You are wise and You are young

by the late Carver Lamb

He is protective

Like her father

And the sharp

Stirrings of this love

Hobble him.

The love of the

Young woman

Has shambled

The old bastard

This woman firm

Never craving

His old wares

His water runs

To her red

And what can he say?

“You are wise

And you are young”

The Secret Knowledge of Water: There Are Two Easy Ways to Die in the Desert: Thirst and Drowning

Craig Childs' The Secret Knowledge of Water: There Are Two Easy Ways to Die in the Desert: Thirst and Drowning is difficult to review, as it is about one man’s fascination, really, enthrallment, fear and respect for water in the desert.

This simple sentence does not do justice to Child’s book.  In his quest to find water in the desert, Child delves deep into what it means to be alive, to exist, to be a rock, a tree, or a simple organism.  In this book Childs has created a meditation on life and death, fecundity and bareness - on the nature of the universe.  

The book is unavoidably spiritual in tone, but Child is well-versed in the science of water.  There is no divide between spirit and science here.  The writing is superb; even if you have no interest in water, Childs will pull you in with his compelling language, his fascinating marshaling of facts, and his infectious curiosity - even his evident madness.

This is by far the most compelling book about “nature” I have read in a very long time.

Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

Erik Larson’s Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History is the kind of book we can expect of Larson, an informative and entertaining piece of non-fiction.  Larson documents the killer Hurricane that struck Galveston Texas in 1900, mainly through the lens of the chief government meteorologist, the Isaac of the title.

But the book is far broader than one man’s story.  It is about the emergence of meteorology and weather forecasting with its accompanying strengths and pitfalls.  This book is also about how weather can destroy not only a community that is rebuilt, but its future. 

Galveston was poised to be Texas’ great port city.  The hurricane exposed how vulnerable it was to massive storms, and that, along with the discovery of oil around Houston, pushed Galveston aside.

A city molded and destroyed by climate – still a timely story.  

The Ma’aseh Book

The Ma’aseh Book, a collection of stories and legends, is here, in this edition, divided into three parts.  The first is devoted to popular stories told in the midrash and Talmud.  They ring odd to the modern ear; a very helpful companion to this book is Ruth Calderon’s “A Bride for One Night” were she tackles these strange and disturbing tales.  She contextualizes many of these stores with an even hand

The tales in this book are worth reading.  We just need a teacher.

The Night Wanderers: Uganda's Children and the Lord's Resistance Army

The Night Wanderers: Uganda's Children and the Lord's Resistance Army by Wojciech Jagielski, tells a story of such utter horror that it is hard to believe that people committed such acts.  And I say this fully knowing the atrocities humanity has committed in our long and often violent, ugly history.

In Uganda, children were (and are?) used as instruments of terror.  What this author shows us is a society whose very foundations are corroding.  This book is also fascinating in showing the role of spirit possession in African culture; it can explain nearly every event, no matter how horrifying.

A Jew in the Woods - Pages from a Diary

A Jew in the Woods - Pages from a Diary by Berl Kagan (Kahn) is a unique Holocaust account as the author wrote this journal between the sentences of a book, while in hiding in the Lithuanian countryside.  Kagan explains the hardships he and his comrades suffer hiding in the barn of a friendly (and brave) Lithuanian peasant.  Later, Kagan must live in the woods and brush outside the farm.

Against the odds, he and his wife survive the Shoah.  Reading his account, it is difficult to imagine the privation, the exposure to the winter and heat, the insects and the fear of discovery.  Kagan experiences this dissonance too, for the diary ends with an explanation: after twelve years, he reads the account again.  He no longer imagines having lived through his experiences; it is a testimony to human durability, he explains.  People will do what they need to survive.