Powers of Attraction

Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive offers an illustrated history of Pierre and Marie Curie, whose partnership and research changed the world—for better and for worse. This 2011 National Book Award finalist cannot be called a picture book, though, or even a book with pictures. The former suggests something suitable for young children, and though its cover and spine glow in the dark, Radioactive wouldn’t work well as a bedtime story. Yet, “a book with pictures” isn’t quite right either, because the images are not subordinate to the text; to the contrary, they’re absolutely vital to the narrative’s success. The most pleasing term I’ve found to describe Radioactive—from sources ranging from The New York Times to NPR to Vogue—is a “visual” or “graphic” biography.

Redniss dedicates the first part of her book to the Curies’ lives prior to their discovery of radioactivity. We learn about Pierre and Marie’s upbringings, early romances, and eventual meeting in a Paris laboratory. Redniss quotes the Curies at length, selecting and arranging their words to allow these two long-deceased lovers to tell their story. The overlapping dialogue provides a vivid portrait of a relationship built not only upon love, but upon a shared passion for science:

MARIE: “He caught the habit of speaking to me of his dream of an existence consecrated entirely to scientific research, and asked me to share that life.”

PIERRE: “It would, nevertheless, be a fine thing . . . to pass our lives near each other, hypnotized by our dreams, your patriotic dream, our humanitarian dream, and our scientific dream.”

The second part of Radioactive occupies nearly four times as many pages as the first. It concerns the repercussions of the Curies’ research and the latter half of their relationship, which ends tragically with Pierre’s death. As one may expect, this marks a significant shift in the book. Suddenly, Marie is left to juggle multiple roles alone: mother, professor, Nobel Prize-winning scientist. Her later research and subsequent affair with another scientist—and interestingly, the work and relationships of her children—occupy significant space in the latter part of the narrative.

Throughout the book, Redniss’s own writing style takes a backseat to story. Her straightforward voice mingles with those of her subjects, a pleasant contrast to the lyrical quality of the quotes:

After four years of steady labor, four hundred tons of water, and forty tons of corrosive chemicals, on March 28, 1902, they managed to extract one tenth of a gram of radium chloride.

MARIE: “I shall never be able to express the joy of the untroubled quietness of this atmosphere of research and the excitement of actual progress.”

With the constant companionship that accompanied their research, the Curies’ love deepened. They cosigned their published findings. Their handwritings intermingle in their notebooks. On the cover of one black canvas laboratory log, the initials ‘M’ and ‘P’ are scripted one atop the other.

Aside from directly chronicling the Curies’ history, Redniss relates radioactivity to period developments such as the X-ray, spiritualism, and Art Nouveau. She also makes frequent leaps forward in time to visit the contemporary uses (and misuses) of radiation: a boy being treated for cancer, the bombing of Hiroshima, the accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, the technology needed to protect and dispose of nuclear materials. The majority of these cutaways worked quite well, though some felt a little too abrupt and even tedious compared to the main plotline.

And amidst all of this, supporting and enhancing the narrative, is the art. Redniss’s drawings are unearthly, eye-catching, and faintly grotesque. This is “a tale of love and fallout,” after all, so the oversized eyes and curving limbs and strangely delicate hands suit Radioactive’s inherent strangeness. Redniss also used a process called “cyanotyping” to give some of the images a beautifully surreal, luminous appearance, like a negative image lit from beneath. Yet, I often stopped reading to wonder: “Who is that man, and why does he have three eyes, two noses, and two mouths? What is this mass of green and yellow meant to signify? . . . And why is that person suddenly naked?”

Color, text placement/shape, and the use of empty space also affect the reading experience in Radioactive. In the black and while illustrations at the beginning of the book, Pierre’s story occupies the left-hand pages, while Marie’s occupies the right. When they meet, this pattern starts to dissolve; their quotes are placed on the same pages, and they begin appearing in color illustrations together. This is a clever gesture to how Pierre and Marie’s lives ran parallel to one another before finally veering into a relationship.  And the chapter’s name? “Symmetry.”

While much of Radioactive is illustrated by Redniss’s own hand, she also includes copies of historical documents and photographs. More of the latter would have been a welcome addition to this book, as there are only three realistic renderings of Marie in the book, and none of Pierre. (While the book’s subtitle gives them equal billing, Radioactive offers more attention to Mme. Curie. Every chapter opens with a quote from her; two pages are dedicated to listing “luminaries, flora and fauna” of Poland, her homeland; she is the one illustrated on the cover. This imbalance isn’t too much of a problem, as Marie’s experiences are textured enough to fill these rich pages.)

Page by page, this book confronts traditional notions of what nonfiction “should be” and what the form can accomplish. By challenging the boundaries of its medium, Radioactive doesn’t just leave its reader looking forward to Redniss’s future material, but also the works that it might inspire other artists to create—a fitting outcome for a story about discovery and transformation.

Maria Sholtis is a nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. Follow her on Twitter here.

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A Man Who Says No

An Algerian born working class Nobel laureate, Camus wrote fiction, plays, essays, and speeches. And he looked all the world like Humphrey Bogart. In The Rebel he asks: how can one respond to the experience of absurdity, without turning to nihilism and suicide, or the tyranny and murder that too often follows revolution? Assuming rebellion is “an essential dimension of human experience”, Camus examines how the rebel should act, and what the terms and consequences would be of that action. He considered this book-length essay a counterpart to his celebrated Myth of Sisyphus, and in it he takes on the massive concepts of value, freedom, and justice. Like the rebel, his method is provisional—and necessarily so. He progresses by associative leaps, metaphors, and delicate particulars.

Camus begins by describing a certain kind of rebel whose impetus is the experience of outraged innocence, an insulted sense of dignity: the feeling that something has “gone on too long” or someone has “gone too far”. Rather than respond destructively or try to replace what oppresses him, this person “pleads for life, undertakes to struggle against servitude, falsehood, and terror.” In this sense the rebel is unlike the heretics (“evil, be thou my good”) and the radical leaders (“we must force them to be free”) who set themselves on the level of their enemies regardless of consequence and “side only with themselves”. After sketching the characteristics of the ideal rebel, epitomized by none other than Ivan Karamozov, Camus establishes a genealogy of those who thought and acted in response to the metaphysical demands of their times. He moves from Sade to Baudelaire and the “dandies”, to Stimer, Nietzsche, Lautreamont, and the surrealists. His observations about these men and the aesthetics that guided them are full of critical admiration special to those who study out of love and necessity.

“More a writer than a philosopher.” — Advisor’s note on Camus’ dissertation

The latter part of the essay sketches a history of rebellion by surveying the stages of the French revolution, then turns to rebellion and the act of artistic creation. The artist refuses the salvific myths of otherwordly justification, even of social or political progress towards an ideal state. The artist makes this refusal in favor of adapting and stylizing the experience ready at hand on its own terms, creating a world out of and within this one. In the closing section, Thought at the Meridian, Camus draws on all of his stylistic powers in a statement of determination and encouragement. Facing and accepting limits is his strongest advice for rebels who refuse to assimilate the characteristics of those they stand against: “The revolutionary mind, if it wants to remain alive, must therefore return again to the sources of rebellion and draw its inspiration from the only system of thought which is faithful to its origins: thought that recognizes limits.” This sense of measure offers a treatment for the malady of nihilism, and an alternative code of action for the rebel.

