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The Northern Lights:
The True Story of the Man Who Unlocked the Secrets of the Aurora
Borealis
Lucy Jago
Alfred A. Knopf
300 pp.
$24
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Like
shooting stars and solar eclipses, the Northern Lights, or aurora
borealis, are a celestial phenomenon that no amount of scientific
explanation can render any less wondrous--pulsing, wavering and
arching across the night sky. For Norwegian scientist Kristian
Birkeland, they were an obsession, and he devoted his professional
life to a frustrating effort to prove and win support for his
theory of their cause, still pursuing his quest when he died,
of a probably accidental overdose, before his fiftieth birthday.
In Lucy Jago's The Northern Lights, we are introduced
to Birkeland on the windswept, stormy slopes of Haldde Mountain,
so far north in Norway that it lies within the Arctic Circle.
Birkeland, along with four assistants, would spend a long, dark
winter living atop the mountain, in a pair of stout huts built
specifically for this expedition, painstakingly recording a voluminous
number of details about wind, weather and atmospheric conditions
in order to prove or disprove centuries of myth and speculation
about the Northern Lights--and, Birkeland hoped, to substantiate
his own theories of their cause.
The expedition was troubled from the start; weather-related
delays in construction of the huts had put the team several weeks
behind schedule. Indifferent accounting on the part of Birkeland
was already resulting in cost over-runs that would continue to
mount significantly. The climb to the top of Haldde, through
a raging storm that pinned the group in a flimsy canvas tent
for nearly two days, left expedition member Bjorn Helland-Hansen
with severely frostbitten fingers that in the end would have
to be amputated, bringing to a halt the medical student's dreams
of becoming a surgeon. On top of the mountain, another storm
later in the winter pinned them in their hut for a dark and terrifying
twenty-one days, with winds so savage that the team feared that
at any moment they might be ripped from the mountain and tumbled
into the abyss. Midway through the winter, Birkeland received
word that his father had died, and not long after, another member
of the expedition, enthusiastic young Elisar Boye, was killed
in an avalanche.
So it went with Birkeland's life, according to Jago's carefully
detailed account--no monumental, single tragedy, but a plague
of setbacks, misfortunes, and even betrayal would pursue him
until his early death. Through Jago's book, we meet a man compelled
mercilessly by his intellect. He had the clear markings of a
troubled genius, suffering from depression coupled with a driving
obsession with his research. More than once, he worked himself
to the point of physical and emotional collapse. Following one
such event, his well-meaning physician brother prescribed him
veronal, to which the insomniac Birkeland soon became addicted
(it was the veronal that eventually would be the likely cause
of his death).
He was bitten by a probably rabid dog in a town in the far
northern reaches of Russia and had to be rushed by train to Moscow,
where he was saved by a twenty-day round of injections of the
recently-developed Pasteur vaccine. He was beset by financial
problems much of his life. An inspired inventor, he developed
and patented a method to extract nitrogen fertilizer from air,
but his jealous and unscrupulous business partner in the venture
squeezed him out and through behind-the-scenes machinations may
well have been instrumental in robbing Birkeland of the opportunity
to be considered for the Nobel prize. Improbably, the research-obsessed
Birkeland married, almost immediately virtually abandoning his
wife for his work, and within only a few years was divorced by
her.
But the most bitter and enduring of Birkeland's sorrows was
the larger scientific world's refusal to accept his theories
of the aurora borealis. Although some recognized Birkeland's
genius and espoused his cause, many didn't. The highly influential
British scientific organization, the Royal Society, dismissed
his treatise out of hand because it failed to agree with their
own current (and ultimately proved inaccurate) theories of space.
It was not until a half-century after Birkeland's death that
satellite observations began to vindicate the virtually forgotten
scientist's ideas. "Since 1967," Jago writes, "scientists
have been looking at the satellite data in relation to phenomena
such as the Northern Lights, rediscovering Birkeland's extraordinarily
prophetic theories and completely reassessing his work. Today,
he is credited as the first scientist to propose an essentially
correct explanation of the aurora borealis, supported by theoretical,
observational, and experimental evidence."
