Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

NonfictionEssays

Franzen muses about words and birds

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Much like John Updike’s elegant novels, Jonathan Franzen’s fiction paints a rich portrait of middle America as it copes with its failures, its hidden dreams and its ruptures. While Updike’s doughy men and women live their lives locked in a struggle between faith and doubt, Franzen’s characters suffer through boredom and restlessness. And just as Updike’s stylish essays range widely and smartly over a broad range of topics from golf and art to philosophy and religion, Franzen’s graceful essays range widely over topics from ecology and the origins of the novel to theater and ornithology. In Farther Away, his new collection of essays (most of them written over the past five years), Franzen discusses topics as diverse as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Alice Munro’s exceptional fiction (and the reasons it excels in comparison to most literary fiction) and . . . hornets.

The fullest bodied of the essays show Franzen engaging passionately with texts, people and birds. Woven through the essays, and the focus of at least two of them, are Franzen’s attempts to come to terms with the loss of his good friend, David Foster Wallace. Reflecting on Wallace and the late novelist’s engagement with writing and the world, Franzen observes, “At the level of form and intention, however, this very cataloging of despair about his own authentic goodness is received by the reader as a gift of authentic goodness: we feel love in the fact of his art, and we love him for it.” Wallace’s death brings Franzen out of himself, as does his own commitment to environmentalism.

In the past, Franzen’s arrogance has masked his real passion for good writing and has limited his ability to express his deep appreciation for writing that makes a difference, but in these essays he unveils his appreciations. On Randall Jarrell’s introduction to Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Women, Franzen reminds us that we “can read Jarrell’s introduction and be reminded of what outstanding literary criticism used to look like: passionate, personal, fair-minded, thorough, and intended for ordinary readers.” With great force and affection he reminds us that James Purdy “continues to be one of the most undervalued and underread writers in America.”

Even though he etches many of them out of pain and loss, the essays in Farther Away offer delightful, poignant, sometimes humorous glimpses of a writer not only struggling to capture a moment in just the right words but also falteringly embracing his humanity.

Much like John Updike’s elegant novels, Jonathan Franzen’s fiction paints a rich portrait of middle America as it copes with its failures, its hidden dreams and its ruptures. While Updike’s doughy men and women live their lives locked in a struggle between faith and doubt, Franzen’s characters suffer through boredom and restlessness. And just as […]
NonfictionMemoir

The transformation of crossing borders

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Why do we fall in love with people we barely know?

In her humorous and poignant memoir of a wedding and an earthquake in the Dominican Republic, novelist Julia Alvarez (How the García Girls Lost Their Accents) attempts to answer this question as she tells the tale of a young worker on her coffee plantation, Piti, and his efforts to make a life by traveling from his home in Haiti to work in the neighboring country.

Alvarez’s friendship with Piti begins when, driving past a neighboring farm, she spies him among a group of his friends playing with kites. She snaps a picture of his smiling face and shows him the picture when she returns, and he beams with wonder and gratitude. On subsequent trips from the U.S., Alvarez brings him jeans, a shirt and a bag in which he can carry his belongings as he makes the often dangerous border crossing from Haiti into the Dominican Republic.

Piti soon becomes a worker on the Alvarez coffee farm, and Alvarez grows closer and closer to this young man. One evening after supper and a night of singing with Piti and the other workers at her little house, she makes one of those “big-hearted promises that you never think you’ll be otherwise called on to keep”: She promises that she’ll be there on Piti’s wedding day.

In early August 2009, Alvarez receives a message from Piti informing her that his girlfriend, Eseline, has had a baby and that the two are getting married on August 20. Recalling her promise, Piti eagerly asks if Alvarez and her husband Bill will be attending the wedding. Reluctant at first, for she is scheduled to attend the Intergenerational Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers the week of the wedding, Alvarez realizes that she cannot break her promise, so she and Bill make arrangements to attend Piti’s wedding.

Alvarez’s arduous trip to Eseline’s home reveals the unsettled political and cultural character of Haiti, as various crossings of checkpoints involve bribery and haranguing guards. Once they reach Eseline’s village, the wedding commences and celebrates the new union between the two young people with enchanting singing that the attendees never want to end.

