Category Archives: Nonfiction – General

A Review of Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton: A Memoir

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I just found out this week that back in high school Jill thought I was “so cool” because I owned a copy of The Satanic Verses. This is how lucky I’ve been in my life: by fifteen, I had found at least one friend who recognized that coolness can be a function of one’s book collection. Never mind that my copy of Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel was in absolutely pristine, unread condition back then and still is; we recognized something in each other back then: a certain sacredness about books, even if life and – in this case – literary immaturity sometimes require us to keep them on the shelves for twenty years or so before we read them.

Of course I wasn’t ready to read The Satanic Verses when I was fifteen – or when I was thirteen, which was how old I was when the Ayatollah issued his fatwa against Rushdie and I went out and bought the book. I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking when I bought the book, but I know that a certain aggressively liberal, politically outspoken history teacher was behind that particular emergency trip to the bookstore. Again, I’ve been a lucky person to have had great friends and great teachers who have shared my sense of urgency when it comes to great books.

Very early – about 12:45 am, actually – on November 1, I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep. I had a plane to catch in the morning and was worried, as I always am, that my alarm wouldn’t go off. I was also hungry – really, really hungry – for no particular reason. And – OK, I might as well say it – I thought I heard footsteps walking around the house, and I was creeped out. This never happens to me – I haven’t been scared of imaginary footsteps in a couple of decades. But I was sleeping in a twin-sized bed in my childhood home, and, well, sometimes these things happen. So I got up, turned on a whole bunch of lights, went downstairs, cooked a huge meal, and opened up Salman Rushdie’s recent memoir, Joseph Anton. And man, was I hooked.

Rushdie’s novels are known for being difficult; I still have never made it all the way through Midnight’s Children (or even Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which is a children’s book, for God’s sake). But this memoir is absolutely readable and accessible – even with very little sleep, even with invisible zombies walking around the house, even on an airplane seat next to an overweight, coughing guy who doesn’t know how to keep his elbows to himself. Yes, it’s that good.

The purpose of this memoir is to tell the story of how Rushdie’s life changed when the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa against his novel The Satanic Verses in 1989 on the basis of a series of misunderstandings about Rushdie’s intent to defame Islam. The book begins, however, with a good deal of background on Rushdie himself – his birth just six weeks before Indian independence in 1947, privileged but troubled childhood in Bombay, his education at Rugby and Cambridge, and his early years as an apprentice novelist and advertising copywriter in London before Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize, securing his reputation and allowing him to work on his novels full-time. Also early in the memoir, Rushdie provides a bit of background on the history of Islam, and specifically on the historical incident surrounding the “satanic verses” of the Qur’an, an incident I was not familiar with before I read this book and which I found very compelling.

This is my very pared-down retelling of the story: when Mohammad was receiving the divine revelation of the Qur’an, there was one occasion when he came down from the mountain and told the people who were transcribing his revelations (since Mohammad was most likely illiterate) that Allah (speaking through the angel Gabriel) had revealed that it was acceptable to worship the statues of three female angels that were posted at the gates of Mecca (which, at the time, was a polytheistic city). This revelation was surprising because up until this point all of Mohammad’s revelations emphasized the importance of worshipping only Allah. This announcement, of course, was pleasing to many of the people of Mecca who were intrigued by Mohammad’s teachings but reluctant to give up their old ways – including many people who were rich and powerful. Some time later, though, Mohammad descended the mountain after another session and told his followers that the angel Gabriel had told him that he himself (meaning Gabriel) had not actually given Mohammad and his followers permission to worship the statues of the angels; in fact, that revelation had been given by Satan, who had disguised himself as Gabriel. The verses that grant Muslims permission to worship the statues of the three female angels have since been referred to as the “satanic verses,” and it is from this incident that Rushdie takes the title of his novel.

What Rushdie emphasizes about this story in his memoir is the host of possibilities it raises about the human motivations of Mohammad. He speculates that Mohammad’s original announcement that worshipping the statues was acceptable to Allah never came from any divine being at all – Gabriel or Satan – but from Mohammad himself as the result of some kind of a deal or bargain he might have struck with the wealthy and powerful men of Mecca. Rushdie speculates that Mohammad became aware that these men wanted to support him in the teaching of this new religion but were stopped short by the injunction that they could not worship any gods except Allah, so Mohammad (in this hypothetical situation) made a deal with them and agreed to insert some flexibility into the scriptures that were being dictated to them by Gabriel. Rushdie then hypothesizes that either Mohammad felt some ethical compunction about his actions later on or possibly was angry because the powerful men reneged on their end of the bargain somehow, so he invented the story of Satan masquerading as Gabriel in order to erase the permission to worship the statues from the public record.

Rushdie makes clear that none of these speculations about Mohammad’s motivations can be proven by the historical record, but he also makes it clear that a) they can be supported by the historical record, which indicates that Mohammad did very much wish to curry favor with the rich and powerful men of Mecca, b) that they cannot be disproven by the historical records, and c) that many scholars before him have made this exact hypothesis and others like it. What fascinated Rushdie about this story is the way Islam – like all religions – emerged from human actions, human motivations, and possibly human imperfections.

(By the way, another book that was receiving flak in the world news in 1988 and 1989 was Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ, which also concerns the human desires and motivations of a religious figure, and which I also purchased in the seventh grade on the advice (very, very strongly worded advice) of the same outspoken history teacher. Did she have stock in B. Dalton or Waldenbooks? She very well might have. If so, though, her portfolio probably isn’t too happy these days. But I digress).

If you’ve ever wanted to read Rushdie’s novels but found them intimidating, I would recommend reading his memoir simply for the fact that he does an excellent job of walking the reader through his thought processes behind several of his novels – The Satanic Verses first and foremost, but also Midnight’s Children, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and The Moor’s Last Sigh. By the time I was a quarter of the way through the memoir, I was desperate to read The Satanic Verses, and while I still haven’t done so (the middle of a cross-country move really isn’t the best time to read dense, symbolic, important works of world literature – a face that I am rediscovering pretty much every day lately), I will do so soon and am looking forward to it. Rushdie does an outstanding job of humanizing himself as a writer, working through his moments of frustration, his moments of inspiration, and the long, diligent years of work that went into each novel.

The second half of Joseph Anton: A Memoir isn’t quite as exciting as the first half, although I still read it with interest. Of course, the subject matter is partly to blame: once Rushdie is in hiding under an assumed name (his assumed name is the Joseph Anton of the title, of course, a name that he chose in honor of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov: “Conrad, the translingual creator of wanderers, lost and not lost, of voyagers into the heart of darkness, of secret agents in a world of killers and bombs, and of at least one immortal coward, hiding from his shame; and Chekhov, the master of loneliness and melancholy, of the beauty of an old world destroyed, like the trees in the cherry orchard, by the brutality of the new”), the outward nature of the plot becomes rather monotonous. Rushdie asks for permission to fly on British Airways and is rejected. He moves from apartment to apartment to various rented houses. He tries to have normal relationships with his ten year-old son and with his ex-wife. His crazy current wife does a wide variety of crazy things, and Rushdie puts up with her ridiculous antics much longer than he should. He somehow, in the midst of all the demonstrations and malicious articles in the press and crazy mullahs calling for his death, manages to meet and fall in love with his third wife. (Contemplating Salman Rushdie’s sex life is not something I ever thought I would spend any fraction of my life doing, but I did. The man gets around.)

Of course there is much more that I could tell you about the events of Rushdie’s life that he narrates in this book, but I want to narrow my focus a bit to a few final points and then encourage you to find the time to read this engaging, important book for yourself. First, Rushdie spends a good deal of time making the case (correctly, I think) that his experience under the ayatollah’s fatwa can now clearly be seen as a harbinger of everything that has happened between the West and the world of militant Islam in the years since 2001. Rushdie uses imagery and language from the Hitchcock film The Birds to dramatize the way individuals and groups within Islam that were hostile to Western democracy and its freedoms inched their way closer and closer to their targets while most of Britain and the United States and other Western nations were looking the other way. Specifically, in 1989 the West was looking at the Soviet Union and the final months of Communism in that country and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demonstration and murders in Tiananmen Square – all important world-historical events, to be sure, but in hindsight they served as distractions from what was happening in the Middle East, namely the regrouping that was happening in both Iran and Iraq at the end of those two countries’ eight-year war. Rushdie depicts  the Ayatollah Khomeini on his deathbed, possibly senile, issuing the fatwa against The Satanic Verses not on the basis of his own reading of it but because his son indicated to him that an attack against a “safe” target (i.e. a novelist – not another nation that might be equipped with weapons) would be a good way to galvanize the Iranian people against a common enemy and redirect their attention from how painfully their country had failed them by waging such a destructive and ultimately fruitless war against Iraq.

Second, while in some ways this memoir paints a very unpleasant picture of the Western media, many of whom essentially joined the ayatollah in blaming Rushdie for the fatwa against him, it also does a wonderful job of depicting the solidarity of the worldwide community of writers, many (though not all) of whom joined Rushdie in defending The Satanic Verses in particular and the right to free speech in general. Portions of this novel read like any writer or reader’s fantasy dinner party, in which such figures as Susan Sontag, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gunter Grass, Nadine Gordimer, William Styron, John Irving, Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, and Harold Pinter linger over dessert, growing more and more tipsy, alternately baring the teeth of their egos and showing themselves capable of great generosity and humanity. The Western world in the early 1990’s was a very easy place to be a novelist – once one got past those sticky obstacles of actually sitting down and writing novels, finding publishers, and that sort of thing, the world was inclined to treat writers well and honor their freedom to say and do more or less whatever they wanted. This memoir does a great job of documenting the way not only Salman Rushdie but the literary world as a whole came to understand that the much-touted Western concept of “cultural ambassadorship” can work both ways – that oppression and censorship and the threat of execution for one’s words and ideas can seep outward from totalitarian regimes and pervade democratic ones. This memoir is yet another document of just how small the world became in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century.

So yes, I recommend this book – it is not only enjoyable but also important. Among its many other virtues, this book has given me my reading list for the next twenty years or so, as I kept jotting down the names of authors and titles that Rushdie references in its pages. So I guess I have to go now – and get this review posted so I can sit down and read some more.

One Pound, Nine Ounces: A Review of Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (by Bethany)

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TBCWL So Far: 3 pounds, 1 ounce

I know people who hate war but love football, and I don’t even want to think about the kind of cognitive dissonance that has to happen inside their heads to make that weird contradiction make sense. As far as I’m concerned, football exists for one primary reason: to habituate young men to violence. Its secondary purpose – to accustom an entire population to a dualistic, us-versus-them mentality that can easily be oriented toward an enemy nation at the flick of a switch – is perhaps even more nefarious. Ben Fountain’s recent novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk does an outstanding job of placing the United States’ football-industrial complex side by side with its military. In Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory, the pieces of the puzzle are all there, but Krakauer misses an excellent opportunity to really develop a connection between the way athletes are cultivated and manipulated and packaged by the NFL and the way the military and its ever-present media liaisons perform a similar magic act on the realities of combat. Krakauer’s primary purpose in this book, of course, is to profile NFL player-turned-Army Ranger Pat Tillman and to expose certain hypocrisies of the Bush White House and the Rumsfeld Pentagon – and he accomplishes these goals reasonably well but in rather troubling ways, without critiquing some on the assumptions behind the Tillman family’s actions and, ultimately, without much lasting narrative power.

I came to this book expecting it to be as good as Into the Wild – a book that I fell in love with years and years ago and have taught for many years in a unit on Transcendentalism and self-determination. In that book, Krakauer blends his own investigative reporting into the life of Chris McCandless and the mystery surrounding his death with stories of his own youthful adventures in wilderness survival. Pat Tillman was a highly admirable young man – by all accounts he was a person of great courage, energy, generosity, curiosity, compassion, intellect, and moral strength – but, unlike McCandless, there is nothing truly unusual or exceptional about him. He played football – OK, he played football REALLY, REALLY WELL – and then he went to war. That’s all well and good, but he is nowhere near as complex and fascinating as McCandless. Not only that, but Krakauer’s politics end up taking over this book, which begins as a biography and ends as a polemic.

But maybe I should back up a bit.

Pat Tillman was born in 1976 (the same year I was born – which is not really important in the scheme of things, although I did spend time as I was reading thinking of Tillman’s life as a parallel to my own) in a small town outside of San Jose, California. The oldest of three brothers, he grew up in constant action and was an exceptional athlete. I won’t say much about his middle and high school careers except that a series of circumstances funneled him toward football even though his body didn’t make him seem a natural for that sport. Early on, he showed a tendency toward great loyalty, remaining intensely close to his family, friends, and girlfriend.

