In the Garden of Beasts

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin is the third of Erik Larson's popular history books that I've read. Like the first two, The Devil in the White City (2003) and Thunderstruck (2006), Larson's latest book compellingly tells a true story that is "stranger than fiction."

This book centers on William Dodd, American Ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937, and his family, especially his daughter, Martha, as they live in Berlin while Adolf Hitler rises to power. Larson is curious how the Dodds reacted as they witnessed first hand the Nazi Party seize complete control of Germany. He especially wonders, for example, if the ambassador could have helped to prevent the horrors that were about to envelope Europe by insisting that President Franklin Roosevelt take a stronger stand against Hitler and the National Socialist Party.

In the summer of 1933, as FDR struggled to get a recalcitrant Congress to pass his economic proposals to combat the worsening Great Depression, at least four men passed on his invitation to be Ambassador to Germany. Roosevelt finally offered the position to a historian of modest renown, currently teaching at the University of Chicago, William Dodd, who reluctantly accepted what everyone in Washington knew would be an extremely difficult job. Dodd packed up his family, including his 24-year-old soon-to-be divorced daughter, and moved to Berlin.

That daughter, Martha, a literary editor at the Chicago Tribune, had had a number of tempestuous romantic relationships over the previous few years, including an affair with Carl Sandberg and a flirtation with Thornton Wilder, and her father hoped that life abroad would settle her into adulthood. But Martha, enchanted by the bright lights of Berlin, shrugged off as “rumors” the talk about concentration camps springing up to house communists and Jews and threw herself into the nightlife. She took a number of lovers, including at least one senior Nazi official as well as a Soviet spy. After the Night of the Long Knives, however, she, like her father, would resolve to work against the Nazi cause.

In addition to telling the story of the Dodds, Larson provides background to life in Germany at this time. For example, he explains why the laws restricting Jews from certain professions didn't matter to American tourists and why even many Jews thought that the threats made by Nazis were primarily bluster. He also details the origins of the ubiquitous Nazi salute, the mandatory sterilization of "defectives" laws, and invention of the deadly Zyklon B gas used in the concentration camps.

Larson's book, like the other two that I've read, is narrative history at its best, and I definitely recommend it.

Enduring Love

Ian McEwan is one of the major novelists of contemporary literature. Although he's written a dozen novels—and many short stories, screenplays, and even librettos—he never gained much recognition outside of England until the film version of Atonement, which won a number of awards a few years ago. Since then, his novels have sold well in America, and some of his earlier works, such as Enduring Love (1997), are starting to gain more recognition, too.

Enduring Love begins with suspense, literally, as Jack Rose, enjoying a picnic with his wife, Clarissa, finds himself trying to grab a rope on a runaway helium balloon that has a terrified boy in its gondola. Five other men, including the balloon's captain, desperately grab the rope, too, but a sudden gust of wind, estimated later to be 70 mph, launches them into the air. Most of them hang suspended a few feet before they become frightened and let go and drop safely to the ground. One man, however, doesn't release and is then carried more than one hundred feet into the air before he loses his grip and plunges to his death.

Surprisingly, the rest of the novel doesn't really directly dwell on the aftermath of this bizarre accident but, instead, focuses on how one of the other men who released the rope, Jed, a fanatical Christian, begins to stalk Jack, who writes for popular science magazines and is scornful about religions. Jed will not accept that Jack has no belief in God and will never seek solace through prayer, and so, increasingly more frantic, he pursues Jack because he feels compelled to "save" him. These traumas—witnessing a death that he might have helped to prevent and then being stalked—have a terrible effect on Jack's emotional state and, consequently, on his marriage.

But what if Jed isn't stalking Joe? What if, in fact, Jed doesn't exist except as a figment of Joe's anxieties about his personal failures in life?

In addition to this disturbing plot, Enduring Love is a meditation on many themes, including the nature of time, the inter-complexities of human relationships, and the impact of science on the modern world. McEwan, for example, speculates about the limits of empirical knowledge and rational thought in the face of seemingly random, inexplicable tragedy.

I've read a half dozen of McEwan's novels, and although they all, like Enduring Love, wrestle with challenging philosophical questions, they are written in such lucid prose that they are accessible for general readers who want to read about interesting characters placed into compelling situations.

Bar Talk and Tall Tales

For years I’d heard stories about the stories of Ray Wheeler, so I was very happy to get a copy of Bar Talk and Tall Tales, a collection of eight of his originals, recently published by Buffalo Commons Press, so I could see for myself if the hype matches the reality. I can say, without reservation, that it does.

