Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Saturday August 14, 2010
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THE WEATHER OF THE FUTURE: Heat Wave, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet
Heidi Cullen
Harper
ISBN 978 0 06 172688 0
329 pages
$25.99
Reviewed by Timothy R. Smith
"The Weather of the Future" peers ahead at a world stricken by climate change. Using models to predict weather patterns, climatologist Heidi Cullen, a frequent contributor to the Weather Channel, explores seven regions and their grim futures: the Sahel in Africa, the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, California's Central Valley, two sites in Greenland, Bangladesh and New York City. Massive floods in Bangladesh may produce "climate refugees," Cullen suggests; New York may be battered by a Category 4 hurricane, which can have sustained winds as high as 135 miles per hour; and coral reefs may be eaten away by an acidic ocean. "These predictions and our seeming inability to heed their warning is a potential tragedy," she writes.
Cullen also predicts some geopolitical repercussions of global warming: Pirates run rampant, Osama bin Laden invokes U.S. carbon emissions to recruit terrorists, and Canada and the United States argue over naval authority in an ice-free Northwest Passage. The book is at its best and most insightful when it explores today's environment, such as regreening efforts in Niger. Let models be used to predict the weather, not the politics.
Timothy R. Smith can be reached at smitht(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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GIVE + TAKE
Stona Fitch
Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's
ISBN 978 0 312 59987 4
244 pages
$23.99
Reviewed by Michael Lindgren
Every decade seems to produce at least one novel perfectly in tune with its collective vibe: Think "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" for the '70s, "Less Than Zero" for the '80s and maybe "The Secret History" for the 1990s. Stona Fitch's charming but wildly uneven "Give + Take" wants to be that book for our hyperventilating new decade, but in the end flounders on its own contradictions.
Fitch's protagonist is Ross Clifton, an itinerant jazz pianist with a secret second life: He steals from the rich, lonely women he meets at nightclub gigs and donates the proceeds anonymously to impoverished strangers. (Ross' guerrilla altruism gives the novel a nice populist twist, which, incidentally, Fitch puts into practice with his own publishing house, the Concord Free Press, which gives all its books away.) Ross is forced to adjust his solitary ways, however, when he is joined on the road by his slacker nephew, Cray, and a seductive torch singer named Marianne, both of whom bring their own secrets to the eccentric menagerie. Cray, in particular, is vividly sketched, an amoral prankster whose manic banality makes him an excellent foil for the often dour and fussy Ross. Marianne, on the other hand, is a cardboard cutout straight from the Bacall/Chandler femme fatale handbook, right down to the slinky dresses and throaty voice.
Stylistically, "Give + Take" is an odd mix of the clumsy and the poetic. Fitch knows his jazz, and he can be graceful when writing about music -- a surprisingly rare ability -- but some of the caper sequences are so awkwardly handled that they don't really make sense, even on a second reading. In general, the narrative is stranded in a tonal no-man's-land: not funny enough to be satire, but not ruthless enough to be noir. As the cities pass by and the miles accumulate, Ross, Cray and Marianne bounce off each other with predictable and diminishing returns, until the novel bumps along to its finale.
On the whole, "Give + Take" stands as an admirable attempt at an epoch-defining parable that doesn't quite jell. In trying for a sardonic commentary on the ethical implications of social inequity, the best Ross can offer is some hazy barroom philosophy: "I'm good at turning stupid expensive things into cash really quickly. It's a gift. And I figure I should use it. Wealth's getting too concentrated." Both Cray and Marianne offer tentative rebuttals to this shopworn romanticism, but Fitch doesn't have the patience or the cunning to follow the implications of their arguments anywhere genuinely challenging. Come to think of it, with its ambivalence and murky morality, its uncertain mix of the tentative and the sincere, "Give + Take" may be perfectly representative of our time, after all.
Michael Lindgren is a writer and musician who lives in Manhattan.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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