Charles Mann's "1493" Illuminates the Origins of the Global Economy

Apart from its misleading subtitle, Charles Mann’s  1493.  Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, is a book to celebrate.  (Columbus’ personal contribution to the creation of the new world Mann describes was roughly the same as Johannes Gutenberg’s to the invention of word processing.)    But Mann is using “Columbus” as a kind of synecdoche for the class of European explorers-conquerors-traders who did in fact inaugurate the process of globalization which created the world we now inhabit.

1493 is a bracingly persuasive counter-narrative to the prevailing mythology about the historical significance of the “discovery” of America.  Pious European pioneers subduing the wilderness to plant a city on a hill and all that.   It’s a companion to Mann’s 2005 study of the pre-Columbian world,1491, which examined not merely the civilization of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans but the devastating effects of old world diseases among the people of the new world.

Summarizing a generation’s worth of scholarship on the complex effects of the mingling of the “old” and “new” worlds, 1493 carries on this line of enquiry by illuminating the political, cultural and biological ramifications of what Mann refers to as the “homogenocene”—the resurrection of Pangaea, the supercontinent, connected this time not by the slow grinding power of geology but by the sinews of commerce.

1493 is inspired by the work of Alfred Crosby, whose studies of the deeper biological effects of what he called the “Columbian exchange” were greeted with a yawn when he started publishing in the early 1970s, but whose brilliance and originality soon after would not only command respect among scholars but inspire a whole new field of enquiry—the meta-history of the environment.   1493, combining original reporting and research by Mann with a survey of the scholarship Crosby’s work stimulated, examines how the European encounter with the Americas, as well as its corollary, the yoking of Europe and the Americas with the continents of Asia and Africa, the latter through the cruel vector of slavery, profoundly altered the whole world.

Many Oregonians have vacationed in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, sunbathing and swimming along the Playa la Ropa.   What they may not know is that this “beach of the clothes” is named for the silk garments which washed ashore when a galleon bringing goods from Asia was wrecked by a storm.   Mann visits Manila to recount the complicated history of this trade between China and the west, fueled by gold and silver from the new world (mined and transported by African slaves), transshipped through Mexico on its way to Madrid, hauled across the Pacific between Manila and Acapulco on ships manned by polyglot crews.

Food crops from the new world were especially influential in the creation of the global economy, a story never told better than in 1493.   Everyone knows how important the Andean potato was to European agriculture—and the indispensible tomato to Italian cuisine.   The mid-19^th century Irish famine, its effects still felt, is likewise a well rehearsed tale whose lineaments are incomprehensible without some knowledge of the biology of the Columbian exchange.   And given its grim effects—modern Ireland’s population is still smaller than its 19^th century peak—one might assume that the Columbian exchange was deleterious.   Mann persuasively argues the opposite.

“Transplanting the potato to Europe and the sweet potato to China created catastrophic social and environmental problems,” Mann acknowledges.   “But it also kept millions of Europeans and Chinese from malnutrition and famine.  The huge benefits of moving species outweigh the huge harms.”

Even in the shadow of the most glamorous shops in Beijing, vendors grilling sweet potatoes add spice to street life, especially on cold winter days.

Astonishing facts accumulate throughout 1493.  Japanese samurai guarded silver shipments between Acapulco and Veracruz in the 17^thcentury.  The samurai were exempted from the racial laws prohibiting non-Spaniards from carrying weapons so they could “wield their katanas andtantos,” as Mann writes, to fend off bandits.    By the mid-18^th century, the militias guarding Mexico’s Pacific coast against British raiders were “a force of morenos, pardos…”—that is mixed-race Afro-Indians and Afro-Europeans, categorized by the colonizers in a hapless attempt to name every possible combination of genetic admixture over multiple generations—“…Spaniards and chinos, the latter mostly Filipinos and Fujianese.”

1493’s focus on Africans in the new world is its greatest contribution.   At the time Great Britain’s American colonies declared their independence almost three hundred years after Columbus’ landfall, more African immigrants had arrived in the new world than Europeans.    Most did not come voluntarily, of course, but once they arrived they collectively shaped (or escaped) the culture of the eclectic new societies they found themselves in.

They mingled with the native peoples, and with the Europeans—culturally, sexually, linguistically.  New world societies are so distinctive from European societies in part because of the African influence flowing through America’s cultures.  Americans have been reluctant to acknowledge this truth, in part because of the depth of American racism.   But writers, from Mark Twain to Ralph Ellison to William Styron to James Baldwin, have understood that America became as much an African as a European place, and Mann does more to illuminate why that is so that any popular historian before him has ever managed.

1493 is rich in detail, analytically expansive and impossible to summarize.  Reading Mann’s accounts of Africans forging bonds with native peoples throughout the Americas, for example, I thought about the Ramapough Mountain people in New Jersey, a so-called remnant population of mixed African-Indian-European heritage whose community has been destroyed by toxic dumping from a Ford Motor Company assembly plant.   (HBO aired a documentary about this history called “Mann v Ford,” although the plaintiff was not connected to Charles Mann.)   Reading 1493 showed a link between Henry Ford’s epic failed attempt to build an Amazonian rubber empire in the 1920s with the Ramapough’s futile battle two generations latter for justice in America.

