Exploring the Alexander Archipelago and its glaciers
Travels in Alaska, a memoir by naturalist, explorer, and environmental conservationist John Muir, was published in 1915, shortly after his death. The book chronicles three trips Muir made to the Alexander Archipelago in southeastern Alaska during the summers of 1879, 1880, and 1890. (Muir briefly mentions a fourth trip he made to Alaska in 1881, in which he traveled as far as the Aleutian Islands and Barrow. That trip is not covered here but in another book, The Cruise of the Corwin.) Muir didn’t write this account of his trips until much later, using the notes he took during his expeditions to compose the narrative. Muir was writing Travels in Alaska at the time of his death in 1914, so the book is unfinished and stops abruptly midway through the third journey.
Muir had already distinguished himself as a first-class naturalist by exploring and writing on the Sierra Nevada of California. In Yosemite Valley Muir formulated a theory of how glaciation sculpts the geologic landscape. His primary reason for venturing to Alaska was to explore more glaciers in order to investigate this theory. Muir took steamers from California up to Fort Wrangell in Alaska, then explored the islands and inlets in smaller boats and canoes, camping in the wild and engaging in extensive hiking and mountaineering excursions. Muir enjoyed solitude in the wilderness, but he was no recluse. He often made excursions in the company of Native American traveling companions, as well as missionaries from Fort Wrangell including one adventurous Mr. Young. Muir’s account of these trips is an enjoyable mix of a naturalist’s scientific observations, an adventurer’s travel narrative, and a poet’s love letter to mother nature.
The book is at its best when Muir is describing life among the Native inhabitants of Alaska. Muir’s relationship with the Tlingits and Chilcats he met was one of mutual respect, and it’s unlikely you’ll find a more honest and reverential first-hand depiction of the Natives’ way of life coming from a white man’s pen. His descriptions of the natural environment are both beautiful and informative, particularly in his discussions of the region’s plants and animals. Personally, I’m never too enthusiastic about reading descriptions of geological phenomena, topography, and the like, but Muir’s writings on the subject are better than most. Beyond rocks and minerals, Alaskan earth science has the added dimension of glaciology, which is a fascinating subject in its own right and Muir’s true passion. The reader couldn’t ask for a better guide to the wilderness of the region.
Having recently returned from a trip to Southeast Alaska myself, I greatly enjoyed Muir’s vivid and eloquent descriptions of the scenery there, as well as his insightful scientific explanations of the glacial activity taking place. Due to climate change, the number and size of glaciers has greatly decreased since Muir visited, and this book serves as a valuable time capsule of the state of the Alaskan environment at that time. I visited Glacier Bay by cruise ship, a common practice these days, but even Muir encountered significant tourist activity in his 1890 trip. A couple hundred tourists from a sightseeing cruise stopped to visit his campsite, and he greeted them with goodwill, happy to share the wonders of the landscape he loved so much. That same friendly warmth and love of nature shines through in every line of Muir’s writing, and his enthusiasm is infectious. Travels in Alaska is a beautiful document of the land and its people. Those who have been to Alaska will appreciate it all the more. If you haven’t been, Muir’s book will make you want to go.
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Pro-socialist Cold War spy story
Revolution, a novella by Mack Reynolds, was first published in the May 1960 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine. How it got there, however, is a mystery, since this is not a science fiction story. Though it takes place five years in the future (i.e. 1965), it’s basically just a story of Cold War espionage, and only about as sci-fi as a James Bond film. Unlike his similar novellas Combat and Status Quo, Reynolds doesn’t even bother to sprinkle the narrative with gratuitous hovercars, just a couple of secret agent gadgets reminiscent of something Bond might get from M.
In this very-near-future vision of 1965, the USSR is winning the Cold War. Their totalitarian form of government, coupled with an abundance of cheap labor, has allowed them to outperform the U.S. in almost every sector of manufacturing. Paul Koslov is an operative for an American intelligence agency. Through years of successfully accomplished covert missions and political assassinations, Koslov has earned a reputation as a very effective and lethal agent. This time when he reports to his chief’s office for a new assignment, he is given the mother of all missions. Instead of merely thwarting a commie plot or taking out a high-profile target, he is tasked with nothing less than overthrowing the entire Soviet government. To do so, he must travel to Russia and direct the operations of the anti-Soviet underground movement within the USSR.