The first half of this book is really quite good. As Krakauer narrates Tillman’s boyhood, he shifts his perspective back and forth between the suburban athletic fields of northern California and the mountains of Afghanistan, constantly reminding his readers of what was going on in that country during the years that Pat Tillman was hiking with his family, training himself into an excellent athlete, and getting into scuffles with his friends at the local pizza joint. Krakauer walks his readers through the Soviet Union’s backing of Marxist-leaning Afghan President Mohammad Daoud Khan’s 1973 return to power after his ten-year exile, followed by the U.S. decision to provide money, training, and weapons to the mujahideen who launched a rebellion against Daoud’s Westernized, Communist (and increasingly oppressive) regime. Jimmy Carter’s decision to arm the mujahideen was predicated on the assumption that if the Soviets were goaded into a full-scale military invasion of Afghanistan, they would be bogged down in that complex, mountainous country for years and weakened just as the Americans were weakened by their war in Vietnam. Carter’s reasoning – misguided though history may have proved his actions to be – was essentially correct. Krakauer credits the American funding of the mujahideen for the Soviet Union’s eventual fall in 1989.

I have read all of this history before, but I appreciated the review. Krakauer’s emphasis is clearly on the way self-interest motivated U.S. actions in Afghanistan in the late 1970’s and throughout the 1980’s, and his point is well made. Equally effective is the way he alternates between his narration of Tillman’s high school and college years with the history of the funding of the mujahideen, of Osama bin Laden’s early years fighting in Afghanistan, of the United States’ abandonment of Afghanistan after the fall of the Soviet Union, of the civil war that followed, of the rise of the Taliban, of bin Laden’s return to Afghanistan and his 1998 fatwa against the United States, which was issued concurrently with the bombing of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania. While these attacks – which between them killed 224 people and wounded 4,585 – were taking place, Pat Tillman, who had recently graduated from Arizona State University after a stellar career as both a student and as an athlete, was preparing for his first regular-season game in the NFL as a recently-drafted safety for the Arizona Cardinals.

An aside: I remember those attacks well. In that first week of August, 1998, I was on an island off of Venice, Italy, where I had traveled for the second summer in a row with a family I babysat for back in New Hampshire. On August 7, I proclaimed that I was not going to speak English at all for 24 hours. My employer’s family’s first language was French, and I was always lambasting myself for not pushing myself to speak it more. I was leaving for grad school in just a week or two and thought I would make one last-ditch attempt to become fully bilingual. I made it as far as the hour before dinner, when CNN ran the footage of the embassy attacks. The older children in the family were pretty politically aware, and over dinner they rolled their eyes as I stumbled through a discussion of the embassy attacks, constantly falling back on stupid adjectives and asking for help with the words I needed. “Can’t we please just speak English?” they finally asked. “This is boring.” And it’s true – life moves at a staggeringly boring pace when I try to speak French.

Two weeks later, I was back in the United States, starting grad school in Arkansas and teaching my first classes. I didn’t have a TV that year and was wrapped up in my writing, my teaching, my classes, and my new friends. I don’t remember anything about the American bombing of a cave complex in Afghanistan called Zawar Kili that was known to be one of bin Laden’s headquarters, and I don’t remember bin Laden’s bold public taunting of the American military or his announcement that Clinton had only attacked Zawar Kili in order to divert the media’s attention away from the Monica Lewinsky scandal (which I also remember talking about in French). For a couple of years I became deeply solipsistic. I remember almost no world events between the beginning of my grad program in the fall of 1998 and the contested 2000 presidential election.

By the time al-Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, Tillman was beginning his fourth season playing for the Arizona Cardinals and I was beginning my fourth and final year of grad school. Initially viewed as an underdog, Tillman was beginning to be recognized by sports analysts and journalists as one of the most efficient, effective players in the league, consistently able to extract more performance per pound of body weight from his relatively small frame than any of the players he competed against. After his second year in the NFL, he was offered a $9.6 million contract to play for the St. Louis Rams, an offer that he declined because he was loyal to the coaches of the Cardinals and liked his (relatively) low-key life with his wife and friends in Arizona. By the time his fourth season with the Cardinals ended, Pat and his brother Kevin – a professional baseball player –  had already spent serious time discussing the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and had made the decision to join the Army, opting to join the Rangers as enlisted men.

To summarize and reflect a little: Pat Tillman was a man of virtue who repeatedly showed his willingness to sacrifice comfort, luxury, and safety in order to defend the ideals he believed in. He excelled in the conventional realms of academics and athletics, but he did not view this success in conventional terms, nor did he see his successes as ends in themselves. This is all good – Tillman deserves our admiration. But he doesn’t deserve quite the extensive accolades that Krakauer showers upon him. The comparisons to Achilles are too much, in my opinion. If he hadn’t walked away from his lucrative NFL contract, he would have been no more and no less than the thousands of other soldiers who die in combat. Krakauer’s determination to make something more of Tillman does little more than indicate how much he too – like so many Americans – is taken in by the lure of money and the corrosive, debased value that most American place on professional sports.

OK. This review is already getting long, so I’m going to try to cover a lot of ground in this next paragraph. Pat Tillman’s first overseas assignment was in Iraq during the first days of the 2003 invasion. Remember the battle of Nasiriyah? That was the nasty, bloody battle in March of 2003 that resulted in the brief celebrity of injured “hostage” Jessica Lynch. I remember watching CNN during the week of this conflict, listening to the shock in the voices of the anchors as they reported that the battle was not going well (since, after all, American military invasions are always supposed to go well). Tillman did not participate directly in the fighting at Nasiriyah, but he did participate in the mission to rescue Jessica Lynch – a mission that encountered no resistance. Krakauer spends considerable time covering this battle in his book for a couple of reasons. He sees Nasiriyah – a disaster comprised of, among other things, poor intelligence; typical American naivete about the battle-readiness of the enemy; the mistakes of dazed, inexperienced soldiers who, among other things, could not correctly operate their radios; the determination of the Bush Administration and the Pentagon to project a positive image of the war to the American public; and the aggression of both the American media and a few misinformed, trigger-happy Air Force bomber pilots – as a direct precursor of the events surrounding Pat Tillman’s death in Afghanistan thirteen months later.

Krakauer’s narration of the events at Nasiriyah is effective for a couple of reasons. I had forgotten a lot of the details of this battle: the fact that all but one of the American deaths were caused by friendly fire, first of all – but also the fact that Jessica Lynch was never taken prisoner but instead was treated with great care and kindness by Iraqi doctors in a civilian hospital and that her “rescuers” never encountered a moment of resistance when they bombarded their way into the hospital and then squirreled her away by helicopter. I absolutely do remember the storm of media coverage surrounding Lynch, and as I was reading this book I couldn’t stop thinking of the scene in David Mamet’s Wag the Dog where the president’s hired Hollywood director films a girl escaping from a burning village in the safety of a film studio. The second impression this scene made on me is that it is the best description I have ever read of what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the full weight of modern American firepower: “Hundreds of bullets began to impact the earth at a fantastic rate, followed many seconds later by a weird screeching noise like a ‘badass blender,’ as one grunt described it; another Marine said the sound reminded him of a ‘buzz saw.’ Blindingly bright pyrophoric decoy flares drifted down from the sky in the wake of the bullets, fizzing and sputtering like Fourth of July fireworks… ‘I’d been strafed eight times during Operation Desert Storm by an A-10. I know exactly what they sound like,’ [said an officer]. The A-10 ‘Warthog’ is an American jet aircraft designed to destroy tanks” (193).

Krakauer’s primary purpose, however, in relating these events is to introduce the motifs of friendly fire, incompetence within the army’s chain of command, and dishonesty and corruption in the highest level of the military that are so crucial to Tillman’s story. Thirteen months after he helped to rescue Jessica Lynch in Iraq, Tillman was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan when his platoon leader obeyed an order under duress to split his platoon into two groups. The groups lost communication with one another, and one half of the platoon mistook the other half for the enemy, killing Pat Tillman and an Afghan officer. This is, of course, the very short version of the story – and the story is compelling and Krakauer tells it well. After the incident, the Army initially covered up the fact that friendly fire caused Tillman’s death, and – according to Krakauer, defied any number of its own regulations by destroying evidence and effectively preventing Tillman from receiving a proper autopsy. Once Tillman’s family learned that friendly fire had killed Pat, they began demanding further and further investigations into the incident. Eventually, the Army conducted seven different investigations into Tillman’s death, never fully satisfying his family.

The second half of this book bothered me, and for a while I had trouble putting my finger on it. At first I associated some of my squeamishness with Krakauer’s obvious bias against the Bush Administration and the higher echelons of the arms, but I knew that couldn’t be the only thing that was bothering me. I really don’t mind an honest, acknowledged bias – as Krakauer’s is – and as far as I can tell there are no places where his logic and his research fail to hold up. I have no doubt that corruption existed in the White House and the Pentagon during the Bush years and that it exists in these places today. I was also bothered by the endless demands that the Tillman family placed upon the Army in their quest for truth. Their feelings are understandable, but their demands for more and more investigations did nothing but tie up personnel who could have been involved in other matters. If the Army could have done anything to change the fact that Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire or to bring him back to life, they should have done it – but since it could do neither, the family had no right to insist that such endless attention be showered on their case. I think that part of my misgivings about this book lie in the fact that Krakauer seems wholly sympathetic to the family’s demands and never questions the worth of the endless questions.

(Please note: I am thoroughly sympathetic with this family’s LOSS. But while I understand the reasons behind their insistence on knowing the truth, I am not sympathetic with their ACTIONS, and I wish Krakauer had been more rigorous in critiquing their choices.)

One of the many examples Krakauer cites of Army ineptitude in the Tillman case is an officer who – while processing the paperwork required for Tillman’s funeral – declared that Tillman should receive a “Christian” funeral in spite of the fact that his advance directive had requested no religious references whatsoever in his funeral. This officer stated in writing (as part of one of the Tillman family’s many investigations) that Pat Tillman and his family “could not come to terms with death” because they were atheists.

Now – this is reprehensible. Of course Pat Tillman’s requests for a secular funeral should have been honored, and atheists should be treated no differently by Army authorities than religious people. However, while his actions were completely wrong, this officer was on to something when he perceived that the Tillman family “could not deal with death.” This is another element of what bothered me so much about this book. The entire Tillman family seemed not to understand that their son and brother and husband had gone to war, and that people who go to war do sometimes die – we hope they will die saving innocent civilians or in some other way that has a clear, measurable purpose, but we know (or we damn well should know) that sometimes they die for really stupid reasons, like friendly fire and training accidents and (not necessarily in recent conflicts but in previous wars) of gangrene and botched battlefield surgeries and snakebites and influenza caught in soggy French trenches. And – to follow this point a step further – not only do soldiers die, but everyone dies. Death is not an injustice; it is an inevitability.

We are – right now, today, all of us Americans – a nation that “cannot come to terms with death” – and this reality frightens the hell out of me. I don’t think that families in previous centuries loved their children any less than the Tillmans loved Pat, but I do think that something was bred in the bones of previous generations that enabled them more readily to accept death. That Krakauer reports on the Tillmans’ actions and feelings is fine; that’s his job. But it bothers me that he never comments directly on the fact that this family is symptomatic of a larger and highly disturbing trend: that it has become part of the American character to think we have a right to die on our own terms. And I don’t know when or where it will happen, but this assumption is going to come crashing down someday – with an unspeakable amount of drama and pain.

I wrote the first half of this review about two weeks ago, right after I finished the book. I was excited about it and had a lot to say, but I got stuck, because I still hadn’t figured out exactly what it was that bothered me so much about the second half of this book. I spent that weekend with a friend in Vermont, and while I was driving north many of the ideas in the last few paragraphs hit me. But then I realized one more thing, and only then was I satisfied that I had finally figured out why this book troubled me so much. Krakauer’s criticisms of the Army and the Bush Administration largely revolve around the fact that they used first Jessica Lynch and then Pat Tillman as tools to accomplish their own ends. The media played up the supposed heroism of Lynch’s story, and then when Tillman was killed he was lionized for his patriotism and sacrifice (namely in walking away from his NFL contract, that all-important NFL contract) in the suspicious absence of any mention of friendly fire or of the failures and miscommunications in the chain of command that contributed to his death. I don’t dispute these claims: I think the White House and the Pentagon probably did manipulate both of these stories to serve their own ends. But Krakauer never seems to mention what now seems to me – after a lot of thought – to be the central irony of this book: that Krakauer is also using Tillman’s story to further his own ends. In Krakauer’s case, of course, his aim is to critique the mismanagement of the Iraq War specifically and the Global War on Terror by the Bush Administration. I am not suggesting that his criticisms are not valid – in fact, I think that they probably are. But it seems clear to me that Krakauer’s aim was fundamentally political, and while he may have started by simply telling Tillman’s story (which is consistent with Krakauer’s reputation and experience as a documenter of extreme masculinity), at some point his aim became political, and at that time Tillman became just a tool to further that aim. Krakauer, in his own way, is no less manipulative than the press and the military authorities he derides in this book.

