Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Friday October 15, 2010
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A GEOGRAPHY OF SECRETS
Frederick Reuss
Unbridled
ISBN 9781609530006
276 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Daniel Stashower, whose most recent book is "The Beautiful Cigar Girl"
"With his eyes open, knowing the consequences, he entered the territory of lies without a passport for return," Graham Greene wrote in "The Heart of the Matter." The line would not be out of place in "A Geography of Secrets," a thoughtful, beautifully written novel by Washington writer Frederick Reuss that tells the story of two men -- a defense analyst and a mapmaker -- and their struggle with the secrets that define them.
Much of the novel is narrated by the mapmaker, who remains nameless throughout. The son of a career diplomat, he suffers from a sense of permanent dislocation. As a child, he explains, "change came in the form of Allied Van Lines and huge wood crates stenciled with an APO address." As an adult, he still feels untethered. "It's easy to feel like a stranger in Washington, D.C.," he tells us. "Even with a house inside the Beltway, a family and a career, it's hard not to feel that you're merely holding down a place until someone else steps in to take over."
He finds solace in his career as a cartographer, bringing order and definition to a world in flux. "On a map, the user fills in empty space with his own imagined presence," he explains, "a map is a one-to-one encounter between a person and a terrain, an existential project. The best maps are mostly blank and make locating oneself easy."
When the novel opens, he catches sight of an unsettling secret that his father has carried to the grave. With a draftsman's precision, he begins looking for answers, attempting to locate himself in the blank spaces of his father's life.
Meanwhile, in a windowless office at Bolling Air Force Base, a defense worker named Noel analyzes satellite data used to coordinate military actions in Afghanistan. "He never aspired to a career in military intelligence," Reuss tells us. "Like his marriage to Pat, it just kind of happened. It wouldn't be fair to call him indifferent. He loves his wife. He also believes in the work he does. He's a technocrat. Utterly dispensable. It doesn't bother him. Nature itself is composed of a great many small, functioning parts."
Noel's assumptions about himself and his place in the universe face a bitter test when he is implicated in the errant bombing of an Afghan school. Guilt-ridden, he loses his bearings and finds he's no longer able to keep his top-secret job walled off from his everyday life. "Is it possible to stop being someone and become someone else?" he wonders. For all his analytical skill, he's so mired in the isolating culture of covert operations that he doesn't know how to begin the process of change. "Besides," he asks, "what is change when you're invisible?"
Reuss uses these interlocking stories to examine the collateral damage of a lifetime of keeping secrets, bringing a page-turning urgency to the interior dramas of two men, and raising provocative questions about identity and individual responsibility. He's fascinated by Washington's culture of deception, at one stage leading the reader on a brisk tour of unheralded landmarks where "secrets and watching have spilled over into history," such as the mailbox at R and 37th streets where Aldrich Ames made his drops and the booth at the Georgetown restaurant where a Soviet defector gave his handlers the slip.
These reminders of Cold War tradecraft appear quaint and somehow comforting when set against the satellite imaging and predator drones of Noel's DOD work, underscoring the manner in which even the business of secrets has been depersonalized by technology. To emphasize the point, Reuss provides longitude and latitude coordinates each time the scene shifts.
For all his fascination with the big picture, however, Reuss has a gift for seizing on his characters' inner lives, as when Noel, noticing sparrows trapped beneath the glass-domed atrium of the Pentagon City mall, wonders "if he is like the birds caught inside this shopping mall, trapped and living under false and artificial pretenses."
"A Geography of Secrets" has the texture and snap of a modern-day Graham Greene novel, painting a world in which even the smallest choices have devastating consequences -- and where, as one character tells us, "Secrets don't keep, they putrefy."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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BIBLE: The Story of the King James Version, 1611-2011
Gordon Campbell
Oxford Univ
ISBN 978-0199557592
354 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
The first edition of the King James Bible was published four centuries ago by Robert Barker, the king's printer, who, according to Gordon Campbell in this history of the King James Version, "held the right to print all Bibles published in England in English translation." Eventually the right to publish the KJV was extended to Cambridge University (in 1629) and ultimately, in 1673, to Oxford University. By now Oxford has published the KJV in so many different forms -- the latest, a handsome leather-bound 400th-anniversary edition at $79.95 -- that it probably would be impossible to calculate total sales, but they run into tens if not hundreds of millions, making the KJV a cash cow indeed for the great Oxford University Press.
