“This is not a book about the great Austrian physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, nor, despite its importance in my life, is it about Antarctica. It is more about time and chance and the images and dreams we bring with us from childhood which shape who we are and what we become. It is about science and atoms and starry nights and what we think we remember, though we have made it up.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (DEC 18, 2011)

Boltzmann’s Tomb: Travels in Search of Science by Bill Green is at once a travelogue and joyous celebration of science. The author is a chemist who has done significant research in the dry lakes of Antarctica. Boltzmann was a brilliant physicist and teacher, a pioneer in the study of entropy. He was an early champion for the atomic model of matter in the 19th century, to the derision of many of his peers. Ironically, he committed suicide at almost the same time as Einstein was doing his pioneering work on brownian motion. This work, unknown to Bolztmann, provided persuasive evidence for the atomic model by demonstrating the existence of tiny units of matter, so small they are invisible and yet energetic enough that they cause macroscopic dust particles to move randomly in water. The author notes that Boltzmann died in Duino, the same city where Rilke wrote his Duino Elegies, brilliant poetry of profound melancholy. Boltzmann and Rilke were kindred spirits in the sense that both suffered profound depression, and were tortured by self-doubt. More importantly, the two shared the supreme gift of being able to take experience and use their respective media of mathematics and written language creatively to express unique truths.

This short work is not intended to do justice to the arduous task of skeptical inquiry and the continuing cycle of intellectual labor turning observation into theory, theory into prediction, prediction into experiment that supports or falsifies the theory. What this book does is illuminate the spark that drives scientists, and it makes clear that science comes from the work of real people who are so moved by the mystery and magic of their experience that they will walk through the fire of scorn, self-doubt and in the case of Galileo, the very real fear of torture, to seek and speak truth.

Boltzmann’s entropy formula S= k*log(W) is carved onto his tomb. His work on entropy describes the relationship between what one can observe such as the temperature of a volume of gas and a statistical description of the more or less random states of tiny units such as the motion of the constituent molecules. His work on entropy metaphorically focuses our attention on the role of chance in our every endeavor. Chance encounters with scientists during the author’s travels as a younger man lead to opportunities such as the chance to work in Antarctica. The capacity for poetic wonder at the splendors of nature fueled his scientific career. The message is that what comes to everyone does so more or less by happenstance, but some find mystery and beauty in these chance encounters. Creative souls, the scientists and poets, are then inspired for a lifetime of expression.

Boltzmann’s Tomb is a scientific travelogue celebrating a number of pilgrimages to the places where great science was made. As we follow the author on his travels, we visit the Vienna of Boltzmann and so many others in science and the arts. We spend time in Galileo’s Florence, hometown of the Renaissance. Cambridge was home to Isaac Newton and Watson and Crick of DNA fame. We visit Prague where Copernicus and Kepler created the basis for modern astronomy and laid the groundwork for Newton’s description of gravity. Along the way we see the scientists as human beings, creatures of their place and time and inspired to transcend their beginnings by creating glorious structures of thought to explain the mysteries of the universe. We come to appreciate the passionate and poetic wonder that informs much of great science. Do yourself a favor and put this book on your shelf of inspirational literature.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bellevue Literary Press (June 14, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bill Green
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene

Bibliography:

• Improbable Eden (2003)
• Water, Ice & Stone: Science and Memory on the Antarctic Lakes (2008)
• Boltzmann’s Tomb: Travels in Search of Science (June 2011)

I know that I can no longer reach her.

I know that, should I try to reach her–should I take her hand as if she were again sitting next to me in the upstairs cabin on the evening Pan Am from Honolulu to LAX, should I lull her to sleep against my shoulder, should I sing her the song about Daddy gone to get the rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunny in–she will fade from my touch.

Vanish.

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (NOV 10, 2011)

Blue Nights is ostensibly about the loss of a child. In reality, however, it is about the passing of time. Indeed, it is the passing of time that captures all loss, loss of children, of loved ones, and ultimately, of self. It is the classic Heritclitian flow and Ms. Didion has here given herself to it fully, embracing every ripple, bend and eddy. With superhuman strength she resists fighting the current. She does not emote. She does not wax sentimental. Rather she turns her hard-edged and beautiful prose squarely upon her subject matter–as she always has done–and sets to work. Yet even she wonders if the manner in which she practices her art is up for the task. Halfway through the book she wrestles with the question: “What if the absence of style that I welcomed at one point–the directness that I encouraged, even cultivated–what if this absence of style has now taken on a pernicious life of its own?” How can one write about the loss of a child with prose chiseled from tempered steel?

How does one make sense of it, bestow order where there is but chaos, the losses, the aging and the attendant frailty?. How does the writer rise to this? She exhibits no pretension, no artifice. There is that line, repeated throughout her previous memoir, A Year of Magical Thinking: “She’s a pretty cool customer.” Never did anyone seem so cool than the writer does here. She is a reporter, a cool and trained observer, even when she is her own subject matter. Yet she is laid bare. “When I tell you that I am afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room…” she writes, noting her infirmities, “is this what I am actually saying? Does it frighten me?”

Yet, she is present, bold and unflinching. She is serious. We can ask for nothing more, and at times wish she would hold back–a trait, I would wager, of which she is not capable. In characteristic Didion fashion she brings her steely eye and razor-precise prose to her subjects: the loss of her daughter Quintana Roo, and, unflinchingly, her advancing inescapable personal extinction. Her narrative is peppered with bits of her childhood, her fading friendships, the loss of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the adoption (March 1966) of Quintana. All this reflected against the backdrop of growing old. It is all loss.

“When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast,” she writes.

