August Wilson Century Cycle
By August Wilson
Theatre Communications Group

T’is the season of the boxed set, but this one has more significance than the usual holiday gift repackaging. This is the first physical embodiment of a singular achievement—ten plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century, which together tell a long story of African American survival. It is the first time the plays of August Wilson have been collected to tell that story chronologically.

Since Wilson completed the cycle shortly before his untimely death in 2005, the nature and extent of this achievement is slowly being recognized. No American playwright of any color has come close to a series of ten major plays like this, or participated in the acclaimed productions of all their plays. Many others helped this process in vital ways, but even so it’s fair to say that August Wilson transformed and enriched American theatre as no individual has ever done.

From “Gem of the Ocean” (set in 1904) to “Radio Golf” (1997) and including “Fences,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Jitney” and “The Piano Lesson”--each play is carefully true to its time, yet there are few historic events even mentioned, and the characters are ordinary people—predominately in the same Pittsburgh neighborhood. The most obvious virtue of these plays is their language—a version of black speech that is at once authentic and Wilson’s own poetry-- and this alone makes these plays unusually good to read as well as to see performed.

With this set it’s possible to feel the changes and the continuities in African American culture through the century. The reader is aided in this by recurring and even legendary characters, and by ancestors and descendants in the same family—and perhaps most hauntingly, in the fate of a single house.

In this boxed set, each play has a foreword by such luminaries as Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, playwright Tony Kushner, writer Ishmael Reed, actor Laurence Fishburne and former theatre critic Frank Rich. Kushner writes that Wilson grappled with theological questions: “Eugene O’Neill, the playwright August Wilson most resembles, did that.” Reed writes that Wilson’s “ear was so good that his character’s words could be set to music.” Fishburne quotes favorite lines from “Two Trains Running” (he was in its first production, along with Samuel L. Jackson): “Freedom is heavy. You got to put your shoulder to freedom. Put your shoulder to it and hope your back holds up.”

There couldn’t be a better introduction to Wilson’s work than the intro to the series by New Yorker drama critic John Lahr. The cover for the set has a great photo of the author, taken in the last year or so of his life. The set lists at $200 and can be purchased for $126, so it’s definitely a gift item. And if you don’t have someone to give it to, think about gifting your favorite local library.

Soldier's Heart
Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point
By Elizabeth D. Samet
Farrar, Strau and Giroux

When she decided to apply to teach literature at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Elizabeth Samet had several things going for her. Her father had been a soldier, and her scholarly interest led her to the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. She was also athletic, which helped at this "relentlessly physical place." But for a graduate of Harvard and Yale, there was still a great deal of strangeness ahead. Her English literature and composition students were also learning to fire machine guns and to defuse improvised explosive devices. Embraced in a caring but sometimes claustrophobic community, she was awash in West Point culture and Army acronyms. And then came 9/11 and Iraq, which meant that her students were graduating into immediate mortal danger.

But during her decade of teaching, Samet moved from OBE (overcome by events) to insight, leading to this combination of memoir and meditation, scholarship and self-scrutiny, observation and commentary. Her gracefully written book, "Soldier's Heart," concerns West Point and her role there, most often in the context of larger questions (courage and sacrifice, obedience and moral judgment, Iraq and Abu Ghraib). It most compellingly provides portraits of young men and women charged with leading the U.S. military.

This review continues at the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

The American Discovery of Europe
By Jack D. Forbes
Illinois University Press

Did Columbus discover America, or did America discover Columbus? Did Columbus meet Native Americans for the first time in 1492 when he sailed the ocean blue—an event marked today by Columbus Day—or did he meet two American Indians 15 years earlier, in Ireland? And did that meeting inspire him to make his voyages?

