Tag Archives: nonfiction

Book review: 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy

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365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy by Charla Muller with Betsy Thorpe. New York: The Berkeley Publishing Group, 2008. 288 pages.

Charla Muller’s epigraph for 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy is from dramatist Jean Anouilh: “To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows.” Out of its context, Anouilh’s quotation summarizes Charla Muller’s attitude toward marital sex: It’s a chore and a bore. That is why, on the occasion of her husband Brad’s 40th birthday, she, in the spirit of self-sacrifice, offers him what she calls “The Gift” — sex every day for the next year. After pages of overwrought mutual analysis about the implications, her husband accepts. In one short chapter, the reader is introduced to what seems to be the most passionless marriage on the planet.

The rest of 365 Nights (give or take a few — mustn’t have sex during menstruation, for example) rarely delves into sex or even intimacy, physical or emotional. Our most penetrating look into the couple’s sex life comes when Muller says, “Wow, that was really nice” (or “yummy”). Her husband replies, “Could you pretend you’re enjoying it?” Muller responds, “How ’bout you just close your eyes.”

Between these flashes of profound love, Muller tirelessly fills the reader in on her rather narrow view of relationships, marriage, parenting, being a working mother (she works two days a week), and how giving her husband what he wants (“The Gift”) has somehow made them stronger as a couple. It’s not the intimacy itself that seems to bring them closer together, but the sense of sacrifice and the willingness to work to overcome the obstacles — not only Muller’s dislike of sex (which she seems to believe she shares with every married mother), but logistics such as work, children, activities, and the need for private time.

Perhaps married women with children who see their husbands as “sperm donors” and “providers,” as Muller writes of some of her friends, will relate to her and her view of love, marriage, and life. Undoubtedly, many will find that she validates the sexual ennui that can set in during any long-term relationship. From my single, childless perspective, she offers no insights, not even as to the underlying reasons she makes every effort to avoid sex with the man she loves and why getting ready for sex means, “I just continue lying there” (prompting her husband to say, “Could you pretend you’re interested in this?”).

When the year of “The Gift” is over, her husband Brad seems happy because he will continue to get sex more frequently (although not every day), and Muller is happy because Brad is more content and her marriage is more solid — and, to me, as free of passion as ever. Muller writes about some of the benefits of sex — it provides exercise and offers improved communication for example (she likes to talk to Brad about the mundane during the act, we learn). She mentions greater emotional intimacy, but she doesn’t convey it or what it means. She touches on the surface of the issues, but is unable or is afraid to say anything meaningful beyond the obvious. While she lies back and gives “The Gift,” she cannot bring herself to mention that she finds any physical pleasure or emotional joy in the act itself (other than that it’s “nice”). She and her husband seem to be well suited to each other, but they could be brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert from Anne of Green Gables for all the passion shown in their marriage — with or without sex.

Muller’s perky style is annoying, and her values, which she assumes we all share, are painfully shallow. She disdains ugly mini-vans (and her beloved children’s energy future) in favor of a “cool” SUV. A “polite feminist,” she believes that it’s a “rule” that women, and now men, must pluck their eyebrows (and any other hair that doesn’t meet her concept of perfect grooming and appearance). She is surprised to learn she is pregnant after just a couple of months, calling herself “very fertile” (what does this make her husband?) and making one wonder if she never learned the reasons that contraception became such a hot topic for 19th century women. She abhors the idea of aging naturally and fantasizes about “slight tweaking” through plastic surgery until her husband says, “What will she [daughter] think if she sees her mother conforming to these bizarre societal standards?” — standards to which Muller would have us all make every effort to conform.

Muller presents herself as someone you should want to chat with over coffee about the vicissitudes of married suburban life; indeed, that’s how this book came about. I couldn’t. It’s more than her overuse of words like “nice,” “gal,” and “girls” (this from a “polite feminist”) or the wearisome banality of her endless reflections. She’s one of those people — we all know at least one — who prattle nonstop without saying anything, leaving one feeling tired and empty — or energized, if that is your sort of thing.

365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy could have been a compelling story, but it would take a more interesting and thoughtful author than Charla Muller to grasp the topic and its nuances and to do it the justice it deserves.

29 August 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Encore Provence: New Adventures in the South of France

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Encore Provence: New Adventures in the South of France by Peter Mayle. New York: Random House, Inc., 2000. 240 pages.

For an unexplained reason, Peter Mayle and his unnamed wife (presumably the “Jennie” of the dedication) left paradise in Provence for Long Island. In Encore Provence, he returns to the south of France, where the food, wine, and slow pace of life again absorb his attention.

Even less structured than Toujours Provence, Encore Provence covers familiar territory from new angles. “The Unsolved Murder of the Handsome Butcher” and “Recipe for a Village” address both the insularity and charms of village life (“Recipe” much less successfully), while “How to Be a Nose,” “Discovering Oil,” and “Friday Morning in Carpentras” provide insights into the perfume, olive oil, and truffle industries, respectively. In one of the best chapters, “Restaurant Critic Makes Astonishing Discovery,” Mayle effectively and humorously discredits Ruth Reichl’s flippant dismissal of Provence. How could a serious critic, after only a month’s visit, write, “I had been dreaming of a Provence that never existed”? To help the reader find ripe tomatoes — which Reichl could not manage to do — and other products of Provence, Mayle provides the names and places for markets, vineyards, restaurants, bakeries, and producers of goods like olive oil and honey. It becomes clear that Reichl could not find Provence because she actively avoided it; perhaps she thought that deflating the expectations that Mayle helped to create was a better story than simply reinforcing them.