In addition to recovering Birkeland's life from historical
obscurity, Jago's book suggests interesting questions about unrecognized
genius and the pursuit of knowledge. Birkeland was deeply admired
and supported by a small but loyal coterie of friends, patrons,
and associates, but seemed to inspire jealousy, resentment, and
antipathy in many more. Is it enough to be right, even if few
will acknowledge that fact, or did Birkeland's theories become
meaningful only when validated by later discoveries? Are scores
settled and wrongs righted if a man's reputation is restored
only after all the principle players in his life are dead? What
inspires us to climb mountains, chase mysteries, and, sometimes,
to pursue discovery with a single-minded disregard for any consequences?
Like the Northern Lights, those questions flicker tantalizingly
at the edge of Jago's story.
--Caroline Kettlewell
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Reading Chekhov:
A Critical Journey
Janet Malcolm
Random House
213 pp.
$23.95
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Prospective
readers of Janet Malcolm's new book, Reading Chekhov: A Critical
Journey, should pay close attention to the book's full title
and look especially hard at its subtitle. While Malcolm does
in fact travel to Russia and visit important Chekhov landmarks
in Yalta, St. Petersburg and Moscow, this is not a travel
book that simply takes Chekhov's geographical wonderings as its
theme. Rather, it's a close reading of Chekhov by a critic who
went to the trouble of confirming her theories first-hand.
Or at least that's partly what it is.
The Russian travels give the book its shape and pace, though,
and Malcolm lets the pleasingly loose structure amble along at
a casual, strolling pace that mutes the impatient traveler's
overwhelming need to get anywhere immediately. No complaints
here: I've always thought travel is best done with a penchant
for lazy meandering (I'm barely keeping myself back from calling
it a sleepy, Russian bear's pace). As long as the author is sharp-eyed
enough to find pleasing distractions and details along the walking
path, it's always an adventure no matter what the speed, isn't
it? And Malcolm is particularly sharp. (Sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued,
that is. While she doesn't give last names (thereby avoiding
lawsuits, I suppose), her descriptions of her travel guides and
drivers are often as acerbic as they are witty and well-drawn.)
One of the more cunning uses to which Malcolm puts her travels
is as meditative devices that lead her into deeper understandings
of Chekhov himself. After having her luggage stolen in Yalta
(the setting for Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog"),
for instance, she writes that "The weight of being thousands
of miles from home with nothing to wear but the clothes on my
back fell on me. I tried to pull myself together, to rise above
my petty obsession with the loss of a few garments, and to that
end invoked Chekhov and the heightened sense of what is important
in life that gleams out of his work." She muses over Chekhov
for a few more moments of walking, she tells us, and then something
happened.
I continued climbing the hill, in the inflexible grip of unhappiness
over my lost clothes. And then the realization came: the recognition
that when my suitcase was taken something else had been restored
to me--feeling itself. Until the mishap at the airport,
I had not felt anything very much. Without knowing exactly why,
I have always found travel writing a little boring, and now the
reason seemed clear: travel itself is a low-key emotional experience,
a pallid affair in comparison to ordinary life.
To some, the payoff might seem a bit too easy when described
in such short space, but the lesson is instructive nonetheless,
I suppose. Literary-minded travel as edification: an enterprising
Russian should set up a travel agency to provide well-heeled,
well-read Westerners with just such experiences (although they
might consider it wise to avoid the Anna Karenina Express Train).
There's another, far more important reason Malcolm's travel
experiences are great fodder for her literary insights: one of
the more important points in the book is that Chekhov leads us
relentlessly back to ourselves and our conditions. And so it's
appropriate that a book about Chekhov is ultimately about what
he can teach his readers about their own lives.
Did I mention this is not a simple travel book?
In addition to not being travel book, Reading Chekhov
is also not a biography. Malcolm dutifully (and helpfully)
includes short passages that describe Chekhov's rise from humble
beginnings (as a shopkeeper's son) to a relatively wealthy life
as a landowning writer (although he trained as a physician, he
never charged fees for his services; his clients were the peasants
who lived around his houses). But Malcolm warns--rather grimly--against
biography as the ends of this (or any other) book:
Chekhov's privacy is safe from the biographer's attempts upon
it--as, indeed, are all privacies, even those of the most apparently
open and even exhibitionistic natures. The letters and journals
we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries
are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we
die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity
of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography.