A year later, Alvarez and Bill embark on another, more trying and difficult journey, as they return to Haiti following the disastrous earthquake in search of Piti’s family and friends. Through all the devastation, Alvarez recalls the lesson that her love for Piti and his family have already taught her. Once we have become involved in something, she tenderly and forcefully points out, that relationship transforms us, and we have an obligation to it.

Why do we fall in love with people we barely know? In her humorous and poignant memoir of a wedding and an earthquake in the Dominican Republic, novelist Julia Alvarez (How the García Girls Lost Their Accents) attempts to answer this question as she tells the tale of a young worker on her coffee plantation, […]
Nonfiction

Answering the questions of human evolution

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

With his probing curiosity, his dazzling research, his elegant prose and his deep commitment to bio­diversity, Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist (The Ants) and novelist (The Anthill) Edward O. Wilson has spent his life searching for the evolutionary paths by which humans developed and passed along the social behaviors that best promote the survival of our species. His eloquent, magisterial and compelling new book offers a kind of summing-up of his magnificent career.

In The Social Conquest of Earth, Wilson asks three simple questions: “Where do we come from?”; “What are we?”; and “Where are we going?” Answering these questions, however, is not so simple, and he brings together disciplines ranging from molecular genetics to archaeology to social psychology in his quest to address these persistent queries.

Drawing upon detailed mathematical models and meticulous biological research, including his own work with the social insects—ants, wasps, termites—Wilson concludes that multilevel group selection, rather than inclusive fitness and kin selection, offers a fuller and more accurate explanation of the origins and development of human social behavior. He demonstrates persuasively how the conflict between individual selection (the competition for survival among members of the same group) and group selection (which shapes instincts that tend to make individuals altruistic toward one another) has led to our very human struggle between good and evil. The worst in our nature coexists with the best; to scrub it out, even if such were possible, would make us less than human.

While not everyone will agree with Wilson’s provocative and challenging conclusions, everyone who engages with his ideas will discover sparkling gems of wisdom uncovered by the man who is our Darwin and our Thoreau.

With his probing curiosity, his dazzling research, his elegant prose and his deep commitment to bio­diversity, Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist (The Ants) and novelist (The Anthill) Edward O. Wilson has spent his life searching for the evolutionary paths by which humans developed and passed along the social behaviors that best promote the survival of our species. […]
HistoryAmerican History

Truth, lies and terrible consequences

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

On a hot Florida Friday night in mid-July of 1949, Willie Haven Padgett had little on his mind but a night of dancing and drinking and whatever else that might lead to as he picked up Norma Lee Tyson. After a night of fun at the American Legion Hall in Clermont, they left to head home. Neither they nor the little community of Groveland, Florida, could have had any idea how all of their lives would change in the course of a few hours.

On the way home, Padgett pulled off the road onto a quiet, sandy driveway, where his Ford’s engine rattled noisily and died and his tires sank into the sand. As Norma waited for him to turn the car around, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin, two black army veterans, were headed over to Eatonville, an all-black town where they could enjoy a night away from the segregated tensions of Groveland and the surrounding towns. Coming across Padgett and Tyson, the two men stopped to help. Before long, however, Padgett’s deep-seated racism emerged in his attitude and in his remarks to the pair; Shepherd decked Padgett, and he and Irvin knew in an instant that nothing good would come of this event. In a matter of days, Shepherd, Irvin and two other young black men, Charles Greenlee and Ernest Thomas—who became known as the Groveland Boys—stood accused and eventually convicted of raping Norma Lee Tyson.

With rich detail and drawing upon never-before-seen material from the FBI archives, Gilbert King (The Execution of Willie Francis) intersperses the sordid features of this tale of Southern injustice—the many trials and appeals, the eventual acquittal of Shepherd and Irvin, Shepherd’s murder by a disgruntled sheriff—with the story of Thurgood Marshall, the future Supreme Court justice, then a highly regarded NAACP lawyer who worked tirelessly to acquit the four men. Marshall emerges as a crusader, deeply committed to equal opportunity for blacks, who operated on the principle that “laws can not only provide concrete benefits, they can even change the hearts of men—some men, anyhow—for good or evil.” With a cast of characters that seem to come straight out of the pages of an Erskine Caldwell novel—corrupt sheriff Willis McCall; a shady prosecutor; everyday workers who emerge at night in the robes of the KKK—Devil in the Grove is an engrossing chronicle of a little-heard story from the pre-Civil Rights era.

