Rock and Roll, Part 2

More music history and biography
Although this topic has nothing to do with the title of this blog, every once in a while I review recent books about rock music. Back in 2018, I published a post on rock and roll autobiographies (mostly), featuring eight books on Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Warren Zevon, Morrissey, and Bob Mould. Since then I’ve reviewed enough music nonfiction to fill another omnibus post recapping past reviews on the subject. Below is the latest crop of books on rock and rollers. Click on the titles below to read the full reviews.

Biographies and Autobiographies

Bobby Womack: My Story 1944–2014 by Bobby Womack and Robert Ashton (5 stars)
This may be the best rock and roll autobiography I’ve ever read. Bobby Womack lived a hard life, enduring much tragedy and hardship, and he tells his story with an unflinching honesty that is admirable and captivating. In addition to his own successful career as a soul singer and guitarist, Womack worked with a long list of rock and roll legends, many of them now Hall of Famers like himself. The stories he tells of these famous acquaintances really reveals their personalities and enlarges your understanding of each individual. Womack’s life story will sometimes make you laugh, might make you cry, and every once in a while may even give you the heebie jeebies.

Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History by Joel Selvin (5 stars)
This gripping band biography is compiled from interviews with about forty different people who lived and/or worked with Sly and the band. Sly Stone himself, a recluse since the 1980s, did not participate. Sly was a successful radio DJ in San Francisco before he decided to form his own band and demonstrate his musical genius on albums like Stand! and There’s a Riot Goin’ On. With escalating fame, however, came escalating drug use and paranoia. This narrative quickly goes south from a success story to a horror story, with former Family Stone members telling harrowing stories of Sly’s erratic and dangerous behavior. This is definitely not a feel-good story, but it’s a riveting read.

And on Piano . . . Nicky Hopkins: The Extraordinary Life of Rock’s Greatest Session Man by Julian Dawson (4.5 stars)
Even if you’ve never heard of Nicky Hopkins, you’ve certainly heard his work. One of the greatest piano players in rock music, Hopkins played on some of the best albums of the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Kinks, the Beatles (mostly their solo records), and more. Hopkins was an official member of a few bands, most notably Quicksilver Messenger Service, but for most of his life he was a much sought-after session man who worked as a hired gun on hundreds if not thousands of recordings. This thoroughly researched book charts the roller coaster career of this humble but highly respected session man who barely achieved fame and never really achieved fortune. 

Ronnie by Ronnie Wood (4.5 stars)
Before joining the Rolling Stones, Ron Wood had already enjoyed quite a successful career in rock and roll, having previously played with The Birds, The Creation, The Jeff Beck Group, The Faces, and Rod Stewart, in addition to his own solo albums. In Ronnie, Wood charts his trajectory from blue-collar upbringing to multimillionaire superstar in charming, articulate, and humorous prose. There is plenty of interesting stuff in here about Wood’s personal life and also about what it’s like to be a Rolling Stone. Though maybe not the most candid of memoirs (as far as his drug use and love life are concerned), this is an entertaining and satisfying read and more enjoyable than Keith Richards’s Life.

The Never-Ending Present: The Story of Gordon Downie and The Tragically Hip by Michael Barclay (3.5 stars)
Though little known South of the border, The Tragically Hip is Canada’s biggest rock band, cranking out challengingly innovative rock albums since 1987. After lead singer Gordon Downie was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, the band went on a farewell tour in 2016. Their final concert was a nationally televised event, and Downie’s death inspired nationwide displays of mourning. This book provides a history of the band, but also goes off on numerous digressions. Downie is highlighted at the expense of the other band members, which is unfortunate because they’re all excellent musicians.

Hellraiser: The Autobiography of the World’s Greatest Drummer by Ginger Baker with Ginette Baker (3 stars)
Widely considered one of the greatest rock drummers of all time, Baker pounded the skins for Cream, Blind Faith, Ginger Baker’s Air Force, the Graham Bond Organization, and Nigerian jazzman Fela Kuti, among others. Baker may have been an excellent musician, but he and and his daughter, who coauthored this book, do not make a great writer. Hellraiser is a rapid-fire string of one-paragraph anecdotes, one after the other, with no continuity, momentum, or suspense. One learns a lot about Baker’s post-stardom life in Africa and his passion for polo. Though Baker and his daughter want you to think his notorious cantankerousness is lovable, he does not come out as likable as they wished. The best you can say about this autobiography is that it does give you a glimpse into the man’s personality, for better or worse.

Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine by Joe Hagan (3 stars)
Jann Wenner, founder and longtime editor of Rolling Stone, authorized this biography, but it is in now way flattering to him. It’s basically an extended psychological study about what a jerk he is. The most disappointing thing about the book is that there really aren’t much in the way of rock and roll stories, just a lot of Wenner and his friends doing drugs, sleeping around, and being mean to each other. This is a very well-researched and well-written work of investigative journalism, but it’s also just really depressing to read a book full of so many unlikable people.

Music History and Criticism

Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock by Steven Hyden (4 stars)
Music critic Steven Hyden celebrates all things classic rock and ponders what kind of future the genre will have now that its stars are dying out. There is also an autobiographical component here as Hyden describes his youth growing up under the influence of classic rock. This will especially appeal to readers from Wisconsin who, like Hyden and myself, grew up listening to the classic rock station WAPL.

Muscle Shoals Sound Studio: How the Swampers Changed American Music by Carla Jean Whitley (2.5 stars)
Some of the greatest recordings in the history of classic rock came out of Muscle Shoals, Alabama. This book recounts the history of one recording studio, the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, run by a group of expert session musicians known as the Swampers. Unfortunately, the author just quotes a bunch of magazine articles and doesn’t really provide any inside information. I would recommend watching the documentary film Muscle Shoals instead.

Songs and Their Stories

 

The Rolling Stones All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track by Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon (4.5 stars)

Bob Dylan All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track by Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon (4 stars)

The All the Songs series is just what it claims to be: commentary on every album and every track recorded by the artists featured, including information on the writing and recording of each song and some explanation of lyrics. The print editions are heavily illustrated coffee table books; the ebook editions are pictureless, but still very informative.

The Songs He Didn’t Write: Bob Dylan Under the Influence by Derek Barker (5 stars)
An encyclopedia of songs that Dylan has covered, in concert or recordings, up to 2008. This book provides a detailed and enlightening glimpse into Dylan’s musical influences. At first glance, this book seems like it would only appeal to the most diehard Dylanologists, but it is quite surprising how much interesting information it delivers on the history of American popular music in general.

Dylanology

 

Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life by Scott M. Marshall (4.5 stars)
A deep dive into Dylan’s spiritual influences and the religious subject matter in his music. Marshall gives welcome attention to Dylan’s gospel period of the late ’70s to early ’80s and analyzes the interplay between Judaism and Christianity in Dylan’s life and work.

Dylan: Disc by Disc by Jon Bream (4.5 stars)
An assortment of rock critics, Dylan biographers, university professors, musicians, and DJs—arranged in pairs—debate the merits and deficiencies of each Dylan album. The selection of contributors is interesting, and every album gets equal treatment, even those that are often derided.

Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, edited by Jonathan Cott (4 stars)
The title is pretty self-explanatory: an anthology of Dylan interviews from throughout his career.

Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown by David Yaffe (3 stars)
A collection of four highbrow music-critic essays. Two are pretty enlightening; the other two not so much.

The Death Ship by B. Traven

A proletarian seaman’s worst-case scenario

The German author who called himself B. Traven is best known for his book The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. His novel The Death Ship was published in 1926. The narrator is Gerard Gales, a name that Traven often uses for the protagonists of his novels, but this character doesn’t seem to bear much resemblance to the Gerald Gales of Traven’s first novel The Cotton-Pickers. This Gales is from Wisconsin, by way of New Orleans, but spends much of the book assuming other nationalities, ultimately adopting the name Pippip and claiming he’s from Egypt.

Gales, an experienced sailor, has found himself comfortable employment on a fine merchant vessel, The Tuscaloosa. After spending a night ashore in Antwerp, however, the ship departs without him, leaving Gales stranded in Belgium. The Belgian police don’t want him there, so they sneak him into Holland. The Dutch don’t want him either, so he is smuggled off somewhere else. He is bounced around Europe from country to country, the victim of exclusionary immigration laws. Gales applies to various consulates in an attempt to acquire the proper papers, but his requests are denied when he comes up against impossible bureaucratic regulations. This goes on for a third of the book, before the “death ship” even shows up. Without any proper papers, Gales is forced to sign on to a shady and decrepit vessel, the Yorikke, on which he is given the lowliest post on the ship, that of “coal drag.” What could be worse than the job of a stoker, who shovels coal into a scalding boiler for hours on end? The coal drag, who serves as the stokers’ underling.

