"The Naked Mom," "A Box of Darkness," more

Healthy Life Video Hyaluronic Acid As Filler And ... Play Now!
Washington Post Book Reviews For You Friday February 11, 2011 THE FATES WILL FIND THEIR WAY Hannah Pittard Ecco ISBN 978-0061996054 243 pages $22.99 Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post. He reviews books every Wednesday and can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com. This year is off to a great start for new novelists -- and readers willing to sample unfamiliar names. Hannah Pittard's "The Fates Will Find Their Way" is the third impressive debut I've read in January (and I've got another for next week and the week after that). These books are a reassuring indication that new voices can still catch the attention of big publishing houses, despite what you may hear from aggrieved self-published authors. "The Fates Will Find Their Way" ruminates over the disappearance of a 16-year-old girl and the shadow of longing she casts over the neighborhood boys. Pittard, a young short story writer who graduated from the University of Virginia, seems at first to be reworking several other authors' material. Indeed, so many kids have vanished in recent fiction they should have their own line of milk cartons. And the men who tell this tale in the plural voice must know the guys who narrated Jeffrey Eugenides' "The Virgin Suicides" almost 20 years ago. But Pittard isn't grasping at the coattails of abduction thrillers, nor is she rewriting Eugenides' macabre book, though she graciously acknowledges its influence. Instead, she offers a story about the dark matter of adolescent desire that pulls on the heart across decades. It's a wistful novel about how little we know of one another, but how eager we are to tape together a collage of rumors, assumptions and fantasies to answer questions we're too young, too cowardly or too polite to ask. When 16-year-old Nora Lindell disappears from her small town on Halloween night, the mothers begin working through their phone tree while the boys gather in a basement and "interrogate each other for information, eager to be the one to discover the truth." Each has a recent sighting to share: She was at the mall, the airport, the swing sets or, most ominously, at the bus station, where she may have gotten into an old car. Trey Stephens claims he had sex with Nora just last month, but he goes to public school, so who knows how reliable that is? The details constantly melt and congeal into different forms as the boys frighten and titillate each other with speculation about what must have happened. Stewart O'Nan wrote a devastating novel about a similar disappearance a few years ago called "Songs for the Missing," which followed the cruel trajectory of one family's hopes. But Pittard doesn't intrude very far into this family's grief, nor do we hear anything about the police investigation. Instead, "The Fates Will Find Their Way" stays focused on a dozen teenage boys who continue wondering about Nora while studying her younger sister with a mixture of concern and prurience. Nora becomes an integral part of their fantasy lives, their dreams of what might have been, visions of romantic perfection they quietly return to again and again throughout their lives, early in the morning while shaving or late at night, lying next to their own pretty enough wives. Most of the novel moves like a winding confession -- not a confession of any crime, but a poignant testimony of male adolescence, steeped in nostalgia and regret. "We were boys, after all," the plural narrator admits, "which means we were creeps -- our mothers' word -- which means we were indiscreet and couldn't help ourselves when it came time to trading what we'd done or not done or when and with whom and how." One anecdote blends into another. The bull sessions in Trey's basement give way to sexual anecdotes of uncertain reliability, along with stories of mothers who talk too freely and fathers who drink too much. The boys polish these scenes into the domestic myths of their lives, such as the piercing anecdote about Nora's sister dressing up as Nora on the next Halloween. It's an arresting incantation, and I couldn't believe how strongly the story drew me back to events in my own life that I hadn't thought of for decades, tragedies that smoldered in gossip without the oxygen of any real information: the boy across the street who shot himself after our neighborhood water fight; the friend whose father hanged himself; the student in the dorm who was raped by an administrator's son -- all of them vanished into the mists of rumor. You have your own adolescent legends, of course, and don't be surprised by the power of this evocative novel to unearth them. As affecting as I found this book, though, I wish its plural narrator were more consistently convincing. Every individual male character Pittard creates here is wholly believable, endowed with the peculiar desires and attributes that make people saunter off the page and prick us with the sense of their reality. By the time these guys approach 50, those original differences in class, conscience and ability have scattered them across the spectrum of happiness and success in completely plausible ways. But this stitched-together narrator pulls at its own seams; such diverse men couldn't speak in a choral voice. References to "our wives" fixing dinner and taking care of "our kids" sound as dated and stylized as a '60s sitcom. At other times, the novel's voice seems weirdly incorporeal, lacking the visceral sense of what it's like to inhabit a breathing, sweating, working male body. These "we boys" who grow up to become "we men" are an oddly sensitive, feminine ideal of male consciousness, filled with quiet sorrow for the transgressions of men. If this is the voice of a dozen guys -- jocks and geeks, executives and deadbeats, alcoholics and pedophiles -- they've been boiled together for a long time to produce a very refined broth. Still, "The Fates Will Find Their Way" is chilling and touching. Pittard can be harrowingly wise about the melancholy process of growing up, of moving from the horny days of high school to the burden of protecting our own children. We realize what's been lost, what's been done to us and what we've done to each other before we're mature enough to calculate the true cost. In Pittard's absorbing treatment, the tragedy of Nora's disappearance is eventually subsumed into the tragedies we all endure. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top HEARTSTONE C. J. Sansom Viking ISBN 978-0670022397 634 pages $27.95 Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, who regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post Book World Good, solid, enjoyable novels are blessedly common, but exceptional, knock-your-socks-off novels are rare. I count myself lucky if I stumble upon two or three a year. But now I've devoured two in one month, both by British writers I'd not read before. The first, reviewed here recently, was Peter James' perverse tale of sexual obsession and expensive shoes, "Dead Like You." Now we have "Heartstone," the fifth book in C.J. Sansom's series about an idealistic lawyer who seeks justice in a violent age, mid-16th-century England. The lawyer, Matthew Shardlake, is 43 years old during this story, which is set in the summer of 1545. He's also a hunchback, a widower and exceedingly trouble-prone. Early in the novel, Shardlake visits two women whose needs set the story in motion. The first, Ellen, has long been confined in Bedlam, the madhouse, under mysterious circumstances; Shardlake is determined to help her if he can. The other is Queen Catherine Parr, who had been his friend before she had the dubious honor of becoming the last of Henry VIII's six, mostly ill-starred wives. Catherine asks the lawyer to investigate the apparent suicide of the son of one of her former housekeepers. Sansom, who is himself a lawyer, has won praise in England for his microscopic knowledge of 16th-century life. Certainly, one of the novel's glories is his ability to bring alive all levels of English society, from cutthroats and common