Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

History

The ancient history of social media

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

The next time someone complains that letter writing is a lost art, thanks to email and Facebook, and that people simply don't communicate as frequently or as thoughtfully now as they did in the good old days, you can hand them a copy of Writing on the Wall, Tom Standage's entertaining and thought-provoking survey of the ways that various social media have developed and evolved since Roman times until now.

Conducting us on a fascinating journey through the back roads of media history, journalist Standage (The Victorian Internet) traces the development of social media to Cicero, who constantly exchanged letters with friends around the Roman Empire so that he could keep up with its political affairs and daily activities. He then chronicles the development of social media from the circulation of Paul's letters in the early Christian communities and the deluge of printed tracts in 16th-century Germany, to the exchange of gossip-laden poetry in Tudor courts, John Donne's practice of circulating his poetry as a means of self-promotion and the establishment of Enlightenment-era coffeehouses that provided the social context and literary atmosphere for writing and exchanging news sheets and pamphlets.

Standage contrasts social media with mass media, which developed in the mid-19th century and which delivered information or social propaganda in an impersonal manner that did not foster conversation among individuals. Contrary to mass media, "social media are two-way, conversational environments in which information passes horizontally from one person to another along social networks, rather than being delivered vertically from an impersonal central source."

As the public became disenchanted with mass media in the 21st century, new forms of social media such as Facebook and Twitter developed and provided individuals with a way to disseminate information about politics and other matters quickly and broadly to their societies. As an example, Standage points to the use of Facebook, YouTube and other social media as instrumental in the revolutionary movement of the Arab Spring that began in 2010.

Standage concludes that "whatever form social media takes in the future, it is clear that it is not going away. Blogs are the new pamphlets; microblogs and online social networks are the new coffeehouses. They are all shared, social platforms that enable ideas to travel from one person to another, rippling through networks of people connected by social bonds, rather than having to squeeze through the bottleneck of social broadcast media." After reading this stimulating survey, you’ll be hard-pressed to disagree.

The next time someone complains that letter writing is a lost art, thanks to email and Facebook, and that people simply don't communicate as frequently or as thoughtfully now as they did in the good old days, you can hand them a copy of Writing…

Memoir

A biologist looks at his own universe

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In 2006, Richard Dawkins gleefully took on fundamentalist Christianity and many other expressions of religious faith in his fiery tract, The God Delusion. With an evangelistic fervor, he devoted the next several years to debating evangelical Christians, proponents of Creationism and just about any theologian willing to engage in a debate with him.

Dawkins’ devotion to this mission almost obscured his earlier groundbreaking and provocative work on the selfish gene and its role in evolution. When his first book, The Selfish Gene, was published in 1976, many reviewers hailed it as the new face of evolution and praised Dawkins’ ability to convey his technical ideas in easy-to-read, almost poetic, fashion.

In An Appetite for Wonder, the first volume of a promised two-volume memoir, Dawkins looks back beyond the publication of his first book in an attempt to trace the steps he made in becoming a scientist. Meandering along through his childhood in Kenya, his young adulthood in England, his college years at Oxford and Berkeley, and his early lectureships in Oxford, Dawkins poses numerous hypothetical questions about the nature of autobiography. “How much of what a man has achieved could have been predicted from his childhood? How much can be attributed to measureable qualities? To the interests and pastimes of his parents? To his genes?”

As a child in Kenya, Dawkins mistakes a scorpion for a lizard, resulting in his receiving a painful sting, and this episode indicates to him that no correlation exists between his African upbringing and his decision to become a biologist. Such encouragement comes at Oxford in a tutorial on starfish: “I didn’t just read about starfish hydraulics. . . . I slept, ate, dreamed starfish hydraulics. Tube feet marched behind my eyelids, hydraulic pedicellariae quested and sea water pulsed through my dozing brain.”

In a humorous anecdote, Dawkins recalls how a semi-divine Elvis seemed to be speaking to him about God in Elvis’ song “I Believe.” Elvis was “calling me to devote my life to telling people about the creator god—which I should be especially well-qualified to do if I became a biologist.” Not especially proud of this momentary religious fervor, Dawkins soon embraced Darwinian evolution as an explanation of the beauty and design of the universe.

