-day knight errant and placed him within a Western milieu. The hard-boiled novelists, especially Chandler, simply transferred the hero (no longer a cowboy but a detective) to an urban setting. The ethos of the hero is much the same; he is not intended to be realistic in the sense that James demands. Many readers will be disappointed to find that James’s discussion of post-World War II detective fiction is largely restricted to a single chapter. While she provides a useful overview of the genre’s dominant trends and developments during this period, she fails to offer any serious critical assessment of those trends or any comparative analysis of major writers. Instead, she dwells at some length on the evolution of the figure of the detective. If the brilliant amateur was the quintessential hero of the detective story after Holmes and throughout the interwar period, in the decades that followed the dominant figure was the professional policeman. James sees nothing to object to in this development and argues that it is in keeping with the increasing realism of the genre. She does not consider the objection that the professionalization of the detective has had the unfortunate effect of distancing him or her from “the common reader.” She does note, however, that the professional detective is now in danger of becoming a stereotype, for he or she is often presented as “solitary, divorced, harddrinking, psychologically flawed and disillusioned.” Unfortunately, James does not explore the social context for the persistence of such a stereotype. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of James’s study is her analysis of the elements of setting and viewpoint in detective fiction. Her perspective is especially significant because she herself is a well-established master of the craft. While many writers and critics might stress characterization as the most important fictional element, James argues that setting is particularly crucial for detective fiction. This is because crime writing does not deal with ordinary events but with actions that are uniquely dramatic and sometimes bizarre. There is thus all the more reason that such events should be firmly “rooted in a place so tangible that the reader can enter it as he might a familiar room.” James also implies that, despite the many changes the genre has undergone, detective fiction is still best served by a setting focused on a “closed society.” Such a closed society need not be the country house commonly employed during the Golden Age; it might be any self-contained community, even within an urban area. As many mainstream and detective novelists have understood, a closed community can effectively mirror and magnify the larger world of which it is a part. Regarding the viewpoint from which a story is told, James recognizes the power and immediacy gained by the use of first-person narration (common, for instance, in hard-boiled fiction), but she insists that, if detective fiction is to attain an effective objectivity, writers must rely on a shifting point of view. By this, she seems to refer to a form of limited omniscient narration that allows readers access to the thoughts of more than one character. Readers who are familiar with seminal studies of detective fiction such as Howard Haycraft’s Murder for Pleasure (1942) or Julian Symonds’s Bloody Murder (1972)

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may feel that James’s book does not add substantially to readers’ understanding of the genre. However, it is a thoughtful and often insightful work that should serve as a useful introduction to the subject for crime-fiction neophytes. Jack Trotter

Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 8 (December 15, 2009): 9. Library Journal 135, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 107. New Statesman, October 12, 1009, p. 51. The New York Times, December 7, 2007, p. C1. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 43 (October 26, 2009): 42 The Spectator 311, no. 9453 (October 31, 2009): 49 The Times (London), October 31, 2009, p. 12. The Times Literary Supplement, November 6, 2009, p. 30. The Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2009, p. A25.

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THE TANNERS Author: Robert Walser (1878-1956) First published: Geschwister Tanner, 1907, in Germany Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky Introduction with photographs by W. G. Sebald Publisher: New Directions (New York). 368 pp. Paperback $15.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The twentieth century Locale: Switzerland; Germany In Walser’s first novel, the young Simon Tanner roams in a zigzag journey from the country to the city, from job to job, and from sibling to sibling, learning though never fully embracing lessons about the nature of freedom, love, and the meaning of life Principal characters: Simon Tanner, the protagonist, a wanderer Klaus Tanner, his oldest brother, a successful university professor Kaspar Tanner, his older brother, a wandering landscape painter Hedwig Tanner, his sister, a teacher Emil Tanner, his younger brother, a patient in a sanitarium Sebastian, a poet and a friend of Hedwig Klara Agappaia, a wealthy housewife who takes in Simon and Kaspar, falling in love with Kaspar

The Tanners was Robert Walser’s first novel. Like much of his fiction, the novel is thinly veiled autobiography, so a summary of the author’s life is useful in evaluating the work. Born the seventh of eight children in Biel, Switzerland, Walser wandered through much of his life from job to job before he discovered he could make a living from writing. He worked as a banker, a butler in a castle (he writes about a young man training to perform such a job in 1908’s Der Gehülfe), and a copyist in an office, an occupation that he revisited from time to time during his writing life. Walser’s father was a bookbinder and ran a small toy shop. An inept businessman, Walser’s father seldom managed to succeed at any of his businesses, and the family lived on his meager earnings. Walser’s mother, the daughter of a blacksmith, had a progressively serious mental illness, and she died when Walser was sixteen. Many interpreters of his work attribute Walser’s obsession with women to the loss of his mother. Simon, Walser’s main character in The Tanners, blames the lack of tenderness from his mother as one of the reasons that he does not feel more tenderly toward his siblings (except for Emil, who is confined to a mental hospital). When he was eighteen, Walser moved to Zurich, where he moved from one menial clerical job to another and where he first started writing. He published some poems in various newspapers during his years in Zurich. When he tired of life in the city,

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Walser would take long walks through the Swiss countryside. During these years, Walser Robert Walser worked as a banker, also visited Munich, where he met members copy editor, and butler before he of the literary circle involved in publishing published his first novel at age twentythe magazine Der Insel (the island). He pub- eight. He wrote at least six novels— lished some of his prose and miniature plays three of which have survived and been in verse in this magazine. In 1904, he pub- translated into English—hundreds of lished his first book, Fritz Kochers Aufsätze short stories, several verse plays, and a series of “pencil writings,” or (Fritz Kocher’s essays), which his brother “microscripts.” Karl illustrated. In 1905, Walser moved to Berlin, where he lived for the next eight years. In Berlin, he wrote and published three novels in as many years: The Tanners (1907), Der Gehülfe (the assistant), and Jakob von Gunten (1909; English translation, 1969). Discouraged by the indifferent reception of his writing by the literary world and the larger reading public, Walser moved back to his native town of Biel in 1913, and for the next eight years he wrote and published sporadically, producing long prose pieces and four of his plays in miniature, published as Komödie (1919). He lived for a time with his sister Lisa and eventually moved to a sparsely furnished room in the Hotel zum blauen Kreuz. In 1921, Walser moved to Bern, Switzerland, where he worked for a short time as an archivist. He soon left that job, but he remained in Bern until 1929. During these years, he worked on a novel, Theodor, that has been lost. In Bern, Walser wrote prolifically, producing the “microscripts”—copies of his stories, poems, and novels that he wrote in a miniature pencil script—for which he would later become famous. After living alone with few friends and almost no means, and after a few attempts to commit suicide, Walser voluntarily committed himself—at the urging of his sister—to a psychiatric clinic in Waldau, Switzerland. He remained there until 1933, when he moved to the asylum in Herisau, Switzerland, where he remained for the rest of his life. He never wrote another word, although he continued his beloved walks through the countryside surrounding the asylum, and he died in 1956 on one of these walks. The largely autobiographical The Tanners might be better translated as “The Tanner Siblings.” The protagonist, Simon—a rootless, articulate, and quite bold young man—wanders from one situation to another, cleverly insinuating himself into relationships with perfect strangers who feel both repulsed and attracted to his lackadaisical, cavalier, yet intellectually engaging character. Simon resembles Walser himself, who moved about from menial task to menial task in a quest to understand the nature of freedom in a culture in which individuals found themselves bound by social convention. Moreover, Simon’s relationships with his siblings—Klaus, Kaspar, Hedwig, and Emil—resemble Walser’s relationships with his own siblings. Early in the novel, Simon shares rooms in a country house with Kaspar, a landscape artist (based on Walser’s brother Karl, a well-known artist and illustrator). The owner of the house is often away, and his wife, Klara Agappaia, falls in love with Kaspar. Eventually, Simon moves into one of the rooms in his sister Hedwig’s apartment, much as Walser moved into one of the rooms of his sister Lisa’s apartment in Biel.

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In another part of the novel, Simon overhears a number of patrons in a tavern retelling a story about a Tanner who was placed in a local asylum. He discovers that they are talking about his brother Emil, who resembles Walser’s youngest brother. Although he seldom mentions his father, Simon often mentions his mother and the lack of affection he received from her while he was growing up. At the end of the novel, Simon tells the story of his life to an attentive and solicitous waitress. He sketches the character traits of each of his siblings, but he reserves his most tender words for his mother as he recalls her death and the subsequent shadows of loss in which he has lived his life. Similarly, the death of Walser’s mother overshadowed the rest of his life, often shaping his relationship with women. Much like the great modernist German novels that Walser’s writings anticipate, The Tanners lacks a clear plot and is instead organized episodically, along the familiar lines of the picaresque novel. Each of the novel’s eighteen chapters deals with a discrete event in Simon’s life, and these events are connected only by the thread of Simon’s wandering, or walking, from place to place. As the novel opens, Simon stands before the proprietor of a bookshop, attempting through his eloquent and selfdeprecating words to convince the man to hire him as a salesperson. Although the bookseller seems not entirely convinced that Simon can perform the job, he hires Simon. A short week later, Simon is already bored by the job and aching to wander through the countryside once again. He quits with a flourish, accusing the bookseller of trying to suffocate his soul in a lousy bookshop. The bookseller views Simon as callow, but Simon clearly knows what he is doing: He pockets the money for the one week of work at the shop and is free once again to pursue whatever work or art he wishes. During his one week of work, Simon receives a letter from his brother Klaus, a successful university professor, who chastises Simon for constantly changing professions, a habit that Klaus views as doing a disservice to the world. Simon ignores the letter. He searches for a new job at an employment agency, emphasizing that he will search for freedom on his own terms and not on the terms that society dictates. In the next episode of Simon’s life, he stands at the door of an ornate country house that a beautiful woman, Klara Agappaia, shows to him. Simon takes a room in the house, and very soon his brother Kaspar, a landscape painter, joins him. Klara soon falls in love with Kaspar, though she also loves Simon, calling him her beautiful boy. As long as Simon and Kaspar live in the country, money is of no concern to them, and neither holds a steady job. The brothers experience all the beauty of culture, even as they revel in the beauty of nature that surrounds them in Swiss countryside. During their stay in the country, they meet up with their sister, Hedwig, and her poet friend Sebastian. These idyllic days resemble life in a fairy tale, where the fragrant earth is luxuriant. Eventually, however, Klara’s husband gambles away the house and deserts her. She must move to the city, and the brothers go their separate ways. Again searching for work and freedom, Simon moves in with Hedwig for three months, but he soon leaves again. He works for a short time as a butler for a wealthy woman, and he then moves to an ugly apartment in the city. One Sunday in the city, Simon meets a stranger

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named Heinrich. He ruminates with this stranger about the meaning of life. Simon reflects that a love of life, a heartfelt attachment to the earth, joy in the present moment, trust in beauty, and carefree pleasure in friendships with others provide individuals with the freedom to live life as they please outside the bounds of society and family. The great theme of The Tanners is walking. Like the protagonists of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s great Romantic epics, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821, 1829; Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, 1827), Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; Elective Affinities, 1849), and Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1779), Simon revels in the wild beauty of the Swiss countryside through which he walks. As soon as Simon finds himself tethered to job in a city, he breaks that bond and leaves for a day or for weeks of walking in the country. In the final chapter of the book, for example, Simon has once again left the confines of his ugly city abode to walk the trails of the Swiss mountains in search of freedom. Even Simon’s siblings wander through their lives, searching for some kind of meaning, although they remain more stationary than Simon. The greatest difference between Goethe and Walser, however, is that Walser’s characters are solitary outsiders who lack connections to social institutions. Goethe’s Werther has ties to Lotte and others, social and fraternal bonds; Simon is a lonely outsider who prefers to walk in solitude rather than be bound by social ties to business or even by family bonds. In many ways, Walser’s solitary outsiders look back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1782; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, 1783) and Stendhal’s Vie de Henry Brulard (wr. 1835-1836, pb. 1890; The Life of Henry Brulard, 1925) and anticipate the dreamy and lonely outsiders portrayed by writers such as Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Peter Handke, Hermann Hesse, and W. G. Sebald, all of whom have acknowledged the influence of Walser on their work. To his last day, Walser himself was a consummate walker, and his literary executor, Carl Seeling, even published a collection of interviews with Walser called Wanderungen mit Robert Walser (1957; Wanderings with Robert Walser, 2007) in which Seeling accompanied Walser on his many walks around Hiersau. Although Walser once ironically described himself as the ninth-best writer in the Helvetic, his readers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would hardly agree with his self-assessment. While Walser received modest attention for his novels, stories, and verse plays during his lifetime, an entire cottage industry devoted to Walser’s works arose in the late twentieth century. His works were included in the Swiss National Archive, the Walser Center opened in Berlin, and a multivolume critical edition of his writings that seeks to reproduce every page of his writing in a facsimile edition was launched. Literary critic Susan Sontag called Walser a truly wonderful and heartbreaking writer. Mid-twentieth century German novelist Hesse—whose own novels show the influence of Walser’s literary style and thematic concerns— proclaimed that the world would be a better place if Walser had a larger audience of readers, while Sebald praised Walser’s abilities to capture in miniature both the imperfections and the beauty of the world. Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 21 (July 1, 2009): 33. Christianity Today 53, no. 10 (October, 2009): 66. Review of Contemporary Fiction 29, no. 2 (Summer, 2009): 350.

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TEA TIME FOR THE TRADITIONALLY BUILT Author: Alexander McCall Smith (1948) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 212 pp. $23.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Gaborone, Botswana The tenth book in McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, this novel places Mma Ramotswe in an investigation of possible game-fixing in a Botswana football club and introduces a disturbing menace to the happiness of her assistant, Mma Makutsi Principal characters: Mma Precious Ramotswe, Botswana’s only woman detective, the owner of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni, her mechanic husband and owner of Speedy Motors Mma Grace Makutsi, her secretary and assistant Charlie and Fanwell, Mr. Matekoni’s young apprentices Phuti Radiphuti, proprietor of the Double Comfort Furniture Shop and Mma Makutsi’s fiancé Puso, Mma Ramotswe’s foster son Leungo Molofololo, owner of the Kalahari Swoopers football club Violet Sephotho, Mma Makutsi’s beautiful but shifty former secretarial college classmate

As is typical of Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novels, Tea Time for the Traditionally Built opens in such a leisurely fashion that it appears to be headed nowhere in particular. However, while setting the tone for what is to come, the book’s opening chapters also provide clues to the resolution of the novel’s central mystery that are so subtle that most readers are apt to overlook them. Indeed, leisurely pacing and subtlety are among the chief pleasures of reading McCall Smith’s fiction. Just as Mma Ramotswe, Botswana’s only female detective, is always acutely alert to nuances in people’s behavior, so must readers of her casebooks pay attention to subtle details to savor the stories’ full richness. The novel opens with Mma Ramotswe and her assistant, Mma Makutsi, enjoying their morning tea while discussing the decline of walking among people. An intelligent woman who tends to be more strongly opinionated than she is informed, Mma Makutsi confidently asserts that people no longer walk enough because everyone is growing lazier. Although Mma Ramotswe is fully aware of her assistant’s proclivity for broad and unsupported generalizations, she takes this suggestion to heart and decides she should do more walking herself. In the very next chapter, she leaves her beloved tiny white van at home and makes the long journey to her office on foot. Her walk is

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relatively uneventful, except for the painful blister it produces on one of her feet. Though seemingly insignificant, that little mishap later comes to seem portentous. The novel’s pace quickens in the third chapter, when an important new client visits Mma Ramotswe’s office: “Mr. Football,” Leungo Molofololo, the rich owner of Botswana’s top football (soccer) team, the Kalahari Swoopers. As pleasantries are exchanged, Mma Ramotswe mentions seeing a newspaper picture of Mr. Molofololo making a generous donation to a nursing charity. He responds by praising the work nurses do, casually adding that if he had been a woman, which is he happy to say he is not, he would have been a nurse. This remark leads to an awkward discussion of the differences between men and women that becomes more pointed as Mr. Molofololo explains that his reason for coming to see Mma Ramotswe has to do with his football team. Mma Ramotswe and her assistant know nothing about the game, in which they clearly have no interest. Taking their disinterest in football in good humor, Mr. Molofololo says, “It is because you ladies are women . . . it is not something that women understand.” Belatedly realizing the sexist tone of his remark, he quickly adds that there are many things men do not understand that women do. Momentarily stumped to think of an example, he says, “There are many things. Women’s business. Shoes maybe. That sort of thing.” Despite the apparently condescending nature of Mr. Molofololo’s remarks about women, Mma Ramotswe thinks to herself that he is right because “men do not understand shoes—not completely, not in the deep way in which women understand them.” Although Mma Makutsi does not say so here, she no doubt would agree, as her own obsession with shoes is a major theme of the earlier novel Blue Shoes and Happiness (2006). In any case, the present story’s brief exchange about shoes provides the second subtle but portentous hint of what is to come. The uncomfortable exchange between Mr. Molofololo and the women touches on one of the most pervasive themes throughout McCall Smith’s series—the often unfathomable gulf between men’s and women’s worldviews. Allusions to differences between the sexes appear on almost every page of his detective stories. However, while Mma Makutsi clearly distrusts men and regards women as superior, Mma Ramotswe is reluctant to pass judgment in such matters. To her, it is enough to know that men and women are different and to understand how to act on that knowledge. That ability, along with her strong desire to help people, is a key to her success as a private detective. In many, perhaps most, of Mma Ramotswe’s cases, her insights into differences between male and female behavior and thinking lead her to solutions that others, particularly men, might not find. In The Kalahari Typing School for Men (2002), she faced one of her most formidable challenges when a South African man opened a riBorn in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Alexander McCall Smith was educated there and in Scotland, where he became professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh. Among his more than sixty books are a dozen academic works, four popular novel series, and twenty children’s books.

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val agency in Gaborone and aggressively billed himself as a professionally trained detective who could solve cases that only a man could handle. In the end, however, his hard-boiled approach failed dismally, while Mma Ramotswe solved the case on which they were both working independently. She succeeded where the man failed by drawing on her insights into female psychology. It is not some vaguely mystical “feminine intuition” that she possesses but rather the real-world wisdom she has garnered from growing up as a woman and closely observing the people around her. In none of McCall Smith’s detective novels do gender differences play a greater role than in Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, in which three interlocking story lines run throughout the book. The first and most important concerns Mr. Molofololo’s case: the investigation of possible game-fixing by a member of his oncestrong football team, which can no longer win games. Because Mma Ramotswe has never even seen a football game, it would be impossible for her to figure out why the team has been losing by watching it play. A man—perhaps even her foster son, Puso—might be able to do so, but she cannot. As a woman, she brings different kinds of insights to the case. Instead of investigating how the players are playing, she investigates how they are living their lives off the field. However, she is also wise enough to seek advice on their playing where she can find it and enlists the aid of the very young Puso, who happens to be a rabid fan of the Kalahari Swoopers. The second story line ties into the real reason Mma Ramotswe walks to work early in the novel: Her old, tiny white van is not running properly, and its engine is making disturbing noises. Her husband, Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni, is the best mechanic in Botswana and would do anything to please her, but she fears that, when he discovers how serious her van’s problems are, he will insist on replacing it, which he eventually does. Mr. Matekoni is a kind and sensitive man, and he loves keeping old cars running. However, he is still a man and as such cannot understand the depth of Mma Ramotswe’s feelings for her van. She would never lie to him, but, because she feels no obligation to tell him everything, her first solution to her dilemma is to hide her van’s problems from him by not driving it. Thus, she walks to work. Unfortunately, because she is a “traditionally built” (overweight) woman, her blister makes further long walks impractical. Moreover, she cannot hide the truth about her van forever. Mma Ramotswe’s devotion to her van reflects both her loyalty to friends, even inanimate ones, and her strong traditionalist views. While she welcomes progress and positive change in her beloved Africa, she is leery about letting go of the good things of the past. Throughout McCall Smith’s detective novels, Mma Ramotswe frequently contemplates what is best about Africa, and about Botswana in particular, and regrets changes, such as the weakening of extended-family ties and the decline of everyday civility. Indeed, the importance of civility is evident not only in the ways in which characters address one another but also in the language of the narrative itself. When Mma Ramotswe speaks to men and women, she almost invariably uses the male honorific “Ra” and the female honorific “Mma.” The anonymous narrator is equally civil: Mma Ramotswe’s husband is always referred to “Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni.” If a single theme runs through all of McCall Smith’s fiction, it is probably human manners. The need for civility, the often mysterious rules of proper etiquette, and the

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ease with which human beings can misunderstand one another play important roles in all his stories. In addition to regarding the tradition of civility as one of Africa’s great strengths, Mma Ramotswe also treasures her family, friends, and familiar surroundings. She laments every loss, and losing her faithful twenty-two-year-old van would be a particularly tragic loss, one she is willing to fight to avoid. The novel’s third story line moves the focus from Mma Ramotswe to Mma Makutsi, into whose mind the narrative voice often looks. In contrast to her employer, Grace Makutsi is filled with insecurities. She has had a hard life and has experienced many disappointments, including the recent loss of a brother whom she had nursed while he suffered from the unnamed “illness” (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome; AIDS) that is devastating Africa. She has raised herself up from rural poverty through hard work and native intelligence. Her greatest triumph was achieving the highest final exam score in the history of the Botswana Secretarial College: 97 percent—a figure that she often finds excuses to mention. However, despite her stellar academic record, she had to struggle to find a job after graduation, while classmates with much lower exam scores were moving quickly into good jobs in big companies. Prickly and opinionated, Mma Makutsi is not without faults, but it is clear that her path to success has been retarded by unfair male stereotypes of what a secretary should look like. Wearing oversized glasses and having “difficult skin,” she could not compete with her “more glamorous” classmates for the best jobs and felt lucky to be hired into Mma Ramotswe’s fledgling detective agency, despite its shaky prospects of success. Happily, however, Mma Makutsi scored an unexpected triumph in an earlier book, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies (2004), by becoming engaged to the kind and generous proprietor of the Double Comfort Furniture Shop, Phuti Radiphuti, whom she met in a ballroom dancing class. At first, she was put off by his plainness, social awkwardness, and nervous stuttering, but she eventually came to appreciate his honesty and sincerity and was astonished to discover that he loved her for who she was. Good things generally happen to good people in McCall Smith’s stories, but their paths to happiness are not always smooth. Even Mma Ramotswe’s long engagement to Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni in earlier novels was not without its problems. In Mma Makutsi’s case, trouble comes out of her past in Tea Time for the Traditionally Built when she learns that Phuti has hired one of her former secretarial college classmates, the glamorous Violet Sephotho, to sell beds in his shop. Phuti is a trusting man and accepts at face value Violet’s claim to have scored 70 percent on the college’s final exam. Grace knows this to be a lie but has no proof. In any case, she also knows she can never tell Phuti that Violet is a liar. Consequently, throughout the novel, she is tormented by Phuti’s reports of Violet’s astounding success in selling beds. When she finally confesses her misery to Mma Ramotswe, her sympathetic employer commiserates with her but also senses that Violet’s success poses a mystery that merits investigation. Mma Ramotswe thus faces three major challenges: identifying the football player who is betraying the Kalahari Swoopers, saving her tiny white van, and learning the secret of Violet Sephotho’s unlikely sales success. Despite the strong feminist perspectives of McCall Smith’s books, Mma Ramotswe knows that men and women are different, and she acts on that knowledge by not hesitating to seek male assistance.

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Her young foster son, Puso, helps her with his insights into football. However, it is Mma Ramotswe herself who finally figures out why the team is losing when she discerns problems in the way Mr. Molofololo runs his team. Attentive readers should not be surprised to learn that the players’ poor performances have much to do with their shoes. To help her save her van, Mma Ramotswe secretly turns to her husband’s younger apprentice, Fanwell, for help. Fanwell cannot provide the miracle that she seeks, but he does provide hope. Interestingly, although all the mechanics in these books are men, there is no suggestion that automobile repair should be an exclusively male domain. Indeed, Mma Ramotswe’s wheelchair-bound foster daughter, Motholeli, pines to become a mechanic herself. If McCall Smith continues writing these books long enough, Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni will almost certainly be happy to teach Motholeli his trade. The final mystery, why Violet Sephotho is selling so many beds, is solved by Fanwell’s fellow apprentice, the slightly older Charlie. Mma Ramotswe correctly senses that this brash, self-styled ladies’ man is perfect for the job. In contrast to the help provided by other male characters, what Charlie does is something that only a man can do. By posing as a customer in the Double Comfort Furniture Shop, he learns that the secret of Violet’s success is the special bed-testing offer she makes to male customers—the most nearly explicit allusion to sex in all these novels. Whether Violet actually delivers what she promises is not revealed, but her sales career quickly ends, and Mma Makutsi’s engagement to Phuti is saved. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency stories have little in common with stories about hard-boiled private investigators: They have almost no violence, few of the crimes Mma Ramotswe investigates are nasty, and the stories’ tone is anything but unsentimental. The books fall more into the genre of “cozies,” in the modern sense of comparatively lighthearted mysteries in comfortable domestic settings that share many of the characteristics of classic comedies of manners. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a book title that is more domestically comfortable than Tea Time for the Traditionally Built. In contrast to the manor houses and vicarages in which traditional English cozies are set, however, McCall Smith’s basic “cozy” setting is Africa itself. Although it would be an exaggeration to say that the almost idyllic portrayal of Botswana his novels present is realistic, Botswana is, in fact, one of Africa’s true bright spots. It is politically stable, peaceful, and relatively prosperous within the African continent. There are reasons why Mma Ramotswe should love it as much as she does, and McCall Smith’s novels convey that love in abundance. R. Kent Rasmussen

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 14 (March 15, 2009): 5. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 10 (March 9, 2009): 29.

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THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 218 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Short fiction Time: Mostly the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries Locale: Nigeria; eastern United States A collection of twelve short stories depicting Nigerians living in Africa and in the United States, but who are at home in neither place Principal characters: Chika, a medical student in Nigeria Grace, also known as Afamefuna, a historian Kamara, a nanny in Philadelphia Nwamgba, a potter and Grace’s grandmother Chinaza Agatha Okafor, a young wife in an arranged marriage

When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was awarded the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (the so-called genius grant) in September, 2008, the foundation praised her two novels, Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and called her “a young writer who illuminates the complexities of human experience in works inspired by events in her native Nigeria.” In Adichie’s new short-story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), she demonstrates the same insight into her characters and the same compassion for them, but she expands her range to include characters who have left Nigeria for a new life in the United States. The characters in the collection’s twelve stories struggle to determine where their home is, who their people are, and how an increasingly globalized world—even a relatively peaceful one— shapes their identity. Many of the characters in this collection are immigrants who have come to the United States for college, as Adichie did, or to follow their husbands, or to look for a better life. These stories join those by Jhumpa Lahiri collected in Interpreter of Maladies (1999), Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane (2003), and other works that illuminate the promise and ultimate disappointment of the immigrant experience. These authors present characters—mostly women—with one foot back home and one foot in the new world, eager for new experiences but unwilling to sever ties with the old ways. Scenes of cooking and eating are important for all these writers, as they depict lonely women trying to fill the empty places inside them with food from home. Where Lahiri and Ali ultimately offer hope that immigrants can find new homes, Adichie’s stories are overlaid with loneliness and regret. In “Imitation,” a woman in New Jersey whose husband travels back and forth between New Jersey and Nigeria learns that he has a mistress in Lagos. In “On Monday of Last Week,” a young, bored,

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and dissatisfied wife named Kamara is hired as a nanny for a privileged couple in Philadel- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the phia. Kamara believes she has made an excit- author of two award-winning novels, ing connection with the mother, Tracy, but Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Tracy discards her as quickly as she picked her Yellow Sun (2006). In 2008, she was up. In “The Arrangers of Marriage,” Chinaza, awarded a MacArthur Foundation another new young wife, finds that her ar- Fellowship, also known as the “genius ranged marriage to a Nigerian medical student grant.” in America will not be as she had dreamed: Her husband is critical, pretentious, and so eager to fit in that he has even changed his name from Ofodile Emeka Udenwa to Dave Bell. The collection’s title story is about a young woman who wins the lottery for an American visa. Her extended family is excited that she will live in the land of plenty; her relatives tell her, “In a month, you will have a big car. Soon, a big house.” Predictably, her actual experience is very different. She begins her life in the United States with an aunt and uncle but has to leave with no prospects after her uncle sexually abuses her. Her employers take advantage of her, paying her below the minimum wage, and they think she is Jamaican because she is black and has an accent. Told in the second person, the story is a heartbreaking depiction of loneliness. Like many of the immigrants in this collection, the young woman in this story is completely alone, aching but unable to tell her family what is happening to her. The narrator crystallizes this situation with a recurring image: “At night, something would wrap itself around your neck, something that very nearly choked you before you fell asleep.” For a time, with a new American lover, she finds that “The thing . . . started to loosen, to let go,” but, like many of the women in this book, she discovers that the answer to her desolation does not lie in the arms of a man. Six of the stories are set in Nigeria, and for the most part they represent a Nigeria that is heavily influenced by the United States. “Cell One,” the first story in the collection, begins, “The first time our house was robbed, it was our neighbor Osita who . . . stole our TV, our VCR, and the Purple Rain and Thriller videotapes our father had brought back from America.” Immediately then, in the book’s first sentence, Adichie introduces a Nigeria that may be unfamiliar to many of her Western readers: Her characters are highly educated, they are wealthy enough to travel and own electronics, and their videos show the American pop stars Prince and Michael Jackson. Many of Adichie’s Nigerian characters are teachers or, like the author herself, children of teachers, and they live sheltered lives generally removed from the poverty and corruption that inform the rare news stories picked up by the international press. In “Cell One,” Adichie depicts a Nigerian teenager who could live in any wealthy suburb in the United States He is privileged, a little bit spoiled, a mystery to his parents—with his music and clothing imported from American rap culture—and utterly unprepared for the harshness of prison. “A Private Experience” is reminiscent of Adichie’s novel of the Nigerian Civil War, Half of a Yellow Sun. Set in the mid-1990’s during the presidency of General

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Sani Abacha, it tells the story of Chika, a wealthy young medical student from the University of Lagos who becomes separated from her sister during a riot while they are visiting their aunt in the northern city of Kano. Chika takes refuge from the violence in a small store, “smaller than Chika’s walk-in closet back home,” guided by another woman who seems to be experienced with hiding from riots. The two women shelter together on the floor of the store for hours and reach a particularly female connection. When the local woman—who is never named—shows Chika her dry, cracked nipples, Chika draws on her medical training to give the woman advice and false comfort. The woman in turn takes a matter-of-fact approach to the danger that calms Chika when she is rattled by the shocking violence and by a glimpse of a dead, burned body. She is unused to such experiences, thinking, “Riots like this were what she read about in newspapers. Riots like this were what happened to other people.” Hovering over the two women is the specter of religion: Chika is a Christian member of the Igbo ethnic group, idly fingering rosary beads as she worries. The other woman is a Muslim of the Hausa group who washes her feet and prays facing Mecca even in their hiding place. Religion is at the heart of the tension in the northern areas of Nigeria, and “Later, Chika will learn that, as she and the woman are speaking, Hausa Muslims are hacking down Igbo Christians with machetes, clubbing them with stones.” Several of the stories set in Nigeria have danger, violence, poverty, or corruption in the air, but their focus, as it is here, is on individual people and the choices they must make. Adichie does not seem to have a political agenda; she is not writing about current events to advocate a political position. She is more interested in what happens within individual minds and hearts, in showing the humanity of the people involved in big events. Two women in danger, she demonstrates, can reach across the divides of religion and social class. In the end, both survive, and both suffer great loss. Before she turned thirty, Adichie was already a rising star. She was called the literary heir to the great Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian and Igbo author of the novel Things Fall Apart (1958), which has been translated into more than thirty languages and is something of a staple in both African and Western high school and college classrooms. In “The Headstrong Historian,” Adichie confronts her literary heritage directly, writing an homage and feminist response to Things Fall Apart. The connections are overt: Adichie employs familiar names from Achebe’s novel, including Obierika and Okonkwo. Both stories are set in a small village during the time of the first white missionaries. In Things Fall Apart, a colonial district commissioner is preparing a book called Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, while in Adichie’s story the protagonist grows up to write a book called Pacifying with Bullets: A Reclaimed History of Southern Nigeria. The headstrong historian of the story’s title is Grace, a young woman educated by missionaries, who eventually becomes a history professor. Rejecting Christianity and chafing under the European dismissal of all things African, she is determined to learn about and reclaim the history and culture of her people. She starts spending more time with her grandmother, Nwamgba, a potter who draws her power from the goddess Oyi, “the protector of women, the reasons women were not to be sold into slavery.”

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Nwamgba lost her spiritual connection with her son, Grace’s father, when she sent him to a missionary school to learn English, but even as a young child her granddaughter demonstrated a “solemn interest in her poetry and her stories,” as well as a “fighting spirit.” Grace becomes for Nwamgba the keeper of the family legacy that Achebe’s Okonkwo is denied. At the end of the story, the narrator reveals that, in her later life, Grace legally changes her name to the one her grandmother gave her at birth, “Afamefuna, ‘My Name Will Not Be Lost.’” This story, the last one in the collection, ends on a hopeful note, unlike the other eleven. In the end, it is the historian—the writer, the storyteller—who finds peace by creating a way to inhabit the modern world while still claiming her heritage. It is too soon to tell whether Adichie will be as great as Achebe, but there is a renewed interest in Nigerian literature outside Africa, and Adichie has a lot to do with that interest. For sixty years, Nigeria has produced important and exciting writers, including the playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa, novelists Buchi Emecheta and Ben Okri of an earlier generation, and contemporary novelists Helon Habila and Helen Oyeyemi. With Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie claimed her place among them. With The Thing Around Your Neck, she reminds readers that there is drama and significance in the little things; that clashes over culture, class, and religion are acted out two people at a time; and that, in order to remain alive, people must remember and tell their stories. Cynthia A. Bily

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 7 (May 1, 2009): 66. Books & Culture 15, no. 4 (July/August, 2009): 30-31. The Christian Science Monitor, July 31, 2009, p. 25. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 9 (May 1, 2009): 43. Library Journal 134, no. 7 (April 15, 2009): 88-89. The New Republic 240, no. 17 (September 23, 2009): 52-55. The New York Times, July 3, 2009, p. C21. The New York Times Book Review, August 30, 2009, p. 16. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 14 (April 6, 2009): 27-28. The Times Literary Supplement, April 3, 2009, p. 20. Vanity Fair, no. 586 (June, 2009): 62. World Literature Today 83, no. 5 (September/October, 2009): 61-62.

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TIEPOLO PINK Author: Roberto Calasso (1941) First published: Il rosa Tiepolo, 2006, in Italy Translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwan Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 288 pp. $40.00 Type of work: Fine arts Time: 1725-1770 Locale: Venice, Italy; Würzburg, Germany; Madrid, Spain A renowned Italian publisher, Calasso applies his formidable learning to the paintings and etchings of Tiepolo, a Venetian artist famed for his effortless technique, and finds fascinating complexities in the works Principal personages: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770), prolific Italian painter Cecilia Guardi Tiepolo, his wife (m. 1719), the mother of his seven children Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804), his son and chief assistant Lorenzo Baldissera Tiepolo (1736-1776), his son and assistant

Roberto Calasso has been called a Renaissance man, and he could truly say with the English essayist Francis Bacon, “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.” Over the last quarter-century, his books have covered a dazzling range of cultures and times, seeking the myths at the base of each. He has written about the formation of modern Europe in the age of Talleyrand (Il rovina di Kasch, 1983; The Ruins of Kasch, 1994); about the origins of Classical civilization (La nozze di Cadmo e Armonia, 1988; The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, 1994); about the cultures of India (Ka, 1996; Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India, 1998); and about authors Franz Kafka (K., 2002; English translation, 2005) and Charles Baudelaire (La folie Baudelaire, 2008). Why Calasso would choose Giovanni Battista Tiepolo for his first book-length essay on a painter may not be apparent right away. Tiepolo, after all, is famous for his virtuosity, for the ease and speed of his work, and for the simple pleasure that many critics have found there. As Calasso observes, Tiepolo may never have read a book; he simply absorbed the images around him. If the painter made his mark with frescos for Venetian palazzi and is remembered for his trademark pinks and reds, his subjects turn out to present iconic images of East and West, often in their encounters with one another, as in a dozen paintings of Antony and Cleopatra from his later years. This larger cultural concern becomes increasingly clear over the book’s three main sections. The opening section takes its title from a comment once made about Tiepolo, that his paintings give “pleasure accompanied by light.” Calasso starts with the remarks

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of Tiepolo’s contemporaries, who described him as a happy man painting quickly and pro- Roberto Calasso is director of the lifically. He thinks of Tiepolo as “the last Adelphi Edizioni publishers. He is breath of happiness in Europe,” a happiness author of Le nozze di Cadmo e that would end with the age of revolution and Armonia (1988; The Marriage of the conflicts of modern life. He notes with ap- Cadmus and Harmony, 1993), and proval Mark Twain’s entry in a European di- his lectures at Oxford University have ary that “Tiepolo is my artist,” observing that been published as La letteratura e gli dèi (2000; Literature and the Gods, the artist was ignored by the academicians of 2002). the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for exactly the reason that Twain liked him: He gave simple pleasure. Much less approvingly, Calasso quotes Henry James’s diary entry about a “pompous” fresco by Tiepolo—pompous because it seemed so large and self-confident. Then, after reviewing the comments of major art critics such as Roberto Longhi, Calasso notes the irony in their view that his work lacks complexity: While the academic paintings of Twain’s decades now seem hackneyed, Tiepolo remains vibrant. His works continue to give pleasure. To make his case for Tiepolo’s complexity and depth of meaning, Calasso turns next to the artist’s relatively small body of etchings: the Caprici and Scherzi created in the 1640’s. These thirty-three “caprices” and “jests” have received very little attention, most critics being content to remark on the artist’s facility and the ease, or sprezzatura, with which he appears to have produced them. They are anything but simple, however, for they are replete with snakes, birds and beasts of prey, and other disturbing images. Many of the images are from the Italian commedia dell’arte, including the pervasive Punchinello (the Punch of the English Punch-andJudy puppet plays). Here especially, Calasso relies on his own encyclopedic knowledge. He is able to trace the snake symbolism, for example, through mythic images of gods and heroes back to the Greek Hermes and the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus. Calasso sees the caprices and jests as a single, unified movement, related to one another as a musical prelude is related to a fugue. Taken together, they form a sort of mute book or novel without words, telling a story that no eighteenth century novelist managed to narrate. There is not a straight plot, so much as a cast of characters and a set of episodes through which they pass. As a consequence, each etching represents a potential beginning or middle or ending, depending on a viewer’s perception of the whole. If there is a unifying theme to Tiepolo’s work, it is magic—the white magic of the Neoplatonic magus who draws power from stars and from herbs and other substances that stars influence. Magicians of this sort exploited the occult, literally “the hidden,” connections between the heavens and the earth, connections that extended to the human being as the epitome of creation. Such magic was “natural” because it depended on nothing outside of nature—no devils were invoked, only spirits of the created elements and the heavens above. In the Italian Renaissance, this magic was thought to be

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a part of natural philosophy, advocated by such giants as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. It was a means of gaining insight into the mysteries of creation. By Tiepolo’s day, it had fallen into neglect, displaced by the philosophy of the Enlightenment. However, it had been preserved in images, notably in the emblems of illustrators such as Andrea Alciato. Calasso suggests that Tiepolo intuited the art of magic from images he could have seen in such designs as the mosaic of Hermes Trismegistus in the Sienna cathedral. Thus, a long discourse on Neoplatonic ideas and images concludes the second part of this book, titled “Meridian Theurgy.” Theurgy is literally the work of gods, and the Neoplatonists spoke about the powers of gods such as Venus and Mars emanating from the planets of those names and from the ideas that gave birth to those planets. The meridian, meanwhile, is the midline along which the magus brings these ideas to life in material shapes. Without attributing any special wisdom to Tiepolo, Calasso suggests that the Scherzi have much to say about wisdom—for example, the wisdom of the serpent, who tempted the first humans with the promise that they would be as gods, knowing the difference between good and evil. Noting that almost all the Scherzi concern the act of seeing, one way or another, Calasso suggests further that the whole series should be considered visionary art. The large cast of characters in the engravings features several that Calasso describes collectively as “Orientals”—African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and New World figures, each with a distinctly non-European cast. (The Italian term orientali has not suffered the same devaluation as its English translation has recently.) Often in elaborate costumes, with turbans and feathered headdresses and flowing robes, these Orientals represent knowledge, power, and arts that are sometimes at odds with those of the Enlightenment in Europe, sometimes complementary to them. These figures appear throughout the book’s final section, “Glory and Solitude,” and in the paintings of Tiepolo’s final years that Calasso discusses there. This final section of Calasso’s text opens with a study of eleven paintings, frescoes, and sketches of Antony and Cleopatra, all showing a supremely confident, even impudent, queen of Egypt and a Roman invader who is not equal to the task at hand. It should not seem entirely strange that the descendant of one of Venice’s oldest families would arrive at this perspective. Venice, the “queen of the seas,” had equally ancient ties with Moorish traders from Spain, Africa, and the Levant. Tiepolo took this Venetian perspective with him when he went north at the beckoning of a German prince. The prince wanted magnificent frescoes for his new residence, and he had the wealth and connections to bring Tiepolo and his sons to execute them. Tiepolo’s large frescoes in the Würzburg Residenz have been much studied, but Calasso brings a fresh perspective to them by showing how the artist responded to the assignments he was given. Directed to paint the marriage of Frederick Barbarosa between the upper windows at one end of the great hall, Tiepolo gave the twelfth century emperor a bride who radiates sovereignty with the supreme self-confidence of his Cleopatras. As do other frescoes in the Residenz, this representation seems to revel in the display of authority. Calasso suggests there is a certain irony to the paint-

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ing: Tiepolo must have realized that the prince’s power was largely illusory in a Germany dominated by the Prussian state to the north, and he must have gloried in the sheer illusion that the new building projected. “The more unreal the power he was celebrating,” Calasso concludes, “the more nimble his hand became.” Tiepolo’s final assignment was altogether less satisfactory. Summoned by Charles III of Spain, he decorated the throne room in the Royal Palace and painted scenes for altars in Madrid churches, but he ran into rivals and critics who were closer to the king. His style was mocked as overblown in comparison to the emerging Neoclassicism, and his altar paintings were replaced soon after he died on the job. Even here, Calasso notes, Tiepolo used his Orientals to critique the very real power he was meant to celebrate, this time in the guise of New World subjects whose innate sovereignty could not be denied. Tiepolo has never lacked for scholars to study him, but even the specialists have praised Calasso for his work on the etchings. Reviewing recent books on the artist for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Johanna Fassl of Columbia University’s program in Venice admires Calasso’s treatment of dissonant, disturbing elements. Where others have tended to dismiss these as mere ornaments, she writes, he has shown that they are integral to the whole. Nevertheless, he has not forced his literary perspective on the series, for he has freely admitted the ambiguities. Early reviewers of Alastair McEwan’s quite literal translation have found that the book holds together nicely. A reviewer for the Los Angeles Times compares the book’s style to that of a compelling novel, and indeed McEwan’s earlier ventures in translation from the Italian have included books by the novelists Alain Aikann and Fleur Jaeggy. The hardcover edition is handsomely printed in Singapore on smooth paper and includes eighty-two illustrations scattered throughout the body of the text, most of them in full color. The illustrations have a softer quality than they would in a separate section printed on glossy stock and thus give a better impression of the originals. The page format is kept simple by an appended section of notes on “sources,” keyed to page and line number. There is also a section on “images,” noting the title, medium, and ownership of each illustration. The lack of captions beneath illustrations makes for a lot of page turning, as the connection of image and title is not always obvious from the text itself. That is a minor complaint, however, about a beautiful book. One may also note a very few errors of fact, which are almost inevitable in a book with such a wide range of reference. For example, the “De Bry brothers” whose engravings graced early books about the New World were in fact father and son. Calasso has enough of the magpie in him to revel in gossip about Tiepolo. Several rumors involve his wife of many years, Cecilia Tiepolo, who took to gambling during his long absences from Venice. When she was losing, as she often did, she is said to have used his drawings and paintings, even his studio and house, as collateral. Because Calasso ends the book with a meditation on Tiepolo’s frequent pairings of old men and young women, it may be appropriate to add a recent anecdote involving the painting of “Time Unveiling Truth,” which Calasso discusses in the opening section. In 2008, the Italian prime minister had a reproduction of this painting retouched so

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that Truth’s bared bosom would not distract audiences during television interviews. Whatever this says about truth, power, illusion would not have escaped the painter as Calasso presents him. Thomas Willard

Review Sources Art & Antiques 32, no. 10 (November, 2009): 108. Booklist 106, no. 5 (November 1, 2009): 19. Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 4 (Summer, 2007): 651-654. Los Angeles Times, October 25, 2009, p. E14.

