A Guide to the Indian Tribes of the Pacific Northwest
By Robert H. Ruby, John A. Brown and Cary C. Collins
University of Oklahoma Press

This is also an important reference work that includes up-to-date information that changes the story it tells.  Part of the invaluable Civilization of the American Indian Series at University of Oklahoma Press, this third edition is substantially different from the 1992 second edition, with references as recent as 2010.  It is still organized as descriptions of all known tribes of the present states of Oregon and Washington, plus some with origins partly or wholly in British Columbia, and partly in other states such as California.

The history sections were drawn from oral accounts by elders of the tribes involved (where possible) as well as standard sources.  These have been refined for this edition, as there is more to say in the contemporary life and culture section for many tribes.  While some of these sections sound as if they were pasted in from tribal publicity, it's undeniable that both contemporary cultural awareness--grown over the past generation especially--plus the financial resources from gaming have made substantial differences.

 For example, after a complex and often dismal post-contact history, the reconstituted Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde became the wealthiest tribe in Oregon, with a net worth of $100 million in 1998, due to the most successful casino in the region.  This has enabled not only employment for some 1700 people, but a number of other companies such as Spirit Mountain Environmental Services, as well as a health and wellness center, tribal archives and library, language classes, active attempts to reclaim cultural objects, and millions of dollars in charitable donations.

The Kalispel Tribe of Indians of Washington State and northern Idaho have established the Indigenous Learning Company, the first Native-owned Internet publishing company that published web-based educational materials--just some of what gaming has helped finance.  But even those tribes without their own casinos have established thriving cultural and environmental programs, and nurtured college graduates and professionals in many fields.  The persistent problems on Indian reservations in every part of the country are well known, but this part of the story isn't often told, especially in a total context of tribal history (which includes summaries of relevant treaties, court cases and government activities.)

In the late 90s I spent several days at a Seventh Generation Fund conference in Seattle, in the company of representatives of some of these tribes (as well as from elsewhere.)   It was an amazing experience for me, so naturally I looked up the tribes of the people I remembered most, such as the Makah and the host tribe, the Skokomish--in their section I saw a photo of the flamboyant Bruce Miller and reference to the comparatively low-key Vi Hilbert, both cultural leaders who were major figures in that conference.  Vi Hilbert was one of the most impressive people I've ever met.  It was like meeting the Dalai Lama.

But while I missed hearing more of the voices of such leaders and elders in this book, surely the book's value is a great deal in bringing together in one volume these succinct summaries of all these tribes, including the many that no longer exist as tribal entities.  Just to sense the scope of Native life in this region is a major effect, and now to see the stories move into the twenty-first century.

I think perhaps the cover is a little deceptive, though.  A number of the tribes most associated with this style of carving--the Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Coast Salish, Westcoast, etc.--are outside the scope of this book, being located farther north in Canada and associated islands.  This also makes the title a little deceptive, although these tribes are often referred to as Northwest Coast.

Otherwise, the accounts in this book are individually and cumulatively powerful.  It is an outstanding reference book, that builds upon the impressive achievements of the first edition and is inspiring not only for the stories it tells, but for the dedicated scholarship and years of effort that went into making it.

Atlas of Oceans: An Ecological Survey of Underwater Life
by John Farndon
Yale University Press

We live on land, but our civilization and even our lives would be impossible without healthy oceans.  Because we live on land we at least seem to know more about it, and discussions about climate change tend to concentrate on land-based effects and causes.  The main topic involving the seas is their level and the effect on coasts.  But some of the most profound and least understood climate threats involve the depths of the oceans.

As the title says, this book is an atlas, and in layout may remind you of other print atlases and even geography books.  But it does emphasize ecological issues, so while it has information that's fascinating and useful beyond those issues, it is directly relevant to today's most pressing concerns.  But it doesn't just name "overfishing" as a problem--it explains what industrial fishing is.

The writing is crisp and clear.  There are lots of photos (with good color especially for the remarkably colorful creatures of the deep) as well as maps and charts.  I find the layout pleasing to my eye and easy to navigate.  The range of subjects seems comprehensive and yet not overwhelming.  You can learn about endangered species but also the different kinds of life in different oceans, and the nature of different kinds of seashores.  The book is a nice size--big enough to do justice to the pictures and allow for this layout, but not so thick that you can't carry it around.  It's impressively published as well as well-written and thought out.  It's excellent and important.

I do have caveats.  I found one big error: A section midway through the book titled "Dead Zones" is actually about "the dark zone"--two quite different things. The dark zone is the very deepest ocean where amazing discoveries of unknown lifeforms have been recently made.  There is a correctly titled section earlier in the book about Dead Zones--huge regions without enough oxygen to support ocean life, due to poisoning by fossil fuels and fertilizer runoff.

Some people (like me) may get Dead Zones confused with other huge areas of the ocean choked with garbage--miles and miles of swirling plastics and other refuse.  These are called the Garbage Patches, but the section about them in this atlas is titled Plastic Soup. There isn't even an index entry for "garbage."  This lack of functionality, at least in this one instance, is always a problem for a reference book, but of course a much bigger problem when people are used to the ease of searching on the Internet.

These problems, as well as some (for me) unenlightening maps and charts, are drawbacks for a reference work.  But reference works often suffer from less than reader-friendly texts.  That's not a problem with this book--in fact, it's a strength.  You can read this book as a single story, a history of the planet from an oceanic point of view, as well as an explanation of current threats and exploration of the latest discoveries.

