Deep Future: The Next 100,000 years of Life on Earth

Review by BRETT WARNKE

Curt Stager, author of Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth; Thomas Dunne Books, 304 pp. Book Release, US., March 15.

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“Save the Carbon!” It’s not the most popular bumper sticker you’ll see as you speed through a crunchy college town but paleoecologist Curt Stager argues it is not merely a thoughtful slogan, it is a prescient one. In his beautiful new book Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth, Stager has elevated science writing to the level of literature and made the case for conserving carbon and the consideration of a changing climate’s consequences.

A sometime writer for National Geographic and a current Professor at Paul Smith’s college in New York, Stager’s arresting book informs us what scientists already know: Humanity has prevented the next ice age and is making decisions that will impact thousands of years of human civilization. This is the book about the next 100 millennia. (Other scribbler’s should note that this is the best idea I’ve yet heard of for keeping a book in print!) Deep Future is a scientific work with a human narrative; an empirical study of a world changing utterly and the horrors and payoffs to come.

“I was a skeptic about climate change,” he admitted in an interview. But once Stager was challenged by physicist Dr. James Hansen to look up the weather records for the Adirondack Mountains, he knew he was wrong. “I added it up and the numbers are in. Now I can see it is due to us.”

Stager welcomes the reader into the Anthroposcene—the Age of Humans. Whether we know it or not the carbon we release and the nukes we have tested have left prints on this planet and 21^st century humans will determine both the acceleration and duration of future warming. But Stager admonishes his readers early on that climate change is “not just a heart-wrenching litany of gloom.” Instead Deep Future excellently summarizes what is known—namely, that modern living has unwittingly causing dramatic climate changes—and Stager offers a global tour through labs and exotic locations anticipating possible decision points and their consequences. Humanity will exist in 100,000 years, he argues. The culprits of our possible destruction—asteroids, disease, nuclear war, a dead sun—are unlikely, impossible, or unthinkably far-off. And since humans have already vaporized 300 Gigatons of fossil carbon and will certainly be around for further millennia, Stager ponders the crucial question: “What will the ‘deep future’ of the Anthroposcene be?”

“I felt like I was a pioneer in a new world,” he said “I had spoken with David Archer (author of The Long Thaw) and he and others were working on modeling--demonstrating how warm and how cool the weather is going to get. But they haven’t yet thought deeply about the future.”

Stager cites meticulous calculations from numerous climatologists, ecologists, glaciologists and uses Archer’s emission models to peer into the mysteries of the future. Then, using the silent stones beneath us he describes a “Super Greenhouse” world 55 million years ago. This is what will happen if humanity hurls itself towards the extreme scenario of releasing 5,000 Gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. What would this waterworld of pole-to-pole warmth look like? Well, scientists already know; the earth has been there and done that.

“A Super Greenhouse is not just some doomsayer’s morbid dream,” he writes. “It really can happen.” And if the world returns to such a climate it would be a “scarlet mark of shame” on future sediment records. Having now prevented the next ice age that would have turned Canada into an igloo, Stager informs us that the 100,000 year heat spike we have initiated will descend. But then what? Cooling. Animals which migrated to warmer regions of North America and Siberia will, like the doomed polar bears, belugas, Arctic Cod, and walruses before them, be trapped.

Using the most recent data, Stager does not engage in the splashing death-row spectacle that Al Gore and other non-scientist activists have predicted. He admits that a “paleoecologists panic button might not be so easily pressed.” Using examples from Venice to Cameroon to Shanghai Stager explains that in most cases sea level rising will be “slow, unrelenting, costly, exasperating, but rarely deadly to humans.”

Our emissions are already creating winners and losers. A recent article in The Scientific American laid out population density and rain patterns for areas as far apart as Mozambique, Mexico and Vietnam. In these and other regions, who will determine how future resources are allocated? Who will organize the inevitable human and animal mass migrations? How will resource battles be fought? The developed world will be the greatest beneficiary as minerals and resources hidden beneath the ice become available. Stager writes that “shipyards, refineries, and storage facilities will turn formerly remote outposts into major transport hubs and busy ports of call.” This means we must readjust or at least contemplate how we talk about what is happening. Is the Arctic being destroyed or is its biodiversity increasing? Is southern Florida’s demise more important than a tenth of the world’s oil reserves now on tap? And which species are “good”? For every mollusk that acidifies in an increasingly carbonized ocean, pteropods, jellyfish, anemones, scallops, and sea cucumbers are beginning to flourish.