(What's a book about Russian literature without a little bleak
philosophy, right?)
As a literary critic, Malcolm is a card-carrying member of
that all-but-banished school of formalism, and her close readings
of Chekhov's fiction are far more valuable as tools for understanding
Chekhov than her travel experiences are, in the final analysis.
Indeed, some of her criticism is breathtakingly good (and useful
too: bone up on Malcolm's take on Chekhov's relationship to Dostoevsky
the next time you want to wow a cocktail party.)
I know, I know: formalists and biographers are like oil and
water, but just as Reading Chekhov isn't exactly a biography,
it's also not simply an unalloyed work of literary criticism.
(Leave it to a writer who has mused profitably over such widely
disparate subjects as Freud, Sylvia Plath, photography and True
Crime to find multiple ways to approach a subject as seemingly
monolithic as Chekhov...)
So what are we left with? A book that's neither a travel journal
nor biography, and not really merely a work of formalist criticism...and
somehow (with a lot of help from the author's sheer skill as
a writer), it comes off wonderfully. Indeed, for all its coy
genre-juggling, it's the perfect book for a casual (if intellectually
stimulating) winter night's fireside reading.
--Doug Childers
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Uncle Tungsten:
Memoirs of a Chemical Boyhood
Oliver Sacks
Alfred A. Knopf
341 pp.
$25
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Oliver
Sacks's new memoir Uncle Tungsten should be the first
thing handed out on the first day of high school chemistry, and
not a word should be breathed of lessons, formulas or the Periodic
Table of the Elements until everyone has finished the book. For
every young student (and I count myself as one of them) who ever
plodded wearily and drearily through chemical equations and lab
notes, Uncle Tungsten is the answer to the exasperated
question, "Why do I need to know this stuff?"
Uncle Tungsten is the story of young Oliver Sacks's
love affair with chemistry, his avid, joyful, piece-by-piece
discovery of the structure of the universe through reading, museum
visits and, most importantly, experimentation.
Sacks grew up in England, in an extended family of exceptionally
scientifically gifted individuals; his grandfather had eighteen
children--nine boys and nine girls--all of whom he encouraged
to pursue scientific educations, and most of whom eventually
were drawn to mathematics, physical sciences, education, research,
invention or medicine. Both of Sacks's parents were physicians.
The Uncle Tungsten of the title was his uncle Dave, whose firm,
Tungstalite, manufactured light bulbs made with tungsten-wire
filaments. A true hands-on scientist, "Uncle's hands were
seamed with the black powder [of tungsten], beyond the power
of any washing to get out."
"It was our business, the family business, to ask questions,
to be 'scientific,'" Sacks writes, and as a boy he was encouraged
to make the world his experimental oyster. A barely preadolescent
Sacks set up a home laboratory for brewing, boiling, reducing,
burning, purifying and otherwise peering into the secrets of
the elements.
"My first taste was for the spectacular--the frothings,
the incandescences, the stinks and the bangs," Sacks writes,
and to feed his habit he would make regular expeditions to a
chemical supply house where apparently even a young boy with
a fistful of pocket money could walk away with arms full of lethal
stuff--hydroflouric and nitric and sulfuric acids, mercury, potassium
cyanide, not to mention the radioactive elements. "I gathered,
over a couple of years, a variety of chemicals that could have
poisoned or blown up the entire street, but I was careful--or
lucky," Sacks notes.
As he leads readers through his own expanding knowledge, we
follow as well the progression of discoveries in the field of
chemistry. We experience the excitement, the world-changing implications
of these discoveries in a way that is sadly missing from the
typical classroom textbook, starting with those basic stinks
and bangs and working our way up to the Big Bang itself, to that
place where chemistry and physics merge in the realm of the quantum.
At least, I'm pretty sure that's the way it works. Having,
I admit, retained almost nothing of what I learned in chemistry
class, I found long passages of Sacks's book to be something
of a foreign language, a fact which detracted not a whit from
my thorough enjoyment of the book. Uncle Tungsten inspires
the reader with Sacks's own curiosity, and when the book was
finished I found myself wondering and aware, too, imagining the
ordinary world as an intricate atomic web of actions and reaction.
