Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Sunday February 20, 2011
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A WIDOW'S STORY: A Memoir
Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco
ISBN 978-0062015532
415 pages
$27.99
Reviewed by Valerie Sayers
Is it perverse to suggest that Joyce Carol Oates' memoir of widowhood is as enthralling as it is painful? Oates has always focused her writing so intensely that virtually all her prose is compelling, but this brave account of her recent grief seems composed with something close to abandon. It is as if Oates has decided, after the sudden death of her husband of 48 years, that her own inclination toward privacy is no longer important.
And so she gives her readers a searing account of the months following Raymond Smith's surprising death from a secondary infection acquired in the Princeton Medical Center, where he was being treated for a virulent form of pneumonia. He was recovering well and planning his imminent return home, when he was stricken again. Oates was called to his bedside in the middle of the night.
By the time she arrived, he was dead.
Oates is outraged that her husband has in some sense become a victim of medical care, but far more wrenching is the guilt that overtakes her: Why did she insist on going to the hospital, where he acquired this new infection, instead of waiting for a doctor's appointment? How could she have stopped obediently at a red light while her beloved lay dying? She replays key scenes -- we hear the voice on the other end of the phone summoning her to return immediately to her husband's side, watch her approach the hospital bed over and over -- yet each iteration feels crucial.
It is characteristic of Oates' superb balancing of the intellectual and the emotional that she enables a reader to experience Smith's death in the dramatic way she herself did, after which she steps back to portray their marriage, including long discussions of their literary and political interests. Smith, a Ph.D. in English, edited the Ontario Review, a journal he founded jointly with Oates in 1974 to showcase Canadian and U.S. literature. "Despite my reputation as a writer my personal life has been as measured and decorous as Laura Ashley wallpaper," Oates writes. Her long, companionable marriage supported her as she confronted risky fictional material: sexual violence, racial tension, murder.
When Smith dies so unexpectedly, Oates takes Camus' famous line -- "Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy" -- to heart and to head. How to resist suicide becomes the central concern of her new life. A horrifying basilisk, an "ugly lizard-creature that beckons me to death, to die" appears as a waking vision; a chant of recriminations echoes. Her relentless insomnia resists all attempts to treat it, and she is stricken with terror that she will become addicted to her medications. She continues her professional life -- teaching, traveling to give readings -- by withholding her fractured self from her audiences. But to us, her readers, she tells all. There is of course a voyeuristic component to reading of her terror, but Oates is fully, ironically aware that we live in an "age of memoir." Readers will be more grateful for than titillated by her willingness to strip bare what is so well-hidden in our culture: how great grief threatens the very soul.
It is also a strange comfort to read these grim scenes and to know that no one else could have written them. All Oates' writerly tics -- the exclamation points, the italicized blocks of text, the Emily Dickinson dashes, the copious quotation marks -- are out in full force, even as she makes an extraordinary statement: "I've come to realize that my writing -- my 'art' -- is a part of my life but not the predominant part." Joyce Carol Oates! The prodigious writer from whom we expect a new book every six weeks!
The glimpses into Oates' conversations and correspondence with other writers are another guilty pleasure, for as Oates is struggling to stay alive with the help of friends, we marvel at their array -- Edmund White, Gail Godwin, Richard Ford -- even as we marvel at their generosity. Gloria Vanderbilt gives this former Catholic a statue of St. Theresa rich with personal associations, and the gift becomes an unexpected comfort.
Indeed, Catholicism itself becomes an unexpected concern as Oates finally steels herself to read her husband's unfinished novel, started before they met but continued intermittently through the years. A former seminarian from an intensely devout Irish-American family, Smith was furious at the Church, but it is only in reading his novel that Oates finally understands how complicated his relationship was. Her contemplation of how she might have encouraged Smith's reconciliation with his father is as difficult and as necessary as her understanding that her husband could never have finished his novel.
By the memoir's wrenching end, Oates hints at a new turn in her life. "Of the widow's countless death-duties," she writes, "there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow should think I kept myself alive." Surely, recounting her grief with such wondrous wild abandon has allowed her to endure.
Valerie Sayers, a professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, has a new novel, "The Powers," coming out this year.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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I BEAT THE ODDS: From Homelessness to The Blind Side and Beyond
Michael Oher with Don Yaeger
Gotham
ISBN 978-1592406128
250 pages
$26
Reviewed by Dave Sheinin
By the time Michael Oher got around to telling it, The Michael Oher Story was already well-known and seemingly devoid of new angles. Oher, an African-American who plays offensive tackle for the NFL's Baltimore Ravens, had been the subject of Michael Lewis' "The Blind Side" (2006), a best-seller-turned-film that earned Sandra Bullock an Oscar for Best Actress as Oher's adoptive mother. A second book, written by the adoptive parents, Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy (with the help of Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins), told the story of Oher's redemption from the perspective of the redeemers.