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TO BE READ IN FIVE HUNDRED YEARS Author: Albert Goldbarth (1948) Publisher: Graywolf Press (St. Paul, Minn.). 185 pp. $16.00 Type of work: Poetry An informative, touching, and prodding volume of poetry that examines what civilization should truly treasure As a poet and an inquisitive citizen of the world, Albert Goldbarth has always shown himself to be excited about historical detail, about the curious anomalies that exist within every culture. He can be considered a collector both literally and figuratively. Since the 1970’s, he has produced one remarkable collection of poetry after another. His first collection, Coprolites, was published in 1973, and for more than thirty years he has produced a volume nearly every year. He has taught at several leading institutions, including Cornell University, Syracuse University, and the University of Texas at Austin. Since 1987, he has taught at Wichita State University, where he is currently the Adele Davis Distinguished Professor of Humanities. Goldbarth is fascinated by objects and is an avid collector of toys. He considers himself a gatherer, a hoarder, a poet who must work into the night at his table, piecing together everything that seems to fit into a whole. There must be debris all around, must be extra words and images that will be used next time. He seems to believe that much more fits together than any other poet would surmise. He gives his readers much to ponder during a long winter’s night. His poetry comprises many layers and many materials. There is room in it for images and tall tales. For all the padding employed, though, there is no excess. Few poets are good at this form of construction, but it all holds together in Goldbarth’s capable hands. Some lines may state the obvious, may seem unnecessary, but they work within a Goldbarth poem. He is willing to appear silly or to risk chaos. For his efforts to inject humor into his poetry, Goldbarth was awarded the 2008 Mark Twain Award for Humorous Poetry by the Poetry Foundation. Goldbarth has not always been very helpful in shedding light into his approach to poetry, enabling others to interpret his work. He has stated that he does not “spend any time thinking about [his poems] in such terms as an aesthetic out of which I create, or an ideal toward which my body of work is heading.” What pleases him the most is that he has “poured the best of myself into the poems themselves.” Goldbarth is suspicious of critical commentary about a poem. He wishes for his poems to be independent “meaningful moments of power for a good reader.” If a poem works, it is primarily because of the skill of the poet and not because of its subject matter. Autobiographic “truth” serves no purpose for Goldbarth. A brilliant poem creates its own “truth.” The poetic worlds that he creates fit into his worldview. Goldbarth believes that “the universe is nothing but incomprehensible multilayers, and our lives are examples of that.” As he sees it, “we are all a thousand things at once.” Through his po-

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etry, he grapples with the vast cosmos, and his poems “are mimetic of a layered, interconnective cosmos.” After completing a poem, Goldbarth can be pleasantly surprised that he has referenced several disparate subjects. He may combine William Shakespeare with a comic book character. This process is not thought out in advance. The references that are seemingly poured into a poem are as large as the poet’s mind. In his long career, Goldbarth has not Albert Goldbarth is a leading American slowed down in his production of stimulating poetry volumes. He continues to believe “in poet and has won the prestigious the power of books to save some individual National Book Critics Circle award for life out there.” The poet is not saying that a poetry twice. He has published more book will affect an entire culture, only that it is than twenty challenging poetry possible for the book to change one life. The collections, as well as a novel and several volumes of essays. talent that the poet brings to the reading, to the dance, to the equation can make all the difference in the world. The poet may not have read poets from centuries past, but each poet can examine what is personal and make a successful poem. Goldbarth has expressed the idea that “there are no rules in poetry.” He has continued to wrestle with the idea of “unity” in all of his work. In some way, he believes, everyone looks to “ignite something extraordinary inside of themselves.” This project encompasses many quests, including the spiritual, the scientific, and the poetic. In his poetry, Goldbarth has shown a tendency to focus on saving “people or cultural moments that have otherwise passed away or are in danger of passing away.” His massive curiosity and enthusiasm is readily apparent in everything that he writes. For To Be Read in Five Hundred Years, Goldbarth finds himself returning to the sciences, the soul, the nature of what makes humans tick. Personal relationships may come and go, disease and death intrude at inopportune times, but there is still the desire to add to what humans possess both in understanding and in toys. The collection is divided into eight sections: “Love and Death on the Cosmic Odometer: 1,” “The Writing Life,” “God Gives Adam and Eve an Alphabet,” “Everything,” “Love and Death on the Cosmic Odometer: 2,” “Taboo, Counterfeiting, Theft, Obliteration, and Other Errancies,” “A Premise as Tough as Monogamy,” and “Toward (and Against) the Future.” The past is observed with fresh eyes, from a new perspective. The collection’s opening poem, “Reseen in This New Context,” gives readers a glimpse of what is to come, what Goldbarth is up to in this collection. He admits that there are many angles that deserve their moment in the sun. He states, “Of course it’s also true that, sometimes, a recontext/ will allow an admission of new and unforeseeable wonder.” From every point of view, the past and the present are sniffed by a thorough bloodhound. The poet is restless, nervous in this contemporary world, where everything seems expendable. There must be something that can be preserved, can be

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dusted for prints. Goldbarth does not believe in throwing things away, in flushing away anything that does not fit into a neat pattern. He finds much to relish in the past, in what can be considered collectibles. He refuses to leave well enough alone. He wonders, for example if his marriage continuing to stay strong, to last beyond all statistical norms, is worrisome, since he does not know how it is possible. Friends and loved ones do not last forever. Illness will rear its ugly head and force poets and concerned citizens to cope with an untidy disease, an untimely death. For Goldbarth, it is necessary to speak the truth as he knows it. He is willing to admit that he is “thinking about sex.” The poet is not the only one to have “sex” on the mind. In the poem “If We Were Honest,” Goldbarth reveals that it is not merely him who has carnal thoughts. Indeed, most people are concerned at any given moment with either sex or death. Most expressions stand in for either sex or death. The poem ends, This is my topic tonight, and how the craft of poetry and the role of the postmodern yes to bare knee like a beacon, like a skull beneath the face-skin, and a question from the audience is yes in my mind, yes in yours, yes sex and death—the one thing.

This sort of honesty can be unnerving, can leave readers in denial. Taking his job as a poet seriously, Goldbarth will have none of such objections. Important poems, immortal poems always will instruct and interrupt. There is no easy way around a poem. If one reads for meaning, then meaning one shall receive. Goldbarth focuses on such things in the poem “The Arc,” where he speaks of the epic poem that over time, becomes a pillow wedged beneath a woman’s skull. She must have loved it ardently; she must have loved this little, private magic into taking place. And we’re all on the arc of a pilgrimage trail, molecule by molecule becoming something different.

For all readers’ rationalizations, for all their “calling the pot black,” no one can escape the truth, the conclusion that takes no prisoners. Goldbarth recognizes all too well that no one dies without leaving something behind. He asks, without mythology, without memory, and without passionate sex, what does humankind really contribute to the “cosmic odometer?” Goldbarth has always made the case that what humans wrestle with makes them tolerable, humorous, and almost remarkable. Humans must dig, must investigate, and must confirm what is true, what is eternal. Will love last, will gods prevail, will civilizations stand tall for eternity? Many will ask these questions, but poets endeavor to resolve the issues at hand. In the poem “Marble-Sized Song,” Goldbarth concludes, “yes in the shadows, yes in the radiance,/ yes we must go in and in.” To be involved in life entails not being satisfied with ignorance, being left in the wilderness.

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The short poem “Birds,” which opens the section “The Writing Life,” professes that “It’s hunger and territory/ although we choose to call it song.” This is history at its most elemental. It is left to those who come after to remember, to sing the praises of what came before. Goldbarth likes to serve as the archaeologist who unearths what has long been buried in the hearts and minds of an absentminded culture. While “Birds” may be the shortest poem of the second section, “The Craft Lecture to the Creative Writers of the Low-Residency Program at Yadda Yadda University, with a Late Assist from Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Maxine Kumin, Sir Thomas Browne, and Allusion to the Title of an early book of Jorie Graham’s” is the longest, at seven pages. The poem opens with “The Earth was writing: the Earth had penmanship,” and ends with Last night my childhood knocked for attention against the inside of my cranium, a ten-year-old boy and a hazy duo behind him looking as if he could never grow up to fail or disappoint, I heard them say that memory is holy, and nothing —not the son or the Son or the sun overhead itself—is eternal. Keep a dream journal.

The idea of keeping a “dream journal” is mentioned several times in the poem. As with many Goldbarth poems, this one is one part real, one part imagined, and another part everything in-between. Readers are advised to “keep a dream journal” in order to keep what is essential for survival close at hand. Goldbarth saves the collection’s title poem for its final section, “Toward (and Against) the Future.” In the poem, he ponders whether “the whizkid physicist thinktank guys” could be right when they suggest that “every acted-on decision of ours” can produce “two simultaneous independent futures.” With so much going on, so much to keep track of, relish, preserve, ponder, and maybe even worship, who is going to make the correct choice? How many mistakes have to be made before those who supposedly should know better will right the ship? For the poet, it is love that gives him purpose. He “freely” gives “her one grand opera rose/ and hiphop dove, she under my skin, she knife in my mind, this thing,/ oh this millennial and hallucinatory and radiant thing, she bring me,/ she life me, she take me, she bring me love/ love love love crazy love.” All the knowledge in the world, all the imagination, all the skills, tools, and dreams, lead to this realization, and this is good. This is what the poet has been trying to present to the ever-attentive readers of this stimulating collection. Jeffry Jensen

Review Source Publishers Weekly 256, no. 20 (May 18, 2009): 39.

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TOO MUCH HAPPINESS Stories Author: Alice Munro (1931) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 304 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Short fiction Time: The late nineteenth and mid- to late twentieth centuries Locale: Canada; Russia Ten new stories by one of the most accomplished North American short-story writers currently practicing that underrated art form Although Alice Munro has insisted in more than one place that she does not write as a novelist does, many critics and reviewers have tried to give her fiction the dignity they think belongs only to the novel by suggesting that her stories are “novelistic” and therefore more complex than most short stories. In a story titled “Fiction” in Too Much Happiness, Munro cannot not resist a wily jab at all those critics who have trivialized the short story as a genre and chided her for not writing something more serious, namely novels. Joyce, the central character, buys a book written by a woman she has met briefly at a party. When she opens it, she is disappointed to find out it is a collection of short stories, not a novel: “It seemed to diminish the book’s importance, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside it.” After climaxing a distinguished career of numerous awards with the Man Booker International Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2009, Munro must have had a sly smile on her face when she wrote those words. Given her own advancing age, it is not surprising that many of the narrators in these ten new stories are older women who are made to recall some crucial event from their past. In “Fiction,” the past is the 1970’s, when Joyce’s husband left her for another woman. However, the primary action of the story takes place in the present day, when, having remarried, she meets a woman at a party who seems familiar to her. Later, she sees her picture on the back cover of a book and buys it. While reading the first story, Joyce realizes that the author, Maggie, is the daughter of the woman for whom her husband left her. The story is about Maggie’s experiences when she was a student in Joyce’s music class. She is chagrined to be reminded that she used the child’s love and adoration for her as a means by which she could pry into the domestic life of her ex-husband and his new wife. However, at the end of the story Joyce is reading, Maggie’s character comes to the realization that, in spite of Joyce’s selfish motives, if the great happiness she felt in her relationship with her teacher came out of Joyce’s unhappiness, it is happiness nonetheless and not to be regretted. The inextricability of happiness and unhappiness, a theme woven throughout many of these stories, is perhaps most obvious in the long title piece. Deriving from Munro’s

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interest in historical subjects—evident in her 2006 collection The View from Castle Rock— “Too Much Happiness” originated with her discovery of the nineteenth century Russian mathematician and novelist Sophia Kovalevsky while looking for something else in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The story focuses on the last few days before Kovalevsky died of pneumonia, which she contracted during a cold, wet trip from Paris to Stockholm. She held a chair in mathematics in Stockholm— the first woman in European history to hold A preeminent writer of short fiction, Alice Munro has won two Giller Prizes, such a professorship. Kovalevsky’s seemingly contradictory talents led Munro to a biograthe Rea Award, and the Man Booker phy by Don H. Kennedy and his wife titled International Prize, among many Little Sparrow: A Portrait of Sophia Kovalevothers. Her collections include Dance sky (1983), which quotes Kovalevsky’s last of the Happy Shades (1968), The Progress of Love (1986), and words at four o’clock in the morning on FebRunaway: Stories (2004). ruary 10, 1891: “Too much happiness.” In Munro’s story, Kovalevsky has been looking forward to the future, having received recognition for her work in an era when woman were not thought to be capable of higher mathematical thinking. She is also happily anticipating her forthcoming marriage to Maxsim Kovalesky, a distant relation and a professor of law—a great bear of a man who offers her comfort and security. Although the title of the story may suggest that Kovalevsky has so much happiness her death is a tragedy, it also may suggest her acceptance of the fact that happiness cannot be separated from unhappiness. It is not surprising that Kovalevsky’s expertise as both a mathematician and a writer of fiction would fascinate Munro, for her brilliant short stories are always complex combinations of the poetic and the formal, embodying a delicate and precise balancing of relationships—between spouses, between family members, between the present and the past. At the end of the title story, as Kovalevsky lies dying, she thinks about writing stories in which she hopes she will discover something underlying that goes on in human life, whether invented or not. Munro has always been driven by the desire to probe the basic mysteries of human experiences. One of her aging female characters says she hates to hear the word “escape” used to describe fiction, thinking rather that perhaps it is life that is the escape. “Some Women” begins with its narrator saying how amazed she is sometimes at how old she is, but it focuses on her experiences when she is thirteen years old and is hired to help care for a young man named Bruce. A veteran of the war who is dying of leukemia, Bruce is staying in the house of his stepmother, Old Mrs. Crozier. His wife, Sylvia, a schoolteacher, seems to be living on the fringes of his life and his illness. Old Mrs. Crozier’s masseuse, Roxanne, bursts into the house like a dynamo and takes an interest in Bruce, who plays the role of a kind of ailing Fisher King, a sort of sacred

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prize in the center of the women. A usual with short stories, “Some Women” amasses its weight on its ending, when Bruce turns the tables on Roxanne and Mrs. Crozier, finding the comfort he needs in his neglected wife. Some readers may feel that there is much more violence in these stories than in Munro’s previous work: Two young girls murder an abhorred playmate; a man kills his children because he thinks his wife has walked out on him; a woman dying of cancer is threatened in her home by a man who has murdered his family. However, in keeping with the theme of “too much happiness,” or happiness bound up with unhappiness, the horror in these stories is often balanced by some compensatory acceptance. For example, in “Dimensions,” although the central character’s insane bullying husband has killed their children, Doree understands that he knows their life and their children better than anyone else and goes to visit him in an asylum. Moreover, the story ends with a random rescue and a kind of personal salvation that seems somehow poetically just. “Free Radicals” is also about a bittersweet confrontation that ends with poetic justice. The central character, who has cancer and whose husband has recently died, has her home invaded by a man who shows her pictures of his parents and sister, whom he has recently murdered. In spite of the fact that she knows the cancer will probably kill her, she clings to life and tries to gain the intruder’s sympathy by telling him that she is also guilty of a crime in her past. However, the story is a lie, a fiction in which she takes on the role of her husband’s wronged first wife who is going to poison the other woman. Telling her that what he did was not so underhanded as what she did, the murderer leaves, only to be killed in a car accident. In Munro’s best work, the hidden story of emotion and secret life, communicated by atmosphere and tone, is always about something more enigmatic and unspeakable than a story generated merely by character and plot. Fascinated by the fact that people do things for mysterious reasons, Munro explores subterranean motivations in “Deep Holes.” The holes of the title become a metaphor for these subterranean motivations, as a young man cuts himself off from his family for no apparent reason except his having fallen into a deep hole as a child from which he had to be rescued by his father. His father’s subsequent indifference to him may, or may not, be the cause of his falling into an even deeper hole of alienation from family and society. In “Child’s Play,” a young girl is so inexplicably threatened and horrified by a mentally challenged playmate that she colludes with another girl to drown her. In “Face,” a young girl scars her face so that she will look like a playmate who has a birthmark. Why these people do the destructive things they do is often an inexplicable mystery in Munro’s stories. Flannery O’Connor once said she lent some stories to a country lady who lived down the road from her, and when the woman returned them she said, “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do.” O’Connor argues that good stories have to show how “some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything.” Munro would agree that the peculiar problem of the short-story writer is to reveal as much of the mystery of personality as possible. In “Wenlock Edge,” the central character, a young scholarship student, believes that the life of literature and those who study it should be different from ordinary life and ordinary people. She is disappointed by the two students who live in her rooming

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house because, although they study modern languages, they seem no different from the girls who work in banks and offices. When she hears the story of the experiences of her roommate Nina—her pregnancy, her trip to Japan to get an abortion, the death of her child, her relationship with an older man named Mr. Purvis—it seems to her that Nina’s life is the complex life of a fictional character, making her feel like a simpleton. When, at Nina’s request, she goes to dinner at Mr. Purvis’s home, she is taken aback when his housekeeper tells her to take her clothes off and calls her a bookworm when she hesitates. Determined to prove she is not simply a bookworm but rather an enlightened woman fit to live in a sophisticated fiction, she sits naked throughout the meal and while she reads poetry to Purvis. Indeed, her adventure seems much like a scene from a forbidden nineteenth century novel. When she begins to read aloud from A. E. House’s A Shropshire Lad (1896), “On Wenlock Edge the Wood’s in Trouble,” she becomes more comfortable, for momentarily living within the fictional work of Houseman’s poetry makes her feel at home. Shame recedes as she thinks of everyone being sad, bare creatures under their clothes. Later, she decides to create her own plot around the lives of Nina and Mr. Purvis, allowing whatever melodrama might occur next to go on as if in a wicked story of her own making. Alice Munro’s short stories are complex and powerful, not because they are “novelistic” and not so much because of what happens in them, but because of what cannot happen except in the mysterious human imagination. More polished and profound than she has ever been, Alice Munro is the preeminent practitioner of the short story—and one of the most brilliant writers in any genre—in the world today. Charles E. May Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 304, no. 4 (November, 2009): 114. Booklist 105, no. 22 (August 1, 2009): 10. The Boston Globe, November 29, 2009, p. 4. The Christian Century 126, no. 21 (October 20, 2009): 56-57. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 21 (November 1, 2009): 1130. Library Journal 134, no. 18 (November 1, 2009): 60. Los Angeles Times, November 8, 2009, p. E10. New Statesman 138, no. 4964 (August 31, 2009): 41-42. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 19 (December 3, 2009): 42-44. The New York Times, November 30, 2009, p. C1. The New York Times Book Review, November 29, 2009, p. 1. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 33 (August 17, 2009): 39. San Francisco Chronicle, November 22, 2009, p. F1. The Times Literary Supplement, August 21, 2009, p. 3-4. The Wall Street Journal 254 (November 13, 2009): W13. World Literature Today 83, no. 6 (November/December, 2009): 8.

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THE TOURIST Author: Olen Steinhauer (1970) Publisher: Minotaur (New York). 408 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 2001-2007 Locale: Blackdale, Tennessee; Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Long Island, New York; Orlando, Florida; Austin, Texas; Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; Raleigh, North Carolina; Amsterdam, Netherlands; Slovenia; Venice, Italy; Paris, France; Frankfurt, Germany; Geneva, Switzerland Unusual circumstances pull a deskbound CIA agent back into the field and into a complex conspiracy Principal characters: Milo Weaver, a CIA officer Tina Crowe Weaver, his wife, a librarian Stephanie Weaver, his stepdaughter Tom Grainger, Milo’s mentor in the CIA Terence Fitzhugh, a CIA administrator Frank Dawdle, a CIA officer turned thief Angela Yates, Milo’s friend, a CIA officer “The Tiger,” a legendary assassin Janet Simmons, a Homeland Security agent Terence Fitzhugh, CIA assistant director of clandestine operations Yevgney Primakov, a retired KGB agent working for the United Nations Roman Vgrimov, an exiled Russian businessman, formerly in the KGB Colonel Yi Lien, a Chinese spy Diane Morel, a French spy James Einner, a CIA officer

Olen Steinhauer’s sixth thriller, The Tourist, centers on Milo Weaver, a weary Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) field agent so disgusted with his deadly work that he is contemplating suicide. In 2001, Weaver is shot during an encounter in Venice with rogue agent Frank Dawdle. Their fight is witnessed by Tina Crowe, a pregnant woman who immediately goes into labor. Six years later, Milo and Tina are married, living a comfortable life in Brooklyn with their daughter, Stephanie, when Milo is thrown back into action against his will and better judgment. In his mid-thirties, Milo is a “tourist,” CIA jargon for a field agent who handles dangerous assignments. He longs to leave such work behind, but circumstances force him to leave his safe desk job. Milo has been tracking a legendary assassin known as the Tiger for six years, and the trail ends in a jail cell in Blackdale, Tennessee. Known

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by many names, the Tiger comes close to being a doppelganger of Milo. He knows more about Milo than the spy knows about him, and he has left clues for Milo so they can finally meet. The Tiger views the CIA agent as an enigma: “There’s no motivation connecting the events of your past.” The assassin, a for mer tourist himself, also does not know who he is working for or who is responsible for his rapidly approaching death, a result of being injected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The Tiger wants Milo to track down his killer, and what Milo learns from the assassin early in the novel sets up a series of resulting events. Steinhauer excels in making his novel’s disparate elements cohere in unexpected ways. Milo is appalled when Angela Yates, another tourist and Milo’s closest friend, is suspected of being a double agent. After she is murdered, he becomes a suspect. The remainder of The Tourist involves Milo’s efforts to clear himself while trying to determine who is lying to whom and why. Janet Simmons, a relentless Department of Homeland Security agent, is but one antagonist. Thomas Grainger, Milo’s mentor, may be another. Terence Fitzhugh, a CIA bureaucrat, wants to bring down Grainger and everyone connected with him. Yevgney Primakov, a retired KGB agent working for the United Nations, has a mysterious role in the proceedings. Only Roman Vgrimov, a dissipated Russian businessman exiled in Switzerland, is a more conventional reprobate. Those involved in manipulating others have been careful never to have direct contact with the agents they control, making the novel’s machinations even murkier. The Tourist opens on September 10, 2001, because it deals with the consequences of the political and moral quagmire following the terrorist attacks that took place the next day. Steinhauer’s tale is both a metaphor for the uncertainties of the age of terrorism and an exploration of the philosophical side of espionage, with its paranoia and shifting identities. There is no good or evil in this world, only uncertainties. Milo feels he has “slipped to some secluded corner of the extremes, some far reach of utter imbalance.” This theme of balance is referred to frequently: “Without balance, a life was no longer worth the effort.” While many fictional spies concentrate only on the immediate tasks at hand, Milo constantly questions his duties and ponders the consequences of his decisions and actions. Like the characters of John le Carré, he is torn between the obligations of his professional and private selves. Steinhauer has said he learned from le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) that espionage fiction can combine entertainment, social commentary, and excellent writing, and the influence of the master espionage novelist is apparent throughout The Tourist. Steinhauer acknowledges his debt to le Carré by having his spies use a line from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as a code. Steinhauer strives to keep his readers off balance, making them as puzzled as the Olen Steinhauer is the author of The Confession (2004), 36 Yalta Boulevard (2005), Liberation Movements (2006), Victory Square (2007), and The Bridge of Sighs (2003), which received Mystery Readers International’s 2004 Macavity Award for best novel.

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characters about what is truly going on. After presenting the first third of the novel from Milo’s perspective, the focus suddenly shifts to Tina’s point of view, and it later shifts to those of other characters. Tina emerges from Milo’s shadow, from her primary role as his emotional and moral support, to face ethical decisions of her own. In offering alterative views of Milo’s predicament, Steinhauer creates a greater degree of psychological realism and sets up a denouement in which not all issues are wrapped up tidily. Although Steinhauer’s style is easier to follow and relies more on dialogue than that of le Carré, the structure of The Tourist resembles that of such le Carré works as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). In Steinhauer’s hands, the events of Milo’s life constantly circle back upon themselves, taking on more meaning each time an incident is revisited, as with the glimpses of the violent day when Milo meets Tina. The revelation toward which The Tourist seems to be building occurs a little over halfway through the novel, but much more is to come. The narrative threads wrap around one another, squeezing until a kernel of truth emerges. This truth, however, can never be complete, as Grainger explains to Milo: “Spying, and in particular Tourism, is all about storytelling. After a while you collect too many layers. It’s hard to discern story from truth.” Milo rightly takes this statement as meaning that he should not trust anything Grainger tells him. Though The Tourist can hardly be considered an experimentally self-conscious, postmodern work, it celebrates the complexities of the storytelling process. The world of espionage as interpreted by Steinhauer has become even grayer than it was during the Cold War. The identities of enemies and their motivations are more difficult to discern. Characters’ identities are constantly shifting. At first, Fitzhugh seems antagonistic toward Milo because he hates Grainger. Gradually, Fitzhugh’s motivations become more difficult for Milo to grasp. In a world where no one can be trusted, everyone is a villain. The very notion of heroism has become an elusive abstraction. Milo’s job requires him to see the connections between disparate elements, but doing so is not always easy: “What he needed was a theory of everything, but each piece didn’t quite line up with the others.” Several characters, such as the Tiger, have multiple names and identities. Diane Morel, a French spy, poses as the girlfriend of Colonel Yi Lien, a Chinese agent, using a suicide victim’s unpublished novel to convince him she is a writer. Morel also has a romantic relationship with Angela, which she ends abruptly, perhaps because it has served its purpose. Steinhauer employs the protocols of spy fiction to underscore his identity theme, a concern made even more slippery in the post-September 11 world. At the beginning of the novel, when Milo is undercover as Charles Alexander, Angela tells him, “When you were Milo, you were a different person.” Milo’s identity is “the deep closet where he kept his secrets.” He never tells Tina or the CIA the true story of his parentage. Just when readers think they understand what Steinhauer is up to, he drops a series of bombshells about Milo’s background, making an already complicated character even more complex. Milo’s chameleon quality hides his true nature even from himself. He is an unusu-

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ally insecure spy, haunted by living a double life, thinking sometimes like the family man he longs to be and at other times like a tourist. Milo has grown flabby from desk work, and he is an emotional mess: “Milo realized, not the first time, that he was no good at living.” Steinhauer’s method of revealing biographical details about Milo in small chunks, especially those about his parentage, contributes to making the character credible and sympathetic. Tina, a Columbia University librarian, loves Milo but resents that the secrecy of his work spills over into his domestic life, seeing espionage as a world parallel to their real lives. He tries to keep these two halves of his life separate, wanting to be nothing more than a bourgeois family man. The disruption of his domesticity is a sign he is being punished for his secrecy. Lies intended to protect Tina and Stephanie have unforeseen consequences. Steinhauer makes the Milo-Tina relationship as important as anything else in The Tourist, without resorting to clichés or strained sentimentality. Milo is amused by fellow agent James Einner, whose view of their profession seems drawn from spy films such as The Ipcress File (1965). The Tourist frequently offers contrasts between the realities of espionage and its representation in popular culture. Milo wishes the motivations behind spying were as clear as they seem in fiction: “The truth was that intelligence work seldom, if ever, ran in straight lines. Facts accumulated, many of them useless, some connecting and then disconnecting. It took a patient, trained eye to figure out which to hold on to and which to lay aside.” Adding to his dilemma is his lack of trust in his own judgment. A Francophile, Milo is nostalgic for the days before he was born when the French adored American music and films, “that time when Europe was rebuilding itself, and beginning anew,” and he misses his own youthful enthusiasm for his employer and his country. After September 11, 2001, he longs for a time when the world made more sense, when nations had genuine fondness for one another. The impossibility of such attitudes is personified by Primakov, who appears to be running a secret espionage agency within the United Nations despite strictures against such activity. Everyone in the novel appears to be spying on everyone else. Milo wonders who can be trusted if all sides mistrust and lie to one another. Many other spy novels are built around paranoia and moral ambiguities. The Tourist stands out for the exacting way in which Steinhauer interweaves his characters, situations, and themes, with everything always pointing back to its distorted mirror image. The Tourist is about the impossibility of knowing the truth. All of the characters involved in espionage are withholding information or lying about something, sometimes to protect an operation, sometimes to cover themselves, sometimes for more malevolent reasons. All the machinations seem to have something to do with the Chinese and Sudanese oil, yet this issue serves merely as an excuse for the lies and murders upon which the spies thrive. So caught up in deception are the agents on all sides that they often lose sight of the ostensible rationale for their work. The rules of espionage include “Never doubt your ability to survive. With doubts come mistakes.” Milo, an existential antihero, certainly makes his share of mistakes. Michael Adams

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 5 (November 1, 2008): 5. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 3 (February 1, 2009): 43. Library Journal 133, no. 18 (November 1, 2008): 61. The Los Angeles Times, March 7, 2009, p. D6. The New York Times, March 5, 2009, p. 7. The New York Times Book Review, March 15, 2009, p. 7. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 50 (December 15, 2008): 32. The Washington Post, March 16, 2009, p. C3.

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TRANSCENDENTAL STUDIES A Trilogy Author: Keith Waldrop (1932) Publisher: University of California Press (Berkeley). 199 pp. $19.95 Type of work: Poetry A bold and revelatory collection of poems that touches on the power of memory in the pursuit of navigating through daily life Keith Waldrop first burst onto the literary scene with the publication of his poetry collection A Windmill near Calvary in 1968. The collection was nominated for a National Book Award for Poetry. Over the years, Waldrop has established himself as not only a leading American avant-garde poet but also a brilliant translator, editor, and artist and an important figure in experimental theater. He is the author of many cutting-edge poetry collections, including The Garden of Effort (1975), The Space of Half an Hour (1983), The Opposite of Letting the Mind Wander (1990), and The House Seen from Nowhere (2002). In addition, he and his wife, Rosmarie Waldrop, began Burning Deck Press during the 1960’s. He also has been involved with avant-garde theatrical performances. This experimental bent has been at the heart of Waldrop’s approach to the creative process. He has been drawn to absurdist writers such as Alfred Jarry and André Breton. He also was deeply influenced by the experimental American writer Gertrude Stein. Waldrop learned from her how to focus on style, and not become mired in the meaning of what he wrote. For Waldrop as for Stein, it would be the general mood or essence created that was of prime importance. Waldrop has translated several French writers, including Breton as well as Paul Eluard, René Char, and Pierre Reverdy. In 2000, the French government bestowed on Waldrop the rank of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres for his contribution to French literature. Waldrop has taught at Brown University for more than forty years and is currently the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of Humanities. Never one to consider slowing down, he continues to work with graduate students who are working toward a master of fine arts in poetry. The poet believes in not giving up on alternate or older versions of a poem. He always advises his students to keep the original version of any poem, no matter how many times it gets revised. What a poet sees as a problem on first reading may on repeated readings become more valuable at a later date. Although Waldrop has criticized himself for “keeping too much,” he remains leery of giving up on a poem, a fragment, or a line too quickly. The poems that Waldrop has stored away may serve him well in the present. Transcendental Studies includes poetry that was written decades ago. The jigsaw puzzle that is a poetry collection can contain material that finally works together now, af-

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ter many years of misfits. The poet finally is smart enough or aware enough truly to Keith Waldrop is the author of several see what belongs together as a whole. Since highly regarded poetry volumes, memory plays an important role in most of including his newest collection, which what Waldrop writes, it is no wonder that his won the 2009 National Book Award for older musings could find a way to the sur- Poetry. He also is a wonderful face decades later. He loves creating art col- translator and writer of nonfiction. lages as well as word collages. He surmises that he has produced more than one thousand art pieces. The collages spark investigation, spark new ways of looking at the world. At Kansas State Teachers College, Waldrop studied psychiatry. He has long been fascinated to how the brain processes images. During the early 1950’s, his studies were terminated when he was drafted into the Army. He was stationed in Germany, where he met Rosmarie Sebald. They eventually married in 1959. She also was a poet and translator, and they have greatly influenced each other. For decades, they have pushed ahead, made their mark whether the poetry establishment took notice or not. In a bold stroke, the judges for the National Book Award for Poetry tapped Waldrop as their 2009 winner. They indicated that Transcendental Studies “is a powerful work that merges the metaphysical and the personal.” After forty years, Waldrop is on the cutting age of a new millennium. He would have it no other way. Waldrop has continued to do what he has always done. He has stayed the course, remained true to his approach. Memory, art , and death still remain at the center of his creative spirit. As usual, he has filled in what is blank, what is missing. While in translation Waldrop must be respectful of the original poem, he has no such consideration in putting together a new collage. The poet is less concerned with the “meaning” of what he has created than in having his work “read.” Waldrop is more concerned that a reader gets the “sense” of his work, as opposed to the “meaning.” For the poet, “meaning” is merely part of the “sense” of a poem. If a reader looks for the meaning then that reader only has scratched the surface. Waldrop believes that a poem cannot be figured out “without really listening to it.” Waldrop has divided Transcendental Studies into three poetic sequences and an epilogue. The three poetic sequences are “Shipwreck in Haven,” “Falling in Love Through a Description,” and “The Plummet of Vitruvius.” Some of the material has been previously published. Shipwreck in Haven was published as a volume in 1989. “Falling in Love Through a Description” was published in 1995 in a French translation as Aimer par description: Études transcendentales. The epilogue “Stone Angels” was published as a chapbook in 1997. This collection has been published as part of the New California Poetry Series through the University of California Press. The series is edited by Robert Hass, Calvin Bedient, Brenda Hillman, and Forrest Gander. Transcendental Studies is the twenty-seventh collection to be published in the series. The series has earned a reputation for publishing some of the most cutting-edge poetry in the country. Some of its most notable volumes include Carol Snow’s For (2000), Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), Mark Levine’s The

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Wild (2006), Ron Silliman’s The Age of Huts (compleat) (2007), and Cole Swensen’s Ours (2008). Waldrop’s poetry takes readers on an “inconclusive” yet fascinating journey. It is a journey to the far reaches of human experience as envisioned by the poetic imagination. This is not established territory that readers already know. Waldrop is a poetic adventurer, an explorer in the finest sense. In this journey, he can be compared to such poetic visionaries as Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Paul Celan, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Waldrop believes in the power of language, in what it can reveal. As a skilled magician of words, he balances between cracking the code through the dance of words and the needed silence in-between. It is by employing contrast that the most light shows through. Widely regarded as one of the most important avant-garde writers of his generation, Waldrop, critics have said, “brings results we’ve never heard before” as he presents poetry as “a vast, holistic science, a science of sciences.” For this reason and several others, it is tragic that he is not better known among readers of serious poetry. He is never less than engaging, and more times than not his writing rises to the level of true exploration. In Transcendental Studies, Waldrop is at the top of his poetic game. The collection features plenty of sly wit and a generous helping of spellbinding cadences that carry readers along. Waldrop is always seemingly able to mix old and new work in order to add richness to the magical whole. The opening sequence is divided into six parts. There are no titles, merely numbers. The first part opens with “Balancing. Austere. Life-/ less. I have tried to keep/ context from claiming you.” The poet does not want to become bogged down with too much meaning, too much pointless searching for cultural clues that can only deaden life. The first part ends with Oh yes and wheels on the pavement, angels of incidence, rebounding from waves, but precisely. Reflective angels. Like the hand of a clock which, minute by minute, crosses its appointed spaces. Oh! You are passing! Things are ready. All things, because something must be settled. Slung. Answering laughter. Mixture of diamond and diamond and blood, a rope of flowers.

There is much of this urgent universe, this inquisitive mind that must be balanced. The poet takes comfort in language that has the potential to reconcile memory, experience, knowledge, and spirituality. This imaginative approach proves itself to be a meditation on the great mystery of where the mind possibly ends and the world possi-

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bly begins. In the blink of an eye, the poet can change how all boundaries are to be perceived. In the sixth part, Waldrop boldly states “Behind and above, I saw then everything/ that was happening on earth and can/ describe the hum of clouds.” And what shall a poet-philosopher-shaman do with all of this information? For Waldrop, it can only come to one end: He must describe, ponder, question, and look into the abyss with childlike wonder. The second sequence is made up of discrete images, fragments, and parts looking for a whole. Its first poem, “An Apparatus,” finds the poet viewing the world (real and imagined) around him. It opens with “From where I sit, I can see other/ things: a silver porcupine, pins/ standing upright. It is a vanished tale of a/ vanished forest at the shore of a vanished ocean.” For all the attempts to make sense of what is entering the mind’s eye, danger still remains close at hand. Transcendental Studies can be viewed as a book of evidence. The jagged fragments, the collages that seem to come out of nowhere, the musings of a madman—all of these elements are pieces that add up to something, add up to glimpses into the abstract puzzle that is the human psyche. Waldrop presents readers with a pinch of death, a dab of sweet art, and a generous helping of brazen memories. Out of this assortment, readers must come to terms with the complications that make up the informed thought process. For all the outer trappings of everyday life that fly by, it is the inner complexities of life that run the show. In the poem “The Growth of Private Worlds from Unattached Feelings,” the poet surmises that “Something is going on. The dead Arch-/ duke is resurrected. Unusual/ beauty of the landscape. I think the world/ is turning around me. Whatever position we/ take, space is not place.” The very foundation is a bit shaky, a bit uncertain in these trying times. In the third sequence, the poem “Carriage—A Transition—” includes a series of potent fragments. There is “My gravity distorts/ the neighborhood every/ quality adrift rub/ the panes roar/ of escaping steam,” and “Walking across someone/ else’s farrago (confused/ world) an un-/ bounded capacity for pain,” and “Zeno must have been/ wrong since time’s arrow has flown from/ him to me/ and is flying and/ yet sometimes his argument/ gives me pause.” The poet recognizes that there is much to consider, much to take under advisement. Waldrop is very much at his most substantial in this collection. He invites readers to relish the experience of absorbing Transcendental Studies. Jeffry Jensen

Review Source Publishers Weekly 256, no. 11 (March 16, 2009): 43.

