Natural Acts

Our book today is “Natural Acts” by David Quammen, and it’s a peppy and heartening little masterpiece.

The field of natural history – a field this book adorns – is gratuitously freighted with literary masterpieces. This is understandable in a way, of course: great minds all start out as young people, and all right-thinking young people are fascinated with the natural world around them. Our young friend Elmo has the brain capacity of a Cray computer and the literary talent of a young Robert Silverberg (strange as it feels for those of us who are accustomed to thinking of Robert Silverberg as a ‘young’ Robert Silverberg … alas, hippy afros fade, and even wunderkinds grow older), but he has felt the sublime wonder of working back to stillness in a natural setting and simply watching as wild wonderful things resume their private activities all around him.

We here at Stevereads have also experienced this, and joyfully: swimming with whales off the coast of Hawaii, knowing the whole time that they were studying us out of simple curiosity; standing on an icebound ridge in Alberta, watching young timber wolves cavort in play under a dying sun; hearing the gorgeous melody of the ‘dawn chorus’ of birdsong on a beautiful chilly morning in the lovely countryside of Kent … the experience is the same, the wonderful rush of viscerally, visually understanding that nature, the wild world, happens without humans, happens all the time around them with no more notice of their bus and trains schedules than of their literary journals (or – gasp – their blogs).

Every naturalist knows these things (even the ones who learned them through the blast of a gun, although Elmo might be slow to allow for that), and quite a few of them have wanted nothing more than to write something that captured their experience. But precious few of them have had the literary ability to pull it off. This has resulted in a vast library of very dull books written about very fascinating things, a curious phenomenon found only in this particular branch of the sciences. Old little libraries dotted around the country have shelves filled with books titled something like “Sixty Years in the Yukon” or “Boating on the Danube” that were written by people who saw and experienced untold wonders (many of which have since vanished from a world increasingly bent on killing its wonders), and yet the books themselves are gaspingly dull. For every William Bartram, there are sixty prospectors with leaden prose styles. For every Theodore Roosevelt, there are eighty cowpokes who couldn’t write a compelling sentence if their lice-infested heads hung in the balance.

Still, there have been giants. Aristotle was one, and of course Darwin was another. William Beebe was one such, and in his own way so was the verbose Stephen Jay Gould. And surely one of the 20th century’s giants is David Quammen.

And Natural Acts is one of his peppiest essay collections (most of these first saw print while Outside magazine was lucky enough to have Quammen writing for it regularly). A collection as zestily written as this one tempts even our steely will here at Stevereads to simply quote its best bits for the next two hours, and we shall only partially resist. The urge anybody feels when they read this book (or, for that matter, most of Quammen’s other books) is to rush up to the next person they see and urge it upon them, and we see no reason to falsify that urge by substituting our own prose, brilliant though it is. Sometimes quoting an author is the best way to recommend him.

For instance, here’s Quammen on bats:

“Clearly the bat has captured human imaginations, and that may be because it seems triply oxymoronic: a flying mammal that sees in the dark by listening to its own silent screams. It is in truth an extraordinary animal, equipped with some startlingly sophisticated evolutionary adaptations, and represented around the world by a wild variety of different forms. If the bat is grotesquely improbable, so is Pablo Picasso.”

And here he is on the disturbing (to humans, anyway) personal presence of the octopus:

One of [Jacques] Cousteau’s assistants adds: ‘I have often had the impression that they are reflecting.’ Other divers and lab researchers make the same sort of comment, describing the same eerie sense of encounter, recognition, even mutuality. Lately I’ve had occasion to experience it myself, during three evenings of octopus-watching in a small university room filled with quietly gurgling tanks: the potent, expressive gaze of the octopus. These animals don’t just gape at you glossily, like a walleye. They make eye contact, as though they are someone you should know.”

And then there’s this, on the often sadistic playfulness exhibited by crows and ravens, a trait we’ve mentioned once or twice here at Stevereads:

“There is also an element of the practical jokester. Of the Indian house crow, Wilmore says: ‘… this Crow has a sense of humor, and revels in the discomfort caused by its playful tweaking at the tails of other birds, and at the ears of sleeping cows and dogs; it also pecks the toes of flying foxes as they hang sleeping in their roosts.’ This crow is a laff riot. Another of Wilmore’s favorite species amuses itself, she says, by ‘dropping down on sleeping rabbits and rapping them over the skull or settling on drowsy cattle and startling them.’ What we have here is actually a distinct subcategory of playfulness known, where I come from at least, as Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’.

