Roth’s Alternate America
I’m generally not keen on political literature, because often the art is sacrificed for the cause. In The Plot Against America, though, Philip Roth pays as much attention to his characters as to politics. This alternate history in which the anti-Semitic, isolationist Charles Lindbergh becomes president is told from the point of view of a Jewish boy whose family is directly affected by Lindbergh’s influence. Roth does a good job of capturing the anxieties of a child in confusing times. The novel’s far from perfect: Roth uses various contrivances to bypass the fact that his narrator is so young, and he conveniently tidies up the plot at the end. (The flaws in this book are reminiscent of those in Roth’s almost-excellent American Pastoral, in which a well-rendered story of a father turned inside out by his teenager-turned-terrorist is marred by the way that the author gets at the story.)
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Pulling Heavy Loads
John McPhee is one of my favorite nonfiction writers. He’s skilled at keeping history and social context in focus while getting the details dead-on. I’m especially fond of his books with a geology bent (Basin and Range, The Control of Nature, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains) .
In Uncommon Carriers, the topic is transportation, mainly freight transport. McPhee rides in the pilothouse of barges on the Illinois River, sits in the cab of a coal train nearly two miles long, and acts as mate to ship captains and pilots training on scale replicas of freighters in a lake in the Alps. He visits the UPS sorting facilities in Louisville, Kentucky, starting in Nova Scotia as he follows lobsters shipped for worldwide distribution. All of this is flanked by road trips with the owner of a chemical tanker truck and interrupted by an account of McPhee and a friend canoeing up New England’s Concord and Merrimack rivers. Although the canoe trip is mildly interesting as a re-creation of an upstream excursion of Henry David Thoreau and his brother, I’m not sure what it’s doing amidst all the commercial journeys. As often is the case with established authors cranking out book after book, one wishes that their editors had a little more of the upper hand.
Also notable on the editorial front: I found myself reaching for the dictionary more than a dozen times, to look up words like ullage, autochthonous, coney, and trig, all perfectly legitimate words that I’ve never run into before. What do you think? Are you put off by esoteric vocabulary or do you welcome it? Or are all the words I listed familiar to you?
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Romance Gone Sour
Elaborating on a homesteader’s spare diary, in Bad Land: an American Romance Jonathan Raban fleshes out the stories of families lured to Eastern Montana in the early 1900s. Free land from the government and false promises of the railroads lead to heartbreak for Europeans trying to make a go of it in a desolate and stubbornly infertile landscape. Raban shows more compassion and less edge than he did in his better-known Old Glory (an account of his journey down the Mississippi). Bad Land includes fascinating passages on the British photographer Evelyn Cameron, who documented Eastern Montana lives and landscapes at the turn of the century.
(Used copies of the diary on which this book is based are available, published as Homesteading, by Percy Wollaston.)
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Manhattan Project Profile
Everyone to whom I’ve lent American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer has given it high marks. It’s an engrossing portrayal of Oppenheimer’s personal life from youth to death and provides a window into the politics and personalities at Los Alamos. It’s also a chilling account of the lives that were ruined by the anti-communist witch hunts of the '50s.
Would one of you kindly write a review for me? (You know who you are!)
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Well-Traveled Microbes
Originally published in 2002 by the National Academy of Sciences, Secret Agents explores the history, science, public health detective work, and the politics and economics of six contemporary infectious disease concerns. Madeline Drexler tackles West Nile virus outbreaks, food-borne illnesses, antibiotic resistance, pandemic flu, bioterrorism, and chronic diseases that may have an infectious cause. Throughout she drives home how infection, whether it’s transmitted via an airline passenger or by parsley sprayed with contaminated water and shipped across a continent, is a global issue. She highlights the high-tech techniques that make identifying infectious agents and tracking them possible. Above all, Drexler makes the case for the paramount importance of funding public health efforts.
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