 The text has what so few reference books have: a voice.  The visuals illustrate this text as well as piquing a browser's interest and satisfying a roving eye. It's absorbing and satisfying reading.  I would  recommend it for young people in particular, especially because they may learn about what good writing is while they learn about the great waters, three-quarters of the planet, three-quarters of ourselves.

Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography

by Rob Lowe
Henry Holt

Yes, it’s a celebrity bio. Though it’s on the cover of Vanity Fair, it’s also in the New York Times Book Review. Pretty boy celebrities are people, too—and an actor who lives in a world populated by the most accomplished film and stage artists as well as the Washington political equivalents is positioned to have some good stories, and possibly even insights into these worlds and their impact on the commonalities of real life. This book has something to say on all these elements.

First there’s the journey to get to those worlds, and Lowe’s was an odd one: from a broken home in Dayton, Ohio to a serendipitous shot in the dark with his mother and her new boyfriend which happened to land them in Malibu down the street from the Martin Sheen family. So his 7th grade pals were Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen and Sean Penn. (If you're wondering how Charlie Sheen got so crazy, it's worth being reminded that his dad as a young man was fairly outrageous himself. Lowe has some stories on that score.)  Athletic as well as an artistic outcast, Lowe lost a race to Superman—or a kid who would grow up to play him (Dean Cain of “Lois and Clark.”)

Lowe broke into movies in the Brat Pack teen film era of the 80s. I was probably one of the few in my older demographic who actually liked those movies. But my chief curiosity was Lowe’s reincarnation as Sam Seaborne in “The West Wing.” His departure from the show after four seasons was never really explained. He’s informative but remarkably restrained about it. He only praises the show and the people involved, while letting declarative statements suggest deceptions and remaining mysteries. Watching people suddenly turn on you without ever knowing why—this at least is familiar outside Hollywood.

As well as rags to riches, there’s the fall (sex and scandal, ego and alcoholism) and resurrection: rehab, new mastery and success, a more balanced life of love and family. Easy to cynically recite, but worthwhile in the differences and details.

It’s a pretty well written book, though not to the level of Sting’s autobiography (Broken Music, or for that matter almost any memoir written by a Brit)—and yes, Sting’s in it, too. It too-regularly employs a revelation device (the girl named Sarah that turns out to be...Sarah Jessica Parker!) that Steve Allen was making fun of in the 50s. But the revelations are interesting anyway. Rob Lowe finds a tone that’s flexible and appropriate—that sounds easy but is usually hard to achieve. It also helps if your stories involve dating Cary Grant’s daughter and riding with 9/11 hijackers.  It's a different world, but how to be human in it?  That does have its fascinations for those of us who've glimpsed it, felt it up close, and then quickly gone back outside.

Modernist America:
Art, Music, Movies & the Globalization of American Culture
by Richard Pellis
Yale

Historian Richard Pellis begins with a good idea: twentieth century Modernism has been most thoroughly explored as a series of European inventions.  But what was the contribution of America, just as it was beginning to become a power in the world?  He begins well by describing modernism as an urban phenomenon, and the similiar functions of New York City, both globally and within America, to the European capitals.  He notes the American difference: the tremendous influx of immigrants in the early 20th century, many from Europe.

But this all turns out to be just a few paragraphs in a wide-ranging survey of just about everything in the 20th century's output of art, music and movies.  There are some insights about movements and individual artists and works, plus a fair number of cliches and a lot of (mostly conventional) opinions.  It seems to be uninterested in clear distinctions between modernism and the post-modern--another disappointment.  As a general survey it has some authority and interest, especially given the author's earlier work.

Quantum Physics for Poets
By Leon M. Lederman and Christopher T. Hill
Prometheus Books

In a way, each new development in physics reorders the whole field, changing the context. So books that cover a lot of the same ground appear every year. Still, it's interesting that a century after the major insights of quantum physics were first proposed, the topic remains remote to many if not most people.

Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman and Christopher Hill have written a pretty thorough book for non-physicists on quantum physics.  It is pretty decently published as well--nice size and heft, clear print (though a bit crowded.)  Their attempts to be engaging, when they fail, don't fail too badly, and aren't insulting.  There's not much math, but a lot of graphs and diagrams, so you need that sort of intelligence to follow it well.

But it isn't a book for poets--that is, there's nothing that makes it a book on quantum physics that's particularly for poets.  "Poets" is I suppose a stand-in for "non-physicists" or (in the academic setting where this book is likely to find its readership) non-majors.  It could be another way of saying "Quantum Physics for Dummies" but it doesn't really have that tone.  Quantum physics certainly has attractions for poets, though probably more for the quirky words like quarks and leptons.  Those of a poetically philosophical or poetically political etc. bent have always been fascinated by the concepts, but there's little here that relates to their source documents. 

Non-physicists, particularly in the computer world, will probably be interested in the too-brief final chapter, "Quantum Physics for Millennium III."  Of all the paradoxes that quantum physics introduces, the one that fascinates me the most is the success of quantum mechanics in actually working (it's essential in a lot of electronic devices, including computers) while quantum theory is still a complete failure--that is, no one can prove their theories of why and how, and most of them sound ridiculous.  Now there's something that will interest poets.        