1493 deserves a prominent place among that very rare class of books which can make a difference in how we see the world, although it is neither a polemic nor a work of advocacy.   Thoughtful, learned, and respectful of its subject matter, 1493 is a splendid achievement.

Immediately, Heller remembered, “the book began to evolve clearly in my mind….All this took place within an hour and a half.”  “Someone,” of course, was Yossarian, and as Tracy Daugherty writes in his biography of Heller, Just One Catch, all of Heller’s novels would be similarly inspired by the revelation of a single sentence.

The curious saga of Catch-22’s creation, from this moment of germination to its publication seven years later to its enduring status as a best-seller and countercultural icon, provides a needed jolt of energy to Just One Catch. The narrative of Heller’s early years in Just One Catch sticks pretty close to the account in Heller’s memoir, Now and Then.   But the chronology is tricked up in a vaguely Hellerian fashion, padded with flashbacks and foreshadowing, a cumbersome approach in a biography.

Heller wrote one to three pages a night, Daugherty notes, once he was under contract for the novel.  Those index cards, shuffled and reassembled, provided the scaffolding for handwritten passages on yellow legal pads.    Heller’s agent, Candida Donadio, a pioneer in getting publishing houses to bid for manuscripts, got Heller a $750 advance, with another $750 due when the manuscript was delivered.  (In 1987, Heller reportedly signed a two book deal for four million.)

Despite not having access to Heller, who died in 1999, Daugherty was not hurting for material.  The drafts of Catch-22 are at Brandeis, while most of the Heller archive is at the University of South Carolina.  Heller, who struggled with money after a long illness and an ugly divorce in the 1980s, sold his papers two years before his death.   “When a dealer offered the Joseph Heller Papers to USC in 1997,” the University “grabbed them for $135,000—which proved to be a steal.”    (Why?  “Heller’s marked copy of Catch-22” by itself sold for $105,160 in 2002.)

“Joe was working on at least nine different drafts” of Catch-22, Daugherty discovered, “both handwritten and typed, often cutting and pasting sections from one draft into another….”  There are more than 150,000 pages in the Heller archive, as well as at least twelve books about Heller cited by Daugherty in his bibliography.

Heller was working full time on Madison Avenue, a married father of two, when he started Catch-22, a book at first called Catch 18.  Heller’s editor, Robert Gottlieb, a major collaborator through most of his writing life, hit on the right number for the “catch” after they learned that Leon Uris was about to publish a novel called Mila 18.

Working in advertising “helped me write Catch-22,” Heller said.  “I felt there was a similarity between writing Catch-22 and the work I was called upon to do in the daytime.”

Heller was, in his own words, “seek[ing] a way of telling a story that [was] different from the mere narration of the events of history.   Putting on his critic’s cap, Daugherty writes that Heller’s approach “highlighted structure (music, rhythm, repetition), violated chronology, and played with language, making puns and setting up sophisticated verbal ironies (swift shifts in register from the comic to the tragic).”

Daugherty writes that Heller’s “favorite narrative method” was “the retrospective elegy,” and observes that someone important dies in the penultimate chapter of every Heller novel.

A professor of literature at Oregon State, Daugherty is an accomplished fiction writer.  Hiding Man, his 2009 biography of his teacher and friend, Donald Barthelme, was a critical and commercial success.   Heller, of course, is a much better-known writer than Barthelme was, although as Daugherty points out, the runaway success of Catch-22 was a burden on Heller for the rest of his career.   As one friend noted, Heller had hit .400 his rookie year.  How do you top that?   Daugherty’s exploration of Heller’s handling of success is a leitmotif in Just One Catch.

Many critics believed Heller never matched the brio and brilliance of Catch 22, but plenty of writers—and Heller counted many writers among his friends—thought his gifts were evident in everything he wrote.   The follow-up to Catch 22, Something Happened, (not its sequel, which would be called Closing Time and would not be published until 1994) was a best-seller.   Several critics savaged Something Happened, but Irwin Shaw, who according to Daugherty had been an early inspiration to Heller, told him it was “a great book.  A masterpiece.”

Something Happened may have pleased most critics, but it was a burden to his family, especially his first wife, who “hated” the book.  “She was embarrassed and disconcerted by the portrait of a narcissistic, fretful man whose love for his wife and children is balanced by equal bouts of revulsion, and who engages in serial adultery to take the edge off his fears of failure.”  [page 329]

Those children, Erica and Ted, would both grow up to be writers.  Erica Heller has a new memoir out this month, which makes her willingness to have also served as a principal source for Just One Catch seem especially generous.

