Book talkin'

Thomas Savage's novel The Power of the Dog (Little, Brown, 1967), a sort of gothic western set in 1920s Montana, contains nary a wrong note. Reminiscent of Ivan Doig's Montana memoir This House of Sky, but without the frippery, it's somewhat autobiographical (according to Annie Proulx's afterword in the 2001 paperback edition I read), about a boy, the death of a parent, and joining a new family. Ed Abbey might have liked this book.

Thanks to Flathead County Library's "Staff Pick" program--and a "hand sell" by director Kim Crowley. ("Read this!")

Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (Doubleday, 20093) was first intended to be a book about the "highly charged relationship" between the Church of the Latter Day Saints ("fastest-growing faith in the Western Hemisphere) and its past. Instead it became, in large part, a true crime story about two fundamentalist Mormon brothers who killed a young woman and her daughter in 1984 because (they said) God commanded them to do it. Krakauer reports on contemporary "outlaw sects" who practice polygamy (through Krakauer's lenses, a boon mostly to pedophiles and men who want to have sex with many different women), and in doing so provides detailed historical context. Most interesting to me was this material about church founder Joseph Smith, the history of Mormon-"Gentile" relations, Brigham Young, the Mormon exodus from one locale after another, and the so-called Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857 and its subsequent cover-up and then scapegoating. Also worth an entire chapter, perhaps, is something that rates but a footnote here, quoting a 1999 Los Angeles Times article by Kenneth Anderson: "Educated Mormon culture has long been characterized... by outstanding physical scientists and engineers, as strictly rational as possible in their worldly work yet devout in their adherence to many historical beliefs that would not pass the test of rational science, and believers, moreover, in deeply mystical ideas..."

Typical of a true crime story, Krakauer also covers the murderers' trials, focusing on lawyers' efforts to prove and disprove insanity. (If one hears what one takes to be the voice of God instructing one to murder, then carries out the deed, is one not culpable due to insanity?)

Read but not yet published: Maureen Webb's Illusions of Security (City Lights), a book about post-9/11 surveillance, detention, rendition, and torture, and What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation (South End Press).

Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man (Viking, 2002) describes the life of Eustace Conway who taught himself to live off the land while he was a boy growing up in suburban North Carolina in the 60s. It’s a quick read—spun off from an article in GQ—that presents another case study in pathological idealism. Conway comes off as part hero and latter-day Thoreau (the book has four Thoreauvian references), and part controlling, egomaniac slave driver, whose human relationships mostly fail, repeating behavior he learned from his father.

Put aside everything you think you know about grizzly bears. Douglas H. Chadwick's True Grizz (Sierra Club Books, 2003), a well-written, empathetic book, specifically about the grizzly interface with humans in northwestern Montana where I live, goes a long way toward correcting bear stereotypes and making sense of attempts to negotiate the human-bear relationship without bloodshed.

"A grizzly commands attention merely by being in the same zip code. It elicits respect and enforces a measure of humility. None of these is a condition easily instilled in Americans. Some folks resent the bears precisely for requiring this magnitude of awareness outdoors. A good deal of what we mean when we complain that grizzlies are unpredictable is that they are not subject to us. They can be killed and even locally exterminated, but they cannot be made to accept our reign…."

The only large land-based mammals with a geographic range wider than grizzlies: humans and wolves.

A resident of Whitefish, Montana, Chadwick has also written widely on mountain goats, a species he studied in the early 70s to gain a Master's degree in wildlife biology.

Ivan Doig’s This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind (Harcourt Brace, 1992; first published 1978) is partly an autobiography about the author’s growing up in Montana, and partly the connected stories of Doig’s father—who was a sort of sharecropping sheep rancher, his grandmother, his mother (who died on his 6th birthday, in June 1945), and a stepmother.

At its best, the book presents vivid anecdotes, many of which have to do with sheep, sheep dogs and sheep ranchers. Picture herding sheep in the face of a storm, or for miles along a highway, befuddling oncoming drivers. Imagine being a boy and having to deal with a rash of sheep dying, bloated in the summer sun, unable to get up after rolling on the ground to relieve the itch of ticks.

Doig describes what it was like to move frequently, and to live in small towns such as White Sulfur Springs where he accompanied his father from bar to bar on Saturday nights, or in spare quarters in remote rural places, or with guardians who weren’t family members. At its best the book is also a well-told story on a higher level, about a way of life that’s almost gone, and about people whose lives, often a struggle, are infused with a certain grace, dignity, and heroism.

