Charles Bowden's extraordinary Blue Desert

Anyone interested in writing (or reading) creative non-fiction will be interested in Charles Bowden's Blue Desert.

Anyone interested in more than a tourist brochure of the Southwest will be interested in Charles Bowden's Blue Desert.

The book is not new. It was first published by The University of Arizona Press in 1986 but the essays are timeless. It is a collection of ten essays about bats, antelope, tortoises, fish

(specifically the Yaqui topminnow), Latinos, the opening of the Glen Canyon Dam (and the concomitant death of Glen Canyon), striking copper miners, Native Americans under pressure from a Tucson developer to lease their land, and a walk from the Mexican border through the desert to Interstate 8, the route immigrants take "for a job I would not take if offered."

Putting an essay's subject into a phrase necessarily distorts it unrecognizably. I read Bowden for the information and for his perceptions. Here is his observation of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife tracking several pronghorn antelope—for the best of reasons, to safeguard the beasts: "A kind of collision between cultures has taken place. Huge machines that fly at eighty miles per hour and drink more than seventy gallons an hour have snared an organism that has raced at fifty miles per hour for millions of years."

He writes in the first person and the present tense and is not shy about putting himself into the story. In his piece about the desert tortoise (the desert tortoise! who knew there was such a creature?), he covers a desert tortoise conference that takes place in a casino: "The women working the place are a problem also, bursting out of their britches, bending down to pour coffee and slapping my face with deep cleavage. I can think of few things more pleasurable than to sleep on the desert, watch the rabbits bounce around and then at dawn walk into a casino where time has stopped and everything always promises to be juicy."

A thread running through the book is Man's—and primarily the white man's—impact on the land, wiping out entire species either because they are a threat to commerce (like wolves) or through development. Bowden observes, "In the West, nothing done by Americans is for keeps, everything—farms, cities, towns, mines, everything—constitutes a brief raid on the dry land and then becomes tumbleweed, ghost towns, lost mines, real estate empires that go up in flim-flam, and the like."

We rip open the earth to extract the copper ore, denude the mountains of trees to fire the smelter, dump the poisonous tailings wherever, and, when the ore is gone, move on. In his piece about a copper strike in Ajo, he writes, "The copper industry is dying. The union is dying. The whole way of life based on ripping up the earth for good wages and then going home to a company house after picking up a six-pack at company store is all dying." Make no mistake; there's money to be made despoiling the earth.

The last piece in the book, "Blue," an account of Bowden's walk with a friend across the desert migrant trail, is a tour de force. "These are the rules," he writes. "Get caught and you go back to Mexico. Make it across and you get a job in the fields or backrooms. Don't make it and you die." He and Bill are pushing forty, in good physical condition (Bowden has trained for the walk as if for a marathon), carry packs with food and water. They start at the El Suguaro truck stop where they have to leave abruptly because the Mexican proprietor is about to shake them down. They walk at night, stumble, grow thirsty, are sliced by thorns on small shrubs and large trees. And yet, and yet:

"Everywhere the earth is beauty. the mountains lift sharply off the valley floor, rockpiles almost naked of plants. Beauty. The moon flashes off the stone walls. Beauty. The creosote, the much derided greasewood, stands spaced like a formal garden. Beauty. Stars crowd the sky and I can hear them buzzing with the fires of their explosive gases. I tear the wrapper from a Granola bar and crunch the grains between my teeth. I top the plastic jug up to my lips and swallow. I look on the moon. Beauty."

I am astonished that Bowden is able to record his perceptions so vividly, grateful to the friend who recommended the book to me.

Offended the gods? Give them your daughter

Kwei Quartey is an American physician whose father was Ghanaian and his mother black American. He was born in Accra and spent his childhood in Ghana. He attended medical

school at Howard University in Washington, DC, currently runs a wound care clinic in Pasadena, CA. He says that he was "your classic nerdy kid reading on a Saturday instead of our playing soccer." And, "Reading as voraciously as I did inspired me to write my own 'novels' when I was around eight to ten years old." He now writes virtually every morning before beginning his day at his clinic.

Wife of the Gods was Quartey's first mystery. It is set in Ghana, not a "Ghana-like African nation," which lends verisimilitude to the setting, actions and attitudes of the characters, and plot. The main character is Darko Dawson, an Accra homicide detective who is happily married. The couple has a young son who was born with a defective heart, a complication that plays a role in the novel.

