For Pleasure: Spring and Summer 2013

My major spring project was reading all twelve of the novels by Robert Heinlein in his Scribners series of juvenile science fiction.  I write more about them here.  These were originally published from 1947 to 1958.  Though I recall the Winston Science Fiction series from my youthful library prowling, I may well have read some of these in my teen years, since our public library held on to their books.  And though this spate of reading began with a library reject of the final novel in the series, I also found earlier ones in a university library's children's section, in their first editions.

Of this series Heinlein said somewhat slyly, "...my books for boys differ only slightly from my books for adults--the books for boys are somewhat harder to read because younger readers relish tough ideas they have to chew, and don't mind big words--and the boy's books are slightly limited by taboos and conventions imposed by their elders."  That discipline turned out to be good for Heinlein's writing actually.

After I finished these, I read several of Heinlein's stories in his "future history" series, collected in The Past Through Tomorrow (1967.)  The consistent future universe of these stories is pretty much the same as in the juvenile novels.

I read H.G. Wells novel Tono-Bungay, a first person account of the rise and fall of a great commercial venture based on a popular tonic that basically does nothing.  An early (1908) and lively fictional analysis of the advertising-driven consumer economy that became so predominant in the second half of the 20th century. I continue to be impressed by Wells as a wordsmith, and in this novel he is actively inventing a way to tell the story he wants to tell by expanding at least the rhetorically reach of the novel, and a little of the form.  Perhaps in the light of Dickens etc. and the amazingly predatory practices of the 19th century (when for example much of the forests of Europe and America were finally cut down) it shouldn't be surprising that the rhetoric of Wells' narrator in 1908 sounds so contemporary a theme:  "It is all one spectacle of forces running to waste, of people who use and do not replace, the story of a country hectic with a wasting aimless fever..."

Other reading was in connection with projects or new books.  I've already written here about re-reading Steinbeck's Travels With Charley.  I investigated several books about World Fairs, and carefully read an unusual one: 1939: The Lost World of the Fair by David Gelernter.  This combines journalistic research (presented as such) on the 1939 New York World's Fair, the famous "Building the World of Tomorrow" extravaganza, wrapped around a central love story that is fictional but (the author says) based pretty closely on fact.  Both stories are interesting--the fair and the affair--but I didn't get a sense of each being dependent on the other.  A hybrid that I enjoyed, even if I didn't see how it quite makes a whole.  It also led me to E.L. Doctorow's novel World's Fair which I've begun.

But apart from the very valuable sense of texture about the Fair, Gelernter's point of view on its utopian aspects (he concludes that we have no more utopias because by the 1960s we were living in the one the Fair proposed--namely, prosperity and suburbia) and particularly his evocation of the 1930s (especially the later years, the "high thirties") and what makes them unique, is strongly expressed, pretty convincing and certainly memorable.

Since this Fair and its historical context was my main interest, I read more about the thirties, particularly the account of the world situation and the 1936 U.S. presidential election in one of my favorite references, William Manchester's The Glory and the Dream.   (I still have the two volume deep blue covered hardbacks I bought for 10 cents each at a library sale in the early 80s.)  This led happily to a new book, Susan Dunn's 1940, which I write about in the post just previous to this one.  Dunn's book--and her particular praise for the playwright and FDR speechwriter Robert Sherwood--led me to a book I am currently reading, Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins.  Most of this book concerns the World War II years, so it follows nicely from this previous reading.  (I'm also planning to read one of Sherwood's Pulitzer-winning plays.)  In the accounts of the 1936 and 1940 elections, and the surrounding politics, I found several disconcerting parallels to more recent elections and politics.  I suppose that was somewhat comforting, if fatalistic in effect.

Apart from new books for review, a few D.H. Lawrence short stories, the beginning chapters of Arthur Zajonc's intriguing Catching the Light and some chapters on Shakespeare plays in conjunction with a production review, I think that's about it.

1940: FDR, Wilkie, Lindbergh, Hitler--the Election and the Storm
by Susan Dunn
Yale University Press

This very readable history is structured like a suspense novel--will FDR break precedent and run for a third term?  Can he pacify the public and his political opponents about keeping America out of war, while following his conviction that the U.S. is in fact threatened by the European war and must help England hold off the Nazis?  Will he win the 1940 election, and save the nation from delusional isolationists and fans of fascism as the wave of the future?

The fact that we know the answers really doesn't detract from the drama.  The stakes are that high, and Susan Dunn is that skillful a writer.  In the course of her narration she describes the political complexities of the late 30s, and highlights the fascinating people of the time--not only the obvious FDR and people like Harry Hopkins but notably the playwright Robert Sherwood, who became FDR's chief speechwriter.

On the other side she details just how intense the opposition was from congressional isolationists and FDR-hating Republicans, but also FDR's own ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, father to the future and non-isolationist President John F. Kennedy.  And the real wild card: the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh and his writer wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh.  Both were not only isolationist but believed that fascist governments like Hitler's and Mussolini's were the wave of the future ( which was the title of Morrow Lindbergh's best-selling book.)

FDR's delicate dance in preparing the U.S. for the possibility of war is especially dramatic as Dunn describes the weakness and unpreparedness of U.S. forces.  The national reaction to World War I was understandable horror but the idea that a European aggressor could simply be ignored was contrary to the technological capabilities of the time.  American culpability for the botched treaties at the end of the first world war that virtually guaranteed a second was largely outside the scope of this book.

Dunn's portrait of FDR as a master politician--and world leader-- is nuanced and informed.  It comports with the work of other historians.  I did miss however any description similar to William Manchester's, of FDR sitting on his boat for hours in absolute silence, and then emerging to lay out not only the Lend-Lease plan that helped save England, but exactly how he could sell it to Congress and the nation.  Perhaps the story is apocryphal, but it's a good one.

Her book however provides a fuller portrait than usual of FDR's 1940 Republican opponent, Wendell Wilkie, before and during his somewhat quixotic campaign, and  afterwards when he surprisingly became a valuable ally to FDR in the early days of the war. Yet Dunn's description makes this a believable and somewhat consistent twist. In a sad coda she describes how the two became friends, and died within a year of each other, Wilkie at age 52, FDR at age 63.

Dunn does not pretend total objectivity--she obviously finds the isolationists and Nazi apologists delusional. This is a very absorbing book about a fascinating and important time.  Taken together with Manchester's description of the 1936 campaign, it's clear that a great deal of what's going on now is not as unprecedented as it may seem, however outrageous and sad.  Today's climate crisis deniers sound a lot like those isolationist Congressmen, refusing to believe the facts.  The political hypocrisy of congressional Republicans voting down FDR's requests for military spending and then criticizing him for a weak military is also way too familiar.

This book is not only eye-opening history, it's a page-turner, too.

My Lunches with Orson
Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles
Edited and with an Introduction by Peter Biskind
Metropolitan Books

First the cast of characters: Legendary and iconic actor, theatre director and filmmaker Orson Welles.  In his final years in the 1980s, he lunched at Ma Maison in LA with the then young entrepreneurial director Henry Jaglom, who tape recorded their conversations from 1983 to 1985, the year Welles died.  Peter Biskind is a former magazine editor and author of books and articles on film and filmmakers.  He made a book of the edited transcripts, and this is it.