Although of the same generation of writers as Norman Mailer and James Jones, whose WW II novels were, Daugherty observes, written in the manner of pre-war fiction, Heller wrote a novel that looked forward in both technique and sensibility while glancing backwards for its setting.  Catch-22 is enduringly influential.  So perhaps it’s no surprise that as I am writing this review, Catch-22 rates a more than respectable 558 on Amazon.  Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, the first novel to hit the post WWII bestseller lists, is at 28,906.   Jones’ From Here to Eternity, which Heller thought was the best WWII novel, is a disheartening 185,916.

The Swinger

The roman à clef is a kind of literary push poll.  Joe Klein’s Primary Colors was a roman à clef, skewering an imaginary Bill Clinton on the campaign trail, while Robert Harris’ The Ghost, the basis for the film “The Ghostwriter,” was the literary evisceration of a fictional British Prime Minister addicted to deceit which was clearly based on Tony Blair.

If you don’t want to know what happens in the The Swinger, stop reading now.  I don’t know how to review this book without giving away the plot.

OK

We have in The Swinger a coded version of Tiger Woods’ life post-scandal, courtesy of two of Sports Illustrated’s finest golf writers, Michael Bamberger and Alan Shipnuck.   Naming the main character  “Herbert X. ‘Tree’ Tremont” signals to readers that their imaginations will not be taxed by trying to break The Swinger’s code. Tree is a mixed-race golfing prodigy with multiple majors won, an income north of one hundred million a year, and a gorgeous Italian wife named Belinda.  He has a taciturn caddy from overseas (a Scot, not a Kiwi), an arrogant lawyer as an agent, and sponsorship by an apparel company with an eccentrically exuberant boss.

We’re left to guess what the “X” stands for, but on my scorecard, an X means surrender.   No echoes of Malcolm X and his repudiation of slave names sound in the deliberately race-neutral sagas of either Tiger Woods or Tree Tremont, but a hint of Mandingo lurks in The Swinger’s description of Tree.

“Even from two hundred yards away, Tree Tremont was an unmistakable figure.  He was built like a martini glass, with powerful shoulders and a chest tapering to a thirty-inch waist, all of it accentuated by his tight European-cut clothing that Belinda hand-picked for him, as Tree liked to remind reporters…Tree’s stride radiated athleticism, confidence, superiority.   There was something virile about his presence, certainly for women but for men, too.”

The narrator gushing thus about Tree is Joshua Dutra, a Florida-based sportswriter.   The conceit of the novel is that Dutra gets hired by the Tremont brain trust to help guide Tree through the aftermath of a tabloid’s discovery that he is not the upstanding family man his PR machine has claimed, but rather a sex-addicted narcissist who lies to his wife as readily as he intimidates his rivals.

There is a Phil Mickelson character in The Swinger called “Will Martinsen.”   He is, no surprise, Tree’s biggest rival.    “Big Herb”—Herbert X. Tremont, Senior—stands in for Earl Woods.  Some golfers appear in the novel under their real names, echoing a favorite technique in the fiction of E. L. Doctorow— Zach Johnson, Jack Nicklaus, Corey Pavin and Luke Donald are among the famous players making cameo appearances as themselves.   This pumps up the verisimilitude while providing a virtuous counterpoint to Tree’s scandalous conduct.

The sportswriter/narrator’s first person account provides an insider’s view of Tree’s self-inflicted wounds and self-destructive fall.   Dutra even accompanies Tree to his stint in rehab for sex-addiction therapy.    Tree is also hooked on a variety of pain-killers and performance enhancers.   He is not a sympathetic guy, with his yachts and his sycophants and his lies.

Then something curious happens.  Tree and Dutra’s business relationship somehow segues into something resembling friendship, and Tree’s rehab succeeds.   His therapist is drawn with sympathy and grace, and an Oprah episode breaks out on a Jerry Springer stage.   The vinegar turns to syrup, and the narrative abandons anger and parody for the sweet prospect of redemption.

The Swinger is fun to read, even after it takes its earnest turn and stops dishing dirt.    As with all successful romans à clef, it keeps the reader on his toes, looking for plausible clues about what Bamberger and Shipnuck must really know that lies hidden behind the burlesque.    If pro golfers were readers, The Swinger would surely find a receptive audience among them.

But  as much as I enjoyed The Swinger, I found this counter-version of Tiger’s life—and especially one that ends with the Tree character turning into a nice guy, a kind of St Augustine of the links—as incomprehensible as the true story of Tiger Woods’ fall from grace.

JS

Michael Bamberger and Alan Shipnuck, The Swinger.  Simon and Shuster, July, 2011.  254 pp, $25.00.

Success in golf is measured on the curve—there is no absolute standard of achievement.    The best score wins in tournament golf (at least in stroke play), and scores are always a function of local conditions.  Occasionally, for example, the Open Championship is contested during a rare stretch of benign weather conditions on the Old Course at St. Andrews, which is famously toothless on a calm day. The scores then are low. But when the wind howls and the harr slides across the links the players shiver their way into scores in the high seventies and beyond.  (Over the last eight Opens played at St Andrews, the winning score ranged between -5 and -19.)

