Book Review: The Last Stone by Mark Bowden

The Last Stone

Author: Mark Bowden

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Date of Publication: April 2, 2019

Pages: 304

     I have vague recollections of the F.B.I. and the Bedford, Virginia, Sheriff's office conducting searches and excavating some private land in Thaxton in 2014.  I remembered that it was in relation to a cold case from Maryland in the mid-1970s, but I did not remember the details or the conclusion.  Mark Bowden, the author of such classics as Blackhawk Down and Killing Pablo, has written the definitive narrative of this compelling story.

     Bowden was a fledgling newspaper reporter in 1975 when two young sisters, ages 10 and 12 disappeared from the Wheaton Mall in Montgomery County, Maryland (a suburb of Washington, D.C.).  John Lyon, the father of the two girls (Katherine and Sheila) was a popular D.C. area radio personality and the hunt for the girls and the mystery of what happened to them captured the attention of the entire area.  Although exhaustive searches were conducted and a multitude of leads were followed, the case was never solved and there was no closure for the family.  Bowden was haunted by it over the years.  He was intent on following up on it when the story gained new life in 2013.

      Credit goes to a group of Maryland investigators who in 2013 went back through the Lyons case with a fine-toothed comb.  They had a person who they thought might be connected and were looking for any details which would link that person to the unsolved crime.  What they found instead was a peculiar witness statement from an 18-year-old boy named Lloyd Welch who went to the police 5 days after the girls' disappearance.  This teen claimed to have seen the girls leaving the mall with a man.  This statement was discounted at the time as non-credible.  Following up on the teen who gave the statement, these investigators located him and found a man with a long criminal record who was currently incarcerated in Delaware for child molestation.  Photos of this man as a teen were eerily similar to a composite sketch from 1975 of a young man seen in the mall talking to Sheila and Kate Lyon.

     The Lyon case was complicated over and above the age of the case.  There were no bodies, no crime scene, and no other forensic evidence.  These investigators began a three-year-long interrogation of Lloyd Welch.  Welch turned out to be an inveterate liar.  He cooperated with the investigation to a point, but always spinning a narrative which put him in the clear.  These detectives ferreted through the disinformation and followed up every detail revealed by Welch.  As time went on, Welch implicated many family members, including his father, an uncle, and a nephew.  The Welch family had cousins in Thaxton on Taylor's Mountain.  Lloyd Welch along with his girlfriend and his father visited this family farm after the Lyon sisters' disappearance and there were various reports from Virginia family members about a large bonfire and a bloody duffle bag being destroyed in the fire. 

     Eventually a joint investigation by the Maryland detectives, the Bedford Sheriff's office and the F.B.I. resulted in indictments and a trial.  Unfortunately, even with this exhaustive work by law enforcement, many questions about the fate of the Lyon sisters remain.

     Bowden discusses the psychological toll this investigation took on the detectives who were so invested in finding the truth and were constantly deceived by Welch. The book does not delve into the crime's effect on the Lyon family, except to note that the one remaining sibling, an older brother, went into law enforcement.  This book gets a bit tedious at times, many long stretches being basically transcripts of the interview tapes with Lloyd Welch.   It is fascinating, though, to see the dogged determination and old-fashioned detective work performed by the four Maryland investigators: Dave Davis, Chris Homrock, Mark Janney, and Katie Leggett.  In these days of  DNA evidence and genetic genealogy, they were able to piece together a case using psychology, hunches, and intuition to come to at least a partial resolution of the Lyon sisters' disappearance.  Central Virginians will enjoy reading this if, like me, they have recollections of the case but want to know the whole story.  The Last Stone is a reminder that we live in a dangerous, treacherous world and evil still lurks about even in the most unexpected places. 

Book Review: Truth Over Fear: Combatting the Lies about Islam by Charles Kimball

Truth Over Fear: Combating the Lies About Islam

Author: Charles Kimball

Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press

Date of Publication: August 20, 2019

Pages: 158

     This little book is exactly what it purports to be.  It is a primer of basic and accurate information about Islam and gives the reader a fundamental knowledge base to be able to begin to comprehend the broad similarities as well as the intrinsic differences between Islam, Christianity and Judaism.  More importantly, Truth Over Fear allows the reader to listen critically to politicians, news media and other speakers and be able to spot the distortions and misrepresentations (as well as outright untruths) about Islam.  We used this book in our adult Sunday School at Outer Banks Presbyterian Church to begin a study of comparative religions and to initiate a program to promote inter-faith dialogue in our community.  The book was very successful in stimulating constructive, positive discussions and understanding about Islam.

     Charles Kimball is the Presidential Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma.  He has extensive experience living and working in the Middle East and has worked tirelessly to promote interfaith understanding and dialogue.  He has written other books which are useful in small group settings, including When Religion Becomes Evil: Five Warning Signs, published in 2008.

     In the author's Introduction, he discusses the misinformation promulgated by politicians, religious leaders and others and suggests that we need a new paradigm for thinking about and interacting with Muslims.  In the first chapter he gives us constructive religious responses to Islamophobia and discusses the Biblical mandate for positive interfaith relationships.  Chapter Two gives a very good explanation of the Five Pillars of Islam.  The Five Pillars are: Statement of Faith, Five Daily Prayers, Fasting, Alms Giving and Hajj, or holy pilgrimage.  Kimball in this chapter also iterates the similarities and differences between Islam and Judaism as well as Christianity.  He stresses that Muslims consider their God (the Arabic word for God is Allah) to be the same God of Abraham and Isaac.  Muhammad's revelations from God are thought to be the final ones in the line that started with Abraham and continued through Moses and the Prophets of the Old Testament and Jesus in the New Testament.  Jesus is seen as one of the great prophets but in Islam, Jesus is not considered divine (neither is Muhammad).  Islam does not believe in the Resurrection of Jesus and does not believe in the Trinity.  The Five Pillars, however, stress many of the fundamental concepts of the Judeo-Christian tradition, taking care of the less fortunate being just one.

