Thursday, August 29, 2013

The Sixteenth Rail: The Evidence, the Scientist, and the Lindbergh Kidnapping

I found The Sixteenth Rail in my pile of unread books recently and decided to read it now primarily because I just read The Aviator's Wife, about the Lindberghs, a couple of weeks ago. The Sixteenth Rail is the story of the Lindbergh trial, or specifically of the evidence at the trial regarding the ladder used to commit the crime. The evidence was gathered and presented by one of the country's early forensic scientists, Arthur Koehler, a xylotomist. (What, you ask, is a xylotomist? One who studies wood, particularly the microscopic properties of wood.) Koehler would use his xylotomy skills to trace several of the rails and rungs in the handmade ladder found at the Lindbergh property to the man who was eventually arrested, tried, and executed for the crime, Bruno Richard Hauptmann.

I'm of two minds about this book. On the one hand, it's absolutely fascinating to consider the detective work that went into tracing the ladder components, particularly considering this was at the height of the Great Depression. Author Adam J. Schrager has clearly research every bit of minutiae pertaining to Koehler's quest and that, in and of itself, is no small feat. However, I often got bogged down in the very minutiae that gave the book substance. Paragraph after paragraph detailing the rpms and knife formations of different planers was too technical for my taste; likewise, the pages detailing testimony at the trial feel as if they are merely the official court transcripts rendered into chapter form. The most colorful bits were those that revolved about any number of characters, in the truest sense of the word, who were pulled into the orbit of the crime. At the end of the day, there was simply too much wood for me to recommend this book to most readers. Only the most dedicated crime readers or Lindbergh fanatics would fully appreciate Sixteenth Rail (being neither myself, I am sure I could not fully appreciate it either).

Fun side note: Both the author, Adam Schrager, and the scientist, Arthur Koehler, have undergraduate degrees from the University of Michigan. Go Blue!

Saturday, August 24, 2013

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

I know what I want to be when I grow up. David Quammen. Okay, fine, you heard me moon over his The Boilerplate Rhino earlier this summer, but really, each time I read one of his books I appreciate what he does all the more...and can only wish that I might be a globe-trotting, tome-writing, scientist-cum-author. So, what's the story with Spillover?

In his latest book, Quammen has set out to understand the origins of any number of zoonoses (diseases that transfer from animals to people). He provides a detailed examination of some of the better known ones - such as AIDS, ebola, and yellow fever - as well as ones most readers have probably never heard of: Nipah, anyone? Hendra? Marburg virus? Typhoid Mary makes an appearance, as does Henrietta Lacks (a great, great read, but before I started the blog). To cover such ground, literally and figuratively, Quammen criss-crosses the planet, from Bangladesh and the Congo to Washington, DC, and the Outback, speaking with molecular biologists, immunologists, epidemiologists and the like, rendering their science-speak into understandable, and highly readable, prose.

The opening pages provide an entirely-too-vivid description of Hendra, a virus that spills from bats to horses to humans with terrible consequences for equines and people alike. I skimmed them, to be honest, and fervently prayed that such imagery would not be a regular occurrence. It wasn't, although many of the descriptions did give me flashbacks to my days working for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, when I first became aware of the myriad, bizarre ways a person might suffer and, not rarely, die.

This is a long book, over 500 pages, broken into nine sections each containing roughly a dozen mini-chapters. Occasionally, by necessity, the language gets a bit technical (which Quammen acknowledges readily, cheekily adding that if his reader has followed, say, the evolutionary stages of a virus, that reader has a promising future in biology). Still, the writing is engaging and the adventures are certainly never dull (searching out primate dung in the far reaches of Africa and capturing bats - flying foxes, specifically - in Southeast Asia, for example, to say nothing of the logistics that are often involved...on second thought, I want to be David Quammen, but with flush toilets and room service).

My only real complaint is that the last 30 or so pages seem to drag in comparison to the rest of the book. The hypothetical story of the Cut Hunter and Voyager, for example, are completely superfluous given the painstaking work in the preceding hundreds of pages. All the same, though, for anyone with an interest in science, off-the-beaten-path travel, and good writing, you won't find a better book this year. Just be sure to skim (or skip) those first few bloody pages.

Sunday, August 18, 2013

The Aviator's Wife

Having enjoyed Melanie Benjamin's previous books (Alice I Have Been and The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb, which seems never to have made it into the blog, but which I remember liking), I have been looking forward to reading her most recent novel, The Aviator's Wife. Benjamin's third book is in the same vein as her previous two - historical figures reimagined and revisited. In this case, the character is Anne Lindbergh, aka Mrs. Charles Lindbergh, himself known by any number of nicknames, not least "Lucky Lindy" after his successful solo flight from New York to Paris in 1927.

Character voice - the extent to which Benjamin is able to embody Anne Lindbergh and make the reader forget that The Aviator's Wife is a fictional account - is the real strength of this book. The weakness is the characters themselves. Anne and Charles both become, very quickly, people it is hard to like (although the reader can at least feel sorry for Anne who is so hunted by the early paparazzi that one cannot help but compare her to Princess Di - or Kate Middleton). Both Anne and Charles are complex characters, but Charles is portrayed here, accurately or not, as a domineering bully, pompous and bombastic on the best of days; cruel and sneering on the worst. Also he seems to have been an anti-Semitic Nazi-sympathizer, which doesn't really help him much. As for Anne, although I was frequently irritated by Anne's seeming indecision and weakness, I also recognize that it is difficult (at best) to judge a woman who lived in such a different era, when opportunities and expectations were so very different from today.

