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Purportedly a photo of the last Great Auk, on the Icelandic island of Eldey. It was strangled on July 3, 1844, because it’s what we do.
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My newest book, The Fall, consists of many brief sections, often just a page or two in length.
I never know which sections to read aloud on school visits, or to share here. Nothing feels exactly emblematic, since it’s all about the cumulation of detail, images, perceptions, facts.
This part was inspired by Elizabeth Kolbert’s brilliant book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. I’ve been telling everyone to read it since the book came out, and I’m glad to see that it recently won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
In my imagination, I thought that maybe a science teacher had read the book and passed along the story of the auks to my book’s narrator. To get that teacher’s name, I thought of my pal, Lisa Dolan, who has dedicated her career to pressing good books into the hands of young readers.
Describe your latest book. My new book, Thunder and Lightning, is about weather and humankind through the ages. How did the last good book you read end up in your hands, and why did you read it? I'm reading Ian Frazier's On the Rez, which was given to me by a friend. Fantastic book. Aside [...]
Kolbert considers the rapacious effects of humanity's unmitigated conquest of our planet and its biota — and the harrowing legacy our actions (and inactions) have ultimately wrought. Forgoing an alarmist approach in favor of a measured, well-reasoned style, Kolbert's shrewd reporting is both vital and engrossing. Books mentioned in this post The Sixth Extinction: An [...]
Every week, we gather together a small pile of newly released titles that we agree should be on everyone's radar. We deem these titles our New Favorites (check out our recent picks here). Now that the year is winding down, we thought we'd take a look back at some of the standouts, in case you [...]
Earlier this summer the impeccable Bill Wolfe invited me to write a short piece for his beautiful blog,
"Read her Like an Open Book" that focuses on the work of women writers (their methods, their work). I had been thinking a lot about books that matter and the clicking tock, about the world we're in and the role of writers. And so I wrote a quick piece on the topic that began an interesting conversation out there in the virtual world.
A few weeks later urgency was still on my mind, and my dear friends at
Chicago Tribune gave me room to expand on the thesis. This time I included books—both fiction and nonfiction—that have lately impressed me as significant.
That piece runs
here today.
With
Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo does more than merely bear witness in Annawadi, the slum that grew up in the shadows of the Mumbai airport and features a sewage lake, horses painted to mimic zebras, and every possible form of corruption.
She does more than sit with the trash pickers, the schemers, the envious, the hungry, the souls who conclude that death is the only way out.
She tells a story. She involves her readers in the intimate dramas of an open-wound place. She compels us to turn the pages to find out what will happen to the prostituting wife with half a leg, the boy who is quick to calculate the value of bottle caps, the man with the bad heart valve, the "best" girl who hopes to sell insurance some day, the "respectable" rising politician who sleeps with whomever will help her further rise, the police who invent new ways to crush crushed souls.
She engages us, and because she does, she leaves us with a story we won't forget. Like
Elizabeth Kolbert, another extraordinary
New Yorker writer, Boo takes her time to discover for us the unvarnished facts, the pressing needs, the realities of things we might not want to think about.
But even if we don't think about them, they are brutally real. They are.
A passage:
What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too. In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world's great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.
Like the photos featured in
this earlier blog post, the picture above is not Mumbai; I've never been to India. It is Juarez, another dry and needing place on this earth.
In Alaska you see not just the glaciers, but where the glaciers so recently were—the stones scraped back as the ice retreated, the rocks barren and unsure.
You are told stories about the ravages left behind by ocean-scraping shrimping technology, about the muck of salmon farms, about the flowers that haven't bloomed yet, perhaps won't.
You see brilliant sunflower starfish, and you are told they are dying.
You see a sea lion choking on a fisherman's net, and you groan, and you are told, "Do you eat fish? If you do, you are partly responsible."
You see children loving the world as the boat glides by, and you want this world for those children.
You see your own face reflected up from the 38-degree sea. You, photographing the blues and purples, the otters and the whales, the mist. You, seeing.
You love this earth. You love it fiercely. And your heart is breaking.
Among the many brilliant writers who have been exhorting us to care more deeply for the world is Elizabeth Kolbert, whose work calls out to us from the pages of
The New Yorker, and whose books,
Field Notes from a Catastrophe and
The Sixth Extinction, are brutally honest and devastatingly clear.
Humans have marched themselves up to the precipice. We are standing on the cliff. We are still not doing what needs doing. Despite the fact that the glaciers are dying, the seas are rising, and nations are disappearing. Despite the fact that super storms blow in now with terrible regularity—proof of all the acid we've dropped into the sea, proof of the power of sea inches.
I don't mean to lecture. I'm not a scientist. I read. I urge you to read Elizabeth Kolbert. I give you this, the final paragraph, of
The Sixth Extinction.
There are choices, still, to be made:
Obviously, the fate of our own species concerns us disproportionately. But at the risk of sounding anti-human—some of my best friends are humans!—I will say that it is not, in the end, what's most worth attending to. Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy. The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have—or have not—inherited the earth.
