Book Review: Greenland

 By David Santos Donaldson

• Pub Date: 2021

• Genre: Literary fiction, magical realism

• Where I bought this book: Roebling Books & Coffee, Covington, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: I liked the cover art (by Devan Shimoyama)

• Bookmark used: Roebling Books & Coffee   

 ****** 

   The esteemed Edwardian-era author E.M. Forster wrote about shaking off the shackles of his time and place. His novels and essays revolved around humanism and man's place in the world.

    In this debut novel, Donaldson attempts to go further, wandering through time, space, and thoughts. His protagonist and budding Forster fictional biography, Kipling Starling, tackles issues of accepting oneself and asserting your color, your culture, and your sexuality in a world that isn't sure it wants to have you around.

    It starts with Kip explaining his novel-within-a-novel -- an examination of the three years that Forster, a conscientious objector, lived in Alexandria, Egypt, as a Red Cross volunteer during World War I. There, he met and fell in love with Mohammed el Adl, a tram conductor.

    Kip, under pressure from himself and his publisher to rewrite the novel in three weeks, locks himself in the basement of an apartment he shares with his lover, Ben. In doing so, he imagines himself taking on the persona of Mohammed -- both are young, gay Black men, and each has fallen in love with an older, more established white man. Even the settings pair the two men -- in 1919, Mohammed spent six months in an isolated prison cell.

    From there, the themes evolve as Mohammed speaks through Kip's novel, and Kip tells his own biography and evolution as a writer and gay man.     

    Kip is having an identity crisis and unable to define or accept himself. He says he is British because he was born and raised in "a perfectly Victorian house" -- and not British because his parents are of Caribbean and Indian heritages. He is named after one of the foremost racist and colonialist intellectuals of all time, the promoter and defender of the white man's burden. 

Take up the White Man's burden--

        And reap his old reward,

The blame of  those ye better,

        The hate of those ye guard--

     Kip is also aware that in his upbringing -- not unlike the times of Forster and Muhammed -- "if displays of desire were out of the question, homosexuality was unmentionable."

    Kip has additional problems. His closest friend, Carmen, a Spanish woman open about her need to express and flaunt her sensuous nature, is dismissive of men, gay, straight or both, who fail to do the same, in favor of being comfortable. She puts Kip and Ben into that category. Kip's literary hero was a closeted gay man who published his only book addressing the issue of his homosexuality posthumously. 

    And in his writings, and in Forster's love affairs, Kip sees himself as many characters, but always the object of affection -- the exploited Mohammed, and the potential lover of Mohammed -- through the aura of time.

    It all gets complicated, and you have to pay attention to the blending of dimensions, characters, and actions. There's a sense of magical realism here, even while Kip expresses his desire to be grounded in the reality of the present.

Book Review: Small Mercies

 By Dennis Lehane

• Pub Date: 2023

• Genre: Historical fiction

• Where I bought this book: Barnes & Noble, Florence, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: I read about the Boston busing crisis in Common Ground, by J. Anthony Lukas, so this one resonated with me

• Bookmark used: Hobart Book Village, in Hobart, N.Y., which I visited the summer of 2024   

 ********* 

    This novel, of course, takes as its theme the Boston busing crisis, in the summer of 1974, when a federal judge drew up a plan and ordered the Boston Public Schools to desegregate. 

    But it encompasses so much more: racism, the Boston Mafia, a family crisis, insular neighborhoods, drug addictions, poverty, and a hot, dry summer in a city already boiling over with racial turmoil.

    It's a rich character study of the Southie neighborhood, its denizens and its surroundings. It's moving, melancholy, sometimes funny, and a tale that reverberates today.

    It centers around Mary Patricia Fennessy, known to one and all as Mary Pat, a pillar of her South Boston community, a stout defender of her Southie heritage and all that entails. But as she gets older, having been abandoned by two husbands, seen one son fight in Vietnam and die from a drug addiction, and her only daughter in serious trouble, her rage ramps up. She begins asking questions.

    Is the Boston Mafia, led by Marty Butler and his men, a protector of Southie? Are the Black people over in Roxbury and Mattapan really just a bunch of lazy thugs? Is her Irish Catholic heritage, and its people, really something to lord over others? And most importantly: Did she raise her children right?   

    We get to know the leaders of the anti-busing brigade, some real and some fictional.  There's Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, whom they call Teddy, because he was one of them. But since he defended busing, they now call him a race traitor, and we see as they assault and spit on him during the demonstrations.

    And we learn about the ugliness of the neighborhood kids who celebrate racism, and the Black folks who survive it. (Well, not all of them survive. There the mysterious death of one Black kid who was in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time, and the impact it had on Black people, white people, and the cops who investigate it.)

