Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life
by Gerald Martin
Knopf 642 pages

When One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in the U.S.—especially when it appeared in paperback in the early 1970s—it arrived as a revelation. As books editor for a weekly newspaper in Boston I met writers and editors who came up from New York, and the talk was always of this sudden magician, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. No novel astonished the literati as profoundly, but that was not its most impressive accomplishment. When anyone asked me to recommend a book they might enjoy, this one was the easiest answer for years, and it didn’t matter if the reader was a Cambridge post-grad or a waitress in western Pennsylvania, they were all blown away.

As chronicled in this first substantive biography of Marquez, it was the same everywhere. Praised first by writers and critics across the Spanish-speaking world, it outsold previous record-holders by a factor of ten. When it was translated into Japanese, a prominent novelist in Japan was so overwhelmed that he stopped writing.

One Hundred Years... is the natural center of this biography, coloring everything leading up to it. Though Marquez himself wrote about his early life and years as a journalist in a wonderful memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, Gerald Martin finds more to reveal, and does so with prose that sometimes soars into Marquez territory. He details more connections between the life and this most famous novel than were previously known.

Marquez had a compelling story anyway: poor and abandoned by his mother, raised by his grandparents in a remote Columbia town, he struggled as a journalist and a writer of obscure fiction and not very good movies. Martin notes the European and American influences—Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway—of the writer who would personify new Latin American literature. The local popular music (which he sang in cafes) influenced him, as well as Bartok and the Beatles (the album “A Hard Day’s Night” played as he wrote.) His “magical realism” also came from his grandmother’s stories.

Yet One Hundred Years of Solitude was just the beginning. Next he published a literary tour de force, Autumn of the Patriarch, with chapters of a single long paragraph and even of a single gargantuan sentence. It is at once a tribute to his modernist models and an exploration of Latin American history. Some literary experts consider it his best work.

But he didn’t abandon the other half of his astounding success: ordinary readers. Novels that followed that, like Love in the Time of Cholera, were his most popular. His Chronicle of A Death Foretold, Martin writes, printed more copies “than for any other first edition of any literary work ever published in the world.”

Martin writes well and perceptively about the different locales of his life, and how deeply Garcia Marquez felt connected to his home area, which was a cultural but also a class grounding. He follows the important relationships, providing vivid descriptions of the characters in the author’s life.

Martin notes his political notions and actions, his fascination with power, and his controversial relationship with Fidel Castro. His point of view on these matters and the time he spends on them was less of a problem for me than the falling off of focus in the last third of this book, and Martin’s increasingly querulous tone. Still, it’s a fascinating account of a singular life, and an admirable accomplishment. Insofar as Garcia Marquez is a hero—and in many respects he is, to me as well as others—this can also be considered an heroic work.

An artist's conception of a terraformed Mars, the subject of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, one of the guilty pleasures of this summer's reading, as noted in the post below.

Summer Reading 2009

If there were such a thing as summer reading, and maybe there is--in moments stolen from the reading and writing for projects there isn't time to accomplish the rest of the year--these would be on my 2009 list:

Frankly, My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited by Molly Haskell (Yale) is one of those guilty pleasures appropriate to summer: a book about a frivolous but fascinating subject by a terrific writer with great insight into film. Especially since Haskell began her career writing about women in movies, this is a great choice of subject. My favorite film critic--Mick LaSalle of the SF Chronicle--loved this book, so I am sure I will, too.

The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr. Beddoes and His Sons of Genius by Mike Jay (Yale.) A dip into the first few chapters reveals an absorbing story of late eighteenth and early 19th century science and society, centered on a fascinating character, Thomas Beddoes. This is intellectual adventure, of a kind with another new book, The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes.

The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel (Yale) is a book I'm already reading with great attention and pleasure. And of course I'm reading it in my library at night.

Another book I've started reading that doubtless will be a centerpiece of my summer is Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. I read his Red Mars on my recent multi-hour airplane trips, and I'm sure the last in the trilogy, Blue Mars, is also in my future. If I wasn't already convinced that Robinson is among our best fiction writers of any kind, I would find the first chapters of Green Mars the clinching and convincing evidence.