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TROTSKY Downfall of a Revolutionary Author: Bertrand M. Patenaude (1956) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 384 pp. $27.99 Type of work: Biography The story of Leon Trotsky’s last years in Mexico, from his arrival in that country in January, 1837, to his assassination in August, 1940 Principal personages: Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), Russian revolutionary and rival of Joseph Stalin Natalia Sedova (1882-1962), Trotsky’s second wife Joseph Stalin (1875-1953), general secretary of the Communist Party and dictator of the Soviet Union Diego Rivera (1886-1957), one of Mexico’s greatest artists and sponsor of Trotsky in Mexico Frida Kahlo (1907-1953), wife of Diego Rivera, lover of Leon Trotsky, and also one of Mexico’s greatest artists

The subtitle of Bertrande Patenaude’s Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary may be a little misleading, since the focus is not on Trotsky’s fall from power in revolutionary Russia during the 1920’s but on the last period of his life in exile in Mexico. Still, by skillful use of frequent flashbacks, Patenaude manages to recount much of Trotsky’s eventful life, including his loss of power to vengeful Joseph Stalin, from the perspective of the revolutionary’s last days. Leon (or in Russian, “Lev”) Trotsky was a fascinating figure on the stage of history. Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein to a prosperous secular Jewish family, he became a revolutionary while still in his teens. Although initially a populist, he soon converted to Marxism and became a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, a faction of which eventually became the Communist Party. He took the name “Trotsky” from one of his jailors under the czarist regime. Fiercely intelligent and formidably self-educated, Trotsky was known to his comrades as “The Pen” because of his skills as a writer. Trotsky was also probably the greatest orator among the Russian revolutionaries. Although Trotsky worked closely with Vladimir Ilich Lenin, the two men came into conflict at the beginning of the twentieth century. Lenin wanted to centralize the activities of the Social Democrats and to place party activities in the hands of a vanguard of professional revolutionaries. Trotsky supported those who advocated broader representation within the party. Lenin was successful in achieving his form of organization, and the party split into the Bolsheviks (or “majoritarians”), who fol-

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lowed Lenin’s approach, and the Mensheviks (or “minoritarians”). By 1904, Trotsky had Bertrand M. Patenaude is author of A distanced himself from the Mensheviks, but Wealth of Ideas: Revelations from the he still played an ambiguous role between the Hoover Institution Archives (2006) and The Big Show in Bololand: The two factions. In the 1905 uprising against the czar’s American Relief Expedition to Soviet government, Trotsky became first vice-chair- Russia in the Famine of 1921 (2002), man and then later chairman of the soviet (or which won the 2003 Marshall Shulman Award and the 2004 Uncommon Book “council”) of workers of St. Petersburg. His fiAward. ery speeches helped make him one of the rad ical leaders in the revolution of 1917, and he played a central part in the Bolshevik seizure of power. During the civil war that followed, Trotsky showed organizational genius when he shaped the Red Army into a force that could hold power for the Bolsheviks. All these historical events were in the past at the time portrayed in the opening of Patenaude’s book, as a ship carried Trotsky from Norway to Mexico. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Trotsky had lost the struggle for power to Joseph Stalin. Exiled first to Soviet Central Asia, then to Turkey, then to France before reaching Norway, Trotsky was welcome almost nowhere thanks to Stalin’s anger. As leader of the communist world, Stalin had the power to make his enemy a pariah in almost any place. Still, even in exile Trotsky held a fascination, and explaining that fascination is one of Patenaude’s chief concerns. If being Stalin’s enemy made Trotsky an outcast, it also helped make Trotsky a figurehead for those who were attracted to communism but opposed to Stalin’s brutality. Trotsky’s brilliance and literary skills appealed to intellectuals. Trotsky has, in addition, drawn sympathy as a victim of Stalinist persecution who suffered intensely when all of his children were murdered by the Soviet Union or Stalin’s agents. As Patenaude relates, the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera was one of those drawn to Trotsky. Rivera was never sophisticated in his political thinking, but he had troubles with the Mexican Communist Party, and he reacted by declaring himself a Trotskyist. The artist convinced Mexico’s leftist but independent president, Lázaro Cárdenas, to offer the beleaguered exile sanctuary, since Norway had given in to Russian pressure to expel Trotsky, who was in danger of being returned to Russia for lack of a place to which to flee. Much of Patenaude’s story deals with the complicated relationship of Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova, with Rivera and Rivera’s artist wife, Frida Kahlo. The tangle of high-powered personalities became even more problematic when Kahlo and Trotsky had an affair. Rivera may or may not have learned of the affair, but it seems to have contributed greatly to Trotsky’s decision to end his period as a guest in Rivera’s home, a development that made him more vulnerable to Stalin’s agents abroad. Much of Patenaude’s examination of Trotsky’s last years concerns the complicated interpersonal relations of the exiled revolutionary and those around him, especially Rivera and Kahlo. Trotsky emerges as a difficult and idiosyncratic personality whose intense character made a clash with the willful Rivera almost inevitable. How-

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ever, the Russian radical also appears as a sympathetic and in many ways admirable individual, although Patenaude’s frequent and well-placed jumps back in time make it clear that this brilliant, dedicated person had been as ruthless in pursuit of his ends as any of the other Bolsheviks. There was a great deal of blood on Trotsky’s hands. His ambition may have been a better world for all, but he was willing to walk over any number of corpses in the conviction that the path would lead to utopia. Trotsky’s life poses a number of challenges for those who believe that Soviet communism could have been a better and more humane system if only he, rather than Stalin, had managed to take power. One of those challenges, as Patenaude makes clear, is that, although Trotsky was a more sympathetic person that Stalin was, he was just as dedicated to the belief that the communist end can justify any means. A second challenge is that, even in exile, Trotsky never repudiated Stalin’s Soviet Union. He still believed that the Soviet Union was a worker’s state and the first step toward world communism. Even under its bad leadership, he believed that the Soviet Union and its system should be defended. These challenges come into particular relief in the sections of the book in which Patenaude looks at Trotsky’s sympathizers and supporters in the United States. While U.S. politicians blocked Trotsky’s entry into their country, lifelines from the north helped sustain him in Mexico. The Commission of Inquiry into Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, known as the Dewey Commission after the American philosopher John Dewey who headed it, helped clear Trotsky of the fictitious charges made by Stalin’s government, provided Trotsky with an international forum, and undermined worldwide confidence in a Soviet government that was staging show trials on the pretense of a Trotskyist conspiracy. The Socialist Workers Party, centered in New York, not only gave Trotsky material help but also supplied him with staff, bodyguards, and companions. This assistance from the north was especially critical after he left Diego Rivera’s household and had to set up his own fortress-style household. Some of the best sections of Patenaude’s work concern Trotsky’s often complicated relations with the Socialist Workers Party. The American Trotskyists tended to split into factions, a tendency they shared with other communist groups. Trotksy’s support for the Soviet Union became the wedge that split the Americans into two opposed groups. In an eerie echo of the history of the Russian Social Democratic Party, the American Socialist Workers Party divided into a Majority and a Minority. The Majority, under the leadership of James Cannon, followed Trotsky’s attitude on the Soviet Union. The Minority; repulsed by the show trials in Moscow, Stalin’s 1939 pact with Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Finland; repudiated the vision of the Soviet Union as the workers’ state. Members of the Minority, such as James Burnham and Max Shachtman, found Trotsky’s dedication to historical fate through dialectical materialism as difficult to accept intellectually as his allegiance to the Soviet Union was to accept morally. Patenaude produces a portrait of Trotsky as a dogmatic leader. Only the members of the Majority, who would accept the absolute truth as given by Trotsky’s understanding of Marxist doctrine, could meet with the master’s approval. Still, he continued to maintain somewhat complicated relations

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even with his former translator, Shachtman, and the ties between the two men were never completely severed by their arguments. In the end, the links to the Socialist Workers Party provided one of the sources of Trotsky’s death. Sooner or later, someone probably would have killed him. Stalin had decided that it was time for his enemy to die. With the end of the Spanish Civil War, veterans of the losing Republican side had entered Mexico in large numbers, and many of these veterans were Stalinists or even direct agents of Stalin. The Mexican Communist Party was guided by Stalinism, and it was vehemently and vocally opposed to Trotsky’s presence in Mexico. Diego Rivera’s rival in art and politics, the muralist David Siqueiros, led an attack on Trotsky’s compound that almost succeeded, but a romance between a Spanish communist and a follower of the Minority faction of Trotskyists ultimately brought about the aging revolutionary’s death. Ramón Mercader was a native of Barcelona and the son of a communist mother. Caridad Mercader had become the lover of one of the leaders of Stalin’s secret police in Spain during the Civil War. Under aliases, Ramón Mercader had entered into a romantic relationship with the American Trotskyist Sylvia Ageloff. Although affiliated with the Minority faction, Ageloff, without knowing Mercader’s true intentions, had enabled him to gain access to the Trotsky household in Mexico. In a moment when Trotsky’s guard was down, Mercader slammed a mountain-climbing icepick into the older man’s head. Patenaude’s portrayal of Trotsky’s deathbed scene is sympathetic, and even the sternest critic of the October Revolution will find tragedy in the episode. The author has nevertheless made it clear that this man caused untold numbers of deaths and stuck to his allegiance to the Soviet Union even after it had turned into one of the world’s most repressive societies and had hounded him into a small corner of the world. Patenaude argues that Trotsky’s own extremes in the revolution caused his dogmatism and his dedication to ideals that most people would say had been unveiled as obvious illusions. Trotsky was not a vicious man but a humane one, so if he had committed vicious acts to bring about a better society, he had to believe that his acts had been worthwhile. This meant an unwavering dedication to unquestionable historical processes and to the state that he had done so much to bring into existence. One of the greatest contributions of this book, then, is that it gives us some insight into the riddle of this man’s mind. In an epilogue, Patenaude recounts the lives of those around Trotsky in the years following his death. His widow, Natalia, eventually concluded that Stalin had destroyed the revolution completely. Trotsky’s grandson, who was living with him when he was killed, eventually visited Russia after the end of communism and met a half-sister, one of the few survivors among those with any connection to Trotsky. Perhaps most interesting, Minority Trotskyist James Burnham eventually became one of the founders of postwar American conservatism and a mentor to William F. Buckley. A number of other New York Trotskyists followed a similar route and by the late twentieth century had become prominent in the movement known as neoconservatism. Carl L. Bankston III

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Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 1 (September 1, 2009): 28. History Today 59, no. 8 (August, 2009): 64. Library Journal 134, no. 13 (August 1, 2009): 91. National Review 61, no. 20 (November 2, 2009): 60-61. New Statesman 138, no. 4954 (June 22, 2009): 52. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 29 (July 20, 2009): 134. The Times Literary Supplement, October 23, 2009, p. 11-12. The Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2009, p. A13. Weekly Standard, September 28, 2009, pp. 35-37.

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TRUE COMPASS A Memoir Author: Edward M. Kennedy (1932-2009) Publisher: Twelve (New York). 532 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Memoir Time: 1932-2009 Locale: Massachusetts; Washington, D.C. In this historic memoir, the scion of one of America’s most powerful political families shares his extraordinary story about his controversial personal life, as well as his work in the Senate on the major issues of five decades Principal personages: Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy, U.S. senator from Massachusetts, 1962-2009 Victoria Reggie Kennedy, his second wife Joseph P. Kennedy, his father Rose Kennedy, his mother John F. Kennedy, his brother and president of the United States, 19611963 Robert F. Kennedy, his brother, U.S. attorney general, 1961-1964, and senator from New York, 1965-1968

During Senator Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy’s funeral in August, 2009, his son, Edward M. Kennedy, Jr., recalled wanting to go sledding as a child. He was apprehensive about climbing the snowy hill, however, because he had had a leg amputated after being diagnosed with bone cancer. When the elder Kennedy encouraged him, Teddy, Jr., heeded his father’s words and learned an enduring lesson about the power of determination to overcome life’s obstacles in spite of one’s shortcomings. The theme of persistence runs throughout True Compass. The youngest of nine children, including three older brothers who outshone their younger sibling, Kennedy had much to prove. His formidable but loving father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., made that clear when he told his son, You can have a serious life or a nonserious life, Teddy. I’ll still love you whichever choice you make. But if you decide to have a nonserious life, I won’t have much time for you. You make up your mind. There are too many children who are doing things that are interesting for me to do much with you.

Ted Kennedy decided to lead a “serious” life as he followed his brothers John and Robert into public service. In True Compass, Kennedy charts his life’s course from his childhood in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, through his years at prep school and Harvard, the beginning of

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his political career as campaign manager for his brother Jack’s congressional run, and his own years in elective office. Compiled with the help of collaborator Ron Powers, recordings from the oral history project at University of Virginia, reminiscences based on Kennedy’s notes and journals, and extensive interviews reveal a compassionate, down-toearth, religious yet flawed man who valued family, faith, and service above all else. The work takes on a poignant cast when one realizes that Kennedy’s narrative was completed in the shadow of his impending death from brain cancer. The Kennedy family’s story is well known, and the high-profile lives of its various members have been fodder for the tabloids and the subjects of endless biographies. Ted Kennedy’s memoir, however, is the first by one of Rose and Joe Kennedy’s offspring and offers a unique insider’s view of the famous family. Kennedy warmly recalls the intellectual challenges of lively discussions at the dinner table led by his mother; horseback rides along the beach with his father; history walks around Boston with his colorful grandfather, former mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald; and the pleasures of sailing in Cape Cod Sound. He also captures the excitement and frustrations of growing up with rambunctious, competitive brothers who were always in motion and rarely at rest. Joe, Jr., who was seventeen years Ted’s senior and was killed during World War II, was not as close to Ted as were the charismatic Jack and the studious Bobby, although Joe, Jr., and Jack taught Ted to sail when he was six. Teaching Ted to sail was perhaps the greatest gift the older brothers could have given to their younger sibling. As the title of his memoir suggests, sailing played a central role in Kennedy’s life. He was happiest when he was on the water, and when tragedy struck he found solace on the sea. Kennedy’s childhood anecdotes about his relationships with Jack, the future president of the United States, and Bobby, a future senator and presidential candidate, offer unique insight into the loving bonds he shared with them and the deep and abiding grief he experienced when they were both assassinated. In eloquent, elegiac passages, he recounts his efforts to find some relief from his grief in solo nocturnal journeys aboard his sailboat. Kennedy is open and candid about his childhood and young adulthood, and he paints a mostly rosy picture of his family life during that time. He ignores salacious allegations about his father’s philandering and his brothers’ exploits and instead focuses on what was good about the family’s life inside the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port and at their winter home in Florida. He appears to want to set the record straight and counter the negative publicity that the Kennedy family has endured over the years. For example, Robert Kennedy was famously labeled “ruthless” by the press, but Teddy claims his brother was just the opposite and reveals that Bobby’s undeserved reputation for ruthlessness became a family joke. As Kennedy moves into recollections of his adulthood, he becomes more re-

Edward M. Kennedy was elected to the U.S. Senate nine times and represented Massachusetts for forty-seven years. He was instrumental in formulating laws addressing immigration, health care, disability discrimination, AIDS, education, civil rights, and children’s health insurance. He died August 25, 2009.

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strained about sharing his private life, except when his personal failings impinged upon his political life . He acknowledges reports of scandals and bad behavior on his part but does not add any new details to what already has been revealed in books and in the media. He often is more introspective about events that occurred earlier in his life than about later ones. For example, in a chapter titled “Harvard Screwup,” he details the events that led to his expulsion from the college for cheating. When he discovered that a D in Spanish would make him ineligible for the varsity football team, he allowed a friend to take the final exam for him. In retrospect, he accepts blame for his actions and admits “It was an immature, spontaneous, extremely poor and wrong decision.” His straightforward admission of wrongdoing in the Harvard episode contrasts with his treatment of the infamous Chappaquiddick incident, in which campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne lost her life. Kennedy acknowledges that his involvement in the death of Kopechne has been scrutinized by the public and the press repeatedly since it occurred in 1969. He offers a brief explanation of why he has never publicly countered the “bizarre theories” about what is now known simply as “Chappaquiddick”: I have refused to respond to false gossip and innuendo. I have never, not once, responded to a story in the tabloids, even when the story got repeated in the mainstream press. I knew that once I started, I would be forced to engage a back-and-forth on every allegation, no matter how ludicrous or impossible. And I knew that no matter what I said, it would not satisfy those who had already made up their minds.

Once he offers this disclaimer, however, he attempts to set the record straight about Chappiquiddick—yet again—and shares his “more personal feelings” about the event. The details of the incident have been carefully scrutinized by experts and laypeople alike: Kennedy and Kopechne met at a party on Martha’s Vineyard for Bobby’s former campaign staff, he offered to drive her back to her hotel, they drove on dark Dike Road to the ferry, his car slid off the Chappaquiddick bridge into several feet of water, he fought feverishly to escape, and he ran to get help. Kopechne’s dead body was found in the car. In the aftermath of the incident, there were allegations of conflicting reports, giving rise to confusion as to what exactly happened and adundant accusations and recriminations leveled against Kennedy. In True Compass, Kennedy accepts full responsibility for the accident, maintaining that his “actions were inexcusable” and that he has had to live with the guilt of causing the death of another human being for forty years. He also, however, endeavors to explain his confusing behavior after the accident and notes that he was “afraid . . . overwhelmed . . . and made terrible decisions.” It may well be that his confusion had a negative impact on his actions. After all, he had been involved in a devastating accident that took the life of a young woman. However, his attempt to offer his befuddled psychological state as a reason for his subsequent actions reads like an attempt at self-justification, something he notes that he finds “distasteful” because of his upbringing. In spite of the ups-and-downs of his private life, Kennedy persevered in his political career. Elected to the Senate when he was just thirty in 1962, he served with his

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brothers in Washington until President John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963 and Senator Robert Kennedy was murdered in 1968. He writes movingly and sincerely about his grief at his brothers’ deaths and addresses another controversy—the conspiracy theories that emerged after President Kennedy’s assassination. He attempts to put those theories to rest when he claims that both he and Bobby accepted the conclusions of the Warren Commission. Kennedy’s accounts of life on the campaign trail and in Washington as a U.S. senator sparkle with energy and authenticity. An old-fashioned politician, he enjoyed meeting and greeting the public and fighting for the causes that had direct impacts on the everyday lives of his constituents, as well as of citizens nationwide. His opposition to the Vietnam War, work for civil rights, activism on behalf of people with disabilities, and passionate advocacy for affordable health care for all Americans was rooted in his own experiences and in the values of fairness, compassion, and service instilled in him as child. Kennedy also offers a fascinating glimpse of the inner workings of Congress and the White House. His critiques of the presidents with whom he worked are often predictable but sometimes surprising. For example, he admired Lyndon B. Johnson for his advocacy of civil rights and Medicare. He abhorred Richard M. Nixon because of his secretive, paranoid nature and his involvement in the Watergate affair. While Kennedy and Jimmy Carter did not get along, in spite of the fact that they were both Democrats, Kennedy liked Ronald Reagan even though they did not see eye-to-eye politically. He also was close to Bill Clinton and liked George H. W. Bush, although the same cannot be said of his feelings about the elder Bush’s son, George W. Bush. Kennedy was passionately opposed to the Bush administration’s push to invade Iraq in 2003 and flatly called the move an “abuse of power.” In the wake of what he believed to be the Bush administration’s wrongheaded policies, Kennedy looked for someone who would be “capable of lifting up and inspiring our nation to move forward, toward our highest and best ideals.” During the 2008 presidential campaign, several of his colleagues were running for the office, including Senators Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. He came to believe that in Obama “history had handed us that rarest of figures, one who could truly carve out new frontiers.” He and his second wife, Vicki, hit the campaign trail on Obama’s behalf, even though Kennedy was ill with brain cancer. Although Kennedy attended President Obama’s inauguration, he sadly did not live long enough to work with the new president on issues closest to his heart, such as universal health care for all Americans. Kennedy’s final years were productive and happy. His second wife and soul mate, Vicki Reggie, to whom his memoir is dedicated, helped him chart a straight course in his personal life. His career in the Senate continued to flourish. In the last chapter, titled “Perseverance,” he tells the story of his grandson Little Teddy’s quest to win sailing races. The youngster was not having much success, but his grandfather encouraged him to stick with it and never give up. Little Teddy took his advice to heart and went on to win an award for “Most Improved Sailor.” A living example of perseverance, the man known as the lion of the Senate fought long and hard for the causes in

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which he believed. It seems, however, that Kennedy wanted to be remembered as an ordinary human being who experienced redemption and renewal as he overcame his personal failings and limitations—a legacy he has passed on to his family and to the nation. Pegge Bochynski

Review Sources The Economist 392, no. 8649 (September 19, 2009): 97-98. Library Journal 135, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 64. New Statesman 138, no. 4973 (November 2, 2009): 53-54. The New York Review of Books, 56, no. 18 (November 19, 2009): 6-10. The New York Times, September 4, 2009, p. 21. New Yorker 85, no. 31 (October 5, 2009): 79. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 42 (October 19, 2009): 13. The Spectator 311, no. 9449 (October 3, 2009): 40-41. Time 174, no. 12 (September 28, 2009): 21. Weekly Standard 15, no. 2 (September 28, 2009): 17-21.

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TUNNELING TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH Stories Author: Kevin Wilson (1978) Publisher: HarperPerennial (New York). 208 pp. $13.99 Type of work: Short fiction This debut collection of eleven stories is filled with strange and wonderful premises about modern society and the lonely adolescents who live in it Although Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, Kevin Wilson’s first collection, includes two relatively realist stories—“Mortal Combat,” about two teenage boys discovering their sexual attraction to each other, and “Go, Fight, Win,” about a teenage girl falling in love with a preteen boy—most of the stories are propelled by various “what if” social or conceptual premises, primarily about nonexistent and unusual jobs. For example, the opening story, “Grand Stand-In,” one of the most intriguing and socially significant stories in the book, imagines what it would be like if there existed an organization that rented out grandparents to families who had lost them. The narrator of the story is a grandmother-for-hire who works for Grand Stand-In, a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider. She admits that the concept of renting a grandparent is undeniably strange (as is true of most of Wilson’s stories); however, she says, once one accepts the concept, it begins to make a bizarre kind of sense. After all, contemporary society is largely populated by mobile couples, many of whom have lost their own parents. Such couples may believe that their children are missing out on an important part of their life experience. The fifty-six-year-old narrator of “Grand Stand-In” serves as a grandmother to five families, traveling to each as called for but ready to disconnect from each when necessary. The twist of her current assignment is that the family’s real grandmother is still alive. However, because she has suffered a stroke and is in a home for the elderly, her son wants to start fresh with a grandmother with whom his child can interact and build good memories. When the grandchild asks for a lullaby that the stand-in does not know, she breaks the policy of the Supplemental Provider and becomes personally involved with the family by going to visit the real grandmother, only to find out that the son has hired a stand-in granddaughter to come and visit her. It is all finally too much for the narrator, so she quits, asking the company to kill her off for all her families. Wilson makes renting a grandmother a significant trope for society’s willingness to find faux substitutes for the lost “real thing.” The concept, one is tempted to say “the gimmick,” in “Blowing Up on the Spot” is also an absurd but somehow believable job held by the story’s narrator. He works in a Scrabble factory, which creates letter tiles for Hasbro, Inc. The factory is made up of five large sorting rooms, each one with hundreds of workers who sort through all

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the wooden tiles that drop from an overhead chute. The job of the protagonist is to search Kevin Wilson’s stories have been for Q tiles, only one of which is included in chosen for New Stories from the South: each game of Scrabble. He has held the job The Year’s Best. He has received for three years. He gets a bonus for each as- fellowships from the MacDowell signed letter he finds, managing to find ap- Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts. proximately fifty to sixty Q tiles each day. The invented job is a clever metaphor for meaningless, repetitive work, as well as a narrative means for focusing on a young man, lonely and alone, who seems to have no real purpose in life. The narrator’s main obsession is counting the steps it takes him to go back and forth to work. He lives with his brother in a small apartment above a confection shop, and the owner’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Joan, climbs up a ladder to his room each night to talk with him. Three years previous to the story, his parents blew up; they simply spontaneously combusted, and he now worries that the same thing might happen to him. The narrator imagines various scenarios of his parents’ death, supposing that it occurred either because they suddenly realized that they did not love each other or because they had a moment of such happiness and love that they exploded wrapped in each other’s arms. Finally, he decides how he wants to imagine their death: His father looked at his mother and knew that she was on the verge of spontaneously combusting; he took her hand, pulled her close to him, and covered her body with his own, so they exploded together. After accepting this version of his parents’ death, the narrator quits his job and runs back to the candy shop to Joan, no longer trying to count the steps that he has always counted before. The narrator of “The Museum of Whatnot” also has a strange job: She is the curator of the Carl Jensen Museum of Whatnot, which houses things that are ordinarily considered junk but that have been transformed into something interesting and valuable simply because someone collected them. One display is a row of jars that a man has filled with his toenail clippings; another is a set of eight thousand Cracker Jack toys. An exhibit she prepares for a special opening showing consists of letters of the alphabet cut out from magazines and books by a teenager who used them to spell out messages, the way kidnappers do in ransom notes. What makes them particularly suitable as a museum exhibit is that the boy used them to spell out his suicide note, “I don’t think I belong here.” The narrator wonders how many letters it took before the boy realized with despair that they would never say the things he wanted them to say. The narrator becomes involved with an older doctor who comes regularly to see a spoon collection in the museum. When she finds six additional spoons in the basement, he is so moved by them that he asks her out to dinner, explaining that the spoon collection belonged to his father and that he recognized one of those she found as being from his childhood. When she gets word that the museum is to receive the collection of whatnots of the famous writer William Saroyan—boxes of rocks, garbage bags filled with rubber bands, balls of aluminum foil—she has difficulty seeing them as anything other than junk. The doctor tells her that everything becomes junk at some

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point; all museums are filled with junk from some previous civilization. She accepts that there is something pleasing about allowing something to fill up one’s life, however trivial it might be, and she welcomes the kisses of the doctor as something that can fill up her own life. The collection’s final weird-job story is “Worst-Case Scenario,” featuring a man with a degree in Catastrophe, for which he studied the way that things fall apart. He advises businesses on such possibilities as how many people would be killed if a disgruntled worker came back to take revenge on his former coworkers or how many people would die if a bus were stuck in a freak blizzard during rush-hour traffic. Although he is only twenty-seven, the protagonist is losing his hair, which he saves and puts in a small pillow. Worried that his girlfriend will no longer love him when he is bald, he constantly asks for her reassurance. When a woman hires him to calculate how safe her baby is in her home, he develops several scenarios, all of which show unlikely but potential danger. For example, the mother might drop a jar of preserves on the floor and miss a piece of glass when she sweeps it up. The baby might then cut itself on the glass fragment, get gangrene, and need to have its arm amputated. The protagonist’s girlfriend leaves him, saying she is sadder than she was before she met him. When his client asks him how she can accept the things he has told her about her baby, he reworks the numbers on his computer program and shows her an animated scenario in which a boy swims in a pool and rides a bike, all in safety. The final animation shows a family sitting on a porch, happy and safe. When she gives him the baby to hold, he says, “Everything is going to be okay,” and, even though he is aware of all the scenarios that refute this reassurance, he makes himself believe it is true. In an interview at the end of the book, Wilson says this is his favorite story in the collection because it is the first hopeful story that he ever wrote. “Birds in the House” is not about a strange job but rather about a weird and wonderful contest. It is narrated by a twelve-year-old boy who has been asked in the will of his Japanese grandmother to be witness to the curious contest, between his father and three uncles, to see who will inherit their mother’s house. Each brother must make 250 origami cranes, label them with his initials, and place them on a large table. Four giant fans at the corners of the room will then be turned on simultaneously to blow the paper birds around, until only one is left on the table. The owner of the “surviving” crane will inherit the mansion. The boy’s father, however, has made two extra origami birds and instructs his son secretly to place them on the table near the end of the contest. When the fans are turned on, the brothers scramble around the floor looking for their initials, and they begin to fight fiercely. Refusing to cheat, the boy releases the two birds into the current created by the fans. As the birds fly throughout the house, suddenly one remains suspended in the middle of the table by the competing force of the four fans. The boy hopes it will never fall, that it will stay suspended there forever. The hundreds of white birds filling the house and flying out the window create an ethereal image in contrast to the fighting and scrambling brothers. The collection’s title story is about three college friends who have just graduated with useless degrees in gender studies, Canadian history, and Morse code. They decide one morning to make tunnels underneath the town in which they live. After sev-

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eral months of digging and living underground, the narrator’s two friends decide abruptly that it is time to leave. When his parents talk him into coming back to the surface as well, a psychiatrist tells the protagonist that he has been postponing his life, hiding in tunnels to avoid the responsibilities of the real world. However, he feels that there was more to the tunneling than that, that it had something to do with making contact with the reality of the earth. The narrator becomes a landscape gardener. Sometimes, he digs his fingers into the ground, thinking he hears a thumping sound— as if the earth were speaking to him in Morse code—only to realize that it is his own heart, and he feels happier than anything on top of the earth. When Wilson was asked how he balances the real and the strange in his stories and keeps the narratives believable, he responded that he works hard at embracing the ridiculous nature of the stories without making the concerns of the characters ridiculous. He also suggests that if authors incorporate strange and perhaps impossible phenomena into their stories without emphasizing those phenomena, they become more readily accepted by readers. Although Wilson’s stories are not as complexly critical and satirically biting as those of George Saunders, with whom he has been compared, they are imaginative explorations of intriguing “what if” scenarios. Charles E. May

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 16 (April 15, 2009): 24. The Boston Globe, April 9, 2009, p. G14. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 4 (February 15, 2009): 170. The New York Times Book Review, April 5, 2009, p. 5. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 48 (December 1, 2008): 25.

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THE UNFINISHED POEMS Author: C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) First published: AtelT poiTmata, 1918-1932, 1994, in Greece Translated from the Greek, with Introduction and Commentary, by Daniel Mendelsohn Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 121 pp. $30.00 Type of work: Poetry The first English version of thirty incomplete drafts by Cavafy from the Cavafy Archives as prepared for publication by Renata Lavagnini and translated by Daniel Mendelsohn C. P. Cavafy published few poems in his lifetime, choosing instead to circulate individually printed copies among friends. A 1919 essay, “The Poetry of C. P. Cavafy” by E. M. Forster, introduced Cavafy to readers of English, but the poet remained little known until a 1951 translation of his works by John Mavrogordato. Since then, Cavafy’s reputation has grown, and he has become one of the most highly respected and widely translated poets of modern Greece. This posthumous success fulfills Cavafy’s belief that his poetry would be read by future generations, who would value his works for more than merely historical reasons. Cavafy lived in Alexandria as a child, but the death of his father, a prominent figure in the export business, precipitated a crisis. Hoping to safeguard the remnants of their estate, Cavafy’s mother moved the family to England, where Cavafy attended school for a number of his impressionable years. The family returned to Alexandria after a series of poor investments left its members in poverty. Cavafy labored most of his life as a mid-level bureaucrat in his beloved native city, spending the latter decades of his life in an apartment above a brothel. The loss of social advantage and prestige created in Cavafy a deep appreciation for the difficulties faced by others in similar circumstances. His homosexuality added secrecy and disquiet to the difficulties he faced as a son and as an adult. Cavafy produced a “canon” of only 154 poems in his lifetime, writing at a slow pace and frequently revising poems several times over a period of years. Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation of Cavafy’s Collected Poems (2009) includes additional works that he repudiated when winnowing his early poems and others that he left unpublished, all compositions that have not previously appeared in English. In the introduction to The Unfinished Poems, Mendelsohn describes the discovery and editing processes that led to his translations. In Cavafy’s last days, the poet discussed some twenty-five poems he hoped to complete before his death. No copies of these drafts came to light until 1963, when Cavafy editor George Savidis (a noted Greek poet in his own right) discovered them, as well as additional completed poems that Cavafy had held back from publication. Savidis published a 1968 collection of the lat-

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ter, although thirty well-developed drafts re mained unavailable to the public until Renata C. P. Cavafy spent most of his life in Lavagnini, a skilled textual critic, edited a his native city of Alexandria, where he scholarly compilation titled Ateli priimata, was employed in the Bureau of 1918-1932 (1994). Even though Lavagnini Irrigation. Deeply affected by the spent decades arriving at the best possible loss of the prominence and wealth renditions of Cavafy’s manuscripts, she re- that his family had once enjoyed, he ferred to her constructs as “last” rather than wrote poetry reflecting upon Greek identity and the vagaries of Greek “final” forms. The Unfinished Poems conhistory. tains the first translations of these works into English. Cavafy dated successive versions of his works and noted the circumstances of their composition, providing Lavagnini with exceptionally clear and well-organized resources. In addition, Cavafy frequently added comments clarifying the provisional status of drafts. Mendelsohn’s notes itemize the number of sheets of paper in the folders and describe changes in the texts as they evolved. In selections for which Cavafy revised drafts numerous times, variant lines—and in some cases entire variant versions—are reproduced. The notes also cover the poet’s background reading, quotations from sources, descriptions of relevant events in the author’s life, and lists of additional poems on related subjects. As a product of the Greek diaspora, Cavafy developed a unique style that evolved from his choice to remain in Alexandria, a location removed from mainstream Greek literary influences. Changes in the Greek language during the late nineteenth century also created an opportunity for the youthful poet. As he began writing, a “high,” or classical, form of Greek known as katharevousa was favored in literary, educational, and governmental circles, while the vernacular, or demotic, language was used in everyday affairs. Poets writing in Greek used katharevousa almost exclusively until artistic sensibilities changed and poetry in the demotic came into vogue. Among Greek poets of the era, Cavafy alone used both, often retaining katharevousa diction and grammar while incorporating demotic wording to reveal stark contrasts. Thus, an emperor who might be “requesting” assistance would later in the same poem be forced to “beg.” This technique sidestepped the need for explanatory passages and revealed to Greek readers the central ironies of Cavafy’s message. Mendelsohn’s translations convey the same effect when he selects words and phrases of Latinate origin to contrast with the less formal Anglo-Saxon derivatives. Written between 1918 and 1933, Cavafy’s unfinished poems reflect the views and constructs of a mature poet. Cavafy favored a prosaic style, forgoing the use of imagery, metaphor, simile, and other common poetic devices. Many of his poems sound musical in the Greek because of their regular meters, cadences that Mendelsohn has examined carefully and attempted to reproduce. The translations also exhibit Cavafy’s use of rhyme through traditional end-rhymes, slanted or “off-rhymes,” assonance, and consonance. These and other similar measures reflect Cavafy’s command of poetic elements previously overlooked in most translations of his work.

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Cavafy referred to himself as a poet-historian, and many of his works fuse the past and the present. Their acuity is made possible by his extensive readings in both classical and modern sources. In the 1890’s, he read Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) and subsequently Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos’s Istoria tou Elltnikou ethnous (1860-1877; history of the Hellenic nation). Later, he frequently consulted Auguste Bouché-Leclercq’s Histoire des Seléucides (1913-1914; history of the Seleucids). Cavafy also copied and filed passages from such classical sources as the works of sixth century historian Procopius of Caesarea. Through reading and personal experience, Cavafy internalized the saga of his people, one that he viewed through the lens of a modern yet marginal existence. Telescoping time—moving from the present to the past and back again—permitted Cavafy a panoramic view of Greek history, and as he traversed the ages he produced elegiac and epigrammatic verse replete with witty and ironic twists. Many of the Cavafy’s unfinished poems draw upon relatively unfamiliar periods of Mediterranean history—the ages of Late Antiquity and the Byzantine Empire— and recreate events in the lives of individuals whom he found particularly interesting. These include works that praise the first century’s Apollonius of Tyana and Byzantine emperor John VI Cantacuzenus, as well as those that censure fourth century Christian bishop Pegasius and his contemporary Caesar Julian Constantius (“the Apostate”). One of four works dealing with this last figure, “The Rescue of Julian,” dramatizes his ingratitude to the Christian priests who saved him as a child from slaughter by political enemies—an act he deemed unworthy of notice after his restoration of pagan deities began. Cavafy satirizes the depravity of the Ptolemaic empire, originally a part of the empire of Alexander the Great, because of the suffering it caused the Alexandrian people. In “The Dynasty,” for example, Cavafy coolly evaluates Ptolemy VIII (182-145 b.c.e.), the corrupt ruler whom the Alexandrians dubbed “pot-belly” for his obesity. The poem also cites Cleopatra III as one who deserved censure in keeping with her nickname “Scarlet,” a slang reference to her genitalia. In “Ptolemy the Benefactor (or Malefactor),” Cavafy depicts the ruler’s unmediated disdain for the city and its people, as the king reminds an admirer that he is Macedonian and not Alexandrian. In “The Patriarch,” Cavafy contrasts the unselfish and honorable John Cantacuzenus, a fourteenth century emperor of Constantinople, with John XIV Calecus, the patriarch of the city, whose quest for power motivates him to discredit the emperor. Sage and magician Apollonius of Tyana experiences a clairvoyant incident in “Among the Groves of the Promenades.” Speaking to a group in Ephesus, Apollonius suddenly realizes through a vision that the despotic Emperor Domitian has been assassinated in Rome. In a similar poem, Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, senses while he is praying in Upper Egypt that the apostate Julian has been killed in Mesopotamia. Nine poems engage in Cavafy’s familiar erotic themes. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Cavafy wrote with increasing candor on the subject of homosexuality, but he retained a descriptive style stressing universal beauty rather than the

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physical attributes of sexual companions. Speaking in an elegiac voice, the old poet celebrates the comeliness of long-ago, idealized lovers, preferring to temper erotic subjects by setting them in the shadowy past. Since the Greek language does not distinguish between male and female as rigidly as English does, Cavafy’s poems could imply homosexual interpretations without the specificity found in translations. In “It Must Have Been the Spirits,” an evening of drinking brings to the narrator an extended reverie in which a group of dissolute Marseille youths revel, at ease in a city that the poet himself visited once in his youth and again in his thirties. Through this review of the past, the narrator feels that his soul has been released from lifelong yet unwarranted feelings of regret. In “On the Jetty,” a memory provoked by the shape of an evening revives a passionate coupling. “After the Swim” juxtaposes the loveliness of nude youths with references to the wisdom of fifteenth century Byzantine church official Georgius Gemistus, who advocated a revival of Hellenic education in the midst of the Christian era. Cavafy believed that art could capture and complete physical experience, as well as create a timeless version of a temporal reality. In “Birth of a Poem,” he wrote, One night when the beautiful light of the moon poured into my room . . . imagination, taking something from life: some very scanty thing— a distant scene, a distant pleasure— brought a vision all its own of flesh, a vision all its own to a sensual bed . . .

Such a poem directly reveals the central, even sensual, roles of art, imagination, and poetry in Cavafy’s life. The Unfinished Poems provides scholars and serious Cavafy readers access to the poet’s last works and should lead to more accurate interpretations of similar, earlier poems. For general readers, Mendelsohn’s notes include adequate historical and textual resources, although an index of personal and place names would have been helpful to readers unfamiliar with Cavafy’s world. Mendelsohn explains in his introduction to the work that the phrase atelT poiTmata carries a connotation of imperfection in the Greek, yet these “unfinished poems” provide ample evidence that Cavafy revitalized the Greek language and literature, tempering noble and at times lofty visions of the past with a thoroughly modern skepticism. Margaret A. Koger

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 14 (March 16, 2009): 38. The Boston Globe, June 7, 2009, p. C5. Harper’s Magazine 318, no. 1908 (May, 2009): 71. The Nation 289, no. 4 (August 3, 2009): 27-30.

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New Criterion 27, no. 8 (April, 2009): p. 44. The New Republic 240, no. 10 (June 17, 2009): 39-45. The New York Times Book Review, April 19, 2009, p. 19. The New Yorker 85, no. 6 (March 23, 2009): 70-75. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 11 (March 16, 2009): 44. World Literature Today 83, no. 5 (September/October, 2009): 69-70.

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UP FROM HISTORY The Life of Booker T. Washington Author: Robert J. Norrell (1952) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 335 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Biography Time: 1856-1915 Locale: United States, particularly Tuskegee, Alabama A favorable account of the life and career of a former slave who became the dominant African American leader and educator of his time Principal personages: Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), founder and president of the Tuskegee Institute Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), U.S. President, 1901-1909 W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), radical black historian, sociologist, and civil rights leader William M. Trotter (1872-1934), radical black journalist and founder of the Boston Guardian Timothy T. Fortune (1856-1928), black journalist and writer who supported Washington James K. Vardaman (1861-1930), U.S. senator from Mississippi, 19131919 Benjamin (“Pitchfork Ben”) Tillman (1847-1918), South Carolina governor, 1890-1894, and U.S. senator, 1896-1918 General Samuel C. Armstrong (1839-1893), Civil War veteran and founder of Hampton Institute George Washington Carver (1864-1943), botanist at the Tuskegee Institute

Early in the twentieth century, Booker T. Washington was the most famous African American in the United States. He was highly esteemed as an outstanding orator, the founder of Tuskegee Institute, and the author of an inspiring autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901). Nevertheless, by the time he died in 1915, his prestige had already declined, primarily because of the sustained attacks by northern African American critics who resented his preeminence and disagreed with his policies. Particularly controversial was his educational philosophy and his refusal to agitate openly for the civil rights of African Americans. Since the 1950’s, moreover, numerous historians, perhaps a majority, have tended to agree with these critics. Waldo Martin, for instance, observed that “the tar brush of Uncle Tomism has stuck to Washington.” Some historians have even suggested that he indirectly contributed to the deterioration in civil rights during his lifetime.