I’ve said a lot here, and this review is the longest I’ve ever written. I recommend this book halfheartedly. I did enjoy it, although the undiluted pleasure I experienced while reading about Tillman’s childhood and the history of U.S-Afghan relations during the first half of the book gave way to a much more uneasy, semi-nauseous form of intellectual pleasure during the second half of the book as I struggled to figure out what exactly it was about the Tillmans and about Krakauer that gave me such a case of the heebie-jeebies. Unfortunately, I think that the target audience of this book is people who already share Krakauer’s politics, and these people are not likely to learn much from it unless they are willing and able to step back from their own beliefs a little. I can imagine this book being an absolutely fascinating document for students of sociology or American history in a couple of centuries. I don’t know what will have changed in that span of time in terms of the American willingness or ability to contend with death. Maybe we will have largely vanquished the need for human beings to sometimes die young, as some utopian fiction suggest. I doubt it, though. If you have a copy of this book, put it in a plastic bag and keep it safe. Scholars of this weird era are going to need it someday.

On the road again…. Anitober begins with a review of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley (by Jill)

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This is the first book in my “Anitober” reading challenge, in which I finally read books recommended to me by my old college roommate, Anita.  Travels with Charley was the first book I remember Anita recommending to me, sometime back in college sometime.  I remember she had me read this one section about hunters in New England and how crazy they can get.  My dad is a hunting type and I used to always make fun of him for it in college (that was before I discovered how delicious game meat can be, and decided that maybe it’s better to eat animals who aren’t raised to be food, because maybe, just maybe, they have better lives than feed lot creatures.  And now I will cease discussing a controversial topic).  At some point I purchased it at Green Apple, probably with Bethany.  My copy cost seventy-five cents when it was first printed, but cost me $3.75.  It’s always bothered me when used bookstores charge more for a book than is printed on the cover.  Shouldn’t it cost what is says it should cost, or less if it’s used?

I wanted to write this review and post it yesterday since I finished Travels with Charley on Monday night, but unfortunately, my actual life got in the way of my blogging life.  On Tuesday night, my thirteen year old dog, Spinner, swallowed a fuzzy cat ball whole.  It was too big to pass and too big for him to vomit back up, so yesterday he had surgery to remove that stupid ball from his stomach.  So yesterday was not a good day for blogging around here.  He is doing fine today, though, and is at home safe and sound.  Perhaps Spinner thought it would be best for me to have a recent anecdote about my own old dog before I started writing about John Steinbeck and his?

The premise of Travels with Charley is that John Steinbeck, famous author and soon-to-be Nobel Laureate, decides he needs to take stock of his country.  He buys a large truck, has it fitted with a custom camper, names it Rocinante, and heads out with his ten-year-old standard poodle named Charley.  He makes a loop from Sag Harbor, New York, through New England, the Midwest, down the Pacific Coast, back through the south, and up to New York again.  This journey took place in 1960 from September to December.  There has been some recent controversy about how true some of the anecdotes in the book are (see this article), but after reading the book I don’t necessarily care a whole lot about the veracity of some of the stories; the sentiment behind the stories in the book is the important part.

Let me take a moment to discuss my relationship with John Steinbeck.  I read Of Mice and Men in high school, as a freshman.  The best thing I had to say about it at the time was that it was short.  I didn’t enjoy it much at all.  And that was the last time I read anything by him.  I managed to avoid The Grapes of Wrath somehow—my sophomore English teacher put something else in our curriculum, and at the time if was fine with me, because my friends who did read it had many negative things to say about it.  I’m not sure if Bethany enjoyed it the first time around or not, but if she did, she was the only one of us.  Now, of course, I wish I had been forced to read more Steinbeck because I feel like I’ve missed out.  I mean, he did win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.  His work can’t be as bad as a bunch of teenagers made it out to be.  At some point, someone told me East of Eden is actually quite good.  Probably it was Bethany or Anita.  So I bought it.  And then I decided a few years ago that probably I should own The Grapes of Wrath as well.  And when I was in Monterey on my honeymoon in 2009 I bought Cannery Row at the aquarium, forgetting that my copy of Of Mice and Men also contained Cannery Row.  Oh, well.  And of course, I bought Travels with Charley at some point in the late ‘90s.  And that’s the extent of my relationship with one of America’s most celebrated and honored novelists.  Fortunately for me, that’s beginning to change.

So where was I?  Oh, yes, Travels with Charley.  The first passage I marked as memorable was this one, describing autumn in New England: “The climate changed quickly to cold and the trees burst into color, the reds and the yellows you can’t believe.  It isn’t only color, but a glowing, as though the leaves gobbled the light of the autumn sun and then released it slowly.  There’s a quality of fire in these colors (p. 27).”  I wanted to get on a plane and go to New England after reading these sentences.  I’ve never seen the fall leaves there, or anyplace that really has seasons, but I have always wanted to.  This is just one example of the wonderful descriptions of our country that are peppered throughout this book.  Steinbeck writes beautifully—this is something I didn’t remember from Of Mice and Men.  Steinbeck is also a funny fellow.  The best example I came across that illustrates his humor is the aforementioned story about the hunters.  “I know there are any number of good and efficient hunters who know what they are doing; but many more are overweight gentlemen, primed with whisky and armed with high-powered rifles.  They shoot at anything that moves or looks as though it might, and their success in killing one another may well prevent a population explosion.  If the casualties were limited to their own kind there would be no problem, but the slaughter of cows, pigs, farmers, dogs, and highway signs makes autumn a dangerous season in which to travel.  A farmer in upper New York State painted the word cow in big black letters on both sides of his white bossy, but the hunters shot it anyway (p. 57).”

There’s moments when Steinbeck definitely comes across like he was in a dark place while he was writing this book.  From what I’ve read about the book from outside sources, he was not in good health at the time of his trip—heart disease—and made the journey when he did because he was worried he might not be alive for much longer.  There are some chapters in which he sounds downright depressed and longing for a time long gone by.  “These great roads are wonderful for moving goods but not for inspection of a countryside.  You are bound to the wheel and your eyes to the car ahead and to the rear-view mirror for the car behind and the side mirror for the car or truck about to pass, and at the same time you must read all the signs for fear you may miss some instructions or orders.  No roadside stands selling squash juice, no antique stores, no farm products or factory outlets.  When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a thing (pp. 89-90).”  I found myself wondering what he would think about our country now; everything he was worried was going to happen seems to have come to pass.  Homogeneity.  The loss of regional accents.  All that stuff.  It’s unfortunate.  But then I think about how connected everything is now and how easy it is to keep in touch with people so far away, and I am glad for interstates and the internet and all that comes with it.  If sacrificing individuality is the price we have to pay for all we’ve gained, I guess I’m okay with that, though we should all acknowledge what was lost—because it was pretty good too.

And what kind of book blogging veterinarian would I be if I didn’t at least touch on Charley?  Charley is a ten-year-old blue standard French poodle.  From France.  It appears that Steinbeck finds him quite intelligent.  And also quite old.  Now in this day and age a ten year old dog is old, but certainly not ancient.  So it surprised me how often Charley was discussed as an ancient dog.  I will say one thing about this book that I know to be true: there was a dog named Charley, and John Steinbeck knew him very well and loved him very much.  I don’t care if he never met a Shakespearean actor on the side of a road in North Dakota; he definitely owned a dog. “Before a plan is half formed in my mind, Charley knows about it, and he also knows whether he is to be included in it.  There is no question about this.  I know too well his look of despair and disapproval when I have just thought that he must be left at home (p. 138).”  What dog owner hasn’t seen that face?  On two separate occasions Charley takes ill with what Steinbeck assumes is prostatitis; one veterinarian tells him it’s just a “cold,” and the other actually makes Charley feel better.  I shudder to think that a veterinarian would actually provide the explanation to an owner that his dog couldn’t urinate because he has a “cold.”  Apparently it was much easier to be a veterinarian in 1960 than in 2012.

There was so much more in this book I wanted to touch on: Steinbeck’s trip home to Monterey.  The horrible integration protests in New Orleans.  Texas.  But if I kept going on this post no one would finish reading it.  Thank you, Anita, for recommending this book to me.  I wish I had read it sooner, but at the same time I’m also glad I waited, because I’ll never get to read it for the first time again, and it was worth waiting for.

Happy Pat Conroy Day: A Review of The Water Is Wide (by Bethany)

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So today is Pat Conroy Day in the city of Tulsa – the day that inspired us to declare September to be PAT CONROY MONTH! here at Postcards from Purgatory, where gleefully one-upping small midwestern cities is an important part of our mission (You’re next, Topeka!) - and I would like to join the citizens of Tulsa in wishing you a very happy and joyous Pat Conroy Day. I hope you’ll all take time out of your busy lives to remember Pat Conroy and to honor him in some way: by playing basketball, for example, or by eating shrimp or visiting Italy or being cruel to your family members or even by eating lots and lots of mayonnaise, if that is your sort of thing. But if you choose the mayonnaise option, please don’t tell me about it.

Once again I have taken WAY too long to write a review of a Pat Conroy book because I want to fit absolutely everything into it – everything that I know and feel about this author and everything that I have learned about myself and about writing and about education in the years since I’ve been reading his books. And that’s – well, not to be an arrogant jerk or anything, but that’s a big job. Like Pat Conroy’s, my first forays into teaching were energetic, ambitious, and good-hearted, and they were also driven by idealism and egoism. Like Pat Conroy, I took risks and made enormous mistakes. I fought with authority figures, and I let myself be overtaken by frustration and anger. I did some good things too, but in my mind these good things never stopped feeling as if they were tempered by failure. I learned that, in Thoreau’s words, “the universe is wider than our views of it,” and I learned the power of my own assumptions and prejudices. I learned how stubborn the world can be and how stubborn I can be in return.

But you don’t really want to read about me, do you? You want to read about Pat Conroy.

The Water is Wide is a re-read for me, of course – I read it as part of a Pat Conroy obsession when I was fifteen, and then I reread parts of it until I memorized them, which, in those days, was an indispensable part of the reading process for me if I loved a book. But I don’t think I’ve so much as picked it up off a shelf since I left for college, and somehow it has gained a place for itself in my mind as one of Pat Conroy’s “lesser works” (even though I remember loving it). There is a good chance that my subconscious devaluation of this book comes from the fact that Conroy himself seems always ready to malign The Water is Wide – in My Reading Life and in his cookbook, to name only two places where he writes about his first commercially-published book with fondness and nostalgia but also a fair bit of what seems like embarrassment.

I spent the first half of this book gasping. This is a good book – just as funny, just as moving, and much better written than I remembered. I gasped less during the second half and will get to the reasons later on, but for now, please know that this book is beautiful and important. It is only occasionally touched by the excesses of Conroy’s later style. It is politically and socially significant as a document of the Civil Rights movement from a mostly unknown angle. It is full of honesty and anger and love and deserves to rank among the best of the modern American coming-of-age narratives, and I think it is one of the best books ever written about teaching.

While I was reading this book, I heard an offhand remark made by a speaker at the Democratic National Convention to the effect that “there is no such thing as two separate Americas.” Oh, yeah? I growled, shaking my Kindle at the television.

I shake my Kindle at the television a lot.

The Water is Wide is Conroy’s memoir of the year he spent teaching fifth through eighth grade on a sea island off the coast of South Carolina. As far as I know, the book is more memoir than novel; the only deviation that I know of in Conroy’s use of fact is his decision to change the island’s name from Daufuskie Island, where Conroy taught during the 1969-70 school year, to Yamacraw Island in the book. Otherwise, he uses real names and real facts, and the novel has always seemed oddly placed in the fiction section of bookstores.