On a hot Florida Friday night in mid-July of 1949, Willie Haven Padgett had little on his mind but a night of dancing and drinking and whatever else that might lead to as he picked up Norma Lee Tyson. After a night of fun at the American Legion Hall in Clermont, they left to head […]
NonfictionMemoir

A literary pilgrimage

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

As a young boy, Howard Frank Mosher would sit at the knee of his honorary uncle, Reg Bennett, and beg him to tell stories. Bennett promised that when Mosher turned 21, the two would embark on a road trip starting in Robert Frost’s New England. Then they’d strike out for the Great Smoky Mountains of Thomas Wolfe, drop by Faulkner’s home in Oxford, Mississippi, check out James T. Farrell’s Chicago and visit its great bookstore, Brentano’s (now long closed), and eventually walk the streets of Raymond Chandler’s L.A. and Dashiell Hammett’s San Francisco.

Although they never had the chance to make that trip together, Mosher sets off on this long-deferred journey in 2007 after learning he has early-stage prostate cancer. This reminder of his mortality, as well as the publication of his new novel, motivates him to get behind the wheel of his 20-year-old Chevy, which he affectionately calls “The Loser Cruiser,” and set out on the Great American Book Tour, stopping to visit more than 150 of America’s best independent bookstores.

In 65 short chapters, Mosher colorfully reflects on his home and family in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, and its lively and eccentric characters, such as the Prof, the old-school, two-fisted school superintendent with whom Mosher gets into a fist fight; and Verna, the Moshers’ first landlady, who made and sold moonshine whiskey and married the federal agent who refused to arrest her when he found her still. He amuses and delights us with tales of his misadventures in the Loser Cruiser, in cheap hotels and greasy spoons across America, and at his many readings and signings at bookstores both large and small, confirming that independent booksellers such as Denver’s Tattered Cover and Oxford’s Square Books are keeping alive the book as we know it.

Mosher’s lively humor and his energetic love of books and reading provide us with animated and generous reflections on the people, places and objects that he loves enough to live for.

As a young boy, Howard Frank Mosher would sit at the knee of his honorary uncle, Reg Bennett, and beg him to tell stories. Bennett promised that when Mosher turned 21, the two would embark on a road trip starting in Robert Frost’s New England. Then they’d strike out for the Great Smoky Mountains of […]
Social Science

The reservation he calls home

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Indian land makes up about 2.3 percent of the land in the United States, and the Indian population in the US is slightly over two million. And yet, as novelist David Treuer wryly observes in his sobering yet quietly redemptive book, Rez Life, in spite of how involved Indians have been in America's business, most people will go a lifetime without ever knowing an Indian or spending time on an Indian reservation.

There are roughly 310 Indian reservations in the United States, but not all of the 564 federally recognized tribes have reservations. All Indian reservations have signs that welcome travelers, offering acknowledgment that the lands the drivers are about to enter is different from the lands through which they have been traveling. Such signs exist in more than 30 states, and you can see them in areas as diverse as the rocks of the Badlands, the suburbs of Green Bay and the sprays of Niagara Falls. Twelve reservations are larger than the state of Rhode Island, and nine are large than Delaware.

As Treuer points out, most people think of life on the reservation as harsh, violent, drug-infested, alcohol-fueled, poor and short. This story of reservation life is often accompanied by a version of history that lays the blame on Anglo-Americans and their despicable treatment of Native Americans.