Boxing, on the other hand, is the most unmediated sport.  A boxing match explodes John Stuart Mills’ dictum on freedom’s boundary: your right to extent your arm stops at my nose.  In boxing, that constraint is abandoned, but under rules which in principle protect the fighters from permanent harm.

Golfers face a purely emotional risk when they’re competing, but that doesn’t mean the experience of faltering in a golf competition is without physical cost.  Discovering how to understand and control the adrenalin surges every players feels when championships are on the line is what finally distinguishes champion golfers from players who can hit it pure on the range but waver when it counts.  After K. J. Choi closed out The Players Championship last weekend with a solid tee shot and a two putt par in playoff with David Toms on the cruel 17^th at Sawgrass, he said “the swing I have now does not break down under pressure.”

What’s most enlightening about Dunn’s commentary on boxing is her insight into how crucial the same sort of emotional control that golf requires is to success in boxing.   It seems intuitively true that victory in boxing should arise from ferocity and rage.   Dunn says just the opposite is true.  “Good boxing requires such clear and rapid analytical thought,” Dunn writes, “that a cool head is mandatory.  Maybe the driving force is desire, what the fight folk call ‘being hungry.’  This hunger is a slippery beast with a million faces.”

Katherine Dunn Waiting for the Next Match

Because she possesses the great novelist’s genius for observing the telling detail, Dunn’s essays reveal what’s behind the appetite— the controlled fury—a boxer must bring into the ring to succeed.   She writes of “tenderness” in the gym—“a practical response,” she observes, “to wearing gloves.  Anyone with huge puffy mittens on his hands can’t blow his own nose or tie his own shoes, so those who are not gloved up help those who are.”

It’s the solitary quality of the boxer’s life in the ring which links him most closely to his brethren on the links.   Both classes of combatants depend on aides and servants to get them through their battles—“seconds” for the boxer, a caddy for the golfer.

A caddy is a kind of figurative cut-man, stanching his player’s wounds as he tries to recover from the tee shot he just blocked into the woods, or the putt drifting irretrievebly past the hole.  Golfers experience sudden death, as David Toms did on Sunday at the TPC; boxers get knocked out.

But at the end of the day, boxers and golfers are both on their own, their opportunities depending on the long hidden hours, sparing in the gym or on grinding on the range, beyond glamour or triumph.

Boxing has generated great nicknames—Sugar Ray and the Brown Bomber, Iron Mike and the Hitman.  Golfers—aside from Tiger, named in infancy, whose handle only incidentally reflects his personality—don’t have noms de guerre.    Perhaps they should:  Rory the Fury Sabbatini.  Ben the Tortoise Crane.   Paul “Glib” Goydos.

Geek Love

Katherine Dunn, One Ring Circus.  Dispatches from the World of Boxing.  Schaffer Press, Tucson, AZ.  Pb, $16.95.

The unlikely saga of Woodie Alan is the subject of “Big in China,” Paul’s modestly framed yet keenly observed and entertaining account of his life as an expat. An inquisitive traveler, Paul relied on the reportorial skills honed by his experience as a freelance writer to shape his response to his rather luxurious life abroad.

An authority on the two elements of American popular culture with the most marked influence on contemporary Chinese life, rock music and basketball, Paul was able to use his Guitar World network to find Chinese musicians to jam with, which led to the formation of the band and its improbable success. The band’s performances were a revelation to Paul, who had always seen himself as a listener and critic and a strictly amateur strummer, but who blossomed as a bandleader and singer in China.

Paul and his wife, Becky — Rebecca Blumenstein, who would win a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting from China in 2007 — lived with their three young children in an expat compound called Beijing Riviera. Becky stays in the background in “Big in China,” busy running the bureau, while Paul, as he had in New Jersey, minds the household and tends the kids.

In China the family enjoys a housekeeper and nanny, which frees Paul to continue writing and to take on a column for the Web version of the Journal. The columns form the scaffolding around which “Big in China” is built. But Paul didn’t isolate himself in the Westerners’ compound. He studied Mandarin, sampled the fabulous variety of cuisine available in Beijing, including the great banquet of street food, and even managed to pass the Chinese driver’s test — an accomplishment that will perhaps be best appreciated by readers of Peter Hessler’s last book, “Country Driving.” And he found his musical family.

The kids were a constant attraction in China. “A growing pack of curious onlookers followed us from our hotel to the restaurant,” Paul writes of a family holiday in Guiyang. “The entire waitstaff crowded around two-and-a-half-year-old Anna, wanting to hold her, kiss her and pose for pictures with her.” Their local guide explained that no one had “seen anyone who looks like Anna, except in pictures. They think she looks like an angel.”

Four-year-old Eli wanted to know why the Chinese were so fascinated with the three American children. “In China,” Paul started to explain, “people are only allowed to have one kid.”

“Eli’s eyes grew fearful; I understood that he was worried that we were going to have to get rid of him and Anna. ‘That’s only for Chinese people,’ I quickly added.”

