Harvey Freedenberg

FictionFamily Saga

The Travelers

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

It’s complicated—that’s a good summary of Regina Porter’s sensitive journey through a network of family relationships and friendships in her debut novel, The Travelers. Moving from rural Georgia in the 1960s to Manhattan at the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency, with side trips to the Vietnam War and Germany both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the novel is a subtle exploration of issues of race and gender in the past half century of American life.

At the heart of this story are two African American women, Agnes Miller Christie and Eloise Delaney. Their story begins as they grow up in Georgia in the early 1960s. After a fire destroys her home, Eloise moves in with her Catholic school classmate Agnes, whose life is later scarred by an act of racial violence. Their friendship turns romantic, but when Agnes ends it, Eloise embarks on what will turn out to be a lifelong quest to find another relationship as deep or satisfying.

Eloise’s own evolution is spurred by her fascination with the real-life story of Bessie Coleman, who became the first African American woman to obtain a pilot’s license in 1921. Coleman’s fierce independence and determination inspire Eloise, as she becomes an intelligence analyst in Vietnam and eventually settles in Germany in the 1970s, learning to fly along the way.

Agnes’ marriage to Eddie Christie, a Vietnam veteran and Shakespeare-quoting janitor in the Bronx who develops a passionate attachment to Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, produces a daughter, Claudia, herself a Shakespeare scholar, whose marriage to Rufus Vincent, a fellow academic, unites the Christie family with the Irish-American Vincents. Porter, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, deploys a light touch in exposing the personal and cultural tensions that surface as two families—one black, the other white—merge.

The Travelers is at times a challenging reading experience, owing to its chorus of narrative voices, its ambitiously large cast of characters and its decidedly episodic structure. Meaningful connections emerge—sometimes slowly, other times unexpectedly—but rather than straining to find them, it’s more pleasurable to yield to Porter’s ample storytelling talent and simply enjoy the ride.

It’s complicated—that’s a good summary of Regina Porter’s sensitive journey through a network of family relationships and friendships in her debut novel, The Travelers. Moving from rural Georgia in the 1960s to Manhattan at the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency, with side trips to the Vietnam War and Germany both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the novel is a subtle exploration of issues of race and gender in the past half century of American life.

NonfictionMedicine

Elderhood

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

If you aren’t currently among the more than 46 million Americans over the age of 65, with any luck, someday you will be. That’s why geriatric physician Louise Aronson’s Elderhood, a passionate, deeply informed critique of how our healthcare system fails in its treatment of the elderly, is such a vitally important book.

As Aronson explains, American medicine is reluctant to acknowledge old age as a distinct stage of life—one with unique medical challenges but hardly lacking in opportunities for deep fulfillment. Whether it’s the failure, until this year, of pharmaceutical trials to test drugs on elderly subjects, resulting in unanticipated side effects, or the tendency to view the final years of an elderly person’s life only through the lens of illness and disability, our perspective is both shortsighted and flawed. 

Another more profound flaw, Aronson argues, is our medical establishment’s stubborn insistence on treating organs and diseases rather than whole human beings, often prizing science and technology over simple, compassionate care. These efforts typically trigger costly late-life interventions that may be successful in the narrowest sense, prolonging life for a time but often inflicting physical and psychological pain on their recipients that severely compromises their quality of life. Aronson advocates for a new care paradigm, focused on the “optimization of health and well-being,” even when an earlier death may be the consequence. 

Elderhood shares some of its DNA with Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. But unlike the well-known surgeon, Aronson brings to bear some three decades of geriatric practice, a branch of medicine that didn’t even emerge as a specialty in the U.S. until 1978. She draws extensively on case histories, including moving stories about her father’s final days and her mother’s resilience in facing the challenges of old age. Aronson, who holds a master’s degree in creative writing, is as comfortable drawing on resources outside the field of medicine, quoting poet Donald Hall or novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, as she is parsing a scientific study. Though the subject of this provocative book is the elderly, its message touches the entire span of human life.

If you aren’t currently among the more than 46 million Americans over the age of 65, with any luck, someday you will be. That’s why geriatric physician Louise Aronson’s Elderhood, a passionate, deeply informed critique of how our healthcare system fails in its treatment of the elderly, is such a vitally important book.

