Edward Morris

Social Science

Our personal lives for hire

Review by Edward Morris

As Americans struggle to survive and prosper in today’s shifting and far-flung economy, they find themselves tugged farther and farther away from the supportive embrace of family and community. Under these conditions, functions that used to be performed personally or “in house,” so to speak—such as finding a mate, bearing and raising children, holding a marriage together and taking care of the elderly—have been “outsourced” to for-profit businesses.

This is the landscape Arlie Russell Hochschild explores in a study that takes her from the office of a “love coach” in Southern California to a ritzy gated community near Minneapolis and from the baby mills of India that specialize in “wombs for rent” to sterile nursing homes in Massachusetts. She illustrates the pervasiveness of outsourcing by following the life cycle from courtship to birth to death and personalizes her account by comparing these modern customs with those she witnessed as a child while visiting her grandparents’ farm in Maine.

To a degree, this is a chronicle of people with too much money to spend. How else to explain the flourishing of such pricey but nonessential trades as Internet dating services, wedding planners, surrogate mothers, kiddie chauffeurs, potty trainers, birthday party producers, “nameologists” (who help couples find the “right names” for their babies), parenting evaluation services and “wantologists” (who aid the confused in distinguishing between what they think they want and what they really want)? But Hochschild gives the people who use these services—and those who offer them—their full say, allowing them to explain their actions in their own words. Whether one is convinced by their reasoning is another matter.

It is only near the end of the book that Hochschild makes it clear that she views profligate outsourcing as an unfortunate triumph of marketing over common sense and social needs. “It’s become common,” she says, “to hear that the market can do no wrong and the government—at least its civilian parts—can do no right, and to hear little mention of community at all. Curiously, many who press for a greater expansion of the free market, gutting of regulations, cuts in social services, are the same people who call for stronger family values. What’s invisible to them is how much market values distort family values.” In attempting to buy happiness perfectly packaged and off the shelf, Hochschild argues, “What escapes us is the process of getting there—and the appreciation we attach to the small details of it.”

As Americans struggle to survive and prosper in today’s shifting and far-flung economy, they find themselves tugged farther and farther away from the supportive embrace of family and community. Under these conditions, functions that used to be performed personally or “in house,” so to speak—such…

Memoir

A darkly funny tale of a lawless childhood

Review by Edward Morris

To hug him or to slug him? That is the question one ponders while reading Moshe Kasher’s gut-wrenching account of his youth, during which he was both emotionally fragile and socially insufferable. Although he’s now a high-profile standup comic, Kasher offers precious little to laugh about here, only the blackest of humor. Still, his book is compelling for its grim candor and voluminous details about slacker street life in Oakland, California. There’s even a wisp of inspiration.

Unlike the solitary and largely sympathetic character of Holden Caulfield conjured up by the book’s title, Kasher in the Rye, Kasher more resembles a gang-oriented Tom Sawyer on drugs. Born in Queens, New York, of two deaf parents who separated within months of his birth, he says he was a “feral kid” from the start, “wild at heart and physically unable to handle the energy and ferocity of [his] own body.” Leaving her abusive husband behind in New York, Kasher’s mother fled with him and his older brother to her home territory of Oakland. Kasher was seven before he was allowed to visit his father again.

Given the parental clashes, his mother’s embarrassing (to him) infirmity, the family’s poverty and his brother’s tendency to excel at school and do everything right, it’s no wonder that Kasher found himself consigned to a therapist when he was four years old. He would remain in therapy on and off—and generally without success—throughout his teenage years. Not surprisingly, he was an abysmal and rebellious student who bounced from one school to another. Nor did he find relief in visiting his father in New York. There he was immersed in a rule-ridden, orthodox Jewish enclave that warred with the free spirit he was developing on the streets of Oakland.

It’s chilling to watch Kasher narrowly evade disaster as he drinks, drugs, steals, schemes and fights his way through life. And it’s infuriating to see him break his devoted mother’s heart again and again. But there is warmth, too, in roaming with the ragtag community of loyal losers he surrounds himself with. Just when it appears that things can’t get any more depraved and desolate for him, Kasher finally seizes control of his fate, and one can almost hear the orchestra swelling. By this time, it’s welcome music indeed.