Stager’s is not without targets. He goes easy on “contrarians,” the mild term he slaps on the wrong-headed loudmouths and status quo skeptics who are often funded by the biggest polluters. And again and again he reveals his impatience with a media he argues is driven by front-page spectacle rather than the slow and more disturbing truth of climate change. But surely he protests too much given the rigorous research by major newspapers, bloggers, and public intellectuals on this subject.

But his warning for us to “Save The Carbon” is a serious one. Shouldn’t our descendents, when threatened with a future ice age, have the option to set a few mountains ablaze to warm things up a bit? Stager’s finely-written and compelling analysis poses queries our busy species has not yet considered. Since we’ll be here a while, Stager’s book is (and will be) a nice way to spend our remaining time.

"The Free World": David Bezmogis's Shining Emigre Story

Review by BRETT WARNKE

The Free World by David Bezmogis

“It’s difficult to travel with a large Jewish family,” one character says in The Free World. “Too many opinions. Like the joke about the couple that has sex on the street in Israel. Everyone who passes by tells them they’re doing it wrong.” Bezmogis's book is an equivalently ironic journey; a trip where much went wrong but is impressively told in every way in every way. Cleanly written and humorous, the book is filled with nuanced characters saddled with the political pressures of their day and the human strains of our lifetime. Bezmogis, a 37-year old Latvian immigrant, takes the reader on a journey through the latter half of what historian Tony Judt called “the forgotten 20th century.” If “uncertainty” is the defining term for this epoch, The Free World begins at its dawn, the 1970s.

The book highlights four months in Rome with the Krasnanskys, emigre Russian-Jews and their loved ones who left the gray and doomed tedium of Soviet stagnation for the so-called “free world.” What the reader experiences is a history of an age and the tale of a immigrants discovering a new world. And while historical it isn't a slog; most of the politics are anecdotal--pursue what you will--but for most 20th century Soviet Jews, if you survived, life itself was made political and historical. As the family negotiates their place in the crowded immigrant neighborhood two popes die, Menachim Begin negotiates with his greatest enemy, and the dizzying pursuit of stability and cash animates every nearby window.

The late 1970s were both an age of detente and a deep freeze. It was an age where the the long-bankrupt national Communism persisted but was not longer living, even in the consciousness of its last devotees. If by the 1930s "god had failed" than by 1968 no one who was intelligent or idealistic or uncorrupted could support the system any longer. If Stalin was the gravedigger of Communism and Khrushchev the ideology’s last passionate priest, then Brezhnev was the funeral attendant for an 18-year burial. Who wouldn't want to leave a country ruled by such a cynical dullard? Brezhnev's rule was like Clive James' review of the formers' memoirs: “Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead." Gorbachev’s “openness” and “restructuring” campaigns came too late and the fictional Krasnanskys missed these reforms by a decade.

The family patriarch, Samuil, is heart-broken but proud. An undying Communist, his father was killed by the reactionary Whites and his brother was murdered in a squalid episode during the German invasion. He befriends Roidman, also an emigre and also a former fighter who remembers the horrors before the Revolution as well as after. (Roidman turns out to be related to Fanny Kaplan, a leftist who tried to assassinate Lenin after he dissolved the Constituent Assembly. Roidman's story is told with the novel's beautiful blend of wit, care, and realism. When he discusses the changing allegiances in the one-party state he says, "If I settle on an allegiance it is guaranteed that new and compromising information will emerge. I revere Lenin, I learn he's a German agent. I venerate Stalin, Khrushchev tells me he killed Mandelstam and a few million others. I tell you, if I worshipped the sun, we'd all end up in the dark." But Samuil's true life is in the pages, the stories he tells, and the memoir he escapes into writing. Story-telling is a refuge from the world's chaos. He comforts himself with the “pleasure of denial" and only the people of his past seem real while the people in his present, including his own children, “seemed to him evanescent, so nearly figments that he could imagine passing his hand through them.”

Samuil's sons, meanwhile, fleeing with their wives and children, could not be more different: “Alec would see a circus and want to join; Karl, meanwhile, would estimate the cost of feeding the elephants and conjecture that the acrobats suffered from venereal disease.” Their domestic dramas intensify and their wives endure the fear of transition and a future that appears only a “happier miserable.” Are their feelings the same in this new world? How does one remake a life?