     Chapter Three is entitled: "Conflict and Cooperation" and traces the development of attitudes towards Islam, Muhammad and Muslims in general from the time of Muhammad (around 620 A.D.) until the late 20th Century.  In a very succinct summary, Kimball presents the geographic, economic and political forces which created a fearful and extremely hostile perception of Islam in Europe.  The writings of Dante and Martin Luther are used as examples of the negative dialogue which prevailed.  Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment thought represented a softening of the negative rhetoric about Islam, but the stereotypical representations of Islam as militant and evil remained.

     Chapter Four is entitled "The World We Actually Live In" and stresses the complexity of the world's religions (including Islam) today and how few people (especially those in charge of foreign policy) understand these complexities.  Kimball states that generic remedies for real or perceived problems include thinly veiled racism or bigotry aimed at groups deemed inferior (such as Muslims) and that people faith and goodwill must be willing to challenge the easy stereotypes and deeply rooted biases about Islam and its 1.7 billion followers.  We saw in the previous chapter how these stereotypes and biases evolved over centuries.  In this chapter the author discusses the diversity in Islam including the differences between Sunnis and Shi'ites and even differences within these sub-groups.  He also gives a cincise definition of Sharia and Jihad and clears up many misconceptions about both.  He ends this chapter with a discussion of Islam in America.

     The concluding two chapters enumerate how interfaith dialogue and improved relations have been attempted on an international scale and how that can be brought to the community and congregation level.  Kimball notes how the Christian mission mandate has changed over the last 50 years which corresponds to the great ecumenical efforts of the World Council of Churches and the Roman Catholic Church through the directives of Vatican II.   Mission work is now seen as an ecumenical effort to witness, serve and dialogue rather than proselytize and convert.  Interestingly, Islam is also a missionary religion which comes directly from the Five Pillars.

     Kimball does not ignore the radical Muslim extremists responsible for the attacks of 9/11 as well as the horrible activities in Afghanistan and elsewhere.   He discusses this and notes that other religious traditions (including Christianity) have extremists as well.  He notes that "Knowing something of the fullness of one's own religious tradition makes it easier to continue to think generically of its ideal and assign repugnant behavior to the marginal extremes."  In other words, it's easy to dismiss these extremists as "not true Christians" or "not true Muslims".  The author further states: "you cannot remove large groups of people with whom you disagree from your broader religious community."  In order to understand these concepts of extremism and how to react to it, our class is next going to study Reza Aslan's Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Extremism in the Age of Globalization.  Stay tuned for more on this topic.

     In summary, Kimball's book is an excellent starting point.  If you stop here you will have a basic understanding of Islam and be able to confront the erroneous statements made by less informed individuals.  It is also a great jumping off point to learn more about the world we live in today.  I recommend it highly.

Book Review: The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

The Wright Brothers

Author: David McCullough

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Date of Publication: May 5, 2015

Pages: 320

     David McCullough is a two time Pulitzer Prize winner (for biographies of Harry Truman and John Quincy Adams) and has won multiple other awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  Here he turns his incredible research and writing skills towards Orville and Wilbur Wright, the designers and pilots of the first controlled, sustained and powered flight of a heavier than air aircraft.

The Wright Brothers National Memorial
Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina

                           

      The first part of this book details the early childhood and education of Wilbur and Orville Wright in Dayton, Ohio.  There were five Wright siblings.  Their mother, Susan Koerner Wright, was the more deductive and logical thinking parent and fostered an inquisitive nature in all of her children.  Their father, Bishop Milton Wright, was a clergyman who traveled a lot for work.  He brought the boys a toy "helicopter" back from one trip. The toy was basically a propeller on a stick with rubber bands which would fly when released.  Both Orville and Wilbur were fascinated with this toy and proceeded to build their own versions when the original finally broke.  Neither Orville or Wilbur attended college, starting a printing business instead.  Wilbur had planned to attend Yale, but was injured in an ice hockey accident and following a prolonged convalescence joined Orville in his new business venture.  Orville had designed and built his own printing presses.  One of their first clients was a high school classmate and friend, Paul Laurence Dunbar, the renowned African-American poet who was publishing his own newspaper at the time.   As bicycles became a more popular mode of travel Orville and Wilbur opened their own cycle shop and later began manufacturing their own brand of bicycles.  All the while, they maintained their interest in flight.  They used the proceeds from their business success to fund their own experiments in aircraft design.  They even developed their own wind tunnel to test different wing designs.  They began building gliders based on a bi-wing design originated by the Chicago engineer Octave Chanute.  They were disappointed by the amount of lift they were getting with their initial gliders and began to question the equations and calculations of Otto Lilienthal, a German aviation pioneer.  Wilbur made his own calculations based on their wind tunnel experiments and used these to perfect wing shape and design of the Wright gliders

Reconstruction of the Wright Brothers
living quarters and workshop.
Kill Devil Hills, N.C.

The 1903 Flyer replica with the Monument
in the background.

     Lift was the first of three major problems which had to be solved in order for the first flight to be successful.  The others were control and power.  At this point in the story, the Wrights had moved their glider testing to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.  They had asked for wind data from the National Weather Service and found the the Outer Banks of North Carolina were the second windiest place on the continent (Chicago was first).  The brothers wanted privacy and secrecy as they carried out their experiments, so the Outer Banks became their first choice.  The Outer Banks in 1900 was an obscure sand bar, reachable only by boat.  It was described by contemporaries as harder to get to than Tibet (many modern vacationers on a summer Saturday or Sunday may think it is still so).  