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In Up from History, Robert J. Norrell presents a strong defense of both Washington and his ideas. Norrell argues that modern critics have been guilty of the “fallacy of anachronism,” of applying the expectations of the late twentieth century to an earlier period of legally enforced segregation called Jim Crow. Washington lived and worked at a time when proponents of “Southern white nationalism” did not hesitate to utilize lynchings and other forms of intimidation against African Americans who dared to challenge the status quo. While acknowledging that Washington did not publicly confront white racism, Norrell writes that he secretly used his influence to oppose discriminatory policies, even helping raise money for court challenges. He also insists that Washington’s emphasis on practical training and basic education was the most appropriate means for improving the terrible conditions faced by the oppressed population that he served. Norrell’s laudatory views are not entirely unprecedented, and he somewhat exaggerates the degree to which all contemporary scholars have disparaged the subject of his biography. Although he correctly quotes the early historical writings of Louis R. Harlan, for instance, he fails to observe that Harlan presented a more positive and nuanced account of Washington in the second volume of his biography, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 (1983), arguing that Washington manifested “multiple personalities to fit his various roles.” Criticizing Washington for not giving more support to “civil rights champions,” Harlan nevertheless recognizes that he “worked unceasingly for black pride, material advancement, and every kind of education.” More recently, improvements in race relations appear to have boosted the reputations of moderates such as Washington. For example, David H. Jackson offers another very positive evaluation in Booker T. Washington and the Struggle Against White Supremacy: The Southern Educational Tours, 1908-1912 (2008). Norrell begins his biography by describing the extremely difficult conditions of Washington’s early life. In the latter days of slavery, he witnessed his uncle “stripped naked, tied to a tree, and struck repeatedly with a leather whip.” Like other slaves at the time, he found that it was often necessary to dissemble. Humble circumstances, however, did not prevent the development of his ambition, determination, and stubbornness, as exemplified by his reaction to being told that slaves were not supposed to learn to read: “From that moment I resolved that I should never be satisfied until I learned what this dangerous practice was like.” Before emancipation in 1865, Washington’s mother Jane stole food to feed the family, but thereafter she “enforced a strict code of honesty of all things.” In contrast to many African Americans, Norrell observes, Washington “benefited from positive relationships with whites.” As a teenager, he worked for four years for a moderately liberal woman, Miss Viola Ruffner, who emphasized dependability and attention to detail. Then, while at Hampton Institute, its founder and director General Samuel Chapman became Washington’s role model and mentor.

Robert J. Norrell, professor of history at the University of Tennessee, has written seven books, including The Making of Modern Alabama (1998) and The House I Live In: Race in the American Century (2005).

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Washington’s building of the Tuskegee Institute, which was the first “exclusively African-American experiment,” was certainly one of the most impressive achievements in American history. When he took over the institute in 1881, it had no land or buildings, but only two thousand dollars in state funds. Initially, Washington had to travel by foot to recruit students, and he was largely responsible for raising the necessary funds from private sources, increasingly from wealthy white donors such as Andrew Carnegie. Washington exercised personal control over most aspects of the institute. Most mornings, he would “saddle a horse and ride over the Institute farm and note the conditions of the crops, the livestock, the buildings, and the equipment.” By 1905, when President Theodore Roosevelt visited the school, it had grown to two thousand acres of land and thirty-three buildings, mostly constructed by student labor. With an enrollment of fifteen hundred students, it surpassed the size of most other southern institutions of higher learning. That year, for instance, the University of Oklahoma had fewer than five hundred students. Washington claimed that he was working not just for his own benefit but rather to improve conditions of his race. Convinced that African Americans were not confident of their own abilities, he wrote: “Nothing helps and encourages a Negro so much as to see one of his own number succeed.” Rather than trying to produce lawyers and medical doctors, the institute established a curriculum designed to train most students to become farmers, carpenters, and elementary school teachers. Washington believed that this policy was “the only alternative between remaining ignorant and receiving, at least, a common, practical education.” Although Washington’s critics attacked him for rejecting the classical curriculum, Norrell demonstrates that he supported higher education and prestigious careers for those who had the necessary preparation and ability (the so-called talented tenth). In a speech to students of 1895, Washington declared: “Understand me, I am not now, nor have I ever been, opposed to any man or woman getting all the education they can.” He simply looked upon industrial and agricultural training as the most practical resources for advancing the material conditions of most African Americans at that point in their history. Given the restraints of the Jim Crow system, Washington assumed that most southern African Americans would have to be content with modest livelihoods in low-status occupations. During the years that Washington was building the Tuskegee Institute, the realities of racial discrimination and segregation were becoming more and more oppressive. At the turn of the century, Alabama and other Southern states were eliminating the right of African American citizens to vote, using a combination of reading tests, grandfather clauses, and local commissions empowered to control voter registration. When Washington endorsed literacy tests for voting, according to Norrell, he mistakenly presumed that the tests would be conducted equally for blacks and whites. This, of course, did not happen. Following Alabama’s constitutional changes in 1901, the number of black voters declined from 180,000 to about 3,000. Norrell documents that Washington supported and helped finance legal challenges to disfranchisement, although it would have been dangerous for him publicly to have indicated his support.

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In 1895, at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, Washington delivered his most famous and controversial speech. In it, he affirmed that southern African Americans would be willing to accept segregation and even a significant degree of social inequality in exchange for basic educational and economic opportunities. He declared that “the wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly,” and that progress and privileges “must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.” The speech included his famous statement: In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

The speech was widely publicized and enthusiastically received by both moderate whites and African Americans in the South. Even W. E. B. Du Bois, who later denounced the speech as the “Atlanta Compromise,” wrote favorably about it at the time. Washington expressed “bitter disappointment” with the infamous Supreme Court ruling Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which allowed racially segregated transportation facilities, based on the principle of “separate but equal” (to quote from Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent). While maintaining a tone of moderation, Washington referred to the ruling as unjust, and he warned that “no race can wrong another race simply because it has the power to do so, without being permanently injured in morals.” His public complaints about Jim Crow, however, were very rare. In order not to offend white sensitivities, he usually spoke optimistically about improvements in the conditions of African Americans. In private, he complained bitterly about the humiliating and uncomfortable conditions of railroad travel under segregation, and he secretly encouraged legal challenges in an unsuccessful attempt to achieve facilities that were equal in quality, as the Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson said they should be. In 1901, southern whites were infuriated when President Theodore Roosevelt had dinner with Washington in the White House. Throughout the South, newspapers and politicians denounced this violation of an old taboo. The governor of Arkansas, Jeff Davis, was shocked that an African American man sat at the same table as the president’s daughter, Alice, and he asked in disgust: “Can you think of anything dirtier, nastier than that?” Senator James Vardaman exploded in disgust: “President Roosevelt takes this nigger bastard into his home, introduces him to his family and entertains him on terms of absolute social equality.” Senator Benjamin Tillman announced: “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they learn their place again.” Such a threat had to be taken seriously. Just two years later, L. A. Planving, principal of an industrial college in Louisiana, was murdered by a shotgun blast, and his educational policies and moderate statements were very similar to those of Washington. At the same time that white southerners were denouncing Washington as a proponent of social equality, left-leaning African Americans in the Northern states were re-

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buking him for his accommodationist policies and speeches. His most outspoken and longstanding critic was William Monroe Trotter, editor of the Boston Guardian, who called him “the Great Divider” and “the Benedict Arnold of the Negro Race.” Trotter boasted: “We northern Negroes are not going to sit supinely by and let the whites put their feet on our necks,” and he asked: “Is there anyone then so selfish as not to know why the white people of this country call Booker Washington great?” In 1903, when Washington spoke to the Boston Business League, Trotter shouted insults and tried to prevent him from speaking. From the relative security of the North, Trotter and his radical colleagues could not appreciate the constraints faced by Washington, but “they saw only the seeming repudiation of full civil rights for black Americans.” About 1900, Du Bois joined the chorus of Washington’s critics. He accused Washington of opposing higher education, of “belittling the race,” and of ignoring civil rights issues. According to Norrell, he intentionally misrepresented Washington’s statements and actions. He had been informed about Washington’s support for legal challenges to Jim Crow, and he also had opportunities to learn that Washington supported higher education for those African Americans with adequate preparation. Norrell observes that the differences between the two men were partly a result of geography and different experiences but that the two men also had different theories about race and the possibilities for gradual improvement. Whereas Du Bois had developed a “romantic racialism at odds with Booker’s practical assimilationism,” Norrell says, Washington saw race as “socially constructed” and “believed that racial distinctions would disappear over time.” Even with these differences, however, Norrell observes that the two men actually “shared a remarkably similar viewpoint” on civil rights and education and that their conflict was primarily about power and prestige within the African American community. In order to replace Washington’s leadership with his own, Du Bois assumed that it was necessary to denigrate his rival, and he did not hesitate to be ruthless in intellectual combat. Up from History is a valuable contribution to the growing literature devoted to African American history and culture. Although the book does not reveal much material not found in previous publications, it is the most readable and compelling biography ever written about a man whose tireless efforts and achievement deserve to be celebrated. The disagreements between Washington and his impatient African American critics, moreover, are closely related to racial issues that continue to be relevant in the twenty-first century. Norrell’s interpretations will likely inspire strong responses from Du Bois’s many admirers. Thomas Tandy Lewis

Review Sources American History 44, no. 2 (June, 2009): 67. Booklist 105, no. 11 (February 1, 2009): 22. Diverse: Issues in Higher Education 25, no. 26 (February 5, 2009): 18.

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First Things 193 (May, 2009): 52-55. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 20 (October 15, 2008) 1104-1105. Library Journal 134, no. 2 (February 1, 2009): 77. National Review 61, no. 5 (March 23, 2009): 37-40. The New Republic 240, no. 20 (November 4, 2009): 50-55. The New Yorker 84, no. 47 (February 2, 2009): 26-30. School Library Journal 55, no. 6 (June, 2009): 154. The Wall Street Journal, January 23, 2009, p. W10.

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THE VAGRANTS Author: Yiyun Li (1972) Publisher: Random House (New York). 337 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Novel Time: Spring, 1979 Locale: Muddy River, a fictional provincial town in the interior of China The execution of a woman counterrevolutionary and what it reveals about life in a provincial town of the People’s Republic of China Principal characters: Teacher Gu, a sympathetic but ineffectual parent and intellectual Mrs. Gu, his second wife and mother of Shan Gu Shan, twenty-eight-year-old daughter of the Gus, executed as a counterrevolutionary Kai, a successful radio announcer, formerly Shan’s schoolmate Han, Kai’s husband, politically well connected Jialin, an impoverished, tubercular counterrevolutionary who is attracted to Kai Bashi, a well-off nineteen-year-old boy regarded as the town idiot Nini, the partially disabled twelve-year-old daughter of a poor family Tong, elementary school boy of a poor family Old Hua and Mrs. Hua, garbage collectors Old Kwen, a perverted janitor

The Vagrants, Yiyun Li’s first novel, is a masterfully crafted and grippingly told account of a dark moment in the life of a provincial town in Li’s native China. It affords a revealing and horrifyingly naturalistic glimpse into the grim conditions of existence in the People’s Republic during the period between the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s and the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, although the immediate events of the novel are contained within the spring of 1979. Although The Vagrants is Li’s first novel, it is her second book of fiction. Her debut book was a much-lauded and prize-winning short-story collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005), set partially in Li’s adopted country of the United States, but mainly in China. (Wayne Wang’s film adaptation of the title story garnered the top award at the 2007 San Sebastián Festival.) Li arrived in the United States in 1996, and she has joined the ranks of émigré writers who have become adept and expert in English, such as Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, and Ha Jin. Like Conrad, Li offers in The Vagrants a searing glimpse into the horror that can overtake humanity at a dark time in an obscure corner of the earth. The horrific event at the center of the novel is the execution of Gu Shan, a twenty-

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eight-year-old counterrevolutionary woman, on March 21, 1979. Li dates the event to coincide with the vernal equinox, suggesting a bloody rite of spring. The novel is set in the fictional Muddy River, a provincial town planned twenty years previously and now grown to a population of eighty thousand. As a teenager, Shan was a leading zealot of the Red Guard during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution unleashed by Chairman Mao Zedong in the 1960’s. This reign of terror and “reeducation” was led by Madame Mao (Jiang Qing) and the Gang of Four against intellectuals and supposed bourgeois reactionaries. Shan’s thinking changed, however, and she dared to criticize Mao—at a time before it was politically correct to do so. Such independent thought is something that her father, Teacher Gu, cultivated in her. As a result of her actions, Shan has been imprisoned for ten years, retried (after losing her sanity), judged politically incorrigible, and sentenced to be shot. The logic of this justice is ironic, absurd, and horrible. The execution is preceded by a ritual denunciation, which is compulsory for all the town’s schoolchildren and workers to attend and which provides Li with her narrative lens. The novel relates its narrative events through multiple points of view, ranging from a seven-year-old’s to a sixtyyear-old’s and providing both a panoramic and a particularized sense of the community. The effect created is reminiscent of that generated by Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (pr., pb. 1938) tinged with the brooding malevolence of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (1948) and Albert Camus’s interrogation of the absurd in La Peste (1947; The Plague, 1948). Teacher Gu, the condemned woman’s father, provides the first of the book’s multiple narrative points of view. The novel begins as he and his wife wake up to their daughter’s last day on Earth. He tries to be philosophical (“Everybody dies” is his repeated mantra), while his wife is full of bitter resentment. Defiantly, she sets off to burn her daughter’s clothes at a crossroads, enacting a politically incorrect superstition that burning Shan’s possessions will allow her to access them in the afterlife. She is arrested for her action. The narrative consciousness quickly shifts to Tong, a seven-year-old boy from a poor family who is out on a morning ramble with his dog, Ear. They run into Old Hua, a garbage collector, whose wife is pasting posters of Shan’s execution on walls. The narrative viewpoint then shifts to Nini, a twelve-year-old girl who has been awakened by a dog’s bark (Ear’s, perhaps); born with a lame leg and a paralyzed hand to poor and abusive parents, she must forage for food in the morning, licking the paste off Mrs. Hua’s posters, scavenging for coal at the railroad, and showing up hopefully for breakfast at the Gus, who have mysteriously been kind to her over the years. The narrative shifts again to Bashi, the nineteen-year-old son of a Communist hero

Yiyun Li’s debut collection of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005), won the PEN/ Hemingway Award, The Guardian First Book Award, Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, Whiting Writers’ Award, and a Lannan Foundation fellowship. She has taught at Mills College and the University of California, Davis.

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(a pilot who actually died during a tonsillectomy). Though made comparatively welloff by his father’s pension, Bashi is regarded as the town idiot because of his odd behavior and unprepossessing appearance. He is obsessed by sex, and, scorned by women, he now plans to pay the Huas to find him a thrown-away baby girl to bring up for his purposes. Later, the narrative shifts to Kai, the town’s premier woman radio announcer and a former schoolmate of Shan. She has married into the political elite, and, as the voice of the government, she prepares to emcee Shan’s denunciation, albeit with private reservations. Through these multiple narrative viewpoints, Li skillfully and vividly conveys a sense of the society and the denizens of her fictional locale, the town of Muddy River. Strategically and ominously, Li’s narrative accords no space to Shan’s consciousness or voice. Indeed, the focal event, Shan’s execution, is never described directly. Like the catastrophe of a Greek tragedy, which is too terrible to present on stage, the denunciation and execution of Shan is conveyed in a many-layered narrative filtered through Li’s multiple witnesses and participants, none of whom has a complete view. To present Shan’s execution whole and immediate would be either too horrible or too clinical for art. As Li presents it, through narrative lenses that range from the naïve child’s to the cynical adult’s, a kaleidoscopic effect is achieved that reveals the subject, the observer, and ultimately the sorry society of which they are all parts. For the schoolchildren, the execution of Shan is a festive day away from routine lessons and classes and an opportunity to show off their singing of “Communism Is Good” and “Without the Communist Party We Don’t Have a Life.” For their worker parents, it is a day off, a chance to sneak a nap or gossip. For Nini’s parents, who were terrorized by Shan during her Red Guard heyday, it is a joyous day of vindication. To the naïve seven-year-old Tong, Shan is a rather bedraggled, pathetic, and silent woman with odd stains on her collar. To the knowing adult onlooker, the stains are telltale signs that Shan’s vocal cords have been cut to prevent her yelling out political slogans. After the denunciation, the naïve twelve-year-old Nini is puzzled by the spreading stain of blood on the sheet wrapped around Shan’s struggling and noiseless person as she is bundled into an ambulance transporting her to the execution ground. The experienced Old Kwen, who also knows how Shan’s arms are trussed so that her finger points to her heart to help guide the sharpshooter, correctly surmises that Shan’s kidneys have been harvested for transplantation before her death. To the surgeon who has prematurely removed her kidneys, Shan represents a promotion for him and his wife, as well as his daughters’ placement in the best schools. For Han, Kai’s up-andcoming husband, the successful kidney transplant involving a high Communist Party official in the capital city means more political capital and a new television set, one of only three in town. For the sex-crazed Bashi, Shan’s body is an opportunity to learn about female anatomy. For Old Kwen, who ironically is hired by the Gus to provide a decent burial for their daughter, Shan’s body becomes an object of his secret necrophilia, and he scalps off trophies from her to preserve in formaldehyde. Through such varying nar-

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rative viewpoints, through juxtapositions of the naïve, the knowing, and the perverted, Li builds up the feeling of what Shan’s execution symbolizes: a travesty of humanity and a political obscenity. The multiple viewpoints of the novel are also skillfully channeled into a structured flow of events. The book is divided into three roughly equal parts, and the flow of events takes on a dialectical rhythm. The state’s action in part 1, Shan’s execution, produces a reaction in part 2, a citizens’ protest, which leads to the state’s counteraction in part 3, the repression of the protest. Thus, part 2 presents the unanticipated aftereffects of Shan’s execution. Kai, who appears to be happily married and a mouthpiece of the state, is secretly in sympathy with Shan and is unfulfilled by her husband, who is a creature of the Communist Party. Kai meets secretly with Jialin, a disgruntled tubercular intellectual at the center of an antigovernment network. Together with Mrs. Gu, they implement a peaceful march protesting the injustice of Shan’s execution on Ching Ming (the Chinese festival commemorating the dead, resembling Halloween but occurring in April). Initially, the state seems tolerant of their dissent. Rumors circulate of a “democratic wall” in Beijing where posters of dissent can be exhibited with impunity. (In historical fact, there was a brief period of tolerance from December, 1978, to December, 1979, called metaphorically the “Beijing Spring.”) Even romance, if it can be called that, blossoms between Bashi and Nini (he is nineteen; she is twelve). In part 3 of the novel, spring in Muddy River draws to a close. The government suddenly reacts against the dissidents with arrests, beatings, and jailings. Teacher Gu suffers a stroke. Bashi finds he is impotent. Kai is incarcerated and condemned to be executed during the Communist summer festival of May Day. The bloody rites of spring are over in Muddy River, but life there seems as nasty, brutish, and sterile as ever. One may conclude by pondering the title Yiyun Li chose for her novel: The Vagrants. It points to the sense of an unsettling lack of certainty and predictability that permeates the lives of the characters, a sense of never being at home in life. Over everything hangs the uncertainty of what is politically correct. At one moment, the Red Guards are heroes; the next, they are villains. At one moment, dissent is tolerated; at another, persecuted. The traditional Chinese cornerstone of family has shattered: Mr. Gu’s first wife denounces him as a Westernizing Nationalist educator in order to get a quick divorce and a university appointment. Kai must choose between her integrity to her truths and her love for her son. Personal trust, too, is in shambles: Shan was betrayed by her boyfriend for a plum position in the army. Nini spitefully steals from her kind host, Teacher Gu, the receipt he was given after he was compelled to pay for the bullet to kill his daughter. Things seem to happen merely at random: The seven-year-old Tong is heartbrokenly searching for his lost dog (already killed and served to strangers) when he wanders into a crowd of dissidents. He uncomprehendingly writes his drunkard father’s name on their petition, initiating a chain of absurdly grievous consequences. Finally, the characters who are most overtly vagrants are a blind beggar, Old Hua, and his wife. The childless Huas have wandered over much of China, rescuing abandoned

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girl babies whom they raise as their own, only to have the government inexplicably take away the adult girls to be processed by institutional social services. The vagrant blind beggar to whom the Huas offer a permanent home may be the most prescient character of all: He turns down their offer. He, it seems, has grasped the true condition of his society, where no one can plan for the future, where no way is the right way for long, and where events happen by chance and the absurd rules. This, perhaps, is the horrifyingly dark vision of her native society that Yiyun Li wishes to leave with her readers through this compellingly told, intricately wrought, and profoundly relevant first novel. It is surely an auspicious harbinger of the masterful works that are to come from her. C. L. Chua

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 9/10 (January 1, 2009): 50. The Boston Globe, March 15, 2009, p. C7. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 20 (October 15, 2008): 1089. Library Journal 133, no. 17 (October 15, 2008): 57. Los Angeles Times, February 15, 2009, p. F8. Ms. 19, no. 1 (Winter, 2009): 71. New Statesman 138, no. 4935 (February 9, 2009): 56. The New York Times, January 29, 2009, p. 7. The New York Times Book Review, March 8, 2009, p. 1. The New Yorker 85, no. 5 (March 16, 2009): 107. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 42 (October 20, 2008): 34. San Francisco Chronicle, February 1, 2009, p. J4. The Times Literary Supplement, February 6, 2009, p. 19. The Washington Post, February 13, 2009, p. C7. The Women’s Review of Books 26, no. 5 (September/October, 2009): 26-27.

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A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF ETERNITY Author: Carlos Eire (1950) Publisher: Princeton University Press (Princeton, N.J.). Illustrated. 268 pp. $24.95 Type of work: History Time: Ancient times to the early twenty-first century Locale: Europe and its American colonies Eire traces the development and metamorphoses of the concept of eternity in Western thought, exploring the social, political, and economic impact of the definition of eternity and the human need for immortality Principal personages: Plato, Greek philosopher whose ideas influenced Christian thought Aristotle, Greek philosopher whose ideas influenced Christian thought Saint Augustine, early Church father Martin Luther, founder and leader of the Protestant Reformation John Calvin, Protestant founder of Calvinism, who believed in predestination Jeremiah Drechsel, Jesuit priest Niccolò Machiavelli, Italian political theorist Nicholaus Copernicus, Polish astronomer Galileo, Italian astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, German philosopher William Blake, English Romantic poet

In A Very Brief History of Eternity, Carlos Eire traces the concept of eternity as envisioned by human beings throughout their history and the influence that the concept has had on the social, political, economic, religious, and scientific world in which they live. He also discusses the effect of the developments in these various areas of human activity, especially in science, on the way eternity is viewed. Eire begins his book by addressing scientific theories about the creation of the universe, such as the big bang, as well as those about its inevitable end, such as the big crunch. From this discussion, he concludes that human beings and all human endeavor will eventually be nonexistent. He also deals at length with the brevity of human existence, both individually and collectively, in relation to the existence of the universe. Thus, Eire establishes that nothingness is the fate awaiting all human beings as entities within a universe that exists in a constant state of flux, increasing and decreasing in a continual process of creation and destruction as matter changes form. He then considers the unacceptability of death and nothingness to the human consciousness. It is this horror of coming from nothing and returning to nothing, of being doomed to nonexistence, that he credits with the development among human beings of the concept of eternity. He insists upon the human need to continue.

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Eire states very explicitly that his book is neither a theological nor a philosophical in- Carlos Eire, the Riggs Professor of vestigation into the idea of eternity but rather History and Religious Studies at Yale a history text that examines how the concept University, is the author of From of eternity developed, its importance in hu- Madrid to Purgatory (1995), War man existence, its disappearance, and its re- Against the Idols (1986), and other appearance. He limits his consideration of books on religious history. In 2003, he the history of eternity to its development in received the National Book Award for Nonfiction for Waiting for Snow in Western culture—that is, in Europe and the Havana. Americas colonized by Europeans. He further emphasizes that his book is a survey of the history of eternity in relationship to human’s earthly lives and their quest for a life after death in an eternal realm. Since the concept of eternity as a place of unending existence for human beings is a very human idea, Eire recounts the history of eternity by proceeding chronologically through the history of human existence, relating ideas about eternity to the ways in which human beings live in society and interact with one another. Eire begins his history of eternity with the meshing together of Greek philosophy and Judaic religious beliefs from which emerged Christianity, the belief system responsible for the idea of eternity in Western culture. In order to help readers understand the role of eternity in Christian thought, he prefaces his actual history of eternity with a consideration of Greek philosophy, explaining its terminology and discussing the monotheism of Judaism. He devotes a considerable part of his book to the early centuries of Christianity and to the Middle Ages, when religion was closely entwined with every aspect of life on Earth. Eire presents the value of martyrdom, the cult of the saints, purgatory, monasticism, and the Eucharist as the five major Christian beliefs that maintained a close relationship between the here and now and eternity. Martyrs were believed to enter directly into eternal life. Consequently, persecution became a positive and welcome experience for the faithful. The earthly remains of the martyrs (relics) were venerated, and this practice grew into the cult of the saints. The preservation of relics and their veneration significantly affected everyday life and placed the dead both in eternity and in the temporal world. Eire sees the church and monasterial housing of relics as forging links to eternity for the living. Possessing a church that housed relics promised prosperity to a city, encouraged building, and promoted trade and travel, as people made pilgrimages to the various locations of the relics. Eire traces the idea of purgatory, a place for cleansing the soul before its entrance into the eternal life, to the fourth century. He presents belief in purgatory and the corollary practice of indulgences and masses for the dead as a strong and ever-present bond between the living and the dead. The living remained associated with the dead and were under an obligation to help them leave purgatory and enter eternal life. Indulgences and masses for the dead also had a significant effect upon the economic life of both the Church and the faithful.

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For Eire, eternity heavily influenced the development of the medieval social structure of church and state, within which two elite classes were differentiated from the rest of the populace. He examines how medieval monasticism created a social class (clerics) who spent their lives in prayer and contemplation of God and enjoyed a greater bond to eternity than either the warrior or the peasant class. Thus, the Church was established as the way to eternal life, and it gained enormous power and influence, especially since entrance into eternity could be denied through excommunication by the Church. Mysticism, with its visions, apparitions, and experiences of heaven, united the world of space and time with the eternal realm, making them one. Eire proposes that the Protestant Reformation and its leaders, Martin Luther and John Calvin, significantly changed the dominant view of eternity. It divided Western culture into two diametrically opposed Christian belief systems. While Catholicism continued to maintain its focus on eternity and the dead as intimately connected to the temporal world, the Reformed belief of Protestantism broke the link between the living and the dead. Luther’s rejection of communication with the dead and of purgatory distanced eternity from life on Earth and situated the human being in either the here and now or eternity after death. The two realms became separate. The religious thought of John Calvin further solidified the barrier between Earth and eternity, as he insisted on human vileness and predestination, thus eliminating any mystic union of human beings with God so long as they were in the temporal world. Eire sees the beginnings of the disappearance of eternity coming by the sixteenth century, as human beings became more and more focused on life in reality and on the ability of the human mind to understand and explain the universe. He points out that, even within the Catholic Church, priests such as Jeremiah Drechsel were writing spiritual guides depicting the agonies of hell more as a means to promote proper behavior in life than out of concern for the fate of the eternal soul. Niccolò Machiavelli’s Il principe (wr. 1513, pb. 1532; The Prince, 1640), advocating the acquisition of power at all costs, had greatly influenced thinking throughout Europe. The cosmos on which eternity had been based, with God and Heaven above the earth, was replaced by a different universal structure after the astronomical discoveries of Nicholaus Copernicus and Galileo. Science and philosophy understood the universe as a mechanistic flux of matter. Eire addresses the continuing secularization of human existence with the coming of the Industrial Revolution and the ongoing discoveries in regard to the universe and its constant state of flux. He then discusses how, during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, eternity has made a reappearance. He states that a separation between human knowledge and faith in God and belief in eternity has occurred in the thinking of many people. The human need to continue, to exist eternally in a conscious state, remains a strong element in the human psyche. However, he emphasizes that secularism has not given way to a return to medieval belief. Eire mentions philosophers such as Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche who have declared God to be nonexistent and reduced eternity to an eternal return. He points out that the postmodern world is encumbered with a sense of dread at the prospect of death and nonexistence. Eire prefaces the conclusion of his work with an admonition

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that the theories of the big bang and big crunch have had a strong influence on reducing the idea of eternity to a cruel hoax, to a human need that traps human beings in dread. He nevertheless concludes his book with a quote from the poet William Blake that reaffirms eternity and the afterlife. Eire includes a number of features in his book to aid readers in comprehending concepts requiring more specialized knowledge. In chapter 4, for example, he provides a summary explaining sempiternity and the Scholastic distinctions associated with it. In this same chapter, he inserts two summaries, one of the aspects of Catholicism rejected by Luther and one of the various dogmas with which Luther replaced these practices and beliefs. At the end of the book, he presents an appendix of the common conceptions of eternity. The illustrations included in the book will add to readers’ understanding of changes in the way human beings have viewed eternity over time. An image of the Ouroboros, a serpent devouring its own tail that acts as a symbol of continuous renewal, dates to the most ancient of earthly times. Albrecht Dürer’s Mass of Saint Gregory (1511), depicting the importance of the Eucharist as a means of transcending from earth to the eternal realm, illustrates a belief that was dominant in the Middle Ages. Contrasted to these images of faith is the design of Cénotaphe à Newton (1784), by Etienne-Louis Boullée, which elucidates the shift in human thought from concern with the eternal to a terrestrial orientation toward the glorification of human reason and logic. Eire lightens the tone of his book by interspersing his own personal comments throughout and by incorporating language that is not normally associated with serious treatises. He titles his first chapter “Big Bang, Big Sleep, Big Problem” and his final chapter “Not Here, Not Now, Not Ever.” He compares medieval pilgrimages to the modern tourist trade. A Very Brief History of Eternity has been well received as a book that is both erudite and entertaining. Eire’s ability to explain complex ideas and to elucidate the ways in which concepts of eternity have affected the way human beings live, as well as being themselves affected by human activity, have made the book popular among readers. While the topic chosen by Eire, eternity, is thought-provoking and momentous, requiring the readers’ full attention, Eire saves his book from being too formidable a treatise with gentle humor and witty asides. Shawncey Webb

Review Sources Booklist 106, no. 6 (November 15, 2009): 18. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 40 (October 5, 2009): special section, p. 16. Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2009, p. W10.

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A VILLAGE LIFE Author: Louise Glück (1943) Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux (New York). 72 pp. $23.00 Type of work: Poetry An extremely compelling meditation on the universality and transience of life and experience, using evocative imagery, moving themes, and profound insights into the human condition In her well-crafted collection of poetry, A Village Life, Pulitzer Prize-winner Louise Glück escorts her readers to an unnamed and undated Mediterranean village so universal that it could be anywhere. In these poems, Glück’s major focus is on time and its rapid and relentless movement forward. In one poem, “Primavera,” Glück declares, “Alas, very soon everything will disappear: . . . In the end,/ even the earth itself will follow the artist’s name into oblivion.” Glück observes that humans resist and resent the merciless march of time. In “A Slip of Paper,” she writes, “To get born, your body makes a pact with death/ and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat.” The stages of life, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, and death are all universal but are experienced differently by each person. Using incisive themes, creative image patterns, and abrupt shifts in tone, Glück elevates common life experiences to uncommon art in the forty-one poems of A Village Life. Mutability and the transience of all living things is a major theme that informs A Village Life. Not only do adulthood and old age move rapidly, inexorably toward death, but also even childhood, Glück asserts, coexists with its opposite. “The fountain is for the young who still want to look at themselves,” Glück writes in “Tributaries,” while old age stands over youth’s shoulder. In “At the River,” childhood itself rapidly expires to make room for adolescence as, “that summer we understood that something was going to happen to us/ that would change us.” Similarly, in “Abundance,” a boy feels, “for the first time he’s touched a girl, so he walks home a man.” For Glück, emblems of death are never too far from images of youth. Time accelerates exponentially, so that the thinly clad young bathers in the quarry of “Midsummer,” dive off “cool and wet” stones, which later serve as “marble for graveyards.” “I’ll just keep being a child,” says the narrator in “Noon,” because change is “an avalanche . . . and the child standing underneath/ just gets killed.” Youth also morphs painfully into difficult adulthood, especially relationships and marriage. In “In the Plaza,” Glück asserts that the female has power in a premarital relationship, but only the man controls the marriage, while “In the Café,” argues that people lose themselves when they look to a partner to be the answer to their

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lives. Youth and adulthood collide in “At the River,” when a young person strives to face her parents’ dysfunctional marriage and her father’s alcoholism, while her mother describes marital “pleasure” to her, “more like a speech about mechanical engineering.” In the ironically titled “Marriage,” violent anger drives a couple apart, while in “A Corridor” a husband and wife’s relationship is so claustrophobic that “they suffocate, as though they were living in a phone booth.” “Figs” Louise Glück, poet laureate of the chronicles the death of marital love as the United States from 2003 to 2004, is the speaker mourns, “He’s trying to turn me into author of eleven books of poems and a a person I never was,” while in “Olive Trees” collection of essays, Proofs and despair just turns to silence. Most painfully, Theories (1994). Her many awards love deteriorates into devastation in “Fatigue,” include the Pulitzer Prize, the National where “Nothing remains of love,/ only es- Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Wallace trangement and hatred.” The death of love slowly becomes the death Stevens Award. of life, preceded by old age. In “Walking at Night,” an old woman realizes that she can now walk safely because young people pay her no attention. Glück describes “the country of death” in “A Slip of Paper” as a trap door through which one is violently shoved by the living since, “they want you there first, ahead of them.” In “March,” Glück refers to death chillingly as “erasure.” Glück also continues her theme of life’s inevitable mutability by choosing to give three different poems the same title, “Burning Leaves.” In the first poem, Glück compares a farmer burning dead leaves at sunset to human death, as well as to the cycle of nature whereby “death [makes] room for life.” In the second poem, the burning leaves yearn to escape the confines of their fiery grave, “those last sparks/ still resisting, unfinished.” In the third poem, the dead leaves flare, are self-consumed, and disappear—an apt metaphor for the brevity of life and the permanence of death. Glück writes, “How fast it all goes, how fast the smoke clears./ And where the pile of leaves was,/ an emptiness that suddenly seems vast.” Similarly, Glück includes two poems, each named “Bats,” that deal with the quick passage of life into death. The first concerns human striving to see beyond the physical, corporeal world, while the second chillingly avers that a human “knows nothing of death [except that] death terrifies us all into silence.” She also includes two poems titled “Earthworm.” In the first, an earthworm gently mocks the human fear of burial, while the second even more gently allows that, although death is the only part of life that makes us part of the infinite, “it is the nature of those/ who walk on the surface to fear the depths.” Mutability takes on more tangible dimensions in the body imagery that permeates these poems. In youth, “your body doesn’t listen. It knows everything now,” writes

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Glück of adolescence in “Noon.” In “Midsummer,” she says, “because they had new bodies since last summer . . . they wanted to exhibit them.” As the young woman in “A Night in Spring” celebrates her own beautiful, young body, “she falls in love with it and vows to protect it.” As old age and death approach, “Watching your body change is hard,” writes Glück in “Figs.” An elderly woman in “A Warm Day,” says of her hands, “how old they are. It’s not the beginning, it’s the end.” Glück declares in “Walking at Night,” “When you look at a body, you see a history/ Once that body isn’t seen anymore/ the story it tried to tell gets lost.” The deterioration and ultimate loss of one’s physical being is a most painful symbol of life’s transience. A woman in the valedictory poem “Crossroads” addresses her body with, “now that we will not be traveling together much longer/ I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you. . . . It is not the earth I will miss/ it is you.” Besides employing body imagery to reinforce this vital theme of mutability, Glück uses very specific and powerful image patterns, the most frequent being light, darkness, and twilight. For Glück, life lasts but a day, so childhood and youth are bathed in bright sunlight, while adulthood, old age, and death are wrapped in a gossamer veil of deepening darkness. In “Pastoral,” the bright sunlight is emblematic of “midafternoon, midsummer,” while in “Noon,” the summertime of youth, free from school, encourages children to strive to stop time. By the end of the poem, however, twilight comes, followed by dusk. They bring the recognition that childhood is sadly evanescent. In “Before the Storm,” darkness threatens to be permanent, with the frightening caveat that “the world beyond the night remains a mystery.” “Fatigue” is a poem of increasing darkness, its verses telling of winter and defeat. Even when a poem begins in bright sunlight, such as in “Via Delle Ombre,” shadows soon appear and night follows, the ultimate night being one’s “reunion with earth.” “Harvest” has a clearly autumnal feel, connoting the encroachment of death. Through light imagery, Glück warns her readers of the stark reality of mutability in “Threshing”: “The sky’s bright, but twilight is coming.” In addition to mutability, Glück writes of people’s physical or emotional alienation from nature by using window imagery. In “Twilight,” she describes the human alienation from the natural world as seeing “In the window, not the world but a squared-off landscape/ representing the world.” Windows can create a barrier, a sense of separateness, too, as in “Harvest,” where the speaker sits at a bedroom window “watching the snow fall . . . detachment meeting detachment.” The young boy in “Before the Storm,” “sent to bed—too early,” is restrained by the window at which he sits. In an ironic use of window imagery in “Dawn,” the window is an entrance for bringing light in, while in “Via Delle Ombre,” the window becomes an exit to take one outside to death. Through abrupt and shocking shifts in tone, Glück’s languid, seemingly ordinary declarative language can suddenly turn razor-sharp and express alienation indirectly. In “Pastoral,” the placidly described, halcyon, mist-covered sunrise is followed by the lines, “The sun burns its way through,/ like the mind defeating

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stupidity” and the shocking, “No one really understands/ the savagery of this place,/ the way it kills people for no reason,/ just to keep in practice.” Similarly, a young child in “First Snow” commonly does not want to sleep because it is not tired; “You may not be tired but I am tired—” replies the mother, followed by the narrator’s bitter pronouncement, “Because the mother’s sick to death of her life/ and needs silence.” In addition to the extraordinary artistry of its individual poems, A Village Life is an important collection of modern poetry because it creates a cohesive, interconnected world, a kaleidoscopic human tapestry of stories, lives, and experiences, all interlocked by the fact of human mortality. By interweaving same-titled poems throughout her collection and through her development of imagery and theme, Glück indicates that all people are connected, unique yet the same. While some critics decried Glück’s use of sparse language and the extreme subtlety of her poems, most critics have celebrated Glück’s ability compellingly to capture the rituals of life in a nuanced and cogent collage of characters and images. Unlike Glück’s early work (such as The House on Marshland, 1976, which was more ostensibly autobiographical) or her later work (such as The Triumph of Achilles, 1987, which incorporated more biblical and mythological characters and themes) A Village Life constructs a parallel universe created solely by Glück. Echoing her career-long concern with loss and grief (as in such collections as The Wild Iris, 1993), Glück prepared readers for A Village Life through her poem cycle Averno (2006), which evinced a mostly wintry tone reflected in bitter imagery of nature’s parched and frozen earth. The last few poems of A Village Life transcend Averno’s negativity through a stern, rueful, and ultimately stoic acceptance of the fragility and brevity of life’s rituals, as well as life itself. The archetypal human experiences related in Glück’s collection of elegiac and autumnal poems, A Village Life, rise above stereotype and sentimentality through her tight, muscular, unembellished diction and her unique insights into specific manifestations of the stages of life and the inevitability of death. In a race with the clock, humans make an uneasy truce with time; since every stage of life is necessary and death is assured, they need to experience, if not appreciate, all of life while they have it. Sometimes tender, sometimes bitter, and often intense, Glück probes laserlike into the common core of the human condition. People are indeed all “villagers,” she suggests, as residents of A Village Life. In “Pastoral,” Glück makes mutability a deeply moving metaphor and indelible image for all who live: When you got tired of walking you lay down in the grass. When you got up again, you could see for a moment where you’d been, the grass was slick there, flattened out into the shape of a body. When you looked back later, it was as though you’d never been there at all.

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Review Sources America 202, no. 1 (January 4, 2010): 24-25. Booklist 106, no. 2 (September 15, 2009): 18. Library Journal 134, no. 13 (August 1, 2009): 86. The New York Times Book Review, August 30, 2009, p.14. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 38 (September 21, 2009): 40.

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WANTING Author: Richard Flanagan (1961) Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press (New York). 272 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1830-1857 Locale: Great Britain; the Arctic; Tasmania In Flanagan’s novel, Lady Jane Franklin, Charles Dickens, and an aboriginal girl called Mathinna are linked across time and space by the disappearance of Sir John Franklin during an expedition to find the Northwest Passage Principal characters: George Augustus Robbins, also described as the Protector, a British colonialist in Australia Mathinna Flinders, also known as Leda, an Aboriginal child Sir John Franklin, lieutenant-governor of Van Dieman’s Land and leader of three Arctic expeditions, during the last of which he perished Lady Jane Franklin, Sir John’s second wife, an indefatigable campaigner on his behalf Charles Dickens, a famous English novelist Catherine Dickens, his wife Dora Dickens, their daughter, who died when she was eight months old Ellen Ternan, an English actress Wilkie Collins, an English author who helped create the detective fiction genre John Forster, Dickens’s secretary Widow Munro, Mathinna’s tutor Francis Lazaretto, another of Mathinna’s tutors Garney Welch, a carter Walter Talba Burney, Mathinna’s murderer

Richard Flanagan’s historical novel Wanting begins in the early 1830’s, when George Augustus Robbins, the Protector, takes up the task of bringing the aboriginal peoples of Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania) within the sheltering confines of civilization. Much to Robbins’s chagrin, his charges begin to die, despite the benefits of English clothes, English food, and English houses. He tends to them as best he can but retains the suspicion that they are dying as a direct act of rebellion against his regime, and he is deeply frustrated by his inability to keep his charges alive. After each man or woman dies, he carries out a crude postmortem to determine the cause of death, but he is not trained as a medical man and, indeed, is barely educated at all. He worries about retaining his position.