Polina who leaves her beloved sister in Russia for the hope of the west; of Samuil cannot abandon communism and his wife who cannot abandon Samuil. The Krasnanskys are unable to escape the day’s international debates as the past’s weight seems to narrow the future. Lyova, from Kishinev, rooms with Alec and his wife Polina. He is nailed to three challenges: An endless bureaucracy, his own conscience, and History itself. Several years earlier, finding himself atop a Soviet tank breaking up the Prague Spring of 1968 Lyova escaped to Israel, the shining hope. There, he raised a family and found himself the instrument of Israeli oppression--roughing up Palestinians while wearing a blue star on his sleeve.

The story is expertly tied together by letters and a tidy style of dialogue unmarked by quotations and the endless "he/she said." Italy itself is the perfect setting for these immigrants, with its layers of crumbled and revived civilization. It is a multicultural society, soldered onto Europe's base between east and west. The personages all appear in the mind's eye, as the author writes, "with that special look of Russian fatigue." The women have a quiet despair; the men respond hungrily (and often irresponsibly) to their changed lives. The Free World is was an energizing trip with a family wandering among the ruins, eager and hopeful, searching for a place in world that has and will change utterly.

Burqa: Ban it or Bear it?

The Janus Political Union at Brown University brought together two speakers on April 6 for a discussion called "Banning the Burqa: French Law and Religious Symbols." Francois Briand, an urbane and dapper legal mind from France spoke for the ban. While Michael Paulsen, a Bush administration official and Professor of Law at The University of St. Thomas, spoke about what he called "religious freedom," which would allow the burqa to be worn.

If the fawning mutual admiration left me more than a bit bored, the arguments--one too state-centered and the other too nihilistic--left me agitated. Briand argued that the French Republic respects religious freedom, relied on the law's overwhelming popularity and passage, denied being a "clueless bourgeois" (he was raised in Muslim Algeria), and said the French law was not about religion, it was about "face concealment."

Horsefeathers.

The French Republic is not worried about pre-Lent revelers wearing masks. This is about a direct attack on the notion of "Fraternity" (I would call it sorority) that demands equal treatment under the law. While Briand said that the Republic "cannot except people excluding themselves and breaking the social agreement" of revealing their faces, his arguments were backward, urging state power to compel rather than liberate. He said that women wearing burqas and hiding their faces defied Western norms and went "beyond free speech." He later argued that naked rowdies or fools in Nazi uniforms would also be impermissible given France's checkered history.

Oh, Francois, remember the ladies! By ignoring the religious argument (where in the Koran does it say women must cover their face?) Briand is side-stepping the crucial issue: If women are not yet equal in the post-Christian "West" than at least this inequality can openly be discussed, argued, and challenged. How do we know when a woman does or does not want to wear her burqa? With blowzy acid-throwing virgins energized and deluded, it would take a brave woman indeed to risk disfigurement in a patriarchal immigrant neighborhood in, say,West London. Has Briand not read Maps for Lost Lovers, the haunting and beautiful account of women beaten, intimidated, and killed by their families for even the slightest gesture of free expression? Muslims should not be exempted from the social contract of a free society with equality before the law because of their faith in the authoritarian gospel of a desert faith.

The most wrenching experience of the night was listening to Michael Paulsen speak. If his self-professed "personal faith" as an evangelical Christian wasn't enough to get my gorge up, the feaux folksy lingo and foot-on-the-chair musings were condescending at best. This is a guy went to Yale and was acting like a 7th grade guidance counselor. Like all creepy evangelicals, Paulsen operates in a realm of relativism disguised as "absolute truth." He spoke repeatedly about his belief in absolutes but interestingly, he ignored any absolute rights as described by Mr. Briand's discussion of Declaration of Human Rights. Such documents in this world of original sin and political Anarchy were mere wasted reams! 'Merican law--grounded, successful, practical--was his topic de jure and religious "tolerance" was his muse. (By the way, I find it delicious when right-wing conservatives use 'multicultural tolerance' to advance Christian fundamentalism and reactionary politics. Clarence Thomas, Alberto Gonzales, and Condoleeza Rice come to mind. )

Paulsen spoke about the need for groups to form"moral-based communities" after he told the audience he had just returned from six months in Kenya. And what exactly was he doing there? Admiring the scenery? The indigenous and Muslim minorities, perhaps? He didn't specify, but I'm sure it was a tolerant voyage of multicultural dialogue.