As in so many other Reynolds stories, the deeper the hero delves into the USSR, the more he (and the reader) discover that the Soviet system isn’t so bad after all. If separated from its totalitarian regime, Reynolds argues, Russia’s brand of socialism could actually solve many of America’s economic problems. Reynolds’s writings often put forth a socialist message, to which I am not entirely unsympathetic. I just wish he would pay more attention to the story he’s using to convey that message. The first half of Revolution is really a pretty good spy thriller, but it falls apart in the end, or in the lack thereof. Having made his political point, he sees no need to continue the story, so he cuts it off with an abrupt and lackluster ending, leaving the reader bemused and unsatisfied.
I’ve read a few great sci-fi stories by Reynolds, which convinced me to work my way through a collection of his novellas. Too often I find, however, that his writings are just half-baked political treatises dressed up in the barest of sci-fi trappings. Here in Revolution, he doesn’t even bother with the trappings. Still, if he had given this story a decent ending, all would be forgiven. As it stands, however, Revolution is disappointingly unremarkable.
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This wanderer should have wandered further
Look Back on Happiness, a novel by Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun, was originally published in 1912 under the Norwegian title Den sidste Glæde, and is also known in English as The Last Joy. Some critics place this novel as the third book in a “Wanderer Trilogy,” following Under the Autumn Star (1906) and A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings (1909), but I don’t know if Hamsun ever designated it as such. Though the three books are similar in style and subject matter, there’s no concrete evidence in the text that the narrator in this book is the same character who featured in those two earlier novels, and Hamsun wrote a lot of books with wandering protagonists.
Here the unnamed narrator, a writer in his early seventies, is successful enough and wealthy enough to live his life as he pleases. Though a man of means, he chooses to leave city life behind and live a nomadic existence in the country. When the novel opens, he is spending the winter in a primitive hut and living off the land like Henry David Thoreau in a Norwegian Walden. The solitude gives him time for philosophical reflection and gives Hamsun the opportunity to indulge in some truly beautiful nature writing. Like Thoreau, however, the narrator is not a total recluse, and he does occasionally entertain visitors in his humble abode. The novel thus becomes less about his life in nature and more about the people he encounters in his travels.
When Spring arrives, the wanderer walks to a farm that operates a country inn for tourists who come to enjoy the mountain scenery. Here he gets to know the staff and the guests and becomes intimately involved in their affairs. From this point, very early on, the narrative veers away from the narrator’s personal journey to focus on these other characters’ lives. This is very much in keeping with Under the Autumn Star and A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings, in that the narrator is almost more of a passive observer than a participant in the narrative. Even after he leaves this tourist retreat, he continues to coincidentally and unrealistically run into the inn’s guests wherever he roams. One woman in particular, a Miss Torsen, strikes his interest, and although he is too old for romantic involvement, he concerns himself in her affairs almost to the point of stalking her.
The picture Hamsun paints of this female character is not very flattering. At first she is depicted as a coquette who toys with men to boost her own self-esteem, though she does grow and become a more sympathetic character as the book goes on. As a schoolteacher, she is an educated woman, but the narrator denigrates her education, and Hamsun indicates that she can only find fulfillment through marriage and childbirth. Sexism should hardly be surprising in a century-old book, however, and Hamsun may just be espousing the joys of simpler family values, as his male narrator likewise represents an ignorance-is-bliss and back-to-nature attitude towards life. There is no doubt a fair amount of social and political commentary in the book that a Norwegian in 1912 might have found very insightful, but much of it was likely lost on this 21st-century reader. For example, one character goes off on an anti-Switzerland tirade that falls somewhere between good-natured ribbing and an international incident.
Look Back on Happiness is one of Hamsun’s less successful works. The fact that he so soon abandons the natural and nomadic aspects of the story in favor of a sort of modern novel of manners is a disappointment. He keeps the reader interested enough to want to move from one chapter to the next, but in the end one wonders what the point is and whether it was all just a waste of time.