In the end, Dawkins admits that he’s not a good observer, nor is he very methodical in his habits; however, he believes he is “a reasonably effective persuader,” especially as he tries to convince people—in The Selfish Gene and other books—that Darwin’s truth is far from being over. Neither is Dawkins’ story over, and he promises to tell the rest of it in a companion volume.

In 2006, Richard Dawkins gleefully took on fundamentalist Christianity and many other expressions of religious faith in his fiery tract, The God Delusion. With an evangelistic fervor, he devoted the next several years to debating evangelical Christians, proponents of Creationism and just about any theologian…

American History

He keeps on rollin’ along

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Flowing down from the north country of Minnesota and pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, the mighty Mississippi River drifts along, carrying with it not only the silty detritus of the mud, leaves and pollutants it picks up along its journey but also the legends of pirates, wily boatsmen and confidence men that writers and musicians have memorialized in song and story.

Awash in the glory of the Mississippi, author Paul Schneider bathes us in the river's rise and fall. Old Man River, his new history of the river, carries us along the currents of its natural history from the last ice age through various wars to conquer, possess and inhabit the territory around it, and up through modern times, including attempts by the Army Corps of Engineers to re-chart the course of the river and by conservationists to save the river from dying. As he traces this history, Schneider recounts tales of the many Native American nations that called the river and its delta home, the earliest meetings of Spanish explorers with these tribes, the exit of the Spanish, the entrance of the French and English, and the eventual American takeover of the river and its surrounding territories following the Revolutionary War and particularly the Civil War. Schneider describes the Civil War as "the final great conflagration of the long line of wars for control of the basin that began with de Soto's fleeing army creatures centuries before."

Weaving his own journeys down the river in kayaks and aluminum boats into this larger history, Schneider swimmingly propels us through the beauty of the many headwaters, streams, creeks and eddies that compose the greater Mississippi. Traveling down the Allegheny, for example, the river pulls him into itself: "After a few days of travel, watching it widen and grow from something awkward and crooked into something curving and lovely, it took a part of me."

While the waters of the great river still contain runoff pollution from cornfields and livestock operations, it is now cleaner, thanks to the Clean Water Act, and wildlife flourishes again in many places along the river. However, attempts to change the course of the river continue. After the great flood of 1927, the Army Corps built the Old River Control Structure in an effort to keep the river flowing in its banks; when the 1970 flood almost wiped out the structure, Congress built another one.

As Charley Pride reminds us, the Mississippi River rolls on, and it's a place to come when the "world's spinning round, too fast for me." Schneider's graceful tale allows the power, beauty and grace of the mighty river to wash over us, too.

Flowing down from the north country of Minnesota and pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, the mighty Mississippi River drifts along, carrying with it not only the silty detritus of the mud, leaves and pollutants it picks up along its journey but also the legends…

Noodling across Asia and Europe

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Newlywed Jen Lin-Liu's quest to find the origins of the lowly yet ubiquitous noodle—that starchy, sometimes unutterably delicious, sometimes indescribably inedible, staple of dishes from soup to spaghetti—begins innocently enough; the year after they're married, she and her husband, Craig, travel to Italy, where he presents her with the gift of a pasta-making class at the renowned restaurant Le Fate. During that class, Lin-Liu's mind wanders back to the incredible similarities between the craft of pasta-making in Italy and the methods of making Chinese hand-rolled noodles that she practiced so often growing up.

Sufficiently intrigued by the connections, Lin-Liu launches herself on a journey along the Silk Road, the legendary trade route along which spices, foods, recipes and cultures have long traveled between East and West. Through her meetings with cooks and her meals in homes and restaurants, she hopes to discover not only where noodles originated, but also to "document and savor the changes in food and people and to learn what remains constant" and ties together the cuisines of East and West.

In On the Noodle Road, a jaunty memoir that is part travelogue, part food history and part recipe book (each section concludes with recipes for noodle dishes from that region), Lin-Liu slurps and munches her way through China, Central Asia, Iran, Turkey and Italy. In China, she discovers the stark regional differences in the use and emphasis on the noodle in cooking—noodles dominate in the north, rice in the south—but in various regions in Central Asia and Iran she finds very few noodles on the menu. As she grazes her way along the Silk Road, she also wonders how this trip will affect her marriage, and as she observes relations between husbands and wives along the way, she ponders her own desire for commitment and independence.

