December 2006 Archives

Reviewed by Patricia Selinger, Head of Preservation

When I read The Bridge of San Luis Rey, I feel I am in the presence of great art. The author’s prose flows and evokes imagery like a masterpiece. It is a worthwhile diversion to refresh the spirit. With 200 pages, more or less depending on the edition, it takes just a short time to immerse into and emerge from a tale sure to stay with you forever.

The book begins with what Brother Juniper witnessed one day as he was walking on the road, just ten minutes from the bridge himself. He had stopped for a moment to celebrate the peace and joy in his heart. Then he heard a snapping sound and saw five people on the Bridge of San Luis Rey fall to their deaths. Trying to make sense of the incident, he wrote a treatise for the church to show how each person who died had been led to this death by God. Surely there was something in each person's life that warranted such an untimely, violent death. "Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan." Unfortunately, Brother Juniper failed to show the divine plan and the church burned him at the stake as a heretic. He had succeeded in showing the humanity of each person in their story — how everyone is good and bad, not evil but not divine, not always humble and not always self-indulgent. In his desire to include all the details of a person's life, he unwittingly wrote how everyone bears difficult loss and anticipates joy, both spiritual and carnal. And then, it was his turn to contemplate his role in forces of good and evil. Others in the town are affected by the deaths and seek meaning in their own way. The bridge becomes a metaphor holding together the land of the living and the land of the dead. What are the bridges you must cross in your life?

I have returned to this book many times in my life. Each time I am reminded what good prose is, and what a good story is. I believe it helps me to be a better writer.

Cabell Library PS 3545 .I345 B7

Reviewed by Kevin Farley, Collection Librarian for the Humanities

Acclaimed author and physician Oliver Sacks (who teaches and practices neurology in New York City) is best known for his studies of extreme cases of illness that afflict the central nervous system or the brain, impairing physical, intellectual, and emotional functions. In books such as The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars, Seeing Voices (an elegant study of deafness), and especially Awakenings (which was made into a Hollywood film, with the shy, eccentric, determined Sacks portrayed brilliantly by Robin Williams), Sacks separates the ravages of illness from the essential humanity that survives — and shows how, paradoxically, illnesses may also bring gifts, developing parts of our minds and talents that lay undiscovered within us. In Uncle Tungsten, Sacks finally, and delightfully, turns his curious and insightful mind upon himself, looking back over a long career and trying to discover the origins of his varied interests, especially for science and chemistry. The "Uncle Tungsten" of the book's title refers to Sacks' maternal uncle, Dave, who encouraged Sacks as a child in his explorations of the minerals and chemicals that comprise the world. And it is the story of his childhood that makes Uncle Tungsten so moving — of the encouragement, inspiration, and abundant love that marked the large Sacks family in their London home, even in the darkest and most dangerous days of the Blitz, when the child Oliver was sent away to the English countryside to escape Hitler's bombs. Sacks preserves this vanished world, the London of his Jewish ancestors, and pays homage to the excitement and wonder he inherited from them, carrying him forward into a lifelong search for the essence of our humanity.

Cabell Library RC339.52.S23 A3 2001
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