Which is where we start, with its ambiguities and uncertainties.  Does our first scene begin with Welles requesting that Jaglom tape these conversations, but keep the recorder hidden in his bag so he isn't distracted, as Biskind claims in his introduction?  Or, as Oja Kodar, Welles' life partner for his last 24 years and the person now in charge of his estate claimed to a reputable source, with Welles peering into Jaglom's bag to find a tape recorder, realizing Jaglom is taping these conversations without his knowledge or permission, and feeling betrayed?

We might actually start in the editing room, for as Biskind acknowledges, this is more than a transcription.  Biskind subtracted and also added, sometimes from other sources.  "Welles ruminations on like subjects, in fact separated by months or even years, have been grouped together."  We must hope that he took into consideration that people's opinions and even recollections change over years or even months.  Biskind  changed some of Jaglom's dialogue. His purpose was to present "Welles unguarded and relaxed, with his hair down."

Which brings us to the possibly unreliable narrator.  Is Welles an accurate reporter of events he witnessed, an accurate reporter of what people said?  That some of the stories he tells have made it into previous and otherwise reputable books (his assertion that FDR told him that "you and I are the best actors in America" appears in William Manchester's history, The Glory and The Dream)  is not complete proof, especially when he is the only source.  After all, he was a storyteller.

And then there's the missing context of just how serious he was being in his assertions--was he saying outrageous things just for the sake of lively conversation, or as a devil's advocate?  Guess you had to be there, and even then...  

What might have made a really valuable book is suggested in the introduction, when Biskind quotes advice Welles gives to Jaglom about his relationship with his crew on his first big movie, which Welles appeared in.  It's a fascinating view into practical film making.  Unfortunately, it's one of the few moments that actual film making is the topic.

Welles' provides a lot of opinions and evaluations, and some insider anecdotes that may be of interest in proportion to the reader's interest in the people he's discussing. But much of the book is simply gossip, and not even gossip about people that a lot of readers today care very much about, though they were icons of the past.  What Welles said about Spencer Tracy as a diabolical Irishman certainly runs counter to Tracy's reputation, and may well reveal a side to him, but who much cares?  We have the performances.

The mystery of Orson Welles is: how did such an awesomely multi-talented theatre and film artist, who made arguably the greatest American movie of all time in his mid-20s (Citizen Kane has led such polls for decades, until recently displaced by Hitchcock's Vertigo, a film Welles disparages in these pages), spend the last decades of his life being unable to finance or finish a film?  The middle period--frustrated by the Hollywood studios he'd offended, but still able to act in and direct both studio and independent classics--is at least comprehensible. His low budget Shakespeare films, flaws and all, are monumental.  But what about that Hollywood ending?  Generally lauded as America's greatest filmmaker for at least the last several decades of his life, why was there no redemptive final film?

Here and there, the conversations as presented in this book suggest possible contributing factors, including Welles' undermining insecurities and understandable sensitivity to yet more rejection.  These are the most painful and human moments.

There are informative passages, as when Welles describes European reception to his work (much greater than in America) and when he describes the strain of directing.  But though he talks about people he admires, these pages have him talking much more about people he loathes, thinks are overrated or just awful, or who have betrayed him, or all of the above.  While all of that might well be justified, it doesn't make for inspiring reading.

As a document of Welles' last years, this book may have value, assuming it is an accurate representation.  As a reading experience, it's too long for the form (though I acknowledge that others may have a greater appetite for dish.)  Structuring the most important content of  these conversations with context and some reporting seems to me a more fruitful approach than this.  Jaglom certainly comes off well, which isn't surprising, given that he is the source of the tapes.

Biskind's unevenly written introduction summarizes Welles' career while a selection from the cast of minor characters is included as an appendix, though again, if you don't know who he is, or who they are, why do you care what he says about them?  Scholars might, but for their purposes this book probably doesn't provide enough support.  It feels rushed and unfocused, like wine that's sold before its time.

Booknote: California Design

A Handbook of California Design, 1930-1965
Craftspeople, Designers, Manufacturers
Edited by Bobbye Tigerman
MIT Press

This is a companion volume to Living in a Modern Way: California Design 1930-1965, published by MIT Press in 2011. It profiles some 140 important figures of the period, including designers Charles and Ray Eames.  The profiles are illustrated, including some rare photographs.  It is a smaller format book than its coffee table size predecessor, but both useful (it's cross-referenced) and attractive.

Travels with Charley 
In Search of America
By John Steinbeck
Viking Press

I was reading an advance copy of Philip Caputo's forthcoming book on traveling across America with his dogs, and was reminded of John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley for the first time in years.  It was first published in 1962 when I was in high school, and I read a library copy of it then.  A few years later I bought the paperback, read that and kept among the books that traveled with me for decades.  It might still be around somewhere, misplaced.

  Steinbeck was one of the first authors (as opposed to the first poems or stories) of literary reputation I read independently, and probably the very first.  I read some of the volume of his six shorter novels that was on my mother's bookshelves (the same book I now have on mine) and I vividly remember reading his 1961 novel The Winter of Our Discontent in the Readers Digest Condensed Books version.  On the other hand, I didn't consciously think of Travels with Charley at all when I was writing my own book that involved traveling around the country, The Malling of America, though subconsciously it probably had a presence.

Steinbeck set out with his dog Charley, driving a truck topped by a custom-made "little house built like the cabin of a small boat" for his living quarters.  He named the vehicle Rocinante.  He equipped it with more than it seems it could hold, including guns and fishing gear partly for a cover story.  (I recall being particularly impressed by the typewriter and reams of typing paper.)  Most of the gear turned out to be superfluous, which he admits with the self-deprecating humor that characterizes the book.

It was a journey of ten thousand miles through 34 states over several months, with a few breaks to visit family and meet up with his wife along the way.  He made the now obligatory decision for such books to stay off the interstates. His stated purpose was to become reacquainted with the country he once knew but hadn't seen in decades. He began after Labor Day in 1960, at the age of 58.

He'd been "rather seriously ill" the winter before, he admitted, but even if the trip was taxing beyond his capabilities, he faced that possibility with bravado.  "And in my own life I am not willing to trade quality for quantity.  If this projected journey should prove too much then it was time to go anyway.  I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage.  It's bad theatre as well as bad living."

His son later put it in starker terms: Steinbeck knew he was dying, and wanted to see the country one last time. The year Travels with Charley was published, Steinbeck somewhat unexpectedly won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  The award caused controversy, with charges that it was not merited--similar to the furor when Sinclair Lewis became the first American writer to win the prize. Steinbeck mentions Lewis in this book, noting his few meetings with him in Lewis' declining years, when he was still scorned in his hometown. Apparently paraphrasing Lewis, he wrote : "The only good writer was a dead writer.  Then he couldn't surprise anyone any more, couldn't hurt anyone anymore."  Steinbeck mentions him as he passes Sauk Center, Minnesota, with its sign, "Birthplace of Sinclair Lewis."  "Brings in some tourists," Steinbeck observes.  "He's a good writer now."

Steinbeck died just six years later, at the age of 66, having published little of consequence and no fiction since this book. More than 50 years later, several of his novels remain integral to the mythology of America.  He brings in some tourists to Salinas, California.  He's a good writer now.

Travels with Charley is a personal account, the tale of a voyage which includes observations of what and who Steinbeck encountered.  The traveler's mood, his penchant for getting lost, spates of bad weather and the illness and treatment of his dog, are just about the only dramatic elements.  But some of his observations do suggest how America has changed, and how it is the same (or at least on the same track) as in 1960.  Steinbeck bemoans the disappearance of local speech, of the local in general, small towns or even the city of Seattle (though he gives more credit than some to corresponding improvements in living standards.)  He is emotionally bothered by "the frantic growth, a carcinomatous growth" of Seattle: "Bulldozers rolled up the green forests and heaped the resulting trash for burning...I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction."  This was not yet the popular theme that it became, for several decades at least if no longer.