NonfictionMedicine

Everything in Its Place

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

When an admired writer dies, one consolation is that his passing doesn’t necessarily mean the end of his appearance in print. Happily, that’s true of prominent neurologist Oliver Sacks, who’s been gone since 2015. Sacks has left behind Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales, a collection of 34 pieces, some of them previously unpublished—a reminder of the breadth of his professional expertise and the depth of his personal passions.

Admirers of Sacks’ previous books, like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, will most enjoy the section titled “Clinical Tales.” In these essays, Sacks revisits some of the subjects of the medical case studies for which he’s best known: the way neurological disorders can alter dreams in striking ways, or whether out-of-body and near-death experiences are hallucinations or divine visions.

But Sacks doesn’t confine himself to tinkering with his previous work. “The Catastrophe” sensitively recounts the tragic story of his patient, actor and writer Spalding Gray, who committed suicide some two years after suffering a head injury in a car accident. “Cold Storage” is the bizarre tale of a man Sacks calls “Uncle Toby,” who gradually slipped into a comatose state where he remained, unmoving (and unmoved by his family), for seven years. Sacks offers encouragement in his essay “The Aging Brain,” as well as terror in “Kuru,” a brief survey of diseases collectively known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE), the most familiar of them “mad cow disease.”

Sacks is equally appealing when he turns to more personal topics—including his love for gefilte fish and botanical gardens—which make up the book’s final section, “Life Continues.” This section takes its title from a touching piece he wrote only a short time before his death. In it he decries the “complete disappearance of the old civilities,” displayed daily in the way “a majority of the population is now glued without pause to their phones or other devices.” But Sacks, the quintessential humanist, maintains his optimism, fueled by a belief that “only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass.” That aspiration and all the essays collected here are a fitting valedictory to Oliver Sacks’ fascinating life.

This collection of 34 pieces, some of them previously unpublished, is a reminder of the breadth of Oliver Sacks’ professional expertise and the depth of his personal passions.
NonfictionSocial Science

The End of the Myth

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Among the many flaws of the frenzied 24/7 news cycle is the lack of context for the latest breaking news story. That’s what makes New York University professor and historian Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America such a valuable contribution to our understanding of the fractious debate over immigration and the attendant controversy over a wall along the United States’ southern border.

Grandin’s compact survey of American history spans the pre-Revolutionary War era to the present, but at its heart is historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous 1893 “Frontier Thesis,” which argued, as Grandin summarizes it, that “the expansion of settlement across a frontier of ‘free land’ created a uniquely American form of political equality, a vibrant, forward-looking individualism.” Relying on a rich trove of source materials, both primary and secondary, Grandin pointedly contends that this mythic “Edenic utopia” has now been eclipsed by the shadow of a concrete and steel border wall, “America’s new myth, a monument to the final closing of the frontier.”

Whether he’s decrying the “Jacksonian consensus” over the means of westward migration, which promoted a ruthless regime “forged in frontier expansion and racist war,” or critiquing free trade agreements like NAFTA and post-9/11 American foreign policy, with its open-ended wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Grandin finds plenty of targets of all political stripes. But he reserves some of his harshest criticism of a country he says has “lived past the end of its myth” for President Trump and the segment of the American electorate he represents. “Instead of a critical, resilient, and progressive citizenry,” Grandin writes, “a conspiratorial nihilism, rejecting reason and dreading change, has taken hold. Factionalism congealed and won a national election.” 

Grandin concludes The End of the Myth on an even more ominous note, observing that future generations will face a stark choice between “barbarism and socialism, or at least social democracy.” Regardless of whether one accepts Grandin’s Manichaean prophecy, with all the bitterness of the conflict it foretells, there is no escaping the need to come to terms with the painful legacy that’s meticulously revisited in this unsettling book.

Greg Grandin’s compact survey of American history spans the pre-Revolutionary War era to the present, but at its heart is historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous 1893 “Frontier Thesis,” which argued, as Grandin summarizes it, that “the expansion of settlement across a frontier of ‘free land’ created a uniquely American form of political equality, a vibrant, forward-looking individualism.”