The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir
by Leslie Marmon Silko
Viking

If somehow this civilization survives much longer, I expect that Leslie Marmon Silko will be judged a major American writer--especially because in order to survive, it’s likely this civilization will need to pay attention to her perspective. While Ceremony, her first novel, is her most familiar (partly because its handy brevity makes it teachable), her most important work is probably her powerful epic novel, Almanac of the Dead. Twenty years after it was published, it still has a lot of truth to tell about America today.

From her short stories and poems to her 1999 novel, Garden of the Dunes, Silko has been a stubbornly original voice. One of the baby boomer generation of Native novelists and poets that broke into the American mainstream, she is now an Elder. So this book is called a memoir, and though it is revelatory, it’s not like any memoir you’ve read before.

Though observations about her mixed-ancestry past float through the narrative, it is focused on the present, and her home at the edge of the desert outside Tucson. Its major characters are rattlesnakes, rainclouds, Star Beings, macaws, grasshoppers and rocks—particularly those flecked with turquoise. Her references include tribal wisdom and old stories, and the language of various sciences and metaphysical systems. She comes across evidence of generations of Native settlement every day, while the 21st century is present in plastic garbage and the steady intrusion of McMansions. She realizes that her old house will be overrun soon after she’s gone.

She sometimes seems to stretch into eccentricity, yet some strange stories--that snake oil works, that bees recognize people—come from history and science. There are sentences that shine like turquoise in the sun, but much of the value here is cumulative.

Those mining this memoir for specific secrets of her writing will probably be disappointed (though she does write while listening to Santana, sometimes through earphones.) "I make myself a fictional character so I can write about myself,” Silko says in the preface. And so we see her nearly always in solitude, though also nearly always in motion. People in her daily life are barely mentioned except in relationship to the world within walking distance of her house, and within the house and its perimeter. Here is the center of memory, history, family, geology, spirituality, coincidence, causality, the laws and mysteries of the cosmos, time itself. Because here is where it is being lived, where she is living it, and it is living her.

Everything returns to the dailiness of her relationship with the life of the natural world around her. It is the ground of her being, and the ground of all being on this Earth. That to me is what this book is all about.

Moon: A Brief History
By Bernd Brunner
Yale

As the only other world humans have visited and the one we've been watching from Earth longer than we've been human, the moon is a fascinating subject. It is also a very large one, encompassing astronomy and all the sciences applied to a physical world, as well as everything human from psychology and poetry to myth and myth-making. This book tries to at least touch all those subjects, and it has been praised in reviews, including this one in the New York Times.

I would also love to love this book, because I love the subject. But I find it crammed more than organized, and poorly edited. I began to sense a certain random quality in the introduction, as if it had been cut and pasted rather than written, and then I ran into several awkward sentences that slowed me down. I got as far as page 18 before I read of astronomer William Hershel that "He also left no doubt that he would prefer the moon as his preferred habitation." If I'd written that sentence in a high school theme, I would have expected some red circles. I don't expect to read such sentences (and this is not the only one) in a book published by Yale University Press.

As a book, it's a nice handy size, and some of the illustrations are handsome if not especially illuminating. I find the typeface annoying, especially the weird-looking question marks, and the narrow centered column of type is jarring. The sentences fight against it. As a reader, all of these things are important to me, and I'm not going to continue reading a book that frustrates me in these ways, unless I'm compelled by the writing or the need of information that only it can provide. The moon is a harsh mistress, but so is the book.

Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Missionary Mystic
By Michael F. Steltenkamp
University of Oklahoma Press

Thanks to Black Elk Speaks by poet John Neihardt, and to a lesser extent, The Sacred Pipe by professor Joseph Epes Brown, Black Elk has become one of the most famous American Indians in history. He was not a chief or a great warrior. The books are about his spiritual visions and beliefs. Like many, Michael Steltenkamp became fascinated with Native American spirituality and the figure of Black Elk. Like only a few, he studied with Joseph Epes Brown in college, and afterwards journeyed to Black Elk's native grounds, becoming a teacher in the Pine Ridge Reservation. Eventually he met Black Elk's surviving children, and claims to have become a confidant of his daughter in her old age. He learned of Black Elk's life after the period that Neihardt wrote about, when Nicholas Black Elk was known as Nick, a Jesuit-trained Catholic catechist or teacher who served as a kind of lay priest and missionary in Indian communities. Learning about Black Elk's work influenced Steltekamp to himself become a Jesuit priest.

Steltekamp wrote a book about Black Elk's later period as a Catholic cathecist (at the behest of Black Elk's daughter and others, he asserts) and with this new book he attempts a more comprehensive chronicle of Nicholas Black Elk's entire life. It is cast less as a biography than a scholarly work, in which he uses his sources and research to test the validity of what other books say--primarily Neihardt's. The impression is of fairness and care, though the Jesuits almost always come out the better. His prose becomes emotional, even scornful, when correcting misimpressions of Jesuits and Black Elk's Catholicism, and there are other passages that are at best passive-aggressive. His facts in these instances might be correct. But these sections and passages support strong skepticism that he has escaped bias. This then seems less definitive than a modern Jesuit brief on the outstanding questions about Black Elk.

Scholars I've read do agree that Black Elk, like the prophet of the Ghost Dance known as Wovoka who for most of his life was called Jack Wilson, was a proselytizing Christian, paid for that work. Both were obviously influenced by Christian doctrines and imagery. The argument seems to be whether Black Elk (or Wilson) repudiated his Native religious beliefs in favor of Christianity, or became disenchanted with Christianity and returned to earlier Native beliefs. This plays out in the argument over whether Black Elk primarily used the imagery and stories of Native traditions to explain Christianity to other Indians (as Steltekamp seems to say) or uses the imagery of Christianity to help explain the Native beliefs that were fast dying at the time (as scholar Alice Beck Kehoe suggests in her study, The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization, Holt 1989.)

