My first conversation with Michael Silverblatt lasted only four hours. It was late on my side of the phone, but we could have easily talked until daybreak on the East Coast. We spanned a vast range of topics that December night. I offered my inevitable spiel about how big a fan I am, which included all the usual platitudes and (botched) attempts at preening. We talked about books, of course, and writers we love; about Silverblatt’s luminous university days in Buffalo; about his hero and mentor John Barth; about soirées with the likes of Michel Foucault and Donald Barthelme and Susan Sontag; and about his list of “secret books” (all of which I knew I had to purchase and read immediately). In a moment I’d like at the top of my résumé, I cited a book with which Silverblatt was not familiar (I know!). He immediately began hunting down a copy, but it was out of print. Going against deeply rooted personal book ethics, I mailed him my beloved edition, asking him to please ignore the juvenile marginalia scrawled throughout. Like the conversations on his legendary KCRW talk show Bookworm, this phone call was an education unto itself
On March 30, 1943, a middle-aged man named Lynn Riggs sat in a Broadway theater, watching the final rehearsal for Oklahoma! before its premiere the following night. The first collaboration between Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the show was about to change musical theater forever. Before, the form centered around jaunty song-and-dance numbers, without much else connecting them. But in Oklahoma!, the music was woven into the plot in a sophisticated new way. Characters had important conversations in song and expressed a wide range of emotions. As New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson later put it, after Oklahoma!, “the banalities of the old musical stage became intolerable.”
It’s hard to imagine what Riggs was thinking that night as he watched the show through his dark-rimmed glasses. He was a playwright, and Oklahoma! was based on his 1930 play Green Grow the Lilacs. As Hammerstein told the press, “Mr. Riggs’ play is a wellspring of almost all that is good in Oklahoma! I kept many of the lines of the original play without making any changes in them at all for the simple reason that they could not be improved on—at any rate, not by me.”
There have been surprisingly few experimental efforts to explore the possible avenues by which Hawai‘i’s snails might have crossed oceans to arrive in their new home. In fact, to date there has been precisely one study on this topic of which I am aware. In 2006, Brenden Holland, a researcher in the biology department at Hawai‘i Pacific University, placed a piece of tree bark with 12 live snails of the species Succinea caduca into a saltwater aquarium. This is one of Hawai‘i’s nonendangered snail species; in fact, it is one of the few species that is found on multiple islands and seems to be doing okay. It is a coastal species, and the individuals enrolled into the study were from populations living as little as 10 meters from the beach. Brenden explained to me: “After heavy rain, they are commonly seen in gullies by the coast so there’s no question that they are going to get washed down pretty frequently.”
John Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson were unlikely allies in the war to preserve Yosemite. Muir, son of a Scripture-quoting Scottish immigrant father, was raised poor on a Wisconsin farm, but he wrote and spoke with the fervor of a prophet, and his craggy visage, tough constitution and unshakable devotion to the natural world drew admirers like a magnet. The urbane and cultured Johnson was an insider with a vast network of contacts in publishing and politics. The editor of one of the country’s preeminent magazines, Johnson hosted New York literary salons, mingled with America’s elite and eventually became the U.S. ambassador to Italy.
Nicole Chung is a chronicler of loss. In her debut memoir, “All You Can Ever Know,” she wrote about what has become known as disenfranchised grief — sorrow that is not publicly acknowledged or socially supported — as she explored the circumstances of her adoption. Now, in her second memoir, “A Living Remedy,” Chung’s anguish is focused on the glaringly visible: the broken U.S. health care system; the brutality of capitalism; the hurt of everyday racism; and the devastating shock of losing her adoptive parents and the family narrative that, for so long, was all she knew.