Friday, October 31, 2008

Blood River by Tim Butcher

I’m delighted to have my review of Tim Butcher’s Blood River appear in today’s Wall Street Journal, under the title Solo in the Congo. It’s the first time I’ve had the opportunity to write for the Journal.

Blood River is the story of how Tim Butcher, a journalist for London’s Daily Telegraph, set out to follow the course of Henry Morton Stanley’s 1874 expedition across Africa. Here’s an excerpt from the review:

As the author jounces over rugged forest paths on a motorbike, he comes upon a settlement where human bones lie scattered, “white among the green undergrowth.” Yet more unsettling than what he sees is the knowledge of all that is hidden or unknown. As roads crumble and people hide in the forest, each village is cut off from the rest. When Mr. Butcher asks about a local massacre where thousands died, no one seems to know about it. “There have been many attacks and many massacres,” one man says. “When it happens we flee into the bush, but nobody ever knows the details.”

The recent book “The World Without Us,” by Alan Weisman, asks us to imagine what the Earth would be like without people—if no one were around to tend the power plants and pump out the subways and repair the roads. The Congo provides a glimpse of that world.

Monday, September 01, 2008

The Tapir’s Morning Bath by Elizabeth Royte

Two of my colleagues went to Costa Rica in August, and since I don’t have any interesting trips on the horizon myself, I think I probably picked up The Tapir’s Morning Bath out of rainforest envy.

The Tapir’s Morning Bath is about the scientists who live and work on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, studying spiny rats, fruit bats, spider monkeys, and other flora and fauna. Before I even began the first chapter, I had already learned something. I had imagined that the Panama Canal was a long concrete trench that stretched all the way across the isthmus, but a map of the Canal Zone shows that ships actually pass through the sizable Gatun Lake during a large part of their passage. Barro Colorado (meaning Red Mud) is the biggest island in the lake. It’s what remains of a ridge of land that was flooded after the damming of the Chagres River in 1910. The island is protected from hunting and development, and a laboratory (now run by the Smithsonian Institution) has been operating there since 1923.

Elizabeth Royte spends a year on the island, off and on, and attaches herself as a field assistant to several scientists. She not only gives a vivid sense of what it’s like to confront a wild peccary on a remote forest trail, or to disentangle a bat from a mist net, but lucidly explains the theories each scientist is setting out to prove. She regrets the passing of naturalists with a big-picture understanding of the interactions of plants and animals in favor of ever more specialized number crunchers, but she recognizes that once in a while even a seemingly useless bit of data completes a missing piece of the puzzle and even offers some practical benefit to medicine or science. And sometimes it just blows a hole in someone’s cherished theory.

Bret Weinstein studies bats that build shelters out of leaves, apparently to give them shelter near their feeding grounds so they don’t have to fly home every night. Bret has also noticed that a male bat keeps several mates in a sort of harem, going to considerable effort to maximize the chance that he can pass on his genes. When the author tells him another scientist has found that female bats often mate in the forest, regardless of what harem they belong to, “a look of consternation” crosses his face. The author thinks of an observation attributed to Mark Twain (though I haven’t been able to find the source): “Researchers have already cast much darkness on the subject, and if they continue their investigations we shall soon know nothing at all about it.”

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Guinea pigs for dinner

In the Times recently, a reporter described dining on roast guinea pig at an Ecuadorean restaurant in Queens. Guinea pigs are eaten, and apparently enjoyed, in the countries of the Andes, and a painting in the cathedral in Cuzco, Peru, pictures Jesus dining on guinea pig with his disciples.

The reporter’s description was less than enthusiastic:

There was very little meat, and it tasted somewhat similar to the dark meat of chicken, gamey like duck or rabbit. The meat was fatty and stringy at times. I had to pick it off the little ribs, and the skin was crunchy, with parts of it thicker with a chewy, almost rubbery, texture.