Early in the book, reflecting on the loss of her daughter, she wonders, “Had she no idea how much we needed her?” When I first read this–it is a sentence repeated throughout, like a mantra–when I first read this my mind filled in the blanks quickly rushing ahead. My mind read, Had she no idea how much we loved her? I stumbled over the word need and had to reread the sentence. Was love too strong an emotion to bring to the page, I wondered? Or was she saying something else? A few pages later, while remembering the adoption of the infant Quintana, she asks, “…what if I fail to love this baby?” (Her italics.) Only here will love appear as a doubt-filled question.

Late in the book she finds herself in the hospital. She had awakened in the night on the floor of her bedroom, lying in a pool of blood. “It seemed clear that I had fallen, but I had no memory of falling, no memory whatsoever of losing balance, trying to regain it, the usual preludes to a fall. Certainly I had no memory of losing consciousness.” The event, however, is not the point. The point is the question of who to contact in case of emergency. “Whole days now spent on this one question, this question with no possible answer: who do I want notified in case of emergency?” (Her italics.) She goes through the lists of people, possible candidates. But there are problems. They live elsewhere, or are out of the country, or aren’t someone with whom she wants to share such intimacy. Or are gone. Ultimately she concludes, “Only one person needs to know.” And then the bookend to Had she no idea how much we needed her? “She is of course the one person who needs to know.” And she is gone.

It is the intertwined nature of family and friendship, of life itself, on display here. The denouement comes in the fashion in which it all unravels, how fast the end arrives and the struggle of the observer, the chronicler–indeed, the mother–to survive. As she confesses at the book’s end: “The fear is for what is still to be lost.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (November 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Joan Didion
EXTRAS:	Powerful Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Year of Magical Thinking

Bibliography:

• Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)
• The White Album (1979)
• Salvador (1983)
• Miami (1987)
• After Henry (1992)
• Political Fictions (2001)
• Where I Was From (2003)
• The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) 
• We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (2006) (first seven previous books in one)
• Blue Nights (November 2011)

Fiction

• Run, River (1963)
• Play It As It Lays (1970)
• A Book of Common Prayer (1977)
• Democracy (1984)
• The Last Thing He Wanted (1996)

“People sometimes sneer at those who run every day, claiming they’ll go to any length to live longer. But I don’t think that’s the reason people run. Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life – and for me, for writing as well. I believe many runners would agree.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (OCT 23, 2011)

In his running journal-cum-memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, titled in obvious homage to Raymond Carver, Haruki Murakami claims that “people basically become runners because they’re meant to” –I know exactly what he means. Runners are different; if only for the fact they think nothing of doubling up socks to run in 20-degree weather while incredulous spouses look on; they brave downpours for the bliss of having paths to themselves; they passionately debate the relative merits of Body Glide vs. Vaseline, bare feet vs. high-tech shoes, real food vs. GU gels. Runners know it’s possible, even enjoyable, to be alone for hours, pushing themselves “to acquire a void” and these quirks of temperament are often enough to form a bond with other distance runners.

Last winter, here in New York, I only cancelled one scheduled run due to the weather which meant I was out in Central Park in rain and hail and snow, passing the same brave souls every day. On a bitterly bleak run, a smile or a nod of acknowledgment was enough to warm those December mornings. On the flipside, summer arrived and I was then having difficulty acclimatizing myself to the heat, and on a particular arduous day, when day’s high was nearing 100F, an older gentleman and fellow runner, passed me with an encouraging shout: “You’re going to do more than finish; you’re going to win.” The kindness of this stranger brought a smile to my face, and although when I run my first marathon here in New York in November, I’ll be far behind the winners, I will be among a group of very special people taking over the streets: runners.

To those who can relate to the above: I highly recommend this book. To fans of Murakami, or those generally interested in writer’s biographies, I have to be more reserved.

Although Murakami describes himself as a mid-pack runner, somewhere between the “energetic ones . . .slicing through the air like they had robbers at their heels” and the “overweight” ones “[huffing] and [puffing], their eyes half-closed, their shoulders slumped like this was the last thing in the world they wanted to be doing,” he is, by most standards, an accomplished runner. After taking up running in 1982, at the age of 33, Murakami has run, on average, one marathon a year – bringing his total to 23 in 2005 when he wrote most of the book. He has also completed a 62-mile ultra-marathon (his time: 11 hours, 42 minutes), a wonderful account of which is included in the book, and six triathlons. Murakami has also been fortunate enough to run races that are on many runners’ bucket lists– Boston, New York, Honolulu, Athens – and an excerpt of an article he wrote chronicling his re-creation of the first marathon, from Athens to Marathon (aptly enough, Murakami’s first marathon), is as inspiring as it is harrowing – I got thirsty just reading it.

But this is first and foremost a runner’s journal. Chapters are structured as discrete journal entries, most dated between 2005 and 2006 – the ultramarathon entry is dated 1997; the excerpted Athens article is from 1983. Consequently, the style is casual, conversational, and for those used to Murakami’s subtly layered narratives, the looseness of the prose might be disappointing. However, perhaps the biggest problem with the book is the lack of focus on Murakami, the writer.

To be fair, Murakami readily admits, this is a book about what “running has meant to [him] as a person” rather than a writer’s memoir. But while, Murakami draws parallels between the “focus” and “endurance” required by both runners and writers, and says that “most of what [he knows] about writing [he’s] learned through running everyday,” I couldn’t help but feel that while he was able to write honestly about his failures as an athlete and the limitations of his aging body (Murakami is 62), he was less candid in describing his life as a writer. Such creative descriptions of his struggles as a runner (at one point he likens his mind to Danton and Robespierre and his body to the rebellious Revolutionary Tribunal) only whetted my appetite for similar descriptions of his struggles as a writer.

Lest you think I’m a sadist, let me clarify. Murakami tells of his experience interviewing the former Olympian, Toshihiko Seko. Murakami asked Seko if he ever experienced days when he just didn’t feel like running. Seko ,“in a voice that made it abundantly clear how stupid he thought the question was, replied, ‘Of course. All the time!’ ” What Murakami was trying to discover with his inane question was “whether, despite beings worlds apart in terms of strength, the amount we can exercise and motivation, when we lace up our running shoes early in the morning we feel exactly the same way” and concluded that “In the final analysis we’re all same [sic].” I wanted Murakami to ask a similarly inane question of himself about his writing, because I, as an aspiring novelist, would too like to know if in the final analysis, we’re all the same.

