2016 Summer Reading List: Let the reading begin!

>>Listen to the Summer Reading Call-in

Our annual summer reading call in once again produced an amazing list of titles. Thanks to regular co-hosts Chris Robinson and John Ernst, and special guest host Paul Graham, for bringing so much to the process. You’re in on the reading conspiracy, too! And, you can still add your recommendations in the comment section or email them to me at [email protected]  Remember, we’re interested in every genre, classic or just off the presses.

Ellen Rocco, NCPR Station Manager

I don’t know about you, but my reading can be plotted on a sine curve. I will go weeks reading hardly anything other than work-related articles or six back issues of The New Yorker or Atlantic magazines. (Okay, and People in the dentist’s office.)

Then, I’ll devour one book after another, drunk on fiction, non-fiction, poetry–stories and words.

So, from my erratic reading of recent months, a few titles.

First, a couple of titles by two writers who live and work in this region. Full disclosure: both are friends of mine.

In Memory of Bread: A Memoir, Paul Graham. Love beer and bread and pasta? Imagine a gluten-free life: not because it’s trendy but because you have celiac disease and gluten can kill you. Paul takes a deep dive into the place of gluten-rich foods in human history, provides the scientific underpinnings for gluten allergies and, more than anything, mourns and comes to terms with the elimination of all gluten from his diet. Don’t get the wrong idea: this book is for anyone interested in food and food history. It is beautifully written. Here’s a link to the very nice review in The Washington Post.

You may have heard about my other regional pick, Leaves Torn Asunder by Glenn Pearsall. Todd Moe interviewed Glenn about this volume of historical fiction–a first for Glenn, who in the past has published Adirondack history volumes.

Among other recent reads I’d recommend:

Hanya Yanagihari’s novel A Little Life. The writing is insightful and fluid; the story follows the lives of four young men whose friendship and history with each other is surprisingly gripping. I didn’t expect to like this one as much as I did.

I believe Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson was recommended by John Ernst sometime in the past year. I finally got around to it this spring and liked the context–and personal stories of some passengers–he adds to the basic bit of history we all know. I’ve shared with several friends who are strictly non-fiction readers.

And here are two from recent years that are worth your time if you missed them when they were making the circuit:

The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena: A Novel, Anthony Marra

During the call in, we had a little conversation about good titles for summer book groups with a focus on the Adirondacks. Here are a few that were mentioned:

An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser. Perfect to pair with the more recent take on the classic American news story that became the basis for Dreiser’s iconic novel:

A Northern Light, Jennifer Donnelly

An Adirondack Passage: The Cruise of the Canoe Sairy Gamp, Christine Jerome

Short Carries, Elizabeth Folwell

 

John Ernst, Call in co-host, Elk Lake/NY

Dear Mr. You, Mary-Louise Parker (2015) I’ve been reading a lot of memoirs recently and Parker’s reputation as an actress who has won a Tony, an Emmy, an Obie, and a Golden Globe Award drew me to this one. No names are named here. This is not a kiss-and-tell effort. Instead, Parker organizes her book as a series of letters to men –- real, imagined and composite – who have played a role in her life. The result is a series of incandescent images of key moments and experiences and feelings rather than a start-to-finish slice of a life. Parker writes about the boyfriend from Hell, about a firefighter she met briefly after 9/11, about the death of her father, about a priest who was important in her childhood. Her writing is direct, colloquial, and unstintingly revealing. At times it is funny. At times it brims with emotion. Can she write? You better believe it. In a jacket blurb Mary Karr says of this book, “I drank it down in one gulp, then started back at page one again.” I felt compelled to do the same thing. This is a unique, brave and completely personal book which has Parker’s unique fingerprints all over it and shimmers with conviction and originality. Even if I weren’t half in love with the author, I would have been impressed.

A Rage for Order: The Middle East from Tahrir Square to Isis, Robert F. Worth (2016)

Bob Worth, a correspondent for The New York Times for 14 years was Beirut Bureau Chief from 2007-2011. He also has an Adirondack connection. His parents, Blaikie and Bob Worth, have been active in the Adirondack Explorer, the Adirondack Museum and many other organizations. In this riveting and timely book, Worth traces the events of the Arab Spring, from the self-immolation in Tunisia that was the initial spark, through the epicenter in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, and on to Libya, Yemen, and Syria. Worth tells the story through the words and experiences of actual participants. The people come alive on the page, and they illuminate the complex cross-currents of culture, religion, and history at play in the region. It’s a searing and saddening story. as in country after country the initial burst of democratic participation and national unity gives way to sectarian violence and the chaos of clashing militias. The strongest impression I took away from what Worth chronicles with great passion and skill, is how little that was really happening on the ground was reported and discussed in this country. The U.S. is barely mentioned here. This is not our story, although we continue to think that it is and that we can affect it, if not control it. If you care about the knowing the people and events that have shaped the Middle East over the past critical five years, I highly recommend that you read A RAGE FOR ORDER. It is a brilliant piece of work.

