UNDERDOGS: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps

Nov 23, 2012 by Washington Post book reviewers

Aaron B O'Connell
Harvard Univ
ISBN 978-0674058279
381 pages
$29.95

Reviewed by Bing West

For the past decade, the public has ranked the Marines as the most prestigious service by a wide margin. After serving one tour of duty in the Corps, you are considered a Marine for life and expected to conduct yourself accordingly. Why? Because the commandant of the Marine Corps says so, that's why, and once a Marine, always a Marine.

In his new book, Aaron B. O'Connell investigates how an organization averaging 180,000 active members has succeeded in attracting such intergenerational fealty and admiration. Covering the period from 1940 to 1965, "Underdogs" is a scholarly work based on a decade of research. An assistant professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, O'Connell enlivens his academic framework with sharp anecdotes and assertive personalities. He reaches several conclusions about the Marine Corps, some old and some refreshingly new.

He begins by describing the old, well-known essence of the Marine image: heroism in combat. Every Marine is a rifleman, and you do only one thing with a rifle. There are no doctors or chaplains in the Corps, only shooters. They pay a cost for their aggressiveness. In World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the Marines absorbed proportionately heavier casualties than the U.S. Army and other units such as the Special Operations Command. In response, Marines forged a powerful self-identity that O'Connell calls a narrative of exceptionalism.While Army draftees in World War II and Korea saw themselves as citizens first and soldiers by necessity, the Marines held themselves apart from society. One advertising slogan summed up that attitude: "We don't promise you a rose garden."

The Marine motto was the "first to fight" - and mayhap to die. To cope with that loss of life and limb, they embraced an ethos that transcended any one life or any one time. O'Connell refers to this tradition as "the Marine belief in a timeless community of the living and the dead." That community's most famous members - like Smedley Butler, John Basilone, Chesty Puller and Jim Mattis - shared the trait of boldness in battle and defiance of death. Starting in boot camp, a Marine learned about a heritage two centuries in the making.

The tradition persists today. Last year, for instance, when a string of improvised explosive devices killed and maimed six Marines in southern Afghanistan, the company commander exhorted his men to remember the hardships borne by that same company in Korea, 61 years earlier. The next day, the Marines again attacked, some with waiting tourniquets strapped to their legs so they could staunch the bleeding when the next IED scythed through their ranks.

That Spartan code of the Marines is well-known; what O'Connell adds is a new insight. He argues that for several decades in the mid-20th century, the Marines were an organizational underdog, fighting for survival against the U.S. Army and the White House. The Marine Corps risked being disbanded after World War II. In the view of Army generals, there was no need for two land forces; the Marines should revert to their 18th-century mission as guards on board Navy ships. Both President Truman, who had proudly served in the U.S. Army, and President (and former Army General) Eisenhower saw merit in a small or nonexistent Marine Corps. In response, the Marines sought allies in the public and in Congress. O'Connell weaves a tale of intrigue, describing how the Corps survived the bureaucratic wars in Washington by engaging in guerrilla politics. They organized what was called the Chowder Society, an unofficial, clandestine cabal of officers that leaked budgetary and organizational plans from the Pentagon and the White House to the Congress; some of the officers' actions were so outrageous that a secretary of defense like Robert Gates would have sacked a bevy of Marine generals. But the generals successfully conducted a bureaucratic insurgency, never confirming their insubordination to the public. Knowing funding was tight, the Marines made a virtue of doing with less, a parsimony that won widespread approval on Capital Hill. The Marines also enlisted journalists and Hollywood to tell their stories. John Wayne, playing Sgt. Stryker in "Sands of Iwo Jima," received plenty of help from script-writing Marines.

The Marines' desperation, brought on by the realization that their service was the most likely to be eliminated, spurred innovation. After World War II, the Corps opposed the national strategy of tactical nuclear war and was determined to place infantry battalions on ships, ready to land at a moment's notice as a "force in readiness." In 1956, when England, France and Israel seized the Suez Canal, President Eisenhower sent a Marine battalion ashore the next day at Alexandria, to protect Americans and signal his anger at our allies. Two years later, as the Lebanese government tottered, Eisenhower sent 6,000 Marines ashore to stabilize the situation. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, 25,000 Marines were afloat in less than two weeks, poised to invade.

By 1965, the Marines had established themselves in the minds of the public and the Congress as the "can do" service, asking for little and delivering more. Gradually, the antagonism with the executive branch and inside the Pentagon waned. As the war in Vietnam escalated, political furor over the unpopular war overwhelmed any reservations inside the Pentagon about the Marines as a duplicative land army. Marines fought hard; that was reason enough to retain the underdog.

After Vietnam, American attitudes about war changed dramatically, because our volunteer military comprised only about 2 percent of our youths. The public, with few relatives involved, moved to the sidelines. War became a spectator sport, in which all-star teams were cheered. Our commandoes - the Special Operations Command - captured the public's imagination. The small SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden garnered more publicity than the 100,000 soldiers and Marines who toiled in Afghanistan.

Today's Marine Corps is no longer the underdog, scrapping for its existence. Marines are now part of an integrated military machine, where the four services perform all tasks jointly. Alongside the Army, the Marines are cutting back their numbers and funding as we pull out of the war in Afghanistan. O'Connell concludes that Marine Corps, even as its size diminishes, will retain "an ideology of elitism, superiority, and paranoia ... which shares some similarities with narratives of American exceptionalism (and keeps) the Marines forever on the attack."

Bing West served as a Marine in Vietnam. He is co-author, with Medal of Honor recipient Sgt. Dakota Meyer, of "Into the Fire: A Firsthand Account of the Most Extraordinary Battle of the Afghanistan War."

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group

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Mixed advice for tackling the challenges of modern manhood

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Washington Post book reviewers

May 25, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Various Authors
Various Publishers
ISBN NA
NA pages
$NA

Reviewed by Dan Zak

After the metrosexuals evolved into hipsters, after mixed martial arts became a thing, after princess boys started wearing tutus on national television and women started earning a majority of the nation's income, the modern American man clearly needs some good advice.

It's hard to find.

Memoirs and how-tos by and for men - like many modern men themselves - seem to align behind two archetypes. One is the lovable-but-hapless former nerd whose lingering social awkwardness provides a lifetime supply of self-deprecating quips and anecdotes (think Jason Segel, Joseph Gordon-Levitt or any man who has read this far). Crash-landing in this category is "I Suck at Girls," by Justin Halpern (It, $16.99), a snoozy meander through the author's adolescence. Halpern gave the world "Sh*t My Dad Says," a Twitter feed of his father's crotchety one-liners and a dead-on-arrival CBS sitcom starring William Shatner. He again drafted the old man to be an overbearing Socratic presence in his new bildungsroman, but Dad smothers son's attempts to extract life lessons from the tropes of puberty (the nerdy hunt for pornography, the nerdy flight from virginity). Halpern the Younger comes across as a self-emasculating millennial who believes his misadventures deserve to be enshrined between hard covers.

He might re-masculate himself by reading "How to Land an A330 Airbus, and Other Vital Skills for the Modern Man," by James May (Sourcebooks; paperback, $14.99). This "clear, concise, untested, optimistic" book details the proper ways to handle low-probability, high-testosterone tasks, such as how to fight a duel or invade the Isle of Wight. May, host of the BBC2 car show "Top Gear," balances specific advice (the autopilot-disengage button is nerve-rackingly near the radio-for-help button on an A330) with historical digressions and witty Britishisms ("How to Prepare and Eat Your Best Mate"). Given the complexities of such challenges, this book is less practical guide and more bathroom amusement, especially for the other archetype of the modern male: the dapper jet-setter with a low body-mass index and over-curated sense of culture (patron saints include Richard Branson, Tyler Brule and whoever writes headlines for Esquire) - in short, the type of man who would look stylish while becoming a hero.