NonfictionSocial Science

Figuring

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, starred review, February 2019

Fans of polymath Maria Popova’s popular website, Brain Pickings, will find themselves right at home in Figuring, her audacious new work of intellectual history that focuses on the lives of a coterie of brilliant women, some well-known and others less so, whose gifts in fields like astronomy, literature, ecology and art have helped shape our world.

Popova’s goal in this book is to tease out the “invisible connections—between ideas, between disciplines, between the denizens of a particular time and place.” Time and again her nimble mind and deep intellectual curiosity make those connections plausible and compelling, like the link that bonds 19th-century astronomer Maria Mitchell, who discovered a new comet in 1847, to Vera Rubin, who became the first woman permitted to use the Palomar Observatory in the 1960s.

For Popova, subjects like literary critic Margaret Fuller, poet Emily Dickinson and sculptor Harriet Hosmer are not disembodied intellects from the past. In describing the often frustrating courses of their personal—and especially romantic—lives, Popova exposes the tension between mundane human existence and the unrelenting demands of great science and art.

Though most of Popova’s icons flourished in the 19th century, she devotes considerable attention to a deeply sympathetic portrait of marine biologist and nature writer Rachel Carson, whose 1962 bestseller, Silent Spring, decried the indiscriminate use of pesticides and helped launch the modern environmental movement. Popova especially admires the way Carson “pioneered a new aesthetic of poetic science writing, inviting the human reader to consider Earth from the nonhuman perspective.”

Popova’s own mellifluous prose enhances her discussion of even the most arcane topics. She draws extensive quotations from primary sources, allowing her subjects to speak at length in their often eloquent, always fascinating voices. Figuring invites the reader to engage with complex ideas and challenging personalities, unearthing a wealth of material for further reflection along the way. 

 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fans of polymath Maria Popova’s popular website, Brain Pickings, will find themselves right at home in Figuring, her audacious new work of intellectual history that focuses on the lives of a coterie of brilliant women, some well-known and others less so, whose gifts in fields like astronomy, literature, ecology and art have helped shape our world.

FictionSatire

Talk to Me

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

It’s a phenomenon that has become all too familiar in the age of YouTube: An embarrassing video of a celebrity goes viral, obliterating a reputation with the speed and thoroughgoing devastation of an F5 tornado. In Talk to Me, his sly second novel, John Kenney (author of Truth in Advertising, which won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2014) dives into the muck of one such scandal, exploring its human toll while raising troubling questions about what it means to produce and consume news today.

The anchor of a highly rated network news show for two decades, Ted Grayson looks like he’s on top of his game. But when his ire at a young immigrant woman leads to a meltdown that’s captured on video, he’s launched on a downward spiral that threatens his career and causes him to question everything he thought he knew about being a journalist. Compounding Ted’s crisis is an impending divorce and the fact that his daughter, Franny, works as a reporter at the bottom-feeding website scheisse.com, run by a young German billionaire whose motto is “NO RULES. JUST CLICKS,” and who’s only too happy to capitalize on Ted’s sudden fall.

Kenney takes the reader inside the maelstrom of the 24/7 news cycle, as an increasingly bewildered Ted watches his world collapse around him, helpless to counteract the forces fueling his destruction. In Ted, Kenney has created a sympathetic and fully realized protagonist who’s haunted by the price he’s paid for a success that now seems hollow, by the decay of his marriage to a woman he still loves and by an estrangement from his daughter that’s deep enough to allow her to become complicit in his downfall.

For all the fast-paced and knowing entertainment it provides, Talk to Me may also serve as a useful antidote to rushed judgment when the next celebrity scandal erupts.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s a phenomenon that has become all too familiar in the age of YouTube: An embarrassing video of a celebrity goes viral, obliterating a reputation with the speed and thoroughgoing devastation of an F5 tornado. In Talk to Me, his sly second novel, John Kenney (author of Truth in Advertising, which won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2014) dives into the muck of one such scandal, exploring its human toll while raising troubling questions about what it means to produce and consume news today.

NonfictionSocial Science

Rising Out of Hatred

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Barely a year has passed since violence incited by white nationalists led to tragedy in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the death of Heather Heyer. That anniversary makes Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow’s Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist all the more timely and important. With the skill of a novelist, Saslow tells the extraordinary story of how the “rightful heir to America’s white nationalist movement” came to repudiate his racist heritage.

