nonfiction

“Provocative Yes. The last word
on evolution No, but a stimulating one all the same.”
from proving darwin
French forces resisted; the Americans suffered hundred of casualties)
and then piloted the ships, successfully reaching the airport
despite obstructions, collisions and enemy fire.
An entertaining story of individual heroism, which
Brady surrounds by an equally entertaining account of the
North African invasion, the largest amphibious operation
in history at the time. (8-page black-and-white insert)
JOHN F. KENNEDY
Brinkley, Alan
Times/Henry Holt (192 pp.)
$23.00 | May 8, 2012
978-0-8050-8349-1
The admirable American Presidents
series nears its end with another slim but
astute biography by another big-league
historian, this time Brinkley (The Publisher:
Henry Luce and His American Century,
2010, etc.).
The reputations of his predecessor (Eisenhower) and successor
(Lyndon Johnson) are rising steadily; not so with John
F. Kennedy (1917-1963), whose middle-of-the-pack rating has
changed little. This seems a fair evaluation of his actual accomplishments,
admits Brinkley, who adds that he left an enormous
legacy as a charismatic leader and a glamorous symbol of
hope and purpose long after his death. He was the handsome,
unscholarly, self-indulgent son of Joseph Kennedy, whose enormous
wealth and ambition cleared his path through Massachusetts
and then national politics. As a congressman and senator,
Kennedy may have been more conservative than Eisenhower—
more fiercely anti-Soviet, in favor of military spending, uninterested
in domestic reform and civil rights and an admirer of
Joseph McCarthy. Elected our youngest president in 1960 by a
tiny margin, his charm enchanted the nation despite a first year
that included the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and bungled
Vienna summit. Experience and input from advisors, including
his brother, Robert Kennedy, improved his performance and
social conscience, but Congress rejected his bills advancing civil
rights, tax reform, aid to education, medical care for the elderly
and antipoverty efforts. All passed under Lyndon Johnson, who
possessed political skills that Kennedy lacked.
Plenty of long, definitive works exist, but Brinkley
takes his job seriously, filling 160 pages with a thoughtful,
opinionated biography.
THE OCCUPY
HANDBOOK
Byrne, Janet--Ed.
Back Bay/Little, Brown (256 pp.)
$15.99 paperback | Apr. 17, 2012
978-0-316-22021-7
A succinct body of essays by knowledgeable,
sympathetic observers on the grievances
of the Occupy Wall Street protestors.
Byrne (A Genius for Living: The Life of
Frieda Lawrence, 1995) organizes the collection
into three parts: “How We Got There,” “Where We Are Now”
and “Solutions.” Economists Paul Krugman and Robin Wells give
a crisp historical overview on how the excoriated “1 percent” quadrupled
its real income between 1979 and 2007, leaving America
as unequal as it had been on the eve of the Great Depression and
unable to implement an adequate government policy because of
the recent Congressional paralysis. Philip Dray reminds readers of
the “enduring and seminal” legacy of protest movements preceding
OWS, such as the Great Rail Strike of 1877 and the spontaneous
lunch-counter sit-ins by black students in Greensboro, N.C., in 1960.
Michael Hiltzik finds a good lesson in the Townsend movement of
1933, which demanded government attention to the concerns of
the aged. Unsurprisingly, the machinations of Wall Street dominate
many of the essays: John Cassidy delves into what was good about
Wall Street (addressing the capital-raising needs of their clients) and
how it went terribly dysfunctional (exploiting instantaneous trading
movements), while the reform of the tax system garners vigorous
responses, such as those from Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez.
Joel Bakan severely scrutinizes the “psychopathic personhood” of
corporations, and Eliot Spitzer proposes income-contingent loans
for struggling students. Some of the most fleshed-out essays put the
OWS protests into a wider worldwide perspective—e.g., Nouriel
Roubini’s simplified economics tutorial on the toll of globalization;
and Robert M. Buckley’s daring assessment of the parallels between
OWS and the pan-European uprisings of 1848. Other notable contributors
include Pankaj Mishra, Barbara Ehrenreich, Paul Volcker,
Robert Reich, Scott Turow and Jeffrey Sachs.
An educational, highly useful primer on what’s broken
and how to fix it.
THE VOW
The True Events
that Inspired the Movie
Carpenter, Kim & Carpenter,
Krickitt with Wilkerson, Dana
Broadman & Holman (210 pp.)
$14.99 paperback | Feb. 10, 2012
978-1-4336-7579-9
A husband’s vapid memoir about a
car crash that left his wife unable to recognize
him.