For page after page, he’s like this: funny, insightful, and empathetic. His essays go by like the happiest of quick dreams, and his longer works wear their considerable learning so lightly they uniformly invite the reader, like having a happy, enthusiastic guest at dinner who just happens to know more than you do about komodo dragons, or coyotes, or jellyfish. Quammen’s writing approaches the natural world with the unembarrassed open-eyed wonder of the very young, and through his words, every reader is encouraged to do likewise.

So exit the computer for a moment, go outside, and look around for some leaping, living nonhuman thing. Once you’ve walked far enough to find one, stand still for a few minutes and just watch it, with no hurry in your head and no harm in your heart. Then when you’re done, come back inside and pull this book down off your shelves (or order it online, if you must). We here at Stevereads heartily recommend it.

The Best Books of 2006!

We here at Stevereads are familiar with all the old adages about it being easier to throw stones than to build houses. Certainly we've made no secret of our FONDNESS for throwing stones. The world is full of crap, and all of it deserves condemnation, and there are only so many hours in a day.

But nevertheless, we'd like to think that those who know us well associate us first with book-ENTHUSIASM, not book-contempt. We read a large amount (a year-end scrutiny of accounts puts the total for 2006 - as of this writing - at somewhere around 730 books, give or take a few re-reads), and most of what we read ends up being anything from merely average to downright terrible.

This has the effect of making us jump all the higher for joy at encountering something good, and thus was born the first annual Stevereads Best Books of 2006! Enjoy!

Big Bam by Leigh Montville - Hand down the best, most judicious, yet most boisterously readable biography of Babe Ruth ever written. 'Readable' is a word that will crop often in this list, and Montville has mastered the science of it.

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak - This touching, sad, completely accomplished novel (calling it 'young adult' feels so dumb, so marketing-advised ... 'adult' novels should be so wonderful), narrated by Death and centering on the Holocaust, is a huge leap forward for Zusak's already-redoubtable talent.

River of Gods by Ian McDonald - Set in India's near-future and featuring a bewildering array of characters from all stripes of society, this is an absorbing reading experience and easily the best science fiction novel of the year.

Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris - 21 centuries of Christian obscurantism are not easily brushed aside. You'd think it would require a doorstop tomb even to attempt it, but you'd be wrong: Harris' book is as slender as a knife and just as lethal - every single prop, every single justification, moral or otherwise, for ... well, for following any organized religion ... is serially skewered, in the minimum number of words, to the maximum effect. St. Augustine would have been furious - proud, but furious.

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell by Tucker Max - 'Raucous' doesn't do this one justice, not by a long shot. This scabrous, disgusting, laugh-out-loud hilarious memoir by our Rabelesian young narrator is quite possibly the funniest book ever written by a hopelessly hardened alcoholic.

Mother's Milk by Edward St. Aubyn - An apocalyptically dysfunctional family, rendered in gorgeous, acerbic prose. We here at Stevereads are beginning to suspect that St. Aubyn's literary talent extends no further than these somewhat autobiographical turns (his previous collection of novellas, "Some Hope," was stunning and similar), but if so, so what? This is fantastic writing and deserves a wider audience.

Grief by Andrew Holleran - Holleran has survived everything (Stonewall, AIDS, Reagan, and even the writing of a great book, his iconic "Dancer from the Dance"), and he takes all that and crafts here an indelibly sad book, as cleansing and cathartic as a day of throwing up. Which is, um, meant as praise ...

Fish by ...... - When he looked through this coffee table book's big, elegantly designed pages, each two-page spread displaying a beatufifully detailed color illustration of one of America's major fish species (each with a breif but intensely informative write-up), my esteemed colleague Cy, in his booming Midwestern voice, said: "That's some book!" We can think of no higher praise.

