Book talkin'

What I've mostly been reading: not-yet-published manuscripts and galleys--and board books (the likes of How Big Is a Pig? and I Am a Bunny ("My name is Nicholas and I live in a hollow tree"). In the latter, a clothes-wearing rabbit named Nicholas lives in a hollow elm tree with a robin family in the late spring, it seems, but oddly in summer not a tree is to be seen in his domain, in autumn maple and oak and tulip tree leaves rain down, and in winter Nicholas walks among pines, visible also from the hole in his home tree.

Walking It Off: A Veteran's Chronicle of War and Wilderness by Montanan Doug Peacock is in part a book about Peacock's friend Ed Abbey, about surviving the Vietnam War, and about wild places in Utah, Arizona, Nepal, and Montana, places "where it all started, each yard of ground fresh with the sweet smell of discovery."

Mama Voted for Obama. Thanks, Nancy.

Ryszard Kapuscinski's Imperium (Knopf, 1994), published shortly after the demise of the Soviet Union, is another of the Polish author's nonpareil accounts of troubled places, beginning with a description of his childhood experience in Pinsk under Soviet occupation in 1939. Then follow chronological accounts (1967-1993) of travels in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgystan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Russia. Fantastic tales of travels in Siberia, alternately bleak and darkly funny. Accounts of Soviet church razings and contemporary attempts to put shards of icons back together. Stalinist insanity, brutality.

"Yvgeny Alekseyevich turns on the color televsion set on top of the dresser. The large, cherry-colored box growls fiercely as if at any moment it were going to bristle. 'Dynamo versus Spartak,' Yevgeny Alekseyevich explains to me in low tones, for the others have already long known this. I stare at the screen. There is no distinct image in it. A dozen or so people are staring intently at the screen, on which every now and then sparks explode, as they do in a fire when someone throws in some dry juniper. The spots, lines, grains of light, dance, flash, and pulsate like an ethereal and mobile Fata Morgana. What a richness of light forms is this . . . All these flashes seem mad and illogical, but I am wrong. A perfect order governs these wanderings of colorful particles, their ceaseless motion and rapid changes of direction. The left side of the screen suddenly starts to sparkle in red; redness vibrates there, undulates, rages, and suddenly a cry resounds in the room 'Goool! Dynamo scored!' 'How do you know they've scored?' I ask Yevgeny Akekseyevich, irritated, especially since the sound on the set isn't working. 'What do you mean, how?' he replies, astonished. 'Dynamo has red shirts!' After a time, at the other end of the screen there appears a great concentration of clue (Spartak's color), and the room (which is clearly rooting for the Dynamo team) groans: 'They tied!' During the break the sparks calm down. . . ."

What does the journalist believe, Kapuscinski, who so often seems to put himself in harm's way, travel to the most bleak locations on earth? "Three plagues, three contagions, threaten the world. The first is the plague of nationalism. The second is the plague of racism. The third is the plague of religious fundamentalism." And this:

"Questioned about the future Ukraine, one of its leaders, Mihailo Horyn, told me in Kiev, 'We want Ukraine to be an enlightened, good, democratic, and humane state.' Enlightened, good, democratic, and humane. Amen."

Phyllis Limbacher Tildes's Baby Animals Black and White and Peter Linethal's Look at the Animals! Those and other board books are what I've been reading aloud this week. Actually the latter is a picture book without words. I'd like to write such a book some day.

Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost is one story of many describing the brutal and systematic violence of colonial Africa, focusing on the personal empire of Belgian King Leopold in the Congo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its forced labor of Africans in building railroads, portering, and collecting rubber. It is estimated that the population of the Congo went from twenty million people to ten million between 1880-1920, due to outright murder, starvation, exhaustion, exposure, disease, and a plummeting birthrate. Some Africans fought back and a few non-Africans were courageous enough to report what they saw happening (the real story behind Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness), and to broadcast this story as widely as possible to the world in an attempt to stop it. Two were African Americans: lawyer/journalist/minister/historian George Washington Williams and Protestant missionary William H. Sheppard. One was English and French: E. D. Morel. One was Irish: Roger Casement. The latter two would eventually serve time in prison for their human rights-promoting efforts. Casement would later be executed for treason after his efforts to get Germany to support his freedom-for-Ireland cause.

Since the March 17, 2007, entry below, I've read about sixty books that are not reviewed on this page--editing, indexing, proofreading, and writing reviews of them published elsewhere. Among these have been a history of the saluki dog breed, a firsthand account of a boat escape from Vietnam, a biography of A. B. Guthrie Jr., an account set in Yellowstone National Park, histories of the Luftwaffe and the Hitler Youth, an overview of the Vietnam War, a history of press partisanship in U.S. presidential elections, books of writings by Rosa Luxemburg and Tom Hayden, poetry books, and books about the pope, Palestine, the Chicago 8, the Comintern, "rogue economics" (and economic globalization), European baseball, immigration law, women in Afghanistan, women in Iraq, the space shuttle program, Black dance in London, local and regional history in California, American advertising in Poland, the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S. soldiers in Bataan during World War II, philosophy in the films of Jean-Luc Godard, and China in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, to name a few. I've indexed a two-volume young adult adaptation of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (Seven Stories), Noam Chomsky's Interventions, David Barsamian's Targeting Iran, and Michael Parenti's Contrary Notions (all City Lights). Especially noteworthy reading: a collection of poetry by John Caddy, With Mouths Open Wide, (Milkweed Editions) and Dahr Jamail's Beyond the Green Zone (Haymarket).

Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Soccer War (Vintage, 1992; first published 1990) is a collection of twenty-two interconnected pieces of firsthand reportage on war and revolution in Africa, Latin America, and Middle East. Not focused on one subject like Kapuscinski's excellent Shah of Shahs, The Emperor, and Another Day of Life, it nevertheless tells a single tale of one man's obsession (so it seems) to go to the heart of dark and violent places. In a voice like a cross between Eduardo Galeano, Paul Theroux, and Werner Herzog, Kapuscinski describes fumbling in the pitch-dark night of wartime Tegulcigalpa; flying in a "dilapidated old DC-3, black with exhaust smoke . . . shot up the day before by a Salvadoran fighter; the holes of its fuselage patched with rough boards"; being bitten by a scorpion in Somalia; and running a burning roadblock in Nigeria after being doused with benzene. One can almost hear Herzog's Bavarian-accented English voice saying, "I vanted to know how it would feel."