If anyone could lay claim to an impeccable pedigree in prejudice, it would be Derek Black, the son of the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard who founded Stormfront, a vicious internet hate site, and the godson of white supremacist David Duke. Starting as a teenager, Black shared a microphone with his father on a radio talk show that relentlessly spewed venom against black people, Jews and other minorities.

But Black’s life began its radical transformation when he enrolled at New College of Florida, a small liberal arts institution in Sarasota, in 2010. Not long after his arrival, he befriended Matthew Stevenson, an Orthodox Jewish student who invited him to Friday night Shabbat dinners to observe the Jewish Sabbath. On one of those occasions, Black met Stevenson’s roommate, Allison Gornik, who became the principal agent for upending Black’s worldview.

Drawing upon hundreds of hours of interviews with Black, his family and friends, Saslow describes how Gornik methodically engaged Black, who proved to be a bright, intellectually curious young man, in conversations. These discussions exposed the flawed sources and logic of the information and fallacious thinking that fueled Black’s bigotry and his fears of a white genocide. Even more significantly, she patiently persuaded him to make amends for his racist past and the harm he’d inflicted.

Nothing in this thoughtful account suggests the conversion Black experienced is likely to become widespread among his former compatriots, but it’s reassuring to learn of one instance in which reason, hope and love prevailed over hate.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Barely a year has passed since violence incited by white nationalists led to tragedy in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the death of Heather Heyer. That anniversary makes Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow’s Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist all the more timely and important. With the skill of a novelist, Saslow tells the extraordinary story of how the “rightful heir to America’s white nationalist movement” came to repudiate his racist heritage.

Nonfiction

What is there to learn?

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, September 2018

If there were such a thing as a required instruction manual for politicians and thought leaders, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century would deserve serious consideration. In this collection of provocative essays, Harari, author of the critically praised Sapiens and Homo Deus, tackles a daunting array of issues, endeavoring to answer a persistent question: “What is happening in the world today, and what is the deep meaning of these events?”

For all the breadth of his concerns, Harari is able to distill the most pressing challenges facing our world down to three: nuclear war, ecological collapse and technological disruption, all of which together “add up to an unprecedented existential crisis.” He explains, for example, how this century will see the development of evermore sophisticated algorithms that will alter everything from the way we work (or don’t, in complex future economies that won’t require many people’s labor) to the way we organize and conduct our political lives.

These trends will unfold in a world that clings to what are, in Harari’s opinion, already outdated notions of nationalism and religious belief, which will inevitably create tension and conflict. But Harari doesn’t ignore our current controversies. His concise essays on terrorism and immigration are examples of the fresh thinking he brings to any subject.

Harari makes a passionate argument for reshaping our educational systems and replacing our current emphasis on quickly outdated substantive knowledge with the “four Cs”—critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity. In the book’s final piece, Harari argues that the practice of meditation, something he does for two hours daily, offers a productive tool for understanding the human mind. Meditator or not, thoughtful readers will find 21 Lessons for the 21st Century to be a mind-expanding experience.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If there were such a thing as a required instruction manual for politicians and thought leaders, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century would deserve serious consideration. In this collection of provocative essays, Harari, author of the critically praised Sapiens and Homo Deus, tackles a daunting array of issues, endeavoring to answer a persistent question: “What is happening in the world today, and what is the deep meaning of these events?”

FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

Marriage in midlife

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In her third novel, Ordinary People, British novelist Diana Evans pays an extended visit to the country of midlife relationships and proves to be a knowledgeable anthropologist in her perceptive study of four of its inhabitants.

Set in and around London in the period between Barack Obama’s first election and the death of Michael Jackson some eight months later, Ordinary People (named for a John Legend song) follows the lives of two couples—Melissa and Michael, Stephanie and Damian—as they navigate the tightrope of children, work and the infinitely complex task of engaging with each other as romantic partners. Together for 13 years, though unmarried, Melissa and Michael have just purchased a home at the ironically named 13 Paradise Row in South London, where they live with their daughter and newborn son. Stephanie, Damian and their three children live in a small town in Surrey.