Another complication is the custom of trokosi. A helpful author's note explains that "even the English translation of the word is debated (wife of the gods, slave of the gods, child of a divinity, and so on)." If a family member does something seriously bad, the gods may begin to punish the family: crops fail, mother has a stroke, cousin drowns. Who knows what's next?

The answer is to deliver a female child to serve at the village shrine where the High Priest, who is an intermediary between the physical and spiritual worlds, will teach her "moral ways." "This would restore good fortune to the family. As a trokosi, though, she officially belonged to the gods and was to bear their children through Togobe Adzima," the village priest, who already had three other trokosi. We're not in Pasadena any more.

A young woman is found dead in the forest. She's an outsider. A medical student from Accra who is working to reduce AIDs in this backwater town. She's already apparently had a fight with the local herbal medical practitioner (he thought she was trying to steal his cures). And she was seen going into the forest with a young man.

Because the death has political ramifications, Dawson is ordered to the town to investigate because  actually has relatives locally and he speaks the local language. (Apparently Ghana has nine government-sponsored languages.) The big city cop showing up in the small town does not sit well with the local police chief, a relationship that does not improve when Dawson establishes that the young woman's death was homicide, not an accident.

I know nothing about Ghanaian society and I had to focus to keep names straight (i.e., Efia, Boateng, Fiti, Chikata, Gyamfi, Kweku, Osewa, Akua, and more). Nevertheless, Wife of the Gods held my interest to the last page as Darko Dawson slowly unravels the mystery while dealing with local superstitions, small town gossip, and his own demons. And while the book is not written as a sociological study of village Ghanaian society, I came away with a fascinating picture of a traditional culture in the midst of change. Cell phones and witch doctors. Intriguing.

Tell a story? Danticat tells marvelous stories

Edwidge Danticat is a writer whose name has floated in and out of my consciousness as someone I ought to know, and with Krik?Krak! I now have. And realized why I've heard of her. Mainly because she's a terrific writer.

Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1969. Before she was five her parents had immigrated to New York, leaving Edwidge to be raised by an aunt and uncle. She spoke Haitian Creole at home, French in school, and when she was 12 years old she joined her parents in Brooklyn.

She began writing when she was 9 years old, published a story in a New York City magazine written by teenagers when she was 14. She wrote another story for the magazine, "A New World Full of Strangers" based on her immigration experience. She later said, "When I was done with the [immigration] piece, I felt that my story was unfinished, so I wrote a short story, which later became a book, my first novel: Breath, Eyes, Memory" published in 1994.

She published Krik? Krak!, her second book, in 1996. A collection of stories that was a National Book Award finalist, the title means, "Tell me a story? I'll tell you a story!" Seven

of the nine stories are set in Haiti, and in spare language and telling details Danticat reveals place, character, and situation. Soldiers burst into a house. "The soldiers held a gun to Lionel's head and ordered him to lie down and become intimate with his mother. Lionel refused. Their mother told him to go ahead and obey the soldiers because she was afraid that they would kill Lionel on the spot if he put up more of a fight. Lionel did as his mother told him, crying as the soldiers laughed at him, pressing the gun barrels farther and farther into his neck." Afterward the soldiers raped Lionel's sister and arrested him and accused him of moral crimes.

Powerful stuff, but a view into the heart of darkness. Or at least into a whole other world: "In Haiti when you get hit by a car, the owner of the car gets out and kicks you for getting blood on his bumper." And one more example chosen at random: "She nearly didn't marry him because it was said that people with angular hairline often have very troubled lives."

Anyone who is interested in writing will find Krik? Krak! filled with interesting characters, situations, and ideas. Here for example is the meditation of a young girl who has been posing for a painter—but the thoughts apply equally to writers: " . . . this was why she wanted to make pictures, to have something to leave behind even after she was gone, something that showed what she had observed in a way that no one else had and no one else would after her . . . ." 

A funeral hotdish is hot stuff

Jana Bommersbach's new mystery, Funeral Hotdish, is interesting for several reasons. The author is a Phoenix journalist who broke the story that Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, the Mafia soldier who ratted out John Giotti and who was supposed to be safely stashed away in

the Witness Protection Program, was actually swanning about in Tempe, Arizona. She is a native of Hankinson, North Dakota, a town of about 900 people in the southeast corner of the state.

Her mystery features a Phoenix journalist, Joya Bonner, who discovers that Sammy "The Bull" Gravano is signing autographs in Tempe and the tragic death of a North Dakota high school girl who has a bad reaction to the drug Ecstasy (or Molly). So Bommersbach, writing about what she knows, weaves living people, actual events, and invented characters into a plausible and satisfying story.