One very likely reason why Traven never achieved widespread recognition is that his writings have an unapologetically anarchistic and socialistic bent. In The Death Ship, Traven exposes and satirizes two main issues of importance to the working class. One is the bureaucratic growth of governments in the early twentieth century, as manifested in their byzantine and draconian immigration laws. The second is the exploitation of labor on ocean vessels. The crewmen in Traven’s novel are unable to acquire passports or proper sailor’s papers, making them men without a nation. This in turn makes them fodder for white slavery, since men without a nation are essentially men without rights. The captive sailors on the world’s “death ships” are forced to perform the most grueling and dangerous work on board their vessels, which Traven details in his vivid descriptions of the hard labor undertaken by the stokers and coal drags on the Yorikke.

The main fault of the novel is that it’s unnecessarily long, and as a result, far too repetitive. The reader learns way more than anyone would want to know about shoveling coal into a boiler, and how many passport horror stories does one need to hear to get the point? On the other hand, much like the muckraking novels of Upton Sinclair, the fact that someone has documented the horrors faced by laborers of this period does have historical value. Another problem is inconsistency of tone. Does Traven intend this to be a comedy or a horror story? The first half of the book is clearly satirical. Every sentence is a punchline that either exaggerates ridiculous immigration laws or paints the Yorikke as the god-awfulest tub on the seven seas. The latter half of the novel, however, is more melancholy and realistic in its depiction of the exploitation of the sailors.

Traven’s writing calls to mind that of Jack London, who was a probable influence on his work. London is better at telling an adventure story, but Traven, writing a few decades later, is better at the kind of brutal socialist realism that London aspired to. Though The Death Ship isn’t as impressive as The Cotton-Pickers or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Traven’s radical and ballsy writing is always a refreshing change of pace from the mainstream literary canon.
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Idle Days in Patagonia by William Henry Hudson

Too many idle thoughts, not enough Patagonia

William Henry Hudson (1841-1922) was born in Argentina, the son of settlers from the United States. He was raised in the pampas near Buenos Aires. He became a British citizen in 1900, and over the course of a literary career that spanned roughly four decades, he published many books on Argentina and England, including ornithological treatises, travelogues, memoirs, and novels. His book Idle Days in Patagonia, published in 1893, is about his first trip South into the vicinity of Argentina’s Rio Negro.

In the opening chapter, Hudson tells us that this journey to Patagonia is a lifelong dream of his. He has always wanted to study the birds of that region. On his way down the Atlantic Coast from Buenos Aires, the steamer in which Hudson is traveling is inadvertently grounded on a beach. All of the passengers have to get out and walk to their destination, a journey of a couple days. Shortly after reaching the Rio Negro, an English acquaintance of Hudson’s accidentally shoots him in the foot. This injury puts a limit on his birding and botanizing expeditions, and, as Hudson explains, results in the “idle days” of the title. Nevertheless, Hudson does manage to venture out a bit on horseback and observe the scenery, wildlife, and vegetation of the region, his descriptions of which constitute much of the book..

Although Hudson is an ornithologist, this book is not a scientific text. He mentions many bird species by name and gives a sentence or two about how pretty they are, but there is very little to learn here about the anatomy or behavior of South America’s birds. This is more a work of travel literature, and not a very good one at that. Successful travel literature requires that the author give the reader a sense of place in regards to the location that’s being discussed, and Hudson doesn’t really accomplish that. In fact, he doesn’t even seem to care whether he writes about Patagonia or not. He drew several of the chapters from papers and articles he had previously published in periodicals. There is an entire chapter in which he rambles on about snow, whiteness, and Herman Melville that has nothing to do with Patagonia at all. Two chapters on eyes and eyesight only vaguely touch upon the people and birds of South America. A chapter on the sense of smell is even more irrelevant. There is even a brief passage in which Hudson advocates for nudism. Hudson frequently departs from his Patagonian narrative to go off on all sorts of asides, which might be forgivable if they approached the philosophical profundity of Henry David Thoreau’s digressions. Instead, Hudson’s musings are mostly just common sense and personal opinion.

Hudson strikes me as one of those authors who decided early in life, “I’m a writer, by God!” and then proceeded to crank out a relentless stream of books about anything that crossed his mind without any consideration of whether what he was saying would be interesting to others. Many writers, once they’d been shot in the foot, might have decided “OK, I guess I’m not going to write this book,” but not Hudson. As a birding enthusiast, I have a high tolerance for writers who just like to talk about birds. Idle Days in Patagonia, however, left me with the feeling that, if I went and spent some time in Argentina, even I could write a better book about it than this.
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Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos: Marvel Epic Collection Vol. 1 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, et al.