This new book by the author of Zen and the Brain continues his exploration of "contemplative neuroscience." See the post below.

Selfless Insight: Zen and the Meditative Transformations of Consciousness
by James Austin, M.D.
The MIT Press
342 pages with notes

Of the various books that explore relationships between western science and eastern meditation, or Buddhism in particular, James Austin's are among the most specifically technical. In large part, this book follows new findings in brain research conducted since his earlier well-known study, Zen and the Brain, and uses them to further the evolving study known as comtemplative neuroscience.

Austin explores such issues as attention, insight, the self, emotional maturity and wisdom, in the light of brain science and in the context of the practices and history of Zen. He also attempts to ask questions and make his points with broader contemporary cultural associations, but readers probably need an abiding interest in the physical workings of the brain to follow his arguments.

Noting Some Essentials...

The guidebook, selection, etc. is an age-old attempt to compress, winnow, collect the most essential information--to make a small library out of a big one. Here are a few new examples:

The Essential Lincoln: Speeches and Correspondence, edited with an introduction by Orville Vernon Burton (Hill & Wang) hits the highlights in 177 pages, including the "House Divided" speech of 1858, Cooper Union speech of 1860, the Inaugurals and the Gettysburg Address. The first speech is from 1832, the last is Lincoln's final public address in 1865. There are also letters that provide another view--Lincoln is sometimes bolder, more incisive, but also more philosophical and feeling. It's also interesting to read Lincoln with President Obama in mind, and note the similarities in style of discourse. Burton is the author of The Age of Lincoln.

The Essential Hospital Handbook: How to Be An Effective Partner in a Loved One's Care by Patrick Conlon (Yale) is a practical, up to date guide for a situation more and more people must face. Dealing with different kinds of doctors, and all the decisions and frustrations of the contemporary mess that's called medical care can be more than maddening. There are definitions of hospital terms, tear-out checklists for various situations, and the advice extends to communicating with other friends and relatives of the patient. There are also other suggested resources. This is a book you hope you won't need, but will be glad you have--even if only a few features turn out to be relevant to your needs.

Fighting Cancer with Knowledge and Hope by Richard C. Frank MD (Yale) is a more specific guide book, for patients, families and health care providers. The style is conversational, with lots of stories from Dr. Frank's experience as director of cancer research at the Whittingham Cancer Center in Norwalk, Connecticut. Again, it answers questions that become very relevant when the topic becomes a central concern.

Nanoscale: Visualizing An Invisible World by Kenneth S. Deffeyes and Stephen E. Deffeyes (MIT) is a compendium of a different kind: a collection of images of substances from water and gold to quasicrystals at the nanoscale: one billionth of a meter. Descriptions of each substance accompany the images.

Can Poetry Save the Earth? This book of appreciative analysis of poems by major poets might convince you. See review below.

Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems
by John Felstiner
396 pp. illustrated
Yale University Press

Back before heuristics, semiotics, deconstruction, evolutionary literary criticism, etc. etc. we had something called "close analysis," an attempt to read poems on their own terms. I thought this particular art was dead, until John Felstiner applied it to a range of poets writing in English, about aspects of the natural world. And lo! It still works.

At least it works for me. Felstiner adds plenty of biographical background, too, which is valuable in itself when you see the majesty of the lives of revered but not exactly famous poets like Kenneth Rexroth and the exemplary W.S. Merwin. Maybe I'm prejudiced because this is how I learned to read poetry--beginning with a poem Felstiner begins with, the ancient anonymous "Western wind, when will thou blow." And many of these are poets I especially admire, from Keats to Wallace Stevens to William Stafford, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder. But I also appreciate the resurrection of Robert Frost, not taken seriously in my college poetry classes, and Theodore Roethke, likewise, although he meant a lot to me back then.

