[written for Mystery Scene Magazine's "Writers on Reading" column, February 2013 issue]
I was raised on a 75-foot fish tender in the Gulf of Alaska. In port, at low tide, it was a forty-two foot climb up an often ice-encrusted ladder to get to the library, but if you’re a born reader and an icy climb is the only way you can get to the library, you climb.
The Seldovia Public Library was one room in the basement of city hall. It was open once a week, on Monday nights, for three hours, seven to ten. Because there were so few books, each patron could check out only four at a time. Susan the librarian started me on Nancy Drew.
I read all the Nancy Drew Susan had in short order, and then I read everything else on her shelves. Because I was a kid on a boat, I was always looking for stories about other kids on boats. Eventually, Susan found me a copy of The Lion’s Paw by Robb White.
It’s World War II. Fifteen-year old Ben’s father is lost at sea in the Pacific. Penny and Nick are siblings on the lam from the orphanage that would split them up. They stow away in Ben’s sailboat, the Hard A Lee. Ben’s uncle is going to sell it, so Ben, Penny and Nick decide to run away on the Hard A Lee together.My favorite kind of book is a how-to book. You can’t put enough detail into a book about how someone lives their life or does their job or falls in love or commits a crime to suit me. The Lion’s Paw is a how-to book. How to run away. How to sail a boat. How to be a captain. How to be crew. How to hide a sailboat in plain sight. How not to wrestle an alligator.
How to go on a quest.
There is that one book every writer can point to as the story that inspired them to tell their own. The Lion’s Paw may be the first book I ever read where I looked at the author’s name on the cover and wondered, “Who is this guy? How does he know all this stuff?” and more importantly “Did he write anything else?”
He did, and I read it all. And then I started writing my own.
And it is finally again in print. Buy it here. I promise you won't be sorry.
# Permanent link to How not to wrestle an alligator.
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
I was going to leave this book starless, because if there is any truth in me I can't say I enjoyed it, but it is a very well written. A painfully realistic grunt's eye view of the war in Vietnam, I'm still cleaning the shit out of my ears.
The title comes from what each soldier carried on patrol into the jungle.
The things they carried were largely determined by necessity...Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations...Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap he'd stolen on R&R in Sydney...Ted Lavender carried 6 or 7 ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RTO, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament...As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother's distrust of the white man, his grandfather's old hunting hatchet...Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost 2 pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away.
The narrative goes back and forth in time, before, during and after the war, and although the author refers to himself by name, he cautions the reader repeatedly not to believe everything he says, and that the truth isn't really the point anyway.
I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.
The creepiest story is "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," when a soldier manages to bring his stateside girlfriend to the war, and she takes to it a lot better than anyone could have imagined. But the story that sticks to me most is "On the Rainy River," when Tim gets his draft notice and takes off for six days. He thinks he's going to Canada, but
I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.
Not an easy read, but worth it.
# Permanent link to I’m still cleaning the shit out of my ears.
Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory by Mickey Rapkin
Go ahead, make all the fun of me you want, I love a cappella. It's probably my mom's fault, she loved Broadway musicals and I grew up knowing all the lyrics to My Fair Lady and Oklahoma and, yes, The Music Man, where Professor Harold Hill keeps seducing the town council away from their duty into four-part harmony. I loved the Spike Lee documentary about a cappella, too. So it follows that I loved Pitch Perfect, that great little 2012 film about two collegiate a cappella teams, one all-boy, one all-girl, competing for some prize or other (Who cares? The music was what mattered.). When the credits rolled and I saw that the film had been based on an actual book, of course I had to read it.
While there are virtually no similarities between book and film, nevertheless this is one of those books specializing in a single subject that is fun and informative and left me googling the dates for the next A Cappella Festivella at UAA. Rapkin writes
That a cappella began with Gregorian chant in the church shouldn't come as a surprise--what's closer to God than the unadorned voice? The music then traveled. In time, the Puritans would embrace shape-note singing and a book of vocal spirituals called The Sacred Harp. Call-and-response singing from Africa, meanwhile, would mingle with these vocal traditions to become American gospel. Somewhere along the way, what began as a service to a higher power went secular. Then it went pop. This is how...
Rapkin takes us from the Mills Brothers in 1931 to Pete Seeger and the Weavers' 1950s cover of Solomon Linda's 1939 song "Mbube," better known to us all (and especially my mother, who was also a huge folk music fan) as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" or "Wimoweh." We get quickly to collegiate a cappella, which to my great surprise is no longer represented only by the Whiffenpoofs (and it is a miracle to me that they have survived this long with that name). Turns out Pitch Perfect wasn't that far off, that today practically every college worthy of the name fields one and often more than one a cappella group, although
...a cappella is the vestige of college life that dare not speak its name. There is no shame, no real social stigma, in admitting you were a Sigma Chi. You might discuss it on a first date. You might even put it on a resume. A cappella, however, is topic non grata.
Whatever, and Rapkin also writes
On campus--though it's crass to say--a cappella will get you laid.