Ray’s narrative voice, whether he’s speaking or writing, has an absurdist quality to it that captures very well the absurdity of living in western North Dakota, where winter temperatures can plunge, seemingly within minutes, to -24 and you can freeze to death if you get lost in the sudden whiteout of a blizzard. Where the wind blows so hard that it seems like you should be able to “retract” your legs and then “ride a wave of it to another country.” Where talking bison—perhaps imaginary, perhaps not—wander through open spaces and suggest quietly that you let the prairie revert back to a “buffalo commons.”

Ray might originally be from Kansas City, but he’s been in western North Dakota long enough (going on 50 years) that he’s seen the oil booms and busts come and go. In one of his stories, “A Kind of Texas,” he spins the tale of Eddie and Lee, two locals who spend most of their time at a bar lamenting the influx of Texans into their community during the latest boom. These Texans, the only folks able to afford the skyrocketing rents, steal their women and cheat them at pool. Eddie, however, is something of a poet (like Ray himself), and so he gets his revenge with a bit of filthy doggerel, but then he pays the price, both in physical and in existential pain.

In fact, in many of these stories there is a price to be paid. In one of my favorites, “How They Spend the Cold Nights Up There,” a writer of western fiction, talking with a washed-up cowboy, Shorty, on a winter’s night at the bar, silently prays that a woman—any woman, so long as she has a warm body and most of her real teeth—will come into the bar. A kind-hearted God answers his prayer, and a woman with luscious lips, calling herself “Belle Starr,” strides into the bar and says that she wants a shot of Scotch and a story. Unfortunately, though, she loses interest in the writer, and in his story about a heroic cowboy named “Dallas Gates,” when she gets drunk and thinks that Shorty, bow legs and all, is the real Dallas Gates. At closing time, she leaves the bar with Shorty, and the writer, whose story doesn’t have an ending, finds himself without an ending, too, as he walks home through the early morning arctic air.

Ray had a bit of a reputation as a playwright back in the 1980s, and if you ask him, he’ll tell you that he greatly admires the work of Sam Shepard. One of the stories in this collection, “The Dakota Kid,” reminds me of Shepard’s plays, such as True West, in that we have a narrative, composed mostly of laconic dialogue, about two desperados who stop off at a bar in Amidon, population 14, to swap their getaway car for a clean car. Adding a note of gothic absurdity to this suspense is the bar owner’s retarded son, who perches on a stool, eating sunflower seeds (as efficiently as a chickadee) and saying nothing except “The world is everything there is.” Nothing good can come from a situation such as this one, and nothing does.

I certainly hope that you’ll pick up this collection of stories, for I think that you’ll find reading them the next best thing to actually drinking some beer with Ray at the local watering hole as he tells you stories that will make you laugh until you cry.

The book is $15 from Buffalo Commons Press, PO Box 15, St. Peter, MN 56082.

Crossing the Heart of Africa

Since I’d rather someone else risk his life so that I can then live vicariously in my armchair while I sip tea, I’m a sucker for adventure travel books. Consequently, I happily downloaded Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure, by Julian Smith, and soon found myself in South Africa contemplating the challenges of traveling through some of the most dangerous territory in the world.

The book is divided into two parts, with chapters alternating between an account of Ewart Grogan’s attempt in 1898 to be the first person to transect Africa length-wise, from Cape Town to Cairo, and Smith’s attempt a few years ago to recreate the feat. Both attempts were inspired by love.

After dropping out of Cambridge University and then fighting in one of the many colonial wars of South Africa, Grogan decided to recuperate in New Zealand, where he soon met and fell in love with Gertrude Watt. She was from a wealthy background, however, and her protective stepfather didn’t have much use for this soldier of fortune from a middle-class background. Grogan said that would earn the stepdaughter’s hand by doing something magnificent, which ended up being an offer to the Royal Geographical Society to survey previously uncharted territory in central Africa, which would necessitate traveling, by foot mainly but by canoe on occasion, from South Africa to Egypt.

Accompanied part of the way by Gertrude’s uncle and large party of porters to carry equipment, Grogan encountered monumental obstacles, including fierce wildlife, disease, and warring tribes. The uncle, severely afflicted by malaria and dysentery, soon quit, as did most of the porters, but Grogan struggled on with just a few native guides until he completed the journey and won his future wife. After a triumphant lecture tour around England, the two then settled in Kenya, where Grogan became an influential plantation owner.

Flash forward to 2007, a little more than hundred years after Grogan’s successful trip, and Julian Smith, a struggling writer who’s afraid to commit to the woman he loves, reads about the feat and resolves to duplicate it. He offers a marriage proposal on the condition that his girlfriend will allow him to make the trip, which will be approximately 4,500 miles long and take a few months by train, car, and boat. She agrees.