A close friend of mine had personal experience of that nearly four decades ago when, fresh out of college, he hired on as a sales agent for OUP. He was neither scholarly nor religious -- quite the contrary -- but he had a winning manner and a ready smile. His territory was the Deep South, and many of his customers were proprietors of small religious bookstores. At almost every stop he would be greeted with a handshake and an invitation he could not refuse: "Brother, let us have a word of prayer together." So John would follow the owner into the back room, get down on his knees, cast his eyes to heaven and pray for a fat sale. Usually he got one.
Obviously, then, Oxford has ample reason to celebrate the KJV's quatercentennial, which it is doing with Campbell's "Bible" as well as the aforementioned deluxe edition, which it describes as "the most authentic version of the original text that has ever been published." This will reward close study by those thus inclined, for the edition deliberately preserves all the original's misprints, of which there were many, as there have been throughout the KJV's long history. Some of them, as Campbell notes, were memorable:
"In the first edition of the KJV designed for private study (1612), as opposed to reading aloud in church, Psalm 119:161 read 'Printers have persecuted me without cause'; 'printers' was a misprint for 'princes.' The 1631 edition now known as the Wicked Bible made adultery compulsory by omitting 'not' in Exodus 20:14, which read 'Thou shalt commit adultery.' The printers were heavily fined, but in 1641 the same press printed an edition in which they omitted 'no' in Revelation 21:1, which read 'And there was more sea.' The problem with negatives cropped up again in 1653, when another printer omitted the second negative in 1 Corinthians 6:9, which read 'Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of God?' From negatives we move uneasily to murderers. A Bible of 1795 rendered Mark 7:27 as 'Let the children first be killed,' when Jesus had in fact asked that they be filled (that is, fed). Similarly, in a Bible of 1801 the murmurers of Jude 16 became murderers, and so the Bible became known as the Murderers' Bible."
My own favorite, though, occurred in the second edition of 1611, a "rushed response to the brisk sales of the first edition." In Jeremiah 31:30 "that eateth" somehow emerged as "ehat tateth," an error that, as Campbell notes with characteristic wit, "should have been noticed by any proof-reader, even one freshly returned from a pub lunch."
But enjoyable as it is to ferret out the errata in the various editions of the KJV, what really matters is that the 1611 translation is one of the masterpieces of world literature, "the most celebrated book in the English-speaking world," indeed "the most important book in the English language." Campbell presents this not in literary terms, as do many others (myself included) but in religious ones: "That importance does not rest on the inception or execution of this particular translation, nor even in its excellence as a translation (some modern translations may be more accurate) or as a work of English prose. It lies rather in its long history at the center of the religious culture of the English-speaking world. It is valued by everyone who is a Christian by conviction or background, even by those who for one reason or another use another translation."
This of course is true, and the point is underscored by the exceptional popularity the KJV has enjoyed in this country, where it has occupied "a central and prolonged presence in the religious life of the nation." As President William Howard Taft declared on the KJV's tercentenary in 1911: "The publication of this version of the Holy Scriptures in 1611 associates it with the early colonies of the English people upon this continent. It became at once the Bible of our American forefathers. Its classic English has given shape to American literature. Its spirit has influenced American ideals in life and laws and government."
The story of how this remarkable document came into being has been told many times. In 1604 King James I, who loved to talk of matters theological, "assembled a group of bishops and moderate puritans" to discuss improvements upon the various translations of the Bible into English then in use. Out of this grew six companies of translators who worked simultaneously on different sections of the Bible, then convened in 1610 to revise and reconcile their labors. They were extraordinary men, and Campbell pays them the tribute they deserve:
"The learning embodied in the men of these six companies is daunting. It is sometimes assumed that people in the twenty-first century know more than the benighted people of the seventeenth century, but in many ways the opposite is true. The population from which scholars can now be drawn is much larger than that of the seventeenth century, but it would be difficult now to bring together a group of more than fifty scholars with the range of languages and knowledge of other disciplines that characterized the KJV translators. We may live in a world with more knowledge, but it is populated by people with less knowledge."
At first the KJV got a mixed reception, but over the years skepticism and hostility changed to admiration and even veneration. Jonathan Swift led the way in 1712: "I am persuaded that the Translators of the Bible were Masters of an English Style much fitter for that Work, than any we see in our present Writings, which I take to be owing to the Simplicity that runs through the whole." In time the word "majestic" became common in descriptions of the KJV, and remains so to this day. As Campbell notes, the KJV is present in our daily language in ways of which we often are unaware: "When people are said to be 'at their wits' end,' for example, there is no awareness of the source of the phrase in Psalm 107:27; similarly, an escape by 'the skin of my teeth' no longer evokes Psalm 19:20, the 'salt of the earth' no longer recalls the words of Jesus at Matthew 5-:13, 'riotous living' is no longer associated with the prodigal son, and the Pauline origins of 'thorn in the flesh' (I Corinthians 12:7) are no longer recognized."
As that passage indicates, "Bible" covers the history of the KJV from its inception to the present day, with about a third of the text devoted to the translators and their labors. For the general reader who wants a more detailed (and perhaps somewhat more accessible) account of the time between 1604 and 1611, I strongly recommend Adam Nicolson's "God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible" (2003). Gordon Campbell on the other hand gives the full sweep of the KJV's truly majestic life, and for that we must be grateful.
Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE WAVE: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean
Susan Casey
Doubleday
ISBN 978-0767928847
326 pages
$27.95
Reviewed by John Lancaster
Susan Casey has a thing about the ocean. Her first book, "The Devil's Teeth," chronicled her sojourn among great white sharks and the scientists who study them off the Farallon Islands near San Francisco. Now she has immersed herself in another chronicle of men (well, mostly men) and the sea, this one focused on a force of nature even bigger and more powerful than the implacable beasts of her previous work. "The Wave" is exactly what its cover advertises: a book about huge waves and the equally outsize personalities who spend (and occasionally risk) their lives trying to measure, understand, predict and sometimes even ride them on surfboards.
This might seem a bit of a gimmick, blending as it does the worlds of meteorologists and physicists, among others, with portraits of gnarly surfer dudes such as Laird Hamilton, whose obsessive -- some would say suicidal -- quest to hurl himself off the lips of waves the size of seven-story buildings provides the book with its main narrative thread (to say nothing of some very impressive wipeouts). But somehow it all hangs together. This is due in part to its scary environmental theme -- about which more in a moment -- and especially to Casey's singular fascination with waves, the bigger the better, which emerge, in her capable hands, not just as hydrological phenomena but as distinctive, often malevolent personalities that in some ways are the most interesting characters in her book.
They are certainly the most deadly. Readers may want to pop a Dramamine before reading Casey's account of the RSS Discovery, a British research vessel that was nearly pounded to smithereens by a massive storm in the North Atlantic in 2000. Instruments on board measured the "significant wave height" -- an average of the largest 33 percent of the waves -- at 61 feet, "the largest ever scientifically recorded in the open ocean" (some spiked as high as 100 feet). The episode added to growing evidence about the prevalence of so-called rogue waves, which can rise up unexpectedly from much smaller seas. The question Casey poses at the outset of her book -- and that animates much of what follows -- is whether climate change is likely to generate even bigger waves.
If so, a handful of elite athletes will be waiting eagerly on the beach. These would be "tow surfers," who instead of catching waves the old-fashioned way -- by paddling -- are catapulted onto them by partners riding personal watercraft. The technique allows surfers to catch waves that were previously considered so big as to be unrideable. The sport was pioneered by Hamilton, who introduces Casey to the testosterone-fueled subculture of which he is the undisputed king. Possibly because he shared a portion of her advance, Casey's portrait of Hamilton -- depicted as a brooding hero with rippling deltoids and a penchant for Delphic utterances such as "Fearlessness is ignorance" -- is not especially revelatory. On the other hand, he is what he is, and there is no disputing his mastery of gargantuan waves such as Jaws, an aptly named offshore break near his home in Maui, and Teahupoo (pronounced tay-ah-HOO-poo), a freakish Tahitian killer "with the personality of a buzz saw."
Casey's descriptions of these monsters are as gripping in their own way as any mountaineering saga from the frozen peaks of Everest or K2. "As Teahupoo reared up it drained the water from the reef, turning the impact zone -- a lagoon that was mercilessly shallow to begin with -- into a barely covered expanse of sharp coral, spiky sea urchins and volcanic rock," she writes. "This happened in seconds, in an area maybe three hundred feet long. I stared. I had never seen a wave behave like this one."
Casey interrupts her surfing narrative with frequent digressions on the science of big waves, and especially their relationship to climate change. At a climatologists' conference on Oahu, she is baffled by the talk of chaos theory and quantum mechanics, but not by the underlying message: A warming atmosphere means warmer seas, which means larger and more violent storms, which means bigger and more destructive waves -- with potentially dire consequences for shipping and coastal erosion. As one climate scientist cheerfully tells her, "We're gonna get smacked. No doubt." Lest anyone doubt the potentially devastating effects of really big waves, Casey devotes another section of the book to tsunamis, like the one that sloshed around a remote fjord in Alaska following an earthquake in 1958. The high-water mark on the mountains flanking Lituya Bay was measured at 1,740 feet.
All this talk of destruction lends a creepy sci-fi element to her narrative and makes the exploits of Hamilton and his buddies seem all the more harrowing. In the end, though, we are thankful she included us on the ride.
John Lancaster is a former Washington Post reporter and a surfer.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THREE BOOKS BY UNREPENTANT POLITICIANS
NA
NA
ISBN NA
NA pages
$NA
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle
Politicians are always the last to know, aren't they? Bound books are widely considered an endangered species -- chased out of their habitat by electronic modes of information-delivery -- yet here go three former office holders, scribbling away for hardcover presentation. Why do they do it? Among other things, books by ex-senators, ex-presidents, ex-first ladies and others of that stripe allow for the settling of scores, the firming-up of prestige and the making of public appearances before fresh audiences. Here are three new works in this Washington-oriented genre:
1. "The Thunder and the Sunshine: Four Seasons in a Burnished Life," by Gary Hart (Fulcrum, $25).
The former senator from Colorado and presidential candidate has known a lot of politicians -- some of them statesmen, some of them hacks -- in his career. So he should be listened to when he suggests that we live in a time of pygmies. Not just in politics, either, Hart argues: "Corporate executives are notable for extravagant salaries, not productivity and long-term investment strategies. Religious figures are known for narrow judgmentalism, not healing. Few university presidents of the age will be known for their elevation of the education system." Hart traces the decline back to "the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s (when) senators began to seem smaller."
2. "The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics," by Walter Mondale with David Hage (Scribner, $28).
The very title of Walter Mondale's new book makes a point. Jimmy Carter's vice-president is an unabashed liberal, and as far as he's concerned, that's a good thing. Beyond that, we find Mondale in a score-settling mood, as witnessed by his long discussion of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy's decision to challenge Carter, the incumbent president, in the 1980 Democratic primaries: "I thought then and think now that Ted's instincts served him poorly that year, with consequences that were tragic for the country and for the causes we believed in."
3. "Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary," edited by Steven R. Weisman (PublicAffairs, $35).
Moynihan is the ringer here. He died in 2003, and this "portrait in letters" was compiled by a former New York Times reporter. Not only that, but Moynihan was a witty and elegant stylist -- and not just for a politician, though the pearly start of his letter of resignation from the post of U.N. ambassador in 1976 served a political purpose: "I resign now. ... It isn't working, and it won't work. I am scarcely without fault in this, but mine is not the preponderance of fault." The book also reprints an artful 1970 memo to President Richard Nixon, written after the president had called student protesters "bums." Advised Moynihan: "I would retract the statement about 'bums.' You could make perfectly clear that you were talking about persons such as those who burned the life work (of a certain college professor). But you appreciate that it was understood to apply to all who protest the war in Vietnam and you intended nothing of the sort. ..."
Dennis Drabelle can be reached at drabelled(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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