By the end of her journey, she admits that many questions about noodles have gone unanswered. Even so, she has "discovered that palpable connections did exist among cultures. I'd seen how food crossed geographical, religious, and political borders and blurred the divide between East and West. I'd learned that the process that brought us the dishes we know and love is mostly an organic one that has unfolded through years and generations."

Newlywed Jen Lin-Liu's quest to find the origins of the lowly yet ubiquitous noodle—that starchy, sometimes unutterably delicious, sometimes indescribably inedible, staple of dishes from soup to spaghetti—begins innocently enough; the year after they're married, she and her husband, Craig, travel to Italy, where he…

NonfictionMemoir

Men We Reaped

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

After a drunk driver killed Jesmyn Ward’s younger brother, Joshua, in a horrific car accident, the court sentenced the driver, who was white, to five years in jail for leaving the scene of an accident, but declined to charge him with vehicular manslaughter. Ward, in disbelief, thought to herself, “This is what my brother’s life is worth in Mississippi. Five years.” In fact, the driver served only two years before being released.

Bewilderment, pain, rage and resentment flow through the bones of Men We Reaped, Ward’s memoir of growing up poor and black in a rural Mississippi still bathed in the waters of hatred, prejudice and racism. She weaves a tale of loss that begins with her father, who left the family behind to follow his own desires. Other losses quickly followed, and she recounts the stories of five young men—friends, a cousin, her beloved brother—who died between 2000 and 2004, from some combination of drugs, suicide, murder, accident and bad luck. A poignant memorial to Roger Eric Daniels III, Demond Dedeaux, Charles Joseph (C.J.) Martin, Ronald Wayne Lizana and Joshua Adam Dedeaux, Ward’s book also underscores a harsh truth: Poverty often cripples black men, causing them either to fall into destructive behaviors or to flee from it, leaving their families in the process. Such absences mar her own family, and Ward stands up to tell the stories. “Men’s bodies litter my family’s history,” she writes. “The pain of the women they left behind pulls them from the beyond, makes them appear as ghosts.”

Searingly honest and brutal, Ward holds nothing back as she strives to find her way in a community that she both loves and hates. There are no platitudes for her as she comes to terms with her losses: “Grief doesn’t fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. . . . We are never free from the feeling that something is wrong with us, not with the world that made this mess.” In Men We Reaped, she makes her readers feel that pain, too; but more than that, she makes us understand that these men mattered—that their lives were worth something after all.

After a drunk driver killed Jesmyn Ward’s younger brother, Joshua, in a horrific car accident, the court sentenced the driver, who was white, to five years in jail for leaving the scene of an accident, but declined to charge him with vehicular manslaughter. Ward, in…
Social Science

White picket fence no longer the American Dream

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In 1962, Malvina Reynolds captured both the rapid development and growth of the suburbs, as well as their homogenous character, in her song “Little Boxes,” which Pete Seeger made famous the following year: “Little boxes on the hillside / little boxes made of ticky tacky . . . they all look just the same.”

Fifty years later, as Leigh Gallagher observes in this captivating and thoughtful social history, the suburbs that the Ozzie and Harriet Nelsons of the 1950s and early 1960s so coveted are now declining, fostering a shift in the shape of the American dream of home ownership.

In The End of the Suburbs, Gallagher traces the history of the suburb from its rise during the post-WWII development of tract housing in places such as Levittown, Pennsylvania, to the great urban exodus of the ’50s and ’60s, when many city-dwellers decamped to wealthy enclaves such as Lake Forest, Illinois. The suburbs grew so quickly because of the rapid growth of the middle class, the advent of mass production of building materials and houses, and the freedom provided by the automobile.

Gallagher acknowledges that most Americans still live in the suburbs because we are a culture that values privacy and individualism, but she provides plenty of evidence that suburbia is at the beginning of a steep decline. Drawing on extensive interviews with policy analysts, construction and housing experts, and suburban dwellers themselves, she cites several reasons for the decline of the suburb as we know it: Home values have inverted; cities are experiencing a resurgence; households are shrinking; the price of oil is rising. As urban areas have witnessed a rise in population and influx of wealth over the past decade, the suburbs have experienced a rise in poverty; from 2000 to 2010, she points out, “the growth rate in the number of poor living in the suburbs was more than twice that in the cities.”

