Brief Book Reviews
28 April 2003
Stiff: The Curious
Lives of Human Cadavers
Mary Roach
This one is a little tough to stomach, but only
at the beginning. I’m not sure
if it’s that it got less gory, or I got used to it, or I simply
developed the good sense to stop trying to read this book while eating
rhubarb crisp. Roach is a nervy and
playful writer (in fact, she might say “gutsy”), the perfect
guide for visits to a university doing a study of decomposition (they lay
them out in the sun), a plastic surgery practice session on previously owned
heads, and the Swedish developer of an ecological burial project (yes,
it’s composting, and it’s a great idea!). Roach digs up (ahem) bizarre stories of our
apparently less squeamish forebears who consumed mummified humans as medicine
and were intensely curious about the possibility of post-guillotine consciousness. Then there are some especially grisly, and
unfortunately more modern, stories of amateur crucifixions and head
transplant attempts (the latter only on animals, although for both these
procedures there are live human volunteers).
She also looks at how cadavers teach us, not only in the anatomy lab
but also by providing damning evidence that the airline industry could
prevent many needless deaths if it were willing to spend, or charge, more for
flights. Although this book takes an
appropriately scientific view of death, Roach offers an interesting look at
what a dead body is – not at all the person it once was, yet still
something human, deserving of respect, and a reminder of our own
mortality. Surgeons who pick up
beating human hearts in their hands and place them in living bodies and
analysts who study bodies in airplane wreckage for clues to the cause of a
crash both need to desensitize themselves to what they are doing. Any use of a human cadaver is accompanied
by heavy ethical scrutiny, which means that sometimes a study that could save
many lives isn’t done because no family would consent to it if they
knew what it involved. It’s easy
to be in favor of an anonymous human body being shot at to test bulletproof
vests, or blown up to evaluate military boots for use in land-mine areas;
even the prospect of one’s own body being used these ways isn’t
particularly troublesome: I won’t be needing it anymore, so why not
take the opportunity to do some good after I’m gone? It’s not as if the popular
alternative, underground decomposition, is a pretty thing to
contemplate. But as Roach points out,
it’s the loved ones of the decedent who have the final say in what
happens to a body, for they have to live with the decision. The best thing you can do, of course, is
donate your organs: please, talk to your family, and check that box on your
driver’s license today or visit organdonor.gov. And read this book.
22 April 2003
Long For This World
Michael Byers
Byers’s first novel is set in the Pacific
Northwest at the end of the 20th century – at
the edge of the country and on the brink of the future. Henry Moss is a
geneticist specializing in an extremely rare disease that causes children to
age rapidly and die as physically old people while still in their early teens
(much like what we call Progeria).
Moss discovers a young man who carries the gene for the disease and
yet, remarkably, is not only healthy but preternaturally so – there are
shades of Tuck Everlasting in this story, a bit of fantasy running
through a very modern domestic novel of family and neighborhood. A couple of
disappointments: the drama promised in the first half wasn’t sustained
in the second, and Byers’ attempts at capturing up to the minute speech
can feel as cheap and ephemeral as mentions of brand names. His ear for
teenage slang sounds accurate to me, which probably means it isn’t. But
his understanding of his characters is real, and his novel burrows into the
heart even as it pulses like a science fiction thriller.
Kick
Me: Adventures in Adolescence
Paul Feig
There’s nothing like a funny
book to make a commute go quickly. If
I could read this book fresh every day I wouldn’t mind standing for an
hour under a drainpipe as four subway trains passed me by. Feig is the creator of Freaks and Geeks -
a show on TV or cable or whatever it’s called these days. He offers up his own cringe-inducing,
outrageous high school experience as gym class pariah and pint-sized neurotic
without a trace of shame or self-pity, and his observations are also touching
in unexpected ways. His puppy love for
a fellow student turns into a nightmare date and he ends the evening watching
old comedy shows with his dad, nostalgic for childhood as only those who are
being hustled out its door can be.
