Book Reviews

Elizabeth Kolbert

Publisher Holt

 The future of Earth: There's good news and bad news

This is probably not going to be the feel-good book of the year.

In 2008, an article appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled, “Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Extinction? A View from the World of Amphibians.”

Over the past half billion years, there have been five great extinctions during which “the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted.”

The first great extinction took place during the Ordovician period, about 450 million years ago, when life on this planet was still basically a watery affair. The greatest extinction event happened about 250 million years ago at the end of the Permian period, when life on earth came close to being snuffed out altogether. The most recent mass extinction occurred around 60 million years ago in the Cretaceous period, when a huge asteroid struck the earth; the resulting “nuclear winter” killed all large life forms, most notably the dinosaurs.

The paper’s authors, David Wake of the University of California-Berkeley and Vance Vredenburg of San Francisco State argued that, based on the current extinction rate of amphibians around the world, we are now in the midst of an event of similar catastrophic magnitude. This sixth extinction is of particular interest to humans because (1) unlike the others, we are living during this event, and (2) we are causing it.

Elizabeth Kolbert, science writer for The New Yorker and author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe (2006) about the impact of climate change, set out to investigate this idea. She traveled to various parts of the world, witnessing first-hand the loss of our “biodiversity.”

The scientific data is staggering: “It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion.”

This current extinction event probably began around 12,000 years ago (which is like only this morning in geologic time), and the main agent is modern humans, who have continuously spread over the planet and altered the ecosphere of whichever area they have inhabited, in much the same way as an invasive species.

It is a little unsettling to think of humans as an invasive species, perhaps even capable of killing its host. Kolbert quotes Stanford’s ecologist Paul Ehrlich: “In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is sawing off the limb on which it perches.”

The good news is that, based on past extinctions, the planet will survive and life will go on in some form; the bad news is that we humans may not be part of it.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (April 15-May14, 2014.) Reprinted with permission.

James McBride

Riverhead Books (Penguin Group)

Riding with the divinely/diabolically inspired John Brown

It’s 1856 on the Kansas-Missouri border; a time when you could be stopped on a lonely road by a group of armed men asking, “Are you Pro-Slave or Free State?” How you answered would determine whether you made it home that night.

The Kansas Territory was a battlefield, being fought between those who wanted it to enter the union a slave state and those who were just as adamant that it become a free state. There was no lack on either side of extremists willing to slaughter families or entire populations of frontier towns for their beliefs.

James McBride, author of the moving and tender memoir, The Color of Water, captures this turbulent time in his novel, The Good Lord Bird, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction.

The story is narrated by Henry Shackleford, nicknamed “Onion,” who as a 10-year old boy is freed by the abolitionist John Brown, he of Harper’s Ferry fame. Onion is light-skinned and comely, and, dressed only in a potato sack as slave children often were, Brown mistakes him for a girl. Though he at first resents this, Onion soon realizes that it’s in his best interest to maintain this guise. (“You just trying to save your skin.”/ “Why not? It covers my body.”)

Hovering over the story is the character of Brown, the “Old Man”—sentimental, murderous, possibly crazy, and, depending upon one’s point of view at the time, divinely or diabolically inspired. (“He got downright holy when it was killing time. ‘Take thine own hand and split an ax with it,’ he said. ‘That’s Eucclestsies twelve seven or thereabouts.’”)

By the time he’s twelve, Onion has been recaptured and is working (still as a girl) in a saloon and whorehouse, where he falls in love with the beautiful but hardened Pie; and where it’s become increasingly difficult to hide the fact that he’s a boy. He’s freed a second time by Brown, and finds himself on the road to Harper’s Ferry.

In a number of ways, The Good Lord Bird reminded me of another story, also set in Missouri, also set in the pre-Civil War years. It, too, had a boy who like Onion, though white, needed to use all his wits and wiles and flexible ethics to survive a series of adventures; who encountered a number of colorful and memorable characters, and who told his story also in a distinctive voice, employing humor and satirical insight into his society and the institution of slavery. And as I recall, at one point Huck disguises himself as a girl, too.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (March 15-April 14, 2014.) Reprinted with permission.

George Packer

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The unraveling of America's social fabric

“No one can say when the unwinding began—when the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way.”