A reporter's job is like a baker's, Kapuscinski writes. The "rolls are tasty as long as they're fresh; after two days they're stale; after a week they're covered with mould and fit only to be thrown out." These pieces were written between 1958 and 1980, while the author worked primarily for the Polish Press Agency, but, remarkably, they are still fresh.

Jack London's People of the Abyss , first published in 1903 (and the first work in the 1982 Library America edition of London's prose, Novels and Social Writings), is a case of literal journalistic slumming. London writes about hiring a reluctant cab driver ("wot plyce yer wanter go?") to take him to the slums of the London's East End, purchasing a set of beat-up secondhand clothing there, and then, with a gold sovereign sewn into the armpit of a singlet, changing into the disguise and hitting the streets with only a few shillings in his pockets for a few days to see how the poorest of English poor people live.

Here's London's tone in the early part of People of the Abyss: "No sooner was I out on the streets than I was impressed by the difference in status effected by my clothes. All servility vanished from demeanor of the common people with whom I came in contact. Presto! in the twinkling of an eye, so to say, I had become one of them. My frayed and out-at-elbows jacket was the badge and advertisement of my class, which was their class. It made me of like kind, and in place of the fawning and too-respectful attention I had hitherto received, I now shared with them a comradeship. The man in corduroy and dirty neckerchief no longer addressed me as `sir' or `governor.' It was 'mate,' now--and a fine and hearty word, with a tingle to it, and a warmth and gladness, which the other term does not possess. Governor! It smacks of mastery, and power, and high authority--the tribute of the man who is under to the man on top, delivered in the hope that he will let up a bit and ease his weight. Which is another way of saying that it is an appeal for alms."

"[T]he Hopper gave me some sterling advice, to which same give heed, you soft and tender people, in case you should ever be stranded in London Town. 'If you ain't got tins an' cookin' things, all as you can get'll be bread and cheese. No bloody good that! You must 'ave 'ot tea, an' wegetables, an' a bit o' meat, now an' again, if you're goin' to do work as is work. Cawn't do it on cold wittles. Tell you wot you do, lad. Run around in the mornin' an' look in the dust pans. You'll find plenty o' tins to cook in. Fine tins, wonderful good some o' them. Me an' the ole woman got ours that way.' (He pointed at the bundle she held, while she nodded proudly, beaming on me with good nature and consciousness of success and prosperity.) 'This overcoat is as good as a blanket,' he went on, advancing the skirt of it that I might feel its thickness. 'An' 'oo knows, I may find a blanket before long.' Again the old woman nodded and beamed, this time with the dead certainty that he would find a blanket before long."

"We were sprinkling disinfectant by the mortuary, when the dead wagon drove up and five bodies were packed into it. The conversation turned to the 'white potion' and `black jack,' and I found they were all agreed that the poor person, man or woman, who in the Infirmary gave too much trouble or was in a bad way, was 'polished off.' That is to say, the incurables and the obstreperous were given a dose of 'black jack' or the 'white potion,' and sent over the divide. It does not matter in the least whether this be actually so or not. The point is, they have the feeling that it is so, and they have created the language with which to express that feeling--'black jack,' 'white potion,' polishing off.'

At eight o'clock we went down into a cellar under the Infirmary, where tea was brought to us, and the hospital scraps. These were heaped high on a huge platter in an indescribable mess--pieces of bread, chunks of grease and fat pork, the burnt skin from the outside of roasted joints, bones, in short, all the leavings from the fingers and mouths of the sick ones suffering from all manner of diseases. Into this mess the men plunged their hands, digging, pawing, turning over, examining, rejecting, and scrambling for. It wasn't pretty. Pigs couldn't have done worse. But the poor devils were hungry, and they ate ravenously of the swill, and when they could eat no more they bundled what was left into their handkerchiefs and thrust it inside their shirts.

'Once, w'en I was 'ere before, wot did I find out there but a 'ole lot of pork-ribs,' said Ginger to me. By 'out there' he meant the place where the corruption was dumped and sprinkled with strong disinfectant. 'They was a prime lot, no end o' meat on 'em, an' I 'ad 'em into my arms an' was out the gate an' down the street, a-lookin' for some 'un to gi' 'em to. Couldn't see a soul, an' I was runnin' 'round clean crazy, the bloke runnin' after me an' thinkin' I was "slingin' my 'ook" [running away]. But jest before 'e got me, I got a ole woman an' poked 'em into 'er apron.'

O Charity, O Philanthropy, descend to the spike and take a lesson from Ginger. At the bottom of the Abyss he performed as purely an altruistic act as was ever performed outside the Abyss. It was fine of Ginger, and if the old woman caught some contagion from the `no end o' meat' on the pork-ribs, it was still fine, though not so fine. But the most salient thing in this incident, it seems to me, is poor Ginger, 'clean crazy' at sight of so much food going to waste."

At its best this slight book lets people talk for themselves, and depicts clearly the true horror not so much of poverty but of the social system in which it thrives, and which keeps poor people poor and beats them down--from the law and its unequal, unjust enforcement, to alleged services that provide minimal food and overnight lodging in exchange for all dignity. At its worst, the book departs from firsthand reportage and spews forth statistics and case studies.

Graham Robb's Rimbaud: A Biography calls Rimbaud "romanticism's best bad example," and says "Rimbaud was writing for an audience that did not yet exist."

"Many poets give up writing between collections or even like Baudelaire, between different parts of the same poem. Some, like Paul Val�ry or Matthew Arnold, fall silent for years. Mediocre poets, on the other hand, are frequently unstoppable."

"It was the reading list of someone who was planning to start his own country," Robb writes (of books Rimbaud requested his mother order for him when he was in Aden, "a horrible rock, without a single blade of grass or a single drop of fresh water," books on carpentry, metallurgy, tanning, candle-making, mining, artesian wells, etc.

"Rimbaud was burning his bridges with people still on them."

Patti Smith's review in the October 2000 Village Voice Literary Supplement is posted here here.

Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town (Houghton Mifflin, 2003) is good stuff. It's the fourth of Theroux's travel accounts I've enjoyed (in addition to his book about his former friendship with V. S. Naipaul, Sir Vidia's Shadow). Since Theroux once lived and taught in Malawi (while in the Peace Corps in the sixties) and later in Uganda, this book in part is a description of homecoming and change. It includes some memorable anecdotes about political repression; the description of a visit to the censorship office in Malawi begs to be read aloud, as does the story of the Ethiopian who translated Gone with the Wind in prison, writing it on the backs of three thousand sheets of cigarette foil, smuggled out in shirt pockets and later retrieved. It also include tantalizing literary citations (from Flaubert: "Traveling makes on modest�you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world"), recounted conversations with "Christ-bitten" missionaries ("Zealots never listen"), and descriptions of eating "purple amblongus pie . . . crumbobblious cutlets and . . . gosky patties, all of which I recognized from 'The Book of Nonsense Cookery' by Edward Lear."

One thing I like about Theroux is how he will talk with anyone, listen to all, argue with all, from beggars to prime ministers, and how he will go where he is told not to go.

"[A]ll travel is a lesson in self-preservation."

"Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold . . . being kept waiting all your working life�the homebound writer's irritants. . . . The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace. As Huck puts it, lighting out for the territory."

Re: Cairo: "The weather forecast printed in a box in the Cairo newspaper was 'Dust' on the cold day in February when I arrived, a day of gritty wind and dust-browned sky. The forecast for tomorrow was the dame�no temperature prediction, nothing about sunshine or clouds or rain, just the one word, 'Dust.' It was the sort of weather report you might expect for Mars."

"'The criterion is how you treat the weak,' a man told me in Khartoum. 'The measure of civilized behavior is compassion."

"If someone writes truthfully, her work will always seem prophetic."

"The very symbol of Africa," according to Theroux, is a giant obelisk that lies still attached to the stone of a quarry in Aswan. "The beautiful thing lay trapped in rock, but if erected it would haven risen 150 feet."

David Robertson's Denmark Vesey (Knopf, 1999) attempts to fit together puzzle pieces (many of which are missing) to depict "the buried story of America's largest slave rebellion and the man who led it." Named after his former owner, Denmark Vesey was a free black in Charleston, South Carolina, who was executed in 1822 after a house slave named Peter Prioleau snitched, thus ultimately warning the city's minority white rulers of Vesey's well-laid plans to "take the city's arsenal, murder the populace--women and children included--burn the city, and escape by ship to Haiti or Africa." (Prioleau told a special court later that "he could not 'remain easy under the burden of such a secret'").

Elegantly spare Joe Gould's Secret, by Joseph Mitchell (Modern Library, 1996) compiles two New Yorker profiles written and first published nearly twenty-two years apart, in 1942 and 1964. The subject, Joe Gould, was a New York street person, a bohemian character who had devoted his life, so it seemed, to writing An Oral History of Our Time, said to be eleven times as long as the Bible (all in longhand). In part it's a story about someone who was the author of his own life--and his own lies. A bumptious, scurrilous, pertinacious fellow (Mitchell's words), "Joe Gould was an odd and penniless and unemployable little man who came to [New York] in 1916 and ducked and dodged and held on as hard as he could for over thirty-five years."

On reading one of Gould's notebooks, Mitchell writes, "I came across three sentences that stood out sharply from the rest. These sentences were plainly meant by Gould to be a sort of poker-faced display of conceit, but it seemed to me that he told more in them than he had intended to. . . . 'I would judge the sanest man to be him who firmly recognizes the tragic isolation of humanity and pursues his essential purposes calmly,' he wrote. 'I supposed I feel about it in this way because I have a delusion of grandeur. I believe myself to be Joe Gould.'"

By the end of the 1964 New Yorker piece, with a title the same as this book (and written after Gould's death), Mitchell comes to tell the story of a book that he himself had been thinking about--and writing in his head--for years. Reflection upon this leads him to become more sympathetic to Gould, a sympathy which shows throughout the book.

Madeline Stern's The Pantarch: A Biography of Stephen Pearl Andrews (University of Texas Press, 1968) describes the life of the "sub-marginal" New England-born anarchist lawyer, Texas abolitionist, free-love champion, developer of a universal language (Alwato), and envisioner of a "Pantarchal United States of the World." Living from 1812 to 1886, involved in various quixotic campaigns, such as the run for the presidency of Victoria Woodhull (Andrews wrote for Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly) and�with Josiah Warren�the Modern Times colony on Long Island, Andrews influenced the likes of individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker. "Based in part upon a corpus of unpublished material in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin."

Louise Erdrich's The Blue Jay Dance: A Birth Year (HarperCollins, 1995), is funny, smart, and sensual--with recipes for an all-licorice meal, for example, and about living and continuing to do one�s work while being stressed by an infant who hardly stops crying. (In the background, it should be pointed out, are two small girls and several acting-out teens, one with fetal-alcohol syndrome.) Erdrich writes about blue jays, woodchucks, tomcat trapping, deer (whose track are "two split moons"), and great gray owls (Ojibwa for owl is "kokoko").

A few snippets:

"Perhaps we owe some of our most moving literature to men who didn't understand that they wanted to be women nursing babies."

"A child is fortunate who feels witnessed as a person, outside relationships with parents, by another adult."

"Ojibwa [is] a language that sounds like water hitting the bottom of a boat."

"When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left."

Dept. of Compound Words: "breastwater" (Ojibwa "do-dush-abo"--that is, milk).

Dept. of Lists: "carpet lint, shoelaces, marbles, cat food, dustpan, bark, paper clip, fork, ancient noodle, the cat herself, gravel, show, mop board, book, toy" (things Erdrich's baby tries to stuff in her mouth).

I read the last one-third of John McPhee's The Control of Nature (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1989), which covers the natural history of Los Angeles canyons, their debris flows and subsequent wildfires, and ill-fated attempts to forestall the latter. It contains the best description of chaparral I've ever read, and is quite gripping, even for someone who's only visited L.A. once. (The other parts of the book are on flood-control efforts along the southern Mississippi and coping with lava flow in Iceland).