Morning commuters are advised to wait until breakfast has completely
settled before attempting the Resusci-Annie chapter, but otherwise this book
is a perfect anesthetic.
Burnt
Bread and Chutney: Growing Up Between Cultures – A
Memoir of an Indian Jewish Childhood
Carmit Delman
Delman’s mother, an Indian Jew, and her
father, an Ashkenazi American, met on a kibbutz in Israel and passed onto their four
children their love for Judaism and its homeland. As a teenager, Delman discovers a diary
kept by an older female maternal relative who lived with Delman’s
family throughout her childhood, and learns a family secret. She weaves excerpts from the diary into her
own story of being a bit of a misfit: feeling different from the other girls
at Indian dance class, subjected to ignorance when her family’s diet,
income, skin color and Jewish observance caused them to stand out at
synagogue, chafing at male-dominated Indian traditions at home, and at school
suffering the humiliation peculiar to, yet so strong at, that age, of not
being able to afford brand-name soda.
As an adult, she can appreciate and pay tribute to the Judaism her
parents gave her: “…for years, the slur Jewish American Princess
did not even click in my understanding. To me, being Jewish meant rolling up
your sleeves. A rugged sort of living
and healthy minimalism. It was closely
connected to a peasant life.” Delman’s eye for recollected
detail, her quiet, dry wit, and merciless yet wholly endearing bent for
self-scrutiny mark her as a talent to watch.
Skipping
Towards Gomorrah: The Seven
Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America
Dan Savage
Popular advice columnist Dan Savage
sets out across America
to explore how the seven deadly sins are committed – or, as he might
have it, indulged in, - today, and to take jabs at foaming conservative
Robert Bork. Savage’s arguments,
against the “war on drugs”, for example, are sound, but the best
parts are his reporting about little-known subcultures; he pays calls on a
fat acceptance convention, a pair of happily married suburban swingers, and a
heterosexual couple who both work as high priced New York escorts. He writes himself into
every story: he has a hard time scoring pot in Washington
Square Park,
but turns out to be a crack marksman when he visits a shooting range in Texas. Savage is funny and sharp and unafraid to
voice a contrary opinion – he has some harsh words for “Gay
Pride”, for example – and he beats cultural conservatives at
their own game by defending every American’s inalienable right to
pursue happiness.
The
Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her
American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
Anne Fadiman
Lia Lee is youngest and favorite of
eight children in a Hmong family newly settled in Merced, California. When as a cherubic toddler she begins to
have epileptic seizures, her parents take her to the nearby county hospital,
beginning a medical history reflective of and shaped by the struggle between
Western and Hmong cultures. Fadiman is a fair yet compassionate observer of
the clash in world views between Lia’s parents, who believe that
Lia’s suffering is caused by the departure of her soul, and will be
cured by animal sacrifices, and Lia’s frustrated doctors, who insist on
prescribing medications that her parents won’t give her, in languages
that her parents don’t understand. Fadiman broadens her story to look
at the whole Hmong community – how the Hmong were used by the US military in the Vietnam war, suffered a
terrifying flight on foot from Laos
and immigrated to the United
States, only to be abused by Americans
mistaking them for Vietnamese. The Hmong are often resented by the Western
doctors who toil for little or no pay to provide them medical care and are
rewarded only by greater demands and complaints from the Hmong, who generally
believe, and not always without cause, that it is medical treatment that
causes illness. It’s a remarkable portrait of the coexistence, and sometimes
collision, of two worlds with seemingly no common ground, a reminder of both
how similar people all over the world are, and yet how very different.
The
Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World
Michael Pollan
Pollan has a lovely, soothing tone that seems to
say to the reader: Sit back, while I explain the world to you. His main idea is simple: plants are using
us just as much as we are using them – which means that they
aren’t “using” us at all, since the idea is that none of us
is agented, we are all subjects of evolutionary natural selection. It’s
in many a plant’s best interest to please us, as that means we’ll
help it make more of itself, which is every organism’s goal. Pollan looks at four plants that are grown
by people: apples, tulips, marijuana and potatoes; a section for each
includes anecdotes, history, personal experience, and a little bit of
science. Makes you think twice about your seat at the top of the food chain.