In 1969, Conroy was 22. He was a recent Citadel graduate and had taught at a public high school in Beaufort, SC during that town’s first year of racial integration in schools. He liked the job but was discouraged by the slow pace of progress and hated seeing the anger and frustration of his black students side by side with the indifference of some of his colleagues. He was young and idealistic and he had young and idealistic friends, and when they heard about the job on Yamacraw Island, they found it appealing in a romantic, Robinson Crusoe sort of way – as a chance to start over in an isolated place and do right what the rest of the country had managed to so horribly screw up: “Since Bernie and I entertained delusions that we would somehow save the world, or at least a small portion of it, the idea of our own island, free from administrative supervision, appealed to us very much” (16).

While I didn’t think of it that way at the time, I think that when I was 28 and moved to Idyllwild, California – 26 miles of winding mountain roads away from the nearest town – it was for the same reason, although by 28 I had given up the idea of saving the world and was willing to settle for saving myself.

On the island, Conroy quickly learns that of his eighteen students (all black; Yamacraw Island was way too isolated to participate in the mainland schools’ program of integration) several were illiterate and lacked basic academic skills like counting, adding, and printing letters, and all were ignorant of basic facts like the organization of the solar system, the touchstones of American and world history, and the fact that their country was fighting a war in Vietnam. They had never heard of Abraham Lincoln or the Emancipation Proclamation, and they did not know that the long struggle toward racial equality in this country was still going on and that they were taking part in it. These children had attended school since they were six, but during those years nothing had happened that you or I would call “education.”

By contrast, Yamacraw School was part of a system presided over by Henry Piedmont, the superintendent whom Conroy recognizes as a “mill-town kid who scratched his way to the top. Horatio Alger, who knew how to floor a man with a quick chop to the gonads… His pride in his doctorate was almost religious. It was the badge that told the world that he was no longer a common man” (3). Part of Piedmont’s job, according to this book’s masterful first paragraph, is to “[maintain] the precarious existence of the status quo” (1). The conflict between two different kinds of idealism – Conroy’s youthful confidence in his changing world and its limitless potential for equality, magnanimity, and growth versus Piedmont’s middle-aged belief that the world as he has inherited doesn’t really have to change and that injustices can always be hidden on islands – provides the momentum of this book.

Now, I happen to be one of those dangerous wacko teachers who think that the job of a teacher is never to maintain the status quo. Passing along traditions can be an appropriate task for an educator, but not at the expense of the neverending process of questioning those traditions. As far as I am concerned, the only rightful job of any educator is to equip the students for revolution – but with two understood corollaries: 1) most or all of the revolutions the students will fight will be personal, not political, and 2) as a teacher, one has to recognize that one is a representative of the world that the students will overthrow – we have to glory in the idea that the job of our students is to one day surpass us.

I realize that I come by these ideas about education from a privileged position. I received an excellent education in two private schools, a liberal arts college, and a state university, and then I taught and worked as an administrator in boarding high schools for ten years. As a student I gelled with some teachers more than others and as a teacher I gelled with some students more than others, but what happened in my classrooms was always fundamentally collaborative, not confrontational. I have feared bosses and failure and my own inadequacies, but as a teacher I have never felt the need to declare martial law in my classroom, nor did I ever feel seriously oppressed in a classroom as a student. I am aware that this experience is a rare luxury that has everything to do with when and where I was born and with choices made first by my parents and then by me – choices that prioritize individuality over conformity in education.

In The Water is Wide, Yamacraw School consists of two classrooms and some kitchen space. Conroy teaches the older children in one classroom, and the other classroom is the dominion of Mrs. Brown, a teacher who had been teaching on the island for several years before Conroy arrived. As Conroy soon discovers, Mrs. Brown is a walking representation of the Gordian knot of race relations in the United States. As a black woman proud of her private school education, Mrs. Brown reveres any person she perceives as representing white authority – including, at first, the 22 year-old Conroy – and is particularly worshipful toward a paternalistic and ineffectual assistant superintendent: “[Mrs. Brown] nodded her head in agreement every time he opened his mouth to utter some memorable profundity. I could not tell if this was a role she was playing or if she actually believed that [he] was the word made flesh” (25). Conroy soon learns to resist Mrs. Brown and everything she stands for (“I would be goddamned if she was going to turn me into an overseer instead of a teacher” [178]; “There was something very wrong in the fact that a black woman in 1969 cast her lot with white men whose thoughts and actions dated back to 1869” [183]).

I have met Mrs. Brown – several incarnations of Mrs. Brown, in fact. I have mentioned that my own education has been one of privilege, courtesy, and challenge; however, I have seen enough of the other face of American education to know that people like Mrs. Brown exist – and they exist now, today – not only in 1969. When Mrs. Brown gives Conroy an initial speech about “the handling of colored children by a teacher so obviously white” (27), I started feeling a little physically sick – because I have been on the receiving end of exactly the same lecture. “’Keep them busy with work all the time or they’ll run you right out of that there door,’ she said. ‘I know colored people better than you do. That’s because I am one myself. You have to keep your foot on them all the time. Step on them. Step on them every day and keep steppin’ on them when they gets out of line” (27).

I don’t remember the name of the most memorable Mrs. Brown figure I’ve met, but I remember what she looked like and what her classroom looked like and even the faces of some of her students. This woman taught eighth grade at Wonder Junior High School in West Memphis, Arkansas, and as far as I can remember, her speech to me and to one of my colleagues might as well have been taken word for word from Conroy’s memoir. Like Conroy, I was in my early twenties when I heard this speech. I was a graduate student working for the Arkansas Writers in the Schools. Once or twice a month, I went into a public school somewhere in the state of Arkansas to teach creative writing – usually poetry. We always traveled in teams of two. Many of the schools we visited were clean, bright, and suburban – the image of what a public school was supposed to look in a free and advanced Western nation. Some schools in impoverished communities were clearly less well equipped but still clean and safe and full of caring teachers and happy children. And others – like Wonder Junior High in West Memphis – were just awful.

It was from this teacher at Wonder Junior High School that I learned that the existence of “black schools” and “white schools” was a contemporary reality, not just a part of American history. “Have you ever been in a black school before?” this teacher asked my colleague and I critically, looking at us in a way that suggested she knew the answer before she heard it. And then she proceeded to give us a speech almost identical to the one Mrs. Brown gives Conroy.

(Side note: in a different school, I once taught a sweet, smiling second grade girl who wrote a poem ABOUT HER ELEMENTARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPAL PISTOL-WHIPPING A DEER. This anecdote is unrelated to my larger comparisons between my experiences and Conroy’s – I just wanted to tell you about it. I mean, if it happened to you, wouldn’t you want to announce it on the internet?)

The problems that Conroy encounters on Yamacraw Island are legion: poverty, isolation (most of the islanders are terrified of the water and don’t know how to swim), violence, alcoholism, superstition, and the presence of both poisonous snakes and hostile and/or paternalistic white people top the list but certainly do not complete it. Fundamentally, though, the problem Conroy most directly tackles is the culture of conformity and gullibility within the educational system on Yamacraw Island.

This book is about developing a healthy respect for cycles. Conroy’s self-declared purpose is to help the children of Yamacraw Island break the cycles of poverty and ignorance that have always dominated their families’ lives; however, what he learns is that social and cultural cycles are like living beings, and when they feel threatened their response is not to break down but to tighten up. When Conroy first takes the job on the island, he rents a house on Yamacraw and only goes back to the mainland on weekends; later, though, he moves to the mainland town of Beaufort (oh, yeah – in this middle of this frenetic year, Conroy gets married and adopts two stepdaughters. 22 year-olds have a LOT of energy, as I perhaps vaguely remember) and commutes daily by boat. On a number of occasions he falls victim to fog and tides and sandbars during a journey that is considered so dangerous by the islanders that they refuse to attempt it even once a year, let alone twice a day, and the power of the cycles of tides and weather emerges naturally as a symbol of the system Conroy is fighting: “Everything occurred in cycles, fanged and implacable cycles. Somehow I had to interfere with the cycle or interrupt it, interject my own past into the present of my students. If I let my students leave me without altering the conditions of their existence substantially, I knew a concrete, sightless ghetto of some city without hope would devour them quickly, irretrievably, and hopelessly. I could hear some white voice coming from some collective unconscious deep within me saying, ‘They don’t know any better. They are happy this way.’ Yet all around me, in the grinning faces of my students, I could see a crime, so ugly that it could be interpreted as a condemnation of an entire society, a nation be damned, a history of wickedness – these children before me did not have a goddam chance of sharing in the incredible wealth and affluence of the country that claimed them, a country that failed them, a country that needed but did not deserve deliverance” (174) and “in crossing the river twice daily I had come closer to more basic things. I had come to know the singular power of a river advancing toward the open sea and the power of tides regulating that advance. I had seen how fog could change the whole world into its own image. The river, the tides, and the fog were part of a great flow and a fitting together of harmonious parts” (285).

This book belongs on the reading list of every high school in the country, and I am sad and embarrassed that I did not reread it just a year or two earlier when I was in a position to shape a school’s reading list. It belongs either in an American literature course, side by side with Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and/or Invisible Man, both works about the ways that education is both a key to solving the problems of racial oppression in this country and about the ways that education helps to perpetuate these problems. It could also be placed in a 9th or 10th grade course on genre and could provide students with a totally pain-free introduction to the sometimes dicey genre of nonfiction – and it would also make a great summer reading assignment. I also think that every college student studying education should read this book – not only for its insights into the history of American education (which are excellent) and not only for its ability to inspire young teachers (also considerable) but for the way it paints a picture of how easily and painfully one can be sucked into the experience of teaching, especially if one is idealistic and thinks he is stronger and tougher and smarter than the cycles that govern the world.

I mentioned earlier that the first half of this book is stronger than the second half, and I want to explain what I meant by that. The whole book is good, but two small problems start to come clear after its midpoint. The first is that this book is really just a chronicle. It lacks the shape of a novel or even of a good, well thought-out memoir. The structure of the narrative is purely chronological: here’s what happened in September, here’s what happened in October, etc. Obviously this is a SMALL problem: Conroy was a young writer still bruised and indignant (and unemployed) when he wrote the book, and the chronicle structure made sense as a quick and easy way to put his story on paper. But I was disappointed a bit anyway, since the first half of the book seems to promise something a bit more carefully structured and novel-like.

Second, something happens in the second half of the book that is both wonderful and sad. Pat Conroy sort of… well, he sort of becomes Pat Conroy – for all that that implies when it comes to his prose style. I feel like a bit of a traitor saying this about a writer for whom I have great affection, but I think he was a better writer (and by that I mostly mean a more controlled writer) at the beginning of this book than he is at the end. Compare the first paragraph of the novel (“The southern school superintendent is a kind of remote deity who breathes the purer air of Mount Parnassus. The teachers see him only on those august occasions when they need to be reminded of the nobility of their calling. The powers of the superintendent are considerable. He hires and fires, manipulates the board of education, handles a staggering amount of money, and maintains the precarious existence of the status quo” [1]) – in which the sarcasm and anger are present but under control, and in which Conroy essentially introduces his primary antagonist and sets the stage for a traditional hubris story in which a protagonist will challenge the gods – to this passage from close to the end of the book: “I underestimated the dark part of mankind that is rarely seen in the light of day. I failed to reckon with the secret beasts that reside in the lightless forests of men’s souls. The beasts were watching me at the first board meeting, and in the flush of victory I failed to hear the baying of those hounds in the unlighted thickets ahead. The great unpardonable sin I had committed was this: I had embarrassed the superintendent of schools. It was Homer who had written again and again about the dangerous folly of mortals challenging gods. I fought with words and youthful ardor. But Piedmont fought with thunderbolts. And time was his greatest ally” (296). This paragraph follows up on the promise made in the opening paragraph about the hubris story – but just look at the prose. Secret beasts that reside in the lightless forests of men’s souls? Really?

So that’s my long, rambling, mostly positive review of The Water is Wide. I could have written more about the deep, deep affection and humor with which Conroy writes about the children of Yamacraw Island (the dialogue in this book is fantastic), and I also could have done more to tell you about my own run-ins with the Mrs. Browns and Henry Piedmonts of the world. But enough. PAT CONROY MONTH! has been tough on me in a number of ways, jerking me back into times and places and former selves that are certainly worth revisiting but not necessarily easy to revisit. But I never would have reread this book if we hadn’t declared September to be PAT CONROY MONTH!, so for that the whole ordeal has been worth it.

