Technical Difficulties

The Society of Timid Souls: or, How To Be Brave by Polly Morland

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
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Fire and Ashes: On the Frontlines of American Wildfire by John N. Maclean

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a collection of four essays and a "dictionary of formal and informal fire terms." One of the essays, about the Rattlesnake Fire, Maclean has expanded into River of Fire, which I have also reviewed. One is about an entrapment which did not end in tragedy, which is interesting because for once, since there are survivors instead of victims, you can find out what they were thinking. One is about Bob Sallee and the unresolvable question of where Wagner Dodge lit his fire and where Sallee and Rumsey escaped from Mann Gulch. (I'm very defensive of Norman Maclean, because Young Men and Fire is such a brilliant book, but this is a good essay.) One is an overview of American wildfire since 1910. All of the essays are competent; none of them is as good as Maclean's best writing (imho The Esperanza Fire). My favorite part of the book is honestly some of the deadpan definitions in the dictionary, e.g., twig pig: National Park Service law-enforcement ranger. (Firefighters apparently go in for their own kind of rhyming slang.)

So this is a good book, though not a great one.



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Famous story of the Uruguayan rugby team that survived ten weeks in the Andes, largely because they ate the dead passengers.

This is not a subtle book, nor does it bother with nuance. It's a fast, vivid, and compelling read. It shows its age mostly in its sexism. Women are nurturing and irrational and must be humored and coddled; men are brave and active, and when they're irrational, they know better; probably it's part of this same gender definition that Read always refers to the survivors as "boys," even though the youngest of them was 19, this giving them room to be irrational and weak without compromising their manhood. In a book with more nuance, there might have been some discussion about gender performance and the fulcrum between the young men's athleticism ("manly" and active) and their religious beliefs (irrational and emotional and therefore "feminine," and the only locus where it was acceptable in the microculture of the survivors to show weakness), but this is not that book. Since all of the survivors frame their experience as a religious one, and since Read says the thing he had in common with them was their Roman Catholic beliefs, this is really not a book that's going to pick apart the survivors' practice and experience of religion--even if it were a book that had that kind of intellectual apparatus at all.

River of Fire: The Rattlesnake Fire and the Mission Boys by John N MacLean

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is an expansion and update of a piece in Maclean's earlier book, Fire and Ashes.

Maclean is a good journalist, and his books are well-written, well-researched, thoughtful. He's not as good a writer as his father (Norman Maclean, whose Young Men and Fire is one of my top three books of all time), but almost nobody is.

This book is about the Rattlesnake Fire and how and why it killed fifteen men. Maclean is thorough and careful. He's interviewed the arsonist, the survivors, anyone who was on the fire and still alive fifty years later. He's gone out and walked the "race against fire" (which he writes about with much the same organization as Norman Maclean uses in writing about the Mann Gulch Fire, which I assume is a deliberate homage). This is a careful, respectful book, predicated on the belief that if we can understand what caused the fatalities on the Rattlesnake Fire, we can keep it from happening again.

The photographs of the landscape are good photographs, but they are labeled almost illegibly (at least for me).



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The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science That Could Save Your Life by Ben Sherwood

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


[library]
[audiobook]

There are interesting bits in this book, but most of what Sherwood ACTUALLY wants to do is to sell his audience on his self-help guru-ism (I did not listen to the last disc and a half or so, where I was being told to go take the quiz on his website to find out my "Survivor IQ.") He chooses to define "survivor" so broadly that it becomes meaningless (anyone who has gone through any kind of a crisis is a "survivor" in Sherwood's definition) and he's only interested in people who (a) survive and (b) come back with a song in their heart and a skip in their step, so to speak. He never talks about the part where survival (even in his broad sense) is something difficult and painful; his section on PTSD is actually on "post-traumatic growth."

Which, okay, yes, optimism is good and important, but this is like the Disneyland version of survival, and is going to leave an awful lot of people feeling like they must be doing it "wrong" because it doesn't look like that for them. Or feeling like if it doesn't look like that for them, it's because they're not trying hard enough.

I yelled at this book a lot.



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The Hot Zone by Richard Preston

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a terrific and also terrifying book about Ebola. It's severely out of date (1994), but is a great snapshot of the epidemiology of Ebola at that particular time. Preston is an amazing writer (much better than his more famous brother Douglas) and manages to write vivid and compelling descriptions of, for instance, putting on a bio-hazard suit.

Nothing that he says has been contradicted by Ebola's career since 1994.

This book is specifically about a dodged bullet: research monkeys shipped from the Philippines to Washington D.C. brought with them a strain of Ebola that, as it turns out, doesn't affect Homo sapiens. Or as Preston chillingly puts it, the disease knows the difference between humans and monkeys. Preston is a fantastic storyteller; he writes amazing exposition, both about the Army's work in containing Ebola Reston (this being before they knew it didn't affect humans) and about what was known about the provenance of Ebola and its filovirus "sisters." Even outdated as it is, I am hard-pressed to imagine someone writing a better book about Ebola.



