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.
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Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs
In this beautiful novel, Geraldine Brooks breathes life into Mr. March, the father in Louisa May Alcott's beloved Little Women. As March is largely absent from Alcott's story, it is Brooks who truly introduces us to this character whom we follow from his youthful days as a peddler in the south to his post as a Union chaplain in the Civil War — first ministering to soldiers and later as the teacher at a contraband farm. Self-taught scholar, passionate abolitionist, and unorthodox clergyman, March is modeled on Alcott's father, Bronson Alcott, with inspiration drawn from his own papers, as well as those of friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
Narrated in the first person by March (with some chapters from wife Marmee's point of view), this very personal account of war, with all its brutality, inhumanity, and both physical and emotional suffering is quite disturbing, and difficult to read at times. Yet it is nicely interspersed with reminiscences of the Marches' domestic life in Concord, Massachusetts, which help create the rich character development of both March and Marmee. March won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Interested in more by Brooks, or other works about the Civil War? Check out Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks, or Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by her husband, Tony Horwitz.
Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs
Eventide is a quiet, yet memorable, chronicle of life in Holt, a small, rural town in the Colorado plains. Many of the town's residents made their debut in the National Book Award finalist Plainsong, yet Eventide introduces memorable new characters, and is not necessarily a sequel to Haruf's earlier work. This newer novel tells the stories of a disabled couple and their children, a boy living with his grandfather, and others whose lives intersect during the course of the year. The plot unfolds somewhat slowly, but this pace seems natural, perfectly suited to the creeping days of a harsh Colorado autumn and winter. Indeed, the landscape itself — the lonely town isolated in dreary plains — is a palpable force in this novel, and also serves to highlight Haruf's beautiful, yet honest and unassuming prose. "It was a Saturday night," he writes, "the sky overhead clear of any cloud, the stars as clean and bright as if they were no more distant than the next barbed-wire fence post standing up against the barrow ditch running beside the narrow blacktop highway, everything all around him distinct and unhidden. He loved how it all looked, except he never would have said it in that way."
Though tinged with sadness, this story of decent, ordinary people has a redemptive quality that makes the novel strangely uplifting. Try Plainsong first, and I guarantee that you will want to pick up Eventide.
Reviewed by Kevin Farley, Collection Librarian for the Humanities
Hailed in the 20th Century as the Great American Novel, an American Homeric epic, in the 19th Century Moby Dick, by Herman Melville (http://www.melville.org/), was dismissed by critics — and readers — when first published in 1851, sending its author into the depths of despair so thoroughly plumbed by his story itself. Perhaps it took the catastrophe of the American Civil War and the horrors of the First World War, with their brutal lessons in the cruel injustices, the great swathes of death, that humans inflict upon one another, to transform Melville's novel from a mere story of New England whaling (which it never was) into a prophecy of the doom that awaits those who forsake mastery of their own wants and desires for mastery and domination of others, and even of Nature itself. In the character of Ahab, hunting relentlessly for the White Whale, and whose tragic, Biblical name foreshadows the destruction he will bring upon himself and his crew on the fatal voyage of the Pequod, Melville captures the seemingly irremediable disease of modernity: namely, revenge upon Nature (for its lack of concern for humanity), and, born of that revenge, the monomaniacal assertion of Self against the common good. A compendium (or "anatomy," in Melville's terms) of the influences that compose American identity — Puritanism and its paradoxes, the love-hate relationship with Nature, the supremacy of the rights of the individual versus the democratic inclusiveness of the happiness of all — Moby Dick continues to beckon us away from the terra firma of our own selfishness and into the unending flux of myth.
Cabell Library Various Call Numbers and Locations
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Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs
Pigs in Heaven tells the story of Taylor Greer and her adopted Cherokee daughter, who flee their Tucson home after a lawyer from the Cherokee Nation shows up on their doorstep claiming that Turtle's adoption is invalid and that she may need to return to the tribe. Although you may recognize these characters from Kingsolver's The Bean Trees, Pigs in Heaven is not a sequel and can be read independent of the earlier novel. It addresses some interesting issues, such as the balance between the rights of an individual and the sacrifices made for the sake of the community. Does Turtle rightfully belong with the only mother she has known for the past three years, or with Cherokee relatives who will instill in her the knowledge of her heritage and their identity? Kingsolver is aware that there are no easy answers, and one can detect a sense of the compassion and empathy that she has for all of the characters, in whom she creates the ability to see the issue in shades of gray.