Before the Fall – Noah Hawley (2016) Also: The Good Father; The Punch; A Conspiracy of Tall Men

This is a cracking good thriller by a novelist, screen-writer and producer who has won Emmy, Golden Globe, Pen, Critics’ Choice and Peabody awards. He is currently executive producer and writer for the cable series, Fargo. It begins with the assembling on a private plane of a small group of the highly privileged, including the head of a Fox-like news network, an investment banker about to be indicted for money-laundering, their families, the plane’s crew, and a down-and-out artist who has been offered a ride from Martha’s Vineyard to New York City. 16 minutes after take-off, the plane disappears from radar and crashes into the North Atlantic. All aboard perish except the painter, who swims 25 miles to shore in the darkness, beating off sharks, towing the 4-year-old son of the broadcast executive. What follows is an investigation into the cause of the crash – terrorism, sabotage, mechanical failure, pilot error?  — and a media riot examining under hot TV lights the personal lives of all on board. Hawley has a sharp understanding of the kind of news organization that believes its function is to create news rather than report it, and he is skilled at delineating recognizable characters with a few strokes. This is my top candidate for summer entertainment. It comes with a bracing view of the contemporary world at its ugliest and most vicious.

Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America, T.S. Stiles (2015) Also: Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War; The First Tycoon: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

T.J. Stiles won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer for his biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt. He has just picked up his second Pulitzer for this biography of a very different participant in post-Civil War America – George Armstong Custer. The trials of the title refer not only to the strains of life and war but to two courts martial within 6 years. To many people Custer is a romantic figure, with his flowing blond locks, his buckskin and velvet non-standard costumes and his genius for self-promotion. Custer was indeed a courageous and occasionally brilliant cavalry officer. He was also a wartime Southern sympathizer, a racist, a compulsive gambler, a womanizer, a toady to the famed and powerful and an inept political dabbler. His wife, the strong-minded Elizabeth, adored him, though he put her through years of uncertainty and jealousy. This is a fair and complete, warts and all biography of Custer. It is not the story of the Little Big Horn, the subject of a shelf of excellent books. The battle is treated concisely in an epilogue. Instead, this is the story of a changing America, when a romantic age was giving way to corporate power, political deal-making and wars of attrition. I found it never less than compelling reading.

Fifteen Dogs: An Apologue – Andre Alexis (2015) Also: Childhood; Asylum; Pastoral

Occasionally a friend will suggest a title that comes completely out of the blue. In this case Nathalie Thill, Executive Director of the Adirondack Center for Writing, told me that this was the most impressive book that she had read all year, since Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot  See. Who could resist? Fifteen Dogs is a novel by an award-winning Canadian writer born in Trinidad. It is based on a most unusual premise. The gods Apollo and Hermes are having a few beers in a Toronto saloon when they decide to make a bet. The wager is that any animal would be even more unhappy than humans are if they had human intelligence. Instantly, 15 dogs staying overnight in a Toronto veterinary clinic find themselves capable of complex thought. Alexis calls his book an apologue, so we expect allegory. It traces what happens to the dogs as they divide into those capable of expressing canine language and even a range of human languages and poetry and those who revert to the rules of the pack and turn viciously on the outsiders.  The author also intends to raise what Publisher’s Weekly calls, ”an astonishing range of metaphysical questions.” The simplest of these are: what does it mean to be human and what does it mean to be a dog? Through the individual stories of the dogs endowed with intelligence, Alexis examines questions of dominance, food, sexuality and allegiance in humans and dogs. This quirky, stimulating book is one of a kind. After reading, it you may never be able to look at dogs in quite the same way again.

One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, Asne Seierstad (2013) Also: The Bookseller of Kabul; A Hundred and One Days; The Angel of Grozny

On July 22, 2011, a 32-year-old Norwegian named Anders Breivik set off a home-made fertilizer bomb near the Prime Minister’s office in Oslo, killing 8 people. He then proceeded to a small island, Utoya, just off the coast where the youth division of the Liberal Party were enjoying an annual summer outing. After landing on the island, Breivik methodically shot and killed 69 people, most of them teenagers, wounding and maiming numerous others.Who was Breivik and what was his motivation? Who were his victims? At his trial would he be judged sane and responsible for his acts or not? What were the after-effects on family and friends of the victims and on the small Norwegian democracy that had brought forth such a monster?These are the questions that veteran foreign correspondent Asne, Seierstad tackles calmly and intelligently through a massive research and interview effort. Her account is riveting – as close as we will ever get to the terrible hours of the killing and to the psychology of the killer, who considered himself the savior of Norway and of Europe from the threats of Islam, Liberalism and multiculturalism. This is truly a stunning book. As one reviewer wrote: “We’ve been diverting ourselves…with crime fiction making play with the eruption of evil into the apparently harmonious societies of Scandinavia. This is the real thing.”

