The Premonition: a Pandemic Story

Michael Lewis (W.W. Norton, 2021)

 

   In 2003, a man named Bob Glass was working at Sandia Labs, playing with computer models, when his daughter Laura asked for his help using them to consider infectious disease. Her eighth grade project modeled the Black Plague; the next year, she introduced social networks to the model. She posited, for example, that children were something like twice as likely as adults to pass along a virus, because they spent more time in close contact with others. Her father coached and challenged Laura, and he did some of his own research, especially on the 1918 influenza pandemic.

 

    The Glasses are just the first of the self-taught plague experts Michael Lewis will introduce to us. They range from White House officials to county health officers; most are doctors or nurses, others are laymen like Bob and Laura Glass. They are experts because they're so interested in the problem, including what could actually be done to slow or stop the spread of dangerous illnesses. That's not exactly easy, but, in the context of this story, there's a larger problem: will they be allowed to do it?

 

   Charity Dean, as the chief health office of Santa Barbara county, has seen more than enough of this problem. She does her own research, including seeing patients in county clinics and homeless shelters; that's where hepatitis C and tuberculosis are likely to present themselves, and she wants to be the first to know when they do. Lewis describes the time in 2014 that Dean closed a clinic on suspicion that it was passing hepatitis from patient to patient. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta reacted with consternation: such a use of local authority struck them as radical and rash. "She'd grown used to the lack of material support. But...the total absence of moral and practical support from the state and federal government mystified her."

 

   It's a mystery, if you imagine that the CDC is intended to be working on controlling disease. Rather, Lewis says, "The CDC did many things. It published learned papers on health crises, after the fact. It managed, very carefully, public perception of itself. But when the shooting started, it leapt into the nearest hole, while others took fire." Charity Dean was a battlefield commander. She was General Grant, knee-deep in mud and blood, to the CDC's fastidious General McClellan. In that position, she had to make decisions on pitifully incomplete information; tests that would help will come back too late. Such decisions often involved asymmetrical risks: "Sins of commission got you fired. Sins of omission you could get away with, but they left people dead."

 

Carter Mecher is another real-life character who's acutely sensitive to that sort of problem. He found his sweet spot in the Veteran's Administration, as an expert in medical error. That is, he studied decisions made and delayed, and taught other doctors to make better ones. In 2005, he was invited to the White House to work on pandemic planning in a newly created interagency group. The official report the group produced went through the normal government bad-writing-ification process, but at least Mecher and the others had permission to think about the real problem, of what to do in an epidemic before vaccines can be produced.

 

Because weird things that happen sometimes happen for good, Bob Glass got his and Laura's research about disease transmission to Carter Mecher, who passed it to Richard Hatchett, a colleague who'd been looking for just such a model. Mecher and Hatchett put Glass to work testing ideas about how to slow disease transmission; the insight that children go to school in petri dishes felt like a big breakthrough.

 

 Later in the book, when a new coronavirus appears in China, we are equipped for premonitions of our own: The CDC collects information and never gives it back; decision-makers make things worse by waiting on data that will be ancient history by the time they get it; the people who do see what could be done have to work in unofficial networks and constantly buck the system. Michael Lewis, as always, tells a gripping story, and it may be as important a story as he's ever told.

 

 

 Published by email,

Any Good Books, December 1, 2021

 

Counterpoint: A memoir of Bach and mourning

Counterpoint: A Memoir of Bach and Mourning

Philip Kennicott (W. W. Norton and Company, 2020)

 

       In Counterpoint, Philip Kennicott gives us an extended disquisition on a project that can never be finished: mastering J. S. Bach's 'Goldberg' variations on the piano. It's an epic, Mount-Everest-sized project, to be able to play it competently, in the first place, and further, to memorize it. He decided to tackle the work after his mother died, when he was in his forties. He'd been a pianist from the age of four, but never a very good student. His mother, a frustrated violinist, started him on lessons, and music complicated their relationship throughout his childhood. "This wasn't about resurrecting the long-discarded fantasy of being a great pianist. Rather it seemed a way to test life again, to press upon it and see what was still vital."

 

         The Goldberg Variations comprise thirty-two linked pieces, beginning and ending with the same aria. The thirty pieces in the middle fall into groups of three, every third one a fugue, with successively more distance between the voices. They are linked by a common thirty-two bar bass line. (That's unusually long - eight bars is more usual, and four is not uncommon.) This is only to scratch the surface of what could be known and studied, of course: with Bach there are always wheels within wheels, and smaller wheels still. 

 

        Then there are the performance options: Bach specified the harpsichord, giving directions for one or two manuals; the piano is certainly more common for today's performance spaces, and living rooms, but it can make fingering exceptionally challenging. Classical guitarists play a version, giving back the plucked quality the piano takes away. There are string ensemble versions, as well; my favorite version, by Bernard Labadie, adds a string orchestra to a harpsichord and a theorbo. (I highly commend Emmanuel Music's performance, as long as it's available -  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onbc0XNcMgI )

 

       It's certainly something you could study for a lifetime, but Kennicott is really talking about remaking himself into someone who could do this. He's fighting a lifetime of bad practice habits and unsound techniques. He procrastinates, or he rushes, or he gets distracted. Hours on the piano bench, as it turns out, don't actually matter as much as the engagement between the hands and the mind. "I have spent decades returning to the piano, struggling to find the concentration and peace of mind necessary to move a piece forward, and never, in all those many attempts, scattered through every chapter of my life, have I managed to find more than a few quarters of an hour when I was actually in control of the music."

