Elephants, their majesty and their power in The Elephant Whisperer

From The Week of March 3, 2014

The world is a playground for humanity. This is the inevitable conclusion drawn by a species that, for thousands of years, has flourished as Earth's apex predator. No other creature can match our intelligence, our self-awareness, our emotional depth. No other species has produced poets and playwrights, gods and scientists. These findings, these thought experiments, distinguish us from the great dumb herd that comprises the world we are free to exploit.

But naturally, this is nonsense, the destructive conclusion of biased thinking. For humans typically only respect as intelligent things they understand. Present to us music and math problems, politics and prose, that we, on some level, comprehend and we are more than willing to acknowledge your personhood, your worthiness. But communicate to us in a language we're not geared to understand -- the skitterings of the monkey, the song of the whale, the bone-deep vibrations of the elephant -- and you are a beast of burden, a thing whose power is to be harnessed and used to our benefit. This inexcusable intellectual arrogance has not only allowed us to ravage our planet, it has permitted us to do it guilt free. The costs are immeasurable, a truth vividly illustrated in Mr. Anthony's touching life story.

Compared to much of the rest of the world, Africa is a wonderland of biodiversity. Swamps and forests, deserts and jungles together contain a breathtaking spectrum of life, from tiny spiders to gigantic elephants, from venomous snakes to harmless dogs, a balance ecosystem in which the ruthless, millennia-long dance of nature and evolution has unfolded. But now, after countless centuries of natural ebb and flow, this treasure trove of life is under threat, not only from encroaching humans but their externalities as well. Urbanization, climate change and trophy hunting have reduced this once vibrant place to a shadow of what it was. Every year, the deserts grow at the expanse of the forests and once populous creatures are hunted for their meat and their horns, as the glories of evolution are reduced to cliched mementos of man's undeserved prowess.

Recently, however, movements have ignited to push back against this butchery of the wild. Conservationists have succeeded in having huge swaths of African territory designated as nature preserves where the ecosystem is allowed to flourish unmolested by all but a handful of poachers who are dealt with violently and mercilessly. Staffed by naturalists whose life's work is the understanding of and treatment of animals, and funded both by governments and tourism, these reserves hold a mirror up to the world, of how it once was and how it will someday never be, the essence of natural, if cruel, harmony.

The story of Lawrence Anthony, the head of the Thula Thula Game Reserve, The Elephant Whisperer is a charming adventure through the life of a world-class conservationist. Organized around Anthony's reception of a herd of elephants abused and hunted by man and the means by which he restores their health and their trust, the work expands to include lush descriptions of the Reserve: its incredible wildlife, its caring staff, its venomous dangers and its thorny politics which are uneasy at the best of times. Throughout, we are afforded glimpses of lives lived with purpose, not to gain advantage, not to hoard wealth, not even to accrue power; simply to hold on to the glories of what came before, beauty we are all-too-eager to bulldoze in favor of another town, another residential complex, another hotel and casino. In this, it is hard not to think of Anthony and those like him as the guardians of nature, as stewards of life the rest of us dismiss as unworthy.

There can be no doubt that Mr. Anthony's charm and passion rides high throughout The Elephant Whisperer, but it is to the credit of Anthony and his biographer that the elephant herd is the work's beating heart. Over and over, the authors demonstrate the grace and intelligence of these majestic creatures who appear as emotionally connected to their allies and their environment as they are willing to fiercely protect it. Described in vivid detail, their five-ton bodies seem as massive as their awareness of the external world is keen, communicating complex notions of friendship and suspicion with devastatingly simple gestures that leave the reader yearning to witness even one of these life-altering moments of cross-species connection. For they leave no doubt that we are not alone on this world we've claimed, that we share it with others who too-often go unheard in the congress of Earth's affairs.

There are flaws here. For a conservationist, Mr. Anthony is a little too fond of recounting his own successes. The Elephant Whisperer's first half is almost entirely about the compassion that Anthony and his friends have for the animals they steward. One cannot help but imagine an alternate text in which the animals feature more prominently than the humans. However, beginning in the work's second half, a series of devastating failures on Anthony's part allows the reader to forge an emotional connection with him and his cause. We are made to understand just how much this means to him and how much of a difference it makes to the creatures in the reserve. This sweeps aside concerns of egotism, leaving in its wake a heart warmed by the world he is fortunate enough to know so well.

