Creative Non-Fiction – Eric Pallant

In the Kingdom of Ice by Hamptom Sides **** (of 4)

America, Book Reviews, Creative Non-Fiction, Environment/Nature/Ag, FOUR STARS ****, History, NON FICTION, Polar, Travel Comments Off

Aug 202017

At the end of the nineteenth century, because no one had ever been there, the virtual consensus among geographers was that the North Pole resided in a warm, open sea. One needed only to sail a ship through the ice surrounding it to reach the open ocean. In 1879, Captain George DeLong and a crew of 30-plus sailors set off for the North Pole. At end of the their first year, their ship, having failed to find open water, was instead frozen in place, where they remained out of communication with the rest of the world for three years. Half of their time was in near total darkness and nearly all of their days and nights were below freezing. Finally, sheets of ice crushed and sank the U.S.S. Jeannette. The crew walked and sailed for hundreds of days across ice floes and freezing oceans with hopes of reaching the coldest landmass on earth, the north coast of Siberia. The test of human physical and psychological endurance is simultaneously contemporary and otherworldly. The relationship of European and American men to the environment, native people of the Arctic, to women, and stoicism is history not to be overlooked.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald **** (of 4)

Audio Book, Book Reviews, Creative Non-Fiction, Environment/Nature/Ag, Europe, FOUR STARS ****, Memoir/Biography, NON FICTION, Prize Winner Comments Off

Oct 312016

Three parallel stories expertly told. In the first, the author trains a goshawk to fly from her glove to hunt pheasants and rabbits on the British countryside. In a second, Macdonald recounts the life of T.H. White, author of Arthurian novels, depressed, gay, abused, and also a goshawk trainer. And, in the third, she writes a memoir of the year that her father died unexpectedly, she acquired a hawk, named it Mabel, trained Mabel, lost her happiness, read everything of T.H. White’s, scrambled in the British woods behind her not always cooperative goshawk, and muddled through. We learn to see Britain’s hedges and forests through the eyes of an expert hawker and the eyes of a hawk, and Britain’s mid-twentieth century rigidity through the writings of T.H. White.

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan *** (of 4)

America, Audio Book, Book Reviews, Creative Non-Fiction, Environment/Nature/Ag, History, NON FICTION, Prize Winner Comments Off

Oct 202016

This recounting of America’s dust bowl is a vivid, filthy painting of an American environmental disaster brought about by greed, hubris, and ignorance. After demolishing the Comanche and the bison, an American government anxious to “settle” the West gave away its prairie in huge chunks. Plows sliced prairie grasses from their deep roots creating caskets of bare soil over buried sod. Homesteader wheat, mining untapped soil nutrients and decomposing grasses, produce unimaginably profitable and prolific yields. When the Great Depression struck in 1929, jobless masses in East Coast cities could not afford to pay for food and wheat piled up in the Great Plains. In terrible need of income farmers expanded production, exacerbating the problem. Then one of the periodic droughts that has always cycled through the Great Plains struck the year following the crash of the stock market and stretched nearly a decade. Crops died. Then trees and streams, horses and cattle all withered. Great roiling winds picked up tons and tons of soil hurling black blizzards of sand and grit across the plains and finally people, their lungs so full of dust they could not draw sufficient oxygen, they, too, started to die and with them the farms and towns of Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas that should never have exchanged perennial grasses, bison, antelope, snakes, and hares for wheat, corn, and cotton. The soil of the Great Plains was eventually tied down by the Soil Conservation Service and new plants grown on water mined from the Ogallala Aquifer, which shortly will run dry.

Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting by Ian Frazier *** (of 4)

Book Reviews, Creative Non-Fiction, NON FICTION, Short stories Comments Off

Oct 202016

Many of the essays, interviews, and reports collected here were first published in the New Yorker, but not one of them is less interesting reading a second time. The stories range from a page to more than thirty and cover such disparate topics as the most dangerous bus route in New York City, seal-spotting, the guys that invented compostable packaging made from fungi, teaching the homeless to be better writers, the origins of one of Bob Dylan’s earliest and most important songs, and how Asian Carp are spreading throughout America’s heartland. Who knew there were so many interesting things to learn about? What makes each essay so interesting, of course, is not the topic, but Frazier’s innate ability to spin simile and metaphor. Park benches have snow pulled up to their knees and a meteorite that crashed through a roof in Monmouth, New Jersey, “was dull brownish-silver and shaped sort of like a small croissant.” Reading every story back-to-back can be wearing. Better, perhaps, to treat this collection like a box of fine chocolates.

