books

From the Archives: Stanley Crawford's 'Mayordomo'

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I was saddened to learn of the recent deaths of two important New Mexico writers, N. Scott Momaday and Stanley Crawford. I never had the chance to meet Momaday though I certainly knew of his legacy as a voice of Native American culture. I did intersect with Crawford years ago and wrote about one of his New Mexico books. I’d only recently begun traveling to the Southwest and getting a handle on the interwoven cultures of the “Land of Enchantment.” Crawford’s Mayordomo was an enlightening guide to the complications of village life. This first appeared in the Kansas City Star in 1988.

From the Archives: Calvin Trillin Three Ways

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One of Kansas City’s favorite literary native sons is coming back to town on a book tour soon. He’s touting a new collection of some of his classic magazine journalism, including landmark reporting on the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s. It was some years later when Trillin’s “American Journal” reports began catching my eye in The New Yorker, and then a decade or so more when I began writing about Trillin during my days as Book Review Editor of The Kansas City Star.

I’ve dug deep into the files to unearth one of those book related stories, which included an interview in Trillin’s Greenwich Village pad.

Twice in the 2000s I managed to accompany Trillin on food tours of his beloved lower Manhattan, which turned me on to some of the more interesting corners of the village and Chinatown.

For now, I’m posting jpeg clippings. Hope that works for all.

Now, a food tour, 2005. My syndicated piece published in the Honolulu newspaper.

Seven years later, 2012, mostly new places, but some old favorites.

From the Archives: The Salman Rushdie Uproar, 1989

The recent violent assault on Salman Rushdie at a literary event in upstate New York reminded us of the unpredictable perils we live with in today’s world. And that doesn’t even begin to speak to disturbing current trends in book-banning, censorship, and battles around free expression. I joined those who were much relieved to learn of the encouraging news about Rushdie’s slightly improved condition following serious stab wounds, and I’ll add all best wishes for a full physical recovery. The incident sent me back more than 30 years to a piece I wrote, as book review editor, about the furor unleashed by the publication of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and the death sentence issued by Iran’s Islamic leader. Except for a couple of tiny edits I’d like to make, I was rather surprised to see how timely the essay still seems to be. Sixteen years later, Rushdie spoke to a capacity crowd at the University of Kansas’ Lied Center in Lawrence, an event I attended. His message about speaking up in the face of challenges to freedom hadn’t changed, though he was able to take local note of the rise of fundamentalism in Kansas and, according to a press account of the time, to dish another timely comment: “It’s a pretty bad time for us who don’t believe that superstition should rule the world.”

 

The following commentary first appeared in the Sunday Arts section of the Kansas City Star, Feb. 19, 1989.

 

By Steve Paul

Anyone who underestimates the power of the book—the power of fiction, no less—should consider the recent events in Islam.

            A novel by a lapsed Muslim, a native of Bombay now settled in England, has caused an upset so great among fundamentalist believers that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini has called for the writer’s assassination. Seven persons died in riots in Pakistan and India prompted by the American publication of the book. The novel has been burned by zealots in England and banned in a large part of the Islamic world.

            Except for the violence, the furor over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is akin to the emotional uprising that occurred last year upon the release of Martin Scorsese’s film “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which was based on Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel. The movie prompted protests, boycotts and threats from fundamentalist Catholics and Protestants in America and abroad.

            It is easy to dismiss the impulse to censor as a symptom of the narrow-minded ignorance of the self-righteous: Just as “The Last Temptation” was unseen by the vast majority of its detractors, The Satanic Verses has been largely unread by the opposition.

            It is not so easy to fathom the consequences.

            No one outside Islam can presume to know the depth of belief that can make one willing to “die one thousand deaths to assure that Mohammed and his family are not hurt,” as an Islamic leader in London has been quoted. One can only compare those feelings to one’s own belief system: Would I kill to defend what I believe? Two centuries of American patriotism and warfare—a sliver on the blood-spattered time line of world history—can confirm it for those in this country. But would we kill because of a book?