Heroism is indeed masculinity in full flower, but its bloom wilts in "Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Facade of American Empire, 1898-2001," by Aaron Belkin (forthcoming from Columbia University Press; paperback, $25). Belkin, a political science professor, dismantles the "double binds" of military culture, which he says require unmasculine submission in order to attain military masculinity. His most startling thesis is that this masculinity, which the United States prizes conspicuously, is inherently undemocratic. "Bring Me Men" is textbookish - even in its unsparing descriptions of male rape at the Naval Academy in Annapolis - and the subject matter and prose somehow render the work both provocative and unpalatable. It is, however, an antidote to the jockiness of "How to Land an Airbus" and makes one wonder how Justin Halpern would endure enlisted life, which Belkin prosecutes for the macho rot under its polished decorum.

Perhaps Belkin would prescribe "Essential Manners for Men," by Peter Post (William Morrow; paperback, $14.99), for the U.S. military. The great-grandson of etiquette goddess Emily Post has penned a second edition of an instruction manual that could be summed up in five words: Don't be a gross moron. To Peter, men are clueless gas factories who must be told to avoid adjusting their genitals in public. He covers everything from hair in the sink ("Clean out the drain") to handshakes (avoid "the bone crusher" or "the limp wrist"). This updated volume also includes advice on "friending" and online dating, social challenges that great-grandma Post never had to contend with. The author's most revolutionary tip? Don't fist-bump a stranger.

Dab Zak is a writer in The Washington Post's Style section. He can be reached at zakd@washpost.com.

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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CITY OF SCOUNDRELS: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago

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Washington Post book reviewers

May 4, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

CITY OF SCOUNDRELS: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern ChicagoGary Krist
Crown
ISBN 978-0307454294
347 pages
$26

DETROIT: A BiographyScott Martelle
Chicago ReviewPress
ISBN 978-1569765265
288 pages
$24.95

Reviewed by Mark Caro

Choosing the right time frame is a key decision for any storyteller. Can you reveal more about a subject by covering exhaustive chronological ground or homing in on a tightly compressed period? Do you pull back for a wide shot and let events rush by as if in a montage, or do you push in for the close-up and have developments unfold in something closer to real time?

Journalists Gary Krist and Scott Martelle offer contrasting answers to these questions with their relatively compact historical books about major Midwestern cities. As the subtitle indicates, Krist's "City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago" is a crisply focused affair that relates how a blimp disaster, a transit strike and a race riot made for a particularly hellish July of 1919. Martell's "Detroit" takes a more panoramic approach, spanning this northern city's 300-plus years of troubled history in fewer than 260 pages of text. Different cities, different authors, different stories to tell, though one approach generates far more tension than the other.

In Krist's doozy of an opening set piece, various Chicagoans set out for work on a day in which a Goodyear dirigible, called the Wingfoot Express, makes its maiden series of voyages around the city, including a low flight over the Loop's business district. The first man we meet, Carl Otto, has decided to return to his bank job a day early after recovering from Spanish influenza, and anyone schooled in foreshadowing mentally cues up the ominous music. Yet the way the disaster plays out, with Krist deftly cutting among multiple perspectives and eyewitness accounts that he has unearthed, is so spectacular and vivid that you're picturing how James Cameron might film it all before you've reached page 20.

Krist goes on to note that worse events were to follow, and he's right. But the subsequent explosions are trailed by longer fuses, as politicians absorbed in their own machinations fail to mind the sparks within the citizenry. The dominant figure here is William Hale "Big Bill" Thompson, the outsized Chicago mayor who is more skilled in rewarding friends, punishing enemies and sweet-talking the public than he is in running a big city. When former ally Illinois Gov. Frank Lowden crosses him, Thompson becomes determined to torpedo his fellow Republican's presidential aspirations, even if that means failing to ask the governor to call in the National Guard when Chicago's police obviously are overmatched by the spread of rioting.

In a direct, unflashy writing style, the author clearly delineates the many other forces at work: labor unrest among transit workers whose work-week and salary demands are incompatible with the mayor's never-ending pledge to keep streetcar fare at a nickel; rising racial tensions as blacks, many having surged into the city during the Great Migration, move into white-dominated neighborhoods where teen "athletic clubs" violently resist integration; the search for a missing 6-year-old girl that prompts officials to call for the roundup of all "morons" (that is, "mentally deficient deviants").

Krist shows an admirable ability to interweave so many threads while breathing life into a host of supporting characters, including black activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the Thompson-opposed owner-publishers of the Chicago Daily News and Chicago Tribune. The narrative develops inexorable momentum as the mob violence, the impending transit shutdown and the mayor's abdication of duties inflict terrifying chaos on the city. The author is less successful whipping up interest in a wan romantic subplot involving a young woman carrying on a secret engagement with an unrefined soldier who shares her Jewish background but dabbles in Christian Science.

The book also doesn't quite make the case that this series of unfortunate events "gave birth to modern Chicago." The nature of racism didn't really change, nor did Big Bill Thompson's brand of machine politics. For him the summer of 1919 was a temporary setback, his biggest accomplishment being the City Council's passage of key elements of the so-called Plan of Chicago on the same day as the Wingfoot Express disaster. But that urban makeover, conceived years earlier by architect Daniel Burnham (a key figure in Erik Larson's more sprawling "The Devil in the White City"), couldn't be considered a product of 1919, and, anyway, it's far from the main thrust of "City of Scoundrels."

Well, let's not judge a book by its subtitle. As a page-turner that offers resonant insights into the inflammatory political and racial dynamics of an earlier time, "City of Scoundrels" works just fine.

Speaking of subtitles, the one for "Detroit: A Biography" is problematic as well. I admit to being someone who gets bugged when filmmakers tout their location work by gushing, "The city essentially became a character." Well, no, it became a setting, as it's supposed to do. Likewise, if Martelle's history purports to be a biography - as opposed to, say, a history or survey - then the northern Midwestern city he's portraying better be quite a compelling figure.

As it turns out, this Detroit is one depressed fellow. Martelle begins his narrative with the French and then British settling this land along the Detroit River (and driving out the Native Americans) before the frontier town grows into a major port city and, eventually, home of the U.S. auto industry. The city is beset by problems that, Martelle points out during his decade-by-decade overview, it never shakes, particularly racism and the short-sightedness of tying its fortunes to a single industry that's especially vulnerable to economic downturns.

In his preface Martelle notes that he chose to bypass Detroit's music and sports history. If you were reading the biography of an actual person who happened to create something as staggeringly influential, popular and enjoyable (and relevant to race relations) as Motown, you'd expect that (and the many other contributions to the music and arts worlds) to be covered. Granted, Martelle had to focus his narrative if he wasn't going to deliver an encyclopedic tome, but ignoring a city's cultural life is like diagnosing a patient without locating a pulse.

Apart from some short, newspaper-feature-like portraits of "Detroiters," the book is driven not by flesh-and-blood characters but by a heavy accumulation of statistics illustrating job losses, car-manufacturing drop-offs and white flight to the suburbs. As a protagonist, Detroit has no arc; the narrative is a grim, slow descent, with the author ultimately suggesting ways the city might survive even as his book can't possibly keep up with the current post-bailout developments.

