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What
We've Been Reading
Most reviewers for this issue are familiar voices
to longtime Weekly readers. From the paper's editorial staff,
editor Ted Taylor reviews the latest (and possibly final) hiking guide
by former EW outdoor columnist, William Sullivan. Calendar
Editor Jennifer Snelling, who's leaving EW's full-time staff
to enter the UO School of Journalism Professional Master's degree
program, reviews an exposé of the fast food industry as well
as a classic of Mexican literature. EW Office Manager Geneva
Miller, the busy mother of teenage twin daughters, reviews a novel
about a single mom and her teenage son and finds humor and insight
there.
Reviews by former EW writers include former
staffer David Johnson's look at two historical pieces -- a memoir
of growing up during China's Cultural Revolution and a young adult
novel about the self-proclaimed "avatar" of Corvallis, circa 1903,
who whisked away many a young woman to be one of his "brides." Former
EW reporter Alice Tallmadge now writes for The Oregonian,
but she found time to review a book about a crisis in New York City's
foster care system. She also reviews an account of the Makah whale
hunt that raised hackles with animal activists.
EW columnist Mary O'Brien reviews two inspiring
books about the natural world, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
and Walking the High Ridge. EW music writer Brett Campbell
reviews a biography of the great American composer, Aaron Copland.
Poet Andrew Feld reviews two poetry collections and a new translation
of Heraclitus. Feld's July books column will be his last until he
returns from the North Pole in October. Elizabeth Pownall, whose work
on lesbian health issues made EW's cover, writes about UO sociologist
Arlene Stein's book on the OCA-sponsored anti-gay ballot measures
in rural Oregon.
Lark Wadsworth, who used to write EW's Net
Wit column, reviews a memoir about the ally of a couple of computer
geeks and works her way through a science fiction novel. EW
science writer Valerie Brown reviews a radical work on contemporary
economics, One Market Under God, and a runner's memoir by a
contributor to NPR's "This American Life." Mary Meredith Drew, who
reviewed a book on world-wide faith communities in April, now goes
In Search of Black America.
Josephine Bridges regularly contributes to EW's
reading issues. Here she reviews the tale of two young bicyclists
who passed through Eugene in 1909 on their way from Santa Rosa, California,
to Seattle, and she takes another look at James Houston's novel about
the Donner party tragedy. Susan Denning, also a regular reading issue
contributor, reviews British writer Tony Parks' first novel. Denning's
column, "What I've Been Reading," available on the web at www.caffeinedestiny.com
inspired the headline for this introduction.
As EW's arts editor I've written about books,
the visual arts and movies for the better part of EW's almost19-year
history. My reviews here include a work of literary nonfiction by
the great Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski; Alistair McLeod's
short stories that created his international reputation.; Jane Hirshfield's
wonderful poems; and other highly recommended literary selections.
-- Lois Wadsworth
Summer
Reading 2000 Index:
FICTION: Novels
| Young Adult Fiction | Short
Fiction
POETRY | CLASSICS
NON-FICTION: General
Non-Fiction | Biography | Memoir
Novels
Irish
Underdog
True History of the Kelly Gang
by Peter Carey. Knopf, 2000. Hardcover, $25.
Peter Carey's rollicking tale
of Australia's Wild West of the 1860s and '70s is narrated by the
legendary outlaw Ned Kelley, who brought color into the dull lives
of the farmers and ranchers living in the hinterlands of the continent
under watchful British control. Ned is 12 when his story begins, and
it ends with his death at age 26 in a shootout with police. There's
rarely an uneventful moment between.
 An
Australian writer now living in New York, Carey won Britain's prestigious
Booker Award for his 1996 novel, Oscar and Lucinda, which was
followed in 1998 by Jack Maggs, his outstanding response to
Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. Now, his homeland's history
has inspired Carey to True History of the Kelly Gang's central,
imaginative conceit -- that recently discovered documents written
in Kelly's own hand tell the story. A colorful narrative, replete
with idiosyncratic spelling and missing punctuation, Ned's tale makes
great use of the word "adjectival" as in: "You adjectival b----------d
I shouted."
Ned's dad is wrongly convicted of theft and dies in
jail. The boy's untamed, beautiful, Irish Catholic mother, Ellen,
doesn't take such insults from the Protestant police lightly. Her
clannish family harbors ancient grudges and long memories, passed
on like gospel to her children. By age 12, Ned tries to protect his
mother from the men who knock on the door late at night. Not welcoming
Ned's attentions, Ellen makes a secret pact with Harry Powers, a highwayman
who robs carriages and travelers. Thus, Ned's apprenticeship begins.
Carey's knack for creating entire new worlds flowers
in this 19th century Australian frontier. Much like the realistic
American West but with kangaroos and wombats, this wilderness is
both familiar and strange. Ned and the gang ride horses on roads that
wash out in the winter; they hole up in remote mountain hideaways;
and they depend on
settlers who also hate the British-controlled Australian police and
courts to give them comfort and cash. These Irish rebels are kin to
their literary counterparts in the old country and the Scotch-Irish
immigrants who settled the American West. A literate rip-snorter of
a novel! --Lois Wadsworth
Plucky Survivor
Here's to You, Jesusa! by
Elena Poniatowska. Translated by Deanna Heikkinen. Farrar Straus Giroux,
2001. Hardcover, $24.
First published in 1969, Elena Poniatowska's blend
of documentary and fiction, Here's to You, Jesusa! is considered
a classic of Mexican literature that's only now available in English
translation. Acclaimed journalist Poniatowska extensively interviewed
Josefina Bórquez -- the model for the book's Jesusa Palancares
-- to give voice to Mexico's many poverty-stricken, disenfranchised
people.
 A
dark-skinned Indian from Oaxaca, the aging, coarse-mouthed, gritty
Jesusa learns quickly that people are not to be trusted. She joins
the Mexican revolutionary forces as a campesina to remain with her
abusive, unreliable father rather than stay with her even more abusive
step-mother.
Married at age 15 to a man who beats her relentlessly,
she risks her life and threatens to stab him to death. After he dies
in the war, Jesusa refuses to ever marry or be abused again. "I think
there must be a special place in hell for the women who have let men
abuse them," she says.
Jesusa spends the next 40 years living in a series
of Mexico City tenements, sometimes working, but mostly drinking and
fighting. She survives, thanks to her deep spirituality and a belief
in mysticism. "To traverse the spiritual path we have to go through
many trials and tribulations and much pain and suffering," she says.
"The protector who guides us reveals himself through them." Jesusa
keeps the faith, because "sometimes you must return to Earth several
times, depending on your debt."
Poniatowska's resilient heroine exposes the corruption
of church and state, illum-inates underplayed aspects of the Mexican
Revolution and provides a stage for a very powerful, often unheard,
voice. Josefina proves to be a feisty, cantankerous heroine who inspires
legends. -- Jennifer Snelling
Forebodings
Snow Mountain Passage by James
D. Houston. Knopf, 2001. Hardcover, $24.
It's 1845, autumn, in Springfield, Illinois. Jim Reed,
restless to move, has been reading about the pure air and abundant
fruit in California. He knows the stories of the trappers and explorers
who have blazed the trail he means to follow. He explains to his eight-year-old
daughter Patty that soon the family will go west. When Patty asks
for a pair of good leather boots "to keep up with Mama," Reed assures
her that the family can ride in the magnificent wagon he plans to
build. But Patty says, "I mean after that."
Snow Mountain Passage, James Houston's novel
of the Donner Party's fateful journey, is relentlessly ominous. Two
buffalo robes stolen from a Sioux burial site are returned, but something
sinister has begun. When Reed kills one of his compatriots and cannot
convince the man's family that he did so in self-defense, he is banished.
Ironically, he crosses the mountains safely before the terrible snows
that trap his family begin.