Regarding the burqa, Paulsen argued that the neutral but "not necessarily agnostic state" does not reliably know what constitutes true religion and thus cannot be trusted to get these things right." He argued against the notion that religion should be "tolerated" and "gently condescended to," but accepted the argument as being on his side. Finally, he rejected what he called "religious intolerance" which he argued is when a state assumes that "religious truth does not exist and that it is affirmatively harmful to secular society to permit the free exercise of such views."

          Say what?

          If religious truth does not exist how could it possibly be "harmful?" No matter. As well as being a bad argument and a straw man it is misses the point. Our Constitution demands that we have freedom from religion in this country as well as freedom for religion. Check out the phonebook. Paulsen can go to any church, tabernacle, or goat-worship that makes him feel better with the caveat that I don't have to hear about it or have its nonsensical beliefs inflicted on me. But as a fundamentalist, Paulsen secretly hopes to smuggle through customs the notion that religion is not separate from the state and that we are a "Christian nation."

So regarding the burqas Paulsen agreed to them being worn by women, being worn in public schools, and being worn by young girls. He is willing to allow cowed and fearful women--many times the chattel of their husbands--to be subjected to the depravations of human contact, light, and social acknowledgement for his own perverse faith. Disgraceful. How do school teachers and social workers know whether "Muslim children" wanted to wear such tents? What alternative would these fledgling ladies have if they chose not to where such awful getups? Honor-killing? A paternal beating? Paulsen said he rejects forcing religion and supports punishment for those who force others to practice as they do. But he ignores the closed and tight-knit nature of Muslim immigrant communities and, as Orhan Pamuk has illustrated in his novel Snow, the symbolic power of the burqa for adherents of the faith. Has he not read Maps for Lost Lovers?  How do we know, in a faith with such a despicable record on women's rights, who is promoting this symbol?

It's not a debate Paulsen wanted. He argued Briand's stance against the burqa was "very close" to Saudi Arabia's type of authoritarianism. His vision of the world is one of the worst kind of religious control merged with a sloppy relativism under the euphemistic title "freedom of religion." Freedom for whom? Freedom from what?

Brett Warnke Review of Robert Frank’s "The Americans" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

By Brett Warnke

“The 50s,” that grey and cozy period of postwar life actually included most of “the 60s” as well. It is a period our contemporary society has been obsessed with since the convulsion of 1968. “It wasn’t that great!” cry the social critics and artists. Films and novels like Revolutionary Road, The Hours, School Ties, Dead Poets Society, Driving Miss Daisy, and Pleasantville are just a toe-dip into the sea of tales hoping to deconstruct “the 50s” myth. Therefore, it is not unlikely that today’s Met Museum patrons viewing Robert Frank’s The Americans will squeal with enjoyment at the off-center, peeling photography of an early mythbuster.

The Swiss-born Frank captured America from 1955-1957 through the use of a Guggenheim grant. He snapped over 28,000 images en route while later whittling his collection down to 83 eerie, pregnant, and provocative photographs. These provide the visual testimony of journeys as far north as Butte, Montana and as far south as Miami Florida.

His motifs are easy to spot: Cars, entertainment, and roads—so many roads—stretching inexorably through the coarse plate lands of the west. In these photographs American vehicles are possessions of necessity where hidden lovers neck, workers roll, and families ride. Jack Keruoac, the road poet himself, penned the jazzy introduction to the book. His phrases are peppered throughout the exhibit.

Interestingly, Frank captures quiet subcultures that seem too early and out of place for “the 50s.” Rodeos in Detroit? Black male trannies in public? A cowboy in New York City? He travels to venues of action. There are funerals, parades, crowded streets, trolley stops, and rallies. Again and again the viewer is faced with the faceless. A globular tuba stares like a Cyclops, but the player’s head is obstructed. An elderly figure ghoulishly stands beneath the stairs—again no face. On a red carpet, a platinum haired starlet is blurred out—her face a fog—while Frank artfully highlights a scoop of her adoring crowd; these are the faces to see. And perhaps most symbolically, a strained flag shows one parade goers patriotism and another’s anonymity as it flaps across a window, hiding faces.