soldiers to the king and queen themselves. Shardlake's investigations take place as a huge French fleet is sailing toward Portsmouth, on England's south coast, and an invasion seems imminent. (This is part of Henry's ill-advised war of 1544-46.) Sansom contrives to have Shardlake's legal work take him to the vicinity of Portsmouth, so that on his ride south he becomes friendly with a vivid array of soldiers who bicker, brawl and "sing bawdy versions of courtly love songs." The author spices his narrative with convincing details and dialogue from that most unruly era. For example, there's the soldier who declares that a man "should experience everything once, save incest and the plague." Shardlake's investigation of the possible suicide -- undertaken at the queen's request -- leads to Hugh Curtey, a youth who, upon his parents' death, became the ward of a landowner named Hobbey. Shardlake suspects that Hobbey is robbing the boy of his inheritance. Clearly, something is terribly wrong in the Hobbey household, but neither Shardlake nor the reader can puzzle out what evil abides there, even after the half-mad mistress of the house cries out, "You fool! You do not see what is right in front of you!" When the truth finally emerges, it is both unexpected and unsettling. Young Hugh runs away to volunteer as an archer in the English cause, which leads Shardlake to Portsmouth as the army gathers. Here the king arrives: "When I had seen him four years before he had been big, but now his body was vast, legs like tree trunks in golden hose sticking out from the horse's side. ... The deep-set little eyes, beaky nose, and small mouth were now surrounded by a great square of fat that seemed to press his features into the center of his head. ... In that grotesque face I thought I read pain and weariness, and something more. Fear? I wondered if even that man of titanic self-belief might think, as the French invasion force approached, what will happen now? Even, perhaps: What have I done?" The novel has it all: an ingenious plot, ceaseless suspense, villains galore, tipsy priests, a bull-baiting, a stag hunt, several murders, the horrors of war, a brooding sense of evil and a glittering portrait of a fascinating age. I rank it with Iain Pears' "An Instance of the Fingerpost" (1998) among the very best of recent historical thrillers. Finishing it, I longed for the leisure to go back and read the previous Shardlake adventures, but my thoughts also turned to those still to come. Early in this novel, when the lawyer meets with Queen Catherine, he also chats with 11-year-old Lady Elizabeth -- Henry's daughter by second wife, Anne Boleyn -- a girl who no one imagines will one day become queen. She proves to be a precocious child who questions the lawyer about the difficulties of achieving justice in this world. (Her concern is understandable, given that her father had her mother's head chopped off and the girl herself declared illegitimate.) The cordial exchange between Shardlake and young Elizabeth suggests the possibility of a future alliance. Henry will soon die, and a bloody decade or so later, Elizabeth will miraculously become queen. Perhaps in future novels Shardlake will advise the young woman during her perilous march to power. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top A BOX OF DARKNESS: The Story of a Marriage Sally Ryder Brady St. Martin's ISBN 978-0312654160 240 pages $23.99 Reviewed by Marie Arana Marriage is hard. I've never known one that wasn't. For all the pretty mythology, for all the romance and high hopes we invest in the institution, it is tough work, a chastening business -- heaven to fall into, hellish to sustain. If we are lucky, we get as much love as we give. If we are unlucky, we take comfort in what we can: the children, the rituals, the quotidian pleasures of making our own little cornerstone of society function. But the moment we start totting up, testily enumerating who gave what and if any of it really is enough for us, surely the love is over. Why anyone would want to reckon those accounts publicly after a life partner is dead is the question I can't help but ask after reading Sally Ryder Brady's blistering memoir, "A Box of Darkness." The marriage this book describes -- by all outward appearances -- was golden. Upton Brady was a successful publisher, executive editor of the Atlantic Monthly Press; Sally was bright and imaginative: a pert, pretty mother of four. Our hero was verbally gifted, impeccably dressed, a stylish man of letters; our heroine, a spirited suburbanite, attentive helpmeet, who wrote freelance in her spare time. They danced well together, had happy, fruitful sex, entertained literary luminaries. But in 1970, eight years into their marriage, he came home one morning after a drunken night out and told her he'd slept with another man. "How many times has it happened?" she asked him, in shock. He didn't answer. He picked up his martini, knocked it back, and that was that. Subject closed. Or so he thought. Forty years later -- and three years after the heart attack that killed him -- "A Box of Darkness" is Sally Ryder Brady's attempt to answer that question. As Kafka might have said, it's a desperate axe flung at the frozen sea within. He was gay. She suggests that in retrospect there was abundant evidence for it: Take his natural flair for dancing, for instance. Or the fact that he always wore freshly ironed handkerchiefs tucked in his breast pocket. When they were first married and unable to afford fancy clothes, he made her an evening dress -- not from a pattern, mind you, but cut from the drape of the silk. He could knit; he could cook; he knew just what to do for her when she was nursing a baby. With such circumstantial substantiation does she argue the case. In truth, there were concrete signs that the man was struggling with his sexual identity. After he was cremated, his body scattered to the winds, Sally found a stash of magazines hidden in his drawer, bursting with "beautiful, nude young men with gleaming bodies." After that, came a cluster of videos, tumbling unbidden from an old suitcase: The slipcases showed a bevy of naked men, frolicking openly. As months wore on, Brady found it impossible to put those striking images out of mind. What else had he been up to when she wasn't paying attention? "I question our marriage over and over again," she writes, "wondering how he could have made love to me for all those years when what he really wanted was a male lover." So much of Brady's story is a product of its time and place. If Upton were indeed gay, it would have been standard operating procedure, in the 1950s, for him to try to mask it, bury it away in some semblance of a married life. One can't help but feel, in this raveling narrative, that Brady doesn't comprehend that pressure. When, in 1977, she realizes that Upton's married brother is gay, she is the essence of understanding. But when it comes to her own husband, she is a woman wronged, the victim. Upton and Sally had met at the Boston Cotillion in the summer of 1956. She was a New England WASP, Barnard girl, a budding bohemian on the cusp of a career in theater. Friends with Joan Baez, girlfriend of Nikos (a dashing Greek studying at Harvard), she was on her way to a very different life from the one Upton ultimately offered. At the cotillion, Upton cut in during a dance, propelled her across the floor, their bodies fitting "leg to leg, pelvis to pelvis." He was drunk, as he would continue to be for most of their marriage, but, oh, could he dance. Her mother objected vehemently. He was "lace curtain" Irish and, therefore, unacceptable. And yet his people had been "raised rich," as Upton liked to say. "They went to fancy schools, wore fancy hand-me-downs, cavorted with fancy people." His mother was the daughter of a well-known general, and had grown up in the Far East "with amahs and finger bowls." The general had sported the very same tailcoat Upton had worn at the Cotillion, except that he had worn it to the White House. Upton's father was headmaster of the exclusive Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island. Strictly