After its publication in 1952, (he had just recovered from a relapse of tuberculosis), most of the French intellectual circle would have nothing to do with him. Sartre’s main complaint was Camus’ rejection of Marxist-Leninism—the kind of political action that he had found imperative as a responsible thinker. There was a big fuss about The Rebel’s wrongs and weaknesses. Camus not only lacked large-scale political strategies, he lacked a systematic understanding of many of his sources. More than that he lacked a logically stable method of argument. In The Philosophical Review, David Sachs spoke for a significant group of critics when he observed of The Rebel that “claims are made in the name of logic, but where ‘logic’ occurs, it sometimes would be better to read ‘tendency’ or ‘drift’…Camus gives the impression of employing a procedure and reaching a conclusion more original and profound than in fact they are”. He wasn’t playing by the rules.

It may be possible to read Camus’ “drift” more generously—as a method adopted not out of laziness or ineptitude, but as an extension of his concern with rebellion. This long essay evidences a conceptual and expressive refusal to capitulate, not only to political ideologies, but to conventional modes of inquiry, a generic regime, or as Sachs puts it, “procedure”. The mode of reasoning Camus refuses (or fails) to participate in prescribes how a good thinker thinks. Modeled after god himself, a voice in the dark void of the universe, conventional reasoning predisposes its participants to singular positions and enforceable claims. Linear, not addressing what it deems irrelevant or unworthy, its power is brutally formulaic, predictable, and closed. Any interlocution is highly manipulated. As revolutions end in oppression, so conventional reasoning perpetuates reductionism under the myth of an ideal language for thought.

Camus takes issue with the premise of universal reasonability in The Rebel and elsewhere. For him, people are reasonable but the world is not. This gap is what interests him. And it is reason in the face of its disastrous context—the experience of the absurd, the mind against its limits, the conditions of life—that Camus engages. Drowning men don’t dance. Even if it were possible it would be unbefitting. Many a professor has smiled with tender condescension at the tattered works of Camus stuffed in the pockets of their students. But those who marginalize Camus as a “good writer but messy thinker” may be missing his true value. His insistence endears; his prose addresses the senses and emotions as well as the intellect. His ideas make sense on their own terms and his methodology, while provisional and limited, has integrity to his subject rare even in those who think clearly.

Andrea Applebee lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

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From its first sentence, “On Pigeons (And Second Glances)” grabbed my attention and rarely relaxed its grip. It’s gross, provocative, sometimes blunt as a mallet, at other times sharp as the instrument with which the narrator cuts apart a “New York dressed” squab. Occasionally it’s tender, and those moments of tenderness are as shocking as the opening. This is a story about the relation between appetite and revulsion, delectation and cruelty, feeder, food, and offal. Think of it as a nightmare companion-piece to The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

On Pigeons (and Second Glances)
by Allie Leach

She’s naked. Her skin is covered in goosebumps; it is a thick, pale yellow, hints of pink glow through her body (those are her insides), as do hints of white (those are her bones). She has a long neck; when stretched out, it’s thin, but when pushed back, looks like a Shar-Pei. Her eyes are black moons circled in yellow. Her legs are skinny and long and pink and snappable. From her feet dart white, sharp nails.

I start gingerly enough, trying to cut in a straight line, a gentle press into flesh with a knife. But the breast bone is in the way. I have to saw. I saw into the body as I would a tree in order to look inside. She has all her parts intact. I find the smooth, brown liver. I roll my fingertips around it, and it feels like a soft, black olive. I find the heart; it’s small, pink-red, with a white film covering. Purple and blue veins wrap around it like a maze. Start here. End nowhere. I find the intestines: both the small and large. They’re tan, thick squiggles that—when stretched out—look like some kind of continuous sausage or rubber ribbon. As I poke around, I shave the skin off with my knife, getting further and further inside the body. I cut too far into her anus and a daffodil yellow liquid streams out like egg yolk. The smell is awful, like something died. And didn’t it? I almost puke in the sink. I almost can’t take it anymore. I almost throw the whole thing away in my trashcan.

What am I doing? I ask myself. Why am I putting myself through something so disgusting? So revolting? I feel like I’m killing the pigeon all over again. It wasn’t enough that it had to go through its first death. Now, it’s going through a second as I carve, poke, finger, dig, pull, detach, and rip. And for what? For my own sick pleasure? For fun? For curiosity’s sake?

Every time I see a pigeon, I stop and stare. If it’s dead I think: I want to take you home and dissect you. If it’s alive I think: what if I killed you? These are my dark thoughts, thoughts that linger like stray cats in the midnight alleys of my brain. Our thoughts have a way of surprising us, revealing sweatshirt layers we had yet to shed. I think about running pigeons over with my bike as I fly down the street. I think about stabbing a big, fat one in the chest. I think about strangling one with my hands. I see the pigeon as exotic, as dirty, as risky, as uncharted territory. At the same time, I want this risk; I want to feel like I’m on the verge of something bad, something scary, something shocking, something new. I want to find these other sides of myself. To dig deeper.

I live in Tucson and pigeons are everywhere. I see them every day. But I only see their outsides: a gray mess of feathers. And I only see their stereotype: that they’re dirty scavengers. But I want to see inside these creatures. I want to taste them. Get to know them better.

My obsession with pigeons and desire to dissect one gets around. I have trusty pigeon correspondents keeping an eye out for me. Two friends—on separate occasions—called me recently to say they’d found dead pigeons around Tucson. One of them found a dead baby pigeon on the road. She kindly let me know where it was located and that she’d help me look for it. The other friend even offered to pick the dead pigeon up for me. But I decide against this (for reasons that will later unfold) and buy a pigeon online instead.

What I buy is squab. Squab happens to be a fancy term (or convenient euphemism) for pigeon. And not just any kind of pigeon, but a baby pigeon. If this isn’t depressing enough, then how about this: not only is the pigeon only four weeks old when it’s killed on a farm, but it never gets the chance to fly. What’s strange about these facts is how they’re marketed on the D’Artagnan website, which, by the way, is where I order my squab. This website houses a variety of gourmet meats that you can buy online and have delivered to your door (as I’ve done).

One might think that a four week old baby pigeon, who’s never flown, is tragic. The website seems to think otherwise: “our fledgling birds have never flown and are raised on a protein-rich, whole-grain diet that develops a plump and flavorful breast meat.” What I infer from all of this, then, is that by not flying, the baby pigeon gets all fattened up, all plumped out. I guess if the pigeon did fly, it would be lean and strong. I guess, if the pigeon was old enough to fly, it would never come back.

The website goes on to describe how the squab tastes: “dark, tender, full-flavored meat that is known for its singular ability to retain moisture while cooking, making it a very versatile, easy bird to prepare. It is also among the easiest meats to digest.” The particular squab that I order is described as “New York Dressed,” which means that this squab comes with its head and feet and wings “attached for presentation” (de-feathered, of course). I choose this particular squab not for its presentation, per se, but for a reality check; I’ve never eaten a piece of meat with its head attached. I’ve always been able to disassociate the meat from the animal. And that’s probably why I’m still able to eat meat. But I want to challenge myself, to make myself see a pigeon as close to the real thing (and as close as I’m comfortable with) as possible.