Houston uses our familiarity with the Donner Party's
fate to evoke an uneasiness toward his characters. We sympathize with
their plight, but we're shocked by their inattention to the menace
that surrounds them, focused as they are on bickering and assigning
blame for so much that goes awry. Events are recounted primarily by
an omniscient narrator in an eerie present tense, juxtaposed with
the first-person recollections of Patty Reed at 83. This structure
increases the tension between our frustration and our compassion.
To tell a story that has been sensationalized for
a century and a half is no small undertaking. To his credit, Houston
puts the party's notorious cannibalism in perspective. It was for
the most part uncommon, yet two men were apparently murdered for food.
Patty writes, "To this very day you will hear people arguing until
they are blue in the face over things they themselves could not have
seen and that none of us will ever know for sure." We do know that
the Donner Party attempted to cross the Sierra Nevada 24 hours too
late, at the beginning of the worst winter there in recorded history.
Ultimately, even James Houston's most repulsive characters provoke
our empathy. -- Josephine Bridges
Class
Conflict
In Sunlight, in a Beautiful
Garden by Kathleen Cambor. Farrar, Straus Giroux, 2001.
Hardcover, $23.
Kathleen Cambor's marvelous novel is based on the
historic 1899 Johnstown flood, a man-made catastrophe aided by the
wettest spring in years. When the water burst over the South Fork
dam's mud walls on Memorial Day weekend, it devastated the bustling
Pennsylvania town that lay in its maddened path and claimed 2,200
lives.
 An
entirely preventable disaster, the earth-wall dam high above Johnstown
was maintained as a recreational lake for the wealthy membership of
the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. Among the club's members
were Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon and Andrew Carnegie. Despite
warnings from engineers about the dam's likelihood of failure, these
industrialists refused to take simple measures that would have made
it safer.
Johnstown springs to life in Cambor's resplendent
tale. A scant 90 miles from Pittsburg by rail, the town sat on the
rich flood plain 20 miles below the dam. Townsfolk were welcome at
the club only as summer waiters, kitchen help, groundskeepers and
lifeguards.
Many men in Johnstown worked for the progressive Cambria
Iron Company, including Frank Fallon, a former Civil War soldier.
Frank lives in a loveless marriage. His wife, Julia, doesn't recover
from the deaths of their two young children to diptheria. Frank pours
his hopes into Daniel, his eldest son, who survives the illness. But
Julia never forgives Daniel for bringing the disease home.
James Talbot is the club's lawyer, torn between ambition
and good sense. Striving to rise above his ambiguous beginnings, James,
too, lives in a marriage gone bad. His hopes are on his talented daughter,
Nora. A clandestine relationship between Daniel Fallon and Nora builds
over time, but neither tells their family. The day the dam bursts
marks their last meeting. Neither will ever forget.
In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden is also
a metaphor for the country's loss of innocence at the hands of the
greedy, powerful capitalist barons of the day. A haunting, beautifully
written tale, it will not leave you alone. --
Lois Wadsworth
Looking for the Lost
A Trip to the Stars
by Nicholas Christopher. Simon & Schuster, 2000. Scribner Paperback,
$14.
I knew within the first 50 pages of A Trip to the
Stars to expect a tightly woven plot with lots of complications
and mysteries. Nicholas Christopher delivers in spades. His story
of a boy and his adoptive aunt weaves together many intricate threads
and plot twists. Set in the desert and jungle, in wartime and peace,
in the present, the past and the future, it's a study in the working
of themes and variations, the principal of which is the search for
and discovery of things that have been lost.
 Alma
has lost her adopted nephew, who in turn has lost both his true and
adoptive parents. Geza, Alma's lover, has lost his mother, his relationship
with his father, and his way in the world. Alma's lost nephew Enzo
is discovered by his blood uncle, who is obsessed with antiquities,
things that could have been, and the lost lore of the world. These
and many other lives swirl about each other as the story progresses.
We discover connections between them just as they discover both how
to live without what they have lost and how to regain it. Into this
mix, the author blends a dazzling array of mystical, historical and
anthropological references, erudite and full of intriguing potential
-- a feast of many delicacies.
The book is disappointing because Christ-opher overstructures;
he forgets to let his characters breathe. And while I am willing to
suspend my disbelief for fantastical story lines, I expect characters
who are emotionally true. There's too much tell and not enough show.
Fatalistically driven by the plot, Alma, Enzo and Geza's pain seems
artificial, their personal journeys ungrounded. Even their reunion
after 15 years of wandering feels like a coda rather than a gratifying
dénouement. Mystical or fantasy genre readers may enjoy this
book on its technical merits alone, but if you're looking to feel
something in your gut, don't waste your time here. --
Lark Wadsworth
Human Comedy
The Death of Vishnu by
Manil Suri. Norton, 2001. Hardcover, $24.95.
Hindu mythology informs Manil Suri's delightful first
novel, but it's the classics as interpreted by Bollywood, not the
stories found in the Bhagavad-Gita.
 This
striking little tale speaks to the lives of the tenants of a Bombay
apartment house and the odd-job man named Vishnu who lives on the
second floor landing. Suri, who now lives in the U.S. and teaches
mathematics at the University of Maryland, grew up in India in just
such an apartment building, where a man named Vishnu lived and died
on the landing.
In The Death of Vishnu, squabbling neighbors
who share a kitchen are affected by the dying man in a variety of
humorous, human ways, even as Vishnu himself sinks into an ecstatic
dreamlike state illuminated by memories of his childhood gods, his
mother's tenderness and a demanding woman he loved. Among the tenants,
the two women who share the kitchen are indelibly etched in all their
pettiness, yet archetypal and familiar to all cultures. Each emotionally
accuses the other of inconsequential culinary crimes and etiquette
misdemeanors. Their suspicions are deeply rooted, in part because
food plays such a large role in the lives of women and the social
status of the household.
By turns poignant and funny, Suri's beautifully constructed
narrative details how the tenants' different religious beliefs are
experienced as if they were scenes from a romantic Bombay movie musical
-- the knowing
posturing of an adolescent girl in love with a boy of a different
faith; the immersion in a search for the one true religion by a man
whose wife thinks he's crazy; and Vishnu's final quest that ends with
Krishna playing the flute for him in the forest of his childhood imaginings.
This is a novel that begs to be read a second time,
to savor its delirious moments, free of the desire to know what happens
next that fuels its furious first reading. --
Lois Wadsworth
What? Me Worry?
Big City Eyes by Delia
Ephron, South of Pico Productions, 2000. Hardcover, $23.95.
Delia Ephron's heroine in Big City Eyes, Lily
Davis, does what so many of us are willing to do for our children.
She uproots herself and her son from New York City, a city she loves,
and they move to a smaller town up the coast. She hopes now her out-of-control,
15- year-old Sam will be safe from the dangers of big city society
... as if all 15-year-olds aren't out of control in some way or another,
regardless of where they live. What parent of teenagers hasn't cringed
about their kid's appearance at times, or worried about drugs and
sex? Lily worries about it all and with good reason.
Lily and Sam settle into the small town, only to realize
they are considered outsiders and freaks. Lily's job as a reporter
with the weekly newspaper involves her in local activities that include
covering a murder and meeting an attractive, married cop. Ephron's
sympathetic portrayal of an overly imaginative single woman who fantasizes
about almost everything is both funny and poignant. The refreshing
ending leaves the reader with good moral decisions. For a little humorous
relief, I recommend Big City Eyes to any parent struggling
with teenager turmoil. -- Geneva Miller
Kramer vs. Kramer Again
Man and Boy by Tony Parsons.
Sourcebooks, 2001. Hardcover, $21.
Harry Silver is a happily married television producer
living in London with his wife, Gina, and their four- year-old son
Pat. On the verge of turning 30, Harry worries he is becoming too
staid, lusts after a sports car and, in one crazy evening, has a one-night
stand with a woman at work. His wife finds out about it, leaves him
and her son. Harry's life heads toward free-fall.
Man and Boy is the first novel by British TV
producer and journalist Tony Parsons, a somewhat autobiographical
coming-of-age novel. Harry Silver, however, is not a typical protagonist
in a roman a clef; he's a grown man who thought he had his
life neatly arranged and ordered for him. When his wife leaves him,
Harry must deal with his failings as a husband and figure out how
to be a father to his son.