These autobiographical chapters, which alternate with chapters describing Grogan’s trip, describe Smith’s adventures as he travels through modern-day South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, and Egypt (he skips Sudan because of its constant warfare). Although he faced few of the genuine dangers that Grogan faced, Smith has a few heart-stopping escapades along the way.

If, like me, you prefer to read about adventure travel instead of actually doing adventure travel, then Crossing the Heart of Africa is for you.

Unfamiliar Fishes

Sarah Vowell is my kind of woman: sharp-witted and on the left politically, with a deadpan sense of humor and a possessor of a large vocabulary. I'm not much of a radio listener so I've rarely heard her commentaries on NPR, but I've enjoyed her appearances on The Daily Show and have found three of her books to be well-written and thoughtful critiques of America and its citizens.

For example, in The Wordy Shipmates (2008), which is about the Pilgrims and their Massachusetts Bay Colony, Vowell analyzes the irony implicit in a group of people fleeing England because of repression but then being so intolerant toward the natives of the New World and any Europeans who didn't believe what they believed. Similarly, in Assassination Vacation (2005), an eccentric sort of travelogue, Vowell visits sites associated with the presidents who have been killed while in office (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy), which leads her to speculate about what makes America such a country of violence.

Vowell’s most recent book, Unfamiliar Fishes (2011), describes a trip to Hawaii for a vacation. While there, she tours the royal palace, and, on that same day in December 2003, U.S. troops capture Saddam Hussein in Iraq. This coincidence makes her realize that America has always been in the business of "regime change." Her new book, as she says in her introduction, tells the story about how the U.S. spent seventy-eight years "Americanizing" Hawaii—from sending the first missionaries to "civilize" the islands in 1820 to formal annexation in 1898. (The latter year, of course, also represents the peak of American imperialism as the U.S. declared war on Spain and ended up seizing Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam.) It's not a story that makes you proud to be an American.

Most of Unfamiliar Fishes is a detailed history of the American missionaries and whalers who began visiting the Sandwich Islands, as they were known until the 1850s, for religious and commercial reasons. These two groups, however, were rivals for the islands as the missionaries sought to convert the natives and the whalers sought some R&R while on shore leave. "Imagine, Vowell says, "if the Hawaii Convention Center in Waikiki hosted The Value Voters Summit and the Adult Entertainment Expo simultaneously—for forty years." As one could imagine, the two cannot possibly co-exist in harmony, and the only reason the conflict between them ended was the discovery, in the mid 19th century, that petroleum was a much cheaper alternative to whale oil, which led to the collapse of the whaling industry (the only reason, indeed, that the whales weren't hunted to extinction) and the triumph of missionary culture in Hawaii.

Although most Hawaiians appreciated how the missionaries contributed to a higher standard of living (particularly with their emphasis on public schools), they lamented the loss of independence that came with American annexation in 1898. Vowell, in fact, takes her title from a metaphor used by one 19^th-century Hawaiian writer to describe the situation of his native land: “If a big wave comes in, large and unfamiliar fishes will come in from the dark ocean, and when they see the small fishes of the shallows they will eat them up.”

Like her earlier books, Unfamiliar Fishes shines a light on a part of American history that is worth exploring, and, as such, I recommend Vowell’s book.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo's award-winning book about slum life in Mumbai, is a stunningly heart-breaking report about people who are determined to get ahead even though their chances are nearly zero. We meet, for example, Abdul, a Muslim living in a Hindu area, who has worked his way from trash collector to a trash buyer and seller; Asha, who hopes to become the first female "slumlord" of her area; and Sunil, a Dalit (Untouchable), who knows that he is undersized for his age and is desperate to eat more so that he can grow and become successful. Boo, a long-time magazine reporter, has made it her mission in life to tell the stories of those who never get an opportunity to speak for themselves, and in this book, her first, she has written a masterpiece.

The book's arresting title comes from an advertising slogan for floor tiles—Beautiful Forever, Beautiful Forever, Beautiful Forever—on a wall by the Mumbai airport that prevents tourists from seeing the abject poverty in the slums adjacent to the airport. Boo emphasizes the contrast between bustling Mumbai, with its increasingly wealthy citizens, and the "undercity" of Annawadi, with its malnourished children who scour garbage heaps to find anything they can sell to a salvage company. In contrast to the tourists who zip past Annawadi, Boo refuses to avert her eyes and reports what day to day life is like for those living on the very margins of Indian society.

The book is divided into five parts, including a prologue that introduces the theme and sets the stage, and each part vividly describes daily life for the residents of Annawadi. Boos' approach is narrative, so she spends little time speculating about the sociological or political causes for the extremely inequitable society but, instead, simply focuses on telling the stories and letting her readers get to know the residents of Annawadi. In short, she treats these people like human beings, who deserve to be treated with the respect and dignity that all human beings deserve.