Well, Finally: A Review of Pat Conroy’s My Losing Season (by Bethany)

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I read this book for the first time in the early months of 2003. The basement apartment I lived in that year – an on-campus apartment provided by my first boarding-school job – was huge and spacious with three bedrooms and a magnificent kitchen, but on winter afternoons it was the darkest, most dismal living space I have ever seen anywhere. Smelling of mold and hidden wetness, the apartment received scant natural light even on bright days through its eight brick-lined window wells, which were covered with slanted sheets of Plexiglass that occasionally served their intended purpose of preventing birds and rodents from falling into the window wells, breaking their bones, and starving to death. When snow fell, it blanketed the Plexiglass so no light entered the apartment at all. That winter my classes ended at one or two o’clock most afternoons, and my JV swim practices didn’t start until five. Under the anemic overhead lights of my tomblike apartment, I savored Pat Conroy’s newest book slowly, cherishing his overwritten sentences and suspecting that this book might have something to tell me about some strange new facts in my life: that I was coaching high school sports, that I was enjoying coaching high school sports, and that I was beginning to suspect that maybe (possibly?) I was actually a little bit good at it.

When I finished the book, my thoughts went something like this: Good book. Great, in fact. Possibly life-changing. But wait. What’s a point guard?

All of this is a long way of telling you that for me, Pat Conroy’s books aren’t really books; they’re mirrors. I look at them and, through some strange affinity with this author that I only partially understand, I don’t see them for what they are in themselves but for who I am as I am reading them. As far as I was concerned in 2003, this was not a book about basketball. I read it and I smelled not sweat socks and orange rubber but the stifling chlorine of the pool where I coached every evening and the spilled gasoline leaking out of the launch from which I had coached the girls’ novice crew team in the fall. And when I reread Conroy’s books, they are mirrors not of who I am now as I reread, but of who I was when I read them the first time around.

I’ve been a little quiet here on Postcards from Purgatory lately, and I am sorry about that. But you see – I’ve been time traveling.

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My Losing Season is Pat Conroy’s memoir of his career as a high school and college basketball player with a focus on his final year playing for the Citadel. If you’re familiar with Conroy’s novels and other nonfiction books, this one will feel like a “Greatest Hits” compilation, with plenty of details about the Citadel familiar to readers of The Lords of Discipline and details about Conroy’s family that readers will recognize from The Great Santini and his other novels. However, one of the reasons his last season as a college athlete is so significant for Conroy is that he sees the birth of his identity as a novelist as absolutely intrinsic to the end of his formal athletic career – so this is in many ways also a memoir of his coming of age as a writer. The prose is lush, sometimes overwritten, and searingly honest in Conroy’s usual fashion; he is not afraid either to boast about his accomplishments or to confess how deeply he is sometimes caught in traps of shame and self-hatred. The book is both well researched – Conroy not only tracked down and interviewed all of his teammates and his coach while writing this novel but also studied news articles about the team from a wide variety of local and college newspapers and, when possible, accessed and studied films of the games his team played during that final season – and deeply personal. I recommend it cautiously; I fully admit that I will read every word that Conroy writes in spite of his tendency toward certain excesses, but I think this book would annoy readers who are looking either for a straightforward, journalistic memoir about basketball (which this isn’t) or a sprawling narrative more in keeping with Conroy’s novels. However, as a book that traces the effects of sports on the complicated psyche of a young man coming into his own as both a person and a writer – and as an insight into the man who wrote The Lords of Discipline, The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides, and other novels – this book is well worth a reader’s time.

As the title suggests, this is very much a book about failure – or, at least, about perceived failure. In his prologue (which, by the way, is only 14 pages long but took me over two hours to read, not because it is difficult or bad but because of the abrupt and disorienting way that it dropped me back into 2003 and everything that year stands for in my own life), Conroy writes, “Winning makes you think you’ll always get the girl, land the job, deposit the million-dollar check, win the promotion, and you grow accustomed to a life of answered prayers. Winning shapes the soul of bad movies and novels and lives. It is the subject of thousands of insufferably bad books and is often the sworn enemy of art” (14). I have a feeling that these words barely touched me back in 2003 – again, I had only the barest inklings that winter of how dark and miserable my life was about to get, and I think I largely saw my life as taking the infinitely upward trajectory that I envisioned when I was in high school, college, and grad school. I probably scanned the prologue quickly, taking more notice of Conroy’s lurid description of the dissolution of his second marriage and his reunion with one of his basketball teammates while on a book tour for Beach Music than of the wisdom of his words about failure.

The first several chapters of the book relate the years prior to Conroy’s enrollment at the Citadel – years in which he and his family moved from town to town as dictated by his father’s Marine Corps career, in which basketball entered Conroy’s life as a way to make friends quickly in new schools, distract himself from the misery of his violent home, find positive role models in his coaches, and try (without success) to elevate himself in his father’s eyes. In his teens, basketball served as Conroy’s antidote to failure – he saw almost universal success on his community and high school teams and then received attention from college recruiters and, beginning in his sophomore year at the Citadel, a college basketball scholarship.

Next, this book focuses on Conroy’s four years at the Citadel, with attention paid to his first year in a chapter that is essentially a redundant experience for anyone who has read The Lords of Discipline, and then with detailed attention paid to his senior basketball season. He devotes considerable attention to each of his teammates (the majority of whom, with typical Conroyvian hyperbole, are referred to as “the greatest athlete the Citadel had ever seen” or some such thing over the course of the memoir), to his coach, to some of his teachers, and to himself, actually devoting a full chapter to each game of that season. Other than Conroy’s own younger self, the most constant presence in this portion of the book is his college coach, Mel Thompson. Mel is variously described as an Ahab figure, as “demon-driven” (341), as a “dark icon of madness” (341), as “the dark father of our college years, but worthy and manly and volcanic” (397) – and, more generally, as a Level One Son of a Bitch. Conroy attributes the total psychological and emotional dissolution of several of his teammates to Mel’s anger, moodiness, irrationality, totalitarianism, and total refusal to offer his team any praise or positive reinforcement at all.

In some ways this is a book about superego development. The working definition of the superego that I’ve always relied on is “the internalization of the parental voice” or, at least, the internalization of the voices of the collective authority of one’s culture. The literal parental voices that Conroy internalized as a child were unfathomably destructive; however, we are all parented by people and by forces other than the individuals who raised us. For me, one of the most interesting elements of this book is the “voice” that begins speaking to Conroy during a game against Loyola University in New Orleans in the middle of his senior basketball season. At this point in the season, Conroy has mostly been serving as part of the second string on his team; he spent most games on the bench, and his role in practice was to push and challenge the starting players – whose role in practice and in life in general was to be tormented and demeaned and manipulated by Mel Thompson.

The first thing that Conroy’s internal voice tells him is to stop listening to Mel Thompson: “He was my coach, but I was my master. Whenever I got into the game for the rest of the year, I would play it as I was born to play it, I would play it with reckless abandon. If Mel Thompson did not like it, he could choose not to play me. I felt a loosening, an opening up. I had done many things in my life but this marked the first time I had felt myself change” (185). Conroy later recognizes this voice as the beginning of his awareness of himself as a novelist – as someone whose job is to see through the surfaces of other people. He calls this voice “the truest part of [him], the most valiant flowering of [his] character, a source of pure light and water streaming out of unexplored caverns deep within [him]. Unlike [Conroy], this voice knew nothing of shyness or reserve or shame or despair. This voice rang with authority and spoke with a blazing, resonant accuracy, with the clearness and certainty of church bells heard on bright Sundays” (217).

The central irony of this book is that, for Conroy personally, his senior basketball season was anything but a failure. His team had a losing record and a miserable experience, but Conroy himself was named team MVP at the end of the season and also received the Citadel’s sportsmanship award. These objective truths about Conroy’s success operate in this memoir the way time operates in a Faulkner novel. Just as Faulkner allows time to slow down and speed up in order to mimic the human perception of time, Conroy minimizes and dismisses much of the evidence of his success in order to mimic the way he felt. After I finished the book, I reread several accounts of individual basketball games and realized that many of these chapters contain deep incongruities. Conroy relates the facts of each game – that he scored twenty-five points, for example, or that the opposing coach paid him a compliment or that his coach bypassed taller, more athletic players to place him in the starting lineup – yet he relates them so obliquely that even the reader doesn’t recognize that the mood of the chapter doesn’t match the facts that are being presented.

The moral of the story: the voices that speak to us in our heads are powerful. They are more powerful than facts and statistics. The adult Conroy who has reflected on his losing season does finally acknowledge that he was able to succeed on his miserable team with his miserable coach while so many of his teammates became so depressed that they could barely function because an atmosphere of misery and dejection was “birthplace and hermitage and briar patch to [Conroy] – a despair with no windows or exits, a futility that made hope vain and the future unthinkable” (184). I have read a book that makes a similar argument about Abraham Lincoln: that he had lived so long in a state of constant depression that when the terrible years of the Civil War arrived he was functioning in his own instinctive element, and his practiced ability to think clearly in the midst of great darkness made him the incomparable leader that he was.

In his final chapter, Conroy reiterates his initial premise that losing shapes both our characters and our inner voices more than winning and success ever can. I think of it in terms of potential energy. If a person is perched at a height, in a place of success, happiness, and status, he possesses a figurative form of potential energy that we all remember learning about in high school physics – except that in the human psyche, I think this potential energy manifests itself as fear. A person at the top of a ladder must always fear falling. To exist already in a heap of bruises at the bottom of the ladder brings its own set of challenges – but the fear of falling is gone. Fear distorts our vision like a pair of tinted glasses, and when these glasses are knocked off or broken at the bottom of the ladder, we see the world with surprising clarity. Conroy writes, “Loss invites reflection and reformulating and a change of strategies. Loss hurts and bleeds and aches. Loss is always ready to call out your name in the night. Loss follows you home and taunts you at the breakfast table, follows you to work in the morning. You have to make accommodations and broker deals to soften the rabbit punches that loss brings to your daily life. You have to take the word “loser” and add it to your resumé and walk around with it on your name tag as it hand-feeds you your own shit in dosages too large for even great beasts to swallow” (395).

***

The first draft of this review was a whole lot longer than the one you are reading right now, and it did more to dig into the events of 2003 and 2004 in my own life and into the idea of why Pat Conroy’s books serve as “mirrors” for me. But ultimately I decided to cut back on the personal stuff – this is Pat Conroy’s month, after all, not mine – but to rework the personal story I was telling into some other form. And that’s what I’m doing, in an essay that I’m calling “The Day I Crashed the Bus.” It’s not finished yet, but it’s getting there – and it’s funny and sad and has a clever overarching metaphor and does all those other things that personal essays are supposed to do. It also wears Pat Conroy’s stylistic fingerprint all over it, but I’m thinking that a little time and revision will temper that. I’m sorry that I took so long to write this review, and I’m also sorry that I foreshadowed some things in its introductory paragraphs that I did not deliver, and I’m sorry that this essay isn’t the beautifully plaited-together hybrid of book review and personal narrative that I had envisioned. My inner perfectionist in in the driver’s seat these days – and as I once said to a hated boss who had used that word to describe me, “If I were a perfectionist, don’t you think I’d find a way to be PERFECT a little more often?”

So yeah. Inner voices. Have a nice weekend, everyone.

In which I visit a City of Books! Jill’s Review of Pat Conroy’s My Reading Life.

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I’ve never been much of a non-fiction reader.  So that’s why when Pat Conroy started publishing memoirs, first in 2003 with My Losing Season, and then in 2010 with My Reading Life, I didn’t rush out and buy them, despite my love of their author.  In the past couple of years, I’ve warmed up to the genre at bit, and wouldn’t you know it, some non-fiction is actually quite good.  When we were planning out PAT CONROY MONTH!! I thought it would be as good a time as any to read one of Pat Conroy’s more recent nonfiction books, and Bethany said My Reading Life was her favorite of the two.  And how could I resist a book about books and reading?  So I felt justified in ordering it from amazon.com a few weeks ago, along with a few other books (I didn’t want it to be lonely in the box).

The interesting thing about this book’s appearance is that it’s a small hardcover, and it appears it will never be available in paperback, as it isn’t now and it was published just about two years ago.  There are sepia-toned illustrations dispersed throughout, which is kind of a nice feature—I do enjoy the occasional picture in my books.  This book is essentially a collection of essays, several of which were previously published elsewhere.  I’ve never read any of them before, so I didn’t mind that aspect of the book.  They’re laid out in approximate chronological order, with chapters dedicated to people and events that were influential in Conroy’s reading life: his mother, a few teachers, colleagues/friends, and favorite writers who he may or may not have ever known.  He actually dedicates an entire chapter to Gone with the Wind and one to War and Peace, books that have always intimidated me with their length and subject matter.  I’ve watched the movie version of Gone with the Wind many times over the years, but when I tried to pick up the book and read it, I just couldn’t.  That was when I was twelve or so, so I’m sure I’ll try again.  I bought a copy when Borders was closing last year so I’ll get to it.  Eventually.

