nonfiction

“The narrative path is sometimes
obscured by a lush undergrowth of detail, but our guide
is wise and the journey is wondrous.”
from james joyce
THE DAY THE WORLD
DISCOVERED THE SUN
An Extraordinary
Story of 18th-Century
Scientific Adventure
and the Global Race to
Track the Transit of Venus
Anderson, Mark
Da Capo/Perseus (288 pp.)
$26.00 | Jun. 5, 2012
978-0-306-82038-0
A scientific adventure tale in which astronomers risk their
lives, traveling the high seas in winter, trekking over ice-bound
Siberia and facing deadly diseases.
Anderson (“Shakespeare” by Another Name: The Life of Edward
de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the Man Who Was Shakespeare, 2005) examines
the scope of the 18th-century international project to
determine the distance between the earth and the sun by measuring
the transit of the planet Venus across its surface. He compares
it to recent investigations like the mapping of the human
genome, NASA’s Apollo program and the building of the Large
Hadron Collider. In 1761 and again in 1769, teams of astronomers
circumnavigated the globe to make precise measurements
of the transit. Although England, France, Prussia, Austria and
Russia were at war, they collaborated on this major scientific
venture, a once-in-a-century opportunity. In both years, Venus
was observed and timed as it appeared to traverse the sun, using
trigonometric calculations to triangulate the distance. Anderson
writes that this was a marriage of advanced science and technology
with extreme adventure, resulting in spinoffs such as the
development of precision timekeepers and the reliable calculations
of longitude. The achievement was commemorated by
“the Apollo 15 mission…command module [which] was named
Endeavour”—after Captain Cook’s ship—and carried “a block of
wood from the sternpost of [his] original HMS Endeavour.” In
1769, the ship carried England’s crew and succeeded in its mission,
despite suffering the tragic deaths of most of its scientific
crew. While the trigonometric calculations were state-of-theart,
if tedious, transporting the telescopic equipment, building
observatories on the spot, making the observations and braving
the rigors of the journey were anything but.
A lively, fitting tribute to “mankind’s first international
‘big science’ project.” (16 pages of b/w photographs)
ISLAND PRACTICE
Cobblestone Rash,
Underground Tom,
and Other Adventures
of a Nantucket Doctor
Belluck, Pam
PublicAffairs (352 pp.)
$25.99 | May 29, 2012
978-1-58648-751-5
In this absorbing debut, award-winning
New York Times staff writer Belluck
chronicles the daily life of a maverick physician and the Nantucket
community he serves.
In addition to his job as head of medicine at Nantucket Cottage
Hospital, Dr. Timothy Lepore, a general surgeon, also runs
a family practice and serves as the physician for the high-school
football team—those are only his official jobs. Not only is his
role “central to the health and life of a community in ways that
rarely occur these days,” writes the author, but it is also exemplary
of the art of healing. “His unconventional story shows…
that what really matters is the time, effort, conviction, and
care that a doctor provides.” Lepore is a larger-than-life figure
on Nantucket, and his quirks are the stuff of legend—e.g., he
carves scalpels from obsidian using stone-age techniques, and
he hunts with a pet hawk. Also legendary are his diagnostic
skills and dedication to his patients. Over the 30 years that he
has practiced medicine on the island, Lepore has dealt with
medical emergencies at times when weather conditions prevented
the transfer of a patient to a specialist on the mainland.
He has treated celebrities on summer vacation, including members
of the Kennedy family, but the year-rounders, many of
whom work in low-wage jobs in the tourist industry, form the
core of his practice. Widely traveled summer tourists may suffer
exotic diseases that challenge his expertise, but depression,
alcohol abuse and teen suicide are endemic on the island. Under
Lepore’s leadership, Nantucket’s hospital has played a crucial
role in maintaining the community’s health, but it is becoming
less sustainable. “The cost of providing free care to poor and
uninsured patients ha[s] grown by 60 percent,” writes Belluck.
Notes the hospital’s CEO, “We kept up with the medical care,
but not with the business of medical care.”
An intriguing biography of a unique—and on Nantucket,
irreplaceable—doctor.
WOMEN FROM THE
ANKLE DOWN
The Story of Shoes
and How They Define Us
Bergstein, Rachelle
Harper/HarperCollins (304 pp.)
$24.99 | Jun. 1, 2012
978-0-06-196961-4
An illuminating study of the history
of women’s shoes in the 20th century.
In her debut, Bergstein examines
the fascinating and surprisingly complex relationship between
women and their shoes—“the average woman owns upward of
ten, twenty, fifty pairs of shoes, some of which have very little
practical use and languish in the back of the closet until just the
right occasion arises.” Bergstein traces the origins of this modern-day
mania to Salvatore Ferragamo, who, by the 1930s, had
“put Italy on the footwear map” by becoming shoemaker to Hollywood
stars like Carmen Miranda and Lana Turner. Ordinary
women who were used to more mundane styles suddenly became
aware of the allure and erotic potential of a pair of beautiful, wellcrafted
shoes. After the privations of World War II, the fashion
industry emphasized abundance through a greater diversity of
styles, including stilettos, which “were meant to be decadent,
not useful.” As haute couture fell out of favor in the ’60s, popular
designers like Mary Quant made the footwear-buying public
aware of new possibilities that included shoes and boots made
of disposable materials like Corfam and vinyl. “[F]antasy and self
indulgence” became the watchwords of the ’70s, when women
and men took to the streets and discotheques in gender-bending
platform shoes. The gains that feminism made for women during
this decade eventually translated into a desire for high-end
footwear by such contemporary designers as Manolo Blahnik
and Christian Louboutin. Bergstein concludes by suggesting that
greater social and economic mobility among women has ultimately
created “the age of great variety, when shoes are as diverse
as the women who wear them.” Like Dorothy’s ruby red slippers,
modern shoes are a way for women to express their hopes and
dreams, but without “question, fear or apology.”
Wickedly provocative.
JAMES JOYCE
A New Biography
Bowker, Gordon
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (624 pp.)
$35.00 | Jun. 12, 2012
978-0-374-17872-7
The biographer of Orwell, Lowry and
Durrell returns with a massively detailed
narrative of the life of the author of Ulysses.
Bowker (Inside George Orwell, 2003,
etc.) begins with several of the myriad
epiphanies Joyce valued—the first, a moment when he was
16 and lost both his virginity and the Virgin (he decided that
was fun, and no Jesuit priesthood for me). The author then
announces his intentions—to show the complexities and contradictions
of the man—and proceeds to do so in detail that is
so impressive as to be overwhelming at times. Joyce (1882–1941)
emerges as a mess of a man in these pages. The author charts
the grim history of his eye problems (nearly a dozen eye operations,
some involving leeches), his struggle to survive in the
early days of his adulthood and marriage, the sad madness of
his daughter, his enormous talents (he learned languages quickly,
read everything) and his difficulty finding publishers for Dubliners
and the more controversial works that followed. It took
a famous Supreme Court ruling to decriminalize Ulysses in the
United States. Joyce found a generous patron, though—Harriet
Shaw Weaver—whose substantial gifts encouraged the spendthrift
genius to live beyond his means, traveling throughout
Europe, staying in first-class hotels, no longer the starving artist.
Bowker’s labor to keep track of the plethora of places the Joyces
lived is Herculean by itself. We see Joyce, too, as a prodigious
worker who labored for endless hours, completing not just the
shelf- and mind-bending novels Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake but a
play, stories and essays. Bowker goes light on the literary criticism.
We see Joyce at work and read about technique and intent,
but there are few journeys into exegesis.
The narrative path is sometimes obscured by a lush
undergrowth of detail, but our guide is wise and the journey
is wondrous.
TWELVE DESPERATE MILES
The Epic World War II
Voyage of the SS Contessa
Brady, Tim
Crown (304 pp.)
$26.00 | Apr. 24, 2012
978-0-307-59037-4
978-0-307-59039-8 e-book
The first American offensive against
Hitler, the November 1942 invasion of
North Africa, began with a commando
raid to capture an airfield outside Casablanca. Although not
“epic,” it was a dramatic adventure rescued from obscurity by
this lively history.
The idea originated with eager American spies on the spot
and impressed Gen. Patton, commander of forces invading the
beaches in Morocco. He didn’t tell his superiors (Marshall and
Eisenhower), who expressed dismay when they learned of it.
Reaching the airport required that two ships travel 12 miles up
a shallow river, impossible without a local pilot; the spies found
one, René Malevergne, a discovery probably responsible for this
book because he kept a diary. Taking advantage of this historical
treasure, Brady (The Great Dan Patch and the Remarkable Mr. Savage,
2006, etc.) builds his story around this local resistance figure
and recounts Malevergne’s experiences under the Vichy government,
his odyssey when he was smuggled out of Morocco to
Gibraltar, flown to Britain and then to America before recrossing
the Atlantic. He observed the landing from his hometown (Vichy
808 | 15 april 2012 | nonfiction | kirkusreviews.com |
| kirkusreviews.com | nonfiction | 15 april 2012 | 809