Quite exciting when Kirby’s on duty

Before there was Nick Fury, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., there was Sgt. Fury, who led his Howling Commandos on impossible missions for the Allies during World War II. The surly, cigar-chomping sergeant, a creation of Marvel Comics legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, made his debut in 1963. The Marvel Epic Collection trade paperback of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, Volume 1, published in 2019, reprints the first 19 issues of the comic book of the same title. These issues originally ran from May 1963 to June 1965. Marvel’s Epic series reprints classic comics in full-color on bright white matte-coated paper, and the reproduction quality in this volume is really beautiful.

Sgt. Nick Fury, the roughest, toughest sarge in the European Theatre, leads a ragtag bunch of half a dozen military misfits in special forces operations. Based in London, their missions take them to Germany, France, Africa, and even Japan. Each member of the Howling Commandos has his own distinct look, skill set, and personality. The most notable character in the squad is the colorful Corporal Dum Dum Dugan, who would later serve as Fury’s right-hand man in S.H.I.E.L.D.

All 19 of these issues were written by “ex-sgt.” Stan Lee. About half of them were drawn by “ex-infantryman” Jack Kirby. The rest were drawn by “ex-corporal” Dick Ayers, who was also the inker of Kirby’s art. Ayers is a fine artist, but nothing spectacular. Kirby’s work, on the other hand, is really phenomenal. Even when he wasn’t drawing cosmic superheroes or mystic gods, Kirby managed to excel in every genre, even westerns and war comics. Although many panels are spent on the seven commandos just standing around chatting and insulting each other, Kirby, like the Hitchcock of comics, makes these scenes visually exciting, and of course that’s even more true of the combat action sequences. Lee’s stories are well-written as well. The plots are sometimes rather formulaic, as one would expect from adventure fiction of this era, but there is enough complexity and variety in the Howlers’ exploits to keep things interesting. It is amazing how many words of dialogue Lee packed into his 1960s comics. Fury and company have got to be the most loquacious commandos in the history of the U.S. military.

Unlike Harvey Kurtzman’s tales of the horrors of war in EC Comics’ Two-Fisted Tales, these are not the kind of stories that win awards. This is pure popcorn-munching pulp fiction. In Lee and Kirby’s hands, WWII is a stage for adventure, heroism, and patriotism. In television terms (for those who remember the 1970s), Kurtzman and company might have been making M*A*S*H, but Lee and Kirby were making Baa Baa Black Sheep. The Germans in these Sgt. Fury stories are typical evil stereotypes like one sees in war movies of the period. Racism and anti-Semitism feature in a few issues, but there’s no hint of the Holocaust. Though Fury and the Howlers do not fight any supervillains, they are still connected to the Marvel Universe. Nazi Barons Strucker and Zemo make appearances, and Captain America and Bucky guest star in one issue. Even Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four makes a pre-superhero cameo as an OSS agent.

In general, I would rather read a superhero comic or a western comic than a war comic, but Lee and Kirby kept me well-entertained with these first 19 issues of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos. Although they present a sanitized version of the war, that was the norm for this time period. Subject to the comics code, Marvel had to keep things kid-friendly, and I know that my childhood friends and I, whose parents and grandparents served in WWII, would have loved these stories.
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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

A clever dystopia until it gets too preachy

Brave New World is one of those books that many American high school students are forced to read in English literature classes. It may very well be, however, one such book that they remember enjoying. Aldous Huxley’s science fiction novel of a dystopian future was first published in 1932 and now resides securely on many “best of” literary lists of the greatest novels of all time. After having first read the book in high school, I decided to reread it a few decades later and found it not quite as amusing as I remember. Brave New World is at its best early on when Huxley maintains his sense of humor. Towards the end, however, the novel takes itself too seriously.