One of Us by Asne Seierstad **** (of 4)

Book Reviews, Creative Non-Fiction, Europe, FOUR STARS ****, NON FICTION, Psychology, Suspense Comments Off

Jul 222016

Even if you do not recall the Oslo terrorist attack in 2011, the opening pages of this book make certain there is no surprise. Anders Breivik, a native of Norway exploded a homemade bomb in front of the Prime Minister’s residence and then drove a van to Utoya Island to murder socialist youth. He killed seventy-seven people, most of them children, nearly all with gunshots to the back of the head. Only a few pages after it opens, the story returns to the beginning of Anders Breivik’s life to uncover in page-turning detail his development as a right-wing terrorist bent upon preserving Norway’s ethnic purity from creeping left-wing government policy. Breivik emerges as a psychotic, deranged killer. Except his continued lucidity and consistent logic of self-defined clarity of purpose make him indistinguishable from any member of ISIS, the Taliban, fanatical Israeli settlers and their Hamas counterparts, the routine gun-wielding mass shooters that too routinely make our headlines, more than a few affiliate of the NRA, and several of my neighbors in northwest Pennsylvania. One of us. This book explains what runs through their minds and then asks us to define the border between idealistic soldier of freedom and the psychologically impaired.

Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett ** (of 4)

Book Reviews, Creative Non-Fiction, Environment/Nature/Ag, NON FICTION, Science Comments Off

Dec 012015

As these things go, not too bad. Consider it everything you ever wanted to know about the hydrological cycle (there are similar books on coffee, cod, oil, and so forth). Well written and organized loosely from the most ancient rains, those that fell on a recently cooled planet, forward toward contemporary discussions of floods, droughts, dams, rivers, crops, and the livelihoods of humans at rain’s mercy. The book is remarkable for its breadth and inclusiveness, and strongest when Cynthia Barnett’s stories are longest, but the final result is like so many unending raindrops. A drowning in more facts about rain than anyone really wishes to endure.

The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown **** (of 4)

America, Audio Book, Book Reviews, Creative Non-Fiction, FOUR STARS ****, History, NON FICTION, Sports Comments Off

Jun 142015

On the face of it an uplifting story of a group of eight hayseeds from Washington state who come together to become the world’s best rowing team. They stand for all that is good in America — hard work, optimism, rags-to-riches, democracy, talent, and above all a can-do attitude — when they compete for gold in Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics. Brown’s writing is so evocative that you can feel the cold wind on Lake Washington during a late-fall practice, endure the doubt inside the mind of every student-rower anxious about paying for an upcoming semester during the height of the great depression, crane your neck watching a tight race, and in the end, when all goes right, fly on a boat with eight oarsmen working in perfect synchrony. You really do want these guys to beat the Nazis.

The Billionaire’s Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace *** (of 4)

Book Reviews, Creative Non-Fiction, History No Responses »

Jun 162010

I had no idea there were still bottles of wine worth drinking from the 18th and 19th centuries or that collectors frequently amassed cellars with thirty, fifty, or one hundred thousand bottles. The Billionaire’s Vinegar opens with the 1985 Christie’s auction of a bottle of Lafite originally purchased by Thomas Jefferson in Paris in 1787. From there Wallace brings us into a world of snobs, sneaks, dilettantes, scientists, clods, and show-offs, a world of invitation-only verticals where a single wine is tasted through decades of vintages and over-the-top horizontals of single year’s showpieces of rare wines that cost thousands per bottle. Patrons are invited to drink history. And there’s a mystery. Is the Jefferson bottle authentic? October 2008.

The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries by Marilyn Johnson * (of 4)

Book Reviews, Creative Non-Fiction, NON FICTION No Responses »

Jun 172010

The book is deadly boring. It might have made a decent one-pager in a fluffy magazine. Johnson is obsessed with obituaries, which, admittedly, can have their appeal, but the book focuses instead on obitiuary writers. As a group they aren’t any more interesting than orthodontists or reporters that follow the daily fluctuations of treasury bonds. September 2006.

A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger **** (of 4)

African American Literature, America, Book Reviews, Creative Non-Fiction, FOUR STARS ****, NON FICTION No Responses »

Jun 172010

In the early 60s the Boston Strangler attacked, murdered, and then raped eleven women in and around the city. A black man with a criminal record was arrested, tried, and convicted for the murder and rape of the aged Bessie Goldberg on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Years later a shady handyman who worked in Junger’s home while his mother was home alone with him admits to the murders, also without providing concrete evidence. Junger recounts the stories of the two potential murderers and leaves it to the reader to draw conclusions. The story is more terrifying than any fictional murder mystery and simultaneously a strong lesson in the principles of the rule of law: better to have ten guilty men walk free than a single innocent man wrongly convicted. September 2008.

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