But in a more general way I don't think that Steltekamp or Kehoe would dispute that Black Elk (and Wovoka) wove together elements of both, finding the commonalities, creating a synthesis of imagery and even practice. What made Black Elk Speaks so significant was the revival of disappearing Native beliefs about the relationship of humans to the rest of nature and to existence that were lacking in industrial culture, and in the prevailing versions of Christianity. Whatever the intentions of Black Elk or Neihardt, what resulted was perhaps overly romanticized, but it was the foundation of a new Native spirituality (as Vine Deloria, Jr. writes) as well as an alternative religious approach that both Native and non-Native Americans can consider and adopt or adapt. Deloria acknowledged the uncertainty of how much Neihardt there was in Black Elk Speaks, but found the question in the end to be unimportant in view of its effects.

So I would prefer to leave this book for scholars to test. As prose about the times and places of Nicholas Black Elk's life it can provide moments of interesting reading. But it just doesn't seem to me to be definitive even as history, without other scholarly reassurance that it isn't tainted by special pleading. In particular, I find troubling the differences in this account and the few pages in Kehoe about this period in Black Elk's life. They bear in particular on his relationship to the Jesuits, and their attitudes towards him.

I'd be more interested in a book that uses Nicholas Black Elk to discuss the issues of spiritual traditions within the Native community as well as the synthesis of Native and non-Native beliefs in our common community. While aspects of this book inevitably bear upon those questions, that daunting task was not its focus.

For Pleasure: Early Winter 2010-11

There wasn't much time for undemanded reading these past few months, but I managed some. I've continued a few nightly pages of Richardson's Emerson: The Mind on Fire, and am close to finishing it. Emerson's admiration for Bronson Alcott, the educator, reformer and daddy to Louisa May, suggested I might enjoy Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia by Richard Francis, new this past fall from Yale. But Francis' unsympathetic portrait of Alcott, whether that was intentional or not, soured me on reading very far into it. Alcott comes across as a thoroughly, aggressively, self-righteously and cluelessly self-deluded character, who made me so impatient that I couldn't bear reading about him, especially in this undistinguished prose. I sure didn't see any reason reflected in this book for Emerson to admire him.

I also followed up Thomas Peacock's comic early 19th century novel Headlong Hall with his Nightmare Abbey. It too was great fun to read, and as satire of both certain forms of romantic fiction and of various pretentious representatives of various pretentious ideologies and systems of thought, it is often remarkably contemporary. And still funny after all these years.

Reading Mark Rotella's Amore: The Story of Italian American Song (Farrar, Straus) reminded me of a book I bagged at a used bookstore some time ago that has been shelf decoration ever since: Schnozzola: Gene Fowler's Story of Jimmy Durante. So I finally read it, and what a book! It covers Durante's life and career in great detail for his early years (it was published in 1951, just as he was becoming the TV star I recall from my childhood.) Durante started out as a ragtime and New Orleans jazz piano player, became a nightclub star in the 20s, Broadway, radio and the movies in the 30s and 40s, and after his decade or so as a TV star, he became a recording star with several albums of standards and ballads in the 60s and 70s. Some of these renditions were revived in the movie soundtracks of Sleepless in Seattle and City Slickers, and his version of "September Song" is definitive, and heartbreaking.

The Gene Fowler book reads like a Damon Runyon story, with the real Damon Runyon as an occasional walk-on. Fowler suggests this is so because it is about the same people Runyon wrote about and fictionalized--especially the people who talked the way Runyon later wrote. So full circle in a way. Show biz characters like Eddie Cantor, George M. Cohan and Ethel Merman play bit parts, with starring roles going to Durante and Lou Clayton, his biggest booster and manager as well as the third member with Eddie Jackson of the act that ruled the Broadway club scene in the 1920s. Durante's complex relationship with his first wife Jeanne is also a central thread (Fowler speculates that she was the "Mrs. Calabash" Durante famously and forlornly said goodnight to at the end of his shows, something which Durante reportedly confirmed many years later.) But the featured players are the gangsters who ran and supported the clubs and the club scene, especially during Prohibition--guys with actual names like Zimp, Johnny Blue Eyes, Long-Shot Abraham and Benevolent Charlie. They don't make 'em--or write 'em--like that anymore.

Recently I've started reading Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice (just as I ran across an Emerson quote in the Richardson book: "...the impracticability and tough unalterableness of sentences which must not stand as they are, demonstrates past a doubt the inherent vice of my writing.") So far this seems a slighter book than Against the Day in more ways that the number of pages. I've also begun Margaret Atwood's novel The Year of the Flood. I've always admired Margaret Atwood, in her nonfiction and interviews and so on as well as her fiction. I especially cherish her book on writing and writers, Negotiations with the Dead. She's still making waves with her 2008 book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. I believe Margaret Atwood will be the next writer in the English language to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and I support the idea.