To hug him or to slug him? That is the question one ponders while reading Moshe Kasher’s gut-wrenching account of his youth, during which he was both emotionally fragile and socially insufferable. Although he’s now a high-profile standup comic, Kasher offers precious little to laugh…

Nonfiction

The science of creativity

Review by Edward Morris

Although Jonah Lehrer discusses brain functions and their connections to different forms of creativity in Imagine: How Creativity Works, the real delights and revelations here are his stories of individuals, companies and cities that fostered new ways of looking at problems and new ways of solving them.

Creativity—whether it manifests itself as a Bob Dylan song, a W.H. Auden poem or a new kind of mop—is almost always more than the torrential activity of an isolated mind. Dylan spun songs out of older forms, literary conventions and melodies, but with such particularity of insight that he made them his own. Auden found inspiration in New York City nightlife and the stamina to keep writing through massive consumption of caffeine, nicotine and Benzedrine. Procter and Gamble’s Swiffer mop, which replaced a permanent mop head with a disposable one, took the company and an outside research team three years to conceive and develop.

Companies known for their innovations have contrived ways to cross-pollinate their employees’ best ideas, Lehrer observes. 3M has an annual Tech Forum at which all the company’s scientists present their latest research. When Steve Jobs took over Pixar, he consolidated everything under one roof and then shifted the meeting rooms, cafeteria, coffee shop and even the restrooms to the center of the building—all this to ensure that everyone, regardless of his or her job, would at least bump into everyone else. There’s now even a Pixar University with a curriculum of 110 classes—from juggling to comic improvisation—that’s open to all employees.

But the granddaddy of creativity, Lehrer asserts, is the big city, where one is awash in other ideas and cultures whether one wants to be or not. Accommodating these irritating but provocative influences is the grain of sand that produces a pearl. “Once people started living in dense clumps,” Lehrer continues, “they created a kind of settlement capable of reinventing itself, so a city founded on the fur trade could one day give birth to Wall Street, and an island in the Seine chosen for its military advantages might eventually become a place full of avant-garde artists.”

This is not a how-to book, and it is obvious that there is no single wellspring of creativity equally accessible to and nourishing for all. But there’s plenty here to think about—which is a good place for creativity to start.

Although Jonah Lehrer discusses brain functions and their connections to different forms of creativity in Imagine: How Creativity Works, the real delights and revelations here are his stories of individuals, companies and cities that fostered new ways of looking at problems and new ways of…

Social Science

A bicycle built for one

Review by Edward Morris

Both proportionately and absolutely, more people in industrialized countries are living alone today than ever before, Eric Klinenberg asserts. This has been made possible, he says, by four primary factors: the massive entrance of women into the workplace; urbanization, which allows “singletons” to form interest-oriented social relationships to replace or supplement traditional family links; the spread and improvement in mass communications that both entertain and enable people to keep in touch with each other; and longer life spans.

Klinenberg is a professor of sociology at New York University and editor of the Public Culture journal. In probing this subject, he leavens his copious array of statistics with dozens of anecdotes about individuals who live alone either by choice or by circumstance. In many cases, having a place of one’s own to retreat to is an unalloyed benefit, a step in the direction of self-determination and personal freedom; in others, it is a lonely and often perilous existence, the grim solitude before the grave.

Klinenberg doesn’t take sides. Having established the contours and likely continuation of this demographic trend, his focus is on its social and political implications. What does it mean for municipal planning? For single women and men who eventually may want to marry and/or have children? For old people who have lost their mates and/or the ability to care for themselves? For the environment? As with most situations in which there are competing interests, there is no one solution that satisfies all.

America, though a vigorous participant in this trend, is not at the forefront of it. According to Klinenberg’s figures, more than half of American adults are single and one out of every seven of these live alone—a total of around 35 million. The proportion is greater in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, where from 40 to 45 percent of adults live alone. Some of the most imaginative planning appears to be taking place in Sweden, where dwelling complexes and mixed communities have been designed to accommodate and socially enrich singletons of every age, from college students to seniors.

Given this phenomenon, what are we to do about it, if anything? Klinenberg concludes Going Solo with this proposition: “What if, instead of indulging the social reformer’s fantasy that we would all just be better off together, we accepted the fact that living alone is a fundamental feature of modern societies and we simply did more to shield those who go solo from the main hazards of the condition?” This book is a catalog of possibilities.