On the other hand, while in our time commentators bristle at ostentatious Texas politicians suggesting that the state might secede from the Union, Steinbeck observes in 1960, "Texas is the only state that came into the Union by treaty.  It retains the right to secede at will. We have heard them threaten to secede so often that I formed an enthusiastic organization --The American Friends for Texas Secession.  This stops the subject cold.  They want to be able to secede but they don't want anyone to want them to."

Steinbeck was traveling during the 1960 presidential campaign between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.  This is a pivotal campaign in American history (and very absorbing to me at the time) but Steinbeck (a JFK supporter) found few people who would venture an opinion about it. A certain atomic age foreboding was also present, at least in Steinbeck's mood.

Some of Steinbeck's masculine insistence and style may strike readers today as a little too Hemingwayesque and anachronistic, but his misgivings about the effects of the march of modernity on the country he loved, especially the natural world, still resonate. He notes that cities are already ringed with trash--"In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index."

There is some deft description of what various parts of the country were physically like in 1960.  I find that the innocent wonder of my first reading at 15 or so sets unrealistic expectations for the actual book, but there are some fine sentences, and the sense of the man and his times that was worth revisiting, or let's say, visiting by the person and reader I am now, older than he was then.

Perhaps the most poignant passages for me this time were his descriptions of having a couple of curious wolves in his gunsights, knowing that--according to the standards of the time--he should shoot them because they are considered "vermin"--but losing the impulse to kill them, and choosing to spare them.  To the extent that he left a couple of cans of dog food behind for them.  There is an elegiac quality that emerges now and then, that seems best expressed in this account.  There is a sense of approaching the end, when his strongest desire is to leave as much life behind as he can.  And I expect there's something of the impulse I feel as the years go by: live and let live, gracefully and with mercy.

In the years since the book came out it has apparently inspired similar journeys (apart from the many taken for literary purposes), and this attempt to retrace the journey exactly by Bill Steigerwald, who claims that Steinbeck fudged or fictionalized various aspects of it. Steigerwald is unduly harsh about it, deriving much of his debunking from a timeline which may well have been different and rearranged in composition.  Some rearranging is actually pretty normal.  Spalding Gray used to call himself a "poetic journalist," and most autobiographical writing either purposely, necessarily, unconsciously or artfully changes what happened and in what order.  The travel and the book are related but separate journeys.

Henry D. Thoreau Essays: A Fully Annotated Edition 
edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer 
Yale University Press

 Here’s something you might not know about Thoreau: even after he was a published writer he worked in the family pencil business, and contributed several technical innovations to the art of pencil making. Here’s something else: when Thoreau stayed for a year in the cabin on Walden Pond, there were active railroad tracks skirting one edge of the pond, so every day as he was writing about nature, he heard trains roar by.

 These tidbits (gleaned from Robert D. Richardson’s excellent biography, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind) remind us that in the mid-19th century Thoreau shared a lot of recognizably modern life. That includes his experience as a freelance writer, hunting for assignments in New York and wasting time and energy trying to get paid on time, or at all.

 As a writer his engagement with the economic, political and technological contexts of his time emerges most directly in essays he wrote for periodicals. To his observations he brought deep scholarship in Western but also Eastern literature and philosophy, and a keen appreciation of Native American cultures. Best known—and best represented in this selection—were his moral and political passions on the subject of slavery, and all it meant to America and mankind.  His essay on civil disobedience is not only eloquent but historically important, a model for Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

 What distinguishes this volume however is not the selection of essays—they add only one short piece to those in such standard collections as Thoreau: The Major Essays published in 1972. This is the latest in a series of annotated editions of Thoreau’s works by Jeffrey S. Cramer, published by Yale in the same format. On facing pages, the outer columns are annotations and the inner two columns are text. To my eye this is an uncongenial arrangement, certainly for reading the text but also for the annotations. Either they crowd against the text, or the text is marooned between equal columns of white space. So the attraction must be the annotations themselves, which are indeed helpful as they clarify word meanings and topical and literary references.

 But with a couple of exceptions, the essays themselves are to my mind the least interesting of Thoreau’s writings. The books are more artful and entrancing, and the journal entries more striking and immediate. Still, these essays contribute to our understanding of Thoreau and especially of Thoreau in his times. They have their champions who will likely find them enhanced by the annotations.

 So precise were Thoreau’s observations of plant cycles and seasons that scientists today use them to measure the effects of climate change. But the essays in particular place him more actively in the public world. (Perhaps most interesting for today is the essay on a book that prophesied wind and solar power.) They help correct the quick stereotype of Thoreau as airily (or earthily) detached from his times.

Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art 
Vincent Katz, ed. 
MIT Press 

 That mid-20th century artistic innovations happened in New York, Paris and San Francisco is no surprise, but rural North Carolina? It’s all but forgotten now, but for 23 years many of those who defined American arts came to an isolated YMCA camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains to teach, learn, collaborate and create.

 Black Mountain College began in 1933 as an experiment in higher education, but the arts were always an important component, and so was the idea of cross-fertilization. The first inspiration was the Bauhaus movement in Germany, which advocated arts and crafts on an equal footing. Among the first Black Mountain teachers were Bauhaus painter Josef Albers and his wife (and craftsperson) Anni Albers. The remarkable landscape of mountains and lake and the natural quiet drew artists from New York and elsewhere to teach —some periodically, some continuously for years. Some students in turn became prominent.

 There were the inevitable problems of a small hothouse campus, of strong convictions, egos and hormones. But there were also historic moments that seem unlikely to have happened anywhere else. For example, there was a rare production of a play by composer Erik Satie, directed by future filmmaker Arthur Penn, with music performed by John Cage, dancing by Merce Cunningham, sets painted by artist Willem de Kooning, and starring Buckminster Fuller, who took time off from teaching how to make geodesic domes to play the outrageous lead character.

There have been other books on the subject, with the two I remember in reasonably new editions (The Black Mountain Book by Fielding Dawson and Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community by Martin Duberman) but it is often missing in accounts of either the arts or education of this era. This generously illustrated volume emphasizes the visual arts, but the text and additional essays cover greater ground. These include an essay by poet Robert Creeley about working with visionary poet Charles Olson—two highly influential literary figures in the 1960s and beyond. Though most of the big names associated with Black Mountain are male (including artists Robert Rauchenberg and Robert Motherwell, composers Lou Harrison and Roger Sessions, poet Robert Duncan), many women and lesser-known men were just as important there, and are well represented in the text and illustrated artworks.

This volume gives the flavor of what it was like to be a student there, especially for those from places and classes that made the New York art scene very remote.  Yet it was important to be in touch with what was going on, and the text reminds us that before the Internet or even many magazines dealing with contemporary art, the works on the walls of New York galleries were mostly inaccessible and unseen in the hinterlands.

 Since these legendary figures who taught there defined American arts and established American artists as world leaders, the Black Mountain College story is historically important. The setting—so different from the usual urban-dominated history—is itself fascinating, and an important key to a lot of the art work of the era. Within this narrative, there is the equally important sense of Black Mountain College as an experiment in education that was influential for decades, though the idea of experimental colleges seems sadly to have nearly died out.