So it is that in breezing through history, "Detroit" bogs down while "City of Scoundrels," which takes its time, hits with the force of Lake Michigan's winds.

Mark Caro is the author of "The Foie Gras Wars" and a Chicago Tribune culture reporter.

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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AS IF: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality

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Washington Post book reviewers

Feb 15, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Michael Saler
Oxford Univ
ISBN 978-0195343168
283 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews each Thursday in The Washington Post Style section and conducts a book discussion for the Post at wapo.st/reading-room. His latest book, "On Conan Doyle," was recently published.

At least since the 18th century, there have been periodic complaints that the world has been drained of enchantment. Once, every meadow, grove and stream seemed appareled in a celestial light. People believed in some sort of natural supernaturalism surrounding them, or felt other worlds enriching our own, whether they were the realms of Faery or the Christian heaven.

Then came the fall. Rationalism, new technology, the disappearance of traditional religious beliefs, the population shift from the country to the city, the rise of democratic governments - all leached the marvelous from existence, leaving humanity roiled in the gloomy condition we call modernity.

Is there no way to re-enchant our mundane, dreary lives while preserving the myriad benefits of the machine age?

According to cultural historian Michael Saler, during the late 19th century - the fin de siecle - people attempted to do just this through an increasing immersion in the fantastic. Spiritualism, the occult, Eastern beliefs and extreme aestheticism offered various paths back to Eden. But all too often these creeds - like some of their modern successors - required one to surrender reason and independent thought as a prerequisite to entering the lost garden.

As an alternative, argues this brilliant if sometimes densely written book, one might instead turn to an early form of virtual reality. Through certain literary texts, people found that they could immerse themselves in various imaginary or secondary worlds. Moreover, by maintaining a sense of irony, they could experience enriching delight without surrendering to delusion.

In effect, "As If" explores the rewards of participatory fandom, concentrating on three groups: the devotees of Sherlock Holmes, especially the famous literary and dining club called the Baker Street Irregulars; the connoisseurs of H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos; and the scholarly enthusiasts of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth.

To some onlookers, people who pretend that Sherlock Holmes existed, who don't laugh at Lovecraft's tentacled or piscine horrors, or who take the trouble to learn Elvish should all go out and get a life. One might reasonably answer: That's just what they've done. By periodically inhabiting vicarious realms, they have created a second life, discovered a way to gladden their souls, gained fresh perspectives on the real world and enjoyed a genuine human connectedness with their fellow enthusiasts.

People accomplish this, Saler repeatedly stresses, through the maintenance of "the double consciousness" of the ironic imagination - a willingness to play a game wholeheartedly while understanding that it is only a game. This is, in essence, the same attitude we bring to enjoying a conjurer's performance: We revel in the tricks and illusions without believing that they are achieved through actual magic.

Such "as if" play, one might argue, is a source of inner enrichment and essential to our full humanity. Virtual communities and environments teach us, in the words of critic Marie-Laure Ryan, "to live, work, and play with the fluid, the open, the potential."

As Saler points out, "as if" activity requires not so much "the willing suspension of disbelief" as "the willing activation of pretense." Historically speaking, certain rich, multi-layered works have encouraged such "activation of pretense" through the use of scholarly and scientific paratexts - that is, maps, documents, footnotes, charts, glossaries, historical timelines, photographs, illustrations and allusions to events outside the story proper. This material plethora displayed a playful seriousness and encouraged a serious playfulness from readers.

Saler mentions, for instance, the 19th-century Hetzel editions of Jules Verne. These elaborate, oversize volumes, bound in gorgeously decorated covers (featuring a Vernean collage of elephants, submarines and balloons) and packed with detailed yet evocative steel engravings, are book-worlds that one can live in. As a child, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre adored the Hetzel editions, remembering them as "magic boxes" and little theaters. Such works were spectacular, in both senses of the word.

Books alone, however, aren't enough to foster an ongoing virtual reality. One also requires "public spheres of the imagination," places where fans can gather, argue and deepen their understanding of the sacred texts. Often the first such sphere is simply the letters page in a magazine, but before long there are "societies, fanzines, and conventions."

In the chapter "Clap If You Believe in Sherlock Holmes," Saler emphasizes that the great detective isn't just logical, he is also distinctly imaginative. Holmes the aesthete perceives the world as an Arabian Nights realm of mystery, full of a "hidden import" of which he alone is aware. Using the same combination of deduction and imagination characteristic of their hero, members of the Baker Street Irregulars "play the game," as they call it: When they rigorously deduce fanciful meanings in Holmes's adventures, they employ the rational techniques of modernity to further a sense of enchantment.

In his Lovecraft chapter, Saler describes the scientific aura surrounding the Cthulhu Mythos, and how later weird-tale writers and readers have added to these stories of Yog-Sothoth and the Old Ones. But he looks particularly at the correspondence, conversations and other exchanges between the author and his admirers - that is, at "the public sphere" of the Cthulhu Mythos - and speculates that the resulting discussions and debates helped Lovecraft mature as a man as well as a writer. Hence, the artistic richness of his later work, his eventual repudiation of his racist views of non-Anglo-Saxons and his newfound sympathy with Norman Thomas's style of socialism.

For Tolkien, Saler says, "re-enchantment through fantastic Secondary Worlds was not a rejection of modernity, but rather a corrective to its one-sided emphases." By "cross-dwelling in another world" - Middle Earth - "a visitor could benefit from the perspectives and practices that she might not find in the context of her own world."

To Saler, Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" is centered on the idea of home, the enchanted realm to which, like the hobbit Sam, we long to return or, perhaps, that we hope to restore. To investigate this theme, Saler surveys Tolkien's life in terms of his "nationalist, aestheticist, and religious views." Despite the novelist's expressed horror at allegorization, Saler views Tolkien's masterpiece as a paean to a certain kind of English homeyness and decency, threatened by our "robot age" and the economic sway and cultural vulgarity of the United States. However, Tolkien strongly believed that stories, especially "sub-creations" that shape an imaginatively inhabitable secondary world, possess the power to "console, redeem, and inspire."

Living in the realm of "as if" thus keeps us truly open and affirming as human beings. We learn "to entertain provisional identities, provisional narratives, and provisional worlds." As a result, we gain an understanding of "contingency and difference" and a wariness of all inflexible, essentialist doctrines.

"As If" doesn't address the current forms of virtual reality, i.e., computer games and simulated worlds. Perhaps that will be Saler's next book. In the meantime, "As If" reminds us that, through real play in imaginary gardens, we can enhance the lives we lead in this alienated modern world.

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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Review-a-Day for Fri, Aug 26: Intellectuals Incorporated: Politics, Art, and Ideas Inside Henry Luce's Media Empire (Politics and Culture in Modern America)

Review-a-Day for Sat, Sep 3: Robinson Crusoe (Modern Library Classics)

by Daniel Defoe A review by Doug Brown

The first thing that surprised me upon picking up a copy of Robinson Crusoe is how long ago it was written. It was published in 1721, when the American colonies were just that. Slavery was the unquestioned institution of the day, even in England; William Wilberforce wouldn't be born for another 40 years. Sailing ships from one place to another was still a very risky proposition; before finally being cast away on a Caribbean island for almost 30 years, Crusoe survives two other shipwrecks. Many scholars assume Defoe was influenced by the popular account of Alexander Selkirk, who was marooned on an island for four years the decade before.