Both proportionately and absolutely, more people in industrialized countries are living alone today than ever before, Eric Klinenberg asserts. This has been made possible, he says, by four primary factors: the massive entrance of women into the workplace; urbanization, which allows “singletons” to form interest-oriented…

Social Science

The dark side of a desert state

Review by Edward Morris

That tragedy may befall us regardless of how sensibly we conduct our lives is a reality almost too unsettling to contemplate. So we instinctively try to rationalize random catastrophes. It is this need to find a cause for every horrifying happening that gives rise to Tom Zoellner’s A Safeway in Arizona, which examines the circumstances leading up to (although not necessarily responsible for) the January 8, 2011, massacre near Tucson that left six people dead and U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords gravely wounded with a bullet through her brain.

Zoellner is a longtime friend of Giffords, whom he met when he was reporting for the Arizona Republic and she was beginning her first term in the Arizona House of Representatives. After leaving the newspaper, Zoellner campaigned for Giffords in her successful runs for Congress. He wonders here if there is something about his home state that inspired and enabled 22-year-old Jared Loughner to clash so violently with Giffords that chilly morning at the Safeway supermarket. Did it have something to do with Arizona’s institutionalized enthusiasm for guns, the apocalyptic rants of its politicians, its economic “starvation” of publicly funded mental health services—or could it be attributed solely to Loughner’s paranoia?

While Zoellner arrives at no single and satisfying explanation of why the shooting occurred, he does provide an insider’s view of Arizona’s peculiar appeal to people eager to re-invent themselves (among them Giffords’ grandfather, a Lithuanian Jew who changed his name from Akiba Hornstein to Gif Giffords and then made a fortune selling tires). Zoellner also dwells on the tendency of Arizonans to insulate themselves from each other instead of striving to form cohesive communities. And he spotlights such disruptive, larger-than-life personalities as Joe Arpaio, the hard-nosed, publicity-seeking sheriff of Maricopa County; Tucson talk-show provocateur Jon Justice; and Russell Pearce, the author of Arizona’s draconian anti-immigration law. (Pearce was voted out of office in a special election after this book went to press.)

Compelling as his probing of the Giffords shooting is, Zoellner’s greatest service here is illuminating the darkest corners of this sun-drenched seedbed of rugged individualism.

That tragedy may befall us regardless of how sensibly we conduct our lives is a reality almost too unsettling to contemplate. So we instinctively try to rationalize random catastrophes. It is this need to find a cause for every horrifying happening that gives rise to…

NonfictionMilitary HistoryHistory

A hard look at the brutalities of war

Review by Edward Morris

"An average of 27,000 people perished each day between September 1939 and August 1945 as a consequence of the global conflict,” observes military historian Max Hastings in Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945. This is a profoundly depressing book but an essential corrective to those who have mined this war for tales of valor and selflessness. No doubt such instances occurred, but, as Hastings demonstrates through both anecdotes and statistics, the war turned the planet into a merciless slaughterhouse where unthinkable acts of cruelty were committed by all sides.

Instead of searching through the official papers of generals, politicians and their defenders to paint his picture of the war, Hasting relies on accounts of soldiers and civilians who were on the frontlines of suffering. He organizes his account chronologically, moving from one theater of action to the next until he has taken the reader through Eastern and Western Europe, Russia, China, Japan, Burma, the Pacific islands, Africa, India and flashpoints in between.

With each new episode of conflict, it becomes clearer that Hastings’ title for the book is more photographic than poetic. “At one time the victim was a girl of sixteen,” recalled a nurse who tended to the civilian casualties during Germany’s 1939 bombardment of Warsaw. “She had a glorious mop of golden hair, her face was delicate as a flower, and her lovely sapphire-blue eyes were full of tears. Both her legs, up to the knees, were a mass of bleeding pulp, in which it was impossible to distinguish bone from flesh.” Elsewhere in Poland a few days later, “a hysterical old Jew” stood over the body of his wife who had been killed in an air raid and shouted, “There is no God! Hitler and the bombs are the only gods! There is no grace and pity in the world!”