That said, Doig’s introductions to each chapter, written in his own adult voice and italicized over-dramatically, seem patently unnecessary. Doig’s tales are perfectly sufficient prose poetry on their own, and the pretentious purple prose he sometimes uses here detracts from this.

Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster (Villard, 1997) ought to have been subtitled differently. There's been more than a single disaster on Everest, after all.

The book focuses on Krakauer's experiences as a "client" member of a guided international team that attempted to scale Everest in the spring of 1996. At the same time, over a dozen other expeditions were on the mountain. At the heart of the tale is a scene where Krakauer, having run out of supplemental oxygen, was descending from the summit, yet had to wait, "in rising terror," for over an hour, at a bottlenock in the route, as other climbers made their way up a stretch of steep rock known as the Hillary Step, one of them so "flummoxed" and exhausted that she had to be pushed from the rear by a guide.

What happened next was a combination of bad weather and faulty human decisions, the latter exacerbated by hypoxia, frostbite, and tiredness. The leader of Krakauer's team didn't hold firm to his designated turn-around time (when climbers needed to return to their highest level camp if they hadn't reached the summit). Krakauer himself (in his thick-headed condition) failed to grok that guide Andy Harris needed supplemental oxygen that Krakauer could have provided. And a storm blew in as climbers were still at or near the summit, preventing more than half dozen of them from making it back to camp. Five died.

Into Thin Air goes beyond the typical "I survived hell" genre of survival narrative, thanks partly to Krakauer's ability to write clearly, choose the right words, strive to see and describe things from different points of view, and avoid decoration. Krakauer is an expert climber, but had never before been as high even as the altitude of Everest's Base Camp, and so part of his story is about acclimatization and the physical affects of high altitude on the human body. The book effectively shows the problems inherent when so many people, of different abilities and temperaments, attempt such an endeavor at once, from a rich socialite whose Sherpa helpers had to carry along an insane amount of gear for her, to a Taiwanese duo whose behavior made it seem they'd never crossed crevasses in a glacier before, to the leader of a South African team who comes off as a psychopath who ought to be prosecuted for breaking moral laws, perhaps. In the end, the book is also a confessional from Krakauer that he has the deaths of others on his conscience. ("As I write these words... no more than two or three hours have gone by in which Everest hasn't monopolized my thoughts.")

"Above the comforts of Base Camp," Krakauer writes, the expedition became "an almost Calvinistic undertaking. The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any other mountain I'd been on; I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking, above all else, something like a state of grace."

The experience of reaching the top of the world did not prompt elation in Krakauer, who only spent a few minutes there before he wisely chose to descend. Plodding his last steps to the peak, he'd felt as though he was underwater, only realizing he'd achieved the goal when suddenly he found himself on a narrow wedge of ice, "with nowhere further to climb." "But the summit was really only the halfway point," he concludes. "Any impulse I might have felt toward self-congratulation was extinguished by overwhelming apprehrension about the long, dangerous descent that lay ahead."

Maria Coffey’s Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow: The Dark Side of Extreme Adventure (St. Martin’s Press, 2003) presents the stories of families and partners of mountaineers who’ve died in climbing accidents, a category the author herself fits. “Can the gains of climbing ever balance the costs?,” Coffey asks. It’s not a question easily answered even on a case-by-case basis, but the points of view represented in this book deserve attention.

Norman Hallendy’s Inuksuit: Silent Messengers of the Arctic (Douglas & McIntyre/University of Washington Press, 2000) is a beautiful, compelling, and sensitively written book about the stone cairns and figures created by the Iniut people and their predecessors, as landmarks, caribou-hunting aids, and objects of veneration. In part, this book is about a way of thinking and how that way of thinking is manifest in naming things carefully and specifically. Hallendy records dozens of Inuit names for specific kinds of inuksuit including ones that express joy, signal good places to catch various animal species, mark meat caches, show good places to cross a river, were built by a non-Inuit, or are the remains of an old inuksuit, as well as human-placed stones that do not act in the capacity of a human (as “inuksuk” means) but are instead meat drying platforms, structures used to steady a telescope, objects believed to have the power to heal, markers of important events, memorials marking where killings took place, and stones in the shape of a doorway through which a shaman entered the spirit world.