A read with the power to re-shape the way one thinks about both Earth and our role in its concrete future... (4/5 Stars)

The many faces of man and India in the long and winding Shantaram

From The Week of July 22nd, 2013

Though we can try to broaden our experiences with travel and literature, exposing ourselves to classes and customs of which we know little or nothing, we will never know others the way we know ourselves. From the thoughts that define our darkest moments to the rhythms of our lives indelibly shaped by the cultures that nurtured us, this is what we know. Everywhere else, we are strangers, floating through societies, defined by languages and landscapes, that would require years to understand. But what if we don't even belong to the places that nurtured us? What if, even there, we are misfits, our energies and temperaments mismatched with what we know? Then escape is our only option, a commitment to life as a stranger in a strange land, the price of which is exquisitely captured in Gregory David Roberts' sprawling work of autobiographical fiction.

The product of a working-class upbringing and a life-defining stint in a harsh, Australian prison, Lindsay Ford is a stranger to himself. A bank robber of some repute, he has fled his native land, and the jail that sought to cage him, and traveled, on a fake passport, to India which, initially anyway, serves as merely a stop on his way to freedom in Europe. However, before Ford can move on, events and new friends conspire to keep him in this unknowable, tumultuous country that he is forced to embrace and understand when, in an act of karmic revenge, he is himself robbed and deprived of all but the shirt on his back.

This defining event sends Lindsay on a remarkable journey of criminality and philanthropy that begins in a Mumbai slum and concludes in the violence of war-torn Afghanistan. Between, he will learn Indian languages, Indian customs and even Indian prisons, each of which serve to deepen his understanding of not only himself, but the suffering of the world. Enlightenment, however, may just come at the cost of his soul which may well be the only thing that one cannot sell in this land of noise and opportunity.

Shantaram is a monumental work of fiction that asks far more questions than it answers. Built on the back of Mr. Roberts' remarkable life, it is a thousand-page odyssey into the India of the 1980s, a place of corruption and sorrow, kindness and justice, that is undoubtedly the star of the tale. For the author forsakes a desire to constantly entertain the reader with plot and action and devotes large swaths of the work to simply describing this nation of a billion souls scrambling to get ahead in a world that makes that an all-but-impossible achievement. Villages and slums, cities and jails, are revealed in all their structure and their limitations, exposing India, at the least the India of this novel, as a place where the failure of organized, fair civic institutions have been replaced by ad hoc operations that attempt to provide some sort of framework for the lives of the lower classes. The patchwork nature of this tapestry is both beautiful and tragic.

Though Shantaram speaks at length to issues that range from morality to corruption, suffering is its profoundest and most consistent theme. Lindsay, Mr. Robert's fictional alter ego, endures a remarkable amount of degradation, all of which eats away at his spirit. In this, he becomes our entry point into the Indians who live with the same treatment, or worse, on a daily basis and do so with, what is to the western mind, a stunning degree of fortitude. The scars of unfathomable poverty linger on them, certainly, but it's the novel's caucasian characters who seem far more burdened by their experiences here. It is they who lack the armor that comes from properly understanding a place, of having their expectations for life calibrated from the moment of their births. The Indians know how to take life's slings and arrows without having them damage their spirit. The westerners, meanwhile, have no such protection which causes them, in the face of all of India's thunder, to break down and lose their way, to become trapped by its schemes, radicalized by its violence, and numbed by its capacity to test the depths of the human spirit.

Shantaram has some revolutionary moments, perspectives and phrases that leave the reader alternately breathless and enlightened, but it does this at the expense of the plot which is picked up and set down at the convenience of its author. Fully half of the work is made up of one rumination or another on the nature of existence which, after awhile, becomes both burdensome and far too apparent. The reader begins to sense the digressions into moral philosophy, to feel them coming, to resist the urge to skip it in order to stay within the story's arc, a frustration that weighs down this truly tome-like work. Had the author made more of an effort to intertwine these spiritual musings with the story's significant episodes, one senses that the read would have been legendary.

Fascinating and enlightening... (3/5 Stars)

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson

From The Week of November 12, 2012 As much as our lives, and thus our personalities, are shaped by a million unpredictable incidents, spanning decades, which are as uncontrollable as they are unavoidable, our parents define our existences. For when we are but blank slates, unformed in childhood, they are there to impart upon us codes of morality and conduct that we cannot reject. To do so would compel us to reject our parents as well and we are ill-equipped, at such an age, to be on our own. Thus, we conform. For good or ill, we learn at their feet, uplifted by their generosity, degraded by their abuse. We are encoded by them in ways we will never escape. No one knows this better than Ms. Winterson, much to her cost.

One of Britain's more famous, contemporary authors, Jeanette Winterson rose to prominence in 1985 when, at the age of 26, she published her first and to-date most successful novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. This coming-of-age tale of a young lesbian suffering the stones and arrows of her narrowminded, fundamentalist mother was as raw as it was vivid, capturing, in its two main characters, both the profound, generational divide that separates postwar parents from their Gen-X children -- repression versus freedom, authoritarianism versus individualism --, and the degrees to which these differences, born of time and circumstance, prevented anything like understanding from forming between the two disconnected groups.

At the time, Ms. Winterson acknowledged that this work was inspired by her own history. However, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal makes clear just how much, introducing the reader to the author's tortured childhood in which her exquisitely miserable adopted mother heaped upon her atypical but talented daughter the sins and the disappointments of her own repressed existence. Obsessed with sin, the elder Winterson could not see past her disapproval to recognize that her daughter possessed an unusual love of literature and poetry, a passion that would carry her to the heights of Oxford and beyond, leaving behind the gray and narrow world in which her mother had boxed herself. From painful, childhood episodes to the search for her biological mother, Ms. Winterson recounts her life, leaping as freely through time as she does from prose to verse, forever exposing the scars of a broken relationship that will never have the chance to heal.

Why Be Happy If You Can Be Normal is a fascinating read. While it is burdened by episodes of distasteful self-indulgence, it is, in every other respect, a revealing portrayal of a damaged person's most private pains. Enchained by her mother's scorn and the secrets of her own origins, Ms. Winterson spends much of her life plagued by an abusive circuit that she cannot break. For as much as she possesses the mental powers to reason her way clear of the wounds her mother burned into her soul, she cannot teach herself how to love. For all her powers, for all her success, this is beyond her talent. It is beyond anyone's talent. For allowing oneself to be loved is something that has to be nurtured in the young, cherished until it can grow armor against life's thorns. It cannot be imposed later on. For the scar tissue has already formed. And this is far from fertile soil in which to plant the seeds of trust and tenderness.

This is a commendable autobiography. For it is as raw as Ms. Winterson's most laudatory work. It is nothing less than the expose of the frailties of one person's mind and soul. And yet, this is also its most grievous flaw. For this is almost too personal, too acute. I feel like a voyeur, like I have been witnessed to something not meant for me. Still, to the degree to which it may help those who have suffered the same or similar dignities from those they trusted most, to make them feel less alone it is worthwhile.

As honest as it is sad... (3/5 Stars)

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

From The Week of April 03, 2011

Intellectuals as insightful and as bold as George Orwell are once-in-a-generation luminaries who possess a unique capacity to expose societal injustices ignored by citizens and dismissed by their governments. His most widely read work, Nineteen Eighty-four, is still popular 60 years after its publication because, more than any other book I can think of, it sees through the veneer of authoritarian Communism, utilizing a profound understanding of human nature to accurately predict the means by which humans forced to labor in such a system are spiritually and intellectually destroyed by it. Though The Road to Wigan Pier lacks the searing satire of Nineteen Eighty-four or Animal Farm, the extent to which it investigates and then reveals the inequities in British society gives it a gravitas worthy of his most famous works.

The Road to Wigan Pier is essentially two books connected by the theme of unfairness and injustice in 1930s British society. Part one is a first-hand account of Orwell's investigations into the lives of the industrial working class. He spends significant time lodging in their homes, participating in their rituals, working in their coal mines, and observing the services provided to them. Though he successfully adopts a fairly detached voice throughout this section, the evidence of widespread neglect and poverty, even after all this time, is enough to churn the stomach. Britain runs on coal. It heats their homes, powers their railways, provides electricity to their factories. And yet the extractors of this vital resource persist in the most appalling, back-breaking conditions imaginable. They are compensated so poorly for what is a dangerous and debilitating job that communities never truly form. There are no lovely homes, no leisurely pursuits, no kids sent off to nice colleges. There are just gray towns that live and die on coal extraction, populated by worried wives, men made unhealthy by the mines and a total lack of affordable, sensible housing for their families.

Part two leaves behind these crippling conditions to engage the reader in a debate.What ought to be done about the problems discussed in the first, investigative section? Orwell cleverly argues that socialism is the only sensible solution to such obvious inequities. However, he's fully aware of socialism's poor reputation in England which is why he sets out to draw in the skeptics by lampooning the period's socialist stereotypes: the soft socialist, the pedantic socialist, the vegetarian socialist, the technologically dependent socialist. And then, once he's thoroughly lured in the doubters by sympathizing with them, he concludes with the obvious, that for all its faults, it is the only fair system.