How did we get to this point? A deeply polarized society— Democrats distrusting Big Business, Republicans distrusting Big Government, and the Tea Party seeming to distrust Big Anything—where diatribe has replaced dialogue, and politics is reduced to pranks (anyone for Green Eggs and Ham?)

In The Unwinding, winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2013, George Packer attempts to understand what is happening by presenting a social history of America over the past three decades.

This could make for flat reading, but Packer, author of The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story through a number of different people’s lives—a tobacco farmer in the South, trying to find a new future; a factory worker in the Midwest, fighting to hold her family together as wages and benefits are eroded while productivity and profits soar; a Washington political insider losing the idealism that first drew him to politics.

Along with these individuals, Packer also reflects on people who have become almost iconic when we think about this period of history:

Newt Gingrich—“Donors were more likely to send money if they could be frightened or angered, if the issues were framed as simple choices between good and evil.”

Oprah Winfrey—“If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.”

Walmart’s Sam Walton—“Mr. Sam launched a Buy American campaign, winning praise from politicians and newspapers around the country, and Wal-Mart stores put up MADE IN THE U.S.A. signs over racks of clothing imported from Bangladesh.”

The short story writer Raymond Carver—“a man who had wandered into a book party from the scary part of town.”

Colin Powell, at once noble and tragic—“When the (Iraq) war began, the president said that he was sleeping like a baby. ‘I’m sleeping like a baby, too,’ said the secretary (Powell). ‘Every two hours I wake up screaming.’”

If the social fabric of this nation is unraveling, it is not anything new. Packer notes that there have been other “unwindings” in our history—such as the years leading up to the Civil War, or during the Great Depression—and each time, the nation went through the crisis, regained its equilibrium, and in the process reinvented itself.

His conclusion is ultimately—eventually—positive: “Each decline brought renewal, each implosion released energy, out of each unwinding came a new cohesion.”

Stay tuned.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (Feb 15-Mar 15, 2013.) Reprinted with permission.

Louise Erdrich

Harper Perennial

Coming of age, and other mysteries

Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, winner of the National Book Award, is one of those occasional novels that can be classified both as “commercial fiction” (fast-paced, strong narrative, action) and “literary fiction” (complex, literate, multilayered, and “serious”.)

The narrator is 13-year old Joe Coutts, living on an Ojibwe reservation with his father, Bazil, a tribal judge, and his mother, Geraldine, who works as a kind of social worker and whose job is “to know everybody’s secrets” on the reservation.

The novel begins with the brutal assault on Joe’s mother in the Round House, a sacred place of worship for their people. Severely traumatized, Geraldine withdraws into herself, unable—or unwilling—to say who attacked her and why.

Emotionally shut out by his mother, frustrated that the police are turning up no clues, Joe begins his own investigation, assisted by his friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus.

The austerity and strain of life on a North Dakota reservation provides the backdrop for the story, highlighting the poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, and tense, mutually mistrusting relations between the whites and the “rez Indians”—“Just yesterday a white guy asked me if I was a real Indian. No, I said…The real Indians are in India. I’m a genuine Chippewa.”

A number of reviewers have compared The Round House favorably to Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird—there is the complex adult world seen through the eyes of a young person, the father as a good and decent man, issues of racism and justice (“Any judge knows there are many kinds of justice—for instance, ideal justice as opposed to the best-we-can-do justice.”)

The mystery of what happened in the Round House drives the narrative. But this is also a coming-of-age story, and amid its bleakness and intensity, there are some very funny scenes: Cappy goes to confession, where he admits to Father Travis that he had sexual relations with a girl…from the visiting Youth Encounter Christ group…inside Father’s church. Joe watches as Cappy comes tearing out of the confessional, running for his life, as Father Travis, an ex-Marine and very fit, chases him throughout the reservation, intent on throttling the boy.

Eventually, Joe and his friends will uncover the truth of the Round House, but will find little comfort in it—“I couldn’t tell anyone. Even I didn’t want to know what I knew”—and learn that the pursuit of truth must sometimes settle for the best-we-can-do kind of justice.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (January 10-February 14, 2014.) Reprinted with permission.

Ivan Doig

Riverhead Books 

The reasoned, seasoned memories of a boy fifty years later

Soon before daybreak on my sixth birthday, my mother’s breathing wheezed more raggedly than ever, then quieted. And then stopped.

