bookshelves: non-fiction
Young Men and Fire recounts the Mann Gulch Fire, a forest fire fought in the 1940's by one of the first teams of Smokejumpers to actually parachute to a fire. The basic story has been laid out in the synopsis and its details have by now been told in various reviews. What potential readers may not have learned, though, is what sets this book apart. Why read it when the plot is already out of the bag?
For one thing, the fire itself forms such an antagonistic element of the story. The author, Norman Maclean, succeeds in conjuring it into a living specter, and this tells us a lot about his literary strength. It will be pointed out, too, that the Smokejumpers themselves are the apparent subject. But maybe, to state it better, it’s Maclean’s awe of the Smokejumpers that drives the telling; he himself had fought forest fires professionally before smokejumping was even invented. His interest borrows as well from the same fascination so many of us mortals indulge for physically elite units – SWAT detachments, Navy Seals or pro sports teams, to name a few.
The author’s connection to firefighting gives his point of view an authentic, even a spiritual, tang. In fact, I would have been delighted if he had developed this further. But what we discover in Young Men and Fire also entails an unsolved mystery: The mystique of the Mann Gulch Fire starts when one of the Smokejumpers, as the fire closes in, does something so startling that firefighters were still talking about it decades later.
This act sparked interest in the unknown dynamics of forest fires, so on top of the human drama we soon find ourselves on a quest. A gnawing need drives the book, a need to find out exactly what unfolded in Mann Gulch, and how the strange behavior of a team member changed it. Could the one act of a single Smokejumper actually have thrown a gigantic fire off course? And to what effect? The poignant loss at Mann Gulch takes Maclean into the emerging science of forest fires.
A couple of small matters detract from the book. While lionizing the Smokejumpers, Maclean doesn't fail to denigrate the other 2300 firefighters who fought at Mann Gulch, depicting them as drunks and useless idiots. And for someone so enthralled with the Smokejumpers, his book is too thin on the human interest details that naturally suggest themselves. The author could easily have corrected both faults.
Yet the prose that describes the fated Smokejumpers can’t be beat. The combination of exquisite elegiac and unsolved mystery drives this book along an inviting trajectory. It even has a section of photos in the middle, plus topographical maps and annotated photos of the Mann Gulch region, which let readers follow every detail of the action. The Smokejumpers and the fire are the subjects here, but Maclean’s obsessed passion for both give this book a vitality that can’t be counterfeited.
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Tyler
read and liked
Bruce's
review of Against Nature (A Rebours) (Penguin Classics):
"Born in Paris, J.-K. Huysmans (1848-1907) published this novel in 1884, and a strange novel it is. The protagonist is Duc Jean des Esseintes, the end of a long and degenerating ancestral line. The story is exclusively about this reclusive aesthete,...more "
"Born in Paris, J.-K. Huysmans (1848-1907) published this novel in 1884, and a strange novel it is. The protagonist is Duc Jean des Esseintes, the end of a long and degenerating ancestral line. The story is exclusively about this reclusive aesthete,...more "
bookshelves: 20th-century
The mashup of the poetic and the vulgar sets this book apart in a way that sometimes annoys and more often hits the spot. Miller gets modernist stream-of-consciousness to work cleverly through the trash-talk. Though I can’t tell you how hard it was to find a quote clean enough to use, it’s better to show what just can’t be described. Notice here how naturally thought flows:
“After that,” – here Van Norden has to smile himself – “after that, mind you, he tells me how she sat in the chair with her legs up ... not a stitch on ... and he’s sitting on the floor, telling her how beautiful she looks ... did he tell you that she looked like a Matisse ... Wait a minute ... I’d like to remember exactly what he said. He had some cute phrase there about an odalisque ... what the hell’s an odalisque anyway? He said it in French, that’s why it’s hard to remember the fucking thing. It sounded just like the sort of thing he might say. And she probably thought it was original with him ... I suppose she thinks he’s a poet or something ... “
Now two complaints detract from the narration. One is the c-word in place of the b-word for women. It’s not that the b-word is exactly commendable, but that the c-word pops up again and again all over the place, like bombs going off, until you’re puking it by the end. The second complaint is the difficulty of following the action in the first third of the book. Miller confuses me with who was doing what with whom, and it only slowly clears up as the story unfolds.
Despite legendary license and debauched dramas, the book has its virtues, among them the insight into those people’s minds, and the account of that generation's standards. We see how syphilis dominated people’s thoughts. One character, dousing his privates with a folk treatment for the syph, reaches over, grabs his dirty underwear, cleans himself, then tosses his shorts to the floor, all while his roommate blandly carries on. And for deodorant these stooges splash on a little cologne – something frightfully inadequate today, but probably better than the Victorians, who thought a perfumed handkerchief was the cat’s meow.
So now we know what the broads back in the thirties could look forward to. In fairness to the males, the idea of a man washing his own cloths or worrying about a little stink was something only a sissy would take seriously. For both sexes, birth control was against the law but probably not needed. Indeed, let us pause and give silent thanks for sulfa drugs and Old Spice.