As with The Paris Wife (the story of Ernest Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley Richardson, and still the best of the historical fiction character embodiment novels that I've read), it's hard to know where the facts end and the fiction begins. Benjamin includes a few pages of notes at the end where she sites specific incidents that are true - such as the kidnapping of their firstborn - for example, as well as incidents she created for the purposes of her story. Still, I was left scratching my head over her decision that Anne would never reveal Charles's womanizing to their children; this information is clearly in the public domain today, so it's not clear if the real Anne ever felt this way or if Benjamin made that decision for her own reasons.

Friday, August 9, 2013

To Serve Them All My Days

R. Delderfield's To Serve Them All My Days opens with a shell-shocked veteran of three years on the Western Front being discharged from the hospital and seeking a teaching position at a boys' school, Bamfylde. The next 600+ pages follow him through the years and decades as he endeavors to teach, lead, and ultimately serve the hundreds of boys who pass through his classroom - and life. It's a kind of idyllic English school set upon the moors where every boy (and teacher) has a nickname, the headmaster is rather jovial and there's a quirky cast of supporting actors. The drumbeat of the past echoes loudly; come what may, this stolid place and its traditions are not going anywhere, or even giving an inch.

In many ways, To Serve Them All My Days can be compared to a river. At times it rushing forth, pushing and pulling the reader through a torrent of rapids, then nearly running dry, all the while flowing from its source (World War I). The strongest feature is the protagonist, David (also referred to as P.J., for reasons that I never understood) and Pow-Wow (for reasons that are at least explained). Early on, I became invested in him and in his story, such that I was able, right up to the end, to overlook a number of weaknesses and irritants.

The first is the sheer number of characters. This makes sense from the standpoint of the numbers of teachers, boys, and parents that David interacts with in the roughly 25 year span of the book. That said, it is impossible to keep them all straight, particularly as they are sometimes referred to by their surname and sometimes by a nickname. Out of necessity characters disappear for long stretches - sometimes hundreds of pages - to the extent that Delderfield is frequently in the position of  interjecting any number of parenthetical asides that seem to serve no purpose other than to remind the reader of the circumstances under which we previously met a character.

Had it been 200 pages shorter, To Serve Them All My Days would have been an excellent, excellent read. As it is, there is too much repetition. Case in point: yes, yes, yes, I remember that David's father and brothers were killed in a mining explosion. If I had to guess, which I do, I'd say Delderfield reiterates that little fact no fewer than 25 times. Is it an important part of who David is? Yes. Would, say, five times have been sufficient for me to know and remember that? Absolutely. The books also bogs down in ancient English history. Again, I get that David is a history teacher. But, I don't need him to stop in the middle of a picnic and give a full lecture on something that happened in this very spot two hundred years earlier to get this. Removing much of this, excuse me, extraneous information would have helped move the story along that much better.

Finally, I was disappointed in the ending. After 600 and some pages, I expected - dammit, I deserved! - to feel a sense of closure. Instead, there is...nothing. Many of the central characters have gradually slipped away in the last 100 pages, but not with any finality, such that I was expecting right up to the last to know what was happening with many of them. What's more, the ending felt at odds with David's entire personality and, in that sense, unlikely and disingenuous.

Through it all, though, a sense of calm - that old English idyll - pervades the book. When David lost himself on the moors, or watched the mists settle about the fields, or contemplated the sun sinking in a profusion of color, I was there. I could picture Bamfyld and the characters nearly leapt from the pages, so vividly were they drawn. Whatever my annoyance at wading through pages of long-dead Kings and ancient battles, there was never any question that I would finish this book.

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

The Chaperone

In Laura Moriarty's The Chaperone, 15-year-old Louise Brooks escapes an unhappy home in Wichita for the big lights of New York City. She makes the trip in the watchful company of fellow Wichitan Cora Carlisle, who seemingly has it all - a handsome husband, a lovely home, college-bound twin sons, and the respect and admiration of every lady worth her salt in or around Wichita. What neither woman can know of the other is the baggage that each carries with her to New York in the form of rather dark secrets from the past.

Louise Brooks was a real person. I first heard of her when I read Flapper earlier this year. She was a silent film star who made it big - bigger than even Clara Bow, perhaps - before being (mostly) lost to history. She really did travel to New York in the summer of 1922 in the company of a chaperone, one Alice Mills. After a few mostly fruitless searches for information on Alice Mills, I have the impression that Moriarty likely came to the quick conclusion that a true-to-life historical fiction in the mold of The Paris Wife wasn't feasible (and might have been far less interesting even had it been) and so created her own chaperone, with a vibrant, twisting story of her own.

All of which is fine and dandy but the question, of course, is what did I make of The Chaperone? It was a good vacation read - easy to pick up and put down, with relatively few characters and a memorable plot that didn't have me turning back the pages to remember one or another obscure detail. That said, it wasn't such a page turner that I ever felt a pang at having to lay it aside and, generally, I felt it was a rather middling read. I much preferred Alice I Have Been or, more recently, The House at Tyneford to The Chaperone. I was more than a bit surprised to discover that it's being adapted into a movie and that Julian Fellowes is writing the screenplay - with Cora Carlisle being played by Cora Crawley, I mean Elizabeth McGovern, herself. If you know me at all, you already knew that I have no plans to see the movie.