Book Review: Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life

Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life by Adam Gopnik
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Gopnik's thesis is not proven in this short collection of long essays.  Not in the slightest.  But that doesn't mean this book isn't worth reading.  Rather than a sensible step-by-step building of connective tissue, an evolution of an idea, you might say, Gopnik wanders about and repeats himself and never really makes anything concise or clear.  I did not leave this book thinking, "Yes!  Darwin and Lincoln WERE midwives to the spirit of a new world! They DID reshape our understanding of what life is and how it attains meaning!"  That Darwin and Lincoln were amazing harbingers of the next is a given but Gopnik doesn't really till new ground in demonstrating the idea.   He does, however, bring up some interesting tidbits for deep thought and these, alone, make the book worth reading.   For example;

"We can find plenty of astonishing ideas in that day, just as we will find traces of the astonishing ideas of the next century somewhere on the fringes of our own time."

"...these styles [the writing styles of Darwin and Lincoln] have in common the writer's faith in plain English, his hope that people's minds and hearts can be altered by the slow crawl of fact as much as by the long reach of revelation."

"The attempt to make Lincoln into just one more racist is part of the now common attempt to introduce a noxious equilibrium between minds and parties; liberals who struggle with their own prejudices are somehow equal in prejudice to those who never took the trouble to make the struggle.  Imperfect effort at being just is no different than perfect indifference to it ... a good man who plays footsie for an evening under the table with a single bad idea becomes the equal of a man who spends a lifetime sharing a slovenly bed with an evil ideology."

For Kazin [a Lincoln biographer], Lincoln's God is neither the God of confident Christendom nor the punishing God of the Calvinist imagination but the God of both Job and John Donne, the God who is the stenographic name for the absolute mystery of being alive and watching men suffer while still holding in mind ideals that ennoble the suffering and in some strange way make sense of it."

"[On the Origin of Species] is both an explanation of evolution, an old idea, and a theory of natural selection, a new one.  If you concentrated on the evolutionary part, which is, as Darwin knew, an old and long-present idea, one of Granddad's tall tales, then you could make it into a kind of progressivism--an explanation of eternal change and social improvement with a vitalist charge.  If you concentrated on the natural selection part, the struggle for survival, you could make it into an endorsement of free markets or imperialism ..."

"People are different, in Darwin's view--he thought there were savages, primitives, at one end and civilized people at another--but what knit them all together was the habit of sympathy, which could be extended wherever, and as far as, we chose to place it."

"We should not judge the past by the standards of the present.  Darwin wrote about "savages";  we wouldn't.  (But then, we use words that our great-grandchildren will be shocked by, too--though which ones:  wife?  veal chops?)"

"...we are allowed only a tiny glimpse, in our hummingbird lives, of what duration and endurance and repetition can actually achieve.  We have a moral and scientific duty to seek out those places--coral reefs and earthworm-plowed fields as well as fossil pits and mussel-moved mountains--where we can get at least a sense of how an earthworm can do a farmer's work, if you give him time."

"The tragedy of life is not that there is no God but that the generations through which it progresses are too tiny to count very much.  There isn't a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, but try telling that to the sparrows."

"The pacifists are not always right.  But the warmongers are almost always wrong."

"Science lets us think big but we still feel small.  No cosmologist has ever felt more serenely about his tenure case by contemplating the vastness of the universe.  We get the big picture, but it's not where we live."

Just using these ideas as jumping off points for thought and further reading make Gopnik's book more than a worthwhile way to spend a few hours' time.


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Too Soon

I woke up this morning while it was still dark.  I lay in bed for a while, willing the fleeting muse of sleep to return but, when it didn't, I sat up.   I don't keep a clock near my bed and, since I was thirsty, I got up and wandered downstairs to see what time it was and to sit on the couch while sipping on a glass of ice water.