However, when I was in college in the 60s, Black Mountain College as an example of both was very much alive.  The influence of Olson and Creeley (who visited my midwestern campus for an unforgettable week) on poetry, the connections with Cage and Buckminster Fuller, all kept Black Mountain's history in our consciousness.  But as an experimental college it was perhaps even more potent in those years of yearning for new forms in college learning.

Some of what Black Mountain and other experimental schools of the period invented became part of programs at traditional colleges like mine, with their source forgotten.   But other more basic ideas and innovations largely disappeared, along with the visions of education they represented.  (Wikipedia does list a number of experimental colleges influenced by Black Mountain.  I'm not sure I'd call all of them experimental.)

 With an emphasis on teaching process, Black Mountain College was (in the words of one teacher) a place where people were more interested in what they didn’t know than in what they did. These two aspects—creativity and the educational experiment—are linked, and this volume is a solid beginning in exploring those links.

The Man Who Planted Trees: Lost Groves, Champion Trees, and an Urgent Plan to Save the Planet
 By Jim Robbins
 Spiegel & Grau

 Jim Robbins is a science writer who has been frequently published in the New York Times. Ten years ago he began seeing the dense pine forest surrounding his Montana home die off, killed by the mountain pine beetle infestation enabled by warmer winters that is still destroying northern forests. It’s evidence of how global warming is adding to centuries of deforestation.

 By then he’d met David Milarch, a hard-living Michigan farmer whose life was changed by a near-death experience and a subsequent visit by angels who gave him his mission: clone the oldest, largest, hardiest “champion” trees before it’s too late. Scientists, not necessarily convinced by angelic instructions, were surprised they hadn’t thought of this themselves. If it turned out to be possible (and often it did), it made sense. This time-tested DNA might provide a better chance for survival.

 Robbins chronicles the ups and downs of Milarch’s efforts. One of his major successes was finding and cloning ancient sequoias in an unusually dry region of central California, conditions that global warming may well replicate elsewhere. But Robbins also writes about trees themselves, their barely understood wonders and the ways in which they nurture the planet, with clear objectivity but in a more complete way that mirrors the combination of standard and frontier science and so-called mysticism in Milarch’s world.

 Even scientists admit we know dangerously little about the trees and forests we’ve been relentlessly destroying. Robbins quotes Werner Heisenberg that “what we observe is not nature itself but nature that responds to our questions.” “As we look into the world of trees," he wrote, "we begin to realize that there are many important questions that haven’t be asked by scientists.” But Milarch’s quest is not some feel-good exercise.  He makes use of what knowledge does exist.  For example, he and others involved realize that just planting a lot of trees everywhere is not enough--planting the right trees in the right places is crucial.

 Along the way Robbins updates the exploits of Michael Taylor, the Humboldt State University grad who, while working at a Radio Shack in Arcata, discovered several of the largest redwoods in the world in the Jedediah Smith Redwood State Park, together with HSU forestry and wildlands professor Steve Sillett. Taylor (who moved to Hyampom, an isolated town of 261 people in Trinity County) expanded his search for champion trees to other species and countries, searching for them partly by intuition. His incredible record improved even more when he teamed up with Milarch. “When I travel with David Milarch, we really find trees. It’s beyond coincidence,” he said.

 But Taylor helped Milarch most by finding champion stumps on private land, where only the owner’s permission is required to obtain the cuttings to clone, not a lot of government red tape. They started with the immense Fieldbrook Stump just outside Redwood State Park. From the stump and the redwood already growing out of it they hoped to grow hundreds and then thousands of copies. “We can use this tree as a symbol of the reforestation of the world,” Milarch said. “This stump is back from the dead, same as I am.”

The debates and the science of global heating tend to stick to the air--the atmosphere and its direct effects on the climate.  Then come the effects on land, humans and animals.  Usually left out are two huge and hugely important factors: the health of the oceans and the health of the forests.  When it first started to function as Gaia, the self-regulating organism of Earth, it was a planet of seas and trees.

I've done just enough research on forests for a couple of articles and a documentary video to be horrified by the self-destructive mania of humans who have cut down their forests and destroyed the ecology that sustains them.  In the few places on the planet where it hasn't happened centuries ago (from Greece to Ireland), it is happening now.  This book quotes Milarch and others noting that the remaining American forests are mostly second and third growth, often of different species than dominated the landscape before Europeans arrived with their axes to grind, and are therefore less resilient individually to any extra threat.  In most places, there are only forest remnants, not large enough to provide the resilient ecology.

There are plenty of threats to forests coming from global heating--beginning with the kind of destruction represented by the mountain beetle infestations.  Without the carbon-cleansing of the trees, among other essential benefits, humans are toast.

HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years On Earth
 by Mark Hertsgaard
 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

 In 2005 environmental journalist Mark Hertsgaard began hearing some deeply unsettling news, primarily from scientists in Europe: climate disruption was no longer something that might happen in the future. It was already happening, and it would continue getting worse for at least the next 25 years, even if carbon emissions were suddenly slashed to nothing.

(In the book, Hertsgaard dates this insight to an October 2005 meeting with David King, science adviser to the British government.  But he's heard similar analysis before, and wrote about it in the San Francisco Chronicle that February--an essay which affected me deeply at the time, and led me on my own researches.)

 Of course, if emissions of greenhouse gases aren’t stopped, the future beyond 2020 gets even worse. But in 2005 American activists didn’t want to talk about dealing with the effects that were surely going to happen, even if they accepted this science. Al Gore and others thought this would distract from the efforts to control emissions so ultimate catastrophe could be avoided.

 In the last few years, when it became apparent that climate change was happening with unexpected speed, American activists (including Gore) began to accept that the world would need to deal with the effects (floods, storms, heatwaves, drought, disease, sea-level rise, etc.) now and in the near future, and they would need to simultaneously address the causes of global heating (emissions), to save the farther future.

 Unfortunately, they adopted the confusing technocratic terms of “adaptation” (dealing with effects) and “mitigation” (the causes.)  Hertsgaard had (to my mind) done a better job in that 2005 essay referring to "protection" and "prevention," but in this book he's deferred to the now conventional nomenclature of adaptation and mitigation.  He does pass on what is apparently a practical mantra for those involved in planning along both tracks: "Avoid the unmanageable, manage the unavoidable."

 Hertsgaard’s book distinguishes itself partly by dealing with what’s needed and what’s being done along both tracks. A lot is being done at the city, state and regional levels in the U.S, including in California.  He reports on Seattle, Chicago (where the city government has a climate plan and an office of climate change)  and New York, as well as internationally in China, Africa, Bangladesh and elsewhere.

  He finds public officials both talking the talk and walking the walk, like Kings County Washington county executive Ron Sims, who convened a conference in 2005 called "The Future Ain't What It Used to Be: Planning for Climate Disruption."  Sims combines vision, perseverance, practicality, humor and straight talk, always asking "the climate question" for any county plan.  Though a pioneer, Sims was not the only such official Hertsgaard found.

New York climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer described the various possibilities for Manhattan and how to respond, while believing that "we have a duty to the future" and to the past.  New York's efforts to anticipate their needs in dealing with flooding effects are especially eerie, after Hurricane Sandy enacted some of their fears.   (The book's research seemed to have been completed in 2010.)

 For all that's being done, the tasks along both tracks are still immense.  Looking at what's required in dealing with both causes and effects simultaneously, Hertsgaard writes a sentence that I've written myself: "...I have come to see the climate crisis as a major evolutionary test for our civilization and perhaps our species."

 The other distinguishing element of this book's approach is a very practical and personal framework: Hertsgaard is trying to figure out what the world is going to be like for his very young daughter back in San Francisco. That’s also part of the impact of understanding that the climate change future has begun. It was his first thought in 2005, he writes: “Chiara will have to live through this.”

 Hertsgaard travels, reports and describes, compares and evaluates with informed objectivity, but Chiara is never far from his thoughts. He realizes that stories—from myths and fairytales to comic book heroes—can tell her important things in addition to what science says.

 Just for its comprehensive and clear information and how it is presented, this is the book I'd recommend as a starting point on the subject. Because of the reporting on what is being done it's also more heartening than many, at least for the near future.  Not everyone is in as much denial as the oppositional and the popular media suggest. That only makes the final chapters more powerful, when he shows how little time there is to save the farther future.  Yet even there he finds practical possibilities.

Even with a book as solid as this one, reading about the climate future is not easy.  It requires emotional work just to allow into consciousness this onrushing future dominated by climate change. But of course it's  necessary to confront it anyway, especially now.  Hertsgaard ends with a letter for his daughter to read in 2020, when much more will be known about the farther future, depending on what gets done in the next seven years. Chiara will be fifteen.

America The Possible: Manifesto For A New Economy
 by James Gustave Speth
 Yale University Press

 James Speth is a veteran environmentalist, and this is the latest book by an environmental veteran about how Americans can successfully address a future dominated by climate change. But his subtitle is not deceptive: he identifies the economy as the crucial element.

 The book is divided into four parts: what’s wrong now, a vision for a better future, what changes are required to get there, and how to build a political force to make those changes. The future he’s writing about is not far off— 40 or 50 years. The climate change he’s assuming is caused by the greenhouse gases that have already been spewed into the atmosphere, plus what’s added as we reduce to 40% of 1990 levels at mid-century. If greenhouse pollution is not reduced and acceleration becomes uncontrollable, or there’s unforeseen abrupt climate change, then the farther future looks more like slow motion nuclear war.

 Balancing “realism and hopefulness,” Speth is nevertheless convinced (and he is hardly alone in this) that addressing even the climate change that’s pretty definitely coming will require major political and economic transformation. He identifies precedents and experiments that show promise, but he believes that only an aroused citizenry can create the pressure necessary for fundamental change. (Once called the “ultimate insider,” Speth now returns to Washington as a protestor.)

 The good news is that changes needed to cope with the climate crisis--different economic values, restructured institutions (including corporations), etc.-- are both needed anyway for other reasons (including oil depletion), and are likely to make for a better country and a better world. Such transformations may seem impossible, but they’ve happened before.

 Speth’s prose is lean and non-academic. This book is clearly organized and well sourced. For covering so much ground it is amazingly short: under 200 pages of double-spaced print, with another 36 pages of notes. So apart from coping with possible emotional shock, it is readable and re-readable.

 On first reading, I’d identify two particular virtues. One is a specific point: Speth recognizes that an economically stronger middle class is essential to its ability to cope with what’s coming, including higher prices for just about everything.

 The general virtue is that he shows how interrelated the problems are, and how comprehensive the change must be. He doesn’t dance around this, and his knowledge is itself reassuring. The ideas he discusses aren’t usually original, but how they might work together is what’s important.  Such conundrums as a steady state economy have been studied in more detail than the last time I checked into the subject.  That's another reassurance: a lot of work in each separate area is being done.  It just takes putting them together and acting.   Some of those previous books (Down to the Wire, Eaarth, etc.) also suggested this.  But Speth is perhaps both more concrete and succinct, folding everything into a comprehensive vision.

 But that very level of analysis, as well as the extent of the tasks, can be overwhelming. There is however another new book that mixes the scales of change to provide more to hold onto, as a companion to this wise and motivating vision: Hot by Mark Hertsgaard, which I’ll review next time.

For Pleasure: Fall into Winter

The DVDs of the BBC Sherlock series and my continuing interest in the Granada Sherlock Holmes series (with Jeremy Brett) inspired me to read (and re-read) Sherlock Holmes stories in my The Illustrated Sherlock Holmes Treasury (Crown 1984) which has many of the original illustrations as well.  Especially when re-watching various Granada episodes (based most closely on the actual stories), I would go to the stories themselves to see how they differ.  Fun and enlightening.  I came to prefer Holmes stories for bedtime.

I happened to see a recent video interview with J.K. Rowling.  She was asked the question: what writer would you most like to be compared to?  I think it was specific to the Harry Potter books.  As the question was asked the name E. Nesbit leapt into my mind.  And so it was with a shiver that I heard her say that same name, E. Nesbit.

English author Edith Nesbit is best known for her children's novels and stories, though she wrote other works and had an otherwise fascinating and dramatic life.  At some point at the old family home, I happened on a couple of her books that had belonged to my younger sisters.  I read them and was enchanted.  When I read the first Harry Potter book much later, the first author I thought of was E. Nesbit.

So I revisited one of those books, The New Treasure Seekers, and for the first time read the original, The Story of the Treasure Seekers.  It was a different reading experience but I wasn't disappointed.

I've also been reading (or re-reading) juveniles from the time of my youth or before.  I've mentioned some before, mostly the science fiction stories but also some sports fictions.  In a box of somebody's giveaways I came across one that I either read or could have read back then: Grand-Slam Homer, a Bronc Burnett story by Wilfred McCormick (1951.)  It did remind me that, next to listening to radio play-by-play of Pittsburgh Pirates games, I learned the most about the finer points of baseball from books like this one.  I learned very little from my own coaches--much more from coaches like Cap'n Al in this book.

Also inspired by viewing a DVD collection of Chekhov plays, I read A New Life of Anton Chekhov by Ronald Hingley.  But with no televisual prompting at all, I also read Michael Billington's 1987 Stoppard, on the plays of Tom Stoppard to that point. Billington is always interesting.  I found myself yearning for the music of James Joyce's sentences, so I began reading the stories in Dubliners, but specifically in the Illustrated (and annotated) Edition by John Wyse Jackson and Bernard McGinley (St. Martins) which I'd been given as a gift many years ago.  For similar reasons, I've reread portions of Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

Arthur Conan Doyle, Edith Nesbit and H.G. Wells were contemporaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  They all appeared in The Strand Magazine, sometimes in the same issues.  Wells has been a particular interest in recent years, so it was for an ongoing project involving his work as well as my Sherlock phase that I also read Arthur Conan Doyle by Don Richard Cox (1985) and The Doctor and the Detective by Martin Booth (1997.)  I'm evolving my own theory about Conan Doyle's influence on Wells.

Finally, as part of that ongoing writing project, I dipped into several books on and by Wells, and I've been reading with great pleasure as well as interest: Margaret Atwood's In Other Worlds, Robert A. Heinlein by H. Bruce Franklin, and particularly Alien Encounters by Mark Rose.

R.I.P. 2012

Among the authors we lost in 2012: Czech novelist Josef Skvorecky.  American science fiction writer Ray Bradbury.  Poet and painter Dorothea Tanning.  Novelist, playwright and public intellectual Gore Vidal. Polish poet and 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Wislawa Szymborska. Historical novelist Barry Unsworth.  Cultural writer Jacques Barzun.  Film critic Andrew Sarris.

Other writers not pictured: novelist Carlos Fuentes, Nora Ephron, ecologist Barry Commoner, Ernest Callenbach, Paul Fussell, art critic Robert Hughes (Shock of the New), Maurice Sendak, poet Adrienne Rich, poet Daryl Hine, science fiction writers Harry Harrison and K.D. Wentworth, novelist Harry Crews, poet Irene McKinney, psychologist Daniel Stern, music critic Charles Rosen, poet Jack Gilbert, childrens book author Jean Merrill, James Q. Wilson, novelist Rosa Guy, journalist Alexander Cockburn, Russell Means, art critic Hilton Kramer, British novelist James Riordan, spy novelist Dorothy Gilman, poet Reed Whittemore, Earl Shorris, historian Peter Connolly, childrens book author Jan Berenstain, William Hamilton, Steven Covey, Jeffrey Zaslow.  Barney Rosset, founder of Grove Press.  May they rest in peace.  Their work lives on.

Among these are authors I've read to my great profit.  But I need to recognize a few books in particular that were important to me.  One of them is Robert Hughes Shock of the New, which along with his PBS series, opened my eyes and mind to modern art.  I heard him speak once as well, and he was riveting. 

Another book that opened my mind was Paul Fussell's Class.  Even given his generally droll treatment, the idea that America even had classes was heretical--and I blush to admit, new to me.















I began reading Ray Bradbury at a fairly young age--pretty directly after the science fiction of the Winston series meant for young readers.  It was later on that I came to appreciate this novel, and then its brilliant screen version by Truffaut.  It gains in importance over time.

Gifts of Art

Rene Magritte: Newly Discovered Works
Edited by Sarah Whitfield
Yale Press

This is the season for coffee table art books, which have apparently outlived coffee tables.  Rene Magritte is one of a handful of modern artists who also fascinates a popular audience with his playful juxtapositions and enigmatic images.  Over the past couple of decades a number of works have surfaced purporting to be Magritte's.  This volume publishes color images of many that have been authenticated as true Magrittes.

For the Magritte aficionado, the imagery of many will be familiar--not only did Magritte often mix and match his imagery, but he created exactly (or almost exactly) the same imagery in different media (here it seems to be most often gouache versions of oil paintings.)  Still, there are enough new variations and several spectacular new images to delight even the casual admirer of Magritte's work.  This is a handsome volume indeed, with some images filling a large page.  The scholarly notes are precise but don't overwhelm the images.  Like many famous Magritte paintings, they delight--they make you smile, but also often with that air of mystery and melancholy.  I've always liked his skies, which seem to be between night and day.  Dawn or dusk--or both.  That's Magritte.

Here are three more of my favorites from Yale:

Ezra Stoller: Photographer
Edited by Nina Rappaport and Erica Stoller

Ezra Stoller's photographs of the work of modern architects helped make them famous.  This volume of his mostly black-and-white photography from the 1940s to the 1970s includes these photos, but also photos of other characteristically modern exteriors and interiors--everything from inside the United Nations to inside a Sears store.  The photos often concentrate on what's most interesting about a building: the play of light and shadow, for instance, or its particular place in the landscape (a small modern house at the top of a formidable rocky hill.)  A few of the interiors include people, which at this point help to place them in time, but most of the images are recognizably from the modern age--the pre-post-modern age, that is.

The selection and arrangement of images is excellent for browsing as well as study, and there are several introductory essays on the biographical, historical and formal background.  "My father was a storyteller," Erica Stoller writes, and this volume is like a collection of visual short stories.  It should please readers beyond those involved in either architecture or photography, but will be of special interest to them.

 Ancestral Modern
by Pamela McClusky, Wally Caruana, Lisa Graziose Corrin, and Stephen Gilchrist
 
Artists and others have long been fascinated with the imagery of Australian aboriginal art, both ancient and contemporary.  But beyond their interest as abstract images, there is often a specific relationship of the images to actual landscape, animals and historical events.  This volume matches images with the aspects of the real world that inspired them.  It should appeal to the wandering eye, open to color and pattern and to their relationship to nature, but there is also the scholarly support by two Australian and two American curators that adds another level of satisfaction as well as a permanent contribution to knowledge.

Roy Lichtenstein
James Rondeau and Sheena Wagstaff; With contributions by Clare Bell, Yve-Alain Bois, Iria Candela, Harry Cooper, Sara Doris, Chrissie Iles, James Lawrence, and Stephen Little.

Lichtenstein's images also combine popular fascination with artistic stature.  This volume expands on the familiar with a more complete view of the artist's work, plus previously obscure drawings and collages.  The contributors place Lichtenstein in art history and his own time, while the wealth of images (some 130 works) presented in this large format may fascinate and delight on their own.  

The Rise of Nuclear Fear
By Spencer R. Weart
Harvard University Press

For readers born since 1990, nuclear fear may be a concept hard to access. Thermonuclear war is something out of cheesy old movies or video games, and nuclear power is a running joke on The Simpsons. Even older generations that saw those movies without irony— on any given day nuclear apocalypse was possibly just around the corner—don’t think about it much anymore. Even though the U.S. and Russia have enough hydrogen bombs still pointed at each other to set civilization back for decades.

But as Spencer Weart writes, “Sometimes the most powerful things in our heads are the ones we don’t pay attention to.” It takes just a few new events to resurrect fearful images: the Fukushima reactor disaster in Japan, the specter of a mushroom cloud over an American city from a terrorist bomb from Iraq or Iran. Those nightmarish images were created over many decades, and Weart produces a history of that imagery.

At first it was extremely positive: the discovery of radium and early theories of atomic potential led some scientists and journalists to proclaim unlimited power for almost no cost, leading to the rich and gleaming White City of the future. But even in the early 20th century the atom’s equally immense potential for destructiveness was the subject of warnings and science fiction tales of total devastation: the Empty City.

  Then in 1945 came the reality. “With the news from Hiroshima sensitive thinkers quickly realized that doomsday was no longer just a religious or science-fiction myth, but as real a part of the possible future as tomorrow’s breakfast.” Weart chronicles the oscillating hopes for utopia and fears of oblivion, and the highly instructive repressions, denial and numbing during the most obviously threatened decades from the 50s through the 80s. He does so in even greater detail (and with better sourcing) in his earlier book (titled simply Nuclear Fear) but in exploring what he calls the post-1990 Second Nuclear Age  in this book, he demonstrates how this imagery echoes—for example, in the pictures of the Twin Towers falling and the devastation around Ground Zero, with their powerful reminders of the mushroom cloud and the Empty City of Hiroshima.

Weart also links nuclear imagery with more ancient and archetypal images, particularly of alchemy (as did some early atomic scientists.) The failure of the climate crisis to inspire motivating imagery, he believes, is because it had not yet found that mythological depth.   

  While Weart suggests that nuclear fear may have helped prevent actual nuclear war, he sees more virtue in disengaging the imagery from the realities, especially when it comes to nuclear power versus fossil fuel pollution—particularly from coal-- that has already killed and sickened millions.

As Weart shows by his approach and this book's content, the response to atomic power involves facts and feelings, in many different combinations.  (Sometimes when the public felt they were being lied to, they were right.) Weart is frequently perceptive in both the more metaphorical areas and in the relationship of imagery to fact in both of the nuclear arenas--as well as in their relationship to each other. His writing voice is clear and with enough personality to carry reader interest and confidence.  Because he explores the topic to the depth required for understanding it--and our times--this is an important book.  Together with Nuclear Fear, and a few other books like DeGroot's The Bomb and  Lindquvist's A History of Bombing, it is indispensable to that understanding.         

2312: A Novel
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Orbit

It’s 300 years in the future and planet Earth is predictably hot—“almost an ice-free planet,” with swaths of the northern hemisphere as hot as the equator now, and the oceans 11 meters higher. Florida is underwater and Manhattan is flooded but inhabited: the 24th century Venice. An attempted technological solution (to block sunlight) only led to faster catastrophe.

But humanity has also spread out to the farthest reaches of the solar system, establishing radically new civilizations on planets and moons, and inside hollowed-out asteroids. While Earth is ruled by “powerful nation-states that were also corporate conglomerates,” the outside worlds (great and small) are teeming with experiment and variety, fiercely independent and ingenious but beginning to cooperate in a new kind of economy. Humans are physically changing in response to their new habitations’ gravity and distance from the sun, as well as some genetic manipulation.

  Kim Stanley Robinson fans will recognize features of his other space-based tales (longevity treatments, other worlds as utopian experiments, artificial intelligence and its complications, even his previous vision of Mercury and to some extent of Mars) and science fiction fans will note echoes from Arthur C. Clarke (his “space elevator” technology) and George Zebrowski’s ground-breaking 1979 Macrolife (colonies inside asteroids.) But with a few new technological wrinkles he creates a plausible and expansive future that includes struggle and adventure.

  Sure, his vision of new worlds of great variety and culture, replicating past Terran civilizations and tenderly nurturing animal species extinct on Earth, may tend towards the idealistic or at least hopeful. It seems just as possible that they would replicate suburbia. But ripples of plausible hope are what Kim Stanley Robinson brings to all the planets on the table.

Part of the plausibility is the story, full of conflict and conspiracy, centered on a mystery. Part of the pleasure of reading it is the central if unlikely love story, and Robinson’s unique feel for the natural world (or worlds) and of humans in the landscape. There is also a central revolutionary act to revive Earth that I won’t give away, but it’s unique in sci-fi, and uniquely KSR.

Robinson’s singular championing of the primal and the natural world does not prevent a hope for grand technologies that “could at last begin to overturn Jevons Paradox, which states that the better human technology gets, the more harm we do with it.” This is a long (561 pages) and richly imagined book-- not nearly as long as his Mars trilogy, but with some of the same qualities. With a literary background (including Theory), Robinson at the beginning of his career made a deliberate choice to bring literary intentions and quality to the genre of science fiction. This is yet another proof of that experiment’s ongoing success.

Net Smarties

Net Smart: How to Thrive Online
By Howard Rheingold
The MIT Press

Howard Rheingold has a white moustache. He dresses like the prototype of an aging hippie, but he’s been involved in personal computer theory and practice for 30 years. His social network experience goes back to one of the earliest example, San Francisco’s legendary The Well. Younger readers may know him as the author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. So he’s positioned to speak to several generations on “how to thrive online,” including boomers.

  But this is not a simple how-to book, full of bullet points and illustrations (though it does include some cartoons reminiscent of R. Crumb.) Rheingold writes about how to use the net “mindfully,” which includes critically. Two of his five web literacies (along with attention, participation and collaboration) are net smarts and crap detection. Still, his stance is mainly positive on the benefits and the social change inherent in what he calls the shift from group to network.

  His approach is historical as well as theoretical, philosophical and practical. He pays attention to how adventures in cyberspace change individuals as well as society, and he considers several sides of those questions. He can be acerbic as well as inspirational.

  One of his main assertions is that “the emerging digital divide is between those who know how to use social media for individual advantage and collective action, and those who do not.” Originally the “digital divide” meant the distance between the individuals and communities who could financially afford to fully participate in cyberspace and those who couldn’t. That divide still exists, especially as full participation seems to require frequent new purchases of the latest devices.

  The author’s personal experience—as well as from his students and children—provides rare perspective on cyberspace. This is also a kind of guidebook to future practice, as Rheingold emphasizes the ethics of good networking and social collaboration. So part of his advice, in addition to how to manage information overload and survive on Facebook, is how to be a good participator and network citizen. Plus his emphasis on the skills of attention and critical thinking are useful beyond cyberspace.

    The book is pretty clearly written but it’s not a fast read because there is at least one interesting idea on every page, and depending on individual net experience, a number of challenging topics. It’s also meant to be read beginning to end, which is not exactly the Internet way. It’s about 250 pages of text plus lots of notes and a mediocre index, but what’s missing is a sorely needed glossary of terms as they are used in the book. Overall it’s that paradox of the instant-obsolescence computer age: a keeper.
                                                                    *

There are a few other books about these technologies and the real world for the computer literate on your shopping list this year.  Computing: A Concise History by Paul E. Ceruzzi (MIT) is exactly that: a clearly written history of computing, complete with names and places--and this one does have a glossary.  At 150 plus pages it's very handy, but still a solid and serious work.

Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age by Steven Johnson (Riverhead Books) is breezily written, with a point of view that's basically similar to Rheingold's, but of course it's a different book, with different perspectives, examples and elaborations. 

The Technology of Nonviolence: Social Media and Violence Prevention by Joseph G. Bock (MIT Press) is even more specific.  It is cutting-edge and global, with chapters on Countering Ethnoreligious Violence in Sri Lanka, Interrupting Gang Violence in Chicago and Crowdsourcing during Post-election Violence in Kenya.  It begins with theoretical frameworks and ends with evaluations and recommendations.  This is a thoughtful, sometimes provocative but well-presented and serious work, especially for those grappling with such issues in government, NGOs and even the corporate world, and for students interested in these fields. 
 

Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism and the Inner Life of Artists
by Kay Larson
Penguin Press

Kay Larson makes a convincing case that, after gathering particular artistic and philosophical strands together from others, John Cage added his own insights and innovations to become a dominant influence in 20th century arts. Those insights were primarily from his understanding of Zen Buddhism, and it is Larson’s singular contribution that as a Zen practitioner, she can elucidate them.

Larson was a distinguished New York art critic before she began Zen studies with John Daido Loori (whose book Cave of Tigers I particularly admire.) This unique view of John Cage is organized by portraits of other artists—those who influenced Cage and those he influenced—as well as Cage’s own biography. As the subtitle suggests, the emphasis is on their inner lives.

Among Cage’s early influences was the artist Morris Graves. They met in 1938 after a Cage percussion concert in Seattle that Graves disrupted, to Cage’s delight. Eventually they shared a house. Graves, who had traveled in Asia, introduced him to Zen, though flavored with his wild Dadaist demeanor. Then again, as Larson points out, “Zen wit” has always been a draw.

Cage’s convictions were eventually consolidated by attending classes at Columbia University in the 1950s with D.T. Suzuki, the first Japanese expert to bring Zen to America. Cage refined his artistic credo: “To use art not as self-expression but as self-alteration. To become more open.” This was the basis for his techniques of chance operations. According to Cage, indeterminacy short-circuits pre-judgment, so it pushes open the doors of the mind to the discrete reality of what’s present. It can also suggest new ways in which sounds or the 90 stories Cage assembled by chance are related—complex relationships emerge.

  Larson makes good use of Cage’s writings, which were themselves (I think) even more widely influential than his music, and in some ways an essential part of the music.  The sense of liberation those writings gave those who didn't have the opportunity to experience his lectures and performances, was inestimable, as Larson demonstrates.  For me, it was not that Cage's own aesthetic was the absolute alternative, but that there were no absolute alternates:

They ask what/the purpose of art is.  Is that how/things are?  Say there were a thousand/ artists and one purpose, would one/artist be having it and all the nine hundred and/ninety-nine others be/missing the point?

Larson's book is full of the creative figures of 20th century art and music who felt that liberation and who were part of living it for others, from the fascinating but relatively obscure to the well-known, including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, dancer Merce Cunningham, poet John Ashbery and Yoko Ono. Larson also writes about the impact of Zen on American arts in general, with Gary Snyder and the Beats. Together they explore an important substratum of particularly American culture.

John Cage (who died in 1992) was a presence. As a student I met him several times, heard him lecture and saw the Merce Cunningham dancers perform some of their collaborations. Several times Larson emphasizes the integrity of his presence, and his persistent open smile. That’s how I remember him. He embodied his world view more completely and serenely than anyone else I’ve encountered—apart from Buddhist monks.

John F. Kennedy
By Alan Brinkley
Times Books

I turned 14 the summer Senator John F. Kennedy was nominated for President and I participated in my first political campaign. I had relatives I could visit in Washington to see the Inaugural parade in January, and by luck and pluck that weekend I was one of the first non-dignitaries to shake hands with the new President. So it isn’t surprising that I read the major books (and some minor ones) on JFK through the 1960s.  Then came the revisionists, the debunkers, the gossip-mongers, and I mostly passed on those, while being aware of their main points.

So I came to this relatively slim volume for a balanced view by a distinguished historian and biographer. It’s part of The American Presidents Series, co-edited by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the historian who was a White House aide to JFK and wrote his own long book on this presidency.  I assume he wouldn’t let serious errors pass.

Yes, Brinkley writes, JFK’s health was more precarious, and he was more of a womanizer than was known at the time. Brinkley handles such revisions fairly, though overall he seems so impatiently determined to demythologize JFK that it becomes harder to understand how Kennedy had such an impact on his times, or why he was so popular as President (and remains so.)  But mostly Brinkley’s narrative is factual. It lacks the detail to bring events to life, but most of the time it generalizes judiciously with the perspective of time and newer evidence.

It will probably amaze younger readers that so much of such importance and drama happened in such a brief presidency, including several foreign crises culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as economic, political and civil rights struggles at home. I caught only one implied factual error, but otherwise Brinkley’s interpretations of events may not be mine but they are at least plausible. (I’d certainly place more emphasis on JFK’s American University speech and subsequent championing of the limited nuclear test ban treaty.)

  On the question of whether JFK would have extracted the modest U.S. presence from Vietnam had he lived to be reelected, Brinkley is doubtful. But he doesn’t explain why he disagrees with the evidence to the contrary collected by government scholar James K. Galbraith, or the statements by Kennedy aides, including Schlesinger, that JFK was indeed planning to withdraw. Brinkley dismisses those who see JFK idealistically, oddly lumping them together with conspiracy theorists.

 Still, as a brief primer on the Kennedy presidency this book succeeds pretty well. I wouldn’t stop here, though. For all their omissions, longer and earlier books by the likes of Schlesinger and Ted Sorensen still give a fuller picture of JFK and his times.

 

Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War
By R.M. Douglas
Yale University Press

1940s movies and domestic propaganda put an understandably noble face on Allied efforts in World War II. It was only in the decades afterwards that some of the morally questionable and transparently brutal counter-evidence emerged: not just the Holocaust and Japanese Army atrocities but the British firebombing of undefended Dresden, the American saturation terror bombing of Tokyo, the deadly irradiating of Nagasaki, to name the most prominent . By the 1960s, war novels by American veterans were revealing unflattering memories.  Revelations continue--in the novel By Blood, the previous book reviewed here, for instance, the reality that even after the war, even after some German concentration camps were liberated, Jews continued to live in them, because no other country would take them.   

But in today’s soundbite history, World War II has reverted to the purity of The Last Good War fought by The Greatest Generation. The truth as it still emerges is a great deal more complicated for what one historian calls the number one “multicide” in human history, with a minimum of 66 million dead, at least half of them civilians. 

And the death toll did not end with the end of the war. Historian R.M. Douglas writes in compelling detail about a little known set of events: at war’s end the Allies ran “the largest forced population transfer—and perhaps the greatest single movement of peoples—in human history.” Some 12 to 14 million German-speaking civilians, most of them women and children, were extracted from their homes in eastern Europe and sent to Germany “amidst the ruins of the Reich, to fend for themselves as best they could.”

Some were transported in locked train freight cars, scenes that we know from Nazi treatment of Jews, and some were held in concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Starvation, disease and abuse resulted in half a million to a million deaths. Douglas explicitly states there is no legitimate comparison or equivalence to the Holocaust, but some of the Holocaust’s victims saw a moral parallel. An Auschwitz survivor viewed with shame the silence that surrounded these events. “We used to console ourselves by saying ‘only the Germans are capable of such things.’”

German speakers were expelled and their property confiscated largely at the behest of host countries (Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland) because they wouldn’t be tolerated by their majority populations, though no evidence was offered for this claim. The massive transfers—or what more recently would be called ethnic cleansings--quickly turned into bureaucratic and international nightmares.

 Douglas relies on verifiable sources to describe these expulsions within the context of the relevant and tangled history of Europe, especially the legacies of World War I. They bear directly on the 1990s ethnic violence in the Balkans, and aspects of this story are way too reminiscent of the recent Iraq occupation. This is an absorbing and eye-opening account, an educational astringent and an antidote to the oversimplified and self-satisfied cliches about World War II that constitute the current conventional wisdom.

By Blood--Quality Summer Read

By Blood: A Novel
by Ellen Ullman
Farar, Straus and Giroux

In 1974 San Francisco, a professor on leave rents an office in an old building to write, but finds himself separated by a paper-thin wall from a working psychiatrist. Most of her sessions are masked by a white noise machine, but for one client she turns it off. That client’s plight becomes his obsession.

So there are two stories in this absorbing literary novel. Out front is an adopted young woman’s conflicted life that becomes centered on a search for her birth mother, as she describes it to her psychiatrist. But creating its own tension is the mystery of the professor who is narrating the story. While he seems a reliable (and eloquent) reporter, his own back story—doled out incompletely in a series of hints and asides as well as a few events—only adds to the creepiness of his insistent eavesdropping. It’s the era of the Zodiac killer, and we wonder who is this guy, and why is his university investigating him? On the other hand, we’re eavesdropping right along with him.

  This narrative device maintains tension, but the substance of the woman’s story is also dramatic. Without giving away too much, it’s important to note that in the early 70s, a young woman during World War II would be in her 50s. The professor asks the central questions that grip him and the patient: “Does it matter who your father is? Your mother? Who are the exact people who dropped their blood into the container that is you?” As the patient staggers through identities—from her upper middle class Protestant upbringing to the possibility that she was born a Catholic (which her father despises) or a Jew (which he despises even more) born in Europe, and then specifically in Germany—the professor listens, and even finds a way to assist in the search.

By the end the reader learns a lot that historical soundbites leave out, and the central questions are explored in several dimensions. The professor-narrator is clearly looking for some redemption in witnessing and aiding the unseen patient’s journey. Whether he achieves it may require the reader to go back to the beginning and start reading the book all over again.

The narrator’s descriptions of 1970s San Francisco (as a man in a Lesbian bar, and in the Castro) are vivid in themselves. The story is as gripping as in a mystery, and the quality of writing as well as the ambiguities and layers of meaning define this as a literary novel in the best sense. Any seeming familiarity in the terrain is deflected by the very specific and well-rendered characters and events. Though it's been out for a few months, for now it’s a summer read of quality.