     The chapters that describe the experiences on the Outer Banks are fascinating.  Wilbur made the first trip North Carolina in 1900 and made it as far as Elizabeth City.  It took him four days to find someone with a boat who had heard of Kitty Hawk.  It then took three days to get from Elizabeth City to Kitty Hawk.  The total isolation and harsh environment is very vividly described here.  Over the years the Wrights were aided by the few locals including the staff of the Kitty Hawk life saving station (that building is now The Black Pelican Restaurant).  Solving the control issue was difficult but Orville and Wilbur studied the many birds on the Outer Banks to help them decipher how to smoothly and predictably control direction and elevation during flight.  They found the turkey buzzard particularly helpful!  These large ungainly birds use the tips of their wings to alter their direction and the brothers used that concept to better control their glider.  

The original motor from the 1903 Wright Flyer
Kill Devil Hills, NC

     The final piece of the puzzle was how to power the glider to sustain flight.  They approached the automobile manufacturers of the day who told them that an engine with the weight limitations and power requirements was impossible to build.  This is when Charlie Taylor played an integral role in the whole project.  This fellow was a machinist whom the brothers had hired to manage their bicycle business in Dayton, Ohio while they were off doing their experiments in North Carolina.  When the brother explained their engine problem to Charlie he built a four cylinder gasoline powered engine out of aluminum which was light enough for the glider but could produce more than the needed horsepower.  The Wrights also had to design their own propellers since their were no precedents for this.  Nautical propellers were useless and the Wrights carved their own propellers which closely resembled the toy helicopter of their youth.  This set the stage for the first successful flight, piloted by Orville (chosen by a flip of a coin), at Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903.   The news traveled very slowly in those days and their was great skepticism in the aviation community that the Wright Brothers had actually accomplished the first flight.   The next section of the book details their refinement of their "Wright Flyer" which was accomplished closer to home in Huffman Prarie, an 84 acre cow pasture eight miles north of Dayton.  The remainder of the book describes how the brothers presented their invention to the world.  The United States government was slow to recognize the importance so Wilbur took the flyer to France and demonstrated its efficacy through multiple exhibition flights at Le Mans.  Eventually the U.S. recognized the Wright's invention and its potential.   Orville was then able to perform exhibition flights at Fort Myer, Virginia.  There is a video of a 1909 flight at Fort Myer on YouTube.  The first air crash fatality occurred at Fort Myer when a guy wire came loose mid-flight interfering with the propeller.  Orville crash landed, killing his military passenger and being seriously injured himself.

Replica of the 1903 Wright Flyer - Kill Devil Hills, N.C.
(The original is in the Smithsonian National Air and Space
Museum, Washington, D.C.)

     Following the exhibition flights the Wrights formed their own production company and spent the ensuing years perfecting their design and fighting patent infringements in the courts.

     Wilbur died of typhoid fever at age 45 in 1912.  Orville lived until 1948 and died of a heart attack.  Orville lived long enough to see the terrible effects of the airplane in warfare and even witnessed the atomic bomb dropped from a descendant of his invention.  In his later years Orville wrote: 

  "We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth. But we were wrong ... No, I don't have any regrets about my part in the invention of the airplane, though no one could deplore more than I do the destruction it has caused. I feel about the airplane much the same as I do in regard to fire. That is, I regret all the terrible damage caused by fire, but I think it is good for the human race that someone discovered how to start fires and that we have learned how to put fire to thousands of important uses."

     

     McCullough's book very thoroughly tells the Wright Brothers story as the fable that it has become: that two humble brothers, both high school drop-outs, confirmed bachelors and bicycle mechanics, together solved the problems which allowed man to fly.  This equal effort, equal ingenuity and equal credit fable is challenged in a recent article by William Hazelgrove in the December, 2018 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.  In his article "Why Wilbur Wright Deserves the Bulk of the Credit for the First Flight" Hazelgrove asserts that Wilbur had the imagination and deductive reasoning required to figure out what needed to be done to create a flying machine.  Orville was the "historian" - recording events as they happened on paper and on film.  According to Hazelgrove, the fact that Orville lived so much longer allowed him to write the history the way he saw it - with shared credit given to both brothers.  Hazelgrove uses the brothers' own writings to justify this viewpoint, especially when Wilbur describes "his" flyer and "his" propeller when writing to his father.  McCullough used the same resources to create his book but did not jump to this conclusion.  A 1930 article about Orville Wright recently republished in The New Yorker magazine points out that in an Encyclopedia Britannica article (also published in 1930) about the first flight, all of the credit is given to Wilbur with almost no mention of Orville.  That encylcopedia article was written by Orville Wright.

     Regardless of which account you adhere to, the story of the Wright Brothers is a fantastic testament to creativity, problem solving and "thinking outside of the box".  McCullough's book is a very readable and entertaining as well as instructive read.  I recommend it highly to anyone who has visited or plans to visit the Outer Banks!

The first powered flight at Kill Devil Hills, NC, December 17, 1903

The Wright Brothers Memorial Monument at Kill Devil Hills, illuminated during a Light Art exhibition, August, 2018

The Stanford Freshman Required Reading List (2018)

      Stanford University annually assigns three books to be read by their incoming freshman class.  Last year the topics included poverty, race and climate change.  This years single topic is immigration.  Wanting to be as well read as these eighteen and nineteen year olds I decided to read them as well.  Here are my thoughts regarding these three books, all of which were superb.

    The three books this year are: Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat,  Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee and Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera (translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman).  

     Signs Preceding the End of the World is interesting on several fronts.  It is a very short novel translated from its original Spanish.  This book paints a memorable picture of an illegal border crossing.  This is the story of Makina, a young Mexican woman sent across the border by her mother to deliver a message to her brother.  First, she must find her brother.  The author describes the border crossing in terse, descriptive writing:

"Rucksacks.  What do people whose life stops here take with them?  Makina could see their rucksacks crammed with time.  Amulets, letters, sometimes a huapango violin, sometimes a jaranera harp.  Jackets.  People who left took jackets because they'd been told that if there was one thing they could be sure of over there, it was the freezing cold, even if it was desert all the way.  They hid what little money they had in their underwear and stuck a knife in their back pocket.  Photos, photos, photos.  They carried photos like promises but by the time they came back they were in tatters."