As in the film Kramer vs. Kramer, to which
it's been compared, Harry's estranged wife reappears halfway through
the novel and decides she wants to be a mom again. Although the parents'
conflict sometimes forays into the overly sentimental, Parsons pulls
off an engaging story that deals with what it means to be a father
in a time when many families are coming apart.
Once Harry considers the different parenting types
offered by the movie Star Wars. His father, he decides, was
the Obi Wan Kenobi type, which Harry also aspires to. But he believes
most fathers today are more like Darth Vader -- "an absent father,
a neglectful dad, a selfish old man who puts his own wishes before
any parental responsibility".
Parsons' strength is in his storytelling and in his
characters' ability to analyze their weaknesses without appearing
self-obsessed. The ending is a bit of a surprise, and those who have
grown to love Harry appreciate his conclusion that "what has truly
messed up the lousy world are all the people who always want one more
chance." -- Susan Denning
The Circle
Border Crossing by Pat
Barker. Farrar, Straus Giroux, 2001.
Hardcover, $22.
Novelist Pat Barker, winner of the Booker Prize and
the Guardian fiction prize, is the author of the WWI trilogy:
Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993) and
The Ghost Road (1995).
 Here
she tells the story of an unfortunate young man named Danny Miller,
who was tried for murder as a 10-year-old; and the psychologist, Tom
Seymour, an expert witness who testified the boy knew killing was
wrong. Now Danny has come back into Tom's life as the result of what
may or may not be an accident. Tom and his wife Lauren are walking
on the beach at Newcastle on a Sunday when they observe a man walk
out onto an abandoned jetty, swallow some pills and fling himself
into the frigid waters. Without thinking, Tom goes after him.
The story unfolds from this central event. Tom investigates
the mysteries surrounding Danny's case, while Danny ever more persistently
moves deeper into Tom's life. On a separate track, Tom and Lauren's
marriage deteriorates, and he is uncertain about his work prospects.
Barker's perceptive psychological understanding makes
Border Crossing more than an ordinary crime story. In the Regeneration
trilogy, she writes about shell-shocked soldiers and the sometimes
experimental treatment they received. Here is a young boy who grew
up with a soldier father who batters him from an early age and frightens
him with tales of killing men in the Falklands and in Northern Ireland:
"It took Tom a long time to realize that Danny was
not using his father's violence as a way of excusing his own behavior.
It was rather more sophisticated than that. He was talking about moral
circles, the group of people (and animals) inside the circle, whom
it is not permissible to kill, and the others, outside, who enjoy
no such immunity."
Tom wonders if a psychically-scarred individual such
as Danny can be rehabilitated, while Barker's powerful writing asks
the same of us, collectively -- can society ever be sure that
such a damaged child is restored to health or guarantee that a rehabilitated
murderer will never kill again? Hard questions. --
Lois Wadsworth
Young Adult Fiction
The
Seductive Avatar of Corvallis
Brides of Eden by Linda
Crew. HarperCollins, 2001. Hardcover, $15.95
In 1903, Corvallis was a small, tranquil city with
an earnest student body at the agricultural college and hard-working,
devout families attending nine Christian churches. Then Franz Edmond
Creffield came to town, and everything changed.
Creffield gave himself the Biblical name of Joshua,
and indeed the trumpets began to blow when Joshua preached his feverish
version of the Good Book! His timing is perfect in a fervent era of
evangelic circuit riders packing tents down by the river; voices speaking
rapturously in tongues; and charlatans counting their baskets full
of greenbacks.
At first, amused town folk write off Creffield as
just another lively character drumming up spiritual excitement, but
when he proclaims himself the New Messiah in search of "The Bride
of Eden," a mid-valley scandal begins to simmer.
Joshua's sermonizing draws a twittering coterie of
mesmerized women who leave their parents and their husbands to camp
out with the mystic who picks candidates for the role of bride. Eagerly,
those chosen to audition give him trembling succor under a patchwork
quilt.
Wait a bucolic minute. This is not the 1960s when
Free Love was embraced across our land by affectionate communards.
It is, in stern contrast, the waning Victorian era when prim and proper
behavior is expected of mothers and daughters.
After too many of Corvallis females join the fold
of this self-proclaimed avatar, enraged husbands and fathers take
action. In May 1904, they grab Joshua, tar and feather the scoundrel,
and deliver him across the Willamette to an unwary Albany. But it
is not the end of Creffield's sordid exploitation of his converts.
After stranding a few believers on the chilly coast near Yachats,
this New Messiah finally encounters a dark retribution.
In Linda Crew's novel for young adults, the true story
of Joshua and his brides is gently told by 16-year-old Eva May Hurt,
who at first adores the handsome preacher, becomes a "Holy Disciple"
and eventually, to her tender horror, learns the bitter truth.
A native of Corvallis, Crew is familiar with the strange
tale of Joshua and his cult. Her family's farm is near the site of
Eva May's home. -- David Johnson
Short Fiction
The
Horse
Island: The Complete Stories
by Alistair MacLeod. Norton, 2001. Hardcover, $29.95.
In this first American collection of the world-renowned
short fiction of Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod are 16 stories as
beautiful as any ever written. MacLeod writes about the people, weather,
land, sea and creatures of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia in an elegant,
spare language with roots deep into the old Gaelic that is his ancient
mother tongue. As in his eloquent novel, No Great Mischief
(2000), MacLeod's stories follow the people who, like him, hail from
this remote North Atlantic land and much earlier from Scotland.
 The
most perfect short story I have ever read, "In the Fall," was written
in 1973. Reminiscent of John Steinbeck's layered simplicity, everything
in the story works. A family lives on a hardscrabble farm high above
but within sight of the cold ocean. It's fall, a storm is brewing,
and the father must return to his winter job as a stevedore in Halifax,
leaving his wife and six children alone. The narrator is the eldest,
a boy nearly 14. He watches his mother nag his father about an old
horse. She's arranged for a man to come and haul the horse away. The
father doesn't argue, but he is saddened. Memories of stories about
the horse and his father flood the boy as he watches the horse follow
him onto the truck:
"He follows him as I have remembered them all of my
life and imagined them even before. Following wildly through the darkened
caverns of the mine in its dryness as his shoes flashed sparks from
the tracks and the stone; and in its wetness with both of them up
to their knees in water, feeling rather than seeing the landing of
their splashing feet and with the coal cars thundering behind them
with such momentum that were the horse to stumble, the very cars he
had set in motion would roll over him, leaving him mangled and grisly
to be hauled above ground only as carrion for the wheeling gulls."
Everyone who loves language and the great, gentle
craft of writing should read this book. MacLeod's stories evoke lucid
memory and renew an emotional connection to the past even as his generous
spirit soars. -- Lois Wadsworth
47 Miles of Barb Wire
Who Do You Love, stories
by Jean Thompson. Simon & Schuster, 2000. Scribner Paperback,
$13. National Book Award finalist.
First published in hardcover (Harcourt Brace, 1999),
Jean Thompson's outstanding collection of short fiction, Who Do
You Love, is now available in paperback. Literary short fiction
makes perfect vacation reading, and each of Thompson's 15 stories
here is perfect and whole. Groups of five stories each are gathered
into three sections: Who We Love, Other Lives and Spirits.
Often the characters in these stories have reached
a dead end, a point of no return, a final reckoning. The girl in "Ice
Angels" leaves her best friend and the cop who rescued them from a
snow drift sitting inside a warm restaurant and walks away, into the
freedom of
a blowing blizzard. Suzanne in "Mother Nature" is a disappointed,
divorced woman with a teenaged daughter who resents her. Suzanne isn't
sure whether to let a man friend she shared a house with years earlier
re-enter her life. The unnamed narrator in "Fire Dreams" lives in
a trailer next to a fire house, at the edge of a new upscale subdivision.
She is grateful when a brief affair with a married firefighter ends.