 

       The more his early teachers tried to make him slow down and concentrate, the less he was able to. His mother's unpredictable violence was certainly no help; he took up music with her support, but it doesn't bring them any closer to a warm, loving relationship; she saw it as something she has lost to him. He found himself bound to use music, her only gift to him, as the vehicle for escaping her orbit. "Had she been merely cruel and capricious, I might have hated her. But all along I saw also the woundedness of her life."

 

        Late in the book, Kennicott visits his most important teacher, back in Schenectady. It's not a lesson, because the two are now friends, but he plays the first ten variations for the man, who is as respectful and careful in his response as ever. "Good teachers are necessarily interested in something that parents all too often find terrifying, the freedom of the younger person. Only after a student has left the teacher and lived for a time in freedom can the teacher judge the success of the relationship." By the same token, Kennicott now has a better sense of what the teacher was trying to free him to do: to trust himself, to forgive himself, and to move forward. That's a lifetime project, and a worthy one.

The Ninth Hour, What About the Baby?

What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction

Alice McDermott (2021, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The Ninth Hour

Alice McDermott (2017, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

     Alice McDermott has taught fiction writing for decades, and written eight well-received novels. I read her book about writing fiction alongside her recent novel, to the benefit of both; What About the Baby shed considerable light on why The Ninth Hour worked so well.

      The novel is set in Irish-Catholic Brooklyn, mainly in the early twentieth century. The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, Congregation of Mary Before the Cross wield a great influence because they show up for the sick and needy. They are, themselves, dependent on money collected pennies at a time, or raised from "idle Catholic women married to successful men." In the first scene of the book, Annie is widowed under awkward circumstances, and Sister St. Saviour is right on the spot. Her efforts to have Annie's husband buried in consecrated ground come to naught, but she's able to conjure up a job for Annie in the basement of the convent, helping with the laundry. Her daughter, Sally, grows up a little sister to the Little Sisters.

      Sister Lucy and Sister Jeanne cobble together a friendship for Annie with Elizabeth Tierney, who lives down the street, and the women stroll out together in the mornings. Sally will not grow up to be a nun, though she'll flirt with the idea, and she'll inherit her father's depressive streak. Instead, she'll grow up and marry one of the Tierney boys; their children provide the narrative voice in some chapters. Sister Jeanne will remain in all their lives, a friend for generations.

      One of McDermott's principles is that fiction "ought to contain, consistently, characters who, if they don't shine with the light of their uniquely individual souls, shimmer at least with that soul's unplumbed or as yet unillustrated possibilities." On this account, she's successful. Each of the nuns has her characteristic ways, including little disagreements with the other nuns, and episodes of irritation or envy. Mr. Costello, the milk-man, is tidy and dutiful, though his wife, an invalid, "was childish, sometimes churlish."

      The characters, she says, have to inhabit a specific place. Everything they eat or drink, sit on or wear, has to come to us in words, and they have to be the right words. Mr. Costello, for instance, "does as much dusting as a man could be expected to do: the top of a bureau, but not the legs; the base of a lamp, but not the shade." Mr. Tierney's Aunt Rose is remembered with "a velvet hat and a pale broadcloth suit, rose-colored perhaps, and maybe the smell of rosewater about her..." Knowing how things feel and smell brings the action to life, even more than a movie would.

      That scent of roses appears in other places, including the deathbed of Sister St. Saviour, though there's room for debate as to whether that was the odor of sanctity, or just an open window. McDermott commends to writers the habit of weaving in connections from one chapter to another. "I am not making a pitch for artifice, manipulation, or trickery, but rather for discovery." The extended description of the convent's laundry, early on, will resonate over and over through the story. Sister Illuminata keeps the nuns clean and starched, of course. She also washes the soiled linens generated by nursing. With Annie's help, she sorts, washes, and mends the neighborhood's castoff clothing, and we're not surprised to see little Sally wearing it.

      McDermott credits a rereading of Middlemarch with identifying a principle theme of her work. George Eliot describes Saint Theresa, whose "passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life." But how many lives, especially women's, never reach that ideal? McDermott says, "I wanted to write about these women, these Saint Theresas who longed for but missed the epic life, who were foundresses of nothing. I wanted to say something about them."

        The Little Sisters of the Sick Poor are destined to die off faster than they are replaced, and the bishop will probably take back their fine house. They are woefully ineffective against certain cruelties of the world, especially those that arise from men. But the work they have done matters, nonetheless, down to the last cup of tea, and the crumbs swept up afterward. McDermott's work matters, too. The creative life of fits and starts being what it is, thirty-five years elapsed between that dip into Middlemarch and this novel, which, "...it might be said, is indeed about women 'whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed...' "

 

 

 

Any Good Books, by mail October 1, 2021

 

The Game: Harvard, Yale, and America in 1968

 

The Game: Harvard, Yale, and America in 1968

George Howe Colt (Scribner, 2018)

         Of all the thousands of college football games that were played in the 1960's, the 1968 Harvard-Yale game seems to be uniquely memorable. This isn't even the first book to be written about it: George Howe Colt was inspired to write it after seeing the masterful documentary, Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, which has its own companion book. There was also, already, an older book about Harvard in the 1968-69 school year, by E. J. Kahn, Jr. It's called Harvard: through change and through storm, which was Kahn's working title even before he experienced the anti-war protests and other uproars and perturbations of his year in residence.

