The most memorable nonfiction I read in 2017

Below are some thoughts on some of the nonfiction I read in 2017:

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America by John M. Barry (1997)

This book is an incredible feat about the horrifying attempts of the 19^th century to tame the Mississippi River. I read it over the summer, and while the book is about the double-edged sword of engineering, the book is also about the wild tides of racism and progressive forces at the start of the 20^th century. I read about the flood of 1927 as men of all ages and of mostly one race burned tiki torches and marched like idiots through Charlottesville in the night. I’m not sure a single book could be so depressingly clear about the snakes writhing at America’s roots and how they have always been there, albeit more dangerous in some times than others. Historical scenes from the 1927 flood include white men, the bosses, holding their black employees hostage atop the levees, fearing black flight from white authority. These scenes took place decades after emancipation and decades prior to white flight from the urban landscape. History isn’t so much a circle or a corkscrew as it is a river given to unpredictable flood cycles. You can grow desperate or satisfied in that awareness.

The Hitchcock Murders by Peter Conrad (2000)

If you want to know more about how Alfred Hitchcock’s film works, this book will do that. For a teacher looking to better explain how techniques and thematic concepts cross paths, this book provides both language and substance for proving you’re not just making it all up, even if you sometimes are.

Better yet, this book crossed my path when a student handed it to me on her last day of class. I am eternally grateful—my students since then maybe less so, for I am punishing them with excerpts about the links between cinematic cuts, appetite, and violence. Bon appètit.

Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle by Kristen Green (2015)

My wife and father both read this book before I did. I read it on their recommendations and simply from observing how moved they were in reading the book. My wife is from Massachusetts and so everything is Southern to her except for polar bears. My dad, however, was born and raised in Altavista, Virginia, near Lynchburg. My mom was born in Atlanta, lived in Charlotte, and was raised in Halifax County, Virginia. I was born in Kentucky, lived in Georgia, and graduated high school from Fredericksburg, Virginia. I bring all this up because Green’s book tells a rather familiar story: people will go to great lengths to keep racist traditions and prejudices alive and acceptable. I bring all this up because those great lengths happened and do happen in places other than Alabama and Mississippi. They can happen in Prince Edward County. They can happen in Charlottesville. They can probably happen elsewhere too.

Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination by Jack Hamilton (2016)

The opening essay is about the shared musical territories of Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan. Other chapters discuss Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, and Dusty Springfield. The conclusive essays focus on Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones. The information is nonstop, and the research is thorough. You will look either at music and artists differently. Certain truths will unravel, and you will hear certain songs as something else. This difference will not be necessarily better or worse, but it will be different and you will be forced to think about what the hell is rock ‘n roll.

Also, Hamilton’s not a bad follow on Twitter if you look him up.

Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town by Jon Krakauer (2015)

I have only read two of Krakauer’s books. This one and Into the Wild. If you want the best passages from Krakauer, Missoula is not necessarily the book to read. Missoula delivers a scathing case study pinpointing why and how the justice system fails the victims of sexual assault and rape: In the charging of just about any other crime the perpetrator is treated as a suspect and the victim as a victim. However, the opposite is often true when police departments investigate crimes of sexual assault and rape or when juries listen to lawyers deliberate.  

Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis by Preston Lauterbach (2015)

I read Lauterbach’s book so I could write With the Memphis Blues Again. Somewhere on the book’s jacket a critic compares it with HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. Seems true. Except Beale Street Dynasty contains more lives, more decades, more history, and more stories, as it traces the history of Beale Street’s development from the Civil War era to the middle of the twentieth century. I once vowed to read a presidential biography a year. I have not kept that vow. But I do think I would be more likely to read at least one American city’s biography per year. Memphis was a decent place to start.

Jerry West: The Life and Legend of a Basketball Icon by Roland Lazenby (2009)

A magnum opus about Jerry West. A tale rooted in colonial Virginia, backwoods West Virginia, and a dangerously depressing search for perfection proves West isn’t just a logo for the NBA, but a perfectly named logo for Manifest Destiny.

Michael Jordan: The Life by Roland Lazenby (2014)

A magnum opus about Michael Jordan. While the whole book is really a case study about the modern athlete and the makeup of Alpha personalities, the passages about Jordan’s grandfather and life along those pinebrushed Carolina rivers really are the most intriguing.

Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America by Jennifer Price (1999)

Going into it, I expected a great deal about flamingos. I was not wrong. However, I now find myself spending an equal amount of time mourning passenger pigeons and shopping malls.

Levels of the Game by John McPhee (1969)

The man writes better than well on tennis.

Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli (2017)

I now know what a 3-Sphere is, but please don’t ask me to explain it.

How to Watch a Movie by David Thomson (2015)

I just jot down movies to watch while reading Thomson and grow angry at his sentences being better than mine. Then I assign Thomson to students, so we can all be angrily humbled together.

String Theory by David Foster Wallace (2016)

The man writes well on tennis.

The Fire This Time edited by Jesmyn Ward (2016)

Adapting its title from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, The Fire This Time is a strong collection of essays and poems that serves as a primer on African-American perspectives in the 21^st century. I read it sometime late last winter, and it appeared on a reading choice list for my English 11 students. I probably didn’t give them enough guidance in working through each essay, but I could be wrong. My personal favorites in the collection are Kiese Laymon’s “Da Art of Storytellin’ (a Prequel)” and its endless thoughts on Outkast, Rachel Kaadzi Ghanash’s “The Weight” because of how it aligns voices from the past with the present, and maybe “Composite Pops” by Mitchell S. Jackson. But, if I were to read it again, I’m not doubtful that list would change.

After all, the list is always changing.

Bryan Harvey tweets @Bryan_S_Harvey.

When winter never came, and the books read waiting

I'd say blow the dust off the blog before continuing, but I'm not sure digital platform even collect dust. Anyway, the following are impressions of some books I read over the last few months when I wasn't updating the LCB blog with any sense of regularity: 

Books I'll remember having read in 2016

Looking back at the books I read in 2016, these are the ones that left the greatest impressions:

Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution by Jonathan Abrams (2016)

Yes, the book is obviously about basketball, but it’s also about how individuals in the United States go about careening through the ephemeral dreamscape we call the American Dream. And it’s about basketball.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty (2015)

This novel is almost two years old. I read it a year ago. Since then, it has won the Man Booker Prize, so you probably don’t need me for an introduction to Beatty’s work. Still, the book reminded me some of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo—there’s something not quite whole about it, even as it tucks joke after joke inside silhouettes of the Little Rascals and that time in the United States when the United States couldn’t decide what to do with or how to think about blackness. And then that laughter you hear when you’re reading a book all alone becomes altogether too real and too strange and you realize you shouldn’t be laughing because these funny circumstances aren’t so funny. They are keeping the past alive in ways that can’t be healthy. And you laugh. And you wonder why you’re laughing.

The Domino Diaries: My Decade Boxing with Olympic Champions and Chasing Hemingway’s Ghost in the Last Days of Castro’s Cuba by Brin-Jonathan Butler (2015)

Read the title and then ask, what isn’t this book about?

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown (1970)

For reasons I cannot explain, I read this book in the delivery room of my first child. Anyway, it later became the foundation of my AP and English 11 curriculums this past fall. I only regret not reading and teaching it sooner.

Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon (2009)

Whether his projects succeed with daring or falter under the weight of his sentences, Chabon ultimately succeeds, at least for me, in his ability to inspire. After reading one of his novels, I always want to try and write something I haven’t quite tried before. Also, the essays in Maps and Legends definitely work, and the last essay in the bunch is ready made to sit beside Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” or Life of Pi in a high school English curriculum.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond (2016)

Walk a mile in other people’s shoes. Maybe it would be better to live a month in other people’s apartments. While I read Matthew Desmond dissection of urban America's ailments, specifically the traps of poverty and unaffordable housing, not once did I hear one of his proposed solutions mentioned in the course of the 2016 Presidential Debates between Clinton and Trump, as if both candidates existed on a stage divorced from the city streets, kitchen tables, and school desks that make up the American reality. Sadly, that’s something not likely to be remedied anytime soon, which makes Desmond’s work even more impressive: he’s finding solutions where most aren’t even seeing the problems.