Thompson gives these characters no-nonsense, simple
American names, although dogs get more exotic names such as Beowulf
in "Mercy" and Barkley in "Mother Nature." The only characters in
"The Widower" are Campbell, Campbell's wife and Dr. Flynn, a steely-eyed
old codger who hates everything they do to make his old house their
own.
In the heartbreaking "Forever," a reporter named Hughes is covering
a story. Bonita Poole is the murdered girl's mother; Dean Kinshaw,
the dead girl's boy friend; and Kelly Poole the pretty girl who died
"because she was pretty and somebody wanted to get her." In "The Lost
Child," a six-year-old kidnap victim has no name.
These ordinary people's stories are remarkable because
Thompson's compassionate spirit accepts them just as they are and
figures we will do the same. Genuine generosity toward characters
is rare in a publication marketing climate that's geared to a trendy,
ironic and shallow treatment of life. But Thompson is no ordinary
writer. She's received both NEA and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships
and is the author of two other collections and two novels. Definitely
one to keep your eyes on. -- Lois Wadsworth
Poetry
New Frontiers
Louise in Love by Mary
Jo Bang. Grove Press, 2001. Paperback, $13.
"Authors are actors," Wallace Stevens once famously
wrote, "books are theaters." Readers should approach Mary Jo Bang's
new, dramatic, postmodern verse-novel, Louise in Love, through
the lens of this aphorism. Bang has set at play a group of characters
-- her "Dramatis Personae" -- starring Louise, partially
modeled on the actress Louise Brooks; her sister; two friends, Ham
and Charles; and "The Other."
 On
the stage of these pages, the characters interact, finding and resisting
their forms in dizzying, disorienting language. And how mesmerizing
the language is! Louise: "In the morning, left to her lovedream, her
rapt regard retrained/onto the window. Is someone rapping? No, the
wet wind/rain-veined and soaking the roses." And Louise in the dark,
singing: "O kiss the night that it comes up/so often and blanks out
what surrounds the lampposts."
Bang's extremely impressive first collection, Apology
for Want, is a combustible mixture of passionate subjective lyricism
in the manner of Sylvia Plath and Louise Gluck and allusive word games
a la Heather McHugh. The poems are skittery and musical, vatic
and personal, and the interiors they speak out of are frequently the
archetypal personas of insulted and injured womanhood: Gretel, Electra
and Persephone, oracles and clairvoyants.
It establishes Bang as a member of a movement that
could be called postmodern Dickinsonianism, one of the most exciting
developments in recent American poetry. The movement's tutelary figure
might be Lucie Brock-Broido, whose 1995 book, The Master Letters,
is, well, a masterpiece. Other important members include Brenda Shaughnessy
and Karen Volkman. While my space here is too short to assess the
importance of a post-Dickinsonian poetics, one look at the work of
any of the above-named poets will make abundantly clear both the issues
at stake and the vitality of their aesthetic.
But of course Bangs should not be read as a member
of a school. She is very much her own poet. With Louise in Love,
Bangs advances into territory where the guiding principle is pleasure.
"Into the interior," she writes, "into the electric connections that
traipsed the chasm between synaptic clefts." --
Andrew Feld
Table
Offerings
Given Sugar, Given
Salt by Jane Hirshfield. HarperCollins, 2001. Hardcover,
$24.
Jane Hirshfield's poems in this collection, her fifth,
are curiously unpeopled. Instead of relationships or family, she writes
about objects such as "Clock," "Bone," "Rock" or "Button." She makes
writing about the commonplace extraordinary by connecting it to an
exotic landscape or animal, as in "Button:" "Brevity and longevity
mean nothing to a button carved of horn./Nor do old dreams of passion
disturb it,/though once it wandered the ten thousand grasses/with
the musk-fragrance caught in its nostrils;/though once it followed
-- it did, I tell you -- that wind for miles."
 Many
poems reflect the concerns of the poet for words, writing, making
poems or reading. Like a poem in waiting, the thought she wants to
speak in "All Evening, Each Time I Started to Say It," cannot find
its way to expression. "After the fifth time this happened, I began
to be amused. 'Runt-of-the-litter' thought, I thought, 'unable
to get to the tit.'" Or in "Like An Ant Carrying Her Bits of Leaf
or Sand" where she draws parallels between the ant obeying "an inexplicable
order" and the poet obeying "an incomprehensible demand": "The work
of existence devours its own unfolding./What dissolves will dissolve
-- /you, reader, and I, and all our quick angers and longings./The
potato's sugary hunger for growing larger./The unblinking heat of
the tiger."
She includes poems about memory, mood, dreams, sleep,
the intransigent moment and musings on the mystery of life, as in
the poem that opens the book, "The Envoy": "There are openings in
our lives/of which we know nothing./Through them/the belled herds
travel at will,/long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust."
Throughout also runs a subtle thread that invisibly
binds the collection together -- change, the fickleness of memory
and growing older. Hirshfield is at her best describing a fleeting
feeling, an emotion bared, as in "Minotaur," a short poem that describes
the loss felt when a secret is told: "Once a minotaur,/a secret revealed
becomes a rock,/a tree, a cow like any other./Only the one who once
held it, seeing it/thus diminished, strokes the rough bark or small
ears./leans against the silent, cold surface with sorrow,/remembers
it in its former, fearsome glory."
This luminous collection shines with its own glory.
-- Lois Wadsworth
Desire
She
Didn't Mean to Do It by Daisy Fried. University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2000. Paperback, $12.95. Winner of the 1999 Agnes Lynch Starret
Poetry Prize.
As the title of her debut collection announces, Daisy
Fried writes poems about the unexpected, inexplicable forms desire
takes, the sometimes wonderful and sometimes catastrophic consequences
of our desire-driven actions.
 The
poems hold up to the light brief, talismanic moments from the lives
of young, American, urban girls as they discover and start to negotiate
the perilous terrain of sexuality. We see her and the young women
she watches in health class, at the swimming pool, going to first
communions, coming home at dawn from the prom and as bridesmaids cruising
the neighborhood in a white stretch limo, squeezed through the roofhole:
"bighaired mermaids waving/weaving arms, mythic fish halves hidden
below/behind blacked-out windows."
Clearly, Fried believes in writing about what she
knows. More importantly, she writes what she hears, which is American
English, circa now. The poems are alive and musical, inflected with
the jazzy rhythms of the living language that is always being invented
around us. "No diff, bride from bridesmaid this night," she writes.
"Bodies spazzy with childhood" and "Clinton photo-opped on his big
'98/China junket, only blobbier, grabassing around."
Although at times the slanginess of the poems can
feel a little mannered, as if Fried is performing a kind of street-smart
act designed for people who have no experience of the streets, more
often they are utterly convincing. The energy of their performance
carries you deeply into the lives they describe.
And when you've put down the book after a few readings,
it's the sure music of these people and places that stays with you,
as in the careful repetitions in the short poem "Fishtown Song." --
Andrew Feld.
Classics
Open-ended
Fragments: The Collected Wisdom
of Heraclitus. Translated by Brooks Haxton, with a foreword
by James Hillman. Viking, 2001. Hardcover, $19.95
The Greek prince Heraclitus of Ephesus gave up his
throne to become a seeker after wisdom. He produced at least one great
book, On Wisdom, which influenced Plato, Aristotle and almost
every great thinker of the Greek and Roman worlds. Then, along with
all his other works, it was lost. But not entirely. Fragments have
survived as quotations in the works of other writers -- small,
aphoristic jewels that have been collected and translated in several
important editions, most recently by the poet and classicist Brooks
Haxton in this lovely, elegant volume.
 James
Hillman argues that "the insights of Heraclitus are strikingly postmodern"
and that "his poetic aphorisms show a deconstructive mind at work."
For Haxton, the Heraclitean idea that "energy is the essence of matter"
points to Einstein and modern scientific thought. Clearly, one main
reasons for Heraclitus' lasting appeal and the inexhaustible applicability
of his thought lies in the way he has come down to us, as fragments.