But even those without sentimental attachment can profit from these cogent essays, and the poems they are about. There are some evocative illustrations as well. Plus the author's brief at the end, confronting the question of his title directly, and making a persuasive case for a craftily affirmative answer. "Can poetry save the earth? For sure, person by person, our earthly challenge hangs on the sense and spirit that poems can awaken."

For Pleasure (Spring 2009): Danger on Peaks, Gary Snyder's 2004 book of poems from Shoemaker Hoard, which immediately and maybe eccentrically became my favorite. It begins with a wonderful pairing of old and new poems about Mt. St. Helen's and our human power and apparent passion to destroy the world and ourselves, with a wise symmetry that continues throughout. Short, late poems and a group of recent poems with prose contexts are also wise and a joy.

I've also been re-reading William Irwin Thompson, preparing to review his latest. I read for the first time his book with David Spangler, Reimagination of the World (Bear & Co.), and Thompson's autobiographical riffs in that volume sent me to his only novel, Islands Out of Time (also Bear & Co.), his sci-fi allegory of the New Age set in Atlantis. I don't know enough about the New Age scene of the 70s and 80s to get more than his own more familiar obsessions, but I enjoyed the novel as a novel. A guilty pleasure was another in the Winston juvenile s/f series, and one I know I read as a pre-adolescent, Trouble on Titan by Alan E. Nourse. Although I remember reading it from the title I didn't remember the story, so it was new, and pretty good. It's this kind of book I like to read as I'm dropping off to dreamland. This spring I even read one of the Flash Gordon novels--terrible but a great giggle.

The original edition cover of a juvenile sci-fi novel I first read in this Winston edition, but read again this month...for (guilty) pleasure.

A fascinating book on the evolution of Charles Darwin, reviewed below.

The Young Charles Darwin
By Keith Thompson
270 pages Yale University Press

In the 200th anniversary year of his birth, and 150 years after his book on the origin of species, Charles Darwin remains the most controversial and in many ways influential scientist of the 21st century, as he was of the 20th and 19th.

Darwin and his theories are written about endlessly, but this book actually covers new ground: his youth, education and early career. Just a glance at the cover—not the inscrutable bearded face of textbooks and postage stamps, but a slim, young and handsome visage—suggests how foreign this territory is. Here are the foundations of his evolutionary theories, including his fabled five-year voyage around the world aboard the Beagle. But most telling, here is the person who is becoming Charles Darwin.

Keith Thomson is an assiduous scholar and an absorbing writer, so this book is a fascinating read. He won me immediately by noting that since the Darwin men had a limited number of first names (“Charles” and “Erasmus” mostly), they were known in the family by nicknames. So Charles Robert Darwin, the fearsome intellect and alarming revolutionary, was called Bobby.

Bobby’s career was hardly a straight line to evolution, even though his famous grandfather (Erasmus Darwin) proposed the basic idea. He studied first to be a doctor, then a clergyman. He was an amateur naturalist who acquired his first fame in geology, which was the first field to offer evidence of change over vast lengths of time, beyond the current Biblical interpretations.

He also fudged a lot of his early life in his own autobiography, and was notoriously lax in giving others due credit—even though one of his first discoveries was stolen by a friend and mentor. Despite his independent income, he worried about his career.

In the process of telling young Darwin's story, Thomson also provides a captivating guide to a unique time, when sciences like geology and the life sciences were really just getting started, and enthusiastic amateurs made real contributions (for much of Darwin’s life, there was no such word as “scientist.”)

This book solves the so-called mystery of why there was so much time between Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle and publication of his theory: it took that long to work it all out. Proposing a mechanism for what was supposed to be the work of the Creator required mental adjustments as well as much supporting evidence as possible.

Those theories remain essential to a lot of science and how we see the world, yet interpretations of them are still changing. "Darwin had the luck," said George Bernard Shaw, "to please anybody with an axe to grind." But now with this enlightening book there is a new account of Darwin’s own evolution.

European cultural history told through the changing conceptions of the Virgin Mary, reviewed below.

Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary
Miri Rubin
533 pages
Yale University Press

This book's title is both accurate and a little misleading. By calling it Mother of God, Rubin rightly indicates that this is a history from the inside, detailing the sometimes shifting conceptions of Mary but basically from within the Catholic Church, though views of outsiders are duly noted. It is also a "history of the Virgin Mary" but though substantial, it is a partial one: from the birth of Christianity until 1600.

This is a clearly written history and a very attractive book, typographically, in its layout and presentation, and particularly in its well-presented illustrations. Rubin finds intriguing relationships between perspectives on Mary and cultural elements of the time. For example: "Early Christian writers developed a manner of thinking about the conception of Jesus in Mary as an act of hearing...Those who favored the ear made words the agents of conception..."

Rubin's treatment of how prevailing or changing cultural contexts and often competing constituencies affected the interpretations and status of Mary provide the historical storyline. Outside this book's purview however are some of the elements that interest me most: both the pre-history (the mythological roots and prior stories that prefigure Mary) and the later history, particularly Mary in the Americas, and the institution in 1959 of Mary's assumption into heaven as Catholic dogma, which suggested to Carl Jung that the trinity was now a quaternity, including the missing feminine.

Rubin does select a few elements of this later history at the end of her book, so perhaps she'll treat it in a future volume. Considering all that she does cover, it's churlish to complain. This book is handsome and readable, and can be read as a fascinating cultural history--using Mary as a Rosetta Stone to view the music, art, drama, philosophical thought and prevailing conceptions in various classes at different times and in various geographical locations. It's a substantial achievement and a superior book.

CO2 Rising by Tyler Volk is a book no climate crisis denier can afford to read. It and another MIT Press book are noted below.

CO2 Rising: The World's Greatest Environmental Challenge
by Tyler Volk
The MIT Press

Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years
by Vaclav Smil
The MIT Press

These are two data-rich books. CO2 Rising is the one book climate crisis deniers do not want to read, because it lays out the data in detail, embedded in narrative and expressed clearly. You may or may not be charmed by the story of a carbon atom named Dave, but you will no longer have an excuse for denying the science behind the reality of a climate crisis caused by what humans have done and are doing in this industrial age so far.

Global Catastrophes and Trends is a different matter. It covers not a single phenomenon in depth, but many in relation to each other, to forecast the fate of nations and the planet. Smil selects and evaluates lots of data, and forms conclusions based on that. To decide what the future outcomes might be of what may be quantifiable in the past and present requires judgment, and a book like this must persuade you of the author's judgment as well as the soundness of the data. Alot depends on the selection of what's relevant and his appropriate use of the data he selects.

The data is often fascinating and sometimes eccentric, and Smil's conclusions aren't always the conventional ones, so the proof is in the reading. Frankly there is so much data, and so many kinds of it, that the journey can be overwhelming. Another problem with this kind of prediction is timing--and this book was finished before the current global economic mess and the responses, or even the election of President Obama, which can cast a new meaning on data, supporting different patterns. Whether Smil's approach is any better than past attempts to forecast probabilities quantitatively won't be known for fifty years I suppose, but there's probably something here to cheer, alarm or provoke everyone right now.

Visitors to the 1939 New York World's Fair look down at the car-intensive vision in the Futurama exhibit. The fix we're in because such a vision was realized, and how we can make it to our future is the topic of the two books noted below.

Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability
Daniel Sperling & Deborah Gordon
Oxford University Press

Fuel
John Knechtel, editor
Alphabet City Media/The MIT Press

To be properly shocked by the idea of two billion cars in the world in 20 years, you need to know that at present there are one billion. How can the planet sustain such growth at a time when cutting back on fossil fuel pollution--and possibly on energy use in general--is crucial?

Perhaps surprisingly, the authors don't emphasize slowing the growth in the number of cars, but in their vision of "Futurama III" (following the car-intensive visions promoted in the General Motors Futurama displays at the New York World's Fairs of 1939 and 1964) for the transportation world of 2050, people will use different kinds of cars in different ways, as well as a mix of transportation vehicles, not necessarily privately owned but thanks in part to computer power, always available. "A typical traveler might use one form of tranportation or mobility service one day and another the next, depending on the nature of the errand, time available, distance, weather and traffic conditions, and personal considerations." And of course they will all be zero emission vehicles.