One of my main motivations—besides wanting to say that I’ve eaten pigeon—for ordering the pigeon, for spending the ridiculous $43.93, (18 bucks plus a whopping 26 bucks for shipping) is that I am curious to look inside one, to see its parts: heart, lungs, intestines, liver, kidneys, gall bladder, and everything in between. I’m also motivated by my own unwavering curiosity to dissect, to analyze, to find meaning. I yearn to get inside things, to discover how things work, to use my hands, to get dirty and stinky and maybe even bloody, to explore, to essay into an experience.

I used to love Anatomy class. Although I was never much of a science buff—didn’t know much about chemistry, physics, or biology—I did have a knack for memorizing body parts, for not being afraid to get out a scalpel and dig inside dead things. In high school, I used to slice open everything from owl pellets to fetal pigs, from crawdads to cats (only while in class, of course). I cannot cut open a cat, my lab partner protested. Scalpel, please, I’d request. I liked to pretend I was a coroner. I would perform the autopsy and attempt to find out what went wrong.

I was also obsessed with the T.V. show E.R. I convinced myself that I could be, should be a surgeon one day. My mad crush on Noah Wyle pushed this dream even further. I wanted to be his girlfriend. Oh, Noah. We have so much in common. We’re not afraid to slice into bodies. Okay, now let’s go home and have sex. After my weekly dose of E.R. every Thursday night, I’d saunter into Anatomy class the next morning. Tight plastic gloves? Check. Scalpel in hand? Check. Ready to fearlessly explore the insides of something, anything? Check.

That once fearless high school girl is now a woman. Some of these fearless qualities, no doubt, still remain inside me: I interview complete strangers, unclog dirty toilets, and sing and tap dance in public. But when it comes to this pigeon, I am disgusted, scared even, while dissecting it. I feel for it. Instead of cutting apart an animal to cut a good grade for class, this experience is now self-motivated, self-directed, self-imposed. And, because of this difference, I am more aware of my movements, question my motives, and empathize with the animal.

I get a white rubber stopper to clog the sink and throw in the innards, the organs, the skin, and the fat. I can’t look at the wings and legs and head any longer. If I’m to eat this thing, I need to detach the parts to detach myself emotionally. So I saw off the wings. I saw off the legs. I saw off the head. It takes much more force than I expect. I throw all of it into the sink, which now looks fit for a slaughter house.

After all of this dissection, this mutilation, all I can come up with are two, tiny palm-sized hunks of brown meat. That’s all. That’s all I have from this mess. The soy sauces and vinegar and ginger and cilantro and wine and scallions that I bought to marinade the meat with seem superfluous. All of this for these two dinky pieces of meat? I had to go through an emotional Ferris wheel for this? I had to rip apart a bird for all this? Well, now I must eat it.

Many are braver than I. In Gary Paul Nabhan’s Coming Home to Eat, he describes picking up a Gambel quail seconds after the bird is hit by a truck. He takes it to his girlfriend’s home and “that evening, after plucking and gutting the quail, I stuffed its cavities full of garlic and wild oregano from my garden and basted it in a prickly pear syrup glaze…After a prayer, we each sampled the quail—a rich taste of dark juicy meat, faintly sweet and spicy.” After reading his account, I wished that my experience had been so romantic. But it wasn’t. And I wish that I had been brave enough to pick a dead pigeon up off the side of the road and eat it. But I didn’t. I was afraid—afraid of getting sick, afraid that my insides would fill up like yellow fluid in a septic tank, flood with disease caused by some type of bird flu, then shut down. I was afraid of dying.

Nabhan says earlier in the book that “if life itself is inherently dangerous, then surely eating to stay alive must involve some risks.” So, I stop and ask myself this: what risks am I willing—and not willing—to take with my food? When and where do I close my mouth and say: No, thank you?

While the brown squab breasts roast, I pop open a beer. I lie on my bed. And cry. I feel like I just killed something. I am having people over, but I don’t want to now. All I want to do is taste squab breasts by myself, honor the meat and the baby pigeon from whence it came, and then sleep for twelve hours straight.

But I don’t. Instead, I buck up, clean up, and check on the oven-roasting squab. I slice into the breast, checking to see if the meat is fully cooked. It is now done, in fact, it is now over-done. I once cooked chicken breasts for my family and got my little sister sick; her breast meat was salmon pink on the inside, not fully cooked. Now that I’ve learned my lesson, now that I’m paranoid, I cook my meat thoroughly (perhaps, too thoroughly). The breasts are a dark brown, cinnamon-chocolate color. They look like two, tiny livers.

I bite into the breast, along with my two wonderful friends who brave this tasting experience with me, and my first thought is the texture. The meat is thick and dense and somewhat tough.

“What do you think?” I ask my friends.

“It’s very…salty,” one of them says. My other friend—an on-again-off-again-vegetarian—nods her head in agreement. And I agree, too. It’s no wonder why they’re so salty, as I’ve rubbed the breasts in salt and marinated them in vinegar and two different kinds of soy sauce.

That night, after I eat the pigeon breasts, I think about giving up meat for good. I think about this—long and hard—for about five minutes. In some ways, I wish this experience had been more of a life shaking, core changing event. I would love to say this: thanks to this experience, I no longer eat meat. Or even this: thanks to this experience, I only eat meat that’s local. But I would be lying. I would be lying if I didn’t mention that I still love meat, crave meat, adore it, even. And while I have no intentions of eating a pigeon again, I barely second guessed my motives the other night as I chomped down on chicken tenders and buffalo wings. I wasn’t sure where the meat came from, but I was positive that it tasted wonderful, delectable. Dipping the chicken tenders into tangy, honey mustard sauce and smothering the hot and spicy barbeque wings into ranch dressing, I instantly thought: this tastes way better than the pigeon.

Why is it that my taste buds are wired for that instant gratification from the chicken wings and tenders, but not for pigeon? Is it simply that I’m a bad cook or could it be something else? Could it be that my preconceived notions of taste got in the way? Could it be that my taste buds knew their final answer before the breast meat even landed in my mouth?

It’s no secret that I am familiar with chicken, have eaten it since I was little. But I’m not familiar with pigeon, haven’t eat it week after week, day in and day out. But let’s say I did. Let’s say I lived in the country, and my Dad shot wild game birds, like pigeons, on the regular. Let’s say that he stuffed these birds with bread crumbs and rosemary, painted them with butter, and roasted them in the oven. Let’s say these birds tasted delicious. That would make this pigeon story of mine a completely different bird, so to speak. But, as of now, I don’t see pigeons in this light. They aren’t on my menu. I didn’t enjoy the taste. The bird felt like a waste. Because I don’t have any plans to eat another pigeon anytime soon, I begin to see them differently—not as meat, but as birds. Just birds.

Bert (of Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie) likes to collect paper clips and bottle caps, eat oatmeal, and watch pigeons. He loves pigeons. So much so, that he has pet pigeons, two of them, named Bernice and Arnold. When I was little, I had a soundtrack to Sesame Street with many of the show’s famed songs like “Rubber Ducky,” “C is for Cookie,” and “Doin’ the Pigeon.” In the pigeon song, Bert imitates the movements of a pigeon, or as he says, “the kind of ballet that sweeps me away.” This ballet includes a bent leg, arabesquing in-and-out, as well as bouncy head that juts in-and-out. I’m reminded of this song when I watch pigeons. I’m reminded of the joy that Bert feels when he watches pigeons; a joy so strong that he’s moved to dance like them.