Much of the book is a meditation on a person alone, and how isolation might affect a man. Crusoe first builds barricades around his tents to keep animals out (his island is well populated with goats and wild cats). He doesn't make a gate; he gets over the barricade with a ladder that he pulls in after himself, in case other people might be about. He throws himself into industrious labor; growing crops, teaching himself pottery to make cooking pots and containers, and becoming quite the basket weaver. He also learns to make clothing from the skins of animals he has caught and killed; I had never spotted that the last name Taylor is an alternate spelling of tailor (Defoe spells it taylor throughout).

Midway through the book, when Crusoe famously sees that single bare footprint in the sand, you might expect him to be ecstatic at not being alone. Instead, he spends the next two years beefing up his fortifications, setting up rifles ready to be fired through windows in his barricade. He is more cautious about setting fires or using his firearms, for fear of being found. His fear isn't just isolationist paranoia; cannibals are foremost in his mind, and every whisper of the wind becomes their footsteps. And sure enough (spoiler alert!), that is who it turns out to be. Canoes of people come from the mainland -- oh, yeah, here are a few surprising details -- which is only 40 miles away, visible from the island, and Crusoe has a boat. And, yet, he never thinks of heading to the mainland, for fear of being invited to dinner in the wrong sense of the word. For when people come to the island, they are indeed cannibals, coming to eat some captives and then go back home.

After witnessing this, Crusoe has a dark night of the soul where first he plans to murder the cannibals, next time they come, then questions whether that would make him no better than them. But on their next visit, a man they are planning to eat runs away, and Crusoe springs into action, killing the cannibals along with the man's help. There is no question whatsoever that this man will now become Crusoe's de facto slave. Indeed, for the rest of the book he is usually not referred to as Friday, the day that Crusoe saved him, but most commonly by the now famous phrase "my Man Friday."

Having written a thoughtful story up to the point that Crusoe gets back to Europe, Defoe unfortunately stumbles at the finish line. At the very end of the book there are some battles with wolves and bears in the Alps that are just plain absurd. At one point his small band fights off what Crusoe estimates to be three hundred wolves (hmm, okay). After 250 pages of intelligently looking at how much a single man needs in order to subsist on an island, Defoe doesn't bother to consider how a pack of 300 wolves could possibly subsist anywhere. If a major studio made an accurate film of the book, everyone would accuse Hollywood of tacking on an unrealistic action scene at the end, just to end with a bang (or, rather, a whole bunch of bangs).

Despite the ending and the datedness of the language, this is one of those books that deserves the appellation "a classic for all ages." I assume most children's versions of the book are set in a more readable fashion than the more accurate Modern Library edition, which preserves Defoe's capitalizations. This was a Time when all Nouns were capitalized, and Proper Nouns italicized, which takes the Eye some getting used to. Defoe also rarely uses periods; his paragraphs are like this: concatenations of sentences separated; by colons: and semicolons. After a while you don't notice it, though. The Modern Library edition also has the obligate introduction that all classics must have; this one is written by some woman named Virginia Woolf (who'd a thunk she'd be a big Robinson Crusoe fan?). The laudatory cover quote comes from a review written by a guy called Edgar Allan Poe; in an appendix, we get his full review (unlike Woolf, I fully get Poe being a fan of this book). A meditative and (mostly) realistic book, Robinson Crusoe isn't as rollicking as its successor Treasure Island; however, there are still gun battles aplenty, shipwrecks, cannibals, and battles with wild beasts. Think of the difference between the films Pirates of the Caribbean and Master and Commander; the first is more fun, but the latter is a better film that more honestly portrays its time. Likewise, Treasure Island is more fun, but I feel that Robinson Crusoe is the better book.

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Review-a-Day for Thu, Aug 4: Pathfinder: Blazing a New Wilderness Trail in Modern America

by Ron Strickland A review by Barney Mann

Ron Strickland is the father of the 1,200-mile Pacific Northwest Trail. He is a latter-day trailblazer, author and the paterfamilias of the nation's newest national scenic trail.

Pathfinder is Strickland's eighth book, and for a zealot -- being "focused" alone doesn't drag a wild-dream mountain trail into reality -- Strickland is more than a passable scrivener. Pathfinder interlaces tales of the trail's founding with steep ascents and descents to match the Pacific Northwest Trail's jutting terrain together with a potpourri of Northwest outback characters, other trail "bad boys" like himself, love in the outdoors (nee sex), backpacking tips and a vision of hiking's future.

Pathfinder is like a snowmelt freshet broken free of Strickland's hard-won trail, a 180-degree turnabout from his seven previous efforts -- five collections of oral histories, one anthology and a 1-pound-plus trail guidebook. Here, Strickland lets his own voice loose at last.

In 1970, 27-old Strickland conceived the idea of the Pacific Northwest Trail, a continuous path from Glacier National Park in Montana to the Pacific Ocean. But after 10 years, the trail received a death sentence. A congressional study concluded "it is overwhelmingly evident ... the trail ... is neither feasible nor desirable." Strickland and his Pacific Northwest Trail went underground and fervent volunteers hoisted axes and pulaskis to make the trail an on-the-ground reality. On March 30, 2009, recognition caught up to reality, and the Pacific Northwest Trail became a congressionally designated National Scenic Trail.

A decade ago, Backpacker magazine branded Strickland a "pulpit-pounding evangelist," but in Pathfinder Strickland is all rosy-cheeked uncle, joshing, cajoling and entertaining, repeatedly poking fun at himself. A Strickland pratfall opens the book. At age 7, a jelly-sandwich-toting Strickland won entrance into his first tent. Heaven. The "canvas hut practically sang of the great outdoors." Then his sandwich plopped, jelly side down. Song over. Long before becoming a trail founder, Strickland was a pup tent reject. "Scram, creep."

Sixty years and 23 chapters later, yet again in a tent with food, Strickland recounted that as the temperature plummeted, his new wife Christine wolfed down a slumgullion dinner. When finished, "she looked expectantly at me as her breath danced in the headlamp's beam. 'What's next?' she purred." She wasn't talking dinner. Strickland proceeds, but here I'll let the tent flaps discreetly close.

Slumgullion: a watery stew. It's Strickland's favorite dish. Occasionally, as in navigating the newly minted Pacific Northwest Trail, you may feel lost, but on the whole, Pathfinder is funny, poignant and unsparing in candor. Entering at "Scram, creep" and exiting at a sultry, "What's next?," Pathfinder portrays a kaleidoscope view of a modern trailblazer's life.

The Oregonian is the online source for comprehensive coverage of the Northwest literary scene. Its daily books report includes news, reviews, and poetry, as well as essays and opinions from local authors.

Plus: The paper's award-winning books section, published on Sundays, strips the buzz from national bestsellers and directs readers to little-known regional gems in a concise package.

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Review-a-Day for Tue, May 31: Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (Terry Lectures)

by Marilynne Robinson A review by Mary Helen Stefaniak

I first encountered Marilynne Robinson in 1983, at the beginning of her fame. Housekeeping had just won the 1982 Hemingway Foundation/PEN award for first fiction, and she had come to the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where she is now a member of the faculty, to read from her award-winning novel. I had read Housekeeping with awe. Seeing the author in person was an inspiration to me. I'd come to the Workshop with three small children and my husband -- I'll resist the temptation to say "in tow" -- straight from my ordinary life as a high school teacher in Milwaukee. Apart from having a lot of reading to catch up on, I felt marked by my apparent domesticity, my lack of writerly panache, even my age. (I was an ancient 31 at the time.) And now here came Marilynne Robinson, with her extraordinary first novel, apparently about my age or even a few years older, and nothing of the black turtleneck about her. She looked like an ordinary person.