Catholic, occupants of good real estate, they led a life straight out of "Brideshead Revisited," complete with two sexually ambiguous sons. Sex was an issue from the first. "I can't do this," Upton said, the first time Sally wanted it. "It's called fornicating. A sin." Eventually he gave in, and became an ardent lover, "but sometimes before and even during sex, there was a shadow, like a papal frown." Life went on. They married, began domestic rituals; children arrived; he worked his way to success. Sally became fully responsible for managing four active youngsters, keeping them quiet when Upton was home. A flowing fount of martinis kept him mellow. He could be dazzling, when he wanted to be. But one swallow too many could turn their paradise into purgatory. He grew mean, even violent. Eventually, he started pushing her around. And then came the admission of the all-night spree with their mutual friend, the openly gay Edward. A reader can't help but take this in with eager, almost prurient fascination. But, as Brady builds her case for her husband's bad behavior, one feels a lingering repugnance. Not to Upton's pointed, cross-gender infidelity -- God knows we've heard that story before -- but to his wife's long, self-pitying whine about it. We're told that Upton was good with words, a gifted storyteller, but there is no evidence of it here. Talents are mentioned, but seldom shown. As time wears on, he gets himself to AA and sobers up, but he becomes a ghost of himself -- out of work, impotent, grumpy -- and, all the while, our author is on a rampage of self-absorption. Dead, he becomes even more unruly. He's left magazines, videos, a backbreaking stack of unpaid bills. Worse, she'll never know whether he really loved her or whether he felt loved in return. "Get over it," her son tells her. By mid-book, although we'll go on and read every last word, we want to shout out the very same thing. Most unnerving of all, perhaps, is that the publisher insists that "Box" is an act of great love. It feels like anything but that. This is no eloquent examination of a marriage -- as was Joan Didion's searing "Year of Magical Thinking," or Christopher Buckley's tough but profoundly tender "Losing Mum and Pup," or John Bayley's deeply moral "Elegy for Iris." We come away feeling as if we've watched a wife drag her husband into the ring and give him the thrashing he very well may have deserved. Except that the man is dead. "Do you mind?" she asks Upton in the end. No. Certainly not. But we do. Marie Arana is a writer at large for The Washington Post. She can be reached at aranam(at symbol)washpost.com. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top THE NAKED MOM: A Modern Mom's Fearless Revelations, Savvy Advice, and Soulful Reflections Brooke Burke New American Library ISBN 978-0451232335 307 pages $25.95 Reviewed by Jen Chaney At first glance, "The Naked Mom" does not look like a book that the average harried mother will embrace. Perhaps it's the nudity. Yes, on the cover there's Brooke Burke -- former bikini model, current co-host of "Dancing With the Stars" and now published author -- all smiles and no clothes, tucking her knees in front of her body just strategically enough for prominent placement at Barnes & Noble. And there's the book jacket's promise of what this pseudo-memoir will deliver: fearless revelations, savvy advice and soulful reflections. Go ahead, ladies. Refrain from rolling your eyes. Can't do it without pulling a muscle, can you? Indeed, it's hard to believe that this one-time Maxim cover girl, a woman who counts Denise Richards and Tori Spelling among her close friends and admits to having her own "glam squad," genuinely understands what it's like to handle day-care drop-offs, post-baby weight gain and toddlers who scream way past bedtime. Yet somehow, "The Naked Mom" turns out to be an often enjoyable, albeit frothy, read, one that presents Burke as a mostly down-to-earth mother of four who also happens to hang out with celebrity ballroom dancers for a living. The book admittedly has a split personality; it can't decide whether it wants to be a memoir, a self-help title or a hardcover version of a mommy blog. But it's just fun and breezy enough to qualify as a guilty pleasure, one that also touches on practical matters, like how to condition your hair with guacamole. (Look, we said breezy. We did not say National Book Award winner.) Burke, who is also co-chief executive of the website Modernmom.com, openly admits that she had some help with her first foray into authorhood. In the acknowledgments, she thanks former Washington Post reporter Tamara Jones for acting as her writing partner. It's hard to know where Jones' help ends and Burke's talent begins, but based on Burke's blog and her Twitter feed -- which boasts 1.7 million followers -- the celebrity mama's voice remains intact here. And that voice rings most true when Burke is at her bluntest, such as her appraisal of the goal of work-life balance: "Balance," she says, "is bull (expletive). End of story." She also writes with wry humor about managing her four children, two of whom she had with her first husband, plastic surgeon Garth Fisher, and two of whom are the product of her relationship with fiance David Charvet. "When Shaya hit his terrible twos," she says of her youngest, "his tantrums were so over the top that we once actually had to leave a zoo because we were disturbing the wildlife." At moments like this, any reader can empathize with Burke, no matter what her dress size. She seems real. She seems funny. She seems like a woman you could trade potty-training tips with while waiting in line at Buy Buy Baby. But then reality intrudes, and Burke starts to write like a sexy celebrity with sexy celebrity friends living a sexy life in Malibu that sounds pretty dreamy compared with the reality experienced by most Americans. She begins sentences with: "I was going through a hellish period of my life several years ago, and I'll never forget the insight and advice I got from my makeup artist." Or she recalls what she said to a personal trainer shortly after delivering her first child: "This is not a time to be experimenting here. I need to be in Belize posing on a beach in a bikini in three months." (Oh, who hasn't said that postpartum?) It's a classic case of celebrity tone deafness, and it undermines the book. I wish an editor had suggested she remove those sections, along with some of the sidebars and silly lists that pop up throughout the text. Readers want to know how a person like Burke juggles motherhood and a busy professional life, but they probably don't care that she includes Joss Stone and Sade on her playlist for a calm house. Some will pick up "The Naked Mom" purely to search for juicy backstage tidbits about "Dancing With the Stars." There are a few here and there; Burke writes at length about her experience as a contestant, and ultimately the winner, of the seventh season, noting that she wanted to be kicked off so badly at one point that she nearly cursed on live television when voters gave her permission to return for another week. She also insists that Kate Gosselin, who managed to clodhop her way through part of the 10th season, was "genuinely warm and likable" when the cameras were off. Burke confesses that she grew up equating beauty with stupidity. With "The Naked Mom," she may not have written a work that rivals Tolstoy, but she proves she's hardly stupid. Jen Chaney can be reached at jen.chaney(at symbol)wpost.com. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Recent Stories    YOU KNOW WHEN THE MEN ARE GONE    THE RED GARDEN    SPURIOUS    LONDON LABOUR AND THE LONDON POOR: A Selected Edition    ALAN LOMAX: The Man Who Recorded the World	Quick Clicks Free Snuggle Fabric Softener "How To Send Your Child To College For Free or Close To It" Are you pregnant? Just had a baby? Click for free baby samples, magazines, coupons and more.
Copyright © 2009 ArcaMax Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

"The Red Garden," "Spurious," more

Wine and Dine Video How To Poach An Egg Play Now!
