#12: State of Wonder

State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett (New York: Harper, 2011)

Summary:
"Dr. Marina Singh, a research scientist with a Minnesota-based pharmaceutical company, is sent to Brazil to track down her former mentor, Dr. Annick Swenson, who seems to have all but disappeared in the Amazon while working on what is destined to be an extremely valuable new drug. Nothing about the assignment is easy: not only does no one know where Dr. Swenson is, but the last person who was sent to find her, Marina's research partner Anders Eckman, died before he could complete his mission. Plagued by trepidation, Marina embarks on an odyssey into the insect-infested jungle in hopes of finding Dr. Swenson as well as answers to troubling questions about her friend's death, the state of her company's future, and her own past.

"Once found, Dr. Swenson, now in her seventies, is as ruthless and uncompromising as she ever was back in the days of the Grand Rounds at Johns Hopkins. With a combination of science and subterfuge, she dominates her research team and the natives she is studying with the force of an imperial ruler. But while she is as threatening as anything the jungle has to offer, the greatest sacrifices to be made are ones Dr. Swenson asks of herself, and will ultimately ask of Marina.

"In a narrative replete with poison arrows, devouring snakes, and a neighboring tribe of cannibals, State of Wonder is a world unto itself, where unlikely beauty stands beside unimaginable loss. It is a rare tale that leads the reader into the very heart of darkness, and then shows us what lies on the other side."

Opening Line:
"The news of Anders Eckman's death came by way of Aerogram, a piece of bright blue airmail paper that served as both the stationery and, when folded over and sealed along the edges, the envelope."

My Take:
A fascinating book. Yes, I'm a sucker for (pardon the pun) novel settings, especially when they're as vividly described as Patchett's Brazilian jungle, but honestly, I think I was more intrigued by how Marina's character develops over the course of the story. While she's a successful physician, she also has her issues: half-Indian, she's always felt somewhat out of place in the Eckman family's blond-haired, blue-eyed Minnesota, and she reacts to the anti-malarial Lariam with vivid, violent nightmares of being a young girl abandoned by her father in a crowded Calcutta market. She also seems more than a little lonely, despite the secretive half-relationship with her boss (who she still thinks of as Mr. Fox, rather than Jim). And then there's the back story: despite the jacket summary above, Swenson was less a mentor to Marina than a senior professor she and the rest of her med school classmates simultaneously admired and feared, and it was Swenson who was the supervising physician when Marina made the error that led her to abandon her ob/ gyn specialty for pharmacology.

Against this backdrop, Marina's boss/ lover Mr. Fox sends her Brazil shortly after they learn of Eckman's death. If Eckman hadn't been able to rein in Dr. Swenson, Fox argues, Marina's history with the older woman (which he doesn't really know anything about) and superior people skills should do the job.

And so she's off. After more than a brief sojourn in Manaus, the nearest city of any size, Marina finally convinces the Bovenders (the neo-hippie couple who've been renting Dr. Swenson's home while she's blissfully incommunicado in the jungle) to tell her where the doctor is (or at least put her in touch with a boatman who can take her there). She eventually reaches the remote settlement of the Lakashi people, who greet her arrival with jubilant torch-waving, and Dr. Swenson, who's a bit less thrilled to see her. As she becomes drawn into Swenson's research (ostensibly on the mysterious Lakashi propensity for extended fertility -- women continue having babies into their sixties and seventies -- but is it really?) and the jungle itself, she must confront complex questions, not only about nature and medicine and intervention, but about who she is and what role she has to play.

Bottom line: Didn't quite live up to the hype it's received, but still quite compelling.

117 - Why Sh*t Happens

And now, in the "yes, I picked this one for the title" category, 117 was Why Sh*t Happens: The Science of a Really Bad Day, by P.J. Bentley (Rodale, 2009). This'll be brief (I've been blogging for much of the afternoon -- a convenient way to pay attention but not too much attention to the aforementioned daughter and the gaggle of friends she was entertaining), but this was a quick non-fiction read with a novel frame story around it. If you're a reasonably bright layperson who's interested in science, this would be a perfect traveling or vacation read.

Essentially, Why Sh*t Happens is Freakonomics or The Economic Naturalist for the physical and life sciences. And yes, I'm an applied econ wonk, so that's a good thing. In each of 39 short chapters, Bentley introduces a clear, often humorous overview of how things work by asking the reader to imagine ... the crummiest bad day you can think of, magnified by a factor of 10.

You start out by oversleeping, and when you finally get up, you slip on the soap in the shower, and cut yourself shaving. Breakfast doesn't go much better, with a bagel that catches fire, a superheated cuppa joe that explodes all over you, and (yum) a nice refreshing swig of sour milk. After finding that your MP3 player's gone through the wash and having a talented bird decorate both you and your car as you're leaving for work, you're so rattled that you leave your briefcase at home, spin out while speeding around a curve, and put diesel in your gas tank by mistake. Oops. You leave your car at the service station, successfully catch the bus despite tripping on the way there, and sink into a seat whose previous occupant has thoughtfully deposited a nice, sticky, ABC wad of gum. Distracted by the gum in your hair, you miss your stop, and end up caught in the rain and then lost, braving a bee sting, a superglued finger, a cell phone that jams a nearby police radio, and a puncture in your brand-new expensive sneakers before you finally make it to your office.