I might even characterize his images as “Hopperesque” since Edward Hopper, too, illustrated the isolated. A friend of mine once wrote a poem observing “only statues and cynics are alone in a crowd.” But in Frank’s pictures there is a consuming emptiness in the crowd itself. Two truckers stare blankly ahead—prisoners of the road. In another, the elderly sit crowded on a bench, their rubbery noses point in independent directions like a multi-fingered road sign. You even see the birth pangs of our consumer society as bored waitresses and elevator operators roll deadened eyes at the camera. Buttressing this isolation is America’s racial reef, nicely depicted in a shot of a New Orleans trolleycar. A solitary black man gazes at the camera from his rear seat. Legally segregated, he’s not even fit to sit beside an adjacent white child.

But Frank’s most famous and enduring images capture the frenzy of American society and its worship of the shiny, the new, the young, and the corrupt. I especially enjoy the arty partiers at MoMA sipping bubbly—perhaps a disapproving jab at the lefties who will later worship his work?

De Tocqueville pointed out that “The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.” Frank removes the varnished layer, starkly positioning photos of poverty beside the vim and radiance of America’s upper class at play. There is American freedom in these photographs, but it is a freedom to conspicuously consume at others expense. In photo 24 a child crawls alone on a dusty floor while photo 25 captures a diamond-dusted diva in a hotel lobby. It is a contrast that never falters because it portrays a truth that never sticks. A blighted Nebraska farm—its only lifeline to the outside world is a narrow mail slot—is placed in juxtaposition with a busty high-roller who whirls dice in a Reno honk-y tonk. These are the contrasts that make America play on.

But where is suburbia? In the flight of “the 50s”, the suburbanization of America had begun. And also, where is religion? True, there is one image of a wanderer on a Delta pilgrimage, but it does little justice to the religious rivers of America’s interior. In our age of rising populism one image haunts me still. A 1956 photo titled “Political Rally” shows a rouser above a crowd waving his fists like he’s fighting bees. His face is a terrifying grimace, reminiscent of any snake-handling Congregationist, or more chillingly, any podium-pounding fascist. And the crowds listen.

Robert Frank’s photos are prescient because they illustrate what we now plainly see: the rusty frame of America’s gleaming Studebaker. The portrait of an absurd, bleak, and cruelly stratified America seems the warning shot in an era of good feelings. Frank’s Americans endures because the inequities and attitudes he portrays are entirely relevant today. Frank peered into the mystery of America and in Keruoac’s words, “sucked a sad poem” right out of it. Perhaps, in foolish hope, we should remember that other great European traveler who wrote, “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”

Brett Warnke Review of Ghost Lighthouses: New and Selected Hatteras Poems, author Chris Waters

By BRETT WARNKE

W.H. Auden once explained that if a generation gap existed, it was due to “those, old or young,/ Who will not learn their Mother Tongue.” Many writers fear for the survival or at least the strength of language—its muscularity, contours, and splendor—as well as its ability to be a vehicle for truth. Today, screens replace reams. Newspapers die. And White House hopefuls can’t name a single periodical they’ve read. In the last century, poets were increasingly pushed out of the public conversation. (Novelists seem to be next in line for the chopping block). Like Michael Ende’s fantasy novel, “The Neverending Story,” a grim Nothing seems to be growing. Ironically, it grows in a world of infinite, digitized, and instantly accessible somethings. Can the strength and beauty of language survive what Saul Bellow called “the moronic inferno” of the world today? Many of those in the scribbler’s trade express a haunted pessimism. But, extraordinarily and inspiringly, a local poet named Chris Waters is hopeful. In our interview he simply couldn’t comprehend the death of literature. “It’s not a loss that’s conceivable to me,” he said. “Then we’d be automotons, we’d be robots.”

Waters recently released a new book of poetry, “Ghost Lighthouses: New and Selected Hatteras Poems.” He does this as his former career as a professional academic has ended. Waters had many interests as a professor—Afro-French theatre, modernism, and the French writer Paul Claudel were just a few topics in his many publications during his years at (to name a few) Harvard, The University of Wales, William and Mary, and URI. While he was at the latter, he was nominated for the school’s Scholarly Excellence Award and has also earned two Pushcart Prizes nominations—one for fiction and one for poetry. In this excellent new collection of poems he writes, “The thing is though to live until/you die. Neither a peach-complexioned nor a prune-faced/zombie be.”