LaRose– Louise Erdrich (2016) Also: The Round House, The Plague of Doves, Love Medicine

Following up on her National Book Award for The Round House, Louise Erdrich’s new novel is a strong, complex and compelling piece of work. At the center of the story is the accidental killing, in a hunting accident, of a five-year-old boy. The man who kills him is strongly linked to him. His wife is a half sister of the dead boy’s mother The two boys were neighbors and best friends. The shooter, an Ojibwe fighting the shadows of addiction, decides to heal the wound in the traditional Native way. He gives his own five-year-old son, La Rose, to the bereaved family. The novel enfolds in a way that is so painful that it is sometimes difficult to read, but it rewards perseverance. Erdrich builds around the figure of LaRose who watches over the stricken and binds people together through his deeply humane nature. This is a layered portrayal of family, relationship, trust, betrayal and revenge. In this heightened atmosphere, a high school girls’ volleyball game becomes a blood sport and a coming of age. Deceased ancestors appear, including the original LaRose, a woman generations removed from the present, a woman whose remains have been stolen by white officials for use in a study of tuberculosis, a woman who wants to come home. In a rapturous final scene – a backyard barbeque for a high school graduation – there is a coming together of people from on and off the reservation, of parents and children, of family and townspeople, of the living and the dead. It is a moving and convincing culmination of all that has come before, linking contemporary reservation life with Anishabee tradition and history and culture.

H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald (2014) Helen Macdonald, a research scholar in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University, had grown up with a keen interest in the practice and literature of falconry. A personal crisis brought on by her father’s passing led to the urge to train a  goshawk, a predator she describes as, ”thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket.” This is the chronicle of that training, in which Macdonald and her goshawk, named Mabel, overcome frustrating inexperience, agonizing miscommunication, and bloody engagements. Together they run the course from strong indifference, to learning, achievement, setbacks, playfulness, and ultimately, a kind of release. Macdonald’s experience is shadowed by that of T.H. White, author of The Once and Future King, whose book, The Goshawk, published in 1951, tells of a training gone terribly wrong and provides brutal insights into White’s private life. But this is also a very personal memoir of a time when Macdonald describes her situation as, “no father, no partner, no child, no job, no home.” Her answer is to try in every way possible to become a hawk. It is obviously the wrong answer, but it makes for fascinating reading. Macdonald is a writer of rare talent. Her descriptions of landscapes are as compelling as I’ve ever read. She uses the arcane vocabulary of falconry along with a slightly archaic diction to forge a personal style that is vivid and completely her own. This is a bravura performance.

Our Souls At Night, Kent Haruf (2015) This is a posthumously-published novel by the author of the much-admired Plainsong. Haruf writes simple, declarative sentences that are as raw and stark as winter in the High Plains. But the story he tells here is full of tenderness and insight and compassion. A bald account of the premise doesn’t do the novel justice. The setting is a small, bleak Colorado town called Holt, which is also the setting for Haruf’s other work. A woman in her seventies whose husband has died visits a widower neighbor she doesn’t know well and makes a bold proposal. Acknowledging their loneliness, they will spend the nights together to talk in the darkness and provide physical comfort. The development of the relationship, the reaction of the town and of family members, the lengthy visit of a 5-year-old grandchild whose parents are separating, these are the elements that make up the novel. The two main characters are ordinary people from a very ordinary town, but in Haruf’s hands their story takes on a larger than life, almost a mythic aspect. This is a parting gift from a writer who earns our gratitude.

The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov; translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1967) Also: The Heart of a Dog; The White Guard

Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev in 1891 and lived most of his adult life under a Stalinist regime that suppressed and banned his fiction and his writing for the theatre. This novel, completed in 1940, the year he died, was not published until 1967. Since then, it has been considered a masterpiece in Russia and has achieved cult status in the U.S. Now, with a new translation appearing, the novel is finding a wider audience in this country. This sprawling, brilliant work is split between the afterlife and its intersection with the present. The story defies summary. In 1930s Moscow, the devil appears, bearing the name Woland, and with his entourage, including a vodka-drinking tomcat, causes general chaos at a Moscow theatre. But the novel is also about Pontius Pilate, who gave the order for the crucifixion of Jesus, and about the Master, whose unpublished novel about Pilate earns him the devotion of the beautiful Margarita, inconveniently married to someone else. In this novel nothing is what it seems. Margarita joins the devil in a night of revelry and thereby rescues the Master from a mental hospital. The devil represents rough justice, perhaps linked to the only kind of justice available in the USSR. The real world is fantasy and dreams are reality. The shifting styles and narrative themes of the novel refract light like a dancehall crystal ball. Complex, yet with a narrative gripping enough to hold attention throughout, I suspect that this book has a different effect on every individual reader and even on every separate reading. It lives up to its growing reputation.