The End of the Suburbs is a first-rate social history that asks pointed questions about one of America’s most cherished cultural institutions.

In 1962, Malvina Reynolds captured both the rapid development and growth of the suburbs, as well as their homogenous character, in her song “Little Boxes,” which Pete Seeger made famous the following year: “Little boxes on the hillside / little boxes made of ticky tacky…

NonfictionHistory

All we need is music, sweet music

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

The summer of 1964 was marked as much by rioting in the streets as by dancing in the street. President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 had already cut deeply into the optimism, hope and anticipation of the early 1960s, and the subsequent escalation of the Vietnam War and racial strife in the cities tore that quilt of dreams wide open during the following year. In the midst of this disappointment and conflict, however, music brought people of diverse backgrounds together in ways that had never occurred previously, and have seldom happened since.

Kurlansky captures the power of music to unite people, at least momentarily, in Ready for a Brand New Beat, the evocative tale of a song and its enduring impact on American culture. Much as he did in his earlier acclaimed books such as Salt and 1968, Kurlansky uses a small focal point as a way to illuminate larger trends in history. Along the way, he tells a rattling good story as he vividly recreates the birth of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ hit song “Dancing in the Street,” its immediate popularity and its long musical afterlife.

When Marvin Gaye, Ivy Jo Hunter and Mickey Stevenson wrote “Dancing in the Street,” Stevenson had his wife, Kim Weston, in mind as the singer; after they invited Reeves to come into the studio to sing the song, and she laid down an energetic, moving first take, the trio knew this was her song. When it was released in August 1964, it started a slow climb to the top of the Billboard charts.

At the end of this long, hot summer marked by urban riots and protests against the war, the song soon took on many meanings. For white audiences, “Dancing in the Street” was a good-time song, providing the soundtrack for their hedonistic spirit. For black audiences, however, “Dancing in the Street” was an anthem that celebrated freedom from the social injustices of segregation. By October, the song had reached the number two spot on the Top 100 chart, confirming its popularity among all audiences.

Much as it provided the musical backdrop to the summer and fall of 1964, “Dancing in the Street” continues to live in more than 35 cover versions by very diverse artists. Kim Weston finally recorded her own take in 1997, and artists including Joan Baez, the reggae group The Royals and the duo of Mick Jagger and David Bowie—who recorded what many have called the best cover ever made—have tried their musical hands at it. Yet because the song is so intimately connected to the events of 1964 in Detroit and in America, none of these covers has equaled the power of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ original.

The summer of 1964 was marked as much by rioting in the streets as by dancing in the street. President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 had already cut deeply into the optimism, hope and anticipation of the early 1960s, and the subsequent escalation of the…

NonfictionMemoir

Glimpsing moments

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Many memoirs tell a straightforward tale of the narrator’s life from birth to the present stage of their lives, reflecting along the way on the failures and foibles of parents and family, on the disappointments of first love or the horrors and joys of school, or on the ragged way that the narrator recognizes and embraces, or refuses to embrace, his identity.

You’ll find many of these elements in acclaimed novelist (The Bird Artist) Howard Norman’s exceptional glimpse into the times and places—especially the places—that animate his character and that have formed his identity. Yet Norman tells these tales not in the usual linear fashion but by recalling moments of “arresting strangeness” that provide the threads by which he has woven the colorful quilt of his life up until now.

Howard Norman is a gifted storyteller whose presence you’ll hate to leave.

Norman experiences such moments of strangeness and, sometimes, clarity, in the places that he calls home for a while; he feels a “bittersweet foretaste of regret when getting ready to leave” them, and it’s these places and his reasons for leaving them that frame his memoir, I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place.

In a tale of teenage lust, angst and despair, Norman recalls one summer during his adolescence in Grand Rapids, Michigan, when life seems to be falling apart on the one hand (as his parents go through a divorce) and full of promise on the other (in his sole sexual encounter with his brother’s girlfriend). Through his first job as an assistant on the town’s bookmobile, he learns about trust and loyalty, but he also finds new worlds opened to him through the books he reads. The books, though, carry their own dangers; from one of them he learns to fashion a trap for ducks on a local lake and inadvertently kills a swan. By the end of the summer, he feels lonely and bereft.