Washington Post Book Reviews For You Thursday February 10, 2011 YOU KNOW WHEN THE MEN ARE GONE Siobhan Fallon Amy Einhorn ISBN 978-0399157202 226 pages $23.95 Reviewed by Lily Burana, the author of "I Love A Man in Uniform: A Memoir of Love, War, and Other Battles" The Army loves its acronyms. We all know SNAFU, AWOL and R&R. A lesser-known abbreviation among civilians is BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front. At any military meeting, the time-pressed leader invariably wants the BLUF: Get to the point, time's a-wasting. So, busy reader, here's the BLUF on Army wife Siobhan Fallon's first short story collection: "You Know When the Men Are Gone" is a terrific and terrifically illuminating book. Fort Hood, the country's largest active-duty military installation -- where Fallon lived during her husband's two deployments to Iraq -- forms the ideal backdrop for these eight loosely interconnected stories of marriage and family life in this time of war. The spare, rural Texan landscape and the stripped-down post itself, surrounded by a ring of tattoo parlors and pawn shops that yield to rings of highways and chain-store sprawl, evoke the essence of military Americana: a war-machine hub bound by barbed wire, then loneliness rolling out for miles. Inside the security checkpoints, it's the same as any other Army post anywhere in the world: eggshell-thin walls between quarters; commissary parking lots clogged with cars on the biweekly paydays; women and children left behind, waiting. In the title story, a young wife, Meg Brady, becomes obsessed with her glamorous Serbian neighbor, Natalya. Meg's fascination forms a powerful counterpoint to her own life, held in suspense by her husband's absence and her morbid thoughts, which crop up during seemingly innocuous activities such as grocery shopping: "She walked the meat aisle, passing her husband's favorites: baby back ribs, pork chops, bacon-wrapped filet mignons. She reached out, touching the cold, bloody meat through the plastic. The raw flesh both horrified and mesmerized, and she wondered if a human being would look the same if packaged by a butcher, the striations of fat, the white bone protruding, the blood thin like water in the folds of the wrap. She wondered if wounds looked like this, purple and livid, but with shrapnel sticking out, dust clinging to the edges, blood in the sand. She quickly put the packaged beef down, telling herself that she would not think such things after Jeremy was home." "It's a small Army," the expression goes, and the entwined lives of Fallon's characters bear this out. In a heartbreaking story called "The Last Stand," injured specialist Kit Murphy journeys home from the Middle East to his wife, Helena. "His section of the plane was dotted with fellow battered soldiers leaning forward with sweat on their foreheads, all of them wondering if their wives would be waiting, and if they were, how long they would stick around when they saw the burn scars, the casts, the missing bits and pieces that no amount of Star Wars metal limbs could make up for." He later shows up in the equally devastating closing story, "Gold Star," to be pressed into telling a young widow how exactly her husband -- a senior noncommissioned officer -- was killed. "I don't mean any disrespect, ma'am," he says, trying to dilute her pain to distance himself from it. "But does it matter? I'm alive because of your husband. ... He saved my life." The highest praise I can give this book -- as a critic and a soldier's wife -- is that it's so achingly authentic that I had to put it down and walk away at least a dozen times. At one point, I stuffed it under the love seat cushions. If Fallon ever expands her talents into a novel, I may have to hide in the closet for a month. Challenging as the subject matter may be, this is a brisk read. Fallon's sentences are fleet and trim. Her near-journalistic austerity magnifies the dizzying impact of the content: This is your brain on war. There is grace in this collection, as well as willed forgiveness and valiant attempts at understanding. But mostly there is pain, of the ignoble sort. A steely thread running through these stories is the hard truth about modern military domestic life: In the endless grind of deployments, upheavals and uncertainty, there are more casualties than we can count. Marriages falter, vows get smashed into dust, suspicions simmer, children suffer. The story "Leave," in which a warrant officer sneaks home from Iraq and breaks into the basement of his own house to spy on his wife, is one of this collection's most powerful stories. He lurks below, wondering if she's cheating on him, wondering what he will do once he finds out. The takeaway from the story, and all the others, is this: When the men come home, the real battles begin. And if the war doesn't kill you, the fiery re-entry just might. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top THE RED GARDEN Alice Hoffman Crown ISBN 978-0307393876 288 pages $25 Reviewed by Anne Trubek, the author of "A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses" Alice Hoffman's "The Red Garden" is a dreamy, fabulist series of connected stories set in Blackwell, Mass., a small town in the Berkshires. As we learn in the first story, "The Bear's House," feisty Hallie Brady founded Blackwell, originally named Bearsville, in 1750. Hallie, unlike the other settlers felled by the winter's cold, was unafraid. She kept families alive by stealing her husband's boots and gun and hunting in the woods, where she spent many happy, freezing nights in a bear's den. She loved that bear and the wild mountains. When the other settlers warmed up and established a small village, Hallie missed her forest. She often "gazed out the window, as if there was someplace she wanted to be, some other life that was more worth living." In her civilized sorrow, she gardened and created the curious patch of ground that gives the book its title. Hallie is the first of many women in "The Red Garden" who desire something found only outside Blackwell. The subsequent stories tell of more such women. Most are accompanied by a date: "The Year There Was No Summer" takes place in 1816, "The River at Home" in 1863, "The Truth About My Mother" in 1903 and "The Red Garden" in 1986. As the decades and centuries pass, women disappear, pine for the wild or die young. Some stay in town resigned to a life of constant longing. As one character says at the end of her tale, "I already knew I would never get what I wanted." Sound bleak? Don't worry. Individual tragedies are offset by Hoffman's penchant for fairy-tale syntax and events. The extraordinary happens daily in Blackwell: Men revert to a wild state, women become eels, trees bloom in the snow, and a ghost in a blue dress calls from the river's edge. Hoffman's consciously simple style transforms people's pain into mythic parable. The morals of these stories are satisfying, particularly the endings, which add just the right combination of finality and resonance: "She was the town schoolteacher and the love of his life," one narrator concludes. "I was the girl who had nearly drowned, but had managed to save myself instead, in the year I turned ten." But elsewhere, when describing places and people, Hoffman's straightforward prose is too pat: A character "didn't feel the cold, perhaps because he was burning up with ideas." The author of two earlier story collections and a number of best-selling novels for adults and young people, Hoffman has developed her own brand of magical realism. Lulling and thought-provoking, she conjures soothing places where readers, like the children to whom we tell fairy tales, can learn with pleasure. Famous people from history stop by Blackwell, and their unlikely visits seem no more implausible than a woman becoming an eel. "The Red Garden" can also be read as a narrative of nation-building. A small New England town makes a good lens through which to view American history and its co-dependent relationship with nature: First, the eels feed the citizens, and then they become material for industry in the form of eelskin boots, only to be replaced later by leather. Meanwhile, the eels, so plentiful in the 18th century, are scarce by the 20th, when hippies set up a communal farm in the apple orchard. The wars, illnesses, trends and events that structure this novel -- the Civil War, the Depression, World War II -- should add a background of historical authenticity. But some of the stories are as unlikely as a garden that turns all flowers red. Blackwell opens a history museum in the 1860s, when few such museums existed. An earnest WPA writer, Ben Levy, visits Blackwell to record tall tales. Levy is a mild-mannered Jew who graduated from Yale in the 1930s when few Jews attended the Ivy League school, and he drinks with his friends at the Plaza's Oak Room. Such a figure would have been unlikely, yet Hoffman does not remark on this. The omissions are notable, too: Hoffman addresses the Civil War and its horrors but not slavery. These historical anachronisms make the novel's use of enchantment unsettling. But perhaps trying to figure out if this history could have happened is playing the wrong game. "A story can still entrance people even while the world is falling apart," Hoffman writes in "The Fisherman's Wife," a story about gossip during the Depression. These tall tales, with their tight, soft focus on America, cast their own spell. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top SPURIOUS Lars Iyer Melville ISBN 978-1935554288 188 pages $14.95 Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Friday The narrator of "Spurious," this short, academic, allegorical tale, is Lars -- not, one hopes, too much like the one who wrote this book, which recently attained great popularity as a blog in England. The real Lars Iyer is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle. The Lars in the novel seems to be holding down an office job, or perhaps an administrative post at a university. Either way, he's wasting his time, as his merciless friend, "W.," constantly reminds him. W. has made it his lifetime commitment to torment and denigrate poor Lars, and if W. is not very innovative or original, he's nothing if not persistent: He mocks Lars' speech: "You stammer and you stutter, and you swallow half your words." This must come from Lars' body's rebellion: "Something inside you knows you talk rubbish. Something knows the unending bilge that comes out of your mouth." But W. is just getting started. "When did you know you weren't going to amount to anything?" He refers to Lars as "the idiot in the forest," and asks him, "Do you think it's possible to die of stupidity?" Actually, W. doesn't think too much of himself or his friend. He dismisses them both as "apes" and torments them both for their inability to think (which is sad since they're both self-proclaimed intellectuals). W. is bitterly competitive, even as he pretends to dismiss the hapless Lars. "His IQ's higher than mine," Lars notes. "Just a little bit, but that's what separates us, man from ape. And he's from a higher class than me." "I have manners," W. tells his friend. "You have no manners. ... Why do you keep touching your chest so much? Does it arouse you? Keep your hands on the table where I can see them. Read your book." During this particular exchange, W. and Lars are traveling through continental Europe, trying to discover some of the dignity and profundity of the Old World. They're searching for ancient and venerable thoughts, but not coming up with all that much. We never know what Lars actually thinks about the world of knowledge. He has his own personal problems, which have to do with the degeneration of his hideous basement flat back in England. W., to his credit, focuses his mind on loftier thoughts, although they are riddled with cliches. W. is convinced, for instance, that the end of the world is nigh. The apocalypse is coming along any minute now, or maybe it's already swung by, and he and Lars just haven't noticed. W. is also fascinated by the possible coming of the Messiah -- though he doesn't believe in God. But W.'s intellectual reach more than exceeds his grasp. He's forever trying to read the great thinkers of our civilization in their original languages, except that he's forgotten all his Latin and Greek. Perhaps that's one of the reasons he can't cease hounding the pitiful Lars, who is -- in W.'s eyes, at least -- repellently fat. When you come down to it, there's not much these discontented companions can do -- except drink. And this they do with pure enthusiasm, saluting the oceans when they pass one, considering pouring libations into rivers. But they'd rather keep their alcohol to themselves: "Last night," Lars remembers, "we had a bottle of red wine, then beer, then we drank Tequila from the bottle. Then we finished off the bottle of Plymouth Gin, then a bottle of Cava and then a bottle of Chablis." The truth is, these men have both come up against a philosophical blank wall. Perhaps they are at the end of a certain kind of time, a certain way of thinking and mapping out the world. The old world is gone, and the new one hasn't come yet. If W.'s rhetoric doesn't make this point, poor Lars' flat does. The place is mysteriously drowning. All the electric fans (philosophical hot air?) can't change the apartment's inexorable decline. "I'm freezing," W. rants at Lars. "How can you live like this? And it's dark. There's no light. I can't see anything. And it's damp." "It's better than it was," Lars answers lamely, but he knows he's lying. His way of living is washed up. Who should buy this book? Intellectuals who face intellectual troubles in their own lives. There's a lot of biting satire about the shortcomings and general foolishness of the so-called life of the mind. This is graduate student wit, which is fearsomely funny if you know the grad students and professors in question, but really not as funny if you don't. And reading this in blog form must have been easier; in one long narrative string, however clever, it becomes relentless. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top LONDON LABOUR AND THE LONDON POOR: A Selected Edition Henry Mayhew. Edited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst Oxford ISBN 978-0199566082 472 pages $24.95 Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Thursday First published in 1850-52 in periodical form and eventually collected in four volumes in 1861-62, Henry Mayhew's "London Labour and the London Poor" takes the fascinated and appalled reader deep into the world of the Victorian underclass. In Mayhew one encounters the real-life equivalents of such Charles Dickens characters as Fagin, the Jewish receiver of stolen goods; Krook, the rag-and-bottle-merchant; Jo, the sickly crossing sweeper; and the Artful Dodger, leader of a band of youthful pickpockets. In the words of its title page, this journalistic classic focuses on "Those That Will Work,Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not Work." As Robert Douglas-Fairhurst notes in the superb introduction to this volume of selections, "London Labour and the London Poor" was "originally advertised as a 'cyclopaedia' of street life, implying that the finished work would be a compendium of facts for dipping into rather than a book to be read from cover to cover, and it certainly lived up to its billing. In its 2,000-odd cramped pages, totaling close to 2 million words, there is scarcely a paragraph that does not contain an eye-opening or ear-catching piece of information. ... London Labour and the London Poor was not only the first major work of sociology (a word first coined in the 1840s). It was also the greatest Victorian novel never written." Henry Mayhew (1812-1887) was himself a Grub Street hack, who cranked out romances and plays, edited short-lived periodicals and helped found the comic magazine Punch. Here, though, he brilliantly combined interviews with lists and statistics, packed on the local color and wrote as vividly about London as any novelist. He once called himself a "traveler in the undiscovered country of the poor" and said his aim was to give "a literal description of (the people's) labour, their earnings, their trials, and their sufferings, in their own 'unvarnished' language." His usual procedure was first to define a category -- for instance, "street sellers" or "street performers, artists and showmen" -- and then to zero in on the various professions comprised under that rubric. Whether discussing sewer scavengers or dustmen, beggars or prostitutes, he would begin by carefully noting their physical appearance and often idiosyncratic garb: "The rat-catcher's dress is usually a velveteen jacket, strong corduroy trousers, and laced boots. Round his shoulder he wears an oil-skin belt, on which are painted the figures of huge rats, with fierce-looking eyes and formidable