The North Water, Ian McGuire

 

Paul Graham, Guest co-host, SLU English Professor

Pigtails: An Omnivore’s Quest for Sustainable Meat, Barry Estabroo

32 Yolks: From My Mother’s Table to Working the Line, Eric Ripert

Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot, Mark Vanhoenacker

The Sixth Extinction, Elisabeth Kolbert

Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays, Cynthia Ozick

Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America, Calvin Trillin

Burning the Days, and Life is Meals, James Salter

 

Chris Robinson, Call in co-host, Clarkson University

There’s reading for information; reading for inspiration; and then there’s reading for escape. I certainly have engaged in the latter. When the Bush Administration refused to heed the warnings and protests of peace activists and launched its illegal war in Iraq, I responded by reading deeply into what philosophers were saying about language in Cambridge and Oxford in the 1940s and 1950s. When I mourn the slow decline of my father, it is with fat novels in hand. This kind of reading is understandable, but it is also a luxury afforded to the few.

The reading that needs to be done for the sake of being a better citizen and neighbor is the sort that informs and inspires. The level of misinformation that is passed around disguised as public discourse on social media and by “the commentariat” is just stunning. Reading needs to be an antidote to the darkest distortions of this election year. We need to be a public informed on the science of global climate change, the pseudo-biology of racism, the extent of inequality and the utter misery it creates, and the fact that corporations are not people and that money is not speech. Reading for inspiration combats quietism and defeatism. If you find yourself thinking that another, more just and sustainable world is not possible, then turn to novels where alternative realities are what the art form is all about. Fiction can be more truthful than newspapers and political analyses in this regard.

Here’s what I can recommend to feed your brain and your heart.