Treuer's elegant chronicle of the lives and stories of individuals on his own reservation, Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota, chips away at the stony structures that embed these views of the reservation in the American consciousness. We meet, for example, Red Lake Nation conservation officer Charley Grolla, who is deeply devoted to protecting the waters and the land on the reservation from outsiders who would encroach upon and destroy it. And we meet Sean Fahrlander, an excellent ricer who can fillet a walleye faster than anyone Treuer knows. Fahrlander continues to fish on the land he has called home all his life, in spite of the state government's attempts now and then to challenge the treaty that the Ojibwe have with the state of Minnesota.

Treuer convincingly and affectionately captures reservation life in order to demonstrate that the reservations are more than scars, tears and blood. Through his stories, he affirms that there is beauty, pride and love in Indian life and on Indian reservations.

Indian land makes up about 2.3 percent of the land in the United States, and the Indian population in the US is slightly over two million. And yet, as novelist David Treuer wryly observes in his sobering yet quietly redemptive book, Rez Life, in spite of how involved Indians have been in America's business, most […]
HistoryAmerican History

The forgotten history of the early frontier

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

When we hear the word “frontier,” our thoughts often turn to the wild, untamed West, full of wagon trains, cattle drives and little houses on the prairie, where rugged men and women eked out a meager existence in their search for open space, gold or simply a new life. Yet, as historian Scott Weidensaul so eloquently points out in this absorbing chronicle, the earliest frontier in America stretched from the Atlantic coast inland to the high, rugged ranges of the Appalachians, and from the Maritimes to Florida. In the West, he observes, the frontier still seems close to the surface, but in the East, the old backcountry is often buried beneath strip malls and subdivisions. Weidensaul scratches the surface and uncovers the terrain of this lost world where Europeans and Native Americans were creating a new society and a new landscape.

Through brilliantly meticulous storytelling, Weidensaul traces the long history of this first frontier, from the Paleolithic Age through the age of European exploration and colonization, to the clash of imperial powers and pent-up Indian fury that led to the Seven Years’ War. For example, when European explorers arrived on the east coast of North America in the early 16th century, the land teemed with millions of indigenous people, so many that the explorers wondered whether there would be room for them to settle. Indians initially welcomed these settlers, who brought new technologies and goods, a cross-pollination of ideas and cooperation. But these warm feelings soon turned sour, for the Europeans were also rapacious and ruthless, and they started a disease epidemic that decimated the native population.

History comes alive in The First Frontier as Weidensaul retells the stories of many of the individuals whose lives both shaped and were shaped by this rugged, violent and often terrifying frontier. He regales us with tales of settlers such as Mary Rowlandson and Hannah Duston, each captured by the Indians, and their wildly different responses to their captivities. Rowlandson prayed for her captors and clung to her belief in God, interpreting her experiences through the lens of her faith, while Duston exacted violent revenge on her captors.

Weidensaul’s captivating chronicle offers a glimpse of this first frontier that was by turns peaceful and violent, linked by trade, intermarriage, religion, suspicion, disease, mutual dependence and acts of both unimaginable barbarism and extraordinary tolerance and charity.

When we hear the word “frontier,” our thoughts often turn to the wild, untamed West, full of wagon trains, cattle drives and little houses on the prairie, where rugged men and women eked out a meager existence in their search for open space, gold or simply a new life. Yet, as historian Scott Weidensaul so […]
Social Science

Making magic on Main Street

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Since 1934, more than 100,000 brides have traveled to a store at the end of a tired-looking block on Main Street in Fowler, Michigan, in search of the perfect wedding dress. Occupying a former bank building, Becker’s Bridal stocks more than 2,500 wedding dresses, a “blizzard of white” squeezed tightly onto three floors of crowded racks. On the second floor, in the former bank vault, sits a room where floor-to-ceiling mirrors cover each wall. In this “Magic Room,” brides stand atop a tiled, circular pedestal in soft lighting as they reflect on the moments that have led them to this place and finally decide on which dress might be the one.

When best-selling author Jeffrey Zaslow (The Girls From Ames) visits the store, his fascination with the lives of its customers catches fire. Weaving the stories of the women who built and nurtured the store with those of several brides-to-be, he captures the powerful allure of Becker’s and the hope and optimism that women bring with them to the Magic Room. Among others, we meet Danielle DeVoe, a social worker whose challenging family life led her from a young age to dream of the power and magic of love, and Julie Wieber, standing on the pedestal for the second time, accompanied by her daughters and recalling through tears the memory of her late first husband, Jeff.