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Restores a forgotten genius to the pantheon of science
Two centuries ago, Alexander von Humboldt was one of the most famous men in the world, but these days he is far from a household name. More places in the world are named after Humboldt than anyone else, yet the man and his accomplishments are anything but common knowledge today. Andrea Wulf sets out to remedy this with her 2015 book The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. In this must-read volume on all things Humboldt, Wulf relates in exquisite detail the man’s fascinating life, his impressive accomplishments, and his enormous intellectual impact on world history.
Humboldt (1769-1859) was a Prussian scientist who traveled the world investigating the workings of nature. He first achieved fame for his daring and scientifically productive expedition to South America. This was in the days prior to scientific specialization, when an ambitious scholar could stake his claim in any number of fields, and Humboldt was an interdisciplinary Renaissance man who excelled in many branches of biology, geology, meteorology, and anthropology. Humboldt was the first to see nature as a holistic system that functioned much like an organism and the first to propose the idea of human-induced climate change. A skilled writer who not only published important scientific works but also popular bestsellers, he essentially established the genre of nature writing as we know it today. In addition, Humboldt socialized, collaborated, or corresponded with many of the greatest minds in the Western world. Wulf not only chronicles Humboldt’s amazing life and career but also examines in detail his interaction with and influence on several historical personages—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Jefferson, Siḿon Bolívar, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, Ernst Haeckel, and John Muir.
Every attempt has been made to make this book as accessible as possible to the general reader. The chapters are short. The prose is brisk. The sentences are clear, and the vocabulary is not challenging. If the book has a flaw, that may be it. At times it simplifies too much and reads almost like a young adult book. Besides an occasional brief footnote, the endnote references are inconveniently hidden so as not to scare away casual readers. Despite the biological and ecological subject matter of the narrative, very few specific species are mentioned, and only a handful of Latin species names appear throughout the book. Wulf does an excellent job of conveying the prodigious breadth of Humboldt’s scholarship, but at times one wishes for more depth in the scientific content.
Some may argue that the chapters on Goethe, Jefferson, Bolivar, Muir, etc. detract from the main narrative of Humboldt’s life, but the various side biographies really enlarge the reader’s understanding of the scientific and political landscape of the 18th and 19th centuries, while also succeeding in demonstrating Humboldt’s monumental impact on world history. The book’s eight “[Famous Person] and Humboldt” chapters are all just as engrossing as those strictly devoted to the man himself. I have read much on Darwin, Thoreau, and Haeckel, yet I still discovered many new and fascinating details in Wulf’s coverage of their lives. I had never heard of George Perkins Marsh before, and I am grateful for the education that Wulf provides on his life and work.
Humboldt should be as big of a household name as Darwin, Newton, or Einstein, and if any book can spark his resurgence in the public consciousness, it’s this one. The Invention of Nature provides the perfect foundational education on Humboldt’s life and work. It’s a must-read for science and history enthusiasts and deserves to be a bestseller.
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A modern Indian mix of romance, social realism, and a dash of horror
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| Rabindranath Tagore |
In 1913, India’s Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Calcutta, Tagore wrote most of his works in his native Bengali language and was prolific in both poetry and prose. Mashi and Other Stories, a collection of his short stories, was published in English translation in 1918.
The 14 stories collected here depict life in modern India in the early 20th century. Appropriate for this time period, Tagore’s writing style displays characteristics of an early modernism, though mixed with more traditional romantic and realist storytelling techniques. Tagore’s depictions of India feel a century ahead of those of British author Rudyard Kipling, who was also born in India, despite the fact that Kipling won the Nobel just six years prior to Tagore. Kipling would ladle on the local color to emphasize the exoticism of India. Tagore’s stories, on the other hand, may touch upon social issues unique to their setting like arranged marriages, income inequality, or the plight of widows in Indian society, but ultimately they succeed by emphasizing the universality of human experience through themes of love, honor, family, fidelity, loss, and regret that strike a chord in readers of all cultures.