The David Roberts book True Summit: What Really Happened on the Legendary Ascent of Annapurna is an excellent case study in investigative journalism. Providing a fuller, more nuanced, and truer view of the 1950 French expedition in the Himalayas, known because of its first scaling of an 8000-meter peak, the book examines, expands upon, and contradicts what has heretofore been the official history, expedition leader Maurice Herzog's Annapurna (see below). Like Kurosawa's great film Rashomon, True Summit presents viewpoints of multiple key players, but instead of this leading to confusion about who is telling the truth, Roberts successfully analyzes and judges source information, most of which has never before appeared in English (other climbers' diaries, unexpurgated manuscripts, interviews with widows, etc.), and pieces it together coherently. What emerges, besides a clearer picture of the expedition, is a more just view of the lionized Herzog, as well as those who've previously been erased from the picture.

The book is certainly aided by virtue of Roberts being a climber himself. Even if he wasn't so, Roberts reaches high ground in his historical research and writing.

Robert Roper's Fatal Mountaineer: The High-Altitude Life and Death of Willi Unsoeld, American Himalayan Legend (St. Martin's Press, 2002) is a competent, engaging psychobiography of a serious mountaineer and interesting person. A prospective seminarian-turned-climber, Unsoeld went on to direct the Peace Corps in Nepal, and later become a philosophy professor at Evergreen State University. A member of the first U.S. team to reach the peak of Mount Everest, in 1963 (with Tom Hornbein, the first to do so from the summit's west ridge, a story of derring-do of its own), Unsoeld lost nine toes to frostbite in the process.

Unsoeld fathered four children in his life, one of whom he named after the highest peak in India, Nanda Devi, which he'd first seen in the fifties. (So immediately smitten was he with the mountain's beauty that he later said, "The thought occurred to me, twenty-one years old and a little retarded, 'You know, I need a wife,' a logical first step in the acquisition of a daughter. Because I suddenly wanted her so that I could name her after that captivating mountain.") Devi Unsoeld herself is an integral to Roper's book, as it focuses on a 1976 expedition in which she took part with her father, an expedition to climb Nanda Devi.

Viewing this expedition as a watershed between teamwork-focused expeditions and ones from the seventies "Me Decade" on in which everyone is in it for themselves, Roper highlights the tension between harmonica-playing mystic Unsoeld with budding professional climber John Roskelley (misspelled "Roskelly" throughout), someone for whom reaching the summit is paramount, "getting it efficiently and then getting the hell out of there." (An interesting side story is the Nepalese views of Devi Unsoeld-- she's commonly seen as the mountain goddess incarnate.)

This is more generally a book about the search for meaning, about living with élan, about fear and conquering it (the passages about multiple crossings of an avalanche-prone area are excellent), about the relationship of a parent and adult child, about aging, and about two ways to die on a mountain, burial alive by avalanche and succumbing to altitude-induced illness. (Other common causes of climbers' "accidental" deaths: being struck in the head by a falling rock, falling and being smashed upon rocks or ice, and freezing--"exposure" in extreme conditions.)

Unsoeld reminds me of Ed Abbey in some ways.

Bruce Barcott's The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier (Ballantine Books, 1997) is a breezy but well-researched natural history of "the largest and most dangerous volcano in the United States of America" (and fifth-highest mountain in the continental United States). Barcott writes about marmots, insects ("aerial plankton"), and plant life, but above all about humans' relationship with the mountain--naming it, climbing it, and writing about it. The organization is effective--as was Barcott's investigation: he did not set out from the start to climb Mount Rainier (in fact cites his "acrophobic tendencies"), but instead gradually explored its lower reaches, intending to circumambulate the mountain on the 92-mile Wonderland Trail. Fortunately, as far as I'm concerned, Barcott decides to attempt a climb of Rainier, and the last half of the book is climbing-related, with some clear-headed thoughts about the nature of mountain climbing (and interesting details about human disasters on mountains). A brief bibliographic essay at the end of the book offers trail heads for further reading, much of it primary sources.

"Civilization proceeds in a direction opposite from everything mountains represent: starvation, hardship, coldness, the constant scramble to survive."

"Those who would know the world through books, wrote the alchemist Petrus Severinus, deny themselves the sensual experience of their subject. 'Burn your books,' he wrote, 'put on your shoes, climb mountains, explore deserts to gain for yourselves some idea of the things of nature.'"

Maurice Herzog's Annapurna (E. P. Dutton, 1952) is a translated-from-French account of the first human ascent of an 8,000-meter peak, Nepal's Annapurna. Herzog led a French expedition to Himalayas in 1950, with the goal of climbing the previously unexplored Dhaulagiri (26,795 feet) or Annapurna (26,493 feet). One of two men to reach the summit of Annapurna on June 3, 1950, Herzog lost fingers and toes afterward to frostbite (with amputations performed by the expedition's physician on the march back down from the mountains). I'm planning to read this book in tandem with Dave Roberts's True Summit: What Really Happened on the Legendary Ascent of Annapurna . The next best thing to climbing rocks is reading about it. (Sheesh.)

Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours (Viking, 1985), by Frederick Turner, nudges me to read more by and about John Muir, his journals, perhaps, and his correspondence with mentor Jeanne Carr. Born in coastal Scotland, raised on a Wisconsin by a brutally strict father, Muir found his calling as a traveler, a mountaineer, and a writer of paeans to trees, forests, rocks, mountains, nature.

Of special interest to me are Muir's connections with Thoreau. For one thing, though his journeys didn't begin until after Thoreau's death, Muir knew Emerson who came to Yosemite in 1871 to meet him. For another, he sometimes sounds like Thoreau:

"Talk of immortality! After a whole day in the woods, we are already immortal."

"I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness."

"What canyons must be crossed, what precipices ascended in reaching the summits at which we aim. What moats and walls, snow avalanches[,] rock avalanches & blustery storms defend the Alpine mansions we would enter; where are the most accessible slopes and passes? There are doors and ways opening and leading to every alpine mansion if we but know where to find them."

Muir had read Thoreau widely and deeply. A footnote here (p.230) says that Muir purchased the 1906 edition of The Writings of Henry David Thoreau "and heavily marked the essay ["Walking"] there . . . By the end of his life Muir knew Thoreau so well he could quote whole passages from the works, especially Walden. Bailey Millard, who knew Muir in his last years, reported that Emerson had said Muir would be the perfect man to edit Thoreau's works (Bailey Millard, 'A Skyland Philosopher,' Bookman's, February, 1908."

Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (with Essays on Conservation from Round River) (Sierra Club/Ballantine Books, 1970; first published by Oxford University Press, 1966) contains Leopold's essays on "the quality of landscape," wilderness, and land ethics. In "The Land Ethic" he famously writes, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the biotic integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

There is much wisdom here, but much to debate. (First one must get past the image that Leopold's words create of himself as a sexist, cigarette-smoking fisher and hunter. Much of the book, in fact, is about Leopold's experiences hunting geese, partridges, etc. Count the mistakes here: "[T]he man who does not like to see, hunt, photograph, or otherwise outwit birds or animals is hardly normal.") Leopold describes "land sickness" (p.252), the trophy-hunting way of thinking (the "reducing-to-possession" not just of the hunter but of the photographer and the mountain climber; p.284), industrial tourism (pp.280–281), land ("not merely soil, [but] a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals," p.253), land health ("the capacity of the land for self-renewal," p.258), land sickness (p.272), carrying capacity (p.257), industrial farming (p.199), carnivores in national parks (p.276), gear (gadgetry, he calls it, pp.214+), abuse of private land (p.200), roads, native wildflowers ("What better expresses land than the plants that originally grew on it?"), and "personal amateur scholarship" (p.205). Modern trophy-hunting humans, says Leopold, are "the motorized ants who [swarm] the continents before learning to see [their] own back yard, who [consume] but never create outdoor satisfactions" (p.294).

Leopold's land ethic essay notes that "Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations." "Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief." "In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his [sic] fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such." But, "[w]e can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in."

"The problem . . . is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessless"(p.210).

"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect"(p.xviii).

"[A]t daybreak I am the sole owner of all the acres I can walk over. It is not only boundaries that disappear, but also the thought of being bounded. Expanses unknown to deed or map are known to every dawn, and solitude, supposed no longer to exist in my country, extends on every hand as far as the dew can reach" (p.44).

"The only conclusion I have ever reached is that I love all trees, but I am in love with pines" (p.74).

"Books on nature seldom mention wind; they are written behind stoves"(p.97).

"Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language" (p.102).

"[A]ll conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish" (p.108).

"The atoms that once grew pasque-flowers to greet the returning plovers now lie inert, confused, imprisoned in oily sludge" (p.115)

"[T]oo much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau's dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf. . ." (p.141).

"It is the part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it. To return not only spoils a trip, but tarnishes a memory. It is only in the mind that shining adventure remains forever bright" (p.150).

"Parks are made to bring the music to the many, but by the time many are attuned to hear it there is little left but noise" (p.159).

"In country, as in people, a plain exterior often conceals hidden riches, to perceive which requires much living in and with" (p.180).

"Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals. . ." (p.187).

"Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend: you cannot cherish [your friend's] right hand and chop off [your friend's] left" (p.189).

"A species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all" (p.194).

"One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to [nonscientists]. An ecologist must either harden [his or her] shell and make believe the consequences of science are none of [his or her] business, or . . . must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise" (p.197).

"As for diversity, what remains of our native fauna and flora remains only because agriculture has not got around to destroying it" (p.199).

"When the last corner lot is covered with tenements we can still make a playground by tearing them down, but when the last antelope goes by the board, not all the playground associations in Christendom can do aught to replace the loss."

Yes, but what to make of it that these things we written by someone who banded birds and considered some birds "shootable game"?

Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution was juicier than I expected. In it Trotsky writes:

"A party for whom everybody votes except that minority who know what they are voting for, is no more a party than the tongue in which babies of all countries babble is a national language."

"In history not only does the reasonable become nonsensical, but also, when the course of evolution requires it, the nonsensical becomes reasonable."

"The historian is ordinarily as little interested in [the peasant] as the dramatic critic is in those gray figures who shift the scenery, carrying the heavens and earth on their backs, and scrub the dressing-rooms of the actors."

"[I]t is the task of revolution to accomplish just those things which will not fit into the heads of the ruling class."

"A danger which remains long unrealized loses it effect."

In John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra, a psalm to mountains and all that live on them ("The charms of these mountains are beyond all common reason, unexplainable and mysterious as life itself"), Muir crows about water ouzels (officially called American dippers these days), writes hilariously about a shepherd's filthy pair of pants, and says famously, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." A few more pithy lines:

"Most of the miracles we hear of are infinitely less wonderful than the commonest of natural phenomena, when seen . . . The worst apparent effect of these mysterious odd things is blindness to all that is divinely common."

"One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature--inexhaustible abundance amid what seems like enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her materials is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather enjoy and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last."

"In our best times everything turns into religion, all the world seems a church and the mountains altars."

Muir knows a good place when he sees it, writing what I have felt in canyon country: "For my part, I should like to stay here all winter or all my life or even all eternity."

In the end it's still a mystery: "A grand, red, rosy, crimson day,--a perfect glory of a day. What it means I don't know."

Rick Bass's Winter: Notes from Montana (Houghton Mifflin) is a slight book, in journal form, describing the Texas-born author's first winter living in remote Yaak, Montana (up the road from us a ways).

Ian Frazier's On the Rez (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2000) is a well-written, interesting, insightful look at both the present and past of the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, and the Oglala Sioux people, focused in part around a Pine Ridge resident who Frazier first met while both were living in New York City. Based primarily on firsthand experience (and conversations with people in Pine Ridge over a period of years), it's deceptively scholarly, with seventeen pages of notes at the end.

Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (Holt, 1970) is a stomach-wrenching account of lies, broken promises, massacres, forced removal, betrayal--the U.S. government's military endeavor to wipe out Native American peoples or pen them up in ever smaller, ever poorer reservations. Focusing on the period from 1860�1890, it tells the stories of would-be peacemakers (native and European), and of those dedicated to exterminating people, and those determined to resist extermination. The stories chronicle battles and massacres such as those at Sand Creek in Colorado in 1864, describe how the reservation system came to exist, and profile leaders and warriors from Red Cloud and Sitting Bull to Crazy Horse and Cochise.