Waters is unsubtle about his priorities these days. His love has always been language, French and English. His license plate illustrates as much. Blazoned with “Poesie,” French for “poetry.” He is in his 80s and shows little hint of mental or physical diminution. He plays tennis, swims, collaborates with the South County Poet’s Group, writes, and spends his free moments sending his work out for publication. When Waters was teaching and researching, batches of rejected poetry used to molder for weeks in sad piles on his desk. “If you’re an honest teacher, you put your time into the classwork,” he said. But now, if rejection slips arrive, Waters will make note and send a half dozen more poems out by sunset. Waters’ wife of Dora of 31 years, his second, teaches both Italian and Spanish. He has 2 daughters and a son in New York, but rarely gets to see them. “Even New York is a distance when you’re busy writing,” he said.

“Ghost Lighthouse” often describes Waters’s retired life beside the teeming fronds and quivering beach grass in North Carolina. A humorous and personal pair of poems “Retirement (I, II)” wink at a world which expects the venerable author to slow down. He can’t. There’s too much to write about: “Golden years sounds like fuzzy brains, the point is/time to do what you haven’t done, or/doing more of it, and or better.”

But Winters isn’t solipsistic. He moves from his own world to that indifferent but galactic natural world he cannot stop noticing. In one poem, he eloquently describes an underappreciated mother, a blue shell crab: “Long before the she-crab’s final moult,/the randy jimmy starts to prance although/he has been known to court an empty carapace, or/even a sheepish brother. ….”Twelve months later, her two million larvae float/away, and she swims toward the open sea to die.”

His poetry is lush but never luxuriant and his words, selected with a jewler’s care, demand repetition. On flowers: “The roadside morning glories’ purple horns/had long since crumpled and, next on their vines, erectile, bursting, their replacements queued.” But not everything is beautiful. Some poems are misty with unease and have the effect of passing a bone peeking out from the soil: “I sat with the night wind as the oil lamp poured through the porch screen, onto the yard clutter—beach chair, handle-less rake, back-less stroller—then to the graveyard that hungered for more.” In another: “Croaking on the dry sand, croakers croak indeed/For all of that these pure fishes are less touching than a beached shark’s operatic struggle. Mouth puckered, glassily staring, convulsing. Winning, whatever its belly holds, our respect.”

Waters mentioned that a friend and fellow poet, Paul Petrie, spent last summer rewriting. Waters did no such thing. “I don’t rewrite,” he said. “I write out my work in long-hand and then push onto other subjects. I’ve never really had anything like writer’s block. There is always something new to write.” In “Beach Doings” he sums up the constant turnover of his mind in a beach scene, “People watch like cats. Things happen, don’t happen, it doesn’t matter, it does matter. Poems get done.”

Waters also taught in Africa. A previous poetry collection, a slim volume called “Senegal,” detailed the equatorial nation’s grisly history. One poem, “House of Slaves,” describes a sinister Middle Passage voyage where the dead are “fed to joyful sharks.” In “AFRICAMERICAUSTRALIA” Waters describes imperialism and its vehicle, the myth of Progress, that wiped out millions of indigenous people. But while a more didactic and less talented writer would flounder under such political topics, Winters excellently uses the voice of an unregenerate colonist describing his troubles: “We talk our language and they try it too. All to no avail./But, when they dare speak their own tongues, put them in jail. They ate stray roots and beasts. From the start, we were plowers, fencers, hoers of fields that stayed in place. This land’s ours.”

A few poems in the new volume,” like “Steam in August” have a hollow pregnancy. But these are very few. Whether Waters is memorializing his favorite cats, jeering at gulls who “winkle every crumb from their beeks,” or allowing the reader insight into the anticipation of becoming a father, “Ghost Lighthouse” glows with a brilliant light.

__

Chris Waters is also looking for a publisher for two works. “Alphonso the Wise” and his collection of American-Indian poems title “King Philip’s Talking Head.” Waters can be reached by email at hwa8559u@aol.com or through mail at PO Box 233 Saunderstown, RI 02874.

97 Orchard Street: Dishing Up A Tale of the Immigrant Experience

(Published on Aug.1, 2010)

New York’s Lower East Side has been a corridor for immigrants since the mid-19th century, whether Germans fleeing the convulsions of 1848, Irish fleeing the preventable Hunger, or Jews fleeing the Okhrana. History can be disgraced by demagogues and faith can be abandoned after experience. A minority’s language can be stamped out and their seemingly solid customs can melt into air. Yet, immigrant traditions of the palate survive. Perhaps, in knowing the culinary history, forgetful middle-class Americans are less likely to forget. This is the intriguing new truth in Jane Ziegelman’s clever book, “97 Orchard.”