Fiction

• Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. The latter title is collection of stories, and they all involve love and relationships. None of the stories in this collection measure up to the more recent Murakami collection, After the Quake. 1Q84 is an 1100 page behemoth. It covers some of the same magical realist ground as Murakami’s earlier, long novel, Kafka on the Shore. This is literary work that takes courage to pursue to its logical ends. I imagine Murakami reflecting repeatedly during the writing “Am I just crazy to do this?” Two stories – one featuring a female assassin/yoga teacher and the other a mathematician/novelist – are enveloped by a mysterious cult that is buying up huge tracts of land in the countryside. The characters are strong, smart and committed to learning the truth of what is happening even as their realities begin to warp under the psychological pressure they endure. This is summer reading at its best.
• Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Volume 4. My third year in a row touting Knausgaard’s six volume novel. Of the four that I have read, this one is probably the weakest. Karl Ove is setting out on a life of independence. He gets his first job as a teacher in the north. He drinks to excess and has blackouts and episodes of astonishing humiliation. And he really wants to have sex.
• Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document: Is there anything better than making a discovery of a new (to you) author? Spiotta is a member of the Syracuse writing crowd that includes Mary Karr and George Saunders. This must be a great place to study writing. Spiotta’s Eat the Document (title borrowed from an underground documentary on Dylan’s first electric tour) is an excellent example of the art of a political novel. It is so easy to screw up a novel that means to convey the outrage we are supposed to feel in the face of the myriad injustices that compose contemporary life. Spiotta’s novel moves back and forth from the late sixties/early seventies to the present, and traces the lives and ideas of activists driven underground after an action they plan goes awry. There are moments of amazing insight on the nature of life in the suburbs, used bookstores, feminism and music collecting. I took notes while I read.
• Alexander Kluge, The Devil’s Blindspot: This book emerges at the nexus between literature, film and philosophy. Kluge is at his best when taking on the lives of philosophers and imaging the experiences that nourished their thought. I will never think of Kant’s daily walks in the same way after reading Kluge.
• Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire: Here’s a doorstopper of a book on Manhattan in the seven It is all character driven, where you understand that the city itself has a personality. It is neglected by politicians at the state and federal level, ravaged by unscrupulous investors and real estate developers, and an absolute haven for gay people, artists, musicians and others seeking life on civilization’s margins. The novel is sprawling and large, and its size is a strength and a weakness. You can crawl in and inhabit the space the author creates, but there is too much repetition and slowness, particularly at the end.
• M. Ledgard, Submergence. This novel was on my list a few years ago. I reread it this spring in order to write on its themes. The book appears even stronger upon a second reading. Ledgard engages in planetary writing. His characters take us to the deepest parts of the ocean and to the outer reaches of Somalia to describe the vastness of life on planet earth and the fragility of human existence. Earth will be fine without us, we learn. We need to grasp our place.
• Tony Kushner, Angels in America. I’m so glad I decided to read this play. I’ve seen it performed and found the effect overwhelmingly powerful. Reading it allows for mulling over ideas and attending to the language. What did HIV/AIDs reveal about America? The spectrum of lessons is explored here.
• Junot Diaz, This is How You Lose Her. I love Junot Diaz’s writing. It is electric, hilarious and heartbreaking all at once. The dialogue is issued at the speed of an urbanite. This collection of stories was not received warmly by critics who all noted that Diaz had failed to break any new ground. Maybe that was an inevitable to response to any work by Diaz published in the wake of The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. But I was happy to back under Diaz’s spell. Maybe it is just plain insane and inhumane to live with one person in a committed and exclusive relationship for more than a couple of years. The pain of infelicities is on full display in these stories. I kept thinking about the common experience of being at an academic conference and talking with someone who is constantly peering over your shoulder for someone more important to talk to.
• Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers and The Strange Case of Rachel K. I spoke about finding a new (to you) author above I reference to Dana Spiotta. Well, I actually have two such authors for this show, and Rachel Kushner is the second. The Flamethrowers spans two generations of an Italian motorcycle manufacturing family, but the protagonist is a young woman from the Pacific Northwest. We travel from Sicily to the salt flats on Nevada to New York to the family compound outside of Florence. The politics of the novel is that of the class-based and revolutionary Autonomia movement of the late seventies in Italy. This movement included fascinating figures like Antonio Negri and Bifo (Franco Berardi) but was animated by workers seeking better working conditions and higher wages. The violence of the era is captured beautifully by Kushner.
• Colm Toibin, The Testament of Mary. This is a novella about the mother of Jesus Christ by the great Irish author, Colm Toibin. Only an Irish Catholic writer could produce such a powerful and heretical work because of the devotion to the Holy Mother at the center of the Irish version of Catholicism. We find Mary living under the protection of two Apostles and traumatized by the horrible death of her son by crucifixion. Toibin explores her beliefs about her son in a manner that retains ambiguity and mystery.
• Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings. This is a Booker Prize winning novel that captures life in Bob Marley’s Jamaica. Marley is at once the center and the periphery of the novel. Life in Kingston is marked by economic inequality and political corruption and Marley is a bridge spanning a wide array of groups. An attempt on Marley’s life triggers a complex sequence of violence that seems antithetical to the music that made him famous. This is an immensely difficult novel to describe, but I want to praise the language of the book. It is lyrical, from the descriptions of poverty to the misogyny of the insults that rivals spewed at one another.
• Charles Johnson, King’s Refrigerator. Johnson is known best as the author of Middle Passage. This collection shows an amazing intellectual range. The title story humanizes Dr. King in a way that only a story set in a kitchen can. My favorite in the collection looks at the relationship between Rene Descartes and the Queen of Sweden. It does not end well for one of the characters.
• David Mitchell, Dream Number 9. This novel looks at organized crime in Japan through the eyes of a young man (Eiji Miyake) searching for his father. Action occurs on two plains: one is the friction-filled plain of physical reality and the second is the frictionless world of dreams. I much preferred the world of the real.

 