     Once Makina crosses the border the quest to find her brother reminded me of Paulo Cueho's The Alchemist.  It becomes an epic journey of growth and understanding aided by gangsters and fellow illegals.  There is an interesting addendum by the translator describing her difficulty in maintaining the author's intent.  She notes the research she did to make sure the idioms and inflections of speech written by the author in Spanish are preserved in the translation.  This is a very valuable book for helping to understand the view from the other side of the border.

     Chang-Rae Lee is a Korean-American and teaches creative writing at Stanford.  Native Speaker, published in 1995, was his first novel.  The novel tells the story of Henry Park, a son of Korean immigrants who works as an industrial spy.  The whole theme of this book centers on Henry's constant attempt at assimilation -  the social process of absorbing one cultural group into harmony with another.   Henry reflects back on his upbringing by immigrant parents trying to preserve their native culture  and constantly compares that to his current life.  Henry is married to a white woman and their marital struggles mirror his larger cultural dilemmas.  As part of his job, Henry infiltrates the campaign of a Korean-American politician in New York.  This politician's success is due in large part to his ability to bridge the divides between the ethnic and cultural groups who must coexist in his city.  It is hard to believe that this book is over twenty years old.  The culture clashes described are very contemporary and one scene was reminiscent of the violence in Charlottesville last August.  Native Speaker is important because it redefines the old "Melting Pot" analogy of America we all learned in  grade school.  There is no one "American" culture to which all immigrants must eventually be part of.  Instead, we are a cauldron of differences, all of which need to be celebrated, but the parts of which need to learn to peacefully coexist.  Henry Park notes the problems with this "assimilation" thinking when describing his wishes for his own son:

"And despite Lelia's insistence that he go to Korean school on the weekends, I knew our son would never learn the old language, this was never in question, and my hope was that he would grow up with a singular sense of his world, a life univocal, which might have offered him the authority and confidence that his broad half-yellow face could not.  Of course, this is assimilist sentiment, part of my own ugly and half-blind romance with the land."

     Later, he describes the scene outside of a crowded Chinese take-out in Brooklyn:

"I know I'm American because I order too much when I eat Chinese.  We stand outside with everyone else, the crowd mixed, Jews and Hispanics, Asians and blacks.  Everyone gets along.  There's cross-talking and joking.  Easy laughs.  It's something enough, I suppose, when you know you will soon eat the same food."

     Edwidge Danticat is a very talented author and native of Haiti.  She has  written numerous outstanding novels including Breath, Eyes, Memory which was an Oprah book club selection.  She has been a National Book Award Finalist and Brother, I'm Dying won a National Book Critics Circle Award Winner for autobiography.   She has been quoted as saying: “Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses.”  In this book she tells the stories of her father who successfully emigrated to New York and her uncle Joseph who cared for her in Haiti when first her father and then her mother left.

    The author is master of description, both of her native Haiti and her adopted home in New York:

"After my parents were married, they moved into a small house in an increasingly packed section of Bel Air.  The cement floor of their two-room rental was the same drab color as the walls.  There were no windows or jalousies, just some diamond-shaped openings in the concrete, which let in some air and also plenty of water when it rained.  My mother decorated the best she could, draping the walls with wide ruffled curtains she made herself."

    She also has the ability to convey the deep emotions of a situation without being maudlin.  Her depiction of her years separated from her parents and siblings is particularly relevant to today's immigration headlines.  She very adeptly explains the political struggles in Haiti, both before and after her emigration.  Her uncles role in the continued upheaval defines the difficulty this family had balancing life in its new country versus concern for events and loved ones in its former country.

     Each of these books is valuable in its own way to help the reader understand some of the issues surrounding the current immigration debate.  Signs Preceding the End of the World very vividly depicts the danger and anxiety of an illegal border crossing.  Native Speaker illustrates the difficulties even legal immigrants face when trying to adjust to and  blend into a completely alien culture and society.  Brother, I'm Dying shows how difficult it is to completely extricate oneself from one's native country, especially when loved ones are left behind in a tumultuous situation.  

     These books as a group also have an enormous importance.  You can take any hot button social issue (think gay marriage, capital punishment, gun control, etc...)  and debate it in the abstract. When you add a human dimension to the debate, people become more empathetic and often the thinking becomes a bit softened.  These three outstanding books add that human dimension to the immigration debate and hopefully would soften the harsh rhetoric we are currently hearing.  I enjoyed reading all three and would recommend them all.  

Book Review: The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston

The Lost City of the Monkey God

Author: Douglas Preston

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Date of Publication: September 5, 2017

Pages: 407

     Douglas Preston is a multi-faceted and accomplished writer.  He has written articles for "National Geographic" and "The New Yorker" as well as non-fiction best sellers (The Monster of Florence).  He is also the co-author with Lincoln Child of a best-selling detective series.  He uses all of the tools in his toolbox for The Lost City of the Monkey God.  It has all of the detail and science contained in a serious periodical piece, the pace and style of the best fiction, and it tells a truly fascinating (and true) story to boot.

