Rising Tide

In Venango County, we still talk about the flood of 1926. But that flood was just the beginning of an unusually heavy load of water that became the Mississippi flood of 1927, one of the greatest natural disasters in US history.

John M. Barry’s work captures the flood in its totality, showing how the flood was tied to many threads of American life—race, class, politics, and science.

Engineers had long argued about the river, a battle of conflicting theories and clashing egos that set the stage for disaster. It’s a tremendous example of how policy by compromise and politics can set the stage for disaster. Once the river rose, politicians and engineers had to decide which of the people and homes in the river’s path would be defended, and which would be sacrificed to relieve some of the enormous pressure.

There are many echoes of our own era. Barry portrays the political battles: on one side, rural populists who railed against “non-Americans” and the privileged, and, on the other, the moneyed elite who used power and wealth to control the destiny of their communities. It was the great flood that boosted the political careers of Huey Long and Herbert Hoover, and sparked a wave of black immigration to northern cities. And choices about how to handle the big river have continued to have consequences up through the Katrina disaster.

With brutal balance, Barry brings to life historical figures who had moments of greatness and moments in which they were horribly wrong. Barry conveys the enormous scope of this event. This reads more like a novel than history, but filled with richness of detail that only comes from a historian who has done his homework. We see the rising disaster and the response from a variety of perspectives, the decisions about who and what to save, influenced by politics, money and race.

It is not a happy or heroic book. The flood was a massive challenge, and Southern leaders did not always respond successfully. Barry shows that while nature may do the grand and unexpected, it takes man to turn it into a disaster.

Fabric of the Cosmos

Brian Greene may just be one of the greatest explainers to ever sit down to a keyboard.

Those of us who managed to just navigate high school physics (and none too recently) may remember the history of physics as a two part story: 1) Isaac Newton discovered some laws and then 2) a bunch of other guys worked out all the details.

But the twentieth century from Einstein on was marked by a steady string of discoveries that are, well, just plain freaky. Subatomic particles that are both waves and particles at the same time—until someone looks at them, and then they make up their mind to be one or the other.

Quantum physics is hard enough to understand, but then we have to contend with string theory, branes, and the origin of the universe.

Much of this has little daily impact on us, though it brings up classic questions: What is Time? What is space made out of? What the heck was Einstein talking about? If we could stand outside the universe, what would we see (and where would we be standing)? Is time travel possible?

For the non-scientist who would like a better understanding of this, Brian Greene (no relation) is The Man. His explanations are clear and readily accessible (he is not above populating his hypothetical examples with characters from The Simpsons), and he has a knack for unfolding his explanations step-by-step in a way that is easy to follow, not overwhelming (he even tells you when it’s okay to skip the next few pages). He explains the things you need to have explained in the order you need the explanation.

I have never seen a writer break down harder stuff into clearer, more entertaining chunks. Fabric of the Cosmos handles it all with grace and style and smarts. For someone who wants to know what all the quantum fuss is about without feeling like the dumb kid in science class, this is a great book.

Ahab's Wife

Let me report one more thing about Moby Dick-- it sticks in your head long after you've set it down, like the last not-quite-dead-yet echo of a bell that's been rung. I'm adding one more idea to my theories about why it's part of the canon-- the book that one remembers after reading is in some ways a better book than the one you read.

That, in turn, leads me to think that a gifted writer would feel a strong urge to...ummm...revisit Melville's work, to retell the story, to rering that bell in a way that might be a bit more clear and pure and stirring.

And that, in turn, leads me to Sena Jeter Naslund's book.

This is a work that may well be a true one-of-a-kind. It is in no way a sequel to MD; in fact, the bulk of it stands as more of a prequel. And Naslund doesn't just revisit Melville's characters; she reimagines many of them, including Ahab himself. I'm not deeply bothered by that-- Melville didn't exactly draw these characters in deep and subtle shades to begin with. But while, for example, Starbuck seems much the same, Ahab himself is given a whole new range of motivation and psychology that makes Naslund's Ahab considerably different from what some acquaintances of Melville's Ahab may have imagined.

It's not strictly necessary to have read Melville's work to read this one, though having done so allows one to recognize many connections that she has included. Some are minor connections-- shared bits of whaling lore, a small back story for Pip-- and some require more of the reader-- at one point the main character encounters Nathaniel Hawthorne (though he is not named), dressed as Rev. Hooper ("The Minister's Black Veil") and sharing a quote from himself which Melville has also quoted in the "preface" to MD.

Hawthorne is not the only historical figure to appear. Our heroine also becomes a confidant of Margaret Fuller and meets (and apparently influences) Frederick Douglass.

But Naslund is more interested in the literature than the history-- she transposes the oil industry of Western PA by a decade or two in order to get some dramatic effect.

The work is packed with story. The opening line announces that stuff is going to happen: "Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last." A wide range of characters, a life wild and full of adventure, a main character who is unapologetically driven by self, unexpected twists of accident and misdirected impulse-- yet all wrapped up in well-crafted, thoughtful and beautiful prose.

It is not hard to see why this work won so many awards-- it's deserving of them. Despite its literary ambitions and achievements, it is a fun and moving read, accessible and rewarding.