By way of parable she told the story of her own family, of her stepmother. Because if I were to marry Joe, I’d be a stepmother too. It was a story she recounted often, with only minor variations in fact and tone, but the take-away? What she was actually telling me? This is how we love.
I have long loved the writing of Lisa Moore — from how she captures truth on a large scale (the captivating day-to-day reality of living in St. John’s, Newfoundland) to truth on the personal scale (the absolute reality of the human heart in all its familiar variety) — and This Is How We Love did not disappoint. The story begins with devastation — Jules and her husband Joe were in Mexico when they learned that their son had been viciously attacked at a party back home — and in chapters that rotate through various characters’ perspectives (always from Jules’ first person POV and third person when focussing on another), Moore skillfully relates stories from across the generations that explain who these people are, what forces made them, and how they got to now. Exploring a wide range of family types, Moore asks just what makes a family, what do we owe to one another, and can we ever step off the path childhood circumstances laid down for us. The overall plot is compelling, the writing is technically masterful as the timeline jumps around, threads dangle and get tied up, and small moments frequently dazzle with their clarity and relatability; I loved everything about this. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
He didn’t see the knife. The knife came when he was being kicked in the head. He saw the boot coming and confused the sensation of the knife with the kick to his skull. There was a synaptic misfire and he felt the knife slide through his skull. But it had punctured his jeans and skin and maybe organs and wasn’t anywhere near his head. It went deep. He could hardly believe it happened twice but at the same time he believed it.
Twenty-one-year old Xavier — “Xay”, “the antic anti-hero”, “the one with the big HaHa” — was raised by loving, stable parents but took that fact for granted until he found himself beaten, stabbed, and left to bleed out on a snowbank in the middle of the night. Maybe it was the thrice-knock of fate, a “wall of doom”, a long ago curse from the Woman with a Yellow Hat, but as he waits for an ambulance that’s a long time coming, Xavier has an opportunity to wonder at the strength of childhood ties that he thought had been thrown off. Meanwhile, Jules learns of the attack hours later, and with the Storm of the Century, a veritable Snowmageddon, heading for St. John’s, she will get on the last flight to Newfoundland before the snow hits (husband Joe will be trapped in Montreal waiting for flights to resume), and alone at her son’s hospital bedside, hoping for his eyes to open, Jules will have long hours to remember the stories about love and family and friendship that brought them here.
She meant I should pay attention if I wanted something and I’d have to act and that it wouldn’t be easy. Of course, she was right. Because this is a story about my son and how he was stabbed at a party and beaten by a handful of monsters and how nobody chooses yearning, it chooses you.
There are many types of motherhood described here — teenage single mothers and foster mothers, same sex and stepmothers — and despite love and intention, it’s a crapshoot how the kids will turn out; few mothers get the chance to actually stand between their children and the knives that are thrust towards them. And on the other hand, what chance in life has the little girl — neglected by her Mom and put into care — who learns early to close her heart to yearning? And what chance has the drug-dealing son of a gun-toting drug dealer who has never been shown love? What chance does Xavier have to survive injury and infection, even as his mother breaks a stay-at-home order to trudge a path through roof-high snowdrifts and make her way to a locked-down hospital? These are the questions that keep us reading.
I felt it was me. I was generating the storm, making it happen with my rage. The rage was as big as the storm, just as malevolent, tearing out of my chest. Or the storm had entered me. It was inside me, freezing everything, starting with my womb, which was frozen, breaking up like an iceberg, pieces sliding off. It was my womb or my heart, or the balancing fluid in my inner ear. I’d lost any sense of balance. The cold crept through me.
I love Lisa Moore, and again, this did not disappoint in narrative, insightfulness, or craftsmanship.
Colette was trying to develop a new way of looking at life, with more lightness, as if everything that seemed so substantial, like a school, or a home, or a marriage, was in fact only disposable and breakable. It was frightening, but also a relief. Phyllis used to joke about how Anne and her husband Tom had experimented with free love before they were married, and Colette saw now how they’d have set about it earnestly, in pursuit of an ideal. Perhaps it was better to be frivolous.
It’s 1967 in a genteel suburb of London and the camera pans to the ideal nuclear family: Father had a “good war” and is a respected Arabist with the Foreign Office; Mother, at forty, is about ten years younger than her husband, an attractive, sociable housewife; older daughter, at fifteen, is respectably studious (if a bit heavy and serious); and the nine year old son is golden and mischievous. Into this scene is introduced a bomb in the form of a twenty-something radical; the unfamiliar son of old friends — a young man trying to disavow his own bourgeois upbringing who resents the social obligation of this dinner — and as he tries to unbalance his host with Marxist provocations, he is met with unexpected good humour and intellectual curiosity. Even so, as Free Love unspools, this Nicky’s presence at the Fischer table will unleash a series of disruptive events that will mirror the change and tumult happening in the world beyond this leafy ‘burb. In relatable and highly readable prose, author Tessa Hadley captures something true about the times, but to be honest, it doesn’t feel like I learned anything new. Hadley skips primarily through the POVs of four main characters — the older couple (Roger and Phyllis) and the younger pair (Nicky and the daughter Colette) — and this is done seamlessly; I really appreciated that we saw both actions and reactions across the sexes and the generations, and especially as these were more nuanced than I expected. But still, the narrative lacked the power and energy of immediacy: I can think of novels from the Sixties that better capture the times and I don’t know if, seventy-some years later, Hadley adds anything of note (beyond a nice read) with this. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. Slight spoilers from here.)
Her performance as a contented wife was consummately good. It frightened Nicky: what depths of experience had he stumbled into? He had taken the Fischers at their face value, as respectable and innocent. Now it appeared that he might have been the innocent himself.
When Nicholas Knight turns up at the Fischer house — an hour late and stumbling with the beers he steeled himself with at the local pub — he immediately dismisses the romantic potential of the daughter (whom he finds “lumpy and ungracious”) and recoils from the flirty touch of his host’s wife. For her part, Phyllis is chagrined to find that young Nicky is immune to her charms, “She’d taken for granted that at her core her sexual self would continue for ever, a nugget of radioactive material charged with its power, irreducible.” Unable to crack Roger’s good cheer with his radical proclamations, Nicky inevitably does turn his attention to Phyllis: “For what was more natural, faced with this unanswerable force of his rival, than to seduce the wife?” How could Nicky know that he had provoked Phyllis into doubling down on seducing him?