Conroy writes with such genuine enthusiasm about people and places and things he has loved that I feel like I know and love them too.  My favorite chapter was the one about his high school English teacher, Gene Norris, who became his lifelong friend.  This relationship is beautiful and sad, for it lasts for the rest of Mr. Norris’s life.  Conroy gave the eulogy at his funeral, and read to him on the phone while he was being treated for leukemia.  I would have loved to have a relationship with a teacher like that.  Maybe that doesn’t happen anymore between teachers and students.  Or more likely, I was too intimidated by grownups when I was a kid to allow that sort of relationship to develop, or to seek it out.  Pat Conroy obviously needed a positive male role model growing up, so he was more likely to go looking for someone.  That and I’d hazard a guess that he was much more talkative to people he didn’t know well when he was a teenager than I was.  It amazes me sometimes that my business now is spending time in small rooms with relative to total strangers, chatting with them about their pets.  That obviously makes being a veterinarian seem more like social hour than it actually is, but when you’re a general practitioner getting to know your clients and patients comes with the territory and is important.  When I was at a conference recently my friend convinced me to go to our alma mater’s alumni gathering, and one of the folks there wanted to introduce me to the recently retired dean of the school.  I was horrified.  I thought to myself, “I can’t talk to him!!  He’s the dean!!  He’s important!  And he’s a grown up!”  But then I just as quickly said to myself, “Wait a minute.  You talk to people you’ve never met for a living, from all walks of life.  Surely you can talk to another veterinarian for five minutes.”  And so I did.  And it was totally fine.  I mean, we didn’t exchange cell phone numbers and promise to text every day, but it was a perfectly pleasant conversation.  I was just so shy and intimidated by authority figures when I was a kid I would never dream of befriending one.  I wonder which of my teachers I’d’ve befriended if that had been something I did when I still had official teachers.

As well as being touching, there are also moments of hilarity in My Reading Life.  The first one that jumps to mind is when Conroy goes to a writer’s conference.  It’s the early to mid seventies, and he wants to go to a talk given by Adrienne Rich, an up-and-coming poet who he loves.  I’m sure I’ve read something she has written, but I can’t think of anything.  He goes in with several female friends, and offers to run out before the talk and get coffee for everyone.  When he returns to the lecture room, he hears something: “A strange sound came from the lecture hall, both ominous and unsettling, but I couldn’t lift my eyes from the shifting cups.  When I got close enough, I could hear the angry hissing of the workshop participants.  They sounded like an a capella choir of rat snakes.  It was not just sibilance I hear; it was hatred in a very undistilled form….  Betsy Scott hurried up to me, frightened and obviously unsure as to what she should do….  ‘Run, Pat.  Get the hell out of here.  They’re hissing at you.  At you.  She kicked all the men out of her workshop—every one of them’  (p. 181).”  This story goes on, and there’s a clumsy exit where in our poor Pat “sprinted toward a series of curtained portals that [he] thought were doors, but they turned out to be windows.  [He] found [him]self flailing away at the window sashes and vermilion drapes and venetian blinds as the hissing grew louder… (p. 181).”  He eventually makes his escape, thankfully.  Pat Conroy was quite possibly one of the most enlightened white Southern males that existed at the time, and he purports that he was entirely supportive of desegregation and women’s rights.  And the poor guy got kicked out of a conference.  I feel bad for him.  And yet, as I sit rereading this story I find myself wanting to laugh out loud.  See?  Pat Conroy is hilarious.

The final two chapters of this book are less stories of Conroy’s life and more him waxing philosophical about his life as a reader and as a writer.  These, to me, were both the high and low points of the book.  I mean, they are beautifully written and absolutely convey his deep love for books and reading and writing.  I believe that he means what he says.  But Pat gets a bit repetitive, and too overly sentimental.  It pains me to say that, but it’s true.  I’m going to stop there, and share with you guys two very short passages from the last chapter of the book that sum up, to me, the entire point of this book.  I definitely recommend this book to any and all lovers of books, and also to people who aren’t readers, because it just might change your minds.

“I have built a city from the books I’ve read.  There are thousands of books that go with me everywhere I go (p. 318).”

“Even today, I hunt for the fabulous books that will change me utterly.  I find myself happiest in the middle of a book in which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch.  Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the necessary discipline for a novelist who burns with the ambition to get better (p. 310).”

A Review of Geoff Dyer’s Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It (by Bethany)

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This book is not about yoga. Not in the slightest little bit. This book is many things – a collection of travel essays, a memoir of the early stages of a nervous breakdown, a contemplation of geography and history and time, a narrative of what it was like to be a global citizen in the years before 2001, when we all became global citizens whether we wanted to or not. But it is most definitely not about yoga.

At first the title disappointed me. Its origin is in a bad joke whose punch line you probably don’t even need me to tell you (Dyer: “I have an idea for a self-help book: Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It.”His friend Kate: “But you can’t be bothered to write it, right?” Dyer: “You stole my punch line” [103]), and at first I thought a stupid joke – plus an attempt to sell books to gullible New Agers – was all it was. For the first two thirds or so of the book, I thought that a phrase Dyer uses a couple of times in his essays, “the archaeology of ignorance,” would have made a better title. But then later on I figured out what Dyer was going for. The title is good – painfully subtle, but good.

Here is a quick synopsis of the book: Dyer has recently turned forty (sometime in the very-late nineties) and is still living a pathologically itinerant lifestyle that he seems to have lived for some time. He crashes for a while in New Orleans, tries to write a novel there, but doesn’t. He and a girlfriend named Circle visit Cambodia, and shortly after Circle departs Dyer has a fling with the aforementioned Kate, whom he meets when she has just emerged from the ocean having been stung by jellyfish all over her body. He travels to Amsterdam and Florida with someone named Dazed (who appears to be female), and in Rome he flirts with someone named Monica, who shows him a picture of her parents at the ruins of Leptis Magna in Libya, which prompts him to go to Libya on his own to see the ruins. He also visits Detroit on assignment to cover an Electronic Music Festival, and finally he goes to Burning Man with Circle, who is now going by her given name, Sarah. In most of these places, Dyer consumes significant quantities of alcohol and a variety of drugs – mostly hallucinogenics. He is often miserable and contemplates time and eternity and decay of various things – civilization and himself being the two primary objects of decay that he contemplates. He often tries to write but finds it impossible to complete projects. He despairs.

I have never found the drug memoir to be a compelling genre. I have no interest in Hunter S. Thompson or William Burroughs or Denis Johnson, although I have read enough of the latter to know that he’s a very skilled writer. The only thing worse than being around people who are taking drugs is reading about people who are taking drugs – and there were times when this book bored and annoyed me for that reason. I’m sure Dyer found the day-long saga of trying to change out of a pair of wet pants and into a pair of dry pants in a series of Amsterdam public restrooms absolutely hilarious when it happened – but someone (Dyer’s wiser self? His publisher? His girlfriend? Never mind that last one – a person named ‘Dazed’ is probably not the right person to advise anyone on how to keep drug stories to a minimum in one’s memoir) should have explained to him that this is not the kind of story that anyone else wants to hear. The Amsterdam episode in this book is boring and frustrating, and the Florida episode isn’t much better – although the frequency with which Dyer and Dazed consume smoothies in Florida (without ever directly calling attention to the number of smoothies they are consuming) made me laugh and almost made up for the excessive use of similes to describe the experience of taking Ecstacy.

What this memoir is really about, though, is the process of coming apart. As the title suggests, in this book Dyer is a person who knows what he should do for his health and well-being but cannot do it. Perhaps on some level he “can’t be bothered to do it” – but mostly there is some kind of miswiring in his brain that prevents him from doing what he knows to be healthy and good. And on this level, once the drug references begin to fizzle out, this book is extremely compelling.

Dyer is constantly trying to write a book about antiquity and ruins. I get the sense that what he wants to write is a very philosophical book – much more like something by Foucault than something by Thomas Cahill – about the theory of ruins, about what it means to live in a world with the crumbling artifacts of our forebears in various stages of decay all around us. I simultaneously find this idea interesting and think it’s as good a sign as any that Dyer needs to check himself into a hospital NOW, and I think that is how Dyer intends us to read it. Because, of course, he himself is a ruin – at least during the years in which this book is set. He himself is the destroyed remnant of some former, healthier, more robust, more courageous self– and the process through which Dyer comes to realize this is the (very loose) plot of this memoir.

This book is marketed as “uproarious,” “freewheeling,” “sidesplitting,” “mordantly funny,” and “exquisitely manic” (all of these are quotations from the front and back covers), and I honestly didn’t find it to be any of these (oh, OK – I guess it’s a bit freewheeling). The only part I found laugh-out-loud funny was an essay from the first third of the book, when Dyer and Circle are visiting the holy city of Angkor in Cambodia. They are tired and thirsty, and a young girl approaches them and offers to sell them a Coke. They are in the process of making the transaction – Dyer even has the Coke in his hand – when a boy who has lost both of his legs to a land mine (he has one wooden leg and one stump, and walks with crutches) approaches and offers to sell them a Coke. Dyer immediately decides to return the original Coke to the girl and buy a Coke from the legless boy. As they share the Coke, Dyer and Circle visit with the boy for a while, learning the story of how he lost his legs, while the girl who tried to sell them the original Coke follows them around having a temper tantrum – “BUY COKE FROM ME! YOU BUY COKE FROM ME NOW!!” – while Dyer and Circle steadfastly ignore her. I laughed hysterically at this, but it wasn’t the kind of laughter that makes you feel very good afterwards. Now, there is nothing wrong with this kind of laughter (most Americans could probably benefit from experiencing more of it, to be honest), and when I finished that chapter I almost forgot how funny it was, since its ultimate effect is not the release of laughter but the recognition of how much desperation and pain exist in the world and how little Westerners do to alleviate it. It reminded me of how I felt after reading the essay in which David Sedaris and his partner tour the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam and then decide that it is their dream house and try to convince the historical society to sell it to them – and then go on and on in front of all the other tourists about how they would decorate it. It’s hilarious (much more hilarious, actually, than it would be if it were less offensive), but when you finish reading it you feel poisoned – or, more accurately, you feel suddenly aware of the poison that was in you all along.

And speaking of David Sedaris – you know those moments of honest and shocking self-hatred that pop out like violent subliminal messages spliced into a children’s movie during the most hilarious parts of his  essays? Dyer operates in that landscape of self-hatred all the time. And for me, because I was so acutely aware of the darkness of this book, many of the moments that were supposed to make me laugh simply didn’t. It’s like when Harry Potter returns to school at the beginning of The Order of the Phoenix and realizes that he can see the thestrals that pull the students to from the train station to the castle – monstrous (though harmless) beasts that no one can see unless he has witnessed death.

The Harry Potter reference is a frivolous aside, of course – but any book about ruins and antiquity (and this book – which is more properly described as a book about NOT writing a book about ruins and antiquity – is about ruins and antiquity just the same) is by necessity also a book about aging and death. Dyer is constantly aware that he is an absurd figure – wandering the world doing drugs, having casual sex, feeling rooted nowhere. He writes that “it was better being forty than twenty, when one was full of fire and ambition and hope. It was even better than being thirty, when those hopes that had once animated you became a goading sense of torment” (165), and while he continually returns to the subject of ruined buildings, he really never states or betrays any desire for the kind of permanence that forty year-olds are supposed to want: houses, mortgages, children, jobs that require showing up every day at a certain place at an appointed time. It almost seems as if in his own mind he is the building that will one day be ruined: he sees the ruins that he explores in Cambodia and Rome and Libya not as representations of the buildings of our era but as representations of himself: “Perhaps the simplest lesson of antiquity is that, after a time, anything vertical – Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, whatever – commands admiration. Ultimately, though, the lure of the horizontal will always prove irresistible” (208). That “whatever,” of course, is a stand-in for “human” – this is one of many very oblique references to the suicidal impulse that pulls this novel forward, making Dyer’s collapse in the second-to-last essay in the book the only reasonable way for the book to end – or almost end.

This is a good book – at least, it’s a good book for a certain kind of reader in a certain kind of mood. Dyer’s prose is extraordinary, for one thing. As I’ve said, parts of the book bored, annoyed, and disgusted me – but I think that the experience of being bored, annoyed, and disgusted is part of reading a book like this and going through Dyer’s decline with him. It’s a cerebral book, which I like, and, of course, this IS the book about antiquity that Dyer claims he failed to write. It is a book about the way – when we are closest to our own mortality and decline – we are compelled to look away at things that, in their very decline, seem immortal.