Rapkin writes about three groups, the tradition-ridden Beelzebubs of Tufts, the bad boy UV Hullabahoos, and the UO Divisi, who, everyone agrees, even the group that won, were robbed at the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella in 2005 because one of the judges didn't like them singing Usher's "Yeah!" instead of something like, well, maybe "Wimoweh." The book is about the Divisi coming back from that, or not, and the Bubs and the B'hoos trying to figure out what they are.
The Bubs aren't professional musicians. They're students. They've been using the word profession as a noun, when they should have been thinking of it as an adjective...
The thing about college a cappella is that it exists in this incredible space: college...The problem arises when you take a cappella out of the context of college--then what is it, really? A cover band. With no instruments.
Pro or am, some of the groups, especially the Bubs, get a hell of a ride out of a cappella, including right into the White House, onto the David Letterman Show and all the way to the Philippines. A lot of them find it hard to give it up when they leave college, and remain very active in their alumni associations, which makes colleges love a cappella groups all the more. An active alumnus is an alumnus who writes checks.
A whole 'nother subculture of which I knew nothing, until now. Worth reading.
One note: There will be significant time spent on YouTube during and following the reading of this book. You have been warned.
# Permanent link to A cappella will get you laid.
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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3F7yUo1fKw&w=640&h=360]
Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist by Thomas Levenson
This is one of those books that only underscores how little I know. I knew about Newton, sure, I'd even heard that great line of Pope's ('God said Let Newton be! and there was light.') but I certainly didn't know that after thirty years at Cambridge Newton got a patronage job at the Royal Mint and pretty much personally hauled the British nation back from the brink of bankruptcy, and further, acted in the capacity of criminal investigator (squee!) in chasing down counterfeiters.
Reading this book is like eating a really long, really good dinner sitting next to a really good raconteur who knows all the fun facts about Newton and his time. Herein, you discover that the story about the apple was not, in fact, apocryphal, and that
In 1943, at a dinner party at the Royal Society Club, a member pulled from his pocket two large apples of a variety called Flower of Kent, a cooking apple popular in the 1600s. These were, the owner explained, the fruit of one of the grafts of the original at Woolsthorpe. Newton's apple itself is no fairy tale, it budded, it ripened; almost three centuries later it could still be tasted in all the knowledge that flowed from its rumored fall.
Eating of the fruit of the the tree of knowledge. Really, I just have to give another [squee!].
They were crowd sourcing back then. Yes, they were:
...how glorious it would be if gentlemen of England rose from their beds and made similar observations all over the country, building a picture not just of local conditions but of the varieties of climate throughout the realm...Hooke published his meteorological call to arms in the journal of the Royal Society...
You'll find out why coins are ridged around the edge instead of smooth, that counterfeiting flourished in spite of a freely applied death penalty (always supposing you didn't have L6,000 to buy a pardon), that Newton spent twenty years trying to turn lead into gold, which had everything to do with his determination to prove the existence of God, and then refused to take communion from the Church of England before he died.
Newton and indeed all science, or natural philosophy as it was called then benefited by the explosion of print media at that time. Anyone with an axe to grind and a few schillings could print a broadside and see it circulated, including William Chaloner, a coyner (counterfeiter) who wrote a broadside attacking bad practices inside the Mint and actually succeeded in getting the ear of the Parliamentary committee that oversaw it. He came way too close to getting a job inside the Mint itself and proved to be Newton's biggest foe. Chaloner, who got his start with sex toys, faked coins of every denomination, the first Bank of England notes, lottery tickets, you name it, if it served as legal tender, Chaloner made a copy and sold it.
He was very careful about never distributing any of the fakes personally, farming that out to friends and associates, and therein his downfall, because
Like any street cop in history--and unlike any other fellow of the Royal Society or Cambridge don--[Newton] would have to wade hip-deep into London's underworld.
And wade he does. He even has himself appointed a justice of the peace so as to solve problems of jurisdiction over London's seven counties, and then, like any good natural philosopher, he starts gathering data.
Most of London's coiners did not grasp the danger this strange new Warden posed. The documents Newton didn't burn [and the story behind that involves torture, extralegal, shades of extreme interrogation], all written between 1698 and 1700, reveal the almost unfair contest between the Warden and those who tried to trade in bad money.
You get the feeling that Levenson feels a little sorry for those hapless counterfeiters, because Newton?
Always gets his man.
Highly recommended, and a quick read, too.
# Permanent link to God said, Let Newton be! and there was light.
If you have a problem with hunting or trapping, stifle it.
From Chapter 4 of Alaska Traveler: If you decide to fly out of Anchorage into the Bush, you’ll be traveling on anything from a Twin Otter (fourteen passengers) to a Piper Super Cub (just you and one pilot and your knees will be crammed into the small of his or her back). Another big difference…
Read more If you have a problem with hunting or trapping, stifle it.
Mousetronaut: Based on a (Partially) True Story by Mark Kelly
The sweetest little picture book, about Meteor the Mouse, one of a rodent team of, uh, mission specialists on board a space shuttle mission who saves the day. At the end Kelly includes an afterword with a brief history of NASA and lots of fun details about travel in space.