    Lehane, born and reared in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood, has written several novels exploring his hometown and its surroundings. His genres have included mysteries and crime, and topics have included violence, loyalty, and a gritty underworld. This one has them all.

Book Review: The Milky Way Smells of ...

 By Jillian Scudder

• Pub Date: 2024

• Genre: Non-fiction, Astrophysics

• Where I bought this book: Joseph-Beth Bookstore, at Books by the Banks, Cincinnati 

• Why I bought this book: The author talked me into it

• Bookmark used: Astroquizzical, another book by Dr. Scudder   

 ****** 

    When I first asked Dr. Scudder at the Books by the Banks Bookfair which of her books I should buy, she asked me if I wanted serious or silly. Of course, my first response was serious, because I wanted to be that important, consequential guy who respected science.

    But then she talked up the silly book as carefully detailed, even profound, if a bit light-hearted. She said she had fun writing and researching it.

    So I grabbed it, and I'm glad I did. 

    It provides a wealth of information and oddball facts, as well at the significant science behind the details. You want proof? It has 45 pages of notes referencing peer-reviewed papers, most of them published in top-rated scientific journals -- with links to those  original works.

    So while the facts may seem outlandish, they have important scientific bases. 

    For instance, the fact that parts of Pluto are mostly crater-free -- discovered during a New Horizon flyby in 2015 -- was a shocking unknown until then. Astrophysicists assumed that Pluto was covered with up to 40,000 craters up to 30 kilometers wide, because, well, because lots of celestial bodies fly around out there, and they have been known to crash into each other.

    But Pluto, and in particular, the surface of Sputnik Planitia -- that's the heart-shaped feature found on the dwarf planet -- is practically devoid of craters of any size. The current thinking is that some of Pluto's surfaces are newly created by the way nitrogen bubbles up to the colder surface and freezes like icebergs, which erases or covers the craters. 

    Or this: Venus also has few craters. But the current thinking here is different: Volcanoes on Venus regularly erupt, and what is erupted covers up the craters. Thus, parts of the surfaces of both Venus and Pluto are much younger than other parts, but for entirely separate reasons.

    All of this is important, because it helps us better understand our solar system, and the universe, more each day. And, because it's fun to know.

    One more thing: Whenever one reads books by astrophysicists, always read the footnotes. They are complementary to the tale and often amusing, like a smirky, knowing aside from a knowledgeable companion.

    This books is no exception. Dr. Scudder enjoys ragging on her fellow scientists for the way they name the stuff in the universe. Usually, it's boring, like a Very Large Crater. But she notes that one darker section of Pluto was originally named Cthulhu Macula, and in a footnote, explains: "Yes, astronomers are nerds. Charon, Pluto's moon, has a region named Mordor Macula."

    In another section, she talks about how it's difficult to grow anything in Martian regolith because it's considered "highly deleterious to cells." She said she'd rather write something like "Mars is great as long as you don't want anything alive to stay that way," but editors of scientific journals frown on such unscientific language.

    Her footnote reads: "It's too bad. It'd really liven up a paper."

Book Review: Wild Houses

 By Colin Barrett

• Pub Date: 2024

• Genre: Irish literature

• Where I bought this book: Oblong Books, Millerton, N.Y. 

• Why I bought this book: I read his previous short story collection, which was OK, so I wanted to give his first novel a try

• Bookmark used: Corner Bookstore, New York   

 ******** 

   This isn't your Ireland of the green and red of Mayo, stone walls and green grass along the N-17, and hoisting up the Sam Maguire.

    No, this is the rural, small-town Ireland filled with exhilarated sadness, where the rain gets in your shoes, and life is dejected and cold.

    And all this is written by a fellow who knows his places. Barrett grew up along the River Moy, in Ballina and Foxtrot, settings for this wonderfully melancholy first novel about the lost souls of the young and old going nowhere, unsure of what they are looking for, and unwilling or unable to find it.

    It's the Ireland where beer and liquor is omnipresent, but without an opium problem, rarely a drug of choice.

He knew the pharmaceutical tastes of the average Mayoite tended away from those substances that encouraged narcosis, introversion and melancholy -- traits the natives already possessed in massive hereditary infusions -- in favour of uppers, addys and coke and speed; drugs designed to rev your pulse and blast you out of your head.

    The characters are well drawn, mostly losers and not necessarily likeable, but surprisingly able to carry the tale. The writing is knowing and sympathetic, drawing on their backgrounds and upbringings to paint a full picture of their flaws and traumas. The overall story is compelling and insightful, although little changes in their lives.

    It's as if the universe is telling us that life goes on, regardless. 

They tackled each day, which was usually just like the day before, in a spirit of inured rue.

    You start with Dev, a lonely, depressed young man bullied by his classmates, deserted by his father, who now lives alone after his mother died. Asked if it suits him to live in an isolated. decrepit old farmhouse, he shrugs. "It's just -- it's just how it ended up."