Non-Fiction

• James Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism. What does it take to resist effectively the institutions of oppression in society today? Scott’s book is an accessible and learned reflection on this very question. Be sure to do your anarchist calisthenics every morning!
• Peter DeRosa, Rebels: The Irish Uprising of 1916. The centennial of the Irish uprising of 1916 sent me off looking for histories and sources from the time. DeRosa’s book is part novel, part drama and part history. It is a fascinating narrative of the events, considered a failure at the time, that became the crucible for the forging of the Irish independence movement of the twentieth century.
• The Letters of Kurt Vonnegut. I love reading the correspondence of writers, and this volume of letters from Kurt Vonnegut is a treasure. First, they are often very funny, but mordantly so. You realize that the author of Cat’s Cradle, Slaughter-House Five, and Player Piano lived the personality that emerges on the page. Moreover, every letter further convinces you of the man’s essential decency. He was not a perfect human being, but he genuinely tried to be the kind person that he celebrated in his writings.
• Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos. I usually avoid including works of political theory and philosophy on my list, even though this is how I spend most of my time. Brown’s book offers an exceptional analysis into how society has been transformed since the advent of Neoliberalism during the time of Ronald Reagan. It is not just that corporations emerged as institutions to be so admired that their profit-first mindset became the model for public institutions, or that these same public institutions were sold and privatized. Brown looks at how Neoliberalism has transformed what it means to be a human being and a citizen. This is a book that deserves a wider readership beyond political theorists and political scientists. We should be talking about these ideas as a society, if there is still a society to be had.
• Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis. What an extraordinary memoir of life in an extraordinary time – Iran after the revolution. This is a graphic novel, and I really have not appreciated the potency of the form until now. I grew up loving R. Crumb and other graphic novelists for their ability to complement ideas with images and vice versa. Persepolisis acknowledged as a work that fulfills the potential of the graphic novel as artform.
• Robert McChesney and John Nichols, People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy. McChesney and Nichols specialize in journalism and media. Their work has been on the erosion of public spaces and public discourse caused by corporatism’s strategies of privatization and deregulation. In this book, they look at the effects of technological innovation on labor. Currently, 50% of all Americans live on or near the poverty line. Many work several jobs to make ends meet. Unemployment statistics are just not trustworthy. You are not counted if you have given up looking for a job, or if you are underemployed or manage to earn a few bucks mowing a lawn. McChesney and Nichols observe how technologies like robots will increase unemployment drastically in the coming years. They do not oppose innovation, but their argument is that we cannot leave decisions about how wealth will be distributed to elites. Fascinating book.
• Oliver Sacks, On the Move. Life without Oliver Sacks is far less interesting than life with the promise of new works by him every year. This memoir was published right around the time Sacks died. It is an often moving journey through a life of scientific, sexual, literary and mind-altering discovery. Sacks gives us brilliant insight into what it took to emerge as one of the leading intellectuals in recent memory. I savored every page. In an odd way, it reminded me a lot of the two memoirs by Frank McCourt.
• Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy. This is the second graphic novel on my list. I came to this book after reading that conservative students protested having to read this book as part of their summer reading for incoming students. I disagreed with the protest, but I also admired the fact that these students recognize the power of literature. They just need to be open to ideas they find disagreeable. The ideas in this book turn on sexual discovery and the pain, even violence, of closeted sexuality. Bechdel’s book is insightful, hilarious and poignant. Hers is a family you won’t forget anytime soon.
• Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams. This is a brilliant collection of essays that begin with Jamison’s reflections on what she learned as a medical model or actor. You get a list of symptoms and you create a patient that a physician-in-training can practice upon. From these initial experiences, Jamison expands outward to consider deeply what empathy is I the contexts of poverty, illness, threats and fear. The kind of self-examination involved in these essays actually works to increase your own vocabulary for critical self-reflection. I want to put this volume in every student’s hands.

 

Jackie Sauter, NCPR Program and Content Director

Barkskins, Annie Proulx

S.W. Hubbard and Julia Spencer-Fleming Adirondack mystery series

 

Brit Hanson, NCPR Digital Content Producer

 A Little Life,  Hanya Yanagihara

 

Barb Heller, NCPR Program Host

Barb shared this with me:

I read The Revenant a few months back…. it was fantastic!  A real page-turner!  I don’t usually go for adventure/westerns, but I’d heard the movie was good, so I checked out the book.  Two thumbs up. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I can’t imagine it could be better than the book was.

By the way, I love to read, but never seemed to actually do much of it — until I got a Kindle.  Now I read all the time, because there are no library fines, no moldy pages, and I always have lots of choices that fit in my purse!  Cookbooks, reference books, stories, novels…. I take them everywhere now.  I don’t miss turning the physical pages at all (even though I was one of those people who worshiped the paper page).  Long live e-books!  My only complaint:  they sometimes “disappear” before I’m finished with them.

 

Connie Meng, NCPR Announcer/Theater Critic

Tennessee Williams: A Pilgrimage of the Flesh, John Lahr. Biography. It’s a fascinating look at a very strange, sad man from the ultimate in dysfunctional families.  He fundamentally changed American play writing.

The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame. I recommend reading or re-reading this classic–it’s soothing and centering, and helps settle emotional turmoil.

 

Mare MacDougall Bari, Canton, SLU Hockey

Kill ’em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul, James McBride. I cannot say enough about this book–a beautiful read that explores the complicated nature of the Godfather of Soul and, moreover, provides an important cultural portrait of race in America.

 

Gregory Jeffers, via email

A Slant of Light, Jeffrey Lent. Set in Upstate New York shortly after the civil war, this is a tale of love and loss, revenge and redemption. Mr. Lent’s vivid setting descriptions vibrate with carnal intensity and his characters stand off the page in beckoning clarity.