In Which I Start Writing about Food and End up Writing about Books: A Review of The Pat Conroy Cookbook (by Bethany)

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On page 239 of his cookbook, Pat Conroy writes that book critics are “mostly bulimic, rail-thin – no great appetites there.” I laughed uproariously (laughing uproariously is a very Conroyvian thing to do) when I read this statement: clearly Conroy has never met THIS book critic. I am the kind of eater to whom the staff members in Japanese restaurants routinely give five or six sets of chopsticks when I come in to pick up my to-go order, thinking that I have ordered enough sushi to feed a family. Invariably I hand all but one set back, indicating with my shaking head and condescending smile that I am planning to eat the entire order myself. In the parking lot. In five minutes, tops.

So in other words, I am a good reader for Conroy’s cookbook. I love both stories and food, and I approve of Conroy’s definition of a recipe as “a good story that ends with a good meal.” I believe that the salubrious effects of good food extend far beyond the nourishment of the body, and I believe that the connection between food and “communion” is far more than just a religious or literary device. (I state these beliefs in spite of the fact that I have eaten far more than my fair share of meals in the parking lots of sushi restaurants and other similar places, because even sitting at a table for one in a restaurant sometimes feels too communal for my solitary tastes. But I believe these things nonetheless – what, you always live out your beliefs to the letter?)

My standards when I started reading this book were high – and they were only partially satisfied. There are recipes in this book that made me want to race out of the house immediately to buy the ingredients and try them out – examples: Barbequed Shrimp with Rosemary Biscuits (263-5), Cured Pork Crostini with Sweet Potato Brandade (254-5), Italian Sausage with Crispy Sweet Potatoes and Wilted Broccoli Rabe (136-7), Scottiglia (127-8) – and others, like Roast Suckling Pig (229) that I thoroughly enjoyed reading even though I doubt I will ever actually attempt them. However, as I thumb through the book to review the recipes, I notice that I marked almost nothing in the first half of the book. There is a simple explanation for why I spent the first half of the book in a constant state of mild nausea not at all conducive to wanting to cook and eat things – and that explanation consists of the single most unappetizing word in the English language.

Mayonnaise.

Let me just say a few things about mayonnaise. With one or two possible competitors, it’s the most disgusting substance that I have ever heard of anyone eating. I have hated it since I was old enough to hate things, and I have often gone hungry if my only choice was to eat something with mayonnaise on it (well-meaning hostesses and restaurant waitstaff have sometimes tried to “help” by wiping the mayonnaise off the offending food with a napkin. Just so you know, this does not help. The mayonnaise is still there; once mayonnaise has touched a food item, that food item is corrupted forever – plus, the visual experience of seeing the mayonnaise smeared around is usually enough to ensure that I won’t eat for at least the rest of the day, if not longer). In college I briefly worked in a deli and used to plead with customers not to order mayonnaise on their sandwiches so I wouldn’t have to run the risk of touching it of catching a whiff of its noxious odor. It would be one thing if mayonnaise were either a) a naturally-occurring substance or b) extremely good for you; in either case, I still don’t think I would like it but I would understand why some people ate it and might be convinced to TRY to develop a taste for it. But the fact that people go out of their way to make this product that is NOT healthy, that goes rancid easily and causes food poisoning, and that, oh yeah, is DISGUSTING is simply a sign to me that not all human beings have evolved at the same rate.

(Side note: If my friend Alison is reading this right now, she is remembering something. And I hope she is laughing her ass off.)

All of this is a long way of telling you that the vast majority of the recipes in the first half of this cookbook contain mayonnaise – and, not only that, that Conroy makes a point of rhapsodizing about mayonnaise. And for those of you who have read any of Pat Conroy’s work, you know that this man deserves a Nobel Prize in rhapsodizing. And if the object of his paeans happens not to be something that makes one vomit, I have no complaint. This tendency to rhapsodize is part of who Pat Conroy is as a writer, and most of the time I enjoy it. But discovering that he worships mayonnaise to the degree he does was disappointing – like finding out that he is a chronic nose-picker or one of those people who saves his own urine or something.

Fortunately, though, things improve once Conroy’s focus shifts to the two major themes of the cookbook’s second half: Italy and bacon. Italy – and its culture of food – has my approval 100%; I am somewhat less excited by bacon but at least am not repulsed by it, and I do admit that it can do a lot to add flavor to a dish when included as one of many other ingredients.

Of course, the primary reason to read this cookbook is to revel in Conroy’s stories. Unfortunately, for those of us who have read My Reading Life, many of the stories in this book are familiar – but whatever. I tell good stories over and over again too; that’s what you are supposed to do with good stories. Most of the stories in this book are about the friends with whom Conroy has shared good food, either in private homes or in restaurants, and about the friends who have helped teach him how to cook. If we take his account for the literal truth, Conroy has an uncanny knack for befriending (or for making enemies with) future celebrity chefs in their pre-celebrity years – and his story about his long-ago encounter with Emeril Lagasse is one of the funniest in the book.

Conroy often writes about his literary heroes – Thomas Wolfe usually foremost among them, although I don’t think he is mentioned in this book at all – but until this book I don’t think I have ever known Conroy to comment upon the powerful effect that John Irving’s The World According to Garp had upon his writing – and, specifically, upon his writing of The Prince of Tides. According to Conroy, both Garp and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude “freed” something about the way he wrote and allowed for the breakthrough that he perceives in his writing in between The Lords of Discipline and The Prince of Tides. Never mind that I know any number of people (possibly myself included, although I’m biased) who would state that the reverse is true: that Conroy’s writing is at its best in his earliest books – in The Water is Wide, The Great Santini, and The Lords of Discipline – what really struck me about this revelation is my own memory of discovering BOTH John Irving (in the form of Garp, The Cider House Rules, The Hotel New Hampshire, and A Prayer for Owen Meany) AND Pat Conroy (in the form of The Lords of Discipline) within the space of about two months in the summer of 1991. It was both of these writers put together (both of them outstanding storytellers, and both also strikingly inconsistent as writers and capable of highly flawed work) that, in the matter of a couple of months, absolutely changed the way I look at the world – gave me an awareness of absurdity and pathos and irony and a willingness to look beneath surfaces that I identify with beginning to think like a writer, and even though it has taken me an awfully long time to really do something about it, I credit that summer of 1991 and the confluence of the work of those two larger-than-life novelists with making that subtle but transformative brain-shift happen, and it makes me happy to think of Irving once having a similar effect on Pat Conroy.

But finally, this book is worth reading if only for the story of how Conroy’s father helped him to finish The Great Santini. I had read this story several times before – I think it is in both My Reading Life and My Losing Season – and I might have read it in an interview somewhere. This is among the best stories – fictional or “true,” and, like all good stories, it is, of course, both – I have ever read or heard anywhere. It’s not my place to reproduce the story in detail here; I’ll just say that this story is one of many that I thought of when my students used to insist that irony doesn’t appear in real life as it does in literature. The idea that irony is something that is created by authors (or that, if it happens in real life, it is only in the form of cruel jokes; “irony is when the fire station burns down” is something that students seem often to arrive in high school already knowing – do they teach that on some stupid 21st-century version of Schoolhouse Rock or something?) is an adolescent tendency that I always found hard to fight – but I wish I had remembered this story of Conroy’s sooner – because it has everything: sadness, vindication, the triumph of coming of age, the recognition that we are all limited by our identities – and yes, irony.

And the irony is beautiful. And the recipes (the ones without mayonnaise, anyway) aren’t bad either.

My Review of Jen Lancaster’s Jeneration X (by Jill)

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If it weren’t for Jen Lancaster I never would have read Eat, Pray, Love.  Before Jen, I had no time for non-fiction.  Non-fiction was not my deal.  And then I read Such a Pretty Fat in 2008.  And I laughed out loud in the car on the way home from Borders reading it.  After that, I was hooked on Jen Lancaster, and non-fiction didn’t seem so intimidating.  I once watched someone in the Davis Borders skimming through Jen’s first book (Bitter is the New Black) in the café and she was LOL-ing.  I looked at her, and wanted to go up to her and say, “Me too!!  You must read all of her books.”  But I thought that might be weird, so I didn’t.  I hope she did what I wanted to tell her to do, because her life would be full of laughter.

Jen Lancaster started blogging as a hobby and parlayed that into a writing career. She was a dot-com executive-type who lost her job in the early 2000’s (when everyone in the dot-com world lost their jobs).  The blog started out as a way to stay busy while she was looking for work, or between temp jobs, and she found a following, and got a book deal.  Her blog, Jennsylvania, is not as frequently updated as it used to be, what with her actually having a busy life writing books and publicizing them and all that.  She also has a Facebook and Twitter presence.  I just love her.  I will continue to refer to her as Jen, because that’s how I think of her—a friend I’ve never met in person, but who I’m sure I could split a bottle of chardonnay with no problem.  I would love to go to a book-signing event of hers if she’d ever come to my town.  Once she was in Oakland, and if I hadn’t had to work the next day I would have driven down for it.  And this is not something I would normally ever consider.  Because of her blog, I feel like I actually know this person, or at least know her more public persona.  And she has dogs and cats that she’s obsessed with!  She’s just like me!

This book is about Jen’s reluctant quest to become a “real” grown up.  She buys a house, writes a will, and even wins a major award from Purdue, her alma mater (it only took her ten years to finish college).  She, like all of us at times, has often felt like she was playing at being an adult, without actually doing all the things that adults do (see above).  Of course, all journeys to adulthood are fraught with stumbling blocks, and Jen has more than her fair share.  Of course, these are some of the most humorous moments in the book.  Each chapter is an individual story of an event in Jen’s life.  In her prior books the story has been more cohesive, and not so much a series of vignettes, so that was a little disappointing for me in a way.  Also, and I may not have noticed this if I hadn’t read on Jen’s blog (so Jen this is your fault I have this complaint), but a lot of the stories have a distinct ring of familiarity to them—more of the content than usual seems to be pulled out of the blog.  And expanded, of course, but still there’s more familiar ground being retread.  Or maybe some of the anecdotes were present in a slightly different form in her novel from last year, If You Were Here (which is more than a little autobiographical), and that’s why they seem incredibly familiar.

Each chapter in the book also has a box at the end with a “reluctant adult lesson learned,” summarizing the moral of each story in a pithy way.  For example, at the end of the chapter in which Jen details her attempts at facial waxing right before bed one night when she makes the mistake of looking at herself in her magnifying mirror under a very bright light (really, who would do that to themselves right before bed), the comment is “Philosophy makes a moisturizer that states on the label that you won’t find so many imperfections if you don’t go looking for them.  The manufacturers of Philosophy products are a bunch of baby-booming hippies.  My philosophy is you won’t find so many imperfections if you simply have that shit lasered (pp. 28-9).”  Some of the other reluctant adult lessons are a bit more useful and less pithy, such as “Estate planning sucks.  Do it anyway (p. 325).”

Of all the anecdotes Jen shares in this book, I have two favorites I want to specifically talk about.  The first one details the shenanigans that ensure when the power goes out and the three young cats go on a walkabout.  She conveys her fear for Gus (one of the three cats who run away, and the one who is gone the longest) and desperation to find him in a very believable way.  It was totally relatable because I’ve had animals vanish for short periods of time and I’ve felt the same things.  Jen is very good at humor and anger and sarcasm.  This is maybe the first time she has done fear and sadness, or at least the best she has done it.  “My cats can’t get out.  My cats have never gotten out.  Never.  Not one of the six cats I had before the Thundercats ever made an unauthorized exit.  I’ve now owned cats for twenty years and nobody’s ever escaped, sort of like Stalag 13 on Hogan’s Heroes.  I have a perfect record.  If I were a factory my sign out front would read: “This Organization Has Gone 7300 Days Without an Incident.  I employ Constant VigilanceTM; this shit does not happen on my watch.”  And after she realizes what has happened (the cats busted out a screen in a window she had opened because the air conditioning was out because of a power outage brought on by a summer storm), she “immediately break(s) out into a sweat…. And conduct(s) a thorough whole-house search for the Thundercats (p. 283).”   This episode brings to mind several episodes with our animals, two by Maxwell the cat and one by Bailey the dog, taking off on unsanctioned, unsupervised wanderings about the neighborhood.  Maxwell was gone for about five hours the first time, and fourteen hours the second time.  Bailey was gone for about two hours.  The most recent of these events was this summer, and the last time Maxwell went on a walkabout was 2006, but they still haunt me.  As a veterinarian, the first things that enter my mind are always all the tragic things that can happen—hit by car, poisonings, attacked by wild animals, attacked by stray dogs, stolen by people who don’t think I am an adequate pet owner….  Give me more time and I’ll come up with more.  When Bailey disappeared last month, I was at work.  My husband called me and told me she’d run off, and if a kind good Samaritan hadn’t found her and brought her home while Jacob was looking for her, I would have left work and driven the 27.5 miles home to look for her too.  All I was doing at work was crying, anyway.  Well, that and making threats on my husband’s life to anyone who would listen.  So, you see, Jen Lancaster loves her animals as much as I love mine.  And that makes her good people.  And I felt her stress and pain in this chapter.  Fortunately for all, all three of the Thundercats made their way home, none the worse for wear.