            It is impossible to compute the number of lives lost in the name of the Bible or the Koran over the centuries. The history of earthly literature, by contrast, has produced its share of controversy, but rarely amid bloodshed. The thunderous reverberations of Darwin’s little book of natural history, for instance, continue to be heard in the nation’s more backward school systems.

            But a novel? Serious fiction is a product of the imagination, and only the most naïve can mistake it for history, James Michener notwithstanding. (And what is history, if not reasoned conjecture, the work of a scholar’s imagination?)

            A novel is a testing ground for an individual’s ideas about the self and life in general, John Gardner suggested in his book On Moral Fiction. Salman Rushdie is discovering the exception to one of Gardner’s assertions: “True moral fiction is a laboratory experiment too difficult and dangerous to try in the world but safe and important in the mirror image of reality in the writer’s mind.”

            The Satanic Verses is a sprawling, manically written novel, a hallucination that can be difficult to enter but exciting nonetheless. It is Rushdie’s attempt to come to terms with the centrifugal force of multicultural identity that is the burden of immigrants in London—Muslims and others who may have fled repression or upheaval in their homelands only to find the paradoxes of freedom in the West.

            At the same time Rushdie examines the shifting nature of good and evil. It is a challenging book whose magical language can propel a reader past its occasional obscurity and break-neck gyrations in plot and structure. It can dazzle you with its style before you realize you may be missing something. It may be self-indulgent and self-reflective—but so was James Joyce.

            The Satanic Verses was widely acclaimed in England, where it was published in September and immediately became a short-list candidate for two prestigious prizes. (It won a Whitbread prize in fiction.) Bill Buford, writing in the Sunday Times (of London), called it “a masterpiece of a novel that is more ambitious than any other fiction being written today.”

            American reviewers have been far from unanimous in their praise, often noting that Rushdie’s accomplishment has fall short of that ambition. Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post called it “an odd, uninvolving book that shows only intermittent flashes of its author’s considerable gifts.”

            It is curious to note that the offending segments of The Satanic Verses and “The Last Temptation of Christ” are contained in dream sequences. In Rushdie’s case, the dreams involved the birth of a religion not unlike Islam and a prophet who can be seen as a parody of Muhammed. It is, of course, futile to point out to the irrational that dreams are the province of irrational consciousness, and so even further removed from representational reality (which should not always be equated with truth).

            Rushdie is not alone among Muslims who have tested the patience and faith of their leaders. Curious American readers have been discovering the wry pleasures of Naguib Mahfouz, an Egyptian writer who a few months ago was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. In 1959 Egypt banned a novel by Mahfouz, The Children of Gebelawi, a proscription that continues to this day. The book, which challenges Islamic orthodoxy, contains “grave insults to religious creeds,” according to Al-Azhar, the 1,000-year-old Islamic institute in Cairo. The institute last fall renewed its ban with the statement: “A novel cannot just be permitted into circulation because its author won the Nobel Prize for literature, since that award does not justify the propagation of misguided ideas.”

            Mahfouz is often considered to be the leading writer in the Arab world, which produced its first modern novel only in 1913, two years after Mahfouz’s birth. (That book was Zainab, by Muhammad Hussein Haikal, an Egyptian writing in Paris.) Mahfouz, however, apparently is a political moderate, and that has cost him readers in the Mideast. According to Anton Shammas, an Israeli-Palestinian writing in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, when Mahfouz suggested in a newspaper column in 1975 that Arabs should find ways to live in peace with Israel, several Arab nations banned his works.

            Free expression—even the ability to propagate “misguided ideas”—is a hallmark of the West, a privilege that too often may be taken for granted. “Whenever books are burned,” the German poet Heinrich Heine once wrote, “men also, in the end are burned.” We in the West in recent years have come to learn only too well the implications of Islamic zealotry. We may not understand it, but we can shake our heads at its unsavory extremism. Western institutions are daily targets of satire, jest and critical opposition—and the debate only makes them stronger. Will Islam ever learn that?