The remembering begins out of that new silence…

One of the most evocative and powerful openings I had ever read began This House of Sky, Ivan Doig’s 1978 memoir of growing up in Montana. I was hooked and eagerly read the books that followed, The Sea Runners, Winter Brothers, Prairie Nocturne, The Whistling Season, Work Song. Like Wallace Stegner, Doig is a storyteller of the modern West and a master stylist, meaning that as important as the story he tells is the way he tells it; his books are full of sentences you want to highlight and underline and remember.

In his most recent novel, The Bartender’s Tale, Doig relates the experiences of Russell (Rusty) Harry when he turned twelve in 1960—“that year of everything”—when his life changed and the world would never be the same again.

The events take place in the small fictional town of Gros Ventre, Montana (“where people knew one another’s business almost before it happened”), the setting of several of Doig’s stories.

Rusty lives with his father, who owns the town’s most popular bar, the Medicine Lodge saloon, and who is some kind of legend in the area with his down to earth, no-nonsense philosophy (“All you can count on in life is your fingers and toes.” “Opposites attract, but usually not for long.”)

“Newly hatched from childhood into adolescence,” Rusty begins to explore the strange goings-on and baffling world of adults. To accompany him on his explorations is a girl new in town, Zoe Constantine. Overcoming the typical 12-year old boy’s suspicion of girls, he and Zoe quickly become best friends and co-conspirators in growing up.

Rather than the story of some dramatic, life changing event, the novel instead recounts the daily little discoveries and mini-dramas that together add up to what Rusty realizes was a turning point in his life: The prospect of his dad re-marrying, or as he called it “maddermoany,” selling the bar that had become a manageable microcosm of the world, or being confronted with the possibility that he has a half-sister neither he nor his father knew about.

Through the story of that momentous year, Doig captures the freshness of a 12-year old’s explorations and discoveries filtered now through the reasoned, seasoned reflections of the boy fifty years later: “That’s grown-ups for you. By the time we ever figure them out…we’ll be them.”

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (September 15-Oct 14, 2013.) Reprinted with permission.

Kate Atkinson

Little Brown & Co.

Time and time again

Life After Life opens with the heroine assassinating Adolf Hitler. It’s 1930. Not bad for a beginning.

When a novel starts this way you know that either you are setting out on an extraordinary journey of the imagination, or the novelist has an abysmal sense of history. In the case of Kate Atkinson (Case Histories), it’s clearly the former.

On February 11, 1910, Ursula Todd is born, and dies at birth (No breath. All the world come down to this.) In the very next chapter, she is born on February 11, 1910 (“A bonny, bouncing baby girl”) to live a full life, or several.

Probably most people have wondered: What if I had married that person rather than this one; if I had accepted that job; if I had taken more risks; if I had played it safer; if I had chosen differently. Life is a series of daily choices, with extenuating circumstances and unforeseen consequences. This is a novel about the great What Ifs of history and our personal lives.

Ursula is an odd duck, out of step with time and her family much of the time (“Try not to be precocious,” Sylvie sighed. “It’s a not a pleasant thing in a girl.”) and her life contains different scenarios with vastly different consequences. When she’s sixteen, she is casually raped by a friend of her older brother, and she grows up to be a timid woman who marries an abusive husband, who winds up killing her.

Take two: As a sixteen year old girl, she punches her brother’s friend in the jaw as he tries to kiss her, and he winces away. Same girl, different story; different life.

The book been compared to the film Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray’s character awakes each morning to live the day all over again. But Atkinson’s story rather suggests parallel universes, as if Ursula were living all these lives simultaneously. In one, she is an air-raid warden in London during the Blitz; in another, she is huddling with her small daughter in Berlin as the Russians approach. In its imaginative reach, the novel, I think, more closely resembles Slaughter House 5—“Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”

Typically, life comes with regrets—for what we did or didn’t do, and with the knowledge that we could have chosen differently, accomplished more, been better persons. It is a kind of consolation of the imagination to think that, maybe in some other universe, we were.

And that in that universe Hitler never lived to become Chancellor of Germany.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (July 15-August 14, 2013.) Reprinted with permission.