Searching for John Hughes: Or Everything I Thought I Needed to Know about Life I Learned from Watching ‘80s Movies by Jason Diamond (2016)

I really enjoyed reading Diamond speak about how he dedicated himself to a passion of his, and when his efforts failed him, he turned something into nothing. The keyword from the title really is “searching.” I took a lot away from this book on a personal level I hope to detail at some later time, possibly.

Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers (2016)

I always tell students how Eggers is a sneaky writer. He’s not writing confusing sentences. He isn’t loading up on SAT words. He doesn’t make obvious allusions. Instead, he presents what appears to be simple and lulls the reader into a sort of sleepy comfort. That is, unless one has already read Eggers or is naturally suspicious of narrators and human wisdom. If the latter is the case, then his characters become worthy of ridicule. What makes for an even better reading of his material is when we as readers share the traits of his subjects, fictive or not, because then our impulse to critique turns inward and we have to face our worst or at least most foolish selves. Aside from constantly finding new ways to play this game with his readers, Eggers continues to grow in his ability to create cinematic set pieces and Heroes of the Frontier contains some of his best.

Sudden Death by Àlvaro Enrigue (2016)

While I probably didn’t understand a lot of what Enrigue does in Sudden Death, this translation of his 2013 Spanish novel prompted and instructed me on how to finish Everything That Dunks Must Converge, especially the introductory chapters for Act One, Act Two, and Act Three.

Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy by Eri Hotta (2013)

I wouldn’t exactly describe this book as an entertaining read, but it fascinated and frightened me nonetheless. Essentially, it is a book about how a country can lose control of its capacities for reason by ignoring both credible sources of knowledge and the needs of its people, trading in these pillars of stability for pride and pettiness. Also, and perhaps just as interesting, is how Hotta’s depiction of prewar Japan casts the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as an act of desperation rather than as something simply cunning and militaristic. In other words, countries that can’t face their own weaknesses end up doing stupid shit they regret for decades.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (2015)

You pick up James’ novel and there’s heft to it. You read the description on the jacket and you latch onto the familiar, which also happens to be the iconic. You latch onto that name you know, Bob Marley. You hum part of a refrain. Then another. You hum fragments from Legend (it played at all the high school parties you vaguely remember). Then you wonder how a novel about him that’s not really about him but a place and a time that is really something else altogether could consist of so many heavy pages. What you hold in your hand—the literal weight of pulp and ink—is something akin to an island lost in time. You flip the pages back and forth. You reread passages. You’re searching. You’re hoping it doesn’t end, and you’re searching. In the end, you find yourself in a small New York diner. You’re reading the names of Jamaican foods. And by this time, they almost read with an old familiarity, like you can remember how they taste—and yet, you’ve never tasted them, never been to the island, never even left your snug living room. And so then you know Marlon James is a magician, and he has ripped out the center of your middle class life in the middle of the United States’ eastern seaboard and sunk it deep in the blue Caribbean tide. And you will never find your way back to believing Bob Marley is the whole of the story because the book will wake you with the weight of the worlds you never knew, that you failed to know, that you could not have known without this book or some other mother to hold you.  

The North Water by Ian McGuire (2016)

The book jacket makes comparisons to Herman Melville and Cormac McCarthy, and I get that. McGuire’s book, after all, contains a sea voyage and violence. But I also think critics and readers have started throwing around McCarthy comparisons a bit too lightly. In some ways, doing so is a compliment to the man, but it’s also kind of lazy. Other writers do exist. Ian McGuire might even be one of them, and his book’s journey from shipyard crime scene to polar bear cage is worth a read. It might remind you of McCarthy and Melville. It might remind you of Robert Louis Stevenson or Gary Paulsen. Maybe you’ll read those authors and think of Ian McGuire. 

The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan (2016)

Morgan’s second novel is an ambitious one. The narrative essentially follows three generations in the Bluegrass state, which rather forcefully causes us to think of plotlines and bloodlines and people and horses as all being intertwined. In this sense, the book feels a bit like Steinbeck’s East of Eden, at least in the scope of the project. There are also passages that read like Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner (I guess I make lazy comparisons too). And, in a sense, the real jockey here is Morgan because she manages to stay on top of her ambitious narrative, steering and manipulating all of its unwieldy sinew and muscle and bone around the track, relaying a rather furious send up of genteel Southern honor and its eternal bedfellow, racism.