But what was largely missing from the books, the movie and the many feature stories about Oher's remarkable life was the voice of the redeemed. The other projects were someone else's telling of his story, and rarely was the shy and soft-spoken Oher quoted extensively about himself. He may simply not have been ready to talk about his life before the Tuohys took him in as a high-schooler.
With the release of his memoir, "I Beat the Odds," Oher finally takes ownership, filling in the gaps in the familiar narrative and somehow managing to make his journey from the streets to stardom seem even more amazing and compelling. A cynic would surmise he did so to finally cash in himself after so many others already had. But that would imply the book was simply thrown together with minimal effort for maximum profit, which doesn't appear to be the case. "I Beat the Odds" is thoughtful and heartfelt, a young man coming to grips with an amazing journey that required the distance of years and perspective to fully grasp.
It's an odd book, so ambitious that, at times, it doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. At its core, it's a straight-ahead memoir, and a heartbreaking one at that, as Oher details his mother's destructive crack habit, his perilous childhood that teetered between near- and actual homelessness, and the nightmarish experience he and his brothers and sisters endured in the overburdened Memphis foster-care system.
At other times, it borders on investigative journalism, as Oher and co-author Don Yaeger, a veteran sportswriter who has ghostwritten several other athlete autobiographies, comb through records and interview social workers to piece together bits and scraps of his history, interspersed with statistics about foster children and poverty.
And at still other times, it reads like a self-improvement book, with Oher imploring readers to get involved in charities that help poor children and offering young readers from backgrounds similar to his a blueprint for trying to rise above their surroundings, as he did.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the book grows less compelling the further Oher gets from his troubled childhood, as the setting shifts from the streets of inner-city Memphis to the tree-lined mansions of the wealthy outskirts, and into the well-worn story of his redemption. But the best part of the book comes at the end, as he describes how the Lewis book and the film came together, including a priceless anecdote about seeing the film for the first time, some two months after its release, in a theater packed with other moviegoers and getting upset about what he perceived to be inaccuracies in its storytelling. "I watched those scenes thinking, 'No, that's not me at all!'" he writes.
In "I Beat the Odds," he gets his chance to tell a story that no one but he could properly tell.
Dave Sheinin is a sportswriter for The Washington Post. He can be reached at sheinind(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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IN TOO DEEP: BP and the Drilling Race that Took It Down
Stanley Reed and Alison Fitzgerald
Bloomberg
ISBN 978-0470950906
226 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Steven Mufson
Just six months after BP stopped its oil from flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, a gusher of books about the spill has begun to wash ashore. The first wave includes three very different approaches to the disaster that riveted the nation most of last summer.
How we interpret the spill is important. The 1969 spill off Santa Barbara soiled the shores and bird life and helped give rise to the modern environmental movement. Exxon's tanker accident in Valdez, Alaska, 20 years later became another symbol of reckless disregard for the environment. What makes the BP oil spill not just shocking but dispiriting is that it might have relatively little impact on ocean-drilling policy beyond a retooling of the regulatory bureaucracy and the imposition of a few additional technological safeguards and backups. The spill has had no effect on the world's appetite for oil, and drilling will continue because the best prospects are offshore in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coasts of Africa and Brazil, in the Caspian Sea and in the Arctic.
The recent spill received massive coverage. At the Associated Press alone, more than 40 reporters and editors were thrown into the fray; teams of reporters were mobilized at papers like The Washington Post, New Orleans Times Picayune, New York Times and Wall Street Journal. But even though the books under review present little if anything new, readers seeking overviews between two neat covers might still find them useful.
"In Too Deep," by Bloomberg journalists Stanley Reed and Alison Fitzgerald, opens with a brief account of the blowout then moves on to BP's history, starting in Iran during the 1950s, when U.S. and British governments overthrew the democratically elected regime for fear that it would hurt foreign oil interests. The authors shift quickly into more recent BP history, describing the enormous and lasting impact of former chief executive John Browne. Browne not only engineered giant mergers with Arco and Amoco, he also helped lead BP into post-Soviet Russia, Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.
An intellectual, an engineer and a politically savvy executive with passions for art and opera, Browne guided the company into deepwater exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. He is credited with recognizing that the size of the discoveries in deeper water were increasing, not leveling off. The book also profiles lower-level BP geologists who figured out where to find the likeliest prospects. A striking chart shows BP's average cost of adding a barrel of oil to its proven reserves were lower than any other major oil company's, and a tiny fraction of current prices.