I was reminded of The Wine-Dark Sea by Patrick O’Brian, the 16th volume in the Aubrey-Maturin series, in which Dr. Maturin sets out on a perilous mission through the Peruvian Andes. The account of guinea pig is even less appealing there:

Three times that day, and at ever-increasing heights, they had left their mules in the hope of a partridge or a guanaco, and three times they had caught up with the llamas not indeed empty-handed, since Stephen carried a beetle or a low-growing plant for the pack of the animal that carried their collections, but without any sort of game, which meant that their supper would be fried guinea-pig and dried potatoes once more; and each time Eduardo had said that this was a strange, unaccountable year, with weather that made no sense and with animals abandoning customs and territories that had remained unchanged since before the days of Pachacutic Inca.

A few pages later, Maturin suggests shooting a vicuña for food, observing to his companion, “You yourself said that you were tired of fried guinea-pig and ham.” Eduardo quietly confirms this in a little while, when Maturin says he would like to dissect an unusual bird they have just bagged.

‘That would mean fried guinea-pig again,’ observed Eduardo.

The two eventually arrive at a Catholic mission, but the priests are nonplussed at having little to offer their guests. “Well,” says one at last, “there may be a few guinea-pigs left in the scriptorium.”

One would think that O’Brian has exhausted the subject, yet his final unfinished novel (published under the title 21) features “a formal dinner given by an Argentine grandee, which includes lobster in a bitter chocolate sauce and 70 freshly harvested guinea pigs.”

Friday, May 30, 2008

Edward Wisner’s fountain

Many thanks to the reader in New Orleans who noticed my post on Edward Wisner and commented on it. He sent this photo later, taken during a scavenger hunt, and added, “After reviewing the photo again, I realized that it must be the fountain that you mention in the article. It’s located in West End Park near where the Southern Yacht Club was located (the yacht club was destroyed by fire in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina). In fact, that whole area was heavily damaged by the storm surge. “

I enjoy the wetland motif of lily pads and cattails that was used to create this memorial fountain. Maybe someday I can see it in person.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Paul Theroux on travel

Paul Theroux has been criticized for being a grumpy, mean-spirited traveler. From my own experience of travel, I don’t think that’s true. Certainly he was never as grumpy as his ex-friend V.S. Naipaul — or Naipaul’s brother Shiva, who died in 1985 and whose North of South is one of the sourest books on Africa I’ve ever read.

For all its surprises and rewards, travel can be tough. You get sick. You get lost. You have to fend off pickpockets at the Harare bus station. Your backpack is stolen from under your feet in Bulawayo. You find yourself stuck without a ride on a lonely road, with night approaching.

Theroux’s travel writing acknowledges snags like these, and that is what makes it so believable. In an article for the Guardian, recently featured by Arts & Letter Daily, Theroux explained that his approach was a reaction to the airbrushed travel-supplement approach of the early 1960s.

The travel book was a bore. It annoyed me that a traveller hid his or her moments of desperation or fear or lust. Or the time he or she screamed at the taxi driver, or mocked the folk dancers. And what did they eat, what books did they read to kill time, and what were the toilets like? I had done enough travelling to know that half of travel was delay or nuisance — buses breaking down, hotel clerks being rude, market peddlers being rapacious. The truth of travel was interesting and off-key, and few people ever wrote about it.

(Oddly enough, in a recent interview that I wrote about earlier, Theroux said that he tries to leave out accounts of being sick or being delayed — that these sorts of things happen to everyone, and are not interesting to readers. Maybe he really meant that a little of that goes a long way.)

Theroux decided early on that a travel book should be about travel — about moving from one place to another. Staying put in Malawi or Uganda or Singapore was more suited to fiction, he felt.

There’s something to this as well. Although I can think of a number of fine nonfiction books that don’t cover much territory, many of the most successful, like Redmond O’Hanlon’s No Mercy, do involve overland traveling toward a goal, with a good deal of suffering along the way.