This vision follows a succinct, crisply written but still thorough summary of recent transportation and fossil fuel history, which makes this a valuable handbook on these issues. As for policy, the authors have definite and clearly stated views on what will work and what won't in energy and climate crisis efforts, which add informed opinion to ongoing debates. All together, Two Billion Cars is an exceptionally clear and useful book.

Fuel is a mini-anthology of writings plus photos and illustrations. It also emphasizes mixed modes of transportation and "energy pluralism," while being perhaps even more aggressive in stating the need to change quickly from dependence on oil, and the practical difficulties of doing so.

The essays are a combination of pretty specific case studies and more general summaries, which is a good mix. As a physical book, however, this volume confuses me. It's heavily illustrated with photos, drawings, charts, maps, etc. but they don't seem particularly striking or useful to me (but then, I'm not a chart and graph person, let alone a fan of schematics) and the book is an odd size for an illustration-heavy tome--small and fat--and the binding works against being able to easily see the illustrations, or even keep the book open.

This might just be a question of style, and it doesn't grab me but it might be just the thing for others. The essays, though uneven, are mostly pertinent and sometimes provocative.

If you read just one book on the Climate Crisis this year, FORECAST by Stephan Faris should be it--partly because it's compelling reading. See review below.

FORECAST: The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley
By Stephan Faris
Henry Holt

There are plenty of books on the climate crisis, but a readable one is rare enough to fetch a Nobel Peace Prize. Though solutions depend on specific and possibly boring knowledge and actions, political and public support requires general understanding and passionate attention. This book is written not by a committee nor as the result of group findings, but by an individual writer—not a scientist or a politician but an astute and acute journalist. It is that rarity: excellently reported and written, very readable and therefore an important book on the most significant topic of our time.

It’s also a post-Inconvenient Truth treatment that doesn’t analyze or speculate but describes. This isn’t about the far future, but changes already underway that are bound to increase in the next few decades: “impacts that range from the subtle and sometimes benign to the horrific and potentially catastrophic…Yet we don’t have to guess at the consequences of a warming world…The future of our planet can be found now, on the frontiers of climate change.”

Faris reports from on the ground to chronicle drought and the ensuing violence in Darfur, hurricanes and the ensuing chaos on the Gulf Coast, the warming Arctic, refugees in Italy from environmental disasters in Africa (which displace more people than war). He writes about lesser- known effects, like the migration of tropical diseases northward, now including North America. Their relationship to the climate crisis is general: as one scientist says, we can’t say Katrina was caused by it, but we can say that the climate crisis will cause more Katrinas.

That the climate is changing is simply part of the experience of the people he interviews, and the reality hits in small, telling comments, like the first mate of a science vessel in Key West who acknowledges that the coral is dying fast, but adds, “it’s the best you’re ever going to see in your lifetime. So try to enjoy that.” Or the Napa winegrower who observes, “This is a beautiful place. I just hope we can even grow flowers here in twenty years.”

Better wines is just about the only positive effect of warming that Farris found, and though the projection that “lands suitable for producing premium wines could shrink by 81%” in California may bring short-term benefits to North Coast and Pacific Northwest wines, one grower observes that the medium and long-term prospects aren’t so good.

Faris can even breathe live into familiar generalizations with his prose: rising ocean temperatures “mean fiercer winds and crueler rains,” bringing “the beginnings of unprecedented meteorological violence.” His final chapter of conclusions is direct and devastating. Every breath we take contains more C02 than any human before us. If we simply allow things to get slowly worse, Faris warns, we will be overwhelmed.

So let me utter the cliche because I mean it: if you read but one book on the climate crisis this year, this book should be that one. It brings the problems alive and that's vital, because these are problems that threaten life for generations to come.