There is no doubt that the dated argument for socialism, in part two, is completely outmatched by the visceral impact of Orwell's time in the mine in part one. His criticism of soft technophiles is hopelessly out of step with the sensibilities of the 21st century mind, gripped by the technological revolution. What's more, Orwell's advocacy for socialism does seem especially ironic coming from one of the 20th century's most famous anti-authoritarians. And yet there's sense here. Orwell left his comfortable, literary world and, for a time, adopted the life of a miner. In doing so, he encountered an inequity so entrenched that the prospect of having it corrected by simple legislation must have seemed ridiculous. Fairness would need a revolution, not a bill in parliament. I sympathize with Mr. Orwell here because I am a classical liberal who struggles to reconcile my small-government libertarianism with a strong desire for societal fairness. I still don't have a satisfactory answer to this dilemma and neither, it seems, did Orwell. Nonetheless, as usual, this did not sway him from speaking out. Surely, in doing so, he helped contribute to the gradual improvement of the plight of industrial workers.

In spite of a weak second half, The Road to Wigan Pier is first-class non-fiction. Yes, the first half is that good. Oh, to have the talents of this greatest of British authors. (4/5 Stars)

Stolen Innocence by Elissa Wall

From The Week of March 06, 2011

Though only the hardest of hearts would deny that the world's various religious faiths have brought peace and comfort to untold millions, the fact remains that religious institutions demand that their worshippers enter into emotionally and psychologically dependent relationships with them. And if we know anything about humanity, we know that we do not do well with imbalances of power. Those who hold the power are tempted to abuse it while those who have given up their power are easily manipulated into sacrificing their rights, rights every human being should have and exercise. Stolen Innocence is a vivid demonstration of this human weakness made real.

Elissa Wall was born into a world defined, in every respect, by Mormon fundamentalism. Her parents, who were both active members in the FLDS church and practitioners of Plural Marriage, did not expose her, or her siblings, to mainstream America. They, and their community, taught her to fear that world. They taught her that the police would, if they learned of their lifestyle, disperse their family beyond the ability of anyone to piece it back together. As a consequence, Ms. Wall was raised to have full and unwavering faith in her parents and her church. And so, when it came time for her to be married, at fourteen, to her cousin, nineteen, she was expected not to question. She was expected to do her womanly duty and further her husband's ascent to heaven by expanding his Household. When, unhappy in her abusive marriage, she rebelled, the leader of her church, Warren Jeffs, the megalomaniacal son of the church's dying prophet, first called upon her sense of duty to her husband to convince her to stay in the marriage. But when that failed to silence her, he turned to threats, against her and her family, manipulating Ms. Wall through her devout and complicit mother. But Ms. Wall defied all these pressures to break free of her cultish world, relying on the love of a supportive friend to be the star witness in the well-publicized trial of Warren Jeffs.

Though autobiographies draw their vitality directly from the striking, first-hand accounts of their authors, they simply cannot be objective. I doubt anyone has the necessary mental clarity to be objective about their own ordeals. But while it would be wise to take Ms. Wall's extraordinary tale with an appropriate amount of salt -- she does, at times, seem to almost revel in being the helpless, wide-eyed victim --, the extent to which she reveals the FLDS church as an institution driven by coercion, manipulation,heartlessness and duplicity is worthy of Jon Krakauer. Jeffs' herculean efforts to maintain power over others at all costs, even the misery of his own followers who look up to him as a demigod, is both sickening and depressing. It's a good thing then that, to a large degree, Ms. Wall's tale has a happy ending. But what about the hundreds, maybe thousands, of other women who are raised in isolation from the moderating influence of society, trained to be obedient, and then locked into unhappy marriages from which there is no exit but exile? What of them?

Ms. Wall narrates her challenging life with a kind of delicate grace. The clear and uncomplicated delivery of her story will, in all likelihood, leave readers with a poor opinion of Jeffs and his church. And though I agree that these men are revolting, we must remember that these sorts of practices, regardless of which religion sanctions them, are the result of imbalances of power. Men like Jeffs succeed because other people surrender their free will to them, not because of the popularity or otherwise, the righteousness or otherwise, of their faith. Until we find a way to ingrain in everyone a belief in themselves, in their own power, there will always be Elissa Walls and Warren Jeffs. But then, there will always be books like this one to remind us of deeper truths. (3/5 Stars)

The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore

From The Week of May 16, 2010

As our population grows, and as the social fabric of the Internet brings that population closer together, the odds of encountering someone who shares your exact name will increase, probably sharply. But even if this becomes more common, we will never top the story of the two Wes Moores.