Several chapters, like “Curious Reasons for Liking Provence” and “Eight Ways to Spend a Summer’s Afternoon,” reveal one of the problems with Encore Provence — the lack of significant new material. More filler than substance, they are more like random personal essays than integral parts of a cohesive work, as though Mayle could not think of a better way to frame his random observations. These chapters are forced, splintered, and almost unnecessary.

Surprisingly, there is less of a sense of place. In the previous Provence books, Mayle’s stone house, with its location abutting public forest, its isolation from traffic, its drawn-out renovations, its pool that attracts thirsty sangliers, and its quirky neighbors like Faustin and Massot, gives the reader a strong sense of a place with personality. The house is at the heart of A Year in Provence. In Encore Provence, it is not clear that Mayle and his wife return to the same house or what their neighbors are like. Even the dogs are mostly absent. Without structure and intimacy, Encore Provence is nothing more than a series of disconnected travelogue stories. Perhaps weary of intrusions into his privacy, or perhaps unclear about the reasons for the first book’s success, Mayle distances himself from his reader.

There may not be much left for Mayle to say about Provence. He writes that, due to building restrictions, not much has changed. Yet he notes that “the garage and the geese are gone, and the farmhouse has sprouted wings and annexes . . . the vines have been groomed” and “the refugees’ urge for rapid [gardening] results has spawned an industry: instant gardens, shipped in and set up with astonishing speed.” These are only a couple of small changes, to be sure, but in time there will be more, and Provence will alter slowly and subtly. Mayle should know that that is the nature of change in the countryside and that, with enough demand, pressure, and money, change can accelerate, transforming a village into a resort town or farmland into suburbia.

Even if you cannot visit Provence, much of the lifestyle that Mayle describes — with food and drink of varying type and quality — is still available in many places outside France. The slow pace, the fatalistic viewpoint, the elderly gossips and moralists, the close-knit relationships, the helpfulness, and the beauty and quirks of the countryside are found in many regions. If you are as observant and open as Mayle, you may be able to find your version of Provence closer to home.

25 May 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Best of Slate

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The Best of Slate: A 10th Anniversary Anthology edited by David Plotz, introduction by Jacob Weisberg, foreword by Michael Kinsley. New York: Atlas Books, 2006. 304 pages.

First, I should note that I have no idea why I bought The Best of Slate: A 10th Anniversary Anthology. I didn’t know what Slate was, although I recently discovered that I joined the site in January 2008. I suspect I acquired the book because I’m fond of anthologies — usually collections of good or sometimes great stories built around a theme, a one-stop shop. In short,without knowing what Slate is, I wanted to read the best of its first decade.

As I learned from Michael Kinsley’s foreword, Slate began at Microsoft as an online magazine (currently owned by the Washington Post). I had in my hands a print tribute to an online publication — a way to package and sell tangible copies of electronically published words. More simply put, The Best of Slate is an opportunity to cash in on the site’s popularity, to sell books, and to get book buyers to the site.

Long-time fans of Slate may appreciate seeing articles they remember in print and having a piece of a favorite Web site in their hands. As a relative newcomer, though, I am disappointed if the articles selected by editor David Plotz truly are the best work Slate has produced in 10 years.

The first article, “Airline English” by Cullen Murphy, enlightens the reader with the obvious; airline terms such as “craft,” “crew,” “captain,” “first officer,” “deck,” “cabin,” “bulkhead,” and “hold” are derived from long-established shipping industry lingo (oddly, “pilot” didn’t make the list). If there is anyone left who hasn’t realized this, I’d be amazed. “Watching Couples Go By,” in which we discover that men like women for physical comfort and conversation and to fill his need to be needed is another space filler, but was undoubtedly included in the collection to honor its author Herbert Stein, who passed away.

I found some common ground if not insight in Seth Stevenson’s “Extroverted Like Me”; at least I recognized the emotionally numbing effects of antidepressants and the disturbing manifestations of withdrawal. Another personal essay, “Daddy Gets His Brain Back” by Michael Lewis, humorously recounts the disorientation the author feels after a head injury (“I remember that if I don’t hand in my book in six weeks, I’m [expletive]”), but ends on a flat note. “The Breakfast Table” features biting repartee between husband Timothy Noah and wife Marjorie Williams about the trivial (the posterior of Jennifer Lopez) and serious (the circumvention of Clinton’s attorney-client privilege and the social taboos around discussing racism, which is also addressed in “Racist Like Me” by Debra Dickerson).

A handful of articles provide useful background, such as “The Pledge of Allegiance” by David Greenberg, and relevant (if not original) commentary (“Fifty/Fifty Forever” by Mickey Kaus). From “What Did Bush Know?” (Fred Kaplan), we learn how 93 pages of intelligence information, caveats, and footnotes were distilled into only one page for the president’s benefit, while “The Misunderestimated Man” (Jacob Weisberg) hints at the president’s personal flaws that made this shortcut necessary. In “Unfairenheit 9/11,” Christopher Hitchens rants about Michael Moore rather than his movie, disingenuously using the same dodgy tactics of which he accuses Moore.