The present owner, Shelley Becker, has been looking into the 90-year-old mirror in the front of the store since she was a little girl; it reminds her of her grandmother, Eva Becker, who ran the store with a firm hand. When she looks into the mirror, she also wonders about the lives of the brides who have stood in front of it. Whose marriages have dissolved? Whose have grown richer as the years have progressed? She wonders if her own daughter, who now works there with her, will join the long line of Becker women who have run the store.

In The Magic Room, Zaslow captures the joy, hope, love and magic in the hearts of these women, and in the hearts and lives of the Becker family, who have made it possible for generations of young women to experience the magical moment of becoming a bride.

Since 1934, more than 100,000 brides have traveled to a store at the end of a tired-looking block on Main Street in Fowler, Michigan, in search of the perfect wedding dress. Occupying a former bank building, Becker’s Bridal stocks more than 2,500 wedding dresses, a “blizzard of white” squeezed tightly onto three floors of crowded […]
NonfictionHistoryBlack History

The Holy Cross hero of the Civil Rights movement

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Echoing loudly down the corridors of history, several events in 1968 and the years just before it rang incessantly in the ears of Americans, and African Americans in particular. The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 fostered both hope and frustration: hope for the future, and frustration that progress came so slowly. Then, in April 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., coupled with the rise of the Black Power movement, lent urgency to the cause of civil rights. Along with concerns about the military draft, racial inequalities in the American education system stirred many of the nation’s largest and most vocal protests.

While debates over integration fueled the fires of protests on many college campuses, the evidence of integration at those same schools was indeed scant. In spite of the formal end to racial segregation in schools in 1954, most of the nation’s top colleges and universities remained strongholds of white privilege in 1968. In the fall of that year, however, a group of diverse African-American students—including Clarence Thomas, the novelist Edward P. Jones, the football player Eddie Jenkins and lawyers Ted Wells and Stanley Grayson—arrived at College of the Holy Cross, a small Jesuit college in central Massachusetts.

As journalist Diane Brady points out in Fraternity, her moving chronicle of the times and the lives of these men, such an event might not have happened if not for the passionate commitment of the Reverend John Brooks to King’s ideals of equality and social justice. The 44-year-old priest convinced leaders of the college that the school was missing out on an opportunity to help shape an ambitious generation of black men growing up in America, and he received the authority to recruit black students and offer them full scholarships.

Of course, racial prejudice and slurs didn’t disappear once Jones, Thomas and the others entered Holy Cross. Brady nicely weaves Brooks’ forceful support of the black students and their goals with the stories of the students themselves and their discomforts, their struggles and their eventual triumphs. As Brady offers heretofore unseen glimpses into the early lives of this fraternity of African Americans, she also brings to our attention for the first time an unsung hero of the civil rights movement.

Echoing loudly down the corridors of history, several events in 1968 and the years just before it rang incessantly in the ears of Americans, and African Americans in particular. The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 fostered both hope and frustration: hope for the future, and […]
NonfictionBiography

Vonnegut’s life, like a bug in amber

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In April 2011, the Library of America permanently established Kurt Vonnegut, who died in 2007, in the literary firmament with its publication of Novels and Stories: 1963-1973, a collection of four of Vonnegut’s most popular novels and a selection of his stories, interviews and speeches. While Vonnegut might have welcomed this recognition, he might also have made light of it with his typically playful harpooning of all matters related to the literary establishment.

As Charles Shields’ crisply delivered and exhaustively detailed new biography, And So It Goes, makes abundantly clear, the enigmatic Vonnegut both relished and loathed literary fame. Writing never came easy for him, and in the early ’50s he struggled at it mightily, for he didn’t have a clear vision of the audience he wanted to reach. He aimed at both the high-paying markets, such as The New Yorker, and the lower-paying pulp magazines like Astounding Science Fiction, to which his writing was much better suited. In August 1952, Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, which introduced many of the themes that would dominate the rest of his literary output. In this novel, Vonnegut demonstrates his love of debunking fixed ideas and institutions that are usually treated with reverence: in this case, General Electric. His characters—as they were in the novels up through Slaughterhouse-Five, at least—are people struggling to avoid corruption and the traps laid for them by circumstance or the environment.