Circumstances became even more grim and deadly with Germany’s invasion of Russia, where starvation and death from exposure became rampant and where enraged Russian soldiers tortured and mutilated the luckless German soldiers who fell into their hands. But the Russians were hardly more charitable toward their own. “In the course of the war,” Hastings writes, “168,000 Soviet citizens were formally sentenced to death and executed for alleged cowardice or desertion; many more were shot out of hand, without a pretence of due process.”

By the summer of 1943, the Italian army had had enough of war (although their German counterparts had not). Hastings reports that Italian soldiers surrendered to the Allied forces “ ‘in a mood of fiesta,’ as one American put it, ‘their personal possessions slung about them, filling the air with laughter and song.’ “ But their attitudes provoked a brutal response: “In two separate incidents on 14 July, an officer and an NCO of the U.S. 45th Division murdered large groups of Italians in cold blood.” One of the Americans machine-gunned 37 captives to death, while the other killed 36 via a firing squad he convened. While both offenders were court-martialed, neither was punished and the incident was hushed up. General George Patton later remarked that he regarded these two massacres of prisoners as “thoroughly justified.”

And so it goes, battle by battle, until the war ended. It is not Hastings’ aim here to compile a catalog of horrors—which this vigorously researched narrative surely is—but to deglamorize the war and rob it of its rationalizations and supposedly grand purposes. Inferno should be companion reading to Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation.

"An average of 27,000 people perished each day between September 1939 and August 1945 as a consequence of the global conflict,” observes military historian Max Hastings in Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945. This is a profoundly depressing book but an essential corrective to those…

Nonfiction

The other side of the Berlin Wall

Review by Edward Morris

Originally published in Australia and the U.K. in 2003, Stasiland describes a series of horrors and indignities visited upon the citizens of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) by the Stasi—the Ministry for State Security—in the years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Anna Funder began her research in 1996 by interviewing both victims and victimizers and rummaging through the vast Stasi headquarters, now a museum.

The Stasi and their spies were everywhere—and they made sure people knew it, reasoning that knowing there was no chance of privacy would discourage subversive activity. “In the GDR, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people,” Funder reports. “If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens.”

In this heavily policed state, private residences were routinely searched on mere suspicion or whim, telephones were tapped, mail was opened and the contents recorded. The Stasi kept voluminous records on virtually every citizen. When the Wall fell, there was an orgy of paper shredding. Even so, there were far too many files to destroy. Now there are teams trying to reassemble the shredded documents, a task predicted to take well over 300 years.

Funder’s stories are at once heartbreaking and outrageous: A 16-year-old girl is imprisoned for a year and a half, some of that time in solitary confinement, for posting “seditious” leaflets; 10 years later her sweetheart dies under mysterious circumstances in a Stasi prison cell; a young woman is summoned by a Stasi official to discuss the intimate portions of her love letters; parents are separated from their gravely ill child for the first five years of his life. Despite all this, the Stasi officials whom Funder interviewed are generally unrepentant.

Fortunately, there are flashes of Orwellian humor amid the soul-crushing darkness. In one such instance, a woman goes to a state agency to apply for a job and makes the mistake of telling the clerk there that she is “unemployed.” This enrages the clerk. “You are not unemployed!” she barks. “You are seeking work. There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic!”

Originally published in Australia and the U.K. in 2003, Stasiland describes a series of horrors and indignities visited upon the citizens of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) by the Stasi—the Ministry for State Security—in the years leading up to the fall of the Berlin…

Social Science

One man’s quest to put a predator behind bars

Review by Edward Morris

People concerned for the welfare of children born and raised within the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Days Saints will take small comfort in knowing that the church’s pedophile leader, 55-year-old Warren Jeffs, was recently sentenced to life imprisonment in Texas. While Jeffs’ conviction should halt forever his preying on young girls and his banishment of teenage boys who might have competed with him for underage “wives,” he still leaves behind the theological mechanism and eager disciples to perpetuate this sad saga of child abuse committed in the name of God. Besides being victims of sexual depredations, FLDS children were, and are, denied access to education and cultural awareness that would enable them to function independently of the church.

Among the dozens of wives Jeffs took during his nine-year reign were some as young as 12 years old. Other child brides were conferred on Jeffs’ favorite lieutenants, many of whom were also middle-aged or older. So strong was Jeffs’ authority that fathers and mothers seeking his goodwill enthusiastically surrendered their daughters to him. Anyone who resisted or hesitated to comply with his draconian, ever-changing rules ran the risk of being driven from the community and having his or her family taken away.

