The Immense Journey (1957) By Loren Eiseley

Literature is not what one expects when tackling a book by an anthropologist, yet great literature is what one unearths when reading The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley.

The book is Part I of the Library of America’s publication titled Loren Eiseley: Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature and the Cosmos, Volume One, edited by William Cronon. The Library of America (LOA) is my favorite source of reading material.  It is a non-profit publisher dedicated to keeping in print important writings by American writers, preserving the availability of classics of literature that have passed their commercial appeal, but not their importance.  Their books are available individually, or via subscription – I’m not sure when I started my subscription, but my personal library now includes 182 volumes from LOA.

Eiseley (1907 – 1977) was a scientist, an anthropologist & paleontologist, who became an educator, crossing over to writer … and a very good writer.  You can call him an "off-spring" of Henry David Thoreau, credit him as the literary father of Carl Sagan, and rank him as a “kissing cousin” contemporary of Ray Bradbury.  

The Immense Journey was his first book, collecting 13 of his essays that had been printed in magazines or as academic papers.  It was published in 1957, when I was four years old.  That date is important when reading his work because in 1957 carbon-dating was a new technology, and DNA sequencing merely a somewhat bizarre theory. Yet, his essays are as on target in 2017 as they were then.

While a scientist, Eiseley was also decidedly a naturalist.  My favorite selection in the book is The Judgement of the Birds.  It needs to be required reading for humanity, of all species.

The opening essay, The Slit, is a captivating short story about descending into (and out of) a mountain crevice, and taking account of the anthropologic passage of time while doing so. How Flowers Changed the World is an important exposition on Darwin.  And, Little Men and Flying Saucers is one of two humorous essays on scientific fraud – science as P.T. Barnum would have it.

Recommendation:  All in all a completly interesting collection that has left me eager to read more of Eiseley’s work.

Audubon: On the Wings of the World (2016) By Fabien Grolleau & Jeremie Royer

Perhaps your name has to be Timmy to appreciate this story: The first “book report” I ever wrote was on Lassie Come-Home by Eric Knight, when I was around 8 or 9 years old.  The report was part of a letter I mailed to my late grandmother, who we called Nanny, when she spent a month or so vacationing in Monterrey, Mexico.  She got me the book before she left on her trip; I’ve been reading, and often “reporting,” ever since.  Note: in the book the kid’s name was Joe, when it was made into a television series is when his name was switched to Timmy. Lassie, a collie, will eternally be Lassie.

With that tale as a preface, one of my neighbors has an 8 year-old daughter. I’m always buying her books, trying to get her hooked on reading.  My campaign got off to a slow start though; she was decidedly unimpressed with Lassie (she has a cat). However, I have discovered that she’s totally into graphic books.  This is not my genre, but at this point I believe getting her to be excited about reading is way more important than what she reads.  And, I seem to have hit the jackpot with these graphic books, especially those by author Raina Telgemeier (Sisters, and Smile).  I always read the books before I give them to her, and then verbally test her when she’s finished reading them.  She scores well on my interrogations.  I’m excited (latent teacher syndrome).

Okay, sorry for that long winded introduction.  I recently gave her the graphic book Audubon: On the Wings of the World, a biography of John J. Audubon (her grandmother is into bird watching). She loves it, even though parts of the narrative/graphics are rather dark, like when Audubon slips into hallucinations during a long bout with “the fever.”  The illustrations are impressive -- a must considering the topic -- and the narrative is on target.  And did I mention that I loved the book? 

Recommendation:  When next you are looking for a gift for an 8 or 9 year old child, or for an old guy going through his second (third, fourth) childhood – it’s a winner.

Exit West (2017) By Mohsin Hamid

Published earlier this year, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid is one of the most interesting books I’ve read … ever.   The novel is brutally current, and can be categorized as dystopian, though it does hold out hope for individuals, if not the world.  The final chapters call to mind Aldoux Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World in style, though not in subject.

Geography is everything in this book, but importantly the opening city is not revealed -- it could be Kabul, it could be Mosul, or it could be Aleppo.  Exit West starts as the love story of and young man named Saeed, and Nadia, a young woman he meets in university.   She’s clad head to toe in a burka – not because she is religious, but as a defense mechanism to ward of unwanted attention.  She also drives a motorcycle.

Mohsin Hamid

While Saeed and Nadia are the main characters of the novel, they are not the story being told. Hamid uses these characters to bring to their place in history two broader subjects: life in a city/country under siege, and the reality of life as a refuge/migrant. 

Saeed & Nadia live in an unnamed city where religious fundamentalists are slowly, but unmistakably taking control.  Their day to day life is a romance, and a nightmare.  While the political good guys vs. bad guys nature of the situation is acknowledged, in reality it doesn’t really matter.  What matters is that regardless of who is firing the rockets, the people being hurt are civilians trying to live ordinary lives; made difficult to impossible when where you live has become unsafe, you don’t have freedom of movement, and basic utilities such as water, sewage and electricity are sporadic, then non-existent.

Like many, Saeed & Nadia make the difficult decision to leave.  In literature and throughout world history, we’ve read that story before – and Hamid handles it superbly with the metaphoric device of calling such an escape "going through the door” without knowing what’s on the other side.  The only thing people know for sure it that it will be somewhere else.  It is a decision being made today by millions of people, throughout the world. “Choosing” to become a refugee is as dramatic a change as one can make in life, and seldom a choice. At one point the narration explains “it was said in those days that the passage was like dying and like being re-born.”

When Saeed & Nadia arrive on the other side of their first door they are on the beach in Mykonos where tourists pay no more attention to them than they do sand crabs, and authorities round them up and remove them to a refugee camp.  Saeed and Nadia will walk through many doors, through many refugee camps, to destinations where they are seldom met with open arms.  Throughout they will meet other refugees from every corner of the earth, and will hear their stories, people escaping war zones, and others escaping crippling poverty.  Their names, their languages, their places of origin are interchangeable, their stories are the same.

Recommendation:  Strongly.