I first read “Slaughterhouse-Five” in 1972, three years after it was published and three years before I published my own first novel. I was twenty-five years old. 1972 was the year of inching slowly toward the Paris Peace Accords, which were supposed to end the war in Vietnam, though the final, ignominious American withdrawal—the helicopters airlifting people from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon—would not take place until three years later, at which point, by way of a small footnote to history, I had become a published writer.
I mention Vietnam because, although “Slaughterhouse-Five” is a book about the Second World War, Vietnam is also a presence in its pages, and people’s feelings about Vietnam have a good deal to do with the novel’s huge success. Eight years earlier, in 1961, Joseph Heller had published “Catch-22” and President John F. Kennedy began the escalation of the United States’ involvement in the conflict in Vietnam. “Catch-22,” like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” was a novel about the Second World War that caught the imagination of readers who were thinking a lot about another war. In those days, I was living in Britain, which did not send soldiers to fight in Indochina but whose government did support the American war effort, and so, when I was at university, and afterward, I, too, was involved with thinking about and protesting against that war. I did not read “Catch-22” in 1961, because I was only fourteen years old. As a matter of fact, I read both “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Catch-22” in the same year, a decade later, and the two books together had a great effect on my young mind.
But by the time my baby was four months old, my fear had been realized: I hadn’t written in nearly half a year. I cried at the kitchen table, exhausted from her bad sleep and unpredictable naps and the guilt of feeling as though something was missing.
Then, one day, she napped. And then she napped again. Over time, it became two naps a day, at least an hour each. During those finite windows, I chose writing over my own rest, over cleaning, over exercising, sometimes over dressing or eating. It felt like a delicious secret.
Every day, at 5pm, the gentle melody of the children’s song Yuyake Koyake chimes across the Minato area of Tokyo from a loudspeaker – one of hundreds dotted across schools and parks throughout this megacity of 37 million people.
The daily jingle does more than signify the arrival of evening. It is a test for the system that is designed to save Tokyoites from what would be one of the worst natural disasters in recorded human history: an earthquake striking the centre of the most populous city on Earth.
To lug the weather station to top of the world had required parceling its pieces out among the members of their team. And among the coils of guy-wire, aluminum poles, and various scientific instruments, there was supposed to be two short sections of metal tubing that connect the wind sensors to the main structure. The men searched and re-searched the packs, but it was nowhere to be found. They stared at each other, both simultaneously turning over this fact in their oxygen-deprived brains and seeking a solution.
The reason any of this was worth the effort, risk, and cost is because only Mount Everest and a few of its Himalayan cousins are tall enough to reliably pierce the Central Asian jet stream—one of the narrow bands of powerful winds that circle the globe at high-altitudes, influencing everything from storm tracks to agriculture growing seasons. For climate scientists, there are few more pressing phenomena to understand than the jet stream, and the weather station would provide scientists an important new tool with which to gather data about it.
Friedrich Nietzsche announced the “death of God” and thereby entrenched the end of belief in the supernatural in our science-centered modernity. Yet he ironically described the ancestry and lineage of scientists as distinctly occult and supernatural. “Do you believe,” he asks in The Gay Science, “that the sciences would have arisen and grown up if the sorcerers, alchemists, astrologers and witches had not been their forerunners?” Peter Bebergal’s Strange Frequencies: The Extraordinary Story of the Technological Quest for the Supernatural continues Nietzsche’s philosophical questioning. He provides a series of vignettes featuring contemporary technologists of various disciplines whose motivations, subjects, and data derive from anomalous phenomena. Bebergal paints a marvelous portrait of the links between what the Enlightenment mentality framed as two very incompatible epistemologies: technology and the supernatural. As he argues, the pursuit of the supernatural appears to be inextricably linked to innovative and extraordinary technologies, and the question that motivates his research is: “Why has technology not pulled us completely away from the magical?” His answers drive this enchanting and provocative book.
Can liberalism be rescued from this lexical and political morass? Should it be? Adam Gopnik has no doubts on that score. In A Thousand Small Sanities, he sets out to offer both a definition of liberalism and a heartfelt defense of it. Gopnik does so in what has by now become his trademark style, honed over 30 years as a staff writer for The New Yorker: engaging, conversational prose; a wry sense of humor; a seasoned eye for the telling anecdote; and a great deal of learning, lightly worn. The book is nothing if not enjoyable to read, and it amply reflects the author’s exquisitely good intentions. Despite the pleasures of the prose, A Thousand Small Sanities is a perfect illustration of the cul-de-sac in which mainstream American liberalism now finds itself. The book is worth reading, above all, because it exemplifies a seductive, well-meaning, but oddly apolitical outlook and language that still may have the power to tempt Democrats away from the progressive policies they need to embrace in 2020.
Crampton mixes history with memoir, giving snapshots of her own love affair with the Thames alongside snippets of literary, political, ecological and social history relating to the river. Though the estuary is her ultimate focus, she starts her journey in Gloucestershire, at the source of the Thames, and gives a mini-tour down the river, heading through Oxford before reaching London and then beyond to Tilbury and Cliffe, Sheppey and Hoo, the Nore and the open sea.
Recently, reading that same great text soon after my mother died, I found myself reversing the myth in my head: I, the daughter, was the enraged and grief-stricken one. It seemed wrong for spring to have come while my mother remained in Hades. This and many other matters Greek I can imagine discussing with Norris, on some small Greek ferry, nursing an ouzo, as yet another island emerges from the haze.
“Taken from the wild to assist human labor, these highly intelligent Asian elephants experience great disruption to their individual lives. Shell views their plight with sympathy but, in the end, subscribes to the view that future conservation of the Asian elephant may well depend on just such an arrangement. He tacks back and forth between worrying over a human-elephant relationship that "can sometimes be harsh or even abusive" and admiring a system that gives the elephants "substantial periods of time in the forest every day to roam and mate with a considerable degree of freedom."