Whether it’s Melissa’s fretfulness over the challenges of new motherhood and her shift from full-time employment with a fashion magazine to freelancing, or Damian’s thwarted dreams of a writing career and his unacknowledged depression after the death of his political activist father, Evans expertly pokes at the tender spots in relationships and examines how partners can behave in ways that, over time, make them strangers to each other. Both couples are at the stage when the initial bloom of lust has long ago faded, but there’s yet sufficient memory of it to make dissatisfaction an unwelcome visitor in every encounter, leaving Damian with a “sense that his life was wrong” and Michael feeling like “he and Melissa were nothing more than flatmates.”

Through all this, Evans is no purveyor of false optimism about the prospects of success for these troubled pairings. Instead, we’re left to ponder and admire the qualities that enable any long-term union to thrive.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In her third novel, Ordinary People, British novelist Diana Evans pays an extended visit to the country of midlife relationships and proves to be a knowledgeable anthropologist in her perceptive study of four of its inhabitants.

NonfictionSocial Science

An acclaimed critic cuts through the noise

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

When Michiko Kakutani ended her tenure of nearly 35 years as a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic with the New York Times in July 2017, she announced her intention to “focus on longer pieces about politics and culture.” If The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, her fiery takedown of the culture of lies personified by the presidency of Donald Trump is any indication, her voice soon may become as influential in the world of politics as it was in literary culture.

Kakutani covers ground that will be painfully familiar to regular readers of her former paper or the Washington Post. Unlike conventional political commentators, however, she digs deeper to seek out the “roots of falsehood in the Trump era.” It’s here that her immersion in literature provides a fresh perspective on our current dilemma: Kakutani lays some portion of the blame on postmodernism, with its “philosophical repudiation of objectivity,” expressed most clearly in the work of Jacques Derrida and other deconstructionists, who posited that there was “no such thing as truth.”

Though Trump likely isn’t familiar with these literary theories, Kakutani argues that, in coining terms like “fake news” and “alternative facts,” his allies are cynically employing the same notion of subjectivity to advance their political agenda. Aided by the right-wing media and highly effective Russian internet trolls, they’ve capitalized on America’s increasing tribalism and skepticism of traditional sources of expertise, employing “language as a tool to disseminate distrust and discord.”

As she envisions the inevitable post-Trump era, Kakutani is not optimistic. If there’s any hope of recovering from this relentless onslaught of falsehood, it will only come about through the efforts of an engaged citizenry, insistent on respect for our institutions and, above all, for the truth. Some of the critical information to fuel that engagement can be found in these pages.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When Michiko Kakutani ended her tenure of nearly 35 years as a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic with the New York Times in July 2017, she announced her intention to “focus on longer pieces about politics and culture.” If The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, her fiery takedown of the culture of lies personified by the presidency of Donald Trump is any indication, her voice soon may become as influential in the world of politics as it was in literary culture.

NonfictionLiteratureArts & Culture

The ultimate TBR list

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

It would be surprising if the reading list of anyone who picks up novelist, critic and professor Francine Prose’s What to Read and Why doesn’t instantly grow exponentially. After considering the 33 essays that compose this deeply informed collection, it’s tempting to ask: Is there anything worth reading that she hasn’t read?

Traversing more than a century and a half of literature, from the works of Dickens, Eliot and Balzac to the recent works of Jennifer Egan, Mohsin Hamid and Karl Ove Knausgaard, Prose’s book offers a generous serving of her wide-ranging literary enthusiasms. And Prose’s favorites aren’t limited to canonical authors. If the names Patrick Hamilton or Elizabeth Taylor (no, not the actress) aren’t familiar, Prose’s accolades may tempt you to seek out their work.

As she revealed in her book Reading Like a Writer, Prose is an evangelist for the painstaking but richly satisfying art of close reading. For her, the most rewarding way of engaging with the best writers’ work is at the level of the sentence. With apt examples, she lavishes praise on Jane Austen for the “grace and wit of her sentences” and the “thrilling attention to the shape of paragraph and sentence” in the work of Rebecca West.

Prose doesn’t confine herself to appraisals of individual authors. Several of the most satisfying essays in this book focus on broader subjects like the uses of art or the difficult task of defining the short story. The essay “On Clarity” is a masterly primer on the art of graceful writing, a gift Prose displays on every page.

