Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier

even now, if coal could be produced without pregnant woman dragging it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive ourselves of coal. But most of the time, of course, we should prefer to forget that they were doing it. It is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence.

Orwell lives his story. “[B]y no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner; the work would kill me in a few weeks,” he quickly realizes. He doesn’t just “tell,” though; Orwell is a master of the “show.”

It was not only the dirt, the smells and the vile food, but the feeling of stagnant meaningless decay, of having got down into some subterranean place where people go creeping round and round, just like blackbeetles, in an endless muddle of slovened jobs and mean grievances.

Particularly in the context of the hard lives of the working class, Orwell suggests that his own trade seems soft. “Words are such feeble things,” he says.

It’s hard to take him at his word about that, though, because Orwell writes description about as well as any writer could dream of. His opening sequence, set in a boarding house, rolls right into it: “Hanging from the ceiling here was a heavy glass chandelier on which the dust was so think that it was like fur.” Suspicious tripe, coal-black fingerprints on slices of bread, crumbs so long unbrushed from the kitchen tablecloth that “I used to get to know individual crumbs by sight and watch their progress up and down the table from day to day”—Orwell doesn’t miss a trick when it comes to setting scene.

The second half of the book grinds down into Orwell’s treatise on the pros and cons of socialism, although for this he can be forgiven. After all, Wigan Pier was written for the Left Book Club, and Orwell explicitly wrote his piece with the idea of social change in mind. “I would not do it if I did not think that I am sufficiently typical of my class, or rather sub-caste, to have a certain symptomatic importance,” he says. This portion of the book was, I admit, of less value to me as I look at the was creative nonfiction writers write about place, although I did go through it just for the sake of enjoying Orwell’s clarity of thought.

Orwell’s social consciousness and his sense of responsibility as a journalist went hand in hand—powered by incredibly literary skill. In Orwell’s hands, words are never such feeble things.

But because I’m getting close to exam time, I’m trying to concentrate more on the reading, with less time for writing about the books as I go. So, these will be brief:

Bryson, Bill. I’m a Stranger Here Myself. (1999) — A little glib goes a long way. That’s how I felt by the time I reached the end of Bryson’s collected columns, written for an English newspaper after moving back to America following a 20-year sojourn abroad. Any one column was great, and Bryson frequently made me laugh out loud. The book was chucklicious. But it was also a little much, perhaps because the columns were short and, by their nature, jumped from topic to topic, which made the overall feel of the book a little manic. Had I spaced the book out over a few weeks and read just a few entries at a time, I’m sure Bryson’s charm and droll humor would’ve worked for me much, much better (because, let’s face it, the guy is hilarious!). I can see myself giving the book one of those “It’s not you, it’s me” speeches.

Gilman, Susan Jane. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. (2009) — I picked this up because it was a travelogue about two college graduates who decide to backpack across China in the mid-1980s. “Hey, let’s be Odysseus,” she and her friend decide. “Let’s be Byron. Let’s be Don Quixote, Huck Finn, and Jack Kerouac all rolled into one—except with lip gloss.” Their story turned out to be funny, tragic, interesting, and gripping. Gilman pulled me in quick, and I didn’t want to put the book not (not that I had the leisure to even if I wanted to). Gilman’s book has pitch-perfect pacing, and it reads like a good novel even though it’s nonfiction. “God knows I couldn’t make this up,” she says in her author’s note. Her post-9/11 perspective as a writer (and a more experienced traveler) gives the book extra resonance.

Kingsolver, Barbara. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. (1995) — This collection of essays was so good I don’t even know where to begin with it. Only a few of her essays focused specifically on place (my reason for reading), but those that do made me feel like I was in the crater of Hawaii’s dormant volcano Haleakala or in a crowded village in the African country of Benin or along the banks of Horse Lick Creek in the mountains of Kentucky. Cumulatively, Kingsolver captures what it means to be human—or should mean, anyway. “It’s starting to look as if the most shameful tradition of Western civilization is out need to deny we are animals,” she writes. The book is a paean to curiosity and wonder. “I have taught myself joy, over and over again,” she says. I constantly found myself highlighting passages, making notes, copying quotes. Kingsolver’s essays are so rich. In the final accounting,” she writes,” a hundred different truths are likely to reside at any given address.” A hundred different truths—and more—reside in this collection. Kingsolver might be the great discovery of this entire reading project.

After feeding twenty-six books into my head in thirty days, I’d like to say that I’m letting my brain decompress, but I’ll be honest: I’m still reading. In fact, I have two books going right now, Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself and Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson. I want to hit up Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams and Wendell Barry’s agrarian essays, too, and I want to spend some time with David Cushman’s book on The Wilderness, Bloody Promenade. Maybe then I’ll be done. Maybe.

But there’s David Gessner’s Sick of Nature. There’s Susan Jane Gilman’s Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. There’s George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier. And there’s still John Muir looming over everything, a backdrop to much of what I’ve read, as significant as the Sierra Nevadas, as significant as Thoreau and Walden.

So many books, so little time.

I’ve been cramming books into my head at an alarming rate–so fast that I literally lost count. Only after I finished did I realize I’d counted two books at #14 and so had, unbeknownst to me, finished a day early. My effort to jam in a final book before midnight on the last day turned out to be gravy, and I didn’t even know it. (I’ve since gone back in true Orwellian fashion and corrected the record–a little ironic since I didn’t get to Orwell yet, although he’s on the list.)

I’m a voracious reader, but even by my standards this reading endeavor has been grueling. But it’s also been intellectually rewarding and, just as important, fun. I even had the author of one of the books I reviewed write to say he was “pleased to see such a
thorough understanding of what I was getting at vs the BS I’ve seen in other reviews. Please pass along my kudos….” That was gratifying.

As I read these books, I was looking, specifically, at the way creative nonfiction writers write about place. So what did I learn?

Upon first reflection, there seemed to be three different ways to approach the notion of place: One could travel through it, one could be in it, or one could piece it together indirectly. For purposes of simplicity, I’ll refer to travel writers and nature writers. As you might guess, the travel writers travel through a place; nature writers exist in a space. I’ll hold off on talking about the third category for a few minutes.

Travel writers and nature writers tended to write about place in much different ways:

1) For a travel writer, a place is something to be experienced. For a nature writer, a place is to be reflected on. Certainly a travel writer may try to figure out what his/her experiences mean as he/she passes through. A nature writer might, indeed, have very meaningful experiences to reflect on, but it seems the real objective is to figure out what the place means.

2) Travel writers tend to weigh their travel experience against what they know about home. They contrast the new with the familiar. In doing so, they frequently learn something about both places, and they learn something about themselves, too. Nature writers tend to examine humankind’s relationship with nature and their own place within that larger scheme. They contrast the natural with the man-made. In doing so, they learn something about the relationship.

3) Travel writers tend to get energized by their experiences, as exhausting (and sometimes scary) as travel is. Nature writers tend to get inspired by nature but then get frustrated and/or depressed when they realize how unrelenting humankind is when it comes to pillaging the planet.

4) Travel writers tend to “show” by recounting experiences; nature writers tend to “show” by evoking mood and wonder. I didn’t read many “poetic” travel writers, but I read lots of beautiful nature writing. Likewise, I didn’t read a lot of humorous nature writing, but I read a lot of funny travel writing. (Bill Bryson falls into both categories, I think—and he’s freakin’ hilarious.)

5) Nature writers tend to value place for its intrinsic worth, while travel writers tend to value place for the experience they can get out of it. That comes across in the ways in which various writers interact with a place and communicate their reflections about it.

Those are all, of course, generalities, and they’re based on a sampling of twenty-five or so books. I’m noting the patterns that jumped out at me, but any other collection of twenty-five books read under saner conditions would, no doubt, produce different patterns for different readers.

The third category of writers I encountered created a sense of place through travel and occupation, and through experience and reflection, but the journey was the destination, so to speak. They created cultural landscapes. I’m thinking of Andrew Ferguson’s Land of Lincoln—what is Lincoln’s America and who is America’s Lincoln? Or Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself—what are these crazy, quirky everyday experiences that comprise the experience of living in America? Or Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic—what do “North” and “South” look like today? Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson is shaping up to be that kind of book, too.

I think of the definition of “creative nonfiction” offered by Philip Gerard, a writing prof at the University of North Carolina and author of Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life. He says a creative nonfiction piece must have an apparent subject and a deeper subject—that is, what’s the story about on the surface and what’s really going on, what does it really mean. It’s like plot and theme in a way. That’s exemplified in the relationship between fact and truth. The “apparent subject” might include the history, geology, geography, and ecology of a place; the “deeper subject” might turn that place into a metaphor or a symbol that relates to the writer’s inner journey. Successful pieces balance the two.

Travel pieces worked best for me when they didn’t just overload me with the apparent subject (the trip) and all the factual information that went with it. For example, Maarten Troost’s Lost on Planet China was obviously a travel book, but the focus of Troost’s trip always came back to his quest to understand the potential impact China’s awakening was going to have on the world—and on him.

Other books, like Julian Smith’s Crossing the Heart of Africa gave lip service to the deeper subject (“Who am I?”) and emphasized the apparent subject (getting from this place to that place and offering background about the places as he goes).

Nature books that were most effective used the apparent subject (life at Walden Pond, the travails of a flooded wildlife refuge) as a way to contextualize the deeper subject (self-sufficiency, coping with loss).

Linda Hogan’s Dwellings almost entirely abandoned the apparent subject (the natural world) to reflect on the deeper subject (how to redefine our thinking about our relationship with the natural world). John McPhee’s grounded his Pine Barrens in the apparent subject (the pine barrens and the people who live there) and let largely left it to readers to find their own deeper subject (the importance of the barrens as a unique landscape).