The best story in the collection, “The Supreme Night,” is an excellent example of this. A young man grows up with dreams of becoming an important lawyer and freedom fighter. In his self-important zeal, he passes on the marriage arranged for him by his parents. The story then becomes a very sincere and moving tale of regret as the protagonist realizes the opportunity for a happy life that he has squandered. Arranged marriage features in quite a few of the stories. In “The River Stairs,” a young woman is married and widowed by the age of eight. “Subha” is about a mute girl who enjoys a simple life on her parents’ farm, until her parents decide to marry her off. Inheritance is another common plot element, as in “The Elder Sister,” in which an adult married woman loses her family’s estate to a newborn brother. For the most part, not much prior knowledge about India is required to enjoy these stories, but there is one notable exception. “The Trust Property” is really only understood after reading a closing explanatory footnote provided by the English editor. Elsewhere, Indian terms and customs are clarified by brief footnotes when needed.
A few of Tagore’s stories wander into the horror genre. In “The Skeleton,” for example, a former medical student listens to the reminiscences of the spirit of the anatomy skeleton he studied in school. Murder and suicide factor into a few others. The horror elements are not so much chilling, like the writings of Edgar Allen Poe, but rather more melancholic, like the works of French writer Théophile Gautier. Tagore is a very capable and eloquent writer, but endings are his weakness. Many of the stories here suffer from disappointing and inadequate conclusions. Often a tale will end with an abrupt twist followed by a vague resolution, leaving the reader to wonder what just happened. The feeling of melancholy is not confined to the horror tales but permeates the entire book, resulting in depressing endings that just leave the reader feeling bummed. If there is a sad way to end a story, Tagore will find it.
Overall, Mashi and Other Stories is a fine collection but fails to live up to Nobel-level expectations. Moments of emotional power and literary genius are mixed with instances of predictable and formulaic romance. There are almost as many misses as hits in the collection. Even so, for lovers of classic fiction the book is an enjoyably refreshing change from the European literary tradition.
Stories in this collection
Mashi
The Skeleton
The Auspicious Vision
The Supreme Night
Raja and Rani
The Trust Property
The Riddle Solved
The Elder Sister
Subha
The Postmaster
The River Stairs
The Castaway
Saved
My Fair Neighbour
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Comprehensive and fascinating, but general readers should proceed with caution
The French Revolution is one of the most fascinating series of events in world history, but it also may be one of the most difficult to grasp in its entirety. Eric Hazan’s A People’s History of the French Revolution provides a detailed and comprehensive guide to the complicated twists and turns in this monumental and convoluted period of political and social upheaval. Originally published in French in 2012 (without the “People’s” in the title), Hazan’s book provides a thorough overview of this complex period. Covering the state of France under Louis XVI at the outbreak of the conflict to the execution of Robespierre in July 1794, this Revolutionary history proved rich in penetrating insight and fascinating detail.
That said, this is no introductory text and does require a fair amount of prior knowledge to fully appreciate and understand. As someone whose education in French history comes primarily from literature, I will admit that at times I was in over my head. Hazan’s purpose in this book is not merely to explain the Revolution, but also to comment upon the accounts of scholars who have preceded him, most repeatedly Jean Jaurès and Albert Mathiez. One need not have read these prior histories to benefit from Hazan’s take on the subject. The reader must, however, have a firm grasp of French geography and more than a general knowledge of the nation’s history. Hazan has clearly written the book for a French audience who have been thoroughly schooled upon the events in question. Throughout the text, he refers to all historical personages by surname only, which seems fine for household names like Danton and Marat, but this rule is applied to even the most minor of characters. Hazan also expects the reader to possess not just a working familiarity with the Republican calendar but almost an intimate knowledge of it. I certainly don’t fault Hazan for my own ignorance, and I admire his encyclopedic knowledge of the topic. I merely offer these caveats to give other general readers an idea of the task at hand.