In the song, “Feed the Birds,”—from the movie, Mary Poppins—a little, old woman sits on the steps of St. Paul’s cathedral in London, feeding bread crumbs to birds. Come buy my bags full of crumbs, she asks onlookers, passersby. The woman is swarmed with pigeons; they cover her body like accessories. The song never fails to choke me up, to make me wish I could talk with the animals. Lyrics like this get me every time:

Come feed the little birds
Show them you care
And you’ll be glad if you do
Their young ones are hungry
Their nests are so bare
All it takes are tuppence from you

It’s such simple act—feeding birds—that I nearly forgot I used to do it. We were a feed the birds kind of family. And it’s no wonder. My sisters and I were obsessed with Mary Poppins growing up. So much so, that, when my Mom was pregnant with my younger sister, my older sister Mary and I suggested (demanded, really) that she name her Jane if a girl, and Michael if a boy, which just so happen to be the names of the children in Mary Poppins. She was girl. And thus, she was named Jane.

Growing up, my sisters and I made birdhouses with my Dad, striking nails with hammers, slathering brick red paint onto wood. We had birdfeeders—those huge, compact, Hershey’s kiss-shaped blocks of seeds. And we fed them bread crumbs, much like the little, old bird woman.

When I bike down Mountain Road on my way to school, close to my home in Tucson, even closer to the University of Arizona, I pass a house-o-pigeons. A front yard, rather. A woman, who I’ll call Carla, sets out two bowls full of bite-sized pieces of bread. Flocks of pigeons gather in gaggles in her front yard; it’s their home. Some eat ravenously. Some hang out on the power lines, sunbathing. Some take baths in water bowls.

When I find Carla, she’s sitting in her seal-gray Toyota Camry; it’s covered—not surprisingly—in bird shit.

“Do you live here?” I ask her.

“Yes, me and my brother do.”

She peeks her head out of her car window; she’s smiling. Her face is like a weathered, brown handbag covered in lovely wrinkles. Her hair is black, highlighted with gray, and her bangs are long, resting just above her eyebrows. She has on a striped black and white shirt underneath a dark gray hoodie. The hoodie is covered in tiny white hairs and brown dirt. Glancing into her car, I see that it’s dirty, too: filled with old newspapers, grocery store ads, and more brown dirt, more tiny, white hairs. I can’t help but think that she kind of reminds me of pigeon—a very cute, smiley one.

There are about twenty pigeons in her front yard. Each one is unique. I find this odd. When I think about most birds—ravens, blue-jays, blackbirds—I often think how much they look alike, identical even. Pigeons, though, are different. The color combinations and speckles and details that differentiate one from another are endless. Some are white with gray dots. Some are half gray, half white. Some are blue-gray. Some are gray with iridescent purple necks. Some are solid black. Some solid white.

“How long have these pigeons been coming to your house?” I ask her.

“I have nooo idea,” she says shaking her head. “These pigeons were starving though. You should’ve seen ‘em when they first came to our house. They were so thin and dehydrated. Now look how big they are!” She points at the pigeons and laughs. It’s odd that she’s sitting in her car, just watching her pigeons, but, at the same time, it’s kind of awesome. Awesome in a Tucson-is-so-weird kind of way.

“Did you just get back from the store?” I ask.

“No, I just like to sit out here in the sun and watch my pigeons.”

She goes on for about a half hour about the pigeons. And not just about pigeons, but about other animals. In addition to the pigeons, cats and dogs come to her door. Maybe it’s because of the food, but, I think, they have a sixth sense about this home, this woman.

“They know it’s a safe haven, don’t they?” I ask.

“Oh, I don’t know, Allie,” she smiles and rolls her eyes. I find it endearing that she includes my name after statements. She continues to do this, periodically, while I talk with her. It’s as if she’s known me for years, but I just met her minutes ago. She welcomes me into her yard just as effortlessly and gracefully as she welcomes the pigeons, the cats, the dogs. I feel like she’s taking me in, taking me under her pigeon wings, in a way.

“Why do some people think that pigeons are such dirty birds?” I ask her.

“I guess because they eat so much litter. But, you know, humans are dirty, too. They’re the ones making all this litter,” she says angrily. I agree with her. I’ve often thought pigeons were dirty and gross. One morning, while running in the alley behind a bar, I found, next to a dumpster, pigeons eating half-eaten pizza slices. Such scavengers, I thought. Why can’t you eat your own food, your bird food? But, after talking with Carla, I realize that it’s our fault they’re eating the litter; we created it and they’re starving. Plus, with the abundance of pigeons around Tucson, the fight for food becomes brutal, and they take whatever they can get.

Though some pigeons, Carla’s pigeons, it seems, can be a little picky. “The pigeons are kind of fussy,” she tells me. “They only like the white bread that I get from Fry’s or Walmart. I’ve tried popcorn and bird-seed, but they don’t eat it.” This tidbit complicates their stereotyped image, the one I had previously become familiar with: pigeons scurrying around trash cans, hoping someone will miss the basket, litter a little. Birds lingering next to dumpsters, hoping the garbage man will spill hamburger buns, onion rings, and mozzarella sticks onto concrete.

Because pigeons have adapted to city life, they have become urban scavengers, quite commonly called “the rats of the sky.” Typically, pigeons are not fussy eaters, as they only have 37 taste buds (humans have 9,000!) Pigeons that live in the country, that live in the wild, often can’t depend on garbage scraps. Instead, these pigeons live off wild grains, seeds, berries, fruit, and insects. Wild pigeons are said to be much healthier than street pigeons, which are often said to harbor diseases (though this stereotype has often been contested). In response to questions about the effects of pigeons on human health, in 1986 the Association of Pigeon Veterinarians issued a statement that concludes, “…to our knowledge, the raising, keeping, and the exercising of pigeons and doves represents no more of a health hazard than the keeping of other communal or domestic pets.” A spokesman for the American Pigeon Fanciers Council says this statement applies to feral pigeon flocks, too. He says “the homing and racing pigeons that people raise stay healthy even though they often come into contact with feral pigeons.” So, while many of us see pigeons as dirty birds, in truth, they’re actually not much dirtier than, say, your dog or cat.

In her book, On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry talks about her complicated relationship with palm trees. She used to think they were the ugliest of trees; she hated them: “palms are not beautiful; possibly they are not even trees.” But, over time, she starts looking at them in a different light, eventually concluding that they are truly beautiful.

I once watched a group of pigeons as they sat on the concrete ledge of a fountain. While small and lively finches bathed themselves in mini-waterfalls, the pigeons sat lazily about, watching the other birds. And, if they weren’t watching, they were waddling around the dirty ground, rummaging for left over bits of food. Why can’t you be more clean? I thought. Why can’t you be more energetic, more spritely like the finches? I realized that, over time, I had developed a kind of bird racism, a kind of bird caste system. I put birds in their respective houses. This one is clean. This one is beautiful. This one is dirty. The instant I saw a finch, I thought it was cute. The moment I saw a pigeon, I thought it was disgusting. Go on a diet. Get away from me. You’re full of diseases. If a finch landed in my hand, I would be delighted. If a pigeon landed in my hand, I’d yell, “Gross!”