            “Mr. Rushdie’s case is intellectual,” the British education minister, Kenneth Baker, wrote recently in The Times of London. “The response should be intellectual, too. His critics should reach for the Koran, not for a box of matches.”

From the Archives: A Chat With Robert Bly

As I’ve been delving into the life and work of William Stafford, on the way toward a possible biography, I couldn’t help but take a new interest in Robert Bly, who became an important champion of Stafford’s poetry. I was sorry to learn of Bly’s recent death. I’d been reading a new book about Bly’s raucous period as the argumentative editor of a small-press poetry journal, serially called The Fifties, The Sixties, and, finally, The Seventies (only one issue under that title). The book is Born Under the Sign of Odin, by Mark Gustafson. I had a few memories of hearing Bly read his work and presiding over a men’s workshop in Kansas City many years ago. Until I dug out an old file, I’d forgotten that I’d actually interviewed him, by phone, in 1992, in advance of one of his Kansas City events. This was at the height of Bly’s fame in the Iron John era, the work in which he explored the power and necessity of myth. So, here’s that piece, which first appeared in the Kansas City Star on October 15, 1992. It ran under the headline “Men's work: Poet Robert Bly uses yesterday's stories to touch today's lives.”  

By STEVE PAUL

Two years ago this fall Robert Bly underwent an unexpected rite of passage. 

  The Minnesota writer, author by then of more than a dozen volumes of poetry and prose, translator of 15 others by European and South American poets, and editor of a handful of anthologies, issued a book that, in the course of its long and still-beating shelf life, not only exceeded sales of all the rest but turned its thoughtful, white-maned author into a pop-culture personality. 

  The poet as media sensation! Unheard of.

  But Bly's book, Iron John: A Book About Men, captured the imagination of hundreds of thousands of readers. It also inspired widespread and vigorous discussion of the meaning of men's lives ("What Do Men Really Want?," Newsweek's cover eventually blared) and put Bly into the thick of a talk-show and speaking-tour whirlwind.

  But once you've seen the mountaintop of fame - People magazine chose Bly as one of the 25 most intriguing people of 1991 - how can you slip back into the contemplative and relatively unnoticed valley of the poet? 

  Bly says it's not at all difficult. The attention finally has waned, and he says he's sticking to his vow to take a year off from speaking and teaching and furthering his "men's work." His hiatus has been interrupted only by some prior commitments, including a speaking engagement Friday at Johnson County Community College and a daylong workshop for men Saturday at Avila College.

  "In general I've been wonderfully at home and lying down and reading and doing some poems," Bly says by telephone from his cabin - he calls it his writing place - at Moose Lake, Minn. "So I'm enjoying it a lot." 

  Bly says he wasn't totally unaccustomed to being in the public eye. He was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, and with Kansas City poet David Ray, helped organize poets against the war through public readings and publications. That was a similar public expression of feeling, he says - an example, like Iron John, of "someone saying things that needed to be said." 

   "But," he adds, "it's no trouble to drop out at all and go back to writing poetry. Thoreau said, `When you give a speech, there's usually an occasion for it, and you give it to those who can hear.' Then he said, `When you write, you write for those who can understand, and the occasion is your whole life.' Isn't that wonderful?"

  Through a combination of ancient mythology, contemporary psychology, poetry and, especially, a deep reading of the "Iron John" fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers early in the 19th century, Bly's book gave men and women an understanding of a great "father hunger," as Bly puts it, that has beset the lives of boys and men since the Industrial Revolution. 

  He touched many lives bound in confusion over the role of men in society. And, perhaps, he presented a moral touchstone to those set adrift in the greedy fervor of the 1980s.

  Long a student of ancient storytelling, Bly helped point readers to the archetypal lessons of mythology. "Mythology," he writes in Iron John, "helps to give weight to our private wounds Without the weight given by a wound consciously realized, the man will lead a provisional life."