As a whole, The Best of Slate is disappointing. For example, the introduction to 2001 notes that, “Slate produced some of its smartest, and most moving, work in the days and months after the Sept. 11 attacks.” Yet the only piece about the attacks, “An Unlikely Hero” by Rebecca Liss, appears (toward the end of the 2002 chapter), and it is neither smart nor particularly moving despite the subject. Liss turns what could have been a compelling account of a painstaking rescue into a flat, spare story short on details or interest and focused more on why the media missed out on hero Dave Karnes (Liss reasons that, because Karnes wasn’t a police officer or firefighter, those organizations didn’t “make room” for him). When the subjects are solid, the writing is too often pedestrian.

If articles like the self-serving “Full Disclosure” by Henry Blodgett or “Not Dead at All” by Harriet McBride Johnson, who believes that liquid replacement of most of a functioning brain indicates a mere “disability,” represent The Best of Slate, I’d be afraid to see its worst. It’s like much of what appears on the Internet — it’s adequate as a time waster during, say, lunch, but not worth keeping or remembering.

18 May 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Tropic of Capricorn

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Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller. Recommended.

Like Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn is part autobiography, part memoir, part polemic, part fiction, part fantasy, and part poetry, written in near stream of consciousness as Miller experiences one epiphany after another.

As with the prior book, Miller’s ramblings are the source and the result of his efforts to define himself as an artist. Other contemporary American writers, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald, seem fascinated by their significance as artists and by the future importance of their art. In the Tropic books, Miller makes his consciousness of himself as an artist the subject of his art. In some ways, reading the Tropic books is like watching someone obsessively paint his self-portrait over and over, all with the title, Self-Portrait of the Artist.

According to Miller, “Life becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show . . . The surface of your being is constantly crumbling; within, however, you grow hard as a diamond.” He says he “was perhaps the first Dadaist in America, and I didn’t know it. Nobody understood what I was writing about or why I wrote that way. I was so lucid that they said I was daffy.” The focus is not on the art (what he is writing about) but on himself as the artist, with an anonymous readership (“nobody,” “they”) who doesn’t understand him. As if his own belief in himself as an artist were not enough to convince us, he quotes a series of friends who insist that he should become a writer.

While Miller lacks objectivity and security, he has moments of insight into the current human condition. “Now we are eating of the same bread, but without benefit of communion, without grace. We are eating to fill our bellies and our hearts are cold and empty. We are separate but not individual,” following an anecdote about sour rye, is a brilliantly simple description of a world he sees as cold and mechanical, when progress and war have robbed men of their humanity. “The smell of a dead horse . . . is still a thousand times better than the smell of burning chemicals . . . the sight of a dead horse with a bullet hole in the temple . . . is still a better sight than that of a group of men in blue aprons coming out of the arched doorway of the tin factory . . .” Honest death and decay, “after life,” are better than “death from the roots, isolating men, making them bitter and fearful and lonely, giving them fruitless energy . . .”

Superior to Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn still shows a lack of discipline, or a contempt for it. Separating the poetic gems are long, rambling passages that are sometimes pointless and sometimes nonsensical. He continues the use of incoherent metaphors such as, “Inwardly they are filled with worms. A tiny spark and they blow up.” Sometimes his attempts to play with words and prose are more childish than literary or artistic, for example, ” . . . deeper and deeper in sleep sleeping, the sleep of the deep in deepest sleep, at the nethermost depth full slept, the deepest and sleepest sleep of sleep’s sweet sleep,” and so on.

Tropic of Capricorn is uneven, ranging from the lively and the lovely to the self-conscious and tedious. It’s unfortunate that Miller expended so much effort trying to convince the reader (and himself) of his status as an evil monster and artist (perhaps with the idea that they are synonymous) and so little culling the irrelevant and refining the rest. Miller’s perspective and vision are interesting, even compelling, when not muddied by his fascination with himself and by his need to stand out.

13 October 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Mothman Prophecies

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The Mothman Prophecies by John A Keel. Recommended for fun.

The Mothman Prophecies opens with a mysterious event — an unusual-looking stranger knocks on a door in rural West Virginia during a storm to ask to use a phone. The couple who live in the house can’t help him — and three weeks later both are victims of the Silver Bridge collapse. A visit from the devil, one of his minions, or the angel of death? No. As it turns out, it was Keel himself, stranded and looking for assistance. This first anecdote shows how easy it is for superstitious people to misinterpret an ordinary event.

Most of The Mothman Prophecies consists of such anecdotes, some with explanations, many without. Many, not all, occur in the Ohio valley area centering on Point Pleasant, the focal point of the “Mothman” sightings, Point Pleasant was located on the West Virginia side of the Silver Bridge, which collapsed on December 15, 1967, due to a combination of factors, including heavy, backed-up traffic and a flawed piece of steel, the failure of which triggered the bridge’s collapse.