The central story that she tells is that of two neighboring Muslim families in conflict with each other. Matters come to a head one evening when the matriarch of one family catches fire, and members of the other family are accused of assaulting her, which then throws them into Mumbai's Kafkaesque legal system of incompetent jurists and corrupt police officers.

I can't say that Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a joy to read, for the overwhelming litany of daily tragedies is very depressing to read, but I can say that Behind the Beautiful Forevers is an important book that everyone should read.

Heart of Darkness

You might not have read Joseph Conrad’s classic short novel about colonialism in Africa, but if you’ve seen Apocalypse Now, then you’re familiar with the basic plot and major characters of Heart of Darkness, which was first published in 1899.

Like the film, the novel tells the story of a somewhat jaded man who travels up a river, through an increasingly more malevolent jungle filled with dangerous animals and hostile tribes, to find a fellow European who has “gone native” and can no longer be controlled by his superiors. Along the way, the traveler, Marlow, has many bizarre, even surreal encounters until he realizes that colonialism destroys the colonizer just as much as it destroys the colonized and that the true “heart of darkness” isn’t in the Belgian Congo but, instead, is in the chests of men.

Two ways of looking at the novel, I think, work best. The first way—the traditional interpretation—is to see the story as a metaphor for the workings of a mind. Marlow, as he steams from the sea to a remote trading post deep in the interior, travels not just back in time, as the jungle seems to become primeval and its inhabitants prehistoric, but also travels deep into collective consciousness. In a sense, he travels through the super-ego, ego, and then into the id, the part of the mind that is primal and instinctual. In this interior, he confronts the deepest fears and anxieties of the human race.

The second way of interpreting Heart of Darkness, which has come to dominate discussion in the past twenty years, is to see the novel as a post-colonial text. In short, the novel reveals more about European attitudes, most of them racist (conscious or subconscious), towards Africans. As Chinua Achebe said in an interview, “But you cannot compromise my humanity in order that you explore your own ambiguity. I cannot accept that. My humanity is not to be debated, nor is it to be used simply to illustrate European problems.” Achebe’s point is that critics who see the novel as reflective of the consciousness of all mankind are blind to the fact that it fails to present Africans truthfully. In short, Achebe asks, how can such an interpretation be taken seriously when it’s based on a lie?

However you choose to interpret the text, reading Heart of Darkness is a richly rewarding experience, and so I encourage you to check it out.

Them

Them: Adventures with Extremists (2001) is one of Jon Ronson's earliest books. Like his other books, it is a first-person account that explores the fringes of society. In this case, it is the people called political “extremists” by the mainstream. I’m a little unsettled by this book, but undoubtedly that is the feeling that Ronson wants me to have. Let me explain.

Most of the extremists that Ronson encounters come across as nut jobs that couldn’t wire a bomb together if they wanted to. Pre-9/11, which is when Ronson wrote these chapters, we would have simply laughed at these paranoid weirdoes spouting off about Jews secretly running the world. Post-9/11, however, we certainly know that some of these paranoid weirdoes are dangerous.

For example, the book's first chapter, "A Semi-Detached Ayatollah," is a profile of Omar Bakri Mohammad, who, even though he lives on welfare in a London suburb, is described in the media as "the most dangerous man in Britain." In Ronson's descriptions of him, based on months of interviews, Mohammad comes across as a complete buffoon. I'm not sure where the truth lies. There's no question that Mohammad, a native of Syria who wants legal residency in Britain, calls for jihad against his adopted land and argues for the imposition of Sharia law, but is he a true threat to security when he can’t even figure out how to launch small helium balloons with anti-British messages?

In the years after 9/11, however, Mohammad’s sermons certainly did raise money for al-Qaeda and certainly did inspire some of his followers to become suicide bombers against American or Israeli targets overseas. In the eyes of the American and British governments, he was unquestionably a dangerous man, and after the July 2005 bombings in London, he was expelled from British soil. In short, he strikes me as anything but a buffoon.

What, then, are we to make of Ronson’s reporting, which suggests that Mohammad is a harmless fool? I don’t know.

Ronson's second chapter is similarly troubling as it turns a sympathetic eye towards an American extremist, Randy Weaver of Ruby Ridge fame. (To refresh your memory, after Weaver ignored a summons to appear on a charge of illegal gun sales, federal agents surrounded his house and, in the mayhem, an exchange of gunfire killed an FBI agent, as well as Weaver’s wife and 14-year-old son. It does seem that the feds were guilty of excessive force, but the Weavers are clearly dangerous customers.) Ronson interviews Weaver, his now-adult daughter, and some of his sympathizers, and he essentially accepts at face value that Weaver, while he might have some outlandish political views, is basically harmless.