That is why writers read writers’ biographies. We look for personality quirks or life experiences we can identify with. We’re comforted by tales of hardship and rejection, hoping that if we persevere, our day, too will come. Murakami started running around the time he started writing, at the age of 32. As the owner of a jazz bar, he worked long hours. Without any previous literary ambitions, he remembers the exact moment he first had the idea to write a novel: around 1:30pm April 1, 1978. He was at Jingu Stadium watching a baseball game, when the thought struck him: “You know what? I could try writing a novel.” From that day on, he wrote at the kitchen table after he got home from the bar until he got sleepy. This first novel, published as Hear The Wind Sing won a literary contest and started Murakami on his career as a writer. Eventually, Murakami sold his bar, and took the plunge to writing full-time, devoting himself to writing more serious novels.

The trouble is: Murakami’s breezy accounting of his career path reads as glib after the detailed accounts of how salt caked his body in Athens, or of how his feet swelled so much he had to switch his shoes for a bigger size during the ultra-marathon. Writing is as a difficult as distance running, and for all his well-deserved literary success, Murakami has also experienced the literary equivalent of aching legs, slowing times, and embarrassing disqualifications. It’s unfortunate that he chose not share them.
While I suspect it will mostly appeal to runners, far be it for me to discourage people from picking up this book. While Murakami admits that he is not out to proselytize on the physical and psychological benefits of running, “still, some might read this book and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to give running a try,’ and then discover that they enjoy it. And of course that would be a beautiful thing.” A beautiful thing, indeed.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 110 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (August 11, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Haruki Murakami
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: 1Q84 Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman After the Quake

Bibliography:

• Hear the Wind Sing (1979)
• Pinball 1973 (1980)
• The Wild Sheep Chase (1982)
• Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985)
• The Norwegian Wood (1987)
• Dance, Dance, Dance (1988)
• South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992)
• The Elephant Vanishes: Stories (1993)
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994)
• Sputnik Sweetheart (1999)
• All God’s Children Can Dance (2000)
• After the Quake: Stories (2000)
• Kafka on the Shore (2003)
• Vintage Murakami (2004)
• Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2006)
• After Dark (2007)
• 1Q84 (October 2011)

Non-Fiction:

• Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (1997; translated 2000)
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007)

Related:

• A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World (2008)

Movies from books:

• Tony Takitani (2005)

“On one occasion in the 1890s, Lord Charles Beresford, a well-known rake, let himself into what he believed was his mistress’s bedroom. With a lusty cry of ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ he leapt into the bed – only to discover that it was occupied by the Bishop of Chester and his wife.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster  (OCT 14, 2011)

What would the world do without Bill Bryson? One simply wants to sit at his knee with a huge grin and listen interminably. I’m an irredeemable skinflint and get all my reading material from the library, but At Home is one book I would seriously like to buy for myself. Considering I have almost no books apart from reference books, my Complete Shakespeare and a Bible I once found in a discard pile somewhere, that’s saying quite a lot.

The volume is in essence a long and amiable discourse on the marvel that was the Victorian era. It’s loosely based around (and supposedly inspired by) the Victorian rectory Bryson lives in. The chapters have titles like: “The Hall,” “The Kitchen,” and so on. The theory is that “houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.” However, apart from in the early chapters (notably “The Hall”) there’s little talk about anything prior to the Victorians. It’s the speed of change and the immeasurable vigor with which so many Victorians pursued their eccentricities and interests that really fascinates Bryson, and he re-tells it at the top of his engaging best.

The downside of the book may perhaps be that it has little structure. It is a little like swimming through thick soup, but oh such good soup! It’s the perfect book for sitting companionably of an evening. The urge to exclaim “Listen to this one!” and regale anybody within earshot with the latest snippet of fascinating information Mr. Bryson has dredged out of history for you, probably occurs about once every fifteen minutes. Which, incidentally, is the perfect interval for this sort of activity: any less and it’s startling, any more and it gets annoying.

The best thing about it is that it’s simply so shockingly knowledgeable. The bibliography alone goes on for 25 pages of dense text, with a further note at the bottom: “for Notes and Sources, please go to www.billbryson.co.uk/athome .”

Despite this, there are a number of curious little niches which harbour the oddest throw-away statements. Like the one that claims the dining room really came about because of the advent of upholstery, with the Victorians not really wanting people smearing greasy chicken over their expensive sofas. What on earth were all those Medieval dining halls doing, then, one wonders briefly? Or the later Elizabethan private dining rooms? Oh Billy, one thinks – but it’s such a lovely idea that a specialised room should be invented because people couldn’t quite envisage a table napkin that one quite forgives it.

These little anomalies only seem to add to the charm: they’re like “Easter eggs” in a computer game. The vast majority of the time, one is overwhelmed with gratitude at the sheer volume of reading and dredging that has been done to winkle these pearls of Victoriana from dusty obscurity. They range from the obscure (why forks usually have three tines: actually it’s never quite explained but apparently people have experimented with other numbers and it’s never quite right) to the monumentally important (such as the discovery of the sources of cholera and scurvy). Electricity holds sway over a whole chapter in “The Fuse Box,” and seems to hold a particular fascination for Bryson, as the “characters” who feature here pop up throughout the book. Perhaps it is not surprising, as without electricity so much of further development would simply not have been possible.

