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Spend now, think later

Global and ravenous, modern capitalism has turned American citizens into mere consumers, people who are focused principally on their own gratification and essentially indifferent to the needs of the larger society. This, in a nutshell, is Paul Roberts’ thesis in The Impulse Society.
NonfictionEnvironment

Measuring mankind’s impact

Review by Alison Hood

Ah, we humans, what have we wrought? Essayist and naturalist Diane Ackerman (author of A Natural History of the Senses, The Zookeeper’s Wife and many other books) tackles this musing—and not merely rhetorical—question in The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us, examining what geologists are calling our current epoch, the Anthropocene, or Human Age.

This is serious ground, but Ackerman treads it with her customary graceful, imaginative and witty prose, infusing this manifesto-like look at the positive and negative impacts human beings are having on the planet with realism—and optimism. “Today, instead of adapting to the natural world . . . we’ve created a human environment in which we’ve embedded the natural world. . . . Without meaning to, we’ve created some planetary chaos that threatens our well-being,” she writes.

Ackerman avows, however, that she holds enormous hope for man’s future: “Our new age, for all its sins, is laced with invention.” And, true to her statement, the author takes us on a breathtaking tour of our “sins,” our successes and the incredible work and explorations that are shaping a new vision of life.

Five impressively researched sections frame our Anthropocene impacts (with considerable focus on climate change); discuss the innovations that might ameliorate those impacts; enumerate man’s interaction with (read: manipulation of) and influence upon nature; outline the intersection of our technological advances and nature; and explore our mind-boggling tinkering with the human body and psyche.

Ackerman’s immense knowledge of the natural world and her poetic and ethical sensibilities embellish an incredible journey that shows us orangutans playing with iPads, oceangoing farmers experimenting with mariculture, a botanist-artist who fashions living, breathing walls of plant life in cities; a project that puts animal DNA on ice for the future; and the newest work in the modeling of human body parts (3-D printing) and in epigenetics.

Who, what and where will we be as we lurch onward in this human-driven age? Perhaps all depends upon our ability “to think about the beings we wish to become. What sort of world do we wish to live in, and how do we design that human-made sphere?” Spoiler alert: This book ends optimistically, but with a caveat: “We still have time and imagination . . . and a great many choices. . . . [O]ur mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.”

 

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Ah, we humans, what have we wrought? Essayist and naturalist Diane Ackerman (author of A Natural History of the Senses, The Zookeeper’s Wife and many other books) tackles this musing—and not merely rhetorical—question in The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us, examining what geologists are calling our current epoch, the Anthropocene, or Human Age.

Medicine’s quirkiest visionary

While there’s something fascinating about old medical equipment and collections of oddities, it’s harder to truly appreciate the reality of life before modern surgery, let alone the ostracism and pain faced by individuals who suffered from conditions routinely corrected today. In this compelling biography of Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter (1811-1850), Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz brings a poet’s sensibilities to the life of an American surgeon who was at the forefront of advances in medical education and reconstructive surgery.
NonfictionMemoir

Piecing together a father’s hidden story

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In most biographies, an epilogue provides the story of what happens after the subject of the book has died or somehow left the scene. It’s a wrapping up, a life-after-life afterthought.

Will Boast, whose Power Ballads: Stories (2011) won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, cannily reverses this usual order by turning the epilogue into the entire story of his life until now. In Epilogue: A Memoir, Boast plunges into the depths of his own heart to probe the ragged mysteries that bring families together, hold them up through the years and cause them to fall apart.

Having already lost his younger brother to an auto accident and his mother to cancer, Boast, at 24, loses his father to complications of alcoholism. Muddling through his father’s papers, seeking consolation in women and wine and generally wondering what life will bring next, Boast stumbles upon secrets his parents had kept from him. He learns that his father had been married, with two sons, before he met and married Boast’s mother. As he attempts to get to know his half-brothers in England, he contemplates the light that these new relationships can shed on the truths of his own childhood, and he imagines rewriting his own family story.

Absorbing and agonizing at the same time, Boast’s narrative refuses to cover raw wounds, instead leaving them open to the fresh breezes of love and renewal that blow into his life after his father’s death.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In most biographies, an epilogue provides the story of what happens after the subject of the book has died or somehow left the scene. It’s a wrapping up, a life-after-life afterthought.