     The Lost City chronicles an expedition to find the legendary "White City" in Honduras.  For five hundred years people have speculated on the existence of a huge lost city in the rain forest which had been the home of a vanished culture.  Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes reported hearing of a vast community with great wealth and from this the legend grew.  Over the ensuing centuries various researchers, archeologists and explorers hypothesized on the location.  Interest in this lost city increased in the 1990s and several attempts were made to find it in the early 2000s.  It wasn't until the advent of lidar technology (lidar is an acronym for light imaging, detection and ranging) that a credible location for the White City could be defined.  The author adroitly explains this space age technology and how it has been used to find historical sites buried in sand in the Middle East.  Science readers will appreciate this chapter.   Preston goes on to describe how lidar was used in the Honduran rain forest and how it helped pinpoint a possible location for further exploration.  It was film maker Steve Elkins, fascinated by the legend of the lost White City, who proposed using lidar to try to locate it.  It was Elkins who finally got this expedition together once the possible location was discovered with lidar.

   Once the planning and funding of the expedition was arranged, Preston was invited to join the team as a journalist.  Permission from the Honduran government was finally obtained (politics is politics, regardless of what country) and the expedition was on.  What follows is a vivid portrayal of a wild experience worthy of an Indiana Jones movie!  Dilapidated helicopters delivered a motley group of scientists and academics deep into an impenetrable jungle.  Camp sites were protected by incompetent and corrupt members of the Honduran armed forces.  Danger was around every tree.  Here is how Preston describes what happened on his first night in the jungle:  "Eager to record some of the stories being told, I hurried back to my hammock on the other side of camp to fetch my notebook.  My new headlamp was defective, so Juan Carlos loaned me a crank flashlight."  Needless to say, Preston got disoriented in the dark, lost the trail but finally found his way back to the campsite.  "Thrilled to be safely back in camp, I circled the hammock, probing the wall of forest with my light for the path that would take me to where the rest of the group was chatting.  On my second circle of the hammock, I froze as my beam passed over a huge snake."  It was a fer-de-lance, one of the largest and deadliest of the venomous snakes indigenous to the area.  "It was staring at me, in striking position, its head swaying back and forth, its tongue flicking in and out.  I had walked right past it - twice."  An unbelievable two page description of bringing the six foot snake down follows.  This description is more frightening than anything every written by Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe or anybody else for that matter!

     There is a lot here for history buffs as well.  Preston educates the reader about "Pre-Columbian" and "Post-Columbian" eras in Central America and also about Mayan and other native cultures.  Many artifacts were discovered in the areas pin-pointed by the lidar scans and knowledge of the history and culture of the area was critical when trying to elucidate their origins and time period.

     The story doesn't end with the expedition.  For months after everyone returned, more and more of the explorers became sick with fevers, muscle aches, cramps and skin lesions.  This included Douglas Preston who came down with the illness while on a holiday with his wife in Switzerland and France.  Several chapters follow which discuss various tropical and infectious diseases.  Eventually the National Institute of Health became involved and the responsible parasite was finally identified and proper treatment prescribed. 

     In summary, this book was exciting, fascinating, educational and scary.  Often all at the same time.  I can't recommend it highly enough. 

Book Review: American Fire by Monica Hesse

American Fire: Love, Arson and Life in a Vanishing Land

Author: Monica Hesse

Publisher: Liveright Publishing Company

Date of Publication: July 11, 2017

Pages: 288

     Back in the Stone Ages when I was in medical school, MCV used to farm out third year students for a one month primary care experience.  I had the fantastic luck of spending the month of August, 1976 at the Northampton-Accomack Memorial Hospital in Nassawadox, Virginia.  There were four of us third-years there that month as well as a fourth year doing an elective.  As my first clinical rotation, this month was a genuine eye-opener.  There were no "real" doctors in the hospital from 11 P.M. until the morning, not even in the E.R.  The attendings all lived a minute or so away and one general surgeon would sleep in his R.V in the parking lot (no beepers - you just went out and pounded on the door if you needed him).  It was a unique and wonderful clinical rotation.  The internist I worked with (William Burton, M.D.) had been second in his medical school class at MCV (his wife was #1!).  I saw many things for the first time and learned a tremendous amount in one month.  I helped manage a lady with acute CHF, saw a Kaposi's sarcoma and even was sent in an ambulance to Norfolk with a variceal bleeder (one I.V. and one unit of blood, just in case she "broke loose").  We were also able to accompany a public health nurse by boat to Tangier Island to do house calls.  Just as enlightening as the medical education I received, I learned a lot of the history and lore of Virginia's Eastern Shore.  Much like current times, the economy was depressed and the locals were looking for new sources of jobs.  The young people were not returning home after college.  There was a huge influx of migrant workers every summer.  Most people ignored their health care until they were in advanced stages of their disease.  So, it is with this backdrop that you can understand that when I heard about Monica Hesse's American Fire, an account of a true story which occurred on the Eastern Shore, I ordered a copy and started reading it the minute it arrived in the mail.


     American Fire is, first and foremost, the story of Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick.  Both of these people are Eastern Shore locals and had a colorful past.  Charlie had frequent run-ins with the law and owned an auto body shop.  Tonya was a nursing assistant and single mother who had a party-girl reputation.  They formed an unlikely couple and then proceeded to become serial arsonists.  They burned many of the unoccupied farm buildings as well as several homes and businesses.  Over eighty fires in all were started.  They managed to elude a massive effort by local and state police as well as F.B.I. and A.T.F. to stop them.  The author does a very creditable job of creating non-judgmental character studies of both of these people.  One of the problems the police had was defining a motive but Hesse does ferret that out by the end of the book.  There are many other fascinating character studies in American Fire, including the volunteer firemen and the police officers involved.

     Just as important as the character sketches, though, the author manages to paint a very stark and realistic picture of the Eastern Shore.  She traces the history of the area, including it's rich farming traditions and its short-lived era as a vacation destination.  She elaborates on the current economic woes which define this area as well as many rural areas in modern America.  In some ways, this book could be viewed as a companion to J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy.  Both books give a harsh view of a distressed and hopeless slice of America.  Hesse's views however are balanced.  She recognizes the charms of living in area such as the Eastern Shore as well as the challenges:

"I went to Accomack County and I found endless metaphors for a dying county in a changing landscape.  There were endless metaphors that went the opposite way, too: rural life as a fairy tale, better than the rest of the country.  The reality is probably somewhere in between.  The people who lived in Accomack were happy to live in Accomack.  It wasn't small, it was close-knit.  It wasn't backward, it was simple.  There weren't  a hundred things to do every night, but if you went to the one available thing, you were pretty much guaranteed to run into someone you knew.  As economies change, as landscapes change, nostalgia is the only good America will never stop producing."