A colleague stops you to sign a form on the way in, and the pen leaks all over your hand. You slip into this morning's meeting just a few minutes late, only to realize ... you're in the wrong place, and have crashed a meeting of complete strangers. Frustrated, you slam the bathroom door a bit too forcefully, and tear your sleeve. When you get to your desk, you find the IT guy hard at work, trying to remove the virus with which you've inadvertently infected the entire company. You fidget with a juice bottle while waiting for him to finish, get your finger stuck, and eventually find that it's hopeless: your PC won't reboot even when the repairs are done. ("It's worse than that; it's dead, Jim.") While carrying it to the local computer morgue, your finger gets caught in a heavy door and broken.

Finally, time to go home and shake off the black cloud. Nope, no such luck. Your bandaged finger makes you clumsy, so you drop your house keys down the storm drain, and then pull a muscle in your shoulder while in the process of retrieving them. Trying to cook seems like a bad idea, so you pop something in the microwave. Unfortunately, you use a plate with metal decorations, and the resulting sparks startle you into dropping your drink, covering your nice white carpet with broken glass and red wine. You order a pizza, but get hot pepper in your eye, which makes you drop the 'za on the floor and come up with a nice tasty mouthful of grit, dust, and possibly broken glass. You decide to settle for a cup of hot cocoa and some mindless TV, but a lightning strike fries the TV, and you blister your hand with spilled cocoa. A relaxing CD? Scratched. A decadent chocolate dessert? Delicious, until you break a tooth on the fork? How 'bout just a nice hot bath? Great, until you stub your toe on the tub, which then overflows while you're whimpering over your boo-boo.

The story alone is so over-the-top that it's funny, though you're not quite sure if you should laugh or groan as things get worse with each passing chapter. I ended up doing both, along with paging ahead frantically to see what science lesson Bentley was going to tie in this time. If there's a formula to it, I couldn't figure it out, so I really just needed to wait and see. The cut-yourself-shaving chapter, for example, touches on the biology and function of our skin and hair. The swimming MP3 player tackles the physics behind batteries; the superglued finger, the chemistry of glue; the dropped keys, gravity; the broken tooth, dental anatomy. At only 7 pages (more or less) each, none of the chapters is able to delve into its topic in much depth, and most of the science was more along the lines of "Oh, yeah, I remember learning about that" than completely new information. (Guess I'm still trying to get smarter than a 5th grader, eh?) Hard-core science wonks (who at last count, make up between 20 and 33% of my readers) will probably find the book superficial at best, and simplistic or flat-out wrong at worst, but for the simple but curious social science dilettantes (who make up 100% of Cafe Hazelthyme's authors), it was a fun afternoon.

#63 - The End of Nature

During less ungodly hours, I finished The End of Nature, by Bill McKibben (Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006). The deceptively short book (186 pages) is apparently somewhat of a classic in environmental literature; it was originally published in 1989 and was one of the first books to discuss global warming in a manner laypeople could both understand and care about. Little has changed with this republication except for the author's introduction.

I need a new approach to reading non-fiction. It's not that I don't want to read it -- if I didn't, I'd stop checking the books out -- but I need to stop trying to read it the same way I do a juicy novel, where you just sit down and turn pages without any conscious effort. Reading non-fiction, especially on a subject I don't yet know much about, is much more deliberate, at least for me. It's horribly dorky, but I find myself taking mental notes as if I were doing the reading for a college class. This must say something about my learning style, though I'm not sure exactly what it is.

Anyway, this was an interesting and fairly readable book -- a bit unsettling and/or depressing, but given the subject matter, that's probably to be expected. In some ways, the book seems oddly quaint, and not in a good way; McKibben cites 1988's dramatic heat wave and Hurricane Gilbert as an example of the bigger, more devastating weather extremes we might expect; and I couldn't help but think that in our contemporary, post-Andrew, -Katrina, and -Wilma world, we've all but forgotten about the "good old days" when Gilbert was a big bad wolf. It also predates most of the first Bush administration, let alone those that followed it, which have changed the terms of the debate a bit. In short, McKibben's argument is that nature -- that is, as a force independent of and uncontrolled by/ unaffected by human beings -- is already ending, and global warming isn't a maybe, someday, eventually problem, but one we need to deal with Right. Now. (See how well we've responded in the last 20 years?) The book is divided into two sections; the first, titled "The Present" provides a short history of humanity's (in particular, the United States') concept of "nature," and describes the current (as of 1989) state of our natural environment. The second, "The Near Future," tells us why we should care, and what we can do about it. Specifically, he offers two options: one, which he calls "The Defiant Reflex," involves finding new, man-made, technological solutions to save the earth (which, he argues, might stabilize the temperature, but would still mean the end of nature as we now know it); and a second, "A Path of More Resistance," which calls for a new relationship between humans and nature, one in which human beings aren't of utmost importance, but respect and preserve nature for its own sake -- rather than as something that exists just for us to enjoy on weekends and vacations.

I had visions of writing a thorough review, complete with summary -- but I'm behind again and the book's already gone back to the libe, so this will have to do. Again, it's short, very accessible, and (especially together with Storm World) a good introduction to environmental literature in general and global warming in particular. (In fact, I've already added McKibben's Deep Ecology to my list -- admittedly, not a very exclusive club -- and am even more convinced that I need to go back even further and read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring to see where it all began.) Read it if the topic interests you even a little bit, and you're up for something sobering; if you want a bit more info or convincing, check out this review first.

#56 - Storm World

OK, I've fallen dreadfully behind in my blogging so here's a quick wrap-up of my last few books. I'll flesh 'em out if and when I have a chance.

Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming, by Chris Mooney (Harcourt, 2007). This book is about the debate over whether global warming is happening, and whether it is contributing/ will contribute to stronger hurricanes (more, stronger, faster winds, lower pressure). Interesting read, but not quite as accessible to the layperson (like me) as I'd hoped.