The book’s title is the address of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a Manhattan National Historic Site. Its Brooklyn author has no time for the stereotypical suffering immigrant and instead writes a nuanced and delicious history of the great (culinary) migration and the “hash-eaters,” “cabbage-shavers” and “rag-pickers” involved.

Specifically, Ziegelman uses four New York families (the Glockners, Gumpertz, Moores and Baldizzis) to anchor her history of immigrant cuisine. While an elephantine work like Irving Howe’s “World of Our Fathers” details the social and political history of four decades of Jewish immigrants, Ziegelman’s nimble book instead peers into the disregarded mysteries of the immigrant stewpot.

For Ziegelman, the story of corned beef, Jewish delis, German beer halls, and sprawling Italian dinners simply illustrated a larger point — that for the 30 million European immigrants who came to America after 1820, food was “a medium to express who they were and who they wanted to become.”

The book is a bright and light introduction to America’s immigrant history, a tasty stew including savory and lesser-known recipes, Ellis Island’s menu, passages by obscure novelists, food critics, middle-class “slummers,” incisive cartoons, and the Tenement Museum’s collected family photographs, all seasoned with intriguing facts:

Did you know that Irish escaping the Great Hunger would never have seen corned beef and hash? Or that in the inferno of East Side pushcart markets one could buy anything from bear to moose snout? Or that Italian male slum dwellers, on average, ate 19 pounds of macaroni a month?

I think the author made a mistake in omitting a discussion of the mid-19th-century’s under-regulated food industry and the consequent malnutrition and infant mortality rate among the poor. But that mistake was one of very few in this delicious book.

Brett Warnke ( brettwarnke@gmail.com) is a freelance journalist who lives in Providence.

Brett Warnke's Providence Journal Review of Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II

By Brett Warnke

(Published in Providence Journal Sept. 16, 2010)

CHURCHILL’S SECRET WAR: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II,

by Madhusree Mukerjee.
Basic Books. 319 pages. $29.95.

When Prime Minsiter Clement Attlee was asked what his predecessor Winston Churchill had done to win the war, Attlee coldly said, "Talk about it."

Churchill indeed talked about it in his own version of history. But he was more than talk. He enticed an isolated America ever closer to a European war. He also relished the role of the warrior poet. The enduring image of an undaunted bulldog lording over London's urban rubble -- the eloquent old scrapper enjoying his own tryst with destiny -- caught the heart of a generation.

The best polemic to burn off this mythical fog is "The Medals of His Defeats" by Christopher Hitchens, while perhaps the most interesting book (I haven't read Richard Toye's new "Churchill's Empire") is David Reynolds "In Command of History." These along with Madhusree Mukerjee's new book, "Churchill's Secret War," give the contemporary reader an unvarnished new view of the engineer of America's "special relationship."

Mukerjee has written a book about an appalling, little known famine in Bengal, which unfolded during the final hours of the British Raj. Mukerjee's book is not a polemic but a clearly written and well-researched study. She explores the incompetence and cruelty of the Raj, especially the divide-and-rule strategy (which sliced the subcontinent in two) and the engineered degeneration of India from breadbasket into basketcase.

What the reader learns is that Churchill was not only "irrational" about India (as his closest advisers repeat in their memoirs) but that he used disturbing, racist language when pushed on the subject of Britain's empire. Churchill allowed his nostalgia for a bygone empire, a reactionary quack like his nefarious adviser Lord Cherwell, and his own ego to shape policies that led directly to the starvation of millions of Bengalis.

With precision and detail, Mukerjee takes the reader from the cold numbers -- the millions of tons of grain exported out of India -- to the food-bare villages of 1943 Bengal. What unfolds in chapters like "In the Village" seems less history and more Cormac McCarthy as peasant families, half-wild with hunger, desperately and often hopelessly struggle to survive.

Mukerjee writes with a careful hand, avoiding an easily dismissible rant and smartly allowing Churchill's closest advisors to color in the dark details. What the reader finds is a tale of deadly neglect and, Mukerjee would argue, intentional terror. She details the secret alliances, shady deals, imperial incompetence, and cynicism that led to hoarding and ultimately to catastrophe.

Brett Warnke (brettwarnke@gmail.com) is a freelance writer in Providence.