        That is to say, these were interesting times. The Vietnam War had gained new salience on both campuses because, in July 1967, the rules of the draft had changed. It was no longer possible to extend one's college deferment by sticking around for a master's degree, nor to take time off from college without becoming eligible for military service. "Now that there was a very real chance they'd have to fight the war themselves, many more students felt the urgent need to stop it. The ranks of the SDS swelled." In October of '67, the Harvard-Radcliffe Students for a Democratic Society picketed a recruiter for the Dow Chemical Company, occupying the chemistry building for some hours. Other students were still participating in ROTC, in order to pick up some spending money, and to qualify to serve as officers when the military called them.

        The football team at Harvard included both SDS and ROTC members, who somehow forgot their differences when they crossed the Charles River to practice. There was even a Marine veteran playing for Harvard, who had enlisted after getting into academic trouble in his sophomore year. Pat Conway had not only been in Vietnam, he had spent the winter of 1968 in Khe Sahn, the last couple of months under North Vietnamese bombardment. Two-a-day practices weren't really such a big deal after that.

      On the Yale side, there were a few legitimately famous athletes, like the quarterback, Brian Dowling, and the halfback Calvin Hill. Hill was just as good a passer as Dowling, but he was too useful all over the field to play him at quarterback. Both went on to play in the NFL, though Dowling never achieved the success his college glory had seemed to promise. The 1968 team was featured in bull tales, the Yale Daily News strip that gave rise to Doonesbury. The fictional B.D. took on a life of his own, over the years, but the original was the star quarterback they called 'God'.

        As Colt profiles these players and a dozen or so more, he also walks us through the season, in which both Harvard and Yale beat every team they faced. Not without close calls, at least for Harvard, and not without injury. Although the players were smaller in those days, football may have been even more dangerous than it is now, because it wasn't yet illegal to tackle headfirst. On the Saturday before Thanksgiving, the two teams met in Harvard Stadium, before a capacity crowd that included fourteen-year-old George Colt, whose father was a Harvard administrator.

        Yale dominated, as had been expected. Late in the first half, the Bulldogs were up by twenty-two points when Harvard's coach sent in Frank Champi, his second-string quarterback, who managed to hit a second-string receiver for a touchdown before the half ended. Even though hobbled by fumbles and a few unfavorable calls, Yale held a comfortable advantage of 29-13 with forty-two seconds to go. "By now it was getting dark....The word gloaming would appear in the accounts of several Boston sportswriters the following morning." Fans from both sides had been leaving the stadium in a steady stream when Harvard scored, made a two-point conversion, and recovered an onside kick. Harvard's offense had first and goal with three seconds to go, and scored on a broken pass play. Two point conversion? Yes! Final score, 29-29. This was before overtime rules came in, so both teams went undefeated on the season, and shared the Ivy League title. Harvard, understandably, saw it as a victory for the ages.

       Calvin Hill met his future wife at a party that night, a Wellesley student who, you guessed it, roomed with Hillary Clinton. A Vassar sophomore named Meryl Streep had a boyfriend on Yale's team. Piquant as all that is, it's really worth our while to hear about the boys from greater Boston for whom athletics made a profound difference in their educational and social prospects, boys from factory towns like Everett and Haverhill whom Harvard wouldn't have looked at otherwise.

       You'll probably enjoy this book more if you like football, at least a little, but if you'd simply like to time-travel back to when our world was young, it's a good ride.

That Good Night

 That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

Sunita Puri (Viking, 2019)

    Hospitals began to offer palliative care in the 1980's, but the American Board of Medical Specialties only recognized it as a subspecialty in 2006. Five years later, when Sunita Puri elected it as her specialty, her parents had doubts. "'Why not do something more useful, like cardiology or intensive care? You can use those skills all around the world, but you can't do that with this... what is it called again?'" Her mother is an anesthesiologist, which was, in her day, a bold career choice; what's more, as an immigrant from India, she had survived much riskier choices than that; but she urged her daughter toward a more traditional path.

     Palliative care does represent a departure from the way doctors are generally trained to think. They spend three years of medical school and at least three years of further training learning what to do about patients who are ill: try to make them well. Adjust the medication, excise the lesion, support the breathing, cure the disease. If the patient is mortally ill, it's all the more urgent: call for the crash cart, restart the heart.

     Such intensive treatments are often uncomfortable, if not downright miserable. Palliative care disrupts that progression by taking a different perspective. The term 'palliative' refers to care directed at keeping patients comfortable, and preventing suffering. 'Hospice' refers to such care at the end of a patient's life, when further treatments of disease may be stopped altogether.

     Hospice and palliative specialists usually work in teams, which may include social workers, chaplains, and nurses as well as doctors, and they want to ask a different set of questions: is a longer life better if it involves substantial suffering, or loss of dignity? What constitutes, for a particular person, a good quality of life? What might the dying person need to say, or do, before they're ready to go? It's easy to see why medical school is not good preparation for these situations: they take time, and they admit of scary outcomes. With or without treatment, three out of three people die.

     In appropriately anonymized case studies, Dr. Puri traces her own progress in learning to lead these conversations. Gentleness does not mean mushiness: "I was learning that honesty sometimes took the form of measured, compact declarative sentences. I had to be Ernest Hemingway. And this sometimes felt brutal, the exact opposite of compassionate. But the honesty was the compassion."

     In some cases, the patient is the most ready to have these conversations, because they alone know just how sick and tired they are. Family members have their own work to do, to make ready to let a loved one go. Often, they have unrealistic expectations. If life were like television, nearly everybody would get well and go home. The hospice team stands by, saying, "I wish that for you, too. But what would your loved one want, if that doesn't happen?"