My husband's computer was open and, wanting company in my sleeplessness, I woke it from its peaceful slumber by deftly touching the mousepad as I passed.  It grunted that electronic grunt of MacBooks lurching out of hibernation but brightened considerably in the next few moments and presented my husband's Facebook page for my perusal.

I scrolled through the updates of his Facebook connections, logged out, then logged into my Facebook account.

And what I saw there guaranteed that I would not sleep again easily.

So let me back up.

When my son was two years old we enrolled him in a Parent's Day Out program two days a week.  His classroom was supervised by a stern hispanic woman named Helen who strenuously discouraged any whiff of mollycoddling and lectured me numerous times on the ridiculousness of my insistence that I pick my son up at noon and take him home for his afternoon nap.

Then one day another parent was there at noon to pick up his son, a new kid in class.  We chatted a bit and I warned this dad that Helen would shake her finger at him for not allowing his child to stay with the other kids until late afternoon.  He smiled and revealed that he'd already been on the receiving end of the lecture.  We laughed then I asked what his son's name was.  He told me.  Same name as my son.  We smiled again.  Then we discovered that we both had the same last initial, which would certainly confuse things as they tried to label clothing and art work.  We laughed  again and predicted that Helen would insist that one of us change our last names or the name of our child.

Helen didn't, of course, though she probably wanted to.  And, in the meantime, we had formed a cursory acquaintance with this family;  I knew the mother slightly, I found out later, through music circles and we would always chat in passing about the difficulties and joys of child rearing.

Then we went our separate ways to different preschool choices.  I would think of this family once in a while when I told Helen stories, but their child, who shared a name with mine, was a part of my past.  I never ran into either the mom or the dad and they faded to the back of my mind.

Until about a year ago when I found out their son had leukemia.  I felt the wind leave my lungs as a mutual acquaintance told me that this six year old kid was fighting the fight of his life.  I shook my head in disbelief but then defaulted to "He's young, he's strong, he'll beat it."

And the periodic updates I got through mutual friends proved me right.  For a while.

Then this weekend, a mutual friend told me the family had signed a DNR.

And then this morning, another mutual friend posted on Facebook that this young seven year-old had lost his brave fight.

I sat devastated.  My first instinct was to try to DO something, though I knew not what.  My second instinct was to feel guilty that I had not paid more attention, been more help, done something more while he was sick.  Though, again, I knew not what.  What could I have done?  I am basically a stranger to this family.

But I feel a kinship.  A connection.  Because their son could be my son.

They shared a name.

They were the same age.

It could have been us.

And why wasn't it us?  Why did my family roll the dice with more luck than his family?  How was he chosen for suffering while my son wiles away his days, blissfully unaware of sorrow, pain and personal tragedy?

I am lost today.  I want to apologize for having a healthy child and at the same time I want to shout on the rooftops about how amazingly lucky I am.  I want to hug my kid hard and impress upon him how favored and fortunate we are.  I want to bellow importantly at everyone I see to tell them that it is paramount that they take time to appreciate those closest to them.  And I want this young boy's family to somehow find peace.

My husband and I are relative secularists when it comes to ideas of the afterlife;  neither of us buy into the Swedenborg idea of heaven as a more glorious suburb of one's present life but we don't really have a replacement myth, either, so our stock phrase when someone dies is, "Well, they had a good run."  When I told my husband about this lost child this morning, he said, "Seven years is not a good run."

Damn straight it's not.

And though it is selfish and self-centered to realize,  the tragedy of this family has served to embed my vast fortune into the depths of my psyche.  I am lucky.  I may not be lucky forever, but I am lucky right now and damn if I'm not going to spend the rest of the day, the rest of my life, appreciating it.

And then, in the midst of all these emotions, my sister-in-law called to tell me she was in labor.  One life begins.  Another ends.

But too soon.  Too damned soon.

Book Review: Igraine the Brave

Igraine the Brave by Cornelia Funke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A nice little romp with no scary, questionable material but still enough excitement and intrigue and magic to keep a young kid occupied.  Lovely intermittent illustrations, too.  Not great literature but a wonderful diverson and a really good read-aloud for younger kids.