The story takes place in London in the year 2540. We are first introduced to the baby factory where humans are manufactured to fit into one of five prescribed social castes. Biological reproduction is now considered disgusting, but indiscriminate casual sex is encouraged. Every citizen fits into their socioeconomic niche like a finely oiled gear in a clockwork machine. Nonconformity and is outlawed for the good of the whole. Any residual discontent is nullified by drugs. Henry Ford, the American father of modern industrialism, is worshipped as a god, and worship is compulsory. Amid this tightly prescribed system, however, there are anomalies. One is Bernard Marx, a high-caste worker who doesn’t fit into and doesn’t buy into this shallow world around him. Bernard craves solitude, individuality, meaning, and love. He’s not even satisfied when the woman of his dreams, Lenina Crowne, wants to have casual sex with him.

After establishing this future London, the plot makes a surprising turn to New Mexico, where Bernard and Lenina venture on vacation. There, on a Native American reservation where the inhabitants live a “primitive” existence (by 2540 standards), Bernard finds a white man living among the Indians. With ulterior motives, Bernard brings this wild young man, whose name is John but who is often referred to as “the Savage,” back to civilized London. If Bernard was a fish out of water in this society, John is even more so. Huxley contrasts the Savage’s old-fashioned (i.e. twentieth-century) morals with the vapid hedonism of the dystopian Londoners.

After contrasting the ways of the Savage with the meaningless existence of the “brave new world,” what is Huxley’s prescription for societal ills? Shakespeare and the Bible. Really? For such a daring book that has been frequently banned for its racy content, Brave New World ultimately delivers a surprisingly conservative ending that’s almost Victorian in its traditional morality. Is Huxley merely directing his satire from one vision of society to another? Though he might be exaggerating some of the Savage’s Christian religious fervor, it seems unlikely that Huxley’s glorification of Shakespeare is insincere.

The surprising thing about Brave New World is that the future it satirically depicts has turned out to be the opposite of where society seems to be heading in the 21st century (at least as far as Americans are concerned). Instead of Huxley’s vision of soulless science, free love, and selfless conformity, the United States moves toward a future that’s anti-science, anti-intellectual, pro-religion, anti-sex, anti-birth control, and pro-redneck individualism. At least our rampant income disparity parallels Huxley’s stratified caste system. Huxley’s brave new world, come to think of it, doesn’t seem so bad, with its blissful ignorance, unlimited sex, and total lack of material wants. By comparison, maybe we’re the ones living in a dystopia.
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Man’s Fate by André Malraux

French perspective on Chinese Communist uprising

French author André Malraux’s novel Man’s Fate was published in 1933 and won the prestigious French literary prize the Prix Goncourt. The original French title is La Condition humaine (The Human Condition), but it has been translated into English as Man’s Fate, Man’s Estate, and Storm in Shanghai, the latter title giving some indication of the book’s subject matter.

The novel revolves around a Communist uprising that took place in Shanghai in 1927, known as the Shanghai Massacre or the April 12 Purge. Several men among the book’s international cast of characters are involved in a Communist cell secretly plotting a revolt against the ruling Chinese nationalist party, known as the Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-shek. The conspirators hope to gain control of Shanghai before the arrival of a train loaded with Kuomintang forces and headed their way. As the novel opens, Chen, a Communist terrorist, is murdering a government official. He later sets his sights on assassinating Chiang Kai-shek himself. While there are a few scenes of violence and brutality, most of the narrative consists of back room meetings in shops, nightclubs, and opium dens, where the Communists hide, plot, and commiserate. The cast also includes a few French businessmen who represent the commercial interests that France had in China at the time. To further their business ventures, the French support Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, and Malraux is critical of this capitalist colonialism on the part of his native land.

This novel is pro-Communist and to some extent romanticizes terrorism. I don’t have a problem with that. I just don’t like the way the story is told. Malraux seems to have gone to the Joseph Conrad school of approaching everything from an oblique angle, dwelling on insignificant details at the expense of plot, and never giving the reader enough information to understand what’s going on. There is an ostentatious artiness to the prose that comes across as pretentious. It also comes across, for the most part, as more boring than this story should be. I found this period in history and the conflict depicted interesting, but Malraux writes as if he wants to obscure the details from readers who aren’t already in the know. When there are life-and-death events taking place in the story, he chooses to concentrate on the characters’ facial expressions, interior monologues, or quirky eccentricities rather than the vital matters at hand. That’s unfortunate, because there are a few chapters here that are really quite moving (in particular one involving political prisoners). I would have liked this novel better, however, if it had been written by a naturalist writer (like Emile Zola), a proletarian realist (André Stil), or even a neo-Romanticist (Boris Pasternak). In any of those cases, the reader would have gotten more social realism and less navel-gazing modernism.