  The book helped to bare the soul of a burgeoning "men's movement." For a decade Bly had been conducting weekend "wild man" retreats in the woods. The concept accelerated in early 1990 when Bill Moyers presented Bly and his men's work in a PBS special and hit warp-drive when Iron John appeared in November of that year, on its way to spending nearly 60 weeks on the hardcover best-seller lists.

  Ever since, books about men and their grief have proliferated, including, just this month, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, a collection of 300 poems "for men," which Bly co-edited (HarperCollins; $25).

  Bly is gratified that his workshops, such as the one he'll conduct here Saturday, have opened up a new audience for poetry. 

  "Some of the complicated grief that men have is best described by poems," he says. "Poems make it more clear. Sociological language can't do it. Psychological language can't do it."

The emerging poet

  Bly's journey to the upper ranks of American poetry began on the farm in western Minnesota that his great-grandparents settled after immigrating from Norway. He served two years in the Navy in World War II, and it was there, he says, that he discovered the power of the poem. 

  "I met the first person I knew who wrote poetry in the Navy," Bly says. "He wrote a poem in front of me. I was stunned. I'd never seen anyone write a poem. I thought the books wrote them. It went something like, `The south side of Chicago is like a running sore on a large body.'

  "What did I know? To me, that was wonderful. The idea that someone could make up an image like that was amazing." 

  Bly then applied to Harvard University and got in. There he studied with Archibald MacLeish and joined what is now an impressive list of fellow writing students, including Donald Hall, Kenneth Koch, George Plimpton, John Hawkes and Adrienne Rich. 

  Bly opted against graduate school and chose instead "the old route of the person in the garret."

  "So I went to New York and made my living as a file clerk one day a week, a typist one day a week and, toward the end, a house painter. 

  "Those were wonderful years, because in a way I escaped graduate school and I had time to read and time to brood and be depressed."

  There was something wonderful about it, because here I had been at college and suddenly I was at the bottom of the whole heap and people could look at me and instantly understand that I was not very far away from being a bag man. 

  "In a way it took away my fear of falling. A lot of people think that if they don't do the right thing, the safe thing, they'll fall through their class."

  By 1962 Bly had published his first book of poems, Silence in the Snowy Fields. He came to prominence later in the decade with his opposition to the Vietnam War and his book The Light Around the Body (1968).

  In the wake of Iron John, several of his best-known poetry collections were reissued last year, including The Light Around the Body; The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981), which explored father-son relationships; Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985); and Selected Poems (1986).

  This year HarperCollins published a collection of Bly's prose poems, What Have I Ever Lost By Dying? That book draws together work spanning more than 20 years, largely observations of nature, family and love. Because of the straightforward, detail-packed style of the prose-poem form, the work tends to be more immediately accessible than the more surreal dreamscapes of his lyrics.

  Bly says he plans another book like Iron John that will deal with several fairy tales. Before that will come a new collection of poems that he has been working on for some years. Many of the poems are about his father.

Easily misunderstood 

  Bly recognizes that his recent work and the movement it has fed are not universally admired.

  "Women have received so much depreciation from men," he says, "that they are justifiably afraid that when men get together they are liable to do something to women."

  The media is to blame, he says, for its oversimplifications and tendency to focus its images on the drum-beating extremes. Bly's metaphors of the inner wild man or soul warrior are easily

misinterpreted. ("Warrior doesn't mean you go to the gulf war," he has said elsewhere. "It means you fight inside your community for what is good.")

  "Most women get the big picture out of the media," he says, "and there's a lot of false pictures of it floating around  But some of the same things that are now being said about the men's movement were said about the women's movement when it began." 

  Typical of the criticism is April Bernard's recent assessment in The New Republic. Reviewing The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart and another book of men's poetry, Bernard wrote: "While it would be unfair, of course, to fault men as a group for exploring their feelings, it could be argued that they have already done that, in what is loosely known as The History of Civilization."

   Bernard characterizes Bly as something of a huckster and particularly disingenuous, betrayed by his language, in his "claim to embrace women, or feminism."