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor (1955)

What can I say here about Flannery O’Connor that hasn’t already been said? I read most of this book with my newborn daughter strapped to my chest. I want her to understand the south’s underpinnings, its deplorables and unmentionables, and how those cruelties are in her blood and therefore she need own up to them. God, I’m already ruining her life, aren’t I? 

Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction by Benjamin Percy (2016)

I don’t read a lot of craft books, but this one made a lot of sense to me, plus the eyeball on the front cover hypnotized my infant daughter. What really clicked for me in Percy’s writing tips is how he aligns writing fiction with iconic moments in cinema. I used to teach creative writing, but I haven’t for a few years now. I have, however, started teaching a Film Studies class. Strangely, and unexpectedly so, I think the latter has helped me improve my writing more than the former. I could also be gravely mistaken. Anyway, Percy’s book, published via Graywolf Press, would make an excellent resource for either high school literature or creative writing teachers.

Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones (2015)

This book takes on a lot. Its concerns traverse national borders as well as decades. It examines the fraying of family relationships, the disintegration of ethics in the medical profession, the vulnerabilities that come with having everything, and the desperation born from having nothing at all. Sometimes governments and institutions fail people because they cling too tightly to power. Sometimes they fail because they do nothing at all. This epidemic appears to be more of the latter, at least in terms of proportion. After all, humanity’s desire for easing its pain is nothing new, but once upon a time, doctors may not have so easily prescribed manufactured poisons to an entire generation. There is a lot here. You should read it. Then we should all figure out what might possibly be done to help those in need. America’s pain needs more than slogans and tax breaks: it needs professional help.  

The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic by Ginger Strand (2015)

Sometimes the world is a stranger place than anything the writer might imagine. The world in Kurt Vonnegut’s books, however, at least as far as I knew, always flaunted such maxims. The island in Cat’s Cradle is a weird place, as are the travel habits of Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five. Then you read Strand’s book and how it places Kurt’s literary work side by side with his brother’s scientific work at General Electric, and you find that the imagination of Kilgore Trout may not be strange enough to articulate the truth of it all.  

The Coyote’s Bicycle: The Untold Story of 7,000 Bicycles and the Rise of a Borderland Empire by Kimball Taylor (2016)

Place an obstacle in front of the human imagination. Tell a person that history and politics have decided a particular fate for them and their families—that parts of the world are forever roped off to them—unless they participate by certain imaginary rules, and they will invent new rules. They will build pathways over, under, and through the physical impediments that separate one side of a border from another. Borderlands are mysterious geographies, full of deceit and magic tricks. This book is a love story written to such places and the people who inhabit them. The games played there are really about more than life and death—they are about drawing substance from the dream. This book really is worth considering every time someone thinks or speaks on the certainty walls may or may not defend.

Authority by Jeff VanDerMeer (2014) 

                            

First, I’m not sure where the spaces and capitalizations should be for Jeff’s last name. I looked at the book and online and I’m not sure anyone’s spelling it consistently. Maybe there’s more than one Jeff Van Der Meer. Anyway—

it’s in how the last scene just allows all the tension and repression and running on a wheel to just uncoil into the great unknown of whatever the third book in his Southern Reach series holds in store. Well done.

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (2011)

For me, the natural comparisons are to The Buest Eye, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Swamplandia! In that sense, this book belongs on high school reading lists. I want my own daughter (who is currently just shy of six months old) to read it, if only for the strength to be found in the last line.

Bryan Harvey tweets about books and basketball mostly @LawnChairBoys.

Early summer reads: Paying urban rent, tennis balls made from hair, masked men, & stories I didn't understand

Image taken from the teaser for the book.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond (2016)

The most poignant aspect of Desmond’s writing is how he understands the conjoined relations between experience and data. The first 292 pages of Evicted focus primarily on the lives of tenants in Milwaukee’s urban neighborhoods. These tenants are mostly single mothers and the children for which they struggle to provide. These stories immerse the reader in the everyday lives of the urban poor, and their battles become more real and less imagined through Desmond’s prose. In these sections, he sprinkles statistics amidst the testimony, but the people are not lost in the numbers. And yet his epilogue “Home and Hope” is twenty or so pages of data-driven argumentation. The shift is beautiful and exactly as it should be. Moreover, Desmond does not hesitate to propose solutions to a crisis he has both recreated through story and sketched with numbers, and the result is the whole elephant in the room, not just a trunk, not just a tusk, but the entire, unavoidable beast.