The second of my favorite stories details Jen’s return to Purdue to accept her Distinguished Alumnus award.  It proves that the more a person changes, the more that person remains the same.  Jen, her husband, her college roommate, and college roommate’s husband travel to Purdue for the ceremony.  Everything goes well.  Jen does not embarrass herself during the ceremony; she gives a speech and it is amusing and well-received.  She feels like a real grown-up.  This is contrasted with brief tales from her college days, including one incident involving slipping on ice while inebriated, sliding under her now-husband’s truck, and being so proud that she did not drop the burrito she was carrying, even though she ripped her pants, hit her head, and had an asthma attack from falling/laughing (pp. 332-333).  After the ceremony, Jen and her three companions plan to go have a few drinks and then head back to the hotel.  They stop at Harry’s, a dive bar that was their old hangout, expecting to have a beer, feel nostalgic, and then head out for someplace less divey.  That is not what happens.  Here is what happens: “we enter Harry’s and it IS 1993.  The place looks—and smells—exactly like it used to and the old friends we’d hope to meet are right there at the door while Steve Perry wails in the background about holdin’ on to that feelin’.  It’s like Brigadoon.  Only with beer….  In honor of the occasion, I switch from the wine I’d politely sipped at the dinner to Long Islands because it feels so appropriate.  As for the rest of the evening, I’ve pieced together what I can via tweets, photographs, Facebook posts, and video (p. 343).”  I would put in the entire minute by minute recounting of events from 9:00 pm to 8:00 am the following morning, but it’s just too much to type.  Highlights include “random Hugging of the Strangers” at 2:00 am, eating stray popcorn off the table and stealing of beer pitchers at 2:40 am, and discovering at 8:00 am that neither she, nor her liver, is twenty-one anymore.  Who hasn’t had a night like this one since exiting their twenties?  If you haven’t, you should.  Nights like this make me glad I’m not in my twenties, and grateful that I survived them.

I love Jen Lancaster.  She has never failed to entertain me.  Jeneration X was not my all-time favorite of hers, (that would be Such a Pretty Fat), but it’s a solid addition to her oeuvre, and as long as she keeps writing, I’ll keep reading.

A Review of Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map (by Bethany)

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I still consider myself very much an amateur at reviewing works of nonfiction, even though I have been reading nonfiction relatively consistently for the last three years or so. But Steven Johnson’s chronicle of London’s 1854 cholera epidemic, titled The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World is a good text for me to practice on, since I experienced two very different – and strong – reactions to it. So expect subjectivity here, folks. That’s all I’ve got.

My favorite works of nonfiction are those that blend a variety of genres, and this book is an excellent example of that approach. The obvious place to shelf this book is under history, but it could also reasonably be considered science or sociology, and Johnson makes frequent references to Victorian literature, especially to the novels of Dickens. He also makes a surprising turn toward the political in his epilogue, but I will get to that a bit later.

The first 90% of this book is absolutely excellent. Moving methodically through the week of August 28, 1854, Johnson tracks the spread of cholera from its index case, a five month-old girl whose mother emptied the water in which she washed the baby’s soiled diapers into a cesspool whose brick walls were crumbling, allowing the bacteria in the dirty water to corrupt the water from the Broad Street pump, which was known to have the best-tasting water in London’s Soho neighborhood.

Note: If you are eating right now, and/or if you are sensitive to reading about doo-doo corrupting the water supply, doo-doo being piled up in people’s backyards and cellars, and the various factors that can lead to accidental human consumption of doo-doo, you might not want to read much further in this review, and you DEFINITELY don’t want to read Johnson’s book. But hey – he’s describing Victorian London, and there was a lot of doo-doo in Victorian London. There is a lot of doo-doo today too, but thanks to many of the events chronicled in this book, we usually do a better job of getting rid of it. But I digress.

The second and third chapters of the book focus on two individuals who took a specific interest – for very different reasons – in this cholera outbreak. John Snow was a London doctor who lived in the Golden Square neighborhood of Soho, close to the outbreak. Snow had already made a name for himself as a pioneer in the field of anesthesiology – specifically, in the regulation of gas density to increase patient safety while using ether and chloroform. Before the cholera outbreak, Snow had achieved such renown in this field that he was hired to administer chloroform to Queen Victoria when she delivered her eighth child. Earlier in his career, Snow had studied the spread of cholera and took an interest in this one above and beyond his work as an anesthesiologist. He was skeptical about the miasma theory that was almost universally believed to be responsible for the spread of disease, and he hoped to prove – and eventually did prove – that cholera is a waterborne illness. Henry Whitehead was a local clergyman who knew the lower-middle class residents of Soho intimately, and his duties included visiting the sick. However, like Snow, he took a personal interest of solving the puzzle of how cholera was spreading through the neighborhood.

Johnson spends a good while working through the complexities of the miasma theory of disease transmission, which states that most diseases are caused by bad smells. Of course, many things that smell bad – corpses, doo-doo, stagnant water – also carry disease, but the agents that cause disease are not transmitted directly by the smell. In most cases, the smell is a warning sign prompting humans to stay away from the source of the smell. Johnson ventures into evolution and natural selection, explaining the likely reasons that we evolved this tendency to fear things that smell bad when we abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in favor of a more settled life – in which the problems of how to deal with corpses, doo-doo, and other forms of waste suddenly became monumental. So while the miasma theory is consistent with the human instinct to stay away from things that smell bad, it also confirms a variety of typical human prejudices: namely those against the poor. While wealthy people can often afford whatever strategies their societies have pioneered to avoid bad smells (and in 1854 many wealthy people had already equipped themselves with flush toilets), poor people don’t always have that luxury – and in some cases, the trades that are available to poor people bring them into contact with unpleasant smells. (Johnson provides quite a catalog of these trades early in his book – again, these are not for the squeamish.)

The miasma theory is not the only misconception that kept Snow from making progress in his work. In Victorian London, the idea that the dispensing of medical advice should be the sole task of those with a medical education was not yet widespread – after all, for centuries, most medicine was practiced by ordinary people in the form of herbs and other home remedies. He quotes from a variety of letters to the editor from London newspapers of the era offering various remedies for cholera. My favorite: heroin. This particular remedy was recommended by London’s chief of police. In his letter, he rhapsodized about the benefits of laudanum and other opiates to cure any gastrointestinal complaints from mild nausea all the way up to the spasmodic cholera, and then he goes on to say that if any of his readers don’t believe him, they are invited to visit their nearest police precinct and ask the officers on duty for their opinion. All police stations, wrote the chief, are stocked with a supply of laudanum just in case any of the officers are caught short with an attack of diarrhea.

Johnson unifies his book with a truly brilliant conceit. Cholera epidemics are the result of human mismanagement of their waste products (although Johnson also makes clear that the scourge of cholera in London was also a side effect of globalization, as empire-builders slowly brought the disease northward from India and elsewhere in Asia). Any time humans settle down in one place, the disposal of waste becomes a huge problem, from the burial or burning of corpses (I grew up, for example, in a city where cemeteries are forbidden within city limits. Instead, there is an entire suburb – the town of Colma, CA – devoted almost exclusively to cemeteries. Its website proclaims prominently that its population includes over 1,600 residents and 1.5 million “souls,” and the motto of the town – also prominently displayed on the website – is “it’s great to be alive in Colma.”) to the struggles we have in our own century with the recycling of glass, plastic, aluminum, and other materials and the safe disposal of nuclear, industrial, and medical waste. Johnson takes the idea of human waste products to a new level and looks at it philosophically: “the advance of civilization produced barbarity as an unavoidable waste product, as essential to its metabolism as the gleaming spires and cultivated thought of polite society” (14). In other words, a massive city like London becomes a likely breeding ground for diseases like cholera and other biological and social ills specifically because of its size, immense population, and capacity for great art and other works of advanced “civilization.” Hunter-gatherers don’t get cholera, but they don’t build Big Ben or write Bleak House either.

There is very little that this book is not “about.” It’s about biology on both the prokaryotic and human levels. It’s about human history and sociology and anthropology and epidemiology. I learned a great deal about civic engineering in general and about London in general. In its final chapter, however, the book takes a turn that I didn’t expect and didn’t like. My first clue that Johnson was taking on a political, polemical tone was the frequent appearance of the first person plural pronoun. All of a sudden, Johnson felt compelled to begin to speak on behalf of humanity as a group: “A hundred and fifty years after Broad Street, we see [population] density as a positive force: an engine of wealth creation, population reduction, environmental sustainability. We are now, as a species, dependent on dense urban living as a survival strategy” (236).

My response: Who are you calling ‘we,’ dude?

Now, Johnson remains the responsible, thorough journalist in this final chapter, and he does provide some compelling arguments for the advantages of city living, including the fact that if New York City were made a state, it would rank twelfth in terms of population but dead last in terms of energy consumption – and that’s great. I take environmental concerns seriously, and energy conservation is important. But I am not willing to make the leap from appreciating this particular statistic to accepting that I am a part of some abstract “we” that believes that city life is safer, saner, and more responsible than life in the country or in a small town. I don’t think I will ever believe that.

Then Johnson begins a coda on a series of fashionable sources of fear – namely terrorism and killer viruses. My cynical side suggested that this tacked-on epilogue seemed like the sort of thing an editor would request in order to sell books, but I realize that if this were the case these topics would be featured more prominently in the marketing materials on the book’s front and back covers – and they’re not. Johnson proposes all kinds of nightmare scenarios – the Ebola virus attacking New York, the avian flu virus merging with a less virulent strain to make itself more readily transmissible, radiation poisoning from dirty bombs, improvised explosive devices – a whole laundry list of CNN headlines that are all designed to do one thing: to make us afraid.

I distrust any authority figure that tells me what to feel – and, almost all the time, authority figures who play to the public’s emotions are working with one of three emotions: pride, euphoria, or fear. For 228 pages, Johnson is a voice of historical and journalistic integrity, chronicling the 1854 cholera epidemic with a tone of serious inquiry, wry humor, and detached wonder at the complexity of creation. And then in his epilogue everything changes, and he becomes one of those voices that want me to be afraid of the world.

And I resent the hell out of that.

Of course I believe that all communities should maintain departments of public health and safety. Of course we should understand the routes that epidemics take and fight these epidemics the best we can. Of course we should never stop tinkering to make our world better and safer. But no water filtration system, no metal detector, no evacuation plan, no program of genetic engineering – no matter how brilliant and Nobel Prize-winning – will change the fact that human beings die, and every study of the interconnected disciplines of human life must be written in a spirit of humility that recognizes that we are being counterproductive when we encourage people to fear death. If we can eliminate a threat like cholera or polio or smallpox, then certainly should, but we should not believe that in doing so we have made the world safer. Another threat will come along to take the place of the one we have conquered. That’s how it’s always been – the human death rate, over time, is always 100%.

I have a feeling that many of my readers will see this review – or the second half of it, anyway, after I stopped using the word “doo-doo” – as bleak and naysaying and pessimistic. I disagree, but I doubt if I will make much headway in persuading others. I don’t have much use for an intellectual approach that is teleological – or oriented toward end results – in nature. I appreciate the fact that there are people in the world who love to solve problems, but I am glad that I don’t have to spend a lot of time inside their brains, and I don’t think that those people eventually do much to explain the world. And when an author like Johnson starts ranting at me about the many ways that I can die, sooner or later I stop listening. My model of intellectual inquiry is the one that Johnson models for the first 90% of his book, the one that analyzes and studies problems but recognizes the infinite complexity of everything that human beings do – not to mention everything that happens in the biological world. Absolutely we should solve problems, but we have to recognize that our solutions will only create or reveal other problems – and that this complexity in itself is something to inspire wonder.

Bring me an authority that wants to inspire me to wonder. That is the authority figure I want to listen to.