Yet Browne was also a relentless cost-cutter, who squeezed money out of operations that actually should have invested more in maintenance and equipment. The authors blame BP culture for a focus on personal rather than process safety, for leaks in BP's Alaska pipeline, for an explosion at its Texas City refinery and for the gulf blowout.
In this narrative, Browne's successor, Tony Hayward, who resigned in the wake of the spill last year, was the unfortunate inheritor of the company Browne built. Chosen in part because he wasn't flashy -- the board was weary of Browne's celebrity -- Hayward lacked the skills to manage this environmental and public-relations disaster.
In "Blowout in the Gulf," William R. Freudenburg, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who died last year, and Robert Gramling, a sociology professor at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, concentrate on the regulatory framework that failed to prevent the accident. For example, they compare offshore-drilling regulation to airline regulation, and discuss whether regulation might be better handled by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
They examine clean-up techniques and the prolonged and futile efforts made in Valdez. A sign of how their perspective differs from that of Reed and Fitzgerald: the two reporters note that Hayward's parting pay package was not "huge" so that "there would be no reward for failure." Freudenburg and Gramling call Hayward's $17-million package a "golden parachute."
The authors make some solid points about the way the U.S. government has allowed big oil companies to march into public waters, about how the much-admired interstate highway system contributed to a fateful boom in U.S. oil consumption, and about the way Americans ravenously consume oil and gas today. "Despite our habit of referring to oil 'production,' the reality is that the twentieth century was an unprecedented exercise in oil 'destruction,'" they write. "The oil was actually produced during the time of the dinosaurs."
Bob Cavnar brings an insider's view to "Disaster on the Horizon," but not one the industry will like. Cavnar has spent three decades, first on a rig and later as chief executive, working for drilling companies in Texas, Louisiana and offshore areas. But he has a dim view of many industry practices, about which he has blogged for the Huffington Post.
Here, he focuses on the oil rig disaster itself and what caused it, reconstructing a readable narrative based on the extensive testimony given in hearings, newspaper accounts and his own experience. He makes a strong case that the spill was caused by human error. "An older engineer taught me, years ago, that wells actually talk to you," he writes. "In the hours leading up to the disaster, the Well from Hell was screaming at the crew that it was going to blow out, but nobody could understand the language it was speaking." And he notes that in deep water "bad situations can escalate very quickly into catastrophes."
Cavnar ends on a cynical note about whether government will respond constructively. The reorganization of the Minerals Management Service "created two new bureaucracies rather than fixing the one we had," he asserts. The moratorium on offshore drilling, he believes, was not long enough. And a policy to improve our energy security "is badly needed and long overdue."
Readers seeking another take on the Macondo well disaster might look at the well-written report to President Obama by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. Available free online (www.oilspillcommission.gov), it gives an account of the accident, the regulatory environment preceding the accident, and what might be done to prevent future incidents. Though the commission lacked the subpoena power held by congressional and other investigators, it still managed to elicit revealing testimony, especially about the stability of the cement job done by oil services contractor Halliburton.
But the commission steered away from placing blame entirely with one actor, writing: "As the Board that investigated the loss of the Columbia space shuttle noted, 'complex systems almost always fail in complex ways.' Though it is tempting to single out one crucial misstep or point the finger at one bad actor as the cause of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, any such explanation provides a dangerously incomplete picture of what happened -- encouraging the very kind of complacency that led to the accident in the first place."
Steven Mufson is The Washington Post's energy correspondent and a staff writer in its financial section. He can be reached at mufsons(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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BLOWOUT IN THE GULF: The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of Energy in America
William R. Freudenburg and Robert Gramling
MIT
ISBN 978-0262015837
254 pages
$18.95
Reviewed by Steven Mufson
Just six months after BP stopped its oil from flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, a gusher of books about the spill has begun to wash ashore. The first wave includes three very different approaches to the disaster that riveted the nation most of last summer.
How we interpret the spill is important. The 1969 spill off Santa Barbara soiled the shores and bird life and helped give rise to the modern environmental movement. Exxon's tanker accident in Valdez, Alaska, 20 years later became another symbol of reckless disregard for the environment. What makes the BP oil spill not just shocking but dispiriting is that it might have relatively little impact on ocean-drilling policy beyond a retooling of the regulatory bureaucracy and the imposition of a few additional technological safeguards and backups. The spill has had no effect on the world's appetite for oil, and drilling will continue because the best prospects are offshore in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coasts of Africa and Brazil, in the Caspian Sea and in the Arctic.