The style is original, too, for the way Miller segues this slimy wallow in the male psyche from blunt vulgarity into language so sublime it resembles poetry in prose. Here I can give no example; these passages are too long and cannot be shortened without sacrificing the effect. But the downdraft and upsurge of the writing distinguish this book, and one cannot help but be struck by Miller’s distinctive narration.
Tropic of Cancer has its ups and downs. Forewarned is forearmed: Readers who know what to expect will enjoy this excursion into Paris’s more exotic precincts. ]]>
What makes this story stand out is its narrator. Younger brother to Wade, the protagonist, the narrator relates his sibling's story with keen precision. And his account touches on family violence, a potent topic. Such a topic can be overdone in fifty ways and gotten right in perhaps only one. Having a narrator mediate the risk provides just the right distance. Russell Banks has an author's instinct for the best approach.
In the background, too, lies poverty. Banks avoids the temptation to lay it on too thick or too thin. He also avoids slamming undereducated people with giveaway argot and Faulkner-like idiocy, and instead supplies his story with believably sensible characters. Measured prose and well balanced characterizations steer the narrative astutely around these several taboos.
That’s all good. But what really sets this book apart is the odd entanglement between the narrator and his brother Wade. Readers are invited to puzzle ever more closely over the younger brother. The plot details provoke questions: Who, exactly, is this narrator? How does he know what he knows? Readers who follow the clues will be surprised.
With evenness, precision, and a bizarre mystery, Affliction delivers more than I was expecting. A clever, engaging tale tinged with a palpable portrait of New England life makes this a book that belongs on the to-read list of discerning readers.
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Tyler
read and liked
MyFleshSingsOut's
review of The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism:
"The best overall take on Nietzsche I've seen yet. It focuses on the aspect of his work that I was most drawn to when first really getting into it and would continue to exalt above all else to this day: a deep affirmation of existence.
Th...more "
"The best overall take on Nietzsche I've seen yet. It focuses on the aspect of his work that I was most drawn to when first really getting into it and would continue to exalt above all else to this day: a deep affirmation of existence.
Th...more "
bookshelves: philosophy
How can ideas that depend upon the human mind be said to be true? Does there even exist such a thing as social facts? Many thinkers have doubted it, but only now has a philosopher taken the question up.
John Searle shows here how ontologically subjective concepts can be objective facts. Intentionality is key, but only collective intentionality makes social facts possible. Yet collective intentioality is exactly what libertarians deny – consider Margaret Thatcher, who tells us there are no societies, only individuals. What can Searle say to this without raising the specter of a Hegelian Absolute? His precise line of reasoning I leave for the book’s readers to assess.
In any case, Searle links physical entities to social facts by describing those facts as labels of intentionality. Physical entities can “count as” (the intending consciousness) mental facts, such as paper rectangle that counts as money. And social objects (a dollar), at bottom, are simply placeholders for some activity (commerce).
The joint buildout of social and ontological facts is the basis of institutions, and here again, fact implies function. A government is an institutional fact; more importantly, it is a function or activity. The upshot is that power grows out of organizations, not individuals.
Social and institutional facts, the author further explains, are true when a “sufficient number” of people in a community treat them as facts. Again, an institution, say a bank, is an ontologically subjective concept. But its acceptance by the people who use it makes it epistemically objective.
As to the individual, we learn nothing. Searle doesn’t tell us what a “sufficient” number is, or what the status of an institution's opponents or dropouts is. Searle finds it amusing that the individual can be thought of as possessing inherent rights. Does that invalidate the power of whatever institutions recognize or enable that concept? Here the discussion stops, perhaps awaiting another book. Meantime, The Unconscious Civilization is a short read I recommend to fill the gap.
Searle does address a related problem, the aforementioned Hegelian idealism, public enemy number one of the individual according to so many. And here Searle has a lot to say. The book, in fact, contains two parts. The exploration of the institution ends the first part. The second part is a defense of both realism and the correspondence theory of truth. Although seemingly superfluous – after all, Searle has already taken care to tie epistemology to a physical ontology – this part is a solid work in its own right. Readers will enjoy the careful perusal of the philosophy in the second part.
The book is not easy. Despite the touchy-feely book cover, this is neither anthropology nor sociology. It is philosophy. But the discussion is structured with an elegance that fans of the subject will appreciate after having their ears boxed by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. I’m glad to give it a good rating. For those who haven’t thought much about how philosophy relates to social matters, this book is a good way to expand one’s horizons.
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Tyler
read and liked
Ben's
review of Winesburg, Ohio (Bantam Classic):
"Fuck, I loved this book...
I loved its drab mood, and existential feel.
I loved the descriptive writing, and the small town, midwest setting, with the seasons and people changing, but life in general, staying the same.
...more "
"Fuck, I loved this book...