M. L. Stedman

Simon and Schuster 

On love, and the guilt of living with its consequences

Who among us lives without guilt? Probably only the very young and the morally insensitive. Yet some people just seem made for guilt. It fits them like a custom tailored hair shirt.

Tom Sherbourne is a decent, thoughtful and principled man who feels his guilt—for having betrayed his mother when he was a small boy, for what he had to do in the Great War, and perhaps most, for returning unscathed when so many came back badly maimed, or didn’t return at all. Perhaps it is the most decent among us who feel their guilt the sharpest.

Tom becomes a lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, perched between the Indian Ocean and the Great Southern Ocean, and a half day’s journey from the West Australian coast. In time, he meets and marries Isabel, a spirited, young woman, and they share an idyllic life together, in time and tune with the tides.

However, after two miscarriages and the still-birth of her baby boy, Isabel falls into a deep depression. Then something miraculous happens: a boat bumps up against the rock, carrying a dead man and a squalling baby girl. Tom wants to report the occurrence, but Isabel convinces him that the infant is theirs, a gift from God, to replace their dead son.

Out of his love for Isabel and concern for the infant—How could they turn her over to the authorities to be placed in an orphanage?—Tom buries the man, sets the boat once more adrift, and they pretend the baby is their own, naming her Lucy (from the Latin word for “light.”)

The joy the three find together continues until several years later when Lucy is a toddler. Visiting the mainland on a vacation, they learn the story of the boat, and of the mother, still devastated by the disappearance of her baby daughter.

Tom wrestles with the moral dilemma: What is best for Lucy? What is best for Isabel? And what about the grieving mother who has held on to a fragile hope that her child still lives? For Isabel, the answer is clear: Lucy is now their daughter.

A number of reviewers have described this story as “heartbreaking,” “heartrending,” and “heart-wrenching.” What’s left for me? They took all the best words. [Hint: Don’t look for a happy ending.]

The Light Between Oceans is a beautifully written, poignant story of the choices good people make for good reasons, and the guilt they must live with when facing the consequences of those choices.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (June 15-July 14, 2013.) Reprinted with permission.

Susan Cain

Random House 

Introverts of the world, unite! (quietly)

We have become an “Extrovert Nation,” says Susan Cain, believing that “the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight,” and that introversion is “a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.”

She says we shifted from being a Culture of Character, defined by virtue (think Abraham Lincoln) to a Culture of Personality, defined and propelled largely by self-promotion (think Tony Robbins).

She attributes this change to the rising cult of the salesperson at the beginning of the 20^th century, particularly Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.

A self-confessed introvert, Cain asks, “How did we go from Character to Personality without realizing that we had sacrificed something meaningful along the way?” and she examines the contributions of famous introverts, like Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Albert Einstein, quiet, self-effacing people who changed history. As a lifelong, card-carrying introvert, I found this a compelling argument.

Of course, introversion-extroversion is on a continuum, similar to masculinity-femininity, gay-straight, liberal-conservative, and there probably never was a person who was 100% extroverted, except maybe my Uncle Al, and he was insufferable.

She offers a quiz that helps the reader assess where he or she is on the “introvert-extrovert spectrum.” For example, extroverts get energy from being with people, while introverts feel their energy drained by being around people and need to recharge by being alone. When my extrovert brother and I were children and sent to our rooms as punishment, Gary suffered the torments of prolonged isolation (30 minutes), whereas for me—happy as a clam!

Cain is not saying there’s anything wrong with extroverts (I mean, they’re fun at parties, I suppose) but asks what is lost? She examines the impact on our decisions in business, education, and politics when energy and action are favored over reflection and thought. How many times have we seen situations where a group adopted a plan, not because it was the best idea, but because it was the most loudly expressed? (“Hey, let’s invade Iraq! We’ll figure out the justification later—WMDs or Al Queda or, something…”)

Nor is she saying that everyone should be introverts—Imagine 20,000 people quietly watching a SeaHawks game; or thousands at a political convention murmuring their approval of a candidate—but that introversion should be as valued as its loud and confident cousin.

I foresee a new political movement emerging—Introvert Pride!—flying a rainbow banner of subdued colors, proudly though unobtrusively proclaiming, “Introverts of the world, unite!...quietly.”

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (May 15-June 14, 2013.) Reprinted with permission.

