Nonfiction

Barbara Hurd has three superlative books out from the University of Georgia Press this summer: Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains; Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination; and Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark. The latter two are reprints that were honored with being a Los Angeles Times book of the year and Library Journal's best natural history book of the year respectively. Walking the Wrack Line is more than likely to win some awards as well, being just as good as the first two, if not better.

In each book, Hurd collects her essays about the subject at hand. Each is a finely crafted gem of insight, imagination, and information. The way in which she collects specific detail and makes it as interesting to the reader as to her is a kind of gift. The focus of her attention in Walking the Wrack Line is as finely tuned as it is at times lyrical. In such essays as "Moon Snail: Unseemly Proportions," "Spider Crab: Disguise," "Jellyfish: The Unfinished," "Bottle and Feather: A Different Question," Hurd not only celebrates the natural world, she also slowly builds up a complete picture of an ecosystem through its component parts. In addition, she manages to infuse her observations with universal themes.

But, for me at least, there's another pleasure that comes from reading Walking the Wrack Line, and it's selfishly personal. I'm one of those readers who also likes mucking about in tidal pools and searching the beach for seaweed, driftwood, and exotic creatures washed up far from home. On that level, Hurd's book also has great appeal. Because nothing in Walking the Wrack Line seems false; instead, it's as if someone had had the same experience, and knew the best way to get it down in prose.

I should add that I not only recommend these books for their content. The University of Georgia Press has done a marvelous job with the packaging. All three volumes are beautiful books, and deserve space on your shelf.

Clarkesworld, an excellent online venue for SF/F fiction and nonfiction has posted my interview with John Grant, author of Corrupted Science. The book is in the middle of a relaunch sparked by word-of-mouth and positive buzz. It's a hilarious and at times infuriating account of hypocrisy, avarice, and plain old fraud in the world of science down through the ages.

Brooks Hansen has written an account of his ultimately successful journey to becoming a father, after much disappointment, called The Brotherhood of Joseph. Like everything Hansen writes, it's honest and unusual and at times very heart-rending. Hansen has written a number of fine novels, including The Chess Garden which is one of my favorites of all time. I interviewed Hansen recently about the book.

Amazon.com: Many people go through difficulties in having children. Many of them are writers. Not all of them write a book about their experiences. You did. Why?
Brooks Hansen: Well, a quick glance at my output will reveal it’s not my first inclination to write intimately about my life. My books have tended to be about distant times and places. In this instance, I made an exception for two reasons, I guess. The first is that what Elizabeth and I went through is something a lot of people are going through these days, and that a lot of people are talking about. But there’s a real gap in the conversation. One doesn’t often hear the husband’s point of view. I don’t assume that I’m a typical husband or that our story is a typical one, but I still thought it might be worthwhile to get a male perspective out there.

Ultimately, though, if I’m being honest, that alone would not have compelled me to write the book. What compelled me to write the book is what happened to us in Siberia, specifically, in the course of around thirty-six hours. That day, day-and-a-half, was so far beyond anything I had ever experienced in my entire life, and ever hope to experience, I really had no choice but to try to express it. Given what I do for a living, it would have been cowardly, weird, and mildly deranged not to.

Amazon.com: Did you keep a personal diary or journal during the period described in the book?
Hansen: The book divides in half. The first part is about my wife’s and my struggle with infertility, our experience with assisted reproductive technology, and the difficulty of transitioning from that to adoption. In general, it’s the more reflective – i.e., less narrative -- half of the book; really, it’s almost an extended essay. For that, no, I didn’t take notes or keep a diary. I kind of just let rip with everything that had been going on in my head for the last seven years.

When we got the call to go to Russia - and it’s that trip that comprises most of the second half of the book -- I did start to take notes, because I knew there was a likelihood I might write about the trip sooner or later, and I knew that what I wrote was probably going to be much more narrative in form, so I wanted to be sure I was remembering the sequence of events correctly, as well as what I was feeling at the time.

Amazon.com: Was the experience of writing the book painful, cathartic, or something else entirely?
Hansen: I didn’t find it painful. The fact is, as dismal as those years or waiting and struggling were, and as difficult as what happened to us in Russia was, by the time I got round to writing about it, I already regarded our story as being an extremely happy one, about two very lucky people. In fact, one of the reasons I wanted to write it quickly and not let too much time pass before getting it all down, is that I didn’t wanted the happiness that I was feeling, and that we were feeling as a family, to obscure the intensity of frustration and anger and sorrow we had been going through before. As I point out in the book, it’s extremely difficult to remember pain. I had to get to that stuff while it was still fresh. 
How do you get enough distance from events to write about them effectively?

As I say, I didn’t really want distance. I wanted it to feel raw, because the experience itself was pretty raw. And yet of course, a certain amount of distance is required just to make sense, and there I think I relied on the fact that, by now, I’ve put in a fair amount of time telling stories. It’s the thing I know how to do. I know when I’m beginning to lose the thread, and I know how to stop and pick it up, just from experience.