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In 1851, Charles Dickens is addressing supporters of the General Theatrical Fund. He is interrupted when his friend John Forster brings the news that Dickens’s infant daughter, Dora, has died suddenly. The Dickens family is distraught, and Charles’s relationship with his wife Catherine begins to deteriorate. In 1836, Sir John Franklin, leader of two expeditions to the Arctic, is appointed lieuRichard Flanagan’s books include the tenant-governor of Van Dieman’s Land and novels Death of a River Guide (1994) sails to Australia accompanied by his wife, and Gould’s Book of Fish (2001), Lady Jane Franklin, to take up the post. The which won the Commonwealth Writers Protector is glad when Sir John and his enPrize, and the nonfiction works A ergetic wife pay a visit to his model comTerrible Beauty (1985) and Codename munity. He is less pleased when Lady Jane Iago (1991). announces her intention of adopting an Ab original child and educating it, though he offers to select an appropriate child. However, Lady Jane has already chosen Leda, originally called Mathinna, the daughter of a chief and one of the few strong, healthy children remaining. The Protector is unhappy about this, given that Mathinna is a headstrong child, but he is forced to acquiesce, though he drags his feet about sending the child to the Franklins. In 1854, Lady Jane Franklin seeks help from Charles Dickens. John Rae’s expedition to the Arctic has brought back news of her husband, who vanished in the mid1840’s. Rae’s Inuit informants confirm that the expedition’s members are all dead, and Rae finds evidence that they turned to cannibalism before dying. Lady Jane is willing to accept that her husband is dead but refuses to accept the possibility of cannibalism, and she enlists Dickens to refute that claim. Dickens writes an article for Household Words that refutes Rae’s report, allowing Sir John a noble death, and Lady Jane finally puts on mourning for her husband. Rae’s discoveries and her own meeting with Dickens reawaken Lady Jane’s memories of her time in Australia with Sir John. These memories focus on her relationship with Mathinna, whom she attempted to educate according to modern Western principles, and on her attempts to civilize Van Dieman’s Land generally. Lady Jane is represented as the energetic partner in the Franklin marriage. She married Franklin, a much older man, as a means of bettering herself and rapidly discovered that he was extremely dull. She threw herself into a wide variety of projects, including encouraging Sir John to make his two famous Arctic expeditions. She believed that his post as lieutenant-governor of Van Dieman’s Land would provide her with an opportunity to improve people’s lives. However, the local administrators were reluctant to adopt the measures she proposed through Sir John, and they viewed the Franklins with the greatest suspicion. Instead, Lady Jane, and then Sir John, devoted all their civilizing efforts into transforming Mathinna into a little English girl, much to the horror of the local European population.

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Dickens’s relationship with his wife has deteriorated since the death of Dora. Affected by the story of the lost polar sailor, Lord Franklin, he eagerly takes up the suggestion by Wilkie Collins that Dickens’s next theatrical extravaganza should be set in the Arctic. Collins writes a play, The Frozen Deep, and Dickens throws himself wholeheartedly into the project, overseeing all aspects of the play’s production as well as taking on the major role of Richard Wardour. Wardour is a polar explorer who loves a woman but nobly sacrifices himself in order to allow her to marry the man she loves, a fellow explorer and rival. The uncertain relationship among the central characters reflects Dickens’s own uneasiness about his marriage. Dickens decides to take the play on the road, to raise money for the family of Douglas Jerrold, who has died suddenly. He needs professional actresses to ensure the play’s success. He is introduced to the Ternan family. The acting mother and daughters are reliable and professional but struggling to survive, and Dickens hires them to take on the female roles in his production. Stepping back in time by ten years, the novel moves to the dying John Franklin, lying in his cabin in his icebound ship, suffering from gangrene and beyond treatment. He himself drifts further back in time, remembering his wife’s activities in Tasmania, her attempts to create a golden age by improving the cultural life of the colony, and her subsequent failure. He remembers that their actions had very little effect on ordinary people and that a later downturn in European prosperity affected the colony’s own prosperity. The Franklins were blamed and eventually recalled at the request of the local administrators, it being claimed Sir John was incompetent and corrupt. The colonists also disapproved of the Franklins’ increasing preoccupation with Mathinna. Sir John was surprised to discover how much he came to like her, the more she resisted the attempts to educate her and thus became more like herself. However, at a masked ball, things went tragically wrong. Sir John was determined to go in disguise as a black swan and had a costume made; however, the notion was ridiculed by his wife, and Mathinna was terrified by his brief appearance in costume. Having waited all evening to dance the quadrille as she has been taught, Mathinna’s delight at being able to dance creates a “scene” when she reverts to a “native” style of dancing. When she is removed from the ballroom and taken to the captain’s cabin to rest, it seems that, echoing Zeus’s assault on the mythical Leda in the guise of a swan, Sir John rapes her (Lady Jane routinely refuses his advances). Afterward, Mathinna withdraws from the life of the household. Lady Jane eventually rejects her, noting that Mathinna will not become white. When the Franklins leave the colony, Mathinna is taken to an orphanage. Sir John longs to flee once again to the ice, regarding Mathinna as a savage or a monster. In England, Wilkie Collins recognizes that something is not right about Dickens’s remarkable performance as Richard Wardour. It is no longer acting, he thinks, but metamorphosis. Dickens is throwing himself into his role in order to escape his home life. However, Collins does not seem to notice that Dickens and Ellen Ternan are falling in love, something they also do not realize. In Tasmania, Mathinna finds herself the focus of local fears that a rebellion will

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break out and is sent back to her people on Flinders Island. Her predicament is that she now sees the whites as her people and rejects the Aborigines, who in turn can make no connection with her. However, the white people see her as black, and they reject her in turn. Although she can read and write, she can do nothing with a scanty education that has fitted her for the drawing rooms of Europe rather than for colonial life. Frequently drunk, she is reduced to prostitution in order to support herself when she is no longer able to hold down a proper job. George Augustus Robinson returns to Britain, unable to understand the consequences of his actions in Tasmania. He finds to his chagrin that no one is interested in the account of his experiences among the natives. He dies unnoticed in 1866. Lady Jane Franklin is invited by Dickens to see a performance of The Frozen Deep in Manchester. As a result of Dickens’s article, she has been freed to assume widowhood, although this does not prevent her continuing to lobby for further expeditions. Eventually, more people will die searching for the Franklin expedition than originally sailed with it. This particular night, Ellen Ternan has to take on the role of Clara Burnham, Richard Wardour’s lost love, as her sister—who normally plays the role—is ill. As the drama unfolds, observers realize that this is no longer a play but something more, as Dickens enacts his own life and relationship with Catherine, his wife. Eventually, as his character dies, Dickens departs from the script and makes what is, to all intents and purposes, a declaration of love for Ellen Ternan, although it is so heavily encoded that only those familiar with the play will realize that something has changed. Lady Jane is deeply moved by the play, shocked by its intensity, and forced to flee the theater, perhaps aware for the first time that her life has been empty of love. Mathinna has continued drinking and her health has deteriorated. Her hair is falling out, she has lost most of her teeth, her body is riddled with lice, and yet she is barely an adult. She continues to rely on her useless European education to help her survive because she knows little else, but she no longer has anyone to talk to who understands her. The local Aboriginal population is still in revolt, and people are still dying inexplicably. After she has an argument with a fellow Aborigine, Walter Talba Bruney, who refuses to pay her for sex because she is so ugly, Bruney strangles her and then drowns her in a puddle. Her body is discovered by a carter, the same man who originally took her to the Franklins, and who now takes her to be buried. Flanagan’s novel is a work of historical fiction, in the sense that it is about real historical figures and based on historical events. However, most reviewers treat it less as revealing historical truth and more as about the inner lives of its particular characters. The novel has garnered praise from many sources for its portrayal of emotion. As the title indicates, its central subject is desire in its many forms: longing, yearning, wanting. It is, ultimately, about the failure of desire to be fulfilled, and the decision to use history as a backdrop for such a novel heightens the sense that Flanagan may see himself as writing about an inherent tragedy of the human condition. Maureen Kincaid Speller

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 12 (February 15, 2009): 33. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 9 (May 1, 2009): 33. Library Journal 134, no. 5 (March 15, 2009): 94. The New York Times Book Review, June 28, 2009, p. 10. The New Yorker 85, no. 16 (June 1, 2009): 87. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 50 (December 15, 2008): 32. Time 173, no. 21 (June 1, 2009): 60. The Times Literary Supplement, October 2, 2009, p. 23.

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WEDLOCK The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore Author: Wendy Moore (1952) First published: Wedlock: How Georgian Britain’s Worst Husband Met His Match, 2009, in Great Britain Publisher: Crown (New York). Illustrated. 386 pp. $29.95 Type of work: Biography, women’s issues Time: c. 1720-c. 1800 Locale: London, County Durham, and Newcastle, England; Cape Town, South Africa A biography of a woman who was tricked into marriage with a brutal adventurer and suffered years of horrific domestic abuse before bravely winning a divorce in a maledominated society Principal personages: Mary Eleanor Bowes (1749-1800), countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne, the richest heiress in Britain, a writer and botanist Sir George Bowes (1701-1760), a member of Parliament, landowner, and father of Mary Eleanor John Lyon, later John Bowes (1737-1776), ninth earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, first husband of Mary Eleanor Andrew Robinson Stoney (1747-1810), an Anglo-Irish adventurer, second husband of Mary Eleanor

Wedlock, Wendy Moore’s biography of the woman well nicknamed “the Unhappy Countess,” begins with an account of the cynical subterfuge that ruined her life. Liberated from a stultifying marriage by the death of her unloved aristocratic husband, Mary Eleanor Bowes, titled and rich, committed indiscretions that led to her being venomously lampooned in the London press. In response, Captain Andrew Robinson Stoney presented himself as a chivalrous defender of her honor and fought a duel with the editor of the Morning Post. The duel did not go well for him. Allegedly wounded almost to the point of death, Stoney asked that his few remaining days be sweetened by the object of his devotion accepting his proposal of marriage. Bowes was romantic, naïve, and a chronically bad judge of character. She agreed to Stoney’s request, and they were married in St. James’s Church, Piccadilly. Her groom, a man she scarcely knew, was carried down the aisle in apparent agony, but in the days following the ceremony he made a remarkable recovery. The laws of the land gave him almost complete control of her very considerable fortune. Bowes was the richest heiress in Britain, perhaps in Europe, her father’s death having left her

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with between $142 million and $285 million in today’s currency. Bowes realized too late Wendy Moore’s work has appeared in that the duel had been elaborately and cruelly national British newspapers including The Times, The Guardian, and The staged. Sunday Telegraph. Her first book, The The subtitle of the British edition of Knife Man (2005), was a biography of Moore’s book is How Georgian Britain’s Worst Husband Met His Match. Stoney, how- John Hunter, the founder of scientific ever, seems to be a serious contender for the ti- surgery. tle of Britain’s worst husband ever, not merely the worst husband of the Georgian era. The story of the vicious physical and psychological brutality he constantly meted out to Bowes and to other women makes dolorous reading. Moore makes valiant efforts to emphasize the positive in her last pages, claiming that her subject’s campaign to obtain a divorce, waged in the teeth of society’s patriarchal indifference, has helped make conditions of life fairer for later women. One nevertheless closes her book appalled at the hideous cost in human wretchedness Bowes’s hard-won victories entailed. Bowes might have had a much better life. She was raised the intelligent daughter of a rich man so progressive that he believed in the education of girls, or at least of his own daughter. Growing up in Gibside Hall, near to but undefiled by the coal-bearing land in County Durham and Yorkshire that contributed extensively to her father’s wealth, Bowes was pampered by servants and praised by her father as she acquired knowledge of the French, Spanish, and Italian languages, as well as English composition. George Bowes died when his daughter was eleven, and Mary Eleanor consequently moved to the fashionable West End of London to live with her aunt. Leading families jockeyed for the young girl’s wealth, and she was soon rejecting offers of marriage from “a great many people of rank.” The eventual winner of her hand and all that went with it was John Lyon, the handsome and aloof ninth earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, then in his late twenties. The two were united on Bowes’s eighteenth birthday. The marriage rendered Bowes a legal nonentity, her existence being subsumed in that of her husband, although she retained her family name and the earl took it as well—a condition of George Bowes’s will. The couple traveled north to Glamis castle, the Scottish seat of the Strathmores where, according to legend if not history, Macbeth murdered Duncan. The marriage was not successful, despite Bowes’s early admiration for Strathmore’s good looks and an encouraging dream or “vision” of him. The earl was interested in rebuilding Glamis, drinking, and horses. His countess was interested in literary pursuits and botany, in both of which she showed promise. The union produced three sons and two daughters, but when her husband died in 1776 Bowes shed few tears. Stoney too took the name of Bowes as a condition of his marriage and assumption of Mary Eleanor’s estate. Inexplicably convalescent very soon after their wedding ceremony, he hosted a splendid dinner in his wife’s Grosvenor Square house to celebrate the marriage and lost his temper on discovering that there was no champagne available. A mere three days after the wedding, he angrily sent trimming for a dress

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back to the shop, giving no reason either for his anger or for the contemptuous return of the goods. Her husband, wrote the countess, “began to treat me with the utmost indignity.” Stoney limited his wife’s movements, forbidding her to use her carriage and sometimes denying her permission even to leave the house. He controlled what food she ate and when, dictated what clothes she wore, prevented her from seeing friends or walking alone in the gardens and hothouses. “He very soon began to beat and pinch me,” she later wrote. The new Mr. Bowes became openly and serially adulterous and regularly seduced the maids. At least one, he raped. When thwarted or angered, he took out his disappointment on his wife. Often, the countess later related, Bowes was “ . . . out of humour with his Mistresses or money matters; and always on those occasions came home and beat, pinched, kicked or pulled me by the ears and nose, often thrusting his nails into my ears, which he made stream with blood; spitting also in my face, and telling me, that he only married to torment me.”

Mary Eleanor’s money went to pay for her husband’s excesses; her estates were plundered to finance his pleasures and his desire for social prominence, the latter taking the form of political ambition and expensive campaigns for a seat in Parliament. He threatened to have her confined in an asylum, as would have been not only possible but also legal in Georgian England; he threatened too to kill her. The effects of this abuse on a woman who had been lively, intellectually inquisitive, and happy were predictable. Mary Eleanor acquired a nervous tic of the lower jaw and a wretched hangdog demeanor. Denied money to buy clothes and hence dressed in rags, she came to resemble the madwoman her husband self-servingly portrayed her as. It seemed only too likely that her eventual fate would be death through unrestrained violence or willed neglect. The servants were largely complicit with their master or too powerless or terrified to intervene when they heard Mary Eleanor being hit or saw yet another bruise on her face. That situation changed, however, when a new woman named Mary Morgan was taken on as maid. An intelligent, self-respecting, and devout widow of thirty-three, she quickly assessed the situation in her new employer’s house. It was Morgan who eventually helped her mistress escape. Disguised in secondhand clothes and with a little money borrowed from her servants, Mary Eleanor slipped out of the house one evening when Bowes was absent and the servants loyal to him were distracted. She had endured eight years of physical and mental abuse. In running away, she realized that she might never be permitted to see her children again. She even risked an involuntary and legally enforced return to her husband. It would take Mary Eleanor nearly two years of legal battles to regain her property and obtain a divorce, during which time she was sometimes afraid for her life and once brutally abducted. Her first legal step was an attempt simply to stay alive: She had Bowes bound over to keep the peace. However, this order did not prevent him from doing all he could to separate Mary Eleanor from her children and to bribe or intimidate any witnesses he thought might support her. Mary Eleanor had a prenuptial agreement with Bowes that guaranteed her inheritance to her. Bowes had forced her

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to revoke the agreement early in their marriage. However, she was able to present the court of Chancery, later to be made notorious for its delays by Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-1853), with a copy of the agreement, making a significant step forward. (The copy had been preserved by a loyal servant: One of Moore’s points is that servants and tenants proved more sympathetic and helpful to their mistress than did anybody at the top of the social scale.) Next, Mary Eleanor sought a divorce. Moore is enlightening on the various forms of uncoupling available in eighteenth century England. Only divorces obtained through the House of Lords, applied for after two separate legal actions had been performed, permitted remarriage. A mere 132 were granted before 1800; none of those granted was instigated by a woman. The only practical possibility for Mary Eleanor was to apply through ecclesiastical court for divorce a mensa et thoro, or “from bed and board.” If granted, this divorce would cancel her marital obligations to Bowes, including the duties to live with and obey him, but it would not permit remarriage. On February 28, 1785, twenty-five days after she had fled from Grosvenor Square, Mary Eleanor approached the ecclesiastical court. It would eventually find in her favor. Bowes’s characteristically venomous response included making an immediate appeal and abducting his wife in broad daylight. She was rescued after eight days of maltreatment, and news of the search for her fascinated the whole country. By now, Bowes’s reputation was in tatters. When he appeared in Westminster Hall on November 28, 1786, to answer charges of kidnapping, attempted murder, and attempted rape, he was hissed. It was not until June 26, 1787, however, that his defense was rejected. Almost a year later, on June 19, 1788, Mary Eleanor was confirmed in the possession of her estates. Moore’s well-researched account would read like a novel, and an exciting one, if any novelist were sufficiently rash to invent a character such as Andrew Stoney. Mary Eleanor was herself aware of the implausibility of her life story. She wrote, distinguishing fiction from an event “which tho’ actually true, is so uncommon as to stagger the belief of Posterity.” Readers must take what comfort they can from the thought that her plight would be impossible today, in any Western country. It is at least something that her divorce, in Moore’s words, “sent a clear signal to abusive husbands and a message of hope to abused wives everywhere,” and that her eight years and more of misery helped bring into being the Married Women’s Property Act. M. D. Allen

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 12 (February 15, 2009): 19. The Guardian (London), January 24, 2009, p. 7. History Today 59, no. 8 (August, 2009): 67. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 27. Library Journal 134, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 107.

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London Review of Books 31, no. 4 (February 26, 2009): 17-18. The New York Times, May 24, 2009, p. 14. The New York Times Book Review, May 24, 2009, p. 14. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 3 (January 19, 2009): 50. Scotland on Sunday, January 25, 2009, p. 11. The Sunday Times (London), February 1, 2009, p. 46. The Times (London), January 9, 2009, p. 11. The Washington Post, March 8, 2009, p. B8.

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WHEN CHINA RULES THE WORLD The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order Author: Martin Jacques (1945) First published: When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World, 2009, in Great Britain Publisher: Penguin Press (New York). 576 pp. $29.95 Type of work: Current affairs, economics An attempt to assess the impact of China’s economic growth and magnitude on world economic conditions, politics, and diplomacy that argues that the “end of the Western world” is not imminent, and the shape of the new global order is vague The meteoric rise of China’s economy since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 has no parallel in recorded history. Martin Jacques’s When China Rules the World charts the trajectory of that rise, looking ahead to its continued path and consequences for the next century. The Chinese story added dimensions when the United States and other developed countries plunged into recession in 2008 and China, though not unscathed, recovered quickly and at relatively minor cost. Long-standing complaints about unfair competition from cheap Chinese products were supplemented by concern about the vast amount of the American national debt held in China’s foreign-exchange reserves. Concern for China was an important factor in the rapid and radical financial interventions by the U.S. government in 2008. All of these matters receive attention by Jacques, but his perspective is much broader. The subtitle suggests this will be a book of apocalyptic warnings, but this is not another routine recital of the “China threat.” Jacques does not pretend that China will literally “rule the world,” any more than the United States has done in recent years. In fact, his presentation is sober, scholarly, and developed with great patience. One of his many important themes is that China is unique in ways that limit the relevance of such familiar categories of analysis as democracy and capitalism. At the same time, China’s rising importance is clearly based on the size and rapid growth of the country’s national output. Jacques argues that for decades analysts in the West have assumed that the only effective path for low-income countries toward modernization and economic abundance would involve westernization, including the development of free markets, the rule of law, and democracy. The experiences of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea after World War II did not obviously disprove this hypothesis, although their conformity to the stereotype was far from complete. China’s economic emergence has cast the entire notion into doubt and dramatized the fact that it did not really apply to most Asian countries, particularly those with a Confucian tradition.

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Jacques feels that “it is inconceivable that China will become a Western-style nation in the manner to which we are accustomed.” He cites four reasons. First, China is not a nationstate in the Western sense but a “civilizationstate.” Much of the book is devoted to explicating the elements of this civilization, which centers around the continuity of long-lived Chinese languages and culture. Second, the Chinese have a strong conviction about the uniqueness and superiority of their race (Han). Racist and xenophobic attitudes are strong in China. Third, for centuries, China’s political culture embodied tributary relationships, in which neighboring states acknowledged the superiority of Chinese culture and power and sought China’s patronage and protection. Fourth, China’s political unity has a far longer history than that of other countries, and it has deep emotional power, reflected in national attitudes toward Tibet, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The continuity of Chinese culture is an important consideration, but there are aspects of it that Jacques overlooks. One is the extraordinary level of violence in Chinese history, spanning the Taiping Rebellion and the mass murders of Mao. An underappreciated achievement of the post-Mao era has been to reduce the extent of official violence (though there is more than is known of in the West). At the same time, one wonders what elements in Chinese culture made Chinese people so willing to brutalize one another. Another element of continuity is the Chinese written language. Admirable as it is it many respects, learning it requires an exceptional degree of memorization by Chinese children. This requirement spreads to a heavy emphasis on rote learning throughout Chinese education. Because of their conviction of intellectual superiority, Chinese universities since the 1980’s have offered doctoral degrees. Often, these degrees do not require students to be familiar with Western languages and do not measure up to the academic standards prevailing in the rest of the world. China produces more than 300,000 engineers a year, but fewer than 10 percent of them meet international engineering standards. It is instructive to scan the list of Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, physics, and physiology or medicine. Eight ethnic Chinese have won such prizes, but only one of these (Samuel C. C. Ting in 1976) received a substantial part of his education in China. By comparison, Japan, with a much smaller population, has recorded a dozen winners. Jacques accepts the revisionist view that China was on a par with Europe in terms of output per capita and institutional development until some time around 1800. According to this view, Europe—especially Britain—moved decisively into industrialization at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a result of the discovery of cheap and abundant coal in Britain and of the colonization of the New World. Thus, the Chinese government did not adopt policies to facilitate economic advance, while Britain and the other European states largely did, and the disparity between their economic outputs began. In other words, Jacques argues that China’s underlying potential for

Martin Jacques was for fourteen years editor of the magazine Marxism Today. He writes regularly for The Guardian (London) and is a visiting fellow at the Asia Research Centre, London School of Economics.

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industrialization and economic advance was nearly on a par with Europe and that contingent circumstances explain why China’s progress was delayed. It would be easy to quarrel with much of this view, citing for instance the apparently contrary views of Chinese intellectuals such as Liang Qichao and Liang Shuming. Without seeing any inconsistency, Jacques supports the myth that Western “imperialism” after 1840 seriously retarded China’s ability to advance. The contrary view, associated with economists such as Wu Jingchao and Li Choh-ming, is that the “imperialists,” especially in the treaty ports, were a powerful force dragging the Chinese despite themselves into modern economic and social arrangements. Missionary child John Hersey affirmed from firsthand experience the extent to which the more admirable initiatives of the communist regime after 1949 had been anticipated by Christian missionaries. However, it cannot be denied that Chinese entrepreneurs who emigrated to other parts of the world displayed an evident dynamism that laid the foundations for the impressive present-day communities of overseas Chinese in places such as Thailand and Malaysia. Jacques argues that uniquely European features such as Christianity and Judaism, Roman law, and perhaps alphabetical languages—while they might have facilitated European development—should not be seen as necessary preconditions for development in China and other areas. A mean-spirited contrarian might counterargue that China’s impressive recent economic advance has had a significant parasitic element. The overseas Chinese, who have contributed so much to the mainland’s rise, achieved their own success in environments shaped by those uniquely European-style factors. The hegemony enjoyed by the United States over the international economic environment since the 1940’s has nurtured China’s advance through liberal policies toward trade and investment. China has been able to adopt technology developed by others and to sell into high-income mass markets in the West. These observations, however, do not invalidate Jacques’s contention that China need not follow a Western script nor use its influence to perpetuate a Western-style world environment. Many of the bases of China’s recent breakneck economic growth should persist for the coming decades. At least half the Chinese population remains in rural areas. Shifting that population into nonfarm production can generate large increases in productivity, since the marginal product of labor in nonfarm work in present-day China is much larger than the product in farming. China’s savings rate is one of the highest in the world. While the one-child policy may be breeding many “little emperors,” many Chinese parents still influence their children toward high achievement. With the recent rapid improvement in long-distance transport, China can expect much productivity gain from improved specialization in a unified national market. Moreover, the opportunities to “borrow” technology and management skills from other countries are not diminishing. The world economy is feeling the impact of China’s economic magnitude. Chinese demand is driving up prices of raw materials and their sources. Chinese exports are driving down the prices of consumer goods. Both of these trends generate winners and losers outside China. It is not obvious that the United States benefited from the easy credit generated by Chinese willingness to buy low-yield American bonds. The

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resulting low interest rates helped produce the financial collapse of 2008, encouraged irresponsible financing both by the federal government and by home buyers, and diverted savings into high-risk assets in search of yield. Still, Jacques expects China’s economic growth to slow. China’s export markets cannot continue to grow as they have. The huge proportion of China’s GDP going into investment is likely to encounter diminishing returns, particularly as the government appears to be returning to its older policy of favoring state-owned enterprises. Both the scope and quality of China’s educational system are becoming limiting factors on its economic potential. Public opinion in China presses for more concern with environmental protection, even if measures to protect the environment raise production costs. Much of When China Rules the World examines relations between China and the other areas of the world. Jacques is particularly impressed with China’s skillful cultivation of relations with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the organization of the ten nations of Southeast Asia. The turning point in those relations was probably the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. China withstood this crisis very well, while the smaller Asian countries experienced damage roughly in proportion to the degree to which they had bought into the “Washington consensus” advocating relatively free exchange rates and capital markets. Jacques provides a useful review of China’s moves into Africa, largely in quest of sources of raw materials. The Chinese government maintains a relatively amoral approach to the many predatory African governments. How these African initiatives will play out may depend a lot on the Chinese racism that Jacques correctly evaluates. Viewed as a scholarly product, Jacques’s study has some glaring deficiencies. There are a great many valuable and interesting tables and charts, but these are presented with no adequate source references—nor, in many cases, adequate interpretations. Jacques’s Marxist background sometimes manifests itself. He gives no attention to the rapid rise of Christian worship in China, an important potential influence toward humanizing what is often a harsh economy. He baldly asserts that “little has changed with Communist rule since 1949.” Considering that Mao’s new government undertook two different mass-murder campaigns in 1950—land reform and the Korean War—the assertion is dumbfounding. The economic well-being of the Chinese people was never a priority for Mao. Perhaps all Jacques means is that Chinese government remains authoritarian, and indeed, the government displays much continuity with millennial Chinese tradition: It enjoys the “mandate of heaven” so long as it promotes the well-being of the population. For all the emphasis on China’s phenomenal economic growth, however, much less attention is given to the relatively small share of consumption in its total output. Whatever the book’s defects, they arise from the grandeur of its conception. No one knows enough about China to carry out this undertaking with complete success. Much of the value of the book is that it helps stimulate debate about the many dimensions of what will be some of the most important developments of the twenty-first century. Paul B. Trescott

When China Rules the World / jacques

Review Sources America 201, no. 19 (December 21, 2009): 26-27. Booklist 106, no. 4 (October 15, 2009): 11. The Economist 392, no. 8639 (July 11, 2009): 84-85. Far Eastern Economic Review 172, no. 7 (September, 2009): 66-68. Foreign Affairs 88, no. 6 (November/December, 2009): 152-153. The Guardian (London), June 21, 2009, p. 23 Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 17 (September 1, 2009): 930. Library Journal 134, no. 14 (September 1, 2009): 129. National Review 61, no. 21 (November 23, 2009): 52-54. New Statesman 138, no. 4954 (June 22, 2009): 47-48. The New York Times, December 4, 2009, p. C31. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 35 (August 31, 2009): 43. The Spectator 310, no. 9440 (August 1, 2009): 26-27. The Sunday Times (London), June 21, 2009, pp. 40-41. Times Higher Education, September 10, 2009, p. 54.

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WHERE MEN WIN GLORY The Odyssey of Pat Tillman Author: Jon Krakauer (1954) Publisher: Doubleday (New York). 383 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Military history, current affairs, biography Time: July, 2002-May 22, 2004 Locale: Afghanistan; Iraq; Almaden, California; Tempe and Phoenix, Arizona; Fort Benning, Georgia; Seattle, Washington Its publication delayed a year while Krakauer embedded himself with U.S. combat troops, this impeccably researched odyssey of professional-football-player-turnedsoldier Tillman chronicles minute-by-minute his death in Afghanistan by what the military finally acknowledged was friendly fire Principal personages: Pat Tillman, former professional football player who enlisted in the Army after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks Kevin Tillman, his devoted younger brother, who enlisted with him and served in same Ranger platoon Marie Ugenti Tillman, Pat’s wife Mary L. (Dannie) and Patrick D. Tillman, his divorced parents Sayed Farhad, Afghan militia fighter who fought alongside Tillman Private First Class Bryan O’Neal, survivor and the only witness of Tillman’s death Lieutenant David Uthlaut, Tillman’s highly respected platoon leader

In “The Soldier’s Faith,” his 1895 Harvard Memorial Day tribute to the Civil War dead, Oliver Wendell Holmes concludes that “every society rests on the death of men.” Only “true and adorable faith,” Holmes continues, “leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he little understands.” Wounded in the Battles of Ball’s Bluff and Antietam, Holmes came finally to insist on the dignity of war as an exercise in personal virtue. If somehow a reincarnated Holmes could be privy to the tragic crucible of Specialist Pat Tillman—a soldier of such “true faith” in himself as to be martyred by it—would the jurist still, as he seemingly did, approve of war? Former National Football League (NFL) strong safety Tillman rejected a multimillion-dollar contract to enlist as a private in the U.S. Army in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. After deployment to Afghanistan, he was the belatedly acknowledged victim of friendly fire in a remote canyon (since designated as

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Tillman Pass). Jon Krakauer, the biographer of another profoundly driven figure in Into Jon Krakauer is the author of Eiger the Wild (1997), has outdone himself with Dreams (1990), Into the Wild (1996), Where Men Win Glory, his comprehensive Into Thin Air (1997), and Under the account of the tragic fate of a compelling Banner of Heaven (2003). He is the man. Tillman walked away from the $3.6- editor of the Modern Library million contract offered to him by the Ari- Exploration series. zona Cardinals in part out of honor, duty, and family tradition. His great-grandfather had served at Pearl Harbor during World War II. His younger brother, Kevin, enlisted with Pat and served in the same Ranger platoon. As Krakauer reveals, however, these matters are the virtues in which male aggression often cloaks itself. Honor and duty could just as easily have obliged Tillman to resist the war in Iraq, which he called “illegal as hell” and an act of “imperial whim.” Tillman was convinced to enlist in part by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” (1841), especially its last lines: “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.” Two months before he enlisted and a month before he married his childhood sweetheart, Tillman, in a document he called “Decision,” wrote, “However, these last few years, and especially after [September 11, 2001], I’ve come to appreciate how shallow and insignificant my role is. I’m no longer satisfied with the path I’ve been following . . . it’s no longer important. . . . This new direction will, in the end, make [life with Marie] fuller, richer, and more meaningful.” Krakauer has subtitled his book The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, which obviates the complaint of one reviewer who faults Krakauer for devoting nearly 250 pages—two-thirds of the book— to Tillman’s life before he and Kevin were shipped from their training base at Fort Lewis, near Seattle, to Bagram Airfield, Iraq. An odyssey is a long series of wanderings. Where Men Win Glory seeks to document these wanderings, not merely the tragic conclusion to which they led. During six weeks at Fort Benning, Georgia, Pat and Kevin completed “jump” training and the challenging curriculum designed to impart the skills Rangers need for special operations warfare. Shortly before Christmas, 2002, Pat and Kevin received their tan berets and assignments to a unit called the “Black Sheep”: Second Platoon, Alpha Company, Second Ranger Battalion, based at Fort Lewis, near Seattle. When they enlisted, the Tillman brothers assumed they would be deployed to Afghanistan to fight Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. They, like most Americans, had no reason to suspect that in November, 2001, scarcely two months after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by al-Qaeda, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had instructed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to secretly create a detailed plan for the invasion of Iraq. It was in Iraq, at Qadisiyah Airbase, that Pat was denied his first combat engagement because his M4 carbine, a small-arms rifle, lacked a grenade-launcher attachment. When a member of his team, the squad automatic weapon (SAW) carrier, was wounded, Pat became his replacement. “Truth be told,” Pat confessed in his journal, “I’d rather stick with the lighter M4, but because I have no choice, I will learn this new weapon and get profi-

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cient at it. This is a heavy casualty-producing weapon, which will change my role.” Pat only fired one shot in Iraq, noncombatively. A burst of bullets squeezed off by an inexperienced SAW gunner who mistook Pat’s cease-fire signals would end his life a year later in Afghanistan. Tillman’s reservations about the war in Iraq may have been fueled by his first mission there. He and Kevin were part of an immense contingent of Marines, Rangers, Green Berets, and others dispatched to rescue a nineteen-year-old soldier reportedly being held prisoner by Iraqi fighters at a hospital in Nasiriyah. The prisoner, who would become famous as a result of the rescue mission, was Jessica Dawn Lynch. As Pat and Kevin got ready to join the most elite special operations commandos in the world, the scale of the rescue mission—unlike anything they’d seen since arriving in the Persian Gulf—puzzled them. “We leave tomorrow,” Pat wrote in his journal on March 30, 2003. “This mission will be a P.O.W. rescue, a woman named Jessica Lynch. . . . I do believe this to be a big Public Relations stunt . . . sending this many folks in for a [single low-ranking soldier] screams of media blitz. In any case, I’m glad to do my part and I hope we bring her home safe.” Tillman’s intimations proved right. Lynch’s “ordeal” was eventually exposed as propaganda after more than six hundred stories about her appeared in the media, including a rushed-intoprint book that debuted at number one on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. The Jessica Lynch hoax worked so well that the White House would recycle the same tactic thirteen months later. A spurious story about an iconic American soldier would be fed to the media to divert attention from unsettling news. This time, however, the soldier cast as the hero would be Tillman himself: a professional football player whose sense of duty had inspired him to enlist in the Army. Tillman’s deeply desired but long delayed opportunity for combat would come in early spring, 2004, when his Second Battalion deployed to Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. On April 22, Tillman’s Black Sheep Platoon found themselves at dusk engaged in a fierce firefight on the shabby road to Mana, near the Pakistan border. During a mission to search villages, one of the armored Humvees in Tillman’s platoon broke down. An officer back at Bagram Headquarters ordered the platoon to split up: half, including Kevin Tillman, were to tow the Humvee to the base; the other half, with Pat, were to search the villages. Lt. David Uthlaut, the highly regarded platoon leader, phoned headquarters to protest the dividing of his outfit, insisting that splitting up in a hostile area weakened each segment. He was told to proceed as ordered. A catalog of horrors unfolded. The units went in separate directions, but Kevin’s group towing the Humvee thought they had found an easier route and doubled back, only to come under attack from the Taliban. Pat and others from the first unit sped to aid their buddies and were fired on by their fellow soldiers in the second unit, who mistook them for the enemy. Pat was shot three times in the head by a SAW gunner, killing him instantly; an Afghan government soldier was also killed, and two other Americans were wounded. Tillman had become the most famous American soldier in Afghanistan. The de-

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moralizing particulars of his death had thus been known worldwide for years before Krakauer began his research. With masterful skill, he has produced a coherent account of what a popular radio commentator used to call “the rest of the story.” In the Tillman story, the “rest” is mostly about the Army’s cover-up, its attempt to hide the friendly-fire horror behind fobbed-up heroics that included awarding Tillman the military’s third-highest honor, the Silver Star, despite the fact that it cannot go to a victim of friendly fire. After Tillman’s death, Army commanders backed by Bush and Rumsfeld, as New York Times reviewer Dexter Filkins put it, “violated many of their own rules, not to mention elementary standards of decency, to turn the killing into a propaganda coup for the American side.” An Army officer—the leader of a forty-man quick-reaction force of Rangers who was serving in Afghanistan when Tillman was killed—has taken issue with Krakauer’s “misimpression that U.S. military officers are mainly political conservatives better at following orders than thinking critically. In reality [they] are as diverse as the people they defend.” Writing in The Washington Post, Andrew Exum finds that Krakauer, although credible about mountaineering in his book Into Thin Air (1997), does not appear to understand light infantry combat [when] he claims that [the decision to split up Tillman’s platoon] was driven not by poor and independent decision-making by field-grade officers but by Donald Rumsfeld’s insistence on [arbitrary deadlines] . . . . Ranger units . . . meet deadlines because the missions they execute . . . are complex operations that demand that men [coordinate] with one another under high levels of stress and confusion.

The historical context that Krakauer provides is important. At the time of Tillman’s death, America’s mood was increasingly disenchanted by the war in Iraq. The public was reading more and more about the torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Rumsfeld and his image-conscious generals needed a win. Tillman’s death gave it to them. As Krakauer notes in his prologue: Aeschylus, the Fifth Century b.c. Greek tragedian wrote: “In war, truth is the first casualty.” In late fall of 2009—more than five years after Tillman’s death—his long shadow still cast its spell. Major General Stanley McChrystal, just named commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, asked President Barack Obama for a reinforcement of troops. It was General McChrystal who one week after the disastrous firefight e-mailed a high-priority personal memo to special operations leaders that warned of an upcoming investigation that would probably reveal that “Corporal Tillman was killed by friendly fire.” General McChrystal’s memo sought “to preclude any unknowing statements by our country’s leaders which might cause public embarrassment if the circumstances of Corporal Tillman’s death became public.” It was McChrystal who prepared the citation for Tillman’s nebulous Silver Star. Richard Hauer Costa

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Review Sources Army Times 70, no. 14 (October 19. 2009): special section, p. 10. The Boston Globe, September 27, 2009, p. C6. The New York Times Book Review, September 13, 2009, p. 11. O: The Oprah Magazine 10, no. 12 (December, 2009): 192. People 72, no. 12 (September 21, 2009): 59. Sports Illustrated 111, no. 25 (December 21, 2009): 71. The Village Voice 54, no. 51 (December 16, 2009): 35.

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WHY THIS WORLD A Biography of Clarice Lispector Author: Benjamin Moser (1976) Publisher: Oxford University Press (New York). Illustrated. 544 pp. $29.95 Type of work: Literary biography Time: The twentieth century Locale: Brazil Moser’s engaging and magisterial biography reveals for the first time the fascinating public and private worlds of Lispector, peering behind the myths that surround her life and unveiling the remarkable woman who converted her struggles into compelling and powerful art Principal personages: Clarice Lispector, Jewish Ukrainian Brazilian writer Lúcio Cardoso, her friend, a fellow writer Maury Gurgel Valente, her husband

As Benjamin Moser points out in his highly acclaimed biography Why This World, Clarice Lispector is often understood through comparisons with other, more famous figures. In a now-famous remark, Gregory Rabassa, one of Lispector’s Englishlanguage translators, described this enigmatic writer as a woman who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf. The French novelist and critic Hélène Cixous claimed that Lispector was what Franz Kafka would have been if he had been a woman, or what Rainer Maria Rilke would have been if he had been a Jewish Brazilian born in the Ukraine, or what Arthur Rimbaud would have been if he had been a mother and had reached the age of fifty, or what Martin Heidegger would have been if he could have ceased being German. After the poet Elizabeth Bishop, who also translated several of Lispector’s short stories, had met and become acquainted with Lispector, she told her friend Robert Lowell that Lispector was a better writer than Jorge Luis Borges. In spite of such compliments and praise, Lispector remained little known outside Brazil for most of her life. Although her fifth novel, A paixão segundo G. H. (1964; The Passion According to G. H., 1988), has been called one of the great novels of the twentieth century, her last novel, A hora da estrela (1977; The Hour of the Star, 1986), published just before her death in 1977, remains her best-known and most famous work. Even though critics compared Lispector to Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Woolf, she refused such associations, remarking that she had never read those writers and that writing for her was a means of staving off loneliness. The legend of Lispector was stronger than the life and work of Lispector herself. Because she did not often grant interviews and because she guarded closely her personal identity, many readers of her novels and stories never knew whether the

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author was a man or a woman, a Jew or a Christian, a lesbian or a housewife, or a Brazilian native or a foreigner. Although she was often regarded as a sphinx whose mysterious ways could not be fathomed by a simple look at her face, Lispector always contended that she had no mystery—or that she was so mysterious that even she did not understand herself. In Why This World, Moser attempts to draw back the veil of mystery that Lispector has hidden behind for so long. Drawing upon a rich archive of Lispector’s letters and other writings, Moser presents for the first time a thoroughly detailed and exhaustive intellectual, literary, and psychological study of this compelling woman and splendidly captures the beauty, mystery, and energy of Lispector’s writings and her own tortured personal life. Moser’s portrait of this master of the Portuguese language unveils her as a writer who insistently probed and scrutinized a single personality (her own) through the many facets of her own work and whose work can be read as one of the twentieth century’s great spiritual autobiographies. Many contemporary reviews of Lispector’s writings compared her to medieval mystics such as Teresa of Avila or St. John of the Cross; Moser points out that Lispector’s desire to confess in public rather than to a priest, and her continual revelation of inner truths uncovered by her constant meditation and reflection, reveal the soul of a mystic in whom one finds the full range of human experience. The youngest of three daughters of Pinkhas Lispector and Mania Krimgold Lispector, Chaya Lispector was born on December 10, 1920, in Chechelnik, Ukraine. In the years following World War I, the Russians subjected Ukrainian Jews to numerous pogroms in which the Jews were robbed, tortured, and murdered. Many Jewish women were raped by Russian soldiers as a means of humiliation and psychological warfare. Sometimes were killed. A group of Russian soldiers gang-raped Mania during one of these pogroms, and she contracted syphilis. The conventional folk wisdom of the time held that pregnancy could cure venereal disease; thus, Mania soon found herself pregnant with Chaya (“life”), and it appeared momentarily that Mania was cured, for her symptoms disappeared. Although Chaya did not contract her mother’s syphilis in the womb, Mania’s syphilis had not been cured, and her health slowly deteriorated after Chaya’s birth. Chaya’s family eventually managed to escape the Ukraine and made their way to Romania. Because Mania had relatives in Brazil, the family was able to secure passports to that country and emigrated in 1922, not long after Chaya had turned one. When they arrived in northeastern Brazil, almost all the members of her family changed their names. Her father Pinkhas became Pedro; her mother Mania became Marieta; her sister Leah became Elisa; and Chaya became Clarice. Only Tania, the Lispectors’ middle daughter, kept her name. Clarice’s father continually struggled to make a living in Brazil.