By the end of their third year in China, Paul writes, the kids were settled in and not eager to return to the States. He worried about the dilemma of “third culture kids,” who “come from one culture, move with their parents to another, and end up feeling like they don’t quite belong to either.” Paul’s not raring to go home either, because he suspects he’ll never find a group of musicians as compatible and in sync as the ones he’s playing with in Woodie Alan.

Paul’s musical friendships provide him with an entree to a China few Westerners see: nights out in working-class bars run by Chinese gangsters, hidden in remnant neighborhoods, or the chance to eat home-cooked meals prepared by his bandmates’ mothers. He writes about what he learns from his fellow musicians with a sympathetic and generous ease. Paul knows and has written about most of the modern guitar wizards, but the musicians of Woodie Alan earn his affection and respect as real bluesmen.

By the time I finished reading “Big in China,” I really wanted to hear Woodie Alan’s music, and found it on the Web at woodiealan.com. Paul’s modesty about his singing voice is appropriate, but the band is solid and fun to listen to, and it is a tribute to Paul’s energy and enthusiasm for the music of his native land that Woodie Alan existed at all.

Alan Paul Rocking in China

Big in China seems to have struck a cord with readers in ways that more grandiose encounters with China by westerners have not.  Hollywood has acquired film rights, and for sure it’s a story with built-in cinematic appeal–cute kids, culture shock, powerful wife, creative husband, exotic settings–what’s not to like?  Ivan Reitman to direct–cool.

Alan Paul, Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues, and Becoming a Star in Beijing. HarperCollins, 272 pages, $25.99.  For a video of a reading by Paul at the Asia Society, see: http://asiasociety.org/video/countries-history/alan-paul-big-china-complete

John Updike was the literary Sam Snead.  Golf  Dreams: Writings on Golf, published in 1996, was his 49th book, a miscellany of golf-related short stories, essays, excerpts from novels and the occasional poem.  As a writer, Updike was long and straight. He was also a natural who strode onto the first tee of the Writer’s Tour with a perfected style, his prose as supple and smooth as Snead’s fluid swing, and as enduring.

Golf was a recurrent motif in Updike’s work.  This handy distillation provided readers not only with a compendium of Updike’s golf prose, but with his own running commentary about the origins and publishing history of the collected pieces.

Able to support himself as a writer practically from infancy – a staff writer for The New Yorker right out of Harvard, he was free-lancing full time by his mid-20s – Updike lived the suburban life much of his fiction centered on. As he observed in his memoir, Self- Consciousness, he had “learned to play the rich child’s games of tennis and golf,” in his mid- 20s, after moving to Ipswich, Mass.

Smitten with the game, and possessing more free afternoons each week than the average working stiff has in a year, Updike not only played golf often, he immediately put his experience to good use by placing golf clubs in the hands of his characters.

Updike in autumn was awakening from his golf dreams, the hope nourished in every golf traveler’s soul that some ultimate improvement lies just over the horizon.  Golf magazines, with their endlessly repeated tips and discoveries, feed off of this longing.   ”The suspicion crept over me,” Updike wrote in the preface to Golf Dreams, “that golf had stolen my life away: the hard gemlike flame with which I, an artist, should have burned had been dampened if not doused by the green mists of this narcotic pastime.”

The glow of Updike’s flame was amply blight, those “green mists” notwithstanding. The earliest stories, mostly written for The New Yorker, carried not merely hints of the greatness to come but its full expression. “Intercession,” chronologically the first Updike golf story, contains this line: “Then, so gently he might have been hooding a falcon, he fitted the golden head of his club with a chamois cover.”  This is echt-Updike, this ability to capture an everyday moment with a simple image that displaces routine with poetry.

Updike’s best-known character, Rabbit Angstrom, was a steady denizen of the links once he escaped the gravitational pull of his youthful orbit.   In excerpts from the four Rabbit novels in Golf Dreams, we see Rabbit evolving from early manhood to middle age: the vigorous, if confused hoopster stalking the “pagan groves and green alleys” of youth will eventually sink into a Florida dusk of golf carts, conceded putts and angioplasty.

Who else but Updike could write that “all swing thoughts decay, like radium,” or describe the aural sensation of a ball leaving the clubface as a “pleasant tearing sound, as if pulling a zipper in space”?

Updike “read about golf, with great pleasure,” he wrote in Golf Dreams, “long before I played it.” Then, having played golf, he compounded the delight for devotees of golf literature by adding these marvelous chapters to golf’s bulging shelf.   I can’t imagine anyone devoted to golf’s literary treasures not finding delight in this unassuming, captivating book.

This Review is part of an ongoing series of commentaries and reviews on the best of golf literature.

Here is my original review:

The Author Wes Moore

The author of “The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates” is a New Yorker with an impressive résumé: Rhodes Scholar, Army officer in Afghanistan, White House Fellow. He works now as an investment banker, the only blemish on his impeccable résumé. His book is both a memoir and the biography of another young man named Wes Moore, now serving a life sentence in a Maryland prison.