That’s one of the contentions and suggestions that run counter to the history we think we know in this book by Jack D. Forbes, professor emeritis of Native American Studies and Anthropology at UC Davis. How did these Indians get to Galway Bay? Forbes marshals evidence to show that Natives of the North and South Americas had impressive maritime traditions and skills, and knowledge of the strong ocean currents that led to Ireland, among other places. They may have been following migrating American sea turtles there for centuries. Forbes mentions in particular the Red Paint People from Maine who left evidence of their sea travels and culture in Norway and elsewhere.

Native seafarers from the Caribbean and the East Coast of North America are most likely to have made it to Europe, by design or stormy accident, though Inuits probably got to Scandinavia and perhaps the British Isles. Forbes believes that tales of mermaids, mer-men and of “fin-folk” in Scotland and Ireland could be based on Inuits who wore the same skins as covered their kayaks, and seemed to be one with them. He cites evidence of Arctic culture in early England.

Later on, before slaves were brought to America, Native Americans were taken to Europe as slaves. For a century or so after Columbus, there may have been more Indians in Europe and Africa than Europeans over here. Forbes suggests that over the centuries Native genes became part of the pool in Africa and all over western and eastern Europe.

This book is not the only one that calls into question much conventional wisdom, from the actual age of humanity and the theory of migration from Asia to America across the Bering land bridge, to the idea that Native Americans were isolated, didn’t have seaworthy boats, including sails. Vine Deloria, Jr. is especially caustic on several of these topics in Red Earth, White Lies, for example. While Forbes is not as entertaining a writer as Deloria, he engages in careful and original scholarship, and brings a Native eye to what non-Natives miss in the available evidence. (There’s ethnicity in science, too, Deloria points out.)

Much of the relevant evidence for any theory on these topics is often pretty scanty, and as I know from previous reading (like The First Americans by Adovasio and Page) the state of actual knowledge about pre-history and early migration, as well as these aspects of history, is precarious and messy. And “established” conclusions are jealously guarded, not to be confused by new facts. So the best message from Forbes’ book for non-scholars may be: don’t be too sure you know what you think you know.

Naomi Klein

The Shocks That We Are Heir To

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
By Naomi Klein
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt

The connections are daring in journalist Naomi Klein's new book, "The Shock Doctrine," but the result is convincing. With a bold and brilliantly conceived thesis, skillfully and cogently threaded through more than 500 pages of trenchant writing, Klein may well have revealed the master narrative of our time. And because the pattern she exposes could govern our future as well, "The Shock Doctrine" could turn out to be among the most important books of the decade.

My review continues at the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review...

Summer Literature

Summer reading, and some are not. So what? Summer season reading as escapist beach recreation is just holdover East Coast chauvinism. Where there even are beaches in the rest of the country, it’s either warm or cool all year. What does figure as a summer season difference is academic freedom—that is, the freedom of people employed in academia from all the regular nonsense they do that has nothing to do with why they got into academia in the first place.

So for them, it’s a time without committee meetings, assessments, grade conferences, promotion portfolios, classes teaching the Same Old to the newly uninterested, and more committee meetings. For some, it is a time for writing and/or reading, and getting reacquainted with the Real Thing. It’s a time for, in a word not often spoke anywhere (least of all in academia): literature.

Following are considerations of several new books that unashamedly “valorize” literature.

THE CASE FOR LITERATURE is the title of Gao Xingjian’s Nobel Lecture, delivered upon his acceptance of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature, and also the title of this slim but powerful collection of his essays published by Yale University Press. It also represents the effect of the other books briefly reviewed here—they all make a case for literature as a living, crucial source of nurture and a noble human activity, in these times of doltish cynicism, profit-taking ignorance and commercially manufactured discouragement.

Gao Xignjian achieved his first success in China in the early 1980s with plays, and continued to write for the theatre, as well as fiction and literary essays through years of shifting political winds until he went into exile towards the end of the decade. His output only increased in the 1990s. Though his autobiographical novel, Soul Mountain, was published in the U.S. in the same year as his Nobel Prize, and remains his best known work in America, it was completed shortly after he left China.