whiskers. His hat is usually glazed and sometimes painted after the manner of his belt. Occasionally ... he carries in his hand an iron cage in which are ferrets, while two or three crop-eared rough terriers dog his footsteps. Sometimes a tamed rat runs about his shoulders and arms, or nestles in his bosom or in the large pockets of his coat. When a rat-catcher is thus accompanied, there is generally a strong aromatic odour about him, far from agreeable; this is owing to his clothes being rubbed with oil of thyme and oil of aniseed, mixed together. This composition is said to be so attractive to the sense of the rats ... that the vermin have left their holes and crawled to the master of the powerful spell." Mayhew brilliantly describes the tohu bohu of the Covent Garden flower and vegetable market, takes us along Petticoat Lane with its myriad street vendors of secondhand goods, and reveals the multiple uses for a piece of castoff wool clothing. One learns about the "pure" pickers who collect dung, of the "mud-larks" who wade into the Thames ooze searching for salable detritus, of how a performer practices to swallow a live snake and how a pickpocket learns his trade. "A coat is suspended on the wall with a bell attached to it, and the boy attempts to take the handkerchief from the pocket without the bell ringing." Shades of Oliver Twist! Powerful as his own descriptions are, Mayhew can't compete with the quiet horror of his transcribed testimonies. A legless man hawks nutmeg graters, a blind man lives by selling bootlaces, and an 8-year-old peddles watercresses. "I ain't a child," says the last, "and I shan't be a woman till I'm twenty, but I'm past eight, I am." Yet even among the most desperate, Victorian class awareness remains. "'We are the haristocracy of the streets,' was said to me by one of the street-folks, who told penny fortunes with a bottle. 'People don't pay us for what we gives 'em, but only to hear us talk. We live like yourself, sir, by the hexercise of our hintellects -- we by talking, and you by writing.'" Listen, then, to the bravura patter of a street-corner salesman: "I've not come here to get money; not I; I've come here merely for the good of the public, and to let you see how you've been imposed upon by a parcel of pompous shopkeepers, who are not content with less than 100 per cent for rubbish. They got up a petition -- which I haven't time to read to you just now -- offering me a large sum of money to keep away from here. But no, I had too much friendship for you to consent, and here I am. ... I've in this cart a cargo of useful and cheap goods; can supply you with anything, from a needle to an anchor. Nobody can sell as cheap as me, seeing that I gets all my goods upon credit, and never means to pay for them. Now then, what shall we begin with? Here's a beautiful guard-chain." Mayhew talks to anyone -- vagrants, swindlers, omnibus drivers, wandering purveyors of joke books, even a provider of artificial eyes. He learns how old horses are killed for dog food and how ashes from coal fires are collected and sifted to be turned into bricks. At times he pauses to compute the cost of this and the amount of that. "The information collected shows that the expenditure in ham-sandwiches, supplied by street-sellers, is 1,820 (pounds sterling) yearly, and a consumption of 436,800 sandwiches." A rather sullen prostitute once called Mayhew "a very inquisitive old party." No doubt he was -- to our benefit. Of manageable length, this "selected edition" of "London Labour and the London Poor" includes contemporary illustrations and notes explaining Victorian terms. It's a book you'll want to keep as well as reread. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Recent Stories    ALAN LOMAX: The Man Who Recorded the World    ALONE TOGETHER: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other    THE 4% UNIVERSE: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality    AMERICAN UPRISING: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt    NEW IN PAPERBACK The case for an unplugged life	Quick Clicks Free Snuggle Fabric Softener Free samples, coupons, daily newsletter with exclusives! 100 Recipes for Diabetics - No More Boring Meals! Click & download yours.
Copyright © 2009 ArcaMax Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

"Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other," more

Healthy Life Video What To Eat At Night For A Snack Play Now!
Washington Post Book Reviews For You Wednesday February 9, 2011 ALAN LOMAX: The Man Who Recorded the World John Szwed Viking ISBN 978-0670021994 438 pages $29.95 Reviewed by Mark Berman Reading about Alan Lomax (1915-2002) can make a person feel very, very lazy. Lomax, who famously scoured the United States and the world collecting folk music, was an archivist, producer, anthropologist, singer, political activist and theorist, to name just a few of his roles. Although he started out collecting folk music in the rural South, he eventually traveled the world finding and classifying song and dance. John Szwed, a professor of music and jazz studies at Columbia University, knew Lomax personally. His biography of Lomax is rich in detail, thoroughly explaining the methods of music collection as well as Lomax's movement into crafting books, concerts, festivals and radio programs. But Szwed skimps on the kind of personal material that might have humanized his subject. Consider Lomax's relationship with his father. Himself a folklorist, John Lomax took his son into the field to collect, setting him on the path toward his life's work. This time on the road learning how to become "a messenger for the masses" changed Alan's life. And yet Szwed writes that, at age 23, Alan was "on the verge of becoming the best-known folklorist in America, but self-doubt haunted him." Did he want to do the work, or was he living out his father's dream? The book barely touches on Lomax's conflicted feelings in this regard. John's death gets only a quick mention, and we don't learn much of anything about his son's reaction. By comparison, when the film director Nicholas Ray dies, Szwed devotes several lines to the ceremony and quotes from Lomax's eulogy for his friend. Lomax's story is filled with interesting trips and, like the man himself, never seems to stop in one place for very long. Among the names that pop up as he is out collecting and, later, putting on concerts are the novelist Zora Neale Hurston and singer-songwriters Woody Guthrie, Huddie Ledbetter, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. Among many interesting anecdotes is one about Lomax's 1939 performance at the White House. He was there to sing for the president, first lady and the king and queen of England, but "everywhere he went in the White House" the Secret Service jostled him in an attempt to frisk him. It turned out somebody had told the FBI he was a threat, thus beginning the FBI's decades-long interest in Lomax. Lomax helped reconnect American music with its roots in folk traditions, and his story is an important one for anyone with an interest in cultural history. Szwed admirably captures the efforts of a man who seemed determined to honor what came before him. Mark Berman can be reached at bermanm(at symbol)washpost.com. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top ALONE TOGETHER: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other Sherry Turkle Basic ISBN 978-0465010219 360 pages $28.95 Reviewed by Jane Smiley In "Why the West Rules, For Now," his excellent and amusing survey of the last 70,000 years or so of human history, Ian Morris discusses an event we can look forward to in 2045: the Singularity, "effectively merging carbon-and-silicon based intelligence into a single global consciousness. ... We will transcend biology, evolving into a new, merged being as far ahead of homo sapiens as a contemporary human is of the individual cells that merge to create his or her body." With 35 years to go, we now have Sherry Turkle's "Alone Together" as a progress report from the biotechnological front lines. And it is not amusing. Turkle is a psychoanalytically trained psychologist at MIT who has specialized for years in studying artificial intelligence and its effect on humans who invent it, use it and enjoy it. Her new book considers robots, Facebook, iPhones and the Internet, and explores questions pertinent to each. Since the 1980s, she has made good use of her access to the foremost thinkers in the AI world, and she has devised experiments for observing how people of all ages -- most instructively children and the elderly -- interact with and relate to machines that in some ways mimic how humans or animals act, think and talk. "Alone Together" is not statistical, it is anecdotal. It is therefore vivid, even lurid, in its depictions of where we are headed, but the reader comes away unsure whether Turkle's anxieties are warranted. It is clear throughout that a new technology has a cost and a momentum that are never considered when that technology is introduced -- tractors looked easier than plows, iPhones seem more convenient than landlines. Only long after each innovation is introduced do humans bother to ponder things like soil erosion or texting while driving. Decades after the introduction of the Internet and of AI, Turkle is beginning to have second thoughts. She focuses first on robots: humans are determined to relate to them. No matter how old or young the humans are, no matter how sophisticated in their experience of AI, they begin to have feelings for robots they come in contact with and to feel that their feelings are reciprocated. A mechanical question elicits an answer, large painted eyes elicit compassion, a metallic touch elicits a responding touch, and the emotions that go along with human responses cannot be controlled. Turkle does not include pictures of the robots she mentions, but looking at them on the Internet after reading about them is disorienting -- surely that is not Kismet, the prototype robotic girlfriend that many of Turkle's subjects are attracted to? But it is. A robot in the room, acting animated and interested, draws us out of ourselves, but social networking tends to push us apart, Turkle says, because humans on the Internet behave (or can behave or are pushed to behave) inhumanely. The Internet gives people the cover to indulge in hate speech, to present phony personas, or simply to avoid relating in real space and time. Turkle's subject is so vast that she cannot address every facet of it, and of course the missing facet that struck me as a novelist is that every robot and every networking app is a work of art, designed to express the psyche of the artist and to shape the response of the user. We are not entirely unversed in responding to things that don't exist -- Odysseus, Macbeth and the woman portrayed in the Mona Lisa don't exist, either. We could say that when we read "David Copperfield," we agree to a joining of minds that is pleasurable and enlightening, and that as we read and experience many works of art, we clarify the boundaries between each one and between art and ourselves. Turkle's research subjects are at the very beginning of the next phase of the human journey. It may be that we will gain self-knowledge from our experience that we can't yet imagine. For those who recoil, though, Ian Morris has an alternative -- the collapse of civilization. He makes a good case that mankind has approached climate/energy/population ceilings before and that breakthrough is less likely than self-destruction; in fact, the melding of human and machine intelligence may be our only salvation. Turkle doesn't ponder this issue, but when you read her engrossing study, you will. Jane Smiley is the author of "Private Life," "The Man Who Invented the Computer" and many other books. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top	Quick Clicks Free Snuggle Fabric Softener Free samples, coupons, daily newsletter with exclusives! Claim Your Cherry Red LG Washer & Dryer Set - FREE! - Participation Required - GO!
Copyright © 2009 ArcaMax Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

"American Uprising," more

Wine and Dine Video Grilled Tuna Burgers And Vanilla Ice ... Play Now!
Washington Post Book Reviews For You Tuesday February 8, 2011 THE 4% UNIVERSE: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality Richard Panek Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN 978-1851688210 297 pages $26 Reviewed by Carl Zimmer In 1969, an astronomer named Jeremiah Ostriker realized that the Milky Way was spinning too fast. That may sound odd, given that it takes the sun 230 million years to make a full orbit. But when Ostriker tried to simulate the Milky Way on a computer, he found that it was spinning so quickly that it should have ripped itself apart long ago. There weren't enough stars to hold it together. Ostriker went to his fellow Princeton scientist James Peebles to share his puzzle. "There's something wrong here," Ostriker said to Peebles. The two scientists decided there could only be one solution: The stars we can see in the Milky Way are just a small fraction of the actual galaxy. They are embedded in a vast, unseen halo, made of an unknown stuff that has come to be known as dark matter. When Ostriker and Peebles looked to other galaxies, they found hints of dark matter there as well. Other astronomers didn't want to believe it. After all, they had spent the past four centuries learning about the universe by collecting the light of the universe in their telescopes. Now it seemed they were missing most of the cosmic show. But as Richard Panek chronicles in his fascinating new book, "The 4 (percent symbol) Universe," it turned out that there was a lot more wrong with the universe than even Ostriker had realized and that his and Peebles' work was only the beginning of an enormous undertaking by many scientists. The latest surveys of the universe indicate that only 4 percent of it is made of ordinary matter. Nearly 23 percent is made up of dark matter, which some physicists suspect consists of wispy subatomic particles that may someday be caught in a detector. And the remaining 73 percent is made up of something far more baffling: an energy that is causing the universe to expand at an ever-increasing rate. Scientists call it "dark energy," and they have no idea what it is. "Get rid of us and of everything else we've ever thought of as the universe," writes Panek, "and very little would change." In "The 4 (percent symbol) Universe," Panek reconstructs the five decades of research that led to this humbling realization. It is one of the most important stories in the history of science, but also one of the hardest to tell. The science is fiendishly tricky, and the human history is also arcane. The discoveries of dark matter and dark energy were not the work of some lone genius. It took a huge network of scientists. In 2007, Cambridge University awarded the Gruber Prize in Cosmology, the highest honor a cosmologist can win, to the discoverers of dark energy. Fifty-two prize-winners showed up. Inevitably, Panek has to plunge into the bureaucratic depths of modern science. His pages are splattered with acronyms -- NSF, CARA, COBE, DASI -- standing for funding agencies and assorted astronomy projects. From time to time, I had the same trouble keeping track of the scientists that I have with the characters in big Russian novels. Some chapters have only tenuous links to the rest of the book, reading more like magazine articles than vital episodes in a greater story. But Panek's passion for the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy wins the day. He succeeds because he recognizes that he's writing not just about red shifts and supernovae, but about people. They're unusual people to say the least, happy to stay up all night to take pictures of stars or write software that compares those pictures to find the pop of supernovae exploding in distant galaxies. And they're far from perfect. The astronomer Vera Rubin gets to pay a visit to the legendary physicist George Gamow to talk about the nature of the universe, only to discover he's an oaf who yells at his wife. "Where were his papers? What had she done with his papers? Why was she always going through his papers?" Panek writes. "Whether Gamow's wife was ever actually there, Rubin couldn't be sure." The success of "The 4 (percent symbol) Universe" also stems from Panek's wisdom about how science works. It's easy to think that the discovery of dark matter and dark energy -- the realization that we have no idea what most of the universe is made of -- is a story of failure. Actually, scientists are delighted to have learned that they have blasted beyond any ready explanation that physics can offer for how the universe works. Now they have the opportunity to build a new physics that can make sense of how the universe, both light and dark, really works. "What greater legacy could a scientist leave a universe?" Panek asks. Carl Zimmer is the author of "The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution." Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top AMERICAN UPRISING: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt Daniel Rasmussen Harper ISBN 978-0061995217 276 pages $26.99 Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley Reading Daniel Rasmussen's interesting if flawed account of a violent slave uprising in Louisiana in 1811, I found myself repeatedly recalling Samuel Johnson's dictum on women in the pulpit. The good doctor's words are totally incorrect, of course, but when one considers that the author of this book is all of 23 years old, they do seem to apply: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." As it happens, Rasmussen has done more things well than poorly, but the phenomenon of a person of his tender years writing and having published a serious work of history cannot go unnoticed. Perhaps it is unfair to Rasmussen to raise the matter, but his publisher's publicists have done so, as will, no doubt, others who review "American Uprising." The historians' guild is not an easy one to crack; that Rasmussen has done so only two years after reaching the age allowing him to raise a glass in his own honor is, in and of itself, rather remarkable. The book itself is somewhat less so. Presumably researched and written during Rasmussen's undergraduate years at Harvard, from which he graduated festooned with honors in 2009, it is carefully researched, especially with regard to daily life on the early 19th-century sugar plantations of Louisiana, and its account of the slave rebellion is vivid and, considering the dearth of hard evidence, convincing. On the other hand, although he clearly is a gifted prose stylist, he has a taste for overwrought dramatization and foreshadowing, both of which could and should have been discouraged by his editors and academic mentors. He also dwells gratuitously and excessively on "how (America's) ideals have at times been twisted and cast aside for the sake of greed and power," on what he calls this country's "hypocrisies, evils, and injustices," lending a shrill political cast to a narrative that should be able to stand on its own. "With little attention from scholars," Rasmussen writes, "North America's largest antebellum slave revolt has languished in the footnotes of history for two hundred years. While historians jostled to write about Nat Turner, who had mobilized fewer than 100 slaves, this diverse band of Louisiana slaves has been remembered by only a few." Well, the dark recesses of history are crammed with untold stories that deserve serious scrutiny, but Rasmussen is right to regard it as strange that this particular story has gone virtually unnoticed. He believes that the blame lies with William C.C. Claiborne, appointed governor of the huge Louisiana Territory after its purchase from Napoleon in 1803. On the evidence presented by Rasmussen, Claiborne really does not seem to have been "distinctly lacking in qualifications," but he was an ardent advocate of the western expansion of the United States who "wrote the slave-rebels out of history, believing that all that was important was the rise of American power." Whether this interpretation is based in historical fact or is merely a figment of Rasmussen's somewhat overheated imagination is unclear, but with rare exceptions historians have overlooked the events of January 1811 in the Louisiana sugar country. Though the slave army's ultimate goal was New Orleans, its uprising began in "one of the wealthiest and most fertile stretches of agricultural land in North America: Louisiana's famed German Coast." Originally settled by Germans but largely French by the early 19th century, the area was dominated by a small number of large plantations, all of them dependent on slave labor. Great rewards were gained by the plantation owners, but "at immense human cost." Rasmussen writes: "Force, or the threat of force, was as necessary an investment as land in making a successful sugar plantation. For slaves would not work without coercion. The planters seemed to focus their attention less on the methods and tremendous injustices of their chosen lifestyle and more on the results; perhaps this was the only way to rationalize the tremendous risks. Yet this heavy investment in violence created a fundamental risk: that the violence would backfire, wreaking uncontrollable havoc on the architects of this brutal system." The planters saw themselves, and were widely seen, as "manly independent patriarchs, as gentlemen farmers, and as powerful aristocrats," and to them "slavery signaled status and wealth, not immorality or danger." Though they were well aware of slave rebellions elsewhere, particularly the fierce one earlier in the century that ousted the French from Haiti, these French settlers were more concerned about the new American governor's efforts "to introduce the principles of liberty and republican self-governance" than about "the tremendous danger posed by the rapidly growing slave population," nor did they "notice the increasingly radical tenor of the political discussions in the slave quarters." Three men were the principal leaders of the slave revolt. Two, Kook and Quamana, "brought with them from Africa the memories and stories of the powerful and warlike empire in which they most likely grew up." The third, Charles Deslondes, "served as a slave driver, a member of the slave elite ... a notoriously conservative group with a bad reputation as traitors to the slave cause." Deslondes, however, "was not the contented slave he appeared" but "one of the key architects of an elaborate scheme to kill off the white planters, seize power for the black slaves, and win his own freedom and that of all those laboring in chains on the German Coast." Deslondes and his followers had a dream: "Inspired by the stories of the Haitian revolution and flush with the philosophies of the French Revolution, the diverse band of slaves that joined insurrectionary cells believed they could secure freedom, equality, and independence through violent rebellion. As the heads of the whites rolled through the streets, they could form a new republic -- a black outpost on the Mississippi, guaranteed by force." They might well have succeeded, or at least made white Louisiana pay heavily for the slave society on which it depended, had one planter not managed to escape during an attack on his house, severely wounded but able to row across the river for help. A number of planters organized a militia, took the rebels by surprise, and began the appallingly bloody process of exterminating them, chopping off the heads of captured slaves and putting them on poles as gruesome reminders of "where power resided." With that, Rasmussen is off and running. Claiborne "stripped the rebellion of revolutionary or geopolitical meaning by dismissing it as an act of base criminality," using it "to dramatize American civil and institutional power, portraying himself as an effective governor and representative of federal authority." He persuaded the formerly skeptical but now fearful French planters of "the value of a strong American presence in the region," one that upheld and protected the slave society. The achievement of statehood for Louisiana in 1812 "was the key to a new and stronger American nation that would spread its imperial tendrils across the continent." Excise "its imperial tendrils" from that passage and you have a reasonably accurate portrayal of what the absorption of the Louisiana Territory meant to the inexorable move westward, but "imperial tendrils" injects a note of the political and/or ideological special pleading that has been too common in the history departments since the 1970s. It seems to be a lesson Rasmussen learned at Harvard, but it's one best unlearned. Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Recent Stories    NEW IN PAPERBACK The case for an unplugged life    ZOMBIE SPACESHIP WASTELAND: A Book by Patton Oswalt    THE METROPOLIS CASE    THE SIXTIES: Diaries, Volume Two: 1960-1969    PUNCHING OUT: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant	Quick Clicks Free Snuggle Fabric Softener Free samples, coupons, daily newsletter with exclusives! Eliminate Windows PC Errors Improve PC's System Speed by Up to 70%
Copyright © 2009 ArcaMax Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.