Funeral Hotdish begins with the death of 17-year-old Amber Schlener and the coma of her boyfriend, Johnny Roth, at a high school dance. Joya becomes enmeshed in the Gravano story because the Phoenix police suspect Sammy is involved in dealing drugs—and Joya's part-time live-in boyfriend is a Phoenix cop. She is astonished to learn from her mother that Amber, back in tiny Northville, North Dakota, is dead from drug overdose. Northville? With a high school graduating class of 17? Not possible. Or a Phoenix connection?

Some readers may have problems with the shifting points of view as we move from head to head as the chapters move by, even from head to head on a single page. That said, I had no trouble following the POVs and by organizing her story the way she has, Bommersbach is able to give the reader insights and observations she would have been hard-pressed to give from a single POV.

Here, for example, is a description: "The Catholics put a low rock wall all the way around their cemetery and fancy iron gates at the entrance. Nobody remembers the gates ever being closed and they're rusted in place by now. The cemetery rises in front of you as you drive up the long entrance, the road splitting around a giant marble altar flanked by two towering alabaster angels. Christ on the cross dominates the altar. You could say Mass out here, but nobody remembers any one doing that. Mostly, people just wander around it, admiring the beautiful angels that were imported from Germany decades ago. . . ."

And here's a woman's observation: "Women gossip like a doubles game of ping-pong, everybody talking at once and throwing an idea back and forth. They'll chew on a thing until it's shredded, and then they move on. But men parcel out their thoughts slowly—two, three trains of thought with everyone naturally keeping track. Like multiple lanes of bowling where everybody knows each score. And in the middle of one train, somebody will tell a joke, and when they pick up again, nobody has to be reminded where they left off. So if you want gossip from women, they hand it over neat and tidy. But if you want it from men, you've got to hang in there for hours to get the whole story. . . ."

A funeral hotdish, of course, is what the church ladies prepare to feed the congregation—and in an appendix to the book, Bommersbach includes the recipe that comes from St. Phillip's Church in Hankinson. It's something you'd want to modify to make at home, of course; St. Phillip's version feeds 175.

Funeral Hotdish is a satisfying and engaging hybrid.

On not seeing the light of "All the Light We Cannot See"

Long time readers of this blog know that I am fascinated by the Amazon comments of readers who hated a book I liked. Did they see something I missed? Do I agree with their criticism? If not, why not?

Anthony Doerr's WWII novel All the Light We Cannot See" won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It is a legitimate New York Times best seller. As I write, it has over 21,100 reviews

on Amazon—72 percent of them five-star, 18 percent four-star. How many novels provoke that many Amazon reviews—90 percent of which are positive? For me, it makes the critics who gave the book one star that much more interesting.

A reader writes: "I rarely give up on a book but here I am on page 151 and I just can't see the point of continuing. The chapters are two pages long each and they switch between the two main characters. I just looked ahead and the whole book is set up like this. Maybe this is good writing and a good story but the lack of flow just kills my interest." In fact the point view shifts between more than two characters, and many chapters are more than two pages, not that this would make any difference to this reader.

A reader writes: "It felt like reading a cookbook. I didn't feel that invested in the characters, which was probably a good thing since the plot sputtered out and died. My favorite character disappeared." True, Doerr does not tie up every single loose end, but I would not agree that the plot sputtered out. And a character does disappear, which is a shock to the reader (this reader), but seemed appropriate in the story's context.

Perhaps the most damming critique was by the reader who wrote more than a thousand words that include: "I am a lifelong reader with a PhD in literature and 40 years experience teaching college writing and literature. The more I study fiction, the more I admire a writer who can use structure (the arrangement of the chronological elements of plot) strategically to develop the novel's themes . . .  Doerr . . .  fragments his plot for no apparent purpose. It is disjointed and difficult to follow, with no payoff for the effort. He not only switches back and forth between the two narratives but also along the timeline. Switching back and forth between the two narratives . . . would have been plenty; also switching back and forth along the timeline before, during, and after WWII creates too much discontinuity and makes the narrative hard to follow. . . . Both plots also depend on too many farfetched coincidences, so much so that it strains credulity." This critic's analysis is correct; the conclusion less so. Clearly, thousands of people were either able to follow or were caught up in Doerr's language—as I was.

I thought that at the sentence level, All the Light We Cannot See is extraordinary. This last critic, who is far more sensitive than I, points out examples in which "far too many of the descriptive passages use words as words—a piling on of sounds—rather than to convey actual meaning." Perhaps another slow edit of the book would have caught these, although I suspect not. (Reportedly Doerr spent eight years writing it; one more pass through would probably have been one too many.)