As I mull over these things, I realize that they’re just convenient constructs for me to organize my thinking. I could easily look past these conveniences and set these books into conversation with each other (and with me) in other ways. For instance, I could reframe my thinking so that I could look at how writing about place helped these writers understand the human condition.

I will spend the next week and a half mulling over these and other connections between the books. I’ll step back and, like Tom Hanks’ character from The DiVinci Code, wait for more patterns to materialize for me out of thin air. Then I’ll write a long, long paper about it for my doctoral program and see if I can make some cohesive sense out of all of it.

And then I’ll start reading another book.

————

For anyone keeping track, here’s the original list I chose my books from. I’ve indicated which ones I read, and I’ve made note, too, of any book that got added in after I compiled the initial list.

Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire.

Berry, Wendell. The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry.

Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.

Bryson, Bill. I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away. (In progress!)

Carson, Rachel. The Edge of the Sea.

Carson, Rachel. The Sea Around Us. (added)

Carson, Rachel. The Sense of Wonder. (added)

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring.

Casey, Susan. The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks.

Cushman, Stephen. Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle.

Dennis, Jerry. The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas.

Elder, John. Reading the Mountains of Home.

Elder, John. The Frog Run: Words and Wildness in the Vermont Woods.

Ferguson, Andrew. Land of Lincoln. (added)

Gilman, Susan Jane. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven.

Gessner, David. My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism.

Gessner, David. Sick of Nature.

Heinrich, Bernd. A Year in the Maine Woods.

Hogan, Linda. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World.

Horwitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic.

Junger, Sebastian. The Perfect Storm.

Kingsolver, Barbara. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. (In progress!)

Kohnstamm, Thomas. Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism.

Lopez, Barry. About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory.

Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams.

McKibben, Bill. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

McPhee, John. selections from The John McPhee Reader and The Second John McPhee Reader.

McPherson, James. Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg.

Muir, John. Nature Writings.

Orwell, George. Road to Wigan Pier.

Smith, Julian. Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Life and Adventure.

Tayler, Jeffrey. Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness.

Thomas, Emory. Travels to Hallowed Ground: A Historian’s Journey to the American Civil War.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Maine Woods.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden.

Troost, J. Martin. Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Finding Beauty in a Broken World.

I don’t know much about Brazil beyond the fact that the Creature from the Black Lagoon lived there on some branch of the Amazon. I also know that a different branch of the Amazon, the River of Doubt, nearly killed Teddy Roosevelt. And I know Rio is there, but what happens in Rio stays in Rio, so I don’t know many details.

So when I stumbled across Kohnstamm’s book about being a travel writer in Brazil, I thought it would be a good chance to learn something about the country. The book looked interesting, too, because it implied a good ethics lesson: Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?

Well, I didn’t learn much about Brazil, and I didn’t get to ponder writerly ethics so much as a get a pretty explicit lesson on what not to do, but Kohnstamm kept me entertained with his Thompsonesque antics. This was “travel hedonism” at its gonzoest.

Paul Theroux once said that travel writing is really about the person who’s traveling. If applied literally to Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?, then this is a book about Hunter S. Thompson. Kohnstamm’s life seems to be an unending stream of sex, drugs, and rocky roads. In fact, he has a self-declared black-belt in long-distance bus travel, “hauling ass at double capacity on potholed highways full of oxcarts, rickshaws, and other buses laying head-on games of chicken in our lane; [peering] out the window at the burnt wreckage of other buses…in mountain valleys below….”

He doesn’t mention Thompson by name, although he does invoke Kerouac, Hemingway and Bruce Chatwin. “They were true writers coming to terms with the struggle of the people, the living history, the challenges of their generation—all while reflecting on the universal human condition with nothing but a journal, a drink, and pen in hand,” Kohnstamm says.

He starts the book trying to come to terms with his own existential crisis. He’s in his mid-twenties and restless. Is it him? Is it his generation? Is it Americans? “Escape is our action of choice,” he says: “escape through pharmaceuticals, escape through technology, and plain old running away in search of something else, anything else.”

He chooses escape of his own, ditching a cubicle-bound life at a Wall Street law firm to answer the siren song of the travel bug. The trip, right from the start, swells with the Thompsonesque quest of Fear and Loathing: the so-called search for the “American Dream.” “It could also be called the New American Dream,” Kohnstamm says. “Fuck the simple pursuit of financial stability. Here’s to finding fulfillment in novelty, excitement, adventure, and autonomy.”

Long story made short: He careens across eastern Brazil, city to city, town to town, hostel to hostel, restaurant to restaurant in a mad dash to cram in as much information as he can for a guidebook for Lonely Planet, eventually resorting to just making shit up because he can’t cover enough ground. His hijinks lead to hedonistic misadventure after misadventure, and in the end, he’s left with just over a week to try and produce a manuscript.

“I must be some kind of masochist,” he admits. “But in the end, I really loved all of it, every triumph and every setback—at least in retrospect. Experiences were had. Repertoires were expanded. Boundaries were pushed. Beverages were consumed. Ladies were bedded. And several hundred pages were written, all of which potentially affected some local economies and several thousand travelers’ itineraries.”

By that definition, chok-full-o good intentions as it is, then Kohnstamm is going to hell, indeed. After all those same good intentions make for great pavement. But damn if it wasn’t a gonzo trip.

If I want background on Brazil, I guess I should get his travel guide—or maybe not, knowing now just how much of it is made up of bullshit. “There is a huge gap between what is required of the author and what the author can realistically do with the alloted time and budget,” Kohnstamm writes. “Is this due to weak editorial direction, or willful ignorance on the part of the travel publishers, who choose to disregard how underpaid and overstretched the writers are in order to keep production costs down? I cannot say. A little of both, I guess.” Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? offers the behind-the-scenes results of that disconnect. It’s not a book about Brazil, it’s a book about writing a book about Brazil.

As a memoir, its veracity is also highly suspect, but Kohnstamm lays out the groundrules right up front. “In order to distill the chaos of life down to a clear narrative, it was necessary to omit certain events, rearrange and compress chronology, and combine a few of the characters,” he says in the author’s note. “I have changed most of the names and identifying details of the characters in this book to protect their privacy. Much of the dialogue and many e-mails have been recreated, but all are based on real conversations and correspondence.”

However, if I want to look at how writers write about place, Kohnstamm certainly provides a useful, entertaining lesson.

“The majority of travel books fall into three basic groups,” he says:

1. There are earnest writers who become enlightened…. A more holistic approach to life is discovered and the universe is balanced.
2. On the opposite side of the spectrum are the smug writers who mock how backward plumbing and transportation are anywhere outside North America…. Such writers should give Orlando or Long Island a try for their next vacation, as both have abundant new cars and functional flush toilets with soft two-ply paper.
3.  Last but not least are the…guys who attempt solo ascents of mountains without telling anyone where they’re going, are forced to amputate their appendages with a spork, and then expect us to appreciate their triumph of human spirit.

Kohnstamm’s falls into a category of its own. It’s a triumph of human…something. Perhaps the New American Dream, discovered by whirling like a dervish across the globe, living life to its top. Thompson, I suspect, would approve of the comparison.

#25: The Land of Lincoln: Travels in Abe’s America by Andrew Ferguson (2007)

The Lincoln Memorial looked like frost tonight. The flurry that had blanketed the lawn white earlier in the day had been glazed with rain and then turned to ice, so the whole landscape shimmered under the Memorial’s lights.

Frost or no, the Memorial still has that beacon-in-the-dark look, which is, I suppose, its main purpose. It is, as I’ve noted before, as close to a temple as we have in America. The man who sits inside has become such an icon he’s lost humanity.

I’m here because I’ve just finished journalist Andrew Ferguson’s Land of Lincoln, an exploration of the man and, in the end, a defense of that icon. I’m here for the icon, too.

When Abraham Lincoln died, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously said, “Now he belongs to the ages.” More than that, though, Lincoln belongs to all of us—and we can each make him into the person we want him to be.

That’s what journalist Andrew Ferguson sets out to explore in Land of Lincoln. The state of Illinois may claim that as its motto, but Ferguson discovers Lincoln’s presence in the most unexpected of places. “I wanted to know what we know about Lincoln, and I wanted to know how we know it,” he says.

Land of Lincoln chronicles Ferguson’s quest to discover the true Abraham Lincoln—the one who doesn’t belong to the ages, the one who’s not chiseled from granite and sitting vigil in a temple-like memorial, the one who’s not known just for writing “Four score and seven years ago.”

“More books have been written about Abraham Lincoln than about any other American—nearly fourteen thousand in all,” Ferguson writes, “and at least half of those books begin by saying that more books have been written about Abraham Lincoln than any other American. This book, you’ll notice, is one of them.”

Ferguson’s book is simultaneously charming and earnest. It’s hard not to be amused when he hangs out with 175 Lincoln impersonators in Santa Claus, Indiana, during their annual convention. “It began with the beard,” one impersonator explains to Ferguson.

“Talking to other Abes, I discovered that this is how it almost always happens,” Ferguson writes. “A fellow, minding his own business, decides to grow a beard. Soon, multiple people are telling him that he bears a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. It doesn’t matter that very often these people are wrong. So strong is the lure of Lincoln that when people tell a man with a beard that he looks like the greatest of all Americans, he believes it.”