The more I stare, the more I start to re-think the pigeon. When the male chases his mate, he puffs and shimmies. Instead of singing, he gurgles and gargles, like an Adam’s apple rattling in someone’s throat. There’s something strangely regal about them. Maybe it’s their shiny blue-green-purple necks, the way these colors shine against the blazing Arizona sun. It’s as if they’re wearing necklaces made of emeralds, amethysts, and aquamarine.

“Look at those two,” Carla says, pointing. “They just kissed each other with their beaks. They’re the only ones who do that.” For while, we are quiet—she in her car, me standing alongside—watching pigeons.

“Thanks for talking with me,” I say.

“Of course, Allie. Take care of yourself.” Carla shakes my hand. It’s a beautiful moment. But for some weird reason, out of some strange instinct, as soon as my fingers slide past her palm, I glance at her, I glance at the mass of pigeons and think—and I hate myself for thinking this—I need to wash my hands.


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Mother of All Things

Madre is a book about language, about the motives for expression that are most familiar and most foreign, the characteristics of a single word that are both obvious and obscure. Brown University linguistic anthropologist Liza Bakewell takes as her subject mother in Spanish (very specifically in Mexican Spanish, a detail that the book’s title does not convey) in this associative, inquisitive, and nostalgic personal account. The jacket copy describes Madre as “a sui generis marvel,” and that’s true in the sense that the book’s tone and structure are more idiosyncratic than conventional of the genres from which the author borrows. Yet Bakewell does have peers in this kind of project, other writers and scholars who have approached their fields of expertise with enough calm and pleasure to turn the research projects that sent them scrambling around the globe into romantic travelogues—Michele Morano’s Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain (cited in Bakewell’s first chapter) immediately comes to mind, followed by Ted Bishop’s Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books. Madre is a cool book, or rather a warm one, full of intelligence, honesty, and the jagged edges of a mind at work.

Bakewell, who has lived on and off in Mexico since 1987, speaking its language at work and at home, wants to know, compared to the vernacular in other Spanish-speaking countries, “Why are idioms with the word madre so popular here in Mexico?” Her answer encompasses the common Western mothers Eve and the Virgin Mary, their distinctly Mexican counterparts Malinche (Cortés’s lover and “tongue,” the translator and intermediary between the Spanish conquistadors and the colonized indigenous people, both a mother and a traitor in the creation story of the country) and the Virgin of Guadalupe (the miraculous 16th-century apparition credited with the founding of a nation and the founding of a nation’s Catholicism), gender roles in Spanish grammar, and feminism in the kinds of verbal spars known as piropos.

“The anthropologist’s approach revels in the fluidity of language, its infinite variations, its heterogeneity, the way speakers and listeners manipulate their communication, the way the variables of gender, class, religion, age, education, ritual, religion, and the like interact with what’s said and how it is understood within these performances,” Bakewell explains. “And then there’s pure play, rhythm and rhyme, tone and style, twisted grammar and far-flung punctuation.” She is a skillful writer and her compressed, almost choral sentences can mix musings on theories of childhood language acquisition with reminiscences of dining with friends in elegant settings. Parenthetical statements about political shifts and presidential elections in Mexico imply a chronology, but Bakewell is less telling a story than recreating a process of understanding that unfolded over time. Bakewell is possessed of an easy intellectualism that allows her to hold an incredible amount of information in her mind at once, but that particular strength also accounts for one of the book’s few vulnerabilities—the weight of each chapter shifts unevenly and uneasily between passages that ask to be read as personal asides revealed in the context of a linguistic study and others that provide academic anecdotes in the context of a memoir.

The joy of reading Madre is watching Bakewell assemble the pieces in front of you. Riding in cars with unemployed politicians in Mexico City, cooking Asian-fusion enchiladas for her graduate students in Oaxaca, sitting at home alone on the couch in Maine, she wonders aloud why this word so closely associated with the source of life should have so many convoluted (and often counter-intuitively vulgar) connotations. In eight chapters that represent over two decades of curiosity, excitement, and frustration, she reviews and revises a running list of these mothers. She does not, however, include a glossary. The choice must be deliberate, as if explaining that the meanings of these explosive expressions—

me vale madre, de poca madre, a toda madre
desmadre, en todo la madre, madriza, madrazo,
me di un madrazo, le dieron un madrazo de aquellos…

cannot exist apart from the world in which they are spoken. Come to Mexico, Bakewell seems to blithely conclude, and figure it out for yourself.

Emily Stone received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Pitt in 2010. Her work has been accepted for publication by AGNI, Fourth Genre, Tin House, and the North American Review, and she has twice been included among the notable authors of the year in Best American Travel Writing. She teaches creative writing, journalism, and literature in English at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China.

Rakoff’s Full Glass of Wit

Those who have read David Rakoff before—the author of Fraud, Don’t Get Too Comfortable, and  numerous  magazine pieces—or heard him on Public Radio International’s This American Life, won’t be surprised by the wry pessimism that radiates from Half Empty, his most recent book of essays. The ten essays that comprise Half Empty all address pessimism in some fashion, and while dark, they’re refreshingly funny rebuttals to the positivity that pervades our culture today.

Certain pieces have a stronger focus on pessimism than others. The first essay, “The Bleak Shall Inherit,” falls into this category, introducing the idea of “defensive pessimism”: assuming the worst is beneficial because it means you won’t be disappointed. This attitude allows you to prepare back-up plans. Essays that aren’t as tied to this theme include “Shrimp,” in which Rakoff talks about having a small frame his entire life, and “Dark Meat,” which discusses the complicated relationship between Jewish people and pork. But for readers craving more on pessimism, the theme resurfaces again in the book with touching pieces like “All the Time We Have,” which addresses Rakoff’s relationship with a longtime therapist, and “Another Shoe,” which details his brush with cancer in middle age.

Even though some of his topics are downright grim and he claims to be “anti-fun,” Rakoff doesn’t really hate fun—he’s just wary of self-delusion and cultural phenomena that encourage such misguided thinking. He slams the musical Rent in the book’s best essay, “Isn’t It Romantic,” and makes a convincing case for why this attack is warranted: Rent romanticizes the life of an artist to an absurd level. The essay is filled with witty lines, proof that at the very least, he’s having fun with language.  

“Creativity demands an ability to be with oneself at one’s least attractive, that sometimes it’s easier not to do anything. Writing—I can really only speak to writing here—always, always only starts out as shit: an infant of monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometimes forever).”

Rakoff isn’t afraid to turn his critical eye inward. In this essay, he shows his own unattractive moments, in his struggle to live the creative life. Another entertaining essay, “The Satisfying Crunch of Dreams Underfoot,” follows his stint in the movie business, with a small role in the 1996 comedy The First Wives’ Club. (Don’t search for his name in the cast credits, as he was very quickly dropped from the production). Part of the humor in this essay comes from the fact that Rakoff makes a very apparent effort not to name-drop the movie or Olivia Goldsmith, the author who wrote the book that’s the basis of the movie. What makes the essay even more hilarious, though, is that Rakoff the character becomes swept up in the fantasy that this little role will propel him to stardom—the kind of delusions that Rakoff the author criticizes.