I’m not sure what qualifies this as a “People’s History,” in the Howard Zinn sense of the phrase, other than Hazan approaches the topic from a perspective favorable to the left. As promised in the marketing copy, he does occasionally highlight the role that peasants, women, and the sans-culottes (lower-class republicans) played in the Revolution, as well as its effect on people of color in France’s colonies in Africa and the Caribbean. For much of the book, however, the main characters are the same deputies, statesmen, and government functionaries who feature largely in mainstream historical textbooks. At times the second half of the book reads like a biography of Robespierre, which perhaps can’t be helped, given the course of history. One thing’s for sure, the royals definitely play a small role in the book. The executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette are each dispatched in a single sentence. Blink and you’ll miss them.
Hazan is clearly sympathetic to the liberal promise of “liberté, égalité, and fraternité,” but he is quick to point out when actual events failed to live up to such high ideals. This results in a relatively even-handed mix of admiration for Revolutionary ideals and disgruntlement at lost opportunities. The Revolution remains a compelling subject because so many of the issues at stake are still relevant to this day. A People’s History of the French Revolution greatly broadened my understanding of this fascinating period in history and proved an eye-opening and intellectually stimulating read.
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Hyperromantic Northwestern shoot-’em-up
I recently traveled to Alaska and wanted to read some classic literature related to the region. Having read everything by Jack London, I turned to the next best thing, Michigan author James Oliver Curwood. Like London, Curwood wrote many novels of the Klondike Gold Rush, several of them with canine protagonists, and other “Northwesterns”—essentially Westerns set in Alaska and the Yukon. His novel The Alaskan was published in 1923.
As the novel opens, a steamer is heading north from Seattle through the Inside Passage on its way to Nome. On board is Alan Holt, a laconic, rather reclusive reindeer rancher who is returning home to his grazing lands after a long sojourn in the lower 48. Though a white man, Holt is a native Alaskan, meaning he was born in the territory. Also on board is Mary Standish, a beautiful young woman, obviously new to the region, who is traveling alone. The reason for her journey to Alaska is unknown to Holt and to the reader. When the two meet, Mary asks Alan to act as her escort and educate her about Alaska. Neither has any intention of romantic involvement with the other, but how long do you think that’s going to last? Shortly after meeting Mary, Alan notices another passenger on the ship, a shifty character of bad reputation named Rossland. From their behavior, it appears that Mary and Rossland have met before, and Alan wonders what connection these two have shared in the past.
To Curwood, Holt qualifies as a hero because he’s an independent self-made man who has wrestled a fortune from the land through resource extraction. (How does a white man come to own a herd of 10,000 reindeer?) On the other hand, the novel’s villain, John Graham, represents corporate interests who take resource extraction too far, raping the land of its bounty and beauty. Alan respects the Natives and they love him like a father figure. As Curwood depicts it, however, Alan’s role in this relationship comes across suspiciously like that of a benevolent slave holder. Curwood argues that Alaska requires American capital so that more men like Alan can develop its resources, while he naively ignores the rights of the Natives and fails to foresee the inevitability of more John Grahams.
Though chronologically later than London’s tales of the North, Curwood’s novel reads as more old-fashioned, more genteel, more romantic—a sort of “London lite,” if you will. Curwood’s writing more closely resembles British-Canadian author Harold Bindloss’s novels of manners set in British Columbia and Alberta. The Alaskan positively drips with Victorian-era chivalry. If the book were written a couple decades later, Alan and Mary would bicker for a while before they found love, but here there’s nothing to argue about because they are both flawless specimens of their type: he the knight in shining armor and she the damsel in distress. The romance between the two is expressed in the most idealistic of terms, and the slow-moving narrative is really too concerned with each and every interior emotion at the expense of action.
It takes about 20 chapters just to figure out Mary’s back story, but once the plot gets down to business it turns into a surprisingly gritty shoot-’em-up. Curwood may be prudish about sexuality, but he’s not prudish about brutality. Rape is a threat constantly hinted at throughout the book, and when the good guys and bad guys clash it makes for a no-holds-barred battle. While much of the novel is predictable, it does not end the way one would expect, which is to its credit. If the whole book were as good as its last four or five chapters, it might have been a great adventure classic. As it stands, however, it’s just pretty good.
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