     The author also includes an entertaining chapter on infamous "Crime Couples", including Bonnie and Clyde and the Barrow Gang, the "Barbie Killers" Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, and Leopold and Loeb.  She describes a shared psychotic disorder, folie a deux (madness of two), which is applicable to these famous cases as well as the Eastern Shore arsonists.  There is also a fascinating chapter on the subspecialty of arsonist profiling.  Using a computer program and the locations of the crimes, police are able to pinpoint where the arsonists live.  In this particular case they narrowed it down to one residential block (which was accurate) but still couldn't identify the culprits even though everyone on the block, including the perpetrators, were interviewed.

    Monica Hesse is a feature writer for "The Washington Post" and has written this book and Girl in the Blue Coat, an Edgar winner for Best Young Adult Mystery.  She has created a stellar entry in the genre of creative non-fiction with American Fire.  I enjoyed it from a nostalgia point of view as well as from the fact that it is a very entertaining and informative read.  

The Stanford Freshman Required Reading List (2017)

 

 

     The Stanford Freshman Summer Reading List - 2017

      Stanford University assigned three books to their incoming freshman class.  Wanting to be as well read as these eighteen and nineteen year olds I decided to read them as well.  I read them for two reasons.  First, I thought I might learn something.  Second, I wanted to see what someone, or some committee at Stanford felt was important for their incoming freshmen to know.  So here are my thoughts regarding these three books, all of which were superb in their own way.

     The first one I read was Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones.  This was a National Book Award Winner in 2011.  It has been described as "the first great book about Katrina" ("The Boston Globe").  I found it more of a crystal sharp, eyes-wide-open view of poverty in modern America.  You can read as many books about poverty which you can find and none will make you feel the experience as well as Salvage the Bones.  The story is set in coastal Mississippi in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina in August, 2005.    It is told through the eyes of an unforgettable 14 year-old African-American girl.  She lives with her three brothers (two older and one much younger) and her father among chickens, fighting dogs, broken down cars and trucks and a dilapidated house.  What sets this novel apart is the quality of the writing.  There isn't one false word or phrase.  Each paragraph packs an emotional punch.  The author's doesn't just tell us about poverty in rural Mississippi, she shows it to us through her vivid descriptions.  This ability enables the setting to almost become its own character.  The land and location certainly set the stage for the lives these people lead:
   
"The few dirt-scratched yards and the thin-siding houses and trailers of Bois Sauvage seem a sorry match to the woods, like pitting a puppy against a full grown dog.  Here, there are swimming holes that are fat puddles and some the size of swimming pools fed by skinny clear creeks, but the earth makes the holes black, and the trees make them as filthy with leaves as a dog is with fleas.  There are clusters of magnolias that are so tall and green and glossy, they are impossible to climb, and the air around them always smells like peaches.  There are oaks so big and old that their arms grow out black and thick as trunks, which rest on the ground.  There are ponds that are filled with slime and tall yellow grasses, and at night, frogs turn them teeming, singing a burping chorus.  There are clearings where deer feed, startle white, and kick away.  There are  turtles plowing through pine straw, mud, trying to avoid the pot."

   The author deftly counterposes daily life for this way below the poverty line family and the father's sense of urgency regarding the impending hurricane.  The final chapters tell of Katrina's arrival and are riveting.

     The Sixth Extinction is a work of non-fiction written by Elizabeth Kolbert, a journalist who currently is a staff writer for "The New Yorker."  She is not a scientist by training but very adroitly makes her case that we are living in an era of mass extinction.  This would be the sixth such event in earth history.  She illustrates her points by personal research including, for example, time spent in Central America examining the disappearance of thousands of species of frogs.  I expected this to be a diatribe regarding climate change but refreshingly, it is not.  She does have chapters on our current climate condition, but she does so without standing on a soap box.  The chapter on acidification of the oceans (CO2 absorption from the atmosphere) and its effects on coral reefs and the ecosystem which relies on them was clearly written.  The other chapter which in my opinion was extremely well done was the one on invasive species and how this has changed environments and native species all over the world.  This process has been accelerated in our lifetime by globalization.  She notes that the most invasive species ever has been homo sapiens:

"Before humans emerged on the scene, being large and slow to reproduce was a highly successful strategy, and out-sized creatures dominated the planet.  Then, in what amounts to a geologic instant, this strategy became a loser's game.  And so it remains today, which is why elephants and bears and big cats are in so much trouble...  Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it's not clear that he ever really did."

 Kolbert not only explains what is going on in our environment today but draws parallels to the five other eras in history when major species extinctions have also occurred.  This book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2015.

     Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing made the biggest impression on me.  This epic story relates a multi-generational slave saga, starting in Ghana in the late 1700s.  The main characters are two half-sisters, one of whom marries a British officer and into a life of privilege.  The other is sold as a captive by a warring tribe and shipped to America.  Chapters follow descendants through major events in history, including the slave experience in Mississippi, the American Civil War and into modern times. These stories are not told in direct chronological order, but interconnect and the ending chapters are back in Ghana.  The characters here are exceptionally well developed and captivating.  I was reading this novel at the time of the events in Charlottesville in August.  Homegoing gave me insight into how reminders of the pre-Civil War South could be enormously hurtful to descendants of slaves.  The slave experience is woven in the DNA of African Americans and this book helped me appreciate that fact.  I am aware that unless you are Native American, we all have an immigrant heritage.  My great grandparents immigrated from Ireland during the potato famine in the 1880s.  My great grandfather worked as a blacksmith in Richmond.  I am also well aware that many ethnic groups faced the obstacle of prejudice in subsequent generations.  I don't think any of these equates with the slave experience and this book enormously helped me understand that.  It doesn't answer the question of what to do with Confederate statues, but at least it makes the issue make sense to me.

