Book Catchup

I lollygagged so long on writing about Krakatoa and then Sea of Glory that I finished two other books.

So, I’m just going to say something briefly about these three as a place marker and promise to write more about them later, in the interest of never writing anything because I let too many ideas accumulate.

The three books are Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, and Nathaniel Philbrick’s Sea of Glory (great title!).

I resisted The Kite Runner a bit because it got excellent reviews and I’m an ornery person and a mercurial reader. Khaled Hosseini’s interview on NPR was very engaging, etc,etc and I was hoping that the book would be as engaging as the only other Afghanistan-related media I’ve consumed: the riveting Hyder Akbar TAL episodes. That is, besides that National Geographic cover.

I was not disapointed: The Kite Runner shares many of the same themes as Hyder Akbar’s radio documentary with a dash of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake angsty father son relationship.

There are some difficult to read moments of violence against children (with consequences for the young afghan actors starring in the movie adaptation).

More to say about the nature of immigration and going home, and the Taliban, but it’s got to be later, because right now it’s onto non-fiction and……….

The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million.

Daniel Mendelsohn travels the world gathering testimony from ailing holocaust survivors of a very small polish shtetl trying to piece together the story of his long-ago perished great uncle and aunt and their four daughters.

In a way, it’s a mirror of Ann Kirshner’s excellent Sala’s Gift, which I had the pleasure of reading this summer. Kirshner and Mendelsohn both write about their family’s experiences in the holocaust, but their stories represent opposite challenges. Kirshner’s mother endured years of living in forced labor camps. After the war, she made a life in America with a personal archive of letters and photographs miraculously intact, but with an understandable reluctance to discuss any of her experiences with her children.

Mendsohn, by contrast, grew up with a garrulous crowd of relatives, especially a doting grandfather who was always ready with a story of their ancestral Polish village. The grandfather and his siblings all left Poland for prosperous lives in America and Israel long before the rise of the Nazis, save one brother who stayed and was killed with his family. Unlike Kirschner, Mendelsohn has abundant stories of the Old Country, but pathetically few personal items to give any insight about the lost family.

After visiting Poland last year, it was much more meaningful to read about the author’s visits to the Polish countryside and to the Krakow ghetto: I had a picture in my mind’s eye of what those places look like.

While I was in Poland, it was astonishing to me how much it felt like traveling back in time – so agragrian, such tiny small towns filled with the acrid scent of wood-burning stoves.

More to say, but it’ll have to be after Sea of Glory (excellent title!).

In fact, Sea of Glory is what’s been holding up the whole blog, because it raises so many topics for discussion .

It follows the four year (FOUR YEAR) U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842 (the “Ex. Ex”), led by one Lt. Charles Wilkes. The vast and varied collection of specimens accumulated on this exhaustive voyage lead to the formation of our nation’s first research institutions (notably: the Smithsonian), which allowed for the establishment for the first time of science as a paying profession in our country.

They circumnavigated the globe, found Antarctica, and had all manner of adventures among the pure and profane, but leader of the expedition, Wilkes, was never given much credit or glory in his own lifetime, and now he, and the expedition, are lost to obscurity.

We can chalk this down, as Philbrick does, to Wilke’s phenomenally off-putting personality. Equally interesting as the exploration is the sort of case study the expedition presents of employees being trapped in close quarters for years on end with a horrible boss. Really, the worst sort of situation you can imagine, if you’ve ever had an undesirable boss. Separated by distance and time from familiar society, Wilkes was not only free to unleash his worst inferiority complexes and passive aggression, but he also had the authority to mete out horrifying physical punishment as well.

Tangentially related: it is astonishing, astonishing! that I still haven’t read a biography devoted to Captain James Cook. Shame on me. He casts such a long shadow on so many books I’ve read in the past few years. Not only did he obviously capture the imagination of the public during his own lifetime, but he, the man who “boldly went where no man had before” shows up centuries later in the fictionalized person of Captain James T….Kirk. He inspired men like Charles Wilkes, who read of him. Those who knew him in person, those who sailed with him, appear to have been profoundly influenced by the experience. Sir Joseph Banks, John Ledyard, William Bligh.

Speaking of my bff Ledyard, he makes a small cameo in Sea of Glory (as does my beloved old MGH). It reminded me that I still have not written about Ledyard’s adventures after I promised to this summer. I know. It’s coming!

Another reason that I was reminded of him is because the same two authors – Henry David Thoreau and Herman Melville- reference Ledyard and Charles Wilkes of the Ex. Ex.

Only one conclusion to draw!

Weirdly, Melville, Thoreau and I share tastes in doomed explorers. It’s like we’re pals separated by a century. We’d have plenty to talk about, except I haven’t written any novels.

I’ve read Thoreau and gone swimming at Walden Pond and been to Concord, so I feel that I have that base covered, but I don’t know anything about Melville except that he wrote Moby Dick, which I haven’t read.

So.

I bought it, and started it this week.

That’ll be the be next book discussed here.

Meantime, has anybody read any of these books? What do you think of them? Does anybody have any Thoughts, or Recommendations of books or topics?