She is not an ordinary person -- and I don't say that just because her second novel won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and her third the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction. As her son James once said (in an interview with The Idaho Statesman), "our way of bonding is to discuss Theodor Adorno's critique of Christianity." Robinson is a kind of brilliance made of words -- a unique consciousness, an irreplaceable subjectivity (and a native of Idaho) -- visible in the ordinary world as a woman with a kind and intelligent face framed by thick hair, gray now, parted on the side and blunt cut above her shoulders. The only person I've ever met face to face whose individual subjectivity compares in its special kind of brilliance to hers is her colleague at the Workshop, James Alan McPherson. Put the two of them in a room together and you've got all the evidence you need to understand how misguided the modern myth of the self must be, if its scientific and parascientific methods require the "suppression of the testimony of individual consciousness."

This suppression, along with the poor light it casts on both science and religion, is the subject of Robinson's new book, which began as a series of Terry lectures she delivered at Yale. Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (Yale University Press, 2010) offers a critical look at evolutionary, neurological, psychoanalytical, and sociological models of human nature that have in common "an exclusion of the testimonies of culture and history," models that "refuse to acknowledge subjectivity." Robinson takes to task theories that "forget the beauty and strangeness of the individual soul, that is, of the world as perceived in the course of a human life, of the mind as it exists in time."

Among those whose writings about the mind and human nature she discusses at some length are Darwin and Freud and Auguste Comte, along with contemporary figures, including the entomologist (and novelist) E. O Wilson. Too often, Robinson says, she sees in such writings -- from the most credentialed to the least -- "a kind of parochialism that follows from a belief in science as a kind of magic, as if it existed apart from history and culture, rather than being, in objective truth and inevitability, their product."

I'm quoting here from the second of four chapters that comprise the book, my favorite, the one entitled "The Strange History of Altruism." In it, Robinson examines the way altruism -- compassion, love -- has been argued out of nature and relegated to religion and other "inventions" of human culture by the enormous growth and influence of what she calls "parascientific literature," for which she offers a definition worth quoting at length:

By this phrase I mean a robust, and surprisingly conventional, genre of social or political theory or anthropology that makes its case by proceeding, using the science of its moment, from a genesis of human nature in primordial life to a set of general conclusions about what our nature is and must be, together with the ethical, political, economic and/or philosophic implications to be drawn from these conclusions. Its author may or may not be a scientist himself. One of the characterizing traits of this large and burgeoning literature is its confidence that science has given us knowledge sufficient to allow us to answer certain essential questions about the nature of reality, if only by dismissing them. -- pp. 32-33

Robinson attributes "the sense of emptiness in the modern world" not to the decline of faith, nor to the advance of science -- she considers both religion and science to be poorly represented by the so-called modern debate between them -- but to "the exclusion of the felt life of the mind from the accounts of reality proposed by the oddly authoritative and deeply influential parascientific literature… and from the varieties of thought and art that reflect the influence of these accounts."

Works she assigns to the genre range from the recent contributions of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett to the writings of Sigmund Freud, whose work she calls "by far the greatest and most interesting contribution to parascientific thought and literature ever made." Freud gets his own chapter in Absence of Mind. Robinson sees his determination to universalize the psyche as a poignant response to the threatening spirit of his age: his theory opposes a growing faith in "the importance of racial, cultural, and national difference," an ideology that will lead, in his lifetime, to the rise of fascism.

Robinson's discussion of Freud reminds us that scientific theories and hypotheses are not products of some ahistorical objectivity; they are ideas firmly bound to the culture and history in which they arise. Turning to thinkers who preceded Freud, she points out the shaky "parascientific reasoning" that led Malthus to his conclusions regarding human population growth and Darwin to describe The Descent of Man. It should not escape our notice that privilege and colonialism were well served by these theories that made the inevitability of suffering in the competition for limited resources into a scientific principle. As the author wryly puts it, their "contemporaries saw clearly enough what the implications must be for social policy, that the impulse to intervene in the suffering of the poor, an impulse that was under formidable control among them in any case, could, if acted upon, yield only greater suffering."

For all the weighty subject matter, Robinson's wry wit is evident throughout, whether she is detecting a "whiff of phrenology" in yet another neuroscientist's trotting out of poor Phineas Gage, the railroad worker whose upbeat personality underwent a change for the worse while he survived for thirteen years with a spike through his brain, or asking us to imagine "a row of schoolroom modernists hanging beside the schoolroom poets, Marx, Nietzsche, and Wellhausen beside Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier" and then to notice the "marked similarity among them of pince-nez and cravat." Modern thought, it turns out, "has been modern for a very long time."

Her book points out what would be obvious to anyone unacquainted with the modern view that "we don't know our own minds," but that "certain well-qualified others do know them."

I have not done justice to Marilynne Robinson's Absence of Mind. I haven't mentioned her genial laceration of gene- (and cultural meme-) based explanations of human behavior, nor her very rational demonstration that a theory of mind that can only deal with the complexity of its subject by denying its reality is, by scientific standards, a pretty inadequate theory. I have hardly mentioned the modern debate between science and religion, in which, as her whole book demonstrates, neither science nor religion is adequately or even accurately represented.

Marilynne Robinson has written two previous works of formidable nonfiction (Mother Country and The Death of Adam). She will forgive me, I hope, for believing that, of the two great prose projects, fiction is the greater miracle. For me, her astonishing novels -- Housekeeping and Gilead and Home -- offer the most compelling argument for her premise in Absence of Mind. Works of fiction like hers are proof, quotable proof, to put it simply, of the reality of individual human subjectivity. They make "the felt life of the mind" real in the world. They offer a clear demonstration that, far from being marginalized or suppressed, "the testimony of individual consciousness" is, in fact, the surest path to a greater understanding of who we are, how we might have come to be, and where we go from here.

Mary Helen Sefaniak's latest novel, The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia (W.W. Norton, 2010) is an Indie Nextpick for September 2010. Her first novel, The Turk and My Mother (W.W. Norton, 2004), received the 2005 John Gardner Fiction Award and has been translated into several languages. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The Antioch Review, AGNI, Epoch, The Iowa Review, New Stories from the South (Algonquin Books), and A Different Plain: Contemporary Nebraska Fiction Writers (University of Nebraska Press, 2004). Self Storage and Other Stories received the Wisconsin Library Association's 1998 Banta Award, and a novella was shortlisted for the O. Henry Prize. She divides her time between Iowa City, where she and her husband live in a 150-year-old stagecoach inn they recently restored, and Omaha, where she teaches at Creighton University. Stefaniak is a contributing editor of Cerise Press. Visit www.maryhelenstefaniak.com

This review was originally published in Cerise Press. Cerise Press, an international online journal based in the United States and France, builds cross-cultural bridges by featuring artists and writers in English and translations, with an emphasis on French and Francophone works.

Co-founded by Sally Molini, Karen Rigby, and Fiona Sze-Lorrain in 2009, Cerise Press hopes to serve as a gathering force where imagination, insight, and conversation express the evolving and shifting forms of human experience.

To contact Cerise Press, please email editors@cerisepress.com.

The Spring 2011, Vol. 2 Issue 6 of Cerise Press features Smoking, Chongqing, a photograph by Steven Benson.