  "For some of those young women feminists," Bly counters, "they are not writing about the book. They are attempting to establish themselves in the eyes of their women peers, and for that they've got to hit it hard."

  Bly has gone beyond the men-only approach by presenting workshops for both sexes in collaboration with Marion Woodman, a Jungian analyst in Toronto. A year ago he and Deborah Tannen, the popular author of You Just Don't Understand, a book about how men and women fail to communicate, gave a joint program in New York on "Men and Women Talking Together."

  Bly is adamant about the value for men and women in such soul-searching work.

  "I'm not a separatist in any way," he says. "I think that many women who participated in the women's movement 20 years ago did marvelous things. They helped to bring out pain and anger that hadn't been expressed, which really is important. Women now feel that something else is needed - it's time to stop attacking men and see if we can get along.

  "The people in the media seem to want more anger between men and women. They are always trying to get us to say something inflammatory. Men and women themselves want less anger and more reconciliation."

On Art, Books and More: Some Recent Writing

I’ve spent a bit more time reviewing books this year, including a handful of 175-word advance reviews for Booklist, the publication of the American Library Association. I was happy to write a somewhat longer review of an important new book that combines memoir and environmental reporting in what was once my home state of Maine. The book is Mill Town, by Kerri Arsenault. My review appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune in August:

https://www.startribune.com/review-mill-town-reckoning-with-what-remains-by-kerri-arsenault/572251082/

When the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in June became one of the first cultural institutions to reopen since the widespread pandemic shutdown began in mid-March, I made a day trip down to Bentonville, Ark., to report on the museum for The Art Newspaper. Along with the precautions I found a surprising resonance with the social upheaval that began just a couple of weeks earlier after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis:

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/review/visitors-return-to-crystal-bridges-amid-adaptations-and-provocations

As the Charlotte Street Foundation prepared to finish building out its new headquarters building, I’d begun work on a profile of its executive director Amy Kligman. And then came the pandemic, which provided the story a sense of drama and urgency. Here’s the link:

http://kcstudio.org/the-art-of-adaptation-charlotte-street-foundation/

For KC Studio, I devoted my bimonthly column to the departure of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Arts curator of Native American art:

http://kcstudio.org/gaylord-torrence-transformed-native-american-presence-at-nelson-atkins/

And this one, which celebrated the contributions of Bobby Watson to the Kansas City jazz scene:

http://kcstudio.org/after-20-years-in-academia-bobby-watson-will-travel-jazz-world-again/

This food thing: A sweet and melancholy affair

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I have a large appetite. Food is not just nutrition but celebration. And life is too short to eat boring food, just as it’s too short to drink unremarkable wine. So I splurge sometimes. I cook with focus, adventure and a kind of subdued passion. I go for new tastes.

Yet, lately, I tend to eat less. Call it diabetes discipline. That’s optimistic. The numbers are good, though my liver would tend to disagree. Still, if tempted with a whole roasted fish or an oozing burrata with smoked trout roe, I’m all over it, at least for a few bites. Turns out that a heaping plate of crispy beef from a local, old-reliable Chinese restaurant can remain the centerpiece of four leftover lunches. I mean, why stuff yourself?

These thoughts began arising as I read a new collection of the late Jim Harrison’s food-and-life essays. The book’s title, A Really Big Lunch, refers to a spectacularly excessive, 37-course feast (or was it 42?) put on by a French chef and friend of Harrison’s. Even Harrison, whose appetites clearly were larger than mine, felt overwhelmed, almost defeated at one point. Harrison holds nothing back as a writer, and some readers might be turned off by his lecherous confessions and old-school impropriety (the essays reach as far back as the 1970s). But looking past all that, which, in the current sexual-harassment environment, becomes admittedly harder to do, he has wise and entertaining things to say about food and wine. I plan to cherry-pick some of Harrison’s wine writing for a paper I’m planning to give at a Hemingway conference, in Paris, in 2018. And imagine my surprise when I realized recently that in my modest collection of bottles I’ve got a Domaine Tempier Bandol from a few years back, which apparently was Harrison’s favorite wine in the world.