     So, all three of these books were excellent and presented the Stanford freshmen and me with lots to think about.  I would imagine that whomever assigned these books generally wanted their freshman to have an awareness of the larger world.  The two novels certainly give insight into poverty and the heritage of slavery.  As Stephen Covey has written: "Seek first to understand, then to be understood."  These books give the reader incredible insights and would seemingly help develop empathy.  The Sixth Extinction gives a broad view of environmental processes and concerns without a political agenda. Again, this would seemingly serve the purpose of helping a young person become aware of issues outside of the college campus.  I enjoyed reading all three of these books and yes, they made me think and rethink some of my opinions.  I recommend all three very highly.

Book Review: Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance

Hillbilly Elegy

Author: J. D. Vance

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Date of Publication: June 28, 2016

Pages: 272

     

                                           "They learned readin', rightin', route 23
                                            To the jobs that lay waiting in those cities' factories
                                            They didn't know that old highway
                                            Could lead them to a world of misery"

                                                  - Dwight Yoakam (from "Readin', Rightin', Route 23")

     It seems a little premature for a 30-something to write his memoir.  It is surprising to me that a publisher bought it and even more surprising that Hillbilly Elegy has become the primer for understanding poor white America and the feelings of helplessness and anger which propelled Donald Trump to the presidency.  After reading the book, however, I understand the importance of this book and its unique perspective on the current state of "the American Dream."  

     I found this book easy to read.  Even though it seems like a sociology text in spots, the author keeps the statistics and academic analysis to a minimum.  Vance is able to tell his story and his family's story in such a way that the reader can truly understand the multiple variables which affected him (both positively and negatively) and shaped his adult life.  These same variables defeated many in his family.  The author was fortunate to find the right mentor and guidance at just the right time to point him in his upwardly mobile trajectory.

     This is a story of a grandson of Kentucky "hillbillies" who migrated from Eastern Kentucky to Ohio following World War II.  These folks were looking for jobs and their slice of the American Dream.  As noted in the Dwight Yoakam song quoted above, the escape via Route 23 didn't always have a fairy tale ending.  For the Vances, life brought broken marriages, lost opportunities and addiction: in short, a world of misery.

    J. D. was saved by the two most exceptional characters in the book, his grandparents:  Mamaw and Papaw Vance.  Their home was a safe refuge for J. D. when chaos consumed his home.  J. D. enlisted in the Marines after high school and did a tour in Iraq.  He returned home and attended Ohio State University and Yale Law School.  He very frankly describes his difficulties each step of the way.  Even as he climbed the ladder of success he had to fight the feelings that he didn't belong. 

     In the Preface the author states that "I do hope that readers of this book will be able to take from it an appreciation of how class and family affect the poor without filtering their views through a racial prism.  To many analysts, terms like 'welfare queen' conjure unfair images of the lazy black mom living on the dole.  Readers of this book will realize quickly that there is little relationship between that specter and my argument: I have known many welfare queens; some were my neighbors, and all were white."  Vance points out that "there is  cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government and that movement gains adherents by the day."  He notes that "There is no group of Americans more pessimistic than working-class whites."  He then goes on to explain how politicians, especially modern conservatives, fail to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents.  "Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers...  The message of the right is increasingly: It's not your fault that you're a loser; it's the government's fault."

   So, I guess it was time for this thirty-something to write his memoir.  There is much to mull in this short but powerful book.  It is an American success story for the author, but one that is paved with misery and suffering on a grand scale for his family and friends.  The characters are powerful and the author tells this in a very engaging and entertaining way.  It is just as funny in some sections as it is pitiful in others.  Read this book.  It is indeed an important one.

Book Review: Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

Lab Girl

Author: Hope Jahren

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Date of Publication: April 5, 2016

Pages: 304

      Lab Girl is part memoir, part discussion of earth sciences and paleobiology and part discourse on women in male dominated (specifically scientific) fields.  The book is informative, entertaining and humorous, often all at once.  It is extremely well written and thought provoking.

     The author relates her early life growing up with a physicist father and often accompanying him to his laboratory.  She naturally becomes interested in studying the sciences which was relatively unusual for young women in the 1970s.   While in college she worked as a pharmacy technician and became enamored with working in a hospital.  She had this to say about that experience:

"Working in the hospital teaches you that there are only two kinds of people in the world: the sick and the not-sick.  If you are not sick, shut up and help.  Twenty-five years later, I still cannot reject this as an inaccurate worldview."

     Dr. Jahren graduated cum laude from the University of Minnesota and instead of pursuing medicine, obtained a PhD. from the University of California, Berkeley.  Her field of interest is soil science.  She has developed innovative methods of studying fossil forests during a distinguished academic career at Georgia Tech, Johns Hopkins and now at the University of Hawaii.

    In  Lab Girl the author spends alternating chapters illuminating areas of her scientific expertise with how these studies have shaped her life story.  It is intriguing the way that she counterposes chapters describing some area of her plant study with incidents from her personal history which follow the same path.  For example she expounds upon plant habitats:

"A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert;  it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet.  Any plant that you find growing in the desert will grow a lot better if you take it out of the desert.  The desert is like a lot of lousy neighborhoods:  nobody living there can afford to move."