Spring Reading: Basketball, Opiates, & Bicycles

Some books I read on a beach or late at night:

Boys Among Men by Jonathan Abrams (2016)

Fictional Science: Ginger Strand's 'The Brothers Vonnegut'

Written to avoid all spoilers (or something like that):

I arrived late to the pages of Kurt Vonnegut. Aside from reading “Harrison Bergeron” in middle school, I don’t think any of my English teachers wanted to go near the man and his quirks, at least not for any longer than a short story. When I first started reading Kurt’s novels, I treated them as supplements to the television show Lost. What explains the show’s last season better than Time Quake’s sentimental notion of a clambake? In this way, Vonnegut’s humor has always struck me as both moving in its desperate humanity and scientific in its striving for answers.

Reading at Summer's End (Nonfiction)

A couple weeks ago I mentioned some of my favorite novels from the summer. Here are some nonfiction selections:

"Yeah, wtf! I don't know either."

The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses & the Battle over General Relativity by Pedro G. Ferreira (2014)

I am in no way a scientist, probably goes without saying, but over the last few weeks, I have found reason to yap about this book as my place of work prepares for a massive Back to the Future celebration. Anyway, I saw this book at the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan. I thought, hmmm, I don’t really know much about relativity. Then I thought I should know more about relativity. I bought the book. I read the book. I now know that I know very little about relativity, which is still a lot more than I did. Surprisingly, this book by Ferreira is one of the quickest reads I’ve enjoyed in a long while. Maybe there’s something to adventuring outside one’s areas of confidence and expertise.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein (2014)

A bold and daring book that in its willingness to engage with all-encompassing issues becomes rather all-encompassing itself. The first three quarters of Klein’s text seem to engage with every industrial event and lack of political will and environmental impulse since the first lump of coal went up in smoke. The book’s memory reaches well back into history, and its concerns spiral out into a wide open future—a future that may or may not involve human life. Especially touching in the work are the parallels Klein draws between a life-sustaining planet and her struggles with her own fertility. Somehow, amidst a creeping cynicism and apocalyptic visions, she manages to find a strange sense of grace, and hope.

A Line in the Sand: The Anglo-French Struggle for the Middle East, 1914-1948 by James Barr (2012)

Reading an article in Time Magazine sometime over the last year, I saw a reference to Barr’s history of the region in the first half of the 20^th Century. I wrote it down. I read it. Similar to Klein’s This Changes Everything, Barr’s text creates an odd mixture of hope and fear. Knowing the history of the region makes apocalyptic panic and fear-mongering a less urgent affair. Yet, at the same time, an awareness of historic pain is overwhelming in its own way. How can violence of such mass and so deeply rooted ever be killed? I’m not sure, but I do know that kneejerk reactions to horrendous photos, a call for rash action disguised as righteous courage, and political games that treat real geographies like board game territories are probably solutions other than right. And, still, to do nothing is no more desirable. We should at least admit the difficulty.

The Art of Rhetoric by Aristotle (Old as hell)

Well, what can I say? I’m a huge nerd. Worse than being a huge nerd, I’m also a very traditional nerd.

Bryan Harvey tweets about books, sports, and other things @LawnChairBoys.

Read West, Young Man! (Nonfiction)

In this post from last week, I mentioned some fiction occupying the Western and Southwestern United States. Below are some nonfiction books that I found helpful or though-provoking, and if anything comes to mind, mention it in the comments section, on Twitter, or Facebook:

To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War by Jon Gibler (2011)

In recent years, a plethora of books have been written and published about the drug crisis south of the border. While I have only begun to scratch the surface in reading about and trying to understand what’s transpired between the United States and Mexico over the last couple decades, Gibler’s book is as good a place as any to start. In it, he traces the history of the drug trade and the War on Drugs and, moving from one body left for dead after another, he exposes, if not solutions, then at least the problem’s shape in full.