View the original article here

TOMATOLAND: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit

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Washington Post book reviewers

Jun 10, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Barry Estabrook
Andrews McMeel
ISBN 978-1449401092
220 pages
$19.99

Reviewed by Jane Black

Lucas Mariano Domingo came to the United States from Guatemala hoping to find a job that would pay him enough to send money home. But he was soon broke and homeless. And so it must have seemed like a lucky break when Cesar Navarrete, leader of a Florida tomato picking crew, offered him false papers, room, board and a job that, if he did well, could earn him $200 a week. It quickly became clear, however, that this was a false opportunity. Domingo was lodged with three other men in the back of a box truck with no running water or toilet. Food was scarce. Navarrete charged extortionate fees for just about everything. After a hot day in the fields, Domingo was docked $5 to stand naked in the backyard and wash himself with cold water from a garden hose. He was paid irregularly and in small, arbitrary amounts. Worse, Navarrete warned that Domingo or any other laborer who attempted to leave would be severely beaten. It took Domingo nearly three years to escape -- and even longer before members of the Navarrete family were charged with what Douglas Molloy, the chief assistant U.S. attorney in Fort Myers, Fla., described as "slavery, plain and simple."

In the 21st century, such horror stories should be uncommon. But over the past 15 years, Florida law enforcement officers have freed more than 1,000 men and women who were held against their will and forced to do field work. Barry Estabrook, one of the country's leading writers on food politics, focused the national spotlight on the issue in 2009, when he published a story in Gourmet magazine (an odd but brilliant placement) that argued that anyone who ate a winter tomato inadvertently supported modern slavery.

Food writers -- including me -- rushed to get in on the story, and food-reform advocates broadened their definition of "sustainability" to include workers' rights. Since then the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which advocates for Florida tomato pickers, has helped shine a national spotlight on the issue of migrant slavery and has won higher pay for migrant laborers and concessions from the big growers. But Estabrook was not content to leave the story there. For him, that perfectly round, perfectly red grocery-store tomato came to represent everything that is wrong with industrial agriculture: the alarming use of fertilizers and pesticides, the relentlessness market pressure on workers and growers alike, and the laserlike focus on shipping, storage and shelf-life with predictably tasteless results. "Tomatoland" is more than the sad tale of one fruit's decline from juicy summer treat to bland obligation. It is an indictment of our modern agricultural system.

The book takes readers on a whirlwind tour from Peru, the birthplace of tomatoes, to California research labs, Pennsylvania farms and Estabrook's Vermont kitchen, where in one scene he tries desperately to inflict damage on a store-bought tomato by dropping it, throwing it, then bowling it across the floor. No dice. (And no surprise, either: Early commercial breeders were instructed to imagine the tomato as a projectile in their quest for fruit that could travel long distances.)

Most of the action, though, takes place in Immokalee (rhymes with broccoli), ground-zero to the Florida tomato industry. Ironically, Estabrook explains, the Sunshine State is anything but an ideal place to grow tomatoes. The soil is sand, which lacks nutrients and therefore must be supplemented with tons of chemical fertilizer. The rarity of frosts provides pests and pathogens a haven, requiring growers to spray tons of chemical pesticides. The humidity encourages blights, spots and mold. But Florida does have one key benefit: its proximity to customers in densely populated and very cold East Coast cities.

Estabrook's exposure of the resulting environmental and human tragedies places "Tomatoland" in the tradition of the best muckraking journalism, from Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" to Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation." There are plenty of shocking statistics: In 2006, Florida growers sprayed nearly 8 million pounds of insecticides, fungicides and herbicides on their tomato crops, nearly eight times as much as California growers used for a similar-size crop. But by and large, Estabrook lets people -- migrant workers, activists and scientists -- tell the story. In the case of pesticides, there is no tale more heart-wrenching than that of three families whose children were crippled or killed, it was later proved, because of their mothers' work in the winter tomato fields.

All three women worked at a company called Ag-Mart, whose products include the nearly ubiquitous Santa Sweets grape tomato sold in plastic clamshell containers at grocery stores. The label depicts three smiling, dancing tomato kids. The company's advertising boasts, "Kids love to snack on this nutritious treat."

Not so the women's newborn babies, all born within seven weeks of one another. Francisca Herrera's son, Carlitos, was born with no arms and legs. Sostenes Maceda's son, Jesus, was born with a deformity of the lower jaw that put him at constant risk of choking on his own tongue. Maria Meza gave birth to Jorge, who had one ear, no nose, a cleft palate, one kidney, no anus and no visible sexual organs. It was later determined that Jorge was a girl, and she was renamed Violeta. She lived just three days.

Most instances of pesticide misuse, Estabrook reports, don't result in charges or fines because workers are afraid to come forward and because of a shameful lack of enforcement. In the case of the deformed babies, agents leveled 88 counts against Ag-Mart, fining the company $111,200. A judge later reduced the fine to $8,400. It took a pro-bono personal injury lawyer to win one family an undisclosed settlement, enough to sustain the little boy financially for life. Ag-Mart admitted no guilt.

It's easy to get enraged reading such stories. But Estabrook is careful to maintain his journalistic distance. The tomato growers and regulators, whom most readers will consider the "bad guys," get to have their say. (Sadly, this is a rarity in the ever-growing crop of books on food politics, which embrace an either-you're-with-us-or-against-us sensibility.) But Estabrook also does not allow political spin or misleading facts to stand unchallenged. When Reggie Brown, the executive vice president of the Tomato Growers Exchange, protests to him that his industry complies with labor laws and pays competitive wages, Estabrook follows with an account of a 2008 Senate hearing in which committee members demolish the industry's claims that workers earn an average of $12 per hour. For workers to do that, one senator points out, pickers would have to pick 3,000 tomatoes each hour, nearly one per second.

"Tomatoland" doesn't offer fixes for the industry's failures. But it does spotlight the people working to change it. Among them: Lady Moon Farms, an organic Florida grower that pays workers an hourly wage and provides them free housing and still manages to compete on grocery-store shelves; Barbara Mainster, a teacher who provides free or low-cost child care and education for migrant farmworkers' children; John Warner Scott, an old-style plant breeder who developed the Tasti-Lee, a tomato that can keep its flavor even when shipped. Each of them offers a ray of hope for the industry -- and for consumers who want a delicious, juicy and guilt-free tomato. But there is still much work to be done. By the end of "Tomatoland," a far more obvious solution will present itself to some readers: Head to the backyard and plant a few tomatoes of your own.

Jane Black, a former Washington Post staff writer, is working on a book about a West Virginia town that is trying to create a healthier local food culture.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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Review-a-Day for Tue, May 31: Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (Terry Lectures)

by Marilynne Robinson A review by Mary Helen Stefaniak

I first encountered Marilynne Robinson in 1983, at the beginning of her fame. Housekeeping had just won the 1982 Hemingway Foundation/PEN award for first fiction, and she had come to the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where she is now a member of the faculty, to read from her award-winning novel. I had read Housekeeping with awe. Seeing the author in person was an inspiration to me. I'd come to the Workshop with three small children and my husband -- I'll resist the temptation to say "in tow" -- straight from my ordinary life as a high school teacher in Milwaukee. Apart from having a lot of reading to catch up on, I felt marked by my apparent domesticity, my lack of writerly panache, even my age. (I was an ancient 31 at the time.) And now here came Marilynne Robinson, with her extraordinary first novel, apparently about my age or even a few years older, and nothing of the black turtleneck about her. She looked like an ordinary person.