"In the summer of 1883, when the Northern Pacific Railroad celebrated the driving of the last spike in its transcontinental track, one of the officials in charge of ceremonies decided it would be fitting for an Indian chief to be present to make a speech of welcome. . . . Sitting Bull was the choice--no other Indian was even considered--and a young Army officer who understood the Sioux language was assigned to work with the chief in preparation of a speech. It was to be delivered in Sioux and then translated by the officer. . . . When Sitting Bull was introduced, he arose and began delivering his speech in Sioux. The young officer listened in dismay. Sitting Bull had changed the flowery text of welcome. 'I hate all the white people,' he was saying. 'You are thieves and liars. You have taken away our land and made us outcasts.' Knowing that only the Army officer could understand, Sitting Bull paused occasionally for applause; he bowed, smiled, and then uttered a few more insults. At last he sat down and the bewildered interpreter took his place. The officer had only a short translation written out, a few friendly phrases, but by adding several well-worn Indian metaphors, he brought the audience to its feet with a standing ovation for Sitting Bull. The Hunkpapa chief was so popular that the railroad officials took him to St. Paul for another ceremony."

Robert L. Allen's The Port Chicago Mutiny (Amistad, 1993; originally published 1989) is, among other things, a history of racism in the U.S. Navy and a case study in military-style miscarriage of justice. It focuses on World War II-era African American stevedores whose job it was to unload boxcars of ammunition and bombs, and then load it onto ships at the Navy's Port Chicago facility north of Oakland, California (despite that many had specialized training and skills) while an all-white group of officers in charge of the loading held competitions to see whose crews could load more tons in a given amount of time. After an explosion in July 1944 killed 320 people and wounded many more, some as far away as the nearest town, and many of the African American enlisted men said that they would do anything but load more ammunition, 55 of them were tried on mutiny charges, then convicted after brief deliberation, and uniformly sentenced to fifteen years confinement followed by dishonorable discharge. The NAACP, led by Thurgood Marshall, pressed for an appeal, but the convictions were upheld. After the war ended in 1945, most of the prisoners were released in January 1946, though they then were shipped back and forth without assignment. "They said they were conditioning us for discharge," one noted.

I've just finished reading The Autobiography of Mark Twain ("as arranged and edited . . . by Charles Neider"), a beat-up mass-market paperback edition that came apart at the seams when I was about halfway through it. I now have pages 199�422 in hand. Clemens dictated the book in his later years, during which time his wife Livy and two of their daughters died. No one can inveigh so invectively. (See other Twain entries below.)

Reading Edward Abbey's Hayduke Lives! (Little, Brown, 1990) was something like meeting Ed and spending an evening in his jovial, prickly, wise, bawdy, opinionated company. I'd held off reading the novel, in part since I'd been so disappointed with its prequel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, a book I found (if memory serves well) sophomoric and lacking depth and nuance. Hayduke, Abbey's last book and published posthumously, was written, it seems, in a fervor, without extraneous punctuation (or editing). It features some of the same characters as Monkey Wrench, some based on real people, in addition to "real people" (or characters playing them and bearing their names), such as Mary Sojourner and Ed himself, and such thinly disguised people as Murray Bookchin-- "Bernie Mushkin" here. Hayduke is full of Ed's humor (yes, sometimes sophomoric), his philosophy, and also his passion for (and careful attention to) the land and all that lives on, in, and above it. (One of the heroes of the book is a turtle.) Hayduke is a book infused with fun as well as anger; and it shows an understanding of sloth (and greed and apathy), as well as pays homage to those with the courage of their convictions, who act not only on what they believe, but to defend what they love.

I read This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (by David Hilliard and Lewis Cole; Lawrence Hill Books, 2001; first published 1993) on the heels of indexing a forthcoming autobiography of the Weather Underground's Cathy Wilkerson. Born in Alabama, the twelfth of twelve siblings, David Hilliard made his way with some of his family to California in the 60s where he met Huey Newton, then followed as Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party (becoming the party's "chief of staff"). Told in the present tense, this view of the Panthers shows drugs, the FBI, and Eldridge Cleaver to be the bad guys, and Huey Newton to be a sort of wise fool, intuitive and comparatively nonviolent. Hilliard eventually did prison time, as most of the Panthers did, and was eventually expelled from the party (as most of the Panthers were who were not slain by police or each other). After the party fell apart (thanks in large part to FBI machinations that set brother against brother, literally, and that encouraged violence in those prone to lash out), Hilliard was set adrift in a world of alcohol and cocaine (as was Newton). Newton was shot and killed by a drug dealer in 1989. Hilliard sobered up, thanks to AA, and survived to write this book�and a biography of Newton.

Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain, "by Susy Clemens, his daughter, thirteen, with a foreword and copious comments by her father" (Doubleday, 1985) is an insider's view of Samuel Clemens, marked by "innocent free spelling" (Twain's words) and remarkable evenhandedness. (Twain notes: "It is to her credit as a biographer that she distributes compliment and criticism with a fair and even hand.") This book is also a sort of autobiography of an interesting family, complete with photos not widely published elsewhere.

Ernest Shackleton's South (Heinemann, 1919) is an account of Shackleton's 1914–17 Antarctic expedition, intended to be the first to cross the continent. Dryly written and relying heavily on excerpts from the author's journals and those of some of his crew, it is notable in part for its photos and its descriptions of ever-changing pack ice and what it can do to a ship�namely, chew it up and swallow it. (Speaking of eating, it's also an account of starvation and its effects.)

A short, factual outline of events described in the book:

Two ships, the Endurance and the Aurora were sailed in 1914 toward opposite ends of Antarctica; a team from the Endurance intended to cross the continent from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea, aided by dogs and a motorized sledge, while a team from the Aurora, starting at McMurdo Sound, was charged with hauling and setting out supply depots upon which the continent crossers would rely. The Endurance was laid up in unusually heavy and active pack ice in 1915; the ship was abandoned in October and sank in November. In April 1916 three lifeboats were successfully sailed to Elephant Island. A week later, one of the lifeboats continued across rough seas and made it to South Georgia Island where three of the crew (including Shackleton) trekked over glaciers and mountains to a whaling station�and rescue. (It took four attempts in four vessels over three months, but the men left behind on Elephant island were finally rescued in late August 1916.) As for the Aurora, some of its crew succeeded in laying out stores intended for the Shackleton team's use, but three men died in the effort�and seven survivors were stranded for nearly two years. (The ship's moorings had failed to hold and it had drifted off.) In April 1916 the Aurora reached New Zealand where it was repaired and outfitted with a new crew (including Shackleton), and set off again for the Ross Sea in December 1916. In January 1917, almost two years after they'd set foot on Antarctica, the seven Ross Sea Party survivors were rescued.