Benjamin Moser is the new books columnist for Harper’s Magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is a frequent contributor to Newsweek and American Scholar and has published translations from the Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

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In the hopes of finding a better job, Pedro moved his family to Recife, where the family settled in the Jewish neighborhood of Boa Vista. Life in Recife did not improve much for the family, however. Five years after settling in Recife, Clarice’s mother—who had been in and out of charity hospitals—died. Clarice, who was ten years old, never got over her mother’s death, and the theme of a motherless child in search of her mother is at the center of many of her novels and short stories. When she was thirteen, Clarice declared that she wanted to be a writer. Although she was a student at several prestigious schools in Recife, she had little interest in the day-to-day subjects that she studied there, including Hebrew and Yiddish. Her real education came in the library, where she read avidly, devouring the Brazilian classics, such as those by Machado de Assis, and any other titles that appealed to her. There, she discovered the two books that most deeply impressed her: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Prestupleniye i nakazaniye (1866; Crime and Punishment, 1886), a favorite of her father that dramatized the struggle of a person who feels abandoned by God, and Hermann Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf (1927; Steppenwolf, 1929), which focuses on art and the price that the artist pays for his art, another theme that was to dominate Lispector’s work. Steppenwolf also appealed to the aspiring writer because of the freedom it gave her to pursue her calling to write about the inner life. Writing about her fascination with Hesse’s novel, Lispector focused on the ways that the interior journey intrigued her. Her early encounter with Steppenwolf influenced her novels and stories, which meander on journeys of self-discovery and seldom feature straightforward plots or fully developed characters. When Clarice was fifteen, her father moved the family to Rio de Janeiro, hoping to find better work and to improve the family’s financial conditions. Two years later, in 1937, she entered the Law School of the University of Brazil. Clarice continued to write stories and published her first story, “Trifuno,” in the magazine Pan in 1940. Even though Clarice began to flourish, her father never achieved the financial success he had hoped to achieve in moving the family to Rio. In August, 1940, her father’s life ended in as unfortunate a way as it had been lived. He died as a result of a failed gallbladder operation. With both of her beloved parents dead, Clarice struggled to make her own way in the world, and she began working as a journalist while she was still in law school, writing for the newspaper, A Noite. Clarice soon discovered a group of writers with whom she could associate, and she fell in love with one of the writers, Lúcio Cardoso. The feverish intensity of her encounter with Cardoso mimicked her earlier encounter with Hesse’s Steppenwolf, and she began to write and publish prolifically. Her short story, “Obsessão” (1941; obsession) which appeared in October, 1941, deals with many of the themes that can be found in her later writings. “Obsessão” involves an epiphany that disturbs the mundane life of its protagonist, awakening him to the possibility of mystical knowledge. In addition, it portrays the coexistence of the sacred and the human, as well as the embrace of the irrational animal existence of everyday life, as involving very often a descent into madness. This descent into madness is the beginning of mystical knowledge. Around 1941, Maury Gurgel Valente, a young diplomat, fell in love with Clarice. Although she felt affectionately toward Valente, she

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loved Cardoso; however, since Cardoso was a homosexual and did not return her love, she married Valente in 1943, eleven days after she became a naturalized Brazilian citizen. After her marriage to Valente, Lispector became the perfect diplomat’s wife, hosting parties and traveling with her husband to all corners of the world. The couple moved from Brazil through Europe and England, finally settling in Washington, D.C., in 1952. In 1948, their first son, Pedro Gurgel Valente, was born in Berne, Switzerland, and in 1953, their second son, Paulo, was born in Washington. Lispector increasingly hated her role as a diplomat’s wife and performed her duties with some disgust. Missing her sisters in Brazil, she and her sons left her husband in Washington in 1959 and returned to Rio, where she spent the rest of her life. In 1943, Lispector published her first novel, Perto do coração selvagem (Near to the Wild Heart, 1990), to great acclaim. The novel won the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize for the best debut novel of 1943, and critics compared her work to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (serial 1914-1915, book 1916). The novel is a coming-of-age story of Joana, an amoral woman whom the narrator often compares to an animal and who suffers through a cold and loveless marriage. Through a liaison with a nameless young man, she ruins her husband and his standing in society. Through stream-of-consciousness writing, the novel focuses on Joana’s interior life. Although she continued to publish stories and novels from the time she married Valente until just before her death, Lispector’s fifth novel, The Passion According to G.H., remains the novel that best expresses her own theory of fiction and her views of the world. In it, G.H. decides to clean the room of her maid, who quit her job the day before. Expecting to find quite a mess, she instead finds a desert of spotlessness. When she opens the closet, however, she spies a cockroach; screaming in disgust, she slams the closet door, crushing the roach in the middle of its body so that the roach’s pus oozes out of its body. Transfixed by this sight, G.H. ponders the fate of the roach and compares her own life to the roach’s life. She eats the cockroach, recognizing that all creatures share the same organic life and are in essence the same creatures. In a moment that is at once horrifying and complex, G.H. identifies the roach with the Mother of God, and most critics agree that in this scene G.H.’s encounter with the dying cockroach represents Lispector’s own memory of her dying mother. In September, 1966, Lispector fell asleep with a lighted cigarette in her bed. The resulting fire wounded her badly, almost destroying her right hand. She continued to write, and three months before her death, she published perhaps her most famous novel, The Hour of the Star. Like many of her other novels, this one features a young girl in search of herself: Macabéa, a poor girl from Alagoas who has moved to Rio de Janeiro. She is so poor that she hardly eats, and her ovaries are dried up. She falls in love with a good-for-nothing man named Olímpico, who dreams of being a butcher. When Olímpico falls for one of Macabéa’s roommates, Gloria, Macabéa visits a psychic to see what lies before her. In a shocking revelation about the confluence of the supernatural world in the natural world, Macabéa leaves the psychic’s office with high hopes, only to have them dashed in a moment as a car hits her. The Hour of the

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Star is some ways the most Jewish of Lispector’s writings. Macabéa is reminiscent of Judas Maccabeus, the Jewish rebel who led the Jews to victory against the Romans and established the holiday known as Chanukah. Like her other novels, though, this one traces the interior journey to truth and its consequences. Not long after the novel was published, Lispector died of ovarian cancer and was buried in the Jewish cemetery of Cajú, near Rio de Janeiro. Moser’s richly layered book chronicles the genius, the brilliance, and the mystery of Lispector. His splendid biography provides not only a portrait of a woman as an artist but also a first-rate social history of twentieth century Brazil and a brilliant history of Brazilian literature and the impulses of literary modernism as they are illustrated in Lispector’s writings. For the first time, Lispector’s life is captured brilliantly in all of its wondrous color by Moser’s epic biography. Moser’s book reveals Lispector in all her mystery, encouraging readers to pick up Lispector’s writings and to discover a neglected twentieth century literary giant. Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 19/20 (June 1, 2009): 24. The Economist 352, no. 8645 (August 22, 2009): 74-75. Library Journal 134, no. 13 (August 1, 2009): 81. The Nation 289, no. 9 (September 28, 2009): 32-36. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 14 (September 24, 2009): 35-36. The New York Times Book Review, August 23, 2009, p. 8. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 23 (June 8, 2009): 36.

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THE WILDERNESS WARRIOR Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America Author: Douglas Brinkley (1960) Publisher: Harper (New York). 940 pp. $34.99 Type of work: History, biography Time: 1858-1909 Locale: United States An account of the impact and consequences of the activities of Roosevelt on the preservation of America’s birds, animals, and wilderness areas Principal personages: Theodore Roosevelt, president of the United States, 1901-1909 Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, his uncle George Bird Grinnell, cofounder of the Boone and Crockett Club Gifford Pinchot, chief forester of the United States John Burroughs, naturalist and writer John F. Lacy, Iowa congressman C. Hart Merriman, head of United States Biological Survey John Muir, naturalist and writer

Douglas Brinkley’s The Wilderness Warrior is a comprehensive, almost exhaustive account of Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation accomplishments. Most historians usually rank Roosevelt fourth or fifth among America’s many presidents, behind Abraham Lincoln and George Washington and perhaps Franklin D. Roosevelt, but it is inarguable that, regarding environmental protection and preservation, Theodore Roosevelt ranks alone at the top. In his seven and a half years as president (from September, 1901 to March, 1909), he established five national parks, 234 million acres of national forests, and fifty-one national bird sanctuaries, and he preserved such iconic archaeological treasures as the Native American Mesa Verde site. All of these accomplishments were made in spite of broad-based opposition from both political parties in Congress and many economic interests, from miners and lumbermen to milliners and fashion manufactures. Brinkley reveals that Roosevelt’s fascination with nature began when he was a young boy growing up in Manhattan. He collected birds and other animals, preserving them through the use of formaldehyde and other methods—the fumes from his bedroom were often overwhelming. His collecting range increased to Oyster Bay, Long Island, where his family rented a summer house and where eventually he would build his own home, Sagamore Hill. He also collected specimens from Egypt and elsewhere when his family vacationed abroad. Roosevelt suffered from asthma as a child, and his health was problematic, but almost as an act of will he overcame those

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physical disabilities, in large part by actively engaging the wilderness. He traveled to New Douglas Brinkley teaches at Rice York’s Adirondacks and to Maine, where his University, is a commentator on CBS, collecting of birds and other animals was com- and is a contributing editor of Vanity Fair. Several of his books have been bined with his lifelong passion for hunting. Roosevelt’s contribution to conservation selected as New York Times Notable and preservation was singular. His personal- Books of the Year. His The Great ity was such that it was said that he wanted to Deluge (2006) was awarded the 2007 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral: He was invariably the center of attention. Brinkley claims that Roosevelt’s manipulation of the press in promoting his own causes, as well as himself, exceeded that of all other presidents, and the humorist Finley Peter Dunne once characterized Roosevelt’s account of the Spanish-American War, in which he commanded the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, as “Alone in Cuba.” However, one of the strengths of The Wilderness Hunter is Brinkley’s inclusion of many other individuals who were central to the environmental crusade. An early influence and inspiration on Roosevelt was his uncle, Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, a black sheep in the highly moralistic Roosevelt family because of his amorous proclivities. Like Theodore, Uncle Robert was a hunter (or, in his case, a fisherman), but he was a major influence on the preservation of fisheries that were being depleted and destroyed, and he served as fishing commissioner of New York. Another ally in Roosevelt’s environmental efforts was George Bird Grinnell, the editor of Forest and Stream. Grinnell reviewed Roosevelt’s Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1884), which related his hunting adventures along with acute environmental observations. This review began a collaboration that led the two men to found the Boone and Crockett Club, established in 1888. The club combined hunting with a strong preservationist ethos and was committed to using legislative means to conserve natural resources. A generation older than Roosevelt, naturalist and essayist John Burroughs was a friend and confidant, as was the younger Gifford Pinchot, America’s first scientific forester. Before assuming the presidency in 1901, Roosevelt was a member of three earlier presidential administrations, and all three of those presidents had significant conservationist accomplishments, even if they were not as extensive as Roosevelt perhaps desired. Benjamin Harrison’s Forest Reserve Act of 1891 gave the president the power to transfer public lands into forest reserves, a power that Roosevelt later used to great effect. In Grover Cleveland’s last weeks in office in 1897, he established 21 million acres as forest reserves, much of it in the Northwest, where lumbermen were heavily engaged in massive logging activities. Cleveland also appointed Gifford Pinchot as chief forester, and William McKinley subsequently appointed Pinchot as head of the Division of Forestry in 1898. Roosevelt was elected as McKinley’s vice president in 1900 and ascended to the presidency when McKinley was assassinated in September, 1901. In many ways, Roosevelt remade the presidency, challenging industrial monopolies, defending the rights of labor, engaging in various foreign activities (including constructing the Pan-

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ama Canal), and winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his negotiations in ending the Russian-Japanese War. He even renamed the Executive Mansion as the White House. His most lasting accomplishments, however, were in conservation, a field in which his activities were wide-ranging. Working with the government’s Biological Survey and C. Hart Merriam, Roosevelt implemented plans toward preserving plants and animals. One of his early presidential initiatives was in regard to the forest reserves: Little had been done to protect the reserves, and ranchers, miners, and lumbermen had widely ignored federal prohibitions. To protect the reserves, Roosevelt appointed like-minded westerners, often over the head of the secretary of the Interior, who in fact soon became subordinate to Pinchot, Roosevelt’s favorite. The first forest reserve established by Roosevelt was in Puerto Rico, which had been taken over by the United States after the Spanish-American War. As a territory and not a state, and with no special interests to influence Congress, it was a noncontroversial site. Prior to Roosevelt’s presidency, the number of national parks was limited. Yellowstone was established in 1872; Yosemite and Sequoia/General Grant, in 1890; and Mount Rainier, in 1899. Roosevelt’s first choice for a national park was the Grand Canyon, but national parks, unlike forest reserves, required congressional assent, and there was considerable opposition by Arizona mining and grazing interests. Oregon was more amenable to hosting a park, in part because neighboring Washington State had Mount Rainier. Consequently, in 1902 Crater Lake became a national park, followed by Wind Cave in South Dakota the following year. In 1902, Roosevelt set aside 14,276,476 acres as national forests, including 4.5 million acres in Alaska alone. Although his eyesight was limited, Roosevelt’s hearing was acute, and his knowledge and interest in birds—he was nicknamed Citizen Bird—went back to his childhood. During the Spanish-American War, he became fascinated with Florida’s brown pelican. The Indian River Lagoon, which included Pelican Island, contained fortythree hundred species of plants and animals. Many were being rapidly destroyed, not least in the quest for bird feathers to be used on hats and other fashions. In March, 1903, Roosevelt declared Pelican Island a federal bird sanctuary. It was to be followed by many more. However, in the absence of federal financial support for enforcement, private organizations such as the Audubon Society paid rangers’ salaries. Buffalo, or bison, were a concern of Roosevelt. By the time he ventured west in the 1880’s, the vast buffalo herds of the Great Plains had been decimated. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were a few in Yellowstone, some in private hands, and a small number at New York’s Bronx Zoo. With Roosevelt’s avid support, a 60,800-acre game reserve was established in Oklahoma’s Wichita Mountains, and in 1907 buffalo from the Bronx Zoo were loosed into the reserve. A second buffalo reserve soon followed on the Flathead Reservation in Montana. Although Congress was often less than enthusiastic about Roosevelt’s conservation initiatives, in 1906, with the clever guidance of Representative William Lacey of Iowa—chair of the House Committee on Public Lands and an unsung hero of the conservation movement—Congress passed the Antiquities Act, perhaps with many members not realizing the unilateral power it gave to the president to appoint any

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“historical landmarks, historic preservation structures, and other objects of scientific interest” as national monuments. With his new discretionary authority, Roosevelt established the Petrified Forest, Devils Tower, Montezuma’s Castle, and other sites as national monuments. When, in March, 1907, Congress attempted to restrict the president’s power to create new forest reserves in the western states, Roosevelt, along with Pinchot, created thirty-two new national forests, or 16 million acres, two days before the restriction was to come to a vote. In 1908, he designated the Grand Canyon and its 800,000 acres as a national monument. Its size by far dwarfed the acreage of his earlier selections and was extremely controversial. Roosevelt did not care. Early twentieth century environmentalists were divided by an issue that has continued to create animosity and conflict between preservationists (exemplified by John Muir) and those environmentalists (such as Pinchot) who wished to conserve resources for possible future use. Roosevelt was a member of both camps, and Brinkley finds one of Roosevelt’s environmental policies problematic. In 1902, Congress passed the Newlands Act, or the National Reclamation Act, which was to provide federal funding for irrigation projects in the arid western states. Roosevelt enthusiastically supported the bill, and one of the early projects of the act was Arizona’s Roosevelt Dam. As a result, almost every western river was dammed, which allowed for water storage and later hydroelectric power for agricultural and urban growth throughout the Southwest. Whether such growth is sustainable in the long run and at what cost in environmental destruction became a major concern in subsequent decades. The author claims that Roosevelt’s greatest failure occurred in the Klamath Basin, where the president established the Klamath Lake Reservation’s 81,619 acres but failed to preserve the entire basin in an attempt to balance agricultural development with preserving waterfowl. It is perhaps his hunting, his shooting of so many animals, that has generated the most criticism of Roosevelt as a conservationist. He often rationalized it as necessary to obtain various specimens for scientific study, and Roosevelt, a confirmed Darwinist, was a superb observer of animals, both alive and dead. Many of his kills were donated to New York’s American Museum of Natural History, where his father had been one of the founders, and the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. Many wound up as personal trophies at Sagamore Hill. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most Americans still lived in rural areas, and hunting for many was an integral part of life. Roosevelt was a product of his own times. Still, Roosevelt’s passion for hunting seemingly exceeded the norm. John Muir, the California naturalist and defender of Yosemite, criticized Roosevelt in a face-toface discussion, asking him when he was going to grow up and abandon the gun. Roosevelt understood the perception by many that his conservation and preservation efforts were at least partially compromised by his rifles and shotguns, but he never abandoned them. Henry David Thoreau said that “in wildness is the preservation of the world,” a phrase often misstated as “in wilderness is the preservation of the world.” Roosevelt would have agreed, particularly if “America” was substituted for “the world.” His embrace of nature with gun in hand could possibly be explained in psychological terms, but Roosevelt firmly believed that the preservation of nature—its for-

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ests, historical ruins, birds, and animals—was imperative to ensuring the continuation of the American character. He feared that the ease and comforts of urban society would weaken both the moral and the physical fiber of Americans. In an increasingly obese America, he may have been right. Eugene Larson

Review Sources American Heritage 59, no. 4 (Winter, 2010): 98. Booklist 105, no.22 (August 1, 2009): 24. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 13 (July 1, 2009): 692-693. Library Journal, 134, no.13 (August 1, 2009): 90. New York Review of Books 56, no. 17 (November 5, 2009): 44-46. The New York Times, July 23, 2009, p. C1 The New York Times Book Review, August 9, 2009, p. 1. The New Yorker 85, no.25 (August 24, 2009): 77. Time 174, no.4 (August 3, 2009): 18.

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THE WINTER SUN Notes on a Vocation Author: Fanny Howe (1940) Publisher: Greywolf Press (St. Paul, Minn.). 196 pp. Paperback $15.00 Type of work: Memoir Time: 2009 Locale: New York; Massachusetts Howe describes her intellectual and spiritual journey as a thinker and writer, reflecting on the experiences, people, and ideas that influenced her, using a method of exploration and analysis that focuses on connections rather than chronology As a writer and thinker, Fanny Howe is fascinated not only with the articulation of words but also with the experiences that motivate them. She calls herself a revisionist, referring to her habit of writing and her efforts to capture an insight, perception, thought, or assessment of her experiences. An inclination to reflect her thoughts and actions in words prompts her analysis of a variety of subjects. In The Winter Sun, her subject is her life. She finds that her life makes sense in retrospect. In thinking and writing about it, she has recalled her compelling experiences, her motivating searches, and the direction that discovered itself. In this memoir, she analyzes the parts of her life inspired by thinkers and artists and explains and demonstrates in emotionally evocative images their impact on her intellectual and spiritual self, that self called to be an artist. Writers and filmmakers influence the book’s structure, which derives in part from techniques Howe appreciates in Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. She adapts Eisenstein’s innovative filmmaking approaches to storytelling—including montage, flashback, close-up, and collage—to create her own literary memoir. As she explores her life, she finds several themes reverberating through it. She discovers that both her actions and her art articulate these themes, which derive from her perceptions of her childhood, her search for meaning and direction, her political and social engagement, and her search for spiritually similar voices. She groups connected influences and ideas into sections or chapters of varying length that include “A Vocation,” “The Message,” “Branches,” “America,” “Person,” “Place Time,” “Waters Wide,” “The Chosen,” “The Land of Dreams,” and “Evocation.” The memoir begins with an epigraph, a poem by William Blake that evokes the contrariness of the plight of human nature—that of perceiving in a dream the place one wants to be and being unable to reach that place. Her memoir expresses her attempts to define for herself the metaphorical dreamland she seeks and her attempts to reach it. This metaphorical, theme-connected description of her journey expresses what she has found. In the first section, Howe explains that her dream was living the life of a poet. This ideal included all of the experiences associated with such a life: radical thinking and

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behavior; indulgent eccentricities; time for talking, traveling, observing, and taking notes; and struggling with the practical questions of writing such as appropriating thought to form. She found from the outset, however, that life for her generation presented grave contradictions. On one hand, life, at least for a person born into her circumstances of physical and intellectual advantage, was full of promise. Each individual was educated with the expectation that his or her potential was great and would continue to unfold. On the other hand, nihilism prevailed, from the Cold War to the present, with repeated reminders that individual lives are disposable and subject to the violence of nuclear bombs, war, murder, and terror. Howe describes her present situation as one in which she has chosen, as she often does, to give up almost all of the exotic attributes of the poet’s experience and confine her experiences and activities to the barest and most essential. She wrote this memoir in a hermitage, safe and warm, looking out at a winter landscape, appreciating its stark beauty from a warm vantage point. She has also written in places that reflected the struggles and complications of her life. She has accumulated descriptions of the multiple aspects of her life to ascertain just what she was doing besides writing poems, and she examines her life to see the connections between it and her poetry. Recalling that a friend once asserted that poetry is a backward logic, Howe examines her life as a critic would a poem, unraveling it to see how technique and form contribute to meaning. She recalls an instructive reflection by Walt Whitman, who said that the poet expresses the result of many experiences and observations uniquely wrought. Looking to identify the motivations that have resulted in her engagement with writing and her art, she recognizes in herself the compulsion Whitman described. Having received accolades for her novels, collections of stories, essays, poems, and other memoirs, Howe in this memoir composes essays, poems, and fragments with the verve, passion, and unique voice characteristic of her work. Together, they constitute her “Notes on a Vocation.” Howe describes a journey that is, in many ways, the journey of every person, her own pilgrim’s progress. Proclaiming that she would have preferred in life to have been sure of a destination, she instead describes in a poem the metaphoric, mysterious winter landscape in which she finds herself, unsure of the meaning or implication of what she sees. Each metaphorical step brings with it a sense not of what is ahead but of what is just behind, as well as of revelation. This poem describes at least one aspect of her life experience. She longs for knowledge of what is right for her in the future and longs when she arrives to know that she is there. She demonstrates through her poems and her assessment of insights gleaned from others that she must work within the dichotomies of her experience and perception and live with, even balance, opposing inclinations and bewilderment.

Fanny Howe was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1940 and grew up in Boston. She has published many collections of poems, novels, and essays. She has won many awards, including the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Poetry prize in recognition of a lifetime of accomplishment. She lives in Martha’s Vineyard.

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“Branches” symbolizes the most basic part of Howe’s being. The title refers to the facts, the genes, and the circumstances of her life. Her early childhood remains vivid to her: She was born during a lunar eclipse when the United States was on the brink of World War II. Her father joined the Army when she was three, and his absence shaped her family’s lives. She recalls an image of him waving good-bye from the top of the stairs, and he maintains this place for her, evoking a slightly distant and idealized presence. This sense of her father contrasts with Howe’s sense of her mother working long hours but radiating energy, as she wrote for and directed a theater group and passionately discussed books with Howe’s older sister. Recognizing in herself a distinct consciousness, Howe withdrew from their exchanges, observing the world she inhabited, preoccupied with the drama of weather in Boston and with the movement of light across her room. When her father returned from the war, Howe recognized differences in her parents. Her mother—surrounded by people, immersed in drama—often longed for her Irish home and the causes she had embraced there. Her father—scholarly, quiet, and ardent—was often involved in political action, first supporting intellectuals against the attacks of Joseph McCarthy and then pursuing civil rights. Howe remembers herself as drawn to both parents yet choosing to observe her engaged family from the vantage point of the middle of the stairs. Through the years, Howe’s experiences and interactions with people fostered her growth, recognition of many social realities, and assimilation of ideas and artistic methods. In “Person, Place and Time,” she describes many experiences and people that shaped her direction. Two marriages brought her emotional pain and certain realizations about self and society. Having children introduced a new joy and new social discoveries. The circumstance of having children acquainted her not only with marital issues of parents connecting with each other and with children but also with issues of race, class, and gender discrimination. Her children also helped her recognize the joy of simple daily doing. Being loved by them and being with them provided a most accessible way to experience life. Going to the park, reading stories, and giving baths alternated with and relieved the activities of reading, ruminating, and writing. Many philosophers, artists, and writers have become significant teachers for or influences upon Howe, including Thomas Aquinas, to whom she frequently alludes. Simone Weil’s words and life figure most importantly in her memoir. Robert Lowell, the first poet Howe got to know well, became a mentor and father figure to her. His own work exemplifies the project of using one’s life to provide content and to shape the form of a body of work. Henry Hampton, in creating the documentary Eyes on the Prize, modeled for Howe creating through collaborating and developed groundbreaking techniques for showing the interior lives of his subjects. His technique, which Howe defines as creating the prolonged now, employs close-in camera work to reflect an action that combines both intention and resolution. This technique resonated with Howe’s own intention, and she adapted it to poetry and fiction. Jacques Lusseyran’s work echoed Howe’s own love of light. His description of how to survive a concentration camp—and, by implication, life—through developing personal attachments and working for others resonated with Howe’s own discoveries as well.

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Howe discusses others who inspired her. Sara Grant’s study of Jesus, leading to the insight that Jesus is a process and not an end, seems to embody the spiritual and intellectual approach to life that Howe has internalized. In the work of Michel de Certeau, Howe found such beautiful words and images even in footnotes that she longed simply to appropriate them into her own poems. Antonia White and Emily Brontë also model techniques that Howe analyzes in her memoir, demonstrating the way they reveal their inner conflicts and longing. Howe ruminates on these authors’ considerations of the eternal, as well as the works of others, including a prayer to St. Raphael reflecting a universal longing to return to a more encompassing state of existence. These considerations provoke her further meditations on the nature of the future and direct her focus to another dimension of such preoccupations, the nature of time. One of Howe’s poems fixes a memory of a revelation experienced in winter that suggests a startlingly disturbing insight about the relationship between time and the world. The poem connects a thread introduced earlier in the book—that of finding direction—with the study of a fifth century Indian grammarian of Sanskrit called Bhartrhari. He asserted a connection that Howe also perceives between grammar and time—and ultimately the eternal. This argument takes words to be grammar and emphasizes that words bring something into being, as in the biblical formulation, “In the beginning was the Word.” Words extract order from a chaos; they create a recognizable, understandable articulation of the internal, creating and revealing a unity. They require a listener who in effect enables the word by waiting for it, anticipating it. Words bring the past into the present as they define it. Howe, by following this train of thought, comes to understand the future as an apprehension of the past from another location. In contrast to her ruminations on time, she participates in a spiritual retreat that again exhorts the value of beneficent action. She considers whether to embrace thinking or doing. In The Winter Sun, Howe shows the circuitous path she has taken to arrive at the balance she achieves in her art. Demonstrating that she is drawn to the satisfactions inherent in action—whether working for social justice or digging a garden—and articulation—extracting order from experience—she expresses artistically the challenge of living with and in uncertainties. Her assertion elsewhere that she is an agnostic Catholic, and the poetic title of this memoir evoke just such a synthesis. Howe ends this poetic mediation in the company of children. As they eat a baguette, she sips wine. Bernadette Flynn Low

Review Sources The Christian Century 126, no. 25 (December 15, 2009): 27-28. The Nation 288, no.13 (April 6, 2009): 34-36. Poetry 194, no. 3 (June, 2009): 244-252. The Times Literary Supplement, September 18, 2009, p. 27.

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THE WINTER VAULT Author: Anne Michaels (1958) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 352 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Novel Time: Late 1930’s-1945; 1964 Locale: Toronto, Ontario; Poland; London; Egypt In her first published work in over a decade, Michaels masterfully weaves the dichotomies of loss and discovery, destruction and creation, sorrow and happiness, as she follows the lives and relationship of Avery Escher and Jean Shaw across cultures and continents Principal characters: Avery Escher, an engineer Jean Shaw, a botanist, his wife Elizabeth Escher, Avery and Jean’s daughter Marina, Avery’s mother Daub Arbab, a friend of Jean and Avery

In Anne Michaels’s The Winter Vault, Avery Escher is an engineer contracted to work on the damming of the St. Lawrence Seaway in Ontario, Canada. Constructing the dam will flood several villages, displacing the living and the dead. Avery meets Jean Shaw, a botanist by hobby, as she frantically and resentfully collects samples of plants and seeds from along the river that will soon be swallowed up by the rushing waters, never to flourish again in their native soil. The dam is completed and “the detonation of silence” fills the area: “Even the leaves on the trees were mute; so absolute the stillness, all sound seemed to have been drawn from the world. ” The newly developed towns adjust to their new lives. The inhabitants of the surrounding areas “simply could not bring themselves to enter the water where so many and so much had vanished, as if they, too, might never return. ” Jean is among those forever changed by the destruction and reconstruction of the town and its inhabitants. Despite Avery’s role in the project, the two begin an intimate relationship through conversations that spill into the early morning. Jean shares memories of growing up alone with her father after her mother’s death, reliving . . . the kind of common revelation that, at thirteen, fills one with an aching wonder and sorrow, an excitement and a disorientation, and the beginning of the very slow realization that one’s ignorance continues to grow at precisely the same rate as one’s experience.

Her mother’s love of gardening, which inspired Jean’s interest in botany, also is a common topic of her discussions with Avery. She explains to him that gardening offered a means of communication with her mother through the planting and nurturing of new seeds. Her mother, Jean recounts,

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“. . . had left a small garden that I kept tending—for her—as if one day she would come back and we would sit there together and I would show her how well her lilies had grown, show her all the new plants I’d added. . . . suddenly I felt I could keep on loving her, that I could keep telling her things this way.”

Avery in turn shares with Jean the story of his parents’ first meeting and of his childhood in war-torn Europe. He spends many nights recounting the years he spent with his mother, aunt, and cousins in England while his father and uncle were at war. These extremely personal late-night conversations serve both as therapy for the two characters and as the foundation for their relationship. During the early stage in their relationship, Avery introduces Jean to Marina, his mother. The two women form a close bond over their interest in plants, their love of life, and a shared deep understanding of loss. Marina connects with Jean by saying “It’s like a spell . . . nothing eats away time like the past.” Jean in turn remarks, “The living haunt us in ways the dead cannot.” Avery receives a job offer that forever alters the course of the characters’ lives. Having the opportunity to travel to Egypt to work on the Aswam Dam and help relocate the temple of Abu Simbel, Avery asks Jean to join him on his journey. He tells her, “Your thumb is the Atlantic, your smallest finger, the Pacific. Your fingertips are Egypt, and the heel of your hand is Africa . . . your heart line is the Arabian desert, your fate line is the river Nile. . . .” Jean agrees, and she and Avery are married by a justice of the peace. The newlyweds travel across the world, to once again engage in a project that will flood a region and devastate a population. Jean, alone in a foreign land, sets to work gathering specimens and realizes how distinctive is the material forming each unique part of the earth: The silt, like the river water, also had its own unique intimacies, a chemical wisdom that had been defining itself for millennia. To Jean, the Nile silt was like flesh, it held not only a history but a heredity. Like a species, it would never again be known on this earth.

At the same time, Avery, whose love for mechanics and machinery has been passed down to him from his father, stands on the brink of undergoing a monumental task that has become “familiar to him now, this feeling at the beginning, which he conscientiously registered as containing an element of self-pity; the first signs of a slow, coagulating grief.” The concept of loss, the very term “lost,” haunts Avery. This was a term for which Avery had once felt contempt but now appreciated, for the sting of its unintentional truth; thousands would become homeless as though through some act of negligence.

He realizes that architecture and engineering, his passions in life, exist “[n]ot to give shape to space, but to give shape to . . . emptiness.” This realization discomforts him and offers him solace at the same time. Michaels uses this paradox throughout the novel to lull readers into a false serenity.

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The two young lovers’ days are filled with awe over the expansiveness and stillness of Anne Michaels’s first collection of the desert. They marvel at how “in the desert poetry, The Weight of Oranges (1986), we remain still and the earth moves beneath won the Commonwealth Prize, and us.” They spend their nights on a houseboat Miner’s Pond (1991) won the National on the Nile, sharing their pasts and contem- Magazine Award and the Canadian plating their futures—and the futures of those Authors Association Award. Her first around them. Absorbed in their newfound novel, Fugitive Pieces (1996), won the Orange Prize, the Books in Canada bliss, “Avery seem[s] to accept the facts— First Novel Award, and the Trillium that they were on the edge of a lifetime of hap- Book Award. piness and, therefore, inescapable sorrow.” This juxtaposition of happiness and sorrow is a dichotomy constantly beneath the surface of the The Winter Vault. The painstaking project of reconstructing the Abu Simbel continues with help from engineers from across the globe. While observing the massive effort, Avery begins to see the temple as a living thing, As the ragged cavity expanded, as the gaping absence in the cliff grew deeper, so grew Avery’s feeling they were tampering with an intangible force, undoing something that could never be produced or reproduced again. The great temple had been carved out of the very light of the river, carved out of a profound belief in eternity. . . . The stone had been alive to the carvers, not in a mystical way but in a material way; their relationship to the stone had affected the molecules of the stone.

Sensing Avery’s turmoil, his friend Daub Arbab offers “Soon . . . everything we see will be under water. There is an illusion of peace. But there is trouble and like much of the trouble in the desert, it is caused both by the living and the dead.” While at the height of their happiness, Jean tells Avery she is pregnant, and while gazing upon the sands of the Nile she lovingly tells him “This is the very place we stand where you first learned we will have a child.” The couple’s bliss is short lived, however. Tragedy strikes, and Jean loses the baby when she is seven months pregnant. She must continue to carry the baby to term, before traveling to Cairo for a cesarian section. During the months with the dead fetus inside her womb, Jean falls into a despair that Avery is incapable of alleviating. Awake in the darkness She did not know how to grieve; she could not separate the baby’s body from her own. What had been a vulnerable ripeness, her shape, she now felt a deformity. The earth weight, now a child cast in stone.

Jean comes to the morbid realization and resolution that her “body is a grave.” After the surgery, the project is nearing its end, and the grieving couple returns to Canada, where they embark on separate lives, unable to interact with one another without being haunted by their loss. Avery abandons engineering and returns to school to pursue his lifelong passion of architecture. Although he is reluctant to leave

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Jean, he knows that it is what she wants and desperately needs, so he obliges her. Jean remains in Toronto, where she studies botany, tends to her gardens, and continues her relationship with Marina. In the evenings, Jean sows in abandoned fields and sidewalk cracks the seeds of plants whose fragrance, feel, or sight might remind passersby of homes they have left behind, by choice or by force. On one of these evening missions, she meets Lucjan, who is known as “the Caveman” for the pictures of beasts he paints on abandoned city walls. The two begin a touching relationship in which Lucjan shares stories of his childhood. Growing up orphaned during World War II, he was forced to seek shelter in bombed-out cellars with others hoping to escape the Nazis. Lucjan’s stories describe not only the aftermath and physical devastation of war but also its emotional effects “The old streets—every doorway and streetlamp and stoop—was familiar, yet not quite; somehow almost more real than we remembered. Everyone wandered the streets the same way, vaguely afraid, as if the dead father or mother, the dead wife or sister might suddenly jump out from behind the doorway. And at the heart of it all, a civic pride, a jubilation, and an unspoken humiliation, our need so open, and so inconsolable.”

Lucjan describes another recurring theme of the novel, the reconstruction of the city by the war’s survivors. He explains, “Cities, like people, are born with a soul, a spirit of place that continues to make itself known, emerging even after devastation, an old word looking for meaning in the new mouth that speaks it.” He reflects upon what he sees as the greatest injustice to the soul—the fact that “Any man who lived through a battle, the bombing of a city, a siege, has shared the same private moment wit thousands of others . . . but what belongs to you? Nothing. Not even the most important moment of your life is your own.”

It is through hearing these confessions that Jean later will realize the unprecedented extent to which modernity is characterized by mass migration. “The great migration of the dead, war did this first, thought Jean, and then water.” As Jean continues to develop a relationship with Lucjan and his friends, she maintains her relationship with Avery. The two correspond to a degree and have regular phone calls. Upon the anniversary of their daughter’s stillbirth, they meet unexpectedly at her grave. Their daughter, Elizabeth, was buried next to Jean’s mother by Marina while Jean and Avery were still in Egypt. This chance meeting rekindles their emotions. Michaels’s background in poetry resonates strongly through her command of language and mastery of fluid prose. At times, the novel’s dialogue and soliloquies appear to ramble, but the beauty of the words may lull readers into a melodic trance. Michaels has the ability to transform what appear to be simple, almost boring, characters upon first read into deep and complex minds that most readers will relate to on some level. Sara Vidar

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 17 (May 1, 2009): 67. The Economist 391, no. 8631 (May 16, 2009): 92. Library Journal 134, no. 9 (May 15, 2009): 70. New Statesman 138, no. 4949 (May 18, 2009): 45. The New York Times Book Review, May 24, 2009, p. 8. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 9 (March 2, 2009): 43. The Spectator 310, no. 9432 (June 6, 2009): 32. The Times Literary Supplement, May 29, 2009, p. 21.