Drawing on interviews with Vonnegut—conducted mostly in the last year of his life—and his family and friends, along with more than 1,500 letters, Shields deftly traces Vonnegut’s life from his early grief over the loss of his mother, his struggles with his siblings and his recognition that humor could get him noticed, to his horrific experiences as a POW in Dresden in WWII and his quite meteoric rise and fall as a novelist. Vonnegut’s work peaked with the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, and, as Shields points out, the novels that appeared after this popular success were not nearly as well received nor as critically acclaimed, in part because these later books tended to bog down in autobiographical diatribes.

Vonnegut once said that he kept losing and regaining his equilibrium, and Shields dexterously captures the ups and downs of Vonnegut’s life and work in this definitive biography.

In April 2011, the Library of America permanently established Kurt Vonnegut, who died in 2007, in the literary firmament with its publication of Novels and Stories: 1963-1973, a collection of four of Vonnegut’s most popular novels and a selection of his stories, interviews and speeches. While Vonnegut might have welcomed this recognition, he might also […]
NonfictionMedicine

Sound advice from doctors to patients

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Trim, athletic and recently retired, Dave Simon enjoyed playing tennis and was working hard to take his game to a new level. During a match, as he lunged to return a ball, he collapsed onto the court; though he tried to get up, he could not move his right arm or leg, and he couldn't speak to answer his tennis partner's questions. Just as he was struggling to find his voice, the door to the examining room snapped open and his doctor's voice greeted him, shaking Simon out of his daydream of being stricken by a stroke. When the doctor asked Simon about his decision to begin drug therapy for atrial fibrillation, the patient—vacillating between his terror of a stroke and the adverse side effects of such drugs on a good friend—simply replied that he had not yet decided to commence treatment.

In Your Medical Mind, a compelling study of the ways we make our decisions about personal health care, Dr. Jerome Groopman and Dr. Pamela Hartzband show that Simon is hardly alone in his ambivalence in seeking a course of treatment whose benefits must be balanced against its drawbacks. Drawing on interviews with a range of patients who have had to make decisions regarding cancer, heart disease and the end of life, the two doctors provide a useful chart of the approaches that individuals take to medical decision-making.

Some patients are maximalists who believe that they are making the best medical choices for themselves by embracing the full range of recommendations—tests, drug therapies, surgery—their physicians make in order to preserve health. Others are minimalists who often avoid treatment, try to use the fewest medications and the lowest dosages of those drugs, and select conservative procedures. Then there are believers who approach each situation with the optimism that there will be a successful solution; doubters approach treatment with profound skepticism and are often unwilling to take risks when the adverse consequences might outweigh the benefits of a procedure or therapy. While believers are most often maximalists and doubters most often minimalists, the authors point out that there are always exceptions to this characterization. Some patients have an orientation toward naturalism and seek out natural remedies or homeopathic treatments and even then partake of those quite sparingly.

With the advent of medical sites and patient blogs on the Internet, television and radio commercials about the promising benefits and the chilling side effects of drugs, conflicting advice from personal doctors and specialists, and the promise of natural remedies and therapies, patients now have more difficulty than ever before in making decisions about how to proceed after a difficult diagnosis or which procedures or treatments might be best for them in a certain situation. Groopman and Hartzband masterfully help us all navigate these choppy medical waters.

Trim, athletic and recently retired, Dave Simon enjoyed playing tennis and was working hard to take his game to a new level. During a match, as he lunged to return a ball, he collapsed onto the court; though he tried to get up, he could not move his right arm or leg, and he couldn't […]
NonfictionPop CultureLiteratureArts & Culture

The dawn of the Renaissance

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Browsing through a sale bin in search of summer reading, Stephen Greenblatt (Will in the World) happened upon a paperback with an extremely odd and erotic cover. Intrigued, he bought a copy of Lucretius’ De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) for 10 cents. Through the random discovery of this poem, Greenblatt recognized a worldview that mirrored his own, for the ancient poet wrote that humans should accept that we and all the things we encounter are transitory, and we should embrace the beauty and pleasure of the world.