5 March 2003
Before the Knife: Memories of an African
Childhood
Carolyn Slaughter
This memoir about growing up white in
colonial Africa is similar to Alexandra
Fuller’s, but much better written. Maybe even too well
written; Slaughter sometimes sacrifices clarity for style. She was a
child in the fifties in what is now Botswana, living under the thumb
of her violent and tyrannical father and her physically present but otherwise
absent mother. Her passionate connection to the wild African landscape
is beautifully rendered, yet her young life is miserable. She finds
relief when sent to live with an Afrikaner family for a summer, and finally
escapes for good, but not before coming to a terrifying confrontation with
her father. The story is mostly about herself and her family, though
she is sharply aware of the growing independence movement that sets Africa simmering under the ever more shaky lid of the
colonial presence. And it’s hard to believe that her
parents’ unhappiness and cruelty at home is separable from their
self-imposed exile in a land where they aren’t wanted.
Jews Without Judaism:
Conversations with an Unconventional
Rabbi
Daniel Friedman
A concise, easy to read summary of the
Secular Humanist Jewish perspective, according to one man, anyway. A
refreshing option for Jews who are committed to their people and ethics, but
who reject the idea of God. Friedman makes a strong case for why Jews
shouldn’t fear death - or even intermarriage – yet he praises the
special gift that Judaism brings to the world. His theses: that, for
most modern-day Jews, Judaism is a wholly secular, rather than religious
practice; that anti-Semitism is largely a thing of the past; and that change
should be embraced rather than feared, may make some uneasy. For
others, they are welcome and inspiring.
A Box of Matches
Nicholson Baker
Me ‘n B
Alas, picking up the new Nicholson Baker
book is like meeting an old friend for coffee and realizing you have nothing
in common anymore. I know I wasn’t the only one who developed a
huge crush on Baker with the 1988 publication of The Mezzanine:
a journey through the trivial corners of one man’s mind as he makes a
trip to the mall to buy shoelaces. To this day, every time I’m in
a drug store I think of his maxim about choosing not the shortest line, but
the one with the smartest cashier. I really thought things were going
somewhere between us when he came out with Room Temperature, a
valentine to marriage and new parenthood. The Updike obsession (U
& I) I could live with, but then he took a detour into phone sex (Vox)
and voyeurism (Fermata), and my ardor cooled. When I saw him
speak at the library on Double Fold, his righteous crusade against the
destruction of old newspapers, I realized I missed his fussy obsession with
detail. Seeing writers in person is usually frustrating. When you
have unfettered access to a man’s innermost musings, you expect some
kind of connection in person, when in fact writers are probably shyer than
average and less able to connect. Baker was no exception. But I
thought we might be able to rekindle the flame with A Box of Matches.
In this new novel, a man in his mid-40s with a wife and two kids begins a
routine of waking up at 4am to build a fire in the dark and think typically
Bakerian thoughts about holes in his socks. More pedestrian minds might
diagnose this as clinical depression, others call it literature. I
don’t know how we grew apart, but minutiae for its own sake has grown
tiresome. Emblematic is the scene where the main character lies beside
his sleeping wife, listening to a faint, high keening wail. Is it a
prowling cat? A lost child? He considers waking his wife.
Then he realizes: the sound is coming from inside of his own nose.
Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About
Mil Millington
For some girls it’s when he gives you
diamonds and roses, for others it’s when he spray-paints your name on a
bridge. For me, true love when he constructs a website chronicling
every irritating thing you do and how he adores you in spite, or because, of
it. Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, the website,
has been turned into a novel. The plot is just a backdrop for hilariously
accurate bickering about defrosting the refrigerator and how best to refer to
one’s partner’s genitalia.
|