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When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944 by Ronald C. Rosbottom

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is about the Nazi occupation of Paris and fits nicely in my Goodreads tag "dystopian nonfiction." It's well written, and Rosbottom clearly loves Paris deeply. I particularly liked the way he talked about the many secret Parises of the city, from the Metro to the hidden rooms in apartment buildings where Jews hid. It's also a book about collaboration (in the negative sense): about what that is, what it means, the imperceptible gradations along the spectrum from Vichy to the Resistance where French people had to place themselves. About what you do when the question is not abstract at all, but is present in the shape of a German officer in your favorite cafe. He also talks about the backlash after the liberation of Paris, in which people who were guilty of nothing were accused of and executed for collaboration within the span of minutes and without any impediment like a trial or even a chance to speak.

This is a book about a city, but it is also a book about how flawed human nature is.



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The Daughters of Juárez: A True Story of Serial Murder South of the Border by Teresa Rodriguez

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This book, published in 2007, is about the skyrocketing rate of murder against women in Ciudad Juarez starting in 1993 and the horrific corruption in the police, the government, and the judiciary that caused/enabled/obfuscated the murders.

It's not a great book. It's not Rodriguez's fault that her topic is open-ended (there hadn't been, as of 2007, a single conviction in any of the murders that wasn't dubious at best) or that it is mind-bogglingly complicated. However, the same things can be said of Michelle McNamara's I'll Be Gone in the Dark, which I'm listening to right now and which has the added burden of being UNFINISHED and yet is excellent. Rodriguez doesn't seem to have a strong enough sense of where she wants her story to be, with the victims' families, with the police corruption, with the overarching problem of violence against women being judged unimportant by the men in power. And, yes, her story can be all of those things, but it takes some serious chops to make that kind of shift in scale from micro to macro work, and Rodriguez is an okay writer, but not the kind of powerhouse she'd need to be to pull it off. Perhaps what was lacking was the person of the author. Both McNamara and Ann Rule (whose Green River Running Red is another extremely complicated story being told on multiple levels) include themselves in the story. This isn't always necessary, or even desirable, but it gives the reader a yardstick, a little human figure to scale that keeps the horrifying numbers from receding into that muffled middle ground between the personal and the historical. And Rodriguez's numbers ARE horrifying--even more horrifying is that nobody really knows what the numbers ARE. Maybe it's that Rodriguez, after her Preface and Introduction, both of which promise a kind of sensibility that the book itself does not have, effaces her subject-position, which makes it feel, to me, like the book doesn't have any backbone--not in the sense of courage, but in the sense of a structure to hang its bones on.



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The Devil's Right-Hand Man: The True Story of Serial Killer Robert Charles Browne by Stephen G. Michaud

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I wanted this book to be a lot better than it was.

And it wasn't BAD. It was an interesting book about the way a volunteer cold case squad in Colorado Springs coaxed serial killer Robert Charles Browne in helping them to solve one of his early murders that had only been classed as a missing persons case.

But it doesn't feel finished. Not just because there are dozens of other murders Browne claims to have committed, but because Michaud & Price published their book while several of these murders were waiting on DNA evidence. I know with the laboratory backlog, an author CAN'T wait for all the DNA to come in, but it makes this book feel rushed. Like there's some invisible deadline Michaud & Price felt they had to meet.

(I know another book about Browne just came out, Hello Charlie, but this is TEN YEARS LATER. Who the heck were Michaud & Price trying to scoop?)

So it feels rushed and superficial, like a bad documentary. (I just watched a bad History Channel documentary about the Zodiac Killer, so the comparison is easy to make.) I feel as if there's a lot more work Michaud & Price could have done, more questions they could have asked. Honestly, the sharpest and most incisive thing about this book is its title, and that's a quote from one of Browne's ex-wives.



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Bodies We've Buried: Inside the National Forensic Academy, the World's Top CSI Training School by Jarrett Hallcox

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I'm going to be perfectly honest. I did not like this book.

There's nothing wrong with it, per se, and I was very interested in its subject matter: the National Forensic Academy's 10 week CSI training program. But I developed a dislike for the authors on about page 3 and it never went away.

I want to differentiate between the authors as human beings, the flesh-and-blood people Jarrett Hallcox and Amy Welch, whom I have never met, and the authors as they present themselves (and it's "we" throughout, not Hallcox and Welch, but Hallcox-and-Welch) in the book. I don't know anything about the flesh and blood people--who by the evidence of material that made it possible for them to write this book are in fact fantastic at their job--I'm only talking about the author-construct. And I disliked the author-construct intensely by the time I was done.

They're too pleased with themselves. "Smarmy" is a harsh word, but it's not wrong. They try to be funny and mostly fail, because humor is extremely hard. There's a feeling throughout of LOOK AT US! AREN'T WE COOL! that rubbed me violently the wrong way.

So if you want to know what CSI training looks like, this is an in-depth and in fact thoughtful discussion of what and how they spend ten weeks teaching their students to do. I just wish I liked it better.



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