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Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

NonfictionLiterature

When poems are psalms

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Quite simply, Christian Wiman’s He Held Radical Light is a beautiful book, floating as it does on elegant, lyrical prose. Wiman seeks to glimpse the ways that art and faith reflect and tangle with each other, and in doing so he offers graceful meditations on the poetry of A.R. Ammons, Mary Oliver, Philip Larkin and Donald Hall, among others.

After a meeting with Seamus Heaney that is marked as much by silence as words, Wiman recalls that the poet’s work “could . . . take that inchoate edge of existence and give it actual edges. He could bring the cosmic into the commonplace. . . . He could make matter, inside the space of a poem, immortal, or make the concept of eternity, in more than one sense, matter.” After a frustrating week of trying to write poetry, Wiman grabs a copy of Don Quixote from his bookshelf, losing himself for three days in its prose and story; he then emerges to discover that the “existential key to his soul had been unlocked.” Reflecting on this moment, he shares his insights into faith and art: “It has been my experience that faith, like art, is most available when I cease to seek it, cease even to believe in it, perhaps, if by belief one means that busy attentiveness, that purposeful modern consciousness that knows its object.” Wiman reveals that faith and art give form to feelings that are incipient, and they offer us a means “whereby we can inhabit our fear and pains rather than they us, to help us live with our losses rather than being permanently and helplessly haunted by them.”

Luminous and moving, He Held Radical Light brilliantly reveals the inextricable bonds of poetry and faith, and it serves as an evocative companion to Wiman’s 2013 memoir, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer.

Quite simply, Christian Wiman’s He Held Radical Light is a beautiful book, floating as it does on elegant, lyrical prose. Wiman seeks to glimpse the ways that art and faith reflect and tangle with each other, and in doing so he offers graceful meditations on the poetry of A.R. Ammons, Mary Oliver, Philip Larkin and Donald Hall, among others.

NonfictionMilitary History

Dispatches from the front

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

The physical and psychological tolls of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on military personnel too often remains hidden from view. In The Fighters, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist C.J. Chivers narrates the stories of six combatants, peeling back the curtain on these individuals’ sacrifices, their commitment despite their nagging uncertainty about the morality of the war, and their lives after service.

Inspired by watching the jets from a nearby air base buzz the cotton farm where he grew up in Texas, Navy Lieutenant Layne McDowell decided early in life that he wanted to fly fighter jets. After enlisting, he gets his chance to fly missions over Afghanistan following September 11, and he confidently settles in to achieve his mission. On his earliest bombing missions, though, he feels a lingering chill and wonders whether he has killed children or a family with his bombs.

Navy hospital corpsman Dustin Kirby returns home from the base in Jacksonville, North Carolina, not yet having faced action in Iraq, to learn that his cousin with whom he had enlisted, Joe Dan Worley, has lost a leg in Iraq; upon hearing the news Kirby thinks that the same will happen to him when he sees action.

Drawing on his reporting from these two wars, Chivers vividly brings to life these combatants, caught in a web of circumstances beyond their immediate control, who are determined to serve America and the country in which they find themselves assigned to duty. The Fighters offers an absorbing and indelible account of war and its costs.

The physical and psychological tolls of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on military personnel too often remains hidden from view. In The Fighters, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist C.J. Chivers narrates the stories of six combatants, peeling back the curtain on these individuals’ sacrifices, their commitment despite their nagging uncertainty about the morality of the war, and their lives after service.

NonfictionMemoir

A heartbreaking memoir of grief

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

One late morning in August, Jonathan Santlofer discovers his wife, Joy, in their living room, gasping for breath. In a surreal flurry, Santlofer frantically dials 911 while urging his wife to hold on. Soon he’s standing against the living room wall watching his wife die, even as paramedics try to save her.

Joy’s death leaves her husband bereft, and Santlofer struggles to live with his grief, a process he details in his heart-rending, poignant memoir, The Widower’s Notebook.

Following Joy’s death, Santlofer spends many sleepless nights not only reliving her death but also recalling the many tender, angry, sad and joyous moments of more than 40 years of married life. On one of those sleepless nights, he writes with fits and starts in a notebook, trying to bring some peace to his restless mind. He also starts to draw pictures of Joy and their daughter, Dorie. “Drawing,” he writes, “has made it possible for me to stay close to Joy when she is no longer here . . . grief is chaotic; art is order.” In the pages of his notebook, Santlofer reflects on the importance of paying attention to the pain of grief: “Better to have painful memories than no memories at all.” He meditates on the many things he misses about Joy, as well as the stupid things that smart people say to grieving friends. Even after he releases Joy’s ashes, Santlofer shares the raggedness of his still-raw emotions, admitting that he’ll never stop crying.

Santlofer’s honesty, his focus on the moments that remind him of Joy and their life together, and his beautifully crafted, tender prose make for heartbreaking yet page-turning reading.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

One late morning in August, Jonathan Santlofer discovers his wife, Joy, in their living room, gasping for breath. In a surreal flurry, Santlofer frantically dials 911 while urging his wife to hold on. Soon he’s standing against the living room wall watching his wife die, even as paramedics try to save her.

NonfictionHistory

A history of power

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Richard Rhodes’ dazzling Energy: A Human History tells a compulsively readable tale of human need, curiosity, ingenuity and arrogance. In a fast-paced narrative, he conducts readers on a journey from humanity’s dependence on wood as the primary fuel source to the use of coal and up to the development of nuclear energy and solar energy.

Along the way, Rhodes introduces readers to inventors and scientists whose discoveries fueled work on various methods of extracting and harnessing different sources of energy. Readers will be familiar with stories about Benjamin Franklin’s discovery of electricity and James Watt’s invention of the steam engine, but Rhodes also introduces lesser-known innovators like Denis Papin, the 18th-century scientist who invented a double-acting steam engine that Watt used as a model, but whose inventions were never supported by others, and Richard Trevithick, the 19th-century inventor of a portable steam engine, among many others.

Rhodes judiciously points out that the overdependence on various sources of energy leads to their depletion and to dangerous threats to health such as air and water pollution. Rhodes concludes that the greatest challenge for the 21st century will be limiting global warming while providing energy for a population that will grow by 25 percent by 2100. This exceptional book is required reading for anyone concerned about the human impact on the future of the world. Rhodes optimistically predicts that by using all sources of energy—nuclear, solar and renewable resources—the world can meet the needs of its growing population.

Richard Rhodes’ dazzling Energy: A Human History tells a compulsively readable tale of human need, curiosity, ingenuity and arrogance. In a fast-paced narrative, he conducts readers on a journey from humanity’s dependence on wood as the primary fuel source to the use of coal and up to the development of nuclear energy and solar energy.

Nonfiction

When the levee breaks

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

When it comes to natural disasters, the question is not so much “if” but “when.” In certain areas of the world, rivers will continue to flood, earthquakes will continue to shake the earth, and volcanoes will continue to erupt. Anyone living in these areas exists in an uneasy truce with nature, always wondering when the next disaster will strike. In her fascinating study, The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do about Them), seismologist Lucy Jones examines 11 of history’s most destructive natural events, from the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 and the floods in Sacramento in 1861-1862 to the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004 and the great 1927 flood in Mississippi, to reveal what we can learn from them.

As Jones points out so astutely, humans label earthquakes and other natural activities “disasters” because of their effects on human lives, yet such events are simply a fluctuation in the natural environment necessary for the support of life. While many cultures have found ways to be resilient—even returning to the scene of a disaster to rebuild—she offers advice about living in areas prone to natural disasters (though any area, she counsels, could experience them): “Don’t assume government has you covered,” “work with your community,” “remember that disasters are more than the moment at which they happen.”

Jones’ fascinating book takes a long view at natural events in order to help us understand our environment and to prepare for and survive natural disasters.

When it comes to natural disasters, the question is not so much “if” but “when.”
NonfictionMemoir

An erudite look back at a life devoted to science

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In Maker of Patterns, Freeman Dyson weaves a quilt sewn from the colorful memories of the early years of his life. The Princeton physicist emeritus stitches together the ups and downs, the lessons learned, and the professional and personal triumphs and failures of his early life in this collection of letters, written mostly to his family from 1941-1978. He interweaves his later reflections between the letters, commenting on various events or figures he’s described in the letters.

In most of the letters, Dyson describes his day-to-day life, but he also reflects on his love of languages, literature and history and his evolving work in physics as he moves from Trinity College in Cambridge, England, to Cornell and eventually to Princeton. Zelig-like, Dyson witnesses many of the most momentous events of the 20th century, from the end of World War II and the hydrogen bomb to the civil rights movement and the Apollo moon landing. The most interesting aspects of his letters are his observations about figures such as Robert Oppenheimer—“unreceptive to new ideas in general”—theologian and social ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr—who had a “reputation for being gloomy”—and physicist Edward Teller—“he seems to do physics for fun rather than for glory”—among others. Dyson also chronicles his two marriages, admitting that he thinks he’s a better father than a husband, as well as his growing work in atomic physics as he tries to apply his theories to nuclear problems. His final reflection looks to the future, and he warns that pure science is best “driven by intellectual curiosity, but applied science needs also to be driven by ethics.” Dyson is hopeful that his granddaughter and her generation will have a chance to make this happen.

Maker of Patterns reveals a glimpse into the keenly curious mind and the passionate life of one of our greatest scientists and public figures.

In Maker of Patterns, Freeman Dyson weaves a quilt sewn from the colorful memories of the early years of his life. The Princeton physicist emeritus stitches together the ups and downs, the lessons learned, and the professional and personal triumphs and failures of his early life in this collection of letters, written mostly to his family from 1941-1978. He interweaves his later reflections between the letters, commenting on various events or figures he’s described in the letters.

NonfictionMemoir

One final farewell from Pat Conroy

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

It’s hard to believe that we’ve been without Pat Conroy’s lovable, gruff voice for three years now. When he died on March 4, 2016, we lost one of the last of a generation of Southern writers whose humorous, riveting, sad, terrifying and redemptive stories captured the ragged ways families fall in and out of love and hope. From his first novel, The Water Is Wide (which catapulted Conroy to a fame he never quite knew how to navigate), to Beach Music, his novels, like Thomas Wolfe’s glorious pageants, portray the struggle of finding home again and living in families whose steel-edged sentimentality prevents them from ever acknowledging the hard truths of abuse, failed love and violence.

The 2016 release of A Lowcountry Heart gave readers a chance to hear his entertaining voice as he regaled them with his reflections of the writing life. Now, in My Exaggerated Life, we get to hear Conroy’s voice again, unadorned and speaking plainly and cantankerously about his struggles and his triumphs in life. Between 2014 and 2016, Conroy spoke on the phone to biographer Katherine Clark—who co-wrote Milking the Moon: A Southerner’s Story of Life on This Planet with another Southern raconteur, Eugene Walter—every day for an hour or more; no topic was off limits. Clark weaves these conversations into a revealing biography structured by the places Conroy called home over the years: Beaufort, Atlanta, Rome, San Francisco and Fripp Island. Conroy admits his mistake in marrying Lenore Fleischer, his second wife, even as he rages over her taking away their daughter, Susannah, from him in the divorce. Conroy mourns the loss of Susannah—they never reconciled—deeply. He learns through therapy that he gets involved with people because he feels he needs to rescue them. He tells delightful stories about his years with his publisher, Nan Talese, and their work together.

Every page of My Exaggerated Life contains a gem from Conroy, despite the pain and vulnerability he shares through the book. His love of reading and writing fills the air that he breathes: “My deepest living is in the imagination of others, when I take that magic carpet ride of being a reader. . . . I think that’s why I want to write, to make others feel that way.” Welcome to Conroy’s magic carpet, and enjoy the ride.

It’s hard to believe that we’ve been without Pat Conroy’s lovable, gruff voice for three years now. When he died on March 4, 2016, we lost one of the last of a generation of Southern writers whose humorous, riveting, sad, terrifying and redemptive stories captured the ragged ways families fall in and out of love and hope.

NonfictionHistory

How things are made

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Factories conjure up images of William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” and the claustrophobic, dangerous and soul-killing multistory buildings of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Joshua B. Freeman’s Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World weaves these grim visions of factories into a broad and compulsively readable cultural history of the birth and development of factories and their impact on society.

In 18th-century England, John and Thomas Lombe erected the first modern factory, their Derby Silk Mill—a “five-story, rectangular brick building, its façade punctured by a grid of large windows”—and filled it with a large workforce engaging in coordinated production using machinery, which was powered by a waterwheel. Freeman deftly chronicles the coming-of-age of factories and the changes, both positive and negative, they brought to the world. The advent of steel mills in mid-19th-century western Pennsylvania, for example, increased the production of steel but also resulted in bloody battles between workers and owners over working conditions. When Henry Ford introduced the assembly line in his factories, productivity increased; however, workers were engaged in repetitious, mind-numbing tasks. By the mid-1980s, large factories in the U.S. were shutting down, causing a decline in manufacturing jobs. In the present, big factories continue to turn out products in China, and electronic firms such as Pegatron have more than 100,000 people working in their factory near Shanghai, with over 80,000 of them living in crowded factory dormitories.

Freeman’s fascinating history of factories, even with its darker chapters of labor unrest, illustrates that humans have persistently searched for ways to reinvent the world, striving to find ways to make their lives and work easier.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Factories conjure up images of William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” and the claustrophobic, dangerous and soul-killing multistory buildings of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Joshua B. Freeman’s Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World weaves these grim visions of factories into a broad and compulsively readable cultural history of the birth and development of factories and their impact on society.

Nonfiction

When up is down

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

What will happen to the Earth when the North Pole and South Pole reverse their positions? How will human society be affected when such a reversal causes a weakening of the Earth’s electromagnetic field? Will mass extinctions occur in species that use the Earth’s magnetic fields to find food or to migrate to winter homes?

Acclaimed science journalist Alanna Mitchell (Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis) asks these and other questions in her mesmerizing The Spinning Magnet. Part detective story and part history of science, Mitchell’s galvanizing story chronicles the tales of the scientists who research the movement of the poles, the power of electromagnetism, the force of the Earth’s magnetic fields and the deleterious effects of solar radiation on Earth. She introduces us to Bernard Brunhes, the French physicist who first discovered that the planet’s two magnetic poles had once switched places. Scientists following up on his findings discovered that the poles had reversed their positions more than once and that a confluence of events—the Earth’s diminishing electromagnetic field and the increase in solar storms—over the past century indicate that the possibility of another such reversal continues to grow more likely.

Mitchell points out that the reversal of the poles will have dire consequences for the world. Electrical grids will be disrupted and millions will live in the dark for days; airplanes will lose the capability to navigate over the poles; satellite systems will cease to function, causing widespread havoc around the world.

In the same vein as Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, Mitchell’s captivating book shocks us into contemplating the physical forces that keep our world spinning that we take for granted every day.

What will happen to the earth when the North Pole and South Pole reverse their positions? How will human society be affected when such a reversal causes a weakening of the Earth’s electromagnetic field? Will mass extinctions occur in species that use the Earth’s magnetic fields to find food or to migrate to winter homes?

NonfictionBiography

A man vindicated by history

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Max Boot’s The Road Not Taken is a page-turning story of a how a now largely forgotten figure could have turned the tide of the Vietnam War if someone in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had just listened to him.

Drawing deeply on previously unavailable archival materials, Boot deftly chronicles the life and career of Edward Lansdale, the CIA operative and Air Force officer who allegedly was the model for Alden Pyle in The Quiet American by Graham Greene. Tracing Lansdale’s sheltered childhood and youth, Boot portrays a young man fascinated by the perceived romance of Southeast Asia. Later, in his short-lived career in advertising, Lansdale developed his trademark knack for honesty, insolence and an ability to see others as equals—qualities that would lay the foundation of his successful covert work in the Philippines and Vietnam.

During the United State’s involvement in the Vietnam War, Lansdale, working as a CIA operative, argued that the U.S. could operate most effectively not by increasing firepower but by making Saigon’s government more “accountable, legitimate, and popular to the people it aspired to serve.” Boot sums up Lansdale’s policy of friendly persuasion to win “hearts and minds” with three L’s—Look: understand how the foreign society works and don’t impose outside ideas that won’t translate to the society; Like: become a sympathetic friend to the leaders of the society; Listen: hear out the leaders’ ideas.

Boot’s mesmerizing, complex biography and cultural history not only recovers Lansdale and his foreign policy strategies but also illustrates the ways that those strategies might be effective in dealing with various military conflicts today.

Max Boot’s The Road Not Taken is a page-turning story of a how a now largely forgotten figure could have turned the tide of the Vietnam War if someone in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had just listened to him.

NonfictionMusic

Legends of rap

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Drawing on interviews with members of N.W.A.—which founding member Ice Cube once famously called the “World’s Most Dangerous Group—their friends, families and musical associates, journalist Gerrick Kennedy vividly tells the fast-paced, captivating story of the group’s rise, fall and enduring legacy in Parental Discretion Is Advised.

With the staccato, sure-fire delivery of a rap artist, Kennedy chronicles the early lives of each of N.W.A’s members—Eazy-E, who died of complications of AIDS in 1995, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren and DJ Yella—and how they came together to form N.W.A. Dre and Eazy met up as members of the World Class Wrecking Crew, mixing and sampling music at crowded venues around Los Angeles; the two saw rap as way of achieving a better life for themselves. The two eventually meet up with MC Ren, DJ Yella and Ice Cube, who writes many of the lyrics for the group’s biggest hits, including “F*ck Tha Police” and “Gangsta Gangsta.” When the group releases Straight Outta Compton in 1988, the album launches their careers even as it marks the beginning of the end for the group. Kennedy chronicles the now well-known story of Ice Cube’s financial disputes with Eazy and Dre and his subsequent move to a successful solo career, as well as the predatory management practices of their first manager, Jerry Heller. As Kennedy points out, N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton was a “sonic Molotov cocktail that ignited a firestorm with acidic lyrics which shocked the world.”

Kennedy’s compulsively readable book shines a glowing light on a brilliant group once accused of destroying America’s moral fabric but now occupies a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for their astonishing contributions to music.

Drawing on interviews with members of N.W.A.—which founding member Ice Cube once famously called the “World’s Most Dangerous Group—their friends, families and musical associates, journalist Gerrick Kennedy vividly tells the fast-paced, captivating story of the group’s rise, fall and enduring legacy in Parental Discretion Is Advised.

NonfictionEssays

The final words of a beloved genius

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

When Oliver Sacks died in 2015, the world lost a writer whose insatiable curiosity about the connections between every facet of life permeated his elegant, joyous and illuminating essays and books. His memoirs, such as Uncle Tungsten, reveal a man peering into the corners of life and discovering sparkling rays connecting family life, human nature and the life of the mind. His books, from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat to Musicophilia, lead us gently and warmly into the labyrinths of psychology and the quirkiness of science without losing us along the way.

Two weeks before he died, Sacks outlined the contents of The River of Consciousness and directed the book’s three editors to arrange its publication. Although a number of the essays in this collection appeared previously in The New York Review of Books (the book is dedicated to the late Robert Silvers, its longtime editor), they read as if they’ve been written just for us. In the essays, Sacks moves over and through topics ranging from speed and time, creativity, memory and its failings, disorder, consciousness, evolution and botany. In a fascinating essay on Charles Darwin, Sacks reminds us that Darwin was deeply interested in botany and spent much of his time following the publication of The Origin of Species exploring the evolution of plants. Sacks points out that Darwin illuminated for the first time the coevolution of plants and insects. Creativity, according to Sacks, is “physiologically distinctive. . . . If we had the ability to make fine enough brain images, these would show an unusual and widespread activity with innumerable connections and synchronizations occurring.”

Sacks’ golden voice and his brilliant insights live on in the essays collected in The River of Consciousness, and for that we’re fortunate.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Sacks’ golden voice and his brilliant insights live on in the essays collected in The River of Consciousness.

Nonfiction

Where stories and science meet

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Almost 20 years ago, in his book Consilience, the prize-winning biologist E.O. Wilson argued for the unity of all human knowledge. In between writing about ants and island biogeography, Wilson has turned out eloquent and forceful works that compel us to reconsider the origins of human nature, the place of humans in the biosphere and the role of humans in preserving biodiversity in our world.

E.O. Wilson’s rich and provocative The Origins of Creativity singles out creativity—expressed in the stories we tell, the movies we watch, the books we write—as humanity’s defining trait. He locates the origins of creativity in hunter-gatherer societies 1,000 millennia ago when individuals would gather around the campfire to tell stories to entertain themselves or to forge bonds with others in the circle. Focusing on innovation, language, metaphors and irony, Wilson traces the ways that creativity serves as common ground for science and the humanities. The two modes of inquiry still have work to do, for the humanities must still strive to understand the deep genetic origins of consciousness, and science must continue its quest to understand the ancient values and feelings that make us human. He urges a “third enlightenment” in which we recognize that science and the humanities permeate each other. “The act of discovery,” he writes, “is completely a human story and scientific knowledge is the absolutely humanistic product of the human brain.”

Regaling us with stories of his meetings with Nabokov, his encounters with movies that illustrate deep human archetypes (the hero, the quest), and his preferences for the beauty of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby over the social gossip of Jonathan Franzen’s novels, Wilson movingly illustrates the dynamic character and the depths of the creative process.

E.O. Wilson’s rich and provocative The Origins of Creativity singles out creativity—expressed in the stories we tell, the movies we watch, the books we write—as humanity’s defining trait; its “ultimate goal,” he points out, is “self-understanding.”

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