Only two years apart, two boys are born with the same name, into the same Baltimore neighborhood. They walked the same streets, struggled with the same poverty, and yet neither they nor their families ever crossed paths. One Moore moved to New York, struggled in school, wound up in military school, rebelled and then finally settled down into a stable, productive life as a financial analyst, army veteran and author, specifically of this book. The other Moore stayed in Baltimore, dealt drugs, killed a cop and is currently serving a life sentence. Two lives headed in exactly the same direction until a moment in time forced a divergence, ascending one Moore to success and plummeting the other into Hell. The two may never have crossed paths were it not for the author Moore seeing his own name in the newspaper, a warrant issued for his arrest for a robbery gone wrong. And after he realized it was the other Wes Moore, he began to follow the case, to speak with the other Moore, to learn how they had come to such different ends.

Yes, this is a self-indulgent rumination on a trivial connection. There is, after all, nothing overly karmic in a name. It's not like the author Moore's success robbed the other Moore of his fair share. We are the result of our circumstances and our experiences. But the sheer similarity of their backgrounds was novel enough to carry me into the book's core theme. On what decisions does the success of a life hinge? What moments set us on the good path as opposed to the ruinous? And though Mr. Moore, the author, leans towards self-righteousness at times, he had the curiosity and the diligence to investigate and ask, and reflect. And, by in large, The Other Wes Moore is the successful outcome of his musings. (3/5 Stars)

The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn R. Saks

From The Week of May 09, 2010

Whenever I am engaged in a discussion about physical disabilities, be they my own or others, invariably the conversation ends on some version of the following, positive note. "Well, at least I can think clearly. Take away my mental health and what's left?" Bravely, painfully, Dr. Saks shows us exactly what is left, madness and despair, far more of both than my well-meaning naivety could have imagined.

The Center Cannot Hold is an autobiographical account of Dr. Saks' lifelong confrontation with Schizophrenia, a widely misunderstood condition which, if possible, is even more agonizing and terrifying than the misapprehension of it which prevails in our culture. Tormented by crippling bouts of anxiety, Dr. Saks suffers episodes in which reality itself seems to be coming apart and re-ordering itself into something new and terrifying, something that only she can see. To her, this reality is completely real. She cannot understand how we cannot see it, understand it, and be tortured by it as she is. These episodes nearly derailed Dr. Saks' promising career in academia which had to be put on hold on numerous occasions while she languished in various institutions. Though these hospitals promised her aid, they seemed to harm as much as help, plying her with a dizzying array of changing drug cocktails and treatments which inspired more dismay than confidence. Dr. Saks eventually relied upon the aid of loyal and tireless friends, along with a few remarkably patient therapists, to knit together a life anyone could be proud of.

The Center Cannot Hold is, in every way, a success. It educates us about Schizophrenia and the terrible price its sufferers pay. It inspires us with the empathy shown to Dr. Saks in her times of greatest need. But most importantly, it is a triumph of the human mind to find a way around its own damaged circuits and create for itself something like stability. The incalculable hours Dr. Saks has spent trying to find an equilibrium that, every day, we take for granted is humbling and inspiring. I can only congratulate her on an excellent book and a fight well fought. (4/5 Stars)

The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

From The Week of September 27, 2009

The Audacity of Hope will undoubtedly be the most widely read of
Mr. Obama's books, but it is, in many ways, an inferior work to Dreams. That chronicle's air of authenticity shielded it from accusations that Mr. Obama was nothing more than an opportunist, appealing for fame and sympathy from an American public he'd one day lead. Audacity has no such armor. Though its backdrop is the fascinating mechanics of a black man running for senate, and though it reveals much about Mr. Obama's family life, including the saintly patience of his
wife, we're too often left wondering what of this is true and what of this is political staging for Mr. Obama's future goals. Audacity is as much political treatise as memoir, a means by which Mr. Obama lays out his bland, centrist philosophies of government. Perhaps this is what reduces this work from a clean portrait of a modern marriage and an exceptional man to a Churchillian slant on events that no one can truly trust.

The unquestionable highlight here is the transcript of Mr. Obama's
speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004. It is an amazing piece of oratory which, when combined with Mr. Obama's considerable presence, leaves little doubt of the reasons why his star ascended so swiftly.(2/5 Stars)