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THE WOMEN Author: T. Coraghessan Boyle (1948) Publisher: Viking Press (New York). 451 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1909 to the late 1940’s Locale: Chicago; California; Taliesin, near Spring Green, Wisconsin; Tijuana, Mexico; Puerto Rico; Japan; Germany; Italy A fictionalized reverse saga of world-renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s tangled and often scandalous relationships with four women, three of whom he married Principal characters: Frank Lloyd Wright, famous, innovative modern architect Olga “Olgivanna” Lazovich Milanoff Hinzenberg Wright, his third wife, a Serbian dancer Maude Miriam Noel Wright, his second wife, a southern belle, Parisian, and morphine addict Mamah Borthwick Cheney, a feminist who leaves her husband and two children for Wright Catherine “Kitty” Tobin Wright, Wright’s first wife and the mother of six of his children Anna Lloyd Jones Wright, Wright’s mother, who divorced his father Billy Weston, a master carpenter and caretaker of Taliesin Julian Carleton, a Barbadian servant who kills seven people and burns Taliesin Tadashi Sato, one of Wright’s apprentices, the novel’s fictional Japanese author Seamus O’Flaherty, the novel’s fictional translator and coauthor

After writing novels about the lives of two other great American icons—cereal entrepreneur John Harvey Kellogg in The Road to Wellville (1993) and sex guru Alfred C. Kinsey in The Inner Circle (2004)—T. Coraghessan Boyle takes on the personal life of architectural giant Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) in The Women. Boyle, known for his entertaining style and quirky, dark humor, has also authored nine other novels plus eight collections of short stories. The Women might have posed Boyle’s biggest challenges and may be his greatest achievement so far. While offering Boyle’s usual attractions, The Women encompasses much more—deepened character studies, an excursion into tragedy, challenging questions about relationships between men and women, and superb narrative structuring for maximum effect. Boyle structures The Women as imaginatively and daringly as Wright designed such creations as the gravity-defying Fallingwater or the circular Guggenheim Museum. He treats, in reverse chronological order, four women with whom Wright co-

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habited: Part 1 is titled “Olgivanna,” part 2, “Miriam,” and part 3, “Mamah.” Significantly, Wright’s first and least interesting wife, Kitty, does not get a full portion of the novel devoted to her. A conventional suburban housewife and mother of six who was only a teenager when they married, Kitty figures prominently only early in “Mamah.” The novel’s structure places Miriam, the most volatile and interesting of the women, at its center: She appears in every section, especially parts 1 and 2, and T. Coraghessan Boyle has written dominates the novel as much as does Wright twelve novels and eight short-story himself. Finally, the structure allows the novel collections. His novel World’s End to end on a tragic climax, the grisly murder of (1987) won the PEN/Faulkner Award, seven people (including Mamah and her two and he won the 1999 PEN/Malamud children) and the burning of Wright’s home, Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. Taliesin. Boyle imparts an operatic level of drama and tragedy to this event that was popularly considered at the time to be a judgment on Wright, his late mistress, and their immoral lifestyle. The narrative structure is also significant for what it leaves out: any focus on Wright’s professional life as an architect. The Women is not a Künstlerroman, or the story of an artist’s development. This type of information can be found in biographies of Wright. Although the novel necessarily refers to Wright’s projects, his professional travels, and the always precarious business side of his operations, it does not provide much analysis of his architectural challenges and plans, his creative process, or his aesthetic philosophies. Instead, it focuses on Wright’s often chaotic relationships with women and the turmoil of his personal life, which might have made the peace and calm of his studio seem like a refuge. A secondary focus of the novel is Wright’s relationships with his workmen and apprentices. Boyle portrays Wright as demonstrating a surprising respect for the skilled workmen on his projects, especially the stonemasons and carpenters, alongside whom he labors. The master carpenter Billy Weston becomes his close friend and the caretaker of Taliesin, Wright’s landmark Wisconsin homeplace, which is twice burnt and rebuilt. Wright also forms lasting friendships with some of his apprentices, although he and Olgivanna generally treat them as though they were sources of slave labor. (The apprentices have to pay Wright tuition for the privilege of working for him.) Of particular interest is the apprentice Tadashi Sato, a well-educated young Japanese man in the wilds of Wisconsin, who is presented as the author of the novel. Sato writes in 1979, looking back on Wright’s life from the perspective of his own old age. He opens each section of the narrative with a chapter relating his experiences at Taliesin. This fictional author requires some suspension of disbelief, since it is not obvious how Sato can know anything about the motivations, thoughts, conversations,

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and love lives of Wright and the four women. Sato never sees three of the women, and by the time he appears at Taliesin in the fall of 1932, Olgivanna has changed so much from her younger self that she has acquired the nickname Dragon Lady. One could pose much the same question about any author who purports to capture or reflect real people in a fictional novel, including Boyle himself. Sato is a convenient literary device: Although the novel is based on carefully researched factual information, all interpretations, fabrications, and even errors of fact can be attributed to Sato’s imagination, as can the opinionated footnotes that appear throughout the text. To supplement Sato, who seems to speak better American English than the native-born American characters, Boyle invents a translator and coauthor, Seamus O’Flaherty, who has a quirky American style. O’Flaherty, who has adventured in the Caribbean and is a terrific writer, is a playful stand-in for Boyle himself. Aside from this postmodern play, Sato is an appropriate narrator, interpreter, and fabricator of the story because he represents the Japanese culture that Wright admired. Split apart from his American girlfriend in no uncertain terms and interned as a dangerous alien during World War II, Sato also provides a chilling perspective on the racism that feeds into the novel’s climax. Finally, Sato adds an important cultural dimension, somewhat missing in American culture, through his appreciation for the master-apprentice relationship: Wright, not much of a parent in reality, is like a father to Sato, who refers to him as Wrieto-San. Boyle thus gives Wright a sympathetic narrator to tell the story of his marriages and mistresses. A giant of architecture, the five-foot-six-inch Wright is a case study of arrested development as a lover: Edwin Cheney—whose wife, Mamah, runs off with Wright, breaking up their two families—very astutely calls Wright “[t]his sawed-off genius.” After the murder of Mamah and her two children, Wright, still not divorced from Kitty, takes up with the Memphis belle and morphine addict Miriam. After he and Miriam finally marry, Wright repeats the same pattern with a younger model, Olgivanna, much as he gets a flashy new car every few years. Wright, a gnomelike figure with a big head, does not drink or smoke and forbids anyone from indulging these vices at Taliesin. He also bans sex among his apprentices, but he has a voracious sexual appetite himself, helped by his healthy lifestyle but also by a goatish temperament. The Parisian connoisseur Miriam confides that even in his fifties Wright is better than any of the Frenchmen and Italians she has enjoyed. Up into his old age, Wright has a shaggy head of hair, even if it is gray or white. More than any of these attractions, though, Boyle portrays Wright’s genius as the key factor appealing to his lovers—that and the perceived need he has to be managed by them. A shadowy character lurking in the background of the novel, but perhaps included among the title characters, is Wright’s mother. Anna Lloyd Jones Wright groomed little Frank from his earliest days to be a great architect. She left his impecunious father when Frank was fourteen and returned to her relatives, prosperous Welsh-descended farmers in the southwestern Wisconsin River valley. When his parents divorced, young Frank changed his middle name from Lincoln to Lloyd. When he married Kitty Tobin and built a home in Oak Park outside Chicago, Anna moved into a

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mother-in-law cottage next door. After he built Taliesin, with its legendary Welsh name, she installed herself there. Sato observes that Frank is “something of a mama’s boy.” Despite his experiences growing up on the farm, he seems to have been spoiled by his mother, which is portrayed as an explanation of his arrested development. He retains a child’s bright-eyed curiosity and enthusiasm but also, along with these admirable qualities, a selfcentered ego that only grows more monumental with success. Wright’s tyrannical reign in his little kingdom of Taliesin allows him to indulge his ego further. When he goes out in public, he drives fancy cars and dresses in dashing costumes—including a cape, string tie, beret, elevator shoes, and flailing cane—like the star he is. Despite making plenty of money, he resembles his father by always having a cash-flow problem, owing money to almost everyone and paying late if at all. It is a common stereotype that such a poor fellow with such boyish charm needs a good woman to manage his affairs. After his mother’s fine training and with her living nearby to provide support, Wright allows Kitty to keep him in line for about twenty years, tending to him as she does to their six children. (In his autobiography, Wright confessed that he eventually outgrew her, which indicates how immature both were.) It seems more than coincidental that the first of the women with whom Wright transgresses is named Mamah. She initiates the transgression and persuades him to act on her feminist belief in free love rather than endure married bondage. Later, in contrast, Mamah’s attempt to force her feminist principles on the wife-abusing black Barbadian Julian Carleton, already seething with his hatred of racism, touches off the novel’s catastrophic ending. Wright’s middle-aged naïveté is exposed when he meets Miriam. Again, the woman initiates the meeting, and Boyle portrays her as within minutes exerting a Circe-like power over Wright, transforming him into a pig snorting for truffles. Within weeks, she has moved into his house, is redoing his decor and diet, and is at work “reforming” him. Soon, they quarrel, make up, and quarrel again, and she leaves him for New Mexico, establishing the pattern of their tumultuous, dishthrowing relationship as a contest of wills. Miriam holds the upper hand: He is as addicted to her as she is to her pravaz (a syringe for injecting morphine). It seems as though any fool would know better than to marry her, but Wright does so and lives to regret it. After she leaves him for California and Wright takes up with Oglivanna, Miriam’s rage and revenge marathon matches the conflagration at the novel’s end. Boyle portrays Miriam as a Fury aided and abetted by the press of the day during an era of yellow journalism. Miriam is as accomplished at giving press conferences as she is at seducing men, though her wiles eventually ensnare her. Others in the novel— Kitty and her children, Mamah airing her feminist views, the hopeless Wright—are depicted as mere pawns and victims of the press, whose sleazy reporters phone, knock on doors, stand in the rosebushes peering into living rooms, and circle the burning Taliesin like buzzards. Boyle’s representation of the press turns it into a kind of modern-day Greek chorus. Olgivanna might not seem to fit the mold of the mothering wife, but she becomes another variation on that theme. Like other immature older men, Wright trades in his

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aging wife for a younger woman, presumably because she is more attractive but also because he thinks he can dominate her and regain his youth with her. Olgivanna quickly becomes hardened and steel-willed, running Taliesin as like the Dragon Lady. Though not covered in the novel, those familiar with Wright’s story will know that the historical Olgivanna inherited his estate and remains. T. Coraghessan Boyle himself owns and lives in one of the California houses designed by Wright, the George C. Stewart house (1909). Boyle must have thought about Wright and considered him as a subject for a long time. The Women will likely not be read as a tribute to Wright, but it might help put Wright’s ghost to rest. A premonitory portrait of a genius, the novel offers insight and some consolation for everyone who is not. Harold Branam

Review Sources America 200, no. 10 (March 23, 2009): 30-32. Booklist 105, no. 5 (November 1, 2008): 5. Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 24 (December 15, 2008): 1266. Library Journal 133, no. 20 (December 1, 2008): 108. The New York Times, January 27, 2009, p. 1. The New York Times Book Review, February 1, 2009, p. 1. The New Yorker 85, no. 3 (March 2, 2009): 71. Publishers Weekly 255, no. 46 (November 17, 2008): 37-38. The Spectator 309, no. 9419 (March 7, 2009): 32-33. The Times Literary Supplement, March 6, 2009, p. 19. The Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2009, p. W8.

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WORLDS MADE BY WORDS Scholarship and Community in the Modern West Author: Anthony Grafton (1950) Publisher: Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass.). 422 pp. $29.95 Type of work: Essays Time: 1500-2008 A collection of essays concerning the nature and status of occidental scholarship, from the Renaissance to the present The New Yorker once featured a cartoon depicting a college professor attempting to describe his occupation to his daughter. As the little girl listens, the bespectacled father declares: “Daddy works in a magical, faraway land called Academia.” The image evokes laughter, inasmuch as artist David Sipress skillfully plays upon a widely held view of the scholar: someone who labors in the proverbial “ivory tower” of academic isolation. Anthony Grafton’s Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West belies this stereotype and makes it clear that scholarship is a matter of anything but isolation. Most contemporary scholars specialize in a particular subject area, have earned Ph.D.s by writing book-length works on original topics and defending them before committees of fellow scholars, and hope to achieve tenured teaching positions through significant research and publication. This is the traditional model of acquiring and disseminating knowledge, and it still flourishes in an age when information can be instantaneously transmitted anywhere. It is for this reason that Grafton’s book is so welcome. He seeks to understand where this model of scholarship came from and how it evolved into its current form. Grafton’s book is by no means a complete narrative of scholarship in the West. The study of the history and methodology of scholarship is a field so vast that it would require a multivolume series, rather than a single tome, even to begin to do it justice. To cite one example, Stephen M. North’s impressive The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (1987) takes four hundred pages to survey the subject of writing in the 1980’s, and this topic represents only one subset of the larger field of English studies. Worlds Made by Words comprises fifteen essays that illuminate the history of scholarship through a mixture of overview essays and articles on individuals. In chapters 1 through 9, which constitute the largest section of the book, Grafton explores the beginnings of modern European scholarship, a period lasting from about 1500 to the late 1700’s that has come to be known as the Republic of Letters. In the useful first chapter, “A Sketch Map of a Lost Continent,” Grafton outlines the origins and development of this phenomenon, which is also his own research specialty. Situating his

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discussion firmly in the political and social context of the time, Grafton makes one realize just how extraordinary a development the Republic of Letters actually was. At a time when Europe was distinguished by the impervious nature of its social structure, scholars enjoyed a kind of equality: In a world of sharp and well-defined social hierarchies—in which men and women wore formal costumes that graphically revealed their rank and occupation—its citizens insisted that they were all equal, and that any special fame that one of them might enjoy had been earned by his or her own efforts.

Although freemasonry is often credited with instilling a kind of nascent European egalitarianism, Grafton implies that the same can be said for the scholarly fraternity. It was no doubt this perceived sense of equality among members of the Republic of Letters that was responsible for the openness with which they dealt with their subject matter. While contemporary scholars only publish the positive results of their research, their intellectual forebears felt free to commit their failures, as well as their successes, to print. It is a lesson in humility that modern academics would do well to learn. One of the characteristics of these early modern scholars that drew them together was the fact that they all shared a thorough schooling in the classics: Greek, Latin, philosophy, logic, and history. It was the ubiquity of Latin in education that established it as the universal language in the Republic of Letters until the mid-seventeenth century, when Latin was supplanted by French. Even a towering figure such as Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), who formulated fundamental laws of gravitation, was firmly grounded in a classical syllabus and published his scientific investigations in Latin. Grafton also emphasizes the crucial fact that, unlike their modern counterparts, the scholars of this period were what he terms “generalists.” In a cross-fertilization of ideas largely absent in modern scholarship, even such specialists as theologians, physicians, and lawyers incorporated elements of the humanistic syllabus into their respective fields. Grafton could have elaborated on this point by noting that many individuals mastered multiple specialties, such as medicine and law, at an early age. Given the porous boundaries between the various disciplines at the time, it should come as little surprise that the Republic of Letters produced individuals fluent in, or even masters of, many areas of knowledge. The permeability of barriers even extended to the area of personal relationships. This was the period Anthony Grafton’s works include Forgers and Critics: Creativity and when such great intellectual centers as Prague, Duplicity in Western Scholarship Leiden, and Amsterdam gained fame, and (1990); Defenders of the Text: The one’s status as a scholar would be enhanced Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of by a visit to a noted figure at one of these citScience, 1450-1800 (1991); The ies. As long as the visitor had paid the necesFootnote: A Curious History (1997); sary intellectual dues by mastering the clasand Codex in Crisis (2008). He has sics, he or she could be assured of a warm won a Guggenheim Fellowship and the welcome as an equal in an age of inequality. Balzan Prize. The overall impression of Grafton’s descrip tion of the Republic of Letters is that of a self-

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sustaining, transnational community whose members were wholly wedded to an increasingly urbanized society. As is true of modern-day intellectuals, a member of Grafton’s borderless republic gained prestige through the moral support of scholars who were separated by vast distances. This fellowship was enhanced by the occasional visit by a scholar from a distant city, but in an age when transportation was primitive, scholars largely conversed through their correspondence. The lifeblood of any scholarly community, both in the early modern period and in contemporary academe, is a sustained, sophisticated form of communication. Worlds Made by Words convincingly argues for the existence of an active, cohesive intellectual community through what Grafton aptly terms “epistolary networks.” A letter during the Republic of Letters was a curious amalgam of expressions of close friendship and rigorous arguments, and Grafton’s impressive research has scoured thousands of such documents in numerous European archives. Long before air or even rail transportation, the Republic of Letters fostered “a new kind of virtual community” through the written word. Erasmus’s published correspondence, to cite only one example, numbers twelve volumes. His examination and reading of correspondence is the most valuable of Grafton’s many useful insights, for it demonstrates a close parallel between the intellectual world of the sixteenth century and that of the twenty-first. That current scholarship owes much to the Republic of Letters is evident in chapter 5, “Where was Salomon’s House?” It discusses Francis Bacon (1561-1626), a Renaissance polymath whose accomplishments included both British politics and philosophy. It was in this latter context that Bacon wrote of an imaginary ideal community in New Atlantis (1627). Previous writers had speculated along similar lines, with Thomas More’s De Optimo Reipublicae Statu, deque Nova Insula Utopia (1516; Utopia, 1551) being the most famous example. However, by Bacon’s time a fundamental change had occurred in the way scholars perceived reality. Their perceptions had come to be characterized by empirical reasoning, the practice of testing theories in the physical world. Bacon envisioned “a new kind of science: a collaborative, interdisciplinary enterprise designed to yield not theories of the traditional kinds, but operational knowledge: knowledge that afforded its possessors power over the natural world.” Grafton’s eloquent discussion of Bacon’s radical project is effective because it so vividly captures the radical nature of the philosopher’s ideas. At the time that Bacon wrote his utopian treatise, institutions of learning were largely devoted to the study of religion, law, and classical literature. It is clear from Grafton’s description that Bacon wanted to create a research facility devoted to science. In this ideal community, lofty towers would foster a systematic study of the atmosphere and the various forms of precipitation. Bacon envisioned a research institution that would intensify the level of communication between researchers: Rather than the sporadic activity generated by occasional letters or visits between geographically distant scholars, he projected an institution that would foster a more effective exchange by situating specialists in the same building. As Grafton astutely points out, Bacon’s plan eerily anticipates some of the problems associated with what has come to known as “Big Science.” Since Bacon

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correctly surmised that such large-scale enterprises would eclipse private financial resources, he advocated publicly funded research with the resulting information kept secret. Grafton’s lucid discussion of this obscure work yields precious insights about the nature of information acquisition that are relevant to contemporary society. Worlds Made by Words reveals elements of early modern scholarship that are both similar to and radically different from contemporary scholarship. On one hand, there is the case of Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). He, like Newton, gained fame for formulating fundamental physical laws while simultaneously pursuing other areas of learning that were subsequently discarded. For Kepler as well as many other scholars of his time, the ultimate intellectual challenge was a field known as chronology, a complicated subject that involved using textual analyses and astronomical information to re-create the calendar methods used throughout history. Grafton clearly knows this subject well. He smoothly elucidates the finer points of what later proved to be an intellectual dead end; however, Grafton convincingly argues for the importance of the means by which Kepler engaged in his research: the fusion of science and humanism. On the other hand, Grafton also correctly insists that early modern scholars still have much to teach their modern counterparts. In chapter 9, he compares the ways in which various early modern writers dealt with the Jewish tradition as it related to Christianity by evaluating works by two of his contemporary writers on the subject, Adam Sutcliffe and Maurice Olender. While praising the works of these fellow scholars, Grafton’s impressive knowledge of the Republic of Letters allows him to highlight the fact that some of the early humanists had more sensitive and nuanced views of Jewish tradition than Sutcliffe and Olender are willing to admit. Grafton’s final chapter is the most signficant: “Codex in Crisis: The Book Dematerializes” deals with the digital revolution as it relates to the field of scholarship. To his credit, Grafton does not simply recount the death of the card catalog in the library. He offers instead a précis of information-gathering and organization from the Library of Alexandria to the World Wide Web. Grafton praises the increased availability of information for the masses, even as he laments the reduced access to primary texts that is the sine qua non of advanced scholarship. True to his profession, Grafton stresses the need for discerning judgment in the organization of the virtual library and warns of the dangers of disseminating information on the Internet in the absence of adequate review. Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West is a fitting tribute to those who seek and produce knowledge. Cliff Prewencki

Review Sources The New York Review of Books 56, no. 8 (May 14, 2009): 45-47. Times Higher Education, April 16, 2009, p. 48-49. The Times Literary Supplement, July 17, 2009, p. 7-8. The Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2009, p. W8.

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WRITING THE RAPTURE Prophecy Fiction in Evangelical America Author: Crawford Gribben (1974) Publisher: Oxford University Press (New York). 258 pp. $29.95 Type of work: Literary history, religion, literary criticism Time: The twentieth and twenty-first centuries The first to discuss prophecy or “Rapture” novels in their historical context, this study offers insights into this branch of Christian literature and discusses its roots in the evangelical Christian tradition Principal personages: Joseph Birkbeck Burroughs, author of Titan, Son of Saturn (1905) Milton H. Stine, author of The Devil’s Bride (1910) Dayton A. Manker, author of They That Remain (1941) Sydney Watson (1847-c. 1918), evangelical novelist Joshua Hill Foster (1861-1947), evangelical novelist Frederick Albert Tatford (1901-1986), evangelical novelist Ernest W. Angley (b. 1921), evangelistic novelist Tim LaHaye (b. 1926), evangelist and writer Hal Lindsey (b. 1929), evangelical writer Pat Robertson (b. 1930), evangelist and writer Jerry B. Jenkins (b. 1949), evangelical novelist Frank Peretti (b. 1951), evangelical novelist

In Writing the Rapture, Crawford Gribben offers a serious examination of a recent literary phenomenon largely dismissed by academics, as well as by much of the reading public: novels that take as their central event or setting the Rapture, in which (in the evangelical interpretation) the righteous are taken bodily into Heaven and the rest of humanity is left behind on Earth. The evangelical novels in Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s Left Behind series enjoyed enormous popularity in the 1990’s, dominating best-seller lists and leading to highly lucrative media and merchandise franchising. The series inspired a number of derivative novels, novel series, spoofs, and commentaries and led some general publishing houses to embrace prophecy novels as a new marketing genre. In the 1990’s, the series’ remarkable success appeared to reflect the cultural mainstreaming of evangelical Christianity within the United States, where evangelical movements had been seen as occupying a fringe status during much of the preceding century. Among the reading public, the general impression has prevailed that the Left Behind series, which began with Left Behind (1995), was offering a new kind of entertainment. Gribben responds to that misapprehension by documenting the early appear-

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ance and even popularity of prophecy novels in the years before World War I. Gribben notes that most early prophecy novels seem to have been written by Americans, including Titan, Son of Saturn (1905), by Joseph Birkbeck Burroughs; Judgment Day (1910), by Joshua Hill Foster; and The Devil’s Bride (1910), by Milton H. Stine. In his historical discussions, Gribben identifies numerous areas in which fictional conventions are established that are adopted or followed by prophecy novels of more recent years. He also notes, in discussing those later novels, ways in which they acknowledge their debts to their predecessors. Several prophecy novelists have been evangelist preachers, and Gribben discusses the development of evangelical Christianity, specifically chronicling changes in American evangelism and fundamentalism. He usefully identifies moments in history that provoked changes in those sets of beliefs, such as the Scopes trial of 1925 and the foundation of Israel in 1948. This analysis may help readers understand the “historicism” of those prophecy novelists who believed that some prophesied events had already occurred. Gribben’s depiction of the shifting and malleable nature of evangelical beliefs in the twentieth century lends credibility to his arguments that prophecy novels, by introducing nontraditional elements into the story of the Christian millennium, have altered the course of American evangelical Christianity. Important in modern evangelical history is the shift of emphasis from postmillennialism to premillennialism, movements in which the “post” and “pre” refer to the time of Christ’s second coming relative to the Christian millennium. Prophecy novelists have embraced premillennialism of a sort identified by theologians as “dispensationalism,” in which a “secret rapture” preceded the millennium. To judge from Gribben’s accounts, this dispensational premillennialism and the prophecy novel genre have developed hand-in-hand. Writing the Rapture’s focus upon American evangelical novels does not prevent Gribben from identifying important influences from abroad. Of particular importance in his analysis are the works of British author Sydney Watson, who published the first series of prophecy novels in the 1910’s. Watson’s trilogy comprising Scarlet and Purple (1913), The Mark of the Beast (1915), and In the Twinkling of an Eye (1916) was distributed widely in England and America, and it enjoyed a long-lived popularity among Christian readers. Watson’s series established several standard conventions of the prophecy novel. As Gribben points out, Watson even used the phrase “left behind.” What may have proved most pivotal about Watson’s series, however, was the decision he made in choosing to employ a form of entertainment traditionally rejected by those who held sacred the subjects of the Rapture and the millennium in order to address those very subjects. In other words, Watson decided to write fiction to entertain and edify those who rejected fiction. Gribben skillfully presents the many ironies of the literary history he traces. The

Crawford Gribben, the author of several books on Irish and Scottish literature and religious history, is founder of an annual millennial studies conference. He has taught at the University of Manchester and is Long Room Hub Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Print Culture at Trinity College, Dublin.

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opening irony, in which a new genre of fiction appears within an antifiction religious tradition, is neatly matched by the ending irony, which only one who undertook a comprehensive reading of these novels might have perceived. One of the key dramatic elements of the novels involves the larger society’s puzzled response to the disappearance of those who have undergone the Rapture. In the aftermath of the massive popular acceptance of the Left Behind series, however, novelists have found it increasingly difficult to portray a society that would witness the Rapture and not immediately have an idea of what had occurred. Gribben identifies attempts by recent novelists to reimagine an America where the Left Behind series was never published, in order to maintain dramatic possibilities. As he notes, the prophecy novel’s success has come at some cost. These novels have depended structurally upon the notion that there is a community of true believers existing at the fringe of society. With dispensational premillennialism being perceived as now having moved into the American mainstream, that notion becomes less tenable. Gribben notes early in Writing the Rapture that a common premillennialist expectation is that forces of decay will grow in influence as the millennium approaches. In the 1990’s, in contrast, the premillennialists themselves grew in influence on a massive scale. Gribben likewise addresses the irony that fundamentalist Christianity, which arose in opposition to modernist social activism, reversed itself and adopted a strongly social-activist stance, especially after Hal Lindsey’s evangelistic The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) became a record nonfiction best seller. Although Gribben leaves it unstated, he makes clear another irony by discussing the emphasis Lindsey placed upon the year 1988 for the Rapture. As he notes, the crisis moment for evangelical broadcasters Oral Roberts, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggart fell immediately before and during 1988. The year must have presented a crisis of credibility to Lindsey himself as well. Gribben at several points issues cautions as to the completeness of his survey, in part because he suspects novels published during earlier decades have evaded his discovery. The gap left between World War I and World War II seems especially pronounced, although Gribben does mention the secular disaster novel Deluge (1927), by Sidney Fowler Wright (1874-1965), and also notes that Watson’s novels were reprinted in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Given the great many novels published in the wake of the Left Behind series, Gribben likewise feels cautious about claiming that his survey of contemporary novels is complete. While Gribben several times points to connections with science fiction and the disaster novel, he might have bolstered his case for the venerability of the prophecy novel by citing the celestial-disaster strand within the wonder-story tradition, which stretches from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839) and “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841) to H. G. Wells’s “The Star” (1897). These works were contemporaneous with some of the millennialist expository writings Gribben identifies. The Wells story is structurally close to the prophecy novels discussed in Writing the Rapture, even if its narrative makes reference to scientific rather than religious understanding.

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Gribben is orderly in his presentation, often introducing a group of novels in survey fashion before turning his attention to each title individually, examining the elements of those novels in terms of their literary and also evangelical traditions, and sometimes offering biographical insight into the prophecy novelists’ lives. Although theological terms sometimes may cluster too thickly for nonscholarly readers, Gribben is clear in his definitions. He also appends a useful glossary of such terms at the end of his study. Since he is writing within a scholarly tradition, however, the book inevitably offers some obstacles to average readers. Many will understand Gribben when he speaks of a “literal hermeneutic” with relation to the Bible, but they may draw a blank, for instance, at the word “soteriology,” which appears several times without obvious clarification. Gribben, who was raised within the Plymouth Brethren tradition, makes an obvious effort to provide a balanced perspective on the history he presents. Although he has moved outside the Brethren, he is able to portray aspects of evangelical and fundamentalist history and thinking with sympathy, and he intelligently discusses evangelical and fundamentalist opposition to religious modernism. He does point to aspects of these novels that should and do cause concern outside the Christian evangelical community, although for some readers these points might seem insufficiently underlined. Gribben’s approach emphasizes the historical place of the novels under examination, rather than the history of the novels’ critical response. All the same, that some of these novels point specifically toward the use of nuclear weaponry by religious fringe-groups against secular threats seems to cry out for more pointed critical questioning or commentary. Gribben raises questions concerning the ethical and moral dimensions of a fiction that may depict murder as religiously justified under the conditions of the Christian tribulation or millennium, in part because some of the novelists themselves have been forced to grapple with this issue. Although his critical response in even this area may seem muted, this impression is likely due to the fact that his focus lies upon the task at hand, of presenting information about the prophecy-novel tradition that most of his readers will not possess. A sharply critical response is also implicit, to a degree, in Gribben’s apparent desire to spread knowledge and understanding of these novels’ content. That Gribben’s study is partly motivated by a desire to determine what ethical stances are taken by prophecy novels is evident in his consistent concern with depicted attitudes toward other groups, especially Jews and Roman Catholics. He cites many instances of apparent or real anti-Semitism and chronicles changing attitudes toward Catholicism through time. Since Gribben observes that the genre arose out of an Anglo-Saxon evangelical community that feared contamination by immigrants and even “halfbreeds,” his attention to these matters constitutes more than a minor strand of his historical narrative. Gribben’s study is commendable for its clear descriptions of the early development and later phenomenonal success of fictional depictions of the Rapture. It undertakes the complicated task of placing the novels against the backdrop of American evangelical and fundamentalist traditions, maintaining a balance of perspectives

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throughout. Whether or not he is correct about the novels’ best-seller status indicating the mainstreaming of dispensational premillennialism, it is undoubtedly true that the prophecy genre has become part of the American literary profile. Mark Rich

Review Source H-Pentecostalism: H-Net Reviews, October, 2009.

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THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD Author: Margaret Atwood (1939) Publisher: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday (New York). 431 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The near future Locale: An unnamed city in North America A companion volume to 2003’s Oryx and Crake, this novel tells the stories of two women who survive a pandemic induced by corporate greed and environmental destruction Principal characters: Adam One, the leader of the religious cult God’s Gardeners Toby, a woman who joins God’s Gardeners after they rescue her from an abusive man Ren, a worker in a sex club who lived with God’s Gardeners as a child Amanda, an artist and Ren’s childhood friend Glenn (later known as Crake), a God’s Gardener sympathizer Jimmy, Ren’s high school boyfriend and Glenn’s friend

Margaret Atwood’s dystopic novel The Year of the Flood is horrifying and wickedly funny, often at the same time. Most readers will find their greatest fear for society realized in the world of the novel, whether it is global warming, species destruction, out-of-control corporate greed, an entrenched gap between the rich and poor, religious fundamentalism at its extreme, rampant crime, or a global pandemic. Atwood terms her novels set in the future “speculative fiction” rather than science fiction. They explore what would happen if events followed a certain trajectory based on what is currently possible. In The Year of the Flood, the future that results is in most ways much worse than the present. The likelihood of so many things actually going so badly is slim, but the setting enables Atwood to satirize aspects of current society ranging from religion to capitalism to environmentalism. Despite the story’s sensational events, including a pandemic that kills all but a handful of people, Atwood’s development of the personal narratives of Toby and Ren is her novel’s most compelling feature. Each woman believes, for most of the novel, that she is the only person to survive the sickness. The plot alternates between scenes from the women’s lives after the pandemic and flashbacks to their earlier lives. The scenes told from Toby’s viewpoint are narrated in the third person, but the scenes from Ren’s viewpoint are narrated in the first person. This strategy gives readers multiple ways to understand the story. Toby is older and is analytical about her experiences. Ren is a young woman at the time of the pandemic, and her observations are often direct but do not always demonstrate a deep understanding about what

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happens around her. Gradually, readers learn from their two stories what led to the pandemic and why these women were saved. Only near the end of the novel do Toby and Ren discover each other, as well as other survivors. The Year of the Flood retells the story of Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake (2003) from different perspectives. The earlier novel focused on Glenn and Jimmy and on Glenn’s creation of a new, ideal human species and Margaret Atwood has written more his bioengineering of the plague that wipes than forty books of fiction, poetry, and out most people on the planet. The main char- critical essays, including The acters in The Year of the Flood are bystanders Handmaid’s Tale (1985); The Blind reacting to events and situations as they oc- Assassin (2000), which won the Booker cur. Prize; and Alias Grace (1996), which Before the pandemic, the characters live in won the Giller Prize and the Premio a society in which wealthy people live in Mondello. gated corporate compounds and others live in the “pleeblands,” where laws are no longer enforced and CorpSeCorps, a police force paid for by the corporations, acts in its own interests. Corporate greed runs rampant. CorpSeCorps targets are likely to be ground up to provide meat for the Secret Burger fast food chain. The HelthWyzer corporation tries experimental drugs on unsuspecting consumers or intentionally spreads illnesses so that consumers will purchase HelthWyzer’s drugs to cure those illnesses. Many species in Atwood’s world have become extinct because the environment has eroded. In their place, the corporations have bioengineered new species. These include the rakunk, a cross between a raccoon and a skunk; the mo’hair, a sheep with human hair in colors such as silver, blue, and purple; and the pigoon, a pig with human brain tissue. The most alarming animal, the liobam, was created by a religious extremist group: A cross between a lion and a lamb, the gentle-looking but deadly animal was designed to show that, not only can the lion lie down with the lamb, but the two species can also coexist in the same body. These satirical embodiments of corporate greed and religious extremism provide opportunities for humor. For example, the bioengineered sheep are useful for hair replacements, which look great so long as the wearer does not mind smelling like mutton when it rains. Overall, tampering with nature is presented as a bad idea. One of the germs developed to create a need for medicines gets out of hand and kills almost everyone on the planet. In fact, all uses of science and technology turn out either to be ill-intended or to have bad effects. In addition to damaging the planet and human health, the corporations’ power shows the dangers of capitalism gone awry. Because Ren lives in one of the walled compounds for corporate families during part of her childhood, readers learn about

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the comfort and privilege the compounds’ residents enjoy. Ren has a pretty bedroom with a closet full of stuffed animals. She attends high school. For the most part, her life in the compound is much like those of upper-middle-class children in current North America. Toby and Ren both belong, for a time, to God’s Gardeners, who treat environmentalism as a religion. The Gardeners rescue Toby from her boss Blanco at Secret Burger. The fast-food chain is run by gangsters whose victims become meals. Blanco has a history of dating employees and then killing them when he gets tired of them. Toby eventually gains a leadership position with the Gardeners, although she never fully embraces their doctrine. Ren joins the Gardeners as a child. Her mother joins because she falls in love with Zeb, one of the leaders. She later takes Ren and returns to their corporate compound when she decides to return to her husband. Although the Gardeners are a saner and more likeable alternative to the corporations, their environmental and religious extremism are an easy target for Atwood’s satire. They squat in abandoned buildings and keep bees and grow food at their Edencliff Rooftop Garden. Their leader is called Adam One, and the other members of the leadership group are all called Adam or Eve with a number. They worship as saints such environmentalists as Euell Gibbons and Dian Fossey. Their rituals include atrociously bad hymns. Atwood researched hymns extensively, using sources ranging from the poetry of William Blake to well-known hymnals. She successfully evokes these loftier sources while making the selections she includes from The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook absurdly silly. The Gardeners echo some current fundamentalist religious groups by wearing unfashionable clothing that makes them easy to identify in a crowd. While their knowledge of plants helps them produce food, some of the Gardeners use that knowledge to stay stoned most of the time, evoking a stereotype of environmentalist hippies. The Gardeners refer to members who spend most of their time too stoned to participate in normal activities as “fallow.” One of the Gardeners even runs a business (without the consent of the group) growing highly potent marijuana in his apartment. Like many religious and environmental groups that predict the Earth’s destruction, the Gardeners’ prophecies warn of a “waterless flood” that will wipe out much of humanity. To prepare, they hide food and other supplies in caches they call “Ararats,” named after the mountain where Noah’s Ark came to rest. It turns out that they are right about the flood, but, as Toby learns once she becomes an Eve, the prophecy may have derived from insider knowledge rather than divine inspiration. The Adams and Eves have computers that they use only within a hidden room and have connections inside the corporations. Atwood even satirizes attitudes toward higher education and the professions for which it qualifies students. Academically talented students from the corporate compounds study science at the Watson-Crick Institute, but their less successful peers enroll in humanities courses at the dilapidated Martha Graham Academy. As she does in much of her other work, Atwood scrutinizes gender roles in The

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Year of the Flood. For the most part, the novel’s gender roles extend current stereotypes. Within the corporations, most of the scientists are men. The women shop and seek beauty treatments. Outside the corporations, male violence is expected and even glorified. Toby’s boss Blanco beats and rapes her. Ren, once she is an adult, takes a job at the Scales and Tails club. The women dress to look like birds or reptiles, and they perform for the guests on trapezes. Ren survives the plague because she is locked in an isolation room to make sure she is not infected after a client bites through her biofilm suit. The most violent men end up in prison, where they play games of “painball.” They remain on teams until they are killed or, in rare instances, escape. Fans watching on television choose favorites and gamble on the sport. Toby’s former boss Blanco ends up in the painball prison. He survives the plague, and he and another painballer continue chasing Toby. Meanwhile, as a remedy to the problems in malefemale relations, Glenn—a minor character in this novel but a major one in Oryx and Crake—designs a new human species. These new people mate only when the female comes into season. When she is “blue,” she chooses four men with whom to mate. Humor and satire are not the only features that keep The Year of the Flood from being extremely grim. In fact, the novel depicts a world in which kindness and love make survival possible. The most important friendships are between women. Ren’s childhood friend Amanda travels a long distance to rescue her from the room where she is locked when the waterless plague strikes. Toby helps Ren find Amanda after the escaped painballers abduct her. The novel ends with some of the last surviving humans sitting around a campfire. Toby and Ren have tied up the painballers, who sit with them. Amanda is also there but is weak and upset. Jimmy, Ren’s high school boyfriend whom she cannot stop thinking about, is also at the campfire but is so badly injured that he does not recognize her or seem to know where he is. The survivors hear the members of the new race coming toward them, singing. This ending leaves many questions about who will survive and what the resolution will be. Members of the new species have told Toby and Ren that they can cure Jimmy by singing, so perhaps he will recover. The likelihood that Blanco can be reformed after pursuing Toby for years is slim, but his fate is left uncertain as the painballers may escape or die. In the biblical story of Noah, the animals that Noah saved on his ark went forth to repopulate the Earth, but the chance of the three men and three women sitting by the campfire following that example seems remote. The main characters have left the Gardeners’ Eden, which was anything but innocent and idyllic, and have survived the great flood, but Atwood has not yet revealed whether the world cleansed by the flood is better or worse than the one that came before it. She has left herself the option of writing another novel that answers these questions. Until that occurs, readers can speculate as to what utopian or dystopian world these characters might create. Joan Hope

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Review Sources Booklist 105, no. 21 (July 1, 2009): 9. The Christian Science Monitor, September 26, 2009, p. Books 25. Kirkus Reviews 77, no. 15 (August 1, 2009): 24. Library Journal 134, no. 13 (August 1, 2009): 62. London Review of Books 31, no. 17 (September 10, 2009): 7-8. Ms. 19, no. 3 (Summer, 2009): 43. The Nation 289, no. 14 (November 2, 2009): 25-32. New Scientist 203, no. 2726 (September 19, 2009): 50. New Statesman 138, no. 4967 (September 21, 2009): 50-51. The New York Review of Books 56, no. 17 (November 5, 2009): 10-13. The New York Times, September 22, 2009, p. 1. The New York Times, September 15, 2009, p. 1. The New York Times Book Review, September 20, 2009, p. 1. The New Yorker 85, no. 30 (September 28, 2009): 79. Publishers Weekly 256, no. 29 (July 20, 2009): 119. The Spectator 311, no. 9447 (September 19, 2009): 42. The Times Literary Supplement, September 18, 2009, p. 19-20. The Village Voice 54, no. 51 (December 16, 2009): 35. The Wall Street Journal, September 18, 2009, p. A21.

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ZEITOUN Author: Dave Eggers (1970) Publisher: McSweeney’s Books (San Francisco). Illustrated. 351 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Current affairs Time: August 26, 2005-fall, 2008 Locale: New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Hunt Correctional Center, Louisiana; Phoenix, Arizona Eggers recounts the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his family, who were caught up in Hurricane Katrina, and the role of various governmental agencies in turning their lives into a nightmare in the storm’s aftermath Principal personages: Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian American painting contractor in New Orleans Kathy, his wife of eleven years Nademah, Aisha, and Safiya, their three daughters Zachary, Kathy’s son from an earlier marriage Ahmad, Zeitoun’s brother, a ship captain living in Spain Yuko, Kathy’s childhood friend living in a suburb outside Phoenix Nasser Dayoob, another immigrant from Syria living in New Orleans

Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun is a frightening book, telling a story of terrible and unexpected consequences of the terrorist threat to the United States. An immigrant from Syria, Abdulrahman Zeitoun in 2005 had lived and worked in the United States for seventeen years, the last eleven in New Orleans. Through hard work, he built a successful business, “Zeitoun A. Painting Contractor LLC,” as the logo on his old truck read. With his wife Kathy handling the office and administrative owrk, Zeitoun had multiple job sites in the city. Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun and their three daughters, plus Kathy’s son, lived together in their two-story house on Dart Street. The Zeitouns also owned a combined office-warehouse space, as well as six rental properties with eighteen tenants. Then, Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana. Kathy fled with the children, first to a sister’s house in Baton Rouge and then to the home of a childhood friend in a suburb of Phoenix. Zeitoun stubbornly refused to leave. He had properties to watch over, he told his wife, and their home would be safer if he was there to patch holes and fix leaks. When the levees failed, Zeitoun carried valuables to the second story of their house and waited out the storm. Soon, he was sleeping on the roof in a tent and paddling around the city in an old canoe. He helped rescue others who remained in the city and needed help, and he fed dogs that were abandoned by their owners. He ran

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into other people who stayed behind and were helping one another, and they converted a Zeitoun property on Claiborne Street that was not flooded and had a working phone into a small emergency center. “He had never felt such urgency and purpose,” Eggers relates. Eggers tells this story from the perspectives of Zeitoun and Kathy, as they live through the hurricane and struggle to survive and to stay in touch with each other. As the drama builds, Eggers fills in their backgrounds: Zeitoun grew up in a small coastal town in Syria in a large, high-achieving family; many of the more than a dozen photographs in the book are of this family. He worked for ten years on ships (starting out serving under his older brother Ahmad), ended in Houston, stayed in the United States, and eventually moved to New Orleans. Kathy is thirteen years younger than Zeitoun, was raised a Southern Baptist in Baton Rouge, converted to Islam, and met and married Zeitoun. Theirs is an American success story, of people living out their dreams through a commitment to marriage, family, and career. Eggers’s story of Katrina and the people it affected takes more than half the book, and then the real tragedy strikes—not the natural disaster but the humanmade one that immediately follows. Zeitoun and the three friends who have been helping him are picked up at the Claiborne house by half a dozen police and military personnel and hustled to the New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal. They are thrown into outdoor cells made of chain-link fences topped by razor wire set up in the station parking lot. No one explains why they are being held, but their civil rights are immediately suspended, and they are not even allowed to make phone calls. They are accused of being looters, but, more important, because of the Syrian-born Zeitoun and Nasser, they are suspected of being terrorists. After several days in these cages—where Zeitoun cannot sleep on the filthy pavement and where they are fed meals he cannot eat because they contain pork products—they are moved to the Hunt Correctional Center, forty miles north of New Orleans. There, the abuse continues. Zeitoun and Nasser are put in a six-by-eight foot cell, and Zeitoun, who is now suffering from several medical problems, is not allowed to see a doctor. The book is divided into five parts, and Zeitoun disappears from the third and middle section, as his ordeal is occurring. In this section, readers have access to the Zeitouns’ story only from Kathy’s point of view, as she grows increasingly frantic trying to locate her husband. All she can think of are the twenty-eight thousand weapons that have been rushed into New Orleans with National Guard, Blackwater, and other police and military units, and all she can imagine is her husband shot and dying anonymously in some jail or hospital. Part 4 of the book begins thirty pages later, as Eggers picks up Zeitoun’s story, and readers learn what has happened to him after the end of part 2 during his arrest and incarceration. Zeitoun is finally interviewed by Department of Homeland Security personnel at

Dave Eggers is the founder and editor of McSweeney’s publishing house and cofounder of 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for kids. He is the author of five books, including A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) and What Is the What (2006).