So I guess maybe that’s the answer to your question. I have long been aware that I seem to have gone about this whole writing business in an ass-backwards fashion. The more traditional route is to begin one’s career by “writing what you know,” finding your voice, and then if you’re still determined to try to make a life of it, you take that voice and you go learn the other skills you’ll need to keep on -- like how to use your imagination, how to research, how to follow your nose, how to find stories and craft them; how, in other words, to write what you DON’T already know.

For me, it has worked the opposite. As soon as I was out of college, I started writing what I didn’t know, and that’s really how I taught myself to write: very much from the imagination, and history, and curiosity, because that’s the stuff that excited me. That’s what kept bringing me back, and made me want to work. And it still for the most part is – applying the high math of storytelling to people and places that fascinate me, but with which I may not be all that familiar at the outset.

And it’s not that I ever rejected the idea of writing what I knew, or writing about my own life.  For me, it just seemed clear that because of my own interests and my own process, I was going to learn how to tell a story first, and how to engage the imagination of a reader, and I trusted that those skills would still serve me if and when something happened to me that merited sharing. Something did. I hope they have.

Amazon.com: How is the book different in its finished form from how you envisioned it originally?
Hansen: Not too. The truth is, I have an entirely different relationship to this book than I’ve had to any other book I’ve ever written. Because it’s about something that happened to me, and because my impulse in writing it was simply to reflect that experience as clearly and as honestly as I was able, I find I didn’t trouble over things like structure, voice, or sequence as much. All those things that slow the process of fiction writing, they were already taken care of. Nor do I find myself troubling much over the book’s commercial prospects. Again, my feeling is, this is what happened to me. I am aware that this sort of thing is happening to a lot of people my age. If my experience can be of service to them, that’s great. Nothing would please me more, and I’ll do anything I can to get word out and be a resource. If not, well, the book still stands as a reasonably accurate record of probably the most extraordinary thing that will ever happen to me. God willing. I had no real choice but to do it, so I find myself curiously relaxed about whether it resonates, or how quickly it resonates. The book is what it is. The people who need it will find it.

Amazon.com: What are you currently working on?
Hansen: I actually just wrote a novella I’d been sitting on for a while – far more quickly than I’m used to -- but the big daunting project for some time now has been a complete telling of the Life of John the Baptist, kind of a composite rendering drawn from different traditions, and different disciplines. As of now, it’s due to come out next Spring from W.W. Norton, having been acquired by the same woman who did most of the editing on The Chess Garden, which is a good thing, but all that assumes I’ll meet a September first deadline. And I’m not sure I mentioned, but I now have a two year old and a four year old, and we’ve living out in California and it’s the summer.

Sometimes writing a book is as much of a life-changing experience as reading it. In the case of Life in the Balance: A Physician's Memoir of Life, Love and Loss with Parkinson's Disease and Dementia, helping a friend write a book can be just as profound. The memoir of MD Thomas B. Graboys would not have been completed without his friend, journalist and author Peter Zheutlin. With Dr. Graboys currently scheduled to appear on ABC's Good Morning America June 25, I interviewed Zheutlin via email.

Why should people read Life in the Balance?
Anyone who has experienced serious illness, either as a patient or a family member, will find a lot of wisdom in this book from a distinguished and beloved physician turned patient. Dr. Graboys brings thirty years of experience helping patients and their families cope with heart disease to his personal struggle with Parkinson's Disease and dementia. It's not an easy read because the story is tragic and there won't be a happy ending because Dr. Graboys' disease is chronic and progressive. Nevertheless, readers will be inspired by how proactive he is about living life to the fullest within the boundaries imposed by his illness.

How did writing this book change you or your perspective on the world?
I knew Tom Graboys for more than twenty years before we collaborated on this book. He gave me the rare privilege of being privy to his most intimate feelings and struggles, and helping him share his story was deeply gratifying. The process of writing the book made me realize that people have so much to offer one another in times of heartache and grief. One lesson that Tom conveys in the book is that the patient can do much to alleviate the burdens that fall to loved ones and caregivers by how they conduct themselves through their illness. Working with Tom also taught me a lesson about determination. That Tom was able to persevere and create a book given the toll dementia has taken on him taught me a lot about perseverance and courage.

Ultimately, what was the basic impulse behind Thomas Graboys wanting to create this memoir?
Being forced to give up the practice of medicine was a huge loss for Tom. His entire sense of self was tied up in being a healer, a teacher, and a physician. In a very real sense this book is Tom's way of continuing to be all those things but through different means.

What kind of response have you received from readers, including either those who have Parkinson’s or those who care for someone with Parkinson’s?
A few weeks ago, Tom and spoke about the book at the Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, MA, where Tom's medical practice was based. There must have been 150 people there. During the Q & A a man got up and said that his father had suffered with Lewy body dementia, the type of dementia Tom has, for twenty years, but until he read Tom's book he never truly understood what his father had gone through. That alone makes the book terribly valuable. It tells a story of dementia from the inside out. I think the book gives voice to people suffering with Parkinson's and dementia and their loved ones and just having someone articulate what you are suffering can be greatly comforting because you know there is someone out there who really understands.
    