These small chunks of wisdom, divorced from context, are astonishingly
open-ended.
On encountering fragment 81 -- "Just as the river
where I step is not the same and is, so I am as I am not" --
some readers will think of Rimbaud's famous dictum "Je est un autre"
and see Heraclitus as a proto-Modernist. Vivid images, broken into
short lines in these graceful translations, will entice others
to think of them as startling, almost contemporary poetry. Poets have
been raiding Heraclitus' work for generations. Think of the Hopkins
poem, "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the
Resurrection," with its lyrical summation of Heraclitean thought,
"Million fueled, nature's bonfire burns on."
Haxton translates the most famous fragment "You cannot
step into the same river twice" as "The river where you set your foot
just now is gone/those waters giving way to this, now this." It was
wistfully reformulated by Wallace Stevens as "He never felt twice
the same about the flecked river" and wittily by Gerald Stern as "you
can't step in front of the same bus twice." Such variations demonstrate
the fragments' flexibility, which continues to ensure their survival. --
Andrew Feld
General Non-Fiction
Doublethinkers
Debunked
One Market Under God: Extreme
Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of Economic Democracy
by Thomas Frank. Doubleday, 2000. Hardcover, $26.
A couple of years ago a business attorney told me
that what Marx meant in saying the workers would own the means of
production was that the employees of a company would own company stock.
I laughed. But he was serious. He'd been reading New Economy management
theory.
In One Market Under God, Thomas Frank provides
an antidote to that literature. Frank draws a big picture that, for
those who can bear it, delineates the means by which "extreme capitalism"
in the 1980s and '90s vanquished economic (and thus political) democracy
with barely a peep of protest from labor, government or academia.
Socialist media theorists have long wondered why the
people failed to throw off their false consciousness and install the
dictatorship of the proletariat on the schedule Marx predicted. Many
said it was because the media (as well as religion) serve as an opiate.
The opiate works because the vocabulary of the revolution is co-opted
by the ruling class and fed back to the people in such a way as to
"inoculate" them against the dangerous pathogen of socialism. A little
bit of subtly manipulated rhetoric can prevent a lot of power redistribution.
Frank shows how, via such rhetoric, the Body Politic
became the Market, and Citizens became Investors who participated
directly and potently in the Market by doing their own stock brokering
on the Internet. Never mind that actual workers in their real daily
jobs faced downsizing, eroded union representation, vanishing health
insurance, wage stagnation -- it was this end run around elitist
Wall Street institutions that struck the real blow for freedom. "Power
to the People" was thus co-opted and injected back into the nation's
cerebrospinal fluid as a combined stimulant and calmative.
Frank writes that The New York Times columnist
and New Economy apologist Thomas Friedman's work gave him "a feeling
akin to the first time I heard Newt Gingrich speak publicly and it
began to dawn on me that this is what the ruling class calls thinking,
that this handful of pathetic, palpably untrue prejudices are all
they have to guide them as they shuttle back and forth between the
State Department and the big think tanks, discussing what they mean
to do with us and how they mean to dispose of our country."
But just as you don't have to run to your doctor and
beg for Viagra or Meridia just because you saw the pretty ads for
them on TV, neither do you have to swallow unthinkingly the economic
propaganda of the powers that be. At least read the label first. --
Valerie Brown
We Are What We Eat
Fast Food Nation
by Eric Schlosser. Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Hardcover, $25.
As the fear of mad cow disease and E. Coli spreads,
and obesity and diabetes continue to rise, America's pledge of allegiance
to McDonald's and the fast food industry is to starting to waiver.
Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation is the literary equivalent
of burning down the golden arches. Schlosser exposes how we've not
only allowed the fast food industry to make us fat, but we've also
let it pave our country, devastate our agriculture, introduce new
lows in advertising ethics, widen the gap between rich and poor, launch
an epidemic of globalization and destroy our ability to appreciate
real food.
 Fast
Food Nation successfully challenges America's insatiable appetite
for fast food because its arguments are not the anti-meat, anti-fat,
anti-packaged food tirade we've heard before. Like the famous muckraker
Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, 1906), Schlosser goes into slaughterhouses
and tells what he finds, which is pretty gruesome. Most media coverage
of the fast food industry focuses on what's in the meat -- manure
causes the E. Coli bacteria, as Schlosser points out --
but he goes much deeper.
He makes a powerful case that consuming fast food
is stomaching an ideology that masquerades under such all-American
principles as free market, efficiency and technology but that actually
represents capitalism at its worst. Schlosser interviewed small farmers
pushed off their land by big agribussinesses, burger-flipping teenagers
who risk being robbed and worse, and impoverished immigrants who work
at America's most dangerous jobs -- meatpackers.
He also learns that only two cents out of every $1.50
spent on a large order of fries goes to the farmer who grew the potatoes.
Fast food companies invest big bucks in equipment so streamlined that
it requires as little skill as possible to operate while pocketing
vast government subsidies for teaching job skills to the poor. Slaughterhouse
workers have been horribly mangled and killed trying to maintain an
"efficient" line speed.
Schlosser's book could hail the beginning of the end
for the American fast food industry. The growth of big chains, at
least in the U.S., has slowed. McDonald's has been forced to reinvent
its image -- starting last month with the McCafe, a Starbuck's-like
coffee and dessert chain. Regardless of the name or image, it will
be hard to think of a 59-cent hamburger as a good deal ever again.
-- Jennifer Snelling
The Politics of Caring
The Lost Children of Wilder
by Nina Bernstein. Pantheon Books, 2001. Hardcover, $27.50.
In 1972 while protesters against the Vietnam War hurled
invective at the country's leaders, college faculties debated the
relevance of their time-honored course offerings and youthful hippies
smoked dope and celebrated free love, thousands of Black and Hispanic
children in New York City's foster care system languished in substandard
facilities.
White foster children had a much better shot at a
decent placement because a 19th century mandate gave Catholic and
Jewish agencies the bulk of the city's foster care budget. The
Lost Children of Wilder is the story of one attorney's resolve
to right this imbalance. The New York Times reporter Nina Bernstein
traces a path through a harrowing legal labyrinth that pits politically
powerful Catholic and Jewish foster care agencies -- and their
political supporters -- against a determined Marcia Lowry, the
young Legal Aid attorney who saw a wrong she was going to right.
Lowry knew she faced formidable odds when she filed
her class action suit in 1973, but she couldn't have known she would
be trying to scale a sheer political cliff with no ropes. It would
take more than two decades for Lowry's "righting" to take hold.
Underlying the legal analyses and procedures is the
story of youth blown apart by adult violence, neglect and abuse. It's
about wasted potential and how about how neglect opens a hole in kids
that they later fill with drugs, sex, chaos and self-hate and then
hand it all down to the next generation they try to parent.
The book traces the life of the case's namesake, Shirley
Wilder, a spirited young girl who entered the city's foster care system
in 1972 at age 13. Shirley bounced around detention centers --
and was beat up in them -- for more than a decade. She emerges
a single mom with no education and no parenting skills. Her bright,
charming son bounds from foster placement to foster placement, abandoned
over and over by adults who swear to love and protect him. Shirley
becomes addicted to crack, infected with HIV, and dies in 1999, just
days before a judge's ruling would end Lowry's 26-year-long effort.
The Lost Children is a thick, dense read, exceptional
because it offers the human side to the legal and political struggle.
Bernstein's research is masterful. The story she tells is sad and
powerful. -- Alice Tallmadge
Timbertown and the OCA
Stranger Next Door by Arlene
Stein. Beacon Press, 2001. Hardcover, $27.50.
Since the late 1980s the Oregon Citizen's Alliance
(OCA) has waged one of the most persistent anti-gay movements in the
U.S. When sociology professor Dr. Arlene Stein arrived at the UO in
1994 she was surprised at the effects the OCA-sponsored ballot initiatives
had on the rural communities in Oregon.
"I began to hear stories of people who stopped speaking
with their neighbors over this issue," Stein said. "The whole thing
struck me in some ways as bizarre -- that the issue of gay rights
would become so explosive. Particularly in rural Oregon where there
are very few out gay people."