But Weaver, as is well documented, associated with the Aryan Nations and had an arsenal of guns, including illegal sawed-off shotguns and automatic weapons. In fact, he received the summons for offering to sell illegal weapons to a man he thought was in the Aryan Nations (he was really an undercover AFT agent). In short, like Omar Bakri Mohammad, Randy Weaver strikes me as a dangerous man. While I think the situation should have been handled differently, I don’t think that Weaver is a sort of buffoon who should be left to live with his family in a cabin in the Idaho wilderness to sell illegal guns.

A few extremists in the book, however, are more clearly wacky but harmless. David Icke, for example. This former professional soccer player and BBC commentator thinks that a cabal of giant lizards from outer space have assumed human form and are actually ruling the world. Ronson interviews him at length, and then spends just as much time interviewing critics determined to debunk his beliefs. (Really? How long can it take to convince people that someone who believes in giant lizards from space is nuts?)  Other extremists—including members of the KKK—fall somewhere between the genuinely dangerous and the clearly wacky. Ronson also spends some time with anti-extremists, although they often come across as intolerant themselves.

Although the book is interesting, I can’t say that I found Them to be compelling as The Psychopath Test. I can say, however, that I intend to read many more books by Jon Ronson.

Gulp & Stiff

One of my favorite non-fiction authors is Mary Roach, who writes popular-science books about somewhat taboo subjects, such as the digestive system (Gulp, 2013) and death (Stiff, 2004). Unfortunately, as you can see from the aforementioned publication dates, she lacked the foresight to write her books in the logical order. But that’s my only complaint about her wonderfully informative and funny books.

Like all of her books, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal is impressively researched through a variety of primary and secondary sources, including citations to such papers as “Paradoxical Sphincter Contraction Is Rarely Indicative of Anismus,” published in Gut; and “The Quality of Colonic Flatus Excreted by the ‘Normal’ Individual,” published in American Journal of Digestive Diseases. She reads these studies so we don’t have to!

Roach begins Gulp in the logical location, the mouth, which has just eaten a meal. Subsequent chapters then trace the route of food, which is soon a bolus, from beginning to end. Various questions along the way lead to various digressions:

·      “Is it possible to eat so much that your stomach bursts?” (Yep.)

·      “Is it possible to asphyxiate yourself from particularly noxious farting?”  (Nope.)

The book concludes with a look at recent experiments in fecal transplants to cure patients whose guts have been wiped clean of the bacteria necessary for healthy digestion. As Roach points out, sometimes the simplest, cheapest solution to a deadly problem is the best.

For a look at what can happen after death, Roach gives us Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, which examines what happens to the bodies left to science. Some of these uses—anatomy classes in medical schools and crash tests for testing seat belts—you’ve probably heard of before, but she details some of the more obscure, sometimes outright bizarre uses for cadavers.

For example, Roach visits the “Body Farm,” at the University of Tennessee, to learn how cadavers, at various stages of decomposition, can help forensic scientists determine time and manner of death. One experiment might involve putting a nude body in a plastic bag and then leaving it in a car trunk in the summer sun and monitoring the number of maggots. Another experiment might involve putting a clothed body in a shallow grave and then regularly checking the chemical composition of the soil as the cadaver decays.

In other chapters, Roach writes about 18th-century French scientists who used condemned prisoners in an attempt to measure precisely the moment a person’s soul leaves the body and more recent Soviet scientists who attempted to reanimate the heads of cadavers. She concludes her book with alternatives to standard disposals of the body (i.e. burial or cremation), including a type of organic compositing that actually makes a lot of sense to me.

I can recommend two of her other books, as well: Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (2011), which is about training for a long-term adventure in space; and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008), which is about--. Well, I’m sure you can guess its subject.

Live By Night

I heard Dennis Lehane talk about his new novel, Live By Night, while I was in Boston in late May. Since its story sounded interesting, and since I liked the movies based on his earlier novels (Gone Baby Gone, Mystic River, Shutter Island), I thought I’d read his latest novel. Unfortunately, it’s not very good.

The novel, set in Boston during Prohibition, is about the son of a cop who rebels by associating with Irish mobsters. Joe then rises in this underworld until he challenges for control of the lucrative liquor-smuggling business. I can’t imagine that it ends well for him.

You’ve undoubtedly noticed that the previous sentence is inconclusive, as if I’m writing this review without having finished the novel. That’s true.