Man’s Fate will probably appeal mostly to those with an interest in Communist history or leftist literature. If you don’t know much about the 1927 clash between the Communists and the Kuomintang, however, you’re not going to learn a whole lot here. Perhaps because Malraux wants to present his narrative as an insider’s view, he writes the novel as if the reader is already intimately familiar with these events. As far as the broader “human condition” is concerned, Malraux includes many scenes of characters dealing with existential angst. If you’re not in a position of killing or being killed, however, it is difficult to see how their inner turmoil and personal dilemmas are applicable to the non-revolutionary life.

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Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth by Avi Loeb

Informed optimism in the search for alien life

In addition to publishing hundreds of scientific papers and articles, Harvard University astrophysicist Avi Loeb has written two popular science books for the general public. Extraterrestrial, published in 2021, is the first, followed in 2023 by a sequel, Interstellar. In both of these books, Loeb considers possible evidence of alien life and advocates for more active investigation into the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence.

In 2017, our solar system received its first confirmed interstellar visitor. Based on its trajectory, the object given the Hawaiian name of ‘Oumouamoua was recognized for having originated from outside of our solar system. Astronomers on Earth made some observations of it while it was passing through our neighborhood, but it didn’t stay long, so the investigation was limited. What data was gathered, however, indicates that ‘Oumouamoua was no average space rock. According to Loeb, measurements of the light reflected from ‘Oumouamoua suggest that the mysterious object was likely the shape of a pancake and made of, or at least covered with, a highly reflective medal. Anomalies in ‘Oumouamoua’s motion and velocity are also atypical of an asteroid, comet, or meteor. This and other evidence leads Loeb to believe that ‘Oumouamoua was created by an alien intelligence, likely a piece of space junk from an ancient civilization that wandered into our solar system (or vice versa). After stating his case, Loeb admits that we will never really know the true nature of ‘Oumouamoua, and that’s the sad part. Will we be better prepared for the next perplexing interstellar object that crosses our path? Loeb hopes so, and after reading this book, you might too.

I like a lot of what Loeb has to say, but I don’t always like how he says it. It’s commendable that he wants to make science accessible to a general audience, but at times this book reads as too accessible, like it’s aimed at high schoolers. Loeb repeats many of the same points over and over again, as if he’s teaching a class to its slowest student. While there is sufficient content about ‘Oumouamoua, at this mass-appeal level of detail it’s not enough to fill up a whole book, so at times the page count feels padded with asides, such as Loeb’s memories of growing up on a farm in Israel or his work studying black holes. Sometimes these digressions do bear interesting fruit, however, like in particular his description of the Breakthrough Starshot project, which aims to send cell-phone-sized space probes, powered by lightsails, to investigate other star systems. Loeb claims such a probe could reach our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, in around 20 years.

Prior to reading Extraterrestrial, I had seen Loeb speak at a local science institution, and I read his later book Interstellar. While Extraterrestrial is more about the phenomenon of ‘Oumouamoua, Interstellar is about what comes after. In that later book, Loeb outlines in more detail his particular plan of action for bettering our chances of detecting interstellar visitors. Both books add up to a compelling and thought-provoking argument. Since Extraterrestrial was published, three or four other interstellar objects have been detected in our solar system, including a couple earthbound meteorites, but none showing characteristics as curious as ‘Oumouamoua. I’m more of a skeptic than Loeb, but his unbridled optimism toward finding alien life has at least partially convinced me that ‘Oumouamoua may have been the real deal—or at least, we should try harder to prepare for the next visitor. Being no astrophysicist myself, I’m not entirely equipped to assess the scientific probability of all of Loeb’s claims, but I’m glad someone is pursuing this area of study, and I admire him for doing so.
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Maya History by Tatiana Proskouriakoff

For expert epigraphers only

Russian-American scholar Tatiana Proskouriakoff is one of the stellar names in the field of Maya studies and was an instrumental contributor to the decipherment of the Maya’s written language. The book Maya History, a summation of her life’s work, was incomplete at the time of her death and published posthumously in 1993. Prior to Proskouriakoff, the prevailing view among Maya scholars was that the hieroglyphic carvings left behind by the Maya civilization were largely devoted to astronomical, calendrical, and mythological content. Proskouriakoff, on the other hand, proved that the Maya carvings were historical records of political events and dynastic lineages. Although the Maya’s written carvings were not completely deciphered, Proskouriakoff was able to recognize the names and titles of rulers and enough verbs to connect royal family trees and diplomatic relations between various Maya city-states. In Maya History, Proskouriakoff examines almost every Mayan stela catalogued during her lifetime, as well as lintels, staircases, and other carved monuments. She presents her findings largely in chronological order while bouncing back and forth between just about every Maya city in Guatemala and Southern Mexico.