For more info:PBS website on the 1914 Shackleton expedition

Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Emperor (Random House, 1983), relies on the words of Haile Selassie's former lackeys-- the ones whose roles were carrying the emperor's purse, opening and closing his door, choosing the right pillow for his throne, shooting off a mortar that fired projectiles stuffed with colored handkerchiefs bearing his likeness, and wiping urine excreted by his dog Lulu from the shoes of dignitaries--to document the mid-1970s demise of the "King of Kings, Elect of God, Lion of Judah, His Most Puissant Majesty and Distinguished Highness the Emperor of Ethiopia." Like Kapuscinski's Shah of Shahs (see below), it's a case study in autocracy and revolution, and answers the questions "What keeps a dictator in power?" and "From whence comes a revolution?"

"In those years there existed two images of Haile Selassie. One, known to international opinion, presented the Emperor as a rather exotic, gallant monarch, distinguished by indefatigable energy, a sharp mind and profound sensitivity, a man who made a stand against Mussolini, recovered his empire and his throne, and had ambitions of developing his country and playing an important role in the world. The other image, formed gradually by a critical and initially small segment of Ethiopian opinion, showed the monarch as ruler committed to defending his power at any cost, a man who was above all a great demagogue and a theatrical paternalist who used words and gestures to mask the corruption and servility of a ruling elite that he had created and coddled. And, as so often happens, both these images were correct."

Justin Kaplan's Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (Simon & Schuster, 1966) is a competent biography focusing on Clemens's life from early middle-age, after he had served as a river boat pilot, then gone west for seven years.

Clemens was an interesting, conflicted guy--outspokenly anti-imperialist and anti-lynching, but an unfettered capitalist, pals in later years with Andrew Carnegie, among others, caught up with one after another scheme to make money. (He lost a fortune on a typesetting machine that never succeeded.)

What does Clemens have in common with Henry David Thoreau? Both spent time in the company of Emerson, though Emerson was "senile" in 1877 when he and Clemens both attended a dinner in honor of John Greenleaf Whittier's 70th birthday. Thoreau was born in Concord; Mark Twain was banned in Concord. And both started forest fires, about which they wrote almost gleefully. Otherwise two more different people are difficult to imagine, as opposed to Clemens and Kurt Vonnegut who died this week. Vonnegut was my generation's Mark Twain. Both spanned the centuries, came east from the Midwest, and were dissed for a long time as being just humorists. Both are famous for novels but got to the point where they were only inclined to write political rants (anti-imperialist, cautionary, caustic ones). Both had formative war experiences and suffered from depression. Both were skeptical free-thinkers, public speakers, and smoked like chimney in January in Montana. Hey, they even looked alike.

Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (Pantheon, 2003) and Persepolis 2 (Pantheon, 2004) are memoirs in graphic novel format about growing up in Tehran during the Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. Born in 1969, Satrapi was raised by liberal parents (and a grandmother) who taught her to think for herself and speak her own mind, the latter a dangerous trait. I'd read Persepolis before, but reread it in light of new knowledge about Iran. In Persepolis 2 Satrapi tells of her life as a student in Austria where her parents sent her, thinking it would be for the best, and about her return, coming of age, and departure again. Both books are effective memoirs with significant things to say about Persian culture, psychology, relationships, liberalism, freedom, biculturalism, and repression.

See Jen Camper's cartoon-format review of Persepolis 2 in the September 2004 issue of Women's Review of Books (you'll have to scroll down on the page to find it).

Ryszard Kapuscinski's Shah of Shahs (Harcourt, 1985) is an insightful and elegantly written book about Iran and revolution. Kapuscinski, who died recently, writes here that the 1979 overthrow of the shah was the twenty-seventh revolution he has witnessed. His insight lies in seeing revolution as something that is largely psychological, and that can begin when a single person overcomes fear.

"The causes of revolution are usually sought in objective conditions--general poverty, oppression, scandalous abuses. But this view, while correct, is one-sided. After all, such conditions exist in a hundred countries, but revolutions erupt rarely. What is needed is the consciousness of poverty and the consciousness of oppression, and the conviction that poverty and oppression are not the natural order of the world. It is curious that in this case, experience in and of itself, no matter how painful, does not suffice. The indispensable catalyst is the word, the explanatory idea. More than petards or stilettoes, therefore, words--uncontrolled words, circulating freely, underground, rebelliously, not gotten up in dress uniforms, uncertified--frighten tyrants. But sometimes it is the official, uniformed, certified words that bring about the revolution."

Mark Twain's generally excellent Life on the Mississippi, first published 1883, describes the Mississippi River from the point of view of a steamboat pilot who writes first about the steamboat era's heyday and then revisits the river years later and describes changes. It's funny and educational (with some prescient words about the inevitable flooding of New Orleans), and apparently wiser than:

Roughing It (published 1872), in which Twain writes about his journey west on a stage coach, his efforts to make his fortune from silver mining in Nevada, and his views of the wild West culture of Carson City and environs. There's a great story about getting lost in the woods in a snow storm, and--in pages where Twain describes a trip to the Sandwich Islands (now the Hawaiian Islands)--another about getting lost in a volcano at night. (He also writes about trying unsuccessfully to surf.) Like Life on the Mississippi, it's a joy, often asking to be read aloud.

I read for a living these days, proofreading, copyediting, and indexing. Here's a list of books I've read for pay in recent months, in the order I've read them, most recent listed last, not including copyedited manuscripts: an English translation of a novel by Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek (Greed), What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race and the State of the Nation (South End Press); Maureen Webb's Illusions of Security (City Lights), Dr. Rice in the House (about Condoleeza Rice), Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority (AK Press), The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Repairing the World, Normand Baillargeon's A Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense, Sin Patrón (Haymarket), a book about worker takeovers of Argentine factories, and Dave Zirin's Welcome to the Terrordome: the Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports.

John Man's The Survival of Jan Little (Viking, 1986) reads like a story that Werner Herzog might have made into a documentary film. According to the jacket (and the book's epilogue), the author beat Herzog to it. In a nutshell, it's the tale of Jan Little, an American woman, divorced and living in Mexico in the late 1950s with her three-year-old daughter, who meets a charismatic man who she impetuously marries and with whom she moves to a Lacandon jungle homestead for twelve years, and then to an even more remote jungle location in the Amazon. The story is complicated by the woman's increasing blindness and deafness, and the man's abusiveness and dubious philosophy, a sort of macho, whining Christian Science. It's a story right out of Greek drama--what about that tragic daughter?--but, as documentaries proclaim, it really happened.