Keel cleverly builds on anecdote after anecdote. Even if some are questionable or unbelievable, they all can’t be, or that seems to be his rationale. Dozens of witnesses can’t be mistaken, lying, or paranoid. For the susceptible, this accumulation of horror stories makes this a frightening book. Some of those people, including Keel himself, must have seen something — from the strangely moving lights in the sky to the aerodynamically impossible “Mothman,” which doesn’t flap its apparently unnecessary wings but flies straight up like a helicopter.

Keel decries “self-style investigators” and believes himself to be a thorough professional. Yet his reporting, whether first- or second-hand, is full of holes. He tells of an odd stranger with “thyroid eyes” (a common feature of these sightings) who comes into a fashionable New York City watering hole but can’t read the menu and doesn’t know how to cut or eat a steak. He tells the waitress he’s from “another world.” That is where Keel leaves the story, “a stranger in a strange land,” with some seemingly trivial but critical questions unasked and unanswered, such as: Did he understand what the check was? How did he pay? Did he know to leave a tip? If so, did he leave an appropriate one? Where did he keep his money and what condition was it in? Without answers to those questions — things that a waitress would easily remember — her assessment that he’s “another put-on artist” seems most likely.

He visits a farm where, coincidentally, the farmer has seen a UFO that frightened his cows off (in another anecdote, the exposed cows are found dead), burns out a piece of electrical equipment, and leaves behind a “fairy circle.” All this is so familiar to Keel that he doesn’t bring in someone to perform chemical analyses to see, for example, if there is any kind of residue in the circle that would help to explain its cause. The opportunity seems to be deliberately missed.

Conveniently, Keel’s “ultra-dimensional beings” operate in a way that precludes independent verification of their existence. Cameras and film malfunction. Supporting witnesses are rendered unconscious or develop amnesia. While Keel believes these beings are interested in him, they contact him primarily through third parties whose reliability is questionable. When “Jane” reports that an envelope he sent was tampered with in the mail, he never considers the possibility that this woman, whose behavior is odd, is telling him what he wants to hear.

The beings also control the behavior of contactees. Dozens of “Orientals” with “sharp features” (since when do Asians have “sharp features”?) and “thyroid eyes” are invited into homes for hours at a time, and their questions about personal matters are answered freely. Personally, I don’t know anyone who would do this.

“Jane” obligingly takes pills provided by her contacts,which make her ill and which prove to be an ordinary sulfa drug. Other people don’t hesitate to climb aboard alien ships. Perhaps most telling, many of the descriptions are vague and refer to contemporary fixtures and technology. “Frosted glass” is one of the few details provided, and “Men in Black,” who are smart enough to produced unissued license plate numbers but not smart enough to obtain late-model vehicles, use the same kind of camera and clunky flash available to 1960s reporters.

Keel cites a conversation with Gray Barker, who claimed not to have spoken with him on that occasion; Barker was later proven to be a hoaxer, and witnesses claimed that he did make the call while drunk. In fact, between “Jane’s” assertions, Keel’s stretched association of “A Pal” with “Apholes,” and his phone troubles, he seems to have become a paranoiac by the end. He even determines that the phone company is tapping his phone, but doesn’t explain why.

He assesses the reliability of each of his witnesses, but he is not reliable. For example, he discusses a map developed by anthropologists that shows that Indians avoided West Virginia. Keel doesn’t provide a source, which makes it difficult to verify this assertion. Of course, there were Indians in West Virginia, despite his claim.

The Mothman Prophecies is entertaining, and Keel tries to make the cumulative evidence compelling. The “facts” are not always accurate, the witnesses are not reliable (“Jane,” his favorite, least of all), and questions are not raised or answered.

In 2007, do “ultra-dimensional beings” tap into digital phones? VOIP? Mobiles? E-mail? Instant messages? Digital cable? Have they adapted to today’s technology? The anxieties that underlie The Mothman Prophecies seem to reflect those of the times — the fears surrounding the Cold War, Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex,” and big government. The Mothman Prophecies is a manifestation of the troubled times in which it was set. Today’s “Mothman” or “Indrid Cold” might be very different creatures indeed.

15 April 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

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Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream by Barbara Ehrenreich. Recommended.

In the 1960s, the possibility of layoffs was always present in the minds of the automotive assembly and steel workers at the Ford Motor Company Stamping Plant and Bethlehem Steel Plant in Lackawanna, New York. I had friends whose fathers were out of work for months at a time. The fear of layoffs and plant closings was so prevalent that even at a very young age I asked my dad if he were going to be laid off. “No,” he assured me. “I’m so high in seniority that if they lay me off the whole plant is in trouble.” Today, that threat of layoff and long-term unemployment preys on the minds of those employees who once seemed invincible — middle and upper managers in marketing, IT, human resources, even accounting. In Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, Barbara Ehrenreich explores the bleak gray world of the white-collar unemployed.

Bait and Switch was intended to be the white-collar equivalent of Ehrenreich’s previous book, Nickel and Dimed, but she soon finds that, once you are outside the fortress of “corporate America,” for whatever reason, it is hard to get back inside.