In Prophet’s Prey, Sam Brower, a private detective and member of the mainstream Mormon church—a very distinct entity from its fundamentalist offshoot—all but sputters with outrage as he recounts Jeffs’ increasingly flagrant offenses. Brower began investigating the FLDS after a trip to its headquarters on the Utah/Arizona border in 2004. There he found a closed, clannish and menacing society designed solely to perpetuate an us-vs.-them mentality. State and local law enforcement agencies tended to look the other way. From that point on, he began compiling evidence of Jeffs’ offenses and their effects on his followers. Occasionally, Brower worked in league with author Jon Krakauer, who had already written about two murderous fundamentalist Mormon brothers in his book Under the Banner of Heaven and provides the foreword here.

Although his focus is on Jeffs, Brower’s narrative makes it clear that as long as government officials are overly solicitous of religious practices—no matter how vicious and antisocial they are—children and childishly naive adults will always suffer.

People concerned for the welfare of children born and raised within the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Days Saints will take small comfort in knowing that the church’s pedophile leader, 55-year-old Warren Jeffs, was recently sentenced to life imprisonment in Texas. While Jeffs’ conviction…

NonfictionBusiness & Finance

The minds behind the markets

Review by Edward Morris

The notion that the ages-old imbalance between rich and poor could be altered by learning how wealth is created and apportioned flowered in Victorian England and has been a staple of governance ever since, particularly in the West. In this richly documented study, Sylvia Nasar chronicles the personal lives and the intellectual and political impact of major economists from England’s industrial age through World Wars I and II, the Cold War and the rise of China and India as world powers.

An economics graduate of New York University and author of the best-selling biography A Beautiful Mind, Nasar examines the principal theories of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Alfred Marshall, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Irving Fisher, Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Joan Robinson, Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson and Amartya Sen and explains how these celebrated thinkers interacted with governments to anticipate and cushion the economic downturns that resulted from wars, overproduction, market failures and kindred ills.

It is fitting that Nasar titles her book Grand Pursuit, because it is obvious that even the stellar minds she writes about here were forever pursuing and falling short of capturing those ultimate answers that would enable them to forecast and find surefire ways of averting economic disasters. That economics is still an infant science (or else economists are the most ignored seers in the universe) is evident from the unprepared-for calamities now facing the U.S., Britain, Greece and the European Union.

While Nasar is a graceful writer, she assumes a greater knowledge of economic concepts and terminology than most readers are likely to have. However, she is thoroughly engaging when describing the academic, social and political worlds in which these economists functioned and contended with each other for supremacy. She seems to hold Marx in particular contempt, scorning not only his ideas but his personal appearance and habits as well. For the most part, though, she is content, as she should be, to let these figures rise or fall in public esteem by the consequences of their counsel.

 

The notion that the ages-old imbalance between rich and poor could be altered by learning how wealth is created and apportioned flowered in Victorian England and has been a staple of governance ever since, particularly in the West. In this richly documented study, Sylvia Nasar…

NonfictionBiography

The life of Yossarian’s creator

Review by Edward Morris

In Just One Catch, his reconstruction of the life of novelist, playwright and screenwriter Joseph Heller, Tracy Daugherty has also illuminated the post-World War II culture of American fiction—from the emergence of Jewish sensibilities as a key narrative element to the influence of mass advertising and television to the corporatization of book publishing. It’s about time for such a comprehensive biography, given the fact that Heller died nearly 12 years ago.

Born to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents in 1923 in the grimy but colorful Coney Island section of Brooklyn, Heller would go to war at 19 (assimilating all its horrors and hilarities as an aerial bombardier); attend college under the G.I. Bill; become an English teacher and advertising copywriter; and finally surface as one of the freshest, most distinctive voices among a cadre of gifted peers that included Norman Mailer, James Jones, J.D. Salinger, Saul Bellow and Kurt Vonnegut.

Heller’s earliest success was as a short-story writer. It wasn’t until 1953 that he began penning a novel whose working title for years would be Catch-18. After many starts and stops—and some Herculean editing by the soon-to-be legendary Robert Gottlieb—Heller’s absurdist rendition of war and bureaucracy was finally published in 1961 as Catch-22. Just as From Here to Eternity did for Jones, Catch-22 became the standard by which all Heller’s subsequent novels were judged—and would always fall short.