In The Swerve, Greenblatt elegantly chronicles the history of discovery that brought Lucretius’ poem out of the musty shadows of obscurity into an early modern world ripe for his ideas. At the center of this marvelous tale stands an avid book hunter, skilled manuscript copyist and notary: Poggio Bracciolini. While Poggio’s adventures in book hunting had not turned up much of value for several years, one day in 1417 changed his life and the world forever. He pulled down a dusty copy of On the Nature of Things from its hidden place on a monastery shelf, knew what he had found and ordered his assistant to copy it. The manuscript of Lucretius’ poem had languished in the monastery for over 500 years; the monks ignored it because of its lack of religious value. In Poggio’s act of discovery, he became a midwife to modernity.

With his characteristic breathtaking prose, Greenblatt leads us on an amazing journey through a time when the world swerved in a new direction. The culture that best epitomized Lucretius’ embrace of beauty and pleasure was the Renaissance. Greenblatt illustrates the ways that this Lucretian philosophy—which extends to death and life, dissolution as well as creation—characterizes ideas as varied as Montaigne’s restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes’ chronicle of his mad knight and Caravaggio’s loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ’s feet. This captivating and utterly delightful narrative introduces us to the diverse nature of the Renaissance—from the history of bookmaking to the conflict between religion and science—and compels us to run out and read Lucretius’ poem.

RELATED CONTENT

Read BookPage's Q&A interview with Greenblatt on The Swerve.

Browsing through a sale bin in search of summer reading, Stephen Greenblatt (Will in the World) happened upon a paperback with an extremely odd and erotic cover. Intrigued, he bought a copy of Lucretius’ De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) for 10 cents. Through the random discovery of this poem, Greenblatt recognized a […]
NonfictionMemoir

Of love lost and found

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In her best-selling memoir, Happens Every Day, Isabel Gillies discovered that her husband had left her for another woman. Devastated, she strove mightily to understand his actions when a friend told her cavalierly that such things happen every day.

In the dazzling sequel, A Year and Six Seconds, Gillies, best known for her role as Detective Stabler’s wife on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” charmingly chronicles the jagged ways that people fall out of relationships and the unexpected, and often exhilarating, ways that they fall back into love.

Following her breakup, Gillies grabs her two sons and leaves the idyllic rural life of Lorain, Ohio, and her teaching position at Oberlin College, where her husband teaches English, for her parents’ apartment in New York City, where she herself grew up. Through a series of hilarious and poignant vignettes, Gillies shares with us her mighty struggles to cope with the loss of a relationship that she thought would last forever, the attempts to balance the needs of her two young sons with her own need for love and support, and the feelings of failure and insecurity that arise when she faces her parents. She writes, “It felt like nobody wanted us, and we needed everybody.”

At the height of her struggle to make her new life, Gillies flies back to Ohio to finalize her divorce from her husband, Josiah. Her heart aches, for even though she is familiar with the abstract idea of getting divorced, the very act of getting divorced is emotionally violent. Yet when Gillies returns to New York later that day, the sun is shining, and Central Park West is full of promises and people. At this moment, of course, she starts her new life.

Shortly after her divorce, Gillies meets Peter, a single father, and falls in love in six seconds; one year after they meet, Peter proposes, and soon she embarks on the road to happiness and love. Through her struggles, Gillies admits that “everything that happens in your life, no matter if it is positive or negative, eventually makes sense. Many things are not perfect, but they are good enough, and good enough is all you really need.” Gillies’ moving memoir is sure to inspire others in their struggles to overcome adversity and find new hope through love.

 

In her best-selling memoir, Happens Every Day, Isabel Gillies discovered that her husband had left her for another woman. Devastated, she strove mightily to understand his actions when a friend told her cavalierly that such things happen every day. In the dazzling sequel, A Year and Six Seconds, Gillies, best known for her role as […]

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