As part of her effort to obtain a managerial or executive position in public relations, event planning, or communications, Ehrenreich encounters a parade of people who “did it right.” They graduated from college, obtained the type of job my father would have described as “good,” and worked hard and well — only to find themselves the victims of cost cutting, outsourcing, or “rightsizing.” Along the way, Ehrenreich discovers the cottage industry of “career coaches.” These seeming parasites on the unemployed range from the perky Kimberly, who represents “some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness,” to Patrick, who blames the victims and who is last seen as one himself, depressed and popping sleeping pills. Whichever approach they take, whether it’s boundless optimism or unwarranted flagellation, these career coaches are skewered with Ehrenreich’s detached ironic humor that highlights their greed, their cruelty, and their utter ineffectiveness.

As Ehrenreich “networks” (although not with her fellow unemployed, per the direction of her coaches), she begins to piece together what the corporate world expects, if not what corporate life is like. She goes to mind-numbing seminar after mind-numbing seminar, held in large windowless rooms, where the attendees listen with zombie-like passivity to speaker after speaker for brilliant insights that never come. Meanwhile she finds that employers care less about qualifications and experience than about likability and “passion.” She is bemused to learn that employees must balance the ability to be a likable, passive team player with the appearance of being a passionate idealist. In this game, too large a swing in either direction is an invitation to leave, especially for older workers.

Ehrenreich’s attitude is sometimes irritating and illogical in a way that the reader is not supposed to notice. For example, she dismisses personality tests such as the Enneagram and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as unscientific, with “zero predictive value even in its own terms.” At every opportunity, she mentions how inaccurate the MBTI is when her results label her an “ENTJ” — after she has stated that she “race[d] through the test with the mad determination of a monkey that’s been given a typewriter and assigned to generate Shakespeare’s oeuvre, hoping that some passably coherent individual emerges.” Her own admission damages the credibility of her otherwise well-supported criticism.

Although Ehrenreich tries to convey the misery and hopelessness of the white-collar unemployed through her descriptions of and stories about the people she meets, her efforts to do so fall flat simply because she never feels the fear that they do; she can walk away from her fake job search at any time and resume her own presumably lucrative career without going into enormous debt and worrying about possible homelessness. The reader is aware of her disengagement, which, while allowing her to view corporate America coldly and dispassionately, and with sarcasm and contempt, does not really enable her to convey the despair of the victims in the same way that a true victim could. Meanwhile, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream seems to be an ill-fitting title — it’s not clear what the “bait and switch” is, and the “American dream” is associated with the ability of the poor and immigrant classes to rise to prosperity, even wealth, through hard work. As a twist on this idea, it doesn’t work.

It’s unfortunate, although no surprise, that Ehrenreich was unable to obtain a job and to write the book that she wanted to about the inner workings of corporate America. I would like to have seen what she would have made of her experiences from the inside. As it is, her efforts, limited as they were, inspired her to encourage the downtrodden, white-collar middle class to organize and strike back. I suspect that corporate America is too strong to notice or care.

18 February 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony

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Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony by Lee Miller. Not recommended.

Armed with a master’s degree in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University, Lee Miller tries to combine history with the arts of the novelist and dramatist. Not successfully, as she might say in one of her numerous misplaced sentence fragments.

As the subtitle implies, Roanoke focuses less on the mystery of the lost colonists than on Miller’s convoluted approach to solving it. She takes the reader on so many voyages, to so many places with so many peoples, and through so many plots and treacheries, none in chronological order, so that within just a few pages that reader feels as lost as the colonists themselves.

Miller tries to use the techniques of the novelist and dramatist to heighten the effect, including a breathless tense that implies the present: “In one of the last glimpses we have of them, it [what?] has already begun: colonist George Howe has been found dead, floating face down among the reeds along the shore.” This, along with the use of the present tense elsewhere, makes this event sound ominous indeed, until later it is revealed who killed him, how, and why. While this information boded ill for the colony, it was not mysterious in the way Lee hints. Howe’s death plays a small role in the Miller’s solution of the “crime,” but it is for the most part a minor red herring.

The author plays up innumerable events and questions as though the revelation of identities and machinations will be shocking to the reader, much in the manner of the present-day tabloid. One of these questions is, “Who are the Mandoag?” This point, raised continually as other nations refer to them ambiguously, mysteriously, and with fear, seemingly becomes the crux of the mystery and the fate of the colonists. After such a buildup, the unveiling has no dramatic impact and little interest. Even worse, Miller’s case for their identity is speculative, weak, and inconclusive.

This describes much of Miller’s approach. She frequently comes to conclusions through process of elimination and then finds supporting evidence. Once she has determined the religious affiliation of the colonists, then their actions, and the mother country’s lack of interest in them, make sense. Such an argument is weak and easily undercut. Miller does so herself when she says that England had become so overpopulated that she didn’t want any colonists back, whatever their affiliation may have been.