For Gao, the purpose of literature is simple: the search for truth. “…its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known or thought to be known, but in fact not very well known, of the truth of the human world.” “For the writer, truth in literature approximates ethics, and is the ultimate ethic of literature.”

But this truth is not in the realm of metaphysics or ideology. “Truth is perceptual and concrete. Full of life, truth is available for human observation at any time and in any place; it is the interaction between subject and object.” It is the individual’s “testimony of his times.”

“The language required by literature comes from spontaneous speech that goes straight to truth.” Gao is a particular champion of the auditory. “The human need for language is not simply a need for the transmission of meaning; language is also needed for one to listen to, and for affirming one’s own existence.”

“It is my view that the only responsibility a writer has is to the language he writes in.” And that language must sing. “The musicality of language is of extreme importance, and music provides me with more insights than any sort of literary theory.” “If I fail to hear music in the sentences I have written, I acknowledge defeat…”

Gao stresses this rigorous program for the writing of literature, which earns it a place on my own short shelf of indispensable and inspirational books on writing. But the individual expression Gao champions should not be confused with the self-indulgent and programmatic confessionals lining the bookstore shelves. “In this postmodern age, which is concerned only with consumerism, the unchecked bloating of the individual is already a far-off myth…” Though he rejects ideological purposes, he does believe literature has social benefit, in the creation of empathy. “Yet through literature there can be a certain degree of communication, so the writing of literature that essentially has no goal does leave people a testimony of survival. And if literature still has some significance, it is probably this.”

Gao writes about his own approach to fiction and theatre, and (especially in a terse but harrowing chapter near the end) his battles with Chinese authorities, but all within the context of this literary purpose. Agree or disagree with his assertions, this is a book anyone involved in literature must read. In the main, it is a book that everyone should read to understand the activity of literature—the single voice singing a surviving truth beyond the amorphous noise.

"In Memory of Bruno Schultz" (1992)
by Tani Fred.

The casually serious literary reader probably has some grasp of national characteristics and literary history of England, France, the U.S., Russia, perhaps Germany. Beyond that, it’s individual writers, two or three to a country, and for some, maybe one, or none. Trinity University Press has embarked on a series of books to enlighten us about the literatures of other nations, through the words of the writers themselves.

Under the series editorship of Edward Hirsch, three volumes have now been published : Irish Writers on Writing (edited by Eavan Boland), Mexican Writers on Writing (Margaret Sayers Peden) and Polish Writers on Writing (Adam Zagajewski.)

Since I represent no one but myself here, I am going to be entirely personal in my responses. Of these three, the literature I know the most about—especially from school days-- is Irish, and indeed many of the names (from William Butler Yeats to Brian Friel) are familiar, though of the 77 writers represented, not even a majority. From the day in Catholic high school when a rebel nun slipped me her worn copy of A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man and into my immediate post-college years (when I hauled the heavy consequence of Richard Ellman’s biography of Joyce like a talisman on my goofy 60s/70s journeys), I pretty much worshipped James Joyce, and he alone was an education in the history of Irish literature.

However, what interests me now about this volume is the role of theatre in 20th century Irish literature, and it’s there in the first dozen or so writers represented. My first impression was that compared to the other volumes, this one seems more like a standard anthology, containing excerpts of literary work rather than a focus on “writing on writing.” But maybe the selection is more subtle. It’s certainly extensive, and though I haven’t read much of it yet, it seems substantive, and likely to repay careful and sustained attention.

After Gabriel Garcia Marquez rocked my world (as we didn’t yet say in the early 70s), my passion passed to Mexican writing, although the only writers represented in this volume that I read then are Carlos Fuentes and the writer I still read and highly esteem, Octavio Paz. Paz I believe was at Harvard when I lived in Cambridge, which is when I wrote my first review of his work, for the Boston Phoenix. So it’s a fitting delight that the introduction to his chapter quotes a poem by Celia Gilbert, who was my friend and colleague at the Phoenix in those days.

The essays and statements in this volume I’ve sampled are more directly focused on the subject of writing. They speak of its mysteries and discoveries, its ironies and its relation to history and real life. I look forward to delving more deeply into them, and to discovering more of the breadth and character of writing in Mexico, including the women writers included in this volume, such as Rosario Castellanos, Margo Glantz and Elena Poniatowska.

But the volume I most naturally needed to read concerned Polish writing. Polish literature is a complete mystery to me, as is my own relationship to that land. Though my last name is (I’m told) a fairly common one in Warsaw, I don’t even know if it is the real name of my father’s family, or an approximation adopted when his grandfather arrived in America, probably recruited to work in the western Pennsylvania coal mines where I was told he toiled for the rest of his life. We don’t know where he came from—not the town or the region. We don’t even know if it was Poland, especially since that country’s borders changed so many times in the past century or so. We don’t know where his wife was from (my grandfather, born in the U.S., married a Slovak.) Though my father’s family was Catholic, there were Jews named Kowinski, and I found record of at least one having died in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. The only other Kowinski who turns up regularly in Internet searches is Fred, an actor in Germany.

There was at least one Kowinski who married into nobility (the “ski” is supposed to indicate nobility, though so many non-nobles adopted it that it lost its accuracy). But almost certainly, my immediate family came from the peasantry. Perhaps by the late 19th century they were working class: coal miners there as well as here. We were lower middle class economically in my childhood, and still mostly working class culturally, though I interacted with my father’s family far less than with my mother’s. She was born in Italy, and my upbringing was among the Italian community—immigrants with a craft (my grandfather was a tailor), mostly from the same region and even the same village; I seemed to be related to many of them. All of my father’s family was native born, and I recall no knowledge or interest about any ancestral homelands.

So I approached this volume on Polish writing with real hunger. I was hungry for information, and for some sense of what in me might be related to Polish writers. In terms of history, though these writers grew up in Poland, many were forced into exile by the Nazis and the Soviets and their own Communist government. This different sort of exile became a preoccupying theme. Editor Zagajewski writes in his preface that in many ways the dilemma of World War II is the focus of this collection.

History earlier in the century was also traumatic, and so the marks of history are everywhere on these writers and their literature. Still they write of the working demands and mysteries of literature itself, as well as its function in their lives and the life of their country.

Boleslaw Lesmian (1877-1937) is the first writer in the collection. “But the more we reflect and investigate,” he writes, “the more we look more deeply into the essence of the thing and listen to the faint whispers of existence, the more our sense of reality becomes discriminating, the more its field visibly narrows.” He reaches for the transcendent. “But beyond the self there exists some tone in the soul: some elemental song without words, waiting for the necessary words to come in a creative hour…” Again, music.

Some of these writers are rigorously logical, others more poetic. Among the most poetic is Bruno Schulz (whose novel, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass was brought to the attention of English language readers when it was included in Philip Roth’s “Writers from the Other Europe” series for Penguin in the early 1980s). A truly remarkable writer, he recalls from his childhood being carried by his father “through the spaces of an overwhelming night, conducting a conversation with the darkness.” For him, literature is a door to such realities. “In a work of art the umbilical chord linking it with the totality of our concerns has not yet been severed, the blood of the mystery still circulates…”

For Schultz, literature is our version of the most basic and characteristic human activity. “The most fundamental function of the spirit is inventing fables, creating tales.” Julia Hartwig sees no contradiction between communication and the deepest mysteries. Concerning poetry she writes, …”although Kerouac’s slogan, ‘Write so the whole world understands you” may sound frivolous, it’s worth taking to heart. And it’s not at all in contradiction with Braque’s statement: ‘ Only one thing is important in art: that which can’t be explained.’ Because understanding in art is not always an intellectual act.”

And of course I glommed onto any tidbits that might tell me about Polish culture and society. Jerzy Stempowski observes that “The nobility did not derive from invaders and nomads but from the same settled population as the serfs.” Jozef Czapski narrates fascinating if horrifying experiences in World War II with a sense of national history. In writing about his own poems, Czelaw Milosz ruminates on landscape and character. Milosz is one of many exiles in this book—in his case, he lived many years here in California, which gave him the feeling of being in “some unearthly fields among the lotus eaters.” Of the writers here, he’s probably the most familiar to me, mostly through his admirable prose (even though he denigrated Arcata, the town where I now live, asking in his book Milosz ABCs, “Should one live there? Perhaps as punishment.” But he was writing about a time when smoke from timber mills darkened the sky; we see a lot more sunshine these days.)

Many of these writers who saw Communist social experiments came to oppose any utopian ideas, as Gao did. And Zbigniew Herbert saw the same social function for literature that Gao did, though in a different way: “In general, writing is not a medium of expression, of expressing oneself, but an art of empathy—that is, entering into others.”

It seems that many of these writers also practiced other arts, such as painting, music and theatre, or were primarily artists in another medium. Throughout this book, I get the impression of a real Polish literary and artistic culture, and community of writers and artists, supporting and of course sniping at each other, and taking very seriously their concerns and stances. They were very aware of western European art and literature (and American), but working through the dangers of xenophobia versus rootlessness, national character and universal principles.

The British playwright Tom Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia, and has long wondered what his life might have been like had his parents not fled during World War II. These thoughts bear fruit in his newest play, Rock & Roll. My relationship to Polish culture is even more complicated, tenuous and ambiguous. Yet there is something to it, and in this personal sense, this book has been like a missing link, or a key to an as yet vague and tantalizing lost home.

As a writer, of course, all of these superior collections provide inspiration and provoke thoughts and feelings. The Writer’s World (as this series by Trinity University Press is called) is a brilliant contribution to literature, which these days needs reminders of its importance in this increasingly frenetic blizzard of addictive technology and commercially encouraged ignorance.

Another timely contribution to literature is A New Handbook of Literary Terms by David Mikics from Yale University Press. It is clearly and crisply written, with concise yet rich and trenchant entries. You will find definitions and citations of relevant works on general topics (“culture,” “essay,” “nihilism”) and the more specific (“dream vision,” “New York school,” “quatrain.”) You’ll find “parody” as distinguished from “satire” and “burlesque.” There are older terms (“burden”), and newer (“language poetry.”) And if you don’t happen to have been a warring party in various university departments over the last few decades, you can recollect in tranquility the definitions of “Marxist criticism,” “deconstruction,” “discourse,” “semiotics,” “gender studies,” “new historicism” and “cultural studies.”

Scholarly without being “didactic,” accessible though not eschewing “lectio difficilior” (No, it’s not a Harry Potter curse—it means “the more difficult reading”), this book becomes automatically indispensable. There is something especially wonderful and important about reestablishing the integrity of literary terms, after the aforementioned decades of looking at the social effects and representations of literature from the outside—a useful cultural analysis—with unfortunate but characteristic overreaching to define the essence of literature in ways that just about killed it. Fortunately, the death of the writer didn’t kill writers reaching across time and borders as well as deep into themselves to reaffirm literature by creating it.

The Real Work Continued

Where are we now, how did we get here, what can we therefore do to save the future? These are the concerns of serious books in these serious, critical times. The climate crisis and related environmental catastrophes as well as geopolitical, social and cultural factors that combine to threaten the existence of civilization and humanity itself, form the context if not the content of our most important writing.

The present and recent past are the subject of the most prominent and popular of these books, such as Bill McKibben's Deep Economy (Times Books), Benjamin Barber's Consumed (W.W. Norton) and Al Gore's forthcoming The Assault on Reason (Penguin Press.) But there are also new scholarly books that examine more of the history contributing to the crises of the moment, and that go into greater detail about what a successful future could look like, and how to get there.

The mid 19th century era of industrialization is emerging as a key period in analyzing our present predicaments. In West From Appomattox (Yale University Press), historian Heather Cox Richardson chronicles the rise of a peculiarly American middle class in the post-Civil War Reconstruction and western expansion. She presents a compelling narrative of this era of racial tensions and the greed of the Gilded Age.

American Leviathan (Hill & Wang) by historian Patrick Griffin begins the story even earlier, in the westward expansion after the Revolutionary War. Like Richardson, he writes about savagery on the frontier, particularly against American Indians but also against the land itself in a war for dominance of all against all and for the accumulation of power and wealth. Yet Griffin also organizes a nuanced political argument concerning the development of a peculiarly American relationship of citizen and state.

Alan Trachtenberg emphasized the rise of corporations in the late 19th century in his classic book, The Incorporation of America, (Hill & Wang) just reissued in a 25th anniversary edition. Now Trachtenberg (Yale Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies) adds color and cultural context to this period in a collection of essays entitled Lincoln's Smile and Other Enigmas (Hill & Wang.) These essays expand on another important theme linking the past to the future: the influence of media--from photography to film, fiction to architecture-- in shaping perceptions. Though he begins with Hawthorne, Lincoln, Whitman and Mark Twain, he also takes us into the 20th century and into the modern city, with Horatio Alger, Walker Evans, Louis Sullivan, Hart Crane, Lewis Mumford and Wright Morris. These frequently provocative portraits provide the sense of the times that supplements broader narratives.

The benefits and destructiveness of technology have been major themes from the 19th century onward, and technology is certainly at the center of the climate crisis and other challenges to the future. In Culture of Improvement (MIT Press), Robert Friedel concentrates on technological developments and their relationship to their times. This is a thorough study, well illustrated, that emphasizes the social context--the expectations that new technologies fulfilled and in turn created for newer technologies. The significance of Friedel's central argument--exploring how new machines were conceived to improve the life of their times--is in the specifics rather than the idea of "improvement," a familiar corporate rationale for new tech. A particular virtue of this book is this examining of actual historical context, rather than imposing a perspective. But though it begins these examinations in the European Middle Ages, it perhaps does not go back far enough. Looking at the role of tools and technologies in indigenous societies and cultures, as well as in non-western cultures, would add valuable perspective, and probably needed insight. Still, this careful and thoughtful book contributes to a necessary knowledge of how technology both responds to society and shapes it.

And what of the future beyond the general suggestions of many present-centered books, including those mentioned in the first paragraph? Design for Ecological Democracy by Randolph T. Hester (MIT Press) details a vision for the future in buildings and related systems of the built landscape, which is essentially a vision for daily life in the future that combines and expresses democratic ideals and functions, together with sound ecology and better relationship to the natural world. This is likely to become increasingly important as citizens demand greater response to the climate crisis as well as energy efficiency, but without sacrificing choice or happiness. This book offers social and environmental principles as well as technical detail and practical approaches to design in real world contexts that respect all aspects of human life. Planners and landscape architects in particular should find it illuminating and inspiring, but it is also filled with ideas accessible and attractive to anyone who cares about how to save this world while making it a world worth saving, full of pleasure and fulfillment. For example: "For us to derive pleasure from our cities, we must learn again how to walk."

Degrees That Matter: Climate Change and the University by Ann Rappaport and Sarah Hammond Creighton (MIT Press) is even more specific, relating university communities to the climate crisis. Besides academic research, the university community can provide experiential learning and living experiments for larger communities in interconnected strategies for meeting climate crisis challenges. Without visual illustration and with undistinguished and often technical prose, this is more of a summary and a handbook than a persuasive or visionary work. Still, in the right hands, it can make an important contribution.