     Dr. Puri would also like to dispel the tendency of other doctors to see her as the Angel of Death. Putting a patient into hospice care is not 'giving up', or 'doing nothing.' It's treating pain and discomfort, and tending to people at a spiritually significant time in their lives.

     Some problems that people have follow them right to the edge of the grave. Poverty, in particular: "Fully experiencing the benefits of home hospice requires resources that hospice actually cannot provide: Money to afford caregivers, particularly in the absence of involved family members. A nearby pharmacy that stocks opiate medications for severe pain. Insurance that covers long stretches in nursing homes for people whose families may not be able to care for them. Without these luxuries, which some may take for granted, dying at home can be even more full of chaos and suffering than dying in a hospital."

     I hope this book will prompt reflection, and conversation, both at the community level–how would we ideally address those care-giving needs?–and in our own families, and our own hearts. May we all be granted a safe refuge, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.

 

Any Good Books, August, 2021

 

The Bible Told Them So

Any Good Books, July 2021

The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy

J. Russell Hawkins (Oxford University Press, 2021)

       "I don't believe the Bible endorses it; I don't believe God approves it; if we're going to eat with them and go to school with them, the time is going to come...when some of you that sit in this audience today will have grandchildren with Negro blood." In 1954, Pastor W. M. Nevins could get up in front of the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention and argue against integration as an article of faith. He was speaking in a debate over a report from the SBC's Christian Life Commission which recommended an attitude of brotherly love in the face of the recent Brown v. Board of Education decision. The report was accepted, but iall across the South, resistance like Nevins's would be fervent and long-lived.

      J. Russell Hawkins devoted more than a decade to the research he presents in this book. He confined himself to one state, South Carolina and just two Christian denominations: the Baptists and Methodists. Such a robust slice of white Christianity generated plenty of letters, sermons, editorials, and meeting minutes for his purposes. His primary point is that southern white Christians considered themselves to have the correct Bible-based position on the matter of segregation, because they had been hearing it preached and taught from childhood, generation after generation. "Central to the drama for racial justice that unfolded during America's civil rights years lay an indisputable religious conflict between black Christian activists and their white Christian antagonists, both of whom confidently, proudly, and often joyously claimed God's favor for their political stance."

      Not only that: both sides cited the very same verse, Acts 17:26. "As recounted in the book of Acts, during Paul's visit to Athens, the apostle gave an impromptu sermon before the philosophers of the city in which he declared that God 'hath made of one blood all the nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.'" I'd like to point out that the slave trade itself had played merry hell with the bounds of their habitation, so it may be that that had been against God's will. No matter, the latter half of the verse served its purpose.

      "Interestingly, integrationists often appealed to the first half of Acts 17:26–the idea that God had made all the peoples of the earth from one person–as evidence that all humanity shared a common ancestry before God and could therefore lay claim to the equality that Jim Crow denied." Each side, as you might expect, accused the other of 'proof-texting', hunting for words in a row that supported their view.

       The white Christians of South Carolina had rhetorical recourse to other verses, as well, having to do with the tower of Babel and Noah's Ark, as well as the observation from the natural world that birds of a feather flock together. I think it's significant that the Baptists in particular were fundamentalists as to the Bible, considering it the literal Word of God. This stance made it bitterly difficult to accept that the Bible might be wrong, or that God might change his mind because the Supreme Court made a ruling. They also considered that each Christian had a right and a duty to read scripture for himself. For the Baptists, denominational power originated in the pews, for good or ill–it's a highly democratic system, but it means that pastors must cater to the views of his flock. A town with a Confederate soldier guarding the town square would never keep a pastor who appeared to accept school integration. Methodist bishops, by contrast, had authority over the placement of pastors, but that would not save the job of a 'radical' pastor in a church where the members disagreed with him. After the Brown decision, it was more likely that the minister would be found giving the invocation at a meeting of the local Citizens' Council. These organizations, comprised of leading businessmen, used economic power to preserve their social power over their black neighbors.

      Wofford, the Methodist College in Spartanburg, and Furman, in the Baptist university Greenville, were among the leaders in integration, albeit ten years after Brown. As private institutions, they could have opted to remain havens of whiteness, and plenty of alumni wished they would. But by 1964, the trustees and faculty could respond to other incentives: the schools preferred to attract serious scholars, and accept federal funds. Hawkins shows that the language of white supremacy had disappeared from the public arguments, while it's still seen in private communications. In any case, it took decades for enough black students to enroll to make either institution other than a safe white space.

      The Methodists of South Carolina, as part of the national United Methodist Church, spent the latter part of the 1960s working to reconcile the white and black conferences of the church, which had been separated by a 1939 compromise. In South Carolina, the merger was originally proposed to guarantee racially diverse bodies in the administration of the church, with a system of quotas; by the time the merger was hammered out, the white Methodists magically decided that they didn't need quotas because, in effect, their hearts were too pure to see race. Many fewer black Methodists voted for that version of the merger, but that's what passed. A posture of colorblindness drew a veil over the history of unequal treatment, which consequently went unresolved.

      South Carolina dragged its feet on school integration for nearly a decade; when it began to happen in earnest, the segregationist Christians changed their tune but not their intent. Segregation academies frequently started up using the Sunday School space of local churches. By this time, in the early seventies, people were careful to avoid mentioning race as a reason for choosing such a school. In the case of a school named after Wade Hampton, Confederate general and governor of the State at the end of Reconstruction, there's no need to say more. 'Heritage' and 'family values'' now carry the meaning.