David Roberts' Great Exploration Hoaxes (Sierra Club Books, 1982) presents concise, compelling essays about nine explorers who probably--or certinaly-- made false claims and one who was wrongly misbelieved. Examining such fakers as sixteenth century mariner Sebastian Cabot (who some believe never left England), French missionary Louis Hennepin, and polar explorers Frederick Cook, Robert Peary, and Richard Byrd, Roberts seeks common psychological ground. What is it that not only causes a person to make an extreme claim, but also to hold fast to it even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence? Roberts' answers only offer conjecture, but are worth further consideration.

Beyond psychological questions, Roberts provides a cautionary look at written history. Somewhere people lie buried, he asserts, who "fooled every one of us... whose 'records' satisfied the most critical judges." Are they laughing in their graves, as Roberts thinks? More likely they are rotting.

David Roberts’ altogether engaging On the Ridge Between Life and Death: A Climbing Life Reexamined (Simon and Schuster, 2005) is both autobiography and consideration of basic questions about mountaineering: “Why do it?” and “Is it worth the risk?”

Some key facts about Roberts: He’s Jon Krakauer’s mentor and friend, he’s been a climber for over four decades and in his younger days scaled some of Alaska’s most inhospitable and challenging mountains, and he’s seen two friends fall to their deaths (and known many others who’ve perished in climbing-related accidents).

I found the book hard to put down, so cogently it addresses questions I’ve also had. For instance, how does one balance (if at all) the embrace of personal, private loves and demons—do the things that bring the most joy –and yet also be responsible to loved ones?

Roberts remembers the unrivaled thrill and pride of accomplishment of successful climbing in extreme conditions and compares these to less acute joys and excitement he’s known as a journalist, traveling widely and adventuring without putting his life so obviously on the line. He writes about his struggle to become a freelance writer and, most important here, about his relationships with family, seen in new light thanks partly to newfound ability to empathize with those who’ve had loved ones die in the mountains.

After one has been to the mountain, then what? Roberts’ book is a good introduction to mountaineering, conveying the passion (and sometimes mania or neuroses) inherent in extreme climbing, describing technical details in a way that should satisfy mountaineers and armchair climbers alike, and presenting a veritable canon of other climbing-related books, a couple of which I now look forward to reading.

The tiniest quibble: There are no such thing as “mackerel cirrus” clouds. The ones sometimes called “mackerel” are altocumulus. Cirrus clouds are wispy.

Louise Erdrich’s Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (National Geographic, 2003) reads like a sister or companion piece to Bill Holm’s Eccentric Islands. It focuses on Erdrich’s visit to painted rocks on islands in Lake of the Woods and to book-filled cabins built by Ernest Oberholtzer on another island there, that Holm also writes about in his book.

Books and Islands reads like a short essay on mothering daughters (Erdrich’s youngest, Kiizhikok, was born a great-aunt when Louise was in her late 40s), traveling between cultures (Erdrich’s forbearers are German and Ojibwe), and loving books. It articulates a passion for stories, gets at the various meanings of books (as guides, as lenses for new experience), includes a great sentence that describes the essence of girls, and names a few books I’d now like to read (such as John Tanner’s The Falcon, a Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner During Thirty Years Residence among the Indians in the Interior of North America). I enjoyed reading Erdrich’s descriptions of her Minneapolis bookstore and neighborhood, both of which I know, and of people I’ve heard about secondhand. These views enriched my own. I also liked reading Ojibwe words and learning a little more about Ojibwe culture.

James Gleick's Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (Vintage Books, 2000) reports statistics on elevator speed, clock accuracy, and traffic; touches upon the history of "Type A" labeling, watches, photography, and computers; and examines time spent sleeping, filling out forms, eating, engaging in sexual activities, and ostensibly "saving time." That said, it all seems quite cursory, without much insight, neither digging deeply into the human psyche, nor prophesying. Throughout, the book left me wanting more. It does include a thorough list of the author's secondhand sources (some of the book was based on original research) and an index which seems hardly necessary, unhappily.

Here's one notable quote from the book, from "Yale psychologist Robert J. Sternberg": "The essence of intelligence would seem to be in knowing when to think and act quickly, and knowing when to think and act slowly."

Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America, by Stephen G. Bloom (Harcourt, 2000) compellingly reports the contemporary story of Postville, Iowa, a small, sleepy Lutheran and Catholic town in the northeast corner of the state, after an abandoned meat packing plant there was reopened as a kosher slaughterhouse in the late 1980s by a group of Lubavitcher Jews who came from New York. The tale includes Bloom himself, a non-observant Jew who moved with his small family in 1993 from San Francisco to Iowa City, as he tries to decide who he is and whether he’s one the side of the locals or the newcomers. It’s not a simple situation, made more complex by the additional influx of non-Lubavitcher workers from Eastern Europe and compounded by the fact that some longtime Postville citizens experience an upswing in their business. (Real estate booms and the bank’s wealth grows.) Looking through Bloom’s lens, the Lubavitchers seem in some ways entirely admirable in their focus on living and maintaining their own culture to the exclusion of all others. In other ways, though, it seems they treat the locals badly when they deal with them at all.

In Postville, things come to a head in 1997 with a local referendum aimed at extending the town’s boundaries to include the slaughterhouse. Significantly, Bloom also chooses to wait till the end of his book to report on a 1991 robbery and shooting of a local convenience story clerk, a crime committed by two Hasidic "no-goodniks." The story wouldn’t have been so dramatic if readers knew earlier that one of these men would take a fall and the other go free after intervention by the Lubavitcher community, apparently a travesty of justice. Describing tensions and contradictions that mirror those elsewhere in the contemporary United States, Postville provokes questions that can be debated interestingly for a long time but not really answered except by watching and waiting.

I first read Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (McGraw Hill, 1968) right before visiting the canyon country of Utah for the first time. Reading it again, now knowing many of the places (and plants and animals and emotions) Abbey describes--the horrendously rocky Flint Trail, the Hole in the Rock, the White Rim, Arches--my senses quicken and I'm drawn there again. Love for the beautiful desert wells up--love for the paintbrush and antelope squirrels, the cottonwoods and ravens, the curving slickrock and sheer canyon walls, and love for the solitude I've known away from roads (down Davis Gulch)--but also sadness (if not horror) to know that what Abbey described was prophetic: "This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You're holding a tombstone in your hands."

When Abbey wrote Desert Solitaire, Arches National Park was yet a quiet National Monument accessible only via a rough dirt road. Now it's visited year-round by an insane 750,000 humans. Too many people now travel all but the worst roads and rockiest tracks in southeastern Utah, disturbing the balance. For all of Abbey's exaggeration (which is akin to Thoreau's-- and Desert Solitaire mirrors Walden in more ways than one), he really was a proponent for sanity. "Balance, that's the secret," he writes here (in "Bedrock and Paradox"), "Moderate extremism."

Ernst Freidrich’s War Against War! first published in Germany in 1924, addressed "To Human Beings in all lands!," presents stark photos of the squalor, misery, and horror of war, comparing the experience of rulers and generals to those in the trenches. Starting with images of toy soldiers and smiling men marching off to battle in 1914, Friedrich proceeds to show fields littered with human remains, mutilated bodies, people hanging from gallows or about to be shot (think—someone made these photos), mangled faces, heads on bayonets. Along with these pictures appear sarcastic, biting words—"The ‘field of honor," "War idyll," "The pride of the family"—as well as documents such as regulations for the control of a brothel (different battalions assigned different days of the week) and military proclamations promising that civilian hostages "shall be shot down without mercy" if a single weapon is found on them.

The edition I have on hand was published by the late Seattle-based independent Real Comet Press in 1987, with text in English, German, French, and Dutch, some preserving the unusual original typography which intersperses boldface and different font sizes. A publisher’s note says many quadrilingual international editions have been issued, with text in German, French, English, and variant fourth languages ("as many as forty… including Russian and Chinese"). An introduction by Douglas Kellner describes Friedrich’s "pacifistic anarchism," the prison time he served for dissenting, his founding of an Anti-War Museum in Berlin, its destruction by Nazis, his reopening the museum in Belgium during World War II (and its destruction), and the revival of the museum in Berlin once more in 1981, fourteen years after Friedrich’s death.