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Book Review: Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York

Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York by Adam Gopnik
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Oh Adam Gopnik.  How in love I once was with you.  How amazed I was with your facility to dig into layers of everyday life and come up with wise genius.  How many times did I read aloud to friends your original New Yorker "Bumping Into Ravioli" essay?


I still may be in love with you, but this book tested my love, much like Cupid tested Psyche; I turned on the light to see you and you ran away, leaving only a poorly edited, slapped-together published collection of essays to remember you by.  You even messed with my beloved Ravioli.  Why would you do such a thing?


And perhaps, Adam, I still love you but choose not to love one of your books.  That is indeed possible.  It may, Adam, not even be your fault, as this tome is so New York as to be inconceivable to one who doesn't love New York as you do.  Which I categorically do not.


Don't get me wrong, Adam.  I read the whole thing.  And I found many phrases and thoughts to be ponder-worthy.  Sadly, some of those phrases and thoughts were repeated, almost verbatim, in different essays, a fault that lies not with you, perhaps, but with your editors.  Or with your publishers, who put you on deadline.


But even in this slipshod collection of words, your amazing clever wisdom peeks out every once in a great while;


"In my experience, at least, it is the liberal parents who tend to be the most socially conservative-the most queasy at the endless ribbon of violence and squalor that passes for American entertainment, more concerned to protect their children from it.  One might have the impression that it is the Upper West Side atheist and the Lancaster County Amish who dispute the prize for who can be most obsessive about having the children around the table at six p.m. for a homemade dinner from farm-raised food."


"The art of child rearing, of parenting, is to center the children and then knock them off center; to make them believe that they are safely anchored in the middle of a secure world and somehow also to let them know that the world they live in is not a fixed sphere with them at the center; that they stand instead alongside a river of history, of older souls, that rushes by them, where they are only a single small incident.  To make them believe that they can rule all creation, while making them respect the malevolent forces that can ruin every garden:  That is the task."


"Childhood is just like life, only ten times faster."


"We didn't make the children fly.  We simply lowered the heavens and told them they were flying, as we always do."


In conclusion, Adam, I choose to still love you.  I will lay this book aside and convince myself to still gasp in excited anticipation when I see your name affixed to an article in the New Yorker table of contents.  I will give you a second chance.  And, probably, a third chance, too, if need be.  Because I know how good you can be.


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Book Review: A Wrinkle In Time

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another well-loved children's book that I came to late in life.


And I liked it.  But I wanted more description.  More understanding.


Of course, maybe leaving the descriptions sketchy was exactly what L'Engle had in mind, allowing my mind, my prejudices, my life experiences to fill in the gap.


"You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you."


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Book Review: When You Reach Me

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a perfect book.  I don't know that I can say much more about it than that.  Well written, beautifully crafted, engaging, thoughtful, tessering.  Perfect.



"Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop being mean.  It's like how turning on a light makes you realize how dark the room had gotten.  And the way you usually act, the things you would have normally done, are like these ghosts that everyone can see but pretends not to."


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Book Review: First Light

First Light by Rebecca Stead
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For better or worse, this book reminded me of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. And not in any way except that Stead created a secondary world that was entirely science fiction and entirely believable. A world that was more advanced than ours in ways but held onto a primitive ideal at the same time. A cold world. With humans and wild creatures as intimate companions.

But there's where the similarities ended. Stead has no agenda. She's simply telling a story. A very, very good story. She's a fine writer and I look forward to more from her pen.

**********
On second reading, 9 years later, HOW DID I MISS THE AGENDA?!?!?!? Global warming. The world Stead describes is going to disappear. And the denizens of the world are fighting a pitched battle between chosen ignorance preached by a leader who wants to hold on to power or plain fact that will embroil the world in changes that will end it in another way.

Entirely believable. Again.


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