       I don't entirely recommend this book as a reading experience: it's too close to its academic roots to be enjoyable as narrative. Hawkins quotes segregationists' anxious letters to Strom Thurmond, but he misses the chance to point out that Thurmond himself had black grandchildren (by way of a daughter whom he supported but never acknowledged, and whose rights he spent a long Senate career trying to quash.) Also, to my surprise, the copy-editing and indexing don't live up to the standards of the Oxford University Press.

       Howbeit, I was compelled to read it because the title answers a question I've wondered about pretty much all my life: what were they thinking? Why was there any such thing as a Christian segregationist? Within their bubble, these people were acting in good faith. The edifice of belief was too massive to move, sustained as it was by some admixture of self-interest and willful blindness. Of course I think they had much the worst of the argument, and many of their children were alienated from church by the perceived hypocrisy. I also think it's important to notice how that bubble continues to function down to the present day. White supremacy still comes in all flavors, from the violent to the genteel, and the church continues to be stained by it.

Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home

Alexander Wolff (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2021)

     Alexander Wolff sharpened his journalistic skills at Sports Illustrated for the better part of four decades. In 2017, when SI melted down its writing staff for scrap, Wolff took the buyout and moved to Berlin with his family for a year. The book that resulted is the biography of his family, embedded in the history of a chaotic and dramatic time. He goes back into the 19th century to find his Jewish ancestors, some of whom were baptized under the pressures of the time, but most of the book concerns his grandfather, Kurt, and his father, Niko, whose fortunes diverged when Kurt left for America, fleeing the rising Nazi regime.

     Kurt was a publisher, a womanizer, and a partisan of high culture. His first publishing house, the Kurt Wolff Verlag, lasted from before the first world war until 1930. "The Nazis likely objected less to Kurt's mother's Jewish ancestry than to his authors, many of them Jewish, like Franz Kafka, or Expressionist, pacifist, or 'degenerate' besides." After he and his second wife got away to New York, in 1941, they founded Pantheon Books, another enterprise as poor in funds as it was rich in good taste. Fortunes would change when the house landed Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, followed by Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Both were somewhat less highbrow than Pantheon's usual fare, and vastly more profitable.

     Kurt's first wife, Elisabeth Merck Wolff Albrecht, remained in Germany, as did their two children, Maria and Niko. Niko was, as the state measured these things, half as Jewish as his father, so he was eligible to join the Hitler Youth during his boarding school days. In 1940, he was drafted, and became a driver and mechanic in the Wehrmacht, supporting a Luftwaffe unit. For the next six years, his letters to his mother depict his transformation from an earnest teenager to an exhausted and hungry soldier, the embodiment of war-weariness.

    Wolff makes a productive digression when he supplements his father's personal history with research by the historian Timothy Snyder. In Bloodlands, Snyder describes the scorched earth that both the Soviet Union and Germany made of Poland, the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine between 1933 and 1945. Something like fourteen million people died of starvation and associated causes, as both Stalin and Hitler deemed them unworthy of the means of life. But from Ukraine, Niko is writing cheerfully to his mother about the bread, soup, cheese, and sausage he and his comrades enjoy. "In wondering 'What did you do in the war, Daddy?' says Wolff, 'I hardly expected the answer to come back, 'I ate well.'"

    Much later, when the allies won the day, Niko would be subject to a certain amount of payback, once riding in a cattle car for three days. The Allies had trouble keeping up with, let alone feeding, five million prisoners of war, amid the rubble of Europe. By the time he got back to his mother's house in Munich, he weighed a skeletal 133 pounds.

    Niko's mother, Elisabeth was a daughter of the Merck family, which made a multi-generational fortune in opiates and other drugs, including one called Eukodol to which Adolf Hitler is plausibly rumored to have been addicted before U.S. planes bombed the factory in late 1944. She was stably housed enough to receive and preserve her son's letters partly because Dr. Albrecht, her second husband, was a 'supporting member' of the SS, who contributed money rather than actually joining up. It's complicated.

    All credit to Wolff for pursuing the family history, interviewing cousins and probing into archives. He writes with due humility; how can we really know what we would have done? He's not seeking to take on the guilt of the past; each generation deserves a morally clean slate at birth. But responsibility? Yes, to "confront and engage and respond." From Berlin, he can see that the United States has a lot of work to do on this front. Are we treating refugees and migrants as generously as New York treated Karl and Niko (though obviously not all of the Europeans who needed help)?

     Wolff's own mother came from a family that had kept people in bondage in Mississippi. Our work of remembrance and reconciliation with that history is woefully lagging; imagine if all of the antebellum mansions that dot the South were considered as so many Treblinkas, and "the Stars and Bars as a homegrown Swastika."

     Each child is born with a historical clean slate, too. Niko made a break with his past when he emigrated, and his son was raised as an American baby boom child. "Why did he never go into such things? He wanted to spare us, of course. But the question, tacked on to an ever-lengthening list, suggests an answer in the form of another question: How could he have spoken of them? Although that hardly keeps the back half of the refrain from coming round, the companion to He never told me: I never asked." 

 

Published by email, June 1, 2021

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

James Nestor (2021, Riverhead Books)

 

          In Breath, James Nestor has found the ultimate subject for immersive reporting. Every one of us breathes every day, yet most of us know almost nothing about it. Actually, we know less than some ancient civilizations did: "Seven books of the Chinese Tao dating back to around 400 BCE focused entirely on breathing, how it could kill us or heal us, depending on how we used it." Today our doctors have all kinds of equipment, of course, and could readily study our respiration rates and the composition of our blood gases, but they almost never do. What are they missing, and why does it matter?