The Heller portrayed in these pages is surprisingly free of major psychological quirks, considering he lost his father when he was four, suffered the terrors of war and became a celebrity while still a relatively young man. In addition to Catch-22, Daugherty traces the evolution and critical reception of many of Heller’s novels (including Good As Gold, for which he was paid an advance of nearly two million dollars) as well as the play We Bombed in New Haven. Daugherty also provides a lively account of the clashes between the liberal Heller and the increasingly conservative Norman Podhoretz. To examine Heller’s less public side, Daugherty interviewed dozens of sources close to the author, among them Gottlieb, Heller’s two children, his second wife and such close friends as comedian-producer Mel Brooks and author Christopher Buckley.

Heller gave the world more than just his stories; he endowed the English language with a term that has become the indispensable cry of despair for the thwarted and frustrated. Blame it on Catch-22.

In Just One Catch, his reconstruction of the life of novelist, playwright and screenwriter Joseph Heller, Tracy Daugherty has also illuminated the post-World War II culture of American fiction—from the emergence of Jewish sensibilities as a key narrative element to the influence of mass advertising…

Pop CultureMusicArts & Culture

Songs that say America

Review by Edward Morris

It wasn’t obvious as it was happening, but, as David Browne shows in Fire and Rain, 1970 turned out to be a watershed year in popular music. By this time, the Beatles were not only fractured but fractious toward each other. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were spinning in different directions, too, with the former contemplating a solo career and the latter immersed in movie acting. The members of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were demonstrating in every way that their harmony was musical, not fraternal. While these superstars were getting the lion’s share of public attention, a mellow voice with a wry wit out of North Carolina was casually moving into the spotlight. Folkish though James Taylor’s sound and songs were, they carried virtually none of the political content or self-righteousness that characterized folkies of the 1960s. His songs were more like easy-listening landscapes of the soul.

Even though the three bands Browne chronicles were twisting apart, the albums they released in 1970—the Beatles’ Let It Be, Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water and CSN&Y’s Déjà vu—became instant classics. The same was true for Taylor’s Sweet Baby James, also delivered in 1970, which featured the song that gives this book its title. During the course of this year, the Ohio National Guard killed four students at Kent State University, Charles Manson went on trial for the “Helter Skelter” murders and the Vietnam War continued to rage.

Proceeding chronologically, Browne alternates between close-ups of studio sessions and personal relationships and wide shots of how these situations affected or were affected by the overall culture. He sprinkles his narrative with fascinating vignettes: Simon teaching a songwriting course at New York University, Nash and Stills sparring over the affections of Rita Coolidge, Ringo Starr recording his first album in Nashville. Wonder of wonders, he makes all these voluminous details, which might have led to factual overload in lesser hands, eminently readable.

Now a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, Browne gleaned much of his information by interviewing primary sources, among them Crosby, Stills, Nash, Taylor, Coolidge, record executive Clive Davis, singers Bonnie Bramlett and Peter Yarrow and such omnipresent sidemen as Russ Kunkel and Leland Sklar. Browne’s engrossing account of this fertile but volatile period sets the standard by which comprehensive musical histories should be judged.

It wasn’t obvious as it was happening, but, as David Browne shows in Fire and Rain, 1970 turned out to be a watershed year in popular music. By this time, the Beatles were not only fractured but fractious toward each other. Paul Simon and Art…

FictionDebut Fiction

A magical, musical debut

Review by Edward Morris

Don’t be surprised if Steve Earle emerges as a juggler in his next artistic reincarnation. And there’s sure to be one. In this, his first published novel, the singer/songwriter/playwright/actor/radio host (and who knows what else) expertly juggles some of most sharply defined characters since John Steinbeck trotted out his procession of hard-luck cases and societal throwaways.