Since I’m a big fan of gangster films set in the 1920s, as well as the current HBO series Boardwalk Empire, this should be a story that I enjoy reading, but I found the characters wooden and one-dimensional, the writing trite, and the plot predictable. There’s simply no depth anywhere, no complexity. Perhaps I’ve simply seen too many gangster films, or perhaps the genre is exhausted, but I couldn’t get past the mid-point of this novel.

And since life’s too short to read boring novels, I put Live By Night in some cement shoes and then made a midnight visit to the nearest lake.

No god but God

Before the controversies over his most recent book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2013), Reza Aslan was best known for his book about the other major monotheistic world religion, Islam, which happens to be his own faith. No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (2005) is an essential primer into the history of Islam.

The first chapter provides a background to the religion's formation by describing the paganism of Arabia before 600 C.E., which included the major god Allah (the name is a contraction of the phrase al-ilah, meaning "the god") and hundreds of minor gods. Innumerable jinns (also spelled genies) and other spirits also supposedly inhabited Arabia. Mecca, with its Ka'ba (a shrine holding 360 idols), was at the center of this paganism, and all of these gods co-existed in a hierarchy, although Allah was generally accepted as the most important. To understand the rise of Islam, Aslan argues, it is important to understand this social context:

All religions are inextricably bound to the social, spiritual, and cultural milieux from which they arose and in which they developed. It is not prophets who create religions. Prophets are, above all, reformers who redefine and reinterpret the existing beliefs and practices of their communities, providing fresh sets of symbols and metaphors with which succeeding generations can describe the nature of reality.

In short, without this pagan background, which is often ignored in biographies of Mohammad, Islam could not have arisen.

After this provocative first chapter, Aslan then sets the stage for the sudden rise of Islam by pointing to the increasing social inequality in Mecca due to the influence of a powerful tribe that controlled the city’s economy and trade. The disenfranchised and poor, he argues, were extremely receptive to Mohammed's message, which the prophet insisted was straight from Allah, that all believers should be treated with respect and dignity. In fact, after the first "pillar of faith," which is that Allah should be worshipped as the sole deity in the universe ("There is no god but God and Mohammad is his Messenger"), showing charity towards the poor and taking care of the weak are central to Islamic belief. It's no surprise, then, that when Mohammad came down from Mount Hira in 610 C.E., where he had been fasting, to tell of his visions expressing the will of Allah, he found a receptive audience.

(Incidentally, Aslan essentially makes the same argument to explain the rapid spread of Christianity: Like Islam, its promise was to cure the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and protect the weak. There was one additional promise to the Jews, however: To expel the Romans from the Holy Land.)

Subsequent chapters trace the growth of Islam, from the first mosque in Medina to its global impact today. One lengthy chapter explains the schism between the Sunni and Shia that puzzles most non-Muslims, while other chapters discuss the tradition of hijab, the definition of jihad, the nature of the Koran (the book is not simply the words of Allah but is Allah himself), and other tenets of Islam. One particularly fascinating chapter explores the Sufi, a mystical sect of Islam based on love and asceticism. Aslan seems particularly sympathetic to this sect, which is loathed as heretical by orthodox Sunnis.

While No god but God isn't going to make you into an expert in Islam, it will give you a basic understanding into the religion, and as such, you'll find it invaluable reading.

Tenth of December

I first encountered the stories of George Saunders stories when I read “The 400-pound CEO” in Harper’s Magazine in 1993. Saunders soon published other stories, which I read avidly, and then, in 1997, published his first collection of stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Not only did I immediately buy the book, I also did something very rare for me: After reading it, I sent him my copy with a fan letter. Saunders returned the book with a nice inscription and added a warm letter of thanks.

I’ve kept up with his career since then, reading his stories (mainly in The New Yorker) and buying his books. His latest is Tenth of December, which is another collection of odd tales of life—either contemporary or in the near future—in suburban America. As usual, Saunders’ eye is keen, whether he is describing the inner fantasies of people who have failed at life or the interactions between people who can barely stand each other’s company. And, also as usual, many of these stories are wickedly funny.

Some of the stories, such as "Puppy," however, are unbelievably sad. Told from two points of view—an upper-class mother who takes her children to look at the puppy offered by sale by a lower-class mother of a mentally handicapped child—this story suggests that any communication between people of different social status isn't possible, which leads to a puppy not being adopted by a family that could have cared properly for it. Instead of the upper-class children having a puppy to make them happy and the lower-class family having $20 to help them eat, no one has anything. I'm not sure if this is pessimism or realism, but it's damn bleak.