        In the past two centuries, some people have rediscovered and tried to reintroduce what the Taoists (and the Hindus, and the Buddhists) knew. "Many early pioneers in this discipline weren't scientists. They were tinkerers, a kind of rogue group I call 'pulmonauts,' who stumbled on the powers of breathing because nothing else could help them." Their work has consequently had trouble getting a lasting foothold in the culture of medicine. The chance to hear about these odd ducks is a strength, and a delight, of this book.

        Carl Stough, for example, started his career as a choral conductor. He went on to teach opera singers, paraplegics, and people with emphysema better ways of breathing. Under his training, the 1968 U.S. men's track team had one of the great Olympic competitions in history, setting five world records in Mexico City. He broke new ground in every field he tried, but he didn't train anybody to carry on his work. "Stough broke all the rules; he expanded lungs and extended life spans. And yet, most people today have never heard of him."

        Anders Olsson is a Swedish man who has become obsessed with better ways of breathing. He joined Nestor in a mildly insane experiment: they had themselves studied at intervals while they underwent ten days of breathing only through their mouths. The experience of nasal obstruction was as gruesome as you'd imagine: "My snoring has increased 4,820 percent from ten days ago." Fortunately, switching to nasal breathing for the next ten days relieved their headaches, sleep apnea, and other ills relatively quickly.

        Olsson joined Nestor in this project because his own research suggests that overbreathing is a widespread problem, that we actually need more carbon dioxide in our blood to make the best use of the oxygen we take in. Breathing more slowly, and spending more time between inhalations, seems to improve the functions of the nervous system, the heart, and the lungs, and reduce overall stress on the body. Some psychologists are extending that insight into treatment for anxiety disorders as well, having patients inhale extra carbon dioxide to stave off panic attacks. Maybe that's why we can sometimes get a calming effect from a brisk walk.

          Nestor also found that our breathing is also compromised by the changes in facial structure that came along with processed food over the past three centuries. It's not just genetics, it's functional. Of course, he's dogged about the question. "There had to be procedures, manipulations, or exercises that could reverse the past few centuries of damage from soft and mushy industrialized food. There had to be something that could help me with my own obstructed airways, and the wheezing, respiratory problems, and congestion I'd often experienced."

           There is: more exercise for the jaw. He actually added bone mass to his lower face by biting on a retainer and chewing gum. "The chew-airway connection, like so much else breath-related, was old news. As I dug through a century of scientific papers on the subject over several months, I felt like I was trapped in a respiratory research spin cycle. Different scientists, different decades; the same conclusions, the same collective amnesia."

            Since we breathe all day, every day, this book will make you self-conscious. How fast am I breathing right now? Can I walk faster without panting? How can I keep my mouth closed at night, comfortably? (I'm trying out a sleep mask as a chin sling; it's pretty comfortable, and I'm sleeping better.) Because this book is selling so well, I have hopes that this knowledge will be taken up in formal medicine. It probably won't, though, because it comes from outside the walls, which kicks up medicine's own immune response. Nevertheless, better breathing might make us healthier. It's up to us to be curious, and willing to try simple things. 

 

 

Any Good Books, May 1, 2021 

published by email

 

Rock Breaks Scissors:

Rock Breaks Scissors: A Practical Guide to Outguessing and Outwitting Almost Everybody

William Poundstone (2014; Little, Brown and Company)

       We hear a lot these days about algorithms behind the scenes of our digital lives: the minute we shop or browse for news online, Big Data draws a bead on us. Research shows that it would take a great deal of effort not to be predictable in this way; in fact, we probably couldn't achieve it if we tried.  This is not just true of my taste in L.L. Bean sweaters - and what I might be willing to pay for them - but all the way down to the smallest atoms of choice, like a friendly game of Rock, Paper, Scissors over a bar tab. (Not always so friendly: did you know that there are international tournaments of RPS?)

 

      There's actually a game one step more primitive than that, in which two players make individual choices, such as heads or tails on a penny they hold, and award the win to either matching coins, for one player, or non-matching coins for the other. Any binary will do: odds and evens, or yeses and noes. When playing against a machine, the ideal would be to play a random sequence of guesses, and avoid falling into predictable patterns. 

 

      Practically nobody can do this; our vision of randomness turns out to be guessable by the most primitive machines. Back in the fifties, a couple of the masterminds at Bell Labs built such machines; Claude Shannon's had sixteen bits of memory, fewer than you have in your fingers and toes. "A stream of brilliant and egotistical scientists, engineers, and mathematicians passed through Bell Labs in the 1950's. Shannons' outguessing machine was the sword in the stone. Anyone with pretensions to being smart could hardly leave without matching his genius against it. Few could resist the challenge, and few left without sacrificing a bit of ego." Shannon himself, naturally, had the only consistent winning record. 

 

      Poundstone's book looks into research on the prediction problems we encounter in everyday life: multiple choice tests, March Madness brackets, or tennis serves; and some that are rare but consequential: picking unguessable passwords, or offering the right price on a house. His advice won't make you unbeatable, but these are cases where moving the odds a little bit is at least pleasing, and possibly profitable. 