The one essay that falls short is “A Capacity for Wonder.” Each section focuses on a “constructed Eden”: the Disney Innoventions Dream Home, Hollywood Boulevard, and Mormon Salt Lake City. While all three sections have amusing moments—an African-American man he bumps into in Salt Lake City equates becoming a Mormon to joining the Klan—Rakoff doesn’t show us how the three places connect or reveal something about contemporary culture. In other essays, his tendency to digress is entertaining, and he does return to his point, but “A Capacity for Wonder” lacks this point-of-return.

Having a pessimistic outlook may be seeing the glass as half empty, but Rakoff delivers an essay collection that is full of sharp observations and ideas. If someone has to break it to us that the world is not as bright and brimming with possibilities as we make it out to be, he’s the man for the task. At least we’ll go out laughing. 

Jessica Wang is currently a MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh, working on a family memoir. She previously reviewed A Good Fall and Notes from No Man’s Land for Hot Metal Bridge.

The premise is too fascinating to pass up: in 1945, while Germany is a vast, raw expanse of post-war ruins and hunger, take one villa in Nuremberg and populate it with former members of the Nazi party. Add some former members of the Resistance movement and several concentration camp survivors. Finally, find a beautiful Hungarian countess, ask her to manage the villa and keep the conversation civil, and wait for the war crimes trials to begin. Thus, The Witness House, a work of nonfiction by German journalist Christiane Kohl, translated into English by Anthea Bell.

In the beginning of her book, Kohl discusses her inspiration for the project. One night a man named Bernhard von Kliest (a house-guest staying with her parents) revealed a visitors’ book with signatures of people ranging from Rudolph Diels, the man who created the Gestapo, to concentration camp survivors like Eugen Kogon. von Kliest explained to Kohl that he had been a translator in the Nuremberg Trials while his wife, Annemarie von Kliest, took over the management of this odd place—the Witness House—that the American occupying forces had established to house those who were to be interrogated for the Nuremberg trials. Her interest piqued, Kohl began her research, locating and conducting interviews with the Hungarian countess, Ingeborg Kálnoky, who had managed the house from 1945-1947 during the height of the trials before von Kliest took over in 1947-1948.

The book is technically impressive, painting quirky and detailed portraits of many guests of the Witness House. Kohl pulls much of her material from first-hand interview accounts (with Kàlnoky and several others) as well as documents like interrogation records and letters. She moves in and out of the story, giving narratives of present-day interviews, in which her voice is very much present, and then slipping back out to discuss the Witness House and German post-war history from a greater distance. The narrative shifts, for example, from the larger political climate of 1930s and 1940s Germany in the shadow of the Third Reich, to stories of a former Nazi functionary at the Witness House begrudgingly giving soap and razor blades to a former Resistance member. Horrors like laboratory experiments performed on Jewish concentration camp inmates exist alongside a snapshot of General Köstring impatiently looking for a lost fountain pen.

Especially compelling is the fact that Kohl focuses almost purely on the lesser-known, more indirect contributors to the atrocities committed by the National Socialists—men like Heinrich Hoffman, Hitler’s personal photographer and Gisela Limberger, Hermann Göring’s secretary and librarian—rather than the infamous Himmlers, Görings, and Ribbentrops who were being held nearby under lock and key at the time.

By focusing on so many of these figures and their involvement as witnesses in the trial, Kohl is able to show how those existing in the ethically grey areas after the end of World War II quietly scrambled to re-classify themselves among the changed and remorseful, the latecomers to the Resistance, the unknowing, the outright innocent. The guests at the Witness House hang in a certain balance: former Nazis accept, deny, and brood over their guilt, their complicity, the people they have been over the past decade and a half. Some assert their continuing superiority and lament their ill treatment at the hands of the Americans. All the while, former Resistance members and concentration camp inmates navigate their way through their grief and torment, their anger and betrayal and loss, the compromises they have been forced to make, while sitting across the dinner table from those who controlled their fates until far too recently, sometimes only months before. These face-to-face encounters are troublesome for everyone—for those on each side of the trial and for the reader, because Kohl has portrayed the multi-faceted human being underneath the villain and the victim. In one chill-inducing scene, Kohl describes concentration camp survivors asking Hoffman, with very genuine curiosity, for his impressions of Hitler.

However, the great imbalance in this book is the painfully limited amount of space Kohl leaves for discussing what I felt to be the overarching questions of the book. How could conversation stay so civil? Why did the guests stay almost completely silent on the matters at hand, rather than come out and ask “Why?” and “How?” All while people were testifying about events that would be imprinted in the consciousness of the western world. All while guests of the Witness House were listening to death sentences read over the radio after the first round of trials. It’s not that I find it unbelievable that rage and flare-ups would be self-repressed; on the contrary, it feels like a reaction that human beings in the circumstances of the book would be likely to have. Kohl offers several possible explanations for the steady tone and atmosphere maintained in the house; however, I found myself begging her to have taken it further. What was really going on in the psychology of these people who had just experienced a seismic shift in their lives and worldviews? Was Kohl simply limited in exploring the Jewish reactions to being at the Witness House because it was too painful to be able to comment on the experience at the time? Because no former Nazi would have yet processed the magnitude of what he had contributed to?

In the end, however, this is a book that is very much worth reading and that is very different from other accounts of Germany during and after the war. While the writing itself is not necessarily stunning, it is artful enough, and the weaving together of narrative and history is done in a deft and thought-provoking manner. I can acknowledge that, in some ways, the entire book is asking the questions above, simply by the anecdotes that are offered—juxtaposed with meticulous and often horrifying historical facts—to the reader. A reader can piece together possibilities for answering these questions or be content to keep creating questions to follow Kohl into the human psyche. What is it about human beings that makes us turn inward, shut down, gloss over, deny? What makes us able to push a Holocaust to the side, finish our dinner with perfect manners, and follow it with a drink and a cigarette?

Nicole Carroll exists somewhere between Buffalo and Pittsburgh and is currently an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh.

Angel-Ajani’s first novel, Strange Trade, makes for strange reading. The story is part research, educating the reader on the drug world: “Since the late 1980’s, starting with the fall of the Medellin Cartel in Columbia, the drug-smuggling business has transformed itself into a boutique operation.” It is part disclosure, shedding light on her choice of topic being related to her drug-trade-influenced childhood: “As a child, I thought of prisons as people-eating machines.” But it is also an action drama: the story of Angel-Ajani allowing herself to be sucked into the outer ring of the drug vortex.

The beginning of her story is discombobulating. An early chapter starts with the story of Mary, one of the “Two Women” (the other being Pauline) prominently promised in the subtitle. The rest of the novel switches between third person reflective personal histories of Mary and Pauline and the first person story of Angel-Ajani, which devolves from a “comfortable student life of research and study” into the threatening world of outer-ring drug business.

Though the back cover warns that she will be dishing out a “deeply personal perspective” to her black-market subject mater, this did not prepare me for the establishment of Angel-Ajani as a third main character. The book’s subtitle should have included “with insight into the affected children of this trade, including the author herself.”