Ferguson goes to Gettysburg to sit in on a leadership institute’s Lincoln-themed training session. (The book Lincoln on Leadership, after all, is one of the best-selling business books of all time.) Gettysburg, he notes, has “a dazed, dull feel to it—the consequence, I suppose, of taking a scene of blood-drenched horror and unspeakable heartbreak and trying to make it a pleasant vacation spot.”

Ferguson travels to the area around Lincoln’s boyhood home where he watches a musical theater production based on the young Lincoln’s life. He visits the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, where Disney “imagineers” created a museum that creates a powerful emotional experience but somehow manages to avoid information. The primary purpose, says Ferguson, is to make Lincoln “fun.”

“Get their hearts and their heads will follow,” the imagineer tells him. “You lead with the emotions rather than the intellect. And remember, it’s not any old emotion—the emotion they feel is the one we want them to feel.”

Ferguson visits historical sites, National Parks, and museums. He examines statues. He follows the old Lincoln Heritage Trail. The Land of Lincoln, Ferguson discovers, exists as much in our national subconscious as it does in any geographical spot. This was useful for me because, like Confederates in the Attic, the book becomes a portrait of a cultural landscape.

The supporting cast proves to be highly colorful. Ferguson meets people cult-like in their devotion to Lincoln. He talks with Lincoln scholars, Lincoln collectors, and even Lincoln critics. “Who could object to Lincoln?” Ferguson asks. “He seems too big even to have an opinion about.” Yet when the National Park Service installed a Lincoln statue at its Civil War battlefield park in Richmond, commemorating a visit Lincoln made to the city in April 1865 when the city surrendered, controversy erupted.

Throughout, Ferguson continues to ask, “Who is Lincoln? Why is he important to us today?” He never draws firm conclusions but instead presents a wide array of evidence for readers to consider—just as he himself considers it, too.

“What if Lincoln the man was, as I’d come to suspect, unknowable, as most men are 140 years after their death?” he writes. “And what if the icon—big, grand, unmistakable—is more real than the much smaller, custom-fit Lincolns that each of us creates for ourselves?”

Serious in its goals but light in its tone, Land of Lincoln successfully weaves together history, travel, cultural studies, and even memoir to sketch a thoughtful portrait of one of America’s most known—and perhaps least knowable—figures. Land of Lincoln doesn’t try to debunk any myths but instead tries to figure out how the man grew into myth. Both have value.

Ferguson finishes his journey on the steps of Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Memorial. “It’s the unavoidable Lincoln,” he says. “Anyone who wants to understand the Land of Lincoln has to account for it.”

That’s why I’m here tonight. I’m accounting for it. I come here two or three times a year, in fact, and I always make it a point to see what Lincoln has to teach me.

Juxtaposed against the experience was a stop earlier in the evening at the new Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial. Prior to that, I’d visited the National Holocaust Museum to see an exhibit on Nazi propaganda. I was chilled to realize that Hitler, King, and Lincoln all really do belong in the same league when it comes to their skill as communicators, although they employed those skills for very different purposes. I’m still, I admit, wrapping my head around that.

To start the day, I visited Ford’s Theatre, a site Ferguson skipped, but a place I wanted to visit so I could see the newly installed exhibits in the theater’s museum and in the new museum across the street adjacent to the Peterson House (the house where Lincoln died). The exhibits are marvelous and thoughtful, but a quote from one exhibit panel in particular jumped out at me. As the Lincolns were getting ready to head to the theater on the evening of April 14, 1865, the president said to his wife:

“Mary, I consider this day, the war, has come to a close … we must both be more cheerful in the future—between the war and the loss of our darling [son] Willie—we have both been very miserable.”

Scholars spend a lot of time trying to find “the real Lincoln,” as Ferguson points out, but here was a simple quote from Lincoln himself that humanized him for me more than any scholar’s work.

I juxtaposed that against the great marble man sitting in the Memorial. It’s useful to see Lincoln as human, but ultimately, his status as an icon is perhaps more important to us—we who live in a cynical age that dismisses heroes and revels in its iconoclasm. If we’re ever to stop our bitterly partisan political bickering, if we’re all to lend a hand “with malice toward none, with charity toward all,” if we all want a good and decent future for our children, then we all need to aspire to be those very best things that America has always stood for.

Lincoln, I think, personifies that. He really does stand like that beacon in the night. We just have to get over ourselves long enough to admit that it’s okay to aspire for values that we’re usually quick to paint as quaint and old-fashioned. We have honest differences about how to achieve those things, but we’ll never figure out solutions if we don’t stop yelling at each other and decide to talk. “Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection,” Lincoln said in his first inaugural. Hear, hear!

“Maybe that’s why icons are dismissed as unreal these days,” Ferguson said. “Icons aren’t complicated enough for the wised-up world. Nuance fits the times. We can be consumed by nuance, argue about it on TV, blog about it, fill our scholarly monographs with its infinite refractions—even when, like the forest and the trees, our obsession with it obscures the bigger, unarguable facts that are plain in front of us.”

That’s what Lincoln has to say to me tonight: Aspire to be a better person. Aspire to be a better people. Aspire to be a better nation.

Otherwise, “We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope on earth.”

I’d hate for our own cynicism to be the death of us.

#24

“Historian travels to battlefields and writes about his experiences.” Sounds right up my alley. After all, I do a lot of that for Emerging Civil War, and my dissertation is going to take me in that direction, so it’s always interesting to see how other people do it.

That’s how a professional colleague of mine described Emory Thomas’s Travels to Hallowed Ground. He recommended it to me particularly because Thomas takes his son on some of his journeys, and my colleague knew that I got into battlefielding because of my daughter. Thomas’s book, then, might potentially offer some interesting ways at looking at the fields.

Thomas has a long career as a Civil War historian, with biographies of Confederates Robert E. Lee and JEB Stuart as his most notable books. He’s retired now, and to the best of my knowledge, hasn’t made a cottage industry out of tour-guiding the way a lot of the other “lions” of the field have done. If he had some thoughts inspired by visits to battlefields, I figured they’d be worth reading.

I was disappointed with the last such book I looked at, though: James McPherson’s Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg. It turned out to basically be McPherson’s excuse to write about the battle—which was, no doubt, an excellent account. But as a first-person presence in the book, he didn’t add much in the way of personal reflections or insights. He was almost superfluous in that respect (his history, and his narrative were great, though, so my disappointment only stems from what I was expecting, not from the quality of McPherson’s work).

Thomas does no better, although rather than take an extended look at a single battle, he provides shorter explorations of several battles. Each chapter is the length of a typical magazine article (and, indeed, some appeared in Civil War magazines in the mid-80s). There’s no real common thread that connects the chapters, though, other than the fact that Thomas visited there.

And for the record, his son goes on only one journey—so any hopes I had of father-child bonding experiences were pretty much shot. They travel to Roanoke Island—home of the infamous “Lost Colony” of English settlers who vanished long ago. Thomas and his son went there, though, to check out Burnside’s successful capture of the North Carolina coastal defenses. They discovered that not much had been preserved (such is still the case today). “What did you expect?” his son asks at the end, the long set-up to joke that’s not as clever as it thinks it is. “When you go looking for the remains of a battle like Roanoke Island, the most appropriate thing you can find is nothing.”

Thomas arranges his essays in chronological order, but there are such vast gaps in the chronology that their order seems almost moot. He skips most major battles­, which I kind of liked, and visited some out-of-the-way places, which I also liked.

He doesn’t quote much primary-source documentation but rather just synthesizes it all into his narratives, which read like summaries. It might, therefore, seem like the book would then lend itself as a good source for a beginner who wants a general overview of things, not too in-depth, but because Thomas leaves out so many of the war’s biggest events, his book wouldn’t be too useful for the novice. The buff, meanwhile, is going to know most of this already. The one thing he could bring to the table—his own insights and reflections—must’ve gotten left in the car as he was driving around.

The one exception is his second-to-last chapter, which focuses on an ethics-related issue from Petersburg. A photographer took a picture of a Confederate soldier’s corpse, with entrails hanging out, and copies of the photo because widely popular as a stereoscopic image in parlors across the country. Basically, a camera with two lenses, side-by-side, snapped the same picture, but because of the slightly different angles, when viewed through a stereoscope device, the images created a 3-D effect for viewers. They were all the range in the 1860s.

“That the dead young soldier and his three-dimensional entrails became items of entertainment only adds obscenity” to the lesson that “war is meaningless butchery,” Thomas says, obviously disturbed by the episode. In the 80s, with threats of nuclear annihilation still hanging over us, Thomas wondered if people would ever learn. “The human experience of history seems to show that if we are to survive, to avoid nuclear holocaust, we must do something more than watch television,” he says.

While that piece provided an excellent takeaway, the rest of the book was modest. I’m not sure it was worth the effort to track it down (since it’s out of print).

————

cross-posted at Emerging Civil War

#23

I’ve written before about my fascination with the Congo and Africa’s mythical “dark heart.” Conrad. Tarzan. Mkele-Mbembe. Stanley and Livingston and Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner. “Mistah Kurtz. He dead.” Oh, the horror, the horror.

Beyond all the myth is a country torn by war, wracked by poverty and tainted by the overexploitation of colonialism. It might hold allure as an exotic place to go for adventure, but really, it’s a place to die—or nearly so, as Jeffrey Tayler chronicled in his book Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey in the Heart of Darkness.

“With its sonorous o’s, the word Congo resonated with the power of a village drum to conjure up visions of jungles and thrashing crocodiles along a great African river,” Tayler thought, falling for the romance of it much the way I always have. He was living in Moscow and, entering his thirties, facing an existential crisis. “I needed to know who I was and what I was good for. I did not,” he said.