Phyllis eventually tracks Nicky down to his squalid London flat, and what she will discover through him is not just a sexual awakening, but a social one, too: Mixing with the writers and artists and pot-smoking hippies of Nicky’s acquaintance, Phyllis is forced to examine everything her priveleged upbringing had taught her. In a way, Phyllis feels like the main character out of the ensemble cast in Free Love, and while you can cheer for her “unshackling the chains of the patriarchy”, you also have to wince at how unclever Hadley has made her; unable to read a work of nonfiction without her mind wandering, Phyllis is forever asking the men around her to tell her what to think. Watching a news report on the Six Day War between Israel and the surrounding Arab states, Phyllis asks Roger, “Don’t the Jews deserve their own country, after what happened to them?” And despite being a thorough establishment man, Roger’s thinking is always considered and nuanced, “Of course, incontrovertibly…The trouble is, this country of theirs belonged just yesterday to someone else. One can see the thing both ways.”
When Colette is sixteen (and has slimmed herself and started wearing contacts; but not to be attractive, Mom), she starts to associate with Phyllis and Nicky’s London friends, and I did find it interesting that her attraction to “the scene” feels more authentic than Phyllis’ had: her interest is more intellectual, while Phyllis’ felt like an emotional draw, and Free Love reads, in the end, like Collette’s coming-of-age story (as though the baton of "main character" had been passed from mother to daughter along the way). At one point, Nicky comes back from the Paris student riots (working as a journalist for a left-wing newspaper, Nicky had gone to join and observe the protest), and he lectures an assembled group that one didn’t want to be “a revolutionary tourist: there were plenty of those”. But while Phyllis hung on his every word, watching nervously to see how Nicky would react to her daughter’s presence, Colette herself was sneering at his political dilettantism:
Colette wasn’t on the side of the political types anyway. She was more drawn to the ones who talked about drugs and art and music, were often stoned and not at all in earnest. They weren’t waiting for the students and factory workers to bring about a new era. As far as they were concerned it had arrived already, they were helping themselves to it wholeheartedly.
Meanwhile, Roger — who is really such a decent man — doesn’t feel like he can stand in the way of anyone’s growth and happiness, and as you learn more about his backstory, the reader really wishes that he could grab some happiness for himself as well. The plot goes to places expected and not so expected (but if one feels the need to write “and now – in this situation as fatally twisted as a Greek drama”, perhaps the plot has gone too far), but it truly didn’t reveal anything new about the time and place; certainly nothing new about the human heart. This was a pleasant and interesting read, but held up against Hadley’s previous work, it was just fine to me.
We Americans, we the dead, now have a new condition: the data complex. The data complex is both material, out there — in our libraries, archives, data centers, bombproof bunkers — and psychological, inside us — in our minds where we fear the progressions of time and decay, and place our faith in the bulwarks and technological magic of the cloud.
Brian Michael Murphy is a poet and a “media archeologist” (oh, and a Fulbright Scholar and the Dean of the College and Director of the MFA in Public Action at Bennington College with a PhD in Comparative Studies from Ohio State University, where he was a Presidential Fellow) and his latest book (based on research from his doctoral dissertation), We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World, is one of the most philosophically interesting things I’ve read in a long time. I thought this was going to be a book about the Singularity — which it’s not, until it sort of is — but it’s even more out there than that: Tracing the history of America’s information collection and storage systems (what Murphy calls “the data complex”), We the Dead lifts the veil on some dark history, a shadowy present, and an uncertain future; it’s the kind of read that makes you wonder, “How are people not talking about this stuff all the time?” I was interested in absolutely everything here — from the broad historical context that Murphy provides to his personal anecdotes of visits to public libraries and military-guarded deep-mountain storage bunkers — but if I had a caution it’s that Murphy writes from a definite point-of view: this is not a dispassionate academic work, and it solely focuses on the American experience, but as an accessibly-written exposé of that experience, it often blew my mind. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Over and over again, the data complex expanded in those moments when many Americans felt they were quite possibly living just prior to the end of the world, from the Depression and the hottest moments of the early Cold War, to this moment of human-induced climate change and ecological disaster. Americans now preserve more data — from paper documents to microfilm reels to digital files — than any other civilization in history. This book retraces our steps to show how we arrived here, from the first “permanent” time capsules, created during the Depression to preserve American culture for 5,000-plus years, to subterranean vaults in abandoned mines that now house artifacts of every information medium: etchings, rag paper magazines, magnetic tape, microfilm reels, wax cylinders, and digital hard drives.
Data collection first became important in the US after the Civil War (with increased urbanisation and a need to distribute pensions to veterans), but it really ramped up during the Depression, with corporate America realising that data preservation was essential to the protection of Capitalism and liberal democracy and vital to the needs of the federal government rolling out its social programs. This period also saw eugenicists burying bomb-shaped time capsules for the future (elegaic messages from a time of threatened racial purity, apparently) and archivists attempting to kill bookworms with gas chambers filled with Zyklon B: the instability of the times leading up to WWII seemed to have conflated the needs to kill and preserve. And Murphy makes the point that this is what happens every time Americans feel they are in a time of heightened crisis: The Cold War saw the frantic building of bomb shelters (many of which eventually became underground bunkers for data storage) and suburbanisation (with white people and their artifacts dispersing, leaving POC in the bullseyes of city centers); to the aftermath of 9/11 (which saw the further dispersal of physical and digital artifacts and an astronomical rise in clandestine data collection, now backed up on multiple systems in bomb-proof cold storage); to the climate crisis of today — Norway has been selling itself as natural and permanent cold storage, but when even the “permafrost” at the site of the Svaldbad Global Seed Vault has started melting, where to put all that data when it needs to be kept cold to prevent disintegration and industrial refrigeration further contributes to the warming of the planet? Space is cold. But DNA is the most efficient storage system we know. Wonder what the billionaires are betting on.