Lyndsay Faye

G. P. Putnam's Sons

RA Long High School grad writes award-winning mystery

It is 1845, and New York City has just formed its first police force. Timothy Wilde is one of these “copper stars,” a job he has received through his older brother’s political connections.  One night as he’s ending his beat, a ten-year-old girl runs in to him as she is dashing through the dark streets. She is dressed only in her nightgown, and the gown is covered in blood.

So begins Lyndsay Faye’s 2012 novel, Gods of Gotham, recently named best mystery novel by the American Library Association, and nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America (winners will be announced May 2.)

Lyndsay Faye is the pseudonym for Lyndsay Farber Lehner, who with her husband, Gabriel Lehner, graduated from R. A. Long in 1998, and now lives in Manhattan.

The New York City that she depicts is a grimy, seamy, violent world that operates through well-oiled corruption (Some things never change.) Wilde is an uninspired cop, just walking his beat “until someone wanted arresting,” but he soon becomes drawn into the girl’s life. The blood on her nightgown is not her own, but of a boy who is (was) her friend. Both of them work at Silkie Marsh’s brothel—and we don’t mean scrubbing the floors.

Wilde enters this sordid world, and it only gets more and more sordid. The girl, Bird Daly, tells him of a dark-masked gentleman who visits the house, and when he does, one of the children disappears. Eventually, Wilde will discover the remains of nineteen of these children buried on the outskirts of the city.

As he begins his investigation to find the brutal child-killer, Wilde runs up against party politics (no surprise, Silkie Marsh is a major contributor), as well as the Nativist rage against the swelling numbers of Irish immigrants arriving each day, “plentiful as fleas.”

Like most of the characters, Wilde is himself wounded and brutalized in this rough and tumble world where there is little difference between the “coppers” and the thugs they are supposed to control. Yet he engages us because of his self-awareness, which seems often lacking in many of the other people (“I’ve done mad things myself. Stupid things. Never quite that mad or quite that stupid, but after all it wasn’t for lack of trying.”)

Almost against our will, we, like Wilde, are drawn down the gritty, squalid alleys of life we would rather not think about.

[Watch the Book Chat interview with Lyndsay Faye, discussing her first novel, Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings, with her former teacher and mentor Jim LeMonds at www.alan-rose.com/bookchat.]

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (March 15 - April 14, 2013.) Reprinted with permission.

Timothy Egan

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 

Capturing on film the soul of a people forever

It is unlikely that you have never seen a “Curtis Indian”—one of those striking, black and white, or sepia portraits of Native Americans created in the early part of the twentieth century by Edward S. Curtis.

Timothy Egan, author of the National Book Award-winning The Worst Hard Time, has written a fast-paced biography of Curtis that also eloquently and movingly relates the systematic destruction of the cultures of the people who once occupied this country.

Curtis came out to Seattle from Minnesota at a time when the city was in its raw and ungainly adolescence. Within a decade the city grew from 10,000 to nearly 100,000, and would double that within another ten years. A man of enormous energy, ambition, and confidence, he quickly learned photography and set up a studio. Within four years, he had moved from a homesteader’s shack on Puget Sound to a large gracious home in Seattle, and had become a celebrity in the Northwest for his portraits.

As his business was prospering, he took a photograph of the 80-some year old daughter of Chief Sealth (Seattle)—“To look at the face and not see humanity is to lack humanity,” states Egan.

What started as a commercial venture for Curtis became a life passion: to create a proposed 20-volume photographic record of the North American Indian cultures. His goal, he said, was that he “wanted people to see human beings in the faces of Indians, and he wanted those faces to live forever.” His task would take on a heightened urgency as he realized “the subject was dying.”

He was able to secure financial backing for his project from mega-financier J.P. Morgan, but the attitudes toward Native Americans were still far from enlightened (Theodore Roosevelt: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”)

He was told not to get “political” in his project—addressing injustices and broken treaties. This became more and more difficult as he uncovered the extent of the injustices and the vast number of broken treaties, and when he met the aging Chief Joseph and studied the dying Nez Perce, and found in them a culture superior in many ways to his own, he had to speak out.

Curtis’s passion would drive his life, eventually consuming him, his business, and his marriage, but through this passion he captured the souls of dying cultures, and faces that would live forever.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (February 15 - March 14.) Reprinted with permission.