Tayler decides to make a descent by pirogue—a kind of dugout canoe—from the upper reaches of the river to the capital of Kinshasa. The route would in part, recreate Henry Morton Stanley’s journey in the 1870s. “[O]ur days are numbered and our time runs out,” Tayler wrote. “I hoped that the expedition would settle once and for all my doubts about who I was and what I could accomplish.”

If the premise sounds vaguely familiar, it’s similar to (but more exciting than) Julian Smith’s Crossing the Heart of Africa. Smith traverses the continent south to north, following the route of explorer Ewart Grogan. Smith’s book, published in 2010, ties together his own adventures, written as a travelogue, with Grogan’s story, and he weaves in a whole bunch of the continent’s history and natural history, too.

Tayler’s book, published in 2000, is almost pure plot. Yes, he weaves in some of the Congo’s recent history—in fact, one of the themes of the book is that he cannot escape the recent history—and he uses Stanley’s experience as a sort of touchstone that he comes back to now and again (nothing like Smith does with Grogan’s story, though). But overall, Facing the Congo is gripping narrative, written like an adventure story. And what an adventure.

Tayler considers his plight as it unfolds—and “plight” is probably an understatement because, it turns out, his life is in almost constant danger from bullying soldiers, hostile tribes people, civil war, the weather, crocodiles and hippos, and the river itself. “It’s very dangerous,” one tribesman tells him, “We Bangala don’t care for life. If we see a mondele [a white foreigner] many of us think only to kill him and take his things.”

Even sleeping becomes an ordeal along the danger-fraught river. “The moon hung a giant pale orange orb,” he writes,

the forest echoed with hoots from monkeys, with the tumultuous splashings of hippos in the shallows somewhere behind us. We had bivouacked early in a malodorous and desolate bight of palm and rubber vines. Biting ants, fat and black, infested our camp, scuttling over our legs, chomping away before we could scrape them off….

Compounding his travails is his inability to understand his guide, Desi—not linguistically but, rather, psychologically. “For me, everything here was new and urgent and unique,” Tayler writes; “for Desi the Congo was a harsh and ancient waterway out of which to wrest a meager living while he battled constant fatigue from worms or fevers or whatever it was that was afflicting him. He would not hurry because, danger or no, this river was his home and he lived by rhythms that allowed him to conserve his strength, enjoy himself when he could, and go on.

Only later does he realize “that I had exploited [the Congo] as a playground on which to solve my own rich-boy existential dilemmas.” He adds that his “drama of self-actualization proved obscenely trivial beside the suffering of the [people] and the injustices of the past.” Ah, to follow in the well-worn footsteps created by a hundred years of European exploitation….

Tayler comes to nothing more profound—or less powerfully obvious—than “time will always be show, and there is always much to be learned from living.” Oh, and “value what I have and…strive to preserve it.” I’m not really giving away the ending because, honestly, his flashes of genius felt underwhelming and anticlimactic following his journey.

It’s an excellent book overall, though. It truly is an adventure through the dark heart of the continent—one I’m glad I can take on the page and not in the pirogue.

#22

It isn’t often that I get to read someone else’s love letters. But read Rachel Carson’s work and you’ll see that’s just what she’s writing. She writes of the sea with a profound, abiding love.

When I spent time with Carson along the edge of the sea a few weeks ago in Maine, I came across references to a Carson book I’d not heard of before. I had already added one extra Carson book to my reading list, and worried about the possible tangent a second might take me on, but in the end, her work resonated with me too strongly to pass it up. The title was too alluring to pass up: The Sense of Wonder.

A sense of wonder, I tell my students, is the first step in exploring the world and finding worthwhile stories to tell. Be curious. Ask questions. Engage in wonder.

“Wisdom begins in wonder,” Socrates said.

Carson’s book, The Sense of Wonder, could very well be a primer for all freshman writing students.

The premise behind the book is deceptively simple: Teach children to appreciate nature. Don’t overwhelm them with species names but, rather, unlock their sense of wonder. “[I]t is not half so important to know as to feel,” she says. “Once the emotions have been aroused—a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love—then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning.”

Exploring nature is largely a matter of becoming receptive to what lies around you, Carson says.

[W]herever you are and whatever your resources, you can still look up at the sky—its dawn and twilight beauties, its moving clouds, its stars by night. You can listen to the wind, whether it blows with majestic voice through a forest or sings a many-voiced chorus around the eaves of your house…and in the listening, you can gain magical release for your thoughts. You can still feel the rain on your face and think of its long journey, its many transmutations, from sea to air to earth.

Such things might be so commonplace that we take them for granted. We literally lose sight of the wonder right in front of us. “[B]ecause they could see it almost any night perhaps they will never see it,” she laments.

Originally written in July 1956 as an essay for Woman’s Home Companion, Carson dreamed of expanding the essay into a longer piece. “I want very much to do that Wonder book,” she said. “That would be Heaven to achieve.” She died—at age 56—before she was able to complete the project.

In 1998, photographer Nick Kelsh resurrected Carson’s dream. The result is gorgeous. Carson’s essay, artfully laid out with generous leading and wide margins on high-gloss, parchment-colored pages, is interspersed with pages of Kelsh’s nature photography. The photographs loosely illustrate the settings and landscapes Carson mines for wonder. Kelsh’s work enhances Carson’s while remaining respectful of it, too. Carson’s writing, and her love of nature, remain at the heart of the book.

It’s easy to reveal in her language. Take, for instance, a sentence like this, capturing an image like this: “Out there, just at the edge of where-we-couldn’t-see, big waves were thundering in, dimly seen white shapes that boomed and shouted and threw great handfuls of froth at us.” Carson makes me feel like I’m there with all the emotional richness of the moment. I want to close my eyes, cross my arms, and smile at the breath of sea spray misting my cheeks.

While I found great delight in Carson’s writing, it’s her vision that I found most remarkable, most alluring.  “If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children,” she says, “I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

Carson’s unabashed love of the natural world represents a way of seeing that we could all benefit from. The world would benefit from it, too. How could we rape and pillage the land if we treated it with reverence, respect, and awe.

What an amazing gift we could pass on to future generations if only we awakened their sense of wonder. What amazing power that wonder would hold.

#21

I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s read Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods and had a burning urge to go hike the Appalachian Trail. Of course, that might also have something to do with the fact that my girlfriend is heading there today to hike part of it. But whatever.

My experience with the AT is pretty limited, although the few places I’ve crossed its path are places I’ve crossed it a lot. The spot that comes to mind most is a foot bridge that crosses over I-90 in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. I’ve never stepped on that leg of the AT, but I’ve driven under it about a thousand times.

By foot, I’ve encountered the AT most frequently at Harper’s Ferry, WV. The trail crosses the Potomac River and rises up to Maryland Heights where it vanishes into the woods before climbing even further to run along the crest of South Mountain. In fact, my favorite stretch of the AT heads into the woods at the northern border of Gapland State Park several miles north of Harper’s Ferry. I remember a misty afternoon that cast a primeval air around the trail as it climbed into leafy greenness. Rain dripped from everything. The mud glistened.

I’ve intersected the AT at the top of Mount Washington in New Hampshire. I’ve always wanted to follow it to the top of Mount Katahdin in Maine. I’ve wanted to avoid it in Duncannon, PA, where a double-murder took place in September of 1990. Because I grew up in that area, the town’s name jumped out at me when I heard about the crime on the news. It struck me with such foreboding that it still sticks to me like a bad superstition.

My girlfriend and I hiked several hundred yards of the AT over the summer at Shenandoah National Park. We were, in fact, hiking up the impossibly never-ending trail to Hawksbill Mountain. The AT ran along the top of the ridge, so we made a point to walk out to it just so we could say we did the AT—only to discover that it also ran right by the parking lot where we’d left Caity’s car. For principle’s sake, we walked the trail there, too.

It was on that jaunt that I discovered an important truth about hiking, which Bryson so perfectly articulates:

The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill. The thing about being on a hill, as opposed to standing back from it, is that you can almost never see exactly what’s to come…. Every time you haul yourself up to what you think must surely be the crest, you find that there is in fact more hill beyond, sloped at an angle that kept it from view before, and that beyond that slope is another, and beyond that another and another, and beyond each of those more still, until it seems impossible that any hill could run on this long…. Still you stagger on. What else can you do?

Bryson’s book is at once clever, engaging, and chock-full-o information. I’ve read some of Bryson’s other works before—his A Short History of Nearly Everything is one of the more brilliant books I’ve ever read—but I’ve not read any of his more memoirish stuff before.

It’s not for lack of wanting to. A former NPS colleague of mine tried to get me to read A Walk in the Woods a few years ago. I wanted to, sincerely, but knew I didn’t have the time just then. She urged me to take her book; I reluctantly did so only because I knew it might be a while before I could get to it. It has sat there ever since (right next to the John McPhee reader I’d mentioned the other day, in fact).

Oh, my, am I glad I finally had the excuse to read this book. I have laughed out loud over and over.

Bryson discovers the AT almost by accident when he moves to a small town in New Hampshire after years abroad. He decides to check it out. “Running more than 2,100 miles along America’s eastern seaboard, through the serene and beckoning Appalachian Mountains, the AT is the granddaddy of long hikes,” he writes. “From Georgia to Maine, it wanders across fourteen states. Through plump, comely hills whose very names—Blue Ridge, Smokies, Cumberlands, Green Mountains, White Mountains—seem an invitation to amble.”