Anthropological books tend to include the author as a character—after all, the anthropologist has a duty to interpret the people they are studying; it is impossible to take the researcher out of the study, and out of the finished, published, product. I get this; in travelogues I am prepared to accept the idea that the author will be both the anthropologist-guide to the culture and the main character of any action. Angel-Ajani was not so straightforward. Yes, she immediately situates herself as the main character in the midst of a foreboding first meeting with members of a large drug trafficking ring run by “the Ugandan.” Yes, she then descriptively guides us to grey Rebibbia, the largest prison in Italy, and to the Femminile (female) complex. She explains her fieldwork early on: to interview the women incarcerated on drug charges in an effort to discover their motivation. The complexities of the international drug chain are explained as deftly as if they were the procedures for stocking Walmart shelves.

But these explanations are mixed with the candid drama of Mary, Pauline, and (I came to learn) Angel-Ajani’s personal narratives. I was initially not a fan of the disjointing change of view. Yet, as I got more involved with the characters’ stories, the format made it increasingly hard to put down the book. Angel-Ajani, Mary, and Pauline are the three prongs to this pitchfork of a novel, and each woman’s story is oddly captivating in its painful worldliness. Mary, a desperate woman fleeing fighting in her home Liberia, tries to find work to feed her two surviving sons. This attempt to regain normalcy ends when airport police find drugs her boyfriend packed in her luggage. Pauline is the opposite of Mary, an aggressive mother whose lust to be her own boss is more enticing than the love of her husband and children. She willingly enters the drug business, becoming “the Ugandan;” as she says to Angel-Ajani, “I chose this business because it suited me.”

I admire Angel-Ajani’s honesty and find it distressing. She is a professional in a field with a problematic relationship to ethical question, “How close is too close?” At one point she goes out with Pauline’s agent, Hassan, bringing her notebook: “In my mind, my notebook would let people know that I was not like Hassan…that I was not a criminal.” The notebook is a poor shield the drug dealers do not respect; she ends up in an apartment during a drug transaction. As a reader I could see Angel-Ajani being sucked deeper into Pauline’s drug network, but she ignores my cries of “Stupid!” and only manages to come to her senses in time to make a hasty escape from impending disaster.

There are so many shades of grey in this depiction of the drug world: Pauline still claims to love her children, though everything points otherwise, and the sacrificial mother Mary does not plan on looking for her forcefully abandoned sons after her release. These are real women caught up in an international illegal business, not movie characters or family approved TV sitcom interludes. Angel-Ajani is an intelligent graduate student working on her research. Mary has four degrees. Pauline is a self-made go-getter. A crucial point Angel-Ajani makes is that the women involved in drug trading are not stupid.  The issue is deeper, and the people involved have more dimensions than we typically hear.

Ultimately, this book portrays the drug trade for what it is: a business. Angel-Ajani depicts the women involved in this unspoken commerce, and almost becomes one of these women herself.  This is a book that will educate, disturb, enthrall, and leave its reader questioning what they thought they knew about drug trafficking.

Jessica FitzPatrick is wandering around lost in the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh.  When she set out to pursue her PhD, she didn’t realize the pursuit would be so maze-like.  She’s originally from Delaware, where the chickens outnumber the people.

An essay collection about race in America. Wary, you circle around it. It won the 2008 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Its back cover sports blurbs from big names like Sherman Alexie and David Shields. Still, you might ask: haven’t enough books covered race by now? What new insights could author Eula Biss possibly have to offer? Retract your claws and dive into Notes from No Man’s Land, because the connections Biss makes in her essays startle and, more importantly, confront us with truths we usually try to avoid.

The essay collection’s artfulness has much to do with how Biss gradually approaches her subject. The narrative voice doesn’t come across as one stalling for time until a big reveal, because the details she provides while pushing towards her argument are fascinating. Take the first essay in the collection, “Time and Distance Overcome.” Biss tells us about the animosity the public initially had towards telephone poles and how people considered the poles an “urban blight.” It’s interesting for us readers to imagine telephone poles, which are now ubiquitous—and maybe even a little quaint thanks to the popularity of cellular phones—being so objectionable. We’re treated to four pages of the war against telephone poles, and then Biss surprises us with a shift:

“In 1898, in Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole. And in Weir City, Kansas. And in Brookhaven, Mississippi. And in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the hanged man was riddled with bullets. In Danville, Illinois…”

To move from animosity towards telephone poles to the lynching of black men from those poles isn’t a leap in logic, but it’s certainly unexpected.

Another particularly effective essay that makes surprising yet logical connections is “No Man’s Land,” in which Biss ties the prairie experiences of Laura Ingalls Wilder (the author of the much beloved Little House series) to her own experiences in Rogers Park, a predominantly black neighborhood in Chicago (both Biss and her husband are white). Such an essay could turn paternalistic or self-congratulatory, but Biss avoids such traps by questioning herself as much as everyone else. For example, she expresses discomfort when she sees racial profiling in action, but then makes an admission: “I consider going to one of the monthly beat meetings the police hold for each neighborhood and making some kind of complaint, but month after month I do not go.”

Readers familiar with Joan Didion will be interested to read Biss’ version of the iconic essay “Goodbye to All That.” Not only does Biss’ essay have the same title, but her sentences often echo Didion’s. “But that is not the way it really happened,” she writes after relating an anecdote about moving into her first New York City apartment. “That is how I learned to tell the story of my life in New York.” While she tweaks the moving to New York essay (even challenging Didion at times), this essay pales in comparison to others in the collection, because they venture onto unfamiliar ground while this one does not.

In fact, the strongest essays in Notes from No Man’s Land tend to be the ones about the Midwest, rather than the ones that revolve around New York and California. The aforementioned “No Man’s Land” is one of the Midwestern essays, as is the equally impressive “Is This Kansas,” an account of teaching white Iowan college students around the time of Hurricane Katrina. Didion and many other writers have written about New York and California, but the Midwest is underrepresented, especially when it comes to race issues, and Biss fills a major gap by giving us a quartet of essays on the Midwest.

While there are moments in Biss’ essays in which you’ll want to argue with her, those moments speak to the power of the essays rather than serious weaknesses.  She might end Notes from No Man’s Land with an essay titled “All Apologies,” but there’s one thing she doesn’t need to apologize for: this fine collection of work. Her surprising but sound connections make us reconsider how we see things, and wonder if things we’ve previously thought of as dissimilar can in fact be linked to one another.

Jessica Wang is currently a MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh, working on a family memoir. She previously reviewed A Good Fall for Hot Metal Bridge.

There are certain expectations one has before beginning a text by David Foster Wallace. One: the reading will be pleasurable but by no means leisurely. Two: you will learn about subjects both tangential and unrelated to the supposed topic at hand. And three: there will be lots of footnotes, abbreviations and surprisingly hip professor slang. All these hold true and then some in Everything and More.

This particular text was written for the “Great Discoveries Series” which, according to their website, “pairs today’s top writers with crucial scientific breakthroughs in ways that are both surprising and illuminating.” As Wallace explains (indeed, almost apologizes for) in his “Small But Necessary Foreword”:

“[The book’s] subject is a set of mathematical achievements that are extremely abstract and technical, but also extremely profound and interesting, and beautiful. The aim is to discuss these achievements in such a way that they’re vivid and comprehensible to readers who do not have pro-grade technical backgrounds and expertise. To make math beautiful—or at least to get the reader to see how someone might find it so.”

You know you’re getting into some heavy stuff if DFW not only gives a disclaimer, but begins his book with a dedication to his parents in Greek.