The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail (Hill and Wang, 1970), a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, incorporates some of Thoreau's words from Walden and "Civil Disobedience" so that he speaks things we've previously read. (Sometimes the words are paraphrased or changed. Why did Lawrence and Lee feel compelled to end, "The sun is only a morning star," marring the original, "The sun is but a morning star?") The play is set in the Concord Jail, but freely jumps elsewhere--to the school where Thoreau taught briefly, the Emerson household, even a forced dream scene near the end where Emerson appears as a foolish President of the United States and where Abraham Lincoln makes an offstage cameo.

By and large, Thoreau's conversational words in the play ring true, even when they are imagined by Lawrence and Lee, such as when they have him say, "Blessed are the young, for they do not read the President's speeches." Occasionally something seems off, as when "Simplify, simplify" is used as Thoreau's response to Emerson's saying, "When white people and black try to live together, it's infinitely complicated."

The play, written and first performed during the height of U.S. citizen protests against the war in Vietnam, still seems timely. Thanks to Sandy B. for calling to my attention that it was playing in Minneapolis this spring.

I've lately read Wislawa Szymborska's Monologue of a Dog (Harcourt, 2006) the latest collection of the Polish Nobel laureate's poems translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak (and presented side by side with the Polish original). Seven of the 27 poems here were published already in Poems New and Collected. This is not earthshaking stuff--it says something that they are introduced by Billy Collins whose own poems are as mundane and accessible as potato chips-- but these new poems are marked with a certain intelligence, grace, and strong character that takes them several steps beyond simply being accessible. Taken together they don't seem to add up to much, but I sense that they'd stand out in any poetry journal for their clarity and piquancy.

A month or two ago I read Walter Mosley's slim new volume, Life Out of Context (Nation Books, 2006) whose cover and title page promise that the book "includes a proposal for the non-violent takeover of the House of Representatives" a promise that is exaggerated. In the past I've liked Mosley's Socrates Fortlaw books, fiction about one ex-con's attempt to reedem himself, and I'm grateful that Moseley's written--and that the likes of Black Classic Press and Nation Books have published--his political nonfiction. But Mosley rarely gets beyond expressing common sense and platitude. ("One of the most important things we can do for our community is to show up to the table and pull out a chair.") I guess he's writing for an audience that needs to be challenged just a little, and gently.

More challenging reading of late: Simone Weil's Waiting for God (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1951), with which I expect to be spending some more time.

The short, poignant prose poems that make up Gary Young's Pleasure (Heyday Books, 2006) describe jewel-like moments of awareness in which mundane situations and events come to life, as if Young himself has animated them. Orange lichen on a rock, the silence of a child's empty room, the taste of a cigar: all tremble here, newly alive, purposeful, and emblematic.

"A full moon rises over the orchard where two owls sit perched on a snow-dusted tree. One owl falls forward, and floats toward me with wings spread wide, my cold heart moving on."

"Two ravens call from a redwood after the storm. Two black stones, they skip from one branch to another, and when they do, raindrops catch the failing light, and a shower of sparks falls from every stricken tree."

"My son fell asleep beside me on the bed. I slept too, and later, woke up dizzy, almost sick with happiness. My son's warm breath was all about me in the room, and his small bones rested there with mine."

"A sparrow preens its wings on a power line overhead, and cats a filmy shadow across the dusty road, a charcoal drawing erased and redrawn each time the sparrow shudders or twists. The world is reinvented endlessly."

Young's sensuality is colorful, aromatic, tactile, finding pleasure--if sometimes terror--in each small treasure:

"The world cannot be contained. This morning I saw a mockingbird catch a butterfly in mid-air, and with the bright wings fluttering in its beak, it seemed to burst into blossom."

"I took the children to pick berries, and their fingers and their faces were soon stained red with warm, sweet juice. There were mice running ahead of the children in the furrows, and overhead there were hawks, waiting for them."

"The shallow stream murmurs in its narrow bed. A wren repeats his signature riff, and redwoods groan in a stiffening breeze. Graffiti on the wall outside says, I am Valentino Rossi, but not much else. The world is a gift, a wedding. A woman wipes juice from her child's sticky lips. Someone says, I collect maps. The frozen bolt gives way at last."