During my first flight in 2001, there were eighteen mice on board. All of them, with one exception, clung to inside of the mesh during the entire mission. One mouse, smaller than the rest, seemed to enjoy the experience and effortlessly floated around the cage. The story of Mousetronaut is inspired by that mission. We all watched him as he enjoyed the feeling of being weighless. I started to think about that mouse and what it would be like to have him as part of our crew.
The illustrations are just marvelous (lovelovelove the one of Meteor squeezing in between the control panels to get the key, and the one of him in his space suit), and you know the details are right. Any kid of any age will enjoy this book, and more importantly, no adult will be bored with having to read it 9 times in a row to his kid.
# Permanent link to One mouse, smaller than the rest…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, July 5, 2010]
So I'm sitting here bawling because John Adams just died. It doesn't seem to matter that it happened 182 years ago.
The best biographers understand that a biography is not only a history of the title subject but a time machine to the time in which he or she lived. Having read David McCullough's John Adams, I now feel like I was in the room when John (look at that, we're on a first-name basis) rose in Congress to speak in support of the Declaration of Independence, like I was sitting at Abigail's elbow when she wrote to him wherever he was, Philadelphia, Paris, Amsterdam, London. There are so many great word pictures, like the one of John helping to repel boarders when his ship came under attack crossing the Atlantic, told this time in the words of the ship's captain.
And Abigail. Has there ever been such a woman? Has there ever been such a partnership? It's almost enough to make me believe in marriage.
Of course it helps that John and Abigail both were such indefatigable correspondents (they weren't happy that they were so many times separated but we sure lucked out) and such amazingly good writers. The quality of their writing, as well as that of their multitude of other correspondents is certain to leave you wondering where the hell that ability went.
McCullough's organizational skills in plucking just the right phrase from just the right letter are astonishing, and his own prose doesn't suffer by comparison, either. A glorious, you-are-there book.
# Permanent link to John Adams just died, dammit.
One of the best half hours you will ever spend.
I first read this book back in my teens, and I was in Hawaii recently and decided it was time to reread it. It has held up really well in the interim. Okay, Michener not the greatest master of the craft of writing, agreed, but he knows how to tell a story.
Here he tells a history of Hawaii through the eyes of the different races who lived it, beginning with the Polynesians who emigrated in open canoes across five thousand miles of open ocean 600 years before Prince Henry the Navigator sponsored his first voyage, navigating only by the stars and a few scraps of oral history. Then come the Calvinist missionaries from New England who wrought such unthinking, well-meaning havoc on the native Hawaiian population, with help from the whalers and traders, who were all then followed by the Chinese and the Japanese imported by the missionary descendants for labor in the sugar cane and pineapple fields, although they sure didn't stay there.
This epic narrative, 1,036 pages in length, is ambitious and all-encompassing. (He probably thought (or his publisher did) that if he included the story of the Filipinos the book would be too long to sell.) The story of the four Sakagawa brothers and their poor sister (I will never forgive Michener for what he did to Reiko), and the story of the 442nd Battalion in World War II is sobering and instructive, and I'm pretty sure Shig's story is the fictionalized version of Senator Daniel Inouye's life.
The story I found most compelling was that of Char Nyuk Tsin, also known as Wu Chow's Auntie, also known as Pake Kokua. This peasant woman is kidnapped from her village in rural China, rescued from a career as a prostitute by an inveterate gambler and immigrates to Hawaii with him. He contracts leprosy and is banished to the leper colony on Molokai, also known as hell on earth. Nyuk Tsin accompanies him there voluntarily and nurses him till he dies, after which she takes on all the other lepers as patients, which earns her the title of Pake Kokua (Hawaiian for, roughly, Chinese Helper, which really ought to read Saint).
She scratched his grave into the sandy soil, choosing the side of a hill as she had promised, and where winds did not blow and where, if there was no tree, there was at least a ledge of rock upon which his spirit could rest on its journeys from and to the grave.
Finally the authorities in Honolulu, who have been supremely indifferent to the terrible state of the leper colony thus far, allow her to return home. There, she and her four sons, Africa, America, Australia, and Asia (really, and the whole Chinese name thing is fascinating, and dizzying), get their hui working to found a financial dynasty that would eventually buy the land out from under the descendants of the missionaries. This book is worth reading for Nyuk Tsin's story alone. I defy you not to tear up when she returns to Molokai to sit next to her husband's grave and report to him on the state of their family.
There is an hilarious scene where one of the missionary descendents writes a marvelous expose entitled
Sex Aboard the Brigantine
or
They Couldn't Have been Seasick All the Time
or
There was Friggin' in the Riggin'which is about exactly what you think it is about. I only wish Michener had let us read the whole thing, and I would love to have seen the original source material he got that from. I am also intensely curious as to what the Islanders themselves think of Michener's book, and how close it is to the truth. I have googled madly and found very little criticism of it, or comment of any kind for that matter. Be interesting to know.
Well worth reading.
# Permanent link to There was Friggin’ in the Riggin’
Get your toast out with a fork.
Really can’t repost this often enough.