R.I.P. 2010
J.D. Salinger changed my life, as he did for many, especially those of us who were coming of age when he was still publishing. George Leonard, (top left) when he was writing for LOOK magazine, was also an influence on my developing outlook in the early 60s. When I wrote about reading an Alan Sillitoe novel in August, I hadn't realized that he'd died in April. (That's him in the 50s, bottom extreme right.--click collage to enlarge)

I had a slight personal connection to two of these authors. I met Vance Bourjaily (photo top center) at a writers conference somewhere, and one inebriated night I played piano while he played trombone (I believe.) I reviewed a collection of George Hitchcock's work for the San Francisco Chronicle, which allowed me to allude to getting a handwritten note of encouragement from him on some of my poems rejected for Kayak, his celebrated magazine. His publisher subsequently sent me a note to say how pleased George (pictured in beret)--a lifelong San Francisco resident-- was with the review.

Other authors who died this year include Tony Judt (pictured), Beryl Bainbridge (pictured), poet Andrei Vozensky (pictured with Robert Kennedy), poet Peter Orlovsky (pictured with Allen Ginsberg, his lifelong companion to whom he was an important muse), Howard Zinn (pictured), Ted Sorenson, Belva Plain, Frank Kermode, Louis Auchincloss, Dick Francis, Barry Hannah, Arthur Herzog, Jose Saramago and David Markson. May they rest in peace, and their books be forever read.

Sunset Park: A Novel
By Paul Auster
Henry Holt

The most interesting essay on the contemporary literary scene I've read for awhile is this one by Chad Harbach about the two cultures of American literature, the MFA writers v. the New York writer (i.e. the ones who get published by trade publishers and reviewed.) At one point he notes: "And so the New York 'canon,' at any given moment, tends to consist of a few perennial superstars—Roth, DeLillo, Pynchon, Auster—whose reputations, paradoxically, are secure at least until they die, and beneath whom circulate an ever changing group of acclaimed young novelists..."

If Paul Auster's reputation is secure, it's hard to know--judging by the many reviews of this book on the Internet--whether Sunset Park will enhance it or not. As nearly every reviewer notes since the book came out in early November, this is something of a departure, at least in terms of style. It is more linear, more story-oriented, less "postmodern." Perhaps not coincidentally, Harbach also argues that the New York writers are under increasing commercial pressure towards "neatness and accessibility," and a clarity of presentation--Franzen's Freedom being the prime example. Again, Auster success in gaining New York writer-type approval for his more linear, more character and story driven approach anchored in contemporary places (and this novel did often remind me of Freedom) also remains to be seen. While Sunset Park made the Kirkus list of 2010's best books, it did not make that of the New York Times.

As for me, I enjoyed reading this novel a great deal. While some may regard references to The Great Gatsby or the movie The Best Years of Our Lives as postmodern, I regard them (apart from their modernist literary functions) as reflecting real life--books and movies are part of some people's actual lives (and not all of them live in New York), which may influence the course of those lives, and become part of the texture of particular times in their lives. The baseball references, and the lists of a variety of famous people buried in the same Brooklyn cemetery, were fascinating in themselves, and exactly the kind of thing that fascinates real people.

All the touches of context, from the main protagonist's job at the novel's beginning of cleaning out foreclosed homes to his friend's Hospital for Broken Things, ring true as well as provide a satisfying literary experience. Contrary to at least one reviewer, I don't find the people gathered at the odd abandoned house in Sunset Park to be losers. Almost everyone in the novel is dealing honorably and bravely with personal demons (both given and as a result of experiences) as well as societal failures and portents in a very contemporary period that sure looks like decay and decadence. (This house actually existed at the described location according to the author, but has since been torn down.)

In short, though there may be layers of literary symbolism at work, I read this novel as an organic whole reflecting the lives of unusual but convincing characters in these times. The world of the novel is much richer and perhaps closer to my sympathies than Franzen's in Freedom.

What prevents me from being a wholehearted advocate for this novel is the ending. Though the violence was almost preordained, and the hero's violent reaction at least dimly foreshadowed, his response to this situation in the final paragraphs of the novel seems just all wrong. Maybe I projected too much into this character, and though I don't see these paragraphs as stating as definitive a decision as some reviewers did, I felt the novel collapse rather than end, or even just stop. It was also the one time that I felt a literary intrusion--an attempt to manipulate something for literary or symbolic effect. In short, it ruined the experience for me. Maybe I'll take a more mature attitude on re-reading it. But that won't happen for awhile.

Amore: The Story of Italian American Song
By Mark Rotella
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The classic voices of American popular song—heard in particular abundance during the Christmas season—include a multitude of Italian Americans such as Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Tony Bennett and Dean Martin. That’s not just a product of demographics in the 1940s and 1950s when Italian American singers came into prominence, according to author Mark Rotella. Their Italian heritage and their urban immigrant experience were important in forming the popular music of that era, and beyond it.

Rotella’s book is informative in describing the careers of these singers and others less remembered, from forgotten hit-makers to neglected innovators like Louis Prima. For those of us who grew up in the 50s (especially with an Italian heritage) who do recall the likes of Julius LaRosa and Lou Monte, these chapters both evoke nostalgia and provide new background, including better English translations than my family provided of songs sung in Italian that nevertheless made the hit parade.

But his early chapters delineating the Italian influences are especially fascinating. Rotella writes that Italian singers beginning with Sinatra brought two chief influences: “the bel canto, or beautiful singing, style of eighteenth-century Italian opera, and the romanticism of Italian...folk songs.”