This is an important and fascinating book, but it’s not for general readers. Here’s a typical sentence: “The second hand glyph holds a ‘hook-scroll’ (T19), associated with death expressions, and refers to a rare ahau compound such as that inscribed on a vessel from the Tzakol III burial 22 at Uaxactun (R. E. Smith 1955:2:Fig. 7)”. Proskouriakoff’s intended audience of university professors would have had access to a library of books with illustrations and photographs of Mayan stelae and texts, as well as J. Eric S. Thompson’s catalog of Maya glyphs (where one would find the “T19” mentioned above, for example). Very few illustrations of stelae are actually included in this book (though many single glyphs are pictured alone), so she’s constantly describing monuments that the reader can’t see. Dates are all presented in Maya notation (e.g. 9.12.9.17.16 5 Cib 14 Zotz’), which is no surprise, but no Gregorian equivalents are given. To fully understand everything in this book, one would need not only a faultless understanding of the Maya calendar but also a professional familiarity with all the archaeological sites discussed, or at least a wealth of PhD-level reference materials with illustrations of every stela. Proskouriakoff’s scholarship is sound, but this book could really use a publisher that will go the extra mile to illustrate it to the extent it deserves.

While Proskouriakoff outlines a great deal of Maya chronology in this book, she continually admits that much of what she is stating is speculative or unresolved. The reading of Maya hieroglyphs has no doubt come a long way since much of Maya History was written. Since then, I’m sure that many of Proskouriakoff’s conjectures have been confirmed, but probably a few have been proved erroneous. This book is really more about the process of decipherment, however, than the results. The amount of actual historical information in this book could have been summarized in a two- or three-page chronological table (unfortunately it isn’t). The bulk of the text, on the other hand, is Proskouriakoff’s explanatory examination of Maya glyphs and text.

Proskouriakoff’s Maya History is a five-star book in the history of Maya studies. For the general reader, however, it’s not a five-star reading experience. For nonacademic readers like myself looking for a deeper dive into the arcane details of this subject, I would recommend Forest of Kings by Linda Schele and David Freidel. Like Maya History, it combines historical narrative with a detailed examination of glyphs and iconography, but it’s more accessible to the general reader and more generously illustrated.
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Servitude by Eugene O’Neill

Who but O’Neill could make a rom-com so depressing?

Eugene O’Neill

Eugene O’Neill, winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature, is undoubtedly one of the greatest playwrights in the history of the American theatre. Having enjoyed reading O’Neill’s better-known plays, such as Anna Christie, The Hairy Ape, and The Iceman Cometh, I decided to work my way through his complete works. The task has not been entirely rewarding, however, particularly when venturing into O’Neill’s initial efforts, plays that even the author himself wished had been destroyed. Servitude, written in 1914, was O’Neill’s second full-length play, after Bread and Butter. Servitude was not published until 1950, against O’Neill’s wishes, in a volume entitled The Lost Plays of Eugene O’Neill. Now one can find it in various collections of O’Neill’s complete works, such as the Delphi Classics ebook or the Library of America hardcover editions.

David Roylston, a mustachioed playwright (hmmm, I wonder whom he’s patterned after?), is married with children, but his wife and kids are off traveling without him. He is holed up in his suburban New York home working on his latest play, with only his faithful servant to keep him company. Roylston is surprised by a ringing of the doorbell in the middle of the night. He is even more surprised to find that the caller is a beautiful young woman. Mrs. Frazer, as she calls herself, is one of Roylston’s biggest fans. Having perused all of his plays and taken to heart their precepts of scorning convention in order to be true to oneself, she has left her husband and makes a pilgrimage to meet her literary hero. As the two converse, she misses the last evening train and has no way of returning to the city, so Roylston offers to put her up in the guest bedroom.

Keep in mind that in this pre–World War I era, it was considered improper for a woman to be alone with a man who wasn’t her husband (and when defining alone, servants didn’t count). It’s not just an important contextual tidbit to keep in mind; the entire narrative of the play is, in fact, built upon this antiquated taboo. If her overnight stay were discovered, Mrs. Frazer’s reputation would be ruined, since everyone would assume she and Roylston had sex. Regardless, Roylston throws caution to the wind and convinces her to stay anyway. This causes all sorts of turmoil when his wife returns home the following morning to find Mrs. Frazer in her house.

