Boom by Tony Horwitz
If you aren’t already acquainted with Tony Horwitz’s winning brand of travelogue history (Blue Latitudes, One for the Road, etc.), do yourself a favor and head to an Island bookstore. Or save the gas and download the e-book BOOM: Oil, Money, Cowboys, Strippers, and the Energy Rush That Could Change America Forever. A Long Strange Journey Along the Keystone XL Pipeline (Byliner Inc., $2.99). In fact, you may never want to drive again after an armchair journey with Horwitz along the busy Canadian-American oil corridor. Apocalyptic industrial sites, crude-soaked farmland, and convoys of nature-eating machinery blight a landscape whose resources have only just begun to be tapped. If TransCanada gets its wish, another 1,179 miles of pipeline will be carrying close to three-quarters of a million barrels of oil from the sticky tar sands into the U.S. every day. The physical impact of such a project may strike fear in the Sierra Club’s collective heart, but the issue’s many complexities – economic, political, and environmental – resist a pat response.
“The challenge that environmentalism often faces in the United States,” Horwitz observes, is “it collides with the American dream of upward mobility and material wealth.” Horwitz’s insight, and his reliably wicked sense of humor, carry the day here. It’s a gritty trip through them thar hills, but well worth the ride.
American Romantic by Ward Just
In 1955, back when Vietnam was still just a gleam in America’s eye, English author Graham Greene published The Quiet American, a parable of sorts set in Indochina. Greene’s early days as a newspaperman and his Catholicism informed much of his outlook as a writer; he continually mined the place where morality, personal faith, and global politics meet. With his fifteenth novel, Greene struck a knotty vein. The story was a tautly braided yarn, bristling with romance, intrigue, murder. But it was also lacerating in its depiction of Uncle Sam abroad, our bull-in-a-china-shop interventionism wherever our “wide cars” and “not quite latest guns” took us. As personified by young CIA operative Alden Pyle, the U.S. is a dangerous naïf. Well-meaning but thoroughly, terminally, foolhardy.
Nearly sixty years and countless casualties later, the Vineyard’s own prolific ex-newspaperman, Ward Just, brings us American Romantic (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26). The novel, Just’s eighteenth, is also set in Southeast Asia “when the war was not quite a war.” Its central figure, like Pyle, is a callow and privileged New England lad, waist deep in perilous diplomatic swamps. But where Greene fashioned Alden Pyle from the sharp palette of America’s Cold War posturing, it is with sad-eyed wisdom that Just conceived the muted, conscience-stricken Harry Sanders. The story starts out with an optimistic dash. At the moment he is being tapped for a high-stakes mission, Harry begins a passionate fling with Sieglinde, a German nurse stationed on a nearby hospital ship. The love affair ends abruptly. So, too, does the sortie. For Harry, the fallout from both events is both immediate and subtly long-range.
American Romantic motors swiftly through Harry’s life. A distinguished, if not dazzling, career unfolds. There is marriage to a lovely American girl. Postings to Africa, the Balkans, and beyond. Bibelots and rugs. In short, the hard-earned trappings of a career officer and a life well lived. But of course nothing is ever just as it seems. When a colleague asks the aging Harry what the years have taught him, he reflects on dinner parties at his father’s house, amongst government people, when he was young. “All the stories they told had something missing.” As the missing pieces drive life’s plot, so do they propelAmerican Romantic to its satisfying conclusion.
At 78, Just is the Island’s éminence grise of fiction, and a master of the form. His themes surface delicately on the back of elegant, understated prose; the mood is set with a cartographer’s precision. The ample dialogue, set with no quotation marks, lends this globetrotting novel a curiously intimate quality. One settles into it as if in a low-slung hammock. A quietness descends.
For the reader, and for Harry, patience has its rewards.
The Family Cooks by Laurie David
Not since Lisa Douglas left Park Avenue for the green acres of Hooterville has there been a more surprising lady homesteader than Laurie David. Suburban New Yorker turned Hollywood activist, David hardly knew her furrow from her burro when she and her (now ex-) husband bought property in Chilmark. But these up-Island hills can do something to a woman. Fifteen years and one husband later, David is not only chasing chickens, she’s produced a crop of cookbooks aimed at the time-and-nutrition-starved American family. The latest is The Family Cooks: 100+ Recipes Guaranteed to Get Your Family Craving Food That’s Simple, Fresh, and Incredibly Good for You (Rodale Press Inc., $27.99). Don’t be fooled by the cookbook convention; The Family Cooks has more on its mind than easy and delicious recipes. With label translations, tips on trash, and don’t-fear-the-Brussels sprouts inspiration, The Family Cooks is a kind of cheerful manifesto for the GMO age.