Miller’s speculations do not always seem logical. She writes, “And why would they [the colonists] assume that a strange fruit, growing in an unfamiliar land, is fit to eat? In fact, we would expect them to err on the side of caution.” On the contrary, I might expect people who have been at sea for months, living on dry rations, to be so hungry for fresh fruits of the earth that caution might not occur to them in the excitement of the moment, that they might eat any fruit that appeared fleshy and edible. Miller does not speculate as to what the fruit might have been, but concludes that the colonists must have been told by a treacherous individual that it was safe to eat. I would question why an individual would take the risk of betraying such a large number of people in whose company he is stuck and why they would not punish him. The answer could be that they were utterly dependent on his him to get them to Roanoke and/or Chesapeake Bay. Still, the question of this particular betrayal is not as clear as Miller portrays; this is typical of her thought process throughout.

Her writing style and habit of jumping around erratically in time and space is frustrating and tiresome for a reader who is not familiar with the facts of the Roanoke voyages. She tries to use sentence fragments for dramatic effect, but has no idea how to do so. Most of these fall flat. For example, “White pushes ahead, the sailors following. Out of their element.” Since this fragment is not followed up with something that happens because White and the sailors are “out of their element,” it is pointless and adds nothing. Numerous fragments like these are distracting and detract from the narrative. A good writer knows to use such a device sparingly, but Miller indulges in it relentlessly.

By the end of the book, I knew a little more about Elizabethan England, John White, Sir Walter Raleigh, and the nations of the Roanoke area than I did before, although I have qualms about the reliability of Miller’s interpretations of her sources. Her ultimate conclusion about the fate of the colonists seems little different from that of other historians, although she probably presents the case differently. I recommend reading a more straightforward history of Roanoke colony before tackling this book and being prepared for more drama, badly done, than history.

30 November 2006
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ

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Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman. Highly recommended.

You know the feeling — your spouse says something that strikes you the wrong way, and involuntarily you tense up. You can almost feel your blood pressure rise. Without thinking, you respond emotionally, and soon what may have been intended as an innocuous comment has sparked a full-fledged marital battle that may leave as its aftermath lingering feelings of anger and resentment.

In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman describes the physiological processes that drive and are driven by emotion and their purpose, the ability of emotions to hijack rational thought and the short- and long-term physiological and psychological effects, and the personal and social benefits of teaching and learning how to manage the emotions.

In the opening chapters, Goleman discusses in simplified terms the complex interactions of the brain when emotion-causing stimuli are perceived, with the emotional mind reacting more quickly than the rational. For example, the sight of a snake may start the fight-or-flight response; the structures of the emotional brain prime the body to strike out at the snake or to flee from it. Then, after the body is tensed, the rational mind notices that it is a harmless garter snake. The efficiency of the brain circuitry, along with its emotional memory and associative abilities, helps to explain the power of the emotions. Citing research, Goleman suggests that the ability to recognize and manage emotions and emotional response, primarily learned from parents, family, friends, school, and the community, is a greater indicator of success in relationships, work, and society than intelligence tests. It is not necessarily how well you learn or what you know, but indeed how well you play with others.

Goleman covers a variety of topics: depression, mania, anxiety, PTSD, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, relationship issues, abuse, and others. For example, a feeling of sadness can be transformed in the brain into a lingering mood and ultimately into a full-blown clinical depression. He shows how emotional intelligence can be used to control the brain’s circuitry so that pathological conditions like depression, mania, and PTSD can be managed or at least controlled.

Citing an increase worldwide in indicators of emotional and social problems, Goleman focuses on children and the importance of pilot programs that teach such skills as empathy, assertiveness without aggression, self-awareness and self-control, conflict resolution, and so forth. He discusses several studies that show measurable, long-term benefits of such programs, and the negative results when children do not have the opportunity to learn these skills at home, at school, on the playground, or in the community.

Goleman does not always seem trustworthy. His description of the 1963 “Career Girl” murders, intended to illustrate an emotional hijacking, does not match other accounts in key areas. He also leaves out facts, such as that several knives were used, instead saying that the killer “slashed and stabbed them over and over with a kitchen knife.” He does not mention the sexual assaults in “those few minutes of rage unleashed.” The crime he depicts fits his picture of an emotional hijacking, but other accounts show it to have been a more deliberate crime of longer duration. In a section on empathy, he says that one-year-olds “still seem confused over what to do about [another child’s tears],” citing an instance where a “one-year-old brought his own mother over to comfort the crying friend, ignoring the friend’s mother, who was also in the room.” There is no confusion here, but a logical, pre-verbal assumption: “My mother is comforting to me when I am upset; therefore, she will be comforting to you, too.” This kind of thinking is not limited to one-year-olds; for example, how many times has a friend recommended an action movie or horror novel to you, saying that you will “love it,” even though your known preference is historical romance or another completely different genre? Even adults assume that “what works for me will work for you.”

Goleman also discusses school bullies and outcasts in detail. He places so much emphasis on the probability that their peers are reacting to their lack of emotional intelligence that he misses some important exceptions and nuances, such as children who are social outcasts for socioeconomic and racist reasons or because they are nonconformist individualists, in which cases it is the other children who display a lack of empathy and emotional intelligence. On the flip side, there are children (and adults) who are not empathetic or emotionally intelligent but who are well liked, even popular, for other reasons, tangible and intangible (e.g., socioeconomic status, influence, some mysterious force of personality or charisma). Many successful, popular people exhibit little emotional intelligence, which Goleman could have addressed. In addition, while Goleman cites a wealth of research supporting his arguments, he does not present any dissenting opinions, or whether any exist. This weakens his presentation.