The operatic influence was purest in Enrico Caruso, who sang the first song to sell a million records, and later in the popularity of Mario Lanza. But the influence is there in the decidedly non-Italian Elvis Presley, particularly in both the style and melody of his hit, “It’s Now or Never,” which is essentially a version of Caruso’s hit “O Sole Mio.”

In addition to influencing singing styles, versions of actual Italian folk songs became hits, including a lullaby (Como's "Chi-Baba Chi Baba"), a children’s tune (LaRosa' "Eh Cumpari") and a song danced to at weddings (including in The Godfather) known in various versions (some of them quite bawdy), called "Luna Mezza Mare," which Lou Monte transformed into his hit, "Lazy Mary." (Lest anyone make the prickly mistake of equating Italian music with Sicilian only, Rotella makes a point of naming the Neopolitan folk song (from Naples) as the chief influence.)

The Italian influence in American music goes even farther back, to the origins of jazz in New Orleans, when the so-called French Quarter was 80% Italian (mostly Sicilian), and Italian band musicians became part of the mix of African, French and American Indian (or Cajun) music. At least for awhile, Rotella writes, “blacks and whites would perform at New Orlean’s honky-tonks, many of which were owned by Italians.” Among the musicians getting his start in one of these clubs was Louis Armstrong.

After the era of the Italian crooners (which included many with non-Italian names, like Frankie Laine and Joni James), street corner singing in Italian city neighborhoods piggybacked on black do-wop in the rock & roll era with such groups as the Crests, the Elegants, the Regents and especially Dion and the Belmonts and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. (Another possible influence on these groups and their songs that Rotella doesn’t mention but which I hear is the music of the Catholic high Mass.)

This late 50s and early 60s period also produced the next generation of crooners (Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell, Connie Francis, Bobby Darin), a pop lineage continued by less ethnically identifiable stars of Italian heritage, like Madonna and Lady Gaga.

Rotella skips over some fascinating figures like Jimmy Durante, whose career started out as a New Orleans-style piano player in the 1920s, continued through vaudeville, New York nightclubs, Broadway, Hollywood movies and television stardom before recording indelible and even definitive vocal renditions of pop standards. (For that you need to find the out-of-print Damon Runyoneque ramble called Schnozzola by Gene Fowler.) But such exclusions are inevitable in a single book. Most of the story is here, the reading is easy, the information skillfully integrated into personal storytelling, including some retrospective interviews and visits to important places in this history, not many of which remain as they were, or are in any sense preserved.

Rotella ends fittingly with perhaps the last of the great Italian era singers, still going strong: Tony Bennett. (Have you listened--really listened--to "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" recently? With Sinatra, he's the best.) As both a personable tribute to that era and as an informed and needed nudge to historians to take the Italian American role in American music more seriously, this book admirably succeeds.

Climate Refugees
Colectif Argos/Introductions by Hubert Reeves and Jean Jouzel
MIT Press

Colectif Argos is a team of ten journalists, based in France--where this book was first published. There are essays in words and photos describing the effects of global heating on a community of Natives in Alaska, a village in Bangladesh, in Chad, the Maldives, on the North Sea, in China, in Polynesia and in the Himalayas, as well as on the Gulf Coast of the U.S. They are very different places in every part of the globe, all experiencing the changes that are just beginning. The UN estimates there will be some 150 million people dislocated by the Climate Crisis by 2050. This is a real and growing problem, and the authors call for leaders to prepare for a future of mass migrations.

This is a well-made book, with informative and evocative texts, illustrated by excellent photographs (though I'm not overly fond of this kind of processed color.) The photos could stand on their own in an exhibition. However, they don't by themselves communicate much about "climate refugees." They document the present way of life of the people they depict.

Readers who are curious about cultures around the world will likely find both text and photos absorbing. I'm not sure that in America at least, the book will function as quite the call to arms the authors intend. But such an excellent and detailed presentation will surely interest and inform discerning readers, and even inspire them to action.

Gift Books 2010
The Best Technology Writing 2010
Edited by Julian Dibbell
Yale University Press

Once again, this annual Yale Press selection provides informative, timely, thought-provoking and well-written pieces on manifestations of new technologies. The emphasis is less on the technologies themselves that the impact and meaning, applied not only to contemporary life but to our understanding of larger matters such as biological evolution and the human brain.

The topics include those aspects of the Internet that are taking the biggest slice out of life: Facebook, Twitter, Google, texting etc. but there are a few passes at other technologies, like Burkhard Bilger's piece on the attempts to create the perfect stove--cheap enough for the extremely poor, but also efficient, healthy (the leading killer of children in the world is pneumonia, caused by toxic smoke) and low carbon.

There are very few real clinkers--though including elder bloviator Kevin Kelly may have been necessary, perhaps not at this length. On the other end, Mark Bowden's crime reporting hit an important issue, but did it need more than 30 pages? The best pieces, like Bilger's, are a combination of reporting and thoughtful analysis. Vanessa Grigoriadis begins with an account of Facebook's problems with privacy but moves quickly into a nuanced consideration of the Facebook and social networking phenomenon as a whole. Tad Friend's profile of Elon Musks, the epic-scale visionary entrepreneur (Paypal, SpaceX, SolarCity) whose name could have emerged from a Thomas Pynchon novel, is a prime example of a piece you want to have in a book you can grab from your bookshelf.

Then there are the pieces you can both admire and argue with, like Sam Anderson's "In Defense of Distraction," which makes an undeniably good point (that we need both focus and dreaming) which depends somewhat on particular definitions of attention and distraction, while ignoring other important perils of distraction. But it's got interesting reporting and nuanced discussion along the way.