One of the most charming moments of the book is when Sacks describes
himself, now in his seventies and a resident of New York City,
rediscovering some of his boyhood passion, and wandering the
streets of the city at night with a pocket spectroscope to fracture
the streetlights into "atomic emissions."
If there is a place where Sacks's sure touch falters, it is
in those moments when he is compelled to turn the lens of his
microscope onto the messy realm of the human. There are wonderful
sketches of family, of his sprawling home, of strange moments
when his family's devotion to science seems to outweigh common
sense or human feeling, such as when his mother brings home from
her obstetrical practice grossly malformed fetuses and stillborn
infants for her young son to dissect. But most of these remain
sketches, brief interludes in the narrative, and in some cases
they simply leave the reader hanging, as when Sacks mentions
that his older brother Michael, mercilessly beaten and bullied
at his boarding school, becomes psychotic. It is his brother's
psychosis that drives Sacks deeper into the world of science,
in search of order and structure, "holding myself together
in the chaos." But what of Michael? This is the last we
hear of him specifically, and whether he regained his sanity
or wandered forever in the realm of the mad is a question left
unanswered.
This is not quite a memoir, then, but, as the subtitle suggests,
"memories," falling, as memory tends to, not in neat
narrative but rather as brief, bright sparks flaring up to illuminate
a particular place here, a particular individual there, and,
collectively, the making of a scientist's mind.
--Caroline Kettlewell
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Lost Soldiers
James Webb
Bantam
369 pp.
$25
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The
hero of James Webb's Lost Soldiers, suitably sporting
the macho moniker 'Brandon Condley,' is the sort of character
you'd expect--and want--to find in a strong military novel. A
tough ex-Marine, he's an outsider who never left Asia after the
Vietnam War ended. Now, having spent most of his career killing
people on behalf of the U.S. government, he assists the government
in its effort to find and identify the bodies of American soldiers
left behind in Vietnam. But, as an American general affectionately
points out, Condley is a 'shit magnet' who seems to attract trouble
unstoppably, and it's a safe bet that Condley's going to unload
on somebody before the novel's finished, right?
Lost Soldiers certainly starts out promisingly. A body,
presumed to be an American soldier's, has been found in a remote
mountain region of Vietnam, and Condley and his anthropologist
sidekick retrieve it (at some peril) for identification. There's
an unexpected twist, though. The body is in fact that of an Australian
murder victim, and the likely suspects are two U.S. Army deserters
who were known during the war as Salt and Pepper. Bad news for
a public hungry for heroes, to say the least. But the issue facing
Condley now is more immediate: where are Salt and Pepper now?
It's a great plot device, and Webb uses it to send Condley and
his sidekick to such distant locations as Thailand, Russia and
Australia.
Appropriately, Webb's work with Condley strikes a nice balance
between existential angst (Condley is a burnt-out soldier from
a lost war, after all, and he shows it) and a cynical macho swaggering
that hides, perhaps inevitably, a heart of gold. As the anthropologist
sidekick says, "You're a rogue, Brandon, but in a way you're
a saint." It's not a scenario that allows for a lot of range,
necessarily, but it's fine for the genre. The sidekick is another
issue. He's too broad, frankly, and he lacks the careful attention
Webb brings to some of the novel's strongest characters. He's
a minor character, though, and he shouldn't hold many readers
back.
Despite the promising opening (a mystery inside a military
novel seems irresistible), Lost Soldiers's best features
are its deeper themes and Webb's well-researched insights into
Vietnam. Ultimately, the novel is about freedom--freedom from
the past, freedom from your inherited identity, freedom from
being a haunted ghost. Sometimes, the freedom is illicit and
wrongly won. Sometimes, rarely, it's earned. And earned freedom,
of course, is what Condley is after.
Webb sometimes seems less interested in the plot than he is
in its themes and settings, but Lost Soldiers is certainly
an interesting, intelligent addition to the military genre.
--Woody Arbunkle
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