Emotional Intelligence is an insightful, enlightening look at how awareness of the emotions and their physiology can help us to manage them when they affect our lives negatively or when they become pathological (e.g., depression). I found the book to be a practical guide to recognizing when I am reacting rather than listening to others or hearing them correctly. It has helped me to cope with colleagues who are lacking in emotional intelligence and to give them subtle guidance. While most of Emotional Intelligence is intuitive to a perceptive mind, the book serves as a guide and reminder that even a little emotional intelligence can make relationships, situations, and life more positive, more productive, and less stressful.

13 August 2006
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Tropic of Cancer

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Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. Not recommended.

In his 1960 introduction to Tropic of Cancer, Karl Shapiro said, “I call Henry Miller the greatest living author because I think he is,” “. . . as a spiritual example he stands among the great men of our age,” and “. . . he [Orwell] predicts that Miller will set the pace and attitude for the novelist of the future. This has not happened yet, but I agree that it must.” Shapiro does not support any of these points in his essay, and nothing about Tropic of Cancer supports them, either.

Tropic of Cancer consists of 318 pages recounting Miller’s experience as an American expatriate in Paris and expounding his personal philosophy, often in ways that are rambling and painfully nonsensical. Miller’s stories about his friends are tedious, pointless, and catty; like Miller, they seem to have been talentless hacks whose belief in their own artistic abilities makes them artists and writers, as though believing is being. Miller writes, “A year ago, six months ago, I thought I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am” — which is the type of arrogant pretentiousness he mocks in virtually all of his acquaintances.

When they are not creating, or talking about philosophy or creating, Miller and his circle seem to spend nearly every moment picking up women (and disease). They rarely use a neutral term such as “woman” when there are so many obscene, demeaning words with which to objectify the gender. The women that Miller and friends find are invariably portrayed as stupid, drunken, irrational, loose, sly, deceptive, and good primarily for one function, which Miller turns into a squalid, cold, joyless act. In spite of all the vice and the “living,” no one seems to be having fun, and some characters, notably Fillmore, find themselves nearly trapped into the bourgeoisie life.

Miller expresses contempt for the machine, the industrial age, and money — although he schemes to keep 2,800 francs from Fillmore’s mistress and revels in having so much in his pocket. Often hungry, Miller obsesses about food and relies on his friends to support him. When he describes his Indian friend Kepi as “. . . a scrounger, a sort of human tick who fastens himself to the hide of even the poorest compatriot,” he could be talking about himself as he bitterly complains about those of his friends who are stingy with money, accommodations, food, and wine.

Miller’s logic about the working world is facile; he writes, “If you want bread, you’ve got to get in harness, get in lockstep.” On the surface, this is true, but it never seems to occur to him that, if you want bread, someone must cultivate, raise, and harvest the wheat and produce the other components; someone must transform these components into bread; and someone must deliver it to the shops and cafes. In other words, if most people weren’t in “lock step,” Miller could choose to starve or set himself to produce bread, joining the world in harness. He makes his choice clear, then whines about it. He may despise those who support him, whether they are friends or workers, but that is perhaps because he, a misanthrope who finds fault with everyone but himself, needs the very people he denigrates (including “the grocer, the baker, the shoemaker, the butcher, etc. — all imbecilic-looking clodhoppers”), a reliance which he resents. He hates the machine and the machine mind, but offers no alternatives.

Seemingly incapable of sincere feeling, Miller finds human emotion amusing. When a friend says, “A boy can break your heart . . . He’s so damned beautiful! And so cruel!” Miller writes, “We had to laugh at this. It sounded preposterous. But Collins was in earnest.” When an acquaintance to whom he owes money dies, he writes, “At any rate, he was killed in an automobile accident shortly after my arrival, a circumstance which left me twenty-three francs to the good.”

Shapiro claims that Miller is a poet, but his attempts at poetic and philosophic ramblings often make little if any sense. Speaking of buildings and statues, Miller says, ” . . . they must be saturated with my anguish,” the kind of bad metaphor in which he frequently indulges. He describes artists such as himself as the “inhuman ones.” “I am inhuman! I say it with a mad, hallucinated grin, and I will keep on saying it though it rain crocodiles. Behind my words are all those grinning, leering, skulking skulls, some dead and grinning a long time, some grinning as if they had lockjaw, some grinning with the grimace of a grin, the foretaste and aftermath of what is always going on.” Whenever these attempts at poetic philosophy appeared, rambling on for pages, I found myself yearning for a return to his insipid stories about prostitutes, disease, friends, and hunger.

Tropic of Cancer is perhaps the worst book I have ever read (and I did promise myself that I would read Tropic of Capricorn). Shapiro says, “There are not many of these emancipated beings left in our world, these clowns and clairvoyants, celebrants of the soul and of the flesh and of the still-remaining promise of America.” If Miller, with his whining, his criticism, his holier-than-everyone attitude, his “art,” his two-dimensional view of people, and his obsession with excrement, is the “greatest” of these souls, may I never meet the least.

24 May 2006
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I, Genius of the Golden Age

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The Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I, Genius of the Golden Age by Christopher Hibbert. Not recommended.