(Parenthetically: In one of the recurring themes throughout We the Dead, I found it interesting that American billionaires seem to have always understood that data storage was where it’s at. Dale Carnegie funded all those libraries. Herman “the Mushroom King '' Knaust turned defunct icehouses along the Hudson River into mushroom farms and then into data storage facilities; the abandoned mine he bought eventually becoming the iconic Iron Mountain National Data Center. Bill Gates once thought that photo licensing would be a winning investment and he bought up all the rights he could [since sold off to a Chinese company, which now owns the rights to Marilyn Monroe struggling with her skirt and Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue] — and today Gates is a major investor in data storage on DNA.)
The so-called cloud does not exist immaterially in the air above our heads but resides very materially in these remote, reinforced, transcendent underground spaces within a vast data preservation infrastructure that grew out of hauntings of destruction, and fears of radioactive and racial contamination. We have now repurposed this infrastructure in ways that reflect our current fears, hopes, and persistent impossible desires for permanent data invulnerable to the forces of (cyber) terrorism, natural disasters, and the indomitable force of decay that inheres in all media artifacts.
In a case of “I guess I knew that and never really thought about it”, Murphy repeatedly makes the point that “the cloud” isn’t some invisible haze of permanent, ephemeral information that will outlast us: it is the physical storage of vast amounts of data (he uses terms like exabytes and yottabytes that mean nothing to me, but they sound like a lot) and it’s held on discs and microchips and film, using processors that become obsolete every five years or so, and the more that physical items (film, paper, books) are archived, the fewer of them that are digitised or indexed or ever again made available for human interaction. The more data we collect, the more we decide this stuff is important and attempt to back it up to the cloud, the more we risk it becoming less permanent. On the other hand, the entire internet could fit into a shoebox-sized amount of DNA; everything that could be known about you could be very easily written into your own DNA and constantly updated. How’s that for immortality?
Ultimately, this is a pretty dark story: governments and corporations attempt to ensure their own survival through ever-growing data collection and storage — a process we participate in with our smartphones and internet use — and not only are there dangers inherent in hackers “scraping” or “mining” our data to use against us, but the more we rely on this data being stored somewhere safely and permanently, the more risk there is for it to degrade or disappear entirely. As for the Singularity, Murphy writes that we have already become cyborgs “as human biochips are now embedded in the cyborganism of the data complex”:
If life were an early Cold War B movie where extraterrestrial marauders are scanning Earth for life and treasure, which organism would appear to reign supreme on this lush planet ? Certainly not the humans. For the humans are working feverishly to pull minerals from the ground and refine them, to build data centers and lash them together with fiber-optic cables laid across oceans and deserts, to connect all these machines through invisible tethers of light attached to satellites ringing the globe, and to spend most of their waking hours every day staring at screens and feeding data to the cyborganism that is the data complex. Even when these strange little creatures are not clicking and scrolling, they are carrying devices that perpetually transmit data about their location, the number of steps they take, and their resting heart rate to be recorded in the several million silicon bellies of the supreme beast. Even while they sleep, the data complex grips humans’ wrists through smartwatches and counts their heartbeats.
Not what I was expecting, but incredibly interesting and well-written. I hope this will be widely read.
This book is not fiction. It is an experiment written over many years, and while someone might read it in a day, in a week, it was years in the making. Patterns occurred, themes returned, as with anything that one observes over a long enough period. Surely this is part of the reason death hurts us. We want to stay and look longer, to conduct our experiments, to see the patterns repeat and confirm what we might have suspected all along: In the distance, this makes sense and even more than sense, in the distance this makes beauty.
The Unwritten Book is kind of a memoir, with author Samantha Hunt describing her life and her family and looking for hidden patterns in the influences that shaped her. This is highly literary — with Hunt often quoting from a broad range of novelists — but the author also draws heavily from art and film and music (even a relatably engaging essay on One Direction), getting to the essence of what makes us all unwritten works. This does have the feeling of an experimental project — which may not have universal appeal — but I found Hunt to be thoughtful and likeable and it did work for me. Rounded up to four stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
I carry each book I've ever read with me, just as I carry my dead — those things that aren't really there, those things that shape everything I am.
After Hunt’s father (an editor at Reader’s Digest and an aspiring novelist) died, she found an unfinished manuscript on his computer, and she shares the existing few chapters throughout this book — including countless footnotes that explain where he sourced names for people or places, what real life events would have prompted him to include certain details. The manuscript itself is interesting and well-written, but I guess it’s most valuable as a way for Hunt to demonstrate the countless influences that any artist brings to their craft. Hunt writes:
Nick Cave, the artist, created his first Soundsuit in 1992 after Rodney King was beaten by members of the Los Angeles Police Department. Cave’s suits are assemblages of twigs, toys, sweaters, buttons, beads, pot holders, globes, stuffed animals, afghans, cookie tins, ceramic birds, sock monkeys, baskets. Cave’s care-full constructions translate these objects into something more meaning-full than their original purpose. More meaning-full because the bits that make up his Soundsuits are now in relation with other objects.
And it’s the patterns and relation of bits that Hunt seems most intrigued by. She notes that W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn “references so many books, people, and histories I’ve never heard of before that the question of what is fiction or nonfiction, though always present, becomes in some way unimportant”; the first time she saw Patti Smith in concert, "I recognized in her elements of Borges’s definition of the aleph: that which contains everything in the universe seen from every point of view simultaneously" ; she references (among many others) the collage qualities of the Hauntings installation by filmmaker Guy Maddin, The Kept Private, a multisourced historical play written by Jeremy Davidson, and the Song Dong piece Waste Not, “which makes order from his mother’s collections''. We learn that Hunt’s own mother is an artist (whose collections might be in need of order), and although her father had become sober before his death, his years of alcoholism sound messy and disordered. Hunt describes her current life as a writer and a teacher, a wife and a mother to three young girls, and we can see how the influences she describes rattle around inside her, waiting to be written.
What book do you use as oracle? What book don’t you use that way? What book is not a work of reference, pointing in the direction of every book our author has read, job her parents have worked, meal she’s eaten, film she’s seen, road she’s walked, rock she’s kicked, microbe she’s never even imagined?
Filled with interesting references and thoughtful consideration of them, this is much more than a personal memoir (although it is that, as well). I particularly liked Hunt's father’s manuscript and her dissection of it, and while this whole might be too experimental for wide appeal, I did enjoy it and hope it finds its niche.
Scratching River is a name that considers the gratchias, the burdock that grows thick along the river’s banks. It’s this stout weed Louis spoke of all those years ago when his memories were recorded. It’s a plant you can’t forget really. Gratchias grows in wet and mud, and the banks of rivers offer the perfect conditions for the burdock to grow. Gratchias is a name for all those burrs that dig at the river’s quick hips, for the stout purple clusters that hook and irritate, born to be tenacious and prickly.
In a poetic and unconventional work of narrative nonfiction, Métis author Michelle Porter uses several different threads of story and style in Scratching River to braid together meaning from the history of her immediate family, her ancestors, and the entire Métis people. Primarily centered on Porter’s older brother Brendon — and the personal trauma that the author suffered when she, as a teenager, learned of the abuse Brendon was experiencing at a group home — Porter hearkens to the vanished landscape that her people so closely identified with to claim for them the tenacity of the gratchias, the adaptability of a rerouted river, and the strength of prairie bison. This is such a personal story, told in an engagingly provocative manner, that “rating” it feels meaningless: this is a perfect manifestation of its intent. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. As a matter of fact: There were quirks in the digital copy — “ff”, “th”, “fi” were all dropped from words — and I took it upon myself to fix those errors in my quotes; and to be honest, I appreciated that I had to slow down my reading to mentally fix words along the way.)
My brother was drying up. He had become closed up and so cracked and so oozing we didn’t know if he would survive. If it can, a river will keep on moving, no matter what, but there are times when rivers stop flowing. Contributing to the stoppage are factors that include the meander of the river, the history of trauma written in the layers of rocks and sediment, the patterns of autism, schizophrenia, and poverty, and the way these braid themselves across the landscape, and the riverbank histories of the people he doesn’t know are his.
Brendon would eventually be diagnosed with schizophrenia and autism, but as an uncommunicative and uncontrollable (if mostly watchful and impish) child, his loving mother made the hard decision to place him in a residential institution for autistic children. Porter relates many trips by Greyhound bus to visit her brother from their home outside Edmonton to his in Calgary, and Brendon was always happy to see them; was obviously well cared for and safe. But when he turned eighteen, Brendon’s mother was forced to find an adult facility for him, and although “The Ranch” was presented as an excellent home, it was horrifying for her to discover, a few months later, that Brendon was in hospital with third degree burns to his lower legs and what looked like cigarette burns on his thighs and genitals. Unable to vocalise what happened to him, and the owner of The Ranch denying any responsibility, there seemed to be no interest by the police or government to seek justice for Brendon. This awful story is unspooled slowly, interspersed with transcripts from contemporaneous newspaper and television investigations into complaints about The Ranch, along with Porter’s happier memories, and excerpts from a book made out of the transcriptions of oral stories as related by Porter’s great-great-grandfather's brother — noted Métis storyteller and musician, Louis Goulet. Goulet’s stories relate the old ways of the Métis people — the buffalo hunts, long trading trips with oxen and Red River wagons, prairie fires that bring both danger and renewal — and against this historical perspective, Porter juxtaposes the modern Métis struggle for recognition, land, and treaty rights. And it all works together to weave a picture both personal to Porter’s family and common to the Métis people; a picture of tenacity, adaptability, and strength. In an Afterword, Porter explains her intent:
We continue and we thrive when we recover our ability to tell our stories from the land seven generations back, pointing them in the direction of the seven generations that are coming ahead of us all. We survive because we are always moving and we bring our stories
Porter also explains that she wrote Scratching River as a way of dealing with the trauma brought on by watching Brendon recover from his burns when she was fourteen, but she doesn’t dwell on these hard parts in the book. Instead, she writes that he was eventually placed in a very good home closer to family; choosing to dwell on happier memories:
My big brother taking me by the hand, pulling me into his world. One hand cupping one ear. Tapping a wall, a tree. A big smile. In a sing-song voice: da-da-da, and da-da-da again. Off I went with him.
Lush landscape writing, maps with handwritten notations, a bibliography that reads like poetry: There's just so much here, and it all works together perfectly.
The Great Skellig falls away below the Plateau like green silk, and Artt’s suddenly filled with triumph. To think that he and his monks have travelled all this way, to the hidden haven saved for them since Creation. They’ve begun their work, and God looks on it and calls it good.
In an Afterword at the end of Haven, author Emma Donoghue describes a jagged island off the southwest coast of Ireland — known as “Skellig Michael” since the early Eleventh Century, but likely first inhabited by monks around the year 600 — and it’s in this time and place that she has chosen to set her story of a “living saint” and the two monastic brothers whom he enlists to found a new order at the uninhabited edge of the world. Donoghue is a master of historical fiction and she perfectly captures this time of stink and strain and superstition. She is also a writer who has lately taken to criticising the historical wrongdoings of the Catholic Church in her novels — which is a totally fair perspective for her to write from, but with a tale that focuses on a character who embodies the worst of the Church’s hubris, hypocrisy and misogyny, there weren’t a lot of surprises in this narrative; as pride goeth before a fall, so too does the reader anticipate a final reckoning. Certainly not a waste of time — Donoghue’s scenes and sentences are as engaging as ever — but this didn’t add up to anything special to this reader. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Artt finds himself wondering if perhaps tales will be told about him. Is it arrogance to think it? The legend of how the priest and scholar Artt set off, with just two humble companions, in a small boat. The extraordinary pair of islands he found in the western ocean; how he claimed the higher one for God, and founded a great retreat in the clouds. The glory of the books reproduced there, and then generations of the copies’ offspring. The ceaseless hum of prayer always rising from that little hive.
Artt — a learned scribe and famed converter of pagan hordes — has a dream in which he and two fellow monastic brothers found a new order in the empty ocean. The brothers from his dream — one old and hunchbacked and the other young and gangly — are readily released from their vow of obedience to the worldly Abbot of Cluain Mhic Nóis (if only to get rid of the priggish and judgmental Artt), and several days into a frightful water journey, the trio land on the larger of a pair of sheer-cliffed “skelligs”. While the older monk, Cormac — trained in masonry and gardening — would like to immediately start building a shelter and planting food, and the younger, Trian — an observant naturalist from a clan of fishermen — would like to start planning trading trips in order to barter for the things not found on their hump of isolated rock, their godly Prior, Artt, charge the men with building their monastery — carving a gigantic cross, building a stone chapel, locating an open-aired scrivenery — assuring the others that God will provide for their bodily needs. What could go wrong with a plan like that?
As the narrative unspools, Cormac — a garrulous storyteller, to Artt’s silence-loving displeasure — is forever telling young Trian tales of the saints, and as they occur so often, they honestly began to feel like filler. “I’m put in mind of the voyages of holy Breandán and his seventeen companions,” Cormac will say, or he’ll relate the story of holy Brigit’s pupil Darlugdach (who put embers in her own shoes when she was tempted to go to a man in the night); we learn the tales of blessed Molua, holy Colm Cille, and of the time the austere Comgall caught some thieves, etc. When Artt tells a story for the improvement of young Trian, it’s generally along the lines of, “The wisest Church Fathers, and the ancients before them, all agree that a woman is a botched man, created only for childbearing,” or referring to the legendary Sionan as “this perverse daughter of Eve”. When Artt quotes the Gospel in ways that confound the other monks, Cormac thinks, “He doesn’t need to fathom the depths of scripture, only follow and obey.” And it is the vow of obedience — to a self-aggrandising fanatic — that will lead to hunger, exposure, and suppressed dissent; all for the glory of God (or at least for His representative on Earth).
How did it happen that they came to this place? Was there a different way the currents and breezes could have taken the boat that would have washed them up on another, gentler island, where spring and summer and autumn might have played out differently? Or have the three of them always carried this terrible tale inside themselves?
Also in the Afterword, Donoghue writes that the monks who settled Skellig Michael were “more practical” than her invented characters (bringing livestock to the island and engaging in trade to create a community that lasted centuries), so it was a conscious choice for her to inhabit her island with a prideful zealot and the underlings who were bound by vows of obedience to not push back against his denial of their corporality. And that’s certainly a fair situation for her to explore — there’s no doubt men like Artt have always existed — but the storyline unfolded predictably (the ultimate “twist” was telegraphed along the way and could certainly have been explored more deeply), and with the frequent stories of the saints feeling like so much filler in a not-long novel, this didn’t entirely satisfy me.
During the hour drive from my home to the Cape, I fantasized that I’d replicate the peace and higher perspective Henry had documented in that seam of land and sea. “The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground,” he wrote, “a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world.” I didn’t expect sublime perspective; I hoped only for a respite from my nightmares, for the waves and wind and weather to reshape the masses of my subconscious as they had shifted the dunes of Wellfleet, Truro, and Provincetown. Isn’t this always the hope, heading out for a long walk? That in your aloneness the landscape will relieve you? That your mind will be renewed, calmed?
We learn early in Six Walks that after suffering a devastating breakup — that caused him anxiety, insomnia, and nightmares — author Ben Shattuck reached for some of the writings of Henry David Thoreau, and living in the same general area as that famed naturalist had, Shattuck decided to retrace one of Thoreau’s walks and see what became of it. This led to another and another long walk, and for the first half of this book, it was moving and poignant to watch as Shattuck reconnected to himself as he considered the changing landscape around him and sent feelers back in time to discover what kind of man Thoreau must have been. This was very satisfying as a work of naturalism, literary criticism, and self-discovery memoir. The second half of the book sees Shattuck returning a couple of years later to the project of retracing Thoreau’s paths — while in a COVID lockdown with the love of his life — and although the thinking and writing are still of the highest order, it’s not quite as affecting without the pain. Still, this is a mashup of my favourite types of nonfiction writing — the nature writing, the literary callbacks, the thoughtful self-examination — and as a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Shattuck is certainly a polished wordsmith and Six Walks is finely crafted and relatable. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Henry had walked to Wachusett, sat up on the summit and looked at the stars as if they were “given for a consolation” six months after his brother died. Was he doing the same thing I was doing? Walking to husk the dead skin of grief? Looking up to feel the comfort of one’s own smallness in the world, to displace bulging selfhood, under the shadow of such urgent beauty as the night sky?
Six Walks is only lightly confessional — we learn much more about Thoreau’s history than Shattuck’s, and that was fine with me — but it is interesting to read what a person today might find along these increasingly less isolated pathways: the parking lot atop what was once a remote summit; the unexpected kindness of strangers; the brass plaques that confirm one is, indeed, standing in Thoreau’s footprints. And again, Shattuck’s writing style is lovely:
If spring is the season for the eyes —“Earth laughs in flowers,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson — and summer for touch — of the sun, of bare feet, of seawater on your skin — then fall is mostly for the nose: the bass-note scent of the ground. To walk through a forest in New England’s autumn is to put your nose to nature’s neck.
But again, the second half of this project isn’t quite as compelling as the first (it almost feels as though, during lockdown, Shattuck thought, “If I go on a few more walks, these old notes and sketches might make a book.”) In one later chapter, Shattuck decides to head off from his home in a southwest direction (because that is what Thoreau proposes in his essay “Walking” when one has no particular destination in mind), knowing that it will eventually bring him to Rhode Island and the summer property that his great-great-grandparents had enjoyed (long since sold out of the family). Shattuck has some ordinary experiences along the way, takes the opportunity to relate some of his family’s history (which was interesting), and when he arrives at the oceanside mansion, he realises that the house had been completely rebuilt at some point: Everything, even the landscaping, was different. I suddenly felt foolish, making a pilgrimage to something that wasn’t there anymore. And that was simply not as overall interesting to me as a person’s efforts to “husk off the dead skin of grief”. Still, Shattuck’s conclusions are worth arriving at:
Reflecting here, I think I understand something more of why Henry journaled, and why there is so much good writing in it, so little lazy writing, so many elaborate metaphors and full sentences. Writing is willing permanence. If I remembered what John had said about becoming a father, I would return to it here, I would feel the sensation of his words here again, and so make it permanent. I would not live it again — the sound of John’s voice under the gloaming sky, the satisfaction of arriving in deep territory after days of lighter talk — but I would be able to replicate and hold some of the sensation. I could refill myself with that sensation, as you might hold a water glass under a tap. Writing is the glass, I see.
I suppose I should stress again that this is not primarily a memoir — I learned more about Shattuck’s life from the author bio at the end than I did in the body of the book — but what is here is for the most part interesting and consistently well-written; a satisfying journey of literary self-discovery that I enjoyed retracing with the author.
The lust of an old man is disgusting but the lust of an old woman is worse. Everyone knows that. Certainly, Susan knew it. ~Susan and Miffy
In the Acknowledgements at the end, author Jane Campbell says of writing Cat Brushing: I must wholeheartedly thank my four children who have generously accepted the fact that their mother, rather than entering a simple and trouble-free dotage, has rather inappropriately at the age of eighty become the published author of these provocative and transgressive stories. I had no idea until that point that this was a debut collection (at eighty!); nothing in the writing feels amateur or unpractised. This collection is comprised of thirteen stories, each from the POV of a different elderly woman (and while each of them seems to be a white, well off British woman, that’s pretty much all the characters have in common; there is breadth here), and while primarily focussing on memory (and its loss), love (and its loss), and making new beginnings (even at an advanced age; even against one’s will), these stories nearly all contain lust and sex (if only in yearning memory) and passions that surprise even the women feeling them. Provocative and transgressive, indeed. Characters express deep sadness, unexpected joy, homicidal rage, and moments of elegiac contemplation (and especially when brushing one's cat; not a euphemism). Settings range from England to Bermuda to Africa, even to a near future where technology is being developed to deal with the old people. This is not a long read but I felt compelled to pause after each story to savour and think about it before turning to the next; I am delighted to have had an early chance to read this collection and I do hope it finds a wide readership. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Trying so hard to keep a grip on reality seemed like a waste of time when after all reality was so cruel. That face in the mirror in the morning, the ghastly hair, the lost waistline . Some, of course, are slim. Some, of course, don’t drink or eat too much. But what else was left? ~The Scratch
I don’t want to go through and analyse each story — beyond saying that there were no real clunkers in here; each is a lovely gem of varying sparkle — and while most of these quotes should speak for themselves, I do want to note that the following is from the POV of a character who has been moved to a care facility during some future coronavirus “Long Lockdown”, and although her situation has some enviable sci-fi perks, I’m sure these are relatable feelings for a lot of the folks who have felt isolated in long term care:
There are some poignant articles being written at the moment about whether this is life or is it simply not-death. In other words, is it worth it? ~Lockdown Fantasms
And, yes, I may have mostly picked out melancholy quotes:
Through the smoke I looked out at the darkening light. It was the kind of summer evening that makes you think kindly of death and fills your soul with nostalgia for what never was. There was a sniff of the eternal about it; a nudge from the noumenon, from beyond the detritus of the phenomenal, and I knew I had to get there. ~Schopenhauer and I
Or:
I am not crying. When you are as old as I am your eyes water all the time and I think there is a draught coming in from the front door; perhaps the people from the hospital have arrived.~Le Mot Perdu
But there was plenty of cheekiness here as well:
Old men, even good-looking ones, get desperate as their libidinal options shrink. All cats are grey at dusk. ~Kindness
Like Jane Campbell herself, these stories serve to remind us that the elderly are still fully alive with contributions to make — where there’s breath, there’s thought and heat — and shame on me for being surprised at how transgressive this collection really is. I hope Campbell is hard at work writing a dozen more stories; I’d read’em.
Though “cult language” comes in different varieties, all charismatic leaders — from Jim Jones to Jeff Bezos to SoulCycle instructors — use the same basic linguistic tools. This is a book about the language of fanaticism in its many forms: a language I’m calling Cultish.
I was drawn to read Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism for reasons of my own (more on this later)*, but despite the book’s pop-sciencey blurb and Amanda Montell’s self-description as a “linguist”, this wasn’t nearly as language- or academic-based as I had hoped. Montell gives some overviews of groups we undeniably think of as cults (Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate, Scientology) — including quotes from conversations she’s had with people who successfully fled those groups — and she makes some generalisations about the language tools that their leaders used to recruit and retain members. Montell then casts a wider net in search of groups that use “cultish” language — from Amway to CrossFit and QAnon — and makes judgments as to how pernicious these organisations are. Montell herself features squarely in this book — sharing personal experiences, detailing text conversations with old friends who got caught up in pyramid schemes, describing how her research led her down social media rabbit holes — and along with countless cultural references that mark her as so much younger than I am, the whole tone was more informal and conversational than I had been expecting. Not a deep dive into the topic, but not a total waste of time.
Ultimately, the needs for identity, purpose, and belonging have existed for a very long time, and cultish groups have always sprung up during cultural limbos when these needs have gone sorely unmet. What’s new is that in this internet-ruled age, when a guru can be godless, when the barrier to entry is as low as a double-tap, and when folks who hold alternative beliefs are able to find one another more easily than ever, it only makes sense that secular cults — from obsessed workout studios to start-ups that put the “cult” in “company culture” — would start sprouting like dandelions. For good or for ill, there is now a cult for everyone.
* Taking a gentle jab at the author’s “more on this later” quirk, here, nonetheless, is the more: I attend a HIIT-bootcamp-style gym, and other than feeling fitter and stronger, I most enjoy the camaraderie I’ve found with the other women I sweat along with at 6:45 every morning. I understand that this gym is an American company — started by a big, buff white American man; my local gym is one of three owned by a local big, buff white Canadian man — but there was nothing particularly American(or cult)-styled about it…until just before COVID hit. In a directive that came right from California HQ, at the end of every “class”, we were encouraged to clap our hands together rhythmically, gather in a circle, and “put our hands in” (which always takes more of the form of Evangelical arm waving or Nazi salutes than the football huddle I assume they’re going for) while the coach riffs on the thought of the day: “Don’t look back, you’re not going that way” or “When you feel like quitting, think about why you started”. And then the coach says, “OK, family on three”, and everyone is supposed to chant “One, two, three, family” and break to start the cool down. But I don’t want to do that. And I refuse to do that; this is not my “family” and saying that it is feels cultish. And in the beginning that wasn’t a huge problem, except COVID closed the gyms, and we started getting our workouts via video, and the coaches always started with a chirpy, “Hey FitFam!” And then the gyms opened and it seemed natural for everyone to use the new language and participate in the new culty routines, and especially since there were a couple of new young female coaches who no one wanted to make feel uncomfortable by not chanting along with them. All of my fellow sweaty gymgoers (who privately mock the chant but not the feeling of being a “FitFam” who got through the lockdowns together, if physically apart) have been just going along with it all, but I don’t. (If there’s one thing I learned from Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered, it’s that I shouldn’t allow my gender-ingrained politeness to force me into behaviours that make me feel uncomfortable.) So, is this a fitness cult (like Bikram Yoga or, for its instructors apparently, Peloton) or threatening to become one? Montell might point to the chanting and other coercive linguistic tools, or the fact that it’s (white) men at the top and women at the bottom of the power structure, to say that it shares some cult-like features. But there really isn’t anything abusive going on — this is a very supportive group of coaches that welcomes, and retains, members of all sizes and colours (even if it vastly attracts more women than men to the workouts) — and no one is pushed to the point of injury, there are no escalating fees for acquiring higher knowledge, no isolating behaviours or barriers to leaving. Not a cult, but in a corporate-America kind of way, a generally well-meaning business trying to make money off of secular people’s search for ritual and community. I'm still not willing to engage with "family on three".
It would be easy enough for me to write off all these groups, from SoulCycle to Instagram, as cultish and thus evil. But in the end, I don’t think the world would benefit from us all refusing to believe or participate in things. Too much wariness spoils the most enchanting parts of being human. I don’t want to live in a world where we can’t let our guards down for a few moments to engage in a group chant or a mantra. If everyone feared the alternative to the point that they never took even small leaps of faith for the sake of connection and meaning, how lonely would that be?
I guess I ultimately got what I came for, but I'm still leaving wanting more.
“Based on what you telt us, Mrs Hamil –, sorry, Ms Buchanan, we wanted to see what . . .” The polis looked at his pad. “Mun-go?” He shook his head in pity at a name destined to get belted in any playground. “. . . what young Mungo might know about it?”
As a followup to the Man Booker-winning Shuggie Bain, I think it’s fair to acknowledge that Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo treads very similar territory — a sensitive young Glaswegian lad is coming of age in a time and place of casual violence and toxic masculinity, raised by an alcoholic single mother whom he can’t help but love and care for — but while Shuggie’s story was mostly one of a childhood lost, Mungo’s is a tale of exploring one’s sexuality and discovering self. With a plot unspooled in alternating timelines — what events led to Mungo being sent off on a camping trip with a pair of questionable male role models and what happens on that trip — there is a fair amount of tension, if no real shockers (and perhaps some strained credibility), but Young Mungo shines more in the specifics than in the overall picture; and shine it does. Stuart has, once again, created some really fine and believable characters, and in this world of hurt, I rooted for them. Rounding up to four stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Mo-Maw didn’t like her children to call her Mammy, nor Mother, and never just Maw. She said she was too young for that shite. She had just turned fifteen when she came down with Hamish and was only nineteen when Mungo was born. They all came out so close together, they might have been arm-in-arm. Mungo was the only one who hadn’t burst forth singing. The other two came out raging, fists clenched and faces blue, but Mungo had just looked up at her in a sad way, she had said, like he was already expecting her to be a great disappointment.
Mungo Hamilton, the schemie wee bam, is nearly sixteen, suffers from tics and weird self-soothing behaviours, is a poor student (but can’t quit school until his next birthday without getting the School Board after his Mammy), and if it wasn’t for his saintly older sister Jodie taking care of him, Mungo wouldn’t know affection at all. Mo-Maw (never refer to her as anyone’s mother in public) is absent for long stretches at a time, and when she is around, she’s often too drunk and always too self-centered to take proper care of her children. Mungo’s brother Hamish — known as Ha-Ha to the gang he leads — is a violent thug, but ever since he got his fifteen-year-old girlfriend pregnant, he finds himself with less time to devote to making a man out of his little brother. Living in a housing scheme in Glasgow’s East End, Mungo interacts with a colourful cast of supporting characters — mostly people suffering unemployment and still blaming Margaret Thatcher for it a couple years after her resignation — but Mungo’s basic loneliness just might be alleviated through his new friendship with a boy in the next building over. Does it really matter if James is a Catholic and Mungo’s brother likes to rumble with the Billy boys against those dirty Fenian bastards?
Jodie had seen the inside of Glasgow Cathedral only once; she had been allowed to go on that particular school trip since she could walk there and it was all free. As the other girls took out their RE notebooks to rub at the stone carvings, Jodie found a stained-glass window of the patron saint, St Kentigern, or as he was colloquially known to Glaswegians, St Mungo. Here St Mungo was depicted as a melancholy boy, cradling a fat salmon, looking sorry that it was dead. Jodie had watched the afternoon light splinter through the saint and cross the dusty cathedral floor and thought of her brother. It was a peaceful window, somehow lonesome. Jodie had sighed before it. It was unlike Mo-Maw to get something so right.
Probably because Mungo is that much older than the character of Shuggie Bain, my heart didn’t ache for the maternal neglect that he was experiencing in the same way, but by focussing on Mungo’s awakening sense of self and sexuality, Stuart made me really care about Mungo in a different way and hope for his happiness against all odds. The second storyline of the camping trip gives a dose of tension to the plot — just what happens to get Mungo banished like this? — but again, it was the richly drawn Glasgow setting and the characters themselves that most earned my interest. The following is an interaction with the sweet old lady from downstairs:
“Mungo Hamilton, ye’re a useless wee scunner.” The letter box closed with a snap. Mungo sat up. There was a brief pause before it rasped open . “But I love ye.” It snapped closed, and then sprung open again. “Ya wee arsehole.”
I’ve noted recently that I can be a pretty cynical reader, resisting narratives designed to pull at my emotions, but when something feels true, I am open to it and can be affected. Young Mungo feels true — and if that’s because, once again, Douglas Stuart is writing what he knows, then he ought to keep doing that — and it absolutely reached me.
Our planet’s past lies hidden under the dirt. It wears the scars of its formation and change in its crust, and it, too, is a mortuary, memorializing its inhabitants in stone, fossils acting as grave marker, mask and body. Those worlds, those otherlands, cannot be visited — at least, not in a physical sense. You can never visit the environments through which titanic dinosaurs strode, never walk on their soil nor swim in their water. The only way to experience them is rockwise, to read the imprints in the frozen sand and to imagine a disappeared Earth. This book is an exploration of the Earth as it used to exist, the changes that have occurred during its history, and the ways that life has found to adapt, or not.