Stein chose a Oregon small town that she refers to
as "Timbertown" to examine the larger issues surrounding why anti-gay
measures were so volatile in rural communities. Timbertown, like many
other small towns in the Northwest, has suffered great economic and
social upheaval. Thriving, homogenous communities throughout Oregon
changed after the collapse of the timber industry. New people arrived,
taking advantage of lowered real estate values and bringing with them
new ideas, lifestyles and cultural identities. Stein writes:
"By the early 1990s Timbertown's traditional economic
base had all but vanished. If most residents once lived and worked
in town, a majority were now commuting twenty miles or more to work.
...The community, once rooted in the lumber industry, made up of families
who had settled the land for generations, had been transformed into
a bedroom community, more diverse economically and culturally, but
lacking a strong sense of self."
Lon Mabon, leader of the OCA , took advantage of Timbertown's
insecurity when he introduced an amendment to its city charter that
would prohibit the city from granting civil rights protections to
homosexuals. By operating on uncertainty and fear of change, Mabon
garnered enough support to pass the charter amendment in the city
election. The courts later overturned it as unconstitutional.
Mabon presented homosexuality as the root cause of
the disintegration of traditional family values and American culture.
But Timbertown didn't seem as preoccupied with the lesbian/gay issue,
Stein said, as with the changing roles of men and women, shifting
family structures and economic uncertainty. That's what mobilized
the town and others like it to support the OCA campaign, she concluded.
"By declaring who is strange," Stein writes, "we come to know who
is familiar."
Stein reads from Stranger Next Door at 7 pm
on June 20 in Mother Kali's Bookstore. --
Elizabeth Pownall
Challenging Stereotypes
In Search of Black America: Discovering
the African-American Experience by David J. Dent. Simon
and Schuster, 2000. Paperback, $15.
In 1991, David J. Dent was a journalist on assignment
in Brooklyn following the August street riots. Talking with young
men on a popular street corner, he was impressed by the atmosphere
of comfort and acceptance he found there. It struck Dent that while
the corner was the place to discuss subjects of current interest,
racism wasn't one of those subjects. Only when he brought it up did
the conversation turn to issues of race.
Dent decided to seek out African-American communities
throughout the U.S. and to visit "cultural spaces created by black
people, places where individuality -- independent of the baggage
of race -- may thrive." Within such safety, he believed, people
are freed to pursue their own dreams and released from the constant
pressures of being "the other."
Dent traveled for five years -- from mansions and
art galleries in Detroit to bowling alleys in Seattle, from a run-down
yet genteel beach resort in Florida to the "ebony towers" of Spelman
and Morehouse. Across four generations, he unearthed compelling stories
of rodeo organizers, urban bounty hunters, college students and small
town ministers.
Dent focuses on the middle and upper classes, because
he believes the African-American poor are over-represented in the
media. He notes that 2.2 million African-American families earned
incomes above $50,000 in 1997, and 76 percent lived above the poverty
line. His research shows that a diverse range of people he calls the
black majority share talent, determination, faith, common values and
a strong sense of community. African Americans have been raising families,
achieving personal and professional success, contributing to society,
building strong communities and supporting their youth for generations.
"One ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro:
two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals
in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn
asunder," W.E.B. Du Bois wrote. The face of the dichotomy is changing,
Dent writes -- it has become the contrast between images in the
media and the life of the majority. He says "there is something still
very unsettling" about African Americans who find professional and
economic success yet still face the "simple struggle" to find a cab.
-- Mary Meredith Drew
The Humanist
The Shadow of the Sun by
Ryszard Kapuscinski. Knopf, 2001. Hardcover, $25.
Africa has interested me for as long as I can remember.
South African novelist Alan Paton's seminal book, Cry, the Beloved
Country, forced me to imagine apartheid. I took a class on the
short-lived Pan-African movement taught by a British official who
knew many African leaders of the era. I've seen a few fabulous films
made by African filmmakers. But no other observations have brought
Africa alive for me as Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski's "record
of a forty-year marriage," The Shadow of the Sun.
 In
1957 Kapuscinski was sent to Africa as Poland's (only) foreign correspondent.
He lived with Africans, unlike other foreigners, and took public transportation
because his country couldn't afford air travel. "I opted to hitch
rides on passing trucks, wander with nomads through the desert, be
the guests of peasants of the tropical savannah," he writes. The ordinary
Africans Kapuscinski met and became friends with over this very long
period helped him arrive at a deep understandings of the continent
he calls "a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos."
Here's Kapuscinski on the African concept of time:
"Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect
or ignore it. ... In practical terms, this means that if you go to
a village where a meeting is scheduled for the afternoon but find
no one at the appointed spot, asking 'When will the meeting take place?'
makes no sense. You know the answer: 'It will take place when the
people come.'"
Kapuscinski turned even serious illness into an opportunity
to know Africans more intimately. He contracted cerebral malaria,
"the terror of the tropics," and then tuberculosis. He knew telling
Warsaw he was ill would result in his forced return, because hospitalization
would be so expensive. But an Irish doctor helped him get free treatment
at an outpatient clinic, where two male African aides dispensed medication
and gave him shots every day. Despite his pain, Kapuscinski laughed
with them one day, and that broke the ice:
"Rendering me weak and defective, [my illness] diminished
my prestigious white status -- that of someone formidable, untouchable
-- and put me on a more even footing with the black men. Now
a diminished, disowned, flawed white man I could be treated with familiarity
... A warmth entered my relations with [them] that would have been
unthinkable had they met me as a strong, healthy, imperious European."
Written with clear-eyed compassion and an enviable
simplicity, this lovely book contains real treasure. -- Lois Wadsworth
Rugged Wonderland
Eastern Oregon: 100 Hikes/Travel Guide
by William L. Sullivan. Navillus Press (Eugene), 2001.
Paperback, $14.95.
The landscape east of the Oregon Cascades is harsh,
unwelcoming and monotonous for those who drive through on their way
to somewhere else. But for those of us who brave the cold, heat, wind,
rattlesnakes, ticks and loneliness, Eastern Oregon is a pristine wonderland
to be explored and cherished.
 Eugene
resident Bill Sullivan has captured the essence of Eastern Oregon
in his new book, his latest and perhaps his last in a series of Oregon
hiking books and travel guides.
Sullivan spent three years exploring this vast and
diverse region with its dramatic geography comparable to the Australian
outback, Yellowstone Park and the Swiss Alps. He revisited many areas
at different times of the year. This is rugged country without the
well-defined trail system of the Cascades, and in some areas he takes
us cross-country, following deer trails, circumventing poison oak
patches, boulder-hopping across creeks. He even provides latitudes
and longitudes for GPS (Global Positioning System) users to find obscure
trailheads and unmarked road junctions.
He managed to find quite a few short, easy day-hikes;
but others are challenging, such as a nearly 30-mile loop in the Wallowas
with a 4,000-foot elevation gain. This particular hike/backpack provided
him with a gorgeous cover shot of Eagle Cap and Glacier Lake, memories
to last a lifetime, and probably a few blisters.
Sullivan recognizes that exploring Eastern Oregon
requires more commitment of time than a Sunday afternoon hike with
the kids and dog to Proxy Falls. This is rough country with long distances
to cover. So he has made his new book a guide to the region as well
as a hiking book. His useful hand-drawn maps have been expanded in
this book to include some excellent regional overviews showing roads
and towns along with sites and trails of historic and scenic interest.
Sullivan wrote outdoor columns for Eugene Weekly
for many years and now writes for The Register-Guard. His latest
self-published book is a remarkable compilation that belongs on every
outdoor lover's book shelf. But be warned. He only shows us how to
find these exotic places where creeks boil and eagles soar. What we
experience there will be our own, and in magical landscapes such as
Eastern Oregon our expeditions will always be unpredictable. -- Ted
Taylor
Infectious Delight
Walking the High Ridge
by Robert Michael Pyle. Milkweed Editions, 2000. Paperback, $12.