    There's Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, two hoodlums who do as their told, without knowing or caring why. There's Cillian and Doll English, small-time drug dealers who cross the bosses of the Ferdia brothers. And there's Nicky, Doll's 17-year-old girlfriend, the only one with a hint of ambition, but who allows her friends to thwart even her limited dreams.

    To round out the crew, there's an assortment of guilt-instilling Irish mothers and wayward Irish fathers.

    When the Ferdias persuade a reluctant Dev to get involved in a complicated plan of revenge against the English boys, we get character studies, tales told through pain and flashback, and some of the finest writing in Ireland today, worthy of being longlisted for the 2024 Booker prize.

Book Review: Orbital

  By Samantha Harvey

• Pub Date: 2023

• Genre: Space, Science fiction, Literary fiction

• Where I bought this book: Oblong Books, Millerton, N.Y. 

• Why I bought this book: It's the 2024 Booker Prize winner

• Bookmark used: Top 10 Most Challenged Books, from Roebling.com  

 **********

    Samantha Harvey's love letter* to planet Earth reverberates with rapid-fire brilliance on every page. 

    But it's much more than that. It's a paean to the solar system, its exploration, and our humanity. 

    It's there in the description of the astronauts and cosmonauts watching in wonder at seeing the aurora australis** from above.

    It's there as they travel down east from the North Pole, past the Alaskan and Canadian coastlines, over the Pacific and South America, before swinging across the South Atlantic to Africa and up to the Middle East before watching the "first crack of silver" marking their fifth or sixth sunrise of the day. 

    It's there as they watch, helplessly, as a typhoon bores down on and eventually assaults the Philippines.

    It's there as author Harvey shows the blackness of the deep oceans and the color palettes of the land: The field of gold of Polynesia, the blues of the Indian Ocean, the purple-green of the Nile River. 

    It's in Uzbekistan, an expanse of ochre and brown. It's in the apricot desert of Takla Makan,*** It's in the rose-flushed and snow-covered mountains of Asia. It's there as Astronaut Nell looks down during her spacewalk: Cuba pink with morning, the turquoise shallows of the Caribbean; her left foot obscuring France, her right foot Germany.

    More than a mere novel, the 2024 Booker Prize-winner reads like a dazzling think piece in the best literary journal, At 200 pages, it ends too soon. But as you set it aside, you agree with some of her final words about life on a minor planet revolving around an ordinary star in an obscure part of the Milky Way: "The past comes, the future, the past. It's always now, it's never now."

    Its plot is simple: A single day, 18 revolutions around the Earth in the lives of four astronauts, Nell, Chie, Shaun, and Pietro from America, Europe and Japan, and two cosmonauts, Anton and Roman, from Russia, as they live, work, and play in the International Space Station. In small snippets, we learn about their lives at home, growing up. Learn about their families. Learn about their travels on earth. Learn why they wanted to go to space.

    They reflect on life in the cramped quarters, the state of the planet, and their place in the universe. They note how from 250 miles above, the Earth is "just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war." They see no borders except for the land and the sea. Countries are indistinguishable.

    Except when the sun is on the other side, they see the lights of their hometowns below: Seattle, Osaka, London, Bologna, St. Petersburg, Moscow. 

    And politics below sometimes intrudes on the international mission of peace above. Because of "engaging political disputes" on Earth, they must use their "national toilet" in the Soviet-built module or the American one. Americans, Japanese and Europeans on one side, Russians on the other.

    They follow the rule but find it amusing. "I'm going to take a national pee, Shaun will say. Or Roman: I'm going to go and do one for Russia." 

    In 1969, while piloting Apollo 11 alone, Michael Collins snapped a photo of the lunar module taking off from the moon, with the Earth hanging in the background. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were in the Eagle, and the rest of humanity was on Earth.     

NASA photo

   

Michael Collins is the only human being not in that photo, it is said. ...(But) what of all the people on the other side of earth that the camera can't see, and everybody in the southern hemisphere which is in the night sky and gulped by the darkness of space? ... In truth, nobody is in that photograph, nobody can be seen. Everybody is invisible. ... The strongest, most deductible proof of life in that photo is the photographer himself. ... In that sense, the most enchanting thing about Collins's image is that, at the moment of taking the photograph, he is really the only human presence it contains.

    Sublime. It's thoughtful, soulful, and mindful. It shows the earth being "wired and wakeful." You want to read it slowly, mark every other paragraph, then read it again. Read it with a cup of tea on the table and cat in your lap, poking at your skin, the pinpricks making you feel alive, if Earthbound.

    It is truly a book for the ages.

------------------------------------------------

* I'll admit to stealing this term from a friend

** The Southern Lights

*** A desert in the Xinjiang province in northwest China. Often spelled in English as Taklamakan