Intended for children, but fun for all, Discovering Nature's Alphabet, by Krystina Castella and Brian Boyl (Heyday Books, 2006), is a colorful photographic alphabet book that fosters curiosity, showing patterns and connections in the living world, finding each letter, multiple times, in branches, roots, cacti, fungi, leaf veins, shoots, tendrils, holes and cracks in rocks, tree scars, shadows, melting ice, a spider, and other things humans often overlook. A thumbnail key in the back identifies subject and location of each photo. (Over half are from California). The book's cumulative effect: awe and respect for all things great and small

Peter Freuchen's Arctic Adventure: My Life in the Frozen North (Lyons Press, 2002; first published 1935) reports firsthand the life of a Dane who went to northern Greenland as a young man and essentially went native, learning the native language, marrying an Inuit woman, learning how to survive dire travel conditions (via dogsled in brutal weather, lost, trapped on ice floes, starving), and respecting--in fact loving (and so respecting)-- the native culture with all its richness and paradox and humor. It is really a great book--about love for land and life, about what is essential and true--that reminded me of the Inuit film "The Fast Runner." Freuchen understates his own bravery and evenhandedness, writes with lively wit, re-enacts episodes in his own life with the verve of a practiced raconteur, and leaves readers imagining that they too might happily enough eat rabbit droppings provided they are rolled up in seal blubber.

Bob Black's Beneath the Underground (Feral House, 1993) is a collection of short essays and book reviews focused around what Black calls the "marginals mileu"-- the counterculture (or a section of it) current when Black was writing these pieces in the 80s and early 90s-- covering especially anarchists, Church of the Subgenius, Situationism, Loompanics Unlimited, and such "marginals demigods" as Hakim Bey, Ed Lawrence, Al Ackerman, and--uh--Black himself.

The book lacks an index, unfortunately, so future researchers in this culture might overlook the fact that it includes material about the aforenamed people and topics, along with the likes of Factcheet Five, Processed World, and other small circulation publications and publishers. At his best Black is not simply iconoclastic but apt and articulate in his critical analysis, as when he reviews books such as Cultures in Contention (Real Comet Press, 1985) and Labor's Joke Book (WD Press, 1986), writes about Loompanics ("The Whole Earth Catalog ruthlessly re-edited by Friedrich Nietzsche"), and touts the self-published booklets of Texan Jim Wheat ("If Harpo spoke, this is what he might say"). At his worst he carries grudges and attributes far too much importance to his own opinion and to the micro-movements he describes.

I can't accurately guess how many books I start reading, dip into, and then put down for good, but the number must be at least a dozen a month. Rarely do I mention such books in this log, but it might not be a bad idea. Yesterday I read 48 pages of a 79-page book, an item that once would have been an article in a magazine, if published at all. The book's title was promising--Birding Babylon: A Soldier's Journal from Iraq (Sierra Club Books, 2006)--but while the Jonathan Trouern-Trend may be a competent birder, he's not a good writer. Taken from Trouern-Trend's "Birding Babylon" blog, the book is trite and badly edited, to boot. I'd already winced at such useless sentences as "They are incredibly cool birds," when I came upon page 48. There I found a sentence in the second paragraph that exactly repeated one in the first ("I saw a small flock of garganey, the first so far") as well as a reference to "one of the most unique birds I've seen." Well, this is one of the more unique books I've come across lately in terms of its topic, but one of the less unique books I've come across in terms of sloppy editing. (Was it edited at all?)

I see dozens of books daily whose creators ought to be punished for wasting paper. Tell Raegan Butcher and the folks at Crimethinc that the world does not need another Charles Bukowkski writing inane "poems" such as "my girlfriend wears a thong." Make the people at Toronto's Natural Heritage Books sit still while someone reads aloud to them the turgid, vacuous, pretentious, seemingly endless, first paragraph of Hap Wilson's The Cabin and see whether they fall asleep or scream with laughter or pain. The freedom to stop reading a book is not to be underestimated.

Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003) revisits some questions from the author's On Photography (see below), such as as whether or not it is true that photographs become "less real" after repeated exposure, by focusing specifically on the photography of war. The extended essay is both a history of war photography dating from the Crimean War and U.S. Civil War; a moral, philosophical examination of its practice, viewing, and effects; and investigation of the psychological fascination with seeing death and gore. (After all, Sontag notes, "sight can be turned off (we have lids on our eyes, we do not have doors on our ears)."

Going beyond describing how Matthew Brady photographers posed corpses and questioning the veracity of Robert Capa's famous image of a Spanish resistance fighter apparently being shot, Sontag examines how photos are always open to interpretation. "All photographs await to be explained or falsified by their captions," she says. And: "Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge."

In the end what matters most is not sympathy --which can be, writes Sontag, "an impertinent--if not an inappropriate response"-- but firsthand experience and deep thinking about our own complicity. "To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as [others'] suffering, and may--in ways we might prefer not to imagine--be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark."

Some snippets:

"The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb."

"Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half's work of those profesional, specialized tourists known as journalists."

"An ample supply of stoicism is needed to get though the great newspaper of record each morning, given the likelihood of seeing photographs that could make you cry."

"The photographer's intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it."

"The iconography of suffering has a long pedigree. The sufferings most often deemed worthy of representation are those understood to be the product of wrath, divine or human."

"It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as ken, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked. For many centuries, in Christian art, depictions of hell offered both these elemental satisfactions."

"A stepped-up recognition of the monstrousness of the slave system that once existed, unquestioned by most, in the United States is a national project of recent decades that many Euro-Americans feel some tug of obligation to join. This ongoing project is a great achievement, a benchmark of civic virtue. The acknowledgement of the American use of disproportionate firepower in war (in violation of one of the cardinal laws of war) is very much not a national project."

Highly recommended.

Related: The Case of the Moved Body (from the Library of Congress "American Memory" project)

Some books portraying back country people are created by photographers who've spent just a few weeks in a place, if that, taking pictures of strangers. The frequent result: galleries of dehumanized freaks, people who are different from us. Ethan Hubbard's Salt Pork and Apple Pie: A Collection of Essays and Photographs about Vermont Old-Timers (Montpelier, VT: RavenMark, 2004) is not one of these, however. A longtime Vermonter, Hubbard exhibits not only curiosity but compassion and empathy for the people he photographs: loggers, sawyers, cedar oil distillers, hand scythers, Indian corn growers, and others who are--for all the uniqueness--us.

Most of the photos here date from the late 60s and early 70s, but others from thirty years later.

Finding George Orwell in Burma, by Emma Larkin (Penguin Press, 2005), first published in Great Britain in 2004 as Secret Histories: A Journey Through Burma Today in the Company of George Orwell, reports firsthand and eloquently on a search for the spoor of George Orwell in Burma. The journey entails colonial history--Orwell was once stationed in Burma as an officer in the British Imperial Police, and his first novel, Burmese Days described his epxeriences there--as well as consideration of the contemporary repressive regime which makes Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four seem prescient. (Burmese citizens joke that the latter two titles complete an Orwell trilogy about their country.)

Sobering, startling, and dangerous enough for the American author to have used a pseudonym, this book is likely to make you want to read more about Aung San Suu Kyi and the Burmese pro-democracy movement.

Especially notable: An anecdote about a prisoner/gardener/librarian and underground literature that is literally hidden beneath the soil. (Thanks to Jim Danky for the recommendation.)

Susan Sontag's On Photography raises good questions about the political, psychological, aesthetic, moral, and social aspects of photography, and makes some strong assertions worth considering. In some ways an intellectual history of photography, it was both a reminder to me about individual photographers with unique points of view and alert about the existence of a few whose names were new to me. It's caused me to haul out other books (a Diane Arbus collection, for example), to use google's image search, to dream about photography, to play with a camera for the first time in over a month, and to attempt answer some of Sontag's questions myself.

Thanks to Martha for retrieving this book for me after I'd talked with her about problematic aspects of a new collection of photographs titled Coal Hollow which a West Virginia friend of mine compellingly argues is "poverty porn."

Here's some Sontag:

"American photographers are often on the road, overcome with disrespectful wonder at what their country offers in the way of surreal surprises."

"Photography has [make that "photographers have"] always been fascinated by social heights and lower depths. Documentarists (as distinct from courtiers with cameras) prefer the latter. For more than a century, photographers have been hovering about the oppressed, in attendance at scenes of violence--with a spectacularly good conscience. Social misery has inspired the comfortably-off with the urge to take pictures, the gentlest of predations, in order to document a hidden reality, that is, a reality that is hidden from them.

"Gazing on other people's reality with curiosity, with detachment, with professionalism, the ubiquitous photographer operates as if that activity transcends class interests, as if its perspective is universal..."

"A photograph that brings news of some unsuspected zone of misery cannot make a dent in public opinion unless there is an appropriate context of feeling and attitude."