Other moments include Norman’s relationship in Halifax with a landscape painter, Mathilde, who “speaks autobiographically, but seldom confessionally”; his encounter with an Inuit shaman and an Inuit rock band whose song gives the book its title; and his attempts to come to terms with a murder-suicide in his D.C. home—the woman to whom he had leased the house for the summer kills her son and herself. Finally, he experiences a moment of “arresting strangeness” at his home in Vermont, where he resolves, in bittersweet fashion, not to “leave this house . . . to let the world arrive as it may.”

Norman is a gifted storyteller whose presence you’ll hate to leave when you close the book.

Many memoirs tell a straightforward tale of the narrator’s life from birth to the present stage of their lives, reflecting along the way on the failures and foibles of parents and family, on the disappointments of first love or the horrors and joys of school,…

NonfictionMemoir

Pick yourself up and dust yourself off

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In the summer of 2005, Mardi Jo Link’s broken-down life bore no resemblance to the happy-go-lucky farm life she’d wished for—and read about—as a girl. Instead, her marriage has just unraveled, her soon-to-be ex-husband is living across the street, her bank account is “practically uninhabited” and her three sons are confused, angry and sad. Flying in the face of such brokenness, however, Link steadfastly claims her “sons, the debt, the horses, the dogs, the land, the century-old farmhouse, the garden, the woods, the pasture, and the barn.”

Over the course of one harrowing year, Link struggles to keep her family and her farm together any way she can. In Bootstrapper, her riveting recollection of her year of living raggedly, she details not only her family’s descent into the ravages of near-starvation, the loss of beloved farm animals and the necessity of killing their own livestock for food, but also the slow, moment-by-moment ascent into a life marked by the hope of a new spring, the wonders of nature and the miracle of love and passion. At the beginning of the book, she realizes that she and her sons are one step away from losing everything. In fact, just two months after she sets out on this journey alone, her beloved horse, Major, is hit by a car. As Link cradles his head and watches his life slip slowly away, she feels a devastating loneliness. Yet she also recognizes the “limitless space of the human heart” to hold love and eventually to conquer that loneliness.

The lessons her family learns sometimes come at odd times. Once, as Link and her oldest son, Owen, are driving down the road, a wild turkey flies into the car’s windshield. She has him stop the car, not to inspect for damage but to see whether or not the turkey is dead so they can take it home for dinner. Link realizes that she has begun to “look at nature in a brand-new way—as something to eat.”

Eventually, glimmers of grace begin to peek through the holes in Link’s ravaged life. At one point she pauses to recount their victories from the past year, which include “standing among prize-winning zucchinis, looking up at the stars during a winter campfire in the valley, decorating our Christmas tree, triumphing over thundersnow, ordering chickens from a catalog.” She also receives an unexpected call from Pete, the contractor who’s remodeling her house, and launches out on a new life with him.

Hilarious, wrenching and heartwarming, Link’s poignant memoir chronicles one woman’s determination to discover meaning and wholeness in the midst of brokenness. It’s almost as if Cheryl Strayed had stayed down on the farm instead of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.

In the summer of 2005, Mardi Jo Link’s broken-down life bore no resemblance to the happy-go-lucky farm life she’d wished for—and read about—as a girl. Instead, her marriage has just unraveled, her soon-to-be ex-husband is living across the street, her bank account is “practically uninhabited”…

Aging

One last move for a beloved mother

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

The delightful Miss Peggy—singer, writer, speaker, pastor’s wife, loving mother, treasured friend—has spent most of her life moving. As her son, Robert, recollects his family’s nomadic ways, he recalls that Miss Peggy has lived in 19 homes over the course of her life. With grace, humor and love, he warmly and tenderly tells us the story of moving her to a new home and a new life in Moving Miss Peggy.

As neighbors, co-workers, friends and family start to notice Miss Peggy’s forgetfulness and actions that could endanger her and others, Benson and his family get together to discuss how best to move her. Anyone living with a family member afflicted with dementia will recognize the slow, sometimes humorous, mostly painful, but eventually redemptive process of making big and little decisions that involve slowly taking away a loved one’s independence.