Shahnameh by Abolqarem Ferdowski (translated by Dick Davis) - The Persian Book of Kings, epic tales from pre-Islam Iran, is here fully translated and annotated for the first time, in a very attractive volume from Viking. Like all of the world's great epics, it carries within it a living, breathing civilization that's now mostly vanished. And the stories make good reading, too.

Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn - edited by Caroline Moorehead - These letters (Moorehead gives us a generous amount) render up the whole person: the gigantic intellect, the almost ungovernable passions, the rollicking sense of humor, the unerring eye. We here at Stevereads often frown on posthumus collections of letters, but this case is different - Gellhorn (like her erstwhile husband) never really wrote anything private, as almost all of these letters demonstrate so wonderfully.

Tigers in Red Weather by Ruth Padel - the author decides to go in quest of the tigers of China, and what she finds both alarms and inspires her. She starts off as just another feckless freelancer with a nifty idea, but in the course of her many, many interviews with all manner of people connected with the cause of tigers in China, she changes - she becomes involved, and so will her readers. This isn't precisely natural history (not, for instance, in the way the fish book is), it's more natural-reporting ... but it's no less interesting for that.

Mussolini's Italy by Richard Bosworth - easily one of the best works of formal history published this year, and yet that 'formal' (meant to denote an impeccable critical apparatus) belies Bosworth's delightful narrative gifts. Bosworth gets at the heart and soul of the country, instead of just the nuts and bolts of the dictator's palace, and the result is an extremely good work of history.

Challenger Park by Stephen Harrigan - we here at Stevereads couldn't keep ourselves awake while reading Harrigan's historical novel 'Gates of the Alamo,' so we were as surprised as anybody that we couldn't put down this novel, set in contemporary times and indeed centering around the space program. There's some subtle writing going on here, and none moreso than in the depiction of Lucy Kincheole - mother, astronaut, and one of the most three-dimensional female characters in modern memory. Here's our vote that Harrigan sticks with the present day for all his future novels.

Washington's Spies by Alexander Rose - this thorough examination of all the various spy-networks used by General Washington and his staff (vital work, in an age before Mapquest could tell you what your enemies were doing on and off the field) is groundbreaking in the sheer amount of its research and really enjoyable in the jaunty tone of its narrative - the best book published on the American Revolution this year.

Bats at the Beach by Brian Lies - Quite possibly the most sublime work of fiction published this year, and hands-down the best picture book. Again, calling this a 'kids' book feels misleading ... certainly kids will love this tale of how much fun bats have at the beach after all the sun-worshipping humans have left, but there's an undecurrent of whimsy here that would be totally inaccessible to any child. Probably the easiest resolution is to say this delightful book can be enjoyed by all ages and anybody with the capacity to smile.

An Irish History of Civilization by Don Akenson - the format of this weird, incredible book - two very large, expensive hardcovers - no doubt warned off nine-tenths of its potential readership, and that's a shame, because even long-time readers of history have never read anything like this work. It's a massive collection of glimpses, vignettes, extended scenes, and increasingly exasperated screeds on all possible facets of Irish history. It's a bawling, defiant, opinionated work such as we here at Stevereads have never quite encountered, and we sincerely hope its format in paperback is sufficiently changed to draw to it the readers it richly deserves.

The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery - of all the books out there on global warming (and there are more every week, it seems), Flannery's is the most balanced and the most fun to read. As a natural history reporter, Flannery likes taking on the big subjects, and he has a knack for pulling his readers along. This is a continuously enjoyable book, albeit on the darkest of all possible subjects.

And lastly, that most enviable item, the Stevereads Best Book of 2006:

World War Z by Max Brooks - This entirely engrossing novel about mankind's death-struggle with a quick-spreading zombie plague is not only the ultimate homage to every zombie movie ever made - it's also the ur-text of zombie fiction, joining, for instance, "Dracula" for vampires or "Jaws" for killer sharks. And most of all, it's a ripping good yarn, the kind of book that any reader in the land would end up loving - if you can only get around their genre-prejudices and get them to read it, that is.

So there you have it - the literary highlights of 2006! We read many, many books this year, but these are the ones that stayed with us, the ones we can picture ourselves re-reading and recommending years from now. We here at Stevereads vouch for their quality and heartily recommend them to you!