The writing is lovely, as one would expect from Kingsolver, although I personally found some of the coincidences and the ending a bit too convenient. While it is still an enjoyable and worthwhile read, I would recommend some of her other novels — particularly Prodigal Summer and Animal Dreams — as better introductions to Kingsolver's work.
Cabell Library PS3561.I496 P54 1993
Spanish Edition: Cabell Library PS3561.I496 P5417 1995
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Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs
Peace Like a River is one of those rare novels that combines beautiful, almost poetic, language with engaging storytelling. Eleven-year-old asthmatic Reuben Land narrates the story of his family as their quiet Midwestern way of life abruptly ends in the winter of 1962, when his older brother Davy kills two teenagers who break into their home. During his trial, Davy escapes from jail one night and heads west, setting into motion a manhunt that soon involves federal investigators. Guided by faith, Reuben, his father, and his sister head west with hopes of reunion — though they have no idea where Davy is headed. "Once traveling, it's remarkable how quickly faith erodes," states Reuben. "It starts to look like something else — ignorance for example." Yet the Lands press on, with help along the way from friends both old and new, as well as from some well-timed miracles, brought on by the haunting character of Jeremiah Land, whose relationship with God is not unlike that of the Old Testament prophets. With compelling characters, lyrical descriptions of stark North Dakota winters, and its nod to the Wild West, Peace Like a River is an example of contemporary American literature at its best.
Reviewed by Kevin Farley, Collection Librarian for the Humanities
In TechGnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information, Erik Davis (http://www.techgnosis.com/) writes in the tradition of the Canadian media philosopher Marshall McCluhan (http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/), who initiated the study of the effects of mass media — particularly advertising — on identity, consciousness, and individual freedom and autonomy. How much freedom is truly possible, McLuhan asked, in an electronic media environment that seems to program and control all of our thoughts and desires? Davis continues McLuhan's critique of media, arguing that, unlike past cultures, in which information was seen as a tool (one of many) that possessed greater or lesser degrees of usefulness, depending upon the nature of the information itself, in the Digital Age "People began to devote themselves more and more to collecting, analyzing, transmitting, selling, and using the stuff." Davis views the often unseen control of information — despite the seeming freedom it possesses on the Internet — as a fact never to be forgotten: "From the moment the first scribe took up a reed and scratched a database into the cool clay of Sumer," he writes, "information flow has been an instrument of human power and control — religious as well as economic and political." Part historical overview, part journal, and part stream-of-consciousness, TechGnosis bristles with Davis' musings on contemporary media and computer culture. Perhaps Davis' most important arguments address the dangers of the human tendency to invest tools and artifacts — including computers and the Internet — with the magical ability to create an eternal order and perfection within ourselves and in the world itself.
Reviewed by Kevin Farley, Collection Librarian for the Humanities
The English satirist, novelist, and essayist Eric Blair — better known by his pseudonym, George Orwell (see LION for biographical and critical information) — has often been called the conscience of the 20th Century. His works, especially his satires (notably Animal Farm and 1984), cannot be confined merely to the socio-political entrapments set by dictators, demagogues, and even, at times, democracies of that era. Orwell's unsparing dissections of hypocrisy, cant, jingoism, jargon, sloganeering, and deceitfulness of all kinds — practiced at the personal and the political levels (which, thanks to Orwell, we now see as often being one and the same) — comprise an indispensable grammar of the unjust workings of power against the powerless. Animal Farm (subtitled "A Fairy Story") was written shortly after the end of World War II, and was read at the time as an indictment of the tyrannies of Facism, Nazism, and Stalinism; it may also be read, however, as a rebuke to all forms of government that repress the freedom to speak or think in terms that oppose the status quo. The "fairy story" elements of Orwell's fable — the sudden ability for animals to speak; the overthrow of Mr. Jones's farm by the animals (led by the sagacious pigs and their aptly named leader, Napoleon) — enfold an unsettling subtext: under the guise of "freeing" the animals from their oppressor, the pigs pervert the revolution by metamorphosing into oppressors themselves, worse, even, than Mr. Jones. Perhaps most troubling of all — for, in the Swiftian tradition, the ambiguity of Orwell's satire precludes a safe vantage point — Animal Farm allows no innocent optimism for the progress of freedom over tyranny, and in that sense the fable, like all of Orwell's writings, stands as a dire warning against complacency and, most importantly, "groupthink." As the pigs proclaim in one of their many revisions to the rules that govern the happiness of life at Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" — thus declaring a war upon freedom in Orwell's day and in our own.
Cabell Library PS6029 .R8 Various Locations
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