I would recommend this unreservedly to anybody, but actively prescribe it if you are feeling glum. Perhaps that’s why I’d like it on my shelf permanently. It’s cheering for three reasons. The unquenchable amiable spirit it’s written in, along with the sheer love of language and words that beams through the pages are two of these reasons – but any Bryson fan will already be familiar with these. The third is that the book will immerse you entirely in the day-to-day reality of Being Victorian. Which includes carrying 40 bucket loads of hot water upstairs nightly for a bath, having to take clothes apart and re-stitch them together for the laundry, refrigerating food (if one were so lucky) with ice brought over from lakes in the States, and countless other inconveniences and checks to daily living that we would simply never consider possible. The writing is so engrossing one’s arms almost ache with the weight of the water-buckets… only to look up and find that: joy! One can just turn the hot water on instead. If you think you’re bogged down with a tedious job or an unrewarding existence or poor working conditions, just read this. You’ll be skipping in no time.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 247 readers
PUBLISHER:	Anchor; Reprint edition (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bill Bryson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome by Alberto Angela

Bibliography:

• The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words (1984)
• The Palace under the Alps and Over 200 Other Unusual, Unspoiled, and Infrequently Visited Spots in 16 European Countries (1985)
• The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989)
• The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way (1990)
• Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe (1991)
• Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States (1994)
• Notes from a Small Island (1995)
• A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail (1998)
• I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away (1999)
• In a Sunburned Country (2000)
• Bill Bryson’s African Diary (2002)
• Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words (2002)
• A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)
• The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (2006)
• Shakespeare: The World as Stage (2007)
• Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors (2008)
• At Home: A Short History of Private Life (2010)

“As a child, yearning to leave home and go far away, the image in my mind was of flight–my little self hurrying off alone. The word ‘travel’ did not occur to me, nor did the word ‘transformation,’ which was my unspoken but enduring wish. I wanted to find a new self in a distant place, and new things to care about. The importance of elsewhere was something I took on faith.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  AUG 12, 2011)

How many travelers has Paul Theroux influenced, I wonder? If poets and composers and artists are prodded, pushed and inspired by predecessors and peers, why not travelers?

Many years ago, after reading The Happy Isles of Oceania, Mr. Theroux’s 1992 book about his exploits paddling around the South Seas in a kayak, I was infected with the Theroux travel bug. (I don’t know what else to call it.) My first adult foray abroad, after reading it, found me in Chilean Patagonia and there, surrounded by fellow travelers with rambling resumes of adventure as long as your arm, I realized that there are people who travel in a serious way in this world. Really seriously, with concentrated intent, focus and devotion. I subsequently devoured Theroux’s travel oeuvre, got my passport renewed, and set out for parts unknown. And then it happened. Fast forward. One night, while on a boat in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of the Seychelles, I became seriously homesick. It was, I realized, the night of my daughter’s homecoming dance and my heart was breaking for home. Only then, I understood, that not everyone can be Paul Theroux. Because one likes to travel, one is no more a traveler á la Theroux, then a day hiker is Sir Edmond Hillary.

Like so much of Theroux’s work, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road, is deceivingly fun. That is to say, his writing is entertaining, his insights profound without being laborious and his style simple and breezy. But make no mistake, Mr. Theroux takes his travel and his travel writing, seriously.

The Tao of Travel is not a travel book, per se. It is a compendium of travel quotes, observations and insights accumulated by Mr. Theroux and collected into categories, framed by his editing and commentary. Here, for example, in a chapter called, “Travel as an Ordeal,” we find William Burroughs commenting, “The Upper Amazon jungle has fewer disagreeable features than the Mid-West stateside woods in summer.” Or in the chapter called “Travel Feats,” Mr. Theroux relates to story of Göran Kropp (1966-2002) who “biked seven thousand miles from Stock-holm to Nepal (via Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan) and then climbed Everest….Afterward Kropp biked back to Sweden, being assaulted on the way by xenophobes and stone-throwing people.” Other chapters include, “It is Solved by Walking,” “Traveler’s Bliss,” and “Perverse Pleasures of the Inhospitable.” There are twenty-seven chapters total and every one is a gem.

Mr. Theroux writes in the Preface, that the book is “intended as a guidebook, a how-to, a miscellany, a vade mecum, a reading list, a reminiscence. And because the notion of travel is often a metaphor for living a life, many travelers, expressing a simple notion of a trip, have written something accidentally philosophical, even metaphysical.” The writing might occasionally rise to the metaphysical, but The Tao of Travel, the very physical book, is a tangible marvel. The cover is soft pearled leather, with faux gold-leaf inlay. And, upon opening the book, one discovers in the leaf a replication of the 1626 “NEW AND ACCURAT [sic] MAP OF THE WORLD.” To finish the package off is an elastic, Moleskine-like, book clasp. The book is not only a delight to read, it is a pleasure to hold. As a gift, particularly for the young traveler, The Tao of Travel will provide a lifetime of pleasure. It belongs on the shelf of every reader interested in the world beyond his or her study, which is to say, everyone.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 37 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (May 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Paul Theroux
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Dark Star

Bibliography:

Non-Fiction

• The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (1975)
• The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas (1979)
• The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain (1983)
• The Imperial Way (1985)
• Sunrise with Seamonsters: Travels and Discoveries 1964-1984 (1985)
• Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China (1989)
• The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific (1992)
• Travelling the World (1992)
• The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean (1995)
• Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents (1998)
• Fresh Air Fiend: Travel Writings (2000)
• Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town (2003)
• The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road (May 2011)

Fiction:

• Waldo (1967)
• Fong and the Indians (1968)
• Girls at Play (1969)
• Jungle Lovers (1971)
• Sinning with Annie and other stories (1972)
• Saint Jack (1972)
• The Black House (1974)
• The Family Arsenal (1976)
• The Consul’s File (1977)
• The Christmas Card (1978)
• Picture Palace (1978: 1999) 
• World’s End (1980)
• The Mosquito Coast (1982)
• The London Embassy (1983)
• Doctor Slaughter (1984)
• Half Moon Street (1986)
• O-Zone (1986)
• My Secret History (1989)
• Dr. Demarr: a novella (1990)
• Chicago Loop (1993)
• To the Ends ofthe Earth (1993)
• Millroy the Magician (1994)
• On the Edge of the Great Rift: Three novels of Africa (1996)
• My Other Life (1996)
• The Collected Stories (1997)
• Kowloon Tong: The Last Days of Hong Kong (1997)
• Hotel Honolulu 2001)
• The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro and Other Stories (2004)
• Blinding Light (2005)
• The Elehanta Suite: Three Novellas (2007)
• A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta (2010)
• The Lower River (May 2012)

Movies from books:

• Saint Jack
• The Mosquito Coast (1986)

“What I mean is that a lot of stuff that I thought were weaknesses of mine turned out to be strengths. And one of them is that I am not, I’m not a particularly exceptional person. I think I’m a really good reader, and I’ve got a good ear. And I’m willing to work really really hard. But I’m more or less a regular person. – David Foster Wallace”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (JUL 20, 2011)

There is that question we asked one another in college: Who in history, if you could meet and talk to whomever you wished, would you select? Depending on orientation and background the answers are all over the place: Jesus is a regular; Buddha, and other spiritual luminaries frequently show up. Second tier options, Nietzsche, Thoreau (personal favorite), St. Francis. No surprises there. Aside from a small collection of history’s heavyweights, answers are typically–and sophomorically–idiosyncratic. (More recently, at a dinner party that included a bunch young adults, one answer was, oddly, Jeff Buckley.) I wouldn’t easily toss aside posterity’s world-making worthies, but if I were so inclined, I’d turn to the great creative artists. Shakespeare certainly would be a contender. Homer too. Rimbaud would be fun over a couple of beers. Joyce was a good singer, I understand. I’m sure he’d light up a room. Reading Lipsky’s book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, reads like a contemporary answer to the “who would you choose” hypothesis. Wallace is gone now, but what if you could just spend a few days with him, even a few hours? What was the man like, really? By his work, he will be remembered. But what of the man?

In March 1996 David Lipsky was assigned to interview David Foster Wallace by Rolling Stone Magazine. Wallace was coming off a book tour, promoting his ground-breaking–and best-selling– tome, Infinite Jest. Wallace, uncharacteristically, agrees to the interview. It will span several days, with Lipsky riding along with Wallace to book readings, NPR interviews, coffee-shop breaks, pit-stops and dog walks. Lipsky writes of Wallace in the introduction, “David had a caffeine social gift: He was charmingly, vividly, overwhelmingly awake–he acted on other people like a slug of coffee–so they’re the five most sleepless days I ever spent with anyone.” The book reads accordingly. Wallace is a brilliant raconteur, breathlessly intelligent, informed, thoughtful and entertaining in that way we once thought we’d be, after we got out of college.

The premise is simple: Ride around with Wallace for five days, tape recorder running and ask him questions. This is the raw stuff of Lipsky’s journalism, though it a properly massaged transcription. For example, on smoking pot: “I stopped smoking pot–I think I stopped smoking pot right about the time I got out of grad school. You know, it wasn’t any kind of big decision. I just, it wasn’t shutting the system down anymore. It was just making the system, it was just making the system more unpleasant to be part of. My own system.” On watching T.V.: “I also, there’s the–like the thing that’s killed it recently for me, is the channel-surfing thing. Is because, I always have this terrible fear that there’s something even better on, somewhere else. And so I will spend all this time kind of skating up and down the channel system. And not be able to get all that immersed in any one thing.” The book is raw in that stream-of-consciousness way.

The project was shelved and Lipsky never wrote the article. Now, fast-forward a dozen years to the height of the David Foster Wallace posthumous creative industrial complex and someone thinks: Hey, what about those Lipsky’s tapes with Wallace? Surely there is a buck or two to be made there! That is the cynical dark-side opinion one might suspiciously hold of this endeavor. That is, here lies yet another exploitive American money-making scheme, cashing out on a brilliant dead writer’s extemporaneous ramblings. But there are two sides to this coin. The good news, setting aside this reader’s apprehension to slink through the graveyard, is that the rambling is brilliant, insightful, funny and, most of all, human. Magnificently human, that is, if one might be capable of being human on the scale of the magnificent. And as if the writer’s works themselves where not sufficient evidence, we now have Lipsky’s record. Let there be little doubt, David Foster Wallace had the capacity to be magnificently human. That is, I think, at the core of what draws so many legions of readers. His brilliance was tempered through the filter of his humanity. Here in Lipsky’s ride-along, we enjoy the genius–and the man.

For example, here Wallace, sipping on a Diet Pepsi, lays out his simple belief on art: “I have this–here’s this thing where it’s going to sound sappy to you. I have this unbelievably like a five-year-old’s belief that art is just absolutely magic….And that good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do. And that the good stuff will survive, and get read, and that in the great winnowing process, the shit will sink and the good stuff will rise.”

Or cultural survival: “At some point, at some point I think, this generation’s gonna reach a level of pain, or a level of exhaustion with the standard, you know….There’s the drug therapy, there’s the sex therapy, there’s the success therapy. You know, if I could just achieve X by age X, then something magically…Y’know? That we’re gonna find out, as all generations do, that it’s not like that.”

There is a terribly sad and poignant scene Lipsky shares in the afterword. Wallace’s condition has deteriorated. His depression medication has lost its punch and he is reeling. He calls his parents and they come to visit. The story, as a family member shared it with Lipsky, is that “one afternoon before they left, David was very upset. His mother sat on the floor beside him. ‘I just rubbed his arm. He said he was glad I was his mom. I told him it was an honor.’” It sounds blithely naive, but reading this book gave me a feeling of being honored as well, a sense that the man had carved out a bit of time for me. By the end of the book my cynicism had evaporated and I was grateful for this record and the insights it contains.

On a practical note, Becoming Yourself is a good David Foster Wallace reader companion. The copy I read was loaned to me by a friend who has never read his fiction, though she aspires to. Her copy was underlined and dog-eared. It will serve her well once she dives into the works. She will have a foundation of understanding the currents that carry his narrative. Conversely, I’ve read his fiction and coming to the book after that experience, I found it illuminating. It underscored what I found in the readings and nicely dove-tailed into the universes he had so carefully constructed. For the stand-alone experience, that is, the reader who has not read Wallace and has no intention of doing so, the book provides a worthwhile and insightful peek into the world of a modern creative genius.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 45 readers
PUBLISHER:	Broadway; 1 edition (April 13, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on David Lipsky
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Infinite Jestby David Foster Wallace The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

Bibliography:

• Three Thousand Dollars : Stories (1989)
• Art Fair (1996)
• The Pallbearer (1996)

Nonfiction:

• Late Bloomers: Coming of Age in Today’s America: The Right Place at the Wrong Time (1994)
• Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point (2003)
• Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (April 2010)

“As the time passed the Dodds found themselves confronting an amorphous anxiety that suffused their days and gradually altered the way they led their lives. The change came about slowly, arriving like a pale mist that slipped into every crevice. It was something everyone who lives in Berlin seemed to experience.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAY 19, 2011)

Before you even think of reading Erik Larson’s latest masterwork, clear your calendar, call in sick, send the kids to grandma’s, and place all your evening plans on hold. You will not want to come up for air until you’ve reached the last pages. It’s that good.

In his preface, Larson writes, “Once, at the dawn of a very dark time, an American father and daughter found themselves suddenly transported from their snug home in Chicago to the heart of Hitler’s Berlin. They remained there for four and a half years, but it is their first year that is the subject of the story to follow, for it coincided with Hitler’s ascent from chancellor to absolute tyrant, when everything hung in the balance and nothing was certain.”

The father was William E. Dodd, the mild-mannered and almost laughingly frugal history professor who became an unlikely choice as FDR’s pick for America’s first ambassador to Nazi Germany. The daughter was his bon vivant 24-year-old daughter, Martha, a beautiful and irrepressible woman of great physical appetites, who went along for the adventure of a lifetime. Their story is nothing short of extraordinary.

To quote Mark Twain: “Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.” Certainly, this is a story in which truth trumps fiction. Martha – a compatriot of literary legends Carl Sandburg and Thornton Wilder – quickly takes her place in German society. Larson writes, “As the daughter of the American ambassador she possessed instant cachet and in short order found herself sought after by men of all ranks, ages and nationalities.” One such pursuer was Rudolf Diels, the young chief of the Gestapo, a scarred, confident and charismatic man with penetrating eyes.

The other – one of the great loves of her life – was Boris, a senior agent for the NKVD, the precursor of the Soviet Union’s KGB. Although he is nominally married, he falls passionately for Martha and indeed, the two consider marrying.

In the meanwhile, her ambassador father is experiencing the crushing disillusionment of recognizing that the Germany of his college years has been taken over by a group of mad men. As a lone voice in the wilderness, he tries to voice concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home, encourage Roosevelt to censor the growing evil, and fight the backstabbing of the wealthy “Pretty Good Club” of affluent ambassadors who race from one glittery party to another. And astoundingly, he tries –without success – to refocus the State Department’s priorities; their “main concern about Germany remained its huge debt to America’s creditors.”

Through the eyes of history, we – the readers – know the eventual outcome of the story, and it’s viscerally painful to see all the junctures where Hitler’s nefarious plans could have been stopped – but weren’t. Like his magnificent Devil in the White City, this book is tautly told, with lots of foreshadowing, building suspense at every corner.

Ending about the time of “The Night of the Long Knives” – Hitler’s purge and the first act in the great tragedy of appeasement – this is an unforgettable look at life inside Germany in 1933 and 1934, through the eyes of a naïve but well-meaning American father and daughter. It is a tour de force about “complicated people moving through a complicated time, before the monsters declared their true nature.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 191 readers
PUBLISHER:	Crown (May 10, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Erik Larson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Day After Night by Anita Diamant Death of the Adversary by Hans Keilson

Bibliography:

• The Naked Consumer: How Our Private Lives Become Public Commodities (1992)
• Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun (1995)
• Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History (1999)
• The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (2003)
• Thunderstruck (2006)
• In the Garden of the Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin (May 2011)

“The leaves of the Bodhi are a wondrous shape. The round broadleaf describes an almost perfect circle, with the midrib extending way down into a long thin lobe forming a tail like a stingray. The leaves, I was told, are suggestive of the Buddha’s ears.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (APR 20, 2011)

There is a scene in the movie, The Social Network, where the Zuckerberg character sits down at his dorm room computer and plaintively declares, “I need an idea.” It is a sensation I suspect many can relate to: that building up of energy, the antsiness and the creative urge which begs to somehow be addressed. In the movie, of course, the idea is big, world-changing big. Facebook is born. Most of the time, surety is lacking and the energy petters out, the idea half-baked and forgotten. There is a sense of that in this book, the feeling of an author in search of an idea. And even the author doesn’t seem sure of its worth. Horan writes, early on: “My cockamamie scheme, to restate it loosely, was this: I would go around the country collecting tree seeds at the homes of famous peoples I admired, grow them into saplings, then buy a cheap parcel of land and plant them there.” He continues, “If all went well, in a few years I would start giving the trees to my book-, nature-, and history-loving friends.” The thing is, unless the idea is crushingly brilliant, the holder of the idea is too often unsure of its value. That usually shows in the execution. Sometimes it turns out to be “cockamamie.” Sometimes not.

Perhaps this idea, collecting seeds from the trees who shaded the great, is indeed lame. The book is tentative that way with a feeling of the random about it. For instance, on page eleven the author shows up in Oxford, Mississippi, at, where else?, Faulkner’s home, Rowen Oak. But, he discovers a sign, “Closed for Repairs.” At Flannery O’Connor’s home he finds a no trespassing sign. Helen Keller’s place is closed, as is Rachel Carson’s. (“My only disappointment about the house being closed was the fact that I couldn’t ask questions specific to the vegetation on the grounds.”) Would a more researched, less random, adventure come to such dead-ends? Is it half-baked? In his defense, Horan’s is not the journey of the tourist. Indeed, he seems ill-at-ease when he does gain entry to a writer’s home; and he disdains the overblown tourist trap. Taking the tour of Emerson’s house in Concord he writes: “The docent wore a frozen smile as she delivered her monologue, and I began to kick myself for having decided to take the tour. I should have been outside on the front lawn, where swollen acorns and pregnant pine cones beckoned to me to pluck them up.”

Those comments aside, this is a fun book. It does not take itself too seriously, and leans to the light and breezy. The author’s voice is compelling. He seems like a good companion for a road trip, even if it’s an armchair adventure. But he is not to be underestimated. His goal is nothing less than to establish a connection to the creatively and historically profound. And when that connection works, it is lovely. It is obvious who Horan’s heros are. The fashion in which he writes about them, thrown in among those who elicit less passion, stands out and calls attention to itself. Of Jack Kerouac, for example, he writes: “Somewhere down the road, with the sun sinking low on the horizon, casting biblical shadows across the rolling continent from end to bittersweet end, when I know where I am going at long last, I’ll think of Jack Kerouac, young Jack Kerouac, with a football under his arm, a rucksack on his back, and the holy glow of a saint…the brother I never had….” Or upon visiting Walden: “Walden Pond is as sacred a place as there is on this planet, and its most famous inhabitant, Henry David Thoreau, is as saintly a prophet as has ever walked the earth.”

It is generally accepted that the better the reviewer, the less you will find of him or her in the review. Like a journalist, the good reviewer should refrain from pontification, self revelation and opinion. But wait, we read books for as many reasons as there are readers and one of those reasons is to experience a connection to others through the shared story. On this level, it doesn’t matter, fiction or fact, the reading experience of which I refer is deeply personal. One can’t help but respond on a personal level when one reads in this fashion. Even the circumspect reviewer steps up.

I make this editorial aside by way of saying, I want to ride along with Horan. I too have sought out my literary heros. I’ve snuck into the room in remote India where Chatwin wrote The Songlines; peered into the window of Virginia Woolf’s London flat (now an office full of busy people turning the wheels of commerce); visited Gertrude and Alice’s apartment in Paris where Hemingway stood in the lobby and eavesdropped, to name just three pilgrimages. I share this as a way of saying, I understand–and enjoy–the premise at work here. Hogan and I are brothers in the same tribe. I only wish he had carved out the time to better explore those places and people about which he was truly devoted and excised the rest. His enthusiasm is compelling when he focuses on that which is most personally meaningful.

There is a nice–and surprising–end note that sums up his effort. It is not a surprise, but I don’t think elaboration is fair. Suffice it to say, his efforts, the substantial collection of “legacy” trees and seeds he has collected finds a home that is both meaningful and profound beyond his personal effort. In that fashion, he succeeds far beyond the intentions for his “cockamamie scheme.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 3 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (April 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Richard Horan
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Written Lives by Javier Mairas

Bibliography:

Fiction:

• Life in the Rainbow (1996)
• Goose Music (2001)

Nonfiction:

• Seeds: One Man’s Serendipitous Journey to Find the Trees That Inspired Famous American Writers from Faulkner to Kerouac, Welty to Wharton (April 2011)

“Resist the easy grooves [digital creative materials] guide you into. If you love a medium made of software, there’s a danger you will become entrapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that!”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (APR 18, 2011)

You Are Not A Gadget is a passionate and thought-provoking critique of Silicon Valley from behind its ramparts, and a must-read for anyone interested in the ways technology is affecting our culture. In his first book, Jaron Lanier, a visionary leader in the development of virtual reality technology (and the man who popularized the term), sounds the alarm: our humanity is under digital attack as the software that increasingly governs our lives impoverishes what it is to be a person.

Not only does software express ideas, making it “impossible to work with information technology without engaging in social engineering,” technology extends “your being, like remote eyes and ears (web cams and mobile phones ) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search online). These become the structures by which you connect to the world and other people. These structures in turn can change how you conceive of yourself and the world.” This need not be a bad thing, however, if these structures expand what it is to be a person. However, Lanier argues, the ideas and philosophies implied by the code, by the software – anonymity, the wisdom of crowds, the emergent intelligence of networks, be they the neural networks of the brain or the networks of cyberspace and the noosphere- undermine the “quest,” the “mystery,” the “leap of faith” that it is to be a person.

The Web 2.0, with the rigidity of Facebook profiles, Blogger templates, and Twitter’s 140-characters, effectively restricts our range of expression. As our online presence becomes our social, economic and professional avatars, as we carry out more and more of our lives online, there is a danger of defining ourselves “downward.” Just as the entrenchment of the MIDI format, originally developed to “express the tile mosaic world of the keyboardist, not the watercolor world of the violin,” reduced the richness of musical expression, and just as UNIX’s command-line interface (and the influence this structure had on all subsequent operating systems) artificially divides and parcels time, our Web 2.0 identities are impoverished versions of ourselves, a reduction with increasingly dire consequences as our world becomes increasingly digital and our online personas increasingly us.

Moreover, the economics of software development means that design decisions are often subject to “lock-in.” As a piece of software grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to make changes, especially if other programs are relying on it to run.

So software presents what often feels like an unfair level of responsibility for technologists. Because computers are growing more powerful at an exponential rate, the designers and programmers of technology must be extremely careful when they make design choices. The consequences of tiny, initially inconsequential decisions are often amplified to become defining unchangeable rules of our lives.

However, Lanier suspects, some of these same computer scientists might actually want to degrade our personhood in order to reduce the distance between human consciousness and computers. On considering Alan Turing’s famous test for machine consciousness – if a computer could fool a human to believing they were conversing with an actual person, that computer should be considered conscious – Lanier brilliantly writes:

“But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you let your personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?”

Considering that many technologists eagerly await the Singularity, a time when computers begin to design themselves, producing machines with capabilities far exceeding our own, a time which “would involve dying in the flesh and being uploaded into a computer and remaining conscious,” they might “cease to design technology to serve humans, and prepare instead for the grand events it will bring.” Whether they realize it or not, many technologists have transferred their faith and fear of death to the machines they work with, hoping “to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion where you hope to become immortal by being uploaded into a computer.”

As humans just become another element in the all-important network, troubling cultural and economic effects emerge. Online anonymity has bred cyber bullying and trolls. The reduction in individual responsibility allowed by the digital world likely contributed to the nesting of abstract financial products implicated in the financial meltdown. Authorship is devalued with the ascendance of the open-source movement and the popularity of crowd-sourcing. The result is that it becomes increasingly difficult to convince consumers that producers of culture should be paid for their work. Some of Lanier’s ideas on how to reintroduce compensation for digital expression – 3-D video-conferencing gigs – are more interesting, and likely more obtainable than, others –music embedded objects, such as jewelry, called songles.

Lanier excels in the depths of philosophy, rather than in shallows of practicalities. His “realistic” approach to computationalism, that the “cybernetic structure of a person has been refined by a very large, very long, very deep encounter with reality” so that the information processes that create consciousness are a part of reality, their “pattern hewn out of so many encounters with reality that they aren’t really abstractable bits anymore, but are instead a nonabstract continuation of reality,” are fascinating and feel to me to be right on the mark, and his hopes for post-symbolic communication in a virtual-reality world, where one might morph to express an idea, exciting to think about, although one has to wonder how hoping for a virtual-reality world doesn’t show as least some of the contempt for human reality as the futurist, who hopes of having his consciousness uploaded into a computer.

Jaron Lanier is a deep and original thinker, and no doubt, you won’t agree with everything he says here, but if you’ve ever thought (or worried) about the cultural effects of our rapidly progressing technology, you won’t be disappointed by this book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 50 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (February 8, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jaron Lanier
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	A look at some of these ideas through fiction: The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sims by Jonathan Coe And the classic novel in which most of us encountered an uploaded personality: Neuromancer by William Gibson

Bibliography:

• You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (January 2010)

“Hold her tight, if you have her; hold her tight, I thought, that’s my advice to all the living. Breathe her in, put your nose in her hair, breathe her in deeply. Say her name. It will always be her name. Not even death can steal it. Same alive as dead, always Aura Estrada.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (APR 07, 2011)

Grief is, by and large, a private and intimate thing. We utter a few platitudes and then turn away in discomfort from who are laid bare by their grief. And emotionally, we begin to withdraw.

Francisco Goldman shatters those boundaries in his devastating book Say Her Name, forcing the reader to pay witness to the exquisite and blinding pain of a nearly unbearable loss. He positions the reader as a voyeur in a most intimate sadness, revealing the most basic nuances and details and the most complex ramifications of the loss of someone dear. And in the process, he captures our attention, rather like Samuel Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, until the reader is literally as fascinated and transfixed with Aura Estrada – Francisco Goldman’s young and doomed wife – as he himself is. It is a masterful achievement, hard to read, hard to pull oneself away from.

The barebones of his story are these: Francisco Goldman married a much younger would-be writer named Aura, who gives every indication of literary greatness. They revel in their marriage for two short years, but right before their second anniversary, Aura breaks her neck while body surfing and dies the next day. Francisco is raw with grief, which is exacerbated by Aura’s passionately devoted and controlling mother Juanita, who blames him for the tragedy. Although he is completely innocent, he blames himself and spirals downward, visualizing himself as “…a hard hollow rectangle filled with tepid blank air. An empty rectangle with sides of slate or lead…”

Brick by brick, Francisco builds a literary altar to the vibrant and exuberant woman he married. And at the same time, he lays naked his own grief at her loss: “Little did I suspect…that I would ever learn what it was like to feel swallowed up by my own sobbing, grief sucking me like marrow from a bone.” And later: “Every day a ghostly train. Every day the ruin of the day that was supposed to have been. Every second on the clock clicking forward, anything I do or see or think, all of it made of ashes and charred shards, the ruins of the future.”

Hungry to keep Aura alive, Francisco takes us back to Aura’s past, to her complex relationship with her overbearing mother and her yearning for the father who left when she was only four years old (setting her on a course to look for a father replacement). He showcases various writings that Aura created in her advanced studies at Columbia and under the tutelage of two famous authors (revealed in bios to be Peter Carey and Colum McCann) for her MFA program. He paints a word picture of Aura as a young girl, a daughter, a wife, and a writer on the cusp of potential greatness.

And in order to keep himself sane, he channels his grief into his art, documenting their time together and Aura’s extraordinary life: “This is why we need beauty to illuminate even what has most broken…Not to help us transcend or transform it into something, but first and foremost to help us see it.”

At its core, Say Her Name is not “another grief book;” rather, it’s a love story, a tribute to Aura, a universal narrative of what happens when one loved one survives another. It is, I suspect, a novel that Francisco Goldman did not choose to write, but had to write. It is a wrenching and eloquent tale of remembrance, a refusal to give death its victory.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 28 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Francisco GoldmanWikipedia page on Francisco Goldman
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Legend of a Suicide by David Vann Widow: Stories by Michelle Latiolois

Bibliography:

• The Long Night of White Chickens (1992)
• The Ordinary Seaman (1997)
• The Divine Husband (2005)

Nonfiction:

• The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? (2007)
• Say Her Name (April 2011)