Bryson decides to take up that invitation, and the story of that amble becomes the premise of the book. Accompanying him is an old high school buddy he hasn’t seen in years, Katz, who is woefully overweight and underprepared. But Bryson soon discovers he’s not really ready for the mission, either. “I had never encountered anything so hard, for which I was so ill prepared,” he writes after being on the trail just a few short days. “Every step was a struggle.”

He doesn’t help his case by psyching himself out with horror stories about bear attacks, either.  “What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp?” he frets after seeing a four-bear photo. “Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children’s parties—I daresay I would even give a merry toot—and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag.”

Aside from liberal doses of humor, Bryson weaves in a lot of biology and ecology and a lot of history. He’s particularly damning of the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service—both so underfunded that their management borders catastrophically on negligence. Best of all, though, his removal from the modern world and immersion in the natural world provide ample opportunity for juxtaposing one against the other, resulting in rich, rich reflection.

The trail itself, he says, serves as a symbol of that contrast. “If a product or enterprise doesn’t constantly reinvent itself, it is superseded, cast aside, abandoned without sentiment in favor of something bigger, newer, and, alas, early always uglier,” he writes. “And then there is the good old AT, still quietly ticking along…unassuming, splendid, faithful to its founding principles, sweetly unaware that the world has quite moved on. It’s a miracle, really.”

Bryson finds miracles all along the way, too. His sense of wonder never shuts off even when his body winds down and his spirit flags. One of my favorite descriptions comes in the Shenandoah National Park, not far from Hawksbill Mountain, in fact. It evoked my own sense of awe being in those same woods:

a broad, ancient-seeming, deeply fetching glade cradled by steep hills, which gave it a vaguely enchanted, secretive feel. Everything you could ask for in a woodland setting was here—tall, stately trees broken at intervals be escalators of dusty sunshine, winding brook, floor of plump ferns, cool air languidly adrift in a lovely green stillness….

Caity will walk through that same terrain tomorrow, although winter will have stripped the lush forest down to its bare brown bark. All the bears will be hibernating. Most of the tourists will be home, waiting for spring to invite them back to the park.

I’ll cross paths with the AT later in the week, where it crosses I-66 outside of Linden, Virginia, on its way northward towards Harper’s Ferry. I’ll be driving east on the highway, on my way south to Caity’s. She’ll show me pictures from her hike, and I’ll tell her about my favorite passages from Bryson’s book, and we’ll both want to go hiking together. We’ll wait for spring, I suspect, but when we do finally go, Bryson will come along as company—it’ll be impossible to ever hike the AT without him.

No one seems to know when “creative nonfiction” emerged as a genre, but John McPhee’s name is frequently cited as one of the seminal figures. I decided I should check out his work. Rather than hit up one of his twenty-five-plus books, I decided to dip into a pair of John McPhee readers so I could get a wide sampling, looking at essays that specifically dealt with places.

I first came across McPhee’s work while I was waiting for an oil change. A member of the university’s English faculty happened to come in, and we started chit-chatting. This colleague’s particular expertise rests with Milton, so I was surprised when the conversation turned to McPhee. “Your work reminds me of his,” he told me.

I had no idea at the time what an immense compliment that was. I ordered one of McPhee’s readers from Amazon so I could see for myself, but by the time it arrived a week later, I’d already gotten caught up in another project and wasn’t able to delve into the book. It has sat on my shelf, patiently waiting, ever since. It’s been years.

I came across McPhee’s work again last spring in the book In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction, edited by Lee Gutkind, the so-called “Godfather of Creative Nonfiction” and editor of Creative Nonfiction magazine.

“McPhee’s work is distinguished by his ability to see the world through the points of view of other people and communicate them intimately and intricately,” Gutkind wrote. “But he also recognizes the compelling nature of personal history and the insight into character and the human condition it can provide.”

McPhee’s work reminded me very much of Lilian Ross’s “fly-on-the-wall” reporting. Ross, a predecessor of McPhee’s at The New Yorker, was an innovator in that regard, although as journalism scholar R. Thomas Berner points out, her innovation has since become standard practice. Ross is present in her stories, but she functions as an observer. She interacts with her subjects but doesn’t offer commentary about them.

“To this point, McPhee has pretty much kept himself and his life out of the narratives,” Gutkind says. McPhee sometimes interacts with his subjects, but when he does, he avoids overt commentary, although his descriptions are so evocative it’s impossible not to start drawing conclusions. In The Pine Barrens, for instance, he describes a man named Bill:

In a straight-backed chair near the doorway to the kitchen sat a young man with long black hair, who wore a visored red leather cap that had darkened with age. His shirt was coarse-woven and had eyelets down a V neck that was laced with a thing. His trousers were made of canvas, and he was wearing gum boots. His arms were folded, his legs were stretched out, he had one ankle over the other, and as he sat there he appeared to be sighting carefully past his feet, as if his toes were the outer frame of a gunsight and he could see some sort of target in the floor. When I had entered, I had said hello to him, and he had nodded without looking up. He had a long, straight nose and high cheekbones, in a deeply tanned face that was, somehow, gaunt. I had no idea whether he was shy or hostile. Eventually, when I came to know him, I found him to be as shy a person as I have ever had a chance to know.

It’s harder to explain McPhee’s descriptions of place because, it seems, in some of his essays everything always seems to come back to place. The Pine Barrens, as an example, is about place, and McPhee explores it through research, history, culture, and adventures with people who live there. “The picture of New Jersey that most people hold in their minds is so different from this one that, considered beside it, the Pine Barrens, as they are called, become as incongruous as they are beautiful,” he writes. He engages readers with his pieces by juxtaposing what they think they know with the discoveries he wants to share with them.

In “Traveling Through Georgia,”

pine trees kept giving us messages—small, hand-painted signs nailed into the loblollies. ‘HAVE YOU WHAT IT TAKES TO MEET JESUS WHEN HE RETURNS?’ Sam said he was certain he did not. ‘JESUS WILL NEVER FAIL YOU.’ City limits, Adrian, Georgia. Swainsboro, Georgia. Portal, Georgia. Towns on the long, straight roads of the coastal plain. White-painted, tin-roofed bungalows. Awnings shading the fronts of stores—prepared for heat and glare. Red earth. Sand roads. House on short stilts. Sloping verandas. Unpainted boards.

He not only picks vivid details, he pieces them together with a real ear for rhythm. Consider part of his description of Anchorage, Alaska in Coming Into the Country:

Roads are rubbled, ponded with chuckholes. Big trucks, graders, loaders, make the prevailing noise, the dancing fumes, the frenetic beat of the town. Huge rubber tires are strewn about like quoits, ever ready for the big machines that move hills of earth and gravel into inconvenient lakes, which become new ground.

As I explore McPhee’s work, the thing I’m coming to admire most is his meticulous attention to craft. His pieces are splendidly well-written. Rhythm, vocabulary, sentence structure, description—it all falls into perfect place. He’s not a flashy stylist; in fact, I’d be hard-pressed to describe his style at all. He writes with clarity and a lack of literary pretension. Perhaps a kind of journalistic formality? His voice isn’t there, yet it is.

I’ve also come to appreciate his versatility. I read something last week that described Barry Lopez as America’s most versatile reporter, but I’ve gotta think McPhee set the bar. Aside from The Pine Barrens and Coming Into the Country, I particularly enjoyed Oranges, The Control of Nature, and a blurb I read from Founding Fish (not in the readers).

I’ve also come to appreciate just how crazy my colleague from the English Department is. While incredibly flattered by the comparison, I’m so far below McPhee’s league that I shouldn’t even share a last initial with him.

I only got a sampling, but I’ll have to go back for more.

#19

I never read The Perfect Storm until I saw the trailer for the 2000 movie. There, on the big screen, a fishing boat tried to bull its way straight up—literally straight up—a gigantic wall of water. “Did you see that?” I said to my wife, smacking her lightly on the shoulder. “Did you see that? Straight up a wall of water!”

That same image would appear on movie posters when the film finally came out a couple months later.

I had to get the book.

By then, The Perfect Storm had been released in paperback, and I was able to find a copy whose cover had not yet been co-opted by the movie studio. The edition did benefit from a new afterward by the author, Sebastian Junger, which has proven to be one of the most useful “case studies” on literary journalism that I’ve ever read.

When Junger chose to write about the loss of the swordboat Andrea Gail out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, he was, in effect, choosing to write about something unknowable. Andrea Gail, lost at sea in October 1991 during a storm of cataclysmic proportions, left no final trace. Junger had a few final radio conversations to draw on, but what happened to the boat and the five men aboard in its last hours was a mystery.

“I’ve written as complete an account as possible of something that can never be fully known,” Junger said in his afterward. “It is exactly that unknowable element, however, that has made it an interesting book to write and, I hope, to read.”

Along with the challenge of piecing together the story of the boat and crew, Junger had to explain the way of life aboard a swordboat. He had to recreate the way of life in a Massachusetts fishing village. He had to delve into the meteorological facts that explained “the perfect storm.”

“On one hand, I wanted to write a completely factual book that would stand on its own as a piece of journalism,” he said in his introduction. “On the other hand, I didn’t want the narrative to asphyxiate under a mass of technical detail and conjecture.”

And here’s why I’ve come to admire the book so much: Junger immerses himself in the story (much the way Tony Horwitz did for Confederates in the Attic). He spent a lot of time hanging out in The Crow’s Nest, the Gloucester bar where the Andrea Gail’s crew hung out. “By and large it’s a bar of people who know each other; people who aren’t known are invited over for a drink,” Junger wrote. “It’s hard to buy your own beer at the Crow’s Nest, and it’s hard to leave after just one….”