 

Susan Williams Beckhorn, via email

The Wolf’s Boy, Susan Williams Beckhorn. It’s a first dog story based, inspired by the finding of the fossilized footprints of a boy and a canine in a Chauvet cave in France. So far it’s had starred reviews from Kirkus and SLJ, a nice review in Publisher’s weekly, and has been selected for the Junior Library Guild’s book club.

 

Peg Cornwell, Seasonal resident and former Canton resident

The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf. It is without a doubt one of the most impactful books I have read in years. Wulf tells the story of explorer and naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt who lived 1769-1859 and, through his vision, changed the way we see the natural world today. His influence on Darwin, Thoreau, Marsh and Muir are astounding. A must read for those interested in and curious about the natural world we experience everyday.

 

From listeners who shared titles during the call in program:

June, Indian Lake:

There We Were, River Running in the Hudson Gorge, Jeff Dickinson

 

Jill, Burke, NY:

The Harry Potter series

Pat Barker WWI Trilogy

 

Mike, Glens Falls:

Whatever Land by Zachary Richards, a Lake George writer

 

Zachary, Lake George

God Made Us Monsters, Bill Neary

 

Leslie Ann, Cranberry Lake

The Architect’s Apprentice, Elif Shafak

 

John, Saranac Lake:

Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942, Ian Toll

 

Kathy Curro, Canton:

Listening to a Continent Sing: Birdsong by Bicycle from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Donald Kroodsman

 

Barbara, Mallorytown, Ontario

Two books about Russia:

Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia, Anne Garrels

Man Without a Face, Masha Gissen

 

Jane, Queensbury:

Sweetbitter: A novel, Stephanie Danler

Barkskins, Annie Proulx

 

John, Massena:

Canadian science fiction author Robert Sawyer with many titles including the trilogy Wake, Watch and Wonder.

Carl Hiasson’s books about Florida

 

Tina, Paul Smiths:

Louise Penny mystery novels about Quebec

 

Philip Newton, Saranac Lake

Lights Out, ((New York, Crown Publishers: 2015), Ted Koppel. Anything  but summer  escapism.   The subtitle, A  Cyberattack. A Nation Unprepared. Surviving the Aftermath, kind of gives this away, especially  when you realize that the book, from former ABC Nightline host Koppel, is non-fiction.  My justification in recommending it more or less, in the immortal words of poor old Willy Loman: “Attention must be paid!”

Most of us remember the aftereffects of the Ice Storm of ’98.  Living in Saranac Lake, my family was lucky, we lost power for only about 12 hours.  But five miles outside of town, and across most of the North Country, the power went out, and stayed out for weeks, in spite of the rapid arrival of help.  I remember hearing  someone, perhaps on NCPR, telling of standing on a Northway overpass and watching a seemingly endless convoy of National  Guard and utility trucks streaming up from the south. Help was coming. We coped and aided one another, secure in the knowledge that power would soon, or eventually, be restored.   And it was, and, eventually, normality.

But what if the lights were to go out and not come back on? Not from some act of nature, but from a malevolent act of enemies, possibly states, more likely non-state terrorists,  upon our power grids.  Not for days, or weeks, but months? Maybe not ever come back on–and, not just in the North Country, but across a huge swath of the U.S.?  Downstate,  Manhattan, Long Island,  Upstate, New England, and beyond, all go dark.  Our lights, our computers, our elevators, our sewage treatment plants, all shut down.  Cell phones would  last a while, but without emergency generation backup, not for long. Emergency generators keep some things together for a while, but the electricity to pump  replacement fuel eventually runs out, and those who would normally supply  in the great outside cannot even obtain it for their own families.  Likewise,  food. Likewise,  everything.  Bad enough up here, where we at least have wood for fuel, and some farm animals,  fields and vegetable  gardens seasonally, and lots of folks with basic survival skills.   Imagine Manhattan three days into  a power outage. Imagine it after  a week.  Imagine the high rise buildings.   Imagine looking over that Northway overpass and seeing another endless stream of vehicles coming up from the south.  Not to save us, but to escape the unfolding disaster behind them, carrying nothing but a looted bag of groceries and a loaded firearm or two.

Koppel provides way too much evidence to tuck this nightmare scenario away with the comet strike and Ebola  scenarios. He  interviewed  dozens of experts, from the head of FEMA, and the former head of the NSA on down.  The one most concerning to me was with Richard Clarke, the  former head of counterterrorism in the Bush Administration (you know which Bush)  who kept getting refused meetings with the President in summer 2001, the one whose White House colleagues joked about him  acting like his hair was on fire. Clarke is not terribly optimistic about  our ability to resist, or recover from, cyber attacks on our electrical grid.  Of the dozens of other experts Koppel interviewed, most seemed to fall into two groups: “concerned” or “clueless” (the latter perhaps to hide more concern than they wish to show).