So, food, wine and cooking. From time to time I pay attention to the appetites.

On a fall Saturday, with nothing much else going on, I turned some of the last of our yard tomatoes into a marinara. They were not lovely orbs. They weren’t even deeply red, but they would do for a kitchen improvisation. It took a while in boiling water to loosen their skins, but when that was done I set them aside to cool. Chopped onions and garlic and the last of some baby carrots in the fridge. I was hoping to add tomato paste to the simmering stew, to add some color and heft, but alas I could find none on the shelf. Here’s a suitable substitute: a small jar of prepared tapenade; hmm, red peppers, some kind of cheese, why not? The tapenade turned the marinara a bit orange, but with salt, pepper and dried herbs, it all tasted pretty fine nearly two hours later when I turned off the burner. I put some of the marinara in a bag to freeze, and held out a good portion to eat the next day.

One Sunday, we found some frozen lamb chops in the freezer. I chopped onion and garlic. I opened a red wine (a mass market red Zinfandel) and a jar of vegetable stock I’d made around Thanksgiving. Ta da: braised lamb, with little potatoes and carrots. We ate lamb chops for days.

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As a onetime restaurant critic, my radar remains fairly well tuned when we go out to eat. Yet, I failed myself on a recent trip to Toronto. Though I managed to sample a decent variety of tastes in a couple of days – pub food, tapas at a trendy Sherry bar -- I missed the hugely important world of alluring Asian cuisines that seem to define dining in that capital of cultural diversity. Next time, for sure. A recent trip to Atlanta gave us a sampling of that city’s burgeoning fine-dining scene, though we barely scratched the surface. In Boston this fall, at the Neptune Oyster Bar (pictured), I managed to consume some of the finest oysters on the half shell I’d ever met. In Kansas City, I’ve sampled a couple of promising new restaurants lately and always find pleasure and creativity when returning to old favorites (Novel, the Rieger, the Antler Room, to name just three). And I had one of the best meals of the year when birthday splurging in Corvino’s Tasting Room (details in a previous blog). But I always have to remind myself that some of the other best meals of the year occurred in domestic settings: A humbly generous and bustling family meal around an extended kitchen table at the Zia Pueblo in New Mexico; an intimate and poignant Thanksgiving tribute with family members of a close friend who had died just the week before.

With the holidays in full swing, I expect much feasting ahead, some of it happy, some, so it goes, melancholy. The warmth of the kitchen, the clink of glasses, all that love on our plates – sure, we can’t help but feel grateful for what we have.

From the Archives: On Bill McKibben and The End of Nature

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            Environmental activist and writer Bill McKibben is on a speaking tour, and I’m sorry I’ll miss him when he stops in Kansas City, at UMKC, on Oct. 6. (He’s also in Columbia, MO, today, Oct. 4.) McKibben has been a consistent leader in the literature of alarm. I dug out my piece on his landmark book The End of Nature and was a little surprised to realize how current his arguments remain nearly 30 years later. You can recognize the awareness of the climate change debate that continues today, though without the ugly divisiveness we seem to be stuck with. The language is a little outdated (“global warming”) and McKibben can sometimes be precious (as perhaps was I) and predictably pessimistic to the extreme. But I thought it would be interesting to revisit the state of environmental consciousness-raising from the 1980s. This review of The End of Nature first appeared in The Kansas City Star on Oct. 15, 1989.

 

The end of nature that Bill McKibben addresses in his vitally important and terribly depressing new book is not so much the end of the world, but the end of the human idea of nature as being something bigger than we are – eternal, separate, permanent and immutable.

            That perception has come to an end, the end of nature has arrived, McKibben argues in a startling and deeply moving essay, because we have proved as a species that we have the God-like power to alter the Earth on a global scale.