At about the same time he was named a Rhodes Scholar, author Moore learns that a man sharing his name has been arrested for murder, and articles about both men appear in their hometown paper, the Baltimore Sun. On his return from Oxford, Moore finds himself unexpectedly obsessed with this other Wes Moore. Writing that “there were nights when I would wake up in the small hours and find myself thinking of the other Wes Moore, conjuring his image as best I could, a man my age lying on a cot in a prison cell, burdened by regret, trying to sleep through another night surrounded by the walls he’d escape only at death. Sometimes, in my imaginings, his face was mine.”

Moore recognizes that this is a thin cord of attachment. His family was able to summon the resources to provide him educational opportunities unavailable to the other Wes Moore. Access to good schools surely made a difference. Nonetheless, he’s proud of his choices and his accomplishments, and his accounts of petty delinquencies during his adolescence are intended to suggest the road not taken. The other Wes Moore is also smart and resilient, but his single mom could not insulate him from the lure of the drug trade and the bogus glamour of thug life, and he was a thriving gangster by his early teens. Once the author Moore is at Valley Forge Military Academy and the other Moore is a dropout, a teenage father and a full-time drug dealer, the die has been cast. These parallel narratives have, however, almost no dramatic tension — we know the outcome before the story begins.

Colin Powell was one of Moore’s idols, and they share a Caribbean ancestry. West Indian immigrants in general outperform native-born African Americans economically, although this is not an issue Moore considers. Attempts to explain this disparity have ranged from observations of strong family ties among West Indians to hiring preferences among employers. But a recent study by sociologist Suzanne Model casts doubt on these explanations. She “compares the economic achievement of recent West Indian immigrants with the achievement of native-born African Americans who recently changed residence within the U.S. There are no differences between the two groups. Put another way, West Indian immigrants have better economic outcomes than African American non-movers, but they do not have better economic outcomes than African American movers.”

“The Other Wes Moore” lacks the passion animating the great autobiographies of Black America, from Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” to Claude Brown’s “Manchild in the Promised Land” to “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” Moore also tells us, apropos the other Wes Moore’s success as a dealer, that there are 100,000 drug addicts in Baltimore, a city of 700,000. He does not wonder, however, what makes this possible — what levels of official corruption must exist to supply a craving so vast?  (He also neglects to cite a source for this number, which seems astonishly high–one in seven Baltimoreans are drug addicts, when the highest estimate of illicit drug use in the USA that I could find pegs addiction rates at about 8%, or one person in 12, not Baltimore’s one in 7?)  

Moore also does not wonder either at the fact that in 1999, 58 percent of state prisoners convicted on drug charges were African American, despite compelling statistical evidence that the rates of use and sales of drugs are proportionately identical among America’s white and black populations. African American men are incarcerated at a rate almost seven times that of whites, with enduring implications: Felons can’t find work, fall back on criminal skills refined in prison and abandon hope. Can there be a better prescription for the creation of an alienated criminal class?

Wes Moore, whose determination and ambition shine through the pages of “The Other Wes Moore,” may succeed in converting the interest generated by this well-promoted book into a genuine debate about opportunity and aspiration, and the enduring cost of racism.�

“The Other Wes Moore”
Wes Moore �
Spiegel & Grau
$25, 256 pages

Adventurer-authors filled the second stream of travel writing, with their exhilarating narratives of life-and-death encounters with fierce beasts and ferocious people, especially in Africa. Henry Stanley, Mary Kingsley and Richard Burton  were among the celebrated explorers whose accounts thrilled Victorian readers, creating an enduring image of the “dark continent.”

Ewart Grogan, according to Portland writer Julian Smith’s “Crossing the Heart of Africa,” was an equally redoubtable British trekker whose exploits are now largely forgotten. In “Crossing the Heart of Africa,” Smith narrates his efforts to retrace Grogan’s 5,000-mile trek in 1898-1900 from the town of Beira, in what is now Mozambique, all the way north to Cairo.

Smith’s approach to Grogan’s epic journey mixes elements from the two main modes of travel writing. Smith, as an accomplished author of travel guides, knows how to negotiate unfamiliar terrain with limited resources and no common language. But he’s also roughing it at times, echoing Grogan’s travails. But what Grogan spent two years doing, Smith hopes to finish in two months.

Grogan undertook his adventure to impress a woman, or at least her skeptical stepfather. He was 25 and a veteran of the British army’s colonial wars in southern Africa, but he’d been kicked out of Cambridge and didn’t have a job. Grogan’s beloved, Gertrude Watt, was a descendent of James Watt, whose steam engine powered the industrial age. Gertrude’s aunt agreed to subsidize Grogan’s journey, Smith writes, suggesting that the family was not entirely hostile to Grogan’s campaign to win Gertrude’s hand. An uncle accompanied him for much of the journey.

Smith heads north from Beira along Grogan’s path, following the rivers and lakes of the Great Rift Valley, from Lake Nyasa (or Lake Malawi) in the south through Lake Tanganyika to Lake Albert in the north and then over the Mountains of the Moon to the White Nile and the dangerous waters of the Sudd. Smith crosses land mostly as a passenger on bikes, or on buses and the occasional taxi. He avoids the eastern Congo, one of the world’s most dangerous places.