Never underestimate what a star-studded Hollywood movie
can do for a poorly written book. Carpenter’s account of the
1993 car crash that changed his family’s life was first published
in 2000. The recent film retold the story with leads Channing
Tatum and Rachel McAdams. Unfortunately, the actual narrative
leaves much to be desired. Carpenter’s book opens with the
author reminiscing about how he met his wife Krickitt over the
telephone. One conversation with her was enough to make him
feel like a “nervous, lovesick teenager.” Soon, Carpenter, who
lived in New Mexico, was calling Krickitt, who lived in California,
almost every day. After a brief Christian courtship, the
two decided to marry. But their conjugal bliss was shattered
when the newlyweds were involved in a collision that changed
everything “in the blink of an eye.” Carpenter escaped with
physical injuries that eventually healed, but Krickitt experienced
brain trauma that changed her personality and took away
all recollection of her husband and their shared past. Carpenter
eventually won back his wife by helping her through a long
rehabilitation process, but Krickitt never recovered any of her
memories of their courtship and marriage. Despite the story’s
inherent drama, Carpenter only skims the surface of the underlying
emotional tension, and the amateurish writing (“It was as
if she decided to be the friendliest, most helpful person her customers
talked to every day. If that was the case then she was a
roaring success in my mind”) and flat character portraits further
hamstring the narrative.
A saccharine, thoroughly lackluster paean to the power
of eternal love.
JACKIE AFTER O
One Remarkable Year
When Jacqueline
Kennedy Onassis Defied
Expectations and
Rediscovered Her Dreams
Cassidy, Tina
It Books/HarperCollins (288 pp.)
$24.99 | May 1, 2012
978-0-06-199433-3
A biography of Jacqueline Kennedy
Onassis (1929–1994) focusing on a pivotal year in her life, 1975.
Former Boston Globe reporter and editor Cassidy (Birth: The
Surprising History of How We Are Born, 2006) sets out to prove
that Onassis, though arguably a socialite, was no dilettante—
that her seemingly sudden decision to immerse herself in the
worlds of literature and historical preservation was born of
longstanding interest and expertise in both. The author uses
1975, the year in which Onassis was widowed for the second time,
to examine this transformation from wife to activist and editor.
Rather than creating focus, though, this lens often refracts.
Cassidy includes detailed biographical information from earlier
parts of her subject’s life in order to contextualize the choices
she made during this pivotal year. Therefore, though that single
year organizes the book, each of its significant events—her second
husband’s death, her work as a consulting editor for Viking,
her rejection of the political posts offered to her—is examined
broadly, not deeply. For example, the chapter about her
involvement in the campaign to maintain Grand Central Station’s
status as a landmark site is as much about her restoration
of the White House and her involvement in the preservation of
Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. Throughout, Cassidy is
highly sympathetic to Onassis. She quotes Sally Quinn, a Washington
Post writer who criticized Onassis in the fall of 1975 (“she
is going literary-journalistic because…that’s where the glamour
is, and the action”) and promptly dismisses her: “Quinn used
the journalistic disguise of her own thoughts by inserting what
‘skeptics’ thought.” Cassidy offers no evidence for this assertion,
leaving readers unable to determine whether or not Quinn was
actually voicing a common criticism of the time.
A well-researched but limited account of a year in the
life of Jackie O.
PROVING DARWIN
Making Biology
Mathematical
Chaitin, Gregory
Pantheon (144 pp.)
$24.00 | May 8, 2012
978-0-375-42314-7
978-0-307-90746-2 e-book
From a renowned mathematician, a
collection of a series of lectures on “Metabiology:
Life as Evolving Software”—
a “philosophy and history of ideas course on how and why to
approach biology mathematically.”
Chaitin (Meta Math! The Quest for Omega, 2005, etc.) equates
DNA with a universal programming language, software that
“can presumably express any possible algorithm, any set of
instructions for building and running an organism.” He creates
a model “toy” organism—pure DNA stripped of any cell
parts or functioning metabolism—and studies how the organism
evolves through mutations resulting from random walks
in a huge software space. He makes the point that his model
reflects the creativity and open-endedness of nature, in parallel
with the incompleteness and open-endedness of mathematics
itself, as Kurt Gödel proved. Throughout the text, Chaitin pays
considerable homage to Gödel, Turing and von Neumann. The
author’s model organisms do not stagnate but respond to the
challenge of creating extremely large whole numbers by creating
variations in the software (mutations) achieved by those
random walks, mutations that are in fact algorithms, which
translate to the organism’s increased fitness. Chaitin’s invocation
of mutations that are whole programs rather than simple
changes in a single letter of the DNA code is necessary for his
proof, but it has the effect of taking the issue of natural selection
out of biology and into pure mathematics. As such, questions
are sure to abound, and the book is a bit esoteric for
general readers. But credit the author for a lively style, lots of
useful historical references and an appendix that includes von
Neumann’s prescient essay on self-reproducing automata.
Provocative Yes. The last word on evolution No, but a
stimulating one all the same.
810 | 15 april 2012 | nonfiction | kirkusreviews.com |
| kirkusreviews.com | nonfiction | 15 april 2012 | 811