The play starts out pretty well but just proceeds to get worse and worse. At first, you’re wondering what Mrs. Frazer wants from Roylston, which grabs your interest. Is she some former lover of his? Is she a just a fan, or is she a stalker? Then O’Neill explores the relationship between writers and their fans, which is also kind of interesting. From there, however, the play evolves into a debate about marriage, in which the two lead characters discuss at length how much the institution of marriage sucks. After all that, however, O’Neill tries to do a 180 and turn this into a romantic comedy—not a comedy in the sense that it’s funny; just a comedy as in the opposite of tragedy. For his time, I believe O’Neill had some relatively modern ideas about women’s independence. On the other hand, he doesn’t seem to like women very much, because in his marital dramas they are often depicted as the root of all evil.

Though Servitude shows some promise early on, by the halfway point it ventures into formulaic territory. The only aspect that’s not formulaic is O’Neill’s disgruntled views on love and marriage, which are just a drag. O’Neill would go on to write some masterpieces about marriage and family dynamics (like Mourning Becomes Electra and Long Day’s Journey into Night), but Servitude shows very little inkling of those great things to come.

Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls

Not the “hermit” of Walden but a public intellectual

Laura Dassow Walls, a professor emerita of English at the University of Notre Dame, happens to have written books about a few fascinating figures whom I admire greatly. Luckily for me, Walls is a very good researcher and writer. I previously read her biography of Alexander von Humboldt, The Passage to Cosmos. She followed that excellent book with a biography of another interesting and important figure, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, published in 2017.

In Thoreau’s case, how do you write a biography about someone who devoted most of his life to autobiographical writings? Well, for starters, Walls doesn’t spend a lot of time at Walden Pond. She assumes the reader has already read Thoreau’s best-known work, so she doesn’t devote a lot of time summarizing it. Instead, she concentrates more on Thoreau’s family life, literary career, and the behind-the-scenes story of how Walden became a book. In regards to other Thoreau works, however, such as The Maine Woods and Cape Cod, Walls does quite a bit of recapping. Although Thoreau: A Life is largely a factual biography, it includes a fair amount of literary criticism, as well as considerable speculative psychoanalysis of the man in question.

For those who know little about Thoreau, there’s a popular misconception of him as a hermit who abandoned society to live as a recluse deep in the forest. For most anyone who would be interested in reading this biography, however, it’s likely common knowledge that Walden Pond was just outside of town, Thoreau’s house in the woods was not very far off the beaten path, and while he lived there he still had a great deal of social interaction with friends, family, and the citizens of Concord, Mass. Thoreau’s experiment at Walden was more about domestic economy, environmental awareness, and spiritual clarity than about self-imposed isolation. Walls also reveals that the relationship between Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson was more complicated than simply the kindred spirits of a mentor and mentee. She delves deeply into their friendship and shows that the two were as much rivals as friends. Beyond the expected cast of Transcendentalists, Walls also recounts Thoreau’s encounters with many important literary and historical figures of his day, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Horace Greeley, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown.

One surprise to me was the extent of Thoreau’s celebrity during his lifetime. At least in Massachusetts, and to some extent farther afield, he was well-known as a naturalist and as an author who was popular on the lecture circuit. When he published an essay on a current issue, both the intelligentsia and the general public paid attention and reacted. That’s not to say, however, that his books sold well. He struggled to make ends meet during his lifetime and made most of his living on carpentry and surveying. Instead of just Thoreau the guy who wanders in the woods, Walls’s biography really provides a good look at Thoreau the writer and man of letters who had to promote himself and deal with publishers and critics just like any other literary figure. We also get a glimpse at Thoreau the natural scientist, who counted Harvard faculty like Louis Agassiz among his colleagues. Walls has already published an entire book on Thoreau’s contributions to science entitled Seeing New Worlds, which I look forward to reading.

Thoreau may not have lived as exciting a life as Humboldt (who has?), but the two share much common ground. Both explored the intersection between literature and science, both were early pioneers of ecological thought, and both have been served well by Walls’s thorough research and thoughtful writing. In Thoreau: A Life, Walls skillfully combines factual data, intellectual history, and philosophical analysis into a well-crafted biography that does justice to this illustrious and complex individual.  

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