This is an excellent collection, and an excellent example of why we still need good writing and good reading. But Dibbell makes a salient point in his introduction when he points out that every piece but one comes from the "traditional print media--and perhaps more than ever in the bastions of that tradition upon which the best practitioners of long-form journalism now converge, like polar bears on a shrinking ice floe."

An apt metaphor, since the fetish and frenzy for Internet media are physically destroying the species known as print newspapers, magazines and books. Why is it that this quality of writing and thinking isn't found on the billion blogs, tweets and texts searing cyberspace? Well, except on my blogs. Because writers have to eat and finance a life, and it takes a life to do this work well. It also costs to do the research. Moreover, this is particular work, enabled by the better newspapers, magazines and book publishers. Among the last animals to be paid to arrange words are various species of academics, but due to different priorities and skills, very few produce prose that ordinary intelligent readers care to read.

So far the Internet and the riches it supposedly generates has failed to provide either stable platforms or adequate payment, as evidenced by the example in this volume of the slovenly opportunism of at least one Internet media company that Daniel Roth writes about, and notwithstanding Clay Shirky's myopic analysis of print media.

So grab a good book while you can--this one, for instance. It's accessible to anybody with a vocabulary, technical degrees not required. However, in the short reviews that follow on the page, there are some other possibilities for earnest and especially academic technophiliacs... And don't forget Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia.

Gift Books 2010
Tech Books in Brief

Still looking for that last smart book gift for your favorite technowizard or tech-savvy student of contemporary culture and the future? Here are a few selected fall releases from the Shangri-la of techdom, MIT Press.

Texture: Human Expression in the Age of Communication Overload by Richard H.R. Harper (MIT) takes a social science approach to its stated topic, using the metaphors of touch and texture to emphasize the human benefits. He finds that despite the complexities and disadvantages of being inundated with emails, texts and tweets, “to suggest that people communicate too much is like saying that people are bound to each other in too many ways...” Well, maybe, but I wonder if this doesn’t beg the question.

While Harper’s book is billed as an extended personal essay, Designing Media by Bill Moggridge (MIT)looks at the information revolution through interviews (including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Craiglist’s Craig Newmark but also artists, musicians, magazine and book editors, designers, venture capitalists, video and filmmakers, political media consultant etc.) with photos throughout and a DVD tucked in the back. There is a surprising sense of immediacy in the interviews, and improvisation in the organization of the book (though that might be deceptive.) Apart from the content, it looks and feels like a textbook. There’s bound to be insights for lots of different people in this wide range of interviews, and reference material for those who start with the DVD.

Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media, edited by Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson and Theo van Leeuwen (MIT) is a different sort of anthology: gathering voices on the various implications of voice, examining insights from the arts (dance, video and sound art) as well as video games and other technologies. There’s a chapter (by Martin Thomas) on the damage of written language to aboriginal spoken language, and the role of recording technology in documenting and reviving oral tradition. These essays vary from requiring sophisticated attention to knowing various academic and technical languages. Though some essays treat “voice” as expressed in ways other than in sound, voice is especially interesting because sound is often overlooked in what we choose to call our visual culture. There's also a bias against sound as an element of culture in the past because until recently it couldn't be preserved, and so our sense of the past is warped by a dependence on artifacts that preserve only visual and tactile impressions.

Looking towards the technological future, a number of books have been published recently—or soon will be—on the perils and opportunities of combinations of flesh and technological enhancements, of human and machine. How to Catch A Robot Rat: When Biology Inspires Innovation by Agnes Guillot and Jean-Arcady Meyer (MIT) looks at some 25 years of research—some that looks at biological creatures to help design robots, and some that obtain insights on biology by examining what’s worked and hasn’t in designing robots. Though social, cultural and philosophical insights gleaned come bubbling out of the authors’ explanations of this research, the emphasis is technical.

With each year the convergence comes closer—and where that’s headed is what Nicholas Agar worries about in Humanity’s End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement (MIT). The question is not necessarily whether humans will be replaced by robots in the outside world, but from inside themselves. Agar writes not just about machine technology but chemical and biological enhancements to allow humans to do more, be a great deal smarter, and live very much longer. Agar is engaged and tries hard to be engaging. He organizes arguments made elsewhere (about AI for example) as well as making his own. It’s a thought-provoking web of views on these subjects, which prompt questions on what it means to be human anyway. But as a practical matter, I am deeply skeptical that in view of the extreme economic, social and cultural challenges of the Climate Crisis and other ecological causes, there will be enough in the way of resources to go down these roads very far. Still, I’m sure there will be those among the extremely rich who will try.

Gift Books 2010: Biography

Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life

by Nicholas Phillipson

Yale Press

It would be difficult to find a figure who needs rescue from a mythology built on self-serving propaganda more than does Adam Smith. Next to Darwin, Smith's actual thoughts have been the most kidnapped and distorted (often enough by the same folks.) Though the usual documents that feed biography are scarce, Nicholas Phillipson locates Smith in the historical context of the Scottish Enlightenment. Perhaps most importantly, he gives us the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments as well as The Wealth of Nations. By reconciling these and placing them in an even larger context of Smith's thought, Phillipson provides some guidance for the invisible hand. There's also enough personal information for the reader of biography. I could do no better summarizing the content than James Pressley does, but I can add that it's an attractive and well-made book, suitable for gift-giving.