Working undercover in plain sight

You can get away with quite a lot if no one takes you very seriously. Like carrying military intelligence about the Union army through enemy lines to deliver it to the Confederates. Or hiding Union POW escapees in your attic while Confederate officers are boarding downstairs at your home.
Nonfiction

Weird science

Review by Heather Seggel

Upon hearing that Randall Munroe, NASA roboticist turned webcomic all-star, is writing a collection of “What If?” columns, a number of you will immediately make plans to buy the book. Don’t worry, you’ll love it. But this review is for the rest of you, who are curious if a bit confused.

Munroe draws the extremely popular webcomic xkcd. You may think you’ve never seen it, but pull it up online and you might well exclaim, “Oh, THAT guy!” (At least, that was my response). What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions brings Munroe’s stick figures and low-key hilarity to a formidable task: answering reader-submitted questions like, how many arrows would it take to blot out the sun like in the movie 300? Or, what would happen if everyone on Earth crowded into the same space and jumped together, landing at the same time? (Answers: It’s complicated; and not much, but the traffic jam when everyone tried to go home would be our undoing). The book includes both new questions and some favorites from the website, including a puzzler about whether each of us has a soul mate.

As the book’s subtitle indicates, Munroe uses real science to get to his answers, many of which are terrifying (do NOT try to collect all the elements in the Periodic Table), but his drawings leaven the prospect of total annihilation.

However you approach What If?, you’ll end up someplace different after reading it. I went from enjoying the humor to wanting to learn and understand more (while still laughing a lot). The perfect book for someone with insatiable curiosity, What If? is funny and fascinating in equal measure.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Upon hearing that Randall Munroe, NASA roboticist turned webcomic all-star, is writing a collection of “What If?” columns, a number of you will immediately make plans to buy the book. Don’t worry, you’ll love it. But this review is for the rest of you, who are curious if a bit confused.

A fearless pioneer on charting her own course

Pioneering journalist Gail Sheehy has lived a life jam-packed with work, love, politics and writing. Best-selling author of 1976’s Passages, which revolutionized the way Americans thought about the phases of their adult lives, Sheehy has spent a lifetime documenting American culture. Now in her 70s, she casts a retrospective eye on the chapters of her own life in an absorbing new memoir.
NonfictionMemoir

Looking death straight in the eye

Review by Alden Mudge

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, September 2014

“So, really, what’s a nice girl like me doing working at a ghastly ol’ crematory like Westwind?” Caitlin Doughty asks near the beginning of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, her by turns shockingly gruesome, mordantly funny and, ultimately, richly thought-provoking memoir about working in an Oakland, California, mortuary and crematorium.

It’s an excellent question. Part of the answer, we learn, lies in the death obsession Doughty developed as an 8-year-old after witnessing a child’s plunge from an escalator in a shopping mall in Hawaii where she grew up. One flowering of that obsession was a plan to create a slick, modern, hip—fun, even—mortuary she would call La Belle Mort.

But, Doughty soon discovers that “the day-to-day realities of working at Westwind were more savage than I had anticipated.” And she proceeds to write graphically—and wittily—about those realities: the transportation, embalming and cremation of all shapes, sizes and ages of dead bodies and body parts. Here is one of the less graphic passages: “For those of you who have not had the privilege of smelling Eau de Decomposition, the first note of a putrefying human body is of licorice with a strong citrus undertone. Not a fresh, summer citrus mind you—more like a can of orange-scented industrial bathroom spray shot directly up your nose.”

Doughty’s very unsentimental education at Westwind and, later, in mortuary school has turned her into a forceful and eloquent advocate for confronting the reality of death, as readers will discover in the final chapters of this memoir. “I went from thinking it was a little bizarre that we don’t see dead bodies anymore to believing their absence was a root cause of major problems in the modern world,” she writes. “Death should be known. Known as a difficult mental, physical and emotional process, respected and feared for what it is.” Smoke Gets in Your Eyes offers a path toward that knowledge.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Doughty for Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“So, really, what’s a nice girl like me doing working at a ghastly ol’ crematory like Westwind?” Caitlin Doughty asks near the beginning of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, her by turns shockingly gruesome, mordantly funny and, ultimately, richly thought-provoking memoir about working in an Oakland, California, mortuary and crematorium.

Bragging rights on the gridiron

Who cares that the Atlantic Coast Conference’s Florida State University won the 2013 Bowl Championship Series college football championship? The Southeastern Conference ran away with the previous seven consecutive titles, saw a conference member finish second in the 2013 series and pitted conference members head-to-head for the 2011 title.
NonfictionTechnology

The downside of constant connection

Review by Marianne Peters

I read The End of Absence with interest, because I am a member of what author Michael Harris calls the “Straddle Generation,” the generation born before 1985, the last one to remember adult life before the Internet. Harris compares this moment in history to the advent of the Gutenberg press in the 15th century, when the written word became universally available. “Young and old,” he writes, “we’re all straddling two realities to a certain degree. In our rush toward the promise of Google and Facebook—toward the promise of reduced ignorance and reduced loneliness—we feel certain we are rushing toward a better life. We forget the myriad accommodations we made along the way.” Through constant connectivity, he argues, we have lost our “daydreaming silences,” giving up times of solitude and wonder.

Harris’ book is a sometimes humorous, sometimes disturbing look at the relationships we have with the technology in our lives, as well as the human beings we know and love and increasingly view through the lens of our various technologies. As he points out, “When we don’t want to be alone and yet don’t want the hassle that fellow humans represent either, the digital filter is an ideal compromise.”

What’s more disturbing, Harris argues, is that we are allowing ourselves to be reshaped unconsciously, even biologically, sacrificing the ability to be completely absorbed by a story, keenly aware of life’s smallest details or attuned to silence.

On a hopeful note, Harris offers his own attempts to regain the gift of absence as a roadmap for those of us who want it back.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

I read The End of Absence with interest, because I am a member of what author Michael Harris calls the “Straddle Generation,” the generation born before 1985, the last one to remember adult life before the Internet. Harris compares this moment in history to the advent of the Gutenberg press in the 15th century, when the written word became universally available. “Young and old,” he writes, “we’re all straddling two realities to a certain degree. In our rush toward the promise of Google and Facebook—toward the promise of reduced ignorance and reduced loneliness—we feel certain we are rushing toward a better life.

How America measures up

Ah, the metric system—the logical way of meting out the world that confounds most Americans. Readers who have failed to crack its code will find comfort in John Bemelmans Marciano’s Whatever Happened to the Metric System? How America Kept Its Feet, an intriguing look at why the system failed to take hold here.
Nonfiction

The wilder side of children’s literature

Review by Jill Ratzan

Anyone whose life involves children’s literature has probably encountered the assumption that books for children are all sweetly sentimental tales of selfless trees and fluffy bunnies. In Wild Things! Acts of Mischief in Children’s Literature, librarian-bloggers Betsy Bird, Julie Danielson (also a BookPage reviewer) and their late co-author Peter D. Sieruta thoroughly debunk that notion.

In chapters focusing on book challenges, gender and sexuality, the lasting effect of the Harry Potter phenomenon and other topics on which authors, readers and arbiters of taste have often clashed, the co-authors present a history of the personal stories, sociopolitical debates and subversive details that underlie classic and contemporary books for children and teens. Both longtime fans of children’s lit and relative newcomers will find something to appreciate here, including a risqué image hidden in a Trina Schart Hyman illustration, a discussion of the apparently equally disturbing presence and absence of underwear in books for young readers and varying opinions as to whether or not Nancy Drew will topple civilization.

The chatty, humorous text is broken up by text boxes, “Pushcart Debates” between the authors, rare sketches related to well-known works and, of course, line drawings of mortified-looking fluffy bunnies.

Source notes and an extensive bibliography make the book ideal for university courses, but the audience for Wild Things! is much broader than just students. Anyone who loves children’s books will relish the historical facts, insightful interpretations and wild anecdotes in this highly recommended addition to the literature about children’s literature.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Anyone whose life involves children’s literature has probably encountered the assumption that books for children are all sweetly sentimental tales of selfless trees and fluffy bunnies. In Wild Things! Acts of Mischief in Children’s Literature, librarian-bloggers Betsy Bird, Julie Danielson (also a BookPage reviewer) and their late co-author Peter D. Sieruta thoroughly debunk that notion.

A journalist takes time to reflect

Journalists typically don’t like to write about themselves. It comes from years of writing in the third person and striving for objectivity. And with so many critics of the press, reporters assume no one likes them. Robert Timberg grapples with this issue in his moving memoir, Blue-Eyed Boy. After nearly 40 years as a journalist and three noteworthy books, perhaps he has a story to tell. But he also has self-doubts. Then he looks in the mirror and sees his disfigured face. It is an image he has been trying to forget since 1967, when as a young soldier in Vietnam, just days away from the end of his tour, he suffered third-degree burns from a land mine explosion. He finally decides to confront this defining moment of his life. “I want to remember how I decided not to die,” he writes. “To not let my future die.”

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