The United States’ population, through its appetite for escape and denial, has revealed itself to have a blind disregard for both its own well-being and the well-being of those living outside its borders. Without us, there is no drug trade. Second, military industrial complex has profited from our willingness to fight an impossible war. Third, unlike what we see on Breaking Bad, which I loved, the suffering of drug violence is disproportionately south of the border and perhaps the true crime of FX’s popular series is how we all sympathized with Walter White’s family and Jesse Pinkman and not the unaccounted victims of their industry’s trade.

The Truth about Summer: Recently Read Nonfiction

The books discussed below are in no particular order. I enjoyed them all. Feel free to leave recommendations of your own. Here goes:

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer (2013)

For those familiar with the modernist texts of Jon Dos Passos, Packer's text is, in many ways, a nonfiction pastiche of Dos Passos' (mostly fictive) U.S.A. trilogy. Packer's book also received the National Book Award for Nonfiction, so it's not really like it needs me to advertise. Needless to say, I found myself engrossed with its handling of American lives, from a single mother in Ohio to a businessman of the Carolina Piedmont. He takes individual lives and weaves them into the national fabric in what seems like the most natural of movements, and that's what Packer's text does--moves us from one American epoch that is slightly known into one that none of us can recognize, except for the fact that it is made of individuals like you and like me.

I read a great deal of this book on my back patio, looking over a back yard that is, literally, a postage stamp, and from there, I reflected a great deal on my deceased grandfather's tobacco farm. I reflected on his love for the land, but, then, I also reflected on the bigotry of his that seemed to increase with his age and his dementia. This book helped me to understand that beyond biology breaking him, so, too, was the world of political force--and all its religion--grinding him, and other men like him, into dust. There were times when the clarity of this text stunned me so that I could not read. I would close the book's cover, hold its smooth edges, and stare out over what little part of the world bears my name. I looked out onto nothing, thought shit, and then did what little I could do--I kept reading and stopping and reading some more.

Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World by Catalina De Erauso

Written in the 17th Century, one does not expect the contemporary force and pace of Quentin Tarantino, but at a mere eighty pages Erauso's memoir blisters like a sword hilt. By owing parts of its nature to the baroque Don Quixote and finding a picaresque voice in the Western wild, this romping tale reads as a literary precursor to Mark Twain's most rebellious characters, while somehow foreshadowing the vengeful blood lust of Beatrix Kidd. Seriously, this book is everything and nothing, and no one knows what to do with it other than to read it. I found visions of women wearing Bruce Lee tracksuits, but God knows what you'll find. Blood. Daring. Bravado. A woman spitting on the church doors. Just. Read. It.

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)

Earlier in the year, this book's second chapter "The Mastodon's Molars" appeared in The New Yorker, ending in the lines:

"In fact, the American mastodon vanished around thirteen thousand years ago. Its demise was part of a wave of disappearances that has come to be known as the megafauna extinction. This wave coincided with the spread of modern humans and, increasingly, is understood to have been a result of it. In this sense, the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us." (46)

It's not necessarily Kolbert's conclusions at the end of each chapter that are overwhelming, although they are, but how she manages to arrive at them, moving through obscure fossils and seemingly insignificant studies of fungi and mold to, in the deftest of brushstrokes, reveal the hidden bones of the world in which we currently live and, most likely, will die, not just as individuals but as a species. Her writing is both well-crafted and of great importance. After all, she is making rather complex ideas understandable for those readers who are neither paleontologist nor scientists. She had me near tears over the Great Auk's extinction. Need I say more?

One auk pondering whether to ask another auk about extinction; neither one said anything.

The New Mind of the South by Tracy Thompson (2013)

I'm still parceling out exactly what to make of this text. I found it informative and exploratory; it should receive some credit for helping to lay the foundation for one of my new favorite online magazines: The Bitter Southerner. The South is in need of being redefined, but in that need, like in so many other characteristics, the place seems to never change. I'll be thinking on it some more.


Bryan Harvey can be followed on Twitter @LawnChairBoys.