The recent spill received massive coverage. At the Associated Press alone, more than 40 reporters and editors were thrown into the fray; teams of reporters were mobilized at papers like The Washington Post, New Orleans Times Picayune, New York Times and Wall Street Journal. But even though the books under review present little if anything new, readers seeking overviews between two neat covers might still find them useful.
"In Too Deep," by Bloomberg journalists Stanley Reed and Alison Fitzgerald, opens with a brief account of the blowout then moves on to BP's history, starting in Iran during the 1950s, when U.S. and British governments overthrew the democratically elected regime for fear that it would hurt foreign oil interests. The authors shift quickly into more recent BP history, describing the enormous and lasting impact of former chief executive John Browne. Browne not only engineered giant mergers with Arco and Amoco, he also helped lead BP into post-Soviet Russia, Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.
An intellectual, an engineer and a politically savvy executive with passions for art and opera, Browne guided the company into deepwater exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. He is credited with recognizing that the size of the discoveries in deeper water were increasing, not leveling off. The book also profiles lower-level BP geologists who figured out where to find the likeliest prospects. A striking chart shows BP's average cost of adding a barrel of oil to its proven reserves were lower than any other major oil company's, and a tiny fraction of current prices.
Yet Browne was also a relentless cost-cutter, who squeezed money out of operations that actually should have invested more in maintenance and equipment. The authors blame BP culture for a focus on personal rather than process safety, for leaks in BP's Alaska pipeline, for an explosion at its Texas City refinery and for the gulf blowout.
In this narrative, Browne's successor, Tony Hayward, who resigned in the wake of the spill last year, was the unfortunate inheritor of the company Browne built. Chosen in part because he wasn't flashy -- the board was weary of Browne's celebrity -- Hayward lacked the skills to manage this environmental and public-relations disaster.
In "Blowout in the Gulf," William R. Freudenburg, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who died last year, and Robert Gramling, a sociology professor at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, concentrate on the regulatory framework that failed to prevent the accident. For example, they compare offshore-drilling regulation to airline regulation, and discuss whether regulation might be better handled by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
They examine clean-up techniques and the prolonged and futile efforts made in Valdez. A sign of how their perspective differs from that of Reed and Fitzgerald: the two reporters note that Hayward's parting pay package was not "huge" so that "there would be no reward for failure." Freudenburg and Gramling call Hayward's $17-million package a "golden parachute."
The authors make some solid points about the way the U.S. government has allowed big oil companies to march into public waters, about how the much-admired interstate highway system contributed to a fateful boom in U.S. oil consumption, and about the way Americans ravenously consume oil and gas today. "Despite our habit of referring to oil 'production,' the reality is that the twentieth century was an unprecedented exercise in oil 'destruction,'" they write. "The oil was actually produced during the time of the dinosaurs."
Bob Cavnar brings an insider's view to "Disaster on the Horizon," but not one the industry will like. Cavnar has spent three decades, first on a rig and later as chief executive, working for drilling companies in Texas, Louisiana and offshore areas. But he has a dim view of many industry practices, about which he has blogged for the Huffington Post.
Here, he focuses on the oil rig disaster itself and what caused it, reconstructing a readable narrative based on the extensive testimony given in hearings, newspaper accounts and his own experience. He makes a strong case that the spill was caused by human error. "An older engineer taught me, years ago, that wells actually talk to you," he writes. "In the hours leading up to the disaster, the Well from Hell was screaming at the crew that it was going to blow out, but nobody could understand the language it was speaking." And he notes that in deep water "bad situations can escalate very quickly into catastrophes."
Cavnar ends on a cynical note about whether government will respond constructively. The reorganization of the Minerals Management Service "created two new bureaucracies rather than fixing the one we had," he asserts. The moratorium on offshore drilling, he believes, was not long enough. And a policy to improve our energy security "is badly needed and long overdue."
Readers seeking another take on the Macondo well disaster might look at the well-written report to President Obama by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. Available free online (www.oilspillcommission.gov), it gives an account of the accident, the regulatory environment preceding the accident, and what might be done to prevent future incidents. Though the commission lacked the subpoena power held by congressional and other investigators, it still managed to elicit revealing testimony, especially about the stability of the cement job done by oil services contractor Halliburton.
But the commission steered away from placing blame entirely with one actor, writing: "As the Board that investigated the loss of the Columbia space shuttle noted, 'complex systems almost always fail in complex ways.' Though it is tempting to single out one crucial misstep or point the finger at one bad actor as the cause of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, any such explanation provides a dangerously incomplete picture of what happened -- encouraging the very kind of complacency that led to the accident in the first place."
Steven Mufson is The Washington Post's energy correspondent and a staff writer in its financial section. He can be reached at mufsons(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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