For what it's worth, I had no trouble following the chronology. I did not for a moment believe that these characters were real people in a real WWII. I was not put off by the anachronism I was able to spot. I was willing to suspend disbelief and simply enjoy Doerr's language and admire his ambition. I'd give it four stars.

"Boy Nobody" is a thrill ride from page 1

Let me start by disqualifying myself to give an authoritative review of Boy Nobody by Allen Zadoff. I do not read thrillers as a general rule, and Boy Nobody is, if nothing else, a thrill

ride. I read it on the recommendation of one of my middle school writing students and I am delighted I did so.

The narrator is a 16-year-old assassin trained by and (apparently) working for a super secret US Government agency. As a teenager he is able to ingratiate himself with his peers, become a friend of the family, and in short order murder the target with an undetectable poison. The death looks like a heart attack and who would suspect a kid?

By page 24 we have accompanied the narrator (whose real name we do not learn until very late in the book) into the secure Natick, MA, home of a Chinese businessman, watched him kill the man (the boy uses a special pen and the poison is painless), watched him slip away in the confusion following the man's "heart attack," and watched him disable four Chinese security thugs who suspect foul play. On page 25 we speeding down the Mass Pike in a stolen Mercedes with diplomatic plates.

The point of a thriller (in contrast to a mystery) is that the reader knows what bad thing is supposed to happen and is following the detective/the police to see if they can stop it, or, as in this case, following the narrator on his next assignment, which on the surface seems impossible. And in fact turns out to be more difficult than the narrator, or this reader, realized. For one thing, the narrator begins to recall events from his life before he entered The Program and they begin to complicate his assignment.

The book and the story zip right along. Many short chapters. One- and two-word sentence fragments. one line paragraphs. No extraneous description. Present tense. Lots of dialogue. Yet within the thriller conventions, Zadoff is able to give his 16-year-old some humanity, a code of ethics, and—more problematic—feelings.

If you can accept the idea that a super secret US Government agency is recruiting 12-year-olds and training them to be stone cold assassins, and the idea that the US Government is willing to use assassination as a policy, and that the super secret US Government agency has enough intelligence to know who should be killed, the Boy Nobody is a hoot. I don't accept any of those things, but I was still cheering for the narrator and shocked by the decisions he had to make.

It turns out that Boy Nobody is the first of a series (that Zadoff left the possibility open at the end of the book was clear). The title is now I Am the Weapon. The two more recent books are I Am the Mission, and I Am the Traitor. I'll mention them to my student.

Why all 5-star reviews are bad news

Aside from my feeling that a star system is much too crude a measure to evaluate books (or restaurants or coffee pots or airlines or most products and services), they have another

What you want to see for your book.

deficiency: too many good ones can deter prospective buyers.

As Tom Collinger, a Crunch Network contributor, writes in Tech Crunch, "when consumers see only five-star reviews, they smell something fishy, something that causes their BS meter to go off. They know that some negative opinions about a product, service or place are to be expected, and become suspicious when something is marketed as 'perfect.'"

Collinger cited a Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center and PowerReviews study of 40 product categories that looked at the impact of reviews on purchases. In moderation, bad reviews actually help boost sales—"product purchases were most influenced by reviews with an average star rating between 4.2 and 4.5."

Amazon says that it "calculates a product’s star ratings using a machine learned model instead of a raw data average. The machine learned model takes into account factors including: the age of a review, helpfulness votes by customers and whether the reviews are from verified purchases." I'm not sure what this means because when I post a review, the site asks me to assign a star to the book.

In any event, this means don't tell all the friends you inveigle into reading your book to give it a five-star review. You want a mix of five-, four-. and even one or two three-star reviews. Better yet, you want a thoughtful, appreciative comment.

What's Prison Like in Rwanda? Thailand? Norway?

As one who has spent more than 20 years as a volunteer teacher in prison, I wanted to read Baz Dreisinger's Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World. Dr. Dreisinger is an Associate Professor in the English Department of John Jay

College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, and the founder and Academic Director of the Prison-to-College Pipeline program, which helps incarcerated men and women obtain college degrees. Before talking about the book, however, let me lay a little pipe.