"Who else gets to examine home
ground as closely as a shrew, and call it a job?" Robert Michael Pyle
asks. In Walking the High Ridge, Pyle recounts his life as
one unbroken field trip: his passion for butterflies as a child, travels
throughout the world for international butterfly conservation, enticement
of people outdoors, growing commitment to writing, and ultimate settlement
on a tributary to the Columbia River in southwestern Washington (which
is not exactly a butterfly Mecca).
 His
mood throughout is one of gratitude: for the sex life of the Magdalena,
a black alpine butterfly in the Rocky Mountains; for his mom having
taken him outdoors while he was young; for all three wives he's still
friends with; for teachers, scientists, and writers who have encouraged
him all his life; and most of all for this "infinitely rich, enthralling,
and delightful" world.
That the universe is diverse and that it is ultimately
indifferent to humans thrills Pyle. Figuring that all you see is all
you get, he expresses his fundamental belief: "Heaven is here, angels
are butterflies and bats, and the great beyond is the holy compost
pile of the ages. It is the same for bolloworms, Bigfoot, thee, and
me, so we'd best make haste to live well in the here and now, with
our eyes and hearts wide open, in kindness and generosity toward our
own and other species. That, to me, would seem an ample world in which
to believe, and for which devoutly to hope."
Pyle's enthusiasm is infectious. If you read this
small book while sitting in a meadow or under a tree, you'll probably
end up being newly appreciative of the plant and animal friends who
surround you. Perhaps you'll arrange for more conversations with Pyle
and the world by reading any of his books, essays, articles, scientific
papers, fiction, or poems, which are listed at the back of the book.
-- Mary O'Brien
Tribal Triumph
A Whale Hunt by Robert
Sullivan. Scribner, 2000. Hardback, $25.
That author Robert Sullivan, formerly of Portland
but now relocated to Brooklyn, knows how to make an epic event out
of a day hike was made perfectly evident in his first book, The
Meadowlands, where he explores a toxics-laden bog just a stones
throw away from the New Jersey Turnpike in great detail. In A Whale
Hunt, Sullivan limits his trekking to tiny Neah Bay on the Olympic
Peninsula. Beginning in 1997, he spent two years there chronicling
the Makah tribe's efforts to undertake the tribe's first whale hunt
in more than 70 years.
In the politically correct '90s the Makah couldn't
take on such a venture without raising the eyes and ire of whale-lovers
and animal rights activists around the globe. The 1,500-person town
of three motels, two restaurants, four pay phones, five soda machines
and no tavern became an arena where media hounds flocked to document
the clash between a native culture trying to revive itself and the
animal rights movement.
No one is in doubt about the outcome of the story.
The Makah, despite vociferous protests that rang from one end of the
continent to the other, went ahead with their hunt and got their whale.
But as with so many front-stage events, the drama
of the tale doesn't lie with the outcome but with how it comes to
pass. Downshifting to a glacial pace, Sullivan chronicles the politics,
subtle shifts and conflicts that peppered the Makah's preparation
for the hunt. He digs up old tales and myths, hangs out at the coffee
shop and delves into the quixotic personality of Wayne Johnson, 45,
captain of the whaling crew. An unathletic, aspiritual loner who takes
anger-management classes, Johnson is haunted by malfunctioning vehicles.
No one thinks he has the stuff a leader is made of.
Sullivan got a touch of observer fever living in a
tattered shack and waiting for the hunt. He sketches detailed slices-of-life
about people we don't need to know about and spends pages building
scenes that go nowhere.
But the story picks up as the hunt unfolds. Sullivan
holds us throughout the fracas -- the indignant protesters, the
worried captain and the wild-man whaler who hurls the harpoon that
finds its mark, silences the protesters and heralds a new dawn for
this tiny native band who in their search to go forward dared to go
back to the way of their ancestors. -- Alice
Tallmadge
Caught Up In Life
Geeks by Jon Katz. Broadway
Books, 2000. Paperback, $19.95
"Life began for you when you
got out of high school, which, more likely than not, was a profoundly
painful experience. You may have powers of your own now, yet you see
yourself as one who never quite fits in."
Jon Katz's definition of geekdom may seem broad (who
hasn't felt alienated in high school?), but he expands it eloquently
in this story of two computer whiz kids from Idaho trying to get a
life. Geeks is interesting, not only for its subject matter
but also because Katz is too human to remain an objective bystander.
The author discovers Jesse and Eric in a small town
in Idaho and helps to push them outward, to widen their view of the
world and the possibilities it can hold for them. When they decide
to escape Idaho for the big city, he signs on to chronicle their journey.
Jesse and Eric are ready or at least willing to take
a stab at a larger life. They migrate to Chicago in search of some
goal, they're not sure what. They find jobs that pay more money than
they ever could have dreamed, but building a meaningful life is more
difficult. The reader doesn't know until the end if they're going
to make it.
What starts out as a social documentary becomes in
the end a love story. Katz may have planned to stand off by the sidelines
and report on Jesse and Eric's adventure, grateful only for their
willingness to share their reality with him. Instead, he finds himself
championing their culture and by extension the culture of geeks all
over the world, especially in the aftermath of the Columbine-induced
backlash against geeks and goths.
Instead of dispassionately documenting Jesse and Eric's
emotional changes as they struggle to develop a social life, Katz
becomes actively involved in helping them get where they want to go.
By the end of the book, there is no objective reporter in sight. Katz
is not apologetic. This is a story of a father and his boys, and it
doesn't matter if none of them knew that at the beginning. --
Lark Wadsworth
Biography
Mystery
Musician
Aaron Copland: the Life and Work of
an Uncommon Man by Howard Pollack. University of Illinois
Press, 2000. Paperback, $19.95.
Serious biographies of artists -- especially
musicians, and most especially classical composers -- tend to
fall into two categories: highly technical, scholarly tomes that neglect
the artist's character and celebrity psychoanalyses. The latter track
the major events (and scandals) in a subject's life, yet give little
insight into the creation of important works or even what makes the
artist great. In neither case does the reader learn how a composer's
life and character connected to her or his creative product.
A number of writers -- Jack Chambers writing
on Miles Davis, Jan Swafford on Charles Ives -- have pulled off
this difficult balancing act. Unfortunately, Howard Pollack doesn't,
despite his many contributions to our understanding of America's greatest
composer. Nevertheless, the book is an invaluable, long-overdue resource
that sorts out many details and provides a greater grasp of this fascinating,
good-natured, yet ultimately elusive musician. Anyone interested in
American music should read it.
The book is comprehensive. Pollack has consulted hundreds
of sources and discusses most of the major works, but he lacks a sense
of proportion. The dramatic impact of important turning points in
Copland's life are lost in the morass -- almost 700 pages --
of undifferentiated biographical detail.
The book's structure also contributes to its tedium.
In attempting to resolve the perennial dilemma between discussing
big issues thematically and maintaining the chronological thread of
the subject's life, Pollack addresses major contextual issues --
in their entirety -- when they first arise. So when Copland first
goes to Europe, we get an extended discussion of his lifelong relationship
with European composers. These long, anachronistic digressions undermine
the sense of storytelling that propels us through the great biographies,
such as Edmund Morris's book on Theodore Roosevelt. Context must be
woven more artfully into chronology.
To his credit, Pollack, a musicologist, makes the
book accessible to the general reader with little knowledge of music
theory. Yet he fails to compensate by coming to grips -- in laymen's
terms -- with precisely what made so many of Copland's works
innovative. Despite its wealth of valuable information about Copland's
life and work, the book feels assembled rather than written, and Copland
remains as enigmatic as he was even to his closest friends. --
Brett Campbell
Memoir
Rise
Up
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
by Janisse Ray. Milkweed Editions, 1999. Paperback, $14.95. Winner
of the American Book Award.
Janisse Ray started out in a junkyard in Baxley, Georgia
and has ended up writing passionately about two of her families --
her human people and her 99-percent destroyed longleaf pine people.