Benson’s brother Michael, a pastor, visits his mother in order to persuade her to give up driving. “He seemed always to find the right words to persuade her that the next thing that had to be done was the right thing to do, not just for her family but for her own sweet self.” As difficult as surrendering her car keys and her independence is for her, “giving up the burden of it may well have been a gift.”

Finding a new home for Miss Peggy prompts several questions, such as “Can you see your mother living there?” and “Can you see yourself going there to see her?” Once the family locates the right place, they begin the process of packing and moving, hauling away objects that will be divided among family members, strangers and the trash, all of which represent memories of home and mother for them. In the midst of their efforts to move Miss Peggy, Benson discovers that “if we could each do what we did best, there might just be enough to go round to be all the things Miss Peggy might need her children to be for her. Wherever two or three, or even four of us, were gathered, Someone More would be among us.”

Settled in her new place, Miss Peggy’s wandering days seem to be over. Yet, Benson reflects, “in another way, her wandering days have just begun. She has begun to wander her way into a new life, and she will spend a portion of the rest of her life wandering and wondering her way along from day to day, singing more and more about the sea.”

Benson is a graceful storyteller, and his elegant little meditation offers a powerful parable on the unity of a family coming together to face loss with love and courage.

The delightful Miss Peggy—singer, writer, speaker, pastor’s wife, loving mother, treasured friend—has spent most of her life moving. As her son, Robert, recollects his family’s nomadic ways, he recalls that Miss Peggy has lived in 19 homes over the course of her life. With grace,…

Biography

Letters, legends and lies

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In the middle of May 1536, over a thousand spectators gathered at the Tower of London to witness the execution of Anne Boleyn. Anne has become perhaps Henry VIII’s most famous wife, in part because of his notorious treatment of her and in part because of her own strong personality.

Part biography and part cultural history, Susan Bordo’s riveting new study, The Creation of Anne Boleyn, brings Anne to life through a close reading of existing sources contemporary to her, as well as through a lively exploration of the many cultural representations of Anne, from the 17th century to the present, that have made her a pliable figure, defining her personality by the mood and temperament of the time.

Bordo reminds us that the historical record on Anne is almost nonexistent. In his efforts to eradicate Anne completely from his life and the memory of the court, Henry purged all letters—except for 17 from him to her that are housed in the Vatican—and portraits of her. We know very little about her appearance, and apart from a few inscriptions in prayer books and two letters which may be from Anne to Henry, almost all of our knowledge of Anne is secondhand, coming from “malicious reports of Eustace Chapuys and other foreign ambassadors to their home rulers and various ‘eyewitness’ accounts of what she said and did at her execution.”

Bordo vividly recreates an almost moment-by-moment account of the events leading from Henry’s decision to execute Anne up to her death. Why was Anne executed in the first place? Bordo points out several theories: Her miscarriage might have led Henry to suspect that she was guilty of witchcraft; Henry eagerly embraced Cromwell’s suggestions that Anne was an adulteress; Cromwell acted without Henry’s instigation because Anne had publicly opposed Cromwell’s policies.

In most 20th-century novels, Anne is depicted as a “strong-willed young woman with personal qualities that are quite attractive.” By the early 21st century, Bordo points out, novels such as Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall depict Anne as “selfish, spiteful, vindictive” and a “scheming predator.” Yet, on many websites devoted to Anne and the Tudor period, Bordo discovers that young women view Anne as “neither an angel nor a devil; she was [a] human . . . who was ambitious and intellectual.”

Bordo’s eloquent study not only recovers Anne Boleyn for our times but also demonstrates the ways in which legends grow out of the faintest wisps of historical fact, and develop into tangled webs of fact and fiction that become known as the truth.

In the middle of May 1536, over a thousand spectators gathered at the Tower of London to witness the execution of Anne Boleyn. Anne has become perhaps Henry VIII’s most famous wife, in part because of his notorious treatment of her and in part because…

Medicine

Exploring the spectrum

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Although some medical statistics point out that one in 88 people has some form of autism, the diagnosis is still very little understood. Is it a psychological condition? Is it biological? Are children born autistic, or does their environment contribute to, and perhaps cause, their autism?

In this brilliant book that is part memoir and part scientific study, best-selling author Temple Grandin, one of the world’s most accomplished and well-known adults with autism, probes the causes of the condition, encouraging us to think differently about it and to embrace the strengths autism bestows.