His travels through Rwanda and his reflections on the genocide there echo Grogan’s chilling encounter with cannibals, an episode whose accuracy historians have called into doubt. The dangerous men Smith may encounter — veterans of the Rwandan genocide or followers of the insane prophet of northern Uganda with his Lord’s Resistance Army — have AK-47s. Grogan’s antagonists mostly threatened him with spears or shouts, while Grogan had powerful guns himself, which he used to dispatch the occasional elephant or hippo in the characteristically casual approach to slaughter of the gentleman hunter.

But while Grogan survived a series of life-threatening encounters, according to Smith, the modern traveler faces instead a string of inconveniences. The parallels between Smith’s journey and Grogan’s are broadly drawn, but in the end it’s Grogan’s tale that carries the day.

Smith’s narrative of Grogan’s journey is based on Grogan’s book, “From the Cape to Cairo: The First Traverse of Africa From South to North,” published in 1902 with an introduction by none other than Cecil Rhodes. (Interested readers can download it for free from Google books, and the facsimile includes Grogan’s photos and drawings, some of which Smith includes in “Crossing the Heart of Africa.”)

The eastern half of Africa, from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, is a region still fraught with danger and disarray, from the genocidal wars of Sudan to the forays of Somali pirates to the rebellions of the eastern Congo. Smith’s book raises anew the question of what role the adventurist colonials of the Victorian age contributed to Africa’s ceaseless sorrows.

CROSSING THE HEART OF AFRICA
Julian Smith �
Harper Perennial
$14.99 paperback, 352 pages

“The Rise” was a bracing read, as we witnessed young Teddy struggle against his infirmities, discover his gifts and ascend through force of will (and aided, of course, by the assassination of William McKinley) to the highest office in the land.  He was the youngest man ever to assume the presidency.   The second volume, “Theodore Rex,” examined Roosevelt’s years in the White House, when his power and cunning were in full flower. Now, with the final volume, “Colonel Roosevelt,” Morris is obliged to narrate TR’s decline, replete with episodes of regret, depression and grief. Given the architecture of Roosevelt’s robust personality — his stamina, his courage, his self-confidence, his willpower and his brute intelligence — we don’t anticipate a tranquil exodus from power, but expect instead a clamoring, fist-clinching resistance to marginality. As always in his life, Roosevelt resisted any easy way out.

“Colonel Roosevelt” begins with an account of the yearlong safari Roosevelt embarked on in east Africa soon after leaving office. Typically Rooseveltian in scale and ambition, the expedition combined TR’s lust for the kill with a genuine desire to learn about the natural history of the animals he was dispatching in abundance, many slated for delivery to the Smithsonian. His son Kermit accompanied him, part of a large retinue of guides, porters, cooks and gun bearers. Andrew Carnegie underwrote the safari, but the Colonel’s regular dispatches to Scribner’s Magazine helped defray costs and would generate income to support his large family when published in book form.

Although he was born into a well-to-do family, TR was always a breadwinner, and his main source of earnings was from writing.  He wrote, Morris observes, as he talked — “super abundantly, always interestingly, with clarity and total recall.” But “the power of his prose comes from its realism.”

Faced with the demands of an endless stream of articles, speeches and books, TR never missed a deadline, even when he was ill or in the midst of a fierce political struggle. His theoretical acuity may not have risen to the heights of Jefferson’s or Madison’s, but his literary output was matchless.

In contrast to the exuberance propelling his account of Roosevelt’s rise to power, Morris’ narrative of TR’s last significant foray into electoral politics, the failed presidential campaign of 1912, is, if not perfunctory, tedious. The singular qualities of that campaign — TR breaking with tradition to seek a third term, for example — are interesting, but the endless political maneuvering Morris reports lacks vitality. Roosevelt ultimately split the Republican vote by agreeing to stand as the candidate of the Progressive, or Bull Moose, Party, depriving his handpicked but disappointing successor, William Howard Taft, of a second term and assuring the election of only the second Democrat to the presidency since the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson.

Morris’ account of TR’s final outdoor adventure, undertaken after the debacle of the 1912 election, also lacks the narrative urgency animating most of the trilogy. The subject of Candice Millard’s 2005 “The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey,” a book Morris is gracious in praising, the expedition through Amazonia nearly killed TR. Morris surmises that the illnesses provoked and the injuries suffered on this trip contributed to his premature death.

Once Morris begins to reckon with TR’s final years, “Colonel Roosevelt” sweeps forward with majesty and grace. The concluding chapters are magnificent, with Morris summoning the full array of his narrative gifts. TR faces not only his final illness with courage and fortitude, but endures the loss of his youngest son in combat in a war TR had vigorously supported. All four Roosevelt sons served with distinction in World War I, driven by their father’s example and exhortations.