Also bleak is "The Semplica Girl Diaries," written in the form of a journal, which tells the story of a father trying to please his teenaged daughter, who has befriended a rich girl, by giving her a birthday party for the ages. Predictably, things go wrong (even after the father miraculously wins $10,000 in the lottery), and daughter and father wind up thoroughly humiliated. Saunders usually understates the tragedy in his stories, and he does in this one, too, as it becomes clear later in the story that something truly horrific, which I won't describe here, has become a new status symbol in suburbia. Suffice to say, once the true horror of the story sets in, you feel a sudden shock of recognition.

A longer story in this collection, "Spiderhead," is familiar ground for fans of Saunders, for it describes the dystopian experiences of an average sort of guy in the not too distant future. In this story, the protagonist, Jeff, is a prisoner who is a guinea pig for experiments in neuroscience that involve flooding his body with artificial stimulants or depressants to gauge how he responds. Can he, for instance, be made to feel deep desire for a woman for whom he finds unattractive? Or, conversely, can he be made to feel emotionally detached as he watches a young woman become so anxious that she kills herself? The point of the experiments, it seems, is to see how commercially viable these new chemical compounds could be. "Spiderhead" is a genuinely scathing indictment, not so much at what American society is now but of what it might become in the next few years.

In some stories, such as "Exhortation," Saunders returns to a theme that he's explored often in his fiction: the miseries of being trapped in a soul-sapping mindless job. In "Exhortation," written in the guise of a cheerful memo, a mid-level manager tries to buck up the spirits of his sales staff, who have been missing their quotas, but his language is really just an implied threat to fire them all if they don't immediately meet their sales. It's reminiscent of the sales competition in Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross: top salesman gets a Cadillac; second best, a set of steak knives; everyone else, a pink slip. Similarly, in “My Chivalric Fiasco,” a man working at a Renaissance theme park find himself promoted (from the janitorial staff to faux palace guard) in exchange for his silence after he witnesses his supervisor sexually assault a co-worker. Anyone who's ever been stuck in the drudgery of the working life can surely appreciate Saunders' irony as he skewers that dog eat dog world in these two stories.

Critics have rightly hailed Tenth of December as one of the best works of fiction of 2013, so I'm not alone in thinking it's a collection of stories that resonates deeply as you read it. Check it out!

Interior Places & What the River Carries

Of the many books that I read this past summer, two stand out. It’s not just because they are beautifully written (although they are), but also because they are by my friend, Lisa Knopp.

Lisa has published five collections of her essays with some of the most prestigious university presses in the country: Field of Vision (University of Iowa Press, 1996); Flight Dreams (University of Iowa Press, 1998); The Nature of Home (University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Interior Places (University of Nebraska Press, 2008); and What the River Carries (University of Missouri Press, 2012). All of her books have been well reviewed, and a few have won prizes.

Lisa’s style is consistent, for her essays are typically a blend of detailed observation, either of people or of scenes in nature, and of her own life. In a sense, her essays are memoir, but they are much richer than the typical memoir since her “field of vision” isn’t restricted to herself and her own experiences.

Interior Places is a collection of sixteen essays that, as she says in her first essay, “The Way In,” ranges over “the outer and [the] inner terrain.” Using the analogy of a geode, she argues that the exterior surfaces of many things may seem bland, but one can often find rare, even exquisite beauty on the inside.

One of my favorite essays in this collection is “Surrender,” a meditation on the necessity of submitting one’s self to the larger world and its realities. Almost Buddhist in its tone, Lisa describes how releasing a bird from her hand (a ranger had just banded it) made her realize that she had to let her grown children leave the nest that she had made for them. “’There’s the sun,’” she softly tells the titmouse, lifting her hand skywards. Then she watches as “a burst of wing beats carried the bird into the cloudless sky.”

Another equally powerful essay is “Enclosures,” which juxtaposes the depths of her personal struggles with claustrophobia with the necessity of living in the modern world, with its cars, windowless offices, and elevators. Wondering about the root causes of her phobia, she reads psychological and neurological texts to find out why people have such paralyzing fears. Ironically, she learns, many phobias (of heights, of snakes, etc.) can be a blessing.

As much as I enjoyed Interior Places, I probably liked What the River Carries even more since many of its essays center on historical figures. Like Caesar’s Gaul, Lisa’s book is divided into three parts: Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte. Each of these sections details her encounters with that particular river in the three distinct phases of her life: childhood, mid-life, later-life.

One of my favorite essays from this collection is “Restorations,” which describes how the Boyer Chute National Wildlife Refuge on the Missouri River has been restored to its “wild” state, which leads Lisa to contemplate how her son, Ian, had recently been restored to her after some time in delinquency. She explains how being in nature helped to calm her son by allowing him to express his “wild” side through hunting and fishing. She concludes, with gratitude, that her son, whom she thought she’d lost, has now found his path in life.