Some brief takeaways –

Although the Russians and Chinese have the greatest capacity to attack our grid, they are unlikely to do so short of an all-out war.  Partly because they have no desire to destroy us, and partly because we have the capacity to do likewise to them.

Other actors are less inclined to be  so restrained.  We and the Israelis actually took out Iran’s nuclear weapons program (Koppel points out that this makes us, as usual, the first nation to actually use  a new and deadly weapon), and could hold a  grudge.  A more likely state actor is (you guessed it!) North Korea, which has already probably used cyberwarfare on SONY Pictures as a result of that unfortunate movie.  North Korea also has the greatest potential for launching an EMP  (Electromagnetic Pulse) attack, whereby an enemy explodes a few nukes over the U.S., and fries the power grid. (Koppel briefly covers EMP in the book).

More likely, Koppel thinks, are non-state actors who kind of hate us, and don’t mind taking a chance that might also destroy modern civilization in  order to damage or destroy ours.  Any thoughts who might harbor such a crazy notion?    My personal favorite fear: ISIS subcontracting an attack  on our grids apparently to Russian criminal cyber gangs.

The U.S. government, military and civilian, is dedicating a fair amount of resources to preventing such an attack.  The fact that there has not yet been a successful one, is somewhat reassuring.

The electrical generation industry is fractured , competitive,  and disinclined to  cooperate fully to protect their systems.

Congress is pretty much too involved in investigating Hillary Clinton and influenced by the utilities lobby to do anything very helpful.

FEMA et al seems to be  pitifully unprepared to react to a successful  major cyber attack.  Reserves of food, fuel, backup generating systems and training are geared to responding to relatively minuscule attacks, not major disasters.

A congressional commission that studied the likely outcome of an EMP attack concluded that, “only one in ten of us would survive a year into a nationwide blackout, the rest perching from starvation, disease, or societal breakdown.” (Koppel, p.22) Ditto, cyberattack, or close enough he figures.

The Mormons are in pretty good shape though.  Also, I would assume, our Amish neighbors.   Conversion to one of these faiths might seriously  be the only good medium-term way to prepare, given the  ignorance and unwillingness of our society and our leaders to take the danger seriously.

I don’t think that civilization will be destroyed by a cyber or EMP attack, but I think the chances of it happening are sufficient to be spending a lot more time thinking, talking, and preparing for it. Hence this attempt to disrupt your listeners’ summer mental getaways.  And Radio Bob, keep that emergency transmitter well-maintained, with lots and lots of stabilized fuel on hand. And lots.

 

Lois, via email

The Wright Brothers, David McCullough. Reading about them testing their planes–good wind on the Outer Banks–might be psychologically cooling during the summer months. The books is such a good read–a study of two very different men, one of them definitely a genius and the other a good mechanic–it’s had to put down.

 

Paul Sorgule, somewhere in the Adirondacks

(Editor’s note: Paul emailed me about his latest book. I’ve provided the live link.)

The Event That Changed Everything: A Novel About Cooks, Chefs, Restaurant Life, Farming, Relationships and Environmental Consciousness

 

Edith Ostrowsky, via email

The Plot Against America, Philip Roth. It fits in with today’s presidential race atmosphere. Yes, it is fiction.

 

Judith Nadal, Black Brook

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Caitlin Doughty. An intAeresting and important book. A memoir describing her experience working in a crematory, her  evolving insight on the significance of how, as a society, we care for our dead. Addresses distorting effect of fear of death upon  the meaningfulness of our living… Sounds sad or morbid, but instead very enlightening, uplifting and humorous too… I am a hospice nurse.

Barbara Phillips-Farley, Canton

The Mathews Men: Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler’s U-Boats, William Geroux. Mathews is a rural county on the Virginian coast. Many “Mathews men” traditionally became merchant marines, so when the U.S. joined WWII, they were automatically a part of our war effort. Our navy was woefully unprepared to to war and was initially focused on the Pacific, so that the Atlantic’s seamen had a rough time. One of the blurbs on the cover compares this book to The Boys in the Boat.

Sarah Baldwin, via email

Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver. This has it all. From Booklist Review: “Summer is the season for abundance and abandon, and all of its prodigal forces are at work in this seductive tale… Kingsolver unabashedly uses the predicaments of her Appalachian characters to dispense ecological insights, praise the old ways of living, and glory in the beauty of nature… her prose is lush and spellbinding, her humor subtle, and her story compelling, intelligent, sexy, and cathartic.”

 

 

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