Nelson Mandela: Conversations with Myself

by Nelson Mandela; Foreword by President Barack Obama

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

In letters, journal entries and manuscripts as well as excerpts of conversation from his 27 years of imprisonment and afterwards when he was President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela reveals a personal as well as political and moral chronicle. There are a lot of mundane matters discussed in a mundane manner, suddenly followed by something important, revealing and even surprising. It's not a narrative, but a portrait by means of fragments. The process of his thoughts, the personal and political tactics that changed him and his country are revealed slowly, in concrete moments. It's a unique view of a great man of our time, not for everyone perhaps, but a fine gift for the right person.

Gift Books 2010

The Spirit of the Buddha
by Martine Batchelor

The Spirit of the Quakers
by Geoffrey Durham
both Yale University Press

These two volumes are part of a series published in association with the International Sacred Literature Trust. Both are primers that use extensive quotations from the founding and important texts of their traditions. Martine Batchelor, a former Buddhist nun, uses the texts to illustrate her own narrative. Geoffrey Durham uses more quotations and texts, including journals and letters. Batchelor's book provides a glossary of terms and detailed list of sources; Durham's a chronology of Quaker history and an index. They are both solid introductions to their respective traditions, as well as useful selections and organizing of texts for experienced adherents. So they are worthy candidates for gifts to the curious as well as the convinced.

Life Times: Stories 1952-2007
by Nadine Gordimer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux

This prodigious volume (more than 500 pages) selects from more than a half century of short stories by the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature Laureate, Nadine Gordimer. It follows by several months the publication of a similar collection of Nadine Gordimer's non-fiction, Telling Times. (Mark Gevisser writes appreciatively and in detail about both books in the Guardian.)

While both volumes are to be celebrated (and of course read), the appearance of that big book of non-fiction and interviews may have had the unsettling effect of stripping this volume of any context. In any case, it appears without an introduction, biographical notes, prior publication notes, appendix-- anything except the stories. I don't think I am the only one likely to be disappointed and even disoriented by this. An American audience would likely miss that contextual prose in such a collection by a well-known American writer, but this writer's biography--beginning in South Africa--is both very important to the stories, and not so well known here. So while anyone can certainly enjoy the stories in this volume, and it may prove indispensable for students of literature and the short story, as a book it may be unsatisfying for those who don't have or have access to Telling Times.

Preparing for Climate Change
by Michael Mastrandrea & Stephen H. Schneider
Boston Review/MIT Press

As a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research for more than 20 years, and a lead author of one of the UN climate reports, Stephen Schneider was known for his ability to explain the intricacies and the meaning of important and complex issues, especially the Climate Crisis. As such, he was the go-to guy for a lot of journalists over the years, including me. His sudden death this past summer was a blow to both science and journalism, as well as his students at Stanford. This book, written with another Stanford climate scientist, may be his last statement on the issue that he recognized as the most important of his time, and ours.

It is a short book—just 100 pages-- but it is a substantial contribution. It moves from the most succinct explanation of “The Scientific Consensus” that I’ve read (covering the physics and chemistry, observations and modeling) to chapters on “Impacts,” “Understanding Risk,” and then to the new ground of “Preparing for Climate Change.”

It is these last chapters that this book reflects realizations that are beginning to become the new scientific consensus: that climate change is not just likely in the future, it is happening now, and it will happen to some serious extent no matter what is done to stop it from becoming even worse in the farther future.

The authors make a brief but sophisticated argument for acting on both fronts: to stop future heating by controlling emissions, but also (and equally) to prepare for inevitable consequences, including complex and multiple emergencies when the readiness will be all.

This is a trenchant summary for policymakers and others that derives much of its power from being so concise. But to have wider impact, it may require less of the envirospeak abstractions that have unfortunately muddied the meaning of the Climate Crisis in public perception. For example, the authors adopt the terms current in scientific and environmental bureaucracies of “ mitigation” and “adaptation”—words so vague, bloodless and at times misleading that they inspire only mental numbness.

What the authors mean is that we must deal with both the causes of the Climate Crisis (“mitigation”) and the effects (“adaptation.”) As simple as that seems, it may well become the center of a major political argument in decades to come. But if we’re to get a handle on it now, we need to be a lot clearer in what we say and how we say it.

Still, this book both summarizes important facts and discussions (like risk assessment, which Greg Craven writes about so well in What’s The Worst That Could Happen?) as well as signaling the terms of future debates, like how to decide what to do to deal with climate change consequences. It is also a fitting memorial to the brave and persistent work of Stephen Schneider.

Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity
by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Thomas Rodgers in Salon called this book "fascinating, well-researched," and readers who follow celebrities with a certain interest as well as angst may well find it fascinating. Unfortunately the people she writes about weren't all that interesting to me back when they were the most talked-about celebrities (which was probably a year or so ago), and they sure don't interest me now.

But then I have my own perhaps quixotic distinction between "stars" and "celebrities." Celebrities as such are just embarrassing, and as evidenced by many of the names in this book, extremely fleeting. Stars can be fascinating, because there is something special about them, and their world is surely different, and people respond to them differently. This book doesn't penetrate or even deal much with those mysteries. It's an academic work with an economic emphasis. So as it turns out I'm just not that interested in these facts or these insights. Doesn't mean you won't be fascinated, though. The author is a professor with a Ph.D in urban planning, whose previous book on celebrity was The Warhol Economy.