 

      Some of the advice amounts to: be humble. You're human, so your intuition about what randomness looks like is probably terrible. Your intuitions about football betting, in a point-spread tournament, are probably so bad that you'd win just as often betting the opposite of your preferred card, because if your contrarian Evil Twin wins, there are probably no other bets like that to split the pot with. 

 

       The stock market is the classic case of needing to outwit other humans as ill-informed as you are. Poundstone's long term investment strategy, based on a ten-year trailing average of price-to-earnings ratios, is the polar opposite of day trading. It's austere in the extreme, but he's probably right. 

 

      Even if you have no skin in such games, Rock Breaks Scissors is an invigorating book. The writing is clean and clear, and Poundstone follows the questions he raises to a reasonable depth. And his goal is salutary: "To understand the misperception of randomness is to gain power, not over fate but over ourselves. Fortuna keeps spinning her wheel, and no one gets out of the game."

Any Good Books, April 1, 2021 by email.

A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile

A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile

James Alan McPherson (2000, Touchstone)

       The essays of James Alan McPherson (1943-2016) that are collected here were written near the end of his distinguished career as a fiction writer, essayist, and teacher. They offer glimpses of his life as a student, a father, and an observer of American culture and history. His range is impressive, not to say intimidating: he's also capable of reckoning with what ancient Rome, Shakespeare, and modern Japan might have to say to us.

      The exile of the subtitle refers to the fact that, beginning in 1981, he made his home in Iowa City, where he taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop; that's a long way from his childhood: "I lived in a lower-class black community in Savannah, Georgia, attended segregated public schools, and knew no white people socially. I can't remember thinking of this last fact as a disadvantage, but I do know that early on I was being conditioned to believe that I was not supposed to know any white people on social terms." As fate would have it, he became a reader, and then a student at Morris Brown College in Atlanta. At Harvard Law School, he studied fiction writing on the side, and followed up with an MFA from the Iowa workshop, having already been published by the Atlantic Monthly.

      Iowa may be one of the whitest places there is; what McPherson liked about it was that it was self-consciously a place with customs and rituals, a sense of the Done Thing. He went so far as to pose as a sports fan, in concert with the prevailing ethos. "...I was sure to find all the butchers watching a game on television. They had already assumed that I was an athlete because all the black males they noticed were athletes. I did not disappoint them." But of course, there's much more going on with him than that. It's just that you can't get close enough to people to figure out their real stories without making some gesture of community.

       McPherson's own community included Ralph Ellison, whom he appreciates here both as a hero and as a friend, in an essay responding to the publication of Ellison's Juneteenth. Ellison, McPherson says, brought to the modernist project a blues sensibility, capable of mingling the inescapable strife of daily life with a streak of humor, and of personal style. After all, among the ancient Greeks, "life was tragic, full of agon. But to them it was also comic. And the two dramatic categories were linked."

       They're linked in Huckleberry Finn, certainly. In an essay occasioned by the restoration of some passages of the book that had been cut, McPherson observes that Mark Twain "was writing about the possibility of friendships across racial lines, at a time when such emotional connections were considered radical. He was writing about the struggles of the human heart confined to the structure of white supremacy...yet Twain, like Stephen Crane after him, still wrestled with the possibilities of heroic action within the confines of a corrupt uncaring culture."

       Such matters are in McPherson's purview as well, particularly when he reads Othello in the shadow of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, which were recent history at the time. The outlines of our life today were clear to him already: "Prosperity has been polarized, with great wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The institution of the nation-state is rapidly being replaced by global corporate ties under invisible managements. The middle class is frightened. The poor no longer exist as human beings. Europe is becoming one federated nation, while the demographics of the United States are changing relentlessly. Information is everywhere, but there is less and less of it with any substance."

      That's the world we still live in, and we can't say nobody saw it coming.

 

Emailed as  Any Good Books, March 1, 2021

Still in Love

 

Still in Love: a novel

Michael Downing (Counterpoint, 2019)

      Mark Sternum has it made, teaching creative writing at Hellman College. He has tenure, and teaches only two classes per semester. He's conscientious, though, going so far as to complete the assignment for each class, submitting it to be marked up by the Professor, his teaching partner. The Professor is a hard case, and a bit of a pedant. "When would the Professor want to discuss ideas for stories? Never. When would it be useful to disclose the autobiographical basis of a story? Never. How much time will we spend brainstorming and writing in class? None. 'I will never be interested in anything except every word you write.'"

      Mark, on the other hand, is there to mother the students. It's his mailbox that is full of submitted work on Monday mornings, and whose office hours are a parade of students who need to discuss syntactical confusion, ideas for stories, and the feedback they've received from the Professor. He devises the assignments, does all the copying, and keeps track of the lucky twelve who are admitted to the class. On the whole, this arrangement satisfies Mark. He knows it isn't fashionable to admit how much he loves teaching, but he's exceedingly lucky to be at Hellman, where he can still enjoy it wholeheartedly.

      Mark's romantic partner, Paul, is away in Italy for the spring semester of 2017. We met Paul previously in the delightful Perfect Agreement; they are still in the same awkward–or perfect–arrangement by which Mark keeps a too-small house in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and Paul keeps a too-small apartment overlooking the Cambridge Common. Hellman lies conveniently between the two, so Mark can retreat back and forth; his Saab mechanic is in Ipswich, but the Chinese food is better in Cambridge.