When Grandin’s mother noticed her young daughter exhibiting symptoms that we now label autistic—destructive behavior, inability to speak, sensitivity to physical contact—she took her to a neurologist rather than to a psychologist. The doctor diagnosed the young girl with brain damage, and Grandin’s mother carried out a program of intense individual therapy, engaging with the young Grandin one-on-one, a therapy now commonly practiced with autistic individuals today. Grandin points out that, given the rapidly changing views about autism and its causes, a mere decade later a doctor might have told her mother that the problem was all in the child’s mind.

Drawing on extensive and in-depth examinations of the science of the brain and contemporary genetics, Grandin challenges the idea that autism is “all in the mind” and merely a psychological condition that can be accurately diagnosed for every individual case. Indeed, there is no single cause or single symptom for autism. The search for causes for autism “involves the observation of neurological and genetic evidence and looking for each symptom along the whole spectrum.”

She points out that every case is widely different and no two people with autistic tendencies can be treated the same way. The spectrum of autistic individuals includes what she calls “three-kinds-of-minds”: pattern thinkers who are able to see and understand the forms behind the words but who have difficulty with reading and writing; picture thinkers who excel at understanding shapes and learn from hand-on activities; word-fact thinkers who perform poorly at drawing but interact with the world through their stellar writing skills. Prepared with this knowledge, schools and therapists should never ask an autistic individual to learn in a way that he or she can’t understand.

In The Autistic Brain, Grandin revolutionizes our way of thinking about autism, urging us not to fall into labeling or believe that we can only ever respond in one way to an autistic individual.

Although some medical statistics point out that one in 88 people has some form of autism, the diagnosis is still very little understood. Is it a psychological condition? Is it biological? Are children born autistic, or does their environment contribute to, and perhaps cause, their…

NonfictionMemoir

The perils of a promised land

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

On August 31, 1984, Anchee Min hurtled through the night into the unknown, flying alone away from the familiarity of family and home into an uncharted territory full of adventures and challenges. “Sitting in the airplane crossing the Pacific Ocean, I felt like I was dreaming with my eyes wide open. I tried to imagine the life ahead of me, but my mind went the other way.”

In her powerful and compulsively readable new memoir, The Cooked Seed, Min pulls back the curtains on her most intimate fears and hopes, inviting us to join her as she travels from her life in China, by turns wretched and loving, to her life in America, often miserable yet ultimately triumphant. Desperate to escape the privations of life in Communist China, where she toils in a labor camp as a young girl and is shipped off like a package to work on propaganda films in Madame Mao’s Shanghai Film Studio, Min tirelessly and haltingly learns English in order to seek a new life in America. Despite her lack of a secure grasp of the language, she applies for a visa, fearful of being turned away and surprised (yet secretly excited) when her application is approved.

Woefully underprepared for coming to America—she is not fluent in English, and she has no friends or family in this new place—Min faces one challenge after another when her plane lands in Chicago. She is almost turned away at customs, but a kindly translator recognizes Min’s talent and potential and allows her through; her first roommate, Takisha, teaches her lessons about the racism and poverty that exist even in the midst of wealth and plenty in American society. She struggles constantly with her inability to understand English, her lack of money—she works five jobs—and her dream of discovering her true identity and embracing it. About a photo taken during her first months in Chicago, she writes, “I looked confident and attractive. . . . The real me was depressed, lonely, and homesick. I craved affection, and I dreamed of love.”

Looking for love and acceptance amongst the harsh realities of her new home, Min falls into an unhappy marriage, becomes pregnant, almost dies giving birth and gets divorced. “I was broken yet standing determinedly erect. I could be crushed, but I would not be conquered.” In the midst of all this, she discovers her talent for telling stories and blossoms as a writer, going on to write six novels in English as well as a previous memoir about her life in China (Red Azalea).

Min’s soulful tale of despair and hope stirs our hearts and souls with its moving, harrowing and often heartrending stories of one young girl’s coming of age in a land of threat and promise.

On August 31, 1984, Anchee Min hurtled through the night into the unknown, flying alone away from the familiarity of family and home into an uncharted territory full of adventures and challenges. “Sitting in the airplane crossing the Pacific Ocean, I felt like I was…

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