While there, Junger spent time soaking up the atmosphere. His presence there over weeks allowed him to eventually earn the trust of locals so they’d open up to him and talk about their lives, their jobs, and their experiences at sea. “Look, I don’t know a thing about fishing,” he’d say. “So if you don’t tell me about it, I’m going to get it all wrong.”

Sometimes they’d talk to him; sometimes not. Sometimes he’d have his pen and notepad out; sometimes he’d have to excuse himself, run the men’s room, and scribble a few notes there in private. Some people, like Ricky Shatford, the older brother of crewmember Bobby Shatford, didn’t take kindly at all to what they saw as the intrusion. “I told people I was going to kill you,” Shatford eventually told Junger when they’d made piece with each other.

By that point, the book had come out and become a bestseller. Shatford had finally been able to see for himself that Junger treated the story—and his younger brother—with respect.

“Had they not lived the lives they did, and agreed to talk with me about them, the book would not exist,” Junger conceded in his afterword.

He constructed his narrative by gathering everything he could through interviews and research. In instances when he couldn’t answer a question directly—like, what must it have been like for guys on the boat to be caught in the storm—he interviewed people who’d been in similar situations. He never takes that information and projects it onto the crew of the Andrea Gail, but he does suggest parallels and lets readers draw their own conclusions.

In the end, Junger sticks to facts “in as wide-ranging a way as possible,” he said. As a result, there are “varying kinds of information in the book.”

For instance, he uses direct quotes for anything he recorded in a formal interview, but dialogue, based on people’s recollections, appear without quotation marks. “No dialogue was made up,” he emphasized. For radio conversations, he uses italics. He incorporates a lot of research from reading, although he typically doesn’t cite any of his sources, an attempt on his part to keep the narrative lean and readable. In fact, it reads much like a novel, and he uses present tense to keep the story immediate.

Except for the first-person introduction and afterward, Junger keeps himself entirely out of the book. By some definitions, that means The Perfect Storm doesn’t qualify as “creative nonfiction.” By other definitions, Junger’s style of “literary journalism” does qualify. (I realize that’s a question more germane to my own reading at present than it is for most readers, who probably don’t give a rat’s ass how to categorize it!)

In the context of “place,” which is the lens I’m using to look at these books, The Perfect Storm certainly captures a good sense of Gloucester and, even better, of the sea. However, it’s most useful to me now as a model of how a writer interacts within place as he attempts to capture it.

When I first read it, The Perfect Storm was a watershed book for me. It helped show me what else nonfiction could be. It showed me how to tackle some of the ethical questions that arise from being a writer in pursuit of a story. Those are lessons I still reflect on, and pass along to my students, to this day.

“Writers often don’t know much about the world they’re trying to describe, but they don’t necessarily need to,” Junger concluded. “They just need to ask a lot of questions. And then they need to step back and let the story speak for itself.”

#18

Most Civil War historians in the Park Service feel a little battlefield when it comes to Gettysburg. It’s the great Granddaddy of All Battlefields in North America, marked and monumented with enough granite, marble, and bronze to sink Rhode Island into the sea. Pennsylvania, being bigger and more landlocked, isn’t in such danger. In fact, Gettysburg’s location in the Keystone State, so relatively close to the major metropolitan areas of the east coast, ensured its place as Hallowed Ground—not because it represented the “High Water Mark of the Confederacy” but because it was certain to attract tourists. Lots and lots of tourists.

(The notion of the “High Water Mark” just a widely successful PR ploy basically engineered by one man in an attempt to attract those tourists and reinforce his own version of the battle history).

In Spotsylvania, where we get a sliver of the visitation Gettysburg does, we put an advantageous spin on the discrepancy: note how pristine and undisturbed our battlefield is compared to Gettysburg. In Petersburg, south of the James River, some of the rangers feel like the forgotten red-headed stepchildren compared to Gettysburg. In the Western Theater, at Chickamauga-Chattanooga, I know a ranger who refuses to even mention Gettysburg by name.

If people have been to only one battlefield, it’s usually Gettysburg. For me, it was my first, and for years most frequented, battlefield. As an elementary school student growing up in Hershey, Pennsylvania, I boarded a big yellow school bus every year for the obligatory field trip to the battlefield. It was about an hour drive or so. Once there, I clambered through the rocks at Devil’s Den, wandered through the buckshot of monuments at the “High Water Mark,” and swooned with the sheer awesomeness of the nearby wax museum. It wasn’t until I grew up a bit that I appreciated the magnitude of what the place really meant.

“More than any other place in the United States, this place is indeed Hallowed Ground,” says historian James McPherson, best known for his Pulitzer-winning Battle Cry of Freedom. He’s also author of Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg.

“I have toured the battlefield by car, by bus, on a bicycle, and on foot,” McPherson says, explaining that he’s given so many tours there he’s lost count. Hallowed Ground is his attempt to take readers along on one of those tours. “Join me for a walk on this hallowed ground,” he says.

I intentionally read this book following Confederates in the Attic as a way to bring the two books into conversation with each other. In Confederates, author Tony Horwitz explores the landscape of Civil War writ large with an immersive year-long field trip that takes him all across the South. In contrast, McPherson gives readers a much more intimate experience over a much smaller landscape.

Like Horwitz, McPherson is a character in his own story, but beyond that, McPherson takes a vastly different approach. As with Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, Hallowed Ground represents an “outer limit” of creative nonfiction. This is the boundaryland, where the first-person memoir fades back into straight nonfiction because the first-person is a nearly negligible factor.

McPherson shares some of his personal experiences on the battlefield, such as a stop by some of his students from Princeton near the monument of the Twentieth Maine on the edge of Little Round Top. The regiment had executed a maneuver that arguably saved the Union left flank. The incident was made famous for modern buffs by Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Killer Angels and by Ken Burns’ The Civil War, turning the regiment’s commander, Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, into the subject of a veritable one-man cottage industry. One of McPherson’s students had written her thesis about Chamberlain.

“As we came to the place where the Twentieth Maine fought, she could no longer hold back the tears. Nor could the rest of us,” McPherson shares. “Although I have experienced other powerful emotions while walking other Civil War battlefields, none has ever matched that April day in 1987. The world has little noted what I said there, but it can never forget what they did there.”

That’s about as personal as he gets—which is to say, not very. He’s not using the first-person perspective to reveal anything about himself. It’s just a convenient conceit for sharing stories.

He makes the reader complicit by using the first-person plural “we” at times, such as when he literally gives directions for getting from one place to another. For instance, when bringing readers to Pickett’s Charge, the culminating action of the battle’s third day, McPherson writes: “Our next stop is the jump-off point for that attack. To get there from East Cavalry field, we return to town on the Hanover Road (State Route 116) and continue west through downtown Gettysburg on Middle Street, which becomes the Fairfield Road….”

He’s equally unpoetic when he urges visitors to look around at carious spots. “A stroll around this ‘High Water Mark of the Confederacy’ is well worth the time it takes to read the interpretive markers and absorb the information on the three dozen regimental monuments and the dozen or more tablets originally placed by the War Department,” he writes.

He talks about the Park Services then-plans for landscape restoration, chopping down some trees to open view sheds so that the battlefield looks like it did in 1863 when the armies fought there. The plan was to make it easier to read the ground and experience the landscape the way soldiers did. Most of that work has been carried out since the book’s publication in 2003. Such references, however, immediately date the book, making a read-through now obsolete.

That’s what makes Hallowed Ground so disappointing to me. It often feels like McPherson just phoned it in, like he needed a few bucks so he cranked out a quick book on Gettysburg. Slap “Gettysburg” on something and people will snatch it up (says the guy who slaps “Stonewall” on things and has people snatch them up…).

McPherson plays to the general audienceship, too. He makes sure to tell as many quaint war stories as he can, such as that of Sallie the War Dog, a regimental mascot who appears in bronze, lying at the feet of her regiment’s monument. He talks about Chamberlain. He talks about Amos Humiston, a dead soldier who lay unidentified until except for a photo of his three kids clutched in his hand, eventually spotted by his wife months later when it was reproduced in a newspaper article. (Amos came from Portville, N.Y., a town literally seven miles down the road from my house, so I’m a fan of the story.)

McPherson debunks myths of Gettysburg and sometimes even explains why he’ll continue to perpetuate a myth supposedly debunked by other historians. It’s the kind of stuff a general reader would enjoy–one who maybe has that “I visited there once” level of knowledge of the battle.

I don’t get much about McPherson himself, but I do get a lot about the battle. His battle narratives are easily the strongest part of the book. He “walks” visitors place to place, and then uses what he sees and where he stops as his springboard into the history. Such narrative is always readable and excellent.

But overall, the book was clinical and not especially thought-provoking. I didn’t get to muse over much. I sensed McPherson’s respect for the place, but I didn’t get any sense of awe about it. For a guy who’s toured it so often, I expected to feel a little more love about the place. I expected it to feel hallowed.

It’s a short book, so a read-through isn’t going to be a waste of time, especially for people who like anything Gettysburg-related (slap that name on it!). It’s probably the best short account of the battle available. But Hallowed Ground still feels like a far battle cry from McPherson’s best work.

————

Cross-posted at Emerging Civil War.

#17

If there’s one book I’ve wished I’d written, it’s Confederates in the Attic. Of course, Tony Horwitz already wrote it, nearly two decades ago (I can hardly believe it’s been that long). Here’s a guy who wandered around the South, talking to people about the legacy of the Civil War. He asked questions, had conversations, observed, listened, and explored the landscape for himself. He immersed himself in the story.

This, I tell my students, is what good feature writers do. They take the time to do the story justice—and a story as complex as this one requires a lot of time if you’re going to be thorough and fair. That’s what I respect most about Horwitz’s work on the book: he takes the time to make an honest attempt at trying to understanding that which, I suspect, can never fully be understood.