In Otherlands, paleobiologist Thomas Halliday skips backwards through time, visiting sixteen distinct eras from Earth’s history and describing the life, climate, and geological forces at work in each. This is cutting edge science — many of the earliest species can only be inferred by the slightest of impressions they left behind; many more will never make themselves known to us — and Halliday’s prose in describing his rebuilt worlds is comprehensive, evocative, and accessible. There’s always something humbling about confronting how unimportant our own species has been in the long history of the Earth, and as we are forced to acknowledge that we are driving the latest Great Extinction Event, I suppose there’s comfort in knowing that after we are gone, the Earth will diversify and other species will fill the Homo sapien niche. A fascinating read that makes the science come alive. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
To consider the landscapes that once existed is to feel the draw of a temporal wanderlust. My hope is that you will read this in the vein of a naturalist’s travel book, albeit one of lands distant in time rather than space, and begin to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous yet familiar.
From the salt flats of a drained Mediterranean Sea to the lush forests of a tropical Antarctica, Halliday describes vanished worlds that are at once familiar and not. I highlighted dozens of passages in Otherlands — interesting factoids and nice bits of writing — but with the ease of copy/pasting from a digital ARC, I acknowledge that that would be far too much to put in a review. (The following tidbits were placed behind spoiler tags on goodreads for my own use.)
• The loris has access to glands in its armpit which, when combined with saliva, can produce a venom capable of causing anaphylactic shock in humans. In behaviour, colour and even bite, the primate has come to resemble the snake, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Today, the ranges of the loris and cobras do not overlap, but climate reconstructions reaching back tens of thousands of years suggest that once they would have been similar. It is possible that the loris is an outdated imitation artist, stuck in an evolutionary rut, compelled by instinct to act out an impression of something neither it nor its audience has ever seen.
• To grow new bones every year requires enormous amounts of calcium. The demand is so intense that modern-day red deer on the Hebrides are known to wait outside shearwater burrows in spring, crunching down on the chicks as they emerge above ground for the first time and obtaining calcium from their bones, while white-tailed deer in North America are notorious nestling predators of a variety of small songbirds. Antlers are expensive.
• Every monkey in the Amazonian rainforest, from spider monkeys to howler monkeys, tamarins to marmosets, owes its existence to a few lucky survivors from their own presumably difficult and traumatic ocean voyage. The distance to cross from Africa to South America at the time was considerably lower, about two thirds of the width of the modern Atlantic, but this is still a huge distance when relying on rain and pooled water in leaves for a supply of drinking water. Even assuming continuous movement in exactly the right direction, the communities of rafting monkeys must have survived at sea for over six weeks.
• The abundance of food at Seymour Island has proven too much of an attraction, and this sawfish has presumably followed the eastern coastal waters of South America to reach its destination. The saw acts as both locator and capturer of food, with thousands of sensitive ampullae along its length detecting changes in electric fields. Because vertebrates control muscle movement using flows of charged calcium ions, if a herring so much as twitches, the sawfish will know, swiping its saw through the water at high speed, hacking at the seabed with the edge, or pinning its prey down with the flat as it manoeuvres the fish towards its mouth.
• At the moment the Chicxulub meteor struck, all primates, flying lemurs, tree shrews, rabbits and rodents had yet to diversify. They were united within one, perhaps two or three species, common ancestors to all. Our ancestors are here, and they contain within their genetic code the essence of what it means to be a primate. The ancestors of some of the largest land mammals that will ever exist, the 17-ton rhinoceros cousin Paraceratherium, are here, and are the same individuals whose descendants will miniaturize and fly as the smallest, the bumblebee bat. The range of anatomical forms will expand rapidly, exploring the different possibilities of being a mammal, before eventually specializing into the groups we know in the present. It seems an almost biblical promise: your descendants will reach all corners of the Earth and beyond it.
• The penchant for visual display, at least, will persist in dinosaurs until the modern day — no group of vertebrates has the variety, the detail and the vibrancy of colour and shape as birds. Indeed, reptiles, from birds to lizards, have colours that humans cannot see, patterns that fluoresce under ultraviolet light. Given that this seems to be an ancestral trait, it is possible that non-avian archosaur display, including pterosaurs and dinosaurs, extends beyond the human visual spectrum.
• Each cell is semi-independent, and a single sponge blurs the line between individual and colony. If you were to put one in a blender, it would re-aggregate — a different shape, but still a working organism, a functioning sponge.
• The largest logjam in historical times lasted for nearly 1,000 years in the lands of the Caddoan Mississippian culture, now in Louisiana. Known as the Great Raft, it at one time covered more than 150 miles of river, an ever-shifting carpet of trunks slowly decaying in the water, and was an important element of local folklore and agriculture, providing fertile floodwater and trapping silt for crops. It would still be here today if it had not been blown up to allow boats through. Once it was gone, the river flooded the land downstream, requiring further dams to be built, and changing the dynamics of water flow in the region.
*****
This is now undoubtedly a human planet. It has not always been, and perhaps will not always be, but, for now, our species has an influence unlike almost any other biological force. The world as it is today is a direct result — not a conclusion or a denouement, but a result — of what has gone before. Much of life in the past happens in a steady state of slow-changing existence, but there are times when everything can become upended. Unavoidable impacts from space, eruptions at a continental scale, global glaciation — the all-pervasive transitions that force life’s structures to remodel themselves. Had any of those events happened in another way, or not happened at all, the then-unwritten future could have emerged very differently. It is by looking at the past that palaeobiologists, ecologists and climate scientists can address the uncertainty about the near- and long-term future of our planet, casting backwards to predict possible futures.
Reading about species that dominated their world for millions of years before some natural cataclysm wiped them out can be pretty demoralising, from the point-of-view of a species that’s only been around for a few hundred thousand years and is just starting to get the hang of how to best use these big brains. On the one hand, even if we pull together and concentrate on regenerating our environment, we’ve already wiped out the vast majority of large animals on the planet, climate change is threatening the rest (including us), and a supervolcano could blow up at literally any second; it’s easy to feel as helpless as a dinosaur in the path of the incoming Chicxulub meteor. But on the other hand, we are the wise ape, a part of nature and not separate from it, and we can use these big brains to learn lessons from the past and approach the future with more self-awareness than any dinosaur ever had. Halliday ends his trip through deep history on a hopeful note: change is inevitable, but our imminent extinction is not. Well worth the read.