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the Hunt Correctional Center, but it becomes increasingly clear that, in the chaos after Katrina, no one is responsible: “You’re not our prisoner,” guards at Hunt tell him; “You’re FEMA’s problem.” Zeitoun realizes that there is “something broken in the country.” This fourth section ends with further frustrations, as a hearing for Zeitoun is scheduled and then canceled without explanation, and character witnesses whom Kathy and a lawyer have gathered are dismissed. Kathy is finally reunited with her husband three hundred pages into Zeitoun. He has lost twenty pounds, and he looks to her after his twenty-three-day ordeal like a sad old man. Part 5 brings whatever closure can be found in a tragedy such as this. It is the fall of 2008, three years after the hurricane, but Kathy is still suffering from multiple medical complaints, including loss of memory. Her medical tests indicate that she is a victim of post-traumatic stress disorder. The worst part of the ordeal, she says, was after she knew Zeitoun was alive at Hunt Correctional Center—a missionary delivering Bibles to cells took her phone number from Zeitoun and called her—but was not allowed to see him or even know where a court hearing might be held. It was being told by an unknown woman on the telephone that the hearing’s site was private information that did the most damage. Zeitoun’s problems do not stop when he is released. A Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailer is delivered to the family’s house, but it sits unused for months because the agency fails to deliver either keys to unlock it or steps to access the entrance. Finally, the trailer is carted away unused. Zeitoun returns to work, but Kathy works less now. The couple has a son, Ahmad, named after Zeitoun’s brother in Spain. His brother worked hard to find him while Zeitoun was missing, sending e-mails around the world trying to locate him and then helping Kathy free him. The family’s business is back on its feet, and Zeitoun and his crews have restored 114 New Orleans homes. Legal relief for Zeitoun’s treatment proves elusive, however. Lawsuits go nowhere, police officers who arrested Zeitoun claim no responsibility for what later happened to him, and Zeitoun cannot even get his wallet back from the authorities at the Amtrak station. It is being held as evidence, an assistant district attorney tells him. He will not explain what it is evidence of, however. Eggers intrudes very little into his account for he knows that it speaks for itself. It is clear that no one person is to blame: “Zeitoun’s ordeal was caused instead by systemic ignorance and malfunction.” Zeitoun was arrested because he was a Middle Easterner; because the United States was still in a security and cultural posture shaped by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; and because the federal government treated Katrina as if it were—or could become—a terrorist attack. In Phoenix, Kathy heard President George W. Bush compare the storm to the September 11 attacks and the war on terror in his weekly radio address. In such a hysterical atmosphere, rumor and confusion naturally follow. Government fanboats sped by Zeitoun’s waves for help, and soldiers ignored his warnings about other stranded residents. News accounts fueled racist assumptions about murders in the city; even the chief of police claimed on national television that babies were being raped in the Superdome, where thousands of people sought shelter

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during the flooding. While Zeitoun and the others were being held in the chain-link cages at the Passenger Terminal, they realized from the new materials that officials must have been making plans for the building of this makeshift prison within a day of the storm. The complex and difficult job of constructing and staffing these outdoor cells, which would eventually hold more than twelve hundred men and women, “was completed while residents of New Orleans were trapped in attics and begging for rescue from rooftops and highway overpasses.” Hundreds of cases of water and prepared meals were delivered to the guards and their prisoners, while city residents nearby were fighting for food and water. The government’s focus on terrorists warped everyone’s sense of values in this natural disaster. Zeitoun’s tragedy, given the federal mind-set, was inevitable. As Mark Twain wrote, in one of Eggers’s epigraphs to the book, “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The final ten pages of appendixes in the book explain much, and they offer a glimmer of hope. The first appendix describes the Zeitoun Foundation, an organization founded in 2009 by the Zeitoun family, the author, and the publisher to help rebuild New Orleans and “to promote respect for human rights in the United States and around the world.” Eggers lists ten nonprofit organizations that were the first recipients of grants generated by the sale of Zeitoun. These include Rebuilding Together, which rehabilitates houses of low-income homeowners, and the Green Project, which sells building materials salvaged in the New Orleans area. In his acknowledgments section, Eggers lists the people he and the Zeitouns want to thank, the books and articles that were crucial to his project, and the agencies and organizations that provided necessary information. Finally, in a note on process and methodology, Eggers describes how the book came about: A team of volunteers from Voice of Witness—a McSweeney’s book series that uses oral history to highlight human rights crises— produced Voices from the Storm (2005), and the Zeitoun story in that book struck Eggers. He gathered research and interviews and wrote the book over the next three years. Zeitoun is a straightforward account with a compelling momentum to it, and Eggers wisely lets the story tell itself. However, Eggers is, among his many roles, a novelist, and the style of the book reflects his concern for language. In particular, readers will notice persistent animal imagery: Dogs are everywhere, barking in hunger, floating dead in the floodwaters, and even guarding the cages at the bus station ironically nicknamed Camp Greyhound. Zeitoun and the other prisoners are caged and treated as though they were animals. In the most horrific image of the book, after his release Zeitoun returns to find the dogs he had been feeding waiting by the windows for his next visit, dead of starvation. The line between men and animals, Eggers suggests, is very thin. Zeitoun wonders early in the book why Americans sometimes fall short of their ideal. Zeitoun is evidence of how American democracy—with the help of dedicated people and organizations—can periodically right itself. David Peck

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Review Sources American Heritage 59, no. 4 (Winter, 2010): 98. Library Journal 135, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 63. The New York Times Book Review, August 16, 2009, p. 1. The New Yorker 85, no. 26 (August 31, 2009): 79. People 72, no. 10 (September 7, 2009): 56. The Sunday Times (London), August 23, 2009, p. 19. The Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2009, p. W7.


BIOGRAPHICAL WORKS BY SUBJECT

2010 D’AUBIGNÉ, FRANÇOISE Secret Wife of Louis XIV, The (Buckley), 696 DARWIN, CHARLES Angels and Ages (Gopnik), 20 Darwin’s Sacred Cause (Desmond and Moore), 160 DESALVO, LOUISE On Moving (DeSalvo), 584 DIRAC, PAUL Strangest Man, The (Farmelo), 764

ACHEBE, CHINUA Education of a British-Protected Child, The (Achebe), 196 ALDRIN, BUZZ Magnificent Desolation (Aldrin and Abraham), 512 ARMSTRONG, LOUIS Pops (Teachout), 644 BANKS, JOSEPH Age of Wonder, The (Holmes), 6 BARTHELME, DONALD Hiding Man (Daugherty), 294 BECKETT, SAMUEL Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940, The (Beckett), 457 BONAPARTE, PAULINE Pauline Bonaparte (Fraser), 634 BOWES, MARY ELEANOR Wedlock (Moore), 868 BRANDEIS, LOUIS Louis D. Brandeis (Urofsky), 498 BRENT, JONATHAN Inside the Stalin Archives (Brent), 369 BURNS, ROBERT Bard, The (Crawford), 54 BYRON, LORD Age of Wonder, The (Holmes), 6

ENGELS, FRIEDRICH Marx’s General (Hunt), 522 FARADAY, MICHAEL Age of Wonder, The (Holmes), 6 GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, GABRIEL Gabriel García Márquez (Martin), 256 GIBSON, MARGARET DUNLOP Sisters of Sinai, The (Soskice), 721 HAJRATWALA, MINAL Leaving India (Hajratwala), 447 HELPRIN, MARK Digital Barbarism (Helprin), 180 HOWE, FANNY Winter Sun, The (Howe), 893

CARVER, RAYMOND Raymond Carver (Sklenicka), 667 CHEEVER, JOHN Cheever (Bailey), 120 CHIANG KAI-SHEK Generalissimo, The (Taylor), 265 COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR Age of Wonder, The (Holmes), 6

IRVING, HENRY Strange Eventful History, A (Holroyd), 760 KARR, MARY Lit (Karr), 470 KENNEDY, EDWARD M. True Compass (Kennedy), 829 929

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2010 SEEGER, PETE Protest Singer, The (Wilkinson), 658 SHELLEY, MARY Age of Wonder, The (Holmes), 6 SHELLEY, PERCY BYSSHE Age of Wonder, The (Holmes), 6 STONE, I. F. American Radical (Guttenplan), 15

KIPLING, RUDYARD Kipling Sahib (Allen), 410 KOESTLER, ARTHUR Koestler (Scammell), 415 LEWIS, AGNES SMITH Sisters of Sinai, The (Soskice), 721 LINCOLN, ABRAHAM A. Lincoln (White), 1 Angels and Ages (Gopnik), 20 LISPECTOR, CLARICE Why This World (Moser), 883 LUKACS, JOHN Last Rites (Lukacs), 433

TERRY, ELLEN Strange Eventful History, A (Holroyd), 760 TILLMAN, PAT Where Men Win Glory (Krakauer), 878 TROTSKY, LEON Trotsky (Patenaude), 824

NIYIZONKIZA, DEOGRATIAS Strength in What Remains (Kidder), 768 O’CONNOR, FLANNERY Flannery (Gooch), 242

WALDMAN, AYELET Bad Mother (Waldman), 50 WASHINGTON, BOOKER T. Up from History (Norrell), 843 WITTGENSTEIN, KARL House of Wittgenstein, The (Waugh), 322 WITTGENSTEIN, KONRAD House of Wittgenstein, The (Waugh), 322 WITTGENSTEIN, LUDWIG House of Wittgenstein, The (Waugh), 322 WITTGENSTEIN, PAUL House of Wittgenstein, The (Waugh), 322

PARK, MUNGO Age of Wonder, The (Holmes), 6 PRICE, REYNOLDS Ardent Spirits (Price), 33 RASKIN, JONAH Field Days (Raskin), 237 RHYS, JEAN Blue Hour, The (Pizzichini), 81 ROBINSON, SUGAR RAY Sweet Thunder (Haygood), 778 ROOSEVELT, THEODORE Wilderness Warrior, The (Brinkley), 888

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CATEGORY INDEX

2010 AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIRS, DIARIES, and LETTERS . . . BIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . CURRENT AFFAIRS and SOCIAL ISSUES . . . . . . . . ECONOMICS . . . . . . . . . . . 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 . . . . . . . . SCIENCE, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, and MEDICINE . . . . . . . . . . . SOCIOLOGY, ARCHAEOLOGY, and ANTHROPOLOGY . . . . . . TRAVEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . WOMEN’S ISSUES . . . . . . . . . .

. . 931 . . 931 . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

932 932 932 932 932 933 933 934 934

934 934 934 935 935 935 935 935

True Compass (Kennedy), 829 Winter Sun, The (Howe), 893

ANTHROPOLOGY. See SOCIOLOGY, ARCHAEOLOGY, and ANTHROPOLOGY

BIOGRAPHY. See also LITERARY BIOGRAPHY A. Lincoln (White), 1 Age of Wonder, The (Holmes), 6 American Radical (Guttenplan), 15 Angels and Ages (Gopnik), 20 Bard, The (Crawford), 54 Darwin’s Sacred Cause (Desmond and Moore), 160 Generalissimo, The (Taylor), 265 House of Wittgenstein, The (Waugh), 322 Leaving India (Hajratwala), 447 Louis D. Brandeis (Urofsky), 498 Marx’s General (Hunt), 522 Nine Lives (Baum), 574 Pauline Bonaparte (Fraser), 634 Pops (Teachout), 644 Protest Singer, The (Wilkinson), 658 Secret Wife of Louis XIV, The (Buckley), 696 Sisters of Sinai, The (Soskice), 721 Strange Eventful History, A (Holroyd), 760

ARCHAEOLOGY. See SOCIOLOGY, ARCHAEOLOGY, and ANTHROPOLOGY AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIRS, DIARIES, and LETTERS Ardent Spirits (Price), 33 Bad Mother (Waldmean), 50 Digital Barbarism (Helprin), 180 Education of a British-Protected Child, The (Achebe), 196 Field Days (Raskin), 237 Inside the Stalin Archives (Brent), 369 Last Rites (Lukacs), 433 Leaving India (Hajratwala), 447 Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940, The (Beckett), 457 Lit (Karr), 470 Magnificent Desolation (Aldrin and Abraham), 512 On Moving (DeSalvo), 584 931

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2010 ENVIRONMENT. See NATURE, NATURAL HISTORY, and the ENVIRONMENT

Strangest Man, The (Farmelo), 764 Strength in What Remains (Kidder), 768 Sweet Thunder (Haygood), 778 Trotsky (Patenaude), 824 Up from History (Norrell), 843 Wedlock (Moore), 868 Where Men Win Glory (Krakauer), 878 Wilderness Warrior, The (Brinkley), 888

ESSAYS Digging (Baraka), 175 Education of a British-Protected Child, The (Achebe), 196 Manhood for Amateurs (Chabon), 517 Shop Class as Soulcraft (Crawford), 706 Worlds Made by Words (Grafton), 907

CURRENT AFFAIRS and SOCIAL ISSUES Antelope’s Strategy, The (Hatzfeld), 24 Defend the Realm (Andrew), 166 Digital Barbarism (Helprin), 180 Eating Animals (Foer), 192 Face on Your Plate, The (Masson), 233 Horse Soldiers (Stanton), 308 House of Cards (Cohan), 313 In the President’s Secret Service (Kessler), 358 Inside the Stalin Archives (Brent), 369 Nine Lives (Baum), 574 One State, Two States (Morris), 608 Question of Command, A (Moyar), 662 Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (Caldwell), 676 Snakehead, The (Keefe), 734 Strength in What Remains (Kidder), 768 When China Rules the World (Jacques), 873 Where Men Win Glory (Krakauer), 878 Zeitoun (Eggers), 921

ETHICS and LAW Antelope’s Strategy, The (Hatzfeld), 24 Eating Animals (Foer), 192 Face on Your Plate, The (Masson), 233 Life You Can Save, The (Singer), 466 FICTION All Other Nights (Horn), 11 Anthologist, The (Baker), 29 Believers, The (Heller), 58 Blame (Huneven), 72 Blood’s a Rover (Ellroy), 77 Book of Night Women, The (James), 85 Castle (Lennon), 112 Chronic City (Lethem), 129 Cradle, The (Somerville), 147 Crossers (Caputo), 151 Don’t Cry (Gaitskill), 184 Every Man Dies Alone (Fallada), 220 Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Tower), 225 Gate at the Stairs, A (Moore), 261 Generosity (Powers), 270 Genesis (Beckett), 275 Good Fall, A (Jin), 289 Homer & Langley (Doctorow), 304 Housekeeper and the Professor, The (Ogawa), 327 How to Paint a Dead Man (Hall), 336 Humbling, The (Roth), 340 Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris (Shapton), 345

DIARIES. See AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIRS, DIARIES, and LETTERS DRAMA. See POETRY and DRAMA ECONOMICS House of Cards (Cohan), 313 Life You Can Save, The (Singer), 466 Paradise Built in Hell, A (Solnit), 624 When China Rules the World (Jacques), 873 932

CATEGORY INDEX In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Mueenuddin), 349 Inherent Vice (Pynchon), 364 Invisible (Auster), 374 It Will Come to Me (Gordon), 379 Italian Shoes (Mankell), 383 Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (Dyer), 387 Kindly Ones, The (Littell), 400 Lacuna, The (Kingsolver), 420 Laish (Appelfeld), 425 Lark and Termite (Phillips), 429 Laura Rider’s Masterpiece (Hamilton), 437 Little Stranger, The (Waters), 475 Lost Art of Gratitude, The (McCall Smith), 485 Lost Symbol, The (Brown), 493 Love and Summer (Trevor), 503 Lowboy (Wray), 507 Mechanics of Falling, The (Brady), 527 Museum of Innocence, The (Pamuk), 546 My Father’s Tears (Updike), 551 Nine Dragons (Connelly), 569 Nobody Move (Johnson), 579 Once on a Moonless Night (Sijie), 589 Once the Shore (Yoon), 594 One D.O.A., One on the Way (Robison), 598 Original of Laura, The (Nabokov), 612 Reason for Crows, The (Glancy), 672 Rhyming Life and Death (Oz), 681 Sag Harbor (Whitehead), 686 Scarecrow, The (Connelly), 691 Short History of Women, A (Walbert), 711 Siege, The (Kadare), 716 Skating Rink, The (Bolaño), 726 Song Is You, The (Phillips), 742 South of Broad (Conroy), 746 Stone’s Fall (Pears), 755 Tanners, The (Walser), 788 Tea Time for the Traditionally Built (McCall Smith), 793 Thing Around Your Neck, The (Adichie), 798 Too Much Happiness (Munro), 811 Tourist, The (Steinhauer), 815

Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Wilson), 834 Vagrants, The (Li), 849 Wanting (Flanagan), 863 Winter Vault, The (Michaels), 897 Women, The (Boyle), 902 Year of the Flood, The (Atwood), 916 FINE ARTS, FILM, and MUSIC Art Instinct, The (Dutton), 37 Back to the Garden (Fornatale), 46 Digging (Baraka), 175 Tiepolo Pink (Calasso), 802 HISTORY Angels and Ages (Gopnik), 20 Antelope’s Strategy, The (Hatzfeld), 24 Baader-Meinhof (Aust), 42 Back to the Garden (Fornatale), 46 Big Burn, The (Egan), 63 Cahokia (Pauketat), 99 Canal Builders, The (Greene), 108 Catcher (Morris), 116 Dancing in the Dark (Dickstein), 156 Defend the Realm (Andrew), 166 Deliver Us from Evil (Ford), 171 Dynamite Club, The (Merriman), 188 1848 (Rapport), 201 Empire of Liberty (Wood), 206 Ends of Life, The (Thomas), 215 Fordlandia (Grandin), 246 Future of Liberalism, The (Wolfe), 251 Generalissimo, The (Taylor), 265 Good Book (Plotz), 285 Hindus, The (Doniger), 299 House of Wisdom, The (Lyons), 318 How Rome Fell (Goldsworthy), 331 In the President’s Secret Service (Kessler), 358 Inside the Stalin Archives (Brent), 369 King’s Dream (Sundquist), 405 Kipling Sahib (Allen), 410 Leaving India (Hajratwala), 447 Lords of the Sea (Hale), 480 Lost City of Z, The (Grann), 489 Marx’s General (Hunt), 522 933

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2010 Mother of God (Rubin), 536 Nature’s Ghosts (Barrow, Jr.), 560 Nine Lives (Baum), 574 One State, Two States (Morris), 608 Paradise Built in Hell, A (Solnit), 624 Passing Strange (Sandweiss), 629 Question of Command, A (Moyar), 662 Secret Wife of Louis XIV, The (Buckley), 696 Sisters of Sinai, The (Soskice), 721 Spartacus War, The (Strauss), 750 Very Brief History of Eternity, A (Eire), 854 Wilderness Warrior, The (Brinkley), 888

New Literary History of America, A (Marcus and Sollors), 564 Our Savage Art (Logan), 620 Posthuman Dada Guide, The (Codrescu), 649 Talking About Detective Fiction (James), 783 Writing the Rapture (Gribben), 911

HISTORY OF SCIENCE. See SCIENCE, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, and MEDICINE

MEDICINE. See SCIENCE, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, and MEDICINE

LANGUAGE Slang (Adams), 730

MEMOIRS. See AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIRS, DIARIES, and LETTERS

LAW. See ETHICS and LAW

MUSIC. See FINE ARTS, FILM, and MUSIC

LITERARY HISTORY. See LITERARY CRITICISM, HISTORY, and THEORY LITERARY THEORY. See LITERARY CRITICISM, HISTORY, and THEORY

LETTERS. See AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIRS, DIARIES, and LETTERS

NATURAL HISTORY. See NATURE, NATURAL HISTORY, and the ENVIRONMENT

LITERARY BIOGRAPHY Blue Hour, The (Pizzichini), 81 Cheever (Bailey), 120 Flannery (Gooch), 242 Gabriel García Márquez (Martin), 256 Hiding Man (Daugherty), 294 Kipling Sahib (Allen), 410 Koestler (Scammell), 415 Raymond Carver (Sklenicka), 667 Why This World (Moser), 883

NATURE, NATURAL HISTORY, and the ENVIRONMENT Birdscapes (Mynott), 68 Cold (Streever), 133 Darwin’s Sacred Cause (Desmond and Moore), 160 Eating Animals (Foer), 192 Face on Your Plate, The (Masson), 233 Mothers and Others (Hrdy), 541 Nature’s Ghosts (Barrow, Jr.), 560 One Square Inch of Silence (Hempton and Grossman), 603 Summer World (Heinrich), 773

LITERARY CRITICISM, HISTORY, and THEORY Art Instinct, The (Dutton), 37 Book of Samuel, The (Rudman), 90 Book of William, The (Collins), 94 Can Poetry Save the Earth? (Felstiner), 103 Education of a British-Protected Child, The (Achebe), 196 Jury of Her Peers, A (Showalter), 396

PHILOSOPHY and RELIGION Art Instinct, The (Dutton), 37 Birdscapes (Mynott), 68 Digital Barbarism (Helprin), 180 934

CATEGORY INDEX Art Instinct, The (Dutton), 37 Birdscapes (Mynott), 68 Cold (Streever), 133 Darwin’s Sacred Cause (Desmond and Moore), 160 Face on Your Plate, The (Masson), 233 Genial Gene, The (Roughgarden), 280 House of Wisdom, The (Lyons), 318 Life in Space (Mix), 462 Naming Infinity (Graham and Kantor), 555 Strangest Man, The (Farmelo), 764

Future of Liberalism, The (Wolfe), 251 Good Book (Plotz), 285 Hindus, The (Doniger), 299 House of Wisdom, The (Lyons), 318 Judas (Gubar), 391 Mother of God (Rubin), 536 Shop Class as Soulcraft (Crawford), 706 Writing the Rapture (Gribben), 911 POETRY and DRAMA Chronic (Powell), 125 Collected Poems (Cavafy), 138 Endpoint (Updike), 211 Evidence (Oliver), 229 In Such Hard Times (Wei), 354 “Le Cid” and “The Liar” (Corneille), 442 Leavings (Berry), 452 Mercury Dressing (McClatchy), 532 Orlando Furioso (Ariosto), 616 Poems, 1959-2009 (Seidel), 639 Practical Water (Hillman), 654 Seven Deadly Sins, The (Slavitt), 701 Sonata Mulattica (Dove), 738 To Be Read in Five Hundred Years (Goldbarth), 807 Transcendental Studies (Waldrop), 820 Unfinished Poems, The (Cavafy), 838 Village Life, A (Glück), 858

SOCIOLOGY, ARCHAEOLOGY, and ANTHROPOLOGY Art Instinct, The (Dutton), 37 Birdscapes (Mynott), 68 Columbine (Cullen), 142 Darwin’s Sacred Cause (Desmond and Moore), 160 Lost City of Z, The (Grann), 489 Mothers and Others (Hrdy), 541 TECHNOLOGY. See SCIENCE, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, and MEDICINE

RELIGION. See PHILOSOPHY and RELIGION

TRAVEL One Square Inch of Silence (Hempton and Grossman), 603

SCIENCE, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, and MEDICINE Age of Wonder, The (Holmes), 6

WOMEN’S ISSUES Sisters of Sinai, The (Soskice), 721 Wedlock (Moore), 868

935

TITLE INDEX

2010 Dancing in the Dark (Dickstein), 156 Darwin’s Sacred Cause (Desmond and Moore), 160 Defend the Realm (Andrew), 166 Deliver Us from Evil (Ford), 171 Digging (Baraka), 175 Digital Barbarism (Helprin), 180 Don’t Cry (Gaitskill), 184 Dynamite Club, The (Merriman), 188

A. Lincoln (White), 1 Age of Wonder, The (Holmes), 6 All Other Nights (Horn), 11 American Radical (Guttenplan), 15 Angels and Ages (Gopnik), 20 Antelope’s Strategy, The (Hatzfeld), 24 Anthologist, The (Baker), 29 Ardent Spirits (Price), 33 Art Instinct, The (Dutton), 37

Eating Animals (Foer), 192 Education of a British-Protected Child, The (Achebe), 196 1848 (Rapport), 201 Empire of Liberty (Wood), 206 Endpoint (Updike), 211 Ends of Life, The (Thomas), 215 Every Man Dies Alone (Fallada), 220 Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Tower), 225 Evidence (Oliver), 229

Baader-Meinhof (Aust), 42 Back to the Garden (Fornatale), 46 Bad Mother (Waldman), 50 Bard, The (Crawford), 54 Believers, The (Heller), 58 Big Burn, The (Egan), 63 Birdscapes (Mynott), 68 Blame (Huneven), 72 Blood’s a Rover (Ellroy), 77 Blue Hour, The (Pizzichini), 81 Book of Night Women, The (James), 85 Book of Samuel, The (Rudman), 90 Book of William, The (Collins), 94

Face on Your Plate, The (Masson), 233 Field Days (Raskin), 237 Flannery (Gooch), 242 Fordlandia (Grandin), 246 Future of Liberalism, The (Wolfe), 251

Cahokia (Pauketat), 99 Can Poetry Save the Earth? (Felstiner), 103 Canal Builders, The (Greene), 108 Castle (Lennon), 112 Catcher (Morris), 116 Cheever (Bailey), 120 Chronic (Powell), 125 Chronic City (Lethem), 129 Cold (Streever), 133 Collected Poems (Cavafy), 138 Columbine (Cullen), 142 Cradle, The (Somerville), 147 Crossers (Caputo), 151

Gabriel García Márquez (Martin), 256 Gate at the Stairs, A (Moore), 261 Generalissimo, The (Taylor), 265 Generosity (Powers), 270 Genesis (Beckett), 275 Genial Gene, The (Roughgarden), 280 Good Book (Plotz), 285 Good Fall, A (Jin), 289 Hiding Man (Daugherty), 294 Hindus, The (Doniger), 299 Homer & Langley (Doctorow), 304 936

TITLE INDEX Horse Soldiers (Stanton), 308 House of Cards (Cohan), 313 House of Wisdom, The (Lyons), 318 House of Wittgenstein, The (Waugh), 322 Housekeeper and the Professor, The (Ogawa), 327 How Rome Fell (Goldsworthy), 331 How to Paint a Dead Man (Hall), 336 Humbling, The (Roth), 340

Lit (Karr), 470 Little Stranger, The (Waters), 475 Lords of the Sea (Hale), 480 Lost Art of Gratitude, The (McCall Smith), 485 Lost City of Z, The (Grann), 489 Lost Symbol, The (Brown), 493 Louis D. Brandeis (Urofsky), 498 Love and Summer (Trevor), 503 Lowboy (Wray), 507

Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris (Shapton), 345 In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Mueenuddin), 349 In Such Hard Times (Wei), 354 In the President’s Secret Service (Kessler), 358 Inherent Vice (Pynchon), 364 Inside the Stalin Archives (Brent), 369 Invisible (Auster), 374 It Will Come to Me (Gordon), 379 Italian Shoes (Mankell), 383

Magnificent Desolation (Aldrin and Abraham), 512 Manhood for Amateurs (Chabon), 517 Marx’s General (Hunt), 522 Mechanics of Falling, The (Brady), 527 Mercury Dressing (McClatchy), 532 Mother of God (Rubin), 536 Mothers and Others (Hrdy), 541 Museum of Innocence, The (Pamuk), 546 My Father’s Tears (Updike), 551 Naming Infinity (Graham and Kantor), 555 Nature’s Ghosts (Barrow, Jr.), 560 New Literary History of America, A (Marcus and Sollors), 564 Nine Dragons (Connelly), 569 Nine Lives (Baum), 574 Nobody Move (Johnson), 579

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (Dyer), 387 Judas (Gubar), 391 Jury of Her Peers, A (Showalter), 396 Kindly Ones, The (Littell), 400 King’s Dream (Sundquist), 405 Kipling Sahib (Allen), 410 Koestler (Scammell), 415

On Moving (DeSalvo), 584 Once on a Moonless Night (Sijie), 589 Once the Shore (Yoon), 594 One D.O.A., One on the Way (Robison), 598 One Square Inch of Silence (Hempton and Grossman), 603 One State, Two States (Morris), 608 Original of Laura, The (Nabokov), 612 Orlando Furioso (Ariosto), 616 Our Savage Art (Logan), 620

Lacuna, The (Kingsolver), 420 Laish (Appelfeld), 425 Lark and Termite (Phillips), 429 Last Rites (Lukacs), 433 Laura Rider’s Masterpiece (Hamilton), 437 “Le Cid” and “The Liar” (Corneille), 442 Leaving India (Hajratwala), 447 Leavings (Berry), 452 Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940, The (Beckett), 457 Life in Space (Mix), 462 Life You Can Save, The (Singer), 466

Paradise Built in Hell, A (Solnit), 624 Passing Strange (Sandweiss), 629 Pauline Bonaparte (Fraser), 634 Poems, 1959-2009 (Seidel), 639 937

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2010 Tea Time for the Traditionally Built (McCall Smith), 793 Thing Around Your Neck, The (Adichie), 798 Tiepolo Pink (Calasso), 802 To Be Read in Five Hundred Years (Goldbarth), 807 Too Much Happiness (Munro), 811 Tourist, The (Steinhauer), 815 Transcendental Studies (Waldrop), 820 Trotsky (Patenaude), 824 True Compass (Kennedy), 829 Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Wilson), 834

Pops (Teachout), 644 Posthuman Dada Guide, The (Codrescu), 649 Practical Water (Hillman), 654 Protest Singer, The (Wilkinson), 658 Question of Command, A (Moyar), 662 Raymond Carver (Sklenicka), 667 Reason for Crows, The (Glancy), 672 Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (Caldwell), 676 Rhyming Life and Death (Oz), 681 Sag Harbor (Whitehead), 686 Scarecrow, The (Connelly), 691 Secret Wife of Louis XIV, The (Buckley), 696 Seven Deadly Sins, The (Slavitt), 701 Shop Class as Soulcraft (Crawford), 706 Short History of Women, A (Walbert), 711 Siege, The (Kadare), 716 Sisters of Sinai, The (Soskice), 721 Skating Rink, The (Bolaño), 726 Slang (Adams), 730 Snakehead, The (Keefe), 734 Sonata Mulattica (Dove), 738 Song Is You, The (Phillips), 742 South of Broad (Conroy), 746 Spartacus War, The (Strauss), 750 Stone’s Fall (Pears), 755 Strange Eventful History, A (Holroyd), 760 Strangest Man, The (Farmelo), 764 Strength in What Remains (Kidder), 768 Summer World (Heinrich), 773 Sweet Thunder (Haygood), 778

Unfinished Poems, The (Cavafy), 838 Up from History (Norrell), 843 Vagrants, The (Li), 849 Very Brief History of Eternity, A (Eire), 854 Village Life, A (Glück), 858 Wanting (Flanagan), 863 Wedlock (Moore), 868 When China Rules the World (Jacques), 873 Where Men Win Glory (Krakauer), 878 Why This World (Moser), 883 Wilderness Warrior, The (Brinkley), 888 Winter Sun, The (Howe), 893 Winter Vault, The (Michaels), 897 Women, The (Boyle), 902 Worlds Made by Words (Grafton), 907 Writing the Rapture (Gribben), 911 Year of the Flood, The (Atwood), 916

Talking About Detective Fiction (James), 783 Tanners, The (Walser), 788

Zeitoun (Eggers), 921

938

AUTHOR INDEX

2010 BECKETT, SAMUEL Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940, The, 457 BERRY, WENDELL Leavings, 452 BOLAÑO, ROBERTO Skating Rink, The, 726 BOYLE, T. CORAGHESSAN Women, The, 902 BRADY, CATHERINE Mechanics of Falling, The, 527 BRENT, JONATHAN Inside the Stalin Archives, 369 BRINKLEY, DOUGLAS Wilderness Warrior, The, 888 BROWN, DAN Lost Symbol, The, 493 BUCKLEY, VERONICA Secret Wife of Louis XIV, The, 696

ABRAHAM, KEN, with BUZZ ALDRIN Magnificent Desolation, 512 ACHEBE, CHINUA Education of a British-Protected Child, The, 196 ADAMS, MICHAEL Slang, 730 ADICHIE, CHIMAMANDA NGOZI Thing Around Your Neck, The, 798 ALDRIN, BUZZ, with KEN ABRAHAM Magnificent Desolation, 512 ALLEN, CHARLES Kipling Sahib, 410 ANDREW, CHRISTOPHER Defend the Realm, 166 APPELFELD, AHARON Laish, 425 ARIOSTO, LUDOVICO Orlando Furioso, 616 ATWOOD, MARGARET Year of the Flood, The, 916 AUST, STEFAN Baader-Meinhof, 42 AUSTER, PAUL Invisible, 374

CALASSO, ROBERTO Tiepolo Pink, 802 CALDWELL, CHRISTOPHER Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, 676 CAPUTO, PHILIP Crossers, 151 CAVAFY, C. P. Collected Poems, 138 Unfinished Poems, The, 838 CHABON, MICHAEL Manhood for Amateurs, 517 CODRESCU, ANDREI Posthuman Dada Guide, The, 649 COHAN, WILLIAM D. House of Cards, 313 COLLINS, PAUL Book of William, The, 94

BAILEY, BLAKE Cheever, 120 BAKER, NICHOLSON Anthologist, The, 29 BARAKA, AMIRI Digging, 175 BARROW, MARK V., JR. Nature’s Ghosts, 560 BAUM, DAN Nine Lives, 574 BECKETT, BERNARD Genesis, 275 939

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2010 FALLADA, HANS Every Man Dies Alone, 220 FARMELO, GRAHAM Strangest Man, The, 764 FELSTINER, JOHN Can Poetry Save the Earth?, 103 FLANAGAN, RICHARD Wanting, 863 FOER, JONATHAN SAFRAN Eating Animals, 192 FORD, LACY K. Deliver Us from Evil, 171 FORNATALE, PETE Back to the Garden, 46 FRASER, FLORA Pauline Bonaparte, 634

CONNELLY, MICHAEL Nine Dragons, 569 Scarecrow, The, 691 CONROY, PAT South of Broad, 746 CORNEILLE, PIERRE “Le Cid” and “The Liar”, 442 CRAWFORD, MATTHEW B. Shop Class as Soulcraft, 706 CRAWFORD, ROBERT Bard, The, 54 CULLEN, DAVE Columbine, 142 DAUGHERTY, TRACY Hiding Man, 294 DESALVO, LOUISE On Moving, 584 DESMOND, ADRIAN, and JAMES MOORE Darwin’s Sacred Cause, 160 DICKSTEIN, MORRIS Dancing in the Dark, 156 DOCTOROW, E. L. Homer & Langley, 304 DONIGER, WENDY Hindus, The, 299 DOVE, RITA Sonata Mulattica, 738 DUTTON, DENIS Art Instinct, The, 37 DYER, GEOFF Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, 387

GAITSKILL, MARY Don’t Cry, 184 GLANCY, DIANE Reason for Crows, The, 672 GLÜCK, LOUISE Village Life, A, 858 GOLDBARTH, ALBERT To Be Read in Five Hundred Years, 807 GOLDSWORTHY, ADRIAN How Rome Fell, 331 GOOCH, BRAD Flannery, 242 GOPNIK, ADAM Angels and Ages, 20 GORDON, EMILY FOX It Will Come to Me, 379 GRAFTON, ANTHONY Worlds Made by Words, 907 GRAHAM, LOREN, and JEAN-MICHEL KANTOR Naming Infinity, 555 GRANDIN, GREG Fordlandia, 246 GRANN, DAVID Lost City of Z, The, 489 GREENE, JULIE Canal Builders, The, 108

EGAN, TIMOTHY Big Burn, The, 63 EGGERS, DAVE Zeitoun, 921 EIRE, CARLOS Very Brief History of Eternity, A, 854 ELLROY, JAMES Blood’s a Rover, 77 940

AUTHOR INDEX HUNEVEN, MICHELLE Blame, 72 HUNT, TRISTRAM Marx’s General, 522

GRIBBEN, CRAWFORD Writing the Rapture, 911 GROSSMAN, JOHN, and GORDON HEMPTON One Square Inch of Silence, 603 GUBAR, SUSAN Judas, 391 GUTTENPLAN, D. D. American Radical, 15

JACQUES, MARTIN When China Rules the World, 873 JAMES, MARLON Book of Night Women, The, 85 JAMES, P. D. Talking About Detective Fiction, 783 JIN, HA Good Fall, A, 289 JOHNSON, DENIS Nobody Move, 579

HAJRATWALA, MINAL Leaving India, 447 HALE, JOHN R. Lords of the Sea, 480 HALL, SARAH How to Paint a Dead Man, 336 HAMILTON, JANE Laura Rider’s Masterpiece, 437 HATZFELD, JEAN Antelope’s Strategy, The, 24 HAYGOOD, WIL Sweet Thunder, 778 HEINRICH, BERND Summer World, 773 HELLER, ZOË Believers, The, 58 HELPRIN, MARK Digital Barbarism, 180 HEMPTON, GORDON, and JOHN GROSSMAN One Square Inch of Silence, 603 HILLMAN, BRENDA Practical Water, 654 HOLMES, RICHARD Age of Wonder, The, 6 HOLROYD, MICHAEL Strange Eventful History, A, 760 HORN, DARA All Other Nights, 11 HOWE, FANNY Winter Sun, The, 893 HRDY, SARAH BLAFFER Mercury Dressing, 541

KADARE, ISMAIL Siege, The, 716 KANTOR, JEAN-MICHEL, and LOREN GRAHAM Naming Infinity, 555 KARR, MARY Lit, 470 KEEFE, PATRICK RADDEN Snakehead, The, 734 KENNEDY, EDWARD M. True Compass, 829 KESSLER, RONALD In the President’s Secret Service, 358 KIDDER, TRACY Strength in What Remains, 768 KINGSOLVER, BARBARA Lacuna, The, 420 KRAKAUER, JON Where Men Win Glory, 878 LENNON, J. ROBERT Castle, 112 LETHEM, JONATHAN Chronic City, 129 LI, YIYUN Vagrants, The, 849 LITTELL, JONATHAN Kindly Ones, The, 400 941

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2010 MUEENUDDIN, DANIYAL In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, 349 MUNRO, ALICE Too Much Happiness, 811 MYNOTT, JEREMY Birdscapes, 68

LOGAN, WILLIAM Our Savage Art, 620 LUKACS, JOHN Last Rites, 433 LYONS, JONATHAN House of Wisdom, The, 318 McCALL SMITH, ALEXANDER Lost Art of Gratitude, The, 485 Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, 793 McCLATCHY, J. D. Mercury Dressing, 532 MANKELL, HENNING Italian Shoes, 383 MARCUS, GREIL, and WERNER SOLLORS New Literary History of America, A, 564 MARTIN, GERALD Gabriel García Márquez, 256 MASSON, JEFFREY MOUSSAIEFF Face on Your Plate, The, 233 MERRIMAN, JOHN Dynamite Club, The, 188 MICHAELS, ANNE Winter Vault, The, 897 MIX, LUCAS JOHN Life in Space, 462 MOORE, JAMES, and ADRIAN DESMOND Darwin’s Sacred Cause, 160 MOORE, LORRIE Gate at the Stairs, A, 261 MOORE, WENDY Wedlock, 868 MORRIS, BENNY One State, Two States, 608 MORRIS, PETER Catcher, 116 MOSER, BENJAMIN Why This World, 883 MOYAR, MARK Question of Command, A, 662

NABOKOV, VLADIMIR Original of Laura, The, 612 NORRELL, ROBERT J. Up from History, 843 OGAWA, YOKO Housekeeper and the Professor, The, 327 OLIVER, MARY Evidence, 229 OZ, AMOS Rhyming Life and Death, 681 PAMUK, ORHAN Museum of Innocence, The, 546 PATENAUDE, BERTRAND M. Trotsky, 824 PAUKETAT, TIMOTHY R. Cahokia, 99 PEARS, IAIN Stone’s Fall, 755 PHILLIPS, ARTHUR Song Is You, The, 742 PHILLIPS, JAYNE ANN Lark and Termite, 429 PIZZICHINI, LILIAN Blue Hour, The, 81 PLOTZ, DAVID Good Book, 285 POWELL, D. A. Chronic, 125 POWERS, RICHARD Generosity, 270 PRICE, REYNOLDS Ardent Spirits, 33 PYNCHON, THOMAS Inherent Vice, 364 942

AUTHOR INDEX SOSKICE, JANET Sisters of Sinai, The, 721 STANTON, DOUG Horse Soldiers, 308 STEINHAUER, OLEN Tourist, The, 815 STRAUSS, BARRY Spartacus War, The, 750 STREEVER, BILL Cold, 133 SUNDQUIST, ERIC J. King’s Dream, 405

RAPPORT, MIKE 1848, 201 RASKIN, JONAH Field Days, 237 ROBISON, MARY One D.O.A., One on the Way, 598 ROTH, PHILIP Humbling, The, 340 ROUGHGARDEN, JOAN Genial Gene, The, 280 RUBIN, MIRI Mother of God, 536 RUDMAN, MARK Book of Samuel, The, 90

TAYLOR, JAY Generalissimo, The, 265 TEACHOUT, TERRY Pops, 644 THOMAS, KEITH Ends of Life, The, 215 TOWER, WELLS Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, 225 TREVOR, WILLIAM Love and Summer, 503

SANDWEISS, MARTHA A. Passing Strange, 629 SCAMMELL, MICHAEL Koestler, 415 SEIDEL, FREDERICK Poems, 1959-2009, 639 SHAPTON, LEANNE Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris (Shapton), 345 SHOWALTER, ELAINE Jury of Her Peers, A, 396 SIJIE, DAI Once on a Moonless Night, 589 SINGER, PETER Life You Can Save, The, 466 SKLENICKA, CAROL Raymond Carver, 667 SLAVITT, DAVID R. Seven Deadly Sins, The, 701 SOLLORS, WERNER, and GREIL MARCUS New Literary History of America, A, 564 SOLNIT, REBECCA Paradise Built in Hell, A, 624 SOMERVILLE, PATRICK Cradle, The, 147

UPDIKE, JOHN Endpoint, 211 My Father’s Tears, 551 UROFSKY, MELVIN I. Louis D. Brandeis, 498 WALBERT, KATE Short History of Women, A, 711 WALDMAN, AYELET Bad Mother, 50 WALDROP, KEITH Transcendental Studies, 820 WALSER, ROBERT Tanners, The, 788 WATERS, SARAH Little Stranger, The, 475 WAUGH, ALEXANDER House of Wittgenstein, The, 322 WEI YING-WU In Such Hard Times, 354 943

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Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2009

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