Horwitz had a lifelong interest in the war, but it had lain mostly dormant throughout most of his adult life. Then, one morning without warning, he awoke to the sound of gunshots in the street outside his home. A group of Civil War reenactors were filming a TV documentary on the battle of Fredericksburg, and during a break in the action, they collapsed in Horwitz’s yard. Horwitz brought them fresh coffee, and that’s when the questions began.

The “hardcore” reenactors “didn’t just dress up and shoot blanks,” Horwitz discovered. “They sought absolute fidelity to the 1860s: its homespun clothing, antique speech patterns, sparse diet and simple utensils. Adhered to properly, this fundamentalism produced a time-travel high….”

One reenactor brags about soaking his brass buttons overnight in a saucer filled with urine, which oxidized the brass to make it look like a button from the 1860s. “My wife woke up this morning, sniffed the air and said, ‘Tim, you’ve been peeing on your buttons again,’” the man told Horwitz. (Reenactor friends of mine have since told me urine doesn’t really work, but it sure makes a colorful story.)

What makes these men tick, Horwitz wondered. Why does the war hold such sway over them. In fact, he thought, why does the war hold such sway over so many people?

And thus begins one of the oddest of odysseys. Horwitz submerges himself in the South, since that’s where most of the war was fought, to find out for himself. The resulting exploration of place turns into a memorable cultural portrait of the South.

Horwitz decides to start in Charleston, South Carolina, at the site of Fort Sumter, where the war’s first shots were fired, but the War waylays him well before he gets there. On his way south, through North Carolina, he’s sidetracked into the world of the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy, some of whom attend Civil War-related meetings seven nights a week. To commemorate “Lee-Jackson Day,” a holiday once widely celebrated across the South that combined the birthdays of long-dead Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, the folks play Civil War trivia games.

At times, Horwitz acts as a fly on the wall as he takes in the things going on around him. But at his best, he is a full-blown participant, taking sides in the trivia games, dressing up for a reenactment, and offering his unique, submerged perspective on what he sees and experiences. Best of all, he strikes up conversations everywhere he goes, asking, asking, asking.

Horwitz tracks down the legend of Tara from Gone with the Wind. He meets the last living Confederate widow. He rushes through Virginia with a hard-core reenactor, Robert Lee Hodge, hitting as many Civil War sites as they can in a week, what Hodge calls a “Civil Wargasm.”

In one of my favorite encounters of the book, he talks with Shelby Foote, the Memphis writer who penned the sweeping three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative, and who gained national exposure as a kindly grandfather-looking “Voice of the South” in Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary. “It’s the sort of experience we never forget,” Foote told him. “I was in a lot of fistfights, maybe fifty in my life. The ones I remember with startling clarity are the ones I lost.”

While Horwitz discovers that the Civil War is very much alive throughout the South, he also discovers that it’s a Cold War. The lines are no longer just geographic, either: they’re racial, social, and economic, too.

That’s what helps make Confederates in the Attic more than just a fascinating collection of eccentric people—although that is what makes it so captivating. Horwitz manages to write an intensely thought-provoking book. Every eccentric brings a new shade of meaning to the discussion. For every hardcore reenactor like Hodge, who can lay on the ground and “bloat” to look like the dead Confederates in wartime photos, there’s a Michael Westerman, the nineteen-year-old victim of a racially motivated murder, killed while flying a Confederate flag from the bed of his pickup truck. Citizens of Richmond who debate the placement of a statue to the late tennis great Arthur Ashe bring up incredibly nuanced arguments that transcend notions of mere “pro” and “con.”

Horwitz doesn’t shy away from any of it. Confederates in the Attic astutely explores racism, political correctness, national and regional identity, and the relevance of our own history as a way to understand ourselves. Like any good journalist, Horwitz doesn’t pretend to have any answers, but he lays out as many sides to the story as possible so readers can think for themselves.

Horwitz does get a few facts wrong, and sometimes his interpretation is shaky (I take particular exception to the way he tends to portray Stonewall Jackson as a total crackpot). He leaves a few things out, and he stirs up trouble, too. I know some of the people involved in some of the stories, so I have the inside scoop on a few things. Horwitz commits no unpardonable sins, though, and I can forgive much because of the earnestness with which he approaches his quest.

“The present is just a split second,” Hodge tells Horwitz. “The past lasts forever. You can keep going back to it.”

Indeed, Confederates in the Attic is much the same. This marked my fifth or sixth time through the book. It stands as a landmark piece of feature journalism and was  easily one of the best books of the 1990s. Although almost twenty years old, I can keep going back to it, over and over.

————

Cross-posted at Emerging Civil War.

#16

Walden is one of those books everyone’s heard of, but I frequently wonder how many people have actually read it.

It is, of course, the very stuff of high school English classes. I still remember by eleventh grade teacher, Mrs. Cummings, tell us that Thoreau lived what Emerson preached. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the great American philosopher of his day, advocating a simpler lifestyle and harmony with nature; Henry David Thoreau lived a simpler lifestyle in a small log cabin next to Walden Pond, outside Concord, Massachusetts, where both men live. Together, they made up the Janus of American Transcendentalism.

“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately,” Thoreau wrote of his experience, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

His book, Walden, has since become part of the American literary canon, part of American myth, It’s a seminal work of nature writing.

But has anyone actually read it?

The first time I hit up Walden, I was studying for my comprehensive exams for my master’s in English at the University of Maine. On an early-autumn Saturday, I pilgrimaged to Walden, a four-hour drive, to read the book on the shores of the pond. I bought a copy at the bookstore there, read several chapters, then decided to hike around. Swimmers frolicked at the small beach near Walden’s east end. Canoeists drifted across the pond’s center. A train rumbled along the far ridge. This was hardly a natural setting of silence and solitude.

A hiking path rings Walden’s shores while another runs the crest of the ridgeline that circles the pond. Footpaths criss-cross between them like cobwebs. I always took the route that let me be as close to the water as possible. I wanted to see the pond’s nooks and crannies. People were tucked into almost every one. At least one couple, figuring it was “private enough,” were getting it on in the water a few feet offshore.

In later years, the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation would string barbed wire sans barbs along most of the footpaths as part of an erosion control project. So many feet trammeled the pathways that the hillsides themselves were getting packed and beaten. The fencing gave the woods a kind of concentration camp feel, if you can believe it. No one seemed to give the fencing any heed, anyway, though.

I spent so much time exploring on that first day that I didn’t have time to finish the book. Instead, I dipped it in the pond. I made sure it was sopping wet. Gingerly, I carried it, dripping, up the sloping paved walkway to the parking lot and tucked it into the truck of my car.

I’ve repeated the drenching only a few times since, giving away Walden-soaked copies of Walden as special gifts to a few dear friends over the years, people who’d “get it.” For such folks, the gift is a treasure.

I’ve returned to Walden several times over the years. On one early trip, my daughter talked me into swimming with her, although I’d not anticipated it at all. I waded into the pond with her and let her splash around, and I lifted her high into the air. My wife took pictures. Thereafter, my daughter always loved to return to “The Pond.”

I’ve returned to Walden, too, although I’ve never made it all the way through the book. I’ve read snippets. I suspect a lot of people can make that claim, at least. It helps that Thoreau virtually speaks in aphorisms—“to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely”…”a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone”… “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them” … ”Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”

When I graduated from high school, Mrs. Cummings gave me a dictionary as a gift. She inscribed it with what has become my favorite Thoreau-ism: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” I post that quote on my office door every few weeks.

Thoreau’s aphorisms are as rich as the maples along Walden’s shores as they flush gold and red in autumn. He gives himself over to a (mostly) self-sufficient lifestyle in the woods, and he finds delight in it. “I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself,” he says. He spends most of his days carrying out the daily business of living—building his cabin, tending to his beans, cutting firewood, fetching water—or exploring his surroundings. “[F]or I was rich,” he says, “if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly.”

I love, love, love the way Thoreau revels in the world around himself. It is enough to just be: “It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.”

Thoreau spent two years in the woods along Walden Pond. During that time, he frequently walked into town, where he had his mother cook for him sometimes. He took the first of his trips to the Maine woods during that time, too. So, he wasn’t the reclusive hermit history has sometimes led us to believe—an image he himself cultivated. “I love to be alone,” he wrote. “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

After his two-year sojourn, Thoreau returned to civilization. “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there,” he wrote. “Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time on this one.”

Yet, for the rest of his life, Thoreau seldom ventured too far away from his home in Concord. He went on trips—most notably to Cape Cod and back to Maine—but his tie to the lands around Concord bound him tight until his death in 1862.

Walden has never been out of print, so someone must be buying it—but I wonder if it’s one of those books that people have even if it’s one they haven’t necessarily read. Much of Thoreau’s mid-nineteenth-century style is cumbersome for modern readers, and parts of the book are downright preachy. Much of Thoreau’s prose is beautiful, too, though.

“[A]s the sun rose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was reveled, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle.”

To know such things exist in the world is reason to get up every day. That’s why I’ve come to believe that the idea of Thoreau, the idea of Walden, are what really matter most. “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature,” Thoreau wrote. “It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”

My return to Walden this week—all the way through the book for the first time ever—has been a treasure. It’s not that the book awed me, even if Thoreau’s legacy certainly does. Rather, it was good to be reminded why Thoreau is worth knowing. I, like so many of the writers I’ve spent time with over the past two weeks, owe him a tremendous debt for leading the way, for showing us how, for walking to the beat of his own drum.