      Still in Love hits the notes of traditional academic comedy, such as the tension between the tenured faculty, who get offices, and the contingent, who barely get desks. Will they vote to form a union? There's department politics: "[The department chair] had a damnably good memory and a thick file on everyone in the department to back her up when necessary. She had reluctantly agreed to be chair when she was first asked to take the five-year appointment. That was ten years ago." The other English faculty appear in quick sketches: "He was built like a broomstick, and he had long cultivated an image in the department as a misanthrope, which was his attempt to take credit for being disliked." Or sometimes little mysteries: "It's always hard to tell if he's sneaky or senile. Take your pick."

      What I liked best about the book, though, is the course itself. We are in the position of the auditing students, who seat themselves on the deep window ledges around the classroom, while the enrolled students sit around the table. Some of the students need to go back to first principles, like what conjunctions are, and how to tell phrases from clauses. As for how to combine them, regard this little beauty: "When the dependent clause comes first, you need a comma. You need no comma when the independent clause comes first."

      I know my way around prose, but writing fiction is an art so far beyond my knowledge as to appear magical. Downing is simultaneously describing effects and practicing them, especially in the assignments Mark completes. Seemingly impossible technical requirements - words of one syllable, a 125-word sentence - make the writers think hard about every word, and what it contributes to the reader's understanding. They may even, like Mark, come to love limitations, which give form and structure to the work. The Professor's dogmatism is as lovable as it is prickly: "Don't withhold facts to create mystery. That's manipulation, and readers will sense it. The real mysteries of life are not withheld facts. The real mysteries are simple and persistent questions. Why doesn't she love me? How could he say that?"

     Just so, Downing has strewn the novel with mysteries to leave us with. Do Mark and Paul ever get to live together, and should they? Whither Hellman, the adjuncts' union, writing, teaching itself? Why read fiction? I'm a little closer to grasping that one.

 

Any Good Books,

February, 2021

Emailed 2/1/21

 

The Best Cook in the World

 

The Best Cook in the World: Tales from my Momma's Southern Table

Rick Bragg (Vintage, 2018)

Cookbooks, I'm told, vary along a spectrum from the dry, scientific, just-the-facts style to the ridiculously discursive, which lay an elaborate scene for each dish, including its provenance and what the weather was like when the writer first ate it. In The Best Cook in the World, Rick Bragg is surely setting the farthest boundary of the discursive style. Since I'm not really looking for a cookbook to cook out of, that suits me just fine.

In the first place, Bragg is not at all a cook, himself. He took a mind to interview his mother when she was in her late seventies about how she did what she did in the kitchen, in hopes of preserving some knowledge that might be going the way of the old growth forest. "She does not own a mixer or a blender. There is a forty-year-old lopsided sifter for her flour, and a hand-cranked can opener. She mixes with a bent fork and a big spoon, smelted, I believe during the Spanish-American War." The recipes in the books come in teaspoons and cups and such, for our convenience, but "[s]he cooks in dabs, and smidgens, and tads, and a measurement she mysteriously refers to as 'you know, hon, just some.'" And how long does it need to cook? Well, I'm sorry, but Margaret Bundrum Bragg doesn't know you, and she doesn't know how hot your oven runs. You'll know when it's done, if you're paying attention like you should.

In the second place, this is real country food. In the northeastern corner of Alabama, where Bragg's people come from, nobody needed to be told to eat locally, or 'farm-to-table'–that's just what food was. "The country people, the working people, subsisted mostly on beans, greens, potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, pork, and sometimes chicken, when one could be spared or perhaps stolen." And all this with plenty of butter; if not butter, bacon grease; and if not bacon grease, lard. You can only eat food this rich in fat if you have also chopped the wood for the stove to cook it on, or been out hauling logs or digging wells all day.

The family stories Bragg tells go back a hundred years, to when his great-grandfather James J. Bundrum went off to Georgia after (probably) killing another man in a drunken fight. He was a mean, violent old cuss, but he could cook like an angel, so in 1924 his son, Charlie, went and found him in the Georgia hills, and brought him back to teach Charlie's new wife how to cook. The sixteen-year-old bride, Ava, was just as hard-headed as the old man, and "it would be a fat lie to claim that her tutelage began with anything remotely akin to enthusiasm on her part." As iron sharpens iron, though, these two stubborn people eventually came to an understanding. He taught her biscuits and cornbread, and planting and foraging, and how to select the chicken whose day it is to die. "Spare the young when you can, and let them grow into fat hens or good roosters. It might be as tough as a two-by-twelve, but would be good for broth, or dumplings, or stew. And if you have to eat a chicken your kids have named, wait till they are visiting relatives, and blame the foxes."

That last is a level of sneakiness, not to say larceny, that runs in the family, because people have to eat. Where did that stoat come from, or those two pigs feet? (They come in fours.) And why was that cow trying to cross a railway trestle when it came to grief? These are mysterious matters, but in time they became the stuff of stories as delicious as the food they describe. Even the worst year, 1934, when Charlie was serving time for bootlegging, led to wonderful suppers consisting entirely of sweet potato pie or cobbler - cobbled together, indeed, by the best cook in the world. Bragg's own mother wasn't yet born in those days, but she would later work her magic keeping three sons alive on government commodities, and on what Bragg called in another book, "the table scraps of nothing."

Should you ever wish to wax elegiac about hillbillies, I'd suggest this or Bragg's earlier memoirs as a good place to begin. He treats these prideful, stubborn people both honestly and lovingly. Sometimes they drink, sometimes they cuss, sometimes they sing Hank Williams tunes over the stove, and you'll wish you were there to hear them, and to sit down over simple food, cooked well.

 

Any Good Books, by email

January 1, 2021