The setting is a grimy stretch of South Presa Street in San Antonio in 1963/64. The neighborhood is populated by dope dealers, prostitutes, cops on the take and a particularly intriguing abortionist and heroin addict named Doc Ebersole. Once a legitimate physician, Ebersole has spiraled downward to a life of daily desperation. But addiction isn’t the sum of Doc’s woes. He’s also afflicted by the persistent ghost of Hank Williams. It appears, at least as this story goes, that Doc was one of Hank’s drug suppliers and may even have been with him on that night 10 years ago when the tormented singer died in the back seat of his Cadillac. Hank doesn’t so much haunt Doc as annoy him with his post-mortem neediness.

At first, these losers seem repellent. But gradually and without authorial sleight-of-hand or sentimentality, Earle reveals the gold inside each of them. That revelation begins when Doc performs an abortion on an 18-year-old illegal Mexican immigrant named Graciela. Like the other denizens of that predominately Catholic community, Graciela is fascinated by the grace and beauty of First Lady Jackie Kennedy, whom she calls “Yah-kee.” When it’s announced that the Kennedys will be stopping in San Antonio on their way to Dallas, Graciela, Doc, Manny the drug dealer, Teresa the bartender and a handful of others pile into a car and race to the airport to get a glimpse of their beloved Yah-kee and America’s first Catholic president. Kennedy is killed the next day, Yak-kee majestic even in her grief, and gloom envelops the South Presa strip.

Tapping into both her Catholic and aboriginal reservoirs of wisdom, the mystical Graciela becomes the story’s transformative figure, even as Doc and Hank continue to blur the boundaries between life and death. The story grows more complex when a local priest hears of Graciela’s seemingly supernatural healing powers and takes it upon himself to investigate.

Earle’s own bouts with addiction, his Texas heritage and his grounding in country music enable him to make this cast of wildly disparate characters not just believable but important. It’s hard to imagine a more impressive debut novel than this one.

on’t be surprised if Steve Earle emerges as a juggler in his next artistic reincarnation. And there’s sure to be one. In this, his first published novel, the singer/songwriter/playwright/actor/radio host (and who knows what else) expertly juggles some of most sharply defined characters since John Steinbeck trotted out his procession of hard-luck cases and societal throwaways.
Nonfiction

Plane crash in paradise

Review by Edward Morris

It started as a Sunday afternoon lark and developed into one of the strangest survival stories of WWII. On May 13, 1945, a group of American soldiers—among them several members of the Women’s Army Corps—boarded a twin-engine C-47 in Hollandia, New Guinea, intending to do a brief flyover of a remote valley located high in the island’s central mountains. With luck, they’d be back in time for dinner.

A year earlier, an American pilot had spotted the lush valley and the tribes that inhabited it. The natives were so visibly excited when his plane swept in low above them that he concluded they had never seen an aircraft before. He also surmised that they might be headhunters or cannibals. News of his discovery spread quickly, and soon others were lining up to take the tour. To some, the valley’s beauty and inaccessibility brought to mind the mountain-fringed paradise James Hilton described in his 1933 novel Lost Horizon. Hilton called his valley “Shangri-La.”

Less than an hour into the flight, the pilot miscalculated the C-47’s altitude and flew it into the side of a mountain. Three of the 24 on board survived: Lieutenant John McCollom, Tech Sergeant Kenneth Decker and Corporal Margaret Hastings. Drawing on a wealth of documents and personal recollections, author Mitchell Zuckoff has reconstructed an almost hour-by-hour narrative of how the survivors, two of whom are seriously wounded, descend the mountain into the mythical valley, deal with the suspicious but generally friendly natives and eventually aid in their own perilous escape from Shangri-La.

A lot of readers are going to fall in love with Hastings. Thirty years old at the time of the crash, she is smart, flirtatious, fearless and gorgeous, a thoroughly modern woman even by today’s standards. It is a joy witnessing how adroitly she holds her own in situations normally controlled by men. Zuckoff’s impressive research includes dozens of photographs of the survivors and those involved in their rescue. He even makes a pilgrimage to the valley—now a much-violated Eden—to interview tribespeople who were children when the strange trio first hobbled into their midst. Lost in Shangri-La is a movie waiting to be made.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE
Read our interview with Mitchell Zuckoff for Lost in Shangri-La.

It started as a Sunday afternoon lark and developed into one of the strangest survival stories of WWII. On May 13, 1945, a group of American soldiers—among them several members of the Women’s Army Corps—boarded a twin-engine C-47 in Hollandia, New Guinea, intending to do…

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