What are you working on now?
My next book, also a collaboration, will be published next spring by AMACOM, the publishing arm of the American Management Association. The book is tentatively titled, "Riches Among the Ruins: Adventures in the Dark Corners of the Global Economy." Robert P. Smith, the author, pioneered the trade in emerging market debt in the 1980s and his business life was full of adventure. It's not a how-to or dense book about business or economics. You might call it adventure travel with a business slant. Parts of it are downright hilarious.

We're not the first to note the untimely passing of NBC's Tim Russert on Friday. The airwaves and the internet have been full of tributes from colleagues and former interview antagonists to Washington's top political journalist (and the bestselling author of Big Russ and Me and Wisdom of Our Fathers). My favorite personal tribute: his longtime friend Joe Klein's on Time's Swampland ("He was loving this election, as much as any we'd covered. I just can't believe he won't be around to find out how it ends."). My favorite line: Ezra Klein: "Presumably, he's up somewhere beyond the cloudline, hectoring God about His inconsistencies. 'But Lord, in Exodus 6:12, you clearly said...'" Most fitting tribute: Time's collection of his Top 10 Gotcha Moments.

As many have noted, it was especially poignant that he died two days before Father's Day, since few public figures have paid more heartfelt tribute to their fathers than Russert for his Big Russ, who worked two jobs, collecting garbage by day and driving a newspaper truck by night, for most of his working life, and who worked equally hard to pass on to his children a sturdy set of values. And by all accounts Tim did his best to live up to that example in his relationship with his own son Luke. Russert's two books, which have been on the top of our bestseller list since soon after the news broke, are both about fathers, and with the day in mind, I thought it would be appropriate to post a short passage from Big Russ and Me here:

Although we loved our fathers, there was a distance between us and a recognition that they inhabited a very different universe than we did. It was not just that they were usually working, although that was part of it. It was that our fathers and mothers were adults, and we were kids, during a time when grown-ups and children lived in separate worlds and were exposed to very different things. (A small example: in the 1950s we never saw a bad word in print or heard an off-color remark on the radio or on television.) Nobody I knew ever called grown-ups, even close family friends, by their first names, and the grown-ups never suggested that we should. To this day, when I go back to Buffalo and I run into one of our old neighbors, I still address them as "Mr. Griffin" or "Mrs. Geary."

Shaking hands with adults was very important, at least for boys, and it was something I practiced with Dad until it became second nature. Dad insisted on a firm handshake, and he worked with me until I developed one. "When you meet somebody," he would say, "you want to make them feel that you're proud and happy to know them. So don't put a wet fish in their hand. Give that hand a good shake, snap your wrist, and look them in the eye. People are people, and if they like you, they'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Treat them the way you'd like to be treated."

... These things were so ingrained in me that I passed them along to my son, Luke, almost without thinking. When he was four or five, I heard myself echoing Dad's words as we practiced what to do when he met an adult for the first time -- or the twentieth. I'd say, "Come here, buddy, and let's shake hands," and I undoubtedly used the phrase "wet fish" as part of the lesson....

When Luke was a junior in high school and we went to visit a few colleges, one of the deans took me aside and said, "That is one impressive young man you have there." I was happy to hear this, of course, and I silently hoped he would elaborate, which he did. "Your boy shook my hand," the dean continued. "He looked me in the eye and engaged me in conversation." That's all it took! And from the way the dean said it, I could tell this wasn't something he saw every day. I was proud of Luke, but even more, I was grateful to Dad.

Today is Father's Day, but it's also Sunday, the day that Russert made his own in his 17 years of hosting Meet the Press (my favorite detail from his career: NBC News made Russert their Washington bureau chief and named him host of Meet the Press before he had any on-air television experience). This morning's program will be an hourlong tribute to Russert, hosted by Tom Brokaw. Tune in with your dad. --Tom

In Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages noted cultural critic Katie Roiphe examines seven marriages between 1910 and World War II. She uses private memoirs, personal correspondence, and long-forgotten journals as source materials for this attempt to re-create the lives of these fascinating couples. Among those examined are H.G. & Jane Wells, Katherine Mansfield & John Middleton Murry, and Vanessa & Clive Bell. How did Roiphe choose her subjects? As she writes in the introduction, "The couples I have chosen were more than usually involved in questions of freedom and attraction. Their relationships were depraved or innovative, depending on one's point of view, and they tried to solve the problem of intimate relations in more or less creative ways." Why the period between the two wars? In part, she writes, "because it was as richly conflicted as our own. The lives of the writers and artists emerging from the Edwardian period bridged an enormous gap in attitude: their earliest education was infused with the exquisite restraint of the Victorians, and they came of age amidst the seductive freedoms and sexual frankness promised by the new century."

The book has received great praise from the likes of Publishers Weekly, The New York Times Book Review, and Slate. In reading through Uncommon Arrangements, it's clear to me that Roiphe is also interested in telling stories. There's much here that from a plot or narrative perspective fascinates, in addition to Roiphe's observations about the couples and the times in which they lived. Highly recommended.