She also describes living in downtown Baltimore in a reclaimed neighborhood in much the same fashion.  The author finishes her description of desert plant life by describing resurrection plants - small plants which wither and turn brown during drought conditions but rapidly re-hydrate during rain.  She follow up this discussion with a chapter describing her own experience with mania, comparing the human sensations of heightened energy and sensitivity to the to the biologic over activity of the desert resurrection plant during a storm.

     In Lab Girl Dr. Jahren makes her points about women in traditionally male roles without turning the book into a feminist screed.  At one point she notes: "In my own small experience, sexism  has been something very simple: the cumulative weight of constantly being told that you can't possibly be what you are."

     Lab Girl is memoir at its finest.  It was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, a "New York Times" 2016 Notable Book and an Amazon Top 20 book of 2016.  The author is boldly honest as revealed in these quotes:

"My early career had all the makings of a long, slow academic train wreck."   

"I am a female scientist, nobody knows what the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as I go along."

"Our world is falling apart quietly.  Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-hundred-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood.   In our relentless and ever-intensifying obsession with obtaining a higher volume, potency, and variety of these three things, we have devastated plant ecology to an extend that millions of years of natural disaster could not."

Read Lab Girl.  You will be glad that you did.

Book Review: Sam Phillips, The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll by Peter Guralnick

Sam Phillips

The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll

Author: Peter Guralnick

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Date of Publication: November 10, 2015

Pages: 784

   

     If you have even a passing interest in rock and roll music then you owe it to yourself to read this book.  It is just as entertaining as it is informative.  Sam Phillips was a young man from Alabama who grew up in the 1930s hearing African-Americans singing spiritual music.  He became fascinated with radio and began a career in broadcasting.  This eventually led to a job offer in Memphis, broadcasting big band shows from the Peabody Hotel.  He started the Memphis Recording Service at 706 Union Avenue, initially specializing in recording special events and weddings.  He then began recording black musicians who were coming to Memphis to perform on Beale Street.  These recordings were sold to Chess Records in Chicago and other distributors.  Eventually Sam started his own record label: Sun Records.

     Peter Guralnick is a music critic, screenwriter and author who has also written The Last Train to Memphis, the definitive biography of Elvis Presley.  He had a long-time friendship with Sam Phillips and that is clearly evident in the details he includes in this biography.  The story really picks up its pace when the author shows how Phillips used the Memphis Recording Service to record black artists from Mississippi who no one else would record.  What is generally regarded as the first rock and roll record, "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats was recorded by Sam in 1951.  Phillips went on to record Howlin' Wolf, Little Milton, Ike Turner, B. B. King and many other African-American artists.  Sam Phillips also made a social statement by recording The Prisonaires - four black inmates in a Tennessee penitentiary.  This was all done before the Supreme Court ruled against segregated schools and decades before any integration would happen in Memphis.

    The Sam Phillips story really got exciting when a recent high school graduate came in to record a song for his mother.  That young fellow was Elvis Presley.   Sam was not initially sold on Elvis until he recorded Elvis letting loose with the late Scotty Moore and Bill Black on "That's All Right (Mama)" which became the first Elvis single released ("Blue Moon of Kentucky" was the B side).  The sections of the book dealing with Presley and subsequent white artists such as Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison are fascinating.  Rock and roll music was born and Sam Phillips was there to capture it.  He invented recording techniques as he went along, often by necessity.  Once, when Ike Turner's guitar amplifier fell off of his truck and the speaker broke, Sam crammed newspaper into the housing, creating a distorted but very unique sound.  Sam was also instrumental in getting his artists air play on the radio, often traveling thousands of miles to promote his artists to local disk jockeys.

     The author devotes many pages to Sam's personal life, particularly the women in his life.  Although he maintained a long-term marriage to his wife Becky, with whom he had two sons, Sam at various times also lived with other women.  He also had mental health issues, even being hospitalized in 1951 for a "nervous breakdown" and undergoing electroconvulsive therapy.  The last half of the book is mostly about Sam's later ups and downs in the music business and his relationship with his two sons.

     Towards the end of this exhaustive biography, the author relates an anecdote which occurred during the filming of an A & E television special being produced about and with the help of Sam himself.  The videographer stopped the cameras when some dump trucks rolled by the group,  Sam couldn't understand why he did that and chastised the fellow for missing the opportunity to record something real. The author then relates why Sam Phillips felt that way:

      "He loved perfect imperfection, he insisted.  And he cited his recordings to prove it - the inspired accident was what you were always looking for, so long as it didn't drown out what you were trying to get across."  He quotes Sam further (this time while watching the high school marching band in his home town of Florence, Alabama): 'Music is something that you will always remember as long as you live.  Don't cheat yourself by not getting everything you can out of music - but in  the meantime... HAVE A HELLUVA LOT OF FUN DOING IT.'"

     Sam Phillips was indeed a very unique, inventive and pioneering man in the fledgling field of music recording.  He started before there were any real rules and helped shape an industry.  One aspect of all of this which is particularly striking is how color blind Sam Phillips was.  He was looking for sound and for style and didn't care what race the performer was. This is a truly remarkable aspect of this brilliant but flawed man.

     There were several recordings I bought while reading this which helped bring this story to life.  These include "Sun Records: The Definitive Hits"  Volumes 1 and 2 and "Sun Records: Ultimate Blues Collection".  These CDs are actually fun to listen to even if you pass on the book!  This book has been optioned for a movie starring Leonardo Dicaprio as Sam Phillips.  I hope that they keep the essence of the portrait that Peter Guralnick painted in this wonderful biography.

    If you are ever in Memphis, I highly recommend the tour of the old Sun Studios on Union Avenue.  The studio is basically the same as it was in the 1950s with many of the old instruments still there.  After seeing that it is hard to believe the number and magnitude of artists that recorded there.

Sun Studios
With one of the original RCA microphones used by Sun artists.  The "X"on the floor is where Elvis Presley was standing while recording "That's All Right"