She is not an ordinary person -- and I don't say that just because her second novel won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and her third the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction. As her son James once said (in an interview with The Idaho Statesman), "our way of bonding is to discuss Theodor Adorno's critique of Christianity." Robinson is a kind of brilliance made of words -- a unique consciousness, an irreplaceable subjectivity (and a native of Idaho) -- visible in the ordinary world as a woman with a kind and intelligent face framed by thick hair, gray now, parted on the side and blunt cut above her shoulders. The only person I've ever met face to face whose individual subjectivity compares in its special kind of brilliance to hers is her colleague at the Workshop, James Alan McPherson. Put the two of them in a room together and you've got all the evidence you need to understand how misguided the modern myth of the self must be, if its scientific and parascientific methods require the "suppression of the testimony of individual consciousness."

This suppression, along with the poor light it casts on both science and religion, is the subject of Robinson's new book, which began as a series of Terry lectures she delivered at Yale. Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (Yale University Press, 2010) offers a critical look at evolutionary, neurological, psychoanalytical, and sociological models of human nature that have in common "an exclusion of the testimonies of culture and history," models that "refuse to acknowledge subjectivity." Robinson takes to task theories that "forget the beauty and strangeness of the individual soul, that is, of the world as perceived in the course of a human life, of the mind as it exists in time."

Among those whose writings about the mind and human nature she discusses at some length are Darwin and Freud and Auguste Comte, along with contemporary figures, including the entomologist (and novelist) E. O Wilson. Too often, Robinson says, she sees in such writings -- from the most credentialed to the least -- "a kind of parochialism that follows from a belief in science as a kind of magic, as if it existed apart from history and culture, rather than being, in objective truth and inevitability, their product."

I'm quoting here from the second of four chapters that comprise the book, my favorite, the one entitled "The Strange History of Altruism." In it, Robinson examines the way altruism -- compassion, love -- has been argued out of nature and relegated to religion and other "inventions" of human culture by the enormous growth and influence of what she calls "parascientific literature," for which she offers a definition worth quoting at length:

By this phrase I mean a robust, and surprisingly conventional, genre of social or political theory or anthropology that makes its case by proceeding, using the science of its moment, from a genesis of human nature in primordial life to a set of general conclusions about what our nature is and must be, together with the ethical, political, economic and/or philosophic implications to be drawn from these conclusions. Its author may or may not be a scientist himself. One of the characterizing traits of this large and burgeoning literature is its confidence that science has given us knowledge sufficient to allow us to answer certain essential questions about the nature of reality, if only by dismissing them. -- pp. 32-33

Robinson attributes "the sense of emptiness in the modern world" not to the decline of faith, nor to the advance of science -- she considers both religion and science to be poorly represented by the so-called modern debate between them -- but to "the exclusion of the felt life of the mind from the accounts of reality proposed by the oddly authoritative and deeply influential parascientific literature… and from the varieties of thought and art that reflect the influence of these accounts."

Works she assigns to the genre range from the recent contributions of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett to the writings of Sigmund Freud, whose work she calls "by far the greatest and most interesting contribution to parascientific thought and literature ever made." Freud gets his own chapter in Absence of Mind. Robinson sees his determination to universalize the psyche as a poignant response to the threatening spirit of his age: his theory opposes a growing faith in "the importance of racial, cultural, and national difference," an ideology that will lead, in his lifetime, to the rise of fascism.

Robinson's discussion of Freud reminds us that scientific theories and hypotheses are not products of some ahistorical objectivity; they are ideas firmly bound to the culture and history in which they arise. Turning to thinkers who preceded Freud, she points out the shaky "parascientific reasoning" that led Malthus to his conclusions regarding human population growth and Darwin to describe The Descent of Man. It should not escape our notice that privilege and colonialism were well served by these theories that made the inevitability of suffering in the competition for limited resources into a scientific principle. As the author wryly puts it, their "contemporaries saw clearly enough what the implications must be for social policy, that the impulse to intervene in the suffering of the poor, an impulse that was under formidable control among them in any case, could, if acted upon, yield only greater suffering."

For all the weighty subject matter, Robinson's wry wit is evident throughout, whether she is detecting a "whiff of phrenology" in yet another neuroscientist's trotting out of poor Phineas Gage, the railroad worker whose upbeat personality underwent a change for the worse while he survived for thirteen years with a spike through his brain, or asking us to imagine "a row of schoolroom modernists hanging beside the schoolroom poets, Marx, Nietzsche, and Wellhausen beside Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier" and then to notice the "marked similarity among them of pince-nez and cravat." Modern thought, it turns out, "has been modern for a very long time."

Her book points out what would be obvious to anyone unacquainted with the modern view that "we don't know our own minds," but that "certain well-qualified others do know them."

I have not done justice to Marilynne Robinson's Absence of Mind. I haven't mentioned her genial laceration of gene- (and cultural meme-) based explanations of human behavior, nor her very rational demonstration that a theory of mind that can only deal with the complexity of its subject by denying its reality is, by scientific standards, a pretty inadequate theory. I have hardly mentioned the modern debate between science and religion, in which, as her whole book demonstrates, neither science nor religion is adequately or even accurately represented.

Marilynne Robinson has written two previous works of formidable nonfiction (Mother Country and The Death of Adam). She will forgive me, I hope, for believing that, of the two great prose projects, fiction is the greater miracle. For me, her astonishing novels -- Housekeeping and Gilead and Home -- offer the most compelling argument for her premise in Absence of Mind. Works of fiction like hers are proof, quotable proof, to put it simply, of the reality of individual human subjectivity. They make "the felt life of the mind" real in the world. They offer a clear demonstration that, far from being marginalized or suppressed, "the testimony of individual consciousness" is, in fact, the surest path to a greater understanding of who we are, how we might have come to be, and where we go from here.

Mary Helen Sefaniak's latest novel, The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia (W.W. Norton, 2010) is an Indie Nextpick for September 2010. Her first novel, The Turk and My Mother (W.W. Norton, 2004), received the 2005 John Gardner Fiction Award and has been translated into several languages. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The Antioch Review, AGNI, Epoch, The Iowa Review, New Stories from the South (Algonquin Books), and A Different Plain: Contemporary Nebraska Fiction Writers (University of Nebraska Press, 2004). Self Storage and Other Stories received the Wisconsin Library Association's 1998 Banta Award, and a novella was shortlisted for the O. Henry Prize. She divides her time between Iowa City, where she and her husband live in a 150-year-old stagecoach inn they recently restored, and Omaha, where she teaches at Creighton University. Stefaniak is a contributing editor of Cerise Press. Visit www.maryhelenstefaniak.com

This review was originally published in Cerise Press. Cerise Press, an international online journal based in the United States and France, builds cross-cultural bridges by featuring artists and writers in English and translations, with an emphasis on French and Francophone works.

Co-founded by Sally Molini, Karen Rigby, and Fiona Sze-Lorrain in 2009, Cerise Press hopes to serve as a gathering force where imagination, insight, and conversation express the evolving and shifting forms of human experience.

To contact Cerise Press, please email editors@cerisepress.com.

The Spring 2011, Vol. 2 Issue 6 of Cerise Press features Smoking, Chongqing, a photograph by Steven Benson.

View the original article here

Review-a-Day for Tue, May 31: Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (Terry Lectures)

by Marilynne Robinson A review by Mary Helen Stefaniak

I first encountered Marilynne Robinson in 1983, at the beginning of her fame. Housekeeping had just won the 1982 Hemingway Foundation/PEN award for first fiction, and she had come to the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where she is now a member of the faculty, to read from her award-winning novel. I had read Housekeeping with awe. Seeing the author in person was an inspiration to me. I'd come to the Workshop with three small children and my husband -- I'll resist the temptation to say "in tow" -- straight from my ordinary life as a high school teacher in Milwaukee. Apart from having a lot of reading to catch up on, I felt marked by my apparent domesticity, my lack of writerly panache, even my age. (I was an ancient 31 at the time.) And now here came Marilynne Robinson, with her extraordinary first novel, apparently about my age or even a few years older, and nothing of the black turtleneck about her. She looked like an ordinary person.