Yes, this is one of those "it really happened" books. It loses steam toward the end, but I found it fascinating to vicariously cope with destructive pet monkeys, subsist on cold farina, learn to speak Portuguese via Braille, and maneuver alone among rotting bones.

Still reading as background research, I've lately consumed another Tom Brown book (The Search: The Continuing Story of the Tracker; Prentice-Hall, 1980)--see The Tracker below--and Amy Racina's Angels in the Wilderness: The True Story of One Woman's Survival Against All Odds (Elite Books, 2005). The latter is a first-person account of a woman solo hiker in Kings Canyon National Park, out on a two-week trek in a remote area, who fell off a 60-foot cliff, shattered her left hip and right knee, but survived. (Determined to "scootch" her way back to the nearest trail, Dracina managed to move about 80 yards over the course of several days, far enough so that she was in the right place at the right time for hikers to come upon her.) A page on Racina's website shows her with Aron Ralston, the adventurer known for his survival in a Utah canyon a few years ago. (After being trapped by a moving boulder, Ralston extricated himself by amputating his hand.) The two, spiritual kin, look to be blood relatives.

Reading books these days faster than I can write about them--call it research--I'll jot down a few notes here about some book recently consumed:

Eric Blehm's The Last Season (HarperCollins, 2006) describes the 1996 disappearance of longtime seasonal back-country park ranger Randy Morgenson in rugged Kings Canyon National Park, and subsequent search and rescue efforts. If Blehm's portrait is true, Morgenson was an Ed Abbeyesque character who, like Abbey, loved wild land and wrote some perceptive paeans to it (albeit in logbooks and journals, not published essays and novels). Blehm quotes from a 1973 Morgenson report: "I am suddenly close to something very great . . . something containing me and all this around me, something I only dimly perceive, and understand not at all. Perhaps if I am here, aware, and perceptive long enough I will." And from a 1978 logbook: "How can I claim to a greater importance than these alpine flowers, than anything that lives here, or even the very rocks which eventually become the nourishing soil from which it all has to start? . . . I would rather my footsteps never be seen, and the sound of my voice be heard only by those near, and never echo, than leave in my wake the fame of those whom we commonly call great."

Anders Nilsen's Don't Go Where I Can't Follow (Drawn and Quarterly, 2006) is a sort of combined scrapbook, photo album, and graphic autobiography about Nilsen's travel experiences with his girlfriend (and eventually fiancée) Cheryl Weaver, and about her death in November 2005 and subsequent lakeside memorial service. A careful, handsome, poignant production, the book seems crafted as a physical testament to a relationship. Part of the story--Cheryl's hospitalization and death from Hodgkin's disease--make up but nine pages of eight-six here. (Compare that with twenty-one pages reproducing a handwritten letter about a weekend getaway when things kept going wrong.) The book seems like a gift from Anders to Cheryl, not revealing too much to outsiders: a dark little love letter pregnant with mystery.

Peter DeLeo's Survive! My Fight for Life in the High Sierras (Simon and Schuster, 2005) is a first-person account by the pilot of a small plane that crashed in the Sierra Nevadas in late 1994, a man who over the next thirteen days hiked out over the mountains and through deep snow despite severe injuries, who lived to tell the story. On the one hand Survive! is an amazing tale of persistence and will, with lessons germane to surviving outdoors in cold weather. On the other hand, the author depicts himself as a hero when official accident investigation reports, not mentioned anywhere in the book, lead one to think otherwise. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that DeLeo was flying too low into a box canyon and couldn't climb out. Further, their investigation found that the Emergency Locator Transmitter in DeLeo's plane had no antenna, while in his book DeLeo refers to the ELT in ways that indicate he had no clue how to use it. One wonders about the stories of DeLeo's two passengers, both of whom died, one from injuries suffered in the crash, investigators determined, the other of hypothermia.

The Tracker: The Story of Tom Brown, Jr., as told to William Jon Watkins (Prentice-Hall, 1978) tells what it was like to grow up in the woods of New Jersey's Pine Barrens, being a boy who was passionate about the outdoors, but especially about tracks and tracking. The story involves a friend who was equally keen on tracking, a mentor (his friend's Apache grandfather Stalking Wolf--for real?), and lively anecdotes about surviving "quick mud," battling wild dogs, building a cabin, and acclimating to cold. (Stalking Wolf has them run miles through a blizzard while wearing only cut-offs.) Brown subsequently went on to write many books about tracking and the outdoors, and has for years run a wilderness survival school. What lingers most of all, weeks after reading The Tracker is Brown's interest in and attention to detail, and his caring not only for large mammals (deer and bears) but smaller, humbler living things, and how all living things, plant and animal, fit together.

Richard Suskind's By Bomb, Bullet & Dagger: The Story of Anarchism (Macmillan, 1971), written for young adults, focuses on anarchist assassins and would-be assassins to the degree that the likes of peaceable Emma Goldman, Pierre Proudhon, and Peter Kropotkin, covered here in less detail, are seen as a vastly outnumbered minority.

"[I]lluminated in these pages are the forces that eventually combined to defeat and suppress anarchism and render it obsolete," the book's jacket asserts, and an epilogue to the book echoes this, saying that revolutionary anarchism "is a failure" and "has been consigned to the 'dustbin of history.'" That said, note Suskind's use of the qualifier "revolutionary" here. His opening chapter on the Haymarket affair is entirely straightforward and suggests some sympathy with the cause, as does his quotation of Proudhon on the state ("To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied upon, regulated...[etc.]").

Also covered here: Alexander Berkman's attempted attentat against Henry Clay Frick, Leonard Czolgosz's shooting of William McKinley, the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and anarchist assassinations in Spain, Italy, and France.

"Men are as we have always known them, neither better nor worse. From the hearts of rogues there springs a latent honesty, from the depths of honest men there emerges a brutish appetite�a thirst for extermination, a desire for blood," Ruskind quotes Spanish anarchist Federica Montseny (misspelling her name "Monteseny" as he misspells Pissarro "Pissaro."

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