The foreword, complete with abbreviation glossary (one of several), then moves into the problem of infinity and the history of mathematics on both the meta and micro levels. Georg F. L. P. Cantor, we learn, is the cat behind the book, the guy who “solved” infinity in a sense. Infinity, seemingly either straightforward or baffling, is both and neither.

In the next section (divisions are marked with the mathematically-appropriate § symbol throughout the text), he backs up to think about just how abstract math and numbers truly are. Somehow Wallace uses quotes from math historians, O.E.D definitions of “abstract,” and common stumbling blocks for grade schoolers learning numbers to illuminate the distinction between saying there are five oranges on the table versus the concept of the number five: math suddenly seems much harder, but in a whole new way. Even the innocent number line gets a good philosophizing while symbols and representation reemerge throughout as important concepts of infinity, the term being represented by Wallace with the lemniscate symbol rather than linguistically to remind us of the utter abstraction with which we’re dealing.

The tale really begins with logical traps like Galileo’s and Zeno’s paradoxes, the latter of which goes something like this: in order to cross the street, you must cross every single point between one side (A) and the other (B). Because there are an infinite amount of points between A and B, it should be impossible to traverse that distance of infinity, therefore we shouldn’t be able to cross the street.

Obviously we’ve all crossed the road before, so something is instantly fishy. Stuck on this and similar mind traps, early mathematicians ignored or brushed aside infinity and greats like Plato and Aristotle developed incorrect theories that misled the math world for centuries. It wasn’t until the 1600s that mathematicians, by divorcing themselves from geometrical referents like the number line, were finally able to begin developing a rigorous definition for what had become the “problem” of infinity.

The book proceeds in much the same way as it begins: history of math, trimmed and in context; tight, clear reminders of common mathematical concepts and rules; no-nonsense explanations to bring you to his next arithmetical point.

What Wallace ends up achieving is a beautiful book, but not one that’s available to just any audience as the series wants him to do. By no means a technocrat or math genius (I took AP Calculus in high school and even retained a bit of that derivative and integral business), there were still parts of the text, full of symbols and variables, that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around, even with rereads of Wallace’s patient prose. At the very least, readers would benefit from a calculus class, a philosophy course, and probably another book or two of Wallace’s under their belt before they attempt Everything and More.

There are also sections with an overload of abbreviations and incomplete sentences that give it a not-quite-finished draft feel, though given the glut of research and rewriting the work must have taken, I can’t fault Wallace and the editors for not smoothing those out.

That being said, math types have found calculable problems with the text—problems I am too dense to understand but did the equivalent of a vacant head nod as I read about them online. Wallace seemed to anticipate this, as his acknowledgment ends with, “It goes without saying that the author is solely responsible for any errors or imprecisions in this booklet.”

I won’t give away the ending, mostly because I can’t, but let’s just say that the levels of abstraction increase quite a ways above the problem of five oranges and reach a universe of symbols I’ve never seen before, in arithmetic or otherwise. Rules are broken, infinities are found, and I’m back to feeling like a grade schooler.

All abstraction and mind-boggling philosophy-math aside, I’d say the book is worth a try—at least the first hundred pages if you’re weak at math but strong at patience. It’s interesting to see DFW in a realm he was interested in (his senior thesis was on modal logic), but not well-known for, and after reading, I felt like I had sat in on one of his lectures. The voice here is teacherly, kind, and witty. More than ever, I saw his dexterity, his mastery of language and thought, as he twisted around purely conceptual subjects and bowed under the weight of his characteristic sensitivity to ensure understanding, or at least interest. It’s wild to see spots where even a master like him couldn’t quite bend the language his way.

Like most of his work, and infinity itself, Everything and More is about one thing and everything, base and beautiful, floating somewhere in the realm of ideas.

Robyn Jodlowski is a nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh and the book review editor at Hot Metal Bridge. To read more of her work visit http://www.politicsunlocked.com/

It’s been a busy ten years since Anthony Bourdain first let readers into the dark corners of his kitchen and his mind with the mega-bestseller Kitchen Confidential:  Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.  The sometimes ornery chef has gone on to publish a hefty handful of books and articles while moving from country to country with his Emmy Award-winning show No Reservations.

Now retired from the restaurant kitchen, Bourdain proves that he has indeed learned a lot in his 28 years behind the stove. Like him or hate him, Bourdain does not pull punches.  He speaks with clarity about chefdom in his Confidential sequel, Medium Raw, revealing “the searing heat, the mad pace, the never-ending stress and melodrama, the low pay, probable lack of benefits, inequity and futility, the cuts and burns and damage to body and brain—the lack of anything resembling normal hours or a normal personal life.”

The book opens with a scene a la film noir in which a group of heavy-hitter chefs gather in secret to partake in illegal cuisine.  The chapters that follow touch on Bourdain’s reckless days on St. Barts, the conundrum of selling out, and the chef-author’s updated feelings on fellow gastronomic celebrities. “Rachael Ray sent me a fruit basket.  So I stopped saying mean things about her.  It’s that easy with me now,” a sanguine Bourdain admits.

Once a rogue and a provocateur, the Bourdain of Medium Raw is a sage authority.  “I am frequently asked by aspiring chefs, dreamers young and old, attracted by the lure of slowly melting shallots and caramelizing pork belly, or delusions of Food Network stardom, if they should go to culinary school,” says Bourdain.  “I usually give a long, thoughtful, and qualified answer.  But the short answer is ‘no’.”

After his own graduation from the Culinary Institute of America in his early 20s, Bourdain published two “unsuccessful novels” and kept his day job, which spanned an impressive number of Manhattan kitchens.  But the facts of Bourdain’s life are different now; he is older, he is a father, he is no longer a chef, and he deems himself happily uncool.  He has traded the fast-paced, sweaty, profanity-ridden days in the kitchen for the time and the pleasure to dream up new ways to vilify Ronald McDonald for his daughter’s benefit.  The bombastic and angry tone has mellowed considerably.

Medium Raw’s camera pans out slowly on the present, the scene spliced together with vivid shots of bygone years.  Bourdain manages to avoid sentimentality in favor of a studious take on today’s food culture, where the Food Network thrives yet Gourmet magazine is out of business.  Bourdain intelligently and humorously explores the effects of the economic crisis on the restaurant business, the ups and downs of Top Chef, a day in the life at New York’s Le Bernardin, the benefits of dozen-course tasting menus versus lure hamburgers, and his latest heroes and villains.

All of the skills that served Bourdain well as a chef—“creativity, technical skill, leadership abilities, flexibility, grace under pressure, sense of humor, and sheer strength and endurance”—have translated into his writing.  In one of the best and most candid moments of the book, he allows readers to peer in on his coveted “food porn,” describing himself devouring a pain raisin at a small, Parisian boulangerie:  “The reaction is violent.  It hurts.  Butter floods your head and you think for a second you’re going to black out.”

The tamed, more circumspect Bourdain of Medium Raw remains detail-oriented, hilarious, and sharp as ever despite the constant references to his age.  As impressive as his hyper-awareness of foodies and the food industry is his generosity in sharing an honest view of a world that blends food and travel with an intimacy that so few people ever experience first-hand.

Erin Lewenauer, a poet and freelance writer from Milwaukee, is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a graduate of Vassar College and has lived in Paris, Boulder, and New York City.