She is not an ordinary person -- and I don't say that just because her second novel won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and her third the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction. As her son James once said (in an interview with The Idaho Statesman), "our way of bonding is to discuss Theodor Adorno's critique of Christianity." Robinson is a kind of brilliance made of words -- a unique consciousness, an irreplaceable subjectivity (and a native of Idaho) -- visible in the ordinary world as a woman with a kind and intelligent face framed by thick hair, gray now, parted on the side and blunt cut above her shoulders. The only person I've ever met face to face whose individual subjectivity compares in its special kind of brilliance to hers is her colleague at the Workshop, James Alan McPherson. Put the two of them in a room together and you've got all the evidence you need to understand how misguided the modern myth of the self must be, if its scientific and parascientific methods require the "suppression of the testimony of individual consciousness."

This suppression, along with the poor light it casts on both science and religion, is the subject of Robinson's new book, which began as a series of Terry lectures she delivered at Yale. Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (Yale University Press, 2010) offers a critical look at evolutionary, neurological, psychoanalytical, and sociological models of human nature that have in common "an exclusion of the testimonies of culture and history," models that "refuse to acknowledge subjectivity." Robinson takes to task theories that "forget the beauty and strangeness of the individual soul, that is, of the world as perceived in the course of a human life, of the mind as it exists in time."

Among those whose writings about the mind and human nature she discusses at some length are Darwin and Freud and Auguste Comte, along with contemporary figures, including the entomologist (and novelist) E. O Wilson. Too often, Robinson says, she sees in such writings -- from the most credentialed to the least -- "a kind of parochialism that follows from a belief in science as a kind of magic, as if it existed apart from history and culture, rather than being, in objective truth and inevitability, their product."

I'm quoting here from the second of four chapters that comprise the book, my favorite, the one entitled "The Strange History of Altruism." In it, Robinson examines the way altruism -- compassion, love -- has been argued out of nature and relegated to religion and other "inventions" of human culture by the enormous growth and influence of what she calls "parascientific literature," for which she offers a definition worth quoting at length:

By this phrase I mean a robust, and surprisingly conventional, genre of social or political theory or anthropology that makes its case by proceeding, using the science of its moment, from a genesis of human nature in primordial life to a set of general conclusions about what our nature is and must be, together with the ethical, political, economic and/or philosophic implications to be drawn from these conclusions. Its author may or may not be a scientist himself. One of the characterizing traits of this large and burgeoning literature is its confidence that science has given us knowledge sufficient to allow us to answer certain essential questions about the nature of reality, if only by dismissing them. -- pp. 32-33

Robinson attributes "the sense of emptiness in the modern world" not to the decline of faith, nor to the advance of science -- she considers both religion and science to be poorly represented by the so-called modern debate between them -- but to "the exclusion of the felt life of the mind from the accounts of reality proposed by the oddly authoritative and deeply influential parascientific literature… and from the varieties of thought and art that reflect the influence of these accounts."

Works she assigns to the genre range from the recent contributions of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett to the writings of Sigmund Freud, whose work she calls "by far the greatest and most interesting contribution to parascientific thought and literature ever made." Freud gets his own chapter in Absence of Mind. Robinson sees his determination to universalize the psyche as a poignant response to the threatening spirit of his age: his theory opposes a growing faith in "the importance of racial, cultural, and national difference," an ideology that will lead, in his lifetime, to the rise of fascism.

Robinson's discussion of Freud reminds us that scientific theories and hypotheses are not products of some ahistorical objectivity; they are ideas firmly bound to the culture and history in which they arise. Turning to thinkers who preceded Freud, she points out the shaky "parascientific reasoning" that led Malthus to his conclusions regarding human population growth and Darwin to describe The Descent of Man. It should not escape our notice that privilege and colonialism were well served by these theories that made the inevitability of suffering in the competition for limited resources into a scientific principle. As the author wryly puts it, their "contemporaries saw clearly enough what the implications must be for social policy, that the impulse to intervene in the suffering of the poor, an impulse that was under formidable control among them in any case, could, if acted upon, yield only greater suffering."

For all the weighty subject matter, Robinson's wry wit is evident throughout, whether she is detecting a "whiff of phrenology" in yet another neuroscientist's trotting out of poor Phineas Gage, the railroad worker whose upbeat personality underwent a change for the worse while he survived for thirteen years with a spike through his brain, or asking us to imagine "a row of schoolroom modernists hanging beside the schoolroom poets, Marx, Nietzsche, and Wellhausen beside Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier" and then to notice the "marked similarity among them of pince-nez and cravat." Modern thought, it turns out, "has been modern for a very long time."

Her book points out what would be obvious to anyone unacquainted with the modern view that "we don't know our own minds," but that "certain well-qualified others do know them."

I have not done justice to Marilynne Robinson's Absence of Mind. I haven't mentioned her genial laceration of gene- (and cultural meme-) based explanations of human behavior, nor her very rational demonstration that a theory of mind that can only deal with the complexity of its subject by denying its reality is, by scientific standards, a pretty inadequate theory. I have hardly mentioned the modern debate between science and religion, in which, as her whole book demonstrates, neither science nor religion is adequately or even accurately represented.

Marilynne Robinson has written two previous works of formidable nonfiction (Mother Country and The Death of Adam). She will forgive me, I hope, for believing that, of the two great prose projects, fiction is the greater miracle. For me, her astonishing novels -- Housekeeping and Gilead and Home -- offer the most compelling argument for her premise in Absence of Mind. Works of fiction like hers are proof, quotable proof, to put it simply, of the reality of individual human subjectivity. They make "the felt life of the mind" real in the world. They offer a clear demonstration that, far from being marginalized or suppressed, "the testimony of individual consciousness" is, in fact, the surest path to a greater understanding of who we are, how we might have come to be, and where we go from here.

Mary Helen Sefaniak's latest novel, The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia (W.W. Norton, 2010) is an Indie Nextpick for September 2010. Her first novel, The Turk and My Mother (W.W. Norton, 2004), received the 2005 John Gardner Fiction Award and has been translated into several languages. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The Antioch Review, AGNI, Epoch, The Iowa Review, New Stories from the South (Algonquin Books), and A Different Plain: Contemporary Nebraska Fiction Writers (University of Nebraska Press, 2004). Self Storage and Other Stories received the Wisconsin Library Association's 1998 Banta Award, and a novella was shortlisted for the O. Henry Prize. She divides her time between Iowa City, where she and her husband live in a 150-year-old stagecoach inn they recently restored, and Omaha, where she teaches at Creighton University. Stefaniak is a contributing editor of Cerise Press. Visit www.maryhelenstefaniak.com

This review was originally published in Cerise Press. Cerise Press, an international online journal based in the United States and France, builds cross-cultural bridges by featuring artists and writers in English and translations, with an emphasis on French and Francophone works.

Co-founded by Sally Molini, Karen Rigby, and Fiona Sze-Lorrain in 2009, Cerise Press hopes to serve as a gathering force where imagination, insight, and conversation express the evolving and shifting forms of human experience.

To contact Cerise Press, please email editors@cerisepress.com.

The Spring 2011, Vol. 2 Issue 6 of Cerise Press features Smoking, Chongqing, a photograph by Steven Benson.

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