The adjective “Elizabethan” invokes a vision of an era of sumptuous dress, religious strife, European conflict, and the flourishing of the dramatic arts. The Virgin Queen is a study of the ruler for whom the time is named, and her rule, which lasted for an almost-unprecedented 45 years.

Hibbert takes a primarily episodic approach to Elizabeth’s life, from her birth as the unwanted daughter of Henry VIII and his second, ill-fated wife, Ann Boleyn. When Henry finally produces a legitimate male heir, Elizabeth is reduced from “princess” to “lady.” After her unpopular, Catholic half-sister Mary ascends to the throne and she is vaguely implicated in some plots against the new queen, Elizabeth is imprisoned despite her seeming subservience and her pleas of innocence, devotion, and loyalty.

Raised away from the court by hired nobility and taught by Cambridge scholars, Elizabeth appears to be both demure and autocratic. The important point is “appears,” because, while Elizabeth in her correspondence is deferential and in her appearance demure, her peers invariably see her as withdrawn, haughty, and “proud and disdainful” — traits that “much blemished the handsomeness and beauty of her person” (Sir William Sidney). Mary, not unjustifiably paranoid, does not believe in Elizabeth’s humility, honesty, or loyalty. Hibbert’s portrayal of Elizabeth, who craves the adoration of peers, councilors, and subjects alike, seems to support Mary’s assessment.

Elizabeth proves to be arrogant and autocratic, allowing no one to question either her or her rights as ruler. She is keenly aware of the importance of having the support of the populace, which she enjoys in contrast to the despised “Bloody Mary.” She ignores the advice of privy council, however, when it suits her, occasionally to the detriment of her popularity.

Hibbert does not explain why or how Elizabeth, kept out of the way during the reigns of her half-brother and half-sister, became so popular. This points to one of the flaws of Hibbert’s episodic approach; recounting Elizabeth’s life in terms of “Subjects and Suitors” (although not all of them), “Papists and Puritans,” “The Queen in her Privy Chamber,” “Traitors and Rebels” (again, not all of them), and so forth, veils or distorts much of the historical context of Elizabeth’s development and reign. Within one chapter, she may be young at one point and in late middle age at another. With England’s changing allegiances and relationships with France and Spain, it is difficult to track what is happening at a given time and why. Elizabeth’s most noted accomplishment, England’s defeat of the Spanish armada, is covered briefly and superficially, almost as an aside, leaving the reader with the impression that it was happenstance that no one, including Elizabeth or the privy council, had much to do with; it just happened, with little explanation.

The tale of Elizabeth’s suitors can be equally confusing. Hibbert describes her negotiations with Henry, Duke of Anjou (later Henry III of France), when he was 20 and, “in fact, twenty years younger than herself.” A few pages later, Hibbert discusses her negotiations with his younger brother Francis when Francis is “not yet nineteen” and she is 39, yet it appears that the talks with the older brother occurred first, which would make sense. Even more confusing, the negotiations with younger brother Francis continued until she was 45 (they would be the last hopes of getting her married).

Elizabeth’s treatment of religious conflict is glossed over. While Mary is noted for her brutal repression of Protestants, Elizabeth, at least in this biography, is a conservative Protestant who fears and loathes radicals of any kind, Protestant or Catholic. During her reign, repression is focused primarily on the rebellious poor; she is less interested in punishing the wealthy nobility than in grabbing their riches.

As portrayed by Hibbert, Elizabeth is a parsimonious, greedy, emotionally needy woman who wishes to rule absolutely but who cannot make a necessary, definitive decision, such as signing the death warrant for her conniving cousin, Mary Stuart. The privy council, led by Lord Burghley, the Earl of Leicester, and others, devote much of their efforts to manipulating this indecisive autocrat into decisions they want and to making sure that she cannot renege on them — an ironic situation for the woman who says to Burghley’s son, “Little man, little man, the word must is not to be used to princes.”

There are several weaknesses in addition to the episodic structure. For example, the queen herself is not quoted often enough in key areas, yet Hibbert devotes one-third of a page to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem speculating about how she might have felt during her confinement in the Tower of London.

Most notably, however, the book’s subtitle is never explained — neither why the era is “golden” nor why the queen was the “genius” of it. While the biography makes it clear that Elizabeth had a strong personality, as did her parents, the nation’s successes seem to have been the work of the privy council under the leadership of Lord Burghley and of adventurers like Sir Walter Ralegh. Elizabeth is not shown even to have played a role in, for example, nurturing the famed playwrights of the time, such as Shakespeare, Marlow, and Beaumont. The subtitle implies that Elizabeth’s brilliance inspired a benign, cultured age, while the text shows a woman so cold and petty that, when her best friend and seeming lover Leicester dies, she worries only about controlling his estates and monies, and so indecisive that her own privy councilors avoid working with her whenever possible. The age itself is brutal, with the crowd “disgusted by the spectacle” of a drawing and quartering performed, against tradition, while the victims are still alive.

At best, The Virgin Queen is a brief, superficial biography that leaves the reader hungry for more — more about Burghley, Leicester, Mary Stuart, and others, but not about Elizabeth herself, who somehow becomes a supporting player in her own biography.

13 March 2006
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf