Three Great Books & More: Bookmarks September, 2024 Update

Friends: September has always been an emotional time for me. Many family birthdays, the Jewish High Holidays, the start of school, and the end of summer all combine to compel times for introspection and self-evaluation, needs which don't seem to lessen even as I approach the end of my eighth decade. Perhaps it was in this spirit of exploration that September's reading was a random walk through most of writing's genres. Here are the books I read in September:

A quick glance at this list will indicate the eclectic nature of this month's reading: a book of essays, a crime story, three contemporary novels, a book of poetry, a quirky atlas of forgotten places, two tales of spectacular outdoor adventures, and a personal history of the 1960's written by one of our great historians. To share my excitement over the month's reading, I'll start with the three books whose covers I've highlighted above.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is one of our most prolific, insightful, and gifted historians. She and her husband, the late Richard Goodwin were a power couple in the Boston area for decades when they decided to work their way through a garage full of Goodwin's boxes of papers and memorabilia from his time at the center of American politics. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he led the Law Review, Goodwin clerked for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter before joining JFK's campaign in 1960. He was only 29 years old when he found himself the chief speech writer responsible for many of the key speeches for Kennedy and then LBJ. Many of the State of the Union speeches as well as the introduction of major legislative initiatives such as Medicare and Medicaid, the Peace Corps, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were all introduced with Goodwin's words. Kearns had a similarly meteoric rise to a unique vantage point. Stirred to activism by civil rights demonstrations, the Watts riots, and the Vietnam War, she became a White House Fellow in her '20's and was chosen by Lyndon Johnson to be his amanuensis, spending months with him in the White House and later at his ranch, listening to his stories and helping him craft his memoirs. The result of the Goodwins' exploring their boxes and memories is a wonderfully crafted journey through the 1960's as well as a moving portrait of a loving marriage and partnership. "An Unfinished Love Story" is one of the best books I've read in some time, and if you are of a certain age, it will vividly recreate many of the key political and historical events of your younger days.

Written more than half a century earlier, John McPhee's "Giving Good Weight" is a collection of five essays that first appeared in the 1970's in 'The New Yorker.' McPhee, who is still writing and publishing at the age of 94, is perhaps our greatest practitioner of the long form essay, and this book is a superb example of his craft. There are entertaining and informative essays about NYC's farmers' markets, an ill-conceived plan to build floating nuclear power plants off the New Jersey coast, the pinball champion of NYC (who also happened to be a Pulitzer Prize winning writer), a glorious canoe trip up the St. John River in Maine, and a gourmet restaurant owned by a fanatic cook whose name and location McPhee did not reveal. Fifty years after they were first published, these essays are still fresh, engaging, and fascinating. If you don't know McPhee, you must get acquainted. Start with this volume or better yet, read his first book about Bill Bradley's basketball career at Princeton " A Sense of Where You Are" (another story from the '60's) and then the rest of the 41 books he's written. If you need one, I have managed to collect all of them, and they sit on a shelf in our Vermont guest house. Come on by!

The third featured book is Jesmyn Ward's "Sing, Unburied, Sing". I'm embarrassed to confess that I had not read Ward's work and didn't even recognize her name until the NYT recently published its list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st C, and she was one of a handful of writers who had two books on the list. This novel falls into the surreal or supernatural fiction category since there are two ghosts who feature prominently in the action, but Ward is such a terrific writer that I, usually a stickler for realism, didn't even blink when the ghosts showed up. The book is beautifully written, lyrical and tragic, sad and infuriating as Ward tells us the story of a multiracial family in today's Mississippi delta struggling with poverty, drugs, violence, and virulent racism. Here's Ward writing about the Mississippi setting: " “Across the face of the water, there is land. It is green and hilly, dense with trees, riven by rivers. The rivers flow backward: they begin in the sea and end inland. The air is gold: the gold of sunrise and sunset, perpetually peach. There are homes set atop mountain ranges, in valleys, on beaches. They are vivid blue and dark red, cloudy pink and deepest purple. They are yurts and adobe dwellings and teepees and longhouses and villas. Some of the homes are clustered together in small villages: graceful gatherings of round, steady huts with domed roofs. And there are cities, cities that harbor plazas and canals and buildings bearing minarets and hip and gable roofs, and crouching beasts and massive skyscrapers that look as if they should collapse, so weirdly they flower into the sky. Yet they do not.” This is a painful, beautiful book to read---fiction at its best.

The two other novels I read this month were J.G. Ballard's "Concrete Island" and Peter Heller's "Burn". They were both a bit too weird for me. Ballard tells the story of a man who drives off a highway near London, becoming stranded among on and off ramps on a concrete island. Cut off from the world in this pre-cell phone era, he eventually loses his mind and ends up ruling over his one-man concrete kingdom, evoking memories of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness." Heller's novel is also quite violent, set in a dystopic future where a secessionist army has assassinated the American President and is waging a civil war in Maine. The story is narrated by two innocent hunter/fishermen who stumble into the midst of this chaos . No need to read either of these.