Two other of my favorite essays in this collection are “Mound Builders,” about the Native American tribes in the Midwest who constructed the mysterious pre-Columbian mounds, and “Little Dixie,” about the family of Jesse James. In both of these essays, like in many other essays in this collection, she describes the historic sites with the same attention to detail that she uses to describe her relationships with her family.

Lisa has spent most of the past twenty-five years in Lincoln, Nebraska, and so she has come to think of the Platte as her “home river.” Every spring she drives to the central part of the state to watch the Sandhill cranes return for a stop on the Platte as they migrate from the southern United States to northern Canada. In “No Other River,” she writes about her love for these birds and how a flourishing migration means a healthy river for future generations of cranes and crane-watchers. She closes this essay by joining in the mating ritual: “I’ll watch the dance closely enough that I can join in, bowing my head, strutting a bit, tossing sticks, and leaping high above the earth.”

Wouldn't you like to join her?

Zealot

I’ve seen Reza Aslan on The Daily Show over the years, so I knew that he was an author that I needed to check out. I didn’t find the time, however, until his latest book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, came out earlier this summer. As I’d expected, he’s an author worth reading.

Aslan, who has degrees in creative writing as well as a master's from Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D. in Sociology of Religions from the University of California at Riverside, begins by emphasizing that his book, the result of twenty years of research and study, is about the historical Jesus, not about the supposed son of God. In other words, Aslan is interested in finding out as much as he can about the physical man who lived some 2,000 years ago and is not interested in debating whether or not that man was a manifestation of a deity.

Judea of 2,000 years ago, Aslan points out, was aflame with Jewish rebellion against the oppressive rule of Rome. Many prophets wandered through the land, declaring themselves God, or the son of God, and trying to lead a revolt to free the Jewish people. The Romans, and the Jewish ruling class that owed its privilege to the Romans, promptly executed—usually through crucifixion—nearly all of those rebels before they could stir up too much trouble. (Crucifixion, in fact, was the punishment specifically reserved for non-citizens who espoused sedition against Rome.) A problem for any scholar of the period, however, is that almost nothing is known about any one of these prophets, including the most famous of all, Jesus of Nazareth, although a lot is known about them collectively because of the meticulous records-keeping of the Romans. Consequently, to learn about Jesus, Aslan must rely on inference based on his study of the political, economic, religious, and social conditions of that period. Aslan’s central question, then, is how did a Jewish radical, one who advocated for kneeling only to the Kingdom of God, become transformed into the son of God? How did Jesus the man become Jesus the Messiah?

Although his book is rigorously documented (his bibliography runs to sixteen pages), Aslan writes in a colloquial style for the general reader. For example, here he describes what a typical Jewish man arriving at the Temple in Jerusalem would see:

The money changers play a vital role in the Temple. For a fee, they will exchange your foul foreign coins for the Hebrew shekel, the only currency permitted by the Temple authorities. The money changers will also collect the half-shekel Temple tax that all adult males must pay to preserve the pomp and spectacle you see around you: the mountains of incense and ceaseless sacrifices, the wine libations and the first-fruits offerings, the Levite choir belting out psalms of praises and the accompanying orchestra thrumming lyres and belting cymbals.

This straightforward, unadorned style allows Aslan to make his points directly and clearly so that his book's emphasis remains on his argument, which is that Jesus was a dangerous radical who posed a threat to Rome's rule of Judea. He adds, perhaps controversially, that Jesus’s mission should be seen as a failure since, according to Jewish tradition, the messiah would be a living man, proclaimed “King of the Jews,” who would expel the Romans and restore the purity of Judea for the Chosen People. Instead, the Romans crucified Jesus and, following a large-scale rebellion forty years later, razed the Temple in Jerusalem and exiled the Jews from Judea.

Zealot is divided into three parts: Part One covers the birth and early years of Jesus and also explains the rise of zealots during these years (the term refers to Jewish nationalists, full of “zeal,” who swore strict allegiance to the Torah and vowed never to kneel before any but the One God); Part Two begins by describing Jesus’s radical acts, such as attacking the money changers at the Temple, before then explaining exactly why the Jewish and Roman authorities saw such acts as heresies against the Jewish religion and sedition against Rome; and Part Three focuses on the years immediately following Jesus’s crucifixion, in which, Aslan writes, “a failed messiah who died a shameful death as a state criminal” became transformed into “God incarnate.”

Regardless of your faith, or lack of faith, Aslan’s book is a fascinating account of life in Judea 2,000 years ago and, as such, is worth reading.

(After I wrote this review in June, Zealot sparked much controversy, especially following an inflammatory Fox News interview with Aslan).