What to Read and Why is a collection of love letters to the art of literature. The only impediment to devouring this book is the persistent urge to trade it for the work of one of the writers Prose so avidly praises.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It would be surprising if the reading list of anyone who picks up novelist, critic and professor Francine Prose’s What to Read and Why doesn’t instantly grow exponentially. After considering the 33 essays that compose this deeply informed collection, it’s tempting to ask: Is there anything worth reading that she hasn’t read?

FictionDebut FictionComic Fiction

Lazy liaisons

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

The weather isn’t the only thing that’s steamy in Charlottesville, Virginia, in Andrew Martin’s debut novel. Early Work is the smart, if rueful, story of a love triangle, with all the painful fallout that usually attends that particular emotional geometric configuration.

When Peter, the novel’s narrator, glimpses Leslie, it’s a case of lust at first sight. But he faces one towering obstacle if he wants to consummate his desire: For five years he’s been in a relationship with Julia, a medical resident and poet, and sincerely believes they’d “continue to be together for the long, inevitably more complicated, run.” And there’s also the inconvenient fact that Leslie has her own attachment to a fiancé she’s left behind in Texas.

Both aspiring writers, Peter and Leslie aren’t doing much more than toying with works in progress—his a novel he fears will “never cohere into the, what, saga of ice and fire” his friends are imagining, and hers a script she’s being “encouraged,” rather than paid, to write. It seems both are ripe to fall into a summer fling, if only as a source of perceived respite from their unproductive literary efforts.

In Peter’s account—one whose tone alternates between self-lacerating insight and something akin to magical thinking—the desultory relationship doesn’t appear to bring much satisfaction to either character as the tension builds inevitably toward the moment when Julia learns of Peter’s infidelity, a scene that Martin portrays with understated grace.

Early Work isn’t interested in rendering moral judgment on Peter and Leslie’s affair, but it doesn’t shrink from portraying the bleak consequences of the mutual self-absorption that seems to be the driving force in their liaison. Even with that quality of reserve, there’s a lesson to be learned from this quiet novel: Sometimes we’re better off not getting what we want.

The weather isn’t the only thing that’s steamy in Charlottesville, Virginia, in Andrew Martin’s debut novel. Early Work is the smart, if rueful, story of a love triangle, with all the painful fallout that usually attends that particular emotional geometric configuration.

NonfictionBiography

Under the wheels of “progress”

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

The grim story Eliza Griswold tells in Amity and Prosperity will seem familiar to readers who know the tale of New York’s Love Canal or have read Jonathan Harr’s prize-winning book A Civil Action. Griswold’s penetrating story explores the consequences of our nation’s ill-advised zeal for exploiting abundant natural resources and features rapacious corporations, inept—if not complicit—regulators and hapless victims in a small Pennsylvania town. Hapless, that is, until they hire an unlikely husband-and-wife legal team to help them seek justice.

Most of the action unfolds in and around the small town of Amity in southwestern Pennsylvania. Beginning in 2010, Griswold made 37 trips to the region to report the story, and she focuses her careful investigation on nurse Stacey Haney and her two children. The Haneys’ farmhouse is located downhill from a pond containing waste products from the process of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which is used to extract natural gas from the underlying shale deposit.

The Haneys’ worsening financial and health problems eventually drive them to lawyers John and Kendra Smith, partners in a small, local law firm. Though the Smiths’ dogged efforts in the face of fierce resistance from gas producer Range Resources and other defendants yielded only mixed results for the Haneys and their neighbors, they were able to creatively invoke Pennsylvania’s Environmental Rights Amendment, successfully using it for the first time in an action against polluters.

Griswold’s sobering book is yet one more in a growing roster of works that detail the price some members of American society have been forced to pay to serve the convenience and comfort of their fellow citizens.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The grim story Eliza Griswold tells in Amity and Prosperity will seem familiar to readers who know the tale of New York’s Love Canal or have read Jonathan Harr’s prize-winning book A Civil Action. Griswold’s penetrating story explores the consequences of our nation’s ill-advised zeal for exploiting abundant natural resources and features rapacious corporations, inept—if not complicit—regulators and hapless victims in a small Pennsylvania town. Hapless, that is, until they hire an unlikely husband-and-wife legal team to help them seek justice.

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