On the other hand, Peter Stark (aka Donald Westlake) has given us another terrific noir crime story in "The Mourner". No surprise endings like those from Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot nor psychological exploration by Simenon's Jules Maigret--- just a plain, straightforward burglary, blackmail, and murder tale about Parker. Stark's Parker is a one-named anti-hero featured in 24 novels written between 1962 and 2008 by this Grand Master of Mystery. If you like your crime stories straight up without flavored seltzer, try "The Mourner" or better yet, one of the later Parker novels which only got better as time passed.

I could have entitled this monthly update "Don't Try This at Home" in homage to two books about real life pursuits of crazy, life-threatening, mind and body-stretching obsessions. In "Tap Dancing on Everest", Mimi Zeiman looks back 40 years on the time when she was the doctor supporting a four man team attempting to climb Everest's east face from Tibet without guides or oxygen, a feat that until they accomplished it in 1989 had never been achieved. Facing death from brutal cold, avalanches, and hidden crevasses, the expedition reached the summit but at a great price. Zeiman has written a fine book about how obsession can result in both tragedy and glory.

Kevin Fedarko's "A Walk in the Park" tells a similar tale of successfully overcoming incredibly difficult conditions in order to reach an obsessively held goal, in this case hiking from one end of the Grand Canyon to the other. While one can cruise down the 240 mile length of the Colorado River in 2 weeks in relative comfort, it's a journey of several months and nearly 800 miles if you choose to hike the trail-less Canyon floor with its innumerable side canyons, sheer rock faces, absence of water, and extreme heat and cold. Climbing, crawling, rappelling, bushwhacking and just plain slogging, Fedarko and his partner complete the trek, but not without close scrapes with death and destruction. Along the way we learn about the geology, natural history, and human presence in this unique earth formation. Fedarko writes beautifully, as in this description of the Canyon: "“Nowhere else is the ground so broken and the past so exposed. Nowhere else can a person move simultaneously along so many dimensions: forward in space, backward in time, and across the face of an entire hemisphere of life zones, ecosystems, and biological communities. Nowhere else is the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other so provocative, so destabilizing, so densely fraught with the rich and interlocking layers of meaning.” The book itself is a bit of a slog through 400+ pages, but if you love the outdoors and quixotic adventures, give it a try.

If you're looking for any further indication of human follies, read Travis Elborough's "Atlas of Forgotten Places" . It's a quirky exploration of 40 sites around the world that have been abandoned---hotels, hospitals, churches, schools, prisons, palaces, subway stations---a tribute to impermanence and a sobering lens through which to view some of the crazier ideas for building things then and now. It was a fun read, full of useless but fascinating information, such as why Bolivian Amyara Indians wear bowler hats.

Finally, Dorianne Laux's book of poems, "Life on Earth", provided some wonderful moments of beauty and insight. Nearly every poet and many critics have tried to explain why poetry is unique and necessary, and two of my favorite explanations are from Edward Hirsch and Jane Hirshfield. Hirsch wrote "Poetry exists because it carries necessary human information that cannot be communicated in any other way." Hirshfield wrote: "Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being." Laux admirably exemplifies these descriptions in her poems that range from a very funny ode to WD-40 oil to an exploration of this 'age of divestment' as she and her husband prepare to move to a small apartment.

And, speaking of poetry, the return of the Poetry Tree on the Charles is imminent. I have been able to acquire the eponymous URL, and the site is now being constructed. Stay tuned for next month's selections. In the meantime, here are three poems that people sent me this month that I would love to pass on to you. C.P. Cavafy is a fascinating character, a gay, Greek man who lived in Alexandria, Egypt in the early 20th C and worked as a clerk in the Ministry of Public Works by day while turning out great poetry by night. One of my favorite authors, Daniel Mendelssohn has translated 'Ithaka' about the long journey home of Odysseus, a metaphor for our journey through life. It's a long poem, but worth the read. Stanley Kunitz who won the National Book Award in 1995 lived to 100. He wrote wonderful poems and gardened in Provincetown, MA. Carl Dennis is an 85 year old American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001.

To conclude, I've become infatuated with a country & western singer named Tift Merritt whose lyrics and music I listen to via Spotify almost every day. One particularly powerful line is from the song "Feeling of Beauty" which she wrote in 2012. The chorus goes

"Every once in awhile, the feeling of beauty catches my throat, runs right through me."

That pretty much describes why I love to read. Whether it's poetry, drama, novels, essays, or non-fiction, every once in a while, the feeling of beauty catches my throat and runs right through me.

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