            Of course, being both important and depressing will argue against its being widely read, but The End of Nature may be the one essential book published this year.

            Even as brooding as it is, the book, as an urgent call to action and a manifesto for humility, should wind up standing shoulder to shoulder with such mind-altering predecessors in natural history and philosophy as Thoreau’s Walden and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

            McKibben writes for The New Yoerker, where a long excerpt of the book appeared last month. He is not a scientist, but he makes the science and the scientific uncertainty that underpin his thesis meaningful and accessible.

            We have changed the planet – and there’s no turning back, he will make you believe – in our greed and gluttony for more and better. Our utter reliance on fossil fuels and other human endeavors have caused a buildup of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere that is inexorably warming the planet. It has done so in a mere 100 years, an iota on the scale of biological or even human time.

            Even if we completely change our habits now, McKibben writes – and what is the likelihood of that? – enough damage has been done and will become evident in the decades to come.

            Scientists may, and do vigorously debate whether global warming actually has begun but few doubt the soundness of the theory or the possibility of a grim chain reaction of corollary events that may change the way much of the Earth’s population lives – as sea levels rise, as temperatures stay high, as hurricanes become more forceful. One theory has Dallas experiencing half the year at 90 degrees or higher.

            And then, let’s talk about the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere. Or acid rain. Or other forms of global-scale pollution.

            “In our minds,” McKibben writes, “nature suffers from a terrible case of acne, or even skin cancer – but our faith in its essential strength remains, for the damage always seems local. But now the basis of that faith is lost. The idea of nature will not survive the new global pollution … By changing the weather, we make every spot on Earth man-made and artificial.”

            We can never again see nature as it was, he writes; we are doomed to accept the fact that all of it has our stamp, that nature, in the form of climate and weather and all the biological interactions dependent upon them, does not act independent of us anymore. Even if it cannot be proved that the drought of 1988 was a manifestation of global warming, it also cannot be proved that it wasn’t, and just the thought that we may have brought it about is unsettling. Was that rain? The question will go. Or was it something we did?

            McKibben considers the various cures for global warming – nuclear power, planting trees, an umbrella in space – and finds each of them wanting or bringing along their own problems. Plant trees, the environmental president tells us; trouble is, to absorb an adequate level of carbond dioxide we would need to plant an area the size of Europe and by shifting from open field to tree cover we would change the albedo, or the light-reflecting characteristic of the surface, and very likely increase the level of heat absorption.

            Such riddles and “feedback loops” face us at every turn, it seems.

            McKibben attacks the problems not only from a scientific perspective, but also culturally, philosophically, geopolitically and even theologically: Those who look for God in nature, he suggests, now can find only themselves.

            We take nature for granted, but our whole relationship with it has changed.

            “One reason we pay so little close attention the separate natural world around us,” he writes, “is that it has always been there and we presumed it always would. As it disappears, its primal importance will be clearer – in the same way that some people think they have put their parents our of their lives and learn differently only when the day comes to bury them.”

            If The End of Nature is relentlessly pessimistic, so be it. McKibben offeres a moral antidote to the feel-good, New Age notion of macromanaging the planet, of the technological panaceas – for and profit for all! – made possible in the coming era of genetic engineering.

            One (not I) might criticize McKibben for a “tree-hugging,” sentimental attachment to wildness and the mystery of nature – get with the program, Bill! – but one can’t help sharing his profound sense of loss.

            There is a danger that a reader may come away from The End of Nature feeling the same kind of existential despair experienced by the young Woody Allen character in “Annie Hall,” the one who tells the psychiatrist he has stopped eating because he just learned that the universe was expanding. What’s the point of going on? the boy concludes. Those susceptible to melancholic reflection are forewarned.

            But there is, perhaps a far greater danger in not facing up to the scenario McKibben has devised, to the questions about ourselves he has raised, and in the complacency we so easily embrace. It is time now to pay attention and to do something. The End of Nature is a kick in the head. And it comes none too soon. Read it and weep.