We Americans lock people away in prison for four reasons: (1) as punishment for a criminal act; (2) to remove dangerous people from society; (3) to deter others from doing the same thing; (4) as an opportunity to change—to correct—criminal/anti-social behavior. Spelling these out, of course, raises all kinds of questions. How much punishment is appropriate? Is losing one's freedom enough punishment? Does prison—even long mandatory minimum sentences—deter crime? (One student told me that the certainty of being caught deters crime, not a long sentence.) Is it even possible to correct a person's behavior? We call them correctional institutions, but does anyone think they correct anything?

With a background as a "white English professor specializing in African-American cultural studies, a Caribbean carnival lover who is also a prison educator and criminal justice activist, a freelance producer for National Public Radio, [and] an agnostic New York Jew," Dreisinger took two years to visit prisons in Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda, Jamaica, Thailand, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, and Norway, comparing and contrasting their prisons and answers to the questions above to America's answers. She visited prisons and met with prisoners, staff and officials, criminal justice advocates, and more.

The result is a number of fascinating snapshots of very different institutions, culture-bound in some ways, American-influenced in others. For example, "Throughout the colonial world . . . prisons served the aims of whites, extorting money by the way of bribes to stay out of prison and obtaining free labor from prisoners for cotton production . . . colonial powers adroitly manufactured reasons to put bodies behind bars." (So that could be reason (5) for locking people away: Obtain cheap labor.)

Perhaps examples of American-influence are drug laws. "Across the globe, draconian drug policy is packing prisons. Drug users and traffickers represent more than half of those in federal prison in the United States and Mexico, a quarter of all those in prison in Spain, and one-fifth entering prison in Japan; in Malaysia they constitute more than half of the nine hundred incarcerated people awaiting execution. And these are mainly small-time users, more than 83 percent of them, worldwide, convicted of possession."

But while much of the news is grim (don't get arrested for drug possession in Singapore), it's not all dire. It turns out that, given the Australian experience, private prisons may not be all bad all the time. Thanks to Thailand's princess, the country's prisons for women are becoming less oppressive. Norway is showing the world its commitment to corrections over punishment. Whether the positive lessons can—or should—be replicated elsewhere remains in my mind an open question.

I thoroughly enjoyed Incarceration Nations for the insights Dreisinger gives into foreign prisons. I would have enjoyed it more with end notes and an index. It does have an extensive bibliography, but, buff that I am, I would like to be able to look up the original studies she cites. Nevertheless, I recommend the book to anyone interested in incarceration here and elsewhere in the world. 

Who Should Be in the American Writers Museum?

Plans for the American Writers Museum

The American Writers Museum plans open in March 2017 in Chicago, a block north of Millennium Park on Michigan Avenue. According to the website its mission is "to engage the public in celebrating American writers and exploring their influence on our history, our identity, our culture, and our daily lives.

"The American Writers Museum will:

• Educate the public about American writers – past and present
• Engage visitors to the Museum in exploring the many exciting worlds created by the spoken and written word
• Enrich and deepen appreciation for good writing in all its forms
• Inspire visitors to discover, or rediscover, a love of reading and writing

"Through innovative and dynamic state-of-the-art exhibitions, as well as compelling programming, the American Writers Museum will educate, enrich, provoke, and inspire the public."

It sounds great, and I was wondering who all will be included. Considering that the Library of America has already published almost 300 volumes of the works of American writers, including several anthologies assembling several authors, I wonder who will be included, and who may be overlooked. Clarence Budington Kelland? Erskine Caldwell? Robert Riskin? Edna St. Vincent Millay?

Who do you think should be included in the American Writers Museum? And why?

Why you make friends with librarians

I have the impression from the comments I read on websites for writers that many self-published authors do not fully appreciate a basic marketing law: Consumers must first be aware a product exists before they can consider buying it. This is why we have press releases, reviews, advertising, interviews—anything to get the word out.

And you want to get the word out to people who buy and read books. Independent bookstores have always been a wonderful source of getting the word out. There was a time (perhaps mythical, perhaps real) when the bookstore owner and clerks knew their customers' interests and preferences well enough to suggest new titles. (Amazon is trying to accomplish the same thing with its "Customers who bought this item also bought" lists.)

Libraries are also filled with people who read books—and, according to Library Journal—50 percent of the people who start an e-book they've downloaded from their library actually buy the book. I have been giving my book to libraries where (a) I have a relationship and (b) the library is willing to put the book into the circulating collection, which is not always. However, in some cases, the librarian has actually put the book on display where, as in the display illustrated here, it was immediately checked out.

In the best of all possible worlds, the patron read Death in a Family Business and liked it enough to recommend it to friends and acquaintances and, like ripples in a pond, the friends told friends and so the word got out.