Walt McLaughlin's Forest Under My Fingernails: Reflections and Encounters on Vermont's Long Trail (Heron Dance Press, 2005)

Self-described "non-athlete" Walt McLaughlin, a Vermonter with "troublesome knees and nearly twenty pounds of excess fat," was no stranger to eastern woods. But the middle-aged publisher of Wood Thrush Books had never hiked a journey longer than thirty miles before he set out with a backpack, intent on reacquainting himself with the wild and hiking as far as he could on the Long Trail that goes uphill and down for 270 miles from Vermont's southern border to Quebec. Doubtful of his own ability to make it to Canada, McLaughlin instead focuses on his surroundings, taking the time to notice lady's slippers and trout lilies. In Forest Under My Fingernails he recounts his journey, describing without excessive elaboration day-to-day encounters with black flies, red efts, moose, and fellow through-hikers with trail names such as Puff and Mr. Clean, as well as his own thoughts. For the most part McLaughlin refrains from philosophizing, simply asking an occasional pertinent question or observing how just when he's bored with his hike, "when the green infinity seems uniform and uninspiring," something comes along to shake him out of his doldrums. A wood thrush's song makes all the difference. Recommended for city-dwelling humans who long for the cry of a raven, smell of humus (not hummus), and the beckoning vision of mountaintops.

Uchida describes how after Pearl Harbor, legislation was quickly passed that forced West Coast Japanese Americans the option of either moving east on their own, or going-- as prisoners-- to remote camps in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and elsewhere. (President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 led to the imprisonment of about 120,000 Japanese Americans, including children and seniors.)

Uchida's father was one of many arrested immediately after Pearl Harbor. The family had their bank acount blocked and they were forced to leave their rented house in Berkeley, to quickly give away, store, or sell most of their belongings (and the family dog), and only allowed to take with them as much as they could carry. First they were bussed to a temporary camp set up in a race track (the Tanforan Assemby Center) where they were incarcerated in cramped, dirty quarters that had been a horse stall. Months later they were sent via train to the remote Sevier Desert in central Utah, where the camp known as Topaz was hastily constructed. (Topaz eventually housed 8000 prisoners--"residents"-- effectively making it the fifth largest city in Utah.)

Uchida's straightforward account of the harsh experience, one to which Italian-American and German-American citizens were not subjected, is an important addition to a little known part of recent U.S. history. At the same time I read it, I also referred to Delphine Hirasuna's The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts From the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942-1946 (Ten Speed Press, 2005), a book depicting beautiful items made by prisoners from scraps of lumber, wire, rocks, waster paper, and string.

Anne LaBastille's Woodswoman IIII (West of the Wind Publications, 2003) is the fourth volume of LaBastille's series of books about life in the Adirondacks. In the first two volumes, published by Dutton and Norton, LaBastille writes about building two cabins and relates some adventures she had while constructing them and living in such a remote place. In her fourth volume (self-published like her third, as evidenced by the idiosyncratic Roman numeral), La Bastille writes more about her relationships with a companion cat and German Shepherd, about the latter's veterinary care and death, and about her "miserly book factory." Illustrated heavily with black-and-white snapshots, it's self-indulgent but lovable, likeliest to interest fans of her previous works or dog lovers.

To order La Bastille's books, contact her at West of the Wind Publications, R.D. 2, Westport, NY 12993.

Elmo Wortman's Almost Too Late (Random House, 1981) has been translated into multiple languages and made into a film. What it is: One man's account of surviving, with three of his children, a sailboat wreck in the high seas off Alaska's coast on Valentine's Day 1979.

Stranded in the cold without food, the family built a raft and made their way painfully toward help. Wortman and his teenage son attained the shelter of a remote food-stocked cabin after ten days, but it was another two weeks before they were able to return and rescue the family's two youngest daughters who'd managed to stay alive somehow, under shelter of a sail and eating only seaweed and small clams.

Not great literature, Almost Too Late instead seems another entry in the category of books about parents who put their children's lives at risk, like Perishable (see below). Wortman writes early on about how for two years the boat he was building "came first whenever I had a paycheck," and how his children "loved" their lifestyle of surviving on food gleaned from the ocean, wearing hole-ridden boots, and doing the heaviest labor on their dad's boat. I'd like to know their version of the story.

Thanks to my 12-year-old niece Kelley for telling me about this book.

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