Stories about them alternate throughout the book, and Ray has rendered
them equally compelling and memorable. If we all tried to understand
and love both the vulnerabilities and majesty of our human and non-human
families as profoundly as Ray does, neither our human communities
nor our ecosystems would be bleeding so hard.
Members of Ray's extended family were variously violent,
proud, ashamed, mentally troubled and loving -- often two or
three of those at once. For awhile, her father's body was at home,
while his mind was lost. But his love for his family and theirs for
him never ceased. For awhile, Georgia's forests were beautiful, mysterious,
breathtaking and surreal, and Ray's love for them remains. But "If
you clear a forest, you'd better pray continuously," Ray writes, because
"God doesn't like a clearcut. It makes his heart turn cold, makes
him wince and wonder what went wrong with his creation."
Ray uses simple language to render the human and ecological
history of Georgia that moves straight to one's astonished heart.
Anyone who thinks that an episode of mental illness must be tragic
should read "Junkyard." Anyone who thinks explaining ecological principles
requires using abstract terms that turn lives into "systems," "disturbance
processes" and "populations" should read "Built by Fire" and "Flatwoods
Salamander."
And anyone who discounts the power of one, uncommon
native plant surviving in a damaged setting should read "How the Heart
Opens." A carnivorous pitcher plant in the junkyard claimed Ray's
attention. "Its carnivory taught me the sinlessness of predation and
its columns of dead insects the glory of purpose no matter how small,"
she writes. "In that plant I was looking for ... a way of being --
no, not for a way of being but of being able to be."
Ray takes the only stance worth taking when contemplating
the wreckage of families, human or otherwise: Rise up. "There is a
Miracle for You if You Keep Holding On" is her last chapter, followed
by a list of organizations working to assist longleaf pine forests.
Fitting. -- Mary O'Brien
Tom Sawyer in China
Colors of the Mountain
by Da Chen. Anchor Books, 1999. Paperback, $13.
Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and
Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club were just the beginning of a rich
bounty of novels, short stories and memoirs by Asian Americans that
seems to be more than a trend. Lisa See's On Gold Mountain
is a captivating history/memoir that traces the hundred-year odyssey
of a Chinese American family. Ha Jin won the National Book Award for
his novel, Waiting, about a Chinese doctor waiting forever
to marry his love. And now Da Chen has crafted Colors of the Mountain,
a personal coming of age memoir of hard times during China's Cultural
Revolution.
 Born
in 1962, just as the Red Guard was about to descend on millions, waving
their booklets with imperial quotations from Chairman Mao, Da Chen
was a scion of the despicable landlord class. His father and grandfather
were routinely hauled off to prison camps where re-education came
in the brutal form of sticks and fists. His sisters and brothers toiled
at labor camps. In spite of nearly constant separation, his family
struggled to stick together in a fractious world.
At first, young Da Chen was a little imp -- mischievous,
observant and thoughtful. He hangs with a gang of wild boys who smoke
cigarettes, gamble with cards and plan their next caper. While they
ramble, they discuss the mysteries of sex. Yi, a jokester in the band,
explains, "--They do it with different people, with no fixed
partner. That's real spirit of sharing."
This idyllic life of Tom Sawyer in the rice fields
soon turns rough. Da takes abuse from a smug, sadistic teacher at
school and orchestrates his revenge. After a rocky adolescence he
travels to Beijing to study and escape his turbulent life. Yet throughout
his account of adversity and personal achievement, Da finds time to
consider the world around him:
"I loved the endless wheat fields, which were turning
golden as the new year approached. There was calm here. I sat with
my legs crossed like a monk and spread my books on the ground. There
were chapters of history so beautiful that I couldn't help reading
them out loud again and again. This was another time with totally
different people. There was so much I didn't know about my own country,
my own race." -- David Johnson
Seattle or Bust
Two Wheels North: Bicycling the West
Coast in 1909 by Evelyn McDaniel Gibb. OSU Press, 2000.
Paperback, $15.95. Pacific Northwest Writers Association Nonfiction
Book Award winner, 2000.
Eugene was a decidedly different locale in 1909 when
Victor McDaniel and Ray Francisco bicycled through on their way from
Santa Rosa, California to the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle.
After a couple of days of hop-picking and thwarted romance, the young
men found themselves "thumping over the wide planks of the long bridge
across the river from Springfield to Eugene City." They made camp
on the riverbank near two stern wheelers, and "came awake to the throb
of The City of Eugene's steam engine." North of town, watching a thousand
geese darken the sky, Vic confided that this spectacle made him feel
as though he'd been to church.
Two Wheels North is written by Victor's daughter,
Evelyn McDaniel Gibb. Assembled from afternoon conversations with
her aging father, postcards and newspaper clippings, the book began
as notes on her father's adventure, which he would then "emend, add
on, or scratch out." The resulting story is an account of the first
overland journey by Santa Rosans to Seattle not made by rail. It's
also the record of a friendship that sustained these young men for
more than 54 days and 1,000 miles.
There were glorious moments, to be sure, but there
were also maladies (saddle sores, grippe and gastrointestinal distress),
dangers (a rattlesnake, an unexpected train in a railroad tunnel and
a bar in Portland known for shanghais), and hard roads (logs, planks
and cornstalks) when there were roads at all.
The story is enriched by the shifting moods of pious
Ray and skeptical Vic and the splendid language of ordinary folks.
A road is "raisined with gravel," and the dust is "puppy-deep." Hiding
from railroad yard bulls, Vic and Ray are "still as moles in a graveyard."
Not yet halfway to Seattle, Vic notes "a quiet certainness, as though
the universe was my friend...as though, for the first time, I had
met the person I truly was. And I could trust him."
Gibb's fine descriptions would have been plenty, but
there are also photographs of the travelers and reproductions of gorgeous
old postcards from the journey. The illustrations are described in
the back of the book, and there's a map in the front for wistful armchair
cyclists. -- Josephine Bridges
The Competitive
Edge
Racing the Antelope: What Animals
Can Teach Us About Running and Life by Bernd Heinrich.
Cliff Street Books, 2001. Hardcover, $23.
I have no interest in running. This does not mean
I'm opposed to vigorous physical activity. I view dancing and music
as sublime elixirs of life. But I have approached Bernd Heinrich's
Racing the Antelope with special bias-correcting lenses. A
Vermont biologist and runner of 50-100 kilometer ultra-marathons,
he combines personal memoir with science writing and a naturalist's
observational skills. The book will appeal strongly to those who like
to run and possibly to those interested in the mechanics of physical
performance.
Heinrich reminisces about his boyhood in postwar Germany,
where his family lived in a forest that was part of a large estate.
The descriptions of the beetles, rabbits and birds he tracked there
have a sensory immediacy whose lyricism evokes the writing of 19th
century naturalists. Heinrich also offers runners scientific information
on such topics as bumblebee body temperature regulation and the aerobic
capacity of pronghorn antelope.
His personal story is the kind athletes love to hear.
Although he started running young, Heinrich ruptured a lumbar disc
in college. He kept running anyway. In 1981, at 41, he decided to
run the U.S. National Championship 100-km race. He won, briefly joining
the ranks of the world's best runners.
Heinrich repeatedly invokes the metaphor of Man the
Hunter as the motivational substrate for running, glorifying running
as the peak of human physical achievement and assuming that competitive
sports form the noblest expression of this ancient human compulsion.
He praises competitive running because "perfection is fairly and objectively
defined by numbers."
This square, determinist view of achievement works
fine for many people, including scientists for whom nothing can be
comprehensible unless it is mathematized. But there is a less rigid
world view available. Heinrich recalls a trip to Africa, during which
he stumbled onto a pictograph of stick figures running. The last figure
shown is making an exuberant leap, which Heinrich sees as the expression
of a runner's joy, not just in running but in competing and winning
at hunting. But ancient peoples were also painters and dancers. I
prefer to see that leap as a creative impulse as much as a competitive
one. -- Valerie Brown
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