“I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go on before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains,” Thoreau said. “I do not with to go below now.”

#15: Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation by L. Maarten Troost (2008)

The first time I landed in Shanghai, I couldn’t believe how big everything was. The terminal stretched off to some Whovian vanishing point. It was like that driving through the city, too—mile after mile of skyscraper, each as interesting to look at as the last. This was a city that wanted to be Manhattan but bigger, richer, busier.

But the bus windows showed me something distressing, too, as we rumbled across the coastal plain from the airport to the city: muddy canals choked with floating garbage, heaps of garbage and rubble scattered in back lots and side yards, an armada of small blue flatbed trucks jockeying for first place in a race that wasn’t even happening.

China turned my brain into an Escher landscape, constantly challenging me at every turn. I found new things to be amazed about, new things to wonder about, and new things to worry about.

China, I suspect, feels Escher-esque itself, thrashing about in the throes of an identity crisis as it lumbers out on the world stage: ancient and modern, beauty and squalor, opulent wealth and crippling poverty. Everything you can imagine about China is true—and so is its opposite. And everything is go, go, go.

I blogged extensively about my trips to China both times I was there (in 2009 and 2010), so I was eager to see what fellow traveler J. Maarten Troost had to say about his adventures, just a couple years before me, in Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation.

“I had been to dozens of Chinatowns. But this was the mother of all Chinatowns…” Troost said after arriving. “I understood nothing, a sensation that disturbed my psyche. I felt profoundly out of my element.”

In China, it doesn’t take long for a first-time visitor to realize just how very delusional he has been in terms of his assumptions about the country. If nothing else, traveling through China is a profoundly humbling experience, no more so than when you realize that nearly everything you thought you knew about the country, all your presumptions and book learning, your opinions, turn out to be utterly, completely wrong.

At times, I felt like Troost and I lived the same experience. People drive “as if to kill,” he says. He cringed at the unearthly haze that hung over the landscape and “swirled in gray and brown and yellow plumes.” He was trampled in the scrum-like surges that turned standing in queue into “a forum for physical sport.” Most of all, he was stunned by the number of people.

“From the outside, 1.3 billion people is simply a statistic,” he says. “Inside China, the enormity of the country’s population colors everything.”

For example, consider the limited number of names people can choose. “There are 88 million people in China named Zhang. There are more people called Chen in China than there are Canadians in Canada,” Troost writes. “It’s become so problematic that no one knows Hu’s Hu in China.”

Troost’s sense of humor drives much of the book. He is, quite honestly, hilarious. I’ve not laughed my way through a book like that in years. But his humor is witty and intelligent, often the result of his sharp observations. It’s also a way to make some of his insights go down a little smoother because, let’s face it, there’s much in China to worry about.

“[I]t’s difficult to spend a moment in China and not be utterly awed by the scale of the ongoing environmental catastrophe,” Troost observes. Together with India, he says, there are now 2.5 billion people in the global economy that just weren’t there fifteen years ago. “The consequences for the environment are alarming.”

The sky itself serves as a constant reminder. It’s “apocalyptic” in its smogginess. He has a buddy who lights up a cigarette so he get “clean smoke.” I, too, had heard of China’s legendarily bad pollution, although by the time I got there, I could see all the way into Beijing from the top of the Great Wall, some fifty miles distant. Apparently, in preparation for the Olympics, the Chinese government cleaned up the air—not by reducing pollution or instituting pollution control measures but by simply closing down thousands of factories and moving them elsewhere.

The water, too, usually seemed on the verge of bubbling into an open cesspool. “One third of all the freshwater in China—that is, all the rivers and lakes in this enormous country—is considered unsafe for industrial use,” Troost discovered. “When the water is so vile you can’t even use it in a lead paint factory because it’s too dirty, I’d say you have a water problem.”

Later, when he sees how sparse the once-snowy Himalayas have become, where much of China’s (and India’s) water comes from, he gets worried: ‎”and I tried to squelch that gnawing feeling that we are on the cusp of unsettling times.”

With 1.3 million people, who all need food and water and jobs and space, there aren’t a lot of options. “There is not vast empty hinterland in China capable of sustaining a huge population that isn’t already sustaining—barely—a huge population,” he says.

Add to that his “creeping awareness that there are no rules in China, that so much of life in China is essentially a flirtation with anarchy,” and you might understand Troost’s unease.

I always thought of China a little like the Wild West, but as Troost observes, China is getting impatient for the West to get the hell out of the way. “The general attitude among the Chinese toward Americans is similar to that of a young, hotshot quarterback waiting for the tired, banged-up veteran to step aside so he can lead the team,” he says.

My own experience with the Chinese was a bit different. I generally found them to be warm and friendly and intensely curious about us. I didn’t travel as freely or extensively among them as Troost did, so I didn’t get the breadth of exposure he did.

Impatience and disdain or not, part of the Chinese identity crisis stems from their fierce pride in being Chinese coupled with their hunger to embrace a Western standard of living. “Not everyone can have everything in China, not yet, but every day there are more who do,” Troost says. The future looks sunny (“okay, smoggy,) for China—“barring a complete societal collapse as environmental degradation undergoes devastating feedback loops.”

Alas, the burden of responsibility for China’s catastrophic environmental practices lies squarely on us.

In the United States, we squawk about shoddy goods, poisonous toothpaste, contaminated toys. We bemoan the lost jobs. We point to the slave labor in China, like the unfortunate people, kids even, snookered or kidnapped to work in the factories. Or we lament what China is doing to the environment…. But do we decide to buy domestically made, high-quality goods manufactured in a well-regulated environment that ensures humane working conditions? We do not.

My own travels over two years were limited to Shanghai, Nanjing, Xi’an, Beijing, and a couple smaller cities (although in China, “smaller” is relative). Troost goes far and wide, including a foray into occupied Tibet. By the end, at nearly 400 pages, the book feels long, although it doesn’t ever drag; I was just feeling travel fatigue, I suppose. Troost was, too, I think. For instance, he goes to Chengdu to see pandas but then hardly writes about what he sees. He starts to get a little perfunctory by the end, finally conceding, “What is here cannot all be seen by one man. Not in a lifetime.”

I’d agree. China is just too damn big, too larger-than-life. Too magnificent.

We need to pay attention. There’s more at stake than we could possibly imagine.

I’ve always found it somewhat ironic, if that’s the word, that two of the best novels I’ve ever read about America—Dvorak in Love and The Bride of Texas—were written by a Czech expatriate author who lived in Toronto. In fact, they’re two of the best novels I’ve ever read, period. Skvorecky, who died this past week at 87, had what one might call an interesting life—he grew up in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia (experiences which formed a substantial focus for much of his fiction), got into constant trouble in Communist Czechoslovakia for his writings, and was banned repeatedly. He and his wife emigrated to Canada in 1968, and he spent the rest of his life writing excellent novels and short stories, teaching literature, and publishing other Czech expatriates through his publishing house. Lots more details can be found in the NY Times obituary, or in the Telegraph obituary. A fuller literary appreciation will undoubtedly show up in the NY Review of Books soon.

He is perhaps best known for The Engineer of Human Souls, which is a fine and visionary novel about the role of the writer in society, any society, but takes on a deep irony by contrasting the life of Danny Smiricky, who happens to be Czech exile teaching in Canada (as was Skvorecky), with life under both the Nazis and the Communists. This makes it sound like a simple political novel, which it is far from being—it’s a deeply felt, albeit meandering, novel about individualism that happens to take place in multiple locales, with more than its fair share of pathos and humor. Skvorecky used Danny throughout his literary career—the early collections of Danny Smiricky stories are wonderful too, especially the jazz stories. And it’s all good–The Bass Saxaphone stands out here.

But the two that stand out in my mind are the two that concern America. Dvorak in Love is about just that—Dvorak’s journey to America in 1892 to 1895, which produced, among other works, his best-known work, Symphony No. 9 (“From the New World”). Of course, what Dvorak did in America is pretty much what he did in Bohemia all his life—he wandered around and listed to music that people played and sang—in villages, in towns, wherever he could. The novel captures that wonderfully, as Dvorak adapts negro songs and spirituals to symphonic form. But it captures more—Dvorak was in love with America, what it was becoming, and what it represented to many of his countrymen–its energy, its freedom. It’s a wonderful novel, told from multiple perspectives, and not least because Skvorecky is not blind to America’s faults, particularly its racial history, but still, like Dvorak, is enamored of what America represented to Europe and much of the rest of the world—hope.

This theme is explored in more detail in The Bride of Texas, a longer (and much more experimental) novel set in the American Civil War, which follows the exploits of a group of Czech immigrants who enlist in the Union Army. This actually happened—the Union ranks were loaded with immigrants, including Czech immigrants who served, as do the book’s characters, in the 26th Wisconsin battalion under Sherman. And while motives likely varied, there’s no question that at least some of it derived from Skvorecky’s area of concern—the feeling of gratitude to a country that offered hope. The novel itself is probably the most experimental of Skvorecky’s works, with its constant shifts of time and character—but it’s well worth the effort.

It’s easy to forget this sometimes, when the current American political circus seems to offer nothing but ignorance, mendacity and viciousness about immigration (and, lord knows, so many other things), what America used to represent to the world–hope. And to some extent it still does, although the past decade certainly hasn’t helped. But we’re all (or mostly all) descended from immigrants from somewhere, and it’s good to be reminded of why that is. Skvorecky was a wonderful writer with the ability to create a broad canvas in a number of areas—and like his Czech soldiers, I’m grateful to him for having brought me so much pleasure, and I will miss him.