I loved its drab mood, and existential feel.
I loved the descriptive writing, and the small town, midwest setting, with the seasons and people changing, but life in general, staying the same.
...more "
bookshelves: philosophy
The benefits to modern thinking with which the Enlightenment has endowed later centuries are now so obvious that it seems almost impertinent to criticize that period of human development. Yet that is just what three contemporaries of the Enlightenment did at the time. Isaiah Berlin has brought their criticisms to light for modern readers in three remarkably researched long essays.
The gist of the Enlightenment centers around what the good for human beings amounts to. The direction the epoch had taken by the 1700's gave the movement’s greatest thinkers a tendency toward rationalism and, sure enough, toward system building. These critics weren't trying to refute the general humanist orientation, but they insisted that we distinguish the welfare of people in general from that of particular humans. Working separately from one another, these forceful writers were the first to call into question the rationalist trajectory of modern thinking. I like what each had to say.
Vico, for instance, writing early in the eighteenth century, attacks the idea of absolute truth. This doesn’t seem radical today because scientific knowledge is now considered contingent. But it was rather unheard-of when he first suggested it. Vico attacks systems built on a priori knowledge, Descartes' for example, explaining that the propositions of mathematics and other such constructs are absolutely true simply because the human mind can have privileged awareness of what it itself creates.
Vico calls this per caussas knowledge. The implications here go way beyond geometry. For example, does per caussas reasoning mean that conclusions about one’s own or another person's thoughts, impulses and motives might be described in terms of truth or knowing ("I know he's right to think ...")? Can reasoning by analogy from our thoughts to those of another person be justified by per caussas knowing? Isaiah Berlin develops Vico’s epistemology enticingly.
Herder and Harmann attack rationalism from many other angles. Herder emphasizes the role of belonging in contrast to the individualist atomization of the Enlightenment. Hamann, among many questions, asks whether the drive toward uniformity and standardization amounts to an outright denial of human reality. In all cases, these thinkers argue that the human individual cannot reasonably be factored out of human affairs.
As he develops their often disjointed rhetoric and reasoning, Isaiah Berlin brings to this book an enthusiasm for the world of ideas that makes it unusually satisfying to read. As the author points out, these thinkers, whose ideas have developed in so many directions over the past two centuries, do not have any real predecessors, so their critiques are original works. Berlin’s effort here to give these ideas modern expression while locating them in their proper perspective make this an excellent book for anyone interested in early modern philosophy or the history of ideas. ]]>
bookshelves: 20th-century
Stoner transforms 20th-century thought into literature. Writers and philosophers have tried to do this before. But philosophers make decidedly so-so writers, and writers often choose their themes superficially or in isolation. Here John Williams closes that gap and brings readers the full feeling of a life lived existentially.
The book's structure appears flawless. The linear narrative avoids gimmicky experiments, and the lucid prose tells the story evenly, taking as much time as it needs in each place without lingering to no effect.
The paragraphs are superb. The sentences within them accentuate the whole the way brush strokes perfect a Chinese character. Williams is master of the semicolon, whose clauses center the paragraphs with a keen sense of which thoughts go together. Over and over I found myself rereading one or another paragraph to better enjoy its perfection.
The story for its part builds on both the structure and the thoughtful perspective. The writer takes us through the external incidents in the life of Bill Stoner, a Midwestern college professor, touching on themes such as absurdity, work, choice, and alienation. But what gives the story its depth is the vivid inner life at play inside a man whose external circumstances gradually fail him.
The power of the narrative lies in its rich description of the inward experience of being human. Three quotes show how John Williams does it. The first describes beautifully the young Stoner’s new-found love of literature:
The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape.
I couldn’t have said it better. That’s why I didn’t write the book! Every other page contains equally evocative language. The next passage carefully stresses exactly the right elements. It tells of the professor’s reverie as he stares out his office window into the winter night:
He felt himself pulled outward toward the whiteness, which spread as far as he could see, and which was a part of the darkness from which it glowed, of the clear and cloudless sky without height or depth. For an instant he felt himself go out of the body that sat motionless before the window; and as he felt himself slip away, everything – the flat whiteness, the trees, the tall columns, the night, the far stars – seemed incredibly tiny and far away, as if they were dwindling to a nothingness. Then, behind him, a radiator clanked. He moved, and the scene became itself. With a curiously reluctant relief he again snapped on his desk lamp.
The author even gives distinctive cadence to his prose, as in this sentence describing the Stoner’s passion for life:
To a woman or a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.
The poetic footing and the word choice cause the sentence to roll especially well off English-speaking tongues.
That a book of this sort could also be so rich in dialog underscores the attentiveness of this writer, who in real life actually taught writing at a university. Williams rules the craft.
The book is especially suited to people for whom the very living out of the facts of existence is valuable for its own sake. Everyone who, based on the reviews, even suspects they might like the book most likely will like it, and they should add Stoner to their reading lists. ]]>