TR was a man whose belief in duty and sacrifice did not stop on his own doorstep. Morris leaves no doubt that while TR’s otherworldly self-control kept him in charge of his emotions when he heard the news of Quentin’s death, his suffering was deep and abiding — as any father’s would be. His accomplishments separated him from all other men, but his sorrows signaled his simple humanity. Along with the accumulation of parasites and the inventory of illnesses and injuries that had accompanied his strenuous life, the grief of losing his youngest son, Morris writes, hastened TR’s death.

“Quentin had died so young without building an adult life away from home, that Sagamore Hill was still unbearably infused with his personality,” Morris observes. Despite having a great deal in common with his father, Quentin was not drawn to politics. “Quentin’s energy,” Morris writes, with the analytical concision characteristic of his narrative style, “had been explosive rather than propulsive.”

Although inevitably uneven, given the jumbled quality of TR’s last years, when he occupied no office and searched for an elusive all-consuming purpose that might compare, somehow, to the helmsman’s role in Washington, “Colonel Roosevelt” is a book that nonetheless celebrates its subject even as it honors him by refusing to indulge in hero worship. TR was never venal or cynical, and while he had plenty of faults, he was true to himself to an almost pathological degree. Morris’ beautifully written trilogy persuades us once again how fortunate America has been in the leaders its chaotic, impractical system has somehow managed occasionally to yield.

COLONEL ROOSEVELT
Edmund Morris �
Random House
$35, 800 pages

Oliver Sacks writes beautifully in a singular style yoking compassion and curiosity to the cool professional gaze of the trained neurologist. His periodic collections of essays, including the latest, “The Mind’s Eye,” are unfailingly wise, humane and edifying. And Sacks must also be among the last practicing physicians in America making house calls.

Physician and Author Oliver Sacks

When you read about the various perceptual dilemmas they face, however, you can understand why Sacks prefers to see his patients in settings where they’re comfortable. Imagine, for example, losing the ability to identify even simple objects, as one of Sacks’ patients, Lilian, an accomplished concert pianist, did. She also could no longer read words or music, the consequence of a condition with a slow onset of symptoms called posterior cortical atrophy, or PCA.

“People with PCA,” Sacks notes, “tend to experience complex visual disturbances. Their visual disorientation may become profound: Some patients get lost in their own neighborhoods or even their own homes.” He describes placing small objects in front of Lilian during a diagnostic session and describes her often-puzzling stabs at naming what she’s seeing. Shown a “small plastic model of a wolf, she exclaimed, ‘A marvelous animal! A baby elephant, perhaps?’”

There is poignancy in these tales, an underlying melancholy that’s often redressed, in Sacks’ telling, by the courage and resilience of his patients, their ability to struggle against or even overcome seemingly intractable conditions. Most of the essays begin with a description of the symptoms of a single patient, then amble out across the larger philosophical terrain suggested by the presenting symptoms, before returning to a final observation about the outcome of this particular patient’s illness or condition.

Some of Sacks’ patients, for example, cannot distinguish one human face from another. This condition, called prosopagnosia, usually has a genetic basis, but occasionally has a later onset in people suffering strokes or other brain injuries. Sacks has perhaps more than his usual empathy for patients suffering from prosopagnosia because he, too, is prosopagnosic and often fails to recognize even his closest associates.

“My problem with recognizing faces,” Sacks write, “extends not only to my nearest and dearest, but also to myself. Thus on several occasions I have apologized for almost bumping into a large bearded man, only to realize that the large bearded man was myself in a mirror.”

Sacks mentions in a characteristic aside that his friend Chuck Close, an artist “famous for his gigantic portraits of faces, has severe lifelong prosopagnosia.” In a profound act of compensation for this perceptual deficiency, Close’s paintings make flat images that are compelling representations of an alternative reality.

Patients with prosopagnosia are often unable to recognize places and other things as well, Sacks writes, suggesting a neural link between the two conditions. Scientists studying prosopagnosia and the more general condition of visual agnosia have also identified “super-recognizers” — “people with extraordinarily good face-recognition abilities.” Reading Sacks’ descriptions of how “super-recognizers” see the world, I realized that I fall pretty far-out on the bell curve in this regard, and remember for years faces I have encountered fleetingly. I can also identify people from various angles and abbreviated views — what one super-recognizer called “a slim wedge of face.”

Sacks also writes about his own illness — a melanoma in his eye. The turn toward philosophical digression is pointed here, as he contemplates his own mortality. All of Sacks’ essays consider what it is that makes us not only human but persuade us that there is also a persistent and enduring self that is somehow real. But brain injuries especially show how fragile our “true selves” are — how what goes on inside our brains is a rich amalgam of processes that somehow moves through time and space with our physical bodies while preserving a deep and persuasive sense of continuity.

Sacks is a singular figure in the literary firmament, able to cherish and explain to laymen the hard-earned discoveries of scientific enquiry at the same time he is able to marvel at the inexplicable concatenation of accidents and contingencies that defines individual lives. “The Mind’s Eye” is a welcome addition to the rich repository of Sacks’ collected works.

THE MIND’S EYE
Oliver Sacks �
Knopf
$26.95, 288 pages