It Ended Badly

Categories Fiction

At a certain point in the days of my youth, Choose-your-own-Adventure books enjoyed a surge in popularity. I must admit I was one of the many in my generation who paged frantically back and forth exploring another planet or trying to find the lost treasure. I also have to admit that more often than not I was bitten by a poisonous creature or perished in a pit trap. 

I have to admit that my decision making, at least in novels of this sort, has a certain exuberance that overrides my common sense.  Offered the phrase You see a dark wood door;  from behind it comes the sound of uncanny howling.  Do you:

• Open the Door  (turn to page 58)
• Go back down the passage  (turn to page 84)

I'm going to almost always turn to page 58.  I've also now verified that this trait has continued into adulthood with my recent thumbing through several of the hundreds of available plots in Heather McElhatton's Pretty Little Mistakes.

An Anthropologist on Mars

Categories Science , Staff Picks , Nonfiction

Neurologist Oliver Sacks is back after a five-year writing absence with a new book currently on the New York Times Best Sellers List called Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.  I’ve just picked up my library copy and am excited to read it.  In the meantime, I thought I’d write about one of his earlier books. 

In An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, Sacks discusses seven medical cases that challenge our understanding of the brain and how it works.  Here are a few:

• An artist loses all color vision after a car accident and now sees and paints only in black and white
• A young man has a brain tumor that leaves him with no memory of events past 1970
• A surgeon experiences the compulsive tics of Tourette syndrome except while operating
• An autistic boy named Stephen Wiltshire uses his extraordinary drawing skills to communicate with the world

The Air We Breathe

Categories Fiction

Some people don’t like fiction that feels “cool,” where there’s a sense that the author has stepped back a pace from her characters.   But it can be fascinating to watch a writer use the formalities of fiction to explore her subject.  If you agree, try Andrea Barrett’s elegant new historical, The Air We Breathe. 

The novel is set in a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Adirondacks in 1916.  The inmates (who speak as a kind of Greek chorus in an unusual experiment in first person plural narration) are eagerly curious about the newest arrival amongst them.

How that new arrival changes their society results in personal tragedy for several.  And it serves Barrett as a catalyst to explore the interactions of science and social attitudes—attitudes toward medicine, poverty, immigration, patriotism, and war. 

Fire or Ice OR Trouble in the Horse Latitudes OR In the Year 2525

Categories In the News , History , Science , Outdoors & Nature , Nonfiction

Alan Weisman's provocative and deeply depressing book The World Without Us does offer a few optimistic scenarios. The good news (1) Look at the New England forests.  Early settlers chopped them down but later abandoned their farms, and now the trees are all grown up again.  In a few more generations the forests will look pretty much like they did before the European settlers came.  Already, three coyotes have made their way across bridges from New Jersey and into Manhattan.

The other good news (2) In the long run, global warming isn't that big of a deal, because in 5 billion years the sun is going to expand and suck in all the planets, anyway.  Also, given the wobble of the earth and its slightly erratic orbit, unless we've really screwed things up, another ice age is inevitable no matter what we do, and it certainly would be more convenient to have one in 14,000 years rather than in 1,000 years.  Think of New York City and England as tundra, for example.

The Last Secret of the Temple

Categories Mystery & Suspense

The astounding commercial success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, with its irresistible combination of cabalistic hokum and pseudo-historical authority, spawned imitations that left many book lovers with piercing conspiracy-fiction hangovers. It happened to me. But my breaking point came when I encountered "The Da Vinci Code Diet."  

Paul Sussman's new thriller, The Last Secret of the Temple, seems to possess standard ingredients found in a Da Vinci Code knock-off. It posits a deep archaeological mystery, involving a treasure from the Temple of Jerusalem, which the Romans destroyed in 70 AD.  It has a mysterious document penned in coded Latin during the Crusades. And, of course, it has the Nazis storming into the conspiracy in 1944. 

But Sussman aims higher in his intriguing police novel set in Israel and Egypt amid the violence and acrimony of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  

Uninvited Daughters

Categories Rediscoveries , Fiction

Odessa Levin lives in a Vermont saltbox cottage sparely furnished with Shaker pieces of the sort she always longed for during her Long Island-Jewish childhood, which was, let’s say, somewhat more baroque.

She’s single, and she has pared the complications of her life down almost to nothing.  But now she’s beginning to wonder whether that was a good idea.

Into her life walks Megan Vasquez, a lonely and eccentric ten-year-old who’s suffering through the divorce of her Mexican-American father and her New-Age, WASP-rebel stepmother.

Of course, as every experienced fiction reader or moviegoer can guess, befriending Megan will bring lots of sticky complications to Odessa’s tidy, pseudo-Yankee life.  But of course that’s the delight of Elinor Spielberg’s 1993 debut, Uninvited Daughters.

By the Light of the Beautiful Moon

Categories Rediscoveries , Outdoors & Nature , Children's Books

Who doesn't love the Moon, sometimes lovely, sometimes spooky, always fascinating with its undeniable influence over the time and tides of earth?

The Native Americans all over the continent mark time with the moon, but they count 13 of them. A lovely book that explains this is Joseph Bruchac's Thirteen Moons on Turtle's Back: A Native American Year of Moons (1992).

Long Night Moon (2004) by Cynthia Rylant describes the full moon in 12 months of the year, explaining the names of each. Another gorgeous book is by Penny Pollock, When the Moon Is Full: A Lunar Year (2001).

In How the Moon Regianed Her Shape (2006) Janet Ruth Heller borrows from Native American tales to tell the story of the moon phases. Included is interesting factual information on the moon, along with a list of names of each full moon.

We'll have a